Weekly Poetry Assignment 3: Poetry and Photographs
October 27, 2007 by J.C. Hewitt
As I discussed two weeks ago, I am working with a photographer to create cover art for the book of poetry I am getting ready to publish. In compiling my poems, there are a few key images that reoccur, and one of them is a cell phone. Because of this, I want to use my cell phone in my cover art. It is a slightly older phone, and a little beaten up from years of use and abuse. I like to think it has character.
This week my photographer David Hwang and I had a test shoot. We shot pictures of the phone on a table, in my hand, in his hand, on the hood of a car, on the dashboard of a car, on various spots on the ground, with other props, without other props and a few ways I am probably forgetting. There are a couple shots that I really like, but so far there is none that stands out as the “perfect” shot – the one that might convince a casual shopper to pick up the book and take a look at it.
It is difficult to match images sometimes. Translating the thoughts I have in my head into poetry is a significant enough challenge, meshing this with an image in my head and then translating it through another person is an even bigger challenge. It’s like having someone else feed you soup with chopsticks. It’s easy enough to get a taste of what you want, but it is going to take a lot of time and effort to leave satisfied.
This Week’s Poetry Assignment
Write a poem about a photograph, preferably one you have taken yourself.
Further Reading
Related links
- How to Write a Cinquain Poem (0.500)
- How to Write an Epistle Poem (0.500)
- How to Write a Tercet (0.500)
- Poetry Writing Tips (0.500)
- What are Metaphor, Simile and Analogy? (0.500)
Flatland Skies
Blue cotton candies
Mushrooming into dark sky
Sunlight beams through them
Well, I’m just curious, where did everybody go ?
Hi Connie,
That was a nice little nugget. I can see the picture.
At WritersUnbound.com we talked about it going the other way— pictures into poetry. theres a blog starting up that brings photographers and writers together to bounce off each others work. Ic an’t remember her URL off the top of my head but I linked it at WritersUnbound and posted my own inpsirational pic.
Now, see, a cell phone in the poetry aisle would grab my attention:)
PHOTO OF A MAN IN A CAFÉ
There you are, caught off guard,
leaning back in your chair,
a just-lit cigarette
stuck between two fingers,
flipping open your wallet
for the price of our meal.
Your hair looks dark, tied back.
(Loose, it had blonde lights.)
You’re wearing jeans, one earring,
the copper medallion I gave you
and a fake surf club T-shirt
you thought would please me
and bought specially, not knowing
we don’t say ‘Life Guard’ in my country
and there’s more than one Gold Coast beach,
none of them so named.
At this point you still think
we might go somewhere afterwards
and make love. At this point
I still think I might let it happen.
Home now, eighteen months later,
I view your image onscreen.
My cursor traces your profile
as my fingers never did.
You were twice as tempting
as Lindt to a chocoholic.
But I had this other place
to return to, this other man.
You bought me wine
though you abstained.
We talked a very long time.
You drove away alone.
Well, it wouldn’t have done.
I was never going to be
a gracious Southern lady
nor you an understated Aussie bloke.
And we kept having to explain
what we did and didn’t mean,
cutting through tangles of different
strange accents, foreign words.
Now we’re friends instead.
You learnt to use computers;
we meet online.
And there are changes.
You stopped smoking; I no longer drink.
Your latest photos show you
wearing dreadlocks and a beard,
and the medallion I gave you.
© Rosemary Nissen-Wade 2007
Rosemary, I love this oem, it’s just really well done. I like the rhythms, the line breaks, the imagery, the passion . . . everything about it, it feels like it was me.
Thanks, Connie!
Photo Gallery
Frozen;
To look at one’s self;
Cemented;
You come in;
The loving;
The prize;
In front of me;
Singing;
The next;
Your dance
To step;
A hex;
In time;
You’re still;
Movement absorbs me;
Fine;
Step aside;
Some one talks;
Silence broken;
Thoughts stride;
Life is still;
Time stopped;
Beauty exults;
My soul in fill;
A statue of steal;
Screaming;
Almost alive;
Feel;
Bring forth;
The next turn;
A corner;
Art and more;
Exhilarating;
Pounding heart;
Emotions;
Not just a fling;
Everlasting flight;
Yearning;
Craving;
As beautiful as night;
I want more;
Can you feel it;
I dig deeper;
I soar;
Smile;
Frowns;
Indifference;
Beauties;
Feelings mixed;
Confusing thoughts;
Racing;
Bodies fixed;
Pictures move;
Yet unshaken;
Tricks never play;
I’m soothed.
Rianon, I think your use of words here is alive and fascinating, and I like the impressionistic effect of the short lines … but I can’t SEE what you are looking at. I get your emotional response to the photos, but not really the photos, not who the subjects are. There’s you yourself, there’s someone dancing, and that’s about as much as I can figure out. It might be a shame to tamper with this piece, but maybe it needs a companion piece describing the actual contents of the photos? Or perhaps, after all, you might intersperse verses of description between these verses? I am intrigued enough by what you have said that I want to know more!
I’m a thirteen year old writer and poetry is my life… I’ve been following the poetry posted on this site for a while now and I’ve finally plucked up the courage to post an example of my own work. I know that it isn’t quite up to the standard of everyone else on here but I am young.
I decided to write about a picture I have of a village in winter time.
A wintry sun, feeble at dawn,
Drifting snowflakes,
Vaguely passing the waking world,
Lonely beads of dove-white blood
Breaking the copper of the sun,
As of little children of the storm
Lost in skies of burnished gold.
Ice clinging tight,
With tips of frosty fingers
Mirroring the dawn’s soft light.
Footprints trail across the shroud of snow
A shadow of the people,
Marking their paths,
Beneath the feeble, wintry sun
Flecked with beads of dove-white blood.
By Jenny McBride, age 13
Jenny, this is most accomplished! You could title it “A Village in Winter Time” (bearing in mind John’s recommendations about giving names to our poems). You create the visual image with your words, and I love both the original image of the “beads of dove-white blood” and the way you have used the repetition of that phrase. Please let us see more of your work.
Thank you so much for your kind words…and yes, I probably should give it a title… maybe ‘a Village in Winter Time’ as you suggest. Here is another poem based on a picture, but this is quite different, as I took a picture of a sunrise/sunset and interpreted it in my own way, giving it its own story and history. I think that the poem will mean something different to everybody, but to me it is about the desert.
BLEEDS
Beneath the setting sun she stood
Sky red, its heart, she stands in blood,
Half opened eye over the horizon closes
Blind to her plight, he turns away
A tear which her heart shed,
A shadow where she lay.
A lonely footprint flecked with red
Still in the dirt where her soul once bled.
Dark figure on the brightness of sunrise
On the edge of the land the demon cries
Something stirs, never still
Bends gently against the pale skyline
The dream hangs in the air
Magnificent; sublime.
Look into her eyes, into the heart of the dead
No fire burns now where her soul once bled.
Beneath the rising sun she sits
Somewhere above the last piece fits
The half closed eye over the horizon opens
Still she waits, no one knows what for
That for which she searches
Is here no more.
Broken body, denied all it needs,
Lying beneath the rising sun, her soul still bleeds.
By Jennifer McBride, Age 13
Oh by the way I am Jenny McBride; I am logged on now as Aquamarine Angel, but I will probably using both my accounts. In case you were wondering. =)
Here’s a revision to my poem above, as some belated research indicates that T-shirt in second verse was probably the genuine article after all. So the amended second verse now reads:
You’re wearing jeans, one earring,
the copper medallion I gave you
and a T-shirt with a Gold Coast logo
you thought would please me
and bought specially: ‘Look,
your country’s famous swimming team,’
not knowing that to me it was just
some surf club, one of many.
Thank you Rosemary, I appreciate it. I’ll try
Late as usual, but here
The black dog bays with laughter as
She scrambles down the sandy shore
Freed from leash and boundaries
Feet moving faster than her thoughts
She leaps
Ears flopping
Tongue out crazily
Straight into the sea
Splashing gray diamonds everywhere
Suddenly
She stops her plunge and
Leaps as high as she can
Trying to escape chilly drops
She wheels around and bounds back
To the safe shore
Faster than I thought possible
Running as though the waves
Would grab her by the tail
And draw her back in
She finally slows
At the very edge of the beach
By the winding sand trail
Leading through the whispering dunes
There she snorts and shakes
Whole soggy body wriggling
As if to rid herself of the experience
And she stares beseechingly at me
Brown eyes confused
Telling me she
Doesn’t like
The cold, cold wet
And there she firmly stays
Convinced I’m an idiot
Resigned that she warned me
As I laugh and wade right in
To my chilly home
And she sits
And waits
Expectantly
Very visual, Leah. I can see it all! I particularly love ‘Splashing gray diamonds everywhere’ and ‘Whole soggy body wriggling’. I’m wondering at what point you took the photo. Or was it a video, lol? There are several moments that might have lent themselves to a quick snap.
Jenny/Angel: I just registered what you said, ‘poetry is my life’. Welcome to the clan! It’s an unusual life, and sometimes difficult. We almost always have to find some other way to earn a living, and those not in the clan may find us very hard to comprehend. Not even all poets are in this clan; I know some for whom fiction is their true love – and they also make poems, and even make them very well, BUT…. For those who do belong to the clan, there is one great compensation: we would never want any other life anyway. The mere thought is ridiculous!
Your BLEEDS is an ambitious piece, remarkably sophisticated for a 13-year-old. But in the end the poems have to stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of the poet’s age. This one got away from you a bit. The structure is interesting and well handled for the most part, though you lose the rhythm in the last line – a very bad place to lose it, when you want instead to come to a climax. The language is effective for the most part too, but ‘Magnificent; sublime’ are cop-out words that are too abstract to convey anything specific. They add nothing to the poem.
It reads like a fantasy, and as if you are trying to tell a very big story in just a few verses. At its best this poem is highly evocative, creating powerful images. At its worst it’s over-the-top. And I wanted to know more of that back story, which you have only suggested. So you might have to create one, lol! And it might become a sequence of poems instead of just one.
I’d be inclined to put it away a while, then in a few weeks or months you’ll pull it out and what it needs will jump off the page and hit you in the eye!
I imagine you’ve been writing for years. You also say, ‘I’m a thirteen year old writer’ unequivocally, not ‘I’m a thirteen year old who wants to be a writer’ or something. It’s great that you have so clearly identified yourself to yourself! So you’ll have to excuse me but I’m not going to talk down to you as a thirteen year old. The quality of your work puts you right up here with us big kids and I know you have sufficient poetic maturity – and more, dedication – to deal with whatever I say. (Besides, I might not be right, lol. It’s all opinion, really.)
Rosemary Nissen-Wade – Thank you for your feedback and for your advice – I will bear in mind everything that you’ve told me. It’s nice to have someone give me advice on my writing, because usually no one does, not even my English teacher! So I just go along blindly writing with nobody pointing out to me which parts I could improve on. So it’s nice to have some solid, firm advice for once from someone who knows what they’re talking about. Thank you!
And I might add an extra few verses to ‘Bleeds’, to add background, although I did like the mystery of it at first. Maybe I should also change the last line to ‘Beneath the rising sun, her soul still bleeds’, rather than ‘lying beneath the rising sun, her soul still bleeds’? And the line ‘magnificent, sublime’ to:
‘Something stirs, never still
Bends gently against the pale skyline
The dream hangs in the air
Dying as the sun slowly climbs’
Or does that lose the rhythm? Oh well, I’ll have to think about that one. Thank you anyway!