I’ve spent at least eight hours of each of the past four days reading other people’s poems. I am attending to word choice, comma placement, the arrangement of lines on the page. I am remembering, in this process, how vulnerable we poets make ourselves each time we take first the risk of writing poems and then the subsequent risk of sending these poems out into the world. This can be a terrifying prospect, writing and then sharing poetry.From "For oh, I fear," by Camille Dungy
I came across this post over at harriet, the Poetry Foundation blog a few days ago. I've read it several times since then because while anyone undertaking a creative endeavor experiences some degree of anxiety over creating and sharing their work, poets and photographers are more closely related.
Both forms are about distillation and subtraction. It's about seeing the entire world before you, in all its chaos, beauty, ugliness, filth, despair and hope and attempting to make sense of it all in just a few lines scribbled in a notebook, in just one frame that represents 1/250 or 1/1000 of a second. It's a daunting task. I'm sure some variation of these questions runs through our heads:
"Am I revealing too much about myself?" "What will people think of me when they see this?" "Is what I'm doing Important Enough, with the Big Ideas That Will Change The World?" "What if I get rejected?" "What if I'm not good enough?" "Does anyone even care about what I have to say?"
Reading Dungy's post and the selection of poems she included (especially Claude McKay's "Poetry") made me realize that I want to get to the point where I'm not afraid to be vulnerable. Where I'm not afraid to try something new and strange and see where it leads me. Or at the very least, I want to get to the point where, when I am afraid, even terrified of revealing something inside me that I didn't know was there, I don't shrink away. I push through and see where to go from there.
I say all this to say, I've been working on a couple of projects simultaneously. One of the projects feels safe and familiar, which is not always a bad thing. The other project however, is a different beast. It doesn't feel safe and familiar at all but I like the images I have so far.
We'll see where all this goes.
Of interest: (When-poetry-and-photography-intersect edition)
+Sweet Flypaper of Life, a celebration of and meditation on Harlem by two titans: photographer Roy DeCarava and poet Langston Hughes
+Alec Soth's Friday Poems (from his late, great and thoroughly missed personal blog, archived here for posterity)
+Paired, a series of poems paired with complementary photographs via Personism
