This summer, I took a photography class called The Eloquent Image with Keith Carter at the Anderson Fine Arts Ranch in Snowmass. The LA Times describes Keith as the “poet of the ordinary,” so, of course, I wanted to take his class, to see how a photographer creates poetry through image, through shadow, light, blur, focus. Keith described the seminal shot that propelled him into the world of photographic poetry: two boys with a jar of fireflies who could not stand still for him— poetry accidental and blurred. You want the mistakes, he said.
Last night, so bleak the news, Leonard and I watched the migration of a family of elephants through a world of drought. They gathered at the bleached skull of one they had lost years ago or a year ago, I suppose, touching it so tenderly with their trunks before moving on. Tiny birds, thousands, whirled in murmuration like gathering rain that soon breaks. Poetry I want to hold onto. Today, I find the words of William Carlos Williams, a poet I have not thought of for so long, and I don’t know why, but his words are here with me now like these images that keep gathering:
We sit and talk,
quietly, with long lapses of silence
and I am aware of the stream
that has no language
A week ago, two, I searched the river banks for something beautiful, something of poetry to hold onto. The river so crowded, the human construction of it so persistent, I thought, gone, just gone, the snowy egrets I saw so many years past in summer on the rocks preening themselves in light, the crawdads they lifted from the depths glittering. And then I found them, blurred, accidental, stepping into this river, into this visible speaking.
