Poetry

I have started reading poetry in the mornings. Out on the quiet deck, with a cup of warm tea. While that probably sounds a bit idyllic the truth is a bit more mundane. The bustle of back-to-school mornings doesn’t lend itself to longer prose. The slow mornings where I could risk getting lost in a novel were left behind with the warmer days of summer.

“For nesting, the hawk gathers the girl’s
long hair- glinting, caught in a low branch,

sagged on a clothesline. Soon he’ll look
for her gold curls, almost transparent

in the light, and see the strands the color of bark
dull and dark and straight....”

— Maggie Smith

So I take my five minutes and a few sips of tea and as I read Maggie Smith I think- I want to see the world like this.

And then I realize the photographer and the poet…aren’t we trying to do the same thing?

Freeze Time

Distill the world into its smallest details

Notice, observe, record

Make the mundane momentous?

In his book Visual Poetry, photographer Chris Orwig puts it like this:

“What the novelist says in 20,000 words, the poet says in 20. And after reading a poem we don’t just have more information, we have more experience. A good poem isn’t about reductionism. It is about reducing, simplifying and deepening. A poem always gives more. And poems are spare. With so little space, they require distillation, which concentrates and intensifies their meaning and effect. Like evaporating seawater, where only the salt remains, those few lines communicate more. And the best photographs that I know follow this same trajectory.”

Want to become a better photographer? Learn to see the world like a poet. Make images that do more than record facts. Tell stories in the simplest way possible. Capture images that elevate the mundane. Choose the figurative over the literal, the quiet over the noise.

I say this as if creating simplicity isn’t complex. Which of course it is. Ask the poet. Ask the photographer. It’s just words. It’s just light.

Reading poetry in the mornings is a good place to start.

“Does the sky Stop? It doesn’t stop,
it just stops being one thing
and starts being another”

— Maggie Smith