OTHER LITERARY MUSES
A photograph is like a finely crafted poem - a rhyme, a couplet, a sonnet, a haiku, sometimes even a bit of doggerell or a limmerick. The lines, the shapes, the shades and the colours, all these carry meanings that exist beyond the specific context of their subject, just as nouns, verbs, rhymes and turns of phrase become universal metaphors for human existance. The following are some poetic inspirations... photographic poems, or poetic photographs which I have collected over the years. For the most part, they are injunctions on how to "be"... how to find the appropriate verb for our own way of living.
Music, when soft voices diePercy Bysshe Shelley Music, when soft voices die, Vibrates in the memory, Odours, when sweet violets sicken, Live within the sense they quicken. Rose leaves, when the rose is dead, Are heaped for the beloved's bed; And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone, Love itself shall slumber on. |
How To Be a Poet
Wendell Berry
(to remind myself) i Make a place to sit down. Sit down. Be quiet. You must depend upon affection, reading, knowledge, skill—more of each than you have—inspiration, work, growing older, patience, for patience joins time to eternity. Any readers who like your poems, doubt their judgment. ii Breathe with unconditional breath the unconditioned air. Shun electric wire. Communicate slowly. Live a three-dimensioned life; stay away from screens. Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in. There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places. iii Accept what comes from silence. Make the best you can of it. Of the little words that come out of the silence, like prayers prayed back to the one who prays, make a poem that does not disturb the silence from which it came. |
To Play PianissimoLola Haskins
Does not mean silence. The absence of moon in the day sky for example. Does not mean barely to speak, the way a child's whisper makes only warm air on his mother's right ear. To play pianissimo is to carry sweet words to the old woman in the last dark row who cannot hear anything else, and to lay them across her lap like a shawl. |