Photography and Career

I just read an article in ArtNews titled “What Is Art Good For?” In it, they talk with Stephen Shore. Speaking about his “own journey” in art, Mr. Shore says:

When I first knew I was a photographer, when I was still a child, the world of photography was radically different from what we experience today. There were no galleries in New York that showed and sold photographs. Very few photography monographs were published. The first photography gallery I ever visited, the Heliographers Gallery, opened in 1963, when I was already in my mid-teens. And that gallery sold prints for perhaps $15 or $25. I remember buying a print from W. Eugene Smith, at that time one of America’s best-known photographers, for $25. My point is that photography, then, offered the enticements of neither fame nor fortune. For those of us who pursued it as an art, it was simply a ‘calling.’ I mean this literally. I felt called to it.

Stephen Shore. Photo by Sprüth Magers.

This reminded me of Robert Lyons talking about how he and Stephen Shore were the two youngest photographers in a Minor White workshop. Robert was 15 and a half years old, and went on to have a long mentorship and friendship with Mr. White.

Robert Lyons

It’s pretty hard to imagine thinking about career when you’re 15 and a half years old. Clearly for Robert it was a calling.

I really appreciate Stephen Shore reminding me that it used to be virtually impossible to have an art career as a photographer. It makes my own anxieties about whether or not I have an audience, an exhibition, a gallery begin to recede. It’s like standing at the edge of the ocean looking out..

During my time in the Hartford MFA program I had the privilege of watching Bryan Schutmaat open into full bloom. It was incredible how quickly he mastered the 4x5 camera, which he had never used before. And to witness his deep, obsessive attention to detail as he was sequencing what would become Grays the Mountain Sends, his first photobook, which went on to win all the awards and position him for a Guggenheim.

Photo by Kominek Books.

Then, and since, I never heard Bryan talk about career in any way. He talked to me instead about the emotions he wanted the viewer to have looking at his photographs. He talked about movies and literature and all kinds of other things. (He was the first person I ever had a conversation with about Tarkovsky.) I felt he was called to photography, in the way that Mr. Shore talks about, albeit in a different time with different possibilities.

A year or two after we graduated, Bryan was at our house for one of the dinners I host for visiting photographers, and he was speaking with another somewhat more experienced photographer sitting next to him. The other photographer quickly began talking about Bryan’s career strategy. Bryan looked both uncomfortable and embarrassed. It struck me Bryan was mostly listening and being polite.

Now obviously a photographer does not build the career Bryan has without working at it hard. What I’m saying is, I never felt that it was his primary motivation, as it might be for other photographers, whose decisions about their next work are driven by positioning themselves in the market. Yet clearly he has made smart choices regarding the art market.

Susan Howe. Photo by Nina Subin.

I remember reading an interview with the poet Susan Howe where she talked about being OK if she only has a tiny handful of readers for her work. This is the world I come from—poetry, and those who are working, as the poet Michael Palmer puts it, “at the margins.” These poets accept that they may not have a large audience. The poet Robert Duncan used to tell us that every poet is guaranteed two ideal readers—the readers who totally get everything you’re doing. You just hope, he said, that both of them aren’t in the past.

Robert Duncan

Stephen Shore is reminding me of that commitment, that willful engagement of the art of photography with no apparent “upside.” Like the painters Jack Whitten and Stanley Whitney, who toiled for years without real recognition, we have to keep going, even when it would be easy to feel defeated.

Stanley Whitney and a detail of one of his paintings. Photos by Lisson Gallery.

As Stanley Whitney tells it, one day he came back to his studio after one of his regular visits to the galleries in Chelsea, and said to himself, “Well, Stanley, you’ve seen what the galleries want. Do you want to keep doing what you’re doing?” And he replied to himself, “Yes, I want to keep doing what I’m doing.”

The Crisis Tapes by Charlie Simokaitis

This is not a review. I’m not a critic. I’m a photographer who is writing about a photobook by Charlie Simokaitis called The Crisis Tapes (TIS, 2024). The poet Robert Duncan used to say that responsibility is the ability to respond, and that’s what I’m hoping to do here.

The first photograph in the book is of Charlie’s daughter Faye. I know this because Charlie was my friend in the first cohort of the Hartford MFA program, and I watched this work grow from it’s infancy. Charlie’s daughter Faye was gradually losing her eyesight while Charlie was making these photographs, and this situation was the genesis of the book. Her presence for us the viewers fades almost immediately as the book progresses, but not, I imagine, for Charlie.

The second photograph is of sand, in which we see a triangulation of the footprints of a multi-toed small creature and the slithering tracks of a Sidewinder, a desert rattlesnake I know about from old western movies. The uncertainty of what happened in this sand is unnerving, which is true of many of the photos in the book. What are we seeing? Exactly.

We are seeing the things which Charlie looks for, sometimes scenes of nature, sometimes dark corners of possibly a basement ceiling, sometimes a building, sometimes an incomprehensible detail of a wall with two holes, one of which is crossed by a saw blade, sometimes a blind dog. Many of the photos are quite dark, and almost all of them are mysterious.

As mysterious, perhaps, as losing one’s sight. Or as having sight and finding oneself seeing these dislocated fragments of a real world that is no longer real because now it’s a photograph. A Charlie Simokaitis photograph, which I think of as being just as distinctive as a paragraph from a novel by Samuel Beckett (who I happen to know Charlie has read). And I think this is where I take my delights from this book—in seeing so many Charlie images. They are sometimes nearly abstract. Or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, extract—detailed extractions from the context of the world.

The Crisis Tapes feels very much like a celebration of seeing something that doesn’t really exist until it’s photographed. The shattered moon, which might be a way-too symmetrical galaxy, or possibly the broken ice from a bird bath lying on the night grass. Flash is an important part of this seeing at times, as is night, and shadow. I use the word celebration because this is not a gloomy book, despite it’s impetus. I don’t know if he’s seeing on behalf of Faye, who soon won’t be able to, or if he’s seeing sympathetically with her, as the darkening occurs. Perhaps it’s both.

Page after page delivers another extracted image, sometimes clumped thematically, and sometimes a complete surprise, with no comforting narrative structure or set subject matter to ease the uncertainty, the strangeness, the unpredictability. Almost all of these are photographs I’d want on my wall so I could study them over time and live with their presences.

The final image, bookending the first image, is Faye again, this time diving down into the water of a swimming pool with her legs kicking back and up toward the camera. It’s a photograph filled with the bright light of summer sun on water and an exuberance that signals for me, personally, just how joyous it can be to be alive, even though.

I think looking at The Crisis Tapes as being a book about something is a mistake. It’s not an “account” of anything, no matter what the publisher’s blurb says. It is about a lot of things that do not need one thematic thread unifying them. My sense is, it’s more dedicated to Faye than it is about her. It also feels like a long engagement with vision and uncertainty by a father who is coming to terms with his daughter’s approaching loss. Meanwhile, he’s doing what he does in his own particular way, which is to see.

Let Us Now Praise Slim Photobooks

I listened yesterday to a Nearest Truth podcast in which Brad Feurhelm interviewed my friend from the Hartford MFA program Felipe Russo. Among other things, they discussed the beauty of the shorter photobook. They were talking about Felipe’s book Garagem Automática, which consists of 22 photographs.

I commented to Felipe on Instagram that this book felt to me infinite, but that I realized it’s because the images resonated infinitely for me, despite there being such a surprisingly small number of them. It’s a book that took four years to come about, I think he said, and I bet it could have included so many more images. But Felipe realized that 22 were enough.

Spread from Felipe Russo, Garagem Automática.

I have witnessed the development of multiple photobooks from their naissance to their eventual publication, and I’ve seen a few cases involving a shift from what were tight, powerful edits to something larger. It struck me that the expansion of the work did not necessarily make it stronger. Rather, I wondered if the photobook publishers, and maybe the artists, grew the number of images to fill out an idea of what a serious photobook should be, which is: a large hardcover with between 60 and 80 photographs and well over 100 pages.

My sense is that the initial thread of an idea, or concept, can get lost as the number of images grow, and even the relations between the images can become more tenuous. This might have to do with memory’s capacity to hold onto images and relate them to each other. Or it might be that only so many images can be combined around one concept before either repetition or straying sets in.

Don’t get me wrong. I love images that don’t belong, or that surprise the reader––the hard left turn. But I have a suspicion that photographs sometimes end up included in a book both because of the general feeling that bigger is better, and because they’re really good photographs which the publishers and artists don’t want to leave out. The net result might be a collection of really good photographs that don’t necessarily deliver a unified experience. I think this connects to a revelation I had writing poetry in undergraduate school that once I started taking out words and lines the poems often got stronger.

My favorite Robert Frank book—OK, yes, after The Americans—is Pangnirtung, which only has 27 photographs. I think I read once that he shot the images in a single week while visiting an Arctic village. It has a wholeness and a completeness that inspire me to try to make the same. And while it is a hardcover and is bigger in format, it’s a terribly slim book in the hand. The length allows for multiple “readings” in one sitting, which, for me, leads to a deeper contemplation of the book and its images.

The photographer Uta Genilke in Hamburg has been issuing a series of short, slim books, each serving a different theme or idea, and each of which feels like a full and complete piece. She prints these in small editions and they’re quite affordable. They also allow me to really feel the artist’s thinking through images and sequencing. Doing several shorter books I think also gives her a chance to address more ideas than trying to fit more photos under one title.

Uta Genilke. Sacre.

My personal favorite book by Bryan Schutmaat is Good Goddamn, which has 27 photographs made during a going-away celebration between two friends, one of whom was about to head to prison. (It wasn’t Bryan.) The work feels terribly personal and the emotions lift off the pages like mist. I believe Bryan said somewhere that it’s more of a zine, which I disagree with. It’s a book. It’s just a slim book. But to me it’s equally as important as his other longer books. (Brad Feurhelm and Felipe Russo mention that they believe a slim book is not automatically a zine.)

Bryan Schutmaat. Good Goddamn.

And while I love Michael Schmidt’s epic cloth-bound tome Lebensmittel, which clocks in at 264 pages, I find myself more frequently looking at Waffenruhe, a paperback which has 38 photos. I can’t imagine anything is missing at that length, and not a single image in the book feels superfluous.

I might also contrast Waffenruhe with John Gossage’s Berlin in the Time of the Wall, a monumental 464 page book, which I looked at very carefully and completely. Once. I haven’t taken it down from the shelf since. There are many extraordinary photographs in that book, but it’s an ordeal just to turn through the pages

Michael Schmidt. Waffenruhe.

Not that longer photobooks necessarily have superfluous images, but I suppose I’m saying that for me slim books often have more impact and hold me in the images, the idea, and the mind of the photographer longer. Yet I think many in the photobook world still see the big important hardcover as the highest accomplishment. I applaud the photographers who are gravitating toward shorter books that don’t make a grand statement but often speak more forcefully and more compellingly than their lengthier brethren.

When Did We Lose Our Desire to Understand?

The massive and labyrinthine show of Diane Arbus photographs currently at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory was recently reviewed on the Hyperallergic website by Hakim Bishara. “The era of Diane Arbus’s cold, classist gaze is dead, “ he pronounces in the lede sentence. “Her “freak” photographs,” he continues, “of disabled, disfigured, and disenfranchised people she ambushed with a camera in asylums and hospitals were morally challenged when she made them between the late 1950s and early ’70s, and have only soured over the decades.”

Diane Arbus

He goes on to critique the fact that she came from a privileged family that owned a department store, as if that somehow disqualifies her as an artist and the work she produced. “Arbus was in her natural element in New York’s high society,” he asserts.

Interesting. Had he read her biography and dug into her life he might have come to understand just how much she felt like a freak herself, and how she more likely identified with the marginalized people she photographed than the social milieu in which she was raised. But the pulse of curiosity seems to be absent from his entire review. This complicated, suffering, and imperfect artist is instead basically cancelled, together with her work.

John Ashbery

One of my favorite art critics to read is John Ashbery, though he is fairly dead. His reviews focus on trying to understand what’s going on in the art. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that he was an accomplished poet who had created many significant works in his life and maybe had some measure of compassion for the artists who were trying to do the same. I can’t say.

John Yau

I also depend deeply upon the reviews in Hyperallergic by John Yau, a former student of Ashbery’s and a poet, to guide me towards artists I’ve never heard of, and who often end up being very important to me.

Robert Creeley

In 1974 I took a reading class at the University of New Mexico from Robert Creeley on contemporary poetry. Creeley was a writer who was credited by many as one of the most important lyric poets of his generation, and who was associated with the Black Mountain school of poetry, which is where he both taught and studied after dropping out his senior year from Harvard. In our class with Creeley, we read many poets who I’m sure he did not see eye to eye with, nor feel much affinity for, but he led us through their work with the sincere intent to understand what they were doing without dismissing any of them.

Robert Duncan

The poet Robert Duncan used to say that poetry needs all poets. He basically refused to rank in a hierarchy the importance of different poets. And yet he was a poet of great convictions and opinions.

It strikes me that it’s much more challenging to seek to understand an artist than it is to measure them, sometimes 50 or 75 years later, against the moral standards of 2025 and find them to be wanting. I’m actually curious which artists can withstand such scrutiny today. Like, sincerely curious. I wouldn’t know how to make such a list.

I was taken, in reading Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, just how often the “father of psychiatry” admitted he didn’t know something, that he couldn’t have an opinion on it because he didn’t have enough information or it was beyond his expertise. He did this frequently.

Uncertainty. In my personal opinion, this is the heart of art. As artists, perhaps we eventually discover that it’s more useful to seek to understand than it is to know. As for cancelling, I’m not sure what it gives us that’s actually useful.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 6: Tender Buttons

As I mentioned in my post about Emily Dickinson, the second-place prize for most well-known poet who no one reads goes to Gertrude Stein. I’m going to focus on just one work of hers: Tender Buttons. It’s a book of prose poems, written intentionally as a book of poems, not just poems collected into a book. Therefore I believe it has much to say to the photobook makers of today. It’s also so much easier to pick one work, rather than try to talk about her entire ouvre.

First edition of Tender Buttons.

I also chose Tender Buttons because of how “visual” it is. The book is divided into three sections: Objects, Food, and Rooms. (Wouldn’t this make an interesting photobook already?) But let’s start imagining how Stein’s book could be useful to photographers by talking first about the title.

Have you noticed a pattern in the naming of photobooks? There seems to be a set number of formats, including, as the most common, the one-word title. Here are just a few examples: Exposures. Epitome. Cargo. Needle. Noticings. (You get the idea.) It functions, but it doesn’t usually create curiosity.

And the titles with more than one word are rarely ones that I find surprising or intriguing. Not too many photobooks have a title that generates curiosity like the name Tender Buttons. Happily, there are many exceptions, including Jason Fulford’s Raising Frogs for $$$. Surreally (and delightfully) random, right?. Bryan Schutmaat’s Good Goddamn is another. A brilliant title is Michael Ast’s The Windows Are Tinted To Help You Sleep. I bought this slim book just because the title made me laugh with joy.

Another would be Ron Jude’s Lick Creek Line. Talk about a charged and estranged line-up of three words. Coming upon it for the first time, there’s basically no way to even guess what the title might mean, or what the photographs might be inside the book, but the words compel curiosity. If there’s one thing that I think is frequently missing from photobooks and photography today, it would be mystery.

Stein’s book plunges us into an utter mystery of words. Oh, we might feel comforted by the simple title of the first section—Objects—but then we turn the page and find the following, the first poem of the book:

A CARAFE, THAT IS A BLIND GLASS

A kind of glass and a cousin, a spectacle and nothing strange a single hurt color and an arrangement in a system to pointing. All this and not ordinary, not unordered in not resembling. The difference is spreading.

Not ordinary indeed. We are clearly in a realm beyond the simple and clear. In the book, Stein has not given us an “artist’s statement,” as most photography today does, which might explain away the mystery and make it perfectly clear what the artist is doing so that we might rest assured we will not be puzzled, perplexed, stuck, frustrated, or otherwise in a state of unknowing and curiosity. Yet, at the same time, do we need, as readers, a doorway into what is a truly challenging work?

Picasso’s famous portrait of Stein.

Perhaps usefully, Tender Buttons does come with enough of an introduction, written by the author Sherwood Anderson, a contemporary of Stein’s, to help us find some sort of footing without the mystery being destroyed. He suggests that these are portraits in words, portraits influenced by her cubist friends Picasso and Braque. He continues:

“…they revealed Stein to be attacking the denotations of words: while the individual elements of her sentences were familiar, their significance as a whole seems to be stripped away.” He continues, “She emphasized their musical qualities, favoring sound over sense. Confronted with such unexpected associations and willful incoherence, the reader is left to question the meaning of words, to become reacquainted with a language that Stein thought had been dulled by long use.”

The reason this introduction is different, in my opinion, from the artist’s statements of today is 1) it’s not the artist telling us what they’re going to tell us in the work. 2) It does not use artspeak to appeal to an academic audience, but uses everyday language. 3) It does not over-explain everything, but rather helps us into the work and allows us to keep walking along a dark cavern of uncertainty and unfamiliarity that might otherwise seem unapproachable.

The danger, of course, is that we might say, “Oh, I get it. Now I know what’s going on.” Mystery dissolved. Not that the work should remain unknowable, but the reader could then be deprived of the experience of the work because they’re not motivated to wrestle their own understanding out of it.

Stein with Alice B. Toklas and their poodle, Basket.

Reading Tender Buttons is a great way to shake loose new ideas about how a sequence of photographs (or any other medium) could generate meaning, and how a book of images might be structured. Photography in particular has a rather linear heritage, and Stein’s extremely non-linear, non-traditional use of language could inspire all kinds of new approaches to shaping photographic experiences.

I’ll close with one more short poem from the book:

NOTHING ELEGANT

A charm a single charm is doubtful. If the red is rose and there is a gate surrounding it, if inside is let in and there places change then certainly something is upright. It is earnest.

There is an utterly affordable edition of Tender Buttons published by Dover Books. For more about Gertrude Stein you might go to https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gertrude-stein.

Why Poetry?

When I was an anthropology minor in undergrad, one of my anthro professors was Alfonso Ortiz, who also happened to be a member of the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo (formerly San Juan Pueblo) in New Mexico. Ortiz told us that one of the world’s problems was that western civilization had been stuck in a closed conversation with western civilization, and that this had been disastrous. He encouraged us to overcome our white awkwardness and attend the multiple Pueblo dances open to the public. He assured us that this was not an intrusion, but an important engagement with another culture and worldview.

Alfonso Ortiz.

I believe the same is true for photography as an art form. When photography only looks at photography, the possibilities within the field become quite limited. After all, photography is barely two hundred years old. The question often becomes, for the photographer, which established form do I pluck from the shelf and fill out? Typology? Documentary? Identity statement? Portraiture? Landscape? Or, even worse, which photographer’s work do I emulate?

Picasso’s painting “Family of Saltimbanques” (1905) inspired one of the Duino Elegies, a series of poems written by Rainer Maria Rilke, who lived with the painting briefly while visiting Duino Castle in 1912.

The same is true for literature, painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, dance, music, and filmmaking—they all need each other to keep the river flowing, to keep from trapping the water in a back eddy. To keep invention, and each particular art, alive and healthy. For that matter, our arts should infect themselves with all kinds of different influences, such as philosophy, astrophysics, history, anthropology, linguistics—you name it.

One of my favorite sayings related to photography is Tod Papageorge’s restatement of Robert Capa’s famous statement, “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” Papageorge turned it into “If your photos aren’t good enough, you’re not reading enough.”

Anselm Kiefer, “Margarethe,” (1981). Like many other paintings by Kiefer, this one refers to the poetry of Paul Celan, specifically to a figure in Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (1948).

Reading poetry that strives to push into the unknown, rather than stand comfortably in the known and familiar, can give photographers all kinds of ideas about possible structues, subject matters, lack of subject matters, non-linear meaning-making, fragmentation, defamiliarization, recontextualization, and other ways photography might operate. Poetry is the most radical form of language. As such, it hints at what might be possible in our own art involving images.

Given my experience with other photographers and their interest in poetry, but the rather short list of poets I hear referred to, I thought that maybe I could open a few gates and broaden the grazing range (to introduce yet another metaphor—sheesh!). We know, based on the history of other arts, that over time photography will morph and expand photographic experiences and the ways it can create meaning. My thinking is that showcasing some of the less mainstream poets might help to grow the practices at the margins of photography. Because that’s where the innovation happens. That’s where the boundaries of our art are quietly, yet constantly, pushing outward.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 5: John Ashbery

If you listen to Bebop jazz today, it’s sometimes hard to hear how radical it was when it first came out in the 1940s. This is absolutely not the case when reading the early poetry of John Ashbery. His first book, Some Trees, was awarded the Yale Younger Poet’s Prize from W.H. Auden in 1956. Delightful poems. But after his second book, The Tennis Court Oath (1963) was issued, which stepped into much less familiar territory, Ashbery was sure his career was over and he’d never have another book published in his lifetime.

The poetry in that book was, and still is, as innovative and unfamiliar as any in the English language. Ashbery accepted the fact that, from then on, he would only write poetry for himself, convinced he would never have an audience. This commitment on his part—to continue no matter what—is almost as important to me as his poetry. Suffice to say, he had a long “career” and published many more books, winning the Pulitzer and the National Book Award, and being one of the very few truly innovative poets to be published regularly in the pages of the New Yorker.

A couple of years ago, a young poet and friend of mine who was then working on his MFA in creative writing at Vanderbilt, after handing in a paper on John Ashbery, was told by the head of the program that only a few years ago a paper on John Ashbery would not have been acceptable. That’s how controversial his work still is among more conservative academic poetry circles.

I’m telling you all this to help you understand how vibrant and alive and, at some times, even threateningly so, this poetry is, and point towards how impactful it has been over the last last almost-sixty years. Here’s a relatively short (for Ashbery) poem to give you a small taste of some of his work. It’s from his Selected Poems (1986):

Instead of Leaving

Anyone, growing up in a space you hadn't used yet

would've done the same: bother the family's bickering

to head straight into the channel. My, those times

crackled near about us, from sickly melodrama

instead of losing, and the odd confusion...confusion.

I thought of it then, and in the mountains.

During the day we perforated the eponymous city limits

and then some. No one knew all about us

but some knew plenty. It was time to leave that town

for an empty drawer

into which they sailed. Some of the eleven thousand

virgins were getting queasy. I say, stop the ship!

No can do. Here come the bald arbiters

with their eyes on chains, just so, like glasses.

Heck, it's only a muskrat

that's seen better years, when things were medieval

and gold...

So you people in the front,

leave. You see them. And you understand it all.

It doesn't end, night's sorcery notwithstanding.

Would you have preferred to be a grownup in earlier times

than the child can contain or imagine?

Or is right now the answer—you know, the radio

we heard news on late at night,

our checkered fortunes so pretty.

Here's your ton of plumes, and your Red Seal Records.

The whole embrace.

I’m not going to try to explain this poem—or any poem, for that matter. As Ashbery himself wrote: "I’m not very good at explaining my work... I'm unable to do so because I feel that my poetry is the explanation. The explanation of what? Of my thought, whatever that is. As I see it, my thought is both poetry and the attempt to explain that poetry; the two cannot be disentangled." (From John Ashbery, published by the Library of America.)

I see Ashbery as a vital bridge between the poetry that had been happening in Europe—especially France—in the first half of the twentieth century and that which had happened in Great Britain and the US. Ashbery, in my opinion, influenced every important American poet over the second half of the twentieth century, and well into the twenty-first.

A young John Ashbery

Also, as Baudelaire did a hundred years earlier, Ashbery has written some of the most useful art criticism of his era, which is collected in the book Reported Sightings, a book I continue to re-read. His former student, the poet John Yau, now carries on this tradition in writings for Hyperallergic and The Brooklyn Rail web sites.

It is fortunate for all of us, no matter how much I prefer to have single copies of his every book, that the Library of America has issued his collected poems from 1956 to 1987 in one volume, which covers much of his output. This book allows you to sample his first poems, jump into the unsettling delights of The Tennis Court Oath, then skip over to his later, some might say more accessible, work, for a taste of his depth and range.

Again, the purpose of these blog posts is not to fully explore the poets I recommend, but to only point in their direction. Please consider this as emphatic a pointing as I can muster.

For more info about his life, and to read some of his poems, check out https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/john-ashbery.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 4: Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is surely the most familiar poet no one has read. (Followed by Gertrude Stein.) Or at least read in any depth. Everyone seems to have ideas about her, propagated by distorted plays and romantic pop culture misconceptions. She was not a recluse except perhaps at the end of her life. She corresponded frequently with several important literary figures of her time. She interacted with friends and family. She fell in love, with both men and women. But much of the world believed what her father believed, which is that a woman should not be a writer but should serve the household. She stubbornly resisted that in an astonishing way, even though she made her family home her primary world—especially her garden

Over her lifetime she wrote almost 1800 poems, which she neatly bundled together and tied up with string. She published only ten poems while alive.

Despite the sentimentality attached to her image, what she wrote was easily as innovative and challenging as the work of Gertrude Stein or any other modernist. This is particularly clear when you read a collection of her poems that preserves her original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation, with its varying sizes of dashes, such as the R.W. Franklin edition of1998.

Her poems are like three-dimensional bees made out of tightly-bound tapestry thread. The only poetry that is as compact as hers would be the work of Paul Celan. Her meaning is so condensed that a reader has to periodically stick their head out of a window and take deep breaths of fresh air. She is as radical today as when she died in 1886.

Here’s a great example of the way she builds meaning in tight, halting steps. It’s poem number 372 (she did not title her poems):

After great pain, a formal feeling comes –

The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –

The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’

And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?

The Feet, mechanical, go round –

A Wooden way

Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –

Regardless grown,

A Quartz contentment, like a stone –

This is the Hour of Lead –

Remembered, if outlived,

As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –

First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –

Because of the power compressed into each poem, her collected works feels nearly endless. It is an inland sea that cannot be exhausted. And a great example of how an artist can give over to their own idiosyncratic meaning-making if they resist trying to “fit in” to the photography heralded as “successful” and instead follow the small voice that leads them into a strange and unfamiliar garden.

Find out more about Dickinson and read some of her poems at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/emily-dickinson#tab-poems. And consider buying The Poems of Emily Dickinson, edited by R.W. Franklin.

Another rare treat are the lectures by the poet Robert Duncan on Dickinson at New College of California, recorded in 1981 by my friend David Levi Strauss. https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Duncan.php

Also, the poet Susan Howe (blog post 3) wrote a marvelous book, My Emily Dickinson (1985).

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 3: Susan Howe

In my previous post about Wallace Stevens I mentioned that one great admirer of Steven’s richly complex later poems is the (experimental? avant-garde? interesting?) poet Susan Howe.

And like Stevens, she has some of the most delightful titles for her poems and books of poems. One of my favorites is her relatively early book, Defenestration of Prague, which was published by The Kulchur Foundation in 1983. I wish I still had that small-run first edition, with it’s lovely cover.

Susan Howe owns her deep Yankee roots and has focused on such topics in her writing as Emily Dickinson, the Indian Wars in New England, Cotton Mather, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity tale, the pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Pierce, and the attempts at utopia by the Labadists. It’s a wide-ranging and interlaced map of references, and Howe’s poetry, on top of that, is a sometimes elated play with pure language.

In fact, she’s usually associated with the LANGUAGE poets, the loose group of post-structuralist writers who rose to prominence in the late-70s and 80s, who broke many literary conventions and rebelled against the ego-centered emotive lyrical poetry embodied by the Beats and the Confessional poets.

I think Steven Paul Martin gives an insightful description of Howe’s poetic practice:

“by asking us to focus on the tangible presence of language itself—on the morphemes, phonemes and graphemes that words are made of—Howe moves us away from our tendency to think in abstractions, easing us into the motion and fabric of a verbal space that has not been reduced to a mere zone of representation. We are asked to see and hear the shapes and sounds of the words instead of reading through them to what they supposedly refer to. Our sense of discursive or narrative continuity shatters, replaced with the endless Protean linkages that give language its living power.”

The implications, to my mind, for photography are deep and broad. Reading Susan Howe is like completely refreshing one’s understanding of how meaning is made. She is sincerely inventive, in that she’s not just trying to be novel or obscure or difficult. She’s trying to return to a place where language most fundamentally starts to mean something. And that might not be a bad practice for a photographer to engage the image.

As with any “challenging” poet, the trick is to not try to rationally understand everything you’re reading, but to move through it, getting what you can from each pass you take at her work. It’s just like reading Shakespeare. If you stop and turn to a dictionary every time you hit something you don’t know, you lose the flow and the potential experience bound into the language. You can always go back later and Google a reference or a word, and then maybe read it again.

You can find out more about Howe, and read some of her poems, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/susan-howe.

As for a first book, I’d recommend The Europe of Trusts, a collection of three of her earlier books: The Liberties, Pythagorean Silence, and Defenestration of Prague. Published by New Directions, 2002.

Poetry for Photographers & Other Artists 2: Wallace Stevens

Two of the 20th century’s greatest poets had very traditional careers and wrote in their spare time. One was William Carlos Williams, who delivered over 3,000 babies in the Rutherford, New Jersey area as a doctor. The other was an attorney who rose through the ranks to become a vice-president at the Hartford Accident & Indemnity Company: Wallace Stevens.

Despite his conservative lifestyle in Hartford, he created in the mid-20th century some of the most innovative poetry ever written, even by today’s standards. I’m thinking in particular of his later poems, from 1950 onwards, which are deeply admired by the “experimental” poet Susan Howe. And appropriately so. They bear reading and rereading for their rich language, intellectual delicacy, and compelling ambiguities. Here’s the opening stanza from “To an Old Philosopher in Rome.”

On the threshold of heaven, the figures in the street

Become the figures of heaven, the majestic movement

Of men growing small in the distance of space,

Singing, with smaller and smaller sound,

Unintelligible absolution, and an end–

In contrast, Steven’s earlier poetry, particularly his famous book Harmonium (1923), is a lush, overgrown jungle of language at times, with great musicality and striking imagery. For instance, these opening lines from the poem “The Bird with the Coppery, Keen Claws:”

Above the forest of the parakeets,

A parakeet of parakeets prevails,

A pip of life among a mort of tails.

You will also notice, as you read him, that Stevens has the best poem titles of any poet you’ll find. In fact, he often began his poems by coming up with a title first, and then finding where it took him. (I have been doing the same with my photographic works, without knowing this was Steven’s approach.)

The most quoted poem of Stevens’ has to be “The Snow Man,” of which the final stanza reads:

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

There is one photographer, at least, who has paid great attention to Wallace Stevens, and that is Tim Carpenter in his book-length essay, To Photograph is to Learn How to Die. Carpenter sees Stevens as a materialist, but I see him in a slightly different light. I think it’s interesting to note that he converted to Catholicism on his death bed.

However his spirituality might be measured, Stevens could inspire a great amount of photographic work if he lands on your bookshelf. Fortunately for all of us, all his poetry and prose is to be found in one convenient book: Wallace Stevens: Collected Poetry and Prose, published by The Library of America (1997).

You can learn more about Stevens, and read several of his poems, at https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wallace-stevens.

Poetry for Photographers and Other Artists 1: Intro

I’m fascinated by the rather small group of poets that seem to influence many photographers. In essence, it comes down to four names: T.S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W.H. Auden, and Richard Hugo. I can understand why the first three names come up so often, given how famous they are. But I’m a bit puzzled by Richard Hugo. And overall, I’m concerned enough at the puddle-size of this poetic pool to launch a series of suggestions of poets which photographers and other artists might want to add to their shelves.

My background is poetry. I was a creative writing major as an undergrad and attended the New College of California Graduate Program in Poetics in San Francisco in the early 80s. For around 15 years I was seriously writing poetry and publishing in various literary journals, before abandoning art for career in order to support my family. Later, aghast at having ignored my muse, I committed to photography as my art form, which has been deeply informed by my engagement with poetry.

I’lll try to focus each post on one poet, and keep it short and concise—just enough to point you in a poet’s direction and give you some links to their poetry. The great thing is, should you decide to buy one of these poet’s books, such books are positively cheap compared to photobooks and art books. So your investment, even in a decent-sized library of poetry, will be relatively small.

For those of you who will be shopping for these books online and who might be looking for used copies or alternatives to Amazon, you should know about AddAll.com, a great collection of offerings by a multitude of book dealers. https://www.addall.com/used is the url. For rarer out-of-proint poetry you might want to check out my friend David Abel’s lovely offerings at Passages Bookshop: https://www.passagesbookshop.com.

I think I’ll launch this series, which will occur in no particular order, with the next post focusing on Wallace Stevens.