The Funny Thing About Poetry

Authors note:  I have decided to condense the next several posts into one.  I will update occasionally as needed.

2:37pm

When I was seventeen years old, I was in love with my best friend.  I never told her.  Not because of the gay thing, we had, after all, come out together.  It was my neediness that worried me, and her independence.  It might have been a lone act of insight and maturity on my part, or a needless self-sacrifice for the sake of the melodramatic.  Given my history, it's more likely the latter.  I remember writing very bad poetry about it.

The funny thing about poetry, for me, at least, is that the more I want to write it, the worse the poem is.  Or rather, the emotion driving the poetry needs to be the desire for the words themselves.  I can't write poetry from love or longing; I write poetry from the words that circle in my head as I drive home in the snow, the words that make the cadence I fall asleep to.

Not this.


3:55pm

I will not have a good piece by the end of the day.

But I will have a finished piece.


4:24pm

3. Developing the print

Slide the paper into the developer. Use tongs to make sure the entire surface is submerged. Pick up one edge of the tray and begin to rock gently up and down. You want to keep the developer moving, across and back, so that the each molecule meets the photograph, changes it, and is whisked away again to be mixed in with the whole.

You can lose yourself in this, the slow rocking, up and down, the developer washing across and back, calling forth an image from empty space.

You are calling ghosts, here in the dark. You coax them close, and bind them down. The paper holds the memory of the light it has seen. The negative holds its memory it’s moment in the light. And those memories, rather than blending and fading, growing old and dying, they stay. A photograph cannot reconcile what was with what is. A photograph lives forever in was. And isn’t that all a ghost is? The universe’s failure to forget the past. Or the past’s unwillingness to be forgotten.