This pretty much sums up every poem I’ve ever written about photography…
“It’s true that a photograph is a witness, but a witness of something that is no more.” (Roland Barthes)
Quotes
Poetry as Prayer
I’ve always been very interested in the idea of writing poetry as an act of prayer or as a spiritual praxis. What is your favorite book, article, quote, or other resource touching on this? Here’s one of my many favorites…
“You can’t write out of intentional consciousness.”
Carolyn Forché in an Image Journal article– “The Unfinished Cathedral” by James K.A. Smith (https://imagejournal.org/article/the-unfinished-cathedral/)
Rita Dove: A moment when things open up from the inside
Conversations with Rita Dove by Earl G. Ingersoll
And not talk about it
“Anyway, I have it borne in on me that my business is to write and not talk about it.”
~ Flannery O’Connor
Great Thomas Lux poem…
…from a great Christmas present
Lost in the endless shine of eternity
Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Memory
“Your memory is a monster; you forget—it doesn’t. It simply files things away. It keeps things for you, or hides things from you—and summons them to your recall with a will of its own. You think you have a memory; but it has you!”
~John Irving, A Prayer for Owen Meany
Multiple Exegeses
“Never deprive the reader of opportunities for multiple exegeses.”
C.D. Wright, Cooling Time
And if it be poetry that makes the word flesh…
C.D. Wright, Cooling Time
