Photographers believe a picture is worth a thousand words, while poets hope the right word is worth a thousand pictures. Photographers labor over contact sheets, poets labor over a single phrase. I’ve stared at my negatives for years, coaxing my images to say more. Poetry can be the looking glass we hold up to magnify the spaces between photographs, helping to explain why they happened.
Photography and poetry each have their strengths and limitations, yet both attempt to make order out of the infinite thoughts and events we encounter each day. Poetry allows me to break free of photography’s reliance upon realism: the luxury of words grants me the freedom to convey whatever I can imagine, without the need to stand before an actual landscape.
As Kafka wrote, “You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
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