Poetry and photography

What is a photo, if not a visual poem recorded by photons and a sensitive base instead of ink and paper?

I’m a big fan of Evan Puschak’s youtube channel Nerdwriter1 where he delves into art of all sort, and in particular videos where he does deep analysis of poetry. While I’ve always been interested in literature, I’ve forever found poetry a bit too esoteric to get into…until I made the connection between the intersection of form between poetry and photography.

What a photo does so well is “say 1000 words” in a super condensed form…much like a well written poem. I had no idea that a poem could hold so many layers of meaning until watching that linked video above.

To that end, I’ve been playing with pairing stream-of-consciousness short poems with a single picture. I think I started with the “written on the spot” format as a way to cover for my lack of literary skill in this medium…and over time, I’m sure I will devote more time to each one, but for now, this is a fun exercise in learning the form and flow of a fresh vehicle of expression.

I’ll post these here as they are created. Hopefully each can lend a bit of extra context to some of my work, bringing the implied story of the photo to life through a different, but not all that disparate, medium.

So now…the first in a series of who knows how many.

American Dream

He thought that to make it

To make it and win

He needed to outwit

The rest of his kin

He made a deposit

On cottage so quaint

A house, he would posit

That matched his Vette’s paint