Is LF like poetry?

[Ed Richards]

Interesting editorial in the WSJ today about the life of a poet and teacher.
...
When I studied poetry at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in the early 1990s, my father, a business major back in the day, bought me a T-shirt that read "The Iowa Waiters' Workshop." Sadly, it wasn't too far from the truth. Only a poet would go into journalism for the money, I later joked.
...
My undergraduate poetry teacher, Kevin Joe Eldridge ... introduced his students to the poetry of living, breathing American poets: Denis Johnson, James Galvin, Ai, James Tate, Jorie Graham, Galway Kinnell, Ira Sadoff and Louise Glück, to name a few.

He also taught the verse of Dickinson and Whitman and those who first gave voice to American poetry. But it was the fact that poets were alive and writing all over America that he most wanted to convey—that poetry wasn't just something you read in a book, it was something you breathed in and out and read aloud to friends to celebrate, to grieve, to love.
...
But as talented as he was, Kevin never published a book of poems. He did what most poets do. He wrote. He taught. He scratched out a living and traveled from school to school looking for work.
...
It was the moments of clarity and pure music that Kevin was addicted to—not a longing for acknowledgment or fame. To paraphrase one of his favorite poets, James Wright, he knew something of the pure, clear word.

To a former student, Phillip Pace, who was struggling with his own writing and the humbling process of submitting work, he wrote:

"[L]ooking for some long term exoneration of our efforts, some purpose to give them a working world reason to exist, is unavoidable but exponentially carcinogenic . . . worrying about the small details of the product while we're making it is more than enough and then some . . .

"Let's try, though it's hard, to just deal with how the little piece feels to us when we're done with it . . . that's the root purpose, anyway . . . we can drive ourselves crazy with hollywood dreams but in the end what the writing really seems meant for is to keep us, in this way and that, strong enough to survive the new harsh dawn of another grim mundane february day . . ."

[Brian C. Miller]

T.S. Eliot worked in banking for eight years, then went to work in a publishing house. "My reputation in London is built upon one small volume of verse, and is kept up by printing two or three more poems in a year. The only thing that matters is that these should be perfect in their kind, so that each should be an event."

[Renato Tonelli]

What the original post says resonates with me.

And speaking of the poet James Wright...
I took several literature classes under James Wright and have wonderful memories of them and the man. He more than once told the class (he was wickedly funny) that a poet/artist must avoid, at all cost, mediocracy. If you can't be brilliant, it is better to be crappy than mediocre. A very bad piece of poetry (photograph?) has something in common with a brilliant one but never with a mediocre one. Nothing more boring than a mediocre work.
He was one of our best poets (Pulitzer Prize) but he taught for a living.

[Heroique]

Just this morning, I read that architecture is poetry.

Now, I’m still struggling with this, so please be patient...

If LF is poetry, and architecture is also poetry, then LF must be architecture.

[Keith S. Walklet]

Photography is like any language. We all struggle to learn a few words initially, string a few sentences together, and eventually become conversant. But the true command of the language comes with the nuance of poetry.

Elio Gonella, known to some on this forum, summed this up best once during one of my classes at the Ansel Adams Gallery. "There is the story, and there is beauty. We're seeking the beauty."

For the practiced LF photographer, expressing that notion in images is much easier.

[mdm]

To write a poem costs nothing. LF? Its for rich obsessive wannabe types, the larger the format the more money, obsession and wannabeness required. To write a poem is to suck, for the most part it is impossible for nearly everyone to produce something worthwhile. Making LF photographs allows considerable space for delusion. Architects make others pay to realise their vision, skewed and unsuitable or beautiful or functional. Maybe they have to crawl over each other to get there, it cant be easy anyway.

[Ari]

Just this morning, I read that architecture is poetry.

Now, I’m still struggling with this, so please be patient...

If LF is poetry, and architecture is also poetry, then LF must be architecture.

Bingo!

[Thom Bennett]

Ed, NOPA has a Call for Entry about the correlation between poetry and photography:

http://www.neworleansphotoalliance.o...ET.php?cID=531

Josephine Sacabo (photographer) and Dalt Wonk (poet) will jury.

[cosmicexplosion]

the souls architecture
looms on blade of knife light
like magicians slight
fresh slate and endless science
the orbs weave both night and day
and we crash our own light
in stupendous mad face
that lights up room and
transfixes hope on wall.


is that a poem?

[jnantz]

Ed, NOPA has a Call for Entry about the correlation between poetry and photography:

http://www.neworleansphotoalliance.o...ET.php?cID=531

Josephine Sacabo (photographer) and Dalt Wonk (poet) will jury.

thanks thom !