I'm actually really excited with how it turned out and am considering making at a reoccurring part of this project. As always, feedback would be fantastic. What you thought of the pictures, what you thought of the poems, any suggestions for future "adaptations", put it all in the comment box at the end of the post. Now, I present to you, The Poetry Series:
FREEB!RDS, inspired by Frank O'Hara
(click on photo for a bigger version)
Reading the poetry of Frank O'Hara is like taking an unconventional tour of New York City. You won't see the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty, but he'll show you his favorite bar and his favorite places to eat. You will get to meet his friends and gossip about the latest celebrities. And if you're lucky, he'll even buy you a coke. His style is conversational and his content is pulled from his life experiences. O'Hara takes the city apart and examines it, sharing the pieces that he finds interesting with the rest of us through his poetry. He presents his New York, using fragments of the city to build the big picture.
In the poem "A Step Away From Them", O'Hara describes his walk through New York City on his lunch break. In 48 short lines, he manages to mention 13 people (and a group of Puerto Ricans), what these people were doing, 6 different places around the city, what he ate for lunch, and what he shopped for. With lines like "Neon in daylight is a great pleasure", "where laborers feed their dirt/glistening torsos sandwiches" and "A lady in/foxes on such a day puts her poodle/in a cab", it's not hard to assemble the pieces that make up O'Hara's New York.
That's where the idea for this picture came from. O'Hara uses small details to create a larger picture of New York, so I wanted to use smaller pictures, in the style of David Hockney (view his famous Pearblossom Highway #2 here), to create an overall image. Since I live in the beautiful town of Isla Vista, I chose it as my subject. For me, FREEB!RDS is essential to IV. It's an institution, and it's the first place I take someone who is visiting from out of town. It is the place where IV comes together, and at midnight is by far the busiest burrito stand I have ever seen. So at midnight on a Friday, I took tons of pictures of things I found interesting. They are all from different perspectives, but most importantly, they are all from my perspective. All of the pictures (there's over 50 individual frames that make up this photo) come together to create FREEB!RDS as I see it.
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Disappearing Act, inspired by Sylvia Plath's "Cut"
This picture wasn't inspired by Sylvia Plath's poetry as much as it was inspired by her life, and one poem in particular. Plath was obsessed with death and suffered from a number of things, including seasonal depression that came with the winter. She was so obsessed that, during one of the coldest winters in London in 16 years, she took her own life. Her poetry (which is considered confessional poetry) was filled with and defined by her deepest and most personal feelings, a number of them revolving around death. She once wrote, in her poem "Lady Lazarus", "Dying/is an art, like everything else,/I do it exceptionally well".
I believe her feelings toward ending her own life are presented most clearly, though, in the poem "Cut". In "Cut", Plath describes someone who has accidentally severed the tip of their thumb while cutting vegetables. Instead of panicking, the character in the poem becomes excited and contemplative. The poem starts off with the line "What a thrill ---", later describes the event as "A celebration", and contains suicidal imagery in the lines, "Saboteur, / Kamikaze man". For Plath, there was a certain exotic thrill in death, a thrill that can only be experienced once.
That's where the idea for this photo came from, the thrill of dying. Someone in my class pointed out the fact that the character in the poem couldn't tell where her body ended, and where the rest of the world began, which is why she ended up severing her own thumb. That realization, for me, was the key to this photo. I wanted to visually represent the thrill of dying, the thrill of dissolving into your environment and losing yourself.
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One Cold Beer, inspired by William Carlos Williams and Lash LaRue
I took this picture on July 20th as part of my 365 project, but I had been thinking about it for much longer than that. My cousin Lash, who is the subject of this picture, has had an incredibly rough couple of years. Between personal issues and family issues, trouble finding consistent work, and his lack of interest in school, he felt stuck in a rut without anywhere to turn. For him, the only way to escape was to join the army, get out of town, and try to do something respectable with himself. At his low point, he signed his life away, and they gave him his report date. He immediately became a sitting duck, waiting for life to hit him. There was no point in enrolling in school for the fall, no point in trying to find a steady job, and he was left with time to reflect on his problems. I believe he realized things weren't as bad as he had thought, but now he was stuck in a different way.
I knew I wanted to try and visually represent the poems of W.C. Williams when I decided to do this project. There is a certain clarity and simplicity in them that makes them powerful, and that resonates with me. Two poems in particular stuck out to me, both of which I'll include here because they are fairly short.
The first is titled, "This Is Just To Say":
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so coldThe second is titled, "The Red Wheelbarrow":so much depends upona red wheel barrowglazed with rain waterbeside the white chickens.
I struggled for a long time about what to photograph to represent these poems. W.C. Williams is considered an objectivist poet, a group that is defined by their focus on one sole object and their ability to present it in a way that is "clear, sincere, and intelligent". Taking a picture of an object, any object really, in its natural environment would have worked for this, but that almost seemed too easy. And even if I had decided to do that, I could not decide on what object to photograph. There was nothing around me that I felt like I could present as beautifully or as simply as W.C. Williams could write about it.
That's when I came to a realization that these poems are not only about presenting an object, but presenting the entire situation surrounding the object. "This Is Just To Say" is not necessarily about the plums, but about seeing the plums for what they are, what function they possessed, what their purpose was. These poems are about peeling back layers and seeing something essential.
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(click on photo for larger version)
Eleni Sikelianos is a Santa Barbara native who now teachers poetry, literature and thinking & writing at Bard's College in New York. While in New York, she began to miss the west coast, and in her longing wrote an epic poem about california. "The California Poem" is a hybrid poem, part of a new breed of poetry that is emerging in contemporary American poetics. It uses a classic model for storytelling, the epic poem, combining it with a more modernist/avant garde approach to form, lineation, and subject matter.
Sikelianos stays decidedly inconsistent throughout her entire poem, refusing to conform to any formal restrictions. Some lines are incredibly short, playing with sounds and dancing around meaning, like the line "sandflies, sandfleas". Other lines, like "Eagle shells crumbling under the eagle's weight croaking at Cachuma Lake" are more explicit and drive the narrative. In some sections, "The California Poem" becomes a prose poem, in others, it becomes a mesh of constellation-like structures and illustrations of hand motions. Still, the poem manages to paint a picture of Santa Barbara (albeit a blurry one), and convey's Skelianos' sense of nostalgia for her home.
To represent this visually, I started with a film camera. To represent the epic structure of "The California Poem", I chose to shoot and exhibit an entire strip of film. I had the rare opportunity to take pictures in the same area that Sikelianos was writing about, so I thought about the places around campus and IV that were meaningful to me and decided to shoot those. I didn't take the pictures in an orderly way, though. Like the fragmentation in the poem, I made the images run into one another, disregarding the frame lines completely. Some images are composites of two different pictures, interacting with one another to create a more surreal feeling. This was all done by using multiple exposures. The only manipulation that was done to this image was the reassembling of the film strip after scanning, everything else was done in camera. The result is an organic, epic, fragmented photograph.
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