I imagine myself, when I’m writing a poem, blind almost, feeling my way through the work with other senses, listening, pulling myself along, trying to say what I hear. My other art is all eye. When I’m taking a photograph I have the opposite sensation, one of being mute and having to gesture other-ward in order to say what I see.

Susan Sontag says, in her marvelous book, On Photography,

“A way of certifying experience, taking photographs is also a way of refusing it—by limiting experience to a search for the photogenic, by converting experience into an image, a souvenir.”

Other than the slightly derogatory tone of “souvenir,” it seems to me much of the same could be said for poetry—we keep the aperture open and ready to catch, contain, and present the image, idea, feeling crossing before us—passing through us—ready to be urged into being as another thing, a new state. And poems, like photographs, I would argue, are also a backward-facing mirror, revealing as much about their maker as they express the made.

Sontag says later, and so beautifully,

“Photography is an elegiac art…All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.”

How about that idea of making something as a way of refusing or limiting experience? I’d love to hear what you think about this—or about anything I’ve written here this week.

So, an obvious question for a topical blog like Unstressed is how closely to adhere to the topic. My favorite topical blogs are those that stray widely and often, using the chosen subject as a window through which to view the rest of the world. The topic, then, serves as a shared interest that provides a path to the writer’s other interests. 

What say you, Dear Reader? Do you prefer a diet of pure poetry in your poetry blogs? Or is the various & sundry fair game?

• The Playmobil Security Checkpoint introduces 4-7 year-olds to metal detectors, body cavity searches, and crippling paranoia. Don’t miss the product reviews at the bottom of the page. (via Jemima)
• Photographically, I have a thing with glimpses and half-seeings lately. The Web is an endless source of ekphrastic inspiration, yet none of my clicking and writing has produced one decent poem about a photograph. (And this despite a long-standing interest in photography.) Something about the ekphrastic poem eludes me, or is it something about photographs in general? Perhaps the panel on Ekphrasis at this year’s AWP will help.
• Mankind builds multi-million dollar radio telescopes to listen intently into the farthest reaches of space, only to hear the universe screaming incoherently. (via BB)
• Looters have irradiated sections of the arctic by stripping the shielding from nuclear lighthouses abandoned after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Yes, nuclear lighthouses. (via Warren)
• This song by Tim Minchin nicely sums up some of my favorite arguments against common examples of magical thinking. Also, I’m pretty sure the tune is borrowed from “Accidental Babies” by Damien Rice. (via McHuff)
• The most moving photograph I took in 2008. Odd that it was taken on my least capable camera.