For years I had taken photographs for the sheer pleasure of capturing scenes I wanted to preserve for my continuous enjoyment. It wasn’t until much later that a friend of mine, who went to the Maryland Institute of Art for photography, complimented the perspective and composition in my pictures.
At first I didn’t understand what my friend was talking about. I told him that I just followed whatever attracted my eye and snapped the photo when I determined what seemed to be balanced in the viewfinder. He said I had a natural eye for what most photographers had to learn to apply.
Since then I have taken countless photographs trying to hone my art. Recently, I have been seeing a link between my poetry and my photography. At first I felt they must be related because I love both arts so well, even though I may only be satisfactory at both. But then, a common chord struck as William Wordsworth came to mind.
In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballads ” where he offers his ideas about poetry, Wordsworth asserts that poetry is the language of the common man. He insists that poetry should be understandable to anybody living in the world. He espoused that “Humble and rustic life was generally chosen[for the language of poems], because, in that condition, the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language . . . and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated . . . more easily comprehended, and are more durable; and, lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”
Photography is the language of the common person today via even cell phones and You Tube. Photography is understandable to anybody living in the world. The project that a young man outlined last week in an Evening Sun article about his taking cameras to children in other countries proves that the language of imagery is as appreciable as smiling.
But, Wordsworth also cautions poets against the use of lofty, poetic diction, which in his mind is not related to the language of real life. What could be more straight forward and simple than the language of a photograph? Even in abstraction lies simplicity. Extreme close-ups that focus on design and texture, for example.
The English bard sees poetry as acting like Nature, which touches all living things and inspires and delights them. Photography is the freezing of moments that attract us. Wordsworth pens “The principal object . . . was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them . . . and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect; and, further, and above all, to make these incidents and situations interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature: chiefly, as far as regards the manner in which we associate ideas in a state of excitement.” As a photographer I know the photos that I make as art fit this definition of poetry. Many of my own pictures come from the oddities I encounter in nature while going for hikes. Dead leaves pierced by fresh Spring shoots. A lone yellow mushroom atop a bed of verdant moss. The rush of water around a stubborn rock.
As any of us who took British Literature probably can recall, Wordsworth points out that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” These two observations form the lynchpin of Wordsworth’s explanation for the process of writing poetry.
First, some experience we have triggers a transcendent moment, an instance of something extraordinary to our everyday encounters. The senses become overwhelmed; the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” leaves us incapable of articulating the true nature and beauty of the event.
It is only when this emotion is “recollected in tranquility” that we, or the poet, as Wordsworth believes, can compose words to communicate the experience we had. A photograph enables us to simultaneously be caught up in the moment and preserve that moment for reflection and memory trigger at some future time.
Most poetry centers around a single occasion communicated by a speaker. The poet has had an experience, a photographic moment if you will, and by the filter of time and reflection, composes words which most concisely convey the emotion of said moment. It is the sharing of the emotion that links the poet and audience and it is through the use of vivid imagery that the poet attracts us and shares the transcendence he feels, too.