Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Truck Route


An 18x24 oil of a corner in Brooklyn, Third and Third.  Sounds awful.

In an interview the poet Charles Wright said:

There’s a very famous—maybe I’ve said this before—Czech photographer named Josef Sudek. He had only one arm. He was a great photographer and he used this big view camera and he did landscapes and still lifes and things like that. He was once asked why there were no people in his pictures. He said, “Well, I don’t know. There are always people there when I start, but by the time I get everything done and take the picture, they’ve all gone.” And that’s sort of the way my poems are. I think of them as being populated with people who are whispering stories in my ear which I then launder in my own way and present, and by the time the poem gets presented, all the people are gone and nothing’s left but the whispers. Once the people go, there goes your narrative.

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