The Darkroom and Remembrance
During the years that I did not write poems I became more and more serious about photography. Since I didn’t have any place to put a darkroom for film development and printing I used a hybrid method. I had a small, lightproof tent big enough for my two hands to spool the film from its cassette onto the metal reels that fit into the tank. Once the film was onto the reels and inside the tank with the lid on tight I could remove it from that mini-darkroom and continue at the kitchen sink. I would already have prepared the film developer and fixer and go through the devlopment, rinsing, fixing, washing. I used our shower stall with a makeshift clothes line to hang the film to dry. Once the film was dry I would cut the negatives into strips of 5 or 6 frames and after that examine them on a small portable light board. I next used a Nikon scanner to turn the analog film into digital files on a computer. Once the shots were digitized then I used digital software to continue working on editing the frames I was interested in, and finally I would print those best shots using a hi res inkjet printer.
Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson, who had no interest in developing and printing his own work, what I liked best was the darkroom— the editing— where a photo takes its final shape..
Today I think of the photos of those years as an annex of unwritten poems, poems I never wrote down but saw, took, printed. Isn’t “taking a photo” somehow appropriate, an act more than a bit illicit, unwonted, as if the photographer is sneaking fire from the gods? The photos themselves seem to me now to be remembrances of a moment. Yet what I also remember as well is the work of making a good print— a reminder, in other words, that if you want something that would otherwise not exist, then you have to work to make it real.
The "decisive moment" wasn’t my interest. My friend Philip Perkis, a terrific photographer too many people haven’t heard of, always counseled, when he was teaching me how to take a picture, to wait for the photo to come to me.
As I remember those words, Philp's advice could have been about writing a poem. Yes, when I think I have something to say, almost invariably I reach a point where I don’t know what comes next. That is a humbling moment in writing, and, for me a blessed one because then I have to wait for more to come. Sometimes I can tease out the next segment of writing, or push through on my impatience or hunch that there will be more sentences. But more often I have to wait, till the next day, the next month, even next year. And whenever the poem continues again I’m not quite sure after that just how the writing happens. But that kind of waiting has taught me that poetry is the language of memory, and by memory I also mean that memory is a very alive thing, a source of transformation. To think an event in memory is finished, fixed, unchangeable is like saying the stars never change. Seeing them is not enough; we make them talk and say things we fear or desire, we study and group them, we blame or exalt them, all without ever really knowing stars, except that they are there, outside us, and also in that part of us that remembers.
What is it, when I write, that is asking me to remember it? Every poem is its own darkroom of remembrance, containing the original plate of experience as it continues onward and develops, as it asks the poet to make it go on living, again.