Light Speaking

The Poetry Foundation discusses the ties between photography and poetry.

From the post...

Since the invention of the light-reactive photographic plate in 1839, poets have been tantalized by the camera’s images. This dawned on me almost two decades ago, when I’d begun reading about photographic history. Concurrently, as if sensitized by the new subject, I began noticing that almost every poet I picked up seemed to have something to say about photographs. I’d open Donald Justice, maybe, and there would be a poem responding to an image of a Depression-era mule team. Walker Evans’s stately documentary shot is captured in Justice’s lines, which conclude as a shadow:

         the last shade perhaps in all of Alabama — 
Stretches beneath the wagon, crookedly,
         like a great scythe laid down there and forgotten.
                   — From Mule Team and Poster

Or I’d be reading Wislawa Szymoborska and come upon a poem using a baby picture as occasion to note the banality of evil:

And who’s this little fellow in his itty-bitty robe?
That’s tiny baby Adolf, the Hitlers’ little boy!
 ........................................................................
Where will those tootsy-wootsies finally wander?
                         — From Hitler’s First Photograph

Or I’d find poets using photographs figuratively, as in “Epilogue,” where Robert Lowell mourns that

      sometimes everything I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.