Things You Cannot See

The day stretches on. The charade apparent.

People place their trust in sky. Weather fills the frame.

“I don’t press the shutter,” the photographer says.

“The image does. And it’s like being gently clobbered.”

Ambitions in half-light create a complete hush.

So much happens before the click.

Sometimes you can see the strain

when breaking through gloom burns too much.

No one says “cheese.”

“See,” they say. “Me,” they say.

But the command is a fleeting knowledge, and the image a mirror

that stretches time and truth. The stiff smile, a knuckled stare,

the squint against wind as shoulders graze in awkward want —

all is but a moment moving, a photograph catching

the fierce current between seer and seen.

— Drew Myron

This poem is a collage of lines from Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer by Arthur Lubow.

___

Is your mind full, your mood sinking, and are you out of words to explain and express? Me too!

When I’m in that vacant space, I turn to books. To read, yes. But also to lift and massage. Much like a collage poem, or a scramble, the lift & massage is a process that involves skimming through a book, jotting down random phrases, rearranging in a way that feels orderly but also unexpected, then massaging — adding, subtracting, changing — each line until it is your own.

The trick is to massage deeply so that the writing is yours, though born from another. Plagarism is bad, attribution is essential.

Basically, the lift provides the first step out of thuddishness and into the mystery of making.

Try more tricks:
Overwrite
Scramble
Wordcatching
Cut Up
Headlines
Where I’m From