Some Days, Everything Is A Picture

Photography is always a subjective way to see the world, it is an art—you think about your composition, you omit, you choose a special detail, a segment or angle—in short:  you create.

—Brigitta Hügel

Ah, fine photographers.  They understand their equipment; they have patience and skill; they have the eye to spot the perfect shot.  My appreciation for them grows every time I venture forth with my camera.

City Sojourn

Grand Central Station at night

Just for All of Us

Young composer Maxwell McKee had a confession to make.  While he was writing a composition commissioned by Contemporaneous, he was suffering from an acute case of Ligeti’s Syndrome.  (György Ligeti, after whom this syndrome is named, is best known to many as the composer whose music appears in soundtracks of Stanley Kubrick films, including 2001: A Space Odyssey.)

In the Way One Poem Leads to Another

“As it happens,” poet Roger Mitchell wrote to a group of friends and colleagues, “I lived for a year almost 50 years ago in Szymborska's home town. Never met her, but that didn't keep me from writing the attached.”

Wisława Szymborska and Horst Beckmann’s Hat

—for Friko 

In yet another alarming gap in my cultural education, I’d not heard of Wisława Szymborska until Friko’s Poetry and Pictures introduced a poem of hers to me. The poem was The Joy of Writing, and its first line, as translated from the Polish by Czesław Miłosz, is this:  “Where is a written deer running through a written forest?”

Country Sojourn

At Buttercup Farm, the woods are a tangle of brown and gray.

Subway to Estonia

And then Estonia was conquered . . . .
It seemed that all the dreams were broken.

—Taimi Lepasaar

In her poem Public Transportation, Elaine Sexton reminds us that what we see on the surface may not be what is:

. . . The driver does not have
a peanut butter and jelly sandwich in his metal
lunchbox.  He has caviar left over from New Year's
and a love note from his mistress, whom he just left
on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 14th Street.

On public transportation, anything is possible—the whole gamut from disturbance to delight.