Sherry Chandler » The news from poetry or photos?
The news from poetry or photos?
It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day/for lack/of what is found there.
These words by William Carlos Williams stand as a critique of the news media and a challenge to the reading public. Even if the mainstream media cannot change, the question remains of what one should be reading and how one should read. Williams suggests that we are either reading the wrong things or reading the right things obtusely. Certainly the wars go on and men die for not knowing what they should know.
That said, I have never trusted the distinction between poems and news, political deception and artistic truth. You can find both artistry and bad behavior on both sides, and no democratic society can live on poetry alone.
This quotation is pulled from a powerful blog post at No Caption Needed, a post considering a photograph from The New Yorker for October 2 (read it!), a very graphic photograph of a dead Buddhist monk, taken in Burma. It’s disturbing and I will leave it to you to decide whether to click through and see it.
But because the post considers the intersection of art, news, and politics — subjects I deal with here often — I hope the author, Robert Hariman, won’t mind if I re-produce it at some length.
The blog post continues:
One place where art and news intersect is photojournalism. Applied there, Williams question acquires more precise reference: Are we getting the news–the real news–from the photograph? To do that, it would seem, we have to learn to recognize its poetry. And the difficult task would still remain: to see what can be found there that is not available in the photo’s reportage.
…
The force of the photograph comes in part from comparison with standard images of Buddhist serenity. All the elements are there: the still pond, isolated reeds, monk in repose, all composed in simple aesthetic harmony reflecting alignment with the cosmic order. Surely this monk is undisturbed by desire, surely he is in harmony with his natural surroundings. Although his stillness is foreign to us, there is no doubt that he is close to God.
But, of course, the photo depicts not that image but rather its terrible perversion. The pond is still but filthy; the monk is serene because dead; his union with the cosmic order has begun via the body swelling with putrefaction. In place of the harmonious life, he has died miserably.
Cynics could say that he died because he did not understand the poems he had been reading. Would Buddha have taken to the streets? Well, Buddha did take to the streets, in Burma, and now the question is what we are to learn from that. I think the news of this photograph is that Burma has been turned into an ugly, brutalized semblance of what it was. …This process of violent, destructive, brutalization is going on across the globe. Not everywhere, but in too many places. As with totalitarianism in the 20th century, it happens when modern technologies are placed in the service of a primitive will to power, and when the rest of the world stands by and watches or forgets.
And so there really is no news here after all. And that may have been Williams’ point.
Atrocity piles on atrocity and we forget the last one in the horror of the next one. How can we comprehend them all, much less remember?
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3 Comments
1. Rosalie replies at 17th December 2007, 3:31 pm :
Sherry, your post reminded me of two excellent boks that I’d like to recommend to you and your readers. The first is by Adrienne Rich, and takes it’s title from the Williams poem quoted in the article. It’s called What Is Found There. It’s a collection of her essays, notebook entries and letters,and I see on Amazon that a new and expanded edition was published in 2003. In this book, “Rich writes not only about poetry as a literary entity but about our need for it as a force for personal truth and political action. ” from Amazon review. One of my favorites; I actually read many of her essays before I read Rich’s poetry.
In Susan Sontag’s book, Regarding the Pain of Others (Penguin, 2004), the author reexamines the impact of and “our capacity to respond to images of war and atrocity” (Amazon). Sontag spent much of the 90’s in Sarajevo, Bosnia, and she writes of the atrocities she witnessed there. The photo of the monk, and the blog post examining the photo, are good examples of what Sontag analyses in her book. This book, a small volume, has had a lasting influence on the way I perseive violent acts and the suffering of others.
Just a little something to help with that last minute Christmas shopping!
Ro
2. sherry replies at 17th December 2007, 3:44 pm :
Thanks, Rosalie. I knew about the Sontag book, and also her book called On Photography, but not about the Adrienne Rich.
3. Rosalie replies at 17th December 2007, 4:08 pm :
In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag eexamines her earlier ideas as expressed in On Photography.
Rich’s On Lies, Secrets and Silence is the first of her books that I read back in the late 70’s. Powerful, challenging prose from 1966-1978. Still relevant today.
Ro
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