The Poem as Photograph: Assignment for Poem #1
partially from Steve Kowit’s In the Palm of Your Hand
Read the following poems about photographs before you begin the assignment.
Mementos, I
Sorting out letters and piles of my old
Canceled checks, old clippings, and yellow note cards
That meant something once, I happened to find
Your picture. That picture. I stopped there cold,
Like a man raking piles of dead leaves in his yard
Who has turned up a severed hand.
Still, that first second, I was glad, you stand
Just as you stood—shy, delicate, slender,
In that long gown of green lace netting and daisies
That you wore to our first dance. The sight of you stunned
Us all. Well, our needs were different, then,
And our ideals came easy.
Then through the war and those two long years
Overseas, the Japanese dead in their shacks
Among dishes, dolls, and lost shoes; I carried
This glimpse of you, there, to choke down my fear,
Prove it had been, that it might come back.
That was before we got married.
—Before we drained out one another’s force
With lies, self-denial, unspoken regret.
And the sick eyes that blame; before the divorce
And the treachery. Say it: before we met. Still,
I put back your picture. Someday, in due course,
I will find that it’s still there.
—W.D. Snodgrass
History Lesson
I am four in this photograph, standing
on a wide strip of Mississippi beach,
my hands on the flowered hips
of a bright bikini. My toes dig in,
curl around wet sand. The sun cuts
the rippling Gulf in flashes with each
tidal rush. Minnows dart at my feet
glinting like switchblades. I am alone
except for my grandmother, other side
of the camera, telling me how to pose.
It is 1970, two years after they opened
the rest of this beach to us,
forty years since the photograph
where she stood on a narrow plot
of sand marked colored, smiling,
her hands on the flowered hips
of a cotton meal-sack dress.
—Natasha Trethewey
My Wicked Wicked Ways
This is my father.
See? He is young.
He looks like Errol Flynn.
He is wearing a hat
that tips over one eye,
a suit that fits him good,
and baggy pants.
He is also wearing
those awful shoes,
the two-toned ones
my mother hates.
Here is my mother.
She is not crying.
She cannot look into the lens
because the sun is bright.
The woman,
the one my father knows,
is not here.
She does not come till later.
My mother will get very mad.
Her face will turn red
and she will throw one shoe.
My father will say nothing.
After a while everyone
will forget it.
Years and years will pass.
My mother will stop mentioning it.
This is me she is carrying.
I am a baby.
She does not know
I will turn out bad.
—Sandra Cisneros
2
I Go Back to May 1937
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to your children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do and I will tell about it.
—Sharon Olds
Photograph of My Father
in his Twenty-Second Year
October. Here in this dank, unfamiliar kitchen
I study my father's embarrassed young man's face.
Sheepish grin, he holds in one hand a string
of spiny yellow perch, in the other
a bottle of Carlsbad Beer.
In jeans and denim shirt, he leans
against the front fender of a 1934 Ford.
He would like to pose bluff and hearty for his posterity,
Wear his old hat cocked over his ear.
All his life my father wanted to be bold.
But the eyes give him away, and the hands
that limply offer the string of dead perch
and the bottle of beer. Father, I love you,
yet how can I say thank you,
I who can't hold my liquor either,
and don't even know the places to fish?
—Raymond Carver
Diane Arbus,
Self-Portrait Pregnant, 1945
She stands
before a mirror:
shoulder bones
aglow the still
sheen of alabaster,
elbow horizontal,
forearm at rest
in an invisible sling,
her soft wrist
transverses
body
colored the cool
carnival
light of fireflies.
Bangs straight
as a razor,
her gaze atilt,
luminous
on axis
somewhere
between Diane
and the dew
of dreams
about sinking.
The viewer?
An afterthought,
if a thought
at all.
After all,
I am
a lame
lover,
a silly
patron
& panhandler
with one
tongue
and two eyeballs
so limited
in their looking
I will never
get her gaze,
that terrible
pretty
at waltz
with subject
& ceremony:
dominatrix embracing
her client.
—Sydney Brown
3
The Assignment
Poem 1: A Poetic Snapshot (poem that
reveals the story/significance behind an actual
photograph.)
This is a Photograph of Me
It was taken some time ago
At first it seems to be
a smeared
print: blurred lines and grey flecks
blended with the paper;
then, as you scan
it, you can see something in the left-hand corner
a thing that is like a branch: part of a tree
(balsam or spruce) emerging
and, to the right, halfway up
what ought to be a gentle
slope, a small frame house.
In the background there is a lake,
and beyond that, some low hills.
(The photograph was taken
the day after I drowned.
I am in the lake, in the center
of the picture, just under the surface.
It is difficult to say where
precisely, or to say
how large or how small I am:
the effect of water
on light is a distortion.
but if you look long enough
eventually
you will see me.)
—Margaret Atwood
Important Dates
 READ Tuesday 10/19:
Ilya Kaminsky’s Dancing in Odessa
(1-14 and 53-57). Bring book to class
with you. His reading is Thursday!
 DUE Thursday 10/21: Bring four
copies of this assignment for small
group writers’ workshop.
 DUE Tuesday 11/2: Revision. Staple
ONE of the workshopped drafts behind
your revised Poem #1.
Some Guidelines:
Begin by describing a photograph of personal
significance to you (family, friends, a significant
other and/or yourself, a person you admire). Look at
the photograph long and hard until you are deeply
moved. Perhaps the subject of the photo is no longer
alive, or it was taken before you were born, or you
are there in the picture as a young child. Perhaps
behind you stands the house where you grew up and
to which you have not returned in many years. Use
this writing to create your poetic snapshot.
Here are some RULES that might appear at first
to limit your options, but will actually make the
writing easier and the final product richer.
1. Try to use at least two of the following words
(or other photography related words) in your
poem, though not necessarily in their
photography-related meaning: lens, reflex,
develop, blow-up, crop, negative, shoot,
expose, focus, reel, and print.
4
2. IT MUST BE CLEAR IN YOUR POEM
THAT IT IS ABOUT A PHOTOGRAPH
(LIKE THE EXAMPLES).
9. MANDATORY REQUIREMENTS!
3. Begin the poem by describing the photograph,
making at least three observations about it.
Again, your reader must know the poem is
about a photograph. The poems must “work”
without the photograph to accompany it.

No rhyming.

Write in free verse, and focus on line
integrity (lines close in length)—build
a “container” for your poem.
4. Then reveal one or two things that your reader
would not know from the picture (the
narrative, or story, behind the poem—about
yourself and/or the subject of the photograph).
Let the story draw you into your past until
you discover something that you had never
realized or never articulated—or had never
before dared to reveal about yourself or
others.

Try not to end lines with “weak
words,” including conjunctions (and,
but, or, yet, for, nor, so); prepositions
(through, between, with, over, into,
behind, etc.); and articles (a, an, the).

Use enjambment.

Use concrete images
5. Look how the author of “Mementos, I”
creates the emotion that he wishes the reader
to feel. How does the author of “I Go Back to
May 1937” want you to feel about her
parents? Herself? What emotion does one feel
from “My Wicked Wicked Ways?” How had
the author controlled the reader’s response?

Avoid clichés—for a list, check out:
http://clichesite.com/alpha_list.asp?wh
ich=lett+1 (or simply Google “Cliché
List”)

Avoid abstract nouns (often the
enemies of beginning poets), what I
like to call “big words,” such as:
6. Control your reader’s response.
7. Work on your poem until the emotions and
characterizations develop like one of those
Polaroid snapshots that you can watch
growing clearer and clearer. You do
remember Polaroids, right?
8. Don’t call the poem finished until there is the
clarity of a striking, revelatory portrait.
love, soul, pain, fear,
hate, freedom, etc.

Surprise me, but more importantly,
surprise yourself.