"An image that is never filmed"

Tonight, I want to focus on the poetry of Cathy Tagnak Rexford and her ability to capture an photography in a poem. "Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film," "Kinetoscope," and "The Negative," all portray the making of an image into structured words. It's beautiful.

It's the way Rexford deals with an image and memory and perception that entralls me. In "Baleen Scrimshaw as 16 mm Film," she uses repetition, as "Loop the sound," and "Wait. Wait. Wait." and breaks between words on the same line to evoke the way the mind obsesses over a moment or a person or an object. "Her hairline marks her shift         from caribou to woman." That's so much weight in this one line, a line that follows "Loop the sound of tundra grass sprouting." There's a natural movement here, and the poem moves like a camera, focusing on an object, like a woman, to the blurred people behind her, the people that make her who she is: "When you blink, the camera captures / the frame of her kin, walking upside down." Also, I obsess over the line where she says, "The shutter will remember / their white crested etchings. / They resurface in the lyric of your documentary." There's so much here, and she captures how the camera cannot fully capture everything in the moment. The camera can only focus on one object and all the rest of images/objects in the picture blur out of focus. This is exactly what happens in our memory, our perception. Memory is associative like this poem, and it works in haphazard, pattern-like obsession. The structure, the body of the poem on the page works like and veers off like memory, the breaths and the pauses evoke the lapses in our brain and the work it does to continue each thought. 

"Kinetoscope" is another poem I fell in love with. I feel like Rexford is saying something very acute about her writing, "I will write the movement of wings, and I will / write a blood sky so he may trace the line of the horizon." It's a beautiful poem, and she's evoking something that's vivid in this photograph poem--she's drawing out the image, threading out the soul of the man and his action of handling an "extinct / bird" and juxtaposes his imagery and positionality with the faultiness of human memory, emphasized and alluded to the man's failed migration and failure to capture this moment on film.

There is something to be said about how memory works, how it fails, and what it obsesses. "The Negative" brings up these conjectures and thoughts, as she says, "I watch as a negative transform" and even in that word--negative--we can comprehend this idea of a negative photograph and negative space--empty space--and how such spatial concepts provide "distilling meaning from underexposure."

It makes me think about how we imprint our perceptions onto photographs and other holders, repositories for our emotive compulsions. These objects are structures of impressions. They are meaningful only because we infuse meaning into them. What does this say about our memories, our perceptions? It's that philosophical/ontological question of the camera and the photograph--who are we peering at, looking at, when we see an old photograph of ourselves? Are we seeing 'us' or a body that used to hold us? What does the mechanics of a camera do, how does it render a human body, what is the byproduct of its rendering? Do we literally see ourselves in that old photograph, or a partial body, a single, somatic unit of ourselves? It's an compelling question that intersects with the question of identity, and Rexford does a stunning job at composing and deconstructing this construct of self-identity, meshed up with impressed constructions of the body via perceptions, language, and embodying the poem, and memory, on the page.