What Time and Tempest Hold is True

From “What Time and Tempest Hold is True”: As we imagine it in this book, all reading is a kind of ekphrastic act. When we begin to read as children, we have books with images, more often than not, and we learn by looking initially at the pictures and associating the looking with the saying, the viewing and the visualizing with the hearing of words. One does not take precedence over the other – they are in many ways “interchangeable.”… As we grow older or learn the language better, seeing tends to displace oral language – we do not read aloud anymore unless we are compelled to do so – and public (sometimes private!) speaking is felt to be something of an agony for most. But everyone enjoys looking at pictures. And so to conceive a poetics of pictures seems entirely useful, rather than arbitrary, in an age and cultural milieu of increased visuality, which clearly the early twenty-first century in America may be regarded…. Within the small range of subjects here presented – mostly images from nature, from locations in the upstate New York area, from late summer to early winter of the year – we were able to capture, I think, something of what we believe ekphrasis can be when it becomes a language, a way of communicating, just as it was when we were learning how to read. These are poems that are vocalizations of photographs; ways they might speak. Although I do not purport to put words in Andrew’s mouth about what his photographs have to say, these are my imaginings about them, and he has gone along with them so far. We very often agree about things, and I think he sometimes “sees” in my writing some of the things I “see” in his photographs. All of which brings us back to fear and hope and indifference. Critic W.J.T. Mitchell may be right that ekphrasis can never accomplish everything it desires or tries to do, when a word goes out in search of an image, or as Magritte said, “a cage went in search of a bird.” But is it really so important to accomplish everything? Is the bird, in fact, the word? Or could you, perhaps, place an egg in a cage and see what happens? Here’s hoping… Form How many torrents does it take to smooth the stone just slightly? Ages have creased it, generously folding it full with mineral stores of silence; blank, discerning nodes of ambiguous clay alone and proximate at once – how is the stone bruised, how is it mollified? Do the waters lend to it, or take something, erode? Like ghostly potter’s hands the torrents curl around the stone imagining and yielding just slightly at the knowing pull. [insert: image 0564]