Archive

Tag Archives: poetry

Ravenous

See me as I am

Glutton for your attention

Ravenous woman

 

I love haiku poems and have found the blogging world to be filled with poets using this old Japanese form in exciting ways. I have two particular favourites in this field. Today I share one of them with you.

Rose Perez from Poet Rummager is an artist-collector-poet. Her poetry comes in many forms. They are frequently deeply personal and touching, inspiring and insightful. There is a lot to explore on her blog including audio clips of her reading her poems, art of her own making, art from others and collaborations.

A short time ago I asked Rose if she would like to use one my photos as inspiration for some of her work. I was really thrilled when she said yes. I think the piece, above, captures the dynamic in this photo. It makes me chuckle, though without the photo, the poem has a different, more dramatic tone. It stands on its own.

Please visit Rose’s blog to read and see more, at the links above, or here.

The photobooth poem in the previous post, I published without any details about the writer. I wanted to focus on the poem, rather than its origins. My reason for that decision, is that I don’t actually have any details about the author and it is rather a long story to tell you why.

It is all very mysterious. The poem was written as a comment on this post, which revealed that the Flinders Street photobooth had been saved from permanent removal. The comment was made by the blogger atrmws who, I discovered upon searching for more details, has a private blog site. I was unable to determine the most basic information, such as where they are from or whether they are male or female.

As a reply to the poem comment, I asked for permission to use it as a post. After 24 hours or so, with no response, I decided that the author may not regularly be on WordPress and therefore may not have seen my request. I reasoned that publishing it as a separate post would not be a problem, as it had already been published as a comment. Luckily, it was not a faux pas on my part, as atrmws, liked the poem post. Sadly they did not leave a comment.

For the poem, atrmws had done some research. In order to construct it, they referenced comments by Alan Adler, the owner of the booth, from a newspaper article from January 2011. I suspect they have also spent time using an old photobooth as the line “A whirring, thinking, clinking something” exactly captures the sounds one hears when the booth is working to develop photos.

So thank you to atrmws! I was totally thrilled to find that you had written a photobooth poem just for me.

I hope you enjoyed reading The Flinders Street Photobooth poem and hearing at least a fragment of the story behind it. Douglas from From 1 Blogger 2 Another liked it enough to reblog it, for which I thank him. I also thank him for all the other times he has reblogged my posts. Cheers Douglas!

Please check out Douglas’s blog blog to discover some wonderful gems from the blogosphere or check out his artist’s blog Moorezart for a dose of inspiration. You may also enjoy the Art of Quotation for some daily creative thinking through quotes.

Below is another strip of “four square, black-and-white mementos” from the old Flinders Street booth.

photobooth12051999-1

Flinders Street, 12 May 1999

The Flinders Street Photobooth

by atrmws

In the end, it was a question of coins

More accurately the advent of the dollar

That big, shiny circle of happiness

Monumental in the palm, the simplest exchange

For four square, black-and-white mementos

A whirring, thinking, clinking something

Alan Adler was the photo-man, his trolleyful

Of cans, the charmer and his chemicals

Had coloured magic on his hands

photobooth26031996strip

From the Flinders Street photobooth when it printed four shots to a strip. 29 March, 1996


This photo strip was previously published in the post Filling In Time, on the 11th of January 2012.

I will write more about the poem and where it came from in a later post.

%d bloggers like this: