The Poetry of Earth

I took a picture that reminded me of Keats, not because of any inherent quality in the picture, but because of my own spring fever. I always identified Keats with spring. At the same time I had been reading Richard Avedon on the impossibility of truth in photography, which brought to mind the possible impossibility of even taking a picture, the Zeno’s paradox of film.

The perfection of photorealism interferes with the truth of imperfection. Monet chose to paint his garden, although he had a camera. The philosopher Roland Barthes preferred practicing over performing, because he felt there are more sudden revelations in discovering things for the first time, rather than the routine of memorization, which produces cookie-cutter concerts.

How can we rendition any living thing to the zoo, the jail, of film? This is the opposite of what Keats says in his “Ode to a Grecian Urn,” where the artist is praised for preserving a pastoral scene forever with his technique alone. In Barthes’ world, the perfection of technique distances us from the flaws of passion. The technique that preserves also erases the quirks that bring things to life.

I didn’t come to any conclusions about what I was saying until the poem was safely over, when I discovered that, according to the poem, beauty isn’t necessarily truth, contradicting Keats’ famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty…” from the “Ode.” My own poem had decided instead that beauty isn’t truth but joy, echoing “a thing of beauty is a joy forever,” the beginning of Keats’ poem “Endymion.”

But Avedon wanted photography to be a portal, not just to hedonism, but to deeper things, to truth. Although he came to feel that it just wasn’t. As he wrote, “A portrait is not a likeness. The moment an emotion or fact is transformed into a photograph it is no longer a fact but an opinion.” Precisely because of the presence of the photographer (the Heisenberg effect), the purity of the moment is lost.

Keats is flowery in his speech, whereas I’ve tried to be less stately, in rebellion against my own flowers. The rhymes and stanzas follow Keats’ lead. There are several references to the poem: happy, burning, panting are all Keats’ words. Foster-child becomes poster child. Keats’ atmosphere is rearranged in bits and pieces. The title of the poem is from the first line of Keats’ “On the Grasshopper and Cricket”—“The poetry of earth is never dead.” Except when photographed.

One stanza was damaged by ancient software. I’ve left its truncated lines dangling; patching it up years later would betray it somehow.

The poem is also a warning not to overprize the eyes.