Some more of Eugene Atget's famous images

Some of Eugene Atget's famous images

Eugene

http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/atget/index.html





EUGENE
(i)
My streets are empty
because I go out early
and take photographs.

My plates are too late,
mere things; what has happened
has left its mark.

Some mornings alone
I set up my camera
and just keep waiting

for the mist to rise,
for the vacancy to be
a few metres clear:

a cobbled concourse
leading to the Moulin Rouge
where dampness glistens.

Someone said I do
crime scenes, bleached and swept;
if so, the cops aren’t interested.

For artists - who else? -
these silver nitride traces,
instalment stories

where no shots ring out,
and there is no embrace, since
the world has ended.

These are documents
and nothing else. I know Man
Ray – he talks of a journal,

new existences.








EUGENE
(ii)

Sometimes, mornings I’m alone,
passing the Metro, and stop,
set up my camera in vain
for the faces emerging
and disappearing to greet
the soul that inhabits life:

the soul which was there
in the Luxembourg Gardens,
in the mist across water.

I record stone thoroughfares,
entrances machines will block,
the shops they’ll demolish.

My horizon is noisy,
limited by offices.

What can’t be repaired:
the stairs between walls,
full of entry points,

entrances for artists.


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Eugene (iii)

I took you still in your trades,
as you presented yourselves to me,
a set of prints from the streets
that you cross every day and re-cross,
imprinting yourselves at the heart
of the streets that you yourselves
create: baker, porter and tart,
peddler and hurdy gurdy man.
I made these pictures of you, and
with you, for you, as you were
each standing on your bit of street,
I with my tripod, as I presented
myself to you, fellow Parisian, graduate
of the School of Hard Knocks; we
were daybreakers on the gymnasium floor.

New Second-Hand

Poetry Pivotal 2 - New Second-Hand


Walking through Soho in dry light,
top stories splashed in yellow sun,
difficult for digital these Winter days
in life-on-earth shadow of streets,

grave stone of Hazlitt in the church
garden, backs of Old Compton Street,
their bricks and windows; one, piled high
with books, is glinting high up.

The tomb, in splendid isolation
lies flat on the grass, a clean cut
oblong, could be a book on its side,
a tome, Libor Amoris at rest.

While I photograph I’m watched
by a gardener who’s almost invisible
amongst leaves, brooms and wheel barrows.
Once in the Summer, with a new second-hand,

I was trying to get the spire
in, crouching and pointing the lens
up through foliage at the sky,
and fell over backwards, rolled

laughing in the grass, while
sitters on the church-yard benches,
my public, kept their pose.
Now, it’s the man working and me.


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Documents for Poets

Eugene

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Atget

I call my current series: “Documents for Poets”: after consideration I decided for this, because it obliquely touches on the achievements of a famous photographer, who has been an inspiration to many.
The title is borrowed from the celebrated turn of the century Parisian photographer Eugene Atget whose images included Parisian precincts and suburbs where he sought and found relics and preserved masterpieces of a world that was disappearing rapidly. Much of what he depicted focused on the ordinary and everyday, which through his lens was mysteriously transformed to become dreamlike & iconic.
He referred to his photographs as “documents for artists.”
I therefore retrospectively dedicate my “Poetry Pivotal: documents for poets” to Eugene – a title I think he would have understood and tolerated.


Poetry Pivotal 1

(i)

In the window a canal,
bars spill out on the street;
no longer Summer, green September.

There are caravans of ants
on the pavement, trees, rooftops
and the bridge whose angles
pick up the sheen of grass;
pink dark glasses in the day
and glasses to drink from
at night. The motorway’s

curved boomerang shape;
a perfectly formed film star,
in an evening gown, steps
from a cracked walnut;

looking into the canal
her window glimmers.


(ii)

Overarching the concrete and glass
of the station’s restaurants and shops,
Paddington’s still girders –
like elongated yellow bees
the trains reach for clover
and the barley fields.
Once this station was an actor
young and handsome in the Age of Steam.

The past is still doing
its double act with now:
up and down the escalators,
customers who were once passengers
alight at different levels,

and, ranged in a semicircle,
the Station Orchestra is amply playing
the music of the brass, as if
breasting a river somewhere deep,
where, each with its candle glowing,
ride tiny boats across the stream.

A Poem by Phil Crick

This poem is quoted from Treble Poets 3 Chatto & Windus 1977.

Quiberon by Phil Crick

"A ten-ton man
in a suit of stone
dozes face down
on the edge of France.

His green jaws nudge
the immaculate beach
and the low waves lance
a rift in his bone.

All ropes unreel
in his waterlogged heart.
He sways on his bed.
His vertebrae moan.

And he floats a long cry
down through the sand
that even the stars
and the quasars own.

Its echo shatters
the sky off Belle-Ile.
At sunset, too,
sea-owls murmur."

Night Exercise

"About Phil Crick
Philip Crick (1918-1992) was born in the Isle of Wight and grew up in Ramsgate and Broadstairs, Kent. He served in the army in World War Two, first as a Second Lieutenant, and later as a Captain in the Intelligence Corps with the British Rhine Army. After demobilisation, he trained as a teacher and worked in various primary schools and colleges of higher education. He ended his teaching career as a Senior Lecturer at the Garnett College of Education in London.
From the early 1950s until the early 1990s, his poems appeared regularly in a large number of British and American magazines, along with critical essays and reviews of films and books, and articles on aesthetics. His essay on the work of Gustaf Sobin, later published by Shearsman as a slim chapbook, was the first extended assessment of Sobin's poetry." - quoted from the Shearsman website http://www.shearsman.com/pages/magazine/home.html



Night Exercise



Desk of strange juxtapositions, a typewriter
next to a set of teeth cast in plaster
a wind harp, a Larkin; his face was fine-lined
with the ravages of emotional time,
miscreant against the linear spectrum,
poet rated for searching mind,
the ear and its nuances.
In Kingston-Upon-Thames
once in the night, above the cosmic hum,
he heard a distant faint voice crying –
or was it Jill who heard it first?
Help, help…. again, Help. Genuine or games,
madman or victim of a crime? Trying
to work out where, they went out bent on tracing
walking towards it, stopping…. listening….pacing.

Pacing through streets, they heard the voice get louder
while all around suburban households slept –
he told this story as a true reflector
of life’s strangeness and atmospheres, adept
at leaving out – not shouting,
where others might have, of good actions or
deeds. It was what they discovered, came to
there at the gates of Richmond Park –
that the story captured eerily:
in the Moon’s shadow, tied by the feet, suspended,
a frightened human plumb line they cut free,
these rescuers in the dark;
their foray ended
with folded penknife, human decency.



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