When I was young, I used to write a lot of poetry. Though I still enjoy reading it, I don’t think I’ve written any for years now. And that’s OK. It may be something I pick up again later on, but what I wrote never seemed to amount to much worth reading. It always fell short, at least from my perspective. Not awful, but it never got there.
This is natural in art, the gap between the impulse or feeling and the work created in an attempt to express it. We try to make that gap as small as possible, and sometimes it shrinks to minuscule proportions, but it always seemed too large when I was writing poems. The disparity seemed especially large when I read the work of people much better at it than I was, though it’s not that I was discouraged by this. Instead, ultimately I realized I was happy enough enjoying what others wrote that I didn’t mind putting my own attempts aside.
It’s the same with music—my hands never felt anything but alien on the fretboard of a guitar, and my subpar embouchure made fourth-chair trumpet as far as my hand-me-down cornet and I would ever progress, even in high school. I can listen to an album and lose myself in the music, though, and any need I might have once felt to make the music myself all but completely evaporates.
The poetic urge, though, has stuck around. Instead of expression through words, though, it has found a comfortable home in my photography.
I won’t be so pretentious as to ever refer to my photographs as visual poems or anything like that (call the doctor if I ever do), but what I sought to express about the world through poetry is not uncommonly the same sort of ineffable something that I am trying to capture or express with the camera.
Personally, the primary difference between poetry and photography turns out to be that with photographs, I am much more likely to hit the mark, or at least come close enough for government work. The gap between what exists in my mind and what appears in the final image is reliably smaller than it ever was with my poems.
In creative work, what we make can take an infinite number of forms. The spirit that drives us to create only wants us to create. It’s not picky about how we make it or what form it takes in the end. So we are free to test, to experiment, to see what works and what doesn’t, so that ultimately we might arrive at a way of working and a form of expression that works for us as individuals.
This post appeared originally and a couple weeks earlier over on my Patreon. You can join for as little as $3/month and support my ongoing creative work. Some things posted there will also be posted here eventually, but not everything.
