Photograph Printed With Hatch-Marks Or Lines Across The Portrait

 

Some photographs invent a method of fiction, a illogical trying

to think differently history. The true aim of archives is:

a complex, relating, narrating voice and rare versions of what

happened, actuality of actuality. This requires a plastic mind.

Archives of photographs create a direct category linked to the

culture of written history, along with the premise of what may

have happened, spread over the course of images that exist in

two different temporal dimensions, i.e. when the photo was

made and when we see it.

These opposed logics disfigure the true act - the incidental fact

that this did exist - morphing the two times into one

simultaneous reality where temporality remains to say this:

what did exist may still exist. I think the living know this or else

will come to know it when they look at this photograph.

Mary Jo Bang

in, A Doll for Throwing: Poems

News of the Day

 

Everything not in was out and we were the bride

and groom in the marriage of this ridiculous day

and life is only ever a comic opera. To write lower-

case after decades of elevating the noun, this could

be seen as an arm sweeping the past from the

pedestal into the ashcan. To pull a question out of

that hat, the one with an electric rabbit hidden

inside, can become a critique if the overreaching

world looking in is terribly nervous - like a diva

sitting in a warm-water bath extolling the benefits of

hot running water. How embarrassing, the singing

chorus says above a clatter of cubicles where the

press corps pushes out kitsch and vulgarity. Perhaps

the staged hot bath is an embarrassment but who

doesn't want to forget the tank blocking the main

street as well as every other exit. The news of each

day is that times passes quickly regardless - some

hours, however, are longer than others, with many

more minutes that count.

Mary Jo Bang

in, A Doll for Throwing: Poems