In one frame, a small house—not quite a trailer home but a modest rural dwelling. The backdrop, a forest of trees, in the foreground, a satellite dish rusted and rooted among autumn leaves and wheat-colored grass. In a different image, a worker perched atop towering mining equipment, the sky dingy, his body barely visible as smoke engulfs the frame. The color images, taken by Mark Nowak and Ian Teh, respectively, lack vibrancy—a fact that parallels the context in which they are presented. Nowak’s 2009 Coal Mountain Elementary presents human suffering and death as an often by-product of coal mining industries that prioritize profits over safety. When considering the intersection between poetry and images, Coal Mountain Elementary is a text to which I often return as the images are seared into my psyche as much as the words.
We know the addition of images to a poetry collection automatically adds texture to what is often a landscape of black text on a white canvas. These images—visual additions—whether they’re photographic, as in Coal Mountain Elementary, or scanned documents, as found in Henk Rossouw’s Xamissa, or hand-drawn artistry, as Don Mee Choi offers in DMZ Colony, can allow the eye to rest and the mind to absorb important themes in a new way. The photographs in Coal Mountain Elementary are particularly persuasive because they don’t exist as extensions of the text but instead are in conversation with the text. For example, in CME, there isn’t much one-to-one correspondence between image and text as one might see in most books with images. A one-to-one correspondence means that x (text) = x (photo); for example, the poet writes about his childhood on page one and an image of the poet in his youth appears on page two. In much of CME, the photographs offer their own stories, their own arguments, and in doing so, the images represent new rhetorical strategies.
When revising my new book, The Stuff of Hollywood, there was a need to re-evaluate how the images were working. For example, in an earlier version, one image of Walter Scott running away from Michael Slager, was ubiquitous; it had made the rounds through all the news outlets and social media. Though Scott’s body had been edited out, the photo failed to add anything new to our conversations about race, so the image was removed. There too was an image of the cover for B.T. Express’ 1974 funk single “Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied).” The song was a household favorite during my childhood; however, the image was supposed to signal the ways in which we, as Americans, overdo pleasure-seeking, even when the pleasure is violent. The visual (and the adjoining text) fell flat. Both had to go.
The Stuff of Hollywood is a book-length poem interested in the spheres of social, racial, and political violence that intersect with American movie and television culture. The book asks, what do these intersections suggest about us as readers, as viewers, and the larger place we live? Socially informed. Me writing as a citizen. Another tension that influenced the book is my childhood. I grew up mesmerized by the power of the big screen and TV. I watched reruns of shows such as “All in the Family” and “The Jeffersons,” loved movies like “Saturday Night Fever” and “The Godfather”—they all seemed to capture something quintessentially American. How could The Stuff of Hollywood’s images capture a part of America’s essence even in critique?
As with Nowak, Choi, and Rossouw’s books, which are rooted in documentary poetics, a central section of TSOH is all source text taken from D.W. Griffiths’ 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the January 6th congressional hearings. The removal, editing, and adding of new poems happened in tandem with the search for new images—and as the documentary section took shape—I started thinking about images in pairs. Some images from the January 6th insurrection closely resembled war stills from Griffiths’ The Birth of a Nation. Here was a visual connection and I began looking elsewhere in the manuscript for additional pairs. The first poem in the book, the oldest poem, touches upon my yearly ritual of watching Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments as a child. Charlton Heston (Moses) is the protagonist in the film and a sympathetic character, but the manuscript too is concerned with gun violence; Heston in real life was a major figure in the conversation about guns.
Here’s another visual connection, so again I search for images. For copyright purposes the image-pairs can’t be shared here, but the book includes a still from The Ten Commandments depicting Heston with chains around his neck, waist, and wrists; a second image shows Heston holding a rifle at an NRA conference. It’s up to the reader to interpret the deeper connection, if any. Some of the images, specifically the cover image, Ken Gonzales-Day’s “der Wild West Show” (included below), extends the book’s concerns to include a wider swath of racial histories. The cover image is part of Gonzales-Day’s “Erased Lynching” Series, which relies on photographic erasure to focus on the largely unknown history of Latinx, Native American, and Asian lynching in America. That history is related to the era TSOH attempts to capture, an era marked by an increase in anti-Asian sentiment, the mistreatment of immigrants, and the ongoing erasure of Indigenous people. That guns are a key element in the photograph adds yet another important cultural and thematic layer. The inclusion of these visual elements finally gave the manuscript the American sensibility it was in search of from the beginning.
In his essay “The Third Meaning: Research notes on some Eisenstein stills,” Roland Barthes argues there are three kinds of images in film: 1) the informational image 2) the image based on signification and 3) the obtuse image. The informational image exists on a denotative level and on the complete opposite side of the spectrum, the obtuse image offers little to no understanding; it defies articulation. In the middle, there’s signification. From the image-pairs in The Stuff of Hollywood, each individual image works on an informational level but when paired with another image, signification occurs and, in this case, becomes tied to the historical.
In Coal Mountain Elementary, many of the images work similarly. In both DMZ Colony, and its precursor Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, the images and drawings as a whole work on all three levels to render a multi-textural, polyvalent experience. In most successful hybrid works, to my mind, images are not supplementary—meaning, were they removed, the essence of the work would altogether vanish. A poet working with images, as with text, early in the manuscript process need not know why the images they’ve selected resonate, but revision offers the opportunity to listen, see, and reconceptualize the what and how of the visual frame.
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Credit: Ken Gonzales-Day, der Wild West Show, Erased Lynchings series I, 2006. Archival inkjet on rag paper mounted on cardstock, 3.8 × 6 in. © Ken Gonzales-Day, 2006. Courtesy of the artist and Luis De Jesus Los Angeles.
Author photo by Madeline Brenner.
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