A Writer's Moment: Always Searching For The Next Horizon

A Writer's Moment: Always Searching For The Next Horizon:   “There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone ...

Always Searching For The Next Horizon

 “There's another horizon out there, one more horizon that you have to make for yourself and let other people discover it, and someone else will take it further on, you know.” – Gordon Parks

 

Born on this date in a small Kansas community, Parks was drawn to photography after seeing a series of heart-rending images featuring Dust Bowl migrant workers.  At the age of 25 he bought his first camera for $12.50 and embarked on a career that would last for the next 70 years (until his death in 2006). 

 

He first earned renown for his photographs of society women, but on the side he took an extensive and award-winning collection of photos portraying “life on the streets” and life experiences of African Americans.    A 1948 photographic essay on a young gang leader won Parks a staff job as a photographer and writer with Life magazine where he worked for over 20 years as both a photographer and writer .  His portraits of Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Muhammad Ali and Barbra Streisand cemented his reputation as "one of the most provocative and celebrated photojournalists in the United States."

 

Gordon Parks and two of his award-winning photos

The multi-talented Parks also was a novelist, poet and screenwriter who branched into film production before becoming the first major Black director in the late 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s.  But, photography was always his first love and topics for his camera were as varied as his tastes.  “The subject matter,” he said modestly, “is what matters, and is so much more important than the photographer.”  

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A Writer's Moment: Those Tightly Wound Words

A Writer's Moment: Those Tightly Wound Words: “ Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them. ” That description comes from Charles Simic who...

Those Tightly Wound Words

“Poetry is an orphan of silence. The words never quite equal the experience behind them.” That description comes from Charles Simic who, despite his disclaimer, won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry for his 1990 work The World Doesn’t End.   Simic writes with a style called literary minimalism, creating terse, imagistic poems. Critics have referred to Simic poems as "tightly constructed Chinese puzzle boxes."

An immigrant from Yugoslavia, Simic didn’t speak English until he was 15.  Once he learned the language, though, he became one of our most prolific writers, producing some 60 books.  He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry in 2007 and named for the Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in 2011.

 

For Saturday's Poem, here is Simic's,

                                                        The Wooden Toy

                                            The wooden toy sitting pretty.

                                             No … quieter than that.

                                             Like the sound of eyebrows

                                             Raised by a villain 

                                             In a silent movie.

                                             Psst, someone said behind my back.

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