Making Poems and Making Photos: Observations at Sage Hill
Both are ways of being
in the world that
make you stop and notice
or notice and stop.
First time you approach a subject
you don’t know where it will take you.
Sometimes you need to get closer,
sometimes to step back.
What you create depends on
your angle in relation to your subject.
Where you focus matters
as does negative space.
Sometimes you land where you intended
and sometimes you don’t.
Poems and photographs
can be about
line shape
colour texture pattern.
For creator and recipient
poems and photographs are
a form of “architecture
for the imagination.”
“Architecture for the imagination” is a phrase Jane Munro shared with the poets in her group, possibly coined by her grandfather. I thank her for how she helped open up possibilities for continuing work on my adult poetry project. I’m also grateful to the other poets in our group for their interest, insights, and encouragement, and especially the three in the photos you’ll find in the gallery below.
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Kathy Stinson is the author of the classic Red Is Best and the award-winning The Man with the Violin. Her wide range of titles includes picture books, non-fiction, young adult fiction, historical fiction, horror, biography, series books, and short stories. She has met with her readers in every province and territory of Canada, in the United States, Britain, Liberia, and Korea. She lives in a small town in Ontario.
Your poem and photos have inspired me. What a fabulous workshop! Sage Hill is the perfect place to look at things with a new perspective, and your time there was clearly well spent. I’ve often thought of taking a poetry workshop but have been intimidated by the thought of the “real” poets in the group. You’ve given me hope! (Not that you’re not a “real” poet…but you get what I mean!)
Julie, I totally understand your feeling about doing a workshop among “real” poets. I’ve been training myself to call what I’m writing “poems” and not “pieces” — at the encouragement of a “real” poet. Most of the poets in the group I was in were published poets and based on my experience, you should hesitate to take a poetry workshop no longer!
Inspiring and lovely. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks Wendy.
Hello Kathy – Have been enjoying your blogs, particularly with regards to poetry. Some time ago, when I was young(er) and the world was younger too, I did write poetry . . . used to read it at various venues around Toronto, such as The Art Bar. Also joined various poetry groups and met some wonderful poets that way. I was quite impressed at the interest of ‘young people’ then in poetry, and in the writing of poetry. Well, I’ve been out of that scene for a while, but one thing that I learned has stayed with me: Poetry is an invaluable asset in writing fiction and helped me over the years it has taken to recently finishing my now thoroughly mentored but completed YA novel . . . (the first – not completed – resides in a bottom drawer somewhere) .
All the best,
Ann Benedek
Happy to know you’re enjoying the posts, Ann, and that you’ve been engaged in writing and reading poems too. I wish you all the best with your completed novel — congratulations — and may your novel in progress one day make it out of that drawer! (Unless that’s where it truly belongs, as some of my “drawer projects” do.)