85 POETS & WRITERS^I
MAKE photographs. A photo-
graph is simple in its science:
Film photographs are merely
an emulsion of silver salts,
chemically converted and
washed away anywhere light
touches. The earliest photog-
raphers would slather plates of
glass and metal with thin emul-
sions of that expensive silver, just
the depth of a fingernail’s gentle
crease in the collodion, which
after being developed and enam-
eled produced a precious totem,
a photograph. Photographers
were greedier then—an exposure
might take eight or ten seconds
of a person’s life, in those earliest
years—but those first real photo-
graphs, being a chemical process
with an inert product, were incor-
ruptible. Long after their subjects
have died, faded, turned to ash,
the daguerreotypes and tintypes
made in those eight stolen sec-
onds will live on for centuries,
maybe forever. Today’s digital pho-
tographs, of which we can make
thousands in any one second, work
on the same principle, replacing
mutable ore with ones and zeros.
The modern proverb tells us
that a picture is worth a thousand
words; that considered, it gets
hard to do the math. In the course
of those three short years, I com-
mitted breaking and entering with
one poet laureate of the United
States, Ted Kooser; with another,
Joy Harjo, I confused an entire
restaurant by bringing a dres-
sage horse into its dining room.
Perching the fanciest, prettiest,
and perhaps world’s best-paid
falcon, sweetly chittering, on Jane
Hirshfield’s head, one realizes:
Poetry is a nation of people who
know how to turn phrases on
their heads, but as I pitched ideas
to these makers, I started to won-
der if they know every word in the
English language, thousands and
thousands and thousands, except
one: No.Joy Harjo