One Picture is Worth A Thousand Words

Sometimes it is difficult for me to decide what picture to use to illustrate a poem. Yesterday was one of those days.

I had four very different pictures, and each picture could give a different meaning to the poem. 

I finally settled on the bride and groom, but I could have used the trolls, or the picture of Glenn Close and Michael Douglass portraying their characters in the movie “Fatal Attraction”, or the old-timey postcard.

All four pictures show couples, but the poem takes on a whole different meaning because of the associations we have with each picture. It is akin to the connotations of words.

Use the comments section to tell me which picture you think works best with the poem?  Be sure to include your reasons for picking it.  

 Commentary
 

Ha!
Just kidding!
      Or . . .
          maybe not.

Go up to a couple:

Say to one of them,
You know,
        you could
               do better.

 © 2012 Catherine Giordano

 

http://www.cappex.com

 

 

http://img.ezinemark.com

 

 

 

 

 



My Dilemma Over a Poem about Religion

Today I did a poem news print poem based on the show "bare". It is playing at the Breakthrogh Theater in Winter Park. It is a play about teenaged angst made all the angst-ier
by the fact that the teens go to a religious school and have to factor religon into their hormonal soup. I striped away all the review parts and left the teenaged angst parts.

My dilemma concerned what picture to use. I wanted to use the photo of Richard Dawkins' Book, "The God Delusion, but that would eliminate all ambiguity from the poem.  And one mark of a good poem is ambiguity. So I went with a different picture.  A young woman staring up at the sky as if looking for answers. 

See the picture  and read the poem at http://newsprintpoetry2012.blogspot.com/2012/08/teens-looking-for-god.html

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/76/The_God_Delusion_UK.jpg

Picture Perfect

I started to add pictures to the poems about a month ago.  It has turned out to be part of the fun of
doing the poems.

I often spend a lot of time looking for just the right picture, sometimes more time than I spend writing the poem itself.  I want a picture that complements the poem, comments on the poem, reinforces the "message" of the poem, and enhances the experience of the poem.  It's too bad I won't be able to use these picture in my book.

When I'm writing a poem sometimes I find the story I want right away and sometimes the poem falls into place easily.  Other times, I have to go through the paper two and three time ssearching for a story to use and many times I put a lot of effort into crafting the poem.  It's the same with the pictures. Sometimes I find the "right" picture immediately, sometimes I'll do a lot of searches to get just the "right" picture.

Most of the time, I don't know what kind of picture I want when I start searching.  But as soon as I see it, I know it is "the one."