Greenwood Cemetery Rockford, Illinois

As a poet I'm the first person to admit words can be a damn troublesome nuisance. A lot of times they refuse to do what you want them to do. And sometimes they do exactly the opposite. As a poet I'm always looking at words. Maybe I'm hypersensative, but I don't think I see words the same way most other people do. This is another entry in my series of  Poem Photos, which is a collection of examples where words and images seem to evoke contrary, often opposite emotions from what might have been intended. 

Greenwood cemetery in Rockford, Illinois.

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Fat, Drunk and Stupid Is the Rockford Way

The thing about reality is we all see it differently. An example close to my experience is the city I live in, Rockford, Illinois. The national media has a good time making fun of Rockford as the nation's ninth most dangerous city and America's fourth fattest city. Fat, drunk, and stupid may not be any way to go through life according to Dean Wormer, but everyone would have you believe it is the Rockford way. Except for a contingent of local business people, artists, and Chamber of Commerce-type publicists who would have you believe it's all unicorns and rainbows in Rockford and the national media should mind its own business..

So, who's right?

Money Magazine ranked Rockford as The Worst City In America in 1996. Beating out strong contenders like Flint, Michigan, Gary, Indiana, and Youngstown, Ohio. Rockford citizens responded exactly the way you would expect: by burning Money Magazine. 

The Midway Theater. The roof collapsed this Spring. Still no one has fixed it.

A lot of people romanticize the decay and blight in Rockford. And I understand their point of view. Beauty degraded is a valid artistic statement. But I live within a stone's throw of the building in this photograph. I walk past it on a daily basis. And aside from the sadness watching a once beautiful structure reduced to a pile of rubble by a negligent, profiteering scumbag slumlord evokes in your heart, this building is a public nuisance and emblamatic of why Rockford is considered backward, corrupt, and worthy of scorn.

My series of Poem Photos has at its heart the way words and images can sometimes sit side by side and elicit exactly the opposite response than was intended. Words have meanings. Many people want to show you images of the way they want or hope things to look. But this is what Rockford looks like from my perspective. I wish it were different. My heart may even see it differently, but this is the reality. My series of Poem Photos documents different juxtapositions of images and words that somehow have exactly the opposite effect of what was intended. 

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The Mayans Were Chumps Compared To Clee When It Comes To Prophecy (A Poem Photo)

     I rarely take photographs. I'm not good at it and I tend to to see the world in terms of language. The written word is my logos. However, a couple of summers ago I had a brief spell where I was incredibly in tune with the way images and language were used together, and I began to notice several examples of ways in which images and language were combined in ways that produced unintended reactions. At least in my mind. So, I did what I always do when I need a good picture taken: I contacted my friend Ryan Davis to see if he was in the area and could snap some photos of the discordant image/language I witnessed. But he was in Guatemala or Mozambique or somesuch, so being a nice day I resolved to take the photograph myself. And that's where the trouble started. One wouldn't think one would encounter any resistance in the course of shooting a simple photograph of (well, you'll see), but in this instance, one did. I got the Fuji Film old schoola digital camera off the shelf and set out to walk the two blocks to where I had seen a sign that amused me. It amused me a lot. Probably for reasons too idiosyncratic to entertain anyone else substantially, which I find is often a great failing of my work, but I've come to be amused even by the fact that other's aren't seeing the world as the incredibly goofy and inscrutable place it is. I persevere in making small productions out of what others might consider insanity. Nonetheless, I walk the two blocks to where I saw the sign that had created an incongruous message. In fact, in this case I can safely assume the sign created EXACTLY the opposite image in the beholder's eye as was intended. But in this case it wasn't necessarily the words on the sign that created the discordance, it was where the sign was located.

     Ok, but before I show you what I saw, let me tell you what happened. I had my camera out and I started taking a few different photos from different angles. I need to get a photo of a sign inside a shop, and the shop was closed, so I shot from outside. Even if the shop had been open I would have waited for them to be closed and done it this way. The sun was terrible but I fought on man against nature and all that and managed to get a few shots. Then, this lady rolls up on me and asks me what I'm doing. But I'm in don't fuck with me, bitch, because I'm working and I really want to get this shot mode, so I think my reply may have been rather terse and probably consisted of only two, three words maximum designed to inform her that unless she was about to get a bazooka out of her pocket she needed to get out of my fucking face. So, Ms. Self-Appointed Rona Barret of all local activity pretends like she's calling someone. Hey, I probably could have easily explained I was taking a picture of the ironically placed sign I saw thought the window and diffused the situation pronto with some social KY jelly, but that's not my nature. If i wanted you up my ass I probably would have asked for a date, but since I'm not absolutely positive what the legality of photographing someone else's private property is, and i didn't have time to consult my attorney, AND since I already had a dozen or so photos I thought I could use, I just walked away. It was a nice summer day and I had my photos and people like me who have already been declared insane by the State tend to lose arguments once the police show up.

     Without any more do-whacka-do, this is what I saw and what I titled it. The sign has since been moved.

Clee's Beauty Shop in Rockford, Illinois

     So, there you have it. No need for the Mayan prediction of Apocalypse in 2012. Nostradamus? A chump. You want the lowdown on the end of the world you talk to Clee, because apparently she's up to more than just cutting hair. 

August 13, 2013: No Mayan Apocalypse. I wonder what happened. I also wonder how many times a Nostra-Dumbass quatrain is allowed to be used to supposedly predict various events retroactively.

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Poem Photos

     There were Greek philosophers who surmised the world was made from mud, or fire, or a combination of elements, or even numbers or some underlying logos. These were all attempts to condense the totality of human experience into a convenient granule that explains it all. It's what modern Physics is trying to do. But as a poet none of this really concerns me as much as the ways in which we attempt to explain the experience we share on an everyday basis. For me this experience is primarily processed in words. I see words maybe in a different way than others. Maybe that isn't true, maybe I just pay more attention. For a brief period last summer I saw a few different examples of how words seemed to leap out of a container that was created to contain them. In my estimation these were words that existed outside of the context in which they were bound. So I pulled the words out and combined them with other words to create Poem Photos. It's all a long, long-winded way of saying words are all around us and often used with unintended consequences, or at least they evoke responses that were not intended by their creator. Here are some...

The photo was sort of hard to get at the angle, but the reader might be curious to know this picture was taken in the summer of 2010 and this sign still sits there. I wonder if anyone sees it the way I do. Want to see another one?

That one didn't blow up so well, but you get the idea. Even a can of asparagus says things to us. Here's the third of four.

The place where I live was recently found to be the ninth most dangerous city in America. Money Magazine used to find us the worst city in America on a yearly basis, which places any sort of promotional campaign the Chamber of Commerce concocts in a suspicious light. Certainly gaffs like this aren't helping, but they do provide for some unintended laughter at the expense of the already downtrodden. 

The fourth Poem Photo isn't done yet. It involves a generic bag you get at many local stored that simply says "Thank you" on it. The delay in the Poem Photo is largely that I need to combine the bag with a photo a curvaceous woman's ass and I'm not about to put out a casting call for that. 

Thank you for coming by and looking at Poem Photos by Thomas L. Vaultonburg.

December 12, 2012: I really like these Poem Photos. 

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