personal work 01: AN ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN POETRY

Long before I’d seen much of the United States, I knew it from the anthologies of American poetry and literature assigned in school. I knew it as Whitman knew a miracle in every leaf and in the yellow-spear’d wheat. I knew it as Williams knew his red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain. I could imagine Longfellow’s blacksmith, forging his fortunes, and Dickinson’s railway train, licking at distant valleys. The United States to me was Frost’s forking path, Thoreau’s time at Walden. The country was a thought, broad and knotty, painted in verse. I wanted these photographs to be a kind of poetry too, romantic and fragmented, a bit messy and open to interpretation, like the very idea of America itself.
AN ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN POETRY

Long before I’d seen much of the United States, I knew it from the anthologies of American poetry and literature assigned in school. I knew it as Whitman knew a miracle in every leaf and in the yellow-spear’d wheat. I knew it as Williams knew his red wheelbarrow, glazed with rain. I could imagine Longfellow’s blacksmith, forging his fortunes, and Dickinson’s railway train, licking at distant valleys. The United States to me was Frost’s forking path, Thoreau’s time at Walden. The country was a thought, broad and knotty, painted in verse. I wanted these photographs to be a kind of poetry too, romantic and fragmented, a bit messy and open to interpretation, like the very idea of America itself.