.
Marta (Szumin, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 2 February 2013
The surface of the pond remembers
Ripples of your reflection, rotting leaves;
In the stagnant past,
Your future weighs like a sunken stone.
Summer comes and goes, unnoticed
By the grunge flamingos wading in the turbid water.
Untitled (Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 13 July 2013
Untitled (Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 29 April 2013
Untitled (Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 13 April 2013
Marta (Szumin, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 14 December 2012
Psychiatric hospital in Choroszcz (Choroszcz, Podlaskie, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 27 June 2011
Psychiatric hospital in Choroszcz (Choroszcz, Podlaskie, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 27 June 2011
Jedwabne (Jedwabne, Podlaskie, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 27 June 2011
Szumin (Szumin, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 3 February 2013
Szumin (Szumin, Marovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 3 February 2013
Untitled (Szumin, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 3 February 2013
Field (Szumin, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 3 February 2013
Bursztyn (Szumin, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 4 February 2013
chapel -- negativ (Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 4 February 2013
Orchard (Wilkanowo, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 2 February 2013
Gdynia (Gdynia, Pomeranian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 2 February 2013
Nymphenburg (Nymphenburg, Munich, Bavaria, Deutschland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 3 February 2013
Warsaw (Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 2 February 2013
CHEMITEX Chodaków (Chodaków, Mlodzieszyn, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 2 February 2013
Prudential (Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 4 February 2013
Untitled (Edinburgh, Scotland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 13 July 2013
Untitled (Mokotów, Warsaw, Masovian, Poland): photo by Dorota Marta (Sex Crime 1984), 13 July 2013
Viewing and reflecting on this -- the poem and the pictures exist as a single integrated work for me (I think I figured out how you constructed this and I believe it's the most masterful job of improving by editing I've ever seen) -- at the start of morning is, as you can imagine, unsettling. It makes me want to look and reflect more, rather than launch my way into what might be an even more unsettling day. But it might be fine also. A lawyer's life is only apparently dull. Curtis
ReplyDeleteThank you very much, Curtis.
ReplyDeleteThe photos are eerie and evocative, and, as you suggest, the selection and editing proved an interesting exercise.
Tom,
ReplyDelete"Summer comes and goes, unnoticed. . ."
in a Poland we never knew, a reflected we hadn't seen before, Dorota Marta's photos making it all seem real.
8.7
light coming into fog against invisible
ridge, birds beginning to call in field
in foreground, sound of wave in channel
hence in invariant language,
each of these between
relation to field, which is
the question, whether
grey white of fog against top of ridge,
white line of wave in mouth of channel
Those poor dislocated grunge flamingos, the rotting leaves of their past lives illegible. Not just Summer passed over but the memory of home.
ReplyDeleteVery taken with the fifth image.
Yes, amazing editing to make a great work out of what might have been discarded junk
ReplyDeletewhich is what I felt like this morning, felt sorry for myself, but not after visiting Poland with you and Marta
Is Edinburgh the only place to get a hot meal in Europe?
Life is a sex crime
Some are more difficult than others
After my visit I still felt sorry for myself but sorrier still for the waifs and the survivors of the electroshocks in the hospital in Poland
Did you know that Poland is one of the biggest youth tourist scenes in Europe now, at least was last summer? Cheap food, Great nightlife? Low Low prices! Lots of girls hoping to be taken away.
Yes editing these together must have been a lively process.
I wish I were a lawyer and had a day to go through, Curtis. I know it's not dull.
This is dull today, yesterday, not eerie, nor evocative.
Earlier I happened to write
"They are special to you, your old photographs, but to everyone else they just look like old photographs, millions of them up in the attic or in the basement, molding, lost"
You proved me wrong Tom
Thanks,
Harris
There’s a fine sense of dimensions in your poem Tom: a reflecting surface, then, sub-surface, everything that’s sunk out of sight—or so we thought. And the future, after a lifetime of unknowing, now presents itself with a disquieting certainty and clarity. Such feelings might be there in that startled look, or that disbelieving stare, on the faces of Marta’s subjects: the stark realization, yet again, that—shit!—time really does pass—and has passed—or at least leaves us with that all-too-convincing impression, against which we have no effective antidote. In many of Marta’s images there’s a flatness, a one-dimensionality, a dulled surface, often light-struck, showing the detritus of time and craft, and the inexorable abrading of the past. Memory wears out too. I share that ‘unsettled feeling’ with Curtis. Since childhood, August has always been for me a melancholy time. The cicadas sing in the evening, a sign that summer is dying away, along with much else . . .
ReplyDeleteTom - Thanks for your reading of Dorota Marta's ghostly and beautiful Flickr stream. I lived in Warsaw for a few years in the early 90s and the images were certainly evocative, especially the final one of the shop window display with toilet paper, paper towels, and brushes. The ghostliest of them all, maybe.
ReplyDeleteDavid
Been poorly of late (O boy, Hazen, me too with the dog-days melancholy!), still amid the roundabout traffic swirl of fevers the conviction persists that these images are not discarded scraps at all, but bits of somebody's True Cross.
ReplyDeleteNo that's not a rubbish heap there by the road to the Psychiatric Hospital, it's a gold mine. And those aren't cobwebs or chemical stains, it's faery dust. And rest assured, no flamingo was harmed in the making of this post.
Want Proof?
Just check her out -- she's lookin' fine.
Not that Antwerp was easy, but...
Should more evidence be required -- and indeed we have one restless back-channel Doubting Thomas whose querulousness on this issue of the verisimilitude of the here palpably demonstrated Bi-Polish Genius cries out for appeasement --
here is more work of same Genius, from Wednesday last.
Keeping in mind that Who Controls the Present Controls the Past...
And meanwhile, thanks to all from #1 fan of Sex Crime 1984 -- You're the Tops!