The Illustrations

The illustrations to my poems are often the inspiration for them, and become an integral part of them. The following case is an example of how it works.

The other day I was trying to get an old cell phone to work, and discovered that it still had 25 pictures on it. Among them were two nude selfies, taken in 2011. One of them interested me, both because it was from another time period and because it was so very ordinary. The old phone would not allow me to send or transfer the photo, so I photographed the screen of the phone. Here is the resultant image:

I then converted the photo to a gray-scale, black-and-white image, always the next step. In the process I adjusted brightness and contrast:

It is now a usable image, but still an unremarkable one. Another step is necessary to produce the high-contrast, virtual line-art illustrations that I use in the blog (both for aesthetic reasons and because they are easier to print):

This last step is a very delicate process, and can produce a wide variety of images from a single original. Suddenly we have a much more intense image, capable of inspiring a poem. In this case, it has the further advantage that it can now pass through social-media censorship.

Text and images © 2019 by Donald C. Traxler.

Note on Recent Poems

For some time now, I've been aware that my poems are getting shorter. This trend is not intentional, it's just what's happening.

Feeling a need to quantify things, I looked at my poetic output so far for the month of May. Skipping over prose and translations, there were eight poems. Their average length was 3.375 lines. Half of them were only two lines, and only one had more than four lines.

In addition to shortness, my poems are becoming more aphoristic and epigrammatic (no, I don't know how to say that in Udugi). I am, in fact, beginning to think of them as "dichos" (sayings).

Something has changed, but I'm not sure what. My poems are usually based on things that come to me, often in the middle of the night (I keep a notebook beside the bed). Sometimes they are inspired by my photography. The sources haven't changed, so I'm not yet able to explain the current, minimalist trend. Maybe someday I will be. In the meantime, I'll just enjoy it.

Thank you for being the loyal readers that you are.

Photo: Fergus McCarthy.