It's+all+about+point+of+view...

"American Image" by Sebastian Matthews, from //We Generous//. © Red Hen Press, 2007.


 * American Image**

I want to be Walker Evans or Robert Frank setting up shots

in the street—renegades in Brooks Brothers suits

with Leicas draped on their chests snapping shots of the downtrodden,

of churches, bits of billboard, bored debutantes at posh parties

you'd have to fast-talk your way into; or aboard an ocean liner, itching

to disembark; down in the boiler room waiting for the foreman to look away

so you can frame his profile with an arabesque of pipes

and release valves. I'd want to be out on assignment taking far fewer rolls

than I'm being paid for, down south alongside sharecroppers

and the sunburnt poor—trying to steal moments, not souls, to find the past

inside the present, catch the already falling out of fashion.

The photographer and the artist, the musician and the poet all comment on the experience of the worker and the working poor. The FSA photographers were great artists - but they, too, needed a job. This poem came to me today in my email from American Public Radio and it seemed that it needed to be a part of the exhibit. Find the entire Writer's Almanac for the week of May 7, 2007 [|here]