Summer 2011 Guest Photographer Hinkle and Poet Bondhus

Photography and Poetry

Kevin Hinkle-Featured Photographer and Charlie Bondhus-Feature Poet, July 1st, 2011

About this month's featured artists...

Photographer Kevin Hinkle

As a photographer, I am particularly interested in the interaction between colors, shadows, and the edges of objects (buildings, signs, elements of nature, etc.). These are places where surprising combinations of colors and textures go unnoticed but often create unexpected consonance in an otherwise chaotic landscape. Frequently, negative space plays a significant role as a means of re-focusing the viewer's gaze. The images sometimes ask the viewer to decenter his/her focus from its typical resting point to the margins where the overlooked is waiting.

As an artist, I see visual awareness as a way of bridging the growing gap between the story of individual people and the "human" as a species. Both the detail and the whole provide the opportunity to re-imagine not only spaces but also relationships. Just as words, images of decay may simultaneously repel and tell an intriguing story. They may remind us of what we have neglected and what we wish we had forgotten. They may concurrently provoke nostalgia for what we have known and disgust for what we have let slip away. At their best, they remind us that beauty is often found in the tense interplay of opposites.

Poet Charles Bondhus

As someone who has been trained both as an artist and as a scholar, I am equally fascinated by the music of poetry and the intricacy of ideas. I find the best poems to be those that take compelling yet difficult to express concepts and explore them in an accessible way, particularly through the use of striking language and relatable images.

The body recurs frequently in my poetry as both metaphor and literal object. Since the body is simultaneously something that everybody inhabits and something that is made mysterious by its unseeable internal processes, it provides an excellent example of the interrelation between the erudite and the everyday. Corporeality itself offers a rich reservoir of images, while the body politic behind that corporeality raises a range of provocative topics to explore in verse.

Much of my work, therefore, represents an attempt to transpose the aesthetic and the intellectual. I draw ideas and images from philosophy, psychology, physical science, the arts, and of course, my own lived experience. However, regardless of whether I am focusing in a particular poem on the body, landscape, photography, science textbooks, or something else entirely, my ultimate goal as an artist is always to explore complexity through beauty.

Rank and File

by Kevin Hinkle

In Praise of Ruin

What a marvel is the machinery of decay!

—James Merrill

Gaps did it

for me

the negative space

which really wasn’t

fat sky bulging through

hard tissue cradled

like heat between hands

or the toes’

wettish valleys.

Beloved,

there’s been talk

of raising and redressing

the dead

a restoration

to your tourist necklace

and lobster pot days.

They want to string awnings

pinker than blood

between the vertebrae

seal the sky

within lungs’ crinkly paper

scrape your skin

weatherless.

But oh, who will derange

bones which have become

the outstretched arms

of human crowds

veins that are a promenade for wellborn spirits

your ruptures portals

to a place where light is born?

Yes, this body

is full of drafts, but

the ribs are staggered

in such a way

that one could reach your heart

from any angle.

—Charlie Bondhus

Edge #1

by Kevin Hinkle

Spare Room

As the curvature of well-loved bones

wends its way into the infinite

promises produce

whatever light they can.

Blithe and teetering we

expend our heat here and there

tearing bright jags in the vacuum

the honesty of our desire a gleaming instrument

that cuts through sun, moon, logos.

Looking again we are forced to conclude

there are no stars here

only the glow of touched skin.

—Charlie Bondhus

Convalescence

by Kevin Hinkle

Sanctum

Inherent as the organs
which pump and wheeze
is our faith in those colored particles
that assemble
into crosscut bars
dripping white
joining our eyes to your eyes
our minds to the spaceless godhead.

Was it the vastness of our bedrooms
which taught us light’s fragility,
and all that that implies?
(Even with the doors open,
the shades askew,
hairline leaks
of amber and cobalt
our parents tossing
in the next room…)

What we have accepted

as absolute metaphor
is unable to penetrate
the swooping corners
of even this safe
and lovespun place.

—Charlie Bondhus

Bucket of Blue

by Kevin Hinkle

Aggregate

We readily call these objects sublime, because they raise the forces of the soul above the height of vulgar commonplace, and discover within us a power of resistance of quite another kind, which gives us courage to be able to measure ourselves against the seeming omnipotence of nature. –Immanuel Kant

Promise to be the first

and prepare like a bird

sensing shorter days.

Shed old feathers and scales,

dieting on the profundity of clouds

and infinite raindrops.

Get to know mountain-colored breakers

and their arteries of salt,

the grit of beaches that stretch

like history’s listless sprawl.

At the best of moments

when the sun is white and heavy

and wind sickles skin,

you will think of your limbs as halyards

hoisting meaning, your mind

a metal prow, cutting the waves

easily as wings dividing air.

Nevertheless,

when you finally do wade into the aggregate,

light in your face,

blue in your eyes,

you’ll find that your brain

has become a bucket

without a bottom,

and each sense a finger

pinched with sea foam.

The best you’ll be able to hope for then

is that the cold simmer of everything

will cling

like clouds to the sun,

and that your hands will emerge

spume-covered and smelling

of nothing that is land-bound.

—Charlie Bondhus

Fire Escape

by Kevin Hinkle

Metropolitan Hotel 2011

Warm air and boardwalk’s simmer

rose into the guest rooms

dense as summer

and raised the kind of sweat

that sticks to the body’s unseeable shelves.

In the ballroom

a carved wooden bas-relief

sun-shaped and salt-suffused

clings to the wall

like a starfish to a ship’s prow,

one or two of the spear-like rays

rotted away.

Lay your ear against it

and you will hear

human echoes

whispers of smoke

the sound of slapping waves

underscoring jangling forks.

II.

There would have been gas

thinning through carbon steel

water shaking and stressing the pipes

the kitchen a place of growling fire

and tumbling currents

where beef was diced and sauced and

vegetables hotfooted in the frying pan.

III.

In the warped corridors

doors hang from their hinges

like half-shed tears.

On the other side

of a water-stained wall

voices uneven and lovely

as sunlight seen through a breaker’s white crest

sing the song of this

and all coma-wrapped places:

Praise and reverence to

the active dead

bivouacing where they’ve fallen

with fixed looks and stopped hearts

like soldiers who have marched

to the frosty end of the world

rifles and rations clutched

in ice-mummy fingers…

IV.

Here the stairway’s scraped shell

each step

referring to the last.

Here the monument

to ineffability,

here the persistence of function.

Here we see the impulse

and here the decay.

Here the flex of metal

and the sag of moisture.

Here the grit and smudge of sand

and here the coherence of salt.

Here the Parthenon’s green

and brown lessons translated

into common speech.

…mortal being still

and silent as concrete,

feel the warp and bend of our rebars

the cooling of our furnaces

our floors concaving to their breaking points.

Feel the fire escapes shed their slats

the metal bending into birth

pink walls collapsing inward

like the perimeters of stars…

a rearrangement.

VI.

The Metropolitan Hotel

hunkers over the rippled ocean

like an aging Narcissus

renegotiating his wrinkles and chasms

against what he knows

of the smooth peach of beauty.

From the balcony

the sun

leaves its blood on the water

while white paint chips

free beneath my feet.

This is how we stand

on broken legs.

This is how we walk

with flattened feet

a toe or two lost to the ice.

Who would choose

the whitewashed façade

the rowed stairways

the perennial stretch

of monochrome shoreline

when the colors and textures of atrophy

are variegated as heaven’s spatter

across two kinds of eternity?

—Charlie Bondhus

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GREY SPARROW, Summer 2011, Issue 9

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