While I know the blog posts aren’t supposed to mainly be about the quality of the works, I did want to say that I really enjoyed this book. The whole concept was very interesting. Natasha Trethewey’s decision to take Bellocq’s photo and create a story from Ophelia’s POV is in approach I haven’t seen before. Trethewey’s background is in poetry so it’s not surprising that the letters are all poems themselves, even if some read more like prose. The varying formats made for a very interesting experience while reading and made it a bit easier to read then if everything was broken up into couplets like some of the letters are. All the letters are poems but some having much larger stanzas and read more like a prose letter broken into paragraphs. They are all just different forms of poetry, but I am used to seeing poetry formatted in a number of specific ways, and because of that only some of the letters immediately look like poetry to me. While I quite enjoy poetry in general, I am unfortunately not usually the best at understanding any deeper meanings. Despite that I am going to make my best effort to articulate my thoughts about the work.
For having only a series of photographs as inspiration Trethewey breathes an incredible amount of life into Ophelia. I guess in practice it’s not all that much different than creating any fictional character, as these letters are not based on real knowledge of the life of the women Bellocq photographed, and yet somehow it feels different. Perhaps because most works of fiction do not feature letters prevalently, so something about reading letters feels more real. Telling Ophelia’s story through letters makes her life and the things she writes about seem more real than they would have if Trethewey had simply written a short story or a book about the imagined life of the girl behind the pictures. The POV granted by letters also helps make it feel real. Of course, any story can be told in first person (we just finished up with the Moviegoer, a whole novel in first person) but something about letter writing is a look into Ophelia’s thoughts in a unique way. For example, after beginning to learn photography herself Ophelia writes,
“I would like one day, if you would/ permit me, to take your photograph, fix/ an image of you for my table/ to accompany what is left un my head./ I find it harder now, with each month/ that passes, to conjure the true lines/ of your face, and I fear you’ve begun/ to change just as I have. I believe/ I’ve learned the camera well – the danger/ of it, the half truths it can tell, but also/ the way it fastens us to our pasts, makes grand/ the unadorned moment. This is how/ I hope my lense would find you -turning/ from the board, your hands dusted/ with chalk, light on your face, your brow/ shining, and beneath it your eyes/ returning my own gaze. Then you’d hear/ the tiny sound of the shutter falling-/ that little trapdoor catching light, opening/ and closing like the valves of a heart.”
Even with her earlier stated dislike of how the camera does not capture all of reality, Ophelia still sees the beauty, the positives, of preserving things as photos. This letter is not only a continuation of her telling Constance of her new skill and way of looking at life, but also a way to again say that she misses her. She is starting to forget what she looks like and wishes she could see her again and preserve the image forever. It is also another version of what she wrote in an earlier letter that she wants to experience just the normal everyday things with her friend again. IN her imagined image Constance is as she would be any regular day as a schoolteacher. Within the last stanza especially when Ophelia compares the shutter falling on a camera to the beat of a heart, it is also another way of expressing love and care for her friend without saying so.
There are other poems I quite enjoyed or found interesting within this book, but I don’t believe going over them in this post will make the points I am trying to make any clearer, so I’ll leave them for in class discussion.
I agree with you on the amount of life that was depicted in each poem, based solely on minimal photographs. I thoroughly enjoyed reading each poem and comparing it to the photographs that inspired them.