Tracking Trakl

I've spent time this summer reading the poetry of Georg Trakl. I've also been traveling between Maine and Vermont, which has given me a chance to shoot landscapes with a leaky Holga camera that are informed metaphorically by Trakl's poems. I've always been drawn to Trakl's work, since reading early versions and translations by John Logan. Trakl's poems partly inspired the rise of the deep image poets. The poems are dark and heavily imagistic, and range wildly from the sublime to the grotesque. They are also rich with Christian symbolism. I believe his imagery and symbolism awakens something profound in us, whether the spirit or the slumbering soul or the fear of death.

At night I found myself upon a heath,

Stiff with filth and stardust.

In the hazelbush

Crystal angels rang again.

His poems and images have inspired me to shoot photography that attempts to capture the moods--loneliness, solitary joy or melancholy, despair. I've asked my neighbor to read the poems out loud to me in the original German. (I love the sound of the German language.) There is also a connection I make with Trakl and Win Wenders' film "Wings of Desire," from the late 1980s, a movie that had a profound effect on me. Since then I've been fascinated with German, the passion of the culture and language, including Rilke and Goethe.

Trakl was a tortured soul. He was a drug addict and rumored to have had an incestuous relationship with his sister. He died of a cocaine overdose at the age of 27 at the beginning of WWI.

Words & Images

For as long as I can remember, response to outside stimuli has been more physiological than intellectual for me. Our bodies absorb the world, stimulus through the senses, that pings emotion, to give us a primitive response. Music does the same thing, obviously, though that may be more immediate than an image or a quietly spoken phrase. There is a haunting feeling to this image. A distance, distraction, yet at the same time immediacy. It seems old, antique, like the world, though it is not. I thought of Leonard Cohen's song "If It Be Your Will."

That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

From this broken hill

He sings about a broken hill. Metaphorically. Mythically? What does it represent, this hill, in our subconscious mind? I also think of Anthony Hecht's poem "A Hill" that, too, evokes something deep within the unconscious self. These images, obtuse places, snapshots, moments out of our lives that run together arbitrarily, memories, collide and make meaning or not. Nonetheless I feel it deeply. It enters my body like the hands of a psychic surgeon, not to remove disease but to implant a trinket, a charm or talisman, an impression, a memory that I will take to the grave.