Morning Chorus - Photography/Poetry Collaboration by @raj808 & @soyrosa

This is the second part of a collaboration between myself and @soyrosa. In the first part Rosa supplied a series of pictures and I wrote a poem inspired by the images in the pictures. This was a very productive process for me as a story flowed naturally from those pictures. To read the poem from part one and more about how it was inspired please check out the first of my posts in this series The Dereliction of Time - Poetry/Photography Collaboration. To flip to the other side of the coin, the collaboration from Rosa's perspective, please check out her post Art collaboration: Photography by @soyrosa & Poetry by @raj808.

The thing that I have realized throughout this process, is that there is definitely a resonance between the way that a poet and photographer view images. Whether it be accentuating the underlying feel of a place through light/perspective in photography or finding a way to elevate the sense of a subject past its basic function through metaphor. In both poetry and photography you are essentially trying to find hidden layers that will tell a story beyond what appears at the surface.

I wrote this poem over 10 years ago. It was considered for the Liverpool John Moores university literary anthology, but ended up being passed up in favor of a different poem of mine that they published. After a brief edit and re-write, I decided that this could be an interesting choice as there are elements to the verses that use different literary device than imagery.

Morning Chorus is an ancient Arabic form of poetry called Ghazal which repeats words at the end of each stanza. I wanted to give Rosa a poem that was less visual than many of my other poems to limit my influence through prompt. This poem describes things in a more olfactory way, using smells and sound as cues more than imagery. However, there are two main strongly contrasting images as a literary device and I was interested to see how this would translate into photography.

Just as the poetry in the first collaboration built a story that complimented what was already present in the pictures, here the pictures underline the core of the narrative. The black and white adds a solemnity that lends itself to the subject matter, further highlighting the bleak theme of the poem. The progression of images also follows the narrative; the bell and then the bell tolling. This lends a finality to the verses in the second panel, increasing the impact of the poem.

When I first wrote this poem, the religious symbolism of bells were meant as a core part of the subtext, highlighting my view that religion has been the 'alarming' cause of the majority of war and human suffering throughout history. I'm not sure if Rosa picked up on this, choosing cathedral bells for this reason but the choice does highlight the resonance of images that I spoke about earlier. This resonance is clear, whether it be conscious or subconscious. I feel this connection between poetic images and the photographers perspective flows naturally from the way that the two creative artists view the world.

It is this realization that I see as my greatest success of this collaboration. I am now considering trying to learn a higher level of photography and am definitely going to pursue more collaborations with photographers as the two disciplines are so complimentary.