Poetry exercise: Four girls look at death

I could see eyes rolling the other day when I asked a class of journalists to take out a piece of paper for one of the those dreaded exercises.

The site was Madison, Wisconsin, and I was conducting a discussion about how to improve the quality of newspaper photography by raising the level of communication and discourse between photographers and reporters, designers and editors.

We talked about institutional approaches taken by The Washington Post, the Portland (ME) Press Herald and The Virginian-Pilot of Norfolk, Virginia, among others, to encourage better communication by verbalizing what constitutes quality in news photography.

As part of my discussion with editors, reporters and others on hand for the annual convention of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies, we tried our hands at writing poetry to describe the elements of a news photograph.

The "subject" was a 1999 photo from the Daily Camera in Boulder, Colorado, in the wake of the fatal shootings at nearby Columbine High School. A total of 15 people were slain when two Columbine students went on a shooting rampage.

The photo is deeply moving, almost intimate in its approach to the subjects - four young women peering beyond the photographer at the scene of the crime.

The journalists in Madison quickly got into the assignment, writing their verse on notebooks, backs of handouts and scraps of paper.

"It was a good exercise, a way to look more deeply into photographs," says Nicole Lasher, the production manager at the Metroland newspaper in Albany, New York.

The idea of creating poems as a means of better verbalizing visuals came from a discussion with Owen Smith of Rochester, New York, a former teaching chair at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He had successfully tried something similar with a group of students two years ago. Same goal: Get people talking about visuals.

Sometimes, there is a communication gap between shooters and editors. Joe Elbert, the assistant managing editor for photo at The Washington Post, has worked on this issue for years at the D.C. daily.

"Moving from photographer to editor was the worst experience of my life," Elbert said. "I was confronted by 'word people' wanting to know why I was recommending a certain picture. Most photographers intuitively work through photo requests and don't think about how the picture is made -- let alone articulate the process."

As we concluded the program in Wisconsin the other day, six brave participants agreed to read their verse. Four agreed to share them here.

Not every eye was dry by the end of the exercise.

First submission

All eyes in one line,
One plane
One horizontal of wonder and horror,
Blue eyes rolling back inside
The brain.
And I look straight back at you.
One flat world we live in now.
One flat world where we can't look away.

David Allen Jones
Chicago Reader

Second submission

Faces, hands and eyes
Compel us to wonder.
Invite us to ponder
What if we were there.

John Nance
Columbus Alive

Third submission

The eyes of the world in the face of four girls
At the point between thought and expression,
Where fear becomes quiet despair,
Turns into fear once more, and
Struggles for peace with the furies.

Ben Fulton
Salt Lake City Review

Fourth submission

Hold on to each other
Because there is nothing else to hold onto.
Hide but look at the same time.
Clench the heart.

Manny Lewis
The Village Voice