American Life in PoetryA feature provided by Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2004-2006 |
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If we haven’t done it ourselves, we’ve known people who have, it seems:
taken a vacation mostly to photograph a vacation, not really looking at
what’s there, but seeing everything through the viewfinder with the idea of
looking at it when they get home. Wendell Berry of Kentucky, one of our most
distinguished poets, captures this perfectly.
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The Vacation Once there was a man who filmed his vacation. He went flying down the river in his boat with his video camera to his eye, making a moving picture of the moving river upon which his sleek boat moved swiftly toward the end of his vacation. He showed his vacation to his camera, which pictured it, preserving it forever: the river, the trees, the sky, the light, the bow of his rushing boat behind which he stood with his camera preserving his vacation even as he was having it so that after he had had it he would still have it. It would be there. With a flick of a switch, there it would be. But he would not be in it. He would never be in it. |
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
Introduction copyright © 2009 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction's author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006.
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