Max Winter. The Pictures. Tarpaulin Sky Press, 2007.

Review by Lucy Ives.

Max Winter’s The Pictures is just what it says it is, a collection of twenty-one still images and nine moving pictures. These are also poems: in effect written instructions, a kit, for the private generation of twenty-one photographs and nine films in the reader’s mind. But assembly, the getting of something that can be seen from the words of the poems in The Pictures, is not without difficulty. In fact, ‘seeing’ often occurs here only partially or not at all. The manual is imperfect. Also, it knows this.

The problem is one of limits. How much does the reader need to be told, or rather, where does clarity or imagistic precision finally inhere in a given description? To say “blue” is not enough. But say, “blanched blue,” and the loss of pigment from some exemplary blue has a specificity of its own. Yet, even if The Pictures sometimes gives us “blanched blue,” it often says only “blue,” or “white,” or “red,” as in the still poem, “7 by 12”:

Asphalt roof

behind yellow brick wall

rimmed by red clay fluted brick.

Puddle in which we see

mostly clouds, some sky,

today a blanched blue.

Beyond the puddle another partition,

this one flecked with white,

topped with red,

once again,

one big chip in a partition.

It is not easy to see this. In another poem, a different kind of poem, it would matter less if we knew whether the yellow brick wall is composed of bricks painted yellow or bricks made of a material yellow throughout. But here it matters. Also, I cannot seem to locate the puddle. Is it on the ground? The roof? And the other partition, how “flecked with white,” how “topped with red”—what are the white and red materials that fleck and top—and what does it mean that “once again” there is “one big chip in a partition”? How should we see this? Or, to follow a line of investigation the poem itself might employ, What are we to make of all these bright locations, not easily resolved across a single field? Never mind, for the poem quickly introduces a pair of characters:

Across the dirty gray-black valley,

another roof, more manicured,

this one step-shaped.

Upper step: two small palms, one fern,

one woman, blue shorts, bent over.

Lower step: one man, one chair,

one red sweatshirt, one white table,

two magazines, one glass, one thirst.

No time can pass in a photograph, so there is just here enough to identify these two as a couple, maybe retired, something about the way the woman bends over in her blue shorts, before the poem’s conclusion pulls us from consideration of the visual at all. From the hard-to-see mention of “one thirst,” an overstatement of metonymy the glass itself implies already, we move from demonstration of technical difficulty to the problem of its significance:

The picture says

the rest is not important

or it would lie in the foreground.

What I see here

if I may make a leap

is the newly written

covering

the erased.

Smart image or smart narrator: whoever is speaking when the picture “says” recognizes the still’s inadequacy to the whole field of vision which presumably preceded it, but values the limited amount a picture can show. Could we bring to bear the same thinking in relation to the beginning of the poem? Is there a way in which we value the very limited specificity of a word like “blue”? I begin to think about the game in which one is told to draw something while wearing a blindfold. In such a situation, one’s pleasure comes from estimating the shape in question—and later seeing how one has got it wrong. There are things more interesting than accuracy, after all. Thus, when the narrator politely gestures, “[I]f I may,” in the dark I answer, ‘Of course,’ eager for new detail: and I like so much what comes next, since it’s clearer even than the image. The “newly written” is foremost this poem after all, its construction re-imagined in the borders and horticultural efforts of the scene. And “the erased”? Only the author can know. Draft or pre-suburban landscape, the “leap” away has been taken already. Which feels suddenly a little like a miracle.

To be clear, in my reading of this book, these are descriptions only in a literary sense. There is no referent for any of the pictures. The stills are not descriptions of actual photographs, nor are the moving pictures summaries of real films or videos. I have no way of knowing whether or not this is true, and if I am mistaken I like the book less. Of course Winter’s images remind me of other photographs I’ve seen, other movies—August Sander, the lulls in some of Paul McCarthy’s videos—but what remains central as I read is that the poet has nothing else to give one to see, other than the poem. There is no other place where this image or this kind of image can be seen, precisely because description here can be so peculiar: it resists sight, it tugs away from its own objective through imprecision. It is an obfuscation as much as explication, a covering.

Among the twenty-one stills there is great variety, a rock garden with an approaching scorpion, a car abandoned in a desert, a portrait of someone blond, a door leading nowhere, a circus performer, flowing water, a play rehearsal, and many others. I am particularly drawn, as I have begun to mention, to passages of intricate description which are yet difficult to visualize, and I am also drawn to the stills which contain human figures. In particular, I like the descriptions of clothing. Clothes become a substitute for what we cannot hear or feel, for what time and movement could have shown:

He wears a white unitard,

smudged near what must be the navel,

knees, cock, balls, nipples evident.

Or:

And yet she leans against the post, unworried that the paint might stain her black jacket, made of some sequined material, thin, see-through, you see the pink shirt, also somewhat diaphanous, beneath it.

The work we do in reading such detail in the still images serves as preparation for what is required when we come to the moving pictures. As the stills are titled with frame sizes, “4 by 4” all the way to “19 by 19,” the moving pictures are named for their running time. “12 Minutes (Patience),” a particularly beautiful poem, takes place on a train. A girl sits watching “the landscape the train leaves,” drawing a “tree-like shape” in the condensation on the window. Two nearly identical men also appear, and throughout the poem the reader is absorbed with adding finishing touches to these characters, their accessories and actions: place a scarf on her head, put the correct color on the gym bag, add a stripe to the tracksuit. Some details are humorous and maddeningly difficult to recreate: the man’s bag contains, “two or three cumbersome objects / not meant to be placed in a duffel,” for example. In the meantime, captions, “[b]lack block letters,” flash on the “screen” presumably now before us,

WHERE IS THE GHOST

then

IN THIS PICTURE

then

?

If this scene takes place on a television in our house, then the presence of characters, the actors, will give us the feeling that someone is with us, though no one is there. The ghost is any person in the picture, then, and any person in a picture is a ghost, for that matter. Yet the captions seem less a commentary on tv and movie culture than an expression of what underlies the scene unfolding on the train car ‘before’ us. The girl is alone. One man enters the car. They do not speak. Another man passes, wearing the same outfit as the first man. The men converse briefly, using a “language we don’t know.” They look at the girl. This doubling is ghostly; that the men and girl do not speak to each other is ghostly. Each is, like the reader, intimately aware of the physical details of, and yet divided from, the other:

Twenty seconds of silence

in which the girl sits with her eyes

closed, not sleeping,

and the man stares straight forward.

licking his lips occasionally,

he uncrosses his arms.

In so doing, he jostles the girl.

She twists to look at him, then

returns to her earlier state,

staring straight ahead.

He twists, as well,

in almost the same manner.

When a second series of captions, this time in red, appears, it confirms a perhaps unpleasant suspicion:

WE ARE HAUNTED

then

YOU KNOW

then

IT’S TRUE.

The captions anticipate a denial, whether in the scene behind them or from the audience before the screen. Like Hollywood’s scientologists, the captions ask that we believe in an explanatory narrative surrounding a series of events otherwise difficult to interpret. Perhaps it is the fact of narrative itself that haunts us, then, even through the odd layers of voice in this portion of the poem. There is the voice of description, relating the captions, then the voice of the captions themselves. Should we separate the two? Also there is a kind of speech between and among the characters. Thus though the poem seems at the outset primarily a visual exercise, many speakers are here, perhaps haunting us a little. So what do you see in this moving picture? What kind of a story does it tell? In the end, I’m left with my own limitation, that I have to conclude that the people portrayed ‘see’ something in each other, even if it is not there.

The Pictures has made me notice many things which are not there. The tone of the voice employed throughout the book is distinctive, too, and stands out like a visual detail, a character in its own right. This is due to the narrator’s skillful slight of hand; denial is combined with wonder, naïveté with all-knowingness. The seeming limitedness of this speaker, often failing to describe or know with certainty, creates a fascinating kind of realism, neither psychological nor precisely sur-. The Pictures is then both a good experiment and solid evidence that something new can still happen. It’s very much worth reading.