Happy National Poetry Month!
Not only do we offer this month’s Poetry Pairing, featuring Kirby Knowlton’s “viewfinder” matched with a 2014 article, “Tangled Web of Memories Lingers After a Breakup,” by Nick Bilton, but we are also currently running a Found Poem Student Contest as well as an open poetry discussion forum. Join us.
To view all of the Poetry Pairings we’ve published in collaboration with the Poetry Foundation since 2010, and to find activity sheets to help with teaching them, visit our collection.
Poem
Kirby Knowlton is a student at the University of South Carolina. She enjoys good books, bad music and spending time by the lake.
viewfinder
By Kirby Knowlton
i thought you had a summer home
in barcelona because i had seen
pictures of you in front of la
sagrada família and knew your
father had money.
so maybe that’s why
when i first met you i
didn’t know
what to say, someone too
worldly to have
anything to learn from me.
then there was your
halloween party where i
managed not to be in any
of the photos.
perhaps it was for
the best.
upstairs, on a couch i’ll never sit
on again, an image of us has
started to yellow:
me, blushing
because jamie lee curtis’s breasts
are on screen,
and you,
nervous because all your other
guests left us alone.
nothing happened.
at least for another year or so.
sometimes it’s hard to guess
how long film needs to be
exposed. i wanted to get
the colors right.
Times Selection Excerpt
In the 2014 Disruptions column “Tangled Web of Memories Lingers After a Breakup,” Nick Bilton writes about dealing with photographs of himself and his former wife that the two had placed on social media when they were still married.
The last thing I remember was the tears running in rivulets down my cheek as I confirmed that, yes, I did want to delete the picture on my Facebook page.
… “Please God, let them be gone,” I thought. “All of them — gone.”
This had all begun a few weeks earlier, when my wife at the time and I decided to get a divorce. Saying goodbye was difficult, but removing a life we had both lived online for the better part of a decade proved to be close to impossible.
The web was littered with pictures, videos, check-ins, likes and tweets of our every moment. Now that online reality show that I produced, directed and starred in was there to remind me in an almost demonic tone that I was single and that those images weren’t going anywhere.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other sites are happy to lure you to post every intricate moment of your relationships online. Yet when things go wrong, these social tombs do nothing to help people easily delete those memories.
Anyone who went through a breakup before 2005 knows that it was a lot easier in the olden days. Relationships ended with the framed wedding photos being flipped over on the mantle and the pictures of that Parisian vacation stuffed in a shoe box and exiled under the bed, and couples rarely documented the cappuccinos they drank together — at least not normal couples.
… When I tried to decide what to do with the images of me and my ex on the sites I could control, some people suggested I leave the photos alone, embrace the past and allow it to live in perpetuity. But, as I explained, what would happen when I started dating again? Leaving romantic images of me and another woman online would be like inviting a date over to my apartment for dinner and having my old wedding photos framed around the living room.
I doubt that would lead to a second date.
Numerous research studies have also found that forgetting an ex in a breakup is imperative for healing.
Here are two activity sheets you can use with any edition of this feature — and you might also check out the Poetry Foundation’s page of Articles for Teachers and Students:
“viewfinder” appeared in the July/August 2015 issue of Poetry.