Poetry in Motion: Stephanie Bolster + Long Exposure

In 2009, I visited a retrospective of Robert Polidori’s work at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montréal. I had been drawn to his photographs of New Orleans and Chernobyl since first seeing them several years earlier, but had avoided writing about them because I worried the subject matter was too predictable, given that I have often written about photographs and that I tend to be drawn to bleak subjects. I was also uncomfortable with the voyeurism of the photographs, which depict human-centred spaces (often private homes) in the absence of the particular humans who lived and worked there. And I was even more uncomfortable with my own interest in this material.  

In the museum that day, I realized that the only way to write about these photographs would be to interrogate my own fascination. I knew very early in the process that I wanted the work that would become Long Exposure to be a book-length poem. I wanted it to centre perspective and work associatively. I had no idea how to write it. The first passage I wrote involved looking out my home office window at the lights of our rear neighbour’s house—an older man to whom we rarely spoke—and wondering what his life was like. Eventually, this became only a couplet, now on page 41: “After dark, the back windows of the house out back / project themselves. Backlit like Wall’s lightboxes.”  

In my writing generally, but especially in this book, to talk about style is to talk about process. While writing this book over more than a decade, my research and my writing were fluidly concurrent; material drawn from documentaries and websites brushed up against my own writing in drafts as it does in the book. I let the writing send out tendrils in all directions; I followed them and fed them. Long Exposure is constructed as a continuous work rather than a series of individual poems, although within that continuity, key subjects recur, sometimes anchored by titles. The work as a whole is both cohesive and fragmented, spinning and still. My intention was for the experience of the book to flood the reader with images, emotions, and ideas—to simulate the process of thinking and feeling (or my process, in any case). The annotations on the right side of the page, written during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, respond to the primary text. The reader’s response, implicitly, is the next level of annotation. 

Stephanie reads from Long Exposure

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