Patsy Rahn is a Bloomington-based poet and photographer. She recently came in to record some episodes for WFIU’s poetry program the Poets Weave, and I had a chance to talk with her about her poetry and her upcoming exhibition of photography, which is part of Bloomington’s Gallery Walk this month.
PR
Should we chat now?
LJ
Sure. We can chat now.
PR
Do you know I have a photography website?
LJ
I've been to your website, and I think I did notice that there is a photo section.
PR
Ohh that, no, that's the author website. Yeah, no, this is actually me as a photographer, photos I take. Yeah, it's called Skillfully Curled Photography. “Skillfully curled” is from E.E. Cummings poem. Yeah, so, I'm having an exhibit at the Convention Center.
LJ
Ohh, good. Let's talk about that, let's talk about your photography. Are there intersections with your photography and your poetry?
PR
Absolutely, actually. They're different. They're very different because one is visual communication, visual sight and the other one is, um. Poetry is read by the person here, you know, by the person reading it. But if you hear…you also read it out loud like I've just done for this program, or say it’s, a live reading and that's another way of hearing it that's quite different perhaps from when you read it yourself and can sink into it on your own. So that's two ways that poetry sort of comes alive for a person. A visual art like photography…it's an instant reaction to the visual and has to be a very personal reaction. The show I'm going to put up, I think the title is “Magic in the Mundane” because I like to photograph what we see every day, but in ways that you go “ooh,” and see things in a different way—have a different sort of emotional response. It's taking the ordinary and revitalizing it. And I like micro and macro, you know, images, and light is incredibly important. It's probably what leads me to shoot an image at that moment.
LJ
So, tell me about the body of work...that's going to be on display.
PR
Oh, OK. Well, on my website I have galleries, I call them. One is Sky, one is Nature, and Other, and the “other” is sort of indescribable. It's more experimental. You may not know what you're looking at when you see something, but you'd know what if I told you type thing. So, the exhibit is going to be something from all of those, but the whole feeling of it is that idea of the magic and the mundane…that maybe you just never saw this very obvious thing that way before. I, oh, I hate to ruin the surprise, but I've got one of... my clotheswasher broke down, so it flooded my garage. So anyway, I couldn't, I couldn't do my clothes at home is the point, so I went to the laundromat, which I haven't been to since, you know, many years, and the laundry mat had these new machines with these great big round glass doors on them. So, I put my clothes in and I started it, and I realized I had put the soap in the wrong place, so there was no bubbling. There was no soaping going on, but then I said, “Oh my gosh, look what I can see.” And so, I grabbed my camera, and I loved it. I had the best time taking photos of what was going on inside the washing machine, and one of those is going to be in the exhibit, and it was just magic. It really was. It was like ah, man, who knew coming to the laundry mat.
LJ
Why is it important right now for you to show it?
PR
So yeah, I think it's always good for people to slow down and be aware that there's a lot of beauty out there that you don't have to do anything big about. It's just there, and you just have to become aware of looking and then seeing it. And so that's… I think that's a good thing right now for people to have. I think it's a good thing anytime, but I think especially right now both in our culture of biggest, best, and how do we reach fame, and what do we do from the good, the bad to the very ugly, what do we do to make ourselves famous? So this is the antidote to that. This is the opposite.
LJ
Patsy Rahn’s exhibit “Magic in the Mundane” runs May 5th through the 31st at the Monroe County Convention Center. The opening reception is Friday, May 5th from 5-8pm as part of Bloomington’s First Fridays Gallery Walk. More Information can be found at wfiu.org/arts. For WFIU Arts, I’m LuAnn Johnson.
