Allan Graubard About Fragments of Nomad Days
I began the writing in response to a call from a friend in Bilbao, Spain, who puts out an international art and culture journal called Escala, and which devoted an issue to nomadism. I thought of Ira immediately as a collaborator and went over to his place to choose some photos. I'd done this previously for Nexus, writing poems to several shots from his journeys to Ethiopia. He pulled out some "ethnic" photos, all quite wonderful, then the triptych of Caroline. I took to the triptych immediately, held it in my hand but put it down. There was something in the image that attracted and repulsed me. And although I chose more "ethnic" shots and went home to begin the writing, the triptych began to haunt me. A few days later, unable to find the spark so necessary for me to do anything of value with the photos I'd taken, I realized I was facing a void, and in that void was a memory of the triptych, indistinct yet powerful enough. I have always favored silence and the void against any sort of manifest content, and which Ira's "ethnic" photos expressed to me. So I wrote to the photos I did not possess, which I did not have before me, which I couldn't see. I wrote the poem in the absence of the photos that provoked it. For the last few texts in the poems, I went back to Ira's and retrieved the triptych. By that time I'd written most of it. But I needed the actual image of the face to check some details.
-Allan Graubard
