Poet-Photographer Finds Inspiration Worldwide and Close to Home
Paul Brooke once perched on a cliff in Iceland to photograph an elusive blue fox. He trekked through the Amazon rainforest to find red-faced uakari monkeys and across a Chilean desert to see flamingos under a starlit sky.
He also photographs weeds.
A few weeks ago, he collected some plant bits and dead bugs from his home north of Ames and took them to Connecticut, where he photographed them under an electron microscope. Magnified more than 500 times, a tiny wasp leg looks like a palm tree’s shaggy trunk. A butterfly wing looks like a shingled roof.
“You can create art right in your own back yard,” he said. “You can take a burr and photograph it in a way that nobody else has done before. Walk around your own yard and you’ll be shocked by what you can find.”
Brooke, a 2021 Iowa Artist Fellow, teaches creative writing and literary theory at Grand View University and has blended his love of photography and poetry into a half-dozen books. He explores far and wide — and near and small — to understand and appreciate the world’s surprising beauty and enormous scope.
His first explorations were close to home. He grew up in Treynor and Minden, over by Council Bluffs, and kept himself occupied with books and a camera. He earned a master’s degree in English at Iowa State University and Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.
A 2011 sabbatical trip to southwestern Brazil’s Pantanal wetlands was “transformational,” he said. For several days he set camera traps to photograph jaguars, without any luck, until he finally spotted one on a trail.
“I just remember thinking, ‘Oh my word.’ I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “There’s such beauty, but you have to be willing to sacrifice to see it.”
Since then, he’s returned to South America several times and plans to revisit Chile in March to photograph pumas. It always helps, he said, to find guides who know the territory.
To understand the territory himself, Brooke reads a lot — a habit that stuck from his childhood — about nature as well as culture. Wherever he travels, he studies the region’s traditional forms of poetry and reads dictionaries to pick up the sounds and rhythms of the local languages. He often adopts local poetic forms into his own writing and pairs the results with his photos.
“With poetry, you get this sense of place and history and all the verbal-linguistic twists,” he said. “You’re synthesizing it and living it when you travel. It forces you to think in another way.”
During an artist residency in Iceland, for example, he studied dozens of forms of Norse poetry that have been around for centuries. On sunny days — and nights, actually — he took his camera outdoors; when it rained, he stayed inside and wrote poems. When he showed a few to some local friends, they were impressed by how he’d captured the old rhythms, even in modern-day English. The results of that trip will be published in March, in a book called “The Skald and the Drukkin Trollaukin: Photographs and Poems of Iceland.”
Here in Iowa, Brooke borrows traditional Irish and Welsh poetic forms to capture the landscapes of the Midwest.
“Sonnets and villanelles will work, but some of the Irish forms make more sense because they’re more agrarian, more connected to the land,” he said.
He takes morning walks through the woods with his dogs, a French bulldog named Wendell and a Bernese mountain dog named Oscar. They discover new things every day.
“I don’t think people really appreciate what we have here in Iowa. You can write and create with a kind of intensity you don’t often get in other places — that’s the hidden quality of Iowa,” he said.
“I’m grateful for it. It grounds me. It’s good for productivity and for just having time to think.”
— Michael Morain, Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs
