Do you remember you tried to show me how to ride a bicycle, when I was nine years old? …You were showing me how to ride a bike, and you fell and I saw your face then. I remember the expression on your face when you fell. I had my box Brownie with me, and I took the picture.
– Richard Avedon, from a letter to his father, 1970
Do you remember he tried
to show me how to ride a bicycle
when I was nine years old?
Rather than hold the frame
and run alongside, rather than
hold my shoulders and push,
he took the tiny machine
and rode circles in a parking lot.
I remember the expression
on his face when I fell
silent in the shaming glare of
onlookers behind windshields.
I made a record of him: Why
do you care? I will never see
any of these people ever again.
About the Poem:
As technical art forms, poetry and photography have plenty in common: Both make fixed moments continuous. Both usher light into compact spaces. And both (somehow, seemingly magically) raise their subjects into full texture and contrast by casting them onto flat blank surfaces. Here I attempt to create a diptych with the words of a master camera artist: Avedon and I are each memorializing the deeper, subtler lessons that fathers impart, the ones in the cloud-grays of an image. The poem appears in my forthcoming book, Spoke, which contains a whole spool of poems featuring bicycles and/or hard knocks.
About the Poet:
Arden Levine’s poems, essays, and reviews have been featured by the Poetry Foundation, Poetry Society of America, and WNYC’s Radiolab, and have appeared in Harvard Review, AGNI, Barrow Street, Indiana Review, and elsewhere. A member of the National Book Critics Circle and a finalist for the 2024 National Poetry Series, Arden lives in New York City, where her daily work as a municipal public servant focuses on housing affordability, homelessness prevention, and equitable community development.
The letter from Richard Avedon to his father excerpted at the front of the poem appears in his essay “Borrowed Dogs,” included in Richard Avedon: Portraits (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2002).
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