Excerpt from The House with Round Windows

For a while, I considered De the main reason for these visits home. I had the idea to photograph the house to illustrate its relationship to my brother’s poetry. In fact, De never lived in the house for any length of time. A few years at the end of high school; later, for a year or so after he came back from the Navy. But in the poetry of W. D. Snodgrass, the house became the embodiment of all he deplored and condemned about his family, and the world in general—the root of his ethics and his poetics.

His first book, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Heart’s Needle, introduced the family and the house in the very first poem and established the themes that followed throughout the book and, for that matter, the rest of his work: the unquenchable desire for—and the unspeakable deadliness of—love. In Remains, written under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons, the house became the embodiment of a family’s decay and smother love. Later, that oppression became the father figure of Hitler in The Fuehrer Bunker, driving the inhabitants to extremes of behavior, destroying themselves and those around them. The betrayal of loved ones cavorted through W. D.’s Midnight Carnival. He spent decades writing poems in an adapted nursery-rhyme style about the buried terrors of childhood.

My brother’s early work started what came to be known as the Confessional school of poetry—highly autobiographical examinations of self, in plain language, that had a kind of confessional air, an opening up of secrets that paid homage to and sought redemption from the god of psychotherapy. In time, others became more famous at it; others perhaps had a broader scope—Robert Lowell in Life Studies, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath—but no one else reached W. D.’s heights of lyricism and poetic form. Or, for that matter, his depths of insights into the self’s darker, baser motives. In his later work, he worked hard to wrench himself free of the confessional label, to broaden his range with larger, even historical subjects. But his basic ideas just wouldn’t go away. Underlying all was the thought that sanctuary of any sort, whether it’s home or family, bunker or farmhouse, is a scary place.

In photographing the house, I hoped to reveal something of my brother’s torment and intent. At one time it seemed worthwhile, even an important thing to do. But now I wasn’t so sure. After working on the project for a couple of years, the series had grown into something more. Something different. The experience of exploring the imagery of the house had proven to be an object lesson of its own; though the premises were often the same as in my brother’s work, I sometimes came to different conclusions. As a result, my brother and I disagreed increasingly about the family over the last few years. The latest disagreement, a few months earlier during a visit to his home in Erieville, New York, had sent my brother storming out of his own house in a blind fury, howling into the woods. I was learning that for De the family was a subject you could talk about but not discuss.

All things considered, there seems enough lunacy in the house to go around. Downstairs, on the second floor, I can hear Mother moving about, on the pretense of looking for something, waiting for me to come down. Degas said the dancer is just the pretext for painting. Maybe my desire to photograph the house is nothing more than my desire to photograph. An occasion to make images. To be sure, the rooms are awash with imagery, changing daily like flotsam and jetsam cast ashore on a deserted beach as the old woman, my mother, moves things about.