Tag: Platt Babbitt

Niagara Falls by Alexander Duringer

 

duringer
Joseph Avery Stranded in the Niagara River
Photo by Platt Babbitt, July 19, 1853. Image courtesy Niagara Falls Public Library (NY)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Source:  Niagara Falls by Alexander Duringer was originally published in Passengers Journal, volume 3, issue 1

Alexander Duringer is a reformed English teacher from Western New York currently living in Raleigh, NC where he studies as an MFA candidate at North Carolina State University with a concentration in poetry. He received his Masters in English Education from SUNY Buffalo in 2015. He is a winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize and received an Honorable Mention for the Dorianne Laux Prize for Poetry.  In addition to this poem in Passengers Review, his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The South Dakota Review, &Change, Plainsongs, Cola Literary Review, The Shore, and Poets.org among others. 

 

Scene at Niagara Falls: a Haiga by James Penha

 

james
Scene at Niagara Falls. Daguerreotype by Platt Babbitt; Haiku by James Penha.
Daguerreotype is from the Getty Museum in the public domain.

gilded age fashions:
top hats and parasols rise—
niagara falls

An expat New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social

 

 

Niagara by Howard Worcester Gilbert

worcester
Niagara Falls, c1854, by Platt Babbitt,
Image courtesy of the Library of Congress


Far–stretching in the morning beams, 
And blazing in the golden gleams, 
The mingling of a thousand streams !

And trembling many–hued, among
Thy shifting mists, the rainbow hung.
Before thee, o’er thy gulf is flung.

Over thy wave of tender green 
That falls forever down serene, 
Then foams into the whitest sheen,

Its gauzy veil the mist–film throws, 
Through which the shimmering sunshine glows 
Down to thy deep of watery snows.

The avalanche, from mountain–height, 
Sweeps, shuddering, in its awful might, 
And robed in mantle dim and white,

Slow gathering, in its downward sweep, 
Into some gulf’s unfathomed deep, 
With wild, and long, and fearful leap,

Down, down, into the abysmal mist 
Whose mysteries mortal never wist, 
No eye hath seen nor ear may list ;

And silence all the air doth fill 
Save of some moorland–bird the trill, 
Or trickling of the mountain–rill.

But ever–changing thou dost pour, 
Yet still the same, with solemn roar, 
O’er thy dim cliff forevermore.

And standing on thy shore, I seem,
As one who in a silent dream, 
And launched on some mysterious stream,

Is borne, from whence he knows not, hither , 
And with vast sweep is hurried thither, 
He knows not why, he knows not whither ;

While through my brain, in sounding rhyme, 
All thoughts eternal and sublime, 
Course slow, the universe, and time,

And endless change that ceaselessly 
Hymns of eternity through thee, 
And I enter into Infinity.

Published 25th June, 1859

Source:  Howard Worcester Gilbert. Aldornere, and Two Other Pennsylvanian Idylls Together With Minor Poems. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Franklin Printing Co., 1890
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Platt by James Penha

penha
Joseph Avery Stranded on Rocks in the Niagara River. Daguerrotype by Platt D. Babbitt, 1853. Courtesy of the Library of Congress

All night long they heard in the houses beside the shore,
Heard, or seemed to hear, through the multitudinous roar,
Out of the hell of the rapids as ’twere a lost soul’s cries,–
Heard and could not believe; and the morning mocked their eyes,
Showing, where wildest and fiercest the waters leaped up and ran
Raving round him and past, the visage of a man
Clinging, or seeming to cling, to the trunk of a tree that, caught
Fast in the rocks below, scarce out of the surges raught.
Was it a life, could it be, to yon slender hope that clung?
Shrill, above all the tumult the answering terror rung.
–William Dean Howells, “Avery”

Nothing else I could do. It’s my profession after all. Photographing Niagara Falls. Its views. Its visitors. And selling the resulting daguerreotypes. Quite successfully. Because I’m a damn good daguerreotypist. Ask anyone around here. And I’m on duty every day, 365 days a year. This day, July 16, 1853, I was waiting for tourists along the American Channel rapids when I saw three men struggling to maneuver their row boat to shore. They had been working on the big dredging scow anchored in the river. Their oars were broken. Or lost. I turned my lens toward them just as the boat capsized and I saw two bodies cartwheeling over the edge of the American Falls too fast for me to capture them in my camera. There was no sign of the third man — turned out to be a local fellow named Samuel Avery — until he leapt up like a fucking phoenix and sat astride a log cantilevered in a rocky shoal in the middle of the river. The rapids were way too loud for him to hear my hallo, so I waved at him with both arms, but he was likely too afraid to let go of the log to answer. He was riding the river like a scared girl on a runaway stallion, but luckily he kept still enough for me to create an historic photograph. Took an even longer time till someone thought to hitch a lifeboat to the Bath Island Bridge and send the boat down toward the man. Avery caught and climbed into the boat, but before I could re-focus, the rapids turned the lifeboat upside down, and Avery, thrown back into the river, met his fate just as his friends had hours before. Nothing else I could do. I returned to my hotel where I processed the plate and encased a dozen of the images for sale at my Point View stand. They sold well. They still do.

Source: The author, 2021

Listen to James Penha read the prose poem Platt with a short commentary.

 

The prose poem Platt by James Penha was first published in The Ekphrastic Review, March 17, 2016

View the poem Avery, 1853  by William Dean Howells

Sources:
“Getting around.” Luminous-Lint. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.
“Niagara River – Life & Death on the River: Accidents & Rescues.” 20 Feb. 2012. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. .
“Platt D. Babbitt (Getty Museum).” The J. Paul Getty in Los Angeles. Web. 15 Oct. 2015. .
Weld, Charles Richard. A Vacation Tour in the United States and Canada. London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1855. Print.

An expat New Yorker, James Penha has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits The New Verse News, an online journal of current-events poetry. Bluesky: @jamespenha.bsky.social