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Artist

Bobby C. Rogers has an uncanny ability to wring what is profound and surprising from what appears humble and ordinary. In the words of Andrew Hudgins, he is “a near mystic of the domestic.” A story about a young couple moving into a new house and watching the neglected garden come to life as seasons change becomes a poem about the shifting sand of language and the bedrock of love that underlies it. A poem that begins by struggling to understand the photography of William Eggleston becomes a declaration of the necessity of beauty in unexpected places. Rogers’ artistry sneaks up on you. Raised in west Tennessee and now living in Memphis, he writes often about his native place, touching its shacks and roadhouses, highways and banks with a loving attention that makes them sacred. What feels like stream-of-consciousness reveals itself to be a carefully constructed piece of architecture, the logic building and the vistas opening as we move from works of art to dive bars to personal confession to theology and back: “Beauty is best when it’s accidental…. How empty / if the only thing left to look at is your own looking in this world so mysteriously encoded into / shape and color, where even a tawdry streetscape / is built of parts we’ve only happened upon and had no hand in making.” Rogers’ gentle, confident voice reveals a spaciousness in commonplace things. He can almost make you believe that the world around you, the very room you’re sitting in, no matter how unpoetic it may appear, holds the answers to the most profound questions in creation.

 

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The Image archive is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts.

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