Last August, I led a writing workshop at The Albany Institute of History and Art . Participants wrote about the paintings of Stephen Hannock , many of which include excerpts from his writing journals (vistas with texts). I am now finished compiling the collection of those writings, “Texts with Vistas.”Some of the material in the compilation I had expected to encounter. I was not surprised that different writers chose different paintings, or that they approached their subject matter in different ways, or that some wrote prose while others wrote poetry.But I was delighted by a couple of surprises. One writer (who is a painter himself) described Hannock’s frames instead of his paintings. Another writer focused on a woman who was examining a painting, rather than focusing on the painting itself.Can we call a poem “ekphrastic” if it’s responding not to the the art, but to someone looking at the art? When we attend an exhibit, do we become part of the exhibit?
August Rodin Friday, Nov 30 2007
art and ekphrasis and poetry and sculpture 7:35 pm
In the fall 2007 issue of “The Georgia Review ” is a poem inspired by Rodin’s sculpture “Le Secret.” Kevin Clark writes the poem in the first person, from the point of view of a man watching a woman who is gazing at the sculpture. The sculpture is beautiful; the woman is attracted to the sculpture; the man is attracted to the woman. And we the readers are lured through the poem by that triangle. The poem’s surprise ending reveals one secret about the relationship between the man and the woman. Of course, a deeper secret is whether the poem is autobiographically factual or not. Is the “I” of the poem equivalent to Kevin Clark? It’s possible that this poem which so precisely describes the real Rodin sculpture is otherwise playing make-believe. We forgive the poet for imagining a fictional couple in the art gallery, but we do not forgive him for inaccurately describing Rodin’s famous statue.If an ekphrastic poet proves to us that he/she can faithfully describe a real work of art, do we readers expect the same rigor throughout the rest of the poem? Or do we reward him/her with even greater freedom throughout the rest of the poem?
OTHER POEMS ABOUT RODIN
“The Walking Man of Rodin” by Carl Sandburg (Transforming Vision, edited by Edward Hirsch)
Georges Braque Friday, Nov 30 2007
art and ekphrasis and painting and poetry 7:34 pm
Elizabeth McLagan’s poem “Like Braque” appears in the autumn 2007 issue of “The Bitter Oleander ,” a magazine of contemporary poetry and short stories. Instead of responding to only one of Braque’s paintings, this short poem (six unrhymed couplets) presents a series of images evoking several of Braque’s paintings: candlesticks, table top, wine bottle. The poem pays homage to Braque by imitating a cubist style throughout, as in these concluding lines: “the wine, ready / to be drunk, is the empty bottle / lying on its side, asleep with wine.”
Conference Friday, Nov 30 2007
art and ekphrasis and poetry 6:48 pm
Here’s a conference which will address ekphrasis. The quote below is taken from the announcements page of the website of Renaissance Society of America .
Italian Renaissance Conference
Utrecht University, The Netherlands
“From 7 till 10 November 2007 the Department of Italian Studies at Utrecht University hosts an international conference on the intersections between literature and visual arts in the Italian Renaissance . . . While focusing on the dialogue between artists, literati and mediating institutions like printers/publishers and academies, the conference intends to reassess current notions of cross-over phenomena, both in Cinquecento theory (’poetics of painting’) and practice (ekphrasis, etc.).”
Fritz Scholder Friday, Nov 30 2007
art and ekphrasis and painting and poetry 6:47 pm
Recently I received the latest issue of “Tuesday; An Art Project,” a biannual publication of Tuesday Journal Press in Arlington, Massachusetts. “Tuesday” is produced as a limited edition packet of small cards on which are printed photographs, artwork, and poems.This issue contains an ekphrastic poem, “Rodeo Cowboy No. 1, Oil on Canvas, 1978″ by Ravi Shankar. The poem was inspired by a painting by Fritz Scholder, a prominent Western artist.I read this poem several times. I imagined what the painting looked like from phrases such as “a dervish / of dust” and “hoof like a boot” and “without crowdnoise” and “day an overall yolkyellow flattened dimensionless.”This morning, by doing a Google search, I found an image of the painting . I realized how much I had missed, or misinterpreted, from the poem.If an ekphrastic poem is about an obscure work of art rather than a famous work of art, are we obliged to track down a reproduction (easily done in this age of Google)? Does it matter if we misinterpret the image? Can we appreciate an ekphrasis poem for what it is alone?
Phil Hansen Friday, Nov 30 2007
art and drawing and ekphrasis and poetry 6:46 pm
One morning when I went online to Yahoo , I encountered a “Figure It Out” video of artist Phil Hansen drawing a huge self-portrait on a sidewalk by configuring thousands of tiny stick figures into lines and shadows. It occurred to me that concrete poets also draw pictures, but by using letters and words. Can concrete poetry (sometimes called “shaped” poetry or “pattern” poetry) which creates a picture of a work of art (rather than of a swan, butterfly, or other creature) be considered ekphrasis?
Mural Friday, Nov 30 2007
art and ekphrasis and mural and painting and poetry 6:45 pm
In the huge Barnes & Noble bookstore at New York City’s Union Square is a mural depicting great writers from history. The contemporary poet Robert King has written a poem about such a mural (perhaps that same Union Square mural). The five-stanza, twenty-line poem appears in the fall/winter 2007 issue of POET LORE, a fine magazine produced by The Writer’s Center in Baltimore.The title of King’s poem (”In the Great Mural of Literature at Barnes & Noble’s Starbucks”) is straightforward, but the poem’s contents are wry, hinting at the ironies of locating such a mural in the upscale coffee shop of a megalith chain bookstore. The speaker of the poem is someone in the coffee shop who presents his observations about the mural, while at the same time avoiding the use of “I” even once.In my opinion, one of the poem’s ironies is that today’s Starbucks indoor coffee shop is nothing like the Parisian street cafe where intellectuals used to meet to smoke, drink, write, read, discuss, argue, fall in and out of love, and evade the police (one reason that writers once met in public was that the French government used to be able to arrest them for conspiracy if they met in private apartments). As the poem points out, smoking and drinking are “not allowed” in Starbucks.I think that a second irony is this: this mural is primarily decorative, not taking the risks that political murals throughout the history of art have taken. This poem, too, (although indeed accomplished) is primarily fun, somewhat serious, but is not taking the risks taken by the writers depicted in the murals. No Rockefeller is going to censor or tear down this tame picture, and no McCarthy is going to interrogate Robert King. And why do we not know the name of the artists who painted the mural?A third irony may be that the liberal writers depicted in the mural, if alive today, might support small, independent bookstores rather than a corporate chain (although, of course, we can’t be sure). As the poem states, “Dorothy Parker…tries to decide / how to get the hell out of this picture…”So here we have a poem written by writer who’s in the coffee shop of a bookstore looking at a painting of writers who want to leave the coffee shop of the bookstore so that they can go somewhere else to write their books. Delicious, don’t you think?(By the way, this blogger doesn’t think that people who drink or smoke in excess are doing themselves any good; and this blogger admires her friends and sister who work very hard in the corporate world. And for the sake of full disclosure, this blogger acknowledges that she has been a customer of both Starbucks and Barnes & Noble.)
