AWP Wednesday, Jan 30 2008

I’ll be at the AWP conference this week. Although no “ekphrasis” program is being offered, four programs are being offered on other kinds of relationships between visual art and verbal art– 

Off The Page: Multidimensional Writings. (Eileen Tabios, Thylias Moss, Nick Carbo, Thomas Fink, Catherine Daly) This panel presents poets and writers who work in a variety of disciplines encompassing video, sculptures, paper craft, innovative book art,painting, performance events, conceptual art, drawings, film, and multimedia events, among others. Panelists discuss how other disciplines affect their texts and presentation of such texts. In some cases, the poetry book was transformed to not just present written poems. In other situations, community-based performances inspired new poetic forms and theories.

 

Show and Tell: Collaborations of the Verbal and Visual.(Marsha Norman, Christopher Durang, Jules Feiffer, Meg Wolitzer) Stony Brook Southampton’s literary magazine, The Southampton Review, presents four writers who work in a range of media, from film and theater to novels and cartoons. Panelists show and tell as they consider how each medium creates unique opportunities for cross sensory collabroations to collaborate, how their material works differently on page than on stage or on air, and how they get the verbal and visual to play nice.

Poetry and the Other Arts. (Elena Karina Byrne, David St. John, William Wadsworth, Ralph Angel, Lawrence Bridges, Susan McCabe) As we move into the 21st Century, we are reminded that the aesthetic progress of poetry, as well as the artistic growth of many individual poets, has always been deeply linked to its/their relationship to the other arts and artists in other fields — painting and sculpture, contemporary art performance and film, music (opera, popular music, “new” music), dance (for many poets, ballet), and cinema. This panel both celebrates this fact and investigates some of the reasons behind this growing, interactive conjunction of the arts.

  1000 Words: Picturing Fictions. (Lance Olsen, Rikki Ducornet, Steve Tomasula, Debra Di Blasi, Vanessa Place) How can images be incorporated effectively in literary work? When do images become necessary, functioning as more than just illustration? What can fiction learn from graphic novels, hypermedia, video games, podcasts, web pages, and other developing contemporary art forms? This panel explores the reading of image + text, the cultural significance of imagery in contemporary and future literature, and the dissolution of boundaries between artistic disciplines.

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Poets.Org Friday, Jan 25 2008

“Poetry & Art” is the current topic of the “Weekly Feature” on the homepage of the Academy of American Poets, with extensive remarks by Alfred Corn, Mary Jo Bang, and others. 

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Szirtes Thursday, Jan 24 2008

The accomplished poet, translator, author, and editor George Szirtes was born in Budapest and raised in London. Seven of his poems appear in the February 2008 issue of Poetry magazine as the featured “Portfolio.” Each of the poems responds to one photograph included in an exhibition at the Barbican in London entitled In the Face of History: European Photographers in the Twentieth Century.

These poems are lovely. They are spare but powerful, simply-stated but profound. Whether a four-part consideration of latrines  (one part for each soldier in the photo), or a heartbreaking lyric, or a villanelle, or an instance of mirror-image language, or a depiction of all the pathos that is present but unseen in one particular photo,  these poems are small graces. The voice in each is tender, confiding, knowing, saddened. I may never forget this line: “Were I to fall in love all over again, it would be / with this low ceiling…” (from “Doisneau: Underground Press”).

Few print poetry magazines reproduce the specific artworks to which their published ekphrastic poems respond. This issue of Poetry is an exception. For each of Mr. Szirtes’s poems, the related photograph appears on the facing page. As a result, the magazine provides a rare opportunity for the reader to compare the poem with its source of inspiration. 

The titles of the poems in the “Portfolio” cite the name of each photographer. The titles are–
“Kertesz: Latrine”
“Ross: Children of the Ghetto”
“Ross: Yellow Star”"Doisneau: Underground Press”
“Sudek: Tree”
“Petersen: Kleichen and a Man”
“Kolar: Housing Estate”

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One-Liners Tuesday, Jan 22 2008

A captivating article entitled “One-Line Poems: The Smallest Talk” by Michael McFee appears in the February 2008 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle. Mr. McFee asks his readers: “is a one-line poem the most essential poem possible? Or would that quintessence be a one-word poem–if such a creature can even exist, in any meaningful way?” (page 66).

Mr. McFee gives several examples of one-line poems. An argument could be made that one of the examples is ekphrastic, given that a work of architecture is a work of visual art. The poem is John Ashbery’s “The Cathedral Is.” (Not wanting to violate copyright laws by reproducing here the entire poem of three words, I refrain from doing so.)

Inspired by the article and the poem, I set out to write my own one-line ekphrastic poem. I came up with a one-question poem. Ironically, it’s influenced by a line from Mr. Ashbery’s long masterpiece “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Here’s my own one-liner–

Art

What else but the other?

I could condense the poem even further to one word. Here it is–

Art

Otherness.

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King Monday, Jan 21 2008

Prompt for today: Write a poem inspired by any image from the website of The King Center in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Grant Wood Sunday, Jan 20 2008

Last Friday, I had the chance to hear an educator in an art museum talk about Grant Wood’s painting Death on the Ridge Road. Before arriving at the museum, I had driven for almost an hour on snowy, icy roads. As I came over a hill, I saw several people standing on the shoulder of the road, frantically waving their arms at my oncoming car. They were warning me to slow down. A few moments earlier, a van had skidded on the ice and tipped into the ditch. As I drove past the stranded vehicle, I had no idea that Death on the Ridge Road would be one topic of that morning’s art lesson.

After I got home safely that evening, I started writing a poem about the painting:  about the intersection of Art with Life, of Art with Death. I’m grateful still to be alive, writing poems about paintings–even paintings about fatal accidents.

OTHER POEMS ABOUT GRANT WOOD

“American Gothic” by John Stone

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Photography Saturday, Jan 19 2008

“Photography and Writing” and “Photography and Literature” are two chapters in a teacher’s curriculum guide which may be downloaded at no charge from the website of the International Center for Photography. The guide is entitled Focus on Photography and was written by Cynthia Way, former ICP Coordinator of Community Programs.

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Training Friday, Jan 18 2008

Today I am attending the first of two workshops in the “Art and Writing” teachers’ programs at the Williams College Museum of Art.

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Suzanne Stryk Thursday, Jan 17 2008

Two of the most notable ekphrastic poems in the English language are “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams and “Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden, both of which were inspired by Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s sixteenth-century masterpiece Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The Greek myth of Icarus continues to inspire paintings, and paintings of Icarus continue to inspire poetry. In the current issue (Winter, 2007) of Shenandoah appears a poem entitled “Icarus Redeemed” by Dan Stryk, written in the voice of Icarus at the moment of drowning. The poem was inspired by a painting by Suzanne Stryk, whose other mixed media work entitled Code (Pandora Moth) is reproduced in the same journal. I’m gratified whenever I open a contemporary poetry journal and discover therein a fresh response to a centuries-old myth.  Why? Because it’s an act of bravery for an artist or writer to present his/her own original vision of a story which has already been endlessly interpreted. And so, for one more day at least, the tradition of ekphrasis is carried forward.

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Helen Turner Wednesday, Jan 16 2008

These past few days, I’ve been revising a poem inspired by Helen M. Turner’s painting Morning News.  The working title of my poem is “Touches of Red.” I found a reproduction of the painting in one of my art books, Women Artists: An Illustrated History by Nancy G. Heller, and my poem depends upon an assumption that I made about the reddish objects (bowl, flowers, slippers, robe) depicted therein.  I assumed from the reproduction in the book that all those objects are almost identical in color.  But no reproduction of a work of art perfectly reproduces the work of art.  What, then, is the obligation of a poet who writes about works of art?  If I write an ekphrastic poem based upon a reproduction, am I doing justice to the work of art?  At this point in my experience, I have to say, No.  From now on, I’ll be writing only from an actual encounter with an original work of art.  Later today, I’ll stop by one of the many museums and art galleries in my own home town.

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