Black History Month Wednesday, Feb 20 2008

I will devote the last week of February to listing ekphrastic poems either written by African American and other black writers, or inspired by visual artworks created by African American and other black artists. (Poems inspired by jazz, the blues, and other kinds of music are not listed below.)

ALEXANDER, Elizabeth. “Monet at Giverny”

ALEXANDER, Elizabeth. “Painting”

BROOKS, Gwendolyn. “The Chicago Picasso”

BROOKS, Gwendolyn. “The Wall”

CLIFTON, Lucille. “Ten Oxherding Pictures”

CLIFTON, Lucille. “The Photograph: The Lynching”

COTTER, Joseph S. “Looking at Portraits”

DUNBAR, Paul L. “The Photograph”

GILBERT, Christoper. “African Sculpture”

JOHNSON, Georgia D. “To May Howard Jackson, Sculptor”

JOHNSON, James W. “Before a Painting”

KOMUNYAKAA, Yusef. “Facing It”

MAJOR, Clarence. Several poems on Hopper, Rembrandt, Eakins, etc.

MERRIT, Constance. “Black Iris: After Georgia O’Keefe”

MYERS, Walter Dean. “Migration”

RAGLAND, Samantha. “Cigarette Smoker: Painting by Hale Aspacio Woodruff”

RAGLAND, Samantha. “On Looking at “The Banjo Lesson” by Henry Ossawa Tanner”

RAY, Henrietta C. “The Sculptor’s Vision”

RAY, Henrietta C. “The Tireless Sculptor”

St. JOHN, Primus. “Notes on a Painter’s Palette”

TRETHEWEY, Natasha. (Ms. Trethewey has written many poems inspired by documentary and family photographs)

TRETHEWEY, Natasha. “Again, The Fields”

TRETHEWEY, Natasha. “Picture Gallery”

WALCOTT, Derek. Tiepolo’s Hound

WHEATLEY, Phillis. “To S.M., A Young Painter…”

OTHER RELATED POEMS


The white Englishman J.M.W. Turner’s famous painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) might be considered to be at least a footnote to the history of African American ekphrasis. The painting was, in part, based on a poem written by Turner himself. Winslow Homer’s painting The Bright Side depicts African Americans working for the Union Army as mule drivers. Ted Kooser has written a poem about that painting entitled “The Bright Side” (the second poem in his series entitled “Four Civil War Paintings by Winslow Homer”).

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Marc Chagall Tuesday, Feb 19 2008

By their very nature, ekphrastic poems tend to unfold within a sustained moment (during the contemplation of an artwork) and within a circumscribed setting (placed in front of the artwork). But some ekphrastic poems present to the reader a different dramatic moment–the moment when the speaker of the poem turns away from the artwork under consideration and leaves the scene. A famous example is Robert Browning’s “My Last Dutchess.” Near the end of this poem (on lines 53-54 of its 56 lines), the speaker says to his companion, “Nay, we’ll go / Together down, sir.” A contemporary example is the poem “On Chagall’s World” by Bob Bradshaw, published online in the Fall 2007 issue of Apple Valley Review. Relatively earlier in this poem than in the Browning poem (on lines 14-15 of its 24 lines), the speaker recounts that, “There was nothing to do but to turn / my head.” Of course, most poems of any kind turn in some way–whether the turn occurs within tone of voice, narrative or argument, figuration, sytax, etc.  And often a thematic turn is embodied by a formal turn. However, when an ekphrastic poem takes a thematic turn away from an artwork, the consequences are all the greater for its formal concerns.

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Steve Kronen Monday, Feb 18 2008

“After Viewing Twelve Versions of Madonna and Child” is the first offering in Empirical Evidence, a fine collection of intelligent and tightly-woven poems by Steve Kronen. “After Viewing…” belongs to an established mode of ekphrasis called the capriccio, a mode which either summarizes many works of art by one artist, or provides an overview of one genre by many artists.

This poem is impressively intricate: summation is not only its mode, but also its multifaceted central image. The poem is thick with examples of counting: numbers (twelve versions of the painting), ages, weights, stock prices, strings of beads, virtues. The last image in the poem is of the divine child assuming his adult role as “the man who guesses weights and who / Hasn’t been wrong all morning.” He looks out at the viewer, evaluating the viewer’s qualifications to judge the subject.

At its deepest level, then, this poem is about taking account of our lives. But at its most subtle level, this poem is asking whether a poet can accurately assess a work of art—a question which, of course, has ponderous implications for writers of ekphrasis. Is it an act of hubris for a poet to summarize the entire oeuvre of another artist, or to scan an entire genre of art by several artists? How does a poet know when she’s seen enough to pass judgment? Viewing twelve versions of an iconic image may seem, at first, to be sufficient exposure; however, a quick search of “Madonna and Child” images on Google retrieves more than forty-five thousand results. What percentage of 45,000 is 12? Just a mote in the eye.

(NOTE FROM BLOGGER–So as not to leave a false impression with my readers, I mention here that I am an atheist.)

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WCMA Saturday, Feb 16 2008

Yesterday from 9 am to 3 pm I attended an excellent “Art and Writing” teacher’s training at the Williams College Museum of Art.

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Databases Friday, Feb 15 2008

This week I did some research in order to find out what databases exist for locating ekphrastic poems.  Using my two local public library cards and my own computer, I can remotely search the databases Poem Finder, EbscoHost, and ProQuest. In addition, I can drive for fifteen minutes to a nearby university library in order to search Humanities International Index. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to retrieve a listing of ekphrastic poems (titles, poets, and artwork).  These databases allow me to search “ekphrasis” as a subject term in order to retrieve scholarly articles about ekphrasis, and they allow me to search a combination of terms in order to retrieve a list of poems which have something to do with art (for example, combining the terms “Renoir” and “poem”); however, they do not allow me to search “ekphrasis” and “poem” in order to retrieve a list of ekphrastic poems. Furthermore, I discovered some regrettable errors: one database gave “van Gogh” as the author of a poem; another database gave “Ted Kooser” as the author of a poem which he merely introduced as part of his ongoing American Life in Poetry newspaper column project. (The poet was actually Linda Pastan.) So I was surprised to discover how hard it is to keep track of the most recently published ekphrastic poetry–even with the latest technology at my disposal.  In conclusion, I will continue to rely on the old-fashioned method which has served me well for many months: I buy the literary journals, and then I actually read the poems therein. Amazing how simple it is.

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Sandro Botticelli Thursday, Feb 14 2008

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Did you know that John Ashbery once wrote a “humorous ekphrasis of an illustrated valentine card” (Museum Mediations by Barbara Fischer, page 59)?

Are any well-known ekphrastic poems sufficiently amorous for Valentine’s Day? Perhaps Rachel Hadas’s poem “Mars and Venus” which was inspired by Sandro Botticelli’s painting Mars and Venus.

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Submissions Wednesday, Feb 13 2008

Today I prepared several of my ekphrastic poems for submission to various literary journals: “Death on the Ridge Road” (a recalcitrant poem which I have revised extensively over the past few weeks); “Touches of Red” (a compliant poem which came to me almost effortlessly); “Green-Weak” (a recent poem about hereditary colorblindness).  

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Gallen-Kallela Monday, Feb 11 2008

One of the more rewarding aspects of ekphrasis is the complexity which results from writing about visual art, especially if the piece of visual art is presenting a scene from a pre-existing story. In her collection Rope Bridge, Nan Cohen includes a poem which explores that level of complexity while also adding yet another layer. Her poem “Five Lines from the Artist’s Notes” is about a painting of a hero from Finnish mythology:  Lemminkainen’s Mother .  Its Finnish artist, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, depicts the mother grieving over her son’s dead body. Ms. Cohen’s poem foregrounds not the painting itself, nor any written account of the myth; rather, it foregrounds the artist’s own notes about his project (presumably, notes made before the painting was started). The poem’s title immediately alerts the reader to the subversive intentions of the poem, since the phrase “lines from” usually appears tucked within in a poem’s epigraph. Proceeding with her subversiveness, Ms. Cohen scatters the artist’s notes throughout the poem. Each note is separated from the next note by passages of poetic text in which the speaker of the poem contrasts the painter’s early vision (as recorded in his notes) with his later product. This strategy succeeds in showing the reader/viewer the gap between an artist’s original intention and his final achievement. As the poem says, “You don’t always know what you can do. / You fling one glance to heaven, and begin…” Isn’t that true, too, for poets?

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Colorblind Monday, Feb 4 2008

Today I am putting the finishing touches on a poem about my late father, a colorblind artist. I plan to read the poem at an event this coming Saturday at the Niskayuna branch of the Schenectady County Public Library.

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Paul Villinski Sunday, Feb 3 2008

I’m back from New York City where I attended the 2008 AWP conference. After arriving at my hotel last Wednesday, I took some time to visit the nearby Museum of Arts & Design on West Fifty-third Street. I entered the museum just in time to join a tour of the current exhibition, “Pricked: Extreme Embroidery,” one of a series of exhibitions which explore how contemporary artists are incorporating tangible materials (both traditional and innovative) into their artwork.

The piece which I found to be most memorable was Lament by Paul Villinski, a construction shaped as an enormous bird with outstretched wings mounted on a large wall. Villinski created the bird’s menacing wings out of brown, black, and dark blue gloves which he found on city streets and stitched together; and he created the bird’s headless rib cage out of a discarded backpack frame. Sewing needles hang vertically from the gloves on strands of thread.

Already, I’m writing a poem about the piece. For me, Lament evokes the Angel of Death, the fall of Icarus, the ominous descent of a vulture, the great wingspans of the albatross or eagle, or the Nike of Samothrace. It may take me another few days of writing to know which way my poem will go. But I’m already deep within the initial stages of creation, using some strategies which I picked up while attending the AWP conference (and also the recent Williams College Museum of Art training). For example, I’m sketching the wings in great detail; I’m drawing some imagined “before” and “after” scenes; I’m putting on and taking off my own gloves; I’m rotating a photo from the museum catalog; I’m free-writing on the word “lament;” I’m looking for other poetic elegies; I’m seeking out musical equivalents.

So this will be my AWP poem.

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