Arts Society of Kingston Saturday, Mar 29 2008

We writers of ekphrasis know how it feels to write a poem inspired by a work of visual art, but what if the tables were turned on us? How would we feel if a visual artist created a work inspired by one of our poems? Well, here’s a way to find out. The Arts Society of Kingston (NY), also known as ASK, is seeking poems and other short texts for possible use in artistic collaborations and exhibitions. Deadline is April 19. The details are below.   

Hudson Valley writers are invited to submit short works for possible use in collaborations with visual artists for “VisuaLit”, an innovative, July 2008, exhibition at the Arts Society of Kingston. A writer may submit one to three works that are each no more than one page in length. Works may be on any subject and may include poetry, short fiction, drama, essays, or memoirs. Submitted works must be typed or word-processed, with no name or identifying information on the page. A coversheet must accompany the submitted works, with your name, address, phone number, and email address. Mail all submissions, postmarked no later than April 19th, to VisuaLit Submissions, ASK, 97  Broadway, Kingston NY 12401. Electronic submission will not be considered. By submitting works, the writer agrees to the following conditions: 1. The writer affirms that submitted works are entirely his or her own work.2. The decision to use a work as the basis or inspiration for a visual-arts work—painting, drawing, collage, or a multimedia or 3-dimensional work—will be made solely by the visual-artist member of ASK.3. The visual artist may use some or all of the text in the visual work.4. Writers will be contacted only if their work is selected for the exhibition.5. The writers of a selected work must provide an electronic version of the text for use in the exhibition or in related publications.6. All other rights to the text remain the property of the writer.7. If a visual-art work based on the writer’s work is sold, the writer will receive 10 percent of the gross proceeds. For further information, see “Call for Entries” on the ASK website at www.askforarts.org.

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Egypt Friday, Mar 28 2008

Last week my husband, daughter, and I took a tour through Egypt.  Every day I wrote in my travel journal: recording the itinerary, drawing pictures of various objects and scenes, and making notes for future poems. On yesterday’s eleven-hour return flight from Cairo to New York City, I wrote a poem entitled “Unfinished,” inspired by some monuments we had seen in their original settings. As soon as I am recovered from jet lag, I hope to learn more about the major Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawki (1868-1932), whose home (now a museum) we drove past on our way from Giza to Cairo.

(Other ekphrastic poets have written about Egypt. In his chapbook How to Paint the Savior Dead, Jason Gray includes one poem entitled “The Little Sphinx” and another poem entitled “Meditations of the Tomb Painters.” And in her ekphrastic collection Try, Cole Swenson treats the flight into Egypt as part of her long poem “Triptych.” )

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Acceptance Friday, Mar 28 2008

I am delighted to report that the fine journal Poet Lore has accepted one of my poems for publication.

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Collaboration Friday, Mar 28 2008

From the blog of a poet whom I know: a collaboration of poetry and painting.

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Women’s History Month Wednesday, Mar 19 2008

This entry for Women’s History Month will remain posted through the end of March.

So many women have written ekphrastic poems (responding to works of art created by either men or women) that it would be nearly impossible to compile a comprehensive listing.  Instead of attempting to do so, I focus today on some scholarly books which examine issues within the field of ekphrasis that are of special interest to women.

One substantial volume about ekphrasis which deserves attention this month just because it is written by a woman is MUSEUM MEDIATIONS: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Routledge, 2006) by Barbara Fischer. Ms. Fischer’s study “presents ekphrastic poems that exhibit “peripheral vision,” an acute awareness of the physical and institutional conditions that frame encounters with art” (page 3). She calls this approach to ekphrasis “critical mediation,” contrasting it with two other dominant approaches which have been formulated primarily by men: the cooperative reciprocity of words and images; and the competitive struggle between words and images (page 2-3).

Another substantial volume which devotes more than forty pages to an alternative female-centered genealogy of ekphrasis is MUSEUM OF WORDS: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1993) by James. A.W. Heffernan.  His second chapter is entitled “Weaving Rape: Ekphrastic Metamorphoses of the Philomela Myth from Ovid to Shakespeare.”

A related volume (which I haven’t acquired yet) cited frequently in ekphrasis bibliographies is Jean Hagstrum’s THE SISTER ARTS: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1958). 

In conclusion, plenty of significant commentary about ekphrasis exists which is either written by women, or focused on women’s contributions to ekphrastic poetry. If you are aware of other resources, please leave a comment on this blog.

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Eavan Boland Monday, Mar 17 2008

Today, March 17, I honor a major female Irish poet who has composed several ekphrastic poems: Eavan Boland.

For more than forty years, Ms. Boland has been writing what I consider to be stunning poetry: mythic or historical narratives, lyrics on motherhood, finely-wrought patterned forms, and translations. Often her poems explore the intersections of timeless myth, personal memory, recorded history, unrecorded history, and the geography of home or homeland. I greatly admire the supple power of her beautiful poems: they are precisely-observed, keenly-felt, elegantly-lineated, and strongly-voiced.

Some of Ms. Boland’s ekphrastic poems were influenced by the paintings of her own mother, an accomplished  Irish artist. Other poems were inspired by the work of famous masters. But in my opinion, Ms. Boland’s exacting and educated eye has never been elitist. She has focused also on those common products of female housekeeping and immigrant labor which have sometimes been excluded from the annals of art history. In that same generous spirit, then, I am listing here both what I consider to be her ekphrastic poems, and what I consider to be her object poems.

EKPHRASTICS and OBJECT POEMS OF EAVAN BOLAND
From the Painting “Back from Market” by Chardin
Domestic Interior
Fruit on a Straight-Sided Tray
Degas’s Laundresses
Woman Posing
On Renoir’s “The Grape Pickers”
Self-Portrait on a Summer Evening
Canaletto in the National Gallery of Ireland
The Black Lace Fan My Mother Gave Me
Object Lessons
On the Gift of “The Birds of America” by John James Audubon
The Shadow Doll
Bright-Cut Irish Silver
The Photograph on My Father’s Desk
An Old Steel Engraving
Hanging Curtains with an Abstract Pattern in a Child’s Room
The Dolls Museum in Dublin
At the Glass Factory in Cavan Town
The Water-Clock
Lava Cameo
The Art of Grief
A Woman Painted on a Leaf
Imago
In Which Hester Bateman…Takes an Irish Commission
A Model Ship Made by Prisoners Long Ago

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Gregory Pardlo Sunday, Mar 16 2008

Last Thursday night I attended a reading by poet Gregory Pardlo whose appearance was scheduled as part of a local Frequency North visiting writers series. Mr. Pardlo read from his recent award-winning book entitled Totem. The commentary hereafter refers not to Mr. Pardlo’s reading per se, but to his book which I purchased after the reading.  

None of the poems in the book are ekphrastic in a strict, narrow sense (responding to a single work of visual art); however, many of the poems inhabit the world of art to some degree.  ”The Miniaturist” is perhaps most conventionally ekphrastic:  it begins with a description of a woman doing needlework, and it evokes the “milk light” interiors of Vermeer. Other poems consider episodes in the lives of famous painters such as Van Gogh, Pollock, and O’Keeffe.  A few poems are composed as analogues to styles of painting or music: “vanitas” or “portrait of the artist” or “landscape” or “brown study” or “pastoral.” One of my favorites is “The Future as Evaporation” which begins: “Some afternoons I spend posing for Margaret / who is still composing what she calls a self- / portrait using my body.” In the book’s introduction, Barbara Hillman states that Mr. Pardlo “wants to explore the druidic function of art, the way works of jazz musicians, painters, poets and others who live imaginatively expand reality and make imagination free” (page xi).  

(To read a report of the public reading by Gregory Pardlo, see the March 18 entry on the blog of Albany poet and activist Dan Wilcox.)

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Martha Morseth Saturday, Mar 15 2008

A poet friend recently told me about the New Zealand online journal Deep South which offers most of its content (text and images) in pdf format. In the current 2007 issue appears an impressive ten-section poem entitled “Parallax: of time, technology and the camera” by Martha Morseth.

This poem would provoke a lively discussion about ekphrasis. Each section of the poem is accompanied by a black-and-white family photograph. The first question raised by this poem, then, is this: can a poem responding to a common domestic snapshot rather than to a high-art photograph be called “ekphrastic”? (Some say yes; others say no.) Another question raised by some sections of this poem is: if the poet and the photographer are one and the same person, can the poem still be called “ekphrastic”? (The tradition of ekphrasis says yes, because at least one major painter also wrote poems about his own paintings.)

If we call this poem “ekphrasis,” then we must come to terms with its wide variety of ekphrastic approaches and modes: limited description (describing only what’s present in the photograph); omniscient description (describing colors which are not present in the black-and-white photograph); narration (telling the temporal story from which the photograph captures a stop-action moment); peripheral vision (informing the reader of the writer’s grounding external to the photograph); and mediation between text and image (commentary about the nature of photography itself).

Moreover, section 8 (viii) of the poem presents the reader/viewer with an ethical problem. In this section entitled “Great-great Aunt Tackles Time,” the poet describes the appearance of an aunt who was so self-conscious about her appearance that she cut out her face from the family photograph. The aunt, the poet tells us, was “content not to be remembered.” Should a photographer take the picture of someone who doesn’t want to be photographed? Should a writer describe someone who doesn’t want to be described? And is it ethical for me to blog about this self-effacing woman?

Finally, section 10 (x) of the poem presents readers and viewers with an aesthetic problem. In this poem, the speaker (identical, it seems, to both poet and photographer) tells us that she has digitally altered her photograph. We might say that the domestic snapshot has been made more emotionally expressive, more artful. But how do we feel about this alteration? Would we rather look at the less-artful but more-candid domestic snapshot? Or would we rather look at the more-artful but less-candid digital photograph? And which is more suitable for ekphrasis?

I enjoyed immersing myself in the complexities of this suite of poems. I hope to read more of Martha Morseth’s work.

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Prizes Thursday, Mar 13 2008

Here’s a list of ekphrastic poems, chapbooks, or books which have won awards, honors, or prizes.

ASHBERY, John. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (1975). (Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award)

CHAPMAN, Mark. “Ascension: The Uprising” published in Water~Stone Review (Volume 10, Fall 2007). (Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize)

GRAY, Jason. How to Paint the Savior Dead. (2007) (one of several collections selected for the Wick Chapbook Series Four)

KAISER, Mary. Falling Into Velazquez. (2006) (winner of the 2006 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition)

LEVINE, Jeffrey. “Half Matter in a Material World” (2007) (winner of the 2007 Ekphrasis Prize Competition sponsored by Ekphrasis journal)

SWENSEN, Cole. Try. (1999) (winner of the 1998 Iowa Poetry Prize)

WILLIAMS, William Carlos. Pictures from Brueghel (1962) (Pulitzer Prize)

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Spitzer Tuesday, Mar 11 2008

Great ekphrastic poems have been written in response to artworks depicting great personal anguish. Recall the lines from Jacopo Sadoleto’s poem about the Laocoon statue: “Scarce can the eyes endure to look upon / . . . the cruel tragedy.” If any of us write poems in response to the tragic mistakes of Governor Spitzer, I hope that at least a few of our compositions will be laments for the human frailties which we all share. I hope that at least a few our compositions will be compassionate.

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