On Saturday, September 27, 2008, Poets House in New York City will be offering a symposium on the connections between poetry and architecture. For more information, call 212-431-7920.
Poetry Foundation Wednesday, Apr 16 2008
architecture and art and ekphrasis and painting and photograph and poetry 11:54 am
The website of the Poetry Foundation offers a “Poetry Tool” category search which allows you to retrieve the full text of–
more than one hundred poems about painting and sculpture
Egypt Friday, Mar 28 2008
architecture and art and ekphrasis and monument and painting and poetry 1:07 pm
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.” )
One-Liners Tuesday, Jan 22 2008
architecture and art and ekphrasis and poetry 12:49 pm
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.
Prairie Schooner Tuesday, Dec 11 2007
architecture and art and diorama and ekphrasis and jewelry and mosaic and poetry and sculpture 12:30 pm
The Winter 2007 issue of Prairie Schooner offers several ekphrasis poems–
1) “Artemis to Aphrodite” (Parthenon frieze) by Eloise Klein Healy
2) “A New Way of Thinking about Space” (Giotto’s cross) by Beth Bachmann
3) “Garden Smiles” (what’s seen from a museum cafe) by Katherine Soniat
4) “Racy Diorama at the Natural History Museum” (need we say more?) by Anna George Meek
5) “Icons” (mosaic figurines) by Phyllis Hoge Thompson
Beth Bachmann’s poem is one of a stunning group of four stark poems–what I would call a suite–published together in this one issue. The suite has no overarching title; the individual poems are not numbered. The poems do not progressively advance a single story. Rather, each spare poem sits alone next to the others. The words, images, and tone within each poem glance off those within the other poems. The final poem is devastating, retrospectively transforming the entire suite into a poignant tragedy. Here, then, Bachmann employs ekphrasis to provide variation within a group of several poems.
