Picasso, Caravaggio, Anderson, Colville Thursday, Sep 4 2008

The more ekphrastic poetry I read in books and journals, the more I’m convinced that it would be easy to compile several collections of poems inspired by single categories of images. For example, it would be easy to compile a collection of poems inspired by landscape paintings, or portraits, or religious iconography. It would be easy to compile a collection of poems inspired solely by the artworks of Picasso.

So, too, would it be easy to compile a collection of ekphrastic poems inspired by equine art. This week I’m reading a new anthology of poetry entitled Cadence of Hooves : A Celebration of Horses, edited by Suzan Jantz. Scattered throughout the 487 pages in this voluminous paperback are seven conventional ekphrastic poems (inspired by individual works of stationary art). Also included are three poems responding to ordinary photographs.

And what’s on the cover of the book? What we might expect : a lovely painting of three horses by artist Valerie Mejer.

The ekphrastic poems in this anthology are:

“A Painting at the Met” by Danielle Georges (artwork not identified)
“Neon Horses” by Dorianne Laux (Martin Anderson’s neon horses)
“Horses of San Marco Venice, 1989″ by Deborah Fleming (bronze statues)
“The Rope” by Alice Friman (Picasso’s BOY LEADING A HORSE)
“Conversion of Saint Paul” by Rebecca Dunham (Caravaggio)
“Even With No Hand To Hold It” by Margo Berdeshevsky (Picasso’s CABALLO CORNEADO)
“The Eyes of a Dark Horse” by Laurelyn Whitt (Alex Colville’s painting HORSE AND TRAIN)

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The Storialist Monday, Aug 25 2008

Here’s a blogger who composes poems inspired by the photographs on another blog: The Storialist.

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Jan Greenberg Friday, Aug 1 2008

For more than forty years, I have saved some of the picture books which I read as a child. They are so beautiful, and so memory-rich, that I can’t bear to part with them. I still have the Golden Press edition of The Little Mermaid (1966) by Hans Christian Andersen which I received as a holiday gift when I was seven or eight years old. That edition, printed and bound in Japan, has a 3-D picture on the cover: a yellow mermaid suspended in tropical blue water amongst coral and fish. If I tilt the book up and down, the fish waver back and forth.

I feel that same wonder and delight as I hold a brand new book (April 2008) for younger readers: Side by Side: New Poems Inspired by Art from Around the World edited by Jan Greenberg. Yes, that’s right–a collection of ekphrastic poetry for middle-school and junior high students. Side-by-side on facing pages appear a color reproduction of the artwork, the ekphrastic poem in its original language, and a translation of the poem into English. The artworks range from paintings (oil, murals, etc.) to statues (bronze and sandstone) to photographs to mixed media to coffins to wooden figurines to porcelain discs.

Ms. Greenberg has adopted a sophisticated organizational scheme for her book. She divides the contents into four sections in accordance with some established stances of ekphrasis: description, envoicing, narration, and mediation (what the author calls, respectively, Impressions, Voices, Stories, and Expressions). One poem provides an embodiment of ekphrasis that I have never seen before. The poem “Turner to His Critic” by Grace Nichols dramatizes a refutation by the painter J.M.W. Turner to an art critic who dismissed one of his paintings as “soapsuds and whitewash.” In the poem, the affronted painter tells his critic that, “even the sea can see…/That this work is a masterpiece.”

I have yet to find such a far-ranging, multicultural collection of ekphrastic poetry written for adults. In this book, thirty-three countries on six continents are represented. Biographies of the poets, translators, and artists are also included. Ms. Greenberg’s volume sets a fine example. I hope that eventually, someone else compiles a similar collection for grown-ups. Until that book appears, I will savor this juvenile edition.

Perhaps the origins of ekphrasis are not, after all, in mature classic works like the eighteenth chapter of Homer’s Iliad. Perhaps, instead, ekphrasis is just our adult term for that affection which we had, as children, for the pairing of beautiful words with beautiful images.

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Ansel Adams Tuesday, Jul 1 2008

Congratulations to local poet Lyn Lifshin whose ekphrastic poem “Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico 1941″ is published in the Spring/Summer 2008 issue of The Aurorean. Inspired by the iconic photograph of Ansel Adams, the poet imagines a family scene inside one of the Hernandez homes.

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Tattoo Highway Tuesday, May 13 2008

Tattoo Highway is sponsoring a contest:  write a short poem about THIS IMAGE. 

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Poetry Foundation Wednesday, Apr 16 2008

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

twelve poems about photography

thirty poems about architecture

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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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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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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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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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