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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Leigh Wen Sunday, Aug 3 2008

Last Saturday morning, my husband and I walked through the streets, public squares, and parks of downtown Albany, following the trail of the city’s temporary “Sculpture Walking Tour.” The tour features eighteen structures by fourteen different sculptors.  Many of the public artworks are made entirely or partly of steel. One of my favorites, paradoxically, was not a sculpture, but a huge painting paying homage to the river that flows by Albany: The Hudson by Leigh Wen. This mural-like piece was mounted upright behind some large windows on the first floor of a commercial building converted to an art gallery. (Perhaps the artwork qualifies as a sculpture because parts of the building are constructed from steel?)

As soon as I saw the painting, I recognized it. I had seen it first many years ago, in another art gallery a few blocks away from its current site (actually, in the earlier location of this same arts organization). It is a beautiful painting of fluid energy. The entire canvas is filled with blue and white undulating waves.

So I plan to write an ekphrastic poem which compares my first sighting of this painting with my second sighting of it, and relating those changes of location to the ever-changing nature of the river itself.

Can we ever dip into a painting more than once in the same place?

LATER NOTE FROM BLOGGER: After writing this post, I found out that the artwork in the window was similar to, but not identical to, the painting I saw many years ago. In addition, that window artwork qualifies as a sculpture because it is equipped with lighting devices which illuminate the artwork at night.

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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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Pablo Picasso Tuesday, Jul 15 2008

“Guernica” by Yusef Komunyakaa is today’s featured poem on Poetry Daily. The poem moves historically: from one past moment of war, through Picasso’s later moments of creation, then to the ongoing present of war, as depicted by the images still immediately available to us in the painting. The poem’s passage of historical time hinges on a phrase which Mr. Komunyakaa places in the middle of his poem: “& then time’s ashes / drew past & present future perfect together…”

 

OTHER POEMS ABOUT PICASSO

Gloria Vando. “Guernica” (Cortland Review, Spring 2008)

Robert Parham. “Of The Old Guitarist” (Ekphrasis, Fall/Winter 2007)

Gwendolyn Brooks. “Two Dedications: The Chicago Picasso” (The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, edited by Elizabeth Alexander)

Wallace Stevens. “The Man With the Blue Guitar” (Transforming Vision, edited by Edward Hirsch)

Basil King. “Pablo Picasso: Portrait of D.M.” (77 Beasts, by Basil King)

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Trisha Roblee Monday, May 5 2008

Last Sunday my husband and I drove to the New York State Museum (only fifteen minutes away from our home) to see one of its current exhibitions: the 2008 Best of SUNY Student Art Exhibition. I am now composing a poem in response to one of the pieces in that gallery: a grouping of five upright steel bars, stationed in a single row from shortest to tallest, entitled What Raises Us. The student artist is Trisha Roblee from SUNY Geneseo. For this poem, as well as for most of my ekphrastic poems, I follow a particular creative process which I’ve developed from both formal training and personal experiment:

1) I bring paper and pencil with me to each exhibit I attend.

2) I choose an artwork to which I have a strong response: affection, distress, delight, wonder, etc.

3) I carefully record  the artwork’s title, artist, material, year; and the date and place of my visit.

4) I sketch whatever it is I’m looking at, with as much detail as possible.  

5) I  label every part of the sketch, using words which are as descriptive as possible. 

6) When I get home, I let loose some creative impulses in order to deepen my connection to the artwork. I may do any of the following: draw pictures, riff on particular words, read my fragments aloud, convert some words into improv floor movements, work with clay to reproduce some part of the artwork, do a collage to reproduce some part of the artwork.  And I free-write extensively. I keep free-writing until a creative “gathering” is set into motion in my mind. A gathering is any slowly-building constellation of images, memories, insights, etc., that I intuit will eventually organize itself into a poem.

7) I copy over my text by hand. Each time I copy it over, I make changes and improvements. Eventually I transfer one of the hand-written texts to my word processor.

8) I revise, revise, revise. Sometimes for months.

9) I read the poem aloud at open mics. I hear how the poem sounds in front of an audience.

10) I bring the poem to critique groups for feedback.

11) I send it out for publication.

12) Sometimes, I get published.

 

By lunch time on Monday, I had written a rough draft of a poem based upon Ms. Roblee’s artwork. I call the poem “Steel Triolet” and the opening line is “Steel raises our rank.”

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Çole Swensen Monday, Apr 28 2008

Cole Swensen will be one of the featured artists at the “Conceptual Poetry and Its Others” symposium (May 29-31) at the University of Arizona Poetry Center in Tucson. Ms. Swensen is the author of the ekphrastic poetry collection Try which won the 1998 Iowa Poetry Prize.

I own a copy of Try, a long meditation on devotional art which flows through eleven sections, nine of which are divided into three parts (”Triad,” “Trilogy,” “Triune,” “Trio,” “Triptych,” etc.). The poetry is gorgeous and deeply moving, but quite challenging. Ms. Swensen orchestrates a wide array of ekphrastic details, sonic phrasing, lineation, and vantage points. Immerse yourself in its riches on some Sunday afternoon when you have a sustained period of uninterrupted time.

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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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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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Prairie Schooner Tuesday, Dec 11 2007

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.

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Guennol Lioness Friday, Dec 7 2007

This week, an ancient limestone sculpture of a female lion was sold at a New York auction for more than fifty million dollars. The tiny figure (less than four inches high) has been called one of civilization’s greatest works of art. Here’s your chance to write an ekphrasis poem about the Guennol Lioness, carved in Mesopotamia about the same time that the wheel was invented. How much do you think you could sell your poem for?

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