Poetry, Poetics and the Arts

Post Pome: A New Project

2011-06-23T19:56:00.000-07:00

I am embarking on a new project.

Ekphrastic Rapture

2011-05-19T08:39:00.000-07:00

Wanted to write a poem about the apocalypse (and as you all know I have a Sat. deadline). Came across this article about restoring a damaged old triptych. I guess when you paint the apocalypse you don't expect your work to have to last forever.

What Did You See? by Fanny Howe : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

2011-05-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

What Did You See? by Fanny Howe : Poetry Magazine [poem/magazine]

One for the season

2011-04-21T08:45:00.000-07:00

Trying out a tumblr, just because my web presence isn't already dispersed enough. Here's Mandy Thursday on the Run, from my old book.

My 64 Poetic Go-To Words

2011-04-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

This is a scan of the title page for my MFA thesis, a new collection of poems that is due in the next few weeks. After two years of generating new poems and a semester-long wrestling match with the overall shape of the manuscript (another post), it’s finally near completion. In a somewhat manic rush over the past week or two, the manuscript came together, including a few new poems that filled in gaps and some recasting of individual pieces, as well as much tuning and twisting and, I hope, sharpening up of line, sound, image, etc.

I’m at the point now of copy editing and proof reading and formatting the mss according to the school’s guidelines: margins/pg. # lower right/Where do acknowledgments go? But as I’m making notes on typos and double-words, etc, I’m also facing my habits, my fallbacks, my linguistic crutches and tricks. So I began making a list of poetic “go-to” words, terms that appear again and again, poem after poem. It’s a daunting list, and now what to do with it? The number of considerations, often simultaneous, is hard to catalogue, and something I usually do unconsciously. But consciousness can be really useful too. It may even be what poem making is all about--a set of conscious choices in language that tell a truth you did not know or suspect until you set them in motion.

So, first, I need to see if each instance of a term is necessary within each particular poem—does it denote and/or connote what I want it to say? is it the best image? do I need or like the sound it makes on its own or with the words around it? what about the syllables and the emphasis of the term? does it fall at the best place in the line? is it an allusion to something else that matters, or to something to0 heavy for the poem to bear? is the word true, honest in its capacity to make a tactile version of the poem’s intellectual, emotional, linguistic set of experiences? is it a lie or an evasion? if it is an abstraction--“love” or “beauty”—can it be concrete? does it need to be there at all?

Then I consider the whole book, how this poem and the ones next to it work together. Does the repetition of “palm” or “light” or “small” show the development of a theme or vision or idea? Or is it just linguistic laziness? I would never use “small” nine times in a single poem, so why am I doing this in a single section of the book? If I replace it with “tiny” or “slight” or “thumb-sized” what levels of new pleasure or what barriers does that create for the poem’s readers?

At what point does micro-editing individual poems take away their own energy and stand-aloneness in favor of a larger whole? And what if, as I suspect, this list shows me what my real preoccupations might be. From the look of things, I am obsessed with body parts—especially hands, seeing, various beverages, wounds, dark and light, theological abstractions, art, music, eating and naming. Perhaps those very obsessions ARE what the work is about. Finding synonyms or replacements is perhaps too easy or unnecessary?

Here’s the real secret—this work of considering and reconsidering each poem in the light of the whole, of discovering the texture of my preoccupations and obsessions , or getting sick of my own words and hoping to find new ones that teach me something, of taking the poems seriously even if no one else ever does—this is the work I love to do, as both writer and reader. Fire up the coffee (that appeared a lot in the last collection) or pour me a whiskey (shows up a few too many times here) and let me discover what it is I had (and have) to say.

My 64 poetic “go-to” words

palm

light

digital

cup (v.)

shoulder

body/bodies

mouth

name(s)

scar/wound

still

just

come/coming

eye

“my own”

pale(d)

small

music/song

tender(ed)

several

flesh

skin

word

blue

wings & birds of all kinds

how

tongue

pinot

remember

hands

skype

herb(s)

love

name

time

Ambien

lemon

air

echo

empty

beer

hips

dark

belly

together

full

bless/blessed/blessing

balm

attend

porch

voice

throat

Bach

Rothko

God/god/gods/Jesus

bones

break

sweet

garden

loss

core

breath/breathe

forgive

confess(ion)

crush

scent

Paul Plays a Bourrée

2011-03-15T07:58:00.000-07:00

Another Bach poem over at Wunderkammer.

All problems can be solved musically--Dean Young

2010-12-01T18:17:00.000-08:00

Poet Dean Young, from The Art of Recklessness. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2010.

"All problems can be solved musically. On one of those umpteen Miles Davis box sets, there are three takes of a single song: in the first Coltrane hits an obviously off note, a clam it’s called in the recording industry, in the second he hits it again, at a different point, augments it, chooses it, this is Coltrane, man, so by the third time it’s not a wrong note, it’s an integral part of his solo . . . Life my friends is a mess. Mistakes aren’t contaminants any more than conception is infection. Fucked up before I got here, fucked up while I hung around, fucked up when I’m gone. Good news!" (154)

Second Installment--Musical Ekphrasis

2010-11-08T19:17:00.001-08:00

Friends, once again forgive me for starting a discussion, making a promise to post more, and then disappearing for a number of days.

I want to pick up on a number of things tonight, trying to address a few of the questions and concerns folks raised. First, let me remind you of the several kinds of musical ekphrasis I identified, only the first of which I posted on. I wrote:

I see modern/contemporary poets responding to music in these four or five ways:

1) memorial/commemorative (music as invocation of particular individual experiences)
2) contextual icon (poems exploring music as cultural/biographical/historical means into a composer’s life, an era, etc.)
3) mimetic/echoing (poems that imitate and seek the physical/sonic/emotional effects of music)
4) music as figure/god/form (poems that identify music as an idealized form of making art/meaning or as a version of mystery/power beyond language)
5) the riff (music that improvises and dialogues with music, drawing together many or most of the notions above in a single place)

So my mentor for the semester said this in response to my post:

I've always equated ekphrasis with writing about a particular painting or drawing or photo. I'm thinking about William Carlos William's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." So I was surprised that these poems all seemed to be about a personal experience that the speakers had with music: the mother playing the piano, the kid singing to the juke boxetc. They weren't responses to music so much as memories of events and people connected to music. Would you agree?

Here's how I would/did respond:

Absolutely I agree.* In these poems music is a springboard, often even particular pieces of music or particular singers/composers/etc. for the epiphanic, memorial lyric. At one point I was going to write something like this to talk about how such poems, as much as I love them, often ignore the actual experience of music:

At my age, nearly every one I know has a dead grandma with a favorite hymn. Or an involuntary moment of sexual arousal upon hearing the first five notes of an album he made out to in high school. Or can still sit down at the piano or pick up a guitar and play the first song she learned. Or sustains a perverse love for a marginal pop hit to which we made up alternative/obscene lyrics to be sung in the car (lyrics which have since completely erased all memory of the original words). And almost every poet I know (these are quite often the very same people) has a set of poems about the hymn to which his dead grandma made out in high school while her boyfriend played the guitar and made up alternate lyrics.

But of course I realize that for most of us memory and music are so inextricable (see this amazing study) that it would be impossible to shut off poems about music from such associative connections. And why would you want to, completely?

Still, I find these poems limited precisely because there is so, so much about music they really do not take into account, so let me skip number two in my list and move on to number three:

3) mimetic/echoing (poems that imitate and seek the physical/sonic/emotional effects of music)

Of course I have a long, long discourse on this in my essay, but I want to point out just two poems.

First, Langston Hughes, who was one of the first to attempt to tranlate the experience of the blues (the music, not the emotion) into modern poetry. What some scholars have noted about this process, is how Hughes’ attempts developed over time from, at first simply transcribing or mimicking blues lyrics and rhythms. But readers/scholars almost universally agree “[t]hat Hughes writes his best blues poetry when he tries least to imitate the folk blues is a critical commonplace” (Chinitz 179). While David Chinitz (one of my former profs at Loyola University in Chicago) challenges this common wisdom, I still the basic insight it instructive. The musical ekphrastic poem is an engagement with the music. Rather than a mere transcription of the blues, or an attempt to write lyrics to be sung, blues poetry follows Langston Hughes' struggle to capture "the quality of genuine blues in performance while remaining effective as poems" (Chinitz 177). For Hughes and the many writers who merge into and out of the tradition (see some attached suggestions below) the central challenges have been "First, how to write blues poems in such a way the they work on the printed page, and second, how to exploit the blues form poetically without losing all sense of authenticity" (177).

So to see how Hughes works through/past that challenge, we can take a look at his most famous blues poem, The Weary Blues and see how he combines several impulses to generate a kind of musical experience that adds to or supplements the blues. He gives us a narrative and a character that frames the several quotations from an actual blues tune. The rhyme, repeated lines, and quotations combine to feel like the blues, even though they are not all strictly blues forms. But then other poetic devices, like alliteration, assonance, caesuras also do things poetry can do that an actual blues singer cannot.

So as you write, or try to write a poem about music, what poetic tools can you bring to the poem that do something in addition to describing or transcribing a musical encounter?

Second, some poets adopt new formalist techniques to give a musical texture to their poems, reaching back into the deeper connections between music and poetry. A. E. Stallings has done this often, most notably I think in Blackbird Etude where her small stanzas (rhymed haikus with their 5, 7, 5 syllabics), her enjambed rhyme, and her sonic play with unexpected diction (“melismatic runs sur-/passing earthbound skills”) give music-like shape to the blackbird’s song. She shapes a wild creatures song with poetic forms and reference in the title to an etude, that most classical sort of music pedagogy.

Myself, I love the pantoum as a musical form, one that allows me to make music while at the same time not merely imitating (I hope). Here’s a pantoum from a number of years back responding to a performance by Ella Fitzgerald near the end of her life, an experience at the time I had no idea was so remarkable.

If you want to try and write a musical poem, two considerations I would make. What is the form of the piece of music, at least as you understand it. Can you use that as at least a shape to your poem? For instance, a poem about a sonata might be a four or five part poem, loosely following the music form. Even though you cannot reproduce the exact tones, rhythms, etc. of the sonata, you could rely on its shape to “inform” your own poem.

Second, I always try to think not just of the music’s formal qualities, but also the form of my experience of the music. For instance, Hughes' narrative and cultural explorations in "The Weary Blues" are central to the poem. Or in my Ella poem, I am thinking of how my mind wandered from her frailty to the qualities of the music, to the associations I have with other jazz musicians when I think of her, to the connotative possiblities of words like "trip."

*Though I would work with a more expansive definition of ekphrasis than those poems that write about only a single work of art. I think one of the best, and an example of visual ekphrasis that falls into my second category above, is Lisel Mueller's Monet Refuses the Operation which refers to a whole list of Monet’s works, using the painter’s voice to describe and examine them (and lift them off the page).

Here's the formal bib reference to David Chinitz's article:
Literacy and Authenticity: the Blues Poems of Langston Hughes." Callaloo 19 (1996): 177-92.

Four Anthologies of Musical Ekphrasis

2010-11-02T18:18:00.000-07:00

While I am thinking about it, let me link to the four best anthologies I've found so far of poems about music. Three come from the nifty little books in the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets Series. All are worth owning if you are at all interested in musical ekphrasis.

Music Lover's Poetry Anthology, ed. by Helen Hardy Houghton and Maureen McCarthy Draper
Music's Spell: Poems about Music and Musicians, ed. by Emily Fragos
Jazz Poems, ed. by Kevin Young
Blues Poems, ed. by Kevin Young

Discussion One on Musical Ekphrasis

2010-11-01T13:47:00.000-07:00

For the graduate school essay I mention below, I am posting a series of classroom discussions on various ways poets respond to music. Here's the first day's discussion.

“Writing about music,” says Elvis Costello (or Steve Martin, Thelonius Monk, Laurie Anderson, Martin Mull, Frank Zappa, etc.) “is like dancing about architecture. It’s a stupid thing to want to do.” This hasn’t stopped me (or most of the poets I regularly read) from writing dozens of poems about music—music as source of inspiration, font of memory, ideal of form, or subject of artistic envy. Then again, I am also someone who was once spotted dancing on a hill near a Frank Lloyd Wright hotel in southwestern Wisconsin)

My essay explores the dynamics of “musical ekphrasis.” If you want a formal preview, you can read the abstract, or you can refer to the “map” of the essay above.

Here, though, is some material for us to discuss on how poets write in response to music and musical experience.

First a few caveats, definitions, and misdirections:

1) What I am NOT writing about—the shared lineage of music and poetry (I too believe that all the ancient poets were bards who sang their epics and their lyrics on honeyed tongues to the listening masses—but that’s not what I am studying—and besides that hasn’t been the case for say, oh, about a thousand years). Also, I’m not writing about whether or not lyrics (popular or otherwise) qualify as poetry (a subject on which I have many strong, well-informed opinions, none of which matter in this essay—short answer, “usually not”). Also, though I am interested in the notion, I am not writing about how musicians respond to works of visual art (which is what this scholar has done).

2) In his Museum of Words, James A. W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as "the literary representation of visual representation” (3), a “literary mode that turns on the antagonism between . . . verbal and visual representation” (7). John Hollander defines ekphrasis as writing that gives voice to an otherwise mute canvas or stone: “painting is mute poetry and poetry speaking picture” (Hollander 6). Whatever the case, For my purposes, I am interested in ekphrastic poems that respond to and represent the experience of a work of art, using poetry’s particular tools to explore the effect of a viewer’s encounter with visual art.

3) Though ekphrasis has its origins in ancient Greek rhetoric, I’m talking here primarily about the poetic tradition that picked up steam in the early 19th century with work by the Romantics who frequently depicted encounters with visual art as nearly sacramental (in ways often replacing more formal religious encounters and challenged only by direct encounters with nature). Of course the great example of this is John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn." And then there are countless 20th century examples of ekphrasis, the modernists Stevens, Williams, Stein, Auden and since.

4) Of course you can read Keats’ “Ode” as not only an essential/founding example of ekphrasis but also as an emblematic poem of musical ekphrasis—the relationship between silence, music, imagination, and poetry. Melodies, pipes, timbrels, song occupy nearly as much space in the poem as anything else. And so I want to make a case that musical ekphrasis can be seen as an equally important category of poetry, especially in modern and contemporary poetry.

5) In truth, though, I don’t really want to “make a case” for anything (that’s why I gave up on my dissertation and turned to making my own poems instead). I would rather explore HOW poets respond poetically to music and suggest how this has been valuable to my own reading, writing and teaching of poetry and how it might prove valuable and generative to the work of other writers and readers. I’m also interested in this with visual ekphrasis, which explains why I have taught courses in both subjects and used to keep an ongoing blog on the subject. Plus, Lauren Rusk already wrote a very strong piece for the AWP Chronicle a few years back on “The Perils and Possibilities of Writing about Visual Art.” At the end of the week, I will put up a prompt, some suggestions, and some warnings for writing musical ekphrasis, stuff I hope you all might find generative of new work.

MUSICAL EKPHRASIS

The contemporary practice (1920s through yesterday) of musical ekphrasis takes on a thousand varieties of form and approaches, but at the core I am interested in those poems that struggle to improvise a space that is itself an experience (in and through language) of a felt knowledge, a resonant intimacy, and an embodied/shared sonic experience generated primarily by an encounter with music.

I see modern/contemporary poets responding to music in these four or five ways:

1) memorial/commemorative (music as invocation of particular individual experiences)

2) contextual icon (poems exploring music as cultural/biographical/historical means into a composer’s life, an era, etc.)

3) mimetic/echoing (poems that imitate and seek the physical/sonic/emotional effects of music)

4) music as figure/god/form (poems that identify music as an idealized form of making art/meaning or as a version of mystery/power beyond language)

5) the riff (poetry that improvises and dialogues with music, drawing together many or most of the notions above in a single place)

So each day this week, I am going to put forward a poem or two that stand inside one of these categories and ask for your response.

Memorial/Commemorative Musical Ekphrasis

Here are a number of poems that attempt to give “an account of an unforgettable moment” that is tied directly to music, to show “how music has shown us to ourselves more accurately, and given us as well the eerie means to understand transcendence—to step back out of our lives and look back at them” (McClatchy xv).

If you would, pick one of the poems and discuss how it marries/connects music with memory.

How does the poem celebrate, lament, question, reject the musical experience?

And what craft choices does the writer use to represent the music itself?

Which piece of music in your experience immediately evokes powerful memories for you? Have you written about this piece?

Or, alternately, do you have a suggestion of a poem that connects music and memory? I’d love to see it.

Edna St. Vincent Millay, “On Hearing a Symphony of Beethoven”

Frank O'Hara "The Day Lady Died" (Here is Billie Holiday singing "God Bless the Child")

Linda Pastan, “Practicing”

Dorianne Laux, "The Ebony Chickering"

Denis Johnson, “Heat”

Wendell Berry, “A Music”

Naomi Shihab Nye, “Hugging the Jukebox”

Kevin Stein, “First Performance of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Band Puce Exit”

Abstract of an Essay in Progress

2010-11-01T13:39:00.000-07:00

As part of a graduate MFA course, I am trying to tame a paper on Musical Ekphrasis. Above is what it looks like when I work on such things. Here is the abstract of the essay.

Ekphrasis--the practice of writing poems in response to visual art--occupies a prominent place in modern and contemporary American poetry (though it dates back centuries, gaining special esteem during the era of Romanticism). Drawing on this deep ekphrastic tradition, this essay proposes "musical ekphrasis" as an equally valuable way to consider and generate contemporary poems. Musical ekphrastics are poems that represent, respond to, and engage sensuously with musical experience. Langston Hughes, Frank O'Hara, Lisel Mueller, Jean Janzen, Terrance Hayes, and others write poems that grow from various encounters with music, often experimenting with formal innovation and deeply embodied imagery. The poets engage musical experience in memorial, figurative, contextualized, lyrical ways that can be understood as relating to ekphrasis. However, the poems also have their own unique mean of poetic knowing, a way best understood in terms of improvisation between writers, musicians and readers. Practical considerations for how poets might attend to music in a generative fashion conclude the essay.

David Wright: Two Poems | | Wunderkammer

2009-10-20T08:25:00.000-07:00

As the semester allows, I intend to begin updates here again. In the meantime, here's some recent work in Wunderkammer: David Wright: Two Poems | | Wunderkammer

Late Picasso

2009-03-26T08:34:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, an intriguing look at Picasso's end of life paintings.

Creative Non-Fiction

2009-03-24T15:45:00.001-07:00

An example of weaving art history, personal narrative, travel writing, and meditative prose together comes in Julia Blackburn's Old Man Goya. An excerpt from the first chapter demonstrates how Blackburn works to weave together these several voices and genres. Her own history with the artist, her mother's illness, a journey to Spain, and Goya's unfolding biography (especially his deafness) become wed through close examinations of Goya's paintings. For good (I think) or for ill (some other readers suggest) this allows Blackburn to imaginatively enter Goya's world, to speculate on his visions of the landscapes she is now exploring (and to see them as so strongly influenced by her experience of Goya, that perhaps she cannot see them on her own). Here is Blackburn on watching a bullfight as Goya might have:

He looks up at the tiered rows of faces, rippling and swaying together. He sees that this crowd has the same questing, hungry energy as a crowd of pilgrims approaching a shrine, as soldiers going to battle, as men gathered together to witness an execution. He sees the fickleness of the crowd, calling for blood and revenge in one moment and begging for mercy and salvation the next.

Another example of ekphrastic fiction

2009-03-24T15:19:00.000-07:00

Edward Hirsch's Transforming Vision (1994) collects prose and poetry responding to works in the Art Institute of Chicago. While of course heavy on the poetry, one of the excerpts from fiction includes this passage from Saul Bellow's Humboldt's Gift, in which Bellow describes his character, in part, through an encounter with a Monet Painting Sandivka, Norway:

He was waiting between the lions in front of the Institute, exactly as expected in the cloak and blue velvet suit and boots with canvas sides. The only change was in his hair which he was now wearing in the Directoire style, the points coming down over his forehead. Because of the cold his face was deep red. He had a long mulberry-colored mouth, and impressive stature, and warts, and the distorted nose and leopard eyes. Our meetings were always happy and we hugged each other. "Old boy, how are you? One of your good Chicago days. I've missed the cold air in California. Terrific! Isn't it. Well, we may as well start right with a few of those marvelous Monet's." We left attached case, umbrella, sturgeon, rolls, and marmalade in the checkroom. I paid two dollars for admission and we mounted to the Impressionist collection.

There was one Norwegian winter landscape by Monet that we always went to see straightaway: a house, a bridge, and the snow falling. Through the covering snow came the pink of the house, and the frost was delicious. The whole weight of snow, of winter, was lifted effortlessly by the astonishing strength of the light. Looking at this pure snowy dusky light, Thaxter clamped his pincenez on the powerful twisted bridge of his nose with a gleam of glass and silver and his color deepened. He knew what he was doing. With this painting his visit began on the right tone.

Willa Cather makes similar uses of art in her novels, a pattern detailed nicely here by Kathleen Nichols. One of my favorite bits from Cather comes, of course, in Song of the Lark, named after the iconic Art Institute owned painting by Jules Breton. Here is Thea's reverie about that work:

But in that same room there was a picture--oh, that was the thing she ran upstairs so fast to see! That was her picture. She imagined that nobody cared for it but herself, and that it waited for her. That was a picture indeed. She liked even the name of it, 'The Song of the Lark.' The flat country, the early morning light, the wet fields, the look in the girl's heavy face--well, they were all hers, anyhow, whatever was there. She told herself that that picture was 'right.' Just what she meant by this, it would take a clever person to explain. But to her the word covered the almost boundless satisfaction she felt when she looked at the picture.

A Music--Wendell Berry

2008-11-11T06:54:00.000-08:00

I employ the blind mandolin player
in the the tunnel of the Mètro. I pay him
a coin as hard as his notes,
and maybe he has employed me, and pays me
with his playing to hear him play.

Maybe we're necessary to each other,
and this vacant place has need of us both
––it's vacant, I mean, of dwellers,
is populated by passages and absences.

By some fate or knack he has chosen
to place his music in this cavity
where there's nothing to look at
and blindness costs him nothing.
Nothing was here before he came.

His music goes out among the sounds
of footsteps passing. The tunnel is the resonance
and meaning of what he plays.
It's his music, not the place, I go by.

In this light which is just a fact, like darkness
or the edge or end of what you may be
going toward, he turns his cap up on his knees
and leaves it there to ask and wait, and holds up
his mandolin, the lantern of his world;

his fingers make their pattern on the wires.
This is not the pursuing of rhythm
of a blind cane pecking in the sun,
but is a singing in a dark place.

Image and Line

2008-09-22T06:13:00.001-07:00

As you polish poems for me, I promised to link you to the primer on the poetic line that I often use. One on imagery in is the works, though I think many of you got the embodied, sensuous particular quite well last week, as well as the notion of thinking through the logic of the image. Still, I will post it later. This means you need not necessarily send your polished poems this evening. Instead, you might send them by Wed. night. See you at the Art Institute.

2008-09-19T12:03:00.002-07:00

In my ideal world, the home of everyone who loves art would come equipped with a painting by Giorgio Morandi, as a gymnasium for daily exercise of the eye, mind, and soul. I want the ad account: “Stay fit the Morandi way!”

--from The New Yorker and Peter Schjeldahl's review of a Morandi exhibit at the Met.

I mentioned Morandi briefly last year when I wrote about ekphrasis in the novel Falling Man by Don DeLIllo.

Complete Schedule

2008-09-19T12:03:00.001-07:00

ENGW 444/Poetry, Poetics and the Arts
Fall 2008/D. Wright, Instructor

Complete Assignment Schedule (still open to adjustments and additions)

Sept 23 AIC Trip / Two polished poems due via email

Sept. 30 Read Rusk,“Perils and Possibilities” / 2 AIC poems due (submit with digital images &
read one aloud in class) / Discuss Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon
Craft Element: Diction

Oct. 7 Introduce Manifesto / Artistic Process (guest artist)
Read Ratzlaff (all) / AIC Polished poem due in class
Craft Element: Voice

Oct. 14 Manifesto poem due / Finish Ratzlaff discussion / Deep context/Introduce Hymn Lyric Project
Craft Element: Figurative Language

Oct. 21 NO CLASSES—Fall Break / Project Proposal Due via Email by Oct. 25

Oct. 28 Hymn Writer John Bell on campus—Activities TBA

Nov. 4 Hymn draft due / Read Poetics Handout /Form Handout/ Other reading TBA
Craft Element: Form(s)

Nov. 11 Read Keane / Additional Blog Reading
Project Conferences

Nov. 18 Collaboration(s)—Working with artists and musicians
Schedule Peer Crit Sessions/Groups
Craft Element: Revision

Nov. 25 Poetics Draft Due for Peer Critique
Craft Element: Prose Poems

Dec. 2 Portion of Project Due for Peer Crit/Conferences
Optional Class on Ekphrasis and Midrash

Dec. 9 Final Party/Readings/Poetics and Project Due

reorganizing

2008-09-17T17:37:00.001-07:00

With the new semester and a new batch of poets working hard, I am working to reorganize this blog, to give instructional materials in some kind of order, to arrange drafts, to highlight student work, etc. Check back next week.

dw

Anthromusicology

2008-08-31T13:04:00.000-07:00

". . . the thesis of Daniel J. Levitin’s lively, ambitious and occasionally even persuasive new book, “The World in Six Songs.” Music, Levitin argues, is not just something to help pass the time on road trips anda swell facilitator for meeting girls: it is, he writes,“the soundtrack of civilization” — a force that shaped us as a species and prepared us for the higher-order task of sharing complex communications with one another."

from today's New York Times Book Review

Another draft

2008-08-14T09:32:00.000-07:00

Temptation,
after Chagall’s Temptation (1912)

My God, you know, how temptation sits
  in the belly of the world,  red fruit, round, 
  already bitten.  

You know it is not all that matters. Small, hooved creatures,
 tiny birds, Eve’s several glances, and the canopies 
  of  red and blue leaves matter as well.

The real fall will be to believe in Pablo.
 Apollinaire will love you, your round house and the herring brine
  on your father's hands.

Bella loves you, even as you grieve for the Shtetl, for the pale Christ.
  
I understand, my brother, the desire to pare a body 
 into something that will serve beauty.

You understand, my brother, how the world 
 revolves around the edges of the world.

Let the others  eat their fill of square pears on triangular tables,
 suckle at the circles and the cones.

I want to eat, together, whatever we’ve been given.
 The moon behind the garden will be green and will disappear quite soon.

I want, as well, to thank you for this: I woke today  
 and was surprised, like you, to see that I am still alive.

A couple of notes on process in regards to this poem.

1) Earlier this summer, I read Jonathan Wilson's biography of Marc Chagall. Wording of some lines, as well as some of the context of 1912 in Chagall's world have likely been stolen from this good work.

2) Apollinaire wrote these lines for Chagall: "your round house where a smoked herring swims in circles . . . a man in the sky / a calf peers out of his mother's belly" (See Wilson, p. 51).

3) "Let the others eat..." is an adaptation and extension of Chagall's own comment about Cubism: "Let them eat their fill of square pears and triangular tables." He also announced, later, that as Europe was going to war he thought: "Picasso, Cubism is done for!" Picasso often said disdainful things about Chagall, though the two were able to have a semblance of companionship at points in their lives.

A draft from yesterday in St. Louis

2008-08-13T12:38:00.000-07:00

Anaphoric Confession, after  Mark Rothko’s, Red, Orange, Orange on Red

Baby, Monet rhymes with cliché but nothing, 
 nearly nothing sounds like Rothko—
  blood or light, believed to be silent 
   pound in the temples. 

I lied to you when I said I had been in the Rothko chapel.

I have not been surrounded by abstraction, by beauty.

I have not known Fra Angelico, or Signorelli, or Orvieto.

In Venice, for two days, I only loved the gelato.
We posed on the bridges for ourselves.

I live in the saturated, sentimental blood
 of my own loud head—hard
  amens and blunted blows.

Monet and his light. Degas and his dancers
 have no real home here—nor the Germans expressing
  themselves in the other room.

You have heard me cursing you when I should have stood silent.
You have heard my language resound in empty temples of  bone.

Here I would like to bleed across the room—light, color—like Klee—I pray,
 or come into you without a word, 
  like this Rothko—repeated, blessed, 
   parallel, and unrhymed.

Viewing the view of the viewer

2008-08-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

At the Saint Louis Art Museum today, I took a number of photos and started some new ekphrastic poems. My favorite two photos are here, one showing a view from behind Degas' dancer as she views a woman taking a photo of her daughter before the famous Monet water lily. And I am viewing it all as well. And so are you.

I am always reminded of the famous poem by Robert Hayden.

Splash cold water on your vocal cords

2008-08-12T04:44:00.000-07:00

I have made a case, and continue to make the case, that music offers a unique way of knowing--of knowing experience, one another, God. It's a hot idea, apparently, one that Michael Linton would like us to question and resist a lot more. Here's a bit from Linton's review of Jeremy Begbie's latest book. When Begbie argues that music can have a profound effect on human behavior, Linton writes:

Well, no. Not really, or not quite. Music's proven effect upon behavior isn't profound; it's actually pretty trivial. The tempo of particular kinds of music played in particular kinds of grocery stores can affect the speed in which shoppers will generally move through the aisles (but it isn't particularly good at selling individual products: funny animated critters are better—think of that lizard selling car insurance). And like the Chippendale furniture and brass sconces in the law office that suggest sober stability, music can be used as décor. As décor it can do all the things that décor can do: set mood, play upon cultural memory, suggest appropriate behavior—but music cannot dictate behavior any more than the furniture can get you to sign a contract if you don't want to. And relationships between parents and peers play the pivotal role in an adolescent's formation, not music. Music is a means of expressing those relationships.

I think it's good to have this tempered view. Music is just music, sound given significance by individuals and by a tradition. It is not salvation or love or God. Does it work uniquely? I think so. Am I too much of an advocate? Probably. Do I want Michael Linton planning the music at my church? No.

Now that you own a victrola

2008-08-11T12:37:00.000-07:00

I had thought about writing a poem about my grandparents' Victrola. You know the one? It's really there in my mother's garage, rescued from Grandma Clark's basement when we moved her into the nursing home. It's wooden. I played with it as a kid. It plays music, yes indeed. The needle is heavy enough that you could use it as a weapon, or maybe a cooking implement. It would be the kind of poem that Billy Collins thinks we have enough of. In his famous essay "My Grandfather's Tackle-Box: The Limits of Memory Driven Poetry" Collins points out that:
"Up until the end of the eighteenth century, poetic decorum would remind the author that he must keep himself subordinate to his subject matter, which would be determined by his choice of genre. High matter for the epic, verbal coyness or plangent sincerity for the love lyric. For a poet to write of his own life— his discovery of daffodils in a field or his grandfather's tackle box in the attic — would be not only self-indulgent but of no value to an audience interested in its own edification, not in
the secrets of the poet's past."

Yet it's not because of Collins that I haven't written that object-fetishization poem about my grandparents' victrola. No. I read the advertisement copy from the original machine, and it was already a poem:

Now that you own a Victrola, the whole world of music is open to you. There is no kind of music that you may not hear, at will, for the greatest artists in the world record for the Victrola. Everything is yours, from the magnificent pagentry of the grand opera to the wild swing of the dance. The opera, the oratorio, the gospel hymn, the musical farce, the popular song, the war-song, the military march, the symphony — these come to you in your own home. There is no variety of personal taste and no condition of mind, to which Victor records will not minister.

All the real artists are thieves?

2008-08-10T18:57:00.000-07:00

Taking pride in original songwriting however begs the question, What is an original song, when it comes to folk music (or any genre)?

All aspects of creativity are basically reconstituted bits and pieces of things we’ve seen, heard and experienced, finely or not-so-finely chopped and served in a form that hopefully blends the ingredients into something “new.” The ancient Greeks seemed to know this, expressed in their belief that the Muses of creativity were the daughters of Mnemosyne, Titan goddess of memory. Perhaps we would like to think that the thoughts that go into creating a new song are purely impressions from “real life,” but a melody does not suggest itself as much from the impression of the 6 train ride you took this morning as it does from a melody from another song. The same for chord progressions, song concepts, lyric sounds and patterns, song structures and everything else. Folk music is supposed to be a shared continuum after all, and as Louie Armstrong said, “All music is folk music, I ain’t never heard no horse sing a song.”

Despite knowing all this, as a supposedly “creative” artist I am often shocked to discover that a song I’ve written has been a blatant unconscious rip-off of somebody else’s song, either in its structure, or lyrics, etc; if I’m lucky the other person’s song is not particularly popular or recognizable!

from a column by singer/songwriter/thief Jeffrey Lewis. Here's his Had it all on Youtube.

On 52nd Street--Philip Levine

2008-08-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

Down sat Bud, raised his hands,
the Deuces silenced, the lights
lowered, and breath gathered
for the coming storm. Then nothing,
not a single note. Outside starlight
from heaven fell unseen, a quarter-
moon, promised, was no show,
ditto the rain. Late August of '50,
NYC, the long summer of abundance
and our new war. In the mirror behind
the bar, the spirits--imitating you--
stared at themselves. At the bar
the tenor player up from Philly, shut
his eyes and whispered to no one,
"Same thing last night." Everyone
been coming all week long
to hear this. The big brown bass
sighed and slumped against
the piano, the cymbals held
their dry cheeks and stopped
chicking and chucking. You went
back to drinking and ignored
the unignorable. When the door
swung open it was Pettiford
in work clothes, midnight suit,
starched shirt, narrow black tie,
spit shined shoes, as ready
as he'd ever be. Eyebrows
raised, the Irish bartender
shook his head, so Pettiford eased
himself down at an empty table,
closed up his Herald Tribune,
and shook his head. Did the TV
come on, did the jukebox bring us
Dinah Washington, did the stars
keep their appointments, did the moon
show, quartered or full, sprinkling
its soft light down? The night's
still there, just where it was, just
where it'll always be without
its music. You're still there too
holding your breath. Bud walked out.

Lincoln stares back

2008-08-08T06:58:00.000-07:00

My former professor and first serious poetry teacher, Dan Guillory, has for the last number of years been writing poems about Abraham Lincoln. I reviewed his collection of those poems for a forthcoming issue of Illinois Heritage. I was struck by several poems about the iconic photos that have come to mark Lincoln in the American imagination. In the book, each poem is preceded by a short historical headnote. Here's the text of both the note and the poem for one of the photo poems, along with what I think is the photo.

Butler's Ambrotype, August 13, 1860

In the summer of 1860, while Lincoln was campaigning for the presidency, Philadelphia artist John Henry Brown was hired to paint an official campaign portrait. He described his visit to Springfield in these words: "We [Brown and Lincoln] walked together from the executive chamber to a daguerrean establishment. I had half a dozen ambrotypes [positive image on a glass plate] taken of him before I could get one to suit me." The ambrotypist/daguerrotypist mentioned here is Springfield's Preston Butler, who photographed Lincoln on Aug. 13, 1860. The ambrotype shows Lincoln with atypically neat hair, combed smoothly over his forehead. Campaign badges were made from the photograph and sold for 10 cents each or $6 per thousand.

It's all very personal, you know.
You blink, and the camera blinks back
At you, the rolling eye returns
To haunt you, even the crushed satin
Necktie is honored in timelessness.
For once, they got the hair right.
I'm never this neat in Real Life.
But this isn't real -- I'm being
Sold like a piece of soap
Or a view of Niagara Falls.
No matter, for this is America
And I always wanted to become
The first truly modern President.

from Dan Guillory's The Lincoln Poems

Ars poetica

2008-08-06T19:41:00.000-07:00

It has been made a question, whether good poetry be derived from nature or from art. For my part, I can neither conceive what study can do without a rich [natural] vein, nor what rude genius can avail of itself: so much does the one require the assistance of the other, and so amicably do they conspire [to produce the same effect].

from Horace, Epistles, Book II, Ars Poetica

call for ekphrasis

2008-08-06T08:51:00.000-07:00

The Mississippi Review is soliciting ekphrastic work for their Oct. issue.

Entering the work

2008-08-04T06:55:00.000-07:00

Mennonite poet (and friend) Jean Janzen has a wonderful memoir/essay interspersed with poems published in the Spring 2008 issue of Mennonite Life. What I like about the poem below, among many things, is the way she weaves her mother's presence into a Titian altarpiece she sees in Venice. In the painting, she sees "the image of my mother in a studio family photograph in which she holds her first daughter in her lap. Here she was in a city threatened by floods, like her ancestry, 'alive' and glowing." Somehow, though, the poem doesn't make the painting just a Rorschach of her past, but sets up a real exchange, a dialogue with the painter and the viewer. Here's the poem:

My Mother in Venice

She had another life,
not only the vast expanse
of prairie, but this island
adrift and shimmering.

Here she is, in the Frari Church
holding the Child.
Centuries ago Bellini
saw her at the fish market

shivering in the rain,
brought her to the small
fire of his studio
and began brushing her round

face into glow, dressing her in blue silk-my mother
in this city of mirrors
where the centuries swirl

together, where she still holds
the Child, my Brother, where she doesn't hold me.

ROTHKO'S YELLOW

2008-08-01T09:18:00.000-07:00

What I don't understand is the beauty.
The last attempts of the rain, my shoulders
aching from all afternoon with the ladders
and the hour with her. I watch the rainbow
until I have to focus so hard I seem
to create it. Thinking of her watching
this storm, wanting him. This lightning.
This glut in the gutters. Now only
the yellow left. Now the blue
seeped out. The purple gone. The red
gone. People downstairs playing Bach,
the quiet attenuated Bach. She must
have tried and tried. The holes drilled in.
The small man in the movie who looked
like laughter would kill him. The carnation
farmer who left snared birds for the woman
he loved. Who would hang himself after
stitching her ribbon to his chest.
What I don't understand is the beauty.
I remember the theatre in Berkeley where
we sat eating cucumbers, watching the colossal
faces played over with colossal loss.
I would get off early and meet her outside,
her hair always wet. All last night
I listened to the students walk by until 3,
only the drunk left, the rebuffed and
suddenly coupled. What did I almost
write down on the pad by my bed
that someone lowered me into my sleep? One morning
when she and I still lived together,
the pad said only, cotton. Cotton.
Sometimes it's horrible, the things said
outright. But nothing explains the beauty,
not weeping and shivering on that stone bench,
not kneeling by the basement drain.
Not remembering otherwise, that scarf she wore,
the early snow, her opening the door
in the bathing light. She must have tried
and tried. What I don't understand is the beauty.

--Dean Young from Beloved Infidel

The Curator

2008-07-30T15:13:00.001-07:00

Here is the story, now, that I want to tell you.
Early one day, a dark December morning,
we came on three young soldiers waiting outside,
pacing and swinging their arms against the cold.
They told us this: in three homes far from here
all dreamed of one day coming to Leningrad
to see the Hermitage, as they supposed
every Soviet citizen dreamed of doing.
Now they had been sent to defend the city,
a turn of fortune the three could hardly believe.

I had to tell them there was nothing to see
but hundreds and hundreds of frames where the paintings had hung.

“Please, sir,” one of them said, “let us see them.”

And so we did. It didn’t seem any stranger
than all of us being here in the first place,
inside such a building, strolling in snow.

We led them around most of the major rooms,
what they could take the time for, wall by wall.
Now and then we stopped and tried to tell them
part of what they would see if they saw the paintings.
I told them how those colors would come together,
described a brushstroke here, a dollop there,
mentioned a model and why she seemed to pout
and why this painter got the roses wrong.

from Miller Williams' poem The Curator

Hey, John Keats

2008-07-26T11:38:00.000-07:00

River Goddess, India, 8th-9th century, Berkeley Art Museum

They can knock off your nose
 lose your makara, your tortoise,
  but they cannot undo the curve of the Yamuna in your hips,

Or the globes of the world, two worlds
 that are your breasts, and the Ganges of beads 
  running between them.  

Your children are silent and moving with you.

Oh, John Keats, I am here to tell you,
 you should see what she keeps in her red sandstone urn.

Just released! (not ekphrasis, but music related)

2008-07-12T07:26:00.001-07:00

Read more about the just released recording of the hymns from A Field of Voices.

even though i hate fireworks

2008-07-05T20:09:00.001-07:00

I took these last night at the local gunpowder celebration.

Real Sofistikashun

2008-07-03T13:48:00.000-07:00

Probably one of the funniest two or three poets writing in English, Tony Hoagland is also one of the more humane, thoughtful, and helpful writers of work on how to write and read contemporary verse. His collection of essays Real Sofistikashun has a wonderful opening piece on Image, Diction and Rhetoric that I am likely to include in a future course packet. Other useful essays from the collection can be found on line.

Fragment, Juxtaposition, And Completeness: Some Notes And Preferences

How to Talk Mean and Influence People or here

Fear of Narrative and the Skittery Poem of Our Moment

Three Tenors: Glück, Hass, Pinsky, and the Deployment of Talent or here

One of my favorites is on the dilemma of Self-Consciousnes. Hoagland writes of the initial loss of innocence that comes with studying writing:

The gradual intrusion of self-consciousness is one inevitable side effect of an education in art. To read ten poems, or a hundred, is one thing. To read ten thousand is another. As we internalize more of the tradition and become progressively less shielded by our ignorance, we realize how local our upbringing has been, how much there might be to know, and perhaps even, sigh, how limited our talent. T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock comes to know that he is not Prince Hamlet; we must deal with the fact that we are not Eliot. When a person takes the step toward learning more of craft and its history, more of artifice—when, for example, a person crosses the threshold of an MFA program—she chooses to end a childhood in artlessness. She gives up some of their innocent infatuation, the naïveté, the adolescent grandiosity, maybe even some of the natural grace of the beginner. “They are good poets because they don’t know yet how hard it is to write a poem,” I have heard a teacher say, a bit tartly, of her beginning poetry class.

Yet, he goes on to point out, that is part of the necessity of poetic growth:

Self-consciousness in writing, as it does in life, open up a kind of delay between impulse and action, between thought and word. That pause—as these examples show—offers the opportunity for calculated intensifications and angularities that would never occur in “natural,” uninformed speech.

And he concludes with this helpful notion about intelligence, cleverness, and the reader:

Self-consciousness often provokes an overexertion of cleverness. But intelligence, when used well in a poem, never makes the reader feel less smart than the writer, or left behind. Rather, it gives the reader the exhilarating pleasure of being smart in concert with the speaker. . . . To learn what a poet needs to know is to become an initiate; that initiation imposes burdens as well as powers. We have the obligation to make real poems, to contribute to the living, evolving heritage of poetry. . . . Finally, if our awareness of the great Past makes us self-consciously anxious, it is good to remember that Everything has not been done. Possibility has not been exhausted. More reality is being made at the reality factory every day, and new ways to handle it are being invented—language is a technology, after all. Its adaptations are legion; its evolution is hardly over.

In the spirit of this blog, here's an excerpt from his poem Requests for Toy Piano:

Play the one about the family of the ducks
where the ducks go down to the river
and one of them thinks the water will be cold
but then they jump in anyway
and like it and splash around.

No, I must play the one
about the nervous man from Palestine in row 14
with a brown bag in his lap
in which a gun is hidden in a sandwich.

Play the one about the handsome man and woman
standing on the steps of her apartment
and how the darkness and her perfume and the beating of their hearts
conjoin to make them feel
like leaping from the edge of chance—

The longer tradition

2008-06-27T05:18:00.000-07:00

from Viz: Rhetoric-Visual Culture-Pedagogy

One conversation about the relationship between the visual and the textual concerns ekphrasis, commonly defined as the poetic description of a work of art. Regretfully, this popular definition of the term disregards the long and rich rhetorical tradition of ekphrasis, which has been understood as the rhetorically charged description of anything that can be perceived visually or evoked mentally.

Although there are plenty of examples of ekphrasis in classical literature, the earliest extant instructions on how to compose one and what its functions are appear in the Hellenistic composition handbooks known as progymnasmata . . . . These handbooks were designed to train young people in public speaking, and they taught that an ekphrasis was not meant to be composed for its own sake, but it should rather be a part of a longer oration. In this context, the ekphrasis served to evoke a vivid picture in the mind of the audience so as to sway its members’ emotions and prepare them for the subsequent analytical and/or narrative exposition of the issue at hand. An ekphrasis could be composed in any style; it could be used as an introduction (proemium), substituted in the place of a narrative, or inserted as a pointed digression. When inscribed around an image, such as an icon, the ekphrasis functioned to provide commentary and/or guide the viewer’s interpretation of the patron’s intent. Occasionally—and this is especially true for the late antique and Byzantine period—an entire oration could be comprised of an ekphrasis, which functioned allegorically to illustrate either vice or virtue, creation or destruction, wisdom or folly, temperance or intemperance—but always with a rhetorical goal, embedded in a specific historical context.

students from last time

2008-06-24T07:27:00.001-07:00

Two student writers from last fall's version of this class are included in the current issue of Stonework, a journal from Houghton College. Steve Slagg's Why I am not a Theologian and Rachel Alsdorf's In the Byzantine Chapel Fresco Museum show the variety, craft, and intelligence of the young poets from that class. Congratulations, Steve and Rachel.

dw

P. S. Check out colleague Brett Foster's three pieces as well (one link seems to be broken).

American Gothic, Redux

2008-06-23T06:36:00.000-07:00

From a long time ago, an ekphrastic that is mostly description, not what I try to do or teach these days. Can't decide whether or not to put it in the new book, but I still like the last several lines, esp. the internal rhyme with edge and head.

dw

Are you sure he was funny?

2008-06-19T07:36:00.000-07:00

Your assignment:

Write the catalogue copy for the exhibit/auction before this was thought to be a Rembrandt and after it was authenticated. Go.

Two Violins--A. E. Stallings

2008-06-11T09:22:00.000-07:00

An A. E. Stallings poem from the June issue of Poetry. I like the penultimate stanza:

One was fire red,
Hand carved and new—
The local maker pried the wood
From a torn-down church's pew,

The Devil's instrument
Wrenched from the house of God.
It answered merrily and clear
Though my fingering was flawed;

Bright and sharp as a young wine,
They said, but it would mellow,
And that I would grow into it.
The other one was yellow

And nicked down at the chin,
A varnish of Baltic amber,
A one-piece back of tiger maple
And a low, dark timbre.

A century old, they said,
Its sound will never change.
Rich and deep on G and D,
Thin on the upper range,

And how it came from the Old World
Was anybody's guess—
Light as an exile's suitcase,
A belly of emptiness:

That was the one I chose
(Not the one of flame)
And teachers would turn in their practiced hands
To see whence the sad notes came.

Taking My Cousin's Photo at the Statue of Liberty--Richard Blanco

2008-06-05T06:08:00.000-07:00

May she never miss the sun or the rain in the valley
trickling from the palm trees, or the plush red earth,
or the flutter of sugarcane fields and flamboyant, or
the endless hem of turquoise sea around the island,
may she never remember the sea or her life again
in Cuba selling glossy postcards of the revolution
and T-shirts of Che Guevara to sweating Canadians
at the Hotel More gift shop, may she never forget
the broken toilet and peeling stucco of her room
in a government partitioned mansion dissolving
like a sand castle back into the bay of Cienfuegos,
may she never have to count the dollars we'd send
for her wedding dress, or save egg rations for a cake,
may she fall in love with America like I once did,
with its rosy-cheeked men in breeches and white wigs
with the calligraphy of our Liberty and Justice for All,
our We The People, may she memorize all fifty states,
our rivers and mountains, sing God Bless America
like she means it, like she's never lived anywhere
else but here, may she admire our wars and our men
on the moon, may she believe our infomercials, buy
designer perfumes and underwear, drink Starbucks,
drive a V-8 SUV, and have a dream, may she never
doubt America as I have, may this be her country
as I still want it to be for me when she lifts her Coke
into the June sky and clutches her faux Chanel purse
to her chest, may she look into New York Harbor
for the rest of her life and hold still when I say, Smile.

--Richard Blanco

Focus on the dogs, cats, and pet birds

2008-06-03T10:01:00.000-07:00

An excerpt from poet Alfred Corn’s Notes on Ekphrasis, a solid overview of the practice:

Actually, a poem about an obscure painting is also at a disadvantage. Where the original image is well known, we can compare it to the poet's version of what it contains; and the poet's departures from the original, or inaccurate interpretations of it, are sometimes revealing. Without the original image, though, we are forced to trust the poet's description as being accurate, and we are unable to know where it is not. Meanwhile, the compositional task is much more difficult in such cases since the text of the poem has to convey all the relevant visual information, while still qualifying as poetry. On the other hand, if the subject is, say, Leonardo's Mona Lisa, or any other very famous work of art, there's no need to give a detailed description; the audience already knows what's in the painting.

A disadvantage, though, of using very great works of visual art as a subject for ekphrasis is that the comparison between the original and the poem about it may prove too unfavorable. Readers may wonder why they should bother reading a moderately effective poem when they could instead look at the great painting it was based on. If the poem doesn't contain something more than was already available to the audience, it will strike the reader as superfluous, the secondary product of someone too dependent on the earlier, greater work.

The reader may also wonder why the description wasn't done in prose rather than in lines of poetry. All art historians and critics agree that complete and accurate verbal descriptions of visual art are very hard to achieve, even in prose. When the expectations associated with good poetry are part of the goal as well, we see that writing a good ekphrastic poem is a formidable task indeed. The aim of drafting a text entirely adequate to its source, giving a verbal equivalent to every detail in the subject work, is probably too lofty. A more realistic goal is to give a partial account of the work.
Once the ambition of producing a complete and accurate description is put aside, a poem can provide new aspects for a work of visual art. It can provide a special angle of approach not usually brought to bear on the original. For example, in a banqueting scene, the poem might, instead of describing the revelers, focus on the dogs, cats, and pet birds given free rein in the scene.

If you're looking for interpretive/historical context

2008-06-02T10:37:00.000-07:00

You can do no better than my colleague Dr. John Walford and his textbook Great Themes in Art. Not only does he include first rate historical, artistic, and thematic context, but John also has some great passages of ekphrastic prose, describing and engaging art across the ages.

Archaic Torso of Apollo--Rainer Maria Rilke

2008-06-01T19:54:00.000-07:00

We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,

gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.

Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.

Translated by Stephen Mitchell

Keats-On Seeing the Elgin Marbles

2008-05-29T22:05:00.000-07:00

On Seeing the Elgin Marbles--John Keats

My spirit is too weak—mortality
   Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
   And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
   Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
   That I have not the cloudy winds to keep,
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
   Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
   That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main—
   A sun—a shadow of a magnitude.

2008-05-28T13:38:00.000-07:00

“Ekphrasis is about physical as much as verbal translation, about moving the visual object from its original residence into the house of words and then restoring and revivifying it” –Grant F. Scott, from The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts (University Press of New England, 1994).

A few classic examples of Romantic ekphrasis

2008-05-27T05:39:00.000-07:00

I'll be gone on a writing/editing jag for a day or two, then off on vacation. But in the meantime, I thought I'd post a few classic examples of ekphrasis, mostly from the Romantic poets who made the practice central to lyric poetry, taking it away from more narrative moments in epic poems (think Achilles' shield). Here's Shelly's poem on what he believed to be Leonardo's Medusa. However, most scholars now think the version of the mythical character Shelley viewed in Florence is not by Leonardo at all, but by an anonymous Flemish painter. Leonardo's Medusa does not, apparently, survive. So what remains? Ekphrasis.

On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery--Percy Bysshe Shelley

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, 
  Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine;  
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; 
  Its horror and its beauty are divine. 
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie 
  Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine,  
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,  
The agonies of anguish and of death. 
 
Yet it is less the horror than the grace  
  Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face  
  Are graven, till the characters be grown  
Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 
  'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown  
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain. 
 
And from its head as from one body grow, 
  As [   ] grass out of a watery rock, 
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow  
  And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions shew  
  Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock  
The torture and the death within, and saw  
The solid air with many a ragged jaw. 
 
And from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
  Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; 
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft  
  Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise  
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, 
  And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky  
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity. 
 
'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;  
  For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare  
Kindled by that inextricable error, 35 
  Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air  
Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror  
  Of all the beauty and the terror there— 
A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, 
Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

Musical Excurstion--Part Three*

2008-05-22T08:57:00.000-07:00

Option Three: Attend a live performance, rehearsal or ritual use of music (a worship service or patriotic gathering, for instance). In addition to listening closely to the music, pay attention to what you observe and what you experience in your body. Attend to the way the musicians (which might include you) move and use their bodies to produce sound (fingers, breath, muscles). Notice also their emotional reactions and facial expressions. How do their “feelings” translate into sound? Observe how various musicians work together, or how a solo performer engages or ignores her audience. What about this social experience of music makes it differ from listening to a recording? To what uses is this music put (is it an escape, a source of connection, background music, a didactic force)? How does the “utility” of the music affect your sense of its artistic value? Describe as well the physical space in which you encounter this music. In what ways do the walls, the floors, the benches affect the sound and sense of the music?

After you’ve left the venue, either right away of some time later, try to recall the experience in as vivid detail as you can, focusing especially on the music you remember. Which musical quality stays with you? And which non-musical detail remains?

Deep(er) Contexts(and how they might find their way into your writing about music)

1) With a bit of research, identify the narrative elements you would need to know in order to better understand a musical work—setting, character, point of view, conflict(s). If it’s a love song or an oratorio, what’s the story that structures the piece? What moment in the biblical or mythical or historical record is being portrayed? What elements of that narrative are left out? Which characters disappear and which are emphasized? Who is “telling” this part of the tale? Consider “finishing” or “unfinishing” the story with your work.

2) What kinds of cultural conflict or personal upheaval pervaded the artist’s world when the work was made or performed—a war, death of a beloved, divorce, illness, moment of cultural excitement, etc.? How are these events present in the work, implicitly or explicitly? Or how does the work move away from these conflicts, masking them, or using the music as a sanctuary? Is the work in protest to the situation? Is the work about coming to peace with its surroundings? By knowing the conflicted situation within which the work emerged, how do you feel closeness or distance from its work?

3) In contrast to chaos and conflict, investigate the typical habits, manners, and patterns that might have been part of the work’s emergence (or the lives it represents). What work was done as this song was sung? Who has made love with the music in the background? Where does this Bach chorale come in a typical Lutheran service? How might the work itself or the objects to which it refers have had daily, practical uses in the lives of people? What do these details add to the structure or pattern of your poem, story or essay? How do they change your sense of the work to which you’re attending?

4) Biographical context, especially the way a particular work either represents a period of an artist’s life or affects his or her life, is unavoidably attractive. Read a biography of the performer or composer and see if the work you’re listening to has been mentioned. How did the creator of that work view it? What might the artist have said or done just before the work was made? What obvious or hidden impetus led to the work? How did she feel once it had been completed? What did he claim to intend that is missing or (indeed) present? What effect did this work have on his reputation? Where did she rank the work in relation to other pieces? If this piece is highly popular, how might the artist feel about it now? What technical problem did the artist work out in completing this sonata or symphony?

5) Find one or two primary sources, such as diaries, artistic statements, interviews, photographs, films that can be woven into your poem or prose, either implicitly or explicitly. Consider using a quotation from one of these sources for an epigraph or as a concluding line. Consider arguing with the artist’s words directly, using the music as evidence against him or her.

6) Investigate the artistic movements/trends/techniques that your work uses and to which it responds. To what other artists was this composer paying close attention? With what contemporaries (or traditional masters) is this composer or performer conversing? What does he steal? What does she alter? How does the work represent a movement or school of art or music? Find the movement’s founding statements and consider them as part of your poem.

7) What kind of critical and/or popular reception has this work enjoyed? How has this reception changed over time? Where in this procession of responses is your own reaction? Is the work popular or obscure? Who knows about it and what uses do these audiences make of the song (for instance, in what weird commercial would you see or hear this piece)? Can you use some of the critical comments as language for your work? Can you make the audience/critics characters in your fiction or poem?

8) Consider the song as an object/artifact (think of the film “The Red Violin”). Who has owned the vinyl record or the sheet music? Where has it been sold? What near losses has it survived? How many times has the song been performed? What marks have those encounters left on the work? What changes have occurred in its uses (for instance, going from ritual use to concert performance)? How might the earliest performers of a tune think of its current use? How do you know?

9) When I learned that the sarabande was a dance, it changed my entire sense of Bach’s first Unaccompanied Suite for Cello, demonstrating the power of terms to affect what we hear. That sense changed even more when I realized it was a dance that had been banned for its suggestiveness. Investigate one or two of the musical terms that apply to your piece of music. What difference does it make to you to understand the structure of 12-bar blues or to know the difference between andante and allegro? How would you contrast the official definition of a musical device with your actual experience of the piece?

Writing the Song

Poetry offers a very strong way to give a verbal representation of sonic and rhythmic experience, emphasizing in language an embodied encounter with a piece of music. A range of formal choices can follow from your response to the piece. If you note repetitions, you might consider a formal poem that can offer its own sonic pattern of repetition (a pantoum, a villanelle, or a sestina, perhaps, or a use of anaphora or rhyme). You might offer alliteration, assonance of internal rhyme as ways of heightening the musical qualities of language. Or you might be attentive to metrical variations and caesuras.

In your fiction you might highlight the memorial functions of a song. Consider how various artists, styles or tunes offer good ways to invoke setting—era, culture, etc. Explore the ways various characters use music as a way or marking their lives, as a kind of unofficial soundtrack of experience. Or explore a ritualized experience for your characters and its connection to song (the way a hymn suggests home, or the function of lullaby as it passes from one generation to the next). How can you create entire scenes around a particular musical instance—teaching, learning, hearing a song? What social exchanges require music (think here of the role of dance in Jane Austen’s or Edith Wharton’s novels)?

Non-Fiction offers many ways to examine the effects of music on individuals and communities, as well as to examine the difficulties in communicating musical experience to others. Focus on a particular element of you own growth in musical awareness and try to describe how it happened. What did it take for you to collect all of the vinyl versions of a particular artist’s work, and why do you value them over others? Or what happened when you stopped practicing the piano, as your parents wanted, and then picked up the guitar or gave up music in favor of driving your car downtown looking for girls/guys? What did it mean when you formed or broke up with a band? How do you miss or embrace singing hymns or being part of a choice? Or what has music meant to you in especially difficult or joyous times, and how has that changed over the years?

*This is part two of an exercise I'm drafting for this course. Again, please post poems or send responses to this excursion. You'll note that, again, that this excursion opens itself to the possibility of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction. For the Poetry, Poetics, and the Arts Class, only the poetry options will be open.

John Ashbery--The Painter

2008-05-21T12:46:00.000-07:00

Sitting between the sea and the buildings
He enjoyed painting the sea’s portrait.
But just as children imagine a prayer
Is merely silence, he expected his subject
To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush,
Plaster its own portrait on the canvas.

So there was never any paint on his canvas
Until the people who lived in the buildings
Put him to work: “Try using the brush
As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait,
Something less angry and large, and more subject
To a painter’s moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer.”

How could he explain to them his prayer
That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas?
He chose his wife for a new subject,
Making her vast, like ruined buildings,
As if, forgetting itself, the portrait
Had expressed itself without a brush.

Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush
In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer:
“My soul, when I paint this next portrait
Let it be you who wrecks the canvas.”
The news spread like wildfire through the buildings:
He had gone back to the sea for his subject.

Imagine a painter crucified by his subject!
Too exhausted even to lift his brush,
He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings
To malicious mirth: “We haven’t a prayer
Now, of putting ourselves on canvas,
Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!”

Others declared it a self-portrait.
Finally all indications of a subject
Began to fade, leaving the canvas
Perfectly white. He put down the brush.
At once a howl, that was also a prayer,
Arose from the overcrowded buildings.

They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings;
And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush
As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.

-- from Some Trees.

Musical Excursion--Part Two*

2008-05-21T08:35:00.000-07:00

Option Two: Choose a recording of an unfamiliar piece of music, perhaps something utterly beyond your usual musical habits and tastes, or perhaps an obscure tune by your favorite singer, one you haven’t heard in years. As you listen to the music, what do you notice about the piece or about your physical/emotional reaction to it? Are you moved or bored? Do you feel critical or full of praise? What surprises you about the music? What seems predictable? When the piece finishes, what remains in your head—phrase, melody, feeling? Finally, probe each of your responses and see if you can connect a concrete image or physical sensation with each one. For instance, “When the djembe plays, the thud of the hand on the head of the drum resonates like a foot stomping on the floor ” or “Dylan’s voice made my teeth grind.”

During a second listen, notice what you missed the first time. How has your initial response changed or been confirmed? What new questions does the second encounter raise for you? What additional information, about the composer, about the uses of the music, or about its musical/formal qualities would you like to know?

Finally, if possible, find an additional recording of the song. How is this performance different from the one you heard initially? What aspects remain constant? Which do you enjoy more, and why? Which recording would you recommend to someone else?

Write a paragraph or poem that either a) contrasts or layers the experience of hearing the two recordings on top of one another; or b) describes your reactions to the newness or surprise of the piece and/or lays out the questions you’d like to answer for yourself after listening to this new music. Or develop a character sketch of the performer you have heard, or the composer of the piece, investigating the significance of this tune in his life.

*This is part two of an exercise I'm drafting for this course. Option three will appear tomorrow, with other aspects of the excursion to follow. Again, I'm interested in reading responses to this excursion. You'll note that, in this version, the excursion opens itself to the possibility of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction. For the Poetry, Poetics, and the Arts Class, only the poetry options will be open.

A Musical Excursion*

2008-05-20T18:17:00.000-07:00

As I type this, music pours through my headphones, a Bach suite for unaccompanied cello, recorded by the great Pablo Casals in the middle of the last century. Hearing Casals play on my iPod, I can’t help but think of the time I heard this same piece played by Slovakian cellist Josef Luptak. While sitting on wooden pews in a stone chapel in an Austrian castle, as Josef reached the end of the sarabande, we saw mist settle on mountains just barely visible from the tiny arched window. And, almost as a miracle, in the silent space between movements, birds sang. Everyone was still. For a moment we inhabited together a sacred space made possible by Bach, by Luptak, by his listeners, by the setting, and, wonderfully, by some random, improvisatory birds. How I’ve wondered (for five years or more), do I write this? Should it be written?

While nearly everyone has some kind of powerful experience with music—hearing, performing, practicing,
dancing—we often have difficulty expressing music’s effects, its means of moving, comforting, or energizing us.
Descriptions often seem either cold and technical or florid and vague. In both deliberate and serendipitous ways, this
excursion encourages us to find in our musical encounters generative energy for poems, stories, and reflective prose,
to engage our bodies, memories, and intelligence in ways that might hint at the deep connections between language
and music, between story and memory as it appears in song.

Embodied Listening
Begin this excursion with one of these three exercises, each designed to generate a draft that can be focused or
expanded by responding to the questions below.

Option One: Choose a recording of a very familiar piece of music, one you’ve listened to, sung, or played countless
times. As you listen to the song, make a list of all the associations you have with the piece. When/how did it come
into your life? When do you catch yourself humming it? What do you think of the composer/performer? With whom
have you shared your appreciation for this song? What other songs/artists make music like this? Once you’ve made
your list, set it aside and listen to the song again.

This time try to forget your past associations with the music and attend instead to your body’s response to the
music. Do your muscles feel relaxed or tense? What happens to your breathing? Have you shut your eyes or left them
open? As the sound fills your head, how do you react? Does your heartbeat quicken or slow down? Do you dance, or
tap your toes, or play the drums with your pencil? As soon as the music ends, close your eyes and sit with these
physical sensations for a few moments (as long as you are able). When you open your eyes, what sensations remain?
Set your two lists side by side and listen a third time. What aspect of the music itself—tempo, lyrics, rhythm,
repetitions, variations, instrumentation, etc.—seems to connect the two lists you’ve made? What questions about the
performer or the composer arise for you? Not referring to your memorial associations or you own bodily experiences,
how would you describe this piece to someone who has never heard it? Would you put it in a genre? Would you
prescribe uses for it (perfect for a romantic evening, great to work out to, the best commuting tune, etc)?
Now, write three short poems (6-10 lines each), or three paragraphs (from a first person point of view), each
drawing from one of your lists. What theme, character, emotion, or experience begins to cohere from these three
pieces?

*This is part one of an exercise I'm drafting for this course when I teach it again in the fall. Options two and three will come tomorrow, with other aspects of the excursion to follow. I'd be interested in reading responses to this excursion. You'll note that, in this version, the excursion opens itself to the possibility of poetry, fiction, or non-fiction. For the Poetry, Poetics, and the Arts Class, only the poetry options will be open.

dw

Ekphrasis and Discovery

2008-05-13T09:59:00.000-07:00

Leonard Barkan on ekphrasis in his Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture . Here's a little taste of his discussion, how ekphrasis follows discovery:

In the face of these new interrelations, Sangallo and the other onlookers respond in two ways: they draw and they talk. They create more works of art, and they conduct an impromptu seminar on the history of art. The words are a sign that art has a history that deserves to stand alongside the history of power or of nature, while the establishment of a past history of art directs the course of art's future history. The images are a sign that art can be made not only out of dogma, out of natural observation, or out of historical events, but also out of art itself. The words and images together produce aesthetics—which is to say a philosophy and a phenomenology proper to art itself. The unearthed object becomes the place of exchange not only between words and pictures but also between antiquity and modern times and between one artist and another.

A piece of marble is being rediscovered, but at the same time a fabric of texts about art is being restitched. Writings from later antiquity—Ovidian poetry, Roman novels, Greek romances, lyrics, and rhetorical exercises—turn out to be filled with passages, typically what are called ekphrases, in which narrative is framed not as reality but as the contents of an artist's picture. These passages stand in ambiguous relation to the actual objects emerging from the ground. Ekphrases are categorically different from the works of art they supposedly describe; indeed, the poetic description of an imaginary sculpted Laocoön would doubtless not resemble the statue in Rome any more than Virgil's narrative does. Yet this fabric of texts tantalizes readers with the possibility that, together with the rediscovered works themselves, it will reconstruct a complete visual antiquity. In addition, the ekphrastic literature brings with it a set of ways to look at the visual arts and a set of relations between aesthetic representation and language.

11 Unqualified Provocations

2008-05-08T20:19:00.000-07:00

I'm hopeful that someone will pick up this piece I originally wrote for The Pub, the unofficial magazine at Wheaton. It's tangentially related to the ekphrasis course in one way (I assigned the students last semester the task of writing a hymn/song).

Here's a portion:
We should be very careful what we put in other people's mouths. Because songs only exist when they enter and leave the bodies of others (either when they are sung or when they are heard), writers of hymns and leaders of singing need to be more careful than ever about the kind of textual relations we have within our bodies (see provocations three and four above). Too often we sing, over and over, lyrics that break under the weight of repetition. Precisely because music lodges in our senses, our memories of the texts with which music is joined will form some of our most powerful spiritual and theological experiences.

An Ekphrastic Index

2008-05-08T07:11:00.000-07:00

Update
Several people (ok, two) have asked for an index of the 30 Ekphrastics/30 Days posts. Here they are. The end of the term is upon me, so I'm rewarding each graded essay or exam with a few minutes of working on an essay about writing so many ekphrastic pieces in such a compressed space. I'll post that essay here when it's in somewhat better shape. Once grades are turned in, I'm headed off to be part of the staff for the New England Young Writers Conference at Breadloaf, something I've had the pleasure of doing for the past two years as well. It's always a great trip. --dw

An Ekphrastic Index

Day 1: April 90th
Day 2: Moby Dick
Day 3: Showing Raymond Carver a Photograph of My Father in His 31st Year
Day 4: Minor Resolution
Day 5: Fairy Tale
Day 6: Two Suppers at Emmaus
Day 7: Call me Bonham
Day 8: Meeting the Relatively Famous Songwriter/Pop Star
Day 9: Blake Paints What Milton Can't Show in a Play
Day 10: 1970s Arena Rock Love
Day 11: Mulready's Secret Sonnet
Day 12: Confession: The Prairie Queen
Day 13: Tim Coe, His Hat, and Touluse-Lautrec
Day 14: Ace
Day 15: Rachel's Plastic Chalice
Day 16: First of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead
Day 17: Second of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead
Day 18: Third of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead
Day 19: Fourth of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead
Day 20: Some Prayer
Day 21: Rejected Lyric for a New Setting of the 23rd Psalm
Day 22: One of several hymn riffs
Day 23: I swear I use no art at all
Day 24: Four Forms for Addressing the Tired Eye
Day 25: Birthday Poem
Day 26: Flailing Away
Day 27: After David Hooker
Day 28: Pantoum and Variation on What Wondrous Love
Day 29: A little less sad
Day 30: Abstracts of Additional Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

Emily Dickinson--an anti-ekphrastic?

2008-05-03T11:33:00.000-07:00

I would not paint -- a picture --
I'd rather be the One
Its bright impossibility
To dwell -- delicious -- on --
And wonder how the fingers feel
Whose rare -- celestial -- stir --
Evokes so sweet a Torment --
Such sumptuous -- Despair --

I would not talk, like Cornets --
I'd rather be the One
Raised softly to the Ceilings --
And out, and easy on --
Through Villages of Ether --
Myself endued Balloon
By but a lip of Metal --
The pier to my Pontoon --

Nor would I be a Poet --
It's finer -- own the Ear --
Enamored -- impotent -- content --
The License to revere,
A privilege so awful
What would the Dower be,
Had I the Art to stun myself
With Bolts of Melody!

--Emily Dickinson

And one of my favorite essays on Dickinson

Day 30--Abstracts of Additional Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

2008-05-01T05:43:00.000-07:00

Augusta Savage leaves her Art in the skilled hands of Harlem’s young because the Body is a Harp, No Matter who Plows it under and tries to forget

Thomas Cole on The Course of Empire and the Eventual Superiority of Nesting Birds

Edward Kemeys discourses on wild beasts who lurk in public places for public purposes such as assisting humans in offering perpeptual prayers for rain

Carl Milles defends the scale of his bronze gods, particularly Poseidon’s privates, while standing beneath the Sun Singer in Allerton Park.

As a brass band marches by, Charles Ives sings his favorite hymn and sells me life insurance, though he has been long dead.

The dead lead singers from several mediocre bands denounce Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain but sing the praises of Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday, and, oddly, Elvis. They do this in harmonies worthy of a Bach chorale.

Hannah Cohoon sees heaven again with its rounded fruits, its blazing leaves of vision, and offers it to me as a token, but I am too busy humming “Simple Gifts” to hear her

Finally:

Rembrandt challenges Thomas Kinkade to a cage match in the Mall of America over fair use of the phrase Painter of Light®

Day 29--A little less sad

2008-04-29T18:58:00.000-07:00

A little less sad*
(or, the young male songwriters all have higher voices than you’d think and seemingly darker lives than I could manage)

But still a moan, a whine
you’ve learned to do in time
and so it’s tune, a line
strung over water, a fine
high string of voices, mine
included, honest, mine
if I’m honest, I find
hidden in yours, mined
from the psalms. Behind
Absalom, the dawn, skylines,
branches, bones, refined
and sad, though less as you remind
us then, with hands aligned
on keys or strings, your spines.

*Steve Slagg introducing a song.

The singers here in mind: Slagg, Byram, Comstock, RiCharde and, if I’d been able to stick around, Barringer and Ketch.

Day 28--Pantoum and Variation on What Wondrous Love

2008-04-28T15:39:00.000-07:00

What wondrous love is this, O my soul,
to cause the Lord of bliss to bear
a verse and cast away, to cause, a sole
cascade of syllables to mean. I fear

to cause the Lord of bliss to bare
the sacred harp we carry in our breast,
casacade of syllables too mean. I fear
la la so mi so la so mi la la so rest.

The sacred harp we carry in our breast
beats a particular meter, simple tune:
la la so mi so la so mi la la so rest.
and I am sinking down, sinking soon.

Beat a particular meter, simple tune
where millions join the theme,
and I am sinking. Down. Sinking soon.
And still I sing a round and ride a stream

while millions join the theme:
and when from death I’m free
and still, I sing around and ride a stream,
beyond my bliss, my need.

And when from death I’m free,
what wounded love is this. O, my sole
beyond, my bliss, my need,
averse and cast away, my cause, my soul.

Enjoy several versions of this tune:

1) An authentic Sacred Harp Sing

2) An NPR feature on Anonymous 4 that includes their rendition of this hymn.

3) Wheaton College Men's Glee Club

4) A 1960 archived folk recording of Almeda Riddle in Miller, Arkansas.

Day 27--After David Hooker

2008-04-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

After David Hooker

I am trying right now--
 this very syntax, these terms-- 
  to make a cup  

a stranger might put in his mouth
 the way I have put cups,
  have put art to my lips,
  
and the glazed lip of art on my tongue
 for mornings, for years.
  If this endeavor sounds strange,
  
imagine the shock when I damaged
 my back moving around my studio
   a few hundred tons of language like new clay.

Consider the loss when I broke to pieces
 and reclaimed the dust of twenty-three old psalms 
  with still water and refashioned them

as a letter to my congressman, a bulletin announcement 
 for church, and a song I sing my son at night.
  And the pain--you must know this--I endured

when in my own inattention to the natural
 signs of my materials, the vessel cracked
  of its own accord and I burned 

my hands with liquids so hot that I swore,
 in the name of art, never to try this again.

This is a number of months in the making, after I took students to David Hooker's ceramics studio last fall and they wrote poems in response to his work and his commentary about making art. In class, we called these poems, affectionately, our Hooker poems. For this we are truly ashamed. I urge you also to read David's blog and check out samples of his work.

Day 26--Flailing Away

2008-04-26T20:30:00.000-07:00

Thrashing on Troeger Farm, 1886--Revision/Burning Away the Chaff

Thomas Hart Benton could have covered a post office wall
 with you all, made your lives an allegory of horses v. steam.

I  will make no parables , nor will I feed the thousands. 

The bread I eat comes to me whole. The crusts I break
   by hand and dip into cool, pasteurized milk. 

I buy loaves as large and distant as your relative heads.

Thrashing on Troeger Farm, 1886

On the post office wall, you appear to have stopped for a mural.

Thomas Hart Benton would have colored you, 
 my brothers, my sisters, your horses in sepia and autumn.

He would have coursed his allegories and training
 all across the regions of your faces and your fields.

The small, tough world of your love turns up for the thrashing 
 you give to one another and to the earth in 1886.

A few beasts walk the circle and grain separates
 away the straw that breaks as it should;

you know from memory how to burn the chaff, 
        and how to grind and bake grains to sustain 

a body of work I have never been in.  Belief 
       for me comes easy,  without gnarled limbs or crooked and curved spines. 

I have made no parables, nor have I fed the thousands. 

Most of my bread comes to me in perfection. The crusts I break
   by hand and dip into cool, pasteurized milk. 

I buy it in loaves as large and distant as your relative heads.

Day 25-prose poem 2 yrs in the making

2008-04-25T13:38:00.000-07:00

Sitting in the Grass Near a Library, on My 40th Birthday

The air fills with blossoms and bees. I would like, now, to be Monet, to see these blossoms twenty more times in twenty different lights. I would like to be O’Keefe, to see one blossom and its red center as my red center. I hear the bees and would love to be Charles Ives, of course Bach, or even Paganini. The bee on this page knows I bear, nor will I bear, no blossoms. I have not played my scales, nor have I sketched a few thousand flowers in a book. The creature alights. I do nothing of interest. No blossom. No paint. No tune in my hand. No light. Painters, bumble bees alike have stained themselves yellow for love. I have loved them.

I would like, for a wish, to carry this scent home to you, love, who hovered above me this morning like a flower over the bee. That, though, is Georgia’s view, through her eye, not yours, not mine. I suspect my scent, at 40, is my own, as your scent is yours. It is only on occasion, this unheralded spring day, or on a page, or in the folds of our linens where such scents may be mingled, tangle one another as stamen and nectar and sting. I am no great maker of things, but I aspire, like a tune, to grace the humming, fragrant air.

Day 24--Four Forms for Addressing the Tired Eye

2008-04-24T20:54:00.000-07:00

1) First (person)

I am sick of seeing, tired of my eye, 
 of its clouds and precisions.

So I sit on purpose in the dark on my back porch and listen
 to a woman I have never met play a violin.

I have come outside to enter my skin, to be blessed
 in my skin by the lightest wind of April.

If I opened my eyes, I could see the violinist in her apartment,
 the light behind her ponytail, the sway in her hip, her music stand.

But I prefer tonight her sound, her repetitions of the same raw
 passage, a run in a movement of Brahms or someone like him.

All day long I have looked at paintings, at women, at men, 
 at books, at plates full of food. All night long I  have remembered, 

put them together in ways that require fine stitches. I know this 
 sounds like a poem. I know how to make my tongue turn 

a word around so many ways it feels like a thing. So I am grown 
 sick as  well of my mouth. But my ear so full 

of the student’s song, and the air filled as well with her practice, 
 and my arms in the breeze, and my ass on this chair

matter as if I were, myself, a word, as if I were, tonight,
 a sight for sore eyes.

2) Second (person)

 If you opened your eyes, you could see me here in my apartment,
    the light behind my head, the score on my music stand.

How does it sound, these repetitions of the same few measures?
 Do you know the music of Edward Elgar, how it can feel,

at times, like Brahms, at times, like a world? All day long 
   I have practiced this passage in my mind. 

All night long I  have worked  until it sounds, almost, like a poem. 

Do you know how to make your ear  turn a single pitch around 
   so many ways it feels like a word?

Are you in love with what I can do with my hands 
   on the bow and the strings?

My open window might seem an invitation. I am sorry. 
 
What should I make of your heavy head tilted back in the dark?

From here, I have been watching you breathe while I practice.
 From here what can be seen is clear enough. It could nearly be day.

3) First Persons (plural)

We have grown sick of seeing, tired of our eyes.

So we sit together in the dark on our porch and listen 
 to a woman practice a violin.

Could we have stayed inside in the light  and still entered 
 our skin, alive like this in the lightest winds of April?

If we opened our eyes, we could see her apartment,
 could see one another watching her in the dark.

We both say for a moment that we believe this music
 is Brahms, a Concerto we heard once in Chicago.

We both know what we do with our days, how to take a body
 or a term and turn it a few hundred ways

until it feels no longer like a thing. Are we in love
 with all we do with our hands?

4) Imperative (didaction)

Go out in the dark and close your eyes for once.

Sit on purpose in the night on a back porch and listen
 for someone you have never met, or imagine her

as she plays a violin. Enter your skin. Let it be blessed
 by the lightest winds of April and her song.

Day 23: I swear I use no art at all

2008-04-23T23:47:00.000-07:00

I labored for days over the mould, modeled 
  on the sacred bust we keep by the copy machine.

I melted and poured. He congealed. And I waited 
 for my Shakespeare to cool. 

In a leather chair near my office window,
 I unpacked my heart with words

I suspected he would love. I tried to sing
 an iambic birthday card for the bard,

to rhyme antic-disposition with something—
 though manic-precision was off.

I am lost and unable to weep, am an ekphrastic 
 poem of my own sorrow.

I am soothing my inner Iago, Gertrude, Goneril,
  am nothing more than a fishmonger 

with a little plastic genius in my pocket.
 The hole, though, I left in his head,

large enough to hold a candle, has healed
 over. And we are singing at the film festival 

on his birthday, watching Hamlet for hours
 on a screen as vast as the globe.

Note: I'm grateful to KJ for the challenge to make an ekphrastic in response to his lovely birthday poster of the bard. Tomorrow, I will also post a blog entry on my evening at Ebertfest, where I really did see K. Branaugh's 4 hour Hamlet in 70mm glory.

Day 22--One of Several Hymn Riffs

2008-04-22T19:34:00.001-07:00

All Saints Sunday, 2 Nov. 2003

“Jesus is fairer, Jesus is purer
who makes the wounded heart to sing.”
--Schönster Herr Jesu!

Every severed but still beating muscle,
each incised or punctured chamber—

We know these sorts of hearts,
the central, bursting metaphor

grown tender, corroded with age.
The dead have lived through an uneven

song, a vicious singing that tears
pulses from the signature of time,

from habits so far from pure.
Every heart we have is blemished

by the everyday beating we take
and give to ourselves. What other

kind of figure but the heart
would need to be made, to be wounded,

to ache its way through its own
hard, clotted hymn?

Day 21--Rejected Lyric for a New Setting of the 23rd Psalm

2008-04-21T16:16:00.000-07:00

Selah, lah, lah, lah, lah, lah

The Lord is mine, shepherd and word,
divine, I shall not rot.

He bleedeth me inside and the leaden
waters besides which have fled.

I will shear no evil. You plod
and you laugh to comfort me.

You prepare a label to bore me
in the presence of mines, beloved empathy.

You surround me with harp and with lyre,
keep away the barbed liars

all my days, all the shadowed grays
of my slow, grazing life.

And I will chew on the grass,
alas, the Almighty's grass,

on the lawn of the Lord, or never. Again.

Day 20-Some Prayer

2008-04-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

Some Prayer
(an iconoclast longs for several friends)

"The icon is a song of triumph, and a revelation, and an enduring monument to the victory of the saints and the disgrace of the demons." --John of Damascus, On Icons, 2, 2

Someone tonight believe
 in a healing song
 in the hands and their oils
  on the flesh of our brother.

Some hand, tonight, burn
 not as fire
 not as flame
  but as a fierce salve on the skin.

Summon out the venom
 of the cells,
 of the body in the world
  that decays of our own weight.

Some God open, oh icon of yourself,
 open, as a wound, take into yourself 
  my brother at his merest. 
 
Summon him, or raise him, 
 or return him to us clean 
                as a new stone, as a verse in Revelation if you can.

Fourth of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

2008-04-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

Rembrandt Addresses the 1960s and 70s

You will move from black
 and white to color, 
  from an etched world

to an urban landscape of vivid oils
 that will scare and stun
  everyone already

drawn in her best grays and blacks on paper,
 line and outline of a leg,
  her covered curves so clear.

Look back, I think, rather than ahead
 to the glossy magazine and the Soup Cans,
  and the neon Dutch Masters

on the billboard just outside the Queens Tunnel.
  You will find your way into photographs
  and acrylics, and will paint

so fiercely at times that your arms
 will go numb. This will go ahead and happen.
  So you’ll need your rest. Lie down.

I will come to you in a series of dreams and whisper
 die meeste ende di naetuereelste beweechgelickheijt 
  and you will believe until you wake

that I really did see Christ being lifted from the ground,
 heavy as a plastic sack of seed, fallen from a truck,

that I really did see his guards (like the men
 in the grainy video of Vietnam, Munich, 
  Selma, El Salvador, the Moon)

confounded by the sudden appearance of flesh and color,
 that I knew their desire to return to a world 
  of shades and shadow rather than this one,

its ridiculous deaths and resurrections everywhere, 
colored in a television light so harsh I cannot begin
  to find it in a human eye.

Day 18--The Third of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

2008-04-18T08:34:00.000-07:00

J. M. W. Turner on the Qualities and Causes of Things

O voi ch'avete l'intelletti sani,
mirate la dottrina che s'asconde
sotto il velame de li versi strani. Inferno, IX, 11. 61-63

No one living will love you as you need
 to be loved, and I am talking about
  the sturdiest minds.

Blow into the gallery with a daub
 of red lead and trowel or skip 
  it like a shilling on the gray sea. 

Say nothing. They will write or call 
 and want to know why paint palpitates, 
  feels less than the world of trees and seas.

I tell everyone that light is color
 and the world is a veil of poems.

I remind them to rub their pictures 
 with a very soft silk handkerchief 
  to remove the blue chill of new varnish.

I tell Ruskin everyday how disappointed
 I was to discover that the Sun
  was not God, that my forte and my fault, 

the indistinct, belonged 
 to God and not to me.

He tells me that the Dean of St. Paul’s refused  
 to bury me in Carthage, wrapped in a rotted canvas,
   in my own shroud of lead and light.

Day 17--The Second of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

2008-04-17T11:55:00.000-07:00

Braque on Progress and Mimesis

You are making a fact, pictorial fact
 and no one cares how many times 
  the violin in fact has been played.

Do not imitate the thing. Make the thing.
 From this, Christ made loaves 
  and enough fishes for thousands.

You must be more primitive, brother, 
 paint with only one brush 
  and smaller palette you crush 
   from the foods you have failed to eat. 

Oh, I am falling in love with fish, and with birds.
 See the black fish, the birds I have made,
  the new surface I have improvised for the world.

Day 16--The First of Several Manifestos in the Voices of the Dead

2008-04-15T18:24:00.000-07:00

Manifesto One: Van Gogh on the Possible and True*

Even here there is no blue
 without yellow and orange,
  and color must still do everything.

My bedroom (precisely as I have always seen it,
 flat tints and a thick impasto, lilac doors, the green-citron
  pillow and scarlet coverlet, the pale violet 
   walls and floors of red, the basin blue
    which requires, as I’ve said, other colors)

Is heaven. I smoke my pipe in bed
 for days on end and live
  in paintings I never have to make.
                    
And there is nothing in my mirror.

*A number of these lines are cribbed/adapted from Van Gogh's letters, as included and translated in Herschel B. Chipp's Theories of Modern Art: A Source Book. As far as I know, Van Gogh wrote no letters after his actual death.

Day 15--Rachel's Plastic Chalice

2008-04-14T15:33:00.001-07:00

As good a temporary
home for blood as any
human vein or glazed
and fired potter’s art.
The facsimiles, replica
and curve of the grail,
matter little in the dark.

Faithful lips and head
thrown back to imbibe
the wholly impossible,
these form the open
road to the belly,
before belief can
make its way back
to the head, to the eye.
Praise this plastic,
its emptied hollow,
like a body, a head,
ready to be filled.

Day 14: Ace

2008-04-13T21:17:00.000-07:00

Ace

If it’s your grandfather
and you know he beat
a world champion bowler,

and you remember his voice,
and you own the chair where
he sat when he stretched out

Andy Varipapa’s name,
then you don’t care to hear
how square are his head

and his jaw, or how wide
the world opened before
his kind in 1948, the year

when he stood halfway
through his several scores,
maybe four score and ten

in Chicago, at the Neubling
Classic. He knew the heft
of what he held in his hand,

or had known. He was no Satan.
He wore that tie because he should
and, for him, it was no noose.

You can feel his backbone
in this chair where you write
and carry nothing very heavy

by hand. Your softer bones
will never fuse or form themselves
to his armchair’s old spine,

though your eye could be set
on a point to the left of the lens,
like his gaze at a woman, his wife,

or a trophy now lost, or making
nostalgia from the striking
game you believe you have seen,

when you remind yourself this:
He would go taut at ninety,
and you still believe every spin

he remembered, every single frame.

Notes: I have used this very photo a number of times as a prompt for a student writing exercise. Once, a student, having no idea the subject was my grandfather, Ace, wrote a line the likes of "You are Satan, and it is 1948." It was a brilliant poem. This, however, is not a brilliant poem. I made it a "you" poem on the general suggestion of Carl Dennis at a reading last fall in Wheaton. I don't know. Seems like a mighty sentimental draft to me so far.

Also, here's the trick bowler, himself, Andy Varipapa, whom my grandfather did beat in a competition. Also, two other people beat the pro that day, but we don't talk about that.

Day 13--Tim Coe, His Hat, and Touluse-Latrec

2008-04-12T20:50:00.000-07:00

Tim Coe, His Hat, and Touluse-Latrec

He was no Renoir, no lover
of malleable light and its glimmer.

He loved the actual women, their skin
their stares, and the grimmer

pimps, and the bends of dancers
old enough to know better.

He was 20; you, my clever friend
have a 19th century hat and 20 years

of being no Toulouse-Lautrec.
So how have you tilted his frame

toward your hatted, rounded, believing
head where a band with no name

plays the greatest hits yet to be written?
And in your poem, the one behind

your bowler, you will love the green
woman, you will be the mostly kind

man on his elbow, with a wall
between himself and the painted

women for whom he longs. Turn away.
That man’s moustache has been tainted

with beer so bitter he tastes it in his sleep.
Go to the gift shop. Get a postcard you can keep.

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Moulin de la Galette 1889, Oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Day 12--Poem on a Quilt Pattern

2008-04-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

Confession: The Prairie Queen

I am in love with the Prairie Queen,
 draping her over my torso at night.

I trace her every single stitch in the dark
 and remember her color from the light.

I turn her in my eye and she becomes
 in turn my eye, and my sleep

comes slow under her bosom. 
 Some patterns of sky I fold

and keep in a box: the tornado, the spring,
 the wild geese in flight. I told

my wife we could not spread you here
 on our bed any longer 

as I am ashamed of my skin beneath your
 cotton flesh. But she names, stronger

than either your woman’s art, or my simple lust,
 a map of deep, unseen rivers, of a root we can trust.

Note: A bit of history & info on the Prairie Queen quilt pattern.

Another note: The actual quilt on our bed is a wedding ring pattern made by my wife's mother. I feel no guilt sleeping beneath it.

Ah, an essay for next fall's course

2008-04-11T08:11:00.000-07:00

Debra Allbery's fine essay on ekphrasis at the Cortland Review. I like this little bit:

I've been interested particularly in this notion suggested by Stevens and Hollander—that our problems are the same; that we turn to painting not only for inspiration, but instruction.

That is true for me, both in writing about the visual and in writing about music.

Thanks to Therese L. Broderick for the excellent tip.

dw

Day 11--Mulready's Secret Sonnet

2008-04-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

The Sonnet, William Mulready (1786-1863) 1839 Great Britain, Oil on panel 35 x 30 cm

Mulready's Secret Sonnet

A moment in this landscape with your heart,
the brook, the grass, the scent, late flowered air,
could make a simple man of lesser art
than necessary pick up pen. Beware,
my flow’r in velvet red of autumn dress,
I’ll spy you as you read, and, if you bark,
the echo of your high-voiced silliness
will prove me as no Dante, no Petrarch,
and show no Beatrice or Laura pure
has joined me in the genre of rough land.
We came here on our own and, to be sure,
this sonnet I have offered to your hand
is scattered in its rhyme, but not its tone.
I’m glad we’re here alone, no chaperone.

note: I think I'd like to write an annotated set of interlinear responses to this hackneyed sonnet. that's a benefit, I guess, of cranking out even the most unfinished piece for now.

Day 10: 1970s Arena Rock Love

2008-04-10T06:33:00.000-07:00

She had a voice
 like Peter Frampton’s guitar,

And a voice like Peter’s guitar could fill 
 a boy's skinny chest with wah wah & blues.

So, Peter, holding her like your guitar
 that night in the empty high school gym 

I lifted her delicate neck
 and whispered “Show me the way”

And sang to her about how hard 
 it is to love anyone 
 
When no one applauds or lifts
 a lighter to the sky.

Day 9: Blake Paints What Milton Can’t Show in a Play

2008-04-07T21:15:00.000-07:00

Keep the naked bodies
 off the stage
   and you end up with epic

Or anti-epic. Blake believed
 in the moon as a breast,
  in the eye as a home of sin and wonder,

In the poem 
 and the print 
  as lovers of one another,

In the muscled, gentle lovers
 and their blisses
  and the nearness

Of exile as dual blessing.
 Oh, I wish for more
  than either Milton’s diction

Or Blake’s apocalypse can offer.
 I wish for comedy and grace.
  I wish either lover

Looked the other lover in the face. 
 Baby, when we bring our fallen
  bodies to our bower,

I will ask you about your crocuses this spring. 
 Tell me they survived the epic
  winter, even if they died.

Jottings from Milton on Adam Unparadised, the failed version of a play that eventually was recast as Paradise Lost. See Katharine Fletcher's notes on Milton and Performance.

Day 8: Meeting the Relatively Famous Songwriter/Pop Star at Lunch

2008-04-07T20:02:00.000-07:00

He smiles like a beautiful
chord change you know
should’ve happened all along.

I tell him I’ve known his work
for years. I want to, but don’t,
say how many friends I’ve lost,

how they’ve utterly disappeared.
I also fail to mention, as he likely
forgets me, how, in the 80s, I was

pretty as well, how I played tunes
for women who also loved Jesus,
how he and I (and Jesus)

had the same beautiful hair.

Day 7-Call me Bonham

2008-04-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

Or call it Moby Dick
though the book bore
nothing on the title,
or the sticks broken,
or whipped away
while the band walked
off stage as he beat bare
hands bloody, and, maybe
a little drunk, he rocked
one foot on the treadle.
To make a mighty hook
you play a mighty lick
leave a damning wake,
and a broken stick,
and a riff, or two, behind.

Here's a much shortened version of John Bonham's drum solo from Led Zeppelin's "Moby Dick." Legend has it, he sometimes played for 30 mins or more.

Day 6--Two Suppers at Emmaus by Caravaggio

2008-04-05T20:57:00.000-07:00

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus
c. 1600-01; Oil on canvas, 54 3/4 x 76 3/4 in; National Gallery, London

The worm in the apple gnaws the fruit away,
 and the dressed fowl the men have devoured

by the time Caravaggio remembers the inn-keeper
 and his creased wife, the finer linens 

and the pitcher as detailed as the Gospel of Luke,
 and the ridiculously large ears of Cleopas.

What fierce blaze gets fired and glazed
 within the tender  hearted as a stranger paints 

the air with his midrash of pigment and time? 
 What light layers enough shadow over years? 

I am inventing this last part; the rest you could have 
 read or been shown on your own:

Caravaggio once punched a drunk in the head 
 and saw Jesus as the man’s flesh dented  

beneath his fist like a warm loaf. For five years,  
 the stranger arose again and again in Caravaggio’s eye.

Caravaggio, Supper at Emmaus 1606, Oil on canvas, 141 × 175 cm Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan

Day 5--Fairy Tale

2008-04-04T17:28:00.000-07:00

You are singing Stardust
 like you’re Ella Fitzgerald,

and I am singing Stardust
 dead on as Willie Nelson.

Together we have filled
 our bedroom with enough

dust to set off your asthma,
 though I think you’re scatting

when you cough in that syncopated
 way that sounds like the earliest

records of the tune, before anyone 
 had written a single lyric.

And when I twine Willie’s smooth
 near whine around you,

my eyes closed, imagined bandana
 tight around my forehead,

you nearly die from the reverie,
 the memory of the time

you nearly died running home
 from school, the Wahlberg boy

chasing you. And here is Hoagy Carmichael
  trying to strangle you now
 
with a few changes and a pulverized star. 
 I finish in time to pry

his hands from your neck.
 We catch your breath 

together and close our mouths
 to the lovely and deadly dust

so plentiful in the near-light of dusk, 
  not purple, but dark blue and so plain.

Day 4--Minor Resolution (or Stephen Isserlis Plays the Song of the Birds after the World Explodes)

2008-04-03T22:24:00.000-07:00

Not only the small birds but the great, ungrounded
eagle, her slow curve from height, her slow curve
from depths again. I am not a believer in birds of war
but in this lark of the finger on string, in a g-minor wind become hymn.

Note: A lovely translation by Lydia Davis of the original song, along with commentary, from Poetry

Showing a Photograph to Raymond Carver of My Father in His 31st year

2008-04-03T12:19:00.000-07:00

The grin and high cheeks, the tightened lips, poised
 before an exclamation to my mother,
   could break Raymond Carver’s taut heart.

His young father carried fish on a string 
 and bottles of beer in one hand. Little
  Raymond had not yet been born.

But I am the serious bellied boy
 at the wooden arm of your old lawn chair.
  I am pictured and pleasant enough and small.

I desire to be the opened book, 
 the paper in your right hand’s steadied grip, 
  left hand relaxed from reading me.

I would like to show you Raymond Carver’s
 poem and the 1934 Ford
  he parked behind his Daddy.

I would like to show Ray the jig-sawed scar
 on your outside right thigh and ask him why
  he thinks it never healed.

Here's the classic Carver poem on which this is a riff.

Day 2-30 Ekphrastics in 30 Days

2008-04-02T07:02:00.000-07:00

Moby Dick

I am halfway through
Moby Dick, the painting
by Pollock, and, again
I can’t finish the damned
thing—too large and too much
time he spends dissecting
every bit of blue. I mean
how many harpoons and turning
flukes does a world need?
I am stranded in the upper left hand
corner for like a week before
I begin to descend and when
I reach the roiling mess
of what seems to be fire
and mountains and men
and black fins, a pair of feet
or two, and Queequeg’s sacred
map of the back of the world,
I think, I am such a Starbuck.
I should have watched a movie,
or started the painting from the bottom,
where I knew it would end

30 Ekphrastics in 30 Days

2008-04-01T21:05:00.000-07:00

It's National Poetry Writing Month (NaPoWriMo), among other things. I will write an ekphrastic a day for the next 30 days.

April 90th

Scuttled in the wake of Pablo’s Gertrude,
awakened by the turn and term of head,
I head into the April air construed
by 90 airs of Bach strewn through my head.
Thrown hard against the arm chair’s broken arm,
she breaks her brow and plays an April Fool
and fools Picasso like a Harlequin,
and likens then herself to paint. His tools
of eye and self and paint and eye and self
she eyes herself, her velvet coat, her skirt.
He coats her in a gown of browns. She tells
me, Leo, grown and groan and sounds of hurt
sound palatable to a posing girl.
One palette, brother, tints and soils the world.

Trainer poems

2008-03-28T05:17:00.000-07:00

Kay Ryan calls ekphrastic poems "trainer poems" here (scroll down a bit):

I should start by admitting that I have a certain prejudice. I am inclined to see poems-about-paintings as easy poems, or exercises, or trainer poems. The writer is playing tennis against a nice, solid backboard. The artwork is already there; all the poet has to do is dance around in front of something both fixed and culturally valuable. One feels a sense of pre-approval if one writes about Great Art.

But then, later, after exploring some of her own ekphrastic impulses, Ryan writes:

But enough complaining. An artist I’ve returned to over and over in poems is not a painter but the French composer, Eric Satie. In contrast to the thoroughly not-Cassatt poem above, the Satie poem that follows IS, I think, very Satie—and ekphrastic—even though it’s a pure fabrication. Because I’m going to define an ekphrastic poem as one that invokes the spirit of the artist (without having to describe features of any actual work.) Call me a cheater.

"Invoking the spirit of the artist"--how does that strike as a definition of ekphrasis?

2008-03-23T18:19:00.000-07:00

The Holy Women at the Sepulchre, Duccio di Buoninsegna, 1308-1311.

This morning, I am the woman in orange. 
 My sister, the faithful mother in green, 
  and someone we know well is the harlot 
   in her fading scarlet pleats.

Our heads, sweet Duccio, so identical and round, 
 so filled with a species of love
  like duty and doubt,
   defy pious hands.
   
You give us a Tuscan angel, extracted from Matthew,
 modeled on our brothers, our husbands,
  and perched on the emptied sepulchre
   like a bird, or a bat.

Our varieties of myrrh, he suggests, you suggest
 without words,  our various aloes might as well 
  be poured onto the ground, 
   absorbed in sand.
     
Dead Duccio, we knew your children who gave away
 their inheritance to their mother,
  blessed woman who mixed these pigments
   that settle into our strong faces.

Dead Duccio, every morning of our lives at mass
 one woman or another rises up again, as a mountain,
  as a mourner on a stuccoed wall that opens 
   into a Gospel we bless with our open eyes.

In Eckersberg's Cloisters

2008-03-22T19:27:00.000-07:00

In Eckersberg’s Cloisters, San Lorenzo fuori le mura

The arches move, the light moves.
Three brothers stroll away. A fourth
brings a bushel of fruit from the gardens.
And against a pillar, stairs rising north
from his head, another brother attends
to a text--the arced afternoon light fails
to reach him, no matter how I stand, tilt
my head, cover one eye with this book.
Only a slender lizard lies still and warms
its blood with the sun; the walls, meanwhile,
grow green at the edges, stucco peeled from brick
like skin around a fresh and gradual wound.

First appeared in Ekphrasis

Here's the first draft, from a long time back.

Holy Saturday

2008-03-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

William H. Johnson's Lamentation from around 1944.

Good Friday

2008-03-21T08:17:00.000-07:00

Here's a challenge. Choose one of the images linked to from this lectionary site and write a brief ekphrastic meditation on Good Friday, on the Crucifixion, on what it might be like to paint such a thing, on what the uses (and uselessness) of art might be in the face of a central event/mystery of Christian life and history.

dw

George Szirtes Photograph Poems

2008-03-19T20:13:00.000-07:00

Ross: Children of the Ghetto

Love, we were young once, and ran races
over rough ground in our best shiny shoes,
we kicked at stones, we fell over, pulled faces.

Our knees were filthy with our secret places,
with rituals and ranks, with strategy and ruse.
Love, we were young once and ran races

to determine the most rudimentary of graces
such as strength and speed and the ability to bruise.

These lines from one of George Szirtes' eight photograph poems featured in the February 2008 issue of Poetry.

Christian Wiman at Wheaton

2008-03-17T21:53:00.000-07:00

Christian Wiman, editor of Poetry, poet and essayist will visit Wheaton's campus next Tuesday, March 25.

After refreshments at 3:30, he will invite a spirited conversation on what poetry does, why we value it, what's good and bad about contemporary poetry, etc. He will then give a poetry reading at 7:30.

It is more than worth checking out his Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet. A few of the essays from that collection have appeared in print and online. Notes on Poetry and Religion includes this quotation, among many other provocative notions:

Language can create faith but can't sustain it. This is true of all human instruments, which can only gesture toward divinity, never apprehend it. This is why reading the Bible is so often a frustrating, even spiritually estranging, experience. Though you can feel sometimes (particularly in the Gospels) the spark that started the fire of faith in the world—and in your heart—the bulk of the book is cold ash. Thus we are by our own best creations confounded, that Creation, in which our part is integral but infinitesimal, and which we enact by imagination but cannot hold in imagination's products, may live in us. God is not the things whereby we imagine him.

And this one:

I think it is a grave mistake for a writer to rely on the language of a religion in which he himself does not believe. You can sense the staleness and futility of an art that seeks energy in gestures and language that are, in the artist's life, inert. It feels like a failure of imagination, a shortcut to a transcendence that he either doesn't really buy, or has not earned in his work. Of course, exactly what constitutes "belief " for a person is a difficult question. One man's anguished atheism may get him closer to God than another man's mild piety. There is more genuine religious feeling in Philip Larkin's godless despair and terror than there is anywhere in late Wordsworth.

The whole collection is well worth a read.

You can find many of Wiman's poems on line as well:

Interior
The River
Every Riven Thing and This Mind of Dying
This Inwardness, This Ice
Darkness Starts and Reading Herodotus

The Family Photograph--Vona Groarke

2008-03-15T06:57:00.000-07:00

In the window of the drawing-room
there is a rush of white as you pass
in which the figure of your husband is,
for a moment, framed. He is watching you.

His father will come, of course,
and, although you had not planned it,
his beard will offset your lace dress,
and always it will seem that you were friends.

All morning, you had prepared the house
and now you have stepped out
to make sure that everything
is in its proper place: the railings whitened,

fresh gravel on the avenue, the glasshouse
crystal when you stand in the courtyard
expecting the carriage to arrive at any moment.
You are pleased with the day, all month it has been warm.

They say it will be one of the hottest summers
the world has ever known.
Today, your son is one year old.
Later, you will try to recall

how he felt in your arms--
the weight of him, the way he turned to you from sleep,
the exact moment when you knew he would cry
and the photograph be lost.

But it is not lost.
You stand, a well-appointed group
with an air of being pleasantly surprised.
You will come to love this photograph

and will remember how, when he had finished,
you invited the photographer inside
and how, in celebration of the day,
you drank a toast to him, and summer-time.

From Flight and Earlier Poems by Vona Groarke

Echo, after Palestrina

2008-03-12T19:49:00.000-07:00

A voice in a high granite room
can sing a chord with itself,
can be its own deep, broad brother
of sound. Together by accident,
intent, it doesn’t matter.
Here alone with a radio,
I am not alone with a radio.
I am a full, full, resonant room.

dw

First appeared in Teaching English in the Two-Year College.

If you haven't noticed

2008-03-12T08:57:00.000-07:00

I am beginning to post a handful of my own ekphrastic poems. I mean, why not? The course is over and it's my blog, right? Here's an older poem, one that I remembered while trying to write my own poem about David Hooker's ceramic work.

After Her Ceramics Class Results in Many Heavy Christmas Presents from Your Sullen Teenage Daughter

You try to break the gifts while she is gone: heavy, contorted bowls, mugs with no handles.
Knock them to the floor with malice of accident.
The only lovely cup she made--one that curves like a young boy’s shoulder,
the one with blue glazes in several shades--leaks.
You learn how a green dish shines in the afternoon light as it flies, before it gouges
a smile in your stucco wall.
I know you grieve, that you love the wall more than the deadly dish.
I know you wish--small suggestion you’ve held at the back of your throat--for her to give
you something more delicate, something lighter than a human head.

Have I mentioned this smart site?

2008-03-11T05:40:00.000-07:00

An anthology of ekphrasis in poetry and fiction, complete with useful critical quotes, excerpts, and what not. Perhaps, if I were a web designer, this is what this site should look like. Thankfully, it's there all by the grace of Damian J. Rollison .

One of my favorite bits is where he layers criticism of the artist Parmagianino with excerpts from John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.