Abstract of an Essay in Progress

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.

Puce Exit

First Performance of the Rock ‘n’ Roll Band Puce Exit

by Kevin Stein

If puce were sound not color, 
    it would be us: Deep Purple,
though more confused and discordant, 

our guitars tuned in electric ignorance 
    of tone, key, each other—the word
puce derived from the Latin for “flea,” 

as appropriate for pests in the hides 
   of neighbors—our raucous weekend practice,
pubescent groupies lingering on basement steps, 

first on the block to show hearing loss, 
   first to wear paisley with polka dots.
And exit, of course, because music is 

our ticket out. It’s Peggy Wasylenski’s 
   fourteenth birthday party, a real gig,
her parents too cool, or simply so new 

to America they’re expecting something 
   with accordion or banjo, not the freight
we unload from my father’s blue Chevy: 

amps, mikes, drums, Christmas color wheels 
   for visual effect. We set up in the dirt
floor garage, our amps a wall of sound 

maybe knee high across the left bay. 
   Everything’s plugged into a quad outlet
above the single ceiling bulb. Orange wires 

cascade around us like a waterfall
     of blown fuses. We start, start over,
and start again, until we get right 

the three drumstick beat and launch into 
   an 18 minute version of “Satisfaction.”
I’m howling “I can’t get no!” even though, 

in eighth grade, I’m not sure what it is 
    I can’t get any of, but it’s something,
I am sure, I need as badly as any guy

every needed anything, like “voice lessons,” 
    the drummer screams. On break, we play
spin the bottle, Peggy flicking her tongue 

and me choking with surprise, with glee, 
    with adolescent resolve to improve
on the next round, which never comes. 

Police arrive to pull the knotted plug 
    and send us scurrying for the bushes,
guitars around our necks, though no one 

is drunk or stoned on anything other than 
    the rush of innocence soon to take a turn,
accelerating around the corner like Peggy, 

three years later, first night with license 
    and the family station wagon, her eyes
on the lit radio dial and not on the barber, 

my barber, trudging home in rain, the scissors 
    in his breast pocket soon to puncture
his heart beneath her tire’s worn tread.