Entering the work

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.

Hey, John Keats

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.

The longer tradition

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.

Focus on the dogs, cats, and pet birds

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.

“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).

John Ashbery--The Painter

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.

Ekphrasis and Discovery

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.

Ah, an essay for next fall's course

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

Have I mentioned this smart site?

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.

ENGW 333/Fall 2007--Poetry Critique Guide

Print and read each poem scheduled for your group critique session, marking any passages or concerns that strike you as you read. Then take no more than 15 minutes to respond to the questions below, giving as specific a response as you can. You will give your responses to the poet, so make comments legible (type if you can) and references to the manuscript specific (stanza numbers, particular lines, etc.).




Reader Response(s)
1) As you finish the piece, record your initial response as a reader. Are you jealous? Overwhelmed? Confused? Thrilled? Eager to read more? Calmed? Reminded of something? What in the poem or poems most powerfully contributed to this response?

2) What conversations do you overhear as you read this work? Which voices (the poet’s, the artist’s, the audience’s, or other voices) most attracted you? Which ones compelled you to learn more in order to read the poem better? Which voices kicked you out of the poem?

3) What role does the artwork or song play in this ekphrastic piece? Is it central or peripheral? In what ways would you like to understand the work more fully—through the artist, through description, through reception, through context?

4) What role does the speaker or poet play in this ekphrastic poem? Where would you like to experience more distance between the speaker and the work? Where would you like to see the poet better collapse such a distance? How might he or she do this? How might your sense of this distance change as you encounter more poems in the grouping?

Formal/Technical Concerns
1) How does the writer’s choice of form fit or fail to fit with her artistic subject matter? What aspect of the form is he using with special skill? What aspect of the form could still be brought to bear on the poem? (For instance, perhaps the voice in a dramatic monologue is strong, but the writer hasn’t made use of the implied audience).

2) Which images in the poem are especially strong? Which sense does the writer use best? Which sense could he or she develop more here? Where would you like to see a particular image developed in more detail? Which image strikes you as a cliché? How could the poet write “through” the cliché?

3) Mark one or two lines in the poem that you think stand out above all others. What did you like about this line? Is it located in the most effective position? How does it make use of tension? How does it make use of meter? Which line strikes you as more random than it needs to be? Suggest another layer of choice the writer might consider in his or her lineation.

4) How effective or ineffective is the writer’s word choice/diction? Which particular words should the writer reconsider? Why should she/he reconsider these (connotation, sound, consistency of voice)?

5) What uses of sound--rhyme, alliteration, assonance, etc.--fit well with the sense of the poem? What choices seem overdone or under-considered?

6) Characterize the voice in this poem. Is it strong, reflective, consistent or inconsistent? How could the writer better establish the speaker’s voice?

7) Which use of figurative language in the poem drew your attention (metaphor, simile, personification, etc.)? Where could this writer consider using a stronger or weaker comparison? Where do you see mixed or inconsistent figures of speech that need to be made more consistent?

Harder Revision(s) (answer at least one of these and no more than two)
1) What is the central emotional core of the poem? Where do you think the writer best demonstrates this as a grounded/embodied feeling? Where does he or she miss a chance to emphasize or offer more connection to this sensation? Where is he sentimental?

2) What thought/idea/term in this poem is used in a lazy way? Where could it be better defined or made vivid? In whose voice could this abstraction/thought be better conveyed?

3) Where do you find the poet moralizing? Has she earned this? Tell her what she must do to talk to you this way.

4) Does this poem fit your understanding of ekphrasis or musical ekphrasis? Does it expand your sense of these kinds of poetry? Tell the writer what he has done to make you clarify or revise your definition.

is this all ekphrasis is?

New Yorker cover from Apr. 30, 2007 by Harry Bliss