An Ekphrastic Index

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 24--Four Forms for Addressing the Tired Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Day 10: 1970s Arena Rock Love

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.