In Eckersberg's Cloisters

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

William H. Johnson's Lamentation from around 1944.

Good Friday

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

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

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

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

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.