Stephen Dobyns has a fine book of ekphrastic Balthus poems (titled The Balthus Poems) and has a number of Cezanne poems in Cemetery Nights.

William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Breughel are fine examples from the Modernist era. Here's one:

The Parable of the Blind

This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red

in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading
each other diagonally downward

across the canvas
from one side
to stumble finally into a bog

where the picture
and the composition ends back
of which no seeing man

is represented the unshaven
features of the des-
titute with their few

pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
cottage is seen and a church spire

the faces are raised
as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous

to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster


—William Carlos Williams


In her book The Philosopher's Club, Kim Addonizio has a strong poem about a photograph of victims of the Holocaust.

Then there is this famous one by Frank O'Hara based on Michael Goldber's "Sardines":

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he

says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting called SARDINES

―Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)


http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KzfpIs7qjJ...g_sardines.jpg

There is Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way―the stone lets me go.
I turn that way―I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare. The sky.
A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

―Yusef Komunyakaa
[from Dien Cai Dau, Wesleyan UP]

Photo missing here. see below.
And there are so many more good ones!

Best, Tony

Edited in by Janice. Tony, I am very sorry to have removed your photo of the Vietnam Memorial that accompanied the Komunyakaa poem, also the Parable of the Blind by Breughel accompanying the William Carlos Williams poem. They stretched the thread and made it impossible to read without scrolling back and forth on each and every post.

May I suggest that you enter the photo as a link OR as an attachment. See how to add attachments under Additional Options below this thread. If you need help, contact me and tell me where to find the photo and I'll do my best to assist you.

I might suggest The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet by David Middleton. In and interview with William Baer in the current Measure pp. 26-27, Middleton briefly discusses this work.

Can so new a poem be a classic of the art?

Absolutely it can.

Great poetry isn't merely an historical reality - it happens all the time.

And "The Charioteer" is certainly up there with the Ekphrastic greats. Because not only do we get a graphic image of the work of art, but we also get the meaning BEHIND such works of art, which is the effect such things have on the human imagination that contemplates such works.

I think it is totally brilliant, and we are so very very lucky to have a poet like Alicia as a member of this board.

Thanks, everyone, for joining in. Chris, as the unofficial archivist of Eratosphere, kindly bumped up
an old thread on the same subject; Janice has locked it, purely to avoid confusion.
However, it is well worth reading through. There are some great contributions, including some
lengthy discussions of the subject by Rhina, among others. This website has a lot of buried treasures.

For those who haven't the time right now to read through the whole of the old thread I thought
it might be useful to post here a list of the poems that get mentioned, posted or discussed in it.
The list is not absolutely complete, but it does contain, I think, all the major examples:

Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Yeats: Leda and the Swan
Wilbur: “This Pleasing Anxious Being”
Christopher Bakken: “Terra Incognita”
Rhina Espaillat: “Rachmaninoff on the Mass Pike”
Rilke: “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Lowell: “For the Union Dead”
Lisa Barnett: “Whistler Decorates the Peacock Room”
Sylvia Plath: “Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies”, A Sestina for the Douanier
Tim Murphy: “The Muromachi Cranes”
Leslie Monsour: “After Young Thomas and His Mother” (Mary Cassatt)
Wendy Cope: The Uncertainty of the Poet” (De Chirico”)
James Crenner: “The Rondanini Pietà” (Michelangelo)
Fleur Adcock: “The Ex-Queen among the Astronomers”
Frank O’Hara: “Digression on Number 1, 1948” (Pollock), “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware…”
Elizabeth Bishop “Large Bad Picture”
Adrienne Rich: “I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus” (Cocteau film)
Sylvia Plath: “The Disquieting Muses” (De Chirico)
David Trinidad: “9 Cigarettes” (Bette Davis, All About Eve)
Williams: “Picture from Brueghel”
Hecht: “The Deodand”
Marianne Moore: “No Swan So Fine”
Thom Gunn: “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt”
Louis MacNeice: “The National Gallery”
UA Fanthorpe: “Not My Best Side” (Uccello, St George and the Dragon)
Larkin: “The Card Players”
O’Hara: “Why I Am Not a Painter”
Ashbery: “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Miroslav Holub: “Masterpiece”
M Cantor: “Japanese for Beginners”
Heaney: Poet’s Chair
X J Kennedy: “Nude Descending a Staircase”
Kazimir Malevich: “To Malevich’s Woodcutter”
Winfield Townley Scott: “Winslow Homer”
Edwin Muir: “The Annunciation”
Hans Magnus Enzensberger: “The Sinking of the Titanic”
Henri Coulette: “Intaglio”
Donald Justice: “Anonymous Drawing”
Robert Mezey: “Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel” (painting by Donald Justice)
Terese Coe: “Film noir: Out of the Past”

As you will see, some of the poems are by members of the Sphere, because Alicia encouraged
a mixture of "classics" and new works by members. However, since there is now a bumped-up
thread on D&A on the subject, and there is soon going to be an Ekphrastic Event here on the Sphere,
I suggest that we refrain from posting our own works on this thread. Of course, feel free to post other
members' poems, if you consider them classics (like the one by Alicia, already posted here). (
Editing in here, just to express total agreement with Mark's remarks above, with which I cross-posted.)

Here's a link to the third section of Anthony Hecht's poem "Meditation". The section gives a wonderful
description of a Renaissance "sacra conversazione" painting; I don't think any specific work has been
identified here; you can spot details from various painters like Bellini and Cima da Conegliano.

By the way, if anyone does post an image, can they please be careful about keeping it down to manageable size?

R.S. Thomas wrote several good ones and a few less good ones, though I don't have the book to hand and I'm too tired to run a search.

Rory

Somewhere on one of these old threads there's a post by Alicia Stallings about her poem "Amateur Iconography: Resurrection," which appears in Hapax. Although there's an icon of the Harrowing of Hell on the front of the book, Alicia says she had no specific icon in mind for the poem--I've forgotten her words exactly but she talks about the icons as being derived from standard iconographic elements and models. In a case like that, where many icons might be similar, I think a poem could be ekphrastic even without being derived from a unique work. Can Larkin's poem be thought of that way?

Maryann,

Quite. Seconds after posting I thought about what I'd written and tried to excise this little paragraph, but never mind: you'd already seen it and started commenting. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon known as Rory's Law, and an argument in favour of more sleep.

Best,
Rory

I agree with Rory. The Larkin poem is not an example of ekphrasis. At first glance it might seem to be, but in fact it is using a supposed painting as a vehicle in order to cleverly paint with words.

An ekphrasis has to be based on some other work of art and in someway enlarge it. That is the usual definition. The word means "to speak out of" and the Larkin poem is its own reference.

Actually, Janice, 'ekphrasis' is a noun meaning "description" which comes from the verb ekphrazein, to show thoroughly, describe. Had you actually gotten around to reading the thread which I bumped up and you locked, you might have noted my old posts there, to the effect that in ancient practice the genre of ekphrasis involved not the description of some pre-existing work but the invention of an entirely new one, like, for example, the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. Most Latin & Greek examples of the genre happen to fit your definition pretty precisely of what an ekphrasis is not, in that they use "a supposed [artwork] as a vehicle in order to cleverly paint with words." Personally, I see no reason to be dogmatic about the definition of the term.

By the way, for anyone who might not know, American classicists pronounce this word EKphrasis, because the Greek accent falls on the first syllable. The British tend to pronounce it ekPHRAsis, to rhyme with molasses. I advocate the first way, but then, I'm an American classicist.

Chris