Narrative poetry and representational painting have a long entwined history... The Pre-Raphaelites, as Tom mentions, have numerous poem-inspired painting. A favorite subject was Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott." A number of famous paintings are based on scenes from the poem.

Frank O'Hara started off selling cards in the Museum of Modern Art bookstore one Christmas season. By the time of his death, he had become a curator of painting and was still moving up the museum's hierarchy. Part of this was due to his friendships with many painters of the second generation of abstract expressionism. "Chez Jane," for example, is a poem written for Jane Freilicher, a painter, as is this, written for Micheal Goldberg, a poem I adore:


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.


There is a very interesting discussion of this poem at: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ra/painter.htm

Frank,
Larkin's verses were doubtless suggested ('inspired' seems a mite strong!) by one of the 17C or 18C Dutch or Flemish pictures with this subject.(Or maybe a melange of several). Prints of such paintings decorated the walls of many British and Irish homes during the first half of the 20C, so he had probably encountered one or more in childhood.
Margaret.

Hey, A.E.,

Thanks for the additional info...I did some more googling this morning on "art inspired by poety" and came up with some interesting finds. In particular this site:
http://www.artmagick.com/Gallery/Maidens/

Thanks for your response.

TJ

Hey, Tom,

Yeah, that poem is a favorite O'Hara of mine...I first read it about the same time Lawrence Raab published an article in "The Writer's Chronicle" ((May 1999) entitled "Poetry's Weakness". In it, Raab made the point that often one starts out to write a piece on a given subject only to have it turn out to be something completely unanticipated...he likened that kind of creative process, by contrast, to a carpenter who starts out to build a cabinet and ends up with a coffee table. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif That carpenter would not be in business long! At any rate, O'Hara's piece has always reminded me a bit of Raab's analogy.


TJ

Has anyone mentioned John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror"? This is lucid Ashbery, a relatively rare occurrence, and is a fine poem for those who can forgive its lack of meter.

In a sense (far-fetched, perhaps), most of Blake's illuminated poems are ekphrastic. I guess it might depend on which came first, the picture or the poem.

I wonder if a poem like Hart Crane's "Brooklyn Bridge" poem would qualify, since in a way it's a poem about architecture and/or bridge-building, arts unto themselves.

Roger,

If we keep nibbling away like this, soon we'll be left with nothing that's NOT ekphrastic poetry except long narrative poems, idylls, and love poems. jejeje™

(this is meant tongue-in-cheek, in case anyone's unsure)

(robt)

TJ:

What a wonderful site that appears to be. I just took a cursory tour through it, but registered immediately. It's like having a museum on the desk--and much cheaper than the Guggenheim.

Thanks for the tip!
Tom

Alicia,

Many of the Newtonian sonnets are ekphrastic. Here are three examples:

HALSTON 53 SHALL I COMPARE THEE

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
--Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare

To Venus found at Milo nine score years
Ago by Dumont? Thou art softer, warmer
By Far. You try to hide revealing tears
That show your mind is softer, warmer.
To Venus Anadyomene by
J. A. D. Ingres? Thou art covered with
Expensive fabric to foil those who try
To prove that you are certainly a myth.
To Mona Lisa by da Vinci? Thou
Art similar with your facial expression
Expertly worn, proving that you know how
To make that timeless, suave, reserved impression.
And thou hast something added to mortality
Through poetry, which they have--immortality.

Fall 99
http://www.firstview.com/WRTWfall99/HALSTON/P053.html

THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE AND TRIUMPH

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 Opus 18 in C minor--Moderato
--believed to be the model for Richard Halley's Fifth Concerto

The first man built a fire and then was burned
To death for his achievement, but Man now
Had fire though its brave creator was spurned.
Others then created the wheel, the plow . . .
Creators all throughout the ages fought,
Struggled, and perished dragging savages out
Of caves into the light of Progress, brought
Improvements to their lives, killed fear and doubt.
From cave to modern city, Man advanced.
From mindless magic, mind at last emerged.
Savages shivered, shouted, sang, and danced
Where now the Bolshoi Ballet patrons splurge.
Here's to the creators of every kind--
The men of truth, of reason and the mind.

Dedicated to Ayn Rand

(The music of Richard Halley’s Fifth Concerto … seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. –Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

(The sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets—what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of a new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through the ages? . . . An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth. – Spoken by Richard Hailey in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)


EARTHRISE

The lifeless lunar landscape stretches out
Before my eyes in shades of grayish-white,
And only craters love the endless drought--
The heat of day--the chilling cold of night.
A rising orb dispels the black of space,
And strong emotions swell--too deep for Freud.
The Earth, so pregnant with the human race,
Is thirsting there to fill the awful void.
Will mankind propagate among the stars,
Or will some minor cosmic accident
Change Mother Earth into a planet Mars,
Or will there be a method to prevent . . .
And so as mankind walks upon the Moon,
He views the planet from which he was hewn.

(The poem “Earthrise” is based on the famous
NASA photograph “Earthrise.”) http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/pla..._earthrise.jpg

John Hollander wrote an instructive book, The Gazer's Spirit, 'poems speaking to silent works of art' -- which categorizes 'ecphrasis' by instances in which, variously: (a) we know a particular object is being confronted; (b) we know precisely what the object is; and (c) the actual object described is available for us to consider. When (c) is the case, it is 'actual ekphrasis.' When neither (a) nor (b) obtain, and we may be dealing with a fictional work of art, it is 'notional ekphrasis' -- so, Margaret - I guess the Larkin is an instance of 'notional' ekphrasis.

-- FrankText

On the First Good Day, I'm going to go back to Sharon Passmore's post about how to italicize /:

[This message has been edited by FOsen (edited August 02, 2003).]

As Sebastian Levy has posted a Holub on the Skool thread, I thought he might have liked to be invited to this party.

Masterpiece
(Miroslav Holub, Trans. Dana Habova and David Young)

The only masterpiece
I ever created
was a picture of the moth Thysania agrippina
in pastel on grey paper.

Because I was never
much good at painting. The essence of art
is that we aren't very good at it.

The moth Thysania agrippina
rose from the stiff grey paper
with outstretched, comb-like antennae,

with a plush bottom resembling the buttocks
of the pigwidgeons of Hieronymus Bosch,
with thin legs on a shrunken chest
like those on Breughel's grotesque figures
in 'Dulle Griet', it turned into Dulle Griet
with a bundle of pots and pans in her bony hand,

it turned into Bodhiddharma
with long sleeves,

it was Ying or Shade
and Yang or Light, Chwei or Darkness
and Ming or Glow, it had
the black colour of water, the ochre colour of earth,
the blue colour of wood.

I was as proud of it as an Antwerp councillor,
or the Tenth Patriarch from the Yellow River,

I sprinkled it with shellac, which is
the oath that painters swear on Goethe's Science of Colours,
and then the art teacher took it to his study

and I forgot all about it
the way Granny used to forget
her dentures in a glass.

My poem Japanese for Beginners: A Triptych drifts in and out of fantasies regarding Japanese film, drama, screens and prints. This is the final section:

An aijin is a lover who has gone
away; an imprint made another day,
the final woodblock in a triptych frame:
a pentimento leaning on a wall:

bright colors paling into faded tones –
deep muted golds, moss greens, soft browns
of hidden courtyards, bare tatami rooms,
dark purple silk kimono crumpled there -

An aijin is a lover left alone
one day; a single floating island in
the fog-bound Inland Sea; a charcoal line,
a twisted pine, a rock, a memory

uncertain as a cross-cut flashback torn
from Rashomon; a woman, man, a gate,
a storm; their two divergent views; the truth
becomes a rubbing from a worn-down stone;

a palimpsest of touch and flesh, of hair
and scent and fantasy that once one time
a loved one was who was to stay - not drift
apart in slanting rain across the arch

of some forgotten bridge and leave behind
in Grand Kabuki stance - two swords tucked in
his puckered sash, a fan in one pale hand -
abandoned to a walk-on role: aijin

For them what's interested, the complete poem is on Jerry Hartwig's Buckeye web site (HERE IS THE LINK) .

Michael Cantor

Here's one I workshopped here and also posted on Art Museum:

Echoing Eden
(on Fred Tomaselli’s “Untitled” 2000)

Transparent, scarlet veins exposed, they’re dwarfed
by stippled sky that shines with images
of lips and hands, of eyes and eye-like leaves,
of perfect butterflies and blooming daisies
merged with modern psychotropic pills—
a foretaste of man's fate? Expelled, the pair
depart His garden, bowed and sick at heart,
poisoned by the fruit that tempted them
to know both good and evil, and they do.
They step into a marijuana patch,
the borderland between what was and is—
elegiac, this artwork intimates
an herbal Eden echoing a gleam
of what they lost, the glory and the dream.

The image:
http://www.stylusart.com/noticias/Bi...in/dibujo1.htm



------------------
Ralph

Had I remembered it earlier, Seamus Heaney's Poet's Chairmight well have been my first choice for this thread. IMO it is among the best pieces in 'The Spirit Level' and is typically Heaneyesque in its gentle self-mockery and celebrations of integrity and rootedness. It repays careful reading. First time round, I failed to spot the crucial pun on the concluding 'every sense'. I believe the sculpted chair stands in the courtyard of Wilton Park House, Dublin, but am open to correction on that point!

'Poet's Chair'

for Carolyn Mulholland

Leonardo said: the sun has never
Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move
Full circle round her next work, like a loverIn the sphere of shifting angles and fixed love.

1
Angling shadows of itself are what
Your 'Poet's Chair' stands to and rises out of
In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.
On thequi viveall the time, its four legs land
On their feet - catsfiit, goatfoot, bif soft splay-foot too;
Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.
Every flibbertigibbet in the town,
Old birds and boozers, late-night pissers, kissers,
All have a go at sitting on it some time.
It's the way the air behind them's winged and full,
The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades
That makes them happy. Once out of nature,
They're going to come back in leaf and bloom
An angel step. Or something like that. Leaves
On a bloody chair! Would you believe it?

2
Next thing I see the chair in a white prison
With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot,
Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.
His time is short. The day his trial began
A verdant boat sailed from Apollo's shrine
In Delos, for the annual rite
Of commemoration. Until its wreathed
And creepered rigging re-enters Athens
Harbour, the city's life is holy.
No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears
And none now as the poison does its work
And the expert jailer talks the company through
The stages of the numbness. Socrates
At the centre of the city and the day
Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves
Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.
Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth,
But for the moment everything's an ache
Deferred, unknown, imagined and most real.

3
My father's ploughing one, two, three, four sides
Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing
At centre field, my back to the thorn tree
They never cut. The horses are all hoof
And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.
Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time
Up and over. Of the chair in leaf
The fairy thorn is entering for the future.
Of being here for good in every sense.

Margaret.

I think "Nude Descending a Staircase" by X.J. Kennedy is a masterful example of this genre. He does not spend much time on detailed description of Duchamp's painting, but simply conveys the woman's graceful movement, which may (or may not, I am not sure) be present in the painting. I love the last lines of the first and second stanzas.


Nude Descending a Staircase

by X.J Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh—
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair,
Collects her motions into shape.


- Daniel

Daniel, that's a good one I had forgotten about. Very masterful indeed. Beyond ekphrastic, it invokes not just a painting but also another poet, Herrick's poem about the liquifaction of Julia's clothes (you know the one I mean).

Alicia—

Before this thread got going, I would have said there’s no real defense to be made of Housman’s dismissal of poetry on painting—a line merely from Housman in one of his crotchety moments.

But though I’ve found great poem after great poem reading this thread, in their bulk they begin to nag at me. I’m not sure it takes a critic of some particularly strict school to suggest that different arts have different ends. "Trying to write about music," runs a line usually attributed to Elvis Costello, "is like trying to dance about architecture." The visual-art obsessions of the New York poets have always seemed to me one of the things that trapped and limited them. I can imagine a great poem, like Auden’s, about seeing a painting, but the effort to make a poem into a painting—to do in poetry the work of painting—is something that seems to wreck poets. Tom Disch published an interesting article this spring on "why poets want to paint, and painters want to write," and to look at the photos of paintings by e.e. cummings and A.R. Ammons that accompanied the article was not to think anything good.

Of course, a poet can always mine other arts for various purposes: "As with paintings, so with poetry—Some are best seen close up, others from across the room." But when we speak, for instance, of the "musicality" of a poem, we know we are employing a metaphor, since poems that attempt to do nothing but the work of music don’t turn out to be great poems.

Now, obviously we can think of fantastic poems that refer to, perhaps rely on, music. Eliot’s "Four Quartets" are Beethoven haunted, maybe. Wallace Stevens’s "Peter Quince at the Clavier" contains an interesting reflection on music. I’ve always had a soft spot of Browning’s "A Toccata of Galuppi’s."

But I worry about attempts to make music in poetry. There was an overwritten and mind-numbingly long article in the Atlantic Monthly a couple years ago that argued against much contemporary use of music, but one point it made that I think I still believe is that thought is conveyed in such different ways by different arts that the thoughts themselves are fundamentally different.

And maybe there is a defense of Housman to be built out of the chance that poets, when they begin to write about the passive experiencing of some other art, will be lured into trying to make poetry into those other arts.

I’m not entirely convinced of this, you understand. But it does begin to seem to me that there may be more to the wariness about ekphrastic poems than this thread has so far given credit.

Jody

In one of Larkin's letters he quotes Tony Harrison(?) saying about a poem: see such-and-such a painting. Larkin's response is: "Why should I?" It is good point and explains why he wrote about an imaginary painting. If you need the painting the poem doesn't work. If the poem is good, you don't need to see the painting.

It was perhaps unfair on Housman to toss in his comment without context. (And as I think most folks, know I am a HUGE Housman fan.) This is in a selection of letters to his brother, Laurence, and is in a series of comments on some of Laurence's own poems that were sent to him:

"Poems on pictures seem to me an illegitimate genre, but Autumn Leves is a favourable specimen. . ."

Of course, Housman is capable of being crotchety for its own sake, and of leavening his praise with a sharp remark. But despite his razor-like candor with his brother about his poems, his comments are usually also generous in their way.

And by this comment, I do not think he is dismissing all ekphrasitc poetry outright (certainly not Homer or Virgil, of course). (Nor is Keat's urn a "picture"--nor is it, as far as anyone has been able to find, I believe--a single urn.)

He is quite willing to admit a "favourable specimen" of poems on picutres when he sees it. But as far as lyric poetry goes, I think he considers it something hybrid and not "pure" poetic utterence. He seems to simply be expressing a suspicion of it. And I think there is something to this concern.

So, what's a "pure" poetic utterance? How are we to define "pure" (let alone agree on who gets to define it)?

I always thought one of the more interesting developments in all of the arts, particularly since the advent of modernism, are these "hybrids." One of my favorite painters, for instance, is Elizabeth Murray, whose shaped canvases bridge the genres of sculpture and painting. ntozake shange's amazing "choreopoem" (her term) for colored girl who have considered suicide when the rainbow/is enuf mixes poetry, dance, music and drama. shange based the work on a series of poems by Judy Grahn, called "The Common Women Poems" and includes in it nursery rhymes, pop songs, and trendy dances. Laurie Anderson's amazing United States, Parts I-IV is a seminal work of performance art, combining music, visual art and spoken word pieces. None of these works are "pure," by anyone's definition.

Artists have always taken source material from wherever they find most useful to suit their purposes. The ekphrastic poems I've read that fail for me do so because they don't do anything with their source material beyond describing it. That may be the same "suspicion" as Housman's, I don't know for certain. But to read something like XJ Kennedy's poem on the Duchamp painting "Nude Descending the Staircase" (based as it is not only on cubism's analysis of the picture plain but also Muybridge's photographs of humans in motion) gives me another way of appreciating the painting. I know I will be remembering "Collects her motions into shape" whenever I see it again.

Thank the heavens for the impure.

Adaptations of one artistic medium to another have been much on my mind lately.

In the past, when my girls have selected a video or DVD from the library or rental store, they've always chosen one based on a book we've read. With rare exceptions, they have been bitterly disappointed in the film adaptations. The most recent fiasco was with the Disney version of Summer of the Monkeys. Wilson Rawls' book had been one of their favorite read-alouds of all time; the movie changed everything about the characters except their names, and altered so many important details and themes of the book so drastically as to be unrecognizable.

"Why?" my girls ranted, in tears. "Why would they take out everything that made it a good story in the first place, and add all this other junk that has nothing to do with anything? And Jay Berry and Daisy were totally different people in the novel. They were so bratty in the movie that I didn't even like them anymore. If they're going to change everything that much, they should change the kids' names and the title, too. That wasn't Jay Berry and that wasn't Summer of the Monkeys!"

I explained that books and movies are different media, and have different standards. Filmmakers try to include certain things that movie audiences expect in a "good" movie--lots of exciting action sequences, for example--whether or not they occurred in the book. But in order to make room to fit all those extra things in, some other aspects--the leisurely development and interaction of characters, for example--have to be left out. As a result, scriptwriters sometimes resort to a kind of shorthand, by turning the characters into stereotypes that the audience will recognize immediately, without much time or effort on the part of the director or actors; and those stereotypes have nothing to do with the unique characters we grew to know and love in the novel. Being faithful to the book is considered less important than providing the formulaic elements of what many filmmakers consider to be a successful movie.

But not all film adaptations of books are butcheries, even if they do change things profoundly; and not all ekphrastic poems are automatically garbage simply because they are derivative of another art form with different standards. Sure, not everything can be translated to the new medium, but a new emphasis and a new way of experiencing the themes of the original can be valuable in and of itself. It all lies in the execution, and successful execution in the new medium need not be overly faithful to the original.

Julie Stoner


[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited August 09, 2003).]

Well, one might object to some kind of cheap coat-tail leverage a bad poet tries to get out the other work of art; or to a poem that merely wallows around in doting description; or to a poem's success depending on the reader's knowing the picture/music (though I don't think that's the end of the world).

Jody, I saw today a sonnet of Rhina's on Escher where the octave does indeed draw his picture--but with words that add value to the Escher, not just describing. And then, of course . . . there's an Espaillat sestet.

But a poem is sparked by something; in an ekphrastic poem a picture, or music, is just a type of spark.

Yeah, Julie, but a slavish adherence to a book usually results in a boring movie. Look at the Harry Potter films. Of course having a lead actor with zero charisma doesn't help, but I didn't feel like I was watching a movie--it felt like a blow-by-blow transcription of the novels.

There's a truism in Hollywood that great books make dreary movies. I think there's something to that, although there are many exceptions that prove the rule.

But isn't it better that your kids prefer the book?

Tom

Deborah--

You're right, of course, and I wasn't saying that I buy the dismissal of poetry about painting or music--for I don't think I do. But I did want to get on record the idea that suspicion about such poetry isn't necessarily stupid or crackpot or some life-denying straightjacket that we great embracers of multitudinous contradiction have somehow managed in our greatness to throw off.

There remains, I think, an intelligent and artistically serious case to be made for refusing the ekphrastic. The fact that you and I in the end do not find it convincing doesn't mean it isn't serious. And perhaps it involves the mediation of experience: A still-life, for example, is an account of reality that has already passed through one mediating art, and if one of things that poetry claims to do is offer some insight into reality itself--the ontos on, in that great old Aristotelian formulation--then to expend the resources of poetry on something that is already mediated reality may be a waste. Or, perhaps, a slightly disreputable shortcut, if the poem simply takes over the work the painting has done and thereby avoids the hard work that is proper to poetry.

As I say, I don't find this fully convincing. But it strikes me as harder to rebut than I originally would have supposed. To build a philosophically or poetically serious aesthetics that explains what's wrong with it--that's going to take considerable thought at a very high level of both philosophy and poetry. And the end result might well leave us, if not dismissing poetry that relies on other arts, then at least registering an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome.

Jody

Out of curiosity: are there any poems inspired by paintings inspired by poems- Waterhouse's Lady of Shallott, say?- or paintings inspired by poems inspired by paintings? What would be the word for this?

Post-modernism

TeeJaay, in partial answer to your question, Where are the great works of art inspired by poetry?, the Pre-Raphaelites were fond of John Keats, and we have Sir John Everett Millais's Lorenzo and Isabella, illustrative of Keats's poem, "Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil," followed by William Holman Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil," 1866-1868. Some interesting trivia: while Millais accurately portrays Isabella as pining to death -- wan and thin -- Hunt was unable to paint Isabella this way, as his chosen model was his wife, Fanny, eight months pregnant at the time. She held her pose for hours in the Florentine September heat. Their son was born in October, but Fanny, unable to recover from the birth, died in December. Hunt thereafter threw himself into the work as a sort of mourning ritual, eventually creating a life-size version of his wife (to whom he had been married only eleven and a half months). His finished picture is over six feet tall. You can view both prints here:

http://www.abcgallery.com/liter/keats.html

Jennifer

Another ekphrastic poem, this one addressed to The Woodcutter by Kazimir Malevich:

<u>To Malevich's Woodcutter</u>

Wielder of axe, cleaver of branch and trunk,
your solid legs astride a chopped down tree,
sectioning wholeness, clearheaded as a monk
who flails his soul towards austerity,
you want the canvas of your world made light,
to break it down to logs of understanding
that, in your mind, can be the more commanding
for having suffered through your thudding blight.

Yet, with each slice you seem to be approaching
a place where neither branch nor trunk remains,
so log by log you're gradually encroaching
the forest's edge -- you're cutting near your veins.
The more you hack the more you'll turn to tubes,
which Malevich will splinter into cubes.

http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...n/homew01b.gif


Winslow Homer
Fog. He can see only this deep still fog.
Roweled by the falling sun it smoulders westward awhile
But it closes impenetrable curtains: night is fleshed.
No shore, save for the long jut of staggered rock
Shelving a black sharp stair to the burdened, hidden sea.
This he paints in his old aye, recording his utter love.
For him there is one canvas, thick with seventy years—
Picture over picture buried, each worked from the last.
Where are the children's faces in the morning schoolroom?
Far under the battlefields of the Civil War,
Eaten our by tenser light, man-riddled noon.
Even summer landscape empty kept a memory of people—
Visitors passing and strange. Then one seaman storm-struck.
All vanished now, washed over in a high tide of paint.
As though the colors of the world, faster and faster whirling,
Spun this still center of gray; this inevitable mist:
Sun lost, sea filled and covered,
The great stair of black rock deserted, used no more.

WINFIELD TOWNLEY SCOTT (1910-1968)



[This message has been edited by Glen (edited August 11, 2003).]

Well, but EVERY poem faces "an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome." It costs work and time to read, and the reader is "suspicious" to the extent that he wants to be compensated for both. H ewants your poem to give him enough--pleasure, to begin with, and then something more lasting, another kind of pleasure--to make his reading worth the trouble.

But it's not "purity" he's looking for. If the poem you;ve composed as a response to X painting or piece of music gives him that pleasure--both kinds--then it works for him, and he probably says, along with Nyctom (and with me, too!)
Let's hear it for the impure!

The point is, I think, that the X that triggers the poem is a hook on which the poet hangs it, like a person or an event or a remark overheard. It doesn't matter where the poet finds his hooks, it's what he hangs on them that's important.

And perhaps it involves the mediation of experience: A still-life, for example, is an account of reality that has already passed through one mediating art...

I don't relate to art as a mediated account of reality, but as a communication by the artist. When I interact with a work of visual art, my response is a response to what the artist has to say. This is qualitatively different, but fundamentally the same sort of thing, as the magic that happens between performers and audience in performance art.

A good ekphrastic poem, it seems to me, uses the poetic art to express the response of the poet to what the artist used the visual art to say. As such, it lets me in on that usually private dialogue between artist and viewer. I may or may not need to see the painting in order to really appreciate the poem, just as one part of an overheard telephone conversation may or may not make sense.

Victoria Gaile

Rhina:

That's such a good statement I had to quote it in full. I am going to print it out and keep it above the computer.

I have a big spot in my heart for the impure: people and things and ideas. Life's such an interesting mess; why shouldn't art reflect that (and isn't that an interesting paradox right there? to reflect that mess in a crafted fashion...)?

Hope all is well with you and your husband.

Slainte--
Tom

Dear Rhina,

I'm not sure how I got trapped into defending the proposition that poems based on other arts are to be deplored, since I don't believe it. My point was merely that it's not necessarily stupid or a sign that those who think so must not have "big spots in their hearts," as Nyctom would have it. He sees the idea as a kind of moral failing of narrowheartedness, you see it as a kind of poetical failing, and I see it as, well, something intelligent poets and critics might reasonably hold, though I happen not to, probably because I'm not intelligent enough, or poet enough, or critic enough.

Of course every poem faces an initial suspicion from the reader, but the question here, Rhina, is whether poems based on other arts ought properly to face a harsher suspicion--whether they have to clear a higher bar. Some poetry does confront such higher bars, I think. Object poems do not seem in themselves impossible to me, but they face a much higher initial burden in my reading. And if I can say that about one kind of poetry, why not about another--about poems based on works of visual art, for instance?

As it happens, such poems don't face that higher bar, for me. But a defense of why they needn't isn't as simple as it looks. Let me give one example, Rhina. When you write, "the X that triggers the poem is a hook on which the poet hangs it," you're making a philosophical assertion, both ontological and aesthetic, about the nature of those Xs, whether you intend that assertion or not. You're suggesting that a painting, a natural object, and a human action are all roughly the same sort of thing. They're all equivalent hooks.

Maybe so, but it's a pretty complex philosophical claim about the nature of reality. And one could reasonably join Plato in insisting that an apple isn't the same kind of thing as a painting of an apple, and when you write a poem about a painting of an apple, you've left the actual apple pretty far behind--too far behind, for those who want to reject poetry about painting.

Plato, of course, is going to ban the poets from the Republic, in part in response to the way they mediate reality. But there's a long line of platonistic poets writing prose essays of platonic defense of poetry--from Philip Sidney to Percy Shelley, just in English--and the platonic and neoplatonic poet is probably not going to agree with the view of reality implied by your description of how a poet works.

I've always thought Platonism was the wrong way to do aesthetics, but I'm loath to call its practitioners necessarily stupid or narrowhearted. If a smart guy and good poet like Housman wants to hold that poems about paintings face a higher initial suspicion than other poems, I'm all for letting him do it.

Jody



[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 14, 2003).]

I agree with what Rhina says about approaching all poems with suspicion, and I'm sure I do that all the time. But I seem to remember reading an exhortation by Roethke that readers should initially approach all poems with great respect and faith in the poet. (I can't find the exact quote). In other words, one should read all poems as if it were given that they are of the highest quality. If one approaches a poem with skepticism about its quality, it amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. I try, but generally fail, to maintain this attitude when I read poems posted for critique.

I think, perhaps, that this is one of the biggest problems with poetry submissions to magazines. Magazines receive thousands of poems, 99% of which are simply horrible, so it's only natural that editors will approach each poem with the expectation that it, too, will be horrible. And, I think, this attitude probably leads the editors to overlook some pretty fine poems. That's plainly the advantage a "name" poet has, since the expectation is reversed and the editor begins the poem with the thought that it is probably pretty good, since Richard Wilbur and Rhina Espaillat and Billy Collins and Louise Gluck, etc., don't generally send out substandard work, and the editor will approach their work with the attention and high hopes that Roethke felt all poems deserve. (I'm not saying that their poems don't deserve to be published in the best places, or that they never receive rejections --hmm, maybe Wilbur never receives rejections?-- only that their best work is less likely to be overlooked than similar work from someone without the same track record).

Roger, I wish you were the editor of every magazine I subscribe to, if you're making such generous assumptions! Alas, I must tell you right away that I'm swamped with rejection slips: evidently editors are the suspicious type. And maybe just as well: poems should be read as poems, period, not as poems from X or Y.

Jody, I'm with you completely about Housman! He may do anything he wants, and how I wish he were still around to do it, as then we would have more poems by a poet I love dearly.

No, my problem is not with any view of aesthetics at all, but with the notion that poems written in response to this-or-that are ABOUT this-or-that. I don't believe that: I think the poem is about its theme, and uses its subject--a very different thing in many cases--to get its foot in the reader's door. To change the metaphor, the bittersweet I keep yanking out in my garden creeps up all the shrubbery it can find, but it's not doing that for the sake of the shrubs, but for its own sake: it's not about the lilacs at all, but using the lilacs to be about the bittersweet.

Poems are equally opportunistic and stubborn. For the purposes of the poem, the painted scene is pretty much the same as the real bowl of fruit, or lost glove, or dead bird, or....I don't believe that the poem is any "farther" from its theme if the apple is a painted one as opposed to one in the bowl, because the "applehood" of the apple doesn't concern the poem in the first place.

But I certainly don't feel that any aesthetic view--or philosophical view of any kind, is "stupid" by its very nature, and thoroughly enjoy this kind of discussion! I don't think Nyctom was imputing stupidity to Housman's view, or hardness of heart, or narrowness--and certainly neither am I.

This is a fascinating topic that deserves its own discussion. There's some kind of initial inertia against a poem, of course. Reading isn't a natural reaction, but something we have to be trained to do, and so there's a sense in which the sheer physical act of reading a poem presents a burden that the poem has to be good enough to overcome.

But for anyone who likes reading poetry, this is a pretty low bar for a poem to have to clear. I've always thought that Coleridge's description of the willing suspension of disbelief we bring to stories meant something like the opposite of suspicion. Every story starts with the reader's good will--we will to suspend disbelief--and only a bad or badly told story breaks that mood.

Is there an equivalent for poems? Perhaps that's what Roethke means.

[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 15, 2003).]

This is a fun discussion.

But I must add a subtopic to Rhina's

"Alas, I must tell you right away that I'm swamped with rejection slips: "

Rhina,

Editors and writers work on inherently antithetical assumptions: writers want art, truth, beauty, etc, and editors want subscriptions. An art gallery does not exist for new achievement of art, galleries exist either to sell for profit or substantiate prior opinion.

I do not think that your poems are 'rejected,' the ones not taken are put aside so other writers can be printed and garner new subscribers.

Editors may have other ideas in their heads, as well, but I find it hard to apply the word 'rejected' to your work.

TJ

Wow, Rhina, that's about as final a rejection of Platonism as it's possible to make. I think I maybe agree with it--as I said before, I think Platonism the wrong way to do aesthetics--but I'd duck when I presented your proposition to any of our high poets, from Spencer to Eliot, with cosmic ambitions for their poetry. I imagine they believed poems could and ought to reach toward the inwardness of things: the esse, the real nature, the appleness of the apple.



[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 15, 2003).]

Yes, of course, Jody, but I think the poem has its OWN apple in mind--its own fish to fry--not the apple, fish, nude Maja, and so forth, that is may use as a ruse to get into what it really has in mind. It's aiming for the "esse" of that real theme, not the esse of the red herring, the subject. Half the fun of reading poetry is peeling the one from the other, detecting the ruse the poet has used to get us into his clutches--but only after it's too late and we're already in said clutches, of course!--and enjoying the double perception of the ruse and the poet's real purpose.

So much about poetry is "double" like that, sometimes even self-contradictory, like the opposition that sometimes exists between light-hearted metrics and heavy-hearted content, simple vocabulary and complex thought, and so on. I love those. Ekphrasis allows for a lot of that duplicity: imagine, for example, a poem whose theme is a dark and revolting memory, but whose subject is an illustration from a Valentine card, or some other innocuous and probably saccharine piece of commercial art. Would the poet be after the "esse" of heart-shaped candy boxes, or something other?

This is a fascinating discussion.

I suppose I would ask that if a poem's ostensible "subject" (read: "trigger") is not what the poem is "about," why do we need it? To take an extreme example, say I have a political opinion I would like to share, and say that one day I see a painting of an apple, the next I see a crack in the sidewalk, and the next an empty jelly jar, and use all three of these experiences as "jumping-off points" to expound my ideology in verse. Why do I need all these triggers? Why can't I just expound my ideology and have done with it, if there's nothing necessary in the trigger, if there's no reason it had to be this trigger and none other? And if there is a necessity, mustn't the very fact that the poem perceives it be a mediation, or illumination, of its reality?

We talk alot about the "leap" that poems make, to get from their topic to their subject. But how do we justify the poetic welding together of trigger object on the one hand and subject on the other if the two do not illuminate each other? Say we write a poem on Looove and our trigger is a Rodin statue. In my view the poem must, in saying something about the esse of love, say something about the esse of the Rodin statue as well, or we have no right to use it. Otherwise, why not pick a Donatello, or a Mozart symphony, or a blasted oak? I'm not really thinking of literary "tricks" here, like when we see Granny's knife hanging in her pantry and remember how chopping carrots that one day she lost her finger down the garbage dispose-all then bled to death on the kitchen floor, isn't death sad--but doesn't it seem from this alone that there's something inherently different between this sort of un-mediated, real-world trigger and a work of art? Is it that the knife-ness of the knife is a lot less interesting or important than the Rodin-ness of the Rodin? Or is it what Jody was saying from the beginning, that he has already illuminated reality, and that it is therefore not enough for us merely to illuminate the same reality, but to illuminate him? Or would we be shining a flashlight into the sun?

At any rate, I think wariness of ekphrasis quite justified, and I think this because it seems very easy for someone looking for something to write about just to go find a painting and write about it. You could pick one just as easily as another; there's nothing essential there driving you, no reason why it has to be this and nothing else, no necessity. Some poets may feel like they need at least one ekphrastic poem a book, just to keep their subject matter varied, or whatever. It's something that everybody does, some more than others, and seems that it could easily become a gimmick, when used by an undisciplined poet who thinks the painted apple is the same thing as the apple, sort of a waving of the arms and saying "Hey, look how refined I am, I appreciate art!" Of course, that Granny-haunted knife could become a gimmick too, or anything else, so I may be talking more about bad poetry than bad ekphrastic poetry; still, it seems to me the two are different, and have different dangers.

If closeness to the esse of the apple was the main criterion for value, I wouldn't read a poem at all. I'd eat an apple.

Harry