Excellent thread. Splendidly varied contributions, to which I'd like to add Fleur Adcock's provocative'The Ex-Queen among the Astronomers', first published in a 1979 collection The Inner Harbour and frequently anthologised. Maddeningly I can't recall the painter or location of the ?17C ?18C painting- although I can visualise it and think I may have seen the original. An hour's search of the Web has failed to deliver.If no-one on the Sphere can help out I'll try to contact the poet.

The monarch in question was Ex-Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia (daughter of Jas I of England and VI of Scotland, AKA 'The Winter Queen') and Adcock's poem contains echoes of William Wotton's tribute to her which begins 'Ye meaner beauties of the night'.
SEPT 2 CORRECTION WITH APOLOGIES!
A letter from the poet (Fleur Adcock)informs me that my assumptions were wrong. The title of her poem came into her head (she says) from nowhere. Her Ex-Queen was loosely based on 60s press accounts of the jet-setting Soraya of Iran, divorced by the Shah in 1958 - like her predecessor - because of her inability to bear children. For more on the 'sad queen' (including the desecration of her Paris grave) enter'Soraya' and 'Iran' on Google. FA adds that she'spent many happy hours with the encyclopaedia learning about astronomy'.

So, strictly speaking, this is not an ekphrastic poem. However, I'm letting it stay because there ARE several paintings simply entitled 'The Astronomers'. Before my first long-ago reading the FA poem I'd seen and remembered a well-known picture (of 17C or 18C vintage) depicting earnest academic types in dark attire together with a selection of instruments. Into this my tricksy memory/imagination inserted the image of Adcock's ex-queen - whom I assumed to be Elizabeth of Bohemia because of her fame and dates.
I strongly suspect Fleur Adcock may have seen the same painting - and that it may have had an unconscious influence on her choice of subject!

My attempts to supply a direct link from another site didn't work, so here is the text.

THE EX-QUEEN AMONG THE ASTRONOMERS

They serve revolving saucer eyes,
dishes of stars; they wait upon
huge lenses hung aloft to frame
the slow procession of the skies.

They calculate, adjust, record,
watch transits, measure distances.
They carry pocket telescopes
to spy through when they walk abroad.

Spectra possess their eyes; they face
upwards, alert for meteorites,
cherishing little glassy worlds:
receptacles for outer space.

But she, exile, expelled, ex-queen,
swishes among the men of science
waiting for cloudy skies, for nights
when constellations can't be seen.

She wears the rings he let her keep;
she walks as she was taught to walk
for his approval, years ago.
His bitter features taunt her sleep.

And so when these have laid aside
their telescopes, when lids are closed
between machine and sky, she seeks
terrestrial bodies to bestride.

She plucks this one or that among
the astronomers, and is become
his canopy, his occultation;
she sucks at earlobe, penis, tongue

mouthing the tubes of flesh; her hair
crackles, her eyes are comet-sparks.
She brings the distant briefly close
above his dreamy abstract stare.

FLEUR ADCOCK




Margaret.



[This message has been edited by Campoem (edited September 02, 2003).]

But why so few poems here (and in mags) based on 20th/21st century pieces? Are poetry readers assumed to be clueless about "Modern Art" or is it harder to do justice in words to the newer schools of art http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif ?

Two by Frank O'Hara, who had been a curator of modern painting at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, before his accidental death in the early 1960s. He also wrote one of my favorite poems about the movies, "To the Film Industry in Crisis," which I can't find on the web and is, quite frankly, much too long to type out, but well worth tracking down. O'Hara once said only three poets were better than the movies--and I think he was more right than wrong about that!

This is about a Jackson Pollack painting, one of the famous "all-over" drip/splatter abstractions:


Digression On Number 1, 1948

I am ill today but I am not
too ill. I am not ill at all.
It is a perfect day, warm
for winter, cold for fall.

A fine day for seeing. I see
ceramics, during lunch hour, by
Miro, and I see the sea by Leger;
light, complicated Metzingers
and a rude awakening by Brauner,
a little table by Picasso, pink.

I am tired today but I am not
too tired. I am not tired at all.
There is the Pollock, white, harm
will not fall, his perfect hand

and the many short voyages. They'll
never fence the silver range.
Stars are out and there is sea
enough beneath the glistening earth
to bear me toward the future
which is not so dark. I see.


***


On Seeing Larry Rivers' Washington Crossing The Delaware
At The Museum Of Modern Art


Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.

To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding

on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they're smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.

Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific

and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.


***


And a fun poem by Elizabeth Bishop, about a painting by her uncle:


Large Bad Picture

Remembering the Strait of Belle Isle or
some northerly harbor of Labrador,
before he became a schoolteacher
a great-uncle painted a big picture.

Receding for miles on either side
into a flushed, still sky
are overhanging pale blue cliffs
hundreds of feet high,

their bases fretted by little arches,
the entrances to caves
running in along the level of a bay
masked by perfect waves.

On the middle of that quiet floor
sits a fleet of small black ships,
square-rigged, sails furled, motionless,
their spars like burnt match-sticks.

And high above them, over the tall cliffs'
semi-translucent ranks,
are scribbled hundreds of fine black birds
hanging in n's in banks.

One can hear their crying, crying,
the only sound there is
except for occasional sizhine
as a large aquatic animal breathes.

In the pink light
the small red sun goes rolling, rolling,
round and round and round at the same height
in perpetual sunset, comprehensive, consoling,

while the ships consider it.
Apparently they have reached their destination.
It would be hard to say what brought them there,
commerce or contemplation.

***

There is also a marvelous poem by Adrienne Rich, based on a Jean Renoir film. I pulled this off the web so I am not sure about the lineation:


I Dream I'm the Death of Orpheus

I am walking rapidly through striations of light and dark
thrown under an arcade.
I am a woman in the prime of life with certain powers,
and those powers severely limited
by authorities whose faces I rarely see.
I am a woman in the prime of life
driving her dead poet in a black Rolls-Royce
through a landscape of twilight and thorns.
A woman with a certain mission
which if obeyed to the letter will leave her intact.
A woman with the nerves of a panther
a woman with contacts among Hell's Angels
a woman feeling the fullness of her powers
at the precise moment when she must not use them
a woman sworn to lucidity
who sees through the mayhem, the smoky fires
of those underground streets
her dead poet learning to walk backward against the wind
on the wrong side of the mirror.

Another based on a modern painting, this is one of my absoulute favorites by Sylvia Plath. The painting it is based on is by Georgio de Chirico.


The Disquieting Muses

Mother, mother, what illbred aunt
Or what disfigured and unsightly
Cousin did you so unwisely keep
Unasked to my christening, that she
Sent these ladies in her stead
With heads like darning-eggs to nod
And nod and nod at foot and head
And at the left side of my crib?

Mother, who made to order stories
Of Mixie Blackshort the heroic bear,
Mother, whose witches always, always,
Got baked into gingerbread, I wonder
Whether you saw them, whether you said
Words to rid me of those three ladies
Nodding by night around my bed,
Mouthless, eyeless, with stitched bald head.

In the hurricane, when father's twelve
Study windows bellied in
Like bubbles about to break, you fed
My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine
And helped the two of us to choir:
"Thor is angry: boom boom boom!
Thor is angry: we don't care!"
But those ladies broke the panes.

When on tiptoe the schoolgirls danced,
Blinking flashlights like fireflies
And singing the glowworm song, I could
Not lift a foot in the twinkle-dress
But, heavy-footed, stood aside
In the shadow cast by my dismal-headed
Godmothers, and you cried and cried:
And the shadow stretched, the lights went out.

Mother, you sent me to piano lessons
And praised my arabesques and trills
Although each teacher found my touch
Oddly wooden in spite of scales
And the hours of practicing, my ear
Tone-deaf and yes, unteachable.
I learned, I learned, I learned elsewhere,
From muses unhired by you, dear mother,

I woke one day to see you, mother,
Floating above me in bluest air
On a green balloon bright with a million
Flowers and bluebirds that never were
Never, never, found anywhere.
But the little planet bobbed away
Like a soap-bubble as you called: Come here!
And I faced my traveling companions.

Day now, night now, at head, side, feet,
They stand their vigil in gowns of stone,
Faces blank as the day I was born,
Their shadows long in the setting sun
That never brightens or goes down.
And this is the kingdom you bore me to,
Mother, mother. But no frown of mine
Will betray the company I keep.

***


Really, there are quite a bunch of ekphrastic poems based on modern art. These bunch are just off the top of my head and readily accessible on the web. O'Hara, for instance, has quite a few other ekphrastic poems based on modern art. The New York poets were intimately associated with abstract expressionists. Then there is Apollonaire in France during the early part of the 20th century, who was intimately associated with Picasso and Braque and a whole host of modernist painters living in Paris. Then there is the work of David Trinidad, a contemporary poet who integrates pop culture references with established forms with great gay aplomb. One of my favorites of his is a sestina based on the game Clue, where the lines read:

Mrs Plum in the kitchen with a candlestick.
Colonel Mustard in the conservatory with a rope
etc.

all conforming the strictures of a traditional sestina. He has another poem, "Meet the Supremes," where a good 40 or so lines are simply the names of girl groups from the early 1960s. And this is his homage to a great movie, "All About Eve," all done as a series of linked haiku:



9 Cigarettes

(Bette Davis, All About Eve)


Awards banquet: den
of sin. Lit like loaded gun
aimed point-blank at Eve.

*

Run-down dressing room,
Kabuki cold cream. Enrapt:
Eve’s self-creation.

*

Phone rings, 3 a.m.
Bill’s call from Beverly Hills.
Eyes wide to Eve’s scheme.

*

Next morning, breakfast
in bed. “Birdie, you don’t like
Eve.” Blueprint theory.

*

“Fasten your seatbelts”:
perhaps the most famous cig
of last century.

*

Late for audition,
rages onstage. Bushwhacked by
understudy Eve.

*

Stuck on snowy road,
hair down, regrets misconduct
toward all, even Eve.

*

Cub Room: the elite
meet. Great actress to wed Bill.
No more about Eve.

*

Back at banquet: same
cig? Eyes Eve evilly as
she collects her prize.

Tom,
Many thanks indeed for such a rich and varied sample (all new to me except the Bishop.)
Margaret.

Houseman's objection doesn't hold much water, mainly because of precedent: is Homer cheating when he describes Achilles Shield, the images on which he had undubitably seen on pottery, if not all on the same pot. Or is Spencer cheating when he describes the tapistry telling the story of Venus and Adonis in the House of Lust, because Spencer might have used a real tapestry as his model? The same thing probably goes for more famous works of visual art: if you can translate whatever the painter was trying to say or do into words, the more power too you. Here's one from William Carlos William's "Picture's from Brueghel" about same Icarus painting as the Auden.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Cocteau, actually. Both the Orphee films are worth seeing.
I'm surprised no-one mentioned Anthony Hecht's The Deodand.
There's an anthology, The Gazer's Spirit by John Hollander, and a whole book of ekphrastic poems by the Irish poet Paul Durcan (can't remember the title- sorry). A friend told me about them, so I can't say if they're good or not.

Yes, you're right. I had just watched The Grand Illusion recently--God Bless the New York Public Library--and that IS a Renoir film. Thank you for pointing out the mistake to me. What's the Fwensh for "oops"? And the Cocteau film is just magical. It puts schlock like the Harry Potter films into perspective. Absolutely worth seeing (as is Ingmar Bergman's "The Magician"--which I just watched last night and is ripe for poeming up by someone).

Was zipping through Marianne Moore and stumbled across an old favorite. Pick up a copy of her poems for the formatting.


No Swan So Fine

"No water so still as the
dead fountains of Versailles." No swan,
with swart blind look askance
and gondoliering legs, so fine
as the chintz china one with fawn-
brown eyes and toothed gold
collar on to show whose bird it was.

Lodged in the Louis Fifteenth
candelabrum-tree of cockscomb-
tinted buttons, dahlias,
sea urchins, and everlastings,
it perches on the branching foam
of polished sculptured
flowers - at ease and tall. The king is dead.

Why not a separate thread on Moore? She has a new complete edition of poems--including all the inane variations--coming out shortly. And she is formal is such interesting, if not idiosyncratic ways. Just a thought.

I spent a long time getting nowhere on a poem about Stroheim as an aristocratic flying ace(!) in La grand illusion- a feat he carried off by sheer nerve! Have you seen Les Regles du Jeu? I think it's even better. i don't know much about Moore, so I'll keep an eye out for her poems.

‘Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt’


We watch through the shop-front while
Blackie draws stars—an equal

concentration on his and
the youngster’s faces. The hand

is steady and accurate;
but the boy does not see it

for his eyes follow the point
that touches (quick, dark movement!)

a virginal arm beneath
his rolled sleeve: he holds his breath.

…Now that it is finished, he
hands a few bills to Blackie

and leaves with a bandage on
his arm, under which gleam ten

stars, hanging in a blue thick
cluster. Now he is starlike.


By Thom Gunn

You could say this was about modern art. I hope most readers will agree that this poem was inspired by a work of art. And most would figure out on their own that it is written in syllabics, though I might save folk some time and effort by mentioning it.

This is from Gunn’s book, MY SAD CAPTAINS (1961), which contains a number of other astonishing poems written in syllabics, with slant rhymes. Though his metrical work, and his free verse for that matter, are impeccable, it’s more than a bit of a head-scratcher to me that he abandoned syllabics after ’61.

I was fortunate enough to study with Gunn at Berkeley in the mid-seventies. I mean to resurrect the Musing on Mastery thread on him, if I find the time to add something new and cogent to it (I refer, of course, to my comments--plenty of fresh and cogent poems of his to chose from). Meanwhile, this poem of his holds up after forty years, doesn’t it?