Sorry to have been scarce around these parts of late. Only just returned from the island conference.

An issue I've been pondering. It seems to me that we must have discussed this at some point... but looking back, I haven't found it. How to write about art? (Or should one? Housman, for instance, considered poems on paintings an illegitimate genre.)

I'm interested in what favorite ekphrastic poems folks here may have. Or any ekphrastic poems of your own? Any thoughts on this topic?

I'll start things rolling with the obvious:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

-- W. H. Auden


Also a wonderful piece of het-met. And so gracefully rhymed--it was years before I even noticed.

Here's a link to a selection of about 40 poems, each with the relevant picture -

http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Paintin...titlepage.html




[This message has been edited by H Roland Angus R (edited September 09, 2003).]

"The Offering of the Heart" is a famous Flemish Tapestry from the early 15th century, considered by some to be the "original valentine".

I do not know the author of the following, and I cannot google it up, but I have it almost verbatim in memory.

*******************

The Offering of the Heart

Against a somber background, blue as midnight,
more blank and rich than cloud, as dark as storm,
the almost-moving leaves are almost golden,
the light is almost warm.

Seated, a lady in a cloak of ermine
holds on her hand, correctly gloved and bent,
a falcon, without feathered hood or jesses.
Her gaze appears intent

On what her hound, good little dog, is doing
about her ankles, left front paw in air,
heedless of the two white, careless rabbits.
He does not see them there,

Or turn, as does the falcon, toward the gallant,
the gentleman, more elegant than smart,
wearing a crimson cloak with ermine lining,
who offers her his heart,

Holding it gently between thumb and finger,
whose "U" it does not fill, a plum in size,
a somewhat faded strawberry in color.
She does not raise her eyes.

How can a heart be beating in the bosom,
and yet held out so lightly in the hand?
Innocence. Mystery. An age of science
could scarcely understand.

***********************

Since I can't locate the original (I read it once, thirty years or so ago) I cannot check my accuracy, but on other long-remembered poems I'm usually pretty close.

Below is a link to an image of, and discussion of, the tapestry that inspired the poem. When I taught photography, in my first class each semester I'd recite this poem, and then after discussion I'd show an image of the tapestry. Then I'd ask each student to describe in words a photograph they held in high regard, as an assignment.

In the next class session we'd read the descriptions, see if anybody could identify the photo from the words(surprisingly often they could), and then show the actual photo. It was (and is) my contention that, as Richard Avedon said, "The art of seeing is the beginning of Art", and I found this exercise extremely useful in leading students to a truer visualization, or a deeper one, of things.

(robt)

http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/m/mas.../05offeri.html



[This message has been edited by Robt_Ward (edited July 17, 2003).]

Was "Leda and the Swan" based on a painting, or did I make that up?

I read somewhere the casual opinion that ekphrastic poetry began as "descriptive-type writing." In my understanding it wasn't "descriptive" writing so much as the creation by description of a work of art within a poem, such as the Shield of Achilles or the cups of Alcimedon in the Eclogues. By those criteria, Ode on a Grecian Urn would also be ekphrastic, since it isn't really based on one pot as much as the creation of one from scattered sources.

Also, I'm not sure but I think Wilbur's "This Pleasing Anxious Being" is about photographs; at least, the second part is, and the first could be, though it doesn't seem to fit with the third. Photographs and memories. Ekphrastic or not, it's great.

Chris

[This message has been edited by Chris Childers (edited July 17, 2003).]

Chris,

It's generally accepted (or claimed, anyway) that Yeats was writing about Michelangelo's version when he did this poem. There's apparently also an Hellenistic Relief that scholars feel influenced the poem. In any event, the subject itself has been so often depicted in classical painting and sculpture, as well as by poets such as Ovid et al, that certainly Yeats was working from a foundation here.

Here's a quote from the link at the bottom of this page. The link's well worth checking out.

According to Charles Madge* the above mentioned Hellenistic relief would have inspired Yeats. Which is evidenced by the flapping of the wings, the emphasis on the web on Leda’s thighs, but foremost by the way in which the swan catches Leda’s neck and presses her face against its breast.

But equally right are all those who traditionally maintain that the poem is inspired by Michelangelo’s Leda. To begin with, Yeats’ Leda does not stand upright, as she does on the Hellenistic relief. She is lying supine, as with Michelangelo. And even when the webs on Leda’s thighs may also appear on the relief, marble has no colour, and it is precisely the resonance of that colour black that is more than echoed in that splendid ’her thighs caressed by the dark webs’. But foremost those ‘terrified fingers’ betray that also the painting of Michelangelo lies at the roots of Yeats’ sonnet. Even when they ward off, rather than wriggle out of pleasure. The mere fact that Yeats’ Leda uses frail fingers rather than full arms to ward off the brutal swan, at once reminds us of the fact that also on the Hellenistic relief Leda does not ward off. With her full arm she rather eagerly extends a helping hand – her wriggling fingers being hidden from view through the thighs.

http://d-sites.net/english/yeats.htm

(robt)

I saw an excellent one in last month's Atlantic. Can't remember the author.

Thanks all for responding... Hello Bob!

An ekphrastic poem doesn't have to be based on a real work of art--it would include, as Chris points out, Homer's description of the Shield of Achilles (and Auden's), Catullus' description of Ariadne, Virgil's description of the Daedelean gates, etc., etc.

"Leda and the Swan" would be a curiously convoluted case... as paintings would tend in their turn to take details from Ovid (where she is indeed supine), though that is only a few lines from the depiction (ekphrastic) of Arachne's tapestry. Whew.

Ovid, obviously, cannot be overestimated in his influence on paintings of mythological subjects.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" one of the all-time greatest ekphrastic poems.

Speaking of which, here's a little poem by Christopher Bakken from his "After Greece" which is in conversation with the Keats:

Terra Incognita
Phaestos, 17th.c. B.C.E.

Disc, you were buried so long we forgot
how to read: hieratic or hieroglyphic,
surely these doodads signify something.

From rim to center your brave little men
and large-breasted women leap backwards
among shields and beehive thingamabobs.

Who's chasing whom, where on earth, for what?
If only you were marble or hematite,
you might be venerable, sacred: but clay?

Foundling of fires unwilling to speak,
you make, along with us, companion carbon,
a common corporation of dust.

RACHMANINOFF ON THE MASS PIKE


It calls the heart, this music, to a place
more intimate than home, than self, that face
aging in the hall mirror. This is not
music to age by—no sprightly gavotte
or orderly pavane, counting each beat,
confining motion to the pointed feet
and sagely nodding head; not Chopin, wise
enough to keep some distance in his eyes
between perceiver and the thing perceived.
No, this is song that means to be believed,
that quite believes itself, each rising wave
of passionate crescendo, wise and brave.
The silly girl who lived inside my skin
once loved this music; its melodic din
was like the voice she dreamed in, sad, intense.
She didn’t know a thing, she had no sense;
she scorned—and needed—calendar and clock,
the rules, the steps, the lines, Sebastian Bach;
she wanted life to break her like a tide—
but not too painfully. On either side
the turnpike trundles by, nurseries, farms,
small towns with schools and markets in their arms,
small industry, green spaces now and then.
All the heart wants is to be called again.

By Rhina P. Espaillat

Thought of Rilke’s “Archaic Toros of Apollo” and Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” but the above poem might not be as well known. Yet.

And, at this point, I don’t see another poem on a piece of music on this thread.

We actually had an ekphrastic poetry competition over at PFFA recently. For what it's worth, this was my entry -



I found looking for a subject an interesting exercise. I went to the V&A (the Victoria and Albert Museum - a museum of decorative arts) with no real preconceptions about the kind of poem I wanted to write, and wandered around looking for a piece I could write a poem about. I quickly found that just looking for pieces I liked wasn't particularly useful; it was more important to have angle to approach the work from. So in the case of the one I actually used, it's a sculpture of the Virgin and child, but Mary is looking weary - tired and perhaps a touch pissed off. So that gave me a way of writing about it - trying to find an answer or answers to why she looked like that.

More generally, one of the things I like about ekphrastic poetry is that the reader can share the source material with the poet. Ideally, the poem should also work as a free-standing piece, but it's interesting to read the poem with the picture in front of you. Unlike a poem about, say, a funeral, where the reader is very much at the mercy of the poet in the way the experience is presented to them, you approach a poem about a familiar painting more as an equal with the poet. You have your own tale on the painting, they present theirs, and it almost becomes a dialogue where you are exchanging your responses to a shared experience. In fact, it's a three-way dialogue - as well as the normal interaction of poem and reader, there's the interaction between poem and painting, in which hopefully the poem draws strength from the painting as well as casting light on it.

Anyway, enough waffle.

Harry

[This message has been edited by H Roland Angus R (edited July 18, 2003).]

Thanks for posting these wonderful ekphrastic poems. I can't resist making a little contribution of my own...


WHISTLER DECORATES THE PEACOCK ROOOM, 1876-1877

The room an empty space that he would fill
with his extravagant design--with blue
and gold he'd lavish everywhere until
the room outshone what it would hold and through
such alchemy allowed him to forget
the canvases he'd left for months undone;
those spare arrangements he could not perfect
with hours of study, then a quick, pained lunge
with brush and paint.
..........................Not like this dizzy joy,
this circling round and round the gilded room
'til even he could gild no more, so buoyant
with the borrowed brilliance of that plumage
that he invited half of London out
to see his triumph over painted doubt.


Please note that the dots in the the second half of line 9 are not part of the poem; I couldn't get the text to indent otherwise!

Lisa

I've always admired Sylvia Plath's sestina on a painting by Rousseau. The repetends of the sestina work so well because they stand in for the eye moving around the canvas, looking at each of the elements or colors again and again.

The poem also deals with critical disapproval by literalists of a work of art which placed a respectable parlor couch in a jungle. It's a prescient description of what she herself would face from certain quarters, she who dared to write both "respectable" poems on classical themes using classical methods, and jungly poems with wild juxtapositions and heated imagery. If she had lived, no doubt she would have explained her method in a way to satisfy or mollify critics, much as Rousseau explains his methods in the poem, but like Rousseau, the real answer would have been a matter of vivid possesion and vivid aesthetics.

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

A Sestina for the Douanier

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you
Came to be lying on this baroque couch
Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye
Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,
Set in an intricate wilderness of green
Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies
It seems the consistent critics wanted you
To choose between your world of jungle green
And the fashionable monde of the red couch
With its prim bric-à-brac, without a moon
To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye
And body whiter than its frill of lilies:
They'd have had yellow silk screening the moon,
Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you
Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch
Stood stubborn in its jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,
The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.
So Rousseau, to explain why the red couch
Persisted in the picture with the lilies,
Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,
And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon
On a red velvet couch within your green-
Tessellated boudoir. Hearing flutes, you
Dreamed yourself away in the moon's eye
To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies
Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch
Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon
And the snakecharmer's song and the gigantic lilies,
Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.
But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye
So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch
To feed his eye with red, such red! under the moon,
In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!

---------------
The painting: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/le_douanier_...iens/freve.htm

What a wonderful thread! Thanks for starting it, Alicia, and welcome back!

I have a question about ekphrasis: I may be wrong about this, as about so much else, but doesn't the word refer to art in any genre--painting, poetry, music, whatever--based on a response to art in some other form? For instance, is Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" an ekphrastic work? Or Degas' paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers?Or does the term refer only to poetry so inspired?

It would be my understanding that yes, ekphrastic could refer to any genre describing another work of art.

Ekphrasis is just ancient Greek for description.

Gwynn, Tufariello, Sullivan and Davis have all written terrific ekphrastic poems. I have started many ekphrastic poems, but of my 225 poems, only one is Ekphrastic:

The Muromachi Cranes

With outstretched wings the dancers pirouette.
Arching graceful necks
they open great green beaks
and join their voices in a wild duet.

Preening and strutting on a silken stage
the cranes are not dismayed
that painted feathers fade.
Immortals grow more ravishing with age.

Contentedly they wade the swirling ink
of their appointed pool
where spawning minnows school
and poets are prohibited to drink.

As the sun sets on snow peaks in the West
snow cranes contemplate
the chirps which emanate
from the lone egg sequestered in their nest.

Over that egg a four-toed foot is curled
as though a Taoist sage
in a thatched hermitage
slowly revolves the ovum of the world.

Here's a piece I wrote that I've been told is NOT an ekphrastic. How does it escape the frame?

Still Life

My wife of thirty years
paints a picture of a turnip,
an eggplant, and an onion.
Behind them, a male
and female couch potato
stare at the arrangement
as if it were TV.
The rutabaga's perfect.
The eggplant gleams,
swollen, onyx.
The woman on the divan leers.
The sable darts
at the Spanish bulb.
I watch its breath
lift a scrap of skin.

"How do you do that?"
I beg my wife of thirty years.

She stares at me
as if I were the fellow on the couch.
She daubs rose madder
on my nose:
"I have no idea."

I know that a lot of people profess to dislike ekphrastic poems on principle. But while I don't very often enjoy poems-about-poetry (unless they're on the surface level about something else altogether, like Alicia's wonderful bat sonnet), I've always had a weakness for poems inspired by a work of art or a piece of music. Maybe it's because there's a natural tension or challenge involved in the translation of a non-verbal art into words. It's a bit like translation from another language in that it requires a certain humility from the poet, a willingness to give him or herself over to the vision of another artist and often, of another time or culture as well.

Lots of fine examples on this thread already ("Rachmaninoff" is one of my favorites by Rhina). Here's one by Leslie Monsour, from her chapbook Travel Plans. It's the first of a pair of sonnets on Mary Cassatt paintings.


Patience

After Young Thomas and His Mother--pastel

She props him on the couch after his nap.
He's damp and warm. He whimpers, will she let
Him see her necklace? Afternoons are wet
And heavy since July. He finds her lap
Too sweltering, her dress does not feel nice
Against his skin. He much prefers the cold
Metallic chain, the locket made of gold.
She sniffs his tender arm, that sweet, rare spice.

He's glad Papa has gone away for now--
Mama reclines her head and pays no heed
To passing time, dexterity or speed.
Unlike Papa's "Let me. I'll show you how,"
She quietly lets him try. The halves divide
A little world with ticking hands inside.


Good to have you back, Alicia!

Thanks, folks, for posting all these.

Kate, am particularly glad to see the Plath. I was only recently thinking about/discussing sestinas at the Greek island workshop, and Clive, who, to our delight, came this year as a featured reader and stayed on for a few days adding much to the class, pointed out that the difficulty of the sestina is having those end-words repeat back to back at the end and beginning of stanzas. It is very interesting to see how Plath has solved this, and I like your idea of the sestina working something like the eye, looking back over the painting. That might be worth writing up!

Here's a silly one, by Wendy Cope. I think this may have been the first poem of hers I came across:

The Uncertainty of the Poet

'The Tate Gallery announced that it had paid 1 million pounds for a Giorgio de Cirico masterpiece, The Uncertainty of the Poet. It depicts a torso and a bunch of bananas.' (Guardian, 2 April 1985)

I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond,

A fond poet of 'I am, I am'--
Very bananas,

Fond of 'Am I bananas,
Am I?'--a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very'.

I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?

Terri Witek, whom some of you must know from West Chester, has published Fools and Crows, which is primarily ekphrastic poetry.

I gave a poetry reading the other night and wanted to display a painting of Leda and the Swan before reading Yeats's poem and my own "Leda." Here's what I found, from the school of Leonardo:
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2000-05-leda.html

Somehow I don't think this is the one Wild Bill had in mind.

[quote]Originally posted by R. S. Gwynn:

"I gave a poetry reading the other night and wanted to display a painting of Leda and the Swan before reading Yeats's poem and my own "Leda." Here's what I found, from the school of Leonardo"

Good Lord, I didn't know that she'd already had quadruplets.

Bob

Here is a poem by James Crenner:

The "Rondanini Pieta," Michelangelo's Final (And Unfinished) Sculpture

The legs are buckled delicately
under the slumping weight of the dead Christ.
The woman's face is half erased with grief.

Michelangelo was still a young, robust,
believing man when he first hit upon this theme--
this "Pieta" with sorrowful mother

and dead son--and he carved it over
and over again throughout his life,
as if it never could be over with.

Or as if to say, "This is not anyone
in particular. This a statue
of the stricken universe one day holding

the corpse of the world in her arms."
What a lonely, ecstatic secret
it must have been, to love

extinction as tenderly as this man did
who changed the marble into smoke.
Through the insubstantial flesh

of these stone ghosts, we can see
the plain walls of the museum, and one another
circling, grieving and circling.


One of my favorite brief poems by Donald Justice:

On A Picture By Burchfield

Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours.
Already your agony has outlasted ours.

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?

In case anyone's feeling inspired, several of the contests in this year's World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets competition are (or could be) ekphrastic, including:

#16 (most obviously): Carl Maria von Weber Award for a metrical poem, rhymed or in blank verse, suggested by one of the [musical] works by Carl Maria von Weber listed in the contest guidelines. Four prizes: $250, $100, $60, $40. Length: 24 lines minimum, 60 maximum.

#2: Brooklyn Poetry Circle Award for a Petrarchan sonnet about a bridge as reality and/or symbol. One prize: $200.

#3: John Joseph Memorial Award for a metrical poem, rhymed or unrhymed, on a lighthouse as reality or symbol. Three prizes: $50, $30, $20. Length: 14 lines minimum, 42 maximum.

Several other contests are for poems inspired by works of various poets, including Lord Byron(#8), Yeats(#9), Anthony Hecht(#10), the Fugitive Poets(#11), Weldon Kees(#12), Sylvia Plath(#13), and Coleridge(#15). Check out my original thread for details on getting the competition guidelines.

Julie Stoner

Thanks, Julie. This post- WW2 poem by Louis MacNeice might be of interest to some potential competitors. Its 5-8-10 stress pattern of the triplets IMO aptly suggests the opening of a series of windows.

The National Gallery

The kings who slept in the caves are awake and out,
The pictures are back in the Gallery; Old Masters twirl their cadenzas, whisper and shout,
Hundreds of windows are open again on a vital but changeless world - a day-dream free from doubt.

Here are the angels playing their lutes at the Birth -
Clay become porcelain; the patter, the light, the ecstasy which make sense of the earth;
Here is Gethsemane scooped like a glacier, here is Calvary calmly assured of its own worth.

Here are the golden haloes, opaque as coins,
The pink temple of icing-sugar, the blandly scalloped rock which joins
Primitive heaven and earth; here is our Past wiping the smuts from his eyes, girding his loins.

Here saint may be gorgeous, hedonist austere,
The soul'd nativity drawn of the earth and earthy, our brother the Ass being near,
The petty compartments of life thrown wind-wide open, our lop-sided instincts and customs atoned for here.

Here only too have the senses unending joy;
Draperies slip but slip no further and expectations cannot cloy;
The great Venetial buttocks, the great Dutch bosoms, remain in their time - their prime - beyond alloy.

And the Painter's little daughter, far-off-eyed,
Still stretches for the cabbage white, her sister dawdling at her side;
That she grew up to be mad does not concern us, the idyl[l] and the innocent poise abide.

Aye; the kings are back from their caves in the Welsh hills,
Refreshed by darkness, armed with colour, sleight-of-hand and imponderables,
Armed with Uccello's lances, with beer-mugs, dragons' tongues, peacocks' eyes, bangles and spangles and flounces and frills;

Armed with the full mystique of the commonplace,
The lusts of the eye, the gullet, the loins, the memory - grace after living and grace
Before some plain-clothes death grabs at the artist's jemmy,
leaves us yet one half-solved case.

For the quickness of the heart deceives the eye,
Reshuffling the themes: a Still Life lives while portrayed flesh and feature die
Into fugues and subterfuges of being as enveloping and as aloof as a frosty midnight sky.

So fling wide the windows, this window and that, let the air
Blowing from times unconfined to Then, from places further and fuller than There,
Purge our particular time-bound unliving lives, rekindle a pentecost in Trafalgar Square.

L.MacNeice.

Thanks again for the thread, Alicia and co.
Margaret.

Thanks for posting all these poems... many of which are new to me. I am particularly intrigued with the sub-genre of poems on movies. That's a rich topic in and of itself.

But to go back to poems on paintings. Margaret, the National Gallery poem with its mention of Ucello puts me in mind of another poem. This is a hilarious take on Ucello's famous St. George & the Dragon, by UK poet, UA Fanthorpe, in the voice of the Dragon, the Damsel, and St. George:

Not My Best Side


I

Not my best side, I'm afraid.
The artist didn't give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn't comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don't mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.


II

It's hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It's nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn't much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon--
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl's got to think of her future.


III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can't
Do better than me at the moment.
I'm qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don't you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don't
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don't you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You're in my way.


-- U. A. Fanthorpe

Paolo Ucello's "St. George and the Dragon": http://virtualart.admin.tomsk.ru/u/p-ucello2.htm

Catching up with this great thread, and I'm surprised no one's mentioned this one. I don’t know if it's ekphrastic, mock-ekphrastic or ekphrastic only in the word’s first sense, as a vivid description. Whatever, it is a masterful summoning of many senses, right down to the spelling of the names, which makes it as visual an artifact as a Breughel [well, maybe not quite].

Frank


The Card Players by Philip Larkin

Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijk snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Toward the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!
Text

[This message has been edited by FOsen (edited July 29, 2003).]

NICE one frank! I'd never seen it before. If it's not describing an actual painting, it may as well have been...

(robt)

Never seen the Larkin before either. Where did you find it Frank?

- Fugwozzle

It's from 'High Windows' and on page 177 of the 'Collected Poems', dated 4 May 1970.

Poetry inspired by great works of art is certainly enjoyable to read and write, I'd agree.

However, where I ask you, are the works of art, (sculpture, painting, concertos, etc.), that have been inspired by great works of poetry?

I mean, who wouldn't want to see, The Illustrated Sharon Olds? http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/wink.gif

Seriously, are there any well-known artists who have "ekphrasized" works of poetry into other media?

TJ

Tee Jay:

In a sense, any work of art based on classical mythology is ekphrastic, since the myths themselves are literature. One could say the same thing about any works of art based on the Bible. On specific poemsn that are not Biblical or mythological? Yes, there are tons of paintings based on specific poems. This was a respected tradition in the western art academies for hundreds of years. The paintings themselves--and the sculptures--tend to be of either narrative or historical gernres. The pre-Raphaelites in England, for instance, painted quite a number of canvases based on specific poems. There is one, for example, based on Tennyson's "Maude." I just woke up from a nap so I am not clearheaded enough to be able to cite referent-names and titles at you.

It does seem to be a tradition that has faded with the advent of modernism. There is an interesting series of canvases by a contemporary painter (again, I can't remember the name but I am sure it out there in googleland). She wrote to John Ashbery and Ashbery provided her with 40 (I think) titles for prospective works. She has spent the last few years creating works based on the individual titles--just finished the last one recently.

Also there is a tradition of a poet and painter working together on an individual work or series. Frank O'Hara did a series of lithographs called "Stones" in collaboration with Franz Kline. He also did a series in collaboration with Larry Rivers. I remember reading where O'Hara loved learning mirror-writing (you have to put everything backwards on a lithograph for the actual litho to "read" the way you want it).

Hope that gives you some possible starting points for your own investigation.

Tom

Hi, Tom

Thanks for the quick response!

Yep, I thought about the Sistine Chapel and the Renaissance period of works that were often based upon biblical interpretation.

And yes, before I posted my question earlier I did a google and had already found the woman you have referred to ...very abstract stuff it seemed...didn't wait for her site to completely load, though.

And, as well, I was aware of O'Hara and his love for art...I think he actually had initially pursued art in college, and then moved over, eventually, to an English degree, if memory serves.

At any rate, beyond those, I haven't been able to identify any others via googling. But again, Tom, do appreciate your response.

TJ