Ekphrasis - the classics
 

While we wait for the event proposed over on GT by Philip Quinlan (and taken up enthusiastically by others) to find its final form, I thought this forum might be a suitable place to look at some classics of the art.

And we might as well start with one of the most famous. So here's Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts":


"The Shield of Achilles" is obviously another example of an ekphrastic poem, but it can also be seen as a kind of commentary on, or summation of, the entire genre.

Anyway, I'd be interested to see other people's favourite examples, together with any observations on the poems - and the genre itself.

By the way, does anyone know who it was that launched the cry "No more poems about paintings"? I remember reading it somewhere and now can only find it as the title of an essay by Edna Longley, but with a question mark, suggesting that she doesn't necessarily go along with the notion.

Gregory I love that Auden poem. I must confess that part of me is hostile to poems about paintings because so many poets really don't understand painting and use it for their own associations etc. I now accept that as part of life but something in me rebels when they reduce painting to mere illustration and write stories about the supposed illustration. It will be interesting to see what we can make of it.

Auden wrote a great deal about music too. His Magic Flute poem is amusing but is a very shallow take on a deep and deceptively decorative libretto and score.

Just a couple of irritating thoughts in the hope that they may produce a pearl or two.

I can't think of another example at the moment.

I think we've thoroughly hashed over the question of whether we may post on Mastery works by living poets, and I think we've decided that this is fair use, so I'll go ahead and post "The Charioteer" by A.E. Stallings.

I'm fairly sure that this statue is the one being described.

Can so new a poem be a classic of the art? Maybe not, but it's an example that moves me. Even the choice to put spaces between the couplets and to use initial caps is an important part of its effect: the push and pull of stasis and change.

The Charioteer

Delphi Museum


Lips apart, dry eyes steady,
He stands forever at the ready

Fingers open, sensitive
To the horses' take and give

(Although no single steed remains
At the end of tangled reins),

It is as if we are not here,
The way the patient charioteer

Looks beyond us into space,
For some sign to begin the race.

He has stared down centuries.
No wave from us, no sudden breeze,

Will trick him now to a false start.
He has learned the racer's art

To stand watchful at the gate,
Empty out the mind, and wait.

As long as it is in our power,
We gaze--for maybe half an hour--

Before we turn from him to go.
Outside, the hills begin to glow,

Burnished by a brazen sun
Whose course now is almost run.

We shiver, and around us feel
Vanished horses plunge and wheel.

Janet

I have to say four things, purely from a personal point of view:

1) First of all my conception of ekphrasis certainly extends beyond reference to the visual arts alone, although that seems to be the narrow, modern meaning. So I'm glad you introduced the idea of music. Martin Rocek had a thing up not long ago which referenced the music of Webern. Maryann Corbett also did a very effective job on a piece of music recently (Officium Defunctorum).
2) Personally I don't think an ekphrastic poem has to describe (in the strict sense) the (for instance) painting, or explain it, or interpret it (although it could do any combination of those things). For me the painting is a starting point and the poem is a sort of visceral reaction to it, rather than an intellectual one. I think that probably that's exactly the approach you aren't happy with. But I don't believe that diminishes the referenced work. So long, that is, as the poem celebrates the work in some way.
3) I will never be able to paint, because I can't get beyond that thing of "painting what I know is there" rather than what I actually see. Somehow poetry allows me to do that indirectly. OK, not well, mostly, but some.
4) Having had the privelege of working with an artist I have to say that she herself sometimes saw things in her work, having read the poem in response, that she hadn't either noticed or intended, but which nonetheless pleased her.
Philip

Amy Newman’s Guardian workshop on ekphrasis is illuminating. Neither “mastery” nor “classics” in evidence, of course, but the wonderful Jude Goodwin comes close, as always.

The two stages of the workshop can be found here and here.

Adam

I hadn't looked at the Grauniad poetry page in a bit, so I missed this. Thanks.

I thought Christine Klocek-Lim's poem was a far and away the best poem in its own right.

The Guardian workshop attracts some pretty good entries on many occasions. I have never forgiven them for my "found poem" sequence being rejected however (culled from a field guide to mushrooms of all things)!

Philip

Bishop on the ending of "Musée des Beaux Arts" in a letter to Lowell:

...even if it is describing a painting, I think it's just plain inacurate... --the ploughmen and the people on the boat will rush to see the falling boy any minute, they always do, though maybe not to help... Oh well--I want to see what you'll think of my 'Prodigal Son'

(quoting from a secondary source, not sure if ellipses are Bishop's or the quoter's)

The late Australian poet, the wonderful Gwen Harwood wrote many ekphrastic poems about music. The destructive forces of copyright have managed to remove nearly all of her work from the internet. If I manage to find time I will type something out.

Is this too remote from the music itself? More of a study of an artist in torment. Not really ekphrastic but it's short enough to type:
Afternoon

Kröte has spent some time devising
a kind of storage bin for tunes.
His cupboard's full of sheets comprising
the work of drunken afternoons.

Nothing today comes of his labours.
" 'Revenge, revenge' Timotheus cries,"
bellows a hopeful bass — the neighbour's
a singing coach. As Kröte tries

to catch the semiquavers, swearing
and whistling through his snow-white teeth,
Beethoven frowns in plaster, wearing
Kröte's hat on his laurel wreath.

A pupil comes. The noise is fearful.
From next door come contralto wails.
Kröte is forced to have an earful
of Gounod with his pupil's scales.

While she fights Bach he scribbles crudely
in ink across her virgin score.
She murmurs, and he asks her rudely,
"Stupid, what do you pay me for?"

Then he sits scowling at the scowling
features of the illustrious dead.
Between the wrong notes and the howling
he must endure, and earn his bread.

______

New Music

To Larry Sitsky

Who can grasp for the first time
these notes hurled into empty space?
Suddenly a tormenting nerve
affronts the fellowship of cells.
Who can tell for the first time
if it is love or pain he feels,
violence or tenderness that calls
plain objects by outrageous names

and strikes new sound from the old names?
At the service of a human vision,
not symbols, but strange presences
defining a transparent void,
these notes beckon the mind to move
out of the smiling context of
what's known; and what can guide it is
neither wisdom nor power, but love.

Who but a fool would enter these
regions of being with no name?
Secure among their towering junk
the wise and powerful congregate
fitting old shapes to old ideas,
rocked by their classic harmonies
in living sleep. The beggars' stumps
bang on the stones. Nothing will change.

Unless, wakeful with questioning,
some mind beats on necessity,
and being unanswered learns to bear
emptiness like a wound that no
word but its own can mend; and finds
a new imperative to summon
a world out of unmeasured darkness
pierced by a brilliant nerve of sound.

As Philip says, ekphrasis extends beyond paintings and sculpture.

"On first looking into Chapman's Homer" is not very historic, but very ekphrastic.

It's not originally in English, but it's about the most famous ekphrastic poem there is: Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." I didn't look all through the older thread, so I beg your pardon if it's already there.

We argued long and hard about it some time ago on translation, and I don't dare say that any translation is definitive. So here's a page that gives you four choices.