Indeed, this poem can be taken as illustrative of both the strengths and weaknesses of the Contemporary American Sonnet. While it's not too cloying about it, the piece is set in another time period (and fair enough on that) around a high-art motif (again, no foul per se). But it tells you not only what the painting is, but what Lautrec is reckoned to do. It states it quite plainly so that there's no ambiguity, and likewise with the couplet, which does what couplets are supposed to do and illustrates why couplets are so dangerous (and not always in a good way).
To put what David R. and others have put another way, I want the painting to lift off the canvas in an ekphrastic poem somehow, rather than remaining something in the Museum of Western Civilization, to touch this time, possibly others, rather than serving as a sort of commemorative plaque or plaque at a museum explaining what's going on.
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