[Rick Mullin]

Hi Nick,

Thanks a lot. Very encouraging.

Hi Jan,

Well... I'm not conflating Turner and Death in a villanelle. It's an ekphrastic poem. All that matters is the painting--its creator is not a concern.

By the way, if one wanted to do something conflating Turner and Death, there would be a lot of material to work with--a hundred or so shipwrecks, throwing the bodies of dead slaves overboard, and the burning of Parliament, which must have had a body count....


As for whether the painting is finished... not even a consideration here. That said, what more could you ask for? This painting is stunning. Shocking!

You probably know that both Turner and Constable had to deal with people telling them their paintings were "unfinished". Constable, a Tory, tended to go back to work on them. Turner told people to bugger off. But even if Turner left this painting in his studio with a note saying, "I have to come back and finish this before I die," it wouldn't matter to me in this endeavor. Whether or not the painting is considered finished is information. Exclude it. Keep it out.

Maybe I'm completely wrong about all of this.

I may also be wrong about the villanelle as a vehicle for an ekphrastic poem concerning images of death, but name a better one. The villanelle is cyclical, which works well with the processing of any image to start with. In the case of writing about death, the "going nowhere" aspect works nicely. The recurring nightmare? And there is the "you know it's coming, and you know what it's going to be" effect of the closing couplet in a villanelle. No escaping it.

Death to villanelles!

Thanks for coming back. I appreciate your response regarding coherence--I'm asking a lot of the reader here and perhaps too much. I'm not going to get many, I suppose.

I have read some of Frazer. I'm not in much danger of infusing information about Ruskin into anything ~,:^) I'm not familiar with his artwork, and little of his his criticism, but I've read Hamilton's biography of Turner (as well as his bio of Constable), so I know how enthusiastic the young Ruskin was about the old dog. I've been meaning to catch up with Ruskin. Thanks for noting.

Rick