We actually had an ekphrastic poetry competition over at PFFA recently. For what it's worth, this was my entry -
Quote:
Virgin Mary and Child
terracotta
Florence, 1425
i.
In her humidity and temperature controlled
glass case, she sits night and day, weight on one elbow,
hands limp in her lap, her eyes cast down
past the seal-pup face of the Christ-child.
Through the glass she hears the clatter of feet
and the chatter, and hopes to catch
the Tuscan accents that remind her
of a sunny room and the touch of calloused fingers
that deftly shaped and smoothed the supple clay of her.
ii.
She slouches, eyes fixed
on a paint-smudge on the floorboards.
The sack of onions standing in for Jesus chafes
against her side. The blanket draped around her
weighs on her head, and sweat itches
down her back. The arm-rest bites
into her arm, and her shoulder cramps and spasms;
but she dare not stretch, for then he'll come again
to re-position her, his old hands loitering
across her breasts and thighs.
iii.
Slumped in her chair, she gazes past his head
down to the floor, and remembers
the day when the angel came _
mauve incandescence and the smell of cinnamon,
a blast of love that seemed to tear
the skin from her and leave her new. So now she has
this almost-child, fat and pink, who watches
everything and never cries. Behind his stolid dumbness,
she can feel the weight of God in him
pressing heavy against her heart.
A day of carrying him has left her racked by it.
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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).]