Deborah--
You're right, of course, and I wasn't saying that I buy the dismissal of poetry about painting or music--for I don't think I do. But I did want to get on record the idea that suspicion about such poetry isn't necessarily stupid or crackpot or some life-denying straightjacket that we great embracers of multitudinous contradiction have somehow managed in our greatness to throw off.
There remains, I think, an intelligent and artistically serious case to be made for refusing the ekphrastic. The fact that you and I in the end do not find it convincing doesn't mean it isn't serious. And perhaps it involves the mediation of experience: A still-life, for example, is an account of reality that has already passed through one mediating art, and if one of things that poetry claims to do is offer some insight into reality itself--the ontos on, in that great old Aristotelian formulation--then to expend the resources of poetry on something that is already mediated reality may be a waste. Or, perhaps, a slightly disreputable shortcut, if the poem simply takes over the work the painting has done and thereby avoids the hard work that is proper to poetry.
As I say, I don't find this fully convincing. But it strikes me as harder to rebut than I originally would have supposed. To build a philosophically or poetically serious aesthetics that explains what's wrong with it--that's going to take considerable thought at a very high level of both philosophy and poetry. And the end result might well leave us, if not dismissing poetry that relies on other arts, then at least registering an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome.
Jody
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