This is a fascinating discussion.
I suppose I would ask that if a poem's ostensible "subject" (read: "trigger") is not what the poem is "about," why do we need it? To take an extreme example, say I have a political opinion I would like to share, and say that one day I see a painting of an apple, the next I see a crack in the sidewalk, and the next an empty jelly jar, and use all three of these experiences as "jumping-off points" to expound my ideology in verse. Why do I need all these triggers? Why can't I just expound my ideology and have done with it, if there's nothing necessary in the trigger, if there's no reason it had to be this trigger and none other? And if there is a necessity, mustn't the very fact that the poem perceives it be a mediation, or illumination, of its reality?
We talk alot about the "leap" that poems make, to get from their topic to their subject. But how do we justify the poetic welding together of trigger object on the one hand and subject on the other if the two do not illuminate each other? Say we write a poem on Looove and our trigger is a Rodin statue. In my view the poem must, in saying something about the esse of love, say something about the esse of the Rodin statue as well, or we have no right to use it. Otherwise, why not pick a Donatello, or a Mozart symphony, or a blasted oak? I'm not really thinking of literary "tricks" here, like when we see Granny's knife hanging in her pantry and remember how chopping carrots that one day she lost her finger down the garbage dispose-all then bled to death on the kitchen floor, isn't death sad--but doesn't it seem from this alone that there's something inherently different between this sort of un-mediated, real-world trigger and a work of art? Is it that the knife-ness of the knife is a lot less interesting or important than the Rodin-ness of the Rodin? Or is it what Jody was saying from the beginning, that he has already illuminated reality, and that it is therefore not enough for us merely to illuminate the same reality, but to illuminate him? Or would we be shining a flashlight into the sun?
At any rate, I think wariness of ekphrasis quite justified, and I think this because it seems very easy for someone looking for something to write about just to go find a painting and write about it. You could pick one just as easily as another; there's nothing essential there driving you, no reason why it has to be this and nothing else, no necessity. Some poets may feel like they need at least one ekphrastic poem a book, just to keep their subject matter varied, or whatever. It's something that everybody does, some more than others, and seems that it could easily become a gimmick, when used by an undisciplined poet who thinks the painted apple is the same thing as the apple, sort of a waving of the arms and saying "Hey, look how refined I am, I appreciate art!" Of course, that Granny-haunted knife could become a gimmick too, or anything else, so I may be talking more about bad poetry than bad ekphrastic poetry; still, it seems to me the two are different, and have different dangers.
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