[Michael Cantor]

My poem Japanese for Beginners: A Triptych drifts in and out of fantasies regarding Japanese film, drama, screens and prints. This is the final section:

An aijin is a lover who has gone
away; an imprint made another day,
the final woodblock in a triptych frame:
a pentimento leaning on a wall:

bright colors paling into faded tones –
deep muted golds, moss greens, soft browns
of hidden courtyards, bare tatami rooms,
dark purple silk kimono crumpled there -

An aijin is a lover left alone
one day; a single floating island in
the fog-bound Inland Sea; a charcoal line,
a twisted pine, a rock, a memory

uncertain as a cross-cut flashback torn
from Rashomon; a woman, man, a gate,
a storm; their two divergent views; the truth
becomes a rubbing from a worn-down stone;

a palimpsest of touch and flesh, of hair
and scent and fantasy that once one time
a loved one was who was to stay - not drift
apart in slanting rain across the arch

of some forgotten bridge and leave behind
in Grand Kabuki stance - two swords tucked in
his puckered sash, a fan in one pale hand -
abandoned to a walk-on role: aijin

For them what's interested, the complete poem is on Jerry Hartwig's Buckeye web site (HERE IS THE LINK) .

Michael Cantor

[RCL]

Here's one I workshopped here and also posted on Art Museum:

Echoing Eden
(on Fred Tomaselli’s “Untitled” 2000)

Transparent, scarlet veins exposed, they’re dwarfed
by stippled sky that shines with images
of lips and hands, of eyes and eye-like leaves,
of perfect butterflies and blooming daisies
merged with modern psychotropic pills—
a foretaste of man's fate? Expelled, the pair
depart His garden, bowed and sick at heart,
poisoned by the fruit that tempted them
to know both good and evil, and they do.
They step into a marijuana patch,
the borderland between what was and is—
elegiac, this artwork intimates
an herbal Eden echoing a gleam
of what they lost, the glory and the dream.

The image:
http://www.stylusart.com/noticias/Bi...in/dibujo1.htm



------------------
Ralph

Had I remembered it earlier, Seamus Heaney's Poet's Chairmight well have been my first choice for this thread. IMO it is among the best pieces in 'The Spirit Level' and is typically Heaneyesque in its gentle self-mockery and celebrations of integrity and rootedness. It repays careful reading. First time round, I failed to spot the crucial pun on the concluding 'every sense'. I believe the sculpted chair stands in the courtyard of Wilton Park House, Dublin, but am open to correction on that point!

'Poet's Chair'

for Carolyn Mulholland

Leonardo said: the sun has never
Seen a shadow. Now watch the sculptor move
Full circle round her next work, like a loverIn the sphere of shifting angles and fixed love.

1
Angling shadows of itself are what
Your 'Poet's Chair' stands to and rises out of
In its sun-stalked inner-city courtyard.
On thequi viveall the time, its four legs land
On their feet - catsfiit, goatfoot, bif soft splay-foot too;
Its straight back sprouts two bronze and leafy saplings.
Every flibbertigibbet in the town,
Old birds and boozers, late-night pissers, kissers,
All have a go at sitting on it some time.
It's the way the air behind them's winged and full,
The way a graft has seized their shoulder-blades
That makes them happy. Once out of nature,
They're going to come back in leaf and bloom
An angel step. Or something like that. Leaves
On a bloody chair! Would you believe it?

2
Next thing I see the chair in a white prison
With Socrates sitting on it, bald as a coot,
Discoursing in bright sunlight with his friends.
His time is short. The day his trial began
A verdant boat sailed from Apollo's shrine
In Delos, for the annual rite
Of commemoration. Until its wreathed
And creepered rigging re-enters Athens
Harbour, the city's life is holy.
No executions. No hemlock bowl. No tears
And none now as the poison does its work
And the expert jailer talks the company through
The stages of the numbness. Socrates
At the centre of the city and the day
Has proved the soul immortal. The bronze leaves
Cannot believe their ears, it is so silent.
Soon Crito will have to close his eyes and mouth,
But for the moment everything's an ache
Deferred, unknown, imagined and most real.

3
My father's ploughing one, two, three, four sides
Of the lea ground where I sit all-seeing
At centre field, my back to the thorn tree
They never cut. The horses are all hoof
And burnished flank, I am all foreknowledge.
Of the poem as a ploughshare that turns time
Up and over. Of the chair in leaf
The fairy thorn is entering for the future.
Of being here for good in every sense.

Margaret.

[Daniel Haar]

I think "Nude Descending a Staircase" by X.J. Kennedy is a masterful example of this genre. He does not spend much time on detailed description of Duchamp's painting, but simply conveys the woman's graceful movement, which may (or may not, I am not sure) be present in the painting. I love the last lines of the first and second stanzas.


Nude Descending a Staircase

by X.J Kennedy

Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.

We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh—
Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.

One woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair,
Collects her motions into shape.


- Daniel

[Roger Slater]

Daniel, that's a good one I had forgotten about. Very masterful indeed. Beyond ekphrastic, it invokes not just a painting but also another poet, Herrick's poem about the liquifaction of Julia's clothes (you know the one I mean).

[Joseph Bottum]

Alicia—

Before this thread got going, I would have said there’s no real defense to be made of Housman’s dismissal of poetry on painting—a line merely from Housman in one of his crotchety moments.

But though I’ve found great poem after great poem reading this thread, in their bulk they begin to nag at me. I’m not sure it takes a critic of some particularly strict school to suggest that different arts have different ends. "Trying to write about music," runs a line usually attributed to Elvis Costello, "is like trying to dance about architecture." The visual-art obsessions of the New York poets have always seemed to me one of the things that trapped and limited them. I can imagine a great poem, like Auden’s, about seeing a painting, but the effort to make a poem into a painting—to do in poetry the work of painting—is something that seems to wreck poets. Tom Disch published an interesting article this spring on "why poets want to paint, and painters want to write," and to look at the photos of paintings by e.e. cummings and A.R. Ammons that accompanied the article was not to think anything good.

Of course, a poet can always mine other arts for various purposes: "As with paintings, so with poetry—Some are best seen close up, others from across the room." But when we speak, for instance, of the "musicality" of a poem, we know we are employing a metaphor, since poems that attempt to do nothing but the work of music don’t turn out to be great poems.

Now, obviously we can think of fantastic poems that refer to, perhaps rely on, music. Eliot’s "Four Quartets" are Beethoven haunted, maybe. Wallace Stevens’s "Peter Quince at the Clavier" contains an interesting reflection on music. I’ve always had a soft spot of Browning’s "A Toccata of Galuppi’s."

But I worry about attempts to make music in poetry. There was an overwritten and mind-numbingly long article in the Atlantic Monthly a couple years ago that argued against much contemporary use of music, but one point it made that I think I still believe is that thought is conveyed in such different ways by different arts that the thoughts themselves are fundamentally different.

And maybe there is a defense of Housman to be built out of the chance that poets, when they begin to write about the passive experiencing of some other art, will be lured into trying to make poetry into those other arts.

I’m not entirely convinced of this, you understand. But it does begin to seem to me that there may be more to the wariness about ekphrastic poems than this thread has so far given credit.

Jody

[hector]

In one of Larkin's letters he quotes Tony Harrison(?) saying about a poem: see such-and-such a painting. Larkin's response is: "Why should I?" It is good point and explains why he wrote about an imaginary painting. If you need the painting the poem doesn't work. If the poem is good, you don't need to see the painting.

[A. E. Stallings]

It was perhaps unfair on Housman to toss in his comment without context. (And as I think most folks, know I am a HUGE Housman fan.) This is in a selection of letters to his brother, Laurence, and is in a series of comments on some of Laurence's own poems that were sent to him:

"Poems on pictures seem to me an illegitimate genre, but Autumn Leves is a favourable specimen. . ."

Of course, Housman is capable of being crotchety for its own sake, and of leavening his praise with a sharp remark. But despite his razor-like candor with his brother about his poems, his comments are usually also generous in their way.

And by this comment, I do not think he is dismissing all ekphrasitc poetry outright (certainly not Homer or Virgil, of course). (Nor is Keat's urn a "picture"--nor is it, as far as anyone has been able to find, I believe--a single urn.)

He is quite willing to admit a "favourable specimen" of poems on picutres when he sees it. But as far as lyric poetry goes, I think he considers it something hybrid and not "pure" poetic utterence. He seems to simply be expressing a suspicion of it. And I think there is something to this concern.

[nyctom]

So, what's a "pure" poetic utterance? How are we to define "pure" (let alone agree on who gets to define it)?

I always thought one of the more interesting developments in all of the arts, particularly since the advent of modernism, are these "hybrids." One of my favorite painters, for instance, is Elizabeth Murray, whose shaped canvases bridge the genres of sculpture and painting. ntozake shange's amazing "choreopoem" (her term) for colored girl who have considered suicide when the rainbow/is enuf mixes poetry, dance, music and drama. shange based the work on a series of poems by Judy Grahn, called "The Common Women Poems" and includes in it nursery rhymes, pop songs, and trendy dances. Laurie Anderson's amazing United States, Parts I-IV is a seminal work of performance art, combining music, visual art and spoken word pieces. None of these works are "pure," by anyone's definition.

Artists have always taken source material from wherever they find most useful to suit their purposes. The ekphrastic poems I've read that fail for me do so because they don't do anything with their source material beyond describing it. That may be the same "suspicion" as Housman's, I don't know for certain. But to read something like XJ Kennedy's poem on the Duchamp painting "Nude Descending the Staircase" (based as it is not only on cubism's analysis of the picture plain but also Muybridge's photographs of humans in motion) gives me another way of appreciating the painting. I know I will be remembering "Collects her motions into shape" whenever I see it again.

Thank the heavens for the impure.

[Julie Steiner]

Adaptations of one artistic medium to another have been much on my mind lately.

In the past, when my girls have selected a video or DVD from the library or rental store, they've always chosen one based on a book we've read. With rare exceptions, they have been bitterly disappointed in the film adaptations. The most recent fiasco was with the Disney version of Summer of the Monkeys. Wilson Rawls' book had been one of their favorite read-alouds of all time; the movie changed everything about the characters except their names, and altered so many important details and themes of the book so drastically as to be unrecognizable.

"Why?" my girls ranted, in tears. "Why would they take out everything that made it a good story in the first place, and add all this other junk that has nothing to do with anything? And Jay Berry and Daisy were totally different people in the novel. They were so bratty in the movie that I didn't even like them anymore. If they're going to change everything that much, they should change the kids' names and the title, too. That wasn't Jay Berry and that wasn't Summer of the Monkeys!"

I explained that books and movies are different media, and have different standards. Filmmakers try to include certain things that movie audiences expect in a "good" movie--lots of exciting action sequences, for example--whether or not they occurred in the book. But in order to make room to fit all those extra things in, some other aspects--the leisurely development and interaction of characters, for example--have to be left out. As a result, scriptwriters sometimes resort to a kind of shorthand, by turning the characters into stereotypes that the audience will recognize immediately, without much time or effort on the part of the director or actors; and those stereotypes have nothing to do with the unique characters we grew to know and love in the novel. Being faithful to the book is considered less important than providing the formulaic elements of what many filmmakers consider to be a successful movie.

But not all film adaptations of books are butcheries, even if they do change things profoundly; and not all ekphrastic poems are automatically garbage simply because they are derivative of another art form with different standards. Sure, not everything can be translated to the new medium, but a new emphasis and a new way of experiencing the themes of the original can be valuable in and of itself. It all lies in the execution, and successful execution in the new medium need not be overly faithful to the original.

Julie Stoner


[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited August 09, 2003).]