[Deborah Warren]

Well, one might object to some kind of cheap coat-tail leverage a bad poet tries to get out the other work of art; or to a poem that merely wallows around in doting description; or to a poem's success depending on the reader's knowing the picture/music (though I don't think that's the end of the world).

Jody, I saw today a sonnet of Rhina's on Escher where the octave does indeed draw his picture--but with words that add value to the Escher, not just describing. And then, of course . . . there's an Espaillat sestet.

But a poem is sparked by something; in an ekphrastic poem a picture, or music, is just a type of spark.

[nyctom]

Yeah, Julie, but a slavish adherence to a book usually results in a boring movie. Look at the Harry Potter films. Of course having a lead actor with zero charisma doesn't help, but I didn't feel like I was watching a movie--it felt like a blow-by-blow transcription of the novels.

There's a truism in Hollywood that great books make dreary movies. I think there's something to that, although there are many exceptions that prove the rule.

But isn't it better that your kids prefer the book?

Tom

[Joseph Bottum]

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

[hector]

Out of curiosity: are there any poems inspired by paintings inspired by poems- Waterhouse's Lady of Shallott, say?- or paintings inspired by poems inspired by paintings? What would be the word for this?

[nyctom]

Post-modernism

[Jennifer Reeser]

TeeJaay, in partial answer to your question, Where are the great works of art inspired by poetry?, the Pre-Raphaelites were fond of John Keats, and we have Sir John Everett Millais's Lorenzo and Isabella, illustrative of Keats's poem, "Isabella, or, the Pot of Basil," followed by William Holman Hunt's "Isabella and the Pot of Basil," 1866-1868. Some interesting trivia: while Millais accurately portrays Isabella as pining to death -- wan and thin -- Hunt was unable to paint Isabella this way, as his chosen model was his wife, Fanny, eight months pregnant at the time. She held her pose for hours in the Florentine September heat. Their son was born in October, but Fanny, unable to recover from the birth, died in December. Hunt thereafter threw himself into the work as a sort of mourning ritual, eventually creating a life-size version of his wife (to whom he had been married only eleven and a half months). His finished picture is over six feet tall. You can view both prints here:

http://www.abcgallery.com/liter/keats.html

Jennifer

[Jerry Wielenga]

Another ekphrastic poem, this one addressed to The Woodcutter by Kazimir Malevich:

<u>To Malevich's Woodcutter</u>

Wielder of axe, cleaver of branch and trunk,
your solid legs astride a chopped down tree,
sectioning wholeness, clearheaded as a monk
who flails his soul towards austerity,
you want the canvas of your world made light,
to break it down to logs of understanding
that, in your mind, can be the more commanding
for having suffered through your thudding blight.

Yet, with each slice you seem to be approaching
a place where neither branch nor trunk remains,
so log by log you're gradually encroaching
the forest's edge -- you're cutting near your veins.
The more you hack the more you'll turn to tubes,
which Malevich will splinter into cubes.

[Glen]

Winslow Homer
Fog. He can see only this deep still fog.
Roweled by the falling sun it smoulders westward awhile
But it closes impenetrable curtains: night is fleshed.
No shore, save for the long jut of staggered rock
Shelving a black sharp stair to the burdened, hidden sea.
This he paints in his old aye, recording his utter love.
For him there is one canvas, thick with seventy years—
Picture over picture buried, each worked from the last.
Where are the children's faces in the morning schoolroom?
Far under the battlefields of the Civil War,
Eaten our by tenser light, man-riddled noon.
Even summer landscape empty kept a memory of people—
Visitors passing and strange. Then one seaman storm-struck.
All vanished now, washed over in a high tide of paint.
As though the colors of the world, faster and faster whirling,
Spun this still center of gray; this inevitable mist:
Sun lost, sea filled and covered,
The great stair of black rock deserted, used no more.

WINFIELD TOWNLEY SCOTT (1910-1968)



[This message has been edited by Glen (edited August 11, 2003).]

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

Well, but EVERY poem faces "an initial suspicion which the poem must be good enough to overcome." It costs work and time to read, and the reader is "suspicious" to the extent that he wants to be compensated for both. H ewants your poem to give him enough--pleasure, to begin with, and then something more lasting, another kind of pleasure--to make his reading worth the trouble.

But it's not "purity" he's looking for. If the poem you;ve composed as a response to X painting or piece of music gives him that pleasure--both kinds--then it works for him, and he probably says, along with Nyctom (and with me, too!)
Let's hear it for the impure!

The point is, I think, that the X that triggers the poem is a hook on which the poet hangs it, like a person or an event or a remark overheard. It doesn't matter where the poet finds his hooks, it's what he hangs on them that's important.

[VictoriaGaile]

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...

I don't relate to art as a mediated account of reality, but as a communication by the artist. When I interact with a work of visual art, my response is a response to what the artist has to say. This is qualitatively different, but fundamentally the same sort of thing, as the magic that happens between performers and audience in performance art.

A good ekphrastic poem, it seems to me, uses the poetic art to express the response of the poet to what the artist used the visual art to say. As such, it lets me in on that usually private dialogue between artist and viewer. I may or may not need to see the painting in order to really appreciate the poem, just as one part of an overheard telephone conversation may or may not make sense.

Victoria Gaile