[Joseph Bottum]

Originally posted by H Roland Angus R:
If closeness to the esse of the apple was the main criterion for value, I wouldn't read a poem at all. I'd eat an apple.

Dear Harry,

A wise and sharp point. One starts using medieval philosophical terms like "esse" for precision and ends up using them for pretension.

But there is a distinction here that needs some vocabulary or another to maintain. The early medieval neoplatonists used "esse" to suggest simply what the word in Latin obviously means: the "to be" of something, its most real being. This is the sense, as I understand it, of the word in Boethius, for example.

But the later medieval Aristotelians would use the word in a more specialized sense to mean "existence," as opposed to "essence" (as in the title of St. Thomas's breakthrough book, "De Esse et Essentia").

Having been speaking of Platonism, I intended "esse" in its looser sense as "really real" being, however one wants to take that. But if we have to draw the finer distinction, then I imagine it would look like this:

If you want to grasp the existence of an apple, go to an apple tree.

If you want to grasp the essence of an apple, go to a poet.

--or so, at least, those who believe that poetry offers deeper and higher insights into reality would say.

JB


[This message has been edited by Joseph Bottum (edited August 14, 2003).]

[TeeJaay]

Hmmm….now lemme’ see if I’ve got it right…


‘esse phrases’ express ‘ekphrasis’?


[scratchin’ head and gwon to bed]

[Michael Cantor]

Teejay -

They are more or less, I guess, essentially the essence of ekphrasis. Yes?

[Julie Steiner]

This "appleness of apples" discussion reminds me of Wallace Stevens'
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird", a poem which brings us all OH so much closer to understanding the blackbirdness of blackbirds.

But back to ekphrasis. Does a poem about an apple automatically have more immediacy than a does poem about a painting or photograph of an apple? I think not.

A painter or photographer does not just depict the image of an apple. He or she also makes certain compositional decisions that, in effect, create a self-contained universe for the representation of the apple. A poem based on that work of art is really responding to and commenting on that universe, not just the "subject". So it doesn't really matter that the poem is two degrees removed from the apple, because it is still only one degree removed from that unique universe.

Julie Stoner


[This message has been edited by Julie Stoner (edited August 15, 2003).]

[Roger Slater]

Does a poem about an apple automatically have more immediacy than a does poem about a painting or photograph of an apple? I think not.

I guess it depends what you mean by immediacy. If we want to become immediately in touch with the appleness of an apple, the thing itself, then we wouldn't want to place unnecessary layers of interpretation or cognition between us and the apple. It's bad enough that we have to use words, which are already an intrusion on appleness; how could it possibly help us to place another artist's consciousness between us and the apple? If you do that, you're introducing an entirely new subject, and that can only distract from the apple. A given photographer may enjoy photographing apples through gauze, but the one who doesn't use gauze gets a more immediate and accurate depiction of the apple. But even he is left with a photograph, not an apple.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

But a painting of an apple is not "an apple once removed." It's not an apple at all, in any sense, and was never meant to be, so it's not an imitation of anything. It's a real piece of canvas having certain dimensions, covered with real pigment, and probably contained on its sides by a frame of some sort made of real wood or real metal or some other not-imaginary substance. The person who responds to it in a poem is responding to that reality--with all the unseen aspects added to it, such as the perception of the painter's brushstrokes and the evidence of his choices and so on, and his choice of subject. The poem is not responding to the depicted apple, but to the depiction of the apple--the artist's act of depiction and its visible result--which is the work of art.

The artist is a depicter, not a counterfeiter. His work is not intended to replace or be taken for the model. My husband's statues, for instance, sit, lie and stand all over this house, but nobody in his right mind would believe that my husband made them to "imitate" people and fool the viewer somehow! They're too small to compete with real live people; they have metallic or painted or otherwise wholly unskinlike finishes; and they never move! No, he makes them because it gives him pleasure and because he finds the human body endlessly interesting, complete with its wrinkles and bulges and signs of bone under the flesh. Somebody responding to one of his pieces would be moved by my husband's take on his model, the version his eye perceived and what his hands did with it in clay and then in plaster, not by the living model, who is not present in my house, and in any case would have looked different to some other sculptor.

As for the danger of pretentiousness that Chris mentions, alas, there's no getting rid of that, any more than the danger of sentimentality, ineptitude...the list is long. Those are human failings, not dangers inherent in ekphrasis itself. The poet who becomes pretentious writing an ekphrastic poem would probably do so if he limited his subject to a single drop of water. If he's determined to write in such a way as to "impress," he will find a way to do it, however modest his subject, because his true theme--his own magnificence--will out.

[Kate Benedict]

Can't resist supplying this very relevant link:

http://www.uwrf.edu/history/prints/magritte-pipe.html

[Alder Ellis]

Roger >> But I seem to remember reading an exhortation by Roethke that readers should initially approach all poems with great respect and faith in the poet. (I can't find the exact quote). In other words, one should read all poems as if it were given that they are of the highest quality. If one approaches a poem with skepticism about its quality, it amounts to a self-fulfilling prophecy. <<

Roethke was certainly right, and it turns on a distinction between "appreciation" and "criticism." Appreciation is much more demanding. You have to set aside your own preconceptions and commit yourself to, as it were, living with a poem, until its laws reveal themselves to you. Or not! For appreciation is always capable of failure. Criticism, on the other hand, never fails, since it imposes its own laws on the poem.

In practice, no doubt, what we mean by "criticism" involves an interplay of "appreciation" and "criticism" in these narrower senses, but they are logically divergent activities, and the commonest shortcoming of critics is no doubt underdevelopment of the appreciative faculty.

Rhina >> The artist is a depicter, not a counterfeiter. His work is not intended to replace or be taken for the model. <<

Yes, but then again a good likeness is one of the criteria of success. If so, wouldn't an absolutely indistinguishable likeness be superior to an approximation?

Magritte's relevant painting is a super-conventional, iconic representation of a pipe. The utter banality of the representation is overpowering, in a way. It is an ironically abject submission to the outer, superficial aspect of artistic mimesis. The inner aspect is suggested by a saying attributed to the medieval alchemists: "Art is the imitation of Nature in its mode of operation." Not a slavish copying of appearances, but an occult investigation into how the visible results are arrived at. An audacious attempt to acquire something of Nature's power. Hence perhaps Jody's distinction:

>> If you want to grasp the existence of an apple, go to an apple tree.

If you want to grasp the essence of an apple, go to a poet. <<

"poet" here being understood in the etymological sense of "maker."

[Julie Steiner]

Kate, that Magritte was perfect! Kudos!

Sorry, Roger, my statement about "immediacy" was confusing. I didn't mean that the audience of a poem about an apple painting (or photo) should sense that they are interacting with an apple, or even that they are interacting with a painting (or photo).

By "immediacy," I meant the reader's sense that the poetic material is fresh, compelling, and original--that it touches them directly and evokes an emotional response in and of itself, even while it acknowledges some debt to the artist.

So, yes, if we were to view a painting or photograph of an apple--realistic or abstract--our experience of the apple could never be "immediate." That experience would be mediated by the photographer or painter, whether subtly (as in realistic art) or obviously (as in abstract art). Nevertheless, our experience of the photograph or painting itself would be firsthand, direct, unmediated...immediate.

Likewise, if we were to read an ekphrastic poem about that piece of art, our experience of the painting or photograph would be mediated by the poet, but our experience of the poem would be immediate.

"Immediacy" would thus indicate direct interaction with the object at hand. In the case of an ekphrastic poem, the object at hand would be the poet's own work, not the artist's, or even the gardener's. (I think I'm in line with Rhina's sentiment here.)

I brought all this up in an attempt to address the complaint that ekphrastic poetry is, by definition, handicapped by the interposition of an extra layer of mediation between the reader and the "subject". Balderdash. An ekphrastic poem can still be fresh, compelling, and original; it can derive from another work without being "derivative."

Perhaps it would be useful to discuss foreign-language translations as a special case of ekphrasis. Since faithfulness to the letter and spirit of the original is highly valued in translations, this type of ekphrastic poem has much less freedom to vary from the approach taken by the original's creator. Even so, the translator makes significant creative decisions in terms of word choice and emphasis, and we readers interact with the translation differently than we do with the original--even those of us readers who are fluent in both languages.

Whaddya think?

Julie Stoner

[Roger Slater]

Julie, I was also tempted to make an analogy between translation and ekphrastic poetry, but I think it breaks down. After all, the translator is forced by necessity to interpret the source and make creative adjustments, but his goal isn't to provide a gloss on the original, or to use the original as a trigger or starting point for a thoroughly original and personal work of art. In a way, the more he does that, the less he succeeds as a translator. (Though not doing so means he fails as a translator, which is the paradox of translation).

I guess, in a sense, all art can be viewed as translation (a poem about a sunset "translates" the sunset into verse), but it's a shaky analogy, since, as Rhina points out, a poem isn't really "about" the things it describes but the thoughts and themes that those things evoke from the poet. (At least that's what I think Rhina is saying, though I've oversimplified). What's unique about ekphrastic poetry, perhaps, is that the trigger is another work of art, instead of something in the natural world itself. And, come to think of it, that's not so different from literary translation, except with translation it's a necessary evil, and with ekphrasis it's an available good.

My translation of Sor Juana's "To Her Portrait" perhaps shows the difference. Sor Juana wrote an ekphrastic poem about her own portrait. She was not trying to translate her portrait into a sonnet, but to use her portrait as an occasion to say something that the painter of the portrait presumably never intended or thought about. But I was trying to translate her sonnet into another sonnet that did not have a single original thought in it, choosing instead to be subservient (to the extent possible) to Sor Juana's text. I wasn't trying to comment on her text, or to say anything about the underlying portrait that inspired Sor Juana. It would be impossible to criticize Sor Juana's poem by saying that it wasn't true to the portrait, but it would be very possible to criticize my poem by saying it wasn't true to Sor Juana's sonnet.

So I'm not sure about the translation metaphor here even though, having worked so hard at translation for the last eight months or so, I tend to see translation as a metaphor for just about everything! In a way, all communication and perception is translation, but don't get me started or I'll blather even more incomprehensibly than I've been doing.