[Kate Benedict]

I've always admired Sylvia Plath's sestina on a painting by Rousseau. The repetends of the sestina work so well because they stand in for the eye moving around the canvas, looking at each of the elements or colors again and again.

The poem also deals with critical disapproval by literalists of a work of art which placed a respectable parlor couch in a jungle. It's a prescient description of what she herself would face from certain quarters, she who dared to write both "respectable" poems on classical themes using classical methods, and jungly poems with wild juxtapositions and heated imagery. If she had lived, no doubt she would have explained her method in a way to satisfy or mollify critics, much as Rousseau explains his methods in the poem, but like Rousseau, the real answer would have been a matter of vivid possesion and vivid aesthetics.

Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies

A Sestina for the Douanier

Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you
Came to be lying on this baroque couch
Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye
Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,
Set in an intricate wilderness of green
Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies

Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies
It seems the consistent critics wanted you
To choose between your world of jungle green
And the fashionable monde of the red couch
With its prim bric-à-brac, without a moon
To turn you luminous, without the eye

Of tigers to be stilled by your dark eye
And body whiter than its frill of lilies:
They'd have had yellow silk screening the moon,
Leaves and lilies flattened to paper behind you
Or, at most, to a mille-fleurs tapestry. But the couch
Stood stubborn in its jungle: red against green,

Red against fifty variants of green,
The couch glared out at the prosaic eye.
So Rousseau, to explain why the red couch
Persisted in the picture with the lilies,
Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,
And birds of paradise, and the round moon,

Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon
On a red velvet couch within your green-
Tessellated boudoir. Hearing flutes, you
Dreamed yourself away in the moon's eye
To a beryl jungle, and dreamed that bright moon-lilies
Nodded their petaled heads around your couch.

And that, Rousseau told the critics, was why the couch
Accompanied you. So they nodded at the couch with the moon
And the snakecharmer's song and the gigantic lilies,
Marvelingly numbered the many shades of green.
But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye
So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,

Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch
To feed his eye with red, such red! under the moon,
In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!

---------------
The painting: http://perso.wanadoo.fr/le_douanier_...iens/freve.htm

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

What a wonderful thread! Thanks for starting it, Alicia, and welcome back!

I have a question about ekphrasis: I may be wrong about this, as about so much else, but doesn't the word refer to art in any genre--painting, poetry, music, whatever--based on a response to art in some other form? For instance, is Moussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" an ekphrastic work? Or Degas' paintings and sculptures of ballet dancers?Or does the term refer only to poetry so inspired?

[A. E. Stallings]

It would be my understanding that yes, ekphrastic could refer to any genre describing another work of art.

Ekphrasis is just ancient Greek for description.

[Tim Murphy]

Gwynn, Tufariello, Sullivan and Davis have all written terrific ekphrastic poems. I have started many ekphrastic poems, but of my 225 poems, only one is Ekphrastic:

The Muromachi Cranes

With outstretched wings the dancers pirouette.
Arching graceful necks
they open great green beaks
and join their voices in a wild duet.

Preening and strutting on a silken stage
the cranes are not dismayed
that painted feathers fade.
Immortals grow more ravishing with age.

Contentedly they wade the swirling ink
of their appointed pool
where spawning minnows school
and poets are prohibited to drink.

As the sun sets on snow peaks in the West
snow cranes contemplate
the chirps which emanate
from the lone egg sequestered in their nest.

Over that egg a four-toed foot is curled
as though a Taoist sage
in a thatched hermitage
slowly revolves the ovum of the world.

[Robert J. Clawson]

Here's a piece I wrote that I've been told is NOT an ekphrastic. How does it escape the frame?

Still Life

My wife of thirty years
paints a picture of a turnip,
an eggplant, and an onion.
Behind them, a male
and female couch potato
stare at the arrangement
as if it were TV.
The rutabaga's perfect.
The eggplant gleams,
swollen, onyx.
The woman on the divan leers.
The sable darts
at the Spanish bulb.
I watch its breath
lift a scrap of skin.

"How do you do that?"
I beg my wife of thirty years.

She stares at me
as if I were the fellow on the couch.
She daubs rose madder
on my nose:
"I have no idea."

[Catherine Tufariello]

I know that a lot of people profess to dislike ekphrastic poems on principle. But while I don't very often enjoy poems-about-poetry (unless they're on the surface level about something else altogether, like Alicia's wonderful bat sonnet), I've always had a weakness for poems inspired by a work of art or a piece of music. Maybe it's because there's a natural tension or challenge involved in the translation of a non-verbal art into words. It's a bit like translation from another language in that it requires a certain humility from the poet, a willingness to give him or herself over to the vision of another artist and often, of another time or culture as well.

Lots of fine examples on this thread already ("Rachmaninoff" is one of my favorites by Rhina). Here's one by Leslie Monsour, from her chapbook Travel Plans. It's the first of a pair of sonnets on Mary Cassatt paintings.


Patience

After Young Thomas and His Mother--pastel

She props him on the couch after his nap.
He's damp and warm. He whimpers, will she let
Him see her necklace? Afternoons are wet
And heavy since July. He finds her lap
Too sweltering, her dress does not feel nice
Against his skin. He much prefers the cold
Metallic chain, the locket made of gold.
She sniffs his tender arm, that sweet, rare spice.

He's glad Papa has gone away for now--
Mama reclines her head and pays no heed
To passing time, dexterity or speed.
Unlike Papa's "Let me. I'll show you how,"
She quietly lets him try. The halves divide
A little world with ticking hands inside.


Good to have you back, Alicia!

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks, folks, for posting all these.

Kate, am particularly glad to see the Plath. I was only recently thinking about/discussing sestinas at the Greek island workshop, and Clive, who, to our delight, came this year as a featured reader and stayed on for a few days adding much to the class, pointed out that the difficulty of the sestina is having those end-words repeat back to back at the end and beginning of stanzas. It is very interesting to see how Plath has solved this, and I like your idea of the sestina working something like the eye, looking back over the painting. That might be worth writing up!

Here's a silly one, by Wendy Cope. I think this may have been the first poem of hers I came across:

The Uncertainty of the Poet

'The Tate Gallery announced that it had paid 1 million pounds for a Giorgio de Cirico masterpiece, The Uncertainty of the Poet. It depicts a torso and a bunch of bananas.' (Guardian, 2 April 1985)

I am a poet.
I am very fond of bananas.

I am bananas.
I am very fond of a poet.

I am a poet of bananas.
I am very fond,

A fond poet of 'I am, I am'--
Very bananas,

Fond of 'Am I bananas,
Am I?'--a very poet.

Bananas of a poet!
Am I fond? Am I very?

Poet bananas! I am.
I am fond of a 'very'.

I am of very fond bananas.
Am I a poet?

[R. S. Gwynn]

Terri Witek, whom some of you must know from West Chester, has published Fools and Crows, which is primarily ekphrastic poetry.

I gave a poetry reading the other night and wanted to display a painting of Leda and the Swan before reading Yeats's poem and my own "Leda." Here's what I found, from the school of Leonardo:
http://www.artcyclopedia.com/feature-2000-05-leda.html

Somehow I don't think this is the one Wild Bill had in mind.

[Robert J. Clawson]

[quote]Originally posted by R. S. Gwynn:

"I gave a poetry reading the other night and wanted to display a painting of Leda and the Swan before reading Yeats's poem and my own "Leda." Here's what I found, from the school of Leonardo"

Good Lord, I didn't know that she'd already had quadruplets.

Bob

[Michael Creagan]

Here is a poem by James Crenner:

The "Rondanini Pieta," Michelangelo's Final (And Unfinished) Sculpture

The legs are buckled delicately
under the slumping weight of the dead Christ.
The woman's face is half erased with grief.

Michelangelo was still a young, robust,
believing man when he first hit upon this theme--
this "Pieta" with sorrowful mother

and dead son--and he carved it over
and over again throughout his life,
as if it never could be over with.

Or as if to say, "This is not anyone
in particular. This a statue
of the stricken universe one day holding

the corpse of the world in her arms."
What a lonely, ecstatic secret
it must have been, to love

extinction as tenderly as this man did
who changed the marble into smoke.
Through the insubstantial flesh

of these stone ghosts, we can see
the plain walls of the museum, and one another
circling, grieving and circling.


One of my favorite brief poems by Donald Justice:

On A Picture By Burchfield

Writhe no more, little flowers. Art keeps long hours.
Already your agony has outlasted ours.