[Julie Steiner]

In case anyone's feeling inspired, several of the contests in this year's World Order of Narrative and Formalist Poets competition are (or could be) ekphrastic, including:

#16 (most obviously): Carl Maria von Weber Award for a metrical poem, rhymed or in blank verse, suggested by one of the [musical] works by Carl Maria von Weber listed in the contest guidelines. Four prizes: $250, $100, $60, $40. Length: 24 lines minimum, 60 maximum.

#2: Brooklyn Poetry Circle Award for a Petrarchan sonnet about a bridge as reality and/or symbol. One prize: $200.

#3: John Joseph Memorial Award for a metrical poem, rhymed or unrhymed, on a lighthouse as reality or symbol. Three prizes: $50, $30, $20. Length: 14 lines minimum, 42 maximum.

Several other contests are for poems inspired by works of various poets, including Lord Byron(#8), Yeats(#9), Anthony Hecht(#10), the Fugitive Poets(#11), Weldon Kees(#12), Sylvia Plath(#13), and Coleridge(#15). Check out my original thread for details on getting the competition guidelines.

Julie Stoner

Thanks, Julie. This post- WW2 poem by Louis MacNeice might be of interest to some potential competitors. Its 5-8-10 stress pattern of the triplets IMO aptly suggests the opening of a series of windows.

The National Gallery

The kings who slept in the caves are awake and out,
The pictures are back in the Gallery; Old Masters twirl their cadenzas, whisper and shout,
Hundreds of windows are open again on a vital but changeless world - a day-dream free from doubt.

Here are the angels playing their lutes at the Birth -
Clay become porcelain; the patter, the light, the ecstasy which make sense of the earth;
Here is Gethsemane scooped like a glacier, here is Calvary calmly assured of its own worth.

Here are the golden haloes, opaque as coins,
The pink temple of icing-sugar, the blandly scalloped rock which joins
Primitive heaven and earth; here is our Past wiping the smuts from his eyes, girding his loins.

Here saint may be gorgeous, hedonist austere,
The soul'd nativity drawn of the earth and earthy, our brother the Ass being near,
The petty compartments of life thrown wind-wide open, our lop-sided instincts and customs atoned for here.

Here only too have the senses unending joy;
Draperies slip but slip no further and expectations cannot cloy;
The great Venetial buttocks, the great Dutch bosoms, remain in their time - their prime - beyond alloy.

And the Painter's little daughter, far-off-eyed,
Still stretches for the cabbage white, her sister dawdling at her side;
That she grew up to be mad does not concern us, the idyl[l] and the innocent poise abide.

Aye; the kings are back from their caves in the Welsh hills,
Refreshed by darkness, armed with colour, sleight-of-hand and imponderables,
Armed with Uccello's lances, with beer-mugs, dragons' tongues, peacocks' eyes, bangles and spangles and flounces and frills;

Armed with the full mystique of the commonplace,
The lusts of the eye, the gullet, the loins, the memory - grace after living and grace
Before some plain-clothes death grabs at the artist's jemmy,
leaves us yet one half-solved case.

For the quickness of the heart deceives the eye,
Reshuffling the themes: a Still Life lives while portrayed flesh and feature die
Into fugues and subterfuges of being as enveloping and as aloof as a frosty midnight sky.

So fling wide the windows, this window and that, let the air
Blowing from times unconfined to Then, from places further and fuller than There,
Purge our particular time-bound unliving lives, rekindle a pentecost in Trafalgar Square.

L.MacNeice.

Thanks again for the thread, Alicia and co.
Margaret.

[A. E. Stallings]

Thanks for posting all these poems... many of which are new to me. I am particularly intrigued with the sub-genre of poems on movies. That's a rich topic in and of itself.

But to go back to poems on paintings. Margaret, the National Gallery poem with its mention of Ucello puts me in mind of another poem. This is a hilarious take on Ucello's famous St. George & the Dragon, by UK poet, UA Fanthorpe, in the voice of the Dragon, the Damsel, and St. George:

Not My Best Side


I

Not my best side, I'm afraid.
The artist didn't give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn't comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don't mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.


II

It's hard for a girl to be sure if
She wants to be rescued. I mean, I quite
Took to the dragon. It's nice to be
Liked, if you know what I mean. He was
So nicely physical, with his claws
And lovely green skin, and that sexy tail,
And the way he looked at me,
He made me feel he was all ready to
Eat me. And any girl enjoys that.
So when this boy turned up, wearing machinery,
On a really dangerous horse, to be honest
I didn't much fancy him. I mean,
What was he like underneath the hardware?
He might have acne, blackheads or even
Bad breath for all I could tell, but the dragon--
Well, you could see all his equipment
At a glance. Still, what could I do?
The dragon got himself beaten by the boy,
And a girl's got to think of her future.


III

I have diplomas in Dragon
Management and Virgin Reclamation.
My horse is the latest model, with
Automatic transmission and built-in
Obsolescence. My spear is custom-built,
And my prototype armour
Still on the secret list. You can't
Do better than me at the moment.
I'm qualified and equipped to the
Eyebrow. So why be difficult?
Don't you want to be killed and/or rescued
In the most contemporary way? Don't
You want to carry out the roles
That sociology and myth have designed for you?
Don't you realize that, by being choosy,
You are endangering job prospects
In the spear- and horse-building industries?
What, in any case, does it matter what
You want? You're in my way.


-- U. A. Fanthorpe

Paolo Ucello's "St. George and the Dragon": http://virtualart.admin.tomsk.ru/u/p-ucello2.htm

[FOsen]

Catching up with this great thread, and I'm surprised no one's mentioned this one. I don’t know if it's ekphrastic, mock-ekphrastic or ekphrastic only in the word’s first sense, as a vivid description. Whatever, it is a masterful summoning of many senses, right down to the spelling of the names, which makes it as visual an artifact as a Breughel [well, maybe not quite].

Frank


The Card Players by Philip Larkin

Jan van Hogspeuw staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijk snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Toward the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.

Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace!
Text

[This message has been edited by FOsen (edited July 29, 2003).]

[Robt_Ward]

NICE one frank! I'd never seen it before. If it's not describing an actual painting, it may as well have been...

(robt)

[Jerry Wielenga]

Never seen the Larkin before either. Where did you find it Frank?

- Fugwozzle

[FOsen]

It's from 'High Windows' and on page 177 of the 'Collected Poems', dated 4 May 1970.

[TeeJaay]

Poetry inspired by great works of art is certainly enjoyable to read and write, I'd agree.

However, where I ask you, are the works of art, (sculpture, painting, concertos, etc.), that have been inspired by great works of poetry?

I mean, who wouldn't want to see, The Illustrated Sharon Olds?

Seriously, are there any well-known artists who have "ekphrasized" works of poetry into other media?

TJ

[nyctom]

Tee Jay:

In a sense, any work of art based on classical mythology is ekphrastic, since the myths themselves are literature. One could say the same thing about any works of art based on the Bible. On specific poemsn that are not Biblical or mythological? Yes, there are tons of paintings based on specific poems. This was a respected tradition in the western art academies for hundreds of years. The paintings themselves--and the sculptures--tend to be of either narrative or historical gernres. The pre-Raphaelites in England, for instance, painted quite a number of canvases based on specific poems. There is one, for example, based on Tennyson's "Maude." I just woke up from a nap so I am not clearheaded enough to be able to cite referent-names and titles at you.

It does seem to be a tradition that has faded with the advent of modernism. There is an interesting series of canvases by a contemporary painter (again, I can't remember the name but I am sure it out there in googleland). She wrote to John Ashbery and Ashbery provided her with 40 (I think) titles for prospective works. She has spent the last few years creating works based on the individual titles--just finished the last one recently.

Also there is a tradition of a poet and painter working together on an individual work or series. Frank O'Hara did a series of lithographs called "Stones" in collaboration with Franz Kline. He also did a series in collaboration with Larry Rivers. I remember reading where O'Hara loved learning mirror-writing (you have to put everything backwards on a lithograph for the actual litho to "read" the way you want it).

Hope that gives you some possible starting points for your own investigation.

Tom

[TeeJaay]

Hi, Tom

Thanks for the quick response!

Yep, I thought about the Sistine Chapel and the Renaissance period of works that were often based upon biblical interpretation.

And yes, before I posted my question earlier I did a google and had already found the woman you have referred to ...very abstract stuff it seemed...didn't wait for her site to completely load, though.

And, as well, I was aware of O'Hara and his love for art...I think he actually had initially pursued art in college, and then moved over, eventually, to an English degree, if memory serves.

At any rate, beyond those, I haven't been able to identify any others via googling. But again, Tom, do appreciate your response.

TJ