[A. E. Stallings]

Narrative poetry and representational painting have a long entwined history... The Pre-Raphaelites, as Tom mentions, have numerous poem-inspired painting. A favorite subject was Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott." A number of famous paintings are based on scenes from the poem.

[nyctom]

Frank O'Hara started off selling cards in the Museum of Modern Art bookstore one Christmas season. By the time of his death, he had become a curator of painting and was still moving up the museum's hierarchy. Part of this was due to his friendships with many painters of the second generation of abstract expressionism. "Chez Jane," for example, is a poem written for Jane Freilicher, a painter, as is this, written for Micheal Goldberg, a poem I adore:


Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in
"Sit down and have a drink" he
says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color; orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.


There is a very interesting discussion of this poem at: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poe...ra/painter.htm

Frank,
Larkin's verses were doubtless suggested ('inspired' seems a mite strong!) by one of the 17C or 18C Dutch or Flemish pictures with this subject.(Or maybe a melange of several). Prints of such paintings decorated the walls of many British and Irish homes during the first half of the 20C, so he had probably encountered one or more in childhood.
Margaret.

[TeeJaay]

Hey, A.E.,

Thanks for the additional info...I did some more googling this morning on "art inspired by poety" and came up with some interesting finds. In particular this site:
http://www.artmagick.com/Gallery/Maidens/

Thanks for your response.

TJ

Hey, Tom,

Yeah, that poem is a favorite O'Hara of mine...I first read it about the same time Lawrence Raab published an article in "The Writer's Chronicle" ((May 1999) entitled "Poetry's Weakness". In it, Raab made the point that often one starts out to write a piece on a given subject only to have it turn out to be something completely unanticipated...he likened that kind of creative process, by contrast, to a carpenter who starts out to build a cabinet and ends up with a coffee table. That carpenter would not be in business long! At any rate, O'Hara's piece has always reminded me a bit of Raab's analogy.


TJ

[Roger Slater]

Has anyone mentioned John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror"? This is lucid Ashbery, a relatively rare occurrence, and is a fine poem for those who can forgive its lack of meter.

In a sense (far-fetched, perhaps), most of Blake's illuminated poems are ekphrastic. I guess it might depend on which came first, the picture or the poem.

I wonder if a poem like Hart Crane's "Brooklyn Bridge" poem would qualify, since in a way it's a poem about architecture and/or bridge-building, arts unto themselves.

[Robt_Ward]

Roger,

If we keep nibbling away like this, soon we'll be left with nothing that's NOT ekphrastic poetry except long narrative poems, idylls, and love poems. jejeje™

(this is meant tongue-in-cheek, in case anyone's unsure)

(robt)

[nyctom]

TJ:

What a wonderful site that appears to be. I just took a cursory tour through it, but registered immediately. It's like having a museum on the desk--and much cheaper than the Guggenheim.

Thanks for the tip!
Tom

[Thomas Newton]

Alicia,

Many of the Newtonian sonnets are ekphrastic. Here are three examples:

HALSTON 53 SHALL I COMPARE THEE

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
--Sonnet XVIII, William Shakespeare

To Venus found at Milo nine score years
Ago by Dumont? Thou art softer, warmer
By Far. You try to hide revealing tears
That show your mind is softer, warmer.
To Venus Anadyomene by
J. A. D. Ingres? Thou art covered with
Expensive fabric to foil those who try
To prove that you are certainly a myth.
To Mona Lisa by da Vinci? Thou
Art similar with your facial expression
Expertly worn, proving that you know how
To make that timeless, suave, reserved impression.
And thou hast something added to mortality
Through poetry, which they have--immortality.

Fall 99
http://www.firstview.com/WRTWfall99/HALSTON/P053.html

THE CONCERTO OF DELIVERANCE AND TRIUMPH

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2 Opus 18 in C minor--Moderato
--believed to be the model for Richard Halley's Fifth Concerto

The first man built a fire and then was burned
To death for his achievement, but Man now
Had fire though its brave creator was spurned.
Others then created the wheel, the plow . . .
Creators all throughout the ages fought,
Struggled, and perished dragging savages out
Of caves into the light of Progress, brought
Improvements to their lives, killed fear and doubt.
From cave to modern city, Man advanced.
From mindless magic, mind at last emerged.
Savages shivered, shouted, sang, and danced
Where now the Bolshoi Ballet patrons splurge.
Here's to the creators of every kind--
The men of truth, of reason and the mind.

Dedicated to Ayn Rand

(The music of Richard Halley’s Fifth Concerto … seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. –Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand)

(The sacred fire which is said to burn within musicians and poets—what do they suppose moves an industrialist to defy the whole world for the sake of a new metal, as the inventors of the airplane, the builders of the railroads, the discoverers of new germs or new continents have done through the ages? . . . An intransigent devotion to the pursuit of truth. – Spoken by Richard Hailey in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand)


EARTHRISE

The lifeless lunar landscape stretches out
Before my eyes in shades of grayish-white,
And only craters love the endless drought--
The heat of day--the chilling cold of night.
A rising orb dispels the black of space,
And strong emotions swell--too deep for Freud.
The Earth, so pregnant with the human race,
Is thirsting there to fill the awful void.
Will mankind propagate among the stars,
Or will some minor cosmic accident
Change Mother Earth into a planet Mars,
Or will there be a method to prevent . . .
And so as mankind walks upon the Moon,
He views the planet from which he was hewn.

(The poem “Earthrise” is based on the famous
NASA photograph “Earthrise.”) http://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/image/pla..._earthrise.jpg

[FOsen]

John Hollander wrote an instructive book, The Gazer's Spirit, 'poems speaking to silent works of art' -- which categorizes 'ecphrasis' by instances in which, variously: (a) we know a particular object is being confronted; (b) we know precisely what the object is; and (c) the actual object described is available for us to consider. When (c) is the case, it is 'actual ekphrasis.' When neither (a) nor (b) obtain, and we may be dealing with a fictional work of art, it is 'notional ekphrasis' -- so, Margaret - I guess the Larkin is an instance of 'notional' ekphrasis.

-- FrankText

On the First Good Day, I'm going to go back to Sharon Passmore's post about how to italicize /:

[This message has been edited by FOsen (edited August 02, 2003).]

As Sebastian Levy has posted a Holub on the Skool thread, I thought he might have liked to be invited to this party.

Masterpiece
(Miroslav Holub, Trans. Dana Habova and David Young)

The only masterpiece
I ever created
was a picture of the moth Thysania agrippina
in pastel on grey paper.

Because I was never
much good at painting. The essence of art
is that we aren't very good at it.

The moth Thysania agrippina
rose from the stiff grey paper
with outstretched, comb-like antennae,

with a plush bottom resembling the buttocks
of the pigwidgeons of Hieronymus Bosch,
with thin legs on a shrunken chest
like those on Breughel's grotesque figures
in 'Dulle Griet', it turned into Dulle Griet
with a bundle of pots and pans in her bony hand,

it turned into Bodhiddharma
with long sleeves,

it was Ying or Shade
and Yang or Light, Chwei or Darkness
and Ming or Glow, it had
the black colour of water, the ochre colour of earth,
the blue colour of wood.

I was as proud of it as an Antwerp councillor,
or the Tenth Patriarch from the Yellow River,

I sprinkled it with shellac, which is
the oath that painters swear on Goethe's Science of Colours,
and then the art teacher took it to his study

and I forgot all about it
the way Granny used to forget
her dentures in a glass.