Traditionally we understand ekphrasis as a written response, often a poem, to a work of art. John Keats’ “Ode on Grecian Urn” is a famous example. The idea, initially, was to offer a visual description for something that could not be experienced by the reader. But often, in contemporary writing, the ekphrastic poem offers less of a description than a response, or the beginning of a conversation with the art. As the development of photography changed the necessity for artists to slavishly depict an object, so too has the ability to share images widely in the digital age lessened the necessity to make poems that attempt to reproduce the art work.
I own a piece of art by my friend, artist Janet Morgan, called “The God Of Questions”:
I wrote several drafts of a poem in response to this work, but this prose poem is the one I like best:
Thinking about the God of Questions on Winter Solstice
–for Janet Morgan
He’s the subject of a huge painting given to me by a friend, and he shines above the fireplace mantel, the warm heart of my house. I love most the large white ball he holds in front of him, the ball that hides his nakedness. The ball is almost as large as his torso, and I cannot tell if the white of the ball is painted or bare canvas, whether it is a moon, a sun, or a full round nothingness, pregnant with all that we do not know, but would ask.
Sometimes I think I see destruction in the ball he holds. Other times, especially this darkest of nights, there is a questioning stillness there, and a calmness I’ve seldom known. And in that calmness, hope. As I continue to look, I see it is me the god holds, three years sober, turning my questioning face to the familiar dark.
~
You can see that there are, of course, references to the actual image that she painted, but I’ve allowed my imagination to range widely, imagining that I can see my recently sober, hopeful self in the “ball of questions” the figure is holding. I like best these kinds of “ekphrastic” poems, where art and writing are in conversation, and one is not trying to reproduce the other in a different genre.
I’m also really interested in what it would mean to create a kind of visual art in response to writing, and Janet and I have collaborated on two such books, in both of which I asked her to create something in response to writing. She created the art for my first chapbook, The Mask of Medusa, now out of print (although available used on Amazon for the ungodly price of $88.95!!!!)
Janet and I also collaborated, recently, on another book, Metamorphoses, a collection of surrealistic prose poems focused on nature and women
This was also a case where Janet created the art in response to the poems. As I wrote in the introduction, in some cases I sent only one word to Janet, and I worked the poem from the drawing she sent. Sometimes I sent more—an idea for a poem, sometimes a rough draft, less often a finished poem. Sometimes she sent me a drawing that connected with no poem I had yet written, but was somehow in the spirit of what we were doing, and I wrote a companion poem. The goal was not to redo in words or in drawings, what the other had done, not to become the other, but to be connected with the other in some deep way, to be in conversation with the other. The drawings in this book are not intended as illustrations of the poem, nor are the poems intended to explain the drawings. Although there are connections between the two—maybe an image, or a kind of starkness or richness, or a feeling; the two are, rather, companions, translations, indeed, one might even call them metamorphoses of each other.
My friend Darrell Bourque has also long worked with ekphrastic poetry, and what one might call ekphrastic art. He has collaborated with the abstract expressionist Bill Gringles on several books, the most recent of which is migraré:
Etruscan Press is going to publish Darrell’s new book, Until We Talk, later this year or next, which is another collaboration with Gingles. The book is a masterpiece of ghazals and art. The poems are ekphrastic in the sense that they are responding to another work of art–but not visual. They are written in response to Colum McCann’s novel Apeirogon. What shines through in the poems is Bourque’s care for the voiceless, and his desire to be inside those whose voices he wants to understand and amplify. The generosity of his spirit is manifest in every poem, even in the very structure of the manuscript and its honoring of another writer’s work. I think the choice of the ghazal is appropriate in so many ways, the couplets that twin his voice and Colum’s.
So a book in conversation with a book. But also of great interest to me is how Gingles paired paintings that were already completed with the poems Bourque wrote. Gingles writes in the introduction,
“Since the paintings and poems were not originally keyed to each other, the challenge was to find a way to pair them in real and meaningful ways. I knew my paintings intimately but the poems, as they trickled in through the weeks, were new to me. I realized that some degree of intimacy with the poems would be necessary in order to find a way to make each pairing. This would mean living with the poems. Reading them again and again. Reading them with images of paintings in an adjacent window on my computer screen or on my studio wall nearby. Seeing the poems play out in my mind. Feeling myself a witness to the social crimes and injustices, the tragedies, and the poignant beauty that sometimes came from them.”
Gingles writes that he made himself open to any part of the poem; it could have been the title, an epigraph or phrase, a narrative element or even a color that was referenced. I’m looking forward to the publication of this book so I can share more with you about this sort of “reverse” ekphrasis.
In the next post I’ll talk about how I chose a Gingles image for the cover of my last book, 50 Miles and how that led to my thinking about making fiber art in response to poetry and essays I’ve written.
