Let’s say that art induces a response of contemplation, and that this contemplation may be sensual, aesthetic, spiritual, intellectual, so on. I think that imagination can also be a kind of contemplation. An ekphrastic, to me, is an imaginative response to a work of art.
I’ve been writing quite a few ekphrastics lately, mainly in conversation — if you will — with Goya, but also Seurat and Varo. I’ve tried it before, but never as extensively or as seriously as this. So, after the fact, I’ve been thinking about how they work, or at least, how I’ve been working with this concept.
The biggest challenge I face when I’m writing an ekphrastic is with the idea that the poem must stand on its own. This idea may be accepted, rejected or changed, depending on one’s theoretical standpoint. But I have a practical concern and it has to do with reading — I mean reading for pleasure — : if I cannot access a poem without foreknowledge of something else, then I don’t want to read the poem. If I can do one good reading of the poem alone, then I’m ready to go hunting for whatever may enrich the intial reading.
This isn’t so much a problem for when I’m reading than it is for when I’m writing: I don’t want to commit the same crime I can’t bear in other people’s poems.
It seems to me that ekphrastic poetry functions on the paradox that it has to simultaneously be complete on its own and also have a dynamic relationship with its source — a relationship that enriches, if not both the source and poem, enriches at least the poem.
This also brings me more practical concerns: if the poem is a response to, say, a painting, is the poem obliged to describe or otherwise conjure up an image of the painting? To what extent?
One of the earliest ekphrastics I remember reading is Moniza Alvi’s ‘I Would Like to be a Dot in a Painting by Miro.’ It’s a poem I like a little less with time, but only because tastes are bound to change. I still admire this poem. One of the reasons is: when I first read it, I had no idea who Miro was or what his paintings could be like; but the poem immediately gave me a sense of what to expect, and that was more than enough to sustain my first reading. This is something all ekphrastics should be capable of, without having to say, ‘The painting is square. The sky is very blue. There are cows sleeping by a tree.’
If Alvi suggests what might actually be present in the painting (or an imaginary painting by Miro, based on elements he often uses — I’ve never been sure if she was responding to a specific work or his general aesthetic), it is only in relation to what the speaker in the poem — the dot — is thinking and wishing. We have a sense of how the objects relate to each other physically in the dimensions of the canvas, and a brief sense of the colours. This vague impression of the painting allows the poem to be autonomous, if the reader so chooses. It’s no wonder, then, that this poem appears in so many creative writing lessons plans (google ekphrasis and see what you will find).
The question that is adjacent to this, is whether an ekphrastic poem can be content with only describing. In ‘Conventions of Ekphrasis,’ Calamity Jane writes:
Sometimes used interchangeably, ekphrasis usually includes, but is not limited to, the use of enargia. The term comes from classical rhetoric. It means to make the object lively appear before the reader’s eye. This usually happens through careful recreation of the visual artifact through verbal means, such as detailed description, use of sensory information, imagery, etc… In other words, so ekphrasis will also attempt to visually reproduce the art object for the reader so that the reader can experience the same arresting effect as the poet. This, of course, works to varying degrees of success. Some refer to this as “painterly” poetry, and this is precisely the kind of work that lies at the heart of Lessing’s treatise. Lessing saw it as poetry’s attempt to mimic the visual arts.
It makes me curious to know why enargia ‘works to varying degrees of success.’ Maybe the key word is ‘lively.’ Maybe that is where the imagination comes in.
In my recent ekphrastics I’ve usually situated the ‘I’ within the frame of the painting and taken liberties with the characters, and possibly ignored the intent of the work. Sometimes the ‘I’ jumps around within the painting, or jumps out of it. It’s hard to say how much of this energy I will appreciate in a month’s time, but this idea is obsessing me — the idea of the things in the painting studying themselves or each other as works of art. It was an unconscious obsession at first, now less so.
I’m very interested to know about your experience with ekphrastics — reading them, writing them, but especially reading and writing them. This could be a support group for those who have written, are writing, want to write ekphrastics. Or better still, an opportunity for intelligent exchange.
Do, also, share your ekphrastic poems that you like and/or that you’ve written. Here are two of mine:
‘Fog’ (2008)
If you were a bird (2007)
………….on Pablo Picasso’s L’enfant au pigeon
You are calm as a dove held to the chest
of a child. Caged in bones, you may be
her heart. You pulse where her fingers fold
around your body – they are pink
as arteries carrying a flush to her lips.
She watches your beak as if afraid
that you will pluck at something delicate
like the dress she wears. Blue dye spreads
from her clothes onto your feathers
so that she might be wearing you
on her sleeve.
Sometimes you are afraid
that she will let you out into the night:
there is a brightly coloured ball in the field
that perhaps she will pick up to play,
and if she does, where will you go, blue dove,
after beating your wings for so long
in the warm hold of her hands?
_____
Heh, rather pretty stuff.
I’m currently doing a degree in art history, so this topic is very interesting for me. I didn’t know what ekphrasis was before I read this post, and after looking it up online I’m still not sure! But I would be interested to hear your thoughts on the relationship between ekphrasis and the interpretation of meaning – is it more like the way an interpreter translates from one language to another, or the way a musician interprets a score? And what does it mean to respect the art work and the artist in writing ekphrasis?
I’m not sure whether this would count as ekphrasis or not: http://afternoondust.wordpress.com/2010/04/13/uriel-orlow/
Nathan
Nathan,
The wiki explanation isn’t so bad: “Ekphrasis has been considered generally to be a rhetorical device in which one medium of art tries to relate to another medium by defining and describing its essence and form, and in doing so, relate more directly to the audience, through its illuminative liveliness. A descriptive work of prose or poetry, a film, or even a photograph may thus highlight through its rhetorical vividness what is happening, or what is shown in, say, any of the visual arts, and in doing so, may enhance the original art and so take on a life of its own through its brilliant description. One example is a painting of a sculpture: the painting is “telling the story of” the sculpture, and so becoming a storyteller, as well as a story (work of art) itself. Virtually any type of artistic media may be the actor of, or subject of ekphrasis. One may not always be able, for example, to make an accurate sculpture of a book to retell the story in an authentic way; yet if it’s the spirit of the book that we are more concerned about, it certainly can be conveyed by virtually any medium – which in itself is challenging and interesting – and thereby enhance the artistic impact of the original book through synergy.
“In this way, a painting may re-present a sculpture, and vice versa; a poem portray a picture; a sculpture depict a heroine of a novel; in fact, given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art, especially if a rhetorical element, standing for the sentiments of the artist when s/he created her/his work, is present. For instance, the distorted faces in a crowd in a painting depicting an original work of art, a sullen countenance on the face of a sculpture representing a historical figure, or a film showing particularly dark aspects of neo-Gothic architecture, are all examples of ekphrasis.”
And you can find many examples, here: http://www.dwpoet.com/poetassign.html (The link to Calamity Jane’s article in my post is also useful.)
For me, an ekphrastic poem is essentially a response to a work of art — generally a visual artwork, like a painting, sculpture or photograph. That response /can/ be interpretive, but it can also be purely descriptive, concerned with the formal aspects of the work (the colours, the brushstrokes, the elements — forgive me, I’m not an art history major so I’m making up my own terminology!), or it may simply want to play with the ‘story’ of the work. One thing that Calamity Jane’s list shows is that there are multiple ways in which to write an ekphrastic. I don’t know much about Uriel Orlow, but that definitely reads like an ekphrastic to me.
‘the way a musician interprets a score’ — I wouldn’t know much about that, but the language translation analogy doesn’t hold for me. In translation, the original text is transformed — worked upon in some way — so that it can exist in a different language. In ekphrasis, the original text is untouched. There are simply two texts, and the newer one is responding to the older.
There’s also the matter of fidelity, as you suggest, in translation. If not form or exact word meanings, the translator is supposed to at least be faithful to the ‘spirit’ of the work. Someone who is writing an ekphrastic should be faithful only to her reception of the work.
I hope someone else also comments, so you get more than just my opinion.
Hi Aditi,
I’m not so sure that an ekphrastic can leave the original artwork untouched, in the sense that even ‘pure’ description contains some evaluative or interpretative element determining which aspects are described and which aren’t, the kinds of comparisons that are made, etc.. For me there is always a kind of dialogue going on – the work informs the poem, but also the poem informs the work, changing what the work has the potential to mean. I understand your point about wanting the poem to stand on its own, but perhaps too there is something that comes out of the relation between the poem and the artwork that doesn’t belong to either of them, but nonetheless changes the way you think about them both. An example might be James Joyce and Dublin (if one could reduce his work to an ekphrastic of the city!): perhaps the really interesting thing is not Dublin, or Joyce’s writing per se, but what happens in the space between them, the way in which Joyce positions his writing in relation to the city. Ok, that’s a really bad example, but I can’t think of a better one right now!
Nathan
Nathan,
I’m not so sure that an ekphrastic can leave the original artwork untouched, in the sense that even ‘pure’ description contains some evaluative or interpretative element determining which aspects are described and which aren’t, the kinds of comparisons that are made, etc..
That’s not what I meant. I’ll put it differently. When someone reads a translation of, say, Flaubert into English, they are aware that the translation is not and never can be exactly the original, no matter what approach the translator has taken. But they still expect to be reading Flaubert, Flaubert transformed into English. But if one is reading an ekphrastic poem inspired by a painting by Monet, one is not expecting to see Monet’s painting in a poem the way one would expect to read Flaubert in English. In that sense, the original Monet is untouched, but the original Flaubert has been changed.
But of course they will dialogue and inform each other, and in that sense are ‘changed’. I don’t think I suggested otherwise.
Poems are paintings, and of course a poem should be about itself.
“The painting is square. The sky is very blue. There are cows sleeping by a tree.”
That’s a nice painting. Er, poem.
A separate but related idea: lately my obsession with music (classical, in the broadest, most meaningless sense of the term—Medieval through to the Modernists) has resulted in an interest in what I suppose could be called “musical ekphrastics.” I’m not how much I’m abusing the meaning of “ekphrastic.” A lot of the time music simply inspires me in the abstract sense, e.g. I’m listening to a rhythmic, violent piece of music like The Rite of Spring or Schoenberg’s third string quartet, and those emotions make their way into whatever I’m doing at the time. That’s mundane. A few weeks ago I wrote/pieced together a series of interconnected vignettes having to do with personal religious tensions (I’m an atheist with a very conservative Catholic family, etc.), while listening to highly evocative, religious pieces by various post-serial/atonal composers (mostly Ligeti, Penderecki, and George Crumb). It was easy to imagine myself to be “in conversation” with their works, but the nature of the conversation must have been quite strange: all of these works were frightening, outright terrifying even, and the vignettes were often horrific in tone as well. And yet by channeling those emotions from the music, I was completely abusing the intent of the composers. (Actually, I’m not sure how religious Ligeti was, but I was listening to his Requiem, a setting of the Catholic mass for the dead. It counts, I suppose.)
Also, many of the characters I’ve written are composers or music enthusiasts. I’ve conceived a scene (for a story that I’m not yet sure isn’t highly cliche) in which a character is performing a Bach fugue alone in his house, and even though he’s hitting all the right keys at the right moments, the voices of the fugue sound out of sync to his ears. Soon he’s reduced to tears because he can’t play it right, even though his playing is perfect. This is supposed to be symbolic of how he’s losing his sanity or something. I think it’s clever, but it might be too clever. (I’m not a realist, but I don’t want to get caught up in cliches of “experimental” literature that isn’t really experimental. You’ve blogged about this, hehe.)
But I’m not sure any of that is really ekphrastic. I think it would be different than a given piece of music inspiring the emotions of a given story or poem, or musical ideas employed figuratively in a story. A highly figurative account of listening to a musical piece? I once thought of Ligeti’s Kyrie as something like falling to a pool of dry leaves (the choir) and getting poked in the face by skeleton hands (the horns). That’s almost comical.
What music do you like, anyway?
Lane,
Your writing project sounds really cool. I’m pretty sure there is something called musical ekphrasis. I’ve been meaning to read this essay — ‘A Concert of Paintings’ (http://www.eunomios.org/contrib/bruhn1/bruhn1.html) — and there is also this workshop by Fiona Sampson (http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/jul/02/poetry).
(I’m an atheist with a very conservative Catholic family, etc.)
We have this in common.
What music do you like, anyway?
Heh, well, I don’t know much about and haven’t experienced much classical music (however broadly you define it). I listen to a lot of pop (from the 80s/90s) and classic rock, and some metal. Some other stuff I don’t know how to categorise.
Right now I’m obsessed with Madonna and Tori Amos and this one song by The Smiths.
Hey, you should send me your drafts. I’d love to read them, even if I don’t get all the musical references.
@Lane – have you read Adorno’s book on Alban Berg? There are sections of it (especially towards the beginning and the end) that seem imho to be aiming at a kind of musical ekphrasis, or at least to go beyond technical description in one way or another.
@Nathan: I actually haven’t read anything by Adorno, but I’ll look that book up.
@Aditi: Thanks for the links! I don’t know if I’m ready to show my drafts to anyone beyond meatspace, and anyway a lot of my ideas haven’t even been drafted, but when I am/they are I’ll let you know. Thanks for the offer/support.
Hello Aditi,
I just came across your thoughts, queries and fascinating analysis of ekphrasis; it felt quite serendipitous, as I seldom ‘bump’ (virtually or otherwise) into poets engaged with ekphrasis, which happens to be something of a passion, perhaps thanks to my day job
as a producer in performing arts.
Most of my ekphrastic experiences have drawn from performing art works though there are three or four that ricocchet off sculptures (no paintings so far!)…. however, it is just about 7 AM in my corner of the universe, and I am still a bit bleary-eyed, so I will just join the discussion with a link to an essay I had written for Speaking Poetry/Open Spaces some months ago. Some of my ekphrastic poems appear at the end of the piece (a small word of caution, though: the pagination is all shot to bits in the third movement of Distant Music!).
Ooops, the link didn’t appear: http://www.openspaceindia.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=397:that-single-fleeting-moment-thoughts-on-ekphrastic-poetry&catid=55:essaysinterviews&Itemid=109
Thanks, Karthika. That should be exciting to read.
Apologies for the spelling bumbles, by the way! Part of the bleary-eyedness at undawn