Day 19: Ekphrasis

Try some ekphrasis. Don't be intimidated by that word if it's new or strange to you. All you do is choose a visual art piece: photo, drawing, painting, sculpture, collage...and write about it, write a response to it, or write what it reminds you of. Create some of your own meaning from the piece of art in the form of a poem.

Here's one example where the poem references more than one work of art (though I did choose one painting to pair it with):




A Poem is a Painting


A poem is a painting that is not seen;
A painting is a poem that is not heard.

That's what poetry is--
a painting in the mind.
Without palette and brush
it mixes words into images.
The mind's edge sharpens the knife
slashing the canvas with savage rocks,
twisting trees and limbs into tortuous shapes
as Van Gogh did,
or bewitched by movement's grace,
captures the opalescent skirts
of Degas' ballet dancers.

But words on the page
as paint on canvas
are fixed.
It's in the spaces between
the poem is quickened.


By Phoebe Hesketh, from The Leave Train: New and Selected Poems.

* * *

One I wrote years ago on a particular painting:




“The Voice” by Edvard Munch


Straight trees with silent shapes beyond them
showing moon on water. But the girl
There’s always the girl in her white dress
hands primly clasped behind
And her face. She seems to lean forward at the waist
as if to tell us some piece of gossip.
But her lips are missing.

She’s listening, leaning to hear us.
We imagine a sound, a scrap of memory,
and put it in her strain of a mouth.
Maybe the voice of someone we know,
grandfather as he reads us poetry
in a warm evening house under the lamp,
or the whisper in our ear
that comes with a kiss,
or a speech from the narrator who played
Elizabeth in the film we saw last year.

1998



And just for fun, here's a little post I wrote last year on my personal history with ekphrasis. And click here for a poem I wrote about an imaginary painting. Remember, it doesn't have to be painting. Use any visual art. Keats wrote this one about a piece of pottery.