Inside the Frame: Ekphastic Poems: guest blog by Steven Winn

 This post is a guest blog by poet and art critic Steven Winn.

It was, so far as I remember, the first ekphrastic poem that made its mark on me. It was a good one, indeed a famously good one – W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts.” From its invocation of The Old Masters in the second line to its masterly conjuring of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, the poem is a shining fulfillment of the ekphrastic form – which, to put it loosely, is a poem or other piece of writing that references a specific work of visual art.

Steven Winn

 A full discussion of the origins and variations of ekphrasis, a term which dates back to the ancient Greeks and is not strictly limited to writing about visual art, is well above my pay grade. A passing point on the matter, to suggest how broad and deep the topic is: Is Andy Warhol’s Brillo Box ekphrastic art? Are the industrial Brillo boxes on which they are made a kind of found art, or do they become so by virtue of Warhol’s deadpan reinvention of them?

 

As it happens, that aside raises both the allure and challenges of ekphrastic poems. At the heart of the matter, it seems to me, is the paired questions of how the poet uses, adapts, transforms, transcends – or possibly misuses and corrupts – the artwork and how the reader receives the finished poem. To put it simply, it’s complicated.

 

Back to Auden’s “Musée” for a moment, and my powerful reaction to it. The poem is glorious in its own right, independent of the reader’s knowledge of the Bruegel painting – a meditation on memory, suffering, the joy of living and our transitory experience of it. But if you happen to be familiar with Icarus, as I was, a kind of chiming chord goes off. You “see” the painting in your mind’s eye, and register Auden’s seeing of it through the details and language he chooses (the ploughman, those “white legs disappearing into the green/Water”, that “expensive delicate ship”) that seem to alchemize paint on a centuries-old canvas into a kind of inner sight – an insight, as it were, into the poem’s deep interior space.

 

I did not, until much later, go search out the Bruegel painting in an art book. I enjoyed the parallax view of my own memory of Icarus and the one Auden had placed in conversation with it.

 

Now, of course, the history of art is in our pockets. No one has to go the library and pull a heavy art history tome off the shelf. Read an ekphrastic poem, and you can find the artwork in a matter of seconds on your cell phone. Inevitably, when someone brings an ekphrastic poem to our writing group, the phones come out and the painting, sculpture, or photograph is there in everyone’s hand. Many ekphrastic poems, especially those published online, appear adjacent to the visual art that inspired or induced them.

I’m of mixed mind about this. No doubt an ekphrastic poem invites the comparison and scrutiny. By its direct reference to a work of art, whether in a head note or in the body of the text, the poem has an obligation. Did the poet get it “right?” Did she faithfully capture some essential quality about the object? Did he do it justice? Do something more than simply describe? Make their own work of art out of the material of another?

Then again, there’s something reductive about that kind of response. It’s as if the poem were being fact checked or submitted to some kind of means test. Yes, we do this as readers with other kinds of poems – ones that allude to myth, history, other poems, etc. But there’s something different about poems based on a specific artwork, a tendency to place the art and poem in a more immediate one-to-one relation to each other.

 

What can happen is a kind of cognitive dissonance, a reading of the poem that’s too heavily informed by the reader’s external, perhaps cursory “check” of the artwork. I’m not suggesting that readers should remain in blissful ignorance. Only that they keep an open mind – and eye – to the fruitful liberties, departures, eccentricities, and transcending visions ekphrastic poets employ.

 

Great examples abound, from Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” to Anne Carson’s Van Gogh-inspired “The Starry Night,” Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” to lots of poems based on Edward Hopper paintings. Many poets make the allusions explicit; others embed the artwork so deeply it becomes a kind of submerged river or groundwater.

 

I’ve written ekphrastic poems of both types. Several are overt homages to Paul Klee. Others cite less well-known artists. (In general, I think, the degree of difficulty goes up when an artwork is very well known; a Mona Lisa poem better be damn good.) At the risk of playing favorites among my own work, I remain attached to “In Thessaly,” a poem that came about after a visit to the tomb section of a museum in Thessaloniki, Greece.

 

I like to think that it both is and isn’t an ekphrastic poem. In my mind, at least, it occupies that double-vision space of what I saw and remembered and what I made of it. There’s no reason for a reader to know any of that. But I do – an ekphrastic secret I hope the poem contains without ever quite confessing it.

   

IN THESSALY

 

If you’d been rich

and Byzantine

you never would have

lain alone,

with wife, lithe boys and concubines

to keep

you company,

not to mention

servants bound to serve

when breathless night or wine-

raked thirst or tunneled

webby dreams closed in and

left you

in the darkness

on your own.

That would have passed, of course,

and soon, as sweet murmurs,

inquiring looks, offers of cool

water and consoling hands were

fitted around you

like a barrel-vaulted tomb,

where, along with paintings

of your wife and children

holding hands,

of giant birds, stubby trees

and braided vines,

an image of yourself

would loyally stand guard

above your resting form.

Steven Winn is a San Francisco poet and arts critic.  He writes for the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Classical Voice, Opera Magazine, and others.  His poetry and fiction have appeared in Antioch Review, Cimarron Review, Colorado Review, Poetry Daily, Prairie Schooner, Southern Humanities Review, and Verse Daily.   

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Michael Field: The Work and Lives of a Victorian Poet

The poet Michael Field was not actually a man. Or a woman. Michael Field was the pen name of two women who lived in Victorian England, Katharine Bradley (1846–1914) and Edith Cooper (1862–1913). The story is even more complicated than that. Katharine Bradley was Edith Cooper’s aunt, and they were lovers who lived together as a couple. The two were accomplished authors who collaborated to write eight books of poems and numerous verse dramas.

Michael Field: Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper

Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, like many women writers of their time, published under a man’s name as a way to be taken seriously. In fact, once the secret got out that they were really a female writing duo, their work was reviewed less earnestly by critics, as the novelist and critic Emma Donoghue documents in her engaging and beautifully written biography, We Are Michael Field.

In their time, “the Michael Fields,” as they were called by their circle, were befriended and accepted by many of the leading writers of the day, including Robert Browning, Oscar Wilde, and Havelock Ellis. They were true eccentrics who actually wrote a book of love poems to their deceased lap dog. Their work fell out of fashion toward the end of their lives and has only recently received new attention. I’m extremely grateful to Professor Pearl Chaozon Bauer of Notre Dame de Namur University, who acquainted me with their writings and is part of a new wave of scholars reviving the work of Michael Field.

The work of Katharine Bradly and Edith Cooper declined in renown partly because of sexism and homophobia. Their poetry also dropped out of favor because the Michael Fields accepted many of the conventions of Victorian style. They preferred “thou” to “you,” “doth” to “does,” and used poetic interjections such as “O!” The pair often wrote in rhyme, meter, and form. Since their careers ended right at the same time that modernism was purging poetry of the cliché language of the nineteenth century, the poetry of the Michael Fields was lost in the tidal wave of new writing that discarded more traditional diction.

Then why is it important to give the work of the Michael Fields another look? Because their poetry still feels contemporary and exciting in many ways. They were clear-sighted writers who saw with a fresh and free-thinking perspective. Here is a poem of theirs I particularly like:

Nests in Elms

The rooks are cawing up and down the trees!

Among their nests they caw. O sound I treasure,

Ripe as old music is, the summer's measure,

Sleep at her gossip, sylvan mysteries,

With prate and clamour to give zest of these—

In rune I trace the ancient law of pleasure,

Of love, of all the busy-ness of leisure,

With dream on dream of never-thwarted ease.

O homely birds, whose cry is harbinger

Of nothing sad, who know not anything

Of sea-birds’ loneliness, of Procne’s strife,

Rock round me when I die! So sweet it were

To die by open doors, with you on wing

Humming the deep security of life.

It’s so unexpected that cawing crows become for the speaker of this poem a reassuring presence, affirming the calm persistence of life. I often think of crows as annoying, noisy, dirty birds, but Michael Field surprisingly sees their vitality and tenaciousness. The crows stimulate the poets to write in runes of “the ancient law of pleasure,/of love”—a pagan and joyous celebration of the carnal side of life. Not what I think of as Victorian poetry, at all! Even within the confines of this Petrarchan sonnet, Michael Field manages to include thrilling language: “Rock round me when I die!”

Sadly, both Katharine and Edith succumbed to the family illness of cancer, Katharine dying at 67, and her niece Edith at 51, predeceasing her aunt by ten months.

If you don’t know the writing of Michael Field, take the time to seek out their work. They’ll surprise you with the sensuality and depth of their poems.

  

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 2: The Akhmatova Bridge

In the first blog in this series, I talked about the early French translations of anthologies that introduced Western fans of literature to Chinese and Japanese poetry, including Le Livre de jade [The Book of Jade], and the craze for all East Asian art in the West in the late nineteenth century, called Le Japonisme.

Russian poets were well aware of these trends in Parisian culture, and Anna Akhmatova, who lived from 1889 to 1966, was no exception.

Anna Akhmatova, Russian poet, 1889–1966

Anna Akhmatova and her first husband, Nikolai Gumilev, visited Paris on their honeymoon in 1910, and returned to that city the following year.

Nikolai Gumilev, Russian poet, 1886–1921

Clearly they collected all of the available anthologies of East Asian poetry in French, since Gumilev produced a compilation of these anthologies that he translated into Russian. Gumilev called this chapbook of poems Farforovyi Pavilion: Kitaiskie Stikhi [The Porcelain Pavilion: Chinese Poems], which he published in 1918.

The Porcelain Pavilion: Gumilev's anthology of East Asian poetry, 1918

He based the book on four different French anthologies of Chinese classical poetry, including Gautier’s and Saint-Denys’.

At the same time that Akhmatova and Gumilev were visiting Paris and collecting these volumes of translations, Akhmatova was working on the book that would turn Russian poetry upside down, the book that launched modernist poetry in the Russian language. This was her first collection, Vecher [Evening], published in 1912.

Frontispiece of Akhmatova's collection Evening, published 1912

Before Akhmatova’s volume, Russian poetry was dominated by the symbolist movement. Symbolism was a school of poetry that often strove to create crystalline word structures that described an otherworldly reality, often an otherworldly love. One of the most famous symbolist poems is Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.” Poe was a symbolist avant la lettre, before the term “symbolism” even existed:

It was many and many a year ago, 

   In a kingdom by the sea, 

That a maiden there lived whom you may know 

   By the name of Annabel Lee; 

And this maiden she lived with no other thought 

   Than to love and be loved by me. 

Where is this kingdom? What sort of relationship is this where lovers think only of one another? What kind of language is this that marches along with a rhythm unlike the phrases that people usually speak? This was not a world or a style that was useful to Anna Akhmatova as a poet.

Instead, Akhmatova tried to find a different model for poetry, one that dealt with real people living in real places who had real experiences and emotions, spoken in a voice not that distant from daily speech. Akhmatova found that model in East Asian poetry.

She was particularly influenced by the traditional topic in East Asian poetry of the woman who waits all night in vain for her lover to arrive. Akhmatova may well have known a poem by the mother of the Commander Michitsuna.

Mother of the Commander Michitsuna, Japanese poet

This Japanese poet wrote in the tenth century C.E. and was married to the Regent Kaneie. The poem appeared in French translation in de Rosny’s 1871 anthology of Japanese verse. Here is the U.S. poet Kenneth Rexroth’s English version:

Have you any idea

How long a night can last, spent

Lying alone and sobbing?

This traditional tanka is a powerful and concise statement of an emotion. It sums up a relationship in just a few lines. The poet emphasizes the length of the night spent waiting for the lover. The speaker of this Japanese tanka never mentions her lover explicitly, but she does address him with a question.

In her poem “White Night” from her first collection, Evening, Akhmatova revived the traditional East Asian theme of the lover who waits in vain all night for her beloved, but she transported it to a modern, Russian setting. The title refers to the long days of the Nordic summer, when the sun barely sets:

White Night

I haven’t locked the door,

Nor lit the candles,

You don’t know, don’t care,

That tired I haven’t the strength

To decide to go to bed.

Seeing the fields fade in

The sunset murk of pine-needles,

And to know all is lost,

That life is a cursed hell:

I’ve got drunk

On your voice in the doorway.

I was sure you’d come back.

                                                            1911, Tsarskoye Selo

(translation copyright © by D.M. Thomas)

The lover in this poem is so distraught that she doesn’t even bother to light the candles once it finally gets dark, or to drag herself to bed when she realizes the man she’s waiting up for is not coming home. She can’t help keeping the door unlocked in the hope that he will still arrive. The daylight that goes on and on mirrors the insomnia and unstoppered pain of the speaker who waits up.

Akhmatova heightens the emotion implied in poems such as the tanka just discussed. She adapts the traditional theme of the jilted lover to her own purposes. As in the 10^th century tanka, the speaker addresses her lover directly, but in “White Night” the speaker throws her accusation of callousness right in her lover’s face: “You don’t know, don’t care,/ That tired I haven’t the strength/To decide to go to bed.” Akhmatova made use of the East Asian classical tradition of the lover waiting all night in vain, but she interpreted the tradition in her own empowering way.

This forcefulness in Akhmatova’s work caught the ear of North American women writers when they were looking for their own poetic models during the feminist revival that began in the second half of the twentieth century.

In “White Night” Akhmatova employs another device common in Japanese, Chinese, and Korean verse—she choreographs imagery to embody emotion—the sunset and the fading pine needles represent her waning hope. We have the sense that this is not the first time she’s been disappointed by this man, though the last time is getting close.

Interestingly, Akhmatova ends her poem with the date and place of its composition: “1911, Tsarskoye Selo.”

Tsarskoye Selo

Her use of a time and location represents a significant extension of the East Asian tradition. Every one of Akhmatova’s poems ends with the date below the last line of the poem, a stamp of authenticity indicating that these experiences were not simply invented. Many classical Chinese and Japanese poems feel autobiographical, and Akhmatova again expands on this tradition. Akhmatova uses the date at the end of her poem to indicate that she is bearing witness to the events of her heart, just as she witnessed the horrors of Stalin’s dictatorship later in her life. By making the date the conclusion of all her poems, Akhmatova was turning her verse into an ongoing diary of her personal experience, a stance that became the foundation of much of the poetry written by North American women in the 1970s and 80s.

The addition of the name of the town Tsarskoye Selo gives “White Night” an even more personal identification. Tsarskoye Selo was the Versailles of Russia, the site of the tsar’s summer palace. Significantly, it’s also the town where Akhmatova grew up and where she lived with Gumilev, tying the poem more closely to her first marriage.

In a passage from her memoirs, My Half Century, Akhmatova discusses the importance for her of writing out of her own experience. She contrasts her approach with that of the dramatic monologues of Robert Browning: “I’m somewhat anti-Browning, He always spoke in another character, for another character. I do not let anybody else speak a word (in my poetry, it goes without saying). I speak myself and for myself….” This passage reads like a manifesto for the North American poetry of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, when writers such as Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Atwood, Ntozake Shange, Sharon Olds, Linda McCarriston, and many others used autobiographical material as the source of their poetic inspiration and politics.

This outspokenly autobiographical stance of the Acmeist poets was expressed even more explicitly by Nadezhda Mandelstam. Nadezhda was the the wife of Akhmatova’s friend and closest literary ally, the poet Osip Mandelstam: “In poetry, every word is a confession, every finished work is a part of the poet’s autobiography….” (quoted in Justin Doherty, The Acmeist Movement in Russian Poetry: Culture and the Word).

In short, what Akhmatova found in the East Asian tradition was a poetry of personal narrative. This personal narrative was sorely missing in the European and American poetry of the late nineteenth century, dominated by otherworldly visions of the symbolists, the medieval revivals of the pre-Raphaelites, and the displaced emotions of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. Why the personal narrative of the East Asian tradition? Personal narrative is a sort of bearing witness, and where there are witnesses, there can be judgments, there can be remedy.

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 1, Introduction
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 3: Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 4—Jack Kerouac’s Haiku; and Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry