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

Interview with Poet Linda Pastan

This installment of Advice for Writers is an interview with one of my favorite poets, Linda Pastan. Linda Pastan's many awards include the Maurice English Award, the Radcliffe College Distinguished Alumni Award, and the 2003 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. The former poet laureate of Maryland, she is the author of fourteen books of poetry—the latest of which, Insomnia, won the Towson University Prize for Literature.

Q.: Who were your teachers, mentors, or role models? What were the most useful or lasting lessons you learned from them?

Linda Pastan: My only teachers, mentors, and role models were the poets I read in books. As an only child growing up in New York City, I lived far from my school in a kind of isolation, books were my company, and luckily my parents had an extensive library. (I did work for one semester, in graduate school, with the poet J.V. Cunningham.  It was a one-on-one “class” during which he assigned me various forms, and so I learned the rules before learning to break them.) The lasting lesson I learned from reading Dickinson, Keats, Auden, et al., was to be unsatisfied with what I was writing; to try and try harder!!

Linda Pastan

Q. How has the situation of women poets changed since you began writing seriously in the 1960s?

LP: When I first started sending poems out to magazines, I considered using initials so that the editors wouldn’t know I was a woman. Women were not published nearly as much, and they were hardly reviewed at all. That has certainly changed. On the other hand it still seems to be the case that when male poets write about domestic things—marriage, children, etc.—they receive serious praise, but women poets writing on the same subject are more often condescended to.

Q. Do you enjoy reading your poems to an audience? What is the difference for you between publishing your poems and reading them out loud to people?

LP: To me, the poem on the page is what matters most. Some poets read their work out loud well. Others, T.S. Eliot, for example, read them terribly. It doesn’t really matter to me. But I do enjoy reading to an audience. It helps me to realize that there are real people out there, actually reading my work.

Q. You’ve written a lot about families, marriage, and parenthood. How do you approach writing about topics that are so familiar and close to home that it’s hard to get distance on them?   

LP: I don’t think a poet should aim for achieving distance from a subject. The point is to get up close.

Linda Pastan’s most recent book of poems is Insomnia

Q. Do you see yourself as a Jewish writer? How does Jewish tradition and/or Jewish literary tradition shape your work and your voice as a writer? 

LP: I am Jewish, and I am a writer. And I do use Jewish imagery in many of my poems, imagery I learned from Orthodox grandparents. And I love writing on Biblical subjects, particularly  the book of Genesis. But I don’t consider myself a “Jewish Writer,” just a writer who happens to be Jewish.

Q. When you compiled your book Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems, did you rewrite any of the earlier poems? If so, what were you looking to change or improve? 

LP: I think it was Auden who said poems are never finished, merely abandoned. I keep making small revisions on poems, even after they have been published in magazines and then books. And I am still making changes to various poems in the margins of my copy of Carnival Evening.

More information on Linda Pastan's most recent book of poems, Insomnia.

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 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

Poetic Forms: The Villanelle

The villanelle is a beautiful and haunting form that began in French and took on its present shape in the mid-nineteenth century, according to Amanda French.

It’s a demanding form in many ways. The first and third lines of the villanelle have to repeat throughout the poem in a set order. If the poet uses rhyme, only two rhymes are permitted in the entire poem.

The villanelle was originally a song form for country dances. The name derives from the Italian villano, which means “peasant” or “boor.” But there is nothing boorish about this form. It is very much like a country dance, though, with its deliberate repetitions and variations. Folk dances often take the participants through a series of steps that mirror one another from different angles and with different partners, but then wind up more or less where they started. 

French country dance

Here’s a video of a charming traditional French folk dance, for example, that has a theme and variations pattern similar to a villanelle. The pattern of the villanelle makes much more sense when you think about its origins in folk dance.

The Academy of American Poets website describes the form this way:

“The highly structured villanelle is a nineteen-line poem with two repeating rhymes and two refrains. The form is made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain. The first and third lines of the opening tercet are repeated alternately in the last lines of the succeeding stanzas; then in the final stanza, the refrain serves as the poem’s two concluding lines. Using capitals for the refrains and lowercase letters for the rhymes, the form could be expressed as: A1 b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 / a b A2 / a b A1 A2.” 

Of course, slight variations on the repeated lines are allowed, even encouraged.

You’ve undoubtedly seen villanelles, even if you weren’t aware that was the form you were reading. Some of the most famous villanelles in English are “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas, and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.”

The most challenging aspect of the villanelle, from my standpoint, is that the refrains, the two lines that repeat, have to occur four times each in the space of the poem’s nineteen lines. Not only that, the two refrains have to rhyme. 

One approach to these limitations is to choose refrains that are fairly general, and can reoccur in several contexts without stretching their meaning. W.H. Auden, for example, in his villanelle “If I Could Tell You,” begins his poem:

Time will say nothing but I told you so,

Time only knows the price we have to pay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.

Lines as general as “Time will say nothing but I told you so,” and  “If I could tell you I would let you know,” can make sense in many contexts, and Auden ingeniously creates several settings for these lines in his poem. 

W. H. Auden

That flexibility is a plus of a vanilla refrain. On the other hand, choosing fairly neutral refrains means that eight of your poem’s nineteen lines are something of a throwaway in terms of their poetic energy. 

To me, a more exciting solution to the villanelle’s restrictions is to pick two absolutely killer lines that bear repeating four times each. Dylan Thomas accomplishes this brilliantly:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

In the first four words of the poem, he strategically violates the rules of grammar by using “gentle” instead of the adverb “gently” to modify the verb “go.” He also creates a sonorous but not predictable alliteration with “go,” “gentle,” and “good.” He embeds a paradox in just eight words: the “good night” is actually something to be resisted.

In Dylan Thomas’s second refrain, the repetition of the powerful word “Rage” at the start is unforgettable. It also adds assonance to the word “rave” in the previous line. “Light” and “night” are a dynamic pairing for the two main rhymes in the poem. 

The problem with the killer refrain is that it has to be complex enough—linguistically and emotionally—to merit all those repetitions.

Keep in mind that once you’ve written the first tercet, you’ve also written the last two lines of your villanelle, so plan ahead. Your two refrains have to work not only as a beginning but as an ending, and they have to continually surprise the reader. Easier said than done!

One good thing about the repeating lines in a villanelle: as the poet George Higgins put it, “As soon as you’ve started your poem, you’re already a third of the way done!”

Read Zack Rogow’s villanelle, “Film Noir”

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies, including his villanelle, “Film Noir”
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

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