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

The Hated English Teacher and Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”

We all hated our tenth grade English teacher, Mr. Glicksman. In the late 1960s, a time of rebellion and questioning authority, Mr. Glicksman was an old-school disciplinarian. He had taught high school English since shortly before the rocks were placed at Stonehenge. Any violation of his long list of rules incurred points off your grade or a visit to the dean of students.

Bronx High School of Science, where I studied with Mr. Glicksman

Mr. Glicksman had turned the literary arts into a precise science. He gave quizzes on 3 X 5 cards, a piece of white, lined card stock about as wide as your hand and as tall as your thumb. All information was reduced to a series of ten multiple-choice questions that could be answered on one of these cards when it came time for a quiz.

When we studied Homer’s Odyssey, the test questions did not probe the thought-provoking issues raised by an ingenious traveler battling for decades against a hostile god, mythical creatures, and the elements, while yearning to get back to his wife, son, and homeland. Instead, Mr. Glicksman’s quizzes focused on cold facts. One typical question that sticks in my mind (possibly because I got it wrong!) was: “Did Odysseus bend the bow on the third, fourth, fifth, or sixth try?” The answer is the third try, in case you were dying to know.

 

And yet, Mr. Glicksman loved poetry. His favorite was Alfred Tennyson’s “Break, Break, Break”:

 

Break, break, break,

      On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

      The thoughts that arise in me.

 

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,

      That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad,

      That he sings in his boat on the bay!

 

And the stately ships go on

      To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanish’d hand,

      And the sound of a voice that is still!

 

Break, break, break

      At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

      Will never come back to me.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)

When Mr. Glicksman read that poem aloud to our class, he revealed a rare personal emotion, telling us that those lines recalled for him the death of his own brother. He took off his glasses for a second and wiped away an uncharacteristic tear. We were shocked, but also, having suffered under Mr. Glicksman’s harsh penalties for any minor infraction, the students were ready for revenge. After class, the sophomores mocked him for his soft-hearted response: “Can you believe the way Glicksman almost cried at that corny old poem!”

Not long ago, I was walking by the Pacific Ocean at Sea Ranch in California.

Sea Ranch, California (photo by Esta Brand)

The sky was spread with clouds; waves were fracturing against the rocky coastline. I couldn’t help thinking of the lines Mr. Glicksman had read us:

Break, break, break,

      On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!

 

I soon reread Tennyson’s poem, and it moved me, for the first time. It was partly that deeply felt sense of loss that the tides of the ocean pulled out of me that day, and partly the sheer music of the poem’s words.

At first glance, Tennyson’s sixteen lines seem to have a somewhat mechanical plan, with predictable rhymes such as sea and me, and play and bay. But the closer I looked at the poem, the more unconventional it seemed. The first line in stanza 1 has only three syllables, and the same word appears three times in a row. That’s a sharp contrast to stanza 2, where the initial line has eight syllables and no word repeats. The powerful stresses in every line constantly shift the rhythm, from anapestic to iambic to spondaic, evoking the strong but unpredictable swirling of the sea. Tennyson uses mostly monosyllabic words to create pounding beats, and masterfully inserts polysyllabic touches to change up the cadences.

 

Maybe more surprising than the poem’s structure is the fact that the speaker is addressing not a lost loved one, but the sea. The poet says he is unable to “utter/The thoughts that arise in me.” His sense of loss is so jagged that he can barely express it. He can’t even name what or who he’s mourning for.

 

Nothing expressed for me so vividly the feelings the ocean evoked for me that day at Sea Ranch as the poem our teacher had recited to our class, a poem that had lodged in my synapses for 54 years. And I suddenly felt gratitude for that crotchety old Mr. Glicksman, and a sense of loss for “the sound of a voice that is still.”

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies.

Zack’s most recent book of translations, Bérenice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris.

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

John Steinbeck’s Epiphany in the Redwoods

Man against Nature—that was one of the great themes of literature that Ms. Weiss taught us to appreciate in eleventh grade English at the Bronx High School of Science. And that theme was certainly recognizable in many of the books we read that year, among them John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, published in 1939 when the author was thirty-seven.

Steinbeck opens The Grapes of Wrath with an unforgettable chapter on the cataclysm that hit the Dust Bowl in the U.S. prairies in the 1930s:

The wind grew stronger, whisked under stones, carried up straws and old leaves and even little clods, marking its course as it sailed across the fields. The air and the sky darkened and through them the sun shone redly, and there was a raw sting in the air.…

In The Grapes of Wrath, nature feels like a force trying to thwart or obstruct human well-being. What Steinbeck doesn’t mention is that these dust storms were made worse by human factors. Before the region was developed for agriculture, it was filled with tall, deep-rooted prairie grasses. Unsustainable farming practices resulted in an ecosystem with little defense against drought and winds.

Dust storm, U.S. Dust Bowl, 1930s

The Man against Nature paradigm that Steinbeck used in The Grapes of Wrath began to shift in the period after World War II, when the impact of the industrial economy on nature and on human life became more immediate and clear. It’s intriguing that Steinbeck lived long enough to experience and actually influence this shift himself.

At the start of the 1960s, not long before his death at age 66, Steinbeck set off on a quest. “I discovered that I did not know my own country,” he wrote in Travels with Charley, the book where he recounted his trip in an RV with his dog, across the United States. 

John Steinbeck with Charley

At the start of his journey, Steinbeck still looked on America as something of an obstacle: “I was determined to look again, to try to rediscover this monster land.”

Steinbeck did look again, particularly when he revisited the redwoods of his native California. 

Redwoods, Northern California, USA

This time he saw with new eyes: “The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always,” he wrote. “From them comes silence and awe. It’s not only their unbelievable stature, nor the color which seems to shift and vary under your eyes, no, they are not like any trees we know, they are ambassadors from another time.… The vainest, most slap-happy and irreverent of men, in the presence of redwoods, goes under a spell of wonder and respect.”

Steinbeck’s new encounter with the redwoods towards the end of his life was part of a major shift taking place at this time. In 1962, the same year that Travels with Charley appeared, biologist Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, causing a storm of controversy about the impact of pesticides on the environment and human health, and helping to launch the environmental movement. At the same time, John Steinbeck, in his final years, experienced among the redwoods an epiphany that shifted his way of looking at nature—not as humankind’s opponent, but as the domain of revered elders in the family of living things.

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

How to Market Your Book: Interview with Hayley Zelda

This post is an interview with Hayley Zelda on marketing your book. Hayley Zelda is a writer and marketer at heart. She's written on all the major writing platforms and worked with a number of self-published authors on marketing books to the YA (young adult) audience. To contact Hayley, email her at hayleyzelda2 AT gmail DOT com.

Hayley Zelda, book marketing expert

 

ZR: What kind of foundation should a writer build for marketing a book, even before sending a proposal to editors?

 

Hayley Zelda: It’s really helpful to have a website up and an email capture set up on the website as early as you can. Personal websites can take some time before they rank on Google, and you can be sure that with any good marketing, people will be looking you up. Start with a website, social profiles, and an email capture. If you have time, you can begin building your audience, but you don’t have to. It’s important just to get the pages active.

 

Q. How can a writer use personal networks to enhance the marketing of a book?

 

HZ: I advise everybody I work with to promote to their personal networks. Ping all of your friends, family, followers. You don’t even need to tell them to buy your book, just announce that you just wrote a book. Write about yourself and people will want to support you.

 

The easiest thing you can do if you don’t have your book out yet is to start building an audience and network around yourself and your story. Building an audience takes time.

 

You can start with social networks like Twitter and Instagram. Study other authors who write for your audience to see what their fans like them to share. Figure out how to do that, but in your own style and voice. Target hashtags in your genre to attract more readers. The other trick to building your audience is to reply to people who already have an audience. Engage a lot with others and you’ll start seeing your own audience grow.

 

You can also build an audience on writing sites (like Wattpad or Commaful if you’re writing fiction). These sites are more targeted towards specific types of audiences, so if you’re writing for a YA audience, for example, sharing a few side stories featuring your characters can go a long way and help you build your audience.

 

When your book is out, share it everywhere! Harness all that potential energy you’ve built up over time.

 

Q. Is it essential to have a publicist to reach a wider audience?

 

HZ: Absolutely not! Publicists can be very helpful in the process, given experience and connections in the space. Where you are probably new to the world of marketing a book, a publicist promotes new books all the time.

 

That said, publicists are expensive and very few will offer a guarantee of any kind. For most self-published writers or writers who don’t get a large advance on a book deal, publicists are out of budget range anyway.

 

For most writers, thinking more about their book marketing strategy themselves is a good start. There are many cheap/free ways to begin promoting your book. They can take some time to learn, but once you learn them, you can make a lot of progress with generating sales. Some of these strategies include:

• Press

• SEO

• Email list building

• Social media sharing

• Ads

 

Q. How do you find a good publicist, and what should you expect to pay?

 

HZ: Referrals are by far the best way to find a good publicist. Talk to other authors, see who actually liked their publicist and who actually got results. Many publicists can talk a good game, but don’t end up driving good results.

 

If you don’t know many other authors, you can join public writers chats and author chats and ask. You can also reach out to publicists you find online and just go deep in reference checks.

 

Prices for publicists really vary. Most will be at least a couple thousand dollars a month, some $10k+

 

Personally, I like working with very savvy, younger, and very hungry publicists. They tend to be a little cheaper but also willing to work a lot harder to get books out there.

 

Q. How can an author get press without having a publicist or PR rep?

 

HZ: Many publicists and PR reps have existing connections with journalists and blogs, allowing them to feature their clients quickly and easily.

 

It is entirely possible to get press without existing relationships, though! The key is to start small. Unless you’re already famous, don’t go straight to the New York Times. Start with the most local publication you can find. Local publications tend to be the easiest to get into. Find a writer at that publication you think could potentially write about you. Find their email or find them on Twitter and kindly ping them about who you are and what you’ve done. It’s a numbers game. You may not get a reply on your first several, but keep going and you’ll get some small bites.

 

Then you can leverage those small bites into larger ones. In your next pitches, include your previous press features and how well they did.

 

You can use the same strategy for blogs. Don’t go after the big blogs first. Start with small and active blogs. For example, if you’re writing nonfiction, Wired For Youth is clearly still just starting out, but has an initial audience already. It’ll be much easier to score a book review or interview on a site like that before moving onto the bigger ones.

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