Last week at the Montana Book Festival the poet Michael Earl Craig and I conducted a workshop entitled “Contemporary Ekphrasis,” and for funsies I thought I’d post my “lecture” notes here on The Kenyon Review blog. The workshop was largely a success, although neither Earl nor I are still one-hundred-percent sure how to pronounce the word ekphrasis.
To a certain degree I enter any ekphrastic piece of work as a layperson, in the sense that I can’t draw or paint or sculpt or do anything digital/technological and I don’t know a whole heck of a lot about art. I mean, I like art and I like to look at and ponder over art. But I don’t know a whole lot about art. (No Art History classes in college. Or, for that matter, Art classes.) In preparing for this workshop Earl and I have even argued about how to pronounce the word. Ekphrasis. Ekphrasis. It kind of sounds like something you’d catch while vacationing in the Alps in the 1920s, which is also something I know nothing about.
That all being said, I am interested quite a bit in ekphrasis and that interest was initially derived from the way certain visual artists use language in their work. Bruce Nauman and Glenn Ligon’s textual-based art installations really wowed me back in the day, as did Jenny Holzer’s poems-as-art-installations-reflected-on-the-sides-of-major-metropolitan-buildings. But I guess for a decent amount of my writing life (whatever that means) I was more content to sit on the ekphrastic sidelines, content to just let the “actual” artists do the work.
Glenn Ligon, “Love and Theft,” 2008
Jenny Holzer, Times Square installation, 1980s
I don’t really know when that changed, in all honesty—there wasn’t a set moment or day or month—but I suppose in the last five years I’ve become more interested in both A) art and B) attempting to write about art. I think the thing with me at least is that whenever I find a piece of art that I end up deciding to write about—and it’s very, very rarely a conscious decision. I don’t think I’ve ever sat down in front of a painting or sculpture or whatever and told myself, “You will now write a poem about this piece of art.” I always come at it backwards.
If, in the traditional sense of the word, ekphrasis is about description, describing the art piece in specific, vivid detail, I don’t ever really do that. I might start out with straight description, but inevitably I’ll get waylaid by something else in the work, or my mind will just wander and the poem will move from the descriptive to the emotive or surreal or nonsensical. Years ago, I went to the Art Institute of Chicago and stared for a full half-hour at a very famous Rene Magritte painting; it’s called “Time Transfixed”—or when literally translated from the French, “Ongoing time stabbed by a dagger.” Displaying a miniature locomotive train inexplicably coming out of a seemingly-suburban fireplace, it’s a super cool painting. It entranced me and I had to be dragged away from it. So I decided to write a poem about it, one where I would describe what I saw, would make clear to the reader how and why the painting was so powerful to me. But the end result didn’t do any of that; neither the train nor the fireplace were mentioned—nor even really the painting itself. After revisions and rewritings, here’s what I ended up with it:
“ONGOING TIME STABBED BY A DAGGER.”—RENÉ MAGRITTE
A brain secretes thought as a liver secretes bile. Accidents aren’t the same thing as mistakes, but your ideas regarding the difference between the two just might be. From close range the French entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre once fired a cannon at a tree full of relentlessly chirping cicadas and not a note of their song was altered, not a beat missed. They were entirely undisturbed. This proves not that cicadas are deaf; it merely proves that cicadas are not thinking while searching—singing—for a mate, and certainly not about cannon blasts. The massed brain secretes each and every thought as the liver secretes vacuous, guileful, greenish-orange bile. Even when absent, out of view, bile itself is a kind of thought; the liver, however, decidedly not. A white semicircle stapled to a piece of black construction paper and taped on the ceiling we painted a watery dull yellow, lots of unattributable wings floating around, I’ve been working on my idea for a map of the entire universe. In love with its own faultiness, it’s a work in progress, plangent thoughts inside plangent thought.
All that honestly really remained was Magritte’s original French title for the painting, one that he himself didn’t even really like and that I used for my poem’s title. So my “ekphrastic” Magritte poem doesn’t actually have much to do with Magritte at all. Instead it was simply a jumping off point. And that’s how a lot of my own ekphrastic poems seem to go. I start out attempting to describe what I see, then end up going somewhere else; later I’ll cut out the description part, mainly because it often seems to be the weakest part of the poem, trying too hard, obfuscating what I’m trying to say versus what I’m trying to see.
That might make me a failed ekphrastic poet; I wouldn’t disagree. But I personally like to think of ekphrasis as an entirely fluid type of poetry writing, one that is at the whims of the poet’s idiosyncratic whims and desires. Consciously describing what the arting looks like in great detail works—but subconsciously describing how the arting makes you feel in digressive, messy splotches also works. The ekphrastic police don’t exist and if they do they’re probably off catching diseases in the Alps in the 1920s.