Connecting the Visual to the Verbal in the Classroom

Rationale

I began teaching AP English Literature three years ago. In those three years I have worked hard to help my students acquire the skills necessary to not only score well on the AP exam, but to acquire reading and writing skills that would prepare them for whatever career path they chose after high school. One of the many skills that an AP English Literature student needs to acquire is the ability to identify literary devices within the context of a piece of writing, and examine the function of that literary device within the piece. If students are able to do this they will score well on the AP exam, but they will also become careful, analytical readers, which is a valuable skill to possess. The ability to identify literary terms and explain their function is one which a student must demonstrate with prose passages and pieces of poetry. This creates three problems for me every year. The first problem is that my students have little knowledge of literary terms beyond the most basic vocabulary. Even the things they are familiar with, like imagery and simile, they have a hard time finding within the context of a story or a poem. The second problem comes after I teach the students the terms and how to identify them in a text. Once they have acquired the vocabulary and can identify the terms, they really struggle with considering the function of a device within a text. For some reason students think that writers just throw symbols, anaphora, metaphors, or metonymy into a piece of writing simply because they can. The idea that these techniques have a purpose beyond merely showing off some nifty skills on behalf of the author is a completely foreign concept to my students. Then, once I have convinced the students that writers are not simply showing off, they slowly begin to consider the question of function and have discussions about function. These discussions go far concerning stories or plays, but my third problem becomes glaringly obvious once we try to have such discussions about poetry. The students have little to no familiarity with poetry, so their ability to read and understand it is severely limited. Much of my year seems to be spent trying to teach them how to simply read and comprehend poetry, which leaves little time to get to the higher level skills necessary for the AP exam.

Some minor work with ekphrastic poetry in another course I teach gave me some ideas about how I might use the poetry in my AP course, and then the offering of a Yale National Initiative poetry seminar on ekphrasis formalized my initial thoughts. According to Leo Spitzer, ekphrasis is "the verbal representation of visual representation." ¹ The "verbal representation" of ekphrasis is what drew me toward designing a unit using ekphrastic poetry for my AP English Literature and Composition students. With ekphrastic poetry students can focus on how a poet verbally represents a piece of art by identifying the literary devices the poet uses, considering why those devices were chosen, and examining the effect of the devices on the reader of the poem. In my limited work with ekphrasis in the classroom, I realized that poetry becomes much more approachable when students have a visual representation in front of them. Students are intimidated by poetry, and ekphrastic poetry is accessible because they can read the poem with some confidence that they at least have a general idea what the poem is discussing.

This unit will begin with some work with poems in response to Pieter Brueghel paintings to get students familiar with the concept of ekphrasis and the various ways poets can respond to a piece of art. Several poets have written poems in response to the same Brueghel paintings, so this will serve as a good starting point for discussing the various purposes of ekphrasis. After Brueghel we will move on to women poets, mainly because my current course of study has only one text by a woman. A secondary reason is that women have a unique tradition in relation to ekphrasis, and their responses to art raise issues and questions about art and the creation of art that will benefit our work throughout the rest of the school year. So while we study the poems by looking to the text and the painting for our interpretation, I will introduce some of the feminist literary theory related to ekphrastic poetry and its female tradition. Throughout the unit students will work with ekphrastic poetry in four distinct ways. The first way is by viewing and discussing the work of art, then reading and analyzing the poem and examining the effect of the poetry on our reading of the work of art. The second way is to read the poem and consider what the artwork might look like or why it inspired the poem, then moving on to view the artwork and reexamine our ideas about the poem in reference to the piece of art. In each of these approaches we will also work closely with the text of the poem and consider how the literary devices within the text are creating a sense of the art or conditioning a certain response. After the students have worked through various poems using both approaches, they will split up into small groups to teach the rest of the class an ekphrastic poem. Finally, the students will end by creating their own ekphrastic poem and writing an explanation of the techniques they used and their function. By the end of the unit the students should have read around 15 poems and learned the basic techniques for reading and analyzing a poem.

It is important to note here that while this unit is designed for a senior AP English Literature course, it is easily adaptable to many other classes and grade levels. While some of the poems referenced in the unit may not be age appropriate for certain grades, the basic techniques and approaches are easily used within most classrooms.

Ekphrastic Poetry Defined

In order to understand the potential of ekphrastic poetry in a classroom, it is helpful to have a clear understanding of what ekphrasis actually is and what writers are attempting when they create an ekphrastic piece of writing. While the concept seems easy, "poetry or prose in response to art," there are various forms, approaches, and goals for ekphrasis. Knowing the form, the approach, and the goal of the ekphrasis will help you, as the teacher, understand what skills you will be able to teach with that ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis generally refers to any written response to art, regardless of the form of the art or the form of the writing. Up until the last twenty years or so, ekphrasis simply meant a description of a work of art and was mostly used by classicists or historians. ² This sense of the word could be as simple as a caption under a picture in a book; obviously, this is not the type of ekphrasis we will examine. Additionally, many wonderful novels and prose pieces are ekphrastic in nature, like The Scarlet Letter or The Girl With the Pearl Earring, but that is not the focus of the unit. Nevertheless, many of the basic techniques in this unit could be applied to the teaching of ekphrastic prose. Although your classroom instruction may not focus much on poetry, these techniques and ideas are very adaptable and work well with prose. The ekphrases in this unit are all poems, and after the introductory lesson of the unit, it focuses solely on women's ekphrastic poetry.

There are three basic types of ekphrasis: notional ekphrasis, actual ekphrasis, and unassessable actual ekphrasis. In the simplest terms, notional ekphrasis is based on imagined art, actual ekphrasis on a piece of art that we can find and view, and unassessable actual ekphrasis is based on a piece of art that we do not have access to or that has been lost. All of these variations can serve the purpose of making poetry more accessible to students, but clearly actual ekphrasis provides a better frame of reference for students who really struggle with reading comprehension or need an entry point into a poem. Still, many of the other types of ekphrasis are good materials for an AP English Literature course. I will not be using any notional ekphrasis in this unit because it does not provide that visual entry point into poetry that my students need at the beginning of the school year.

Unassessable actual ekphrasis is a better choice than notional if your students are really struggling with understanding poetry. While there may not be an example of the actual work of art present to show your students, you can bring in related images to help them get a sense of what the poet was responding to. A fantastic unassessable ekphrastic poem is Gjertrud Schnackenberg's "Nightfishing". This poem seems designed to be taught in an English class. The sense of loss felt by the speaker is clearly conveyed in even the most superficial of readings, and the strength of the writing enables the poem to stand up well to deep reading and analysis of the various literary techniques employed within the verse. Additionally, Schnackenberg's poem is written about a planter's clock that was hanging in the kitchen of her childhood home, and a teacher could show the students various images of planter's clocks to help them understand some of her imagery and personification. When she writes that the "smiling moon as it dips down below / two hemispheres, stars numberless as days, and peas, tomatoes, and onions as the grow," students can gain clarity about the moon, hemispheres, and vegetable references easily with pictures of other planter's clocks. Once that clarity is gained they can begin to examine how she pulls the vegetable idea through the first verse paragraph in the lines "but though the sands / of time put on this vegetable disguise." Through close examination the phrase "vegetable disguise" refers to the decorative vegetables on the clock disguising the ultimate purpose of the clock, to mark the passage of time. In our world vegetables are seemingly regenerative; they may grow and be eaten, but they are quickly replaced by new vegetables. This creates the impression that vegetables never die, never end, never go away. "The sands of time," however, mark time disappearing, time ending. So while the clock is covered with cheerful vegetables and smiling moons, this is just a disguise, hiding its true purpose. Most students will need to see the face of a typical planter's clock in order to understand this underlying meaning in the first verse paragraph. The concept of time disappearing, moments ending, things staying irrevocably in the past is a major focus in the poem. Without access to a picture of the face of the clock I could see many of my students getting hung up on the seemingly random description of the vegetables in the first verse paragraph, and that will inevitably send them into a spiral of confusion and despair over the bewildering world of poetry where clocks have vegetable gardens. It is access to images, even related images, that will provide my students with the key to the type of reading of a poem expected on the AP exam. Then once students have found this entry point, discovered the significance of the vegetable reference, the class can move on to examine the function of the personification of the clock ("The clock covers its face with its long, think hands"), the function of the metonymy ("You sit still, like a monument in a hall"), or the function of the various references to stopping or drifting throughout the poem. This is what makes ekphrasis so wonderful for the teaching of poetry: a simple photo of a clock can begin a dialogue about the basic meaning of the piece, which leads to the close analytical reading necessary for students to become perceptive readers.

Actual ekphrasis is the best type of poetry to use when looking for that entry point into poetry. It is important to note that some ekphrasis seems to stray rather far from the artwork, leaving one asking how on earth the poet could claim that the artwork inspired the poem, yet even the most oblique ekphrastic poems create discussion, invite questions, and spark interest in students. Getting my students to begin a dialogue with the poem is often the biggest hurdle I face at the beginning of the school year, and even the most bewildering ekphrastic poem will provide the students with an entry point. At the very least they can look for lines in the poem that seem to refer to the art work, and from there they can begin to puzzle out the meaning of the rest of it and the writer's purpose. Mary Leader's poem "Girl at Sewing Machine" is written in response to the painting of the same name by Edward Hopper. This is an interesting ekphrastic poem to work on with the students because of its references to things not in the picture. Hopper's painting is done in gorgeous orange, yellow, and gold tones and depicts a girl wearing a long white dress bent over a sewing machine. She is not a thin, lithe girl, but instead is rather stout. She sits at a sewing machine in front of a window in a bedroom while the sun streams in the window over her and the scene. Leader's poem tells the story of the girl while she works, and seems pretty straightforward and clear in its subject matter. So the poem is already quite accessible to students. The addition of the painting in conjunction with the poem highlights some of the more interesting diction in the poem. Leader's first few lines are "It must be warm in the room, walls the color of over–steeped / tea." In the very first line Leader's use of the word "must" is immediately interesting because it is making a guess about things the viewer of the painting could not know. Is it warm? Leader is making this assumption because of the lighting and color in the painting; however it is not clear if she is correct. Her guessing continues when she writes, "She is a busty girl, / soft, no doubt perspiring, slippery under her breasts, moisture / trapped on the back / of her neck under all that chestnut hair. She doesn't notice, / though; you can see." Leader's reference to heat continues as she guesses that the girl is sweating, but that she doesn't mind because she is intent on her work. Again, this information is not clear from the painting. Hopper's style of painting does not reveal tiny details like sweat on a subject's face to give us any indication that Leader's suppositions are true. Leader continues to focus on physical things about the girl and the setting that no viewer can know, the pudginess of the girl's feet, whether or not she wears shoes, the clothes she wears when she goes out, and why she keeps her hair long. By having the painting there in front of them the students can begin to consider why Leader spends most of the poem talking about things not apparent in the painting. They can examine the function of words and phrases like "more," "are probably," "let's go ahead and say," and "I'm sure she knows." Why is Leader making all of these suppositions? As the poem progresses Leader is no longer making simple guesses about the temperature and the size of the girl's feet; she begins to speak for her with lines like "Yes, I know this girl" and "Let's go ahead and say it's / a dress for herself." She is no longer guessing; she is speaking as if these things are true because she "knows this girl." This ekphrastic poem provides a great opportunity for a really rich conversation about diction and its impact on meaning, purpose, and tone. Also, students could experiment with swapping out words and phrases for other words and phrases in the poem to consider the eternal English class question, "Why this word and not another?" Additionally, Leader uses onomatopoeia and imagery, two terms the students generally know when they arrive in my class. Students should be able to identify those techniques rather quickly, and then we could have a rich discussion of their function in the poem. Leader's poem also offers a good opportunity to discuss some of the unique attributes of female ekphrastic poetry that I discuss in the next section. Without the painting present, while the students may eventually notice that Leader is writing a poem about what is not in the painting, the use of the painting brings the concept to the discussion much more quickly. This allows us to spend more of our class time discussing literary techniques and function rather than spending most of it on basic comprehension of the poem.

In addition to using the piece of art to help the students enter into a richer discussion of poetry more quickly, the teacher can alert the students to some of the basic approaches to ekphrasis. There are some general ways that a poet can structure their response, and once the student knows these responses this knowledge can also aid them in their comprehension and analysis of the poem. John Hollander breaks it down into a few simple categories. According to Hollander, poets are "addressing the image, making it speak, speaking of it interpretively, meditating upon the moment of viewing it." ³ These four clear categories would be good to provide to most students as starting points to figure out the author's purpose with a poem. If you would like to break this concept down further for your students then Honor Moorman's essay "Backing into Ekphrasis: Reading and Writing Poetry about Visual Art" provides a helpful list of approaches to ekphrasis that are rather student friendly, no matter what level of student you teach. Some of the approaches she mentions are:

describing the scene itself, relating the image in the painting to something else, expressing an awareness of him or herself observing the painting, describing how the subject is organized or presented by the artist, trying to figure out what the painting is about, exploring the relationship between the artist and the subject of the painting, assuming the reader's familiarity with the image, discussing the history of the painting, imagining a story behind the scene depicted in the painting, imagining what was happening while the portrait sitters posed for the painting, speaking to the artist, speaking to the subject of the painting, speaking as the voice of a character from the painting, and speaking as the voice of multiple characters from the painting. ⁴

When she uses ekphrastic poetry in her class or does activities with ekphrastic poetry, Moorman will introduce the approach the poet uses to her students, but for my purposes I plan to supply my students with Hollander's shorter list during my introductory lessons of the concept of ekphrasis. Then they can use the list to figure out the approach for the other poems we discuss in class, providing yet another entry point into poetry. If I find, as the unit progresses, that they need narrower categories to consider, then I will provide them with Moorman's more detailed list.

Another rather important thing to consider with ekphrastic poetry is why writers feel compelled to write poems about art at all. On its surface it seems like a peculiar thing to do. A piece of art, whether sculpture, painting, or photography, was meant to make a statement or impact the viewer on its own. So why is there a need for another art medium, writing, to speak about the characters, the scene, the composition, etc. of the artwork? According to Hollander, a common theory about art and poetry (made popular by Plutarch) is that "painting is mute poetry and poetry is a speaking picture." ⁵ This statement seems to equalize both art forms, but I feel it does not answer my question about why the art of poetic ekphrasis exists. Hollander goes on to elaborate and expand on Plutarch's concept, stating, "And ultimately, poetry seems to imply, it can at the very least help art to make its point by showing how, in particular cases, art is being made. In the presence of a work of art, poetry seldom makes the manifest claim that its own further removal gives it a greater authority, and its usual rhetorical stance is awed deference. But just such a claim is often latent." ⁶ Hollander believes that poetry, while seeming to state that it is just reinforcing the message of art, is really making a claim of authority over art. The poet is writing the poem perhaps because the work of art did not make the message clear enough, or perhaps even got the message wrong. While these ideas of speaking from a position of more authority over art may not be overt in the poem (and Hollander states that often they are not), they are clear enough to reveal the rivalry created through ekphrasis. In our Yale National Institute seminar on ekphrastic poetry, Yale professor Paul Fry stated that "A poem has picture envy." So while it is approaching the art from a position of authority, it is really taking that position because it is jealous of what a piece of art is capable of doing that a poem cannot because of its medium. Leonardo da Vinci, according to Hollander, believed that "poetry is condemned to proceed in time, part by part, whereas in a picture there is the power of simultaneity." ⁷ Poetry, in fact all writing, must be approached in parts, and there is a progression of ideas. One must read a line, then the next, and proceed from one stanza to another until finally all of the ideas in the poem have been taken in by the reader. None of the ideas of the poem can be taken in simultaneously, unlike a piece of art which appears to present its idea all at once, in its entirety. Poetry on the other hand can never be as immediate as art, and so seems intent on implying that art is lacking something which requires a poem to clear it up.

All this might seem a bit overstated, but even if this rivalry is not an overt message, or perhaps not even a message at all in the poem, the very nature of ekphrasis implies this idea. Why do poets need to write a poem about a work of art that was made to stand alone? The only answer is that the poet clearly thought that the art did not get the job done, to put it bluntly. The rivalry between art and poetry is inherent in the very act of ekphrasis, so students should be made aware of that and approach the poet's purpose with a little more suspicion than perhaps they would have otherwise.

Women's Ekphrastic Poetry

The rivalry between art and poetry is an important thing to consider in women's ekphrastic poetry. The disparity in the inclusion of male writers versus female writers in typical syllabi is similar to the disparity between the inclusion of male artists versus female artists in major art exhibitions or art history textbooks. In the art world "women have never been, nor are they yet, treated on par with white men." ⁸ The same could certainly be said for the world of literature. In the art community "women are also often excluded from exhibitions within which one would think they would play major roles, and women curators are rarely invited to organize the more prestigious international exhibitions." ⁹ Again, the same is clearly happening in the literary community. Simply flip through the pages of a writing anthology you use in your classroom, and the omission of female writers is apparent. Within my course syllabus for AP English Literature there is only one woman's name, Toni Morrison. In the quest for equality I have added writers like Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, Barbara Kingsolver, and Maxine Hong Kingston, but the students read these texts independently and complete assignments on them independently. Despite the additions of these women writers we still spend little class time on literature with a female voice.

Female ekphrastic poetry changes the equation a bit. There is a strong tradition of female ekphrastic poetry, and by using female ekphrastic poetry within this unit I am filling two voids. First, I am adding female voices to the writing we examine throughout the year. Secondly, while most of the art we view is by men, there are women interpreting, commenting on, and viewing this art. So female ekphrastic poets, infiltrating themselves into the male dominated art community—even though what they say is not in the visual medium—are at least part of the discussion. Still, some critics think that women have made greater strides in the literary field than in the arts. In her well known essay "Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?" Linda Nochlin explains that "art making traditionally has demanded the learning of specific techniques and skills, in a certain sequence, in an institutional setting outside the home, as well as becoming familiar with a specific vocabulary of iconography and motifs." ¹⁰ In contrast, reading and writing is a skill that can be learned in a more isolated setting, allowing women like Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters to practice the art of writing and make an impact on the literary world. Nochlin believes it is this difference in how the art and writing are learned and the traditions behind them that have prevented great women artists from emerging in the art world for so long. However it is not clear why there are still very few women artists and writers being represented in exhibitions, textbooks, or anthologies. Some may argue that women have been making great strides within the art community in recent years, and there are now several well known women artists like Georgia O'Keefe, Frida Kahlo, and Cindy Sherman. Still, despite the impact these women and others have made in the art community, if I would ask my students to name important artists, they would say names like Van Gogh, Hopper, Warhol. The same would be true if I asked them to name important writers, they would list Shakespeare, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. Within the art community women are certainly gaining their voices, but outside of that community they do not have that recognition yet.

When we consider the under–representation of women in the early art world the rationale for some key themes found within ekphrastic poetry become clear. An example of an earlier work of female ekphrasis can be seen in Griselda Pollock's work and her attempts to use paintings by Mary Cassatt to answer the question posed by Sigmund Freud: "What do women want?" ¹¹ Pollock examined paintings like Cassatt's Woman at the Opera, which shows a woman peering through opera glasses at something outside of the range of the painting. In the background one can see other opera goers and one man is peering through his own set of opera glasses and seems to direct his gaze at the woman in the foreground of the painting. Jane Hedley states that Pollock analyzed the painting so that "It is as if we shared this woman's box at the opera, positioned too close for a predatory, mastering gaze but invited instead to 'embrace and indulge' the gaze she directs beyond the space of the painting, toward 'a point outside the geometrical field of Western pictorial space. The force of the [works such as these] can be acknowledged today," Hedley concludes, 'because they find an echo of the current struggle of feminism to answer Freud's famous question: 'What do women want?' –'They want their own way.'" ¹² Hedley believes that "In her eagerness to 'invent ways to speak of, and from, a feminine place' that would lie 'outside current . . . ways of seeing art,' Pollack has resorted to an ekphrasis, putting into her own words the 'passion for women' she discerns in Cassatt's painting.'" ¹³ Here, Hedley touches one of the most important concepts that I want my students to consider when reading female ekphrastic poetry; women are using ekphrasis to look at art in a new way, and provide the female viewpoint that is currently missing from the art world. There are so many works of art with women as the focus, yet most of those pieces of art are created by men. As Hedley puts it, while a woman ekphrastic poet is "writing about someone else's art, she is engaged simultaneously and self–consciously in creation and interpretation, making and viewing, seeing and saying." ¹⁴ So as women look at the art, depicting women, but created by men, they are creating, making, and seeing these works in a new way through their poetry. The poem "The Venus of Willendorf" by Rita Dove examines the effect of the male gaze of the artist and the viewer created through the work of art. The work of art depicts women in a sexualized way. The Venus of Willendorf is a small limestone statue of a woman dated around 22,000 B.C. and depicts the woman with exaggerated body parts and is assumed to be a fertility symbol. In Dove's poem, the narrator (presumably Dove) begins to feel as if the world is viewing her, as a black woman, the way they view the sculpture. Dove writes, "It was impossible, of course, / to walk the one asphalted street / without enduring a gauntlet of stares. / Have you seen her? they asked, / comparing her to their Venus." At this halfway point in the poem Dove begins to experience this gaze that she feels the Venus experiences. As the poem progresses she realizes that they way she is viewed and the way the Venus is viewed, is the way men look at women when she experiences a similar gaze from the scholar she is visiting. Near the end of the poem Dove proclaims that "she suddenly understands what made / the Venus beautiful / was how the carver's hand had loved her." Here Dove is commenting on art, the creation of art, and why the viewer reacts the way he/she does to the art. Throughout the poem Dove is using ekphrasis to consider the gaze of the viewer toward art, the gaze of men toward art, and how these two types of viewing are similar to how she is viewed by men. She also eventually comments on how she feels about being viewed and why art compels a certain reaction. Dove's conclusions about these ideas are ambiguous, which makes this poem an interesting choice for classroom discussion. Within this poem Dove is clearly "engaged simultaneously and self–consciously in creation and interpretation" as Hedley stated. Women's ekphrastic poetry, besides allowing for a way to infuse more female writers into a curriculum, should also help the students in their approach to poetry and their consideration of author's purpose.

Women's ekphrasis is filling a void in the art world, and it also providing a way for us to consider the portrayal of women, not only in art but in literature. It is my hope that by considering the way women are approaching ekphrasis, the questions and ideas they raise in their ekphrasis will continue to be applied to the literature we read throughout the year. This way, even though we are reading literature written by men portraying women, we can think about the way women ekphrastic poets approach the gaze of the audience upon the female subject of art. We can then apply this thought about the reader's "gaze" upon the female characters in a story, or even examine the gaze of other characters upon a female.

The following poems by women and related artwork will be used in this unit. Most of these poems can be used in all high school classrooms, regardless of grade level, but a few contain more mature ideas or subject matter. Swapping out some of the more mature poems with less challenging ones will not affect the outcome of this unit, so teachers should feel free to change and substitute to meet the needs of their students and classroom situation.

Additionally I will start the unit with "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by William Carlos Williams, "Lines on Brueghel's Icarus" by Michael Hamburger, and "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden. These are all based on Pieter Brueghel's painting The Fall of Icarus, though Auden's is also responding to Brueghel's Massacre of the Innocents and Census at Bethlehem.