Poems about Works of Art, Featuring Women and Other Marginalized Writers

Ekphrasis

Simply put, ekphrasis is a genre of poems written about works of art.  Variants exist both in the kind of text and the kind of image or object. For example, we’ll study Robert Lowell’s “Epilogue” which addresses a painting by Johannes Vermeer only in the last third of the poem. In more modern interpretations any text that describes or interacts with a work of art is considered ekphrastic. In notional ekphrasis, the subject covered is representational, like Keats’s Grecian urn, inspired by his viewing of the Elgin Marbles. All English teachers should be familiar with popular examples, such as W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” and William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” (which, in contrast to each other, are an excellent starting place for teachers new to ekphrasis).  Mitchell says that we inevitably read and treat image as text; and in reverse, we see the verbal and treat it as image.² In our heads or as form on paper, we are programmed to interchange the skills necessary to make meaning of either.

Most know Renee Magritte’s The Treachery of Images, his famous picture of a pipe—simply an unembellished pipe centered on a pale canvas.  Beneath it is the large caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.”  This is not a pipe. The relationship between the image and the words can be as simple or complicated as one likes.  The image and the text seem to have equal standing spatially and visually, but they contradict each other. While the image is of a pipe, it is not a literal pipe—so what is it?  “The space between words and images is kind of void into which (and from which) ideas, passions, narratives, representations emerge. It is the third space…”³

In his chapter “Ekphrasis and the Other” W.J.T. Mitchell gives three stages of realization that one who experiences an ekphrastic poem goes through: ekphrastic indifference, ekphrastic hope, and ekphrastic fear.  I became interested in how this would apply to my students, who I may assume have had no previous interactions with poems about art. In a simpler manner, I see my students working through these stages as they approach reading and writing ekphrastic poems. I use Mitchell’s stages as a heuristic tool rather than a literal framework for ekphrasis. The first stage, ekphrastic indifference, comes from the idea that ekphrasis is impossible. Assuming that depiction is our goal, ekphrasis falls short because it “may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do.”⁴ Does the sense of impossibility create angst on the part of the poet? It will do so with my students as their initial suspicion about ekphrasis is that the intent is singularly to describe the work of art. Thomas’s next stage, however, is ekphrastic hope, wherein the reader or viewer has risen to the expectation that language may indeed have the power to engender an image in countless ways as the “estrangement of the image/text division is overcome, and a sutured, synthetic form, a verbal icon or imagetext, arises in its place.”⁵ As students come to understand the endless kinds of statements that ekphrastic poems can make, I think they will feel empowered in their liberties as writers and freed as readers in finding meaning.  I see this last stage, ekphrastic fear, as the realization that the relationship between image and text cannot conceivably meet up the expectations that one has of the other, or that the reader has of either. As this translates to my classroom, I don’t think this means my students lose confidence in their ekphrastic abilities; I think it means that they have reached a new understanding of the complexities of ekphrastic possibility, indicating growth, not setback. As my students come to grips with these stages, I agree with Mitchell that their interaction with ekphrasis, even at a subconscious level, will engage them more than other genres might.  These notions will arise again in the Strategies section of this unit.