Beyond Description: Ekphrasis and the Expanding Lens

Tell us, Dutch painters, what will happen When the apple is peeled, when the silk dims, when all the colours grow cold. Tell us what darkness is.

—Adam Zagajewski, “Dutch Painters”

I

Ekphrasis, even if simply defined as a literary response to visual art, is rich in potential for the poet. The term suggests a boundless field of images, yes, but what to do with those images? Students in their initial study of ekphrasis seem to begin and end with description. Of course, that is not enough. Our poems fail if we do not utilize the poetic imagination to imbue with further possibilities what the previous artist has already imagined. The poet’s response to the visual imagination is to use the poetic imagination to disclose, unearth, and discover such possibilities, and to lend valences to the piece. In doing so, the poem gains its own set of potentialities. It is an act of revelation.

There are several ekphrastic approaches, with varying narrative distances. The bit of Zagajewski above represents an approach that instantly resonates with us. It is thinking of the world as a canvas that we might paint. It puts the poet in the position of the painter recreating the visual piece and supplying the poetic response at once, going beyond mere description. Zagajewski’s lines force the reader, subject (and artist) into our own interrogations. What access to the great mysteries do these painters have? How can we acquire such access? What is “darkness” to us?

The earliest type of ekphrasis considers not particular paintings, but the imagined object. Homer’s The Illiad, which contains one of the earliest examples of “ekphrasis,” provides an uncannily detailed description of the imagined object, the shield made for Achilles by the blacksmith god Hephaestus. But it is not the initial poem alone that is of interest to us. We are also concerned with the score of poems that arise from that initial instance of ekphrasis. We know Achilles’ shield does not stay with Achilles, for example. Homer passes it to the shepherd cum poet Hesiod who claims the shield for Heracles. Then, after centuries of movement, the shield is taken up by W. H. Auden who in “The Shield of Achilles” gives it back to the original owner, though the shield is altered to reflect the dark realities of the twentieth century. This speaks to how the culture of an age may shift what an object represents. Each poet reads the object imagined or not variously. A series of interactions occurs over time, space, and culture, creating a dialogue between pieces and poets. Auden was not speaking to the audience of his day alone; he was speaking to Homer, presenting a new argument, and he continues to speak to us as we consider the poem and perhaps imagine what we see upon the ancient object. And at some point the poems may be said to leave the touchstone of the initial object (imagined or not) almost entirely.

So in the writing of ekphrastic poetry as well as in our responses to earlier ekphrastic poems there exists the possibility of engagement with the art (and its referents as well as the artist), the poet writing in response to the art, and any other poets who have also responded to the art. As such, ekphrasis may be used as an effective means of entering a greater conversation across disciplines, and it is these interstices and allusions that allow not a crass self-referential engagement, but fresh modes of acknowledgement and interrogation.

II

That the 2011 Callaloo Creative Writing Workshop in Poetry would incorporate ekphrasis seemed inevitable since my co-facilitator, the poet Gregory Pardlo, and I were both in literary work with art institutions. Gregory had recently led a series of poetry workshops sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC, in which poets engaged objects in that museum’s collections, and I had completed my first semester as a Visiting Artist/ Poet at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, teaching poetry to fine artists as well as students in industrial design. While not...