Abstract

This essay interrogates the figure of the frame as it is used in two ekphrastic poems, A. E. Stallings’s “Empty Icon Frame” and Jorie Graham’s “San Sepolcro.” In their ekphrastic treatment of images of the Virgin Mary, the poems transform literal, metaphorical, and conceptual frames into sacred thresholds. Conventionally, the threshold marks the passage from one realm to another—for example, from the space of the profane to that of the sacred. However, the defining poetic shared between these two texts is the celebration of the threshold space as itself sacred due to its unruly and, consequently, destabilizing force.

pdf

Share