The Rebirth of Aesthetics

Yuko Otomo creates in two realms: the visual arts and poetry. In this volume she focuses her verbal skills on paintings, graphics, sculptures, installations, photographs, and also aesthetic theory. However, many of the poems are not truly ekphrastic, for she employs a variety of means to respond to the various works of art, often by means other than description. In fact, the first ten “STUDIES” are short aphoristic poems containing brief suggestions about the very basics of visual art, materials and fundamental concepts.

The next section consists of poem cycles inspired by or relating to a wide variety of art works. Here, Otomo shows great ingenuity in approaching her subjects. In what follows, therefore, I would like to enumerate, explain, and exemplify her most important methods of development, and her techniques for Ekphrasis is the term used to characterize much of Otomo’s poetry. “It is the genre specially designed to describe works of art, to translate the arrested visual image into the fluid movement of words.” It first appears in Homer and persists throughout the history of literature in works by such masters as Virgil, Goethe, Keats, and Yeats.

Generally, Otomo avoids flat-footed description. However, her poem on Hans Namuth’s photograph of Joseph Cornell’s storage rack is simply that—a listing of curious objects, and yet, with a certain poetic quality, perhaps derived from their odd juxtaposition.

More striking is the approach to Vermeer’s “Love Letter” where the poet focuses first on the background—two paintings on the wall, one of a forest and the other of an ocean that is both strangely relevant to the theme of the painting—and then recounts the woman’s reaction to the letter.

A second poem on a Vermeer painting portrays the geographer as he stands beneath a terrestrial globe and above his maps and charts, gazing into space. But here, the only physical description is a reference to the glass window (so vital for so many of Vermeer’s paintings). Otherwise, the poem consists entirely of the mind and thoughts of the subject.

Two rather long poems are addressed to works of Caspar David Friedrich. An affinity between the poet and this artist is very understandable, given Otomo’s predilection for cosmic terms: limits and meta-limits, light and dark, air and water, sky and sea, walls, windows, the horizon, emptiness, the void, silence and sudden sound, and the infinite, and the eternal (All of these are words that constantly reappear in the poems).

The following passage from a poem presumably referring to Friedrich’s drawing “Woman Sitting Outdoors” (“Melancholy” 1801), illustrates how Otomo frequently blends a visual description with a suggestion of sound, and sound with the sense of touch:

On a vast spreading crowd of rocksthe voice of a woman lies downa wet voice, bending oversome unrealistic tendernesslies downmelancholy fallingfrom the day ending sky

Other poems are constructed by linking an art work from the past with the memory of an earlier experience in the life of its viewer. An example of this method is “View From Hotel Window—Butte, Montana” which is a response to a photograph by the Swiss photographer Robert Frank with the same title. It reads in part:

I was here once.Who was I with?

But I can never forget

the way my soul trembled when I breathed in the gray silenceof the flat roofs & cruel, clumsy, insignificant chimneysI was shattered totallyby the fragile beauty of the fluttering curtainsthat divided my roomfrom the view outside

Again, the poem presents an oblique view of the scene in the photograph. At times, the poet explores the artist’s motivation, the source of artistic inspiration. For instance, several pieces from “Picasso Museum” imply that sexual energies were what galvanized Picasso’s art:

Woman’s glancesinto the airwere so overtlycunning & placid thathe took up his paint brushes

A woman who criesA woman who gets startledby her own image in a mirrorA...