Framing Our Ground: Ekphrastic Poetry in the Workshop

Ekphrastic poetry as we understand it today experienced sharp gains in notoriety with the evolution of museums as public state institutions. Prior to museums, wealthy urbanites assembled what were called “cabinets of curiosity.” These were private collections that typically served to flatter and aggrandize their owner. Actual public museums, coming into existence later, around the turn of the nineteenth century, were initially difficult to access unless one were an aristocrat. Many of these proto-museums required an application process that might take several weeks before a visitor was approved for admission. It wasn’t until after the political upheavals of the late-eighteenth century that museums began to resemble the public institutions we know today. Art culture was further democratized, and with it ekphrastic poetry, when technology allowed for mechanical reproduction and images of art could be found in magazines, bookstores, and libraries.

Ekphrastic poetry is once again at such a crossroads. For the first time in history, the collections of most major museums across the globe are accessible online. Apps deliver these museums to us via smart phones and tablets. The Google Art Project contributes to the premonition that an insurgence of ekphrastic poetry, the likes of what occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, is once again imminent.

Yet despite these technological advances, the logic of presentation—the logic of the museum—remains constant and continues to guide the design and proliferation of web-sites. Museums are exemplars of cultural values and national pride. Museums achieve this status by perfecting the art of framing. It can be said without cynicism that the narrative context evoked by the staging of an art object is as significant to our evaluation as our unmediated apprehension of the object itself. Consequently, it would be naïve to consider the physical fact of the object as the only point at which a poem can enter into conversation with it. Considering that the museum brokers and mediates our engagement with the objects, and that the museum is largely responsible for the emotional context in which we encounter the objects (our mood is influenced by interactions with the admissions clerks, crowds, guards, and docents, the physical arrangement of space, its temperature, the auditory environment, etc.), we might regard the museum as an integral component of art. Similarly, as poets we must be attentive to the ways our environment informs and conditions our experience of the objects that populate our poems. We must be attentive to the ways we as poets function like museum curators, practitioners of experience design and purveyors of cabinets of curiosities for our readers. The ekphrastic poet, that is to say all poets, must become an expert in the art of framing.

But are all poems ekphrastic poems? How do we define ekphrasis today? Can poems about movies, music, or dance be considered ekphrastic? And if this is the case, why not go all in and say poems about postcards, bridges, and old episodes of Star Trek are ekphrastic, too? According to John Hollander in The Gazer’s Spirit, the object in question need not even exist. Hollander makes the distinction between “notional” and “actual” ekphrasis. Notional ekphrasis, he says, is a poet’s rendering of a fictional object, while actual ekphrasis figures an object that exists and is ostensibly available for examination alongside the poem. The oldest examples of ekphrasis we have are typically notional models because the works they refer to either never existed in fact (Homer’s Shield of Achilles) or have been destroyed over time. But the very question as to whether or not there is an outside referent to the poem reflects that inhibiting anxiety with which poets often contend. Just how much license does poetic license permit? Can we concoct objects out of thin air for use in our poems? If we do, are we breaking the rules? What are the rules anyway? We are conditioned to value accuracy and veracity to the detriment of our imaginative abilities. But we can turn this shortcoming to our favor with the use of a simple, democratizing—though fanciful—syllogism: all poems are translations...