Ekphrasis in Phrases

Ekphrasis poetry, to me, has always been more of an "exercise" poem to help writers engage with imagery. The point of an ekphrasis poem is to interact, in some way, with a piece of visual art, most commonly done in response to paintings. However, it can also be done with sculptures, photos, and other such visual mediums. The most common way to approach an ekphrasis is to simply describe what you see with vivid language--the colors, the style, the overall image and small details--but there are other ways to approach this type of poem. For my pieces I tried to interact with the pieces as if they were not just pieces that I was looking at in that moment, rather I interacted with the works as if I were in them in some way.

For example, one painting I wrote to was just a close-up painting of an eyeball. The poem I wrote explored the life of the person this eyeball belonged to--what they wished for, how they felt, what ailed them. It was very eyes-are-the-window-to-the-soul type of interaction, and I took a lot of liberates with what I wrote, since what I had to write on was an incredibly focused image on one small detail. Another piece I wrote on was an image of two people walking down a dark street together, holding umbrellas. There was a full moon in one corner of the piece. The piece used a lot of dark blues and bright yellows/reds. For this piece I took on the role of one of the walkers and imagined what these two people talked about and felt in that captured moment. It was intended to be an exploration of what the artist was trying to convey, emotionally with their color choice, contrast choice, and the style they chose to do the work in. Yet for anther poem I wrote on Van Gogh's Starry Night. In this one, I used the colors and style of this piece to imagine that I were dreaming, and in this dream I wished to live in a town just like the one depicted in the painting. This was probably the poem that stayed closest to what ekphrasis is usually about--describing the images in the poem.

Despite this, the poems that I produced from this week turned to be incredibly abstract, which is quite uncommon for ekphrasis poetry. Usually this type is meant to test how well that you can write on the image that you see. Because of my long history with poetry, however, I decided to take an unusual approach to the assignment. The poems that came out are quite rough, but with some editing, I think I can make these pieces quite strong and interesting.

Thanks for reading and, please, come back next week where I will be reporting on sestina poetry--one of the most complex forms of poetry.

#ekphrasis #poetry