Poems That Keep Paintings Alive

Did you read "The Aquarium," Aleksandar Hemon's riveting first-person account of his family's loss of a very young daughter to cancer?  (The New Yorker, June 13, 2011) This powerful non-fiction is an answer to the question "How would one write adequately about such a loss?"

Hemon repeatedly alludes to W.H. Auden's ekphrastic poem about Breughel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."  The painting's silence, translated in part by Auden's lines, shimmers anew in the light of Hemon's story.  Through Auden's poem, Hemon finds words and images to characterize the divide between those who experience grief and those who only witness it.

Such mysterious and persistent acts of translation from the visual to the verbal are the focus of "The Ekphrastic Problem," one of two courses I'm offering starting September 15th.  (The other course is called "The Difference.")  Both courses promise to be spectacular.

The Ekphrastic Problem: A Sample

How does one know when one has written enough—and well enough—about a work of art?

Consider the case of Cathy Song’s poem “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” which is addressed to Utamaro’s wonderful ukiyo-e print from the late nineteenth century, reproduced below:

           Utamaro Kitigawa (1752-1806), Musee Guimet, Paris

Song’s ekphrastic poem “Girl Powdering Her Neck,” closes with an understated and moving metaphor.  These three lines handle Japanese motifs (the chrysanthemum and the poetic form, for example) lightly.  Their account of Utamaro’s work is conveyed by evocation of an imaginary scene parallel to, but not depicted in the print. This use of indirection makes the lines especially strong with regard to the likeness and difference we perceive between the girl and her reflection, and charges the poem with mystery:  

Two chrysanthemums


touch in the middle of the lake


and drift apart.

(ll. 50-52)

Isn’t this almost-haiku an almost perfect poem?  But what, then, are we to make of the other forty-nine lines Song has written?

Welcome to the ekphrastic problem! A poetry workshop framed around such inquiries will commence in mid-September.