Focus on Technique: Ekphrastic Art and Poetry

I met Larry Thomas at a reading three years ago.  He taught me about Ekphrastic art.  His poem the Tower Blue Horse was based on the Franz expressionist art and is a symbiotic reaction to the beauty of the piece.  To this day he is still one of the few visiting artists that I keep in touch with (and “The Skin of Light” was one of my first books.) What fascinates me is how he wholeheartedly accepts ekphrastic art as an art form rather than forcing his own originality always.  Instead his originality is birthed in artistic paintings of others. 

The best ekphrastic poetry can place an image in the reader’s head of the inspiration even if the reader is unfamiliar with the inspiration.  For example in Rita Dove’s poem “Golden Oldie”

I made it home early, only to get

stalled in the driveway-swaying

at the wheel like a blind pianist caught in a tune

meant for more than two hands playing.

The words were easy, crooned

by a young girl dying to feel alive, to discover

a pain majestic enough

to live by. I turned the air conditioning off,

leaned back to float on a film of sweat,

and listened to her sentiment:

Baby, where did our love go?-a lament

I greedily took in

without a clue who my lover

might be, or where to start looking.

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/golden-oldie/

I understood how when the artist heard that song it didn’t matter how mundane work had been or boring the car ride was in.  That song reawakened her and through the poem it awaked me!  I knew that song with out actually listening to it.   Her work transported me to the car of my lost mother and how she and I would bop to the 40’s on 4 together and get lost like Dove did, in the music.

This is seen in all sorts of art and throughout media.  It goes back to the idea of what Walter Benjamin theorized in aura, it is the affect art can have on the individual.  It has a sense of nearness and authenticity.  Once art being something only the minority hierarchy of society with the advent of modern communication the masses now have nearness with art and through this we see an explosion of ekphrastic art.  For example not many today would know what I meant by I could attend the ballet a thousand times to see Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky” but if I start to sing the Disney version of “Once Upon a Dream” everybody could hum Tchaikovsky’s classic tune.

This can also be seen in fiction for example a “Good Scent from a Strange Mountain”.   The story in itself is a piece of art.  But throughout the story you can see how the narrator, blind man, and wife are all affected by different genre’s of art.  One example is the wife who is inspired by the blind man touching her face and wrote a poem.  She writes a poem a few times each year to mark life milestones.  The best example though is the narrator trying to describe the artwork of the cathedral and than the blind man helping him draw it without sight.  It is that place where the narrator gains a second sight and the readers understand Butler’s goal of looking beyond the sighted world.

All of my personal art is connected to the ekphrastic world.  I found dark humor in a serious dramatic piece inspired by The Producers, “Spring Time for Hitler” for example and created a dark humorous play: Dreamtime for Hitler that inspires it’s essence but morphs into a different work and place.  I theorize that unless your inspiration comes strictly from your own perspective of nature every one’s art will have ekphrastic elements to it.  For example, my brother loves trains and grew inspiration through the graffiti that was on it.  After dancing in the Corps de Ballet as a youth I can’t ever stop and drool over a Degas.  Life imitates art and than we as artist can imitate both.

This is an example of ekphrastic art. A ballet production club took a very unique alternative song based on the current issues of homosexuality

and inspired it into a ballet brought into an older world

Than as a principal dancer in the right setting affected me the art turned into a unique short story for me that really went to completely different place again.