{"id":674,"date":"2021-07-16T14:24:00","date_gmt":"2021-07-16T14:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/?p=674"},"modified":"2021-07-16T14:21:14","modified_gmt":"2021-07-16T14:21:14","slug":"a-defence-of-ekphrasis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/nclacommunity.org\/newdefences\/2021\/07\/16\/a-defence-of-ekphrasis\/","title":{"rendered":"A Defence of Ekphrasis"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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Antony Huen<\/p>\n\n

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Works of visual art, especially paintings and photographs, are indispensable to modern poetry, from the poems about Brueghel\u2019s paintings, including those by W. H. Auden, William Carlos Williams and Anne Stevenson, through the discursive meditations on a single painting (as in Wallace Stevens\u2019 \u2018The Man with the Blue Guitar\u2019 and John Ashbery\u2019s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror<\/em>) to the bulk of poems about family and historical photographs (including Rainer Maria Rilke\u2019s \u2018Portrait of My Father as a Young Man\u2019 and Ted Hughes\u2019 \u2018Six Young Men\u2019) and into the 2010s, Pascale Petit\u2019s What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo<\/em>, a fully-fledged recreation of Kahlo\u2019s oeuvre. Ekphrasis, a Greek term for description, is now almost exclusively used to refer to literary writing about visual artworks, and in the modern sense of this word, poets continue to engage in the practice of ekphrasis.<\/p>\n\n

Stephen Cheeke, in his book Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis <\/em>(2008), calls writing about visual artworks a contemporary indulgence (2). In fact, poets\u2019 obsession with ekphrasis has long been a bone of contention. In D. J. Enright\u2019s Poets of the 1950\u2019s: An Anthology of New English Verse<\/em>, Kingsley Amis went so far to claim that readers do not want any more poems about\u00a0 \u2018paintings\u2019 or \u2018art galleries\u2019 (17). Speaking of the sheer number of photographs in poetry, the Irish poet and critic Justin Quinn wrote in Poetry Review<\/em> that \u2018photographic ekphrasis\u2019 has \u2018become a set-piece of most collections\u2019 (16). Yet, despite both poets\u2019 and critics\u2019 ambivalence about ekphrasis, the ekphrastic machine shows no sign of stopping. There has been an ironic parallel between the omnipresence of ekphrasis in modern poetry and the critical ambivalence about it.<\/p>\n\n

If any resistance to ekphrasis in poetry has proved ineffectual, a defence of it against the resistance is also out of the question. The popularity of ekphrasis with poets, regardless of the criticism, remains constant. It is futile to isolate poetic ekphrasis from ekphrasis, and ekphrasis from modern poetry. We could continue to think of the ekphrastic practice as addictive, but a more sustainable discussion about ekphrasis would rest on our recognition of its ever-increasing share in modern poetry. What does modern ekphrasis speak to us about modern poetry and culture? If this epistemological inquiry is seen a defence, it will be a defence of the raison d’\u00eatre of ekphrasis. A question to start with can be: how do we position ekphrasis as a player on the poetic and cultural stage?<\/p>\n\n

I suggest using modern ekphrastic poetry as a vantage point from which we understand the interlinked evolutions of poetry, culture, modernity and our sense of humanity. Many poems from the poetic and ekphrastic canon point to this. W. H. Auden\u2019s \u2018Mus\u00e9e des Beaux Arts\u2019 establishes the old masters and museums as triggers for ruminations about suffering and the staging of it as spectacle. Philip Larkin\u2019s \u2018Lines on a Young Lady\u2019s Photograph Album\u2019 dives into the capacity of photography to record a life, anticipating our preoccupation with photographic images. The title poem of Carol Ann Duffy\u2019s collection Standing Female Nude<\/em> is a model\u2019s commentary about the painter\u2019s artistry and his portrayal of her, enquiring into the power dynamics in life drawing and the limits of portraiture.<\/p>\n\n

More recent poems show that modern ekphrasis returns to the version of life embodied by an artistic image but represents a confusion between the life in question and the image of it. Pascale Petit\u2019s poems after Frida Kahlo are voiced by the Mexican painter, conflating the lyric \u2018I\u2019, Kahlo\u2019s artistic self, as well as Kahlo\u2019s doubled or multiplied selves in her self-portraits. We hear from multiple artists when a poem in Petit\u2019s What the Water Gave Me<\/em> describes \u2018how art works on the pain spectrum\u2019 (55). In The City with Horns <\/em>(2011), the London-based poet Tamar Yoseloff recreates the biography of the artist couple Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner, showing a lack of distinction between the violence in their relationship and that in their art (\u2018He\u2019ll wrestle me to the floor | until I\u2019m black and blue\u2019) (25). The two colours evoke those in Pollock\u2019s and Krasner\u2019s paintings.<\/p>\n\n

In his latest full collection Mapping the Delta <\/em>(2016), George Szirtes appropriates the first line from Auden\u2019s museum musings, calling the old masters \u2018old bastards\u2019 and saying they turn \u2018our flesh to dust so we might turn | that dust to song\u2019 (27). Szirtes draws parallels between visual art, poetry and music to dramatise the tendency for artists to transform a corporeal life into a work of art. The meta-ekphrastic poem is a sign of modern ekphrasis having established itself as a vehicle for understanding the raison d\u2019\u00eatre of the arts. Whether we want it or not, ekphrasis has made a tradition of its own within the tradition of modern poetry, and contemporary poetic ekphrasis is reminding us that the term \u201cekphrasis\u201d originally referred to any kind of description. Today in a poem about a painting, for instance, the ekphrasis at work can be manifold. It brings to life the painting and the life or lives represented in it.<\/p>\n\n

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Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n\n

Cheeke, Stephen. Writing for Art: The Aesthetics of Ekphrasis<\/em>. Manchester UP, 2008.<\/p>\n\n

Enright, D. J., editor. Poets of the 1950\u2019s: An Anthology of the New English Verse<\/em>. Kenyusha, 1955.<\/p>\n\n

Petit, Pascale. What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo<\/em>. Seren, 2010.<\/p>\n\n

Quinn, Justin. \u2018Glyn Maxwell\u2019s Decade\u2019. Poetry Review<\/em>, 91 (2001) 13-16.<\/p>\n\n

Szirtes, George. Mapping the Delta<\/em>. Bloodaxe Books, 2016.<\/p>\n\n

Yoseloff, Tamar. The City with Horns<\/em>. Salt Publishing, 2011.<\/p>\n\n

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Born in Hong Kong, Antony Huen<\/strong> is a poet and academic. His latest publications include poems in amberflora<\/em>, The Dark Horse<\/em> and harana poetry<\/em>, and articles in Hong Kong Review of Books<\/em>, The Oxonian Review <\/em>and Wasafiri<\/em>. He is finishing a poetry chapbook and working towards a monograph on modern poets\u2019 investment in the visual arts. With a PhD in English from the University of York, he is a Research Assistant Professor at the Open University of Hong Kong. Follow him on Twitter: @AntonyHuen<\/a><\/p>\n\n

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Antony Huen<\/p>\n

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