Ekphrasis (3.6.18)

This week's project was ekphrasis, poems addressing, describing, alluding to, or in some other way engaging with a painting. Instead of sending the writers off to find their own painting to work on through a poem, I pointed them to Edward Hopper's Nighthawks (to several audible groans). I wanted to see what would happen if everybody riffed on the same piece, where the poems would differ in approach, structure, specificity, tone, subject, style, etc. I wanted everyone to be able to compare his or her engagement to the others'.

Nighthawks was a good piece, I thought, for several reasons. For one thing, it's hardly an unknown artifact; in fact, it's pretty much a cultural meme (cliché?), as any web search will reveal pretty quickly. I knew the W@1 writers would be familiar with it. For another thing, the painting has been interpreted, parodied, copied, made fun of, you name it, countless times, not treated ekphrastically by any poets so far as I know (certainly not as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has been). Maybe one of us would write the next great "Musee des Beaux Arts"! And for a third thing, the painting is so glumly atmospheric--and ripe for parody for all that--that I thought the W@1 writers couldn't possibly come back with mere description, or worse, art-sentiment.

A little more background. Ekphrasis once was a fairly rules-bound rhetorical exercise. To the Greeks, it meant making a close description of a thing, usually an artful thing. Homer describes in fine detail the shield of Achilles made by Hephaestus (and describes the manufacture process as well). If you want to read it, you'll find that piece in the Iliad, XVIII. A note on ekphrasis at poets.org adds that the form also covered descriptions of buildings, fine furnishings, clothing--virtually any carefully designed and built artifact.

So ekphrasis originally was a form of appreciation, an attempt to capture the beautiful in words. (The word means "recount.") In our time, ekphrasis has been more narrowly applied to painting, sometimes photography, while at the same time has adopted a much wider thematic scope. Modern poets writing in English at least, "engage" with paintings, as if in conversation with them or, as poets.org tells it, in confrontation with them. The modern ekphrasitc poem interprets its subject (the painting), or attempts to re-depict a painting's content in words, or "speaks" to the painting and its perspective or meaning, and so on. In other words, in modern ekphrastic writing, the painting is a jumping off point or a tool for making another autonomous work of art, in this case, a new poem.

In our case within Wednesdays@One, an ekphrastic poem could be simply an attempt to describe the painting Nighthawks, qua painting, though as I say, I hoped that engaging with this particular piece of art might propel the writers to something more than description. If the writer opted for the descriptive, I suggested a look at the painting from a certain perspective: objectively (e.g., its painterly qualities) or thematically (its subject matter) or historically (its provenance). 

And if the first of these, I suggested a plan of attack, such as top to bottom, border to center, or, using perspective, front to back (or perhaps even more literally, painting surface to canvas)--an approach that would have to account for color, light, shadow, darkness, brightness, line, and certain techniques like foreshortening. If the second, the writer might need to study the figures, the surrounding architectural forms, the potential meaning of the positioning of the figures, the time of day, and so on. And if the third, then the date of the painting would have to be considered (or at least guessed), the styles of the figures' clothing described and situated, and maybe even the cultural nostalgias of "counter service" or "night out," or "corner café" or "nightcap."

Alternatively, the writers' ekphrastic poems might try to get at the mood of the painting, the ethos or feeling it projects, its atmospherics, the feeling it instills in the viewer. Or the poem might take the subject, characters, style or mood of the painting as jumping-off points, departures into some narrative or lyric that is generated through an attention to the painting, but that might result in a poem with little of the painting actually in it.

I provided references to some poems in the (loosely) ekphrastic form:

“Musee des Beaux Arts” (W.H. Auden). This one’s an example of thematic ekphrastic, where Auden takes Brueghel’s theme of the fall of Icarus and works it into his poem. The poem is based on the painting hanging in the Musee des Beaux Arts in Brussels, so, given the choice of title, it's about the experience of standing before the painting as much as it's about the painting or its subject.

“Pictures from Breughel” (William Carlos Williams). This one is a series of studies of some well-known Brueghel paintings and a good example of descriptive ekphrastic—that is, the poet merely trying to describe the painting (and its effect) through poetry.

“Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” (John Ashbery). This rather famous contemporary poem—not so contemporary anymore—begins as descriptive ekphrastic . . . 

As Parmigianino did it, the right hand

Bigger than the head, thrust at the viewer
And swerving easily away, as though to protect
What it advertises. . . .

. . . but then veers way off into other images, ideas, leaps of imagination, all more or less precipitated by Ashbery’s contemplation of the famous self-portrait painted from the artist’s image in a convex mirror. The resulting poem can't really be described as a faithful rendering of the Parmigianino painting, except to say that Ashbery's poem is a verbal recreation of the artistic statement, art distorts.