How do I hate Ekphrastic poetry? Let me count the ways. . . . First, if not foremost, what an ugly word “ekphrastic” is! Sounds like a cat coughing up a hairball. Or maybe it’s more like the medical term for some skin disease that has a dozen more memorable, if disgusting, common names. I’m generally not a big fan of the habit of slapping unnecessary Greek or Latin names on ordinary things in order to make them sound more genteel, formal, or impressive. When and why did we decide that “ekphrastic poetry” was better than “poetry about art”?
 
Such language seems pretentious at best. And like most abstraction, it pulls in the opposite direction from the best literary language, which is particular, dramatic, and beautiful even when gritty and caked with mud. Just as jazz is best when it remembers its origins in the blues, our poetry and poetic terminology are best when they bear in mind their Anglo Saxon heritage. After all, what “ekphrasis” originally meant in Greek was simply description marked by vivid detail. In our time it has come to refer to poetry written about works of art, especially visual art. I say we need a term that honors both visual art and poetry by being itself vivid and beautiful, and not sounding like a disease. Suggestions welcome.
 
Aside from that admittedly silly pet peeve, though, my discontent goes deeper. Poets have always written about art, naturally, and there are great modern examples to be found among the work of poets like Williams and Auden, who separately wrote fabulous poetry inspired by the paintings of Bruegel. But with the proliferation in recent decades of creative writing programs, with associated texts, conferences, journals, presses, and the like, ekphrastic poetry is everywhere these days. And quite predictably whenever there is a glut of anything, the vast majority of it is mediocre at best. It’s easy to see why teachers of creative writing so often offer ekphrastic prompts—writing about art is a nice pedagogical challenge; it encourages deeper thinking about how the various arts diverge from or converge with each other; it nudges beginning writers to explore themes beyond their own personal experience; and it’s a very flexible sort of assignment. I’ve assigned such exercises myself.
 
In the wider world, though, the result has been overwhelming: there are anthologies, websites, contests, journals all devoted to ekphrastic poetry. And too much of it retains the whiff of the classroom, rather as many student drawings do. The passion and intelligence of an Auden or a Williams is notably lacking, often, in such written-to-order pieces. Novice poets benefit from completing such exercises more than readers benefit from reading them. So at worst issuing a book or journal of ekphrastic poems can be like devoting a whole museum to the products of a class in Drawing I: all those stiff nudes, wooden still lifes, and clumsy landscapes will mostly remind you of what’s missing, the way a Rembrandt or Cezanne can transcend conventional subject matter and mode.
 
Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favor or writing to prompts as a way of priming the pump, surprising yourself as a poet, and exploring other forms of art vicariously. But like all exercises, ekphrastic ones have a relatively low success rate for most of us, most of the time. But in part due to the influence of creative writing classes, some poets and even editors can forget the difference between exercise and finished product. It can be very useful for a writer to attempt such exercises, I fully agree, but that doesn’t mean they should all be published. I taught creative writing workshops myself for decades, though never in an MFA program; I consider the growth of such classes largely a productive development in education. All good things have their downsides, though, and the rush to publish is one that all poets should keep an eye out for.
 
But before going further I should confess a deeper reason I am skeptical of ekphrastic poetry: I fear I’m not very good at it. Lord knows I’ve tried, and even succeeded a number of times, I like to think. (I could be deluded.) More on that in a bit. I adore and am nourished by visual art and so would like to be better at writing poems that spin off from it. But I find it hard. The problems are many. Choosing a subject is the first challenge: select a little known painting or an artist most people aren’t familiar with, and you must build a lot of description and other information into your poem, or it risks losing the reader. Yet if you go heavy on sheer information and description, you may simply remind the reader how much better a painting or drawing is at conveying visual impressions.
 
On the other hand, if you write about the Mona Lisa or Hopper’s Nighthawks or one of Georgia O’Keefe’s iconic flower paintings, you raise the bar on yourself rather high. You risk writing the equivalent of one of those posters on the wall in a college dorm room—predictable, benign, lacking all urgency. Once when I served as a screener for a major book contest, I thought I would scream if I had to wade through yet another manuscript about Georgia O’Keefe: most of which did not enlarge my understanding either of art or of O’Keefe. Rather, they repeated conventional wisdom about the artist in competent but bland verse. Too often it felt like every poem was one I’d read before.
 
Furthermore, when an ekphrastic poem takes a biographical slant, delving into the motivations of Van Gogh or the personal life of Mary Cassatt, I often feel like I’m reading People magazine, whose stories tend to be glossy, superficial, and overly familiar. Or, worse, I conclude that the poet is claiming without achieving some profound insight into an artist’s inner life. All too often a biographically based ekphrastic poem strikes me as either obvious (leaning on familiar ideas about the artist) or presumptuous (attempting a sort of glamour-by-association).
 
It took me a while to come to these conclusions. When I was in college, studying art history seriously for the first time, I composed my first longish poem, which committed all the sins listed above, plus others. It was about Vermeer, whose life and work I had, at the time of composition, studied for several weeks. After which I felt entitled to present my biographical, historical, and aesthetic insights in a series of brief poems I haven’t been able to bear looking at since. I won a writing award for doing them, and it was probably deserved, in that I learned a great deal in the process. I learned a lot about Vermeer, and I learned I didn’t yet know how to write a good longer poem. Win-win!
 
Another thing I eventually discovered was that although many masterpieces of visual art have deeply affected me, in order to write a decent poem about them I need to have more to say than simply “Wow: look at that!” A really strong poem needs to go large, as they say. But since college, when looking at Hals or Vermeer or Eakins, for the most part I haven’t gotten too far beyond “Wow.” There are some exceptions, I hope and believe: see my poems included elsewhere in this issue. I’m not about to claim that they are poetic or ekphrastic masterpieces; but at least I can confirm that they were written not after a few weeks’ acquaintance with the artists I refer to, but after many years of viewing and reflection.
 
I must confess one more thing. I fell in love with visual art at just about the same time I fell in love with an artist, who was then my girlfriend and for the past forty-four years has been my wife. These two things are related, unsurprisingly. One of the joys of my life has been the backstage view of visual art that living with an artist has provided. For over four decades we’ve haunted museums together, collected many exhibition catalogs and other books, gone to countless art openings, hung out with other artists, talked art and literature, and so forth. I’ve watched her work as it was created and as it has evolved. As poet and painter, we’re not in direct competition with each other, yet at the same time we share many of the frustrations and peculiarities of a life devoted to creating art. Living with Lee has also probably given me some of the same benefits that writing ekphrastic poetry, at its best, could supply. It’s always beneficial, I think, for artists in any field to pay attention to other arts—for novelists to know some things about music, for poets to hang out with painters, for musicians to study literature, and so on. I’m also lucky enough to have a live-in art consultant. She’s done cover images for several of my books. So judge my books by their covers, I often say.
 
As you might expect, Lee and I have often been asked if we ever collaborate. Do I write about her paintings, prints, and drawings? Does she ever do work inspired by my poems? The answer is no, for the most part, with scattered exceptions at least for me. As noted, she’s done covers for some of my books, but only one was “inspired” by a specific poem. In another case, she did a monochrome drawing of an existent painting I wanted to use because the publisher couldn’t reproduce a work in color. In two other cases, I selected an already finished painting that I loved for my cover image. In one of those cases, I then wrote a poem to go with it.
 
I can’t speak for her, but in my case I think one problem preventing more collaboration is that my intimacy with her work may tamp down my imagination a bit. In writing any poem I need to feel absolutely free, especially at the drafting stage, to go anywhere, alter facts, improvise, even experiment with discreditable opinions—in other words, to do things I would not want to do with her work. At the same time, my standards are high. For a poem about her or her work to pass muster, I want it to be better than “good.” I’m as egotistical as the next poet, but even I must admit that few my poems are as fierce and deep as my love for Lee, and as I would want any poem about her art to be.
 
Accordingly, I’ve attempted to write any number of Lee-based ekphrastic poems over the past four decades, but very few have escaped my journal and achieved publication. And now I might as well make my final confession. What I’ve been leading up to here is one example where I’m fairly sure I may have escaped the reservations I’ve detailed above. It’s the title poem of my 1990 collection Second Wind, and her painting is the cover image. And it is a love poem, both for Lee herself and for her art. I’ll let the poem speak for itself, but I will note, in case it’s not clear, that the painting depicts a bird skull on a scarf. From the size of it, we think it may be a bluejay. The quotation in section 2 is from John Donne.
 

Second Wind


1. BIRD SKULL: A PAINTING BY LEE SHIPPEY 


It lies slantwise on a vivid scarf,
creamy, ashen, fog-colored bone
against sunset purple fabric
with petals and pods of lavender
touched orange.
 
This eggshell-thin cranium
rendered larger than my own— 
any act of attention
turns to love?  Who would
embrace doubt alone?
 
Bird beyond vocabulary
whose thoughtless brain
weighs little, flies nowhere
if not in the second wind
of naming.


2. “because such fingers need to knit 
that subtle knot”


Our love at first was simple
flame, rooted in air,
consuming the night.
 
Now it feels more
the heat from below, tangled
roots our inspiration:
 
how we learned thorn and weed,
roadside extravagance
of this walk in time.
 
River of speech, fire in the clay,
second wind of the flesh
cleaving to its own, its other:
 
what classic humors
let us breathe what we know,
knitting our knot again.
 
So if I say I love you
it’s not all I intend
but what you understand,
 
transfigured, ripening,
weed among clustered weeds
as I am you are.


3. memento vivari
 
​
Yet if bone on this scarf
is fossil action, halted flight,
it’s also the life of seeing
 
for you, painting it,
and for me, reflecting:
fabric so flat it’s not even
 
background but imperial sky, emblem
and taste of Eve and Adam’s
communion--the skull rises
 
from itself, as if our world
were all foreground, all detail,
and air we feel feathering by
 
is not first speech anymore
but the shaded, intricate
second wind enduring.
 
Originally published in Second Wind. Texas Tech, 1990.