Writing ekphrastic poems

 

 

The following is the first in what I hope will be an occasional series of articles about specific poetic forms, providing a showcase for some of my own published work:

 

I love ekphrastic poems. The reader gets both the impact of their original subject and the additional layers of meaning and emotion provided by the poet, two for the price of one. I have, nevertheless, heard criticisms of the form that claim that, like the ouroboros, it is simply an example of a kind of solipsistic device, art preying on art, by its nature unoriginal, circular and incapable of moving forward to new things.

However, all artists know how crucial the work of others is to their own. In a broad sense, there is no writing of any worth that doesn’t arise out of all the other writing to which the writer has ever been exposed, all the paintings and films and sculptures and TV programmes and plays and concerts that have formed the cultural collateral of his/her psyche. We draw on everything we experience in our own creations, and in our lives in general. Most writers know how stimulating specific works of art can be to our own work. And it isn’t just other poets that inspire our own poetry. Works in other mediums, particularly the visual, can be intensely inspirational.

However, a modern ekphrastic poem is not a work vaguely inspired by the work of a particular artist, or even one that simply gives us a word-painting – it is a poem arising from a close engagement with a specific work of art. It seems to me that ekphrastic poems are at their best when they give the reader something more than merely a description of the original work, more than simply a reproduction or a translation - they nevertheless need to be closely engaged with that specific work, and the very best of them create something new, something interesting in its own right. They take what the original has to offer and provide a new insight into its meaning, and/or they expand or adjust that meaning, producing something not merely descriptive but dynamic and original. For ten brilliant, well-known examples, try the website https://daily.jstor.org/10-modern-ekphrastic-poems/. 

The first time I wrote an ekphrastic poem was thirty years ago, long before I was aware of the word ‘ekphrastic’. It was inspired by a painting by Modigliani, a copy of which used to hang on the study wall of one of my tutors at Sheffield University. I always liked this painting so I looked it up one day, years after graduating, and found a poem emerging, one which combined the thoughts I imagined the painting’s subject to be feeling and the thoughts of the university academic (entirely fictional) in whose office it hung [it was published by both OWP and Fire in the mid-2000s]:

Tutorial With Painting

She has a long column of a neck, flat blocks of hair,

over-large superior hooded eyes. Her hands are neatly folded.

What does she think, from her bench above the door -

what does she make of the row of teenage heads below,

pens poised to forge a life for her in biro and A4?

 

Our tutor sniffs, then asks who painted it. A brutal glare.

‘Modigliani,’  I – nineteen – propose. Heartbeat and sweat.

He frowns. He almost snarls his disappointment, his regret. 

His over-large indifferent eyes dismiss my lucky guess. 

Long necks. Modigliani’s trademark.

 

He looks a bit like her, the tutor: long neck, hair flat

blocks of colour, somehow dead, as if he’ll, as if she’ll,

vanish when we stop looking, lips still pursed.

‘What is the painting called?’ he asks, impatient. There

he’s got me. There my knowledge fails.

 

Woman on chair? Lady with hands in lap? Haughty

bitch with sneer? No one speaks. A gap of silence

as the tutor tightly smiles, his version of a victory shot.

What does she think of him,  as she ladies it on the wall, 

her quiet scowl, eyes hooded with hauteur?

 

I’m sure she’s still there, now – though we are not –

and he still asks ‘Who painted it?’ –  response best left unsaid.

Unless, as long suspected, she now lives with him at home,

perhaps behind a curtain - My Last Duchess – canvas slowly

ageing as he moves inside his head. Perhaps he has a wife

 

who long since learned not to respond, a daughter

who ignores him when she visits with her friends.

 

Perhaps he’s gone from teaching now - retired, or sacked, or dead.

 

I wrote the following during an Open University course I was doing many years ago. They gave us links to paintings and asked us to choose one or two and try to write poems about them. I no longer have the links to the paintings, and I can’t actually remember much about them now, but the poems themselves survive:

 

 

Why We Hired A Wet-Nurse

 I didn’t want him.  There. It’s said and done.

So now I’m Snow White’s stepma, Lady M,

Hansel’s witch (without the gingerbread).

Unnatural.  Instincts soured like day-old cream.

It’s what you never say:  I didn’t want my son.

 

She knows.  Her disapproving mouth is pursed

in outrage as she bathes him, feeds him, coos

him to sleep, wipes up his sick.  I’ve seen her,

dangling on her strings – his wail and whim.

I neglect my duties so she steps in first:

 

my matron-business and my mother-love. We

fight, but lace and lipstick can’t compete

with her pale lullabying voice.  I took

a lover.  So?  I’m Emma Bovary now –

no desolating passion, just ennui.

 

I didn’t want him. I had been the one,

and then they looked at him, through my taut skin,

and later, after all that blood and pain,

their gazes switched again. When she’s not there,

we creep into his room and stare.  My son

 

lies with his eyes clamped shut, after his meal,

mouth slick with milky bubbles, red cheeks fat

as Santa.  I never wanted him.  His tiny

fingers curl into tight fists.  Sleep, sleep, my child,

my son, my little one.  I know how you feel.

 

 [Published in Tears In The Fence 57, summer 2013]

 

 

Hydrangeas

 If I’m honest,

 

I’ve always hated this room, thought it insipid,

like him – pale, watery walls and furniture

scuffed by boredom rather than life.

 

I’ve always hated  the large, oblong window

with its view of the large, oblong lawn,

hydrangea-fringed. They’re such dull flowers,

 

those pale blue globes, like puffed-up

ping pong balls.  That’s how I feel,

inflated til I can’t escape, like a young girl’s

 

wedding-ring stuck on an old woman’s

swollen finger.  My last bolt-hole blocked

by his child and his affection.  Why did

 

it arrive now, this note rousing old hopes,

this leftover voice from before I got here?

I’m lost, running through a daydream, clasping

 

my suitcase, down the dusty lane.  The last train

won’t have left yet.  Imagine the neighbours’

faces, wondering where his wife is going

 

so late on an October afternoon, looking so

alive.  Not knowing I’m not returning.

But the truth snaps back like a slap in the face.

 

I clutch the table’s edge, and with my free hand

feel the heavy curve of my belly through the

cotton.  His child and his affection, pinning me

 

to the room, the cool years elongating ahead

of me.  It arrived too late, this letter, too late to

detonate, ignite the stifling powder of our lives,

 

hydrangea-fringed – though I imagine the explosion,

insipid petals strewn across the oblong lawn,

glass-fragments on the table, and I’m sorry,

 

if I’m honest.

 

[First published in The Interpreter’s House, 2008]

 

 

The excellent magazine, Rattle, runs a regular ekphrastic challenge which has inspired two other poems by me, based on pictures the magazine provides. The first one I wrote (below) was later published by Pushing Out The Boat, Issue 16, April 2021. Copyright issues prevent me from including the painting that inspired it:

 

A walk on the canal path

 Rain on the canal dimples its millpond

lethargy, stirs with a thousand tiny slaps

its sludge-grey sluggishness,

 

releases the sour-green scent

of algae and nettles. I walk in the dust,

fast dissolving into reddish mud,

 

feel pebbles itch beneath my boots.

Drops sting the bat-wing webs

of my umbrella, a percussion

 

of tiny finger-taps that swamps

my thoughts. I’m trying not to think –

trying hard not to think about you –

 

as I step round sludgy puddles, dip

my head to dodge a dripping branch.

Watch the damp crows circle the disused

 

factory, broken edges sharp as cracked teeth

– the derelict now deliquescing

into the purple of bruises, November greys,

 

the rusty ochre of corrugated

roofs. Shadows slide across water,

ghostly slips of light rippling like wraiths

 

across its putty-coloured surface.

A mirror made of old glass,

casting my thoughts back in my face.

 

 

Ekphrastic poems can be inspired by other works of poetry, not just by visual art. One of my own that I have always liked was based on Tennyson’s poem ‘The Lady Of Shalott’, and I like it because I wrote it while invigilating a mock exam. Reading it always takes me back to that afternoon, to the sense of subversion I had because I should have been focusing entirely on policing the students (there were several other invigilators so no one was allowed to cheat despite my lack of professionalism!), and to the strangely comforting silence of an exam hall when you're not sitting an exam yourself - the quiet turning of pages, the almost silent scritch of pen against paper, the ordered gentleness of the experience in the middle of a work-day. I also remember the fizz of excitement I felt as the poem seeped into my consciousness as if out of the ether. In 2005, it won First Prize in the Mike Heywood Poetry Competition and was also one of eight poems chosen in a competition run by the Tennyson Society (it was displayed on the walls of The Mirehouse in Bassenthwaite, Cumbria, in 2009). I subsequently wrote a series of poems based on Tennyson’s work which were later published in Three Drops In A Cauldron, Issue 23, August 2018:

 

Lancelot's Testimony

I took a different route: the sun glared

at the bright wheat and the barley fronds;

the air swam in a heat haze, licking up

stale river scent and the hot incense of lilies.

I itched inside my armour; my head ached.

 

I'd heard the reaper's tales, soft-minded rumours

of faerie voices heard at dawn and dusk

when the world settled - still - and sounds carried

over the water.  But the island, willow-fringed,

seemed derelict. Grey stone of ancient towers

 

peered over the treetops; crooked crenellations

stood, gap-toothed, against the blond, blank sky.

I heard no mystic song, only the distant calls

of market girls and peasants treading slow

to Camelot, and the sly jangle of bugle

 

against saddle - though there was a dislocated

silence in the atmosphere, as if the air hung

tense; seclusion cossetted the island like

down; sounds slipped, collided, slid off downriver,

edged out. Bird call and hoof against dirt path

 

were blunt in the brittle heat. I felt like

a bauble melting in the sun, exposed,

a glossy tiger's eye, garish shield blazing,

red and gold; I felt I was pinned, observed,

impaled by a javelin stare. The smell of

 

horse sweat, white froth on the mare's flanks; acid

taste of heat on my tongue; breast plate cutting

weals in my armpits. But I heard no strange

sighing chant in the glazing noon, no soprano

adagio over the fields. Just the silence,

 

biting and austere in the dried clay heat.

 

A few years later, I wrote another series of poems inspired by a work of literature, this time The Tempest by Shakespeare. This play has inspired me to write a short story too, which got my highest coursework mark on the MA in Writing I did a few years ago, so I have a lot to thank The Bard for! One of the poems I wrote in this sequence was published in Dreamcatcher, Issue 38, January 2019:

 

At Prospero’s Funeral

 My father wept when he left his dainty Ariel

behind. Half-blind with grief, he stood in the stern

of Alonso’s ship, watching the isle dissolve.

Ariel’s farewell breath filled the sails; he flickered

in cold flames along the spars and rigging, danced

like an ape atop the crow’s nest. But all my father

did was weep and stare.

                                        It’s there I see him now,

hands whitely gripping a salt-roughened rope,

his robe becoming watercolours as the island fades.

His old eyes crust with cataracts, spine bends,

nose hooks, cheeks shrink. He looks his age.

No more the mage who raised the dead, controlled

the stir and sweep of the wind, brought goddesses

to earth. 

                 But then, it always was a show - always

the cliff-top pose, cloak billowing behind, staff

raised. The ducal voice. I am Milan. He was a fake,

my bully father.  It was Ariel who could change

for the occasion, slip into a mermaid’s skin,

vanish to a drift of pipe and tabor in the air.

                                

I’d tear the stinking feathers from his harpy’s wings.

I’d trap him tight in the oak’s entrails.  He’d not

entangle me in his foul song, the changeling thief.

                             

My father thought I didn’t know. The mighty Prospero

relying on a  wisp of spirit! Mastering him with a promise.

He never promised me. He turned me off and on.

Fed me to Ferdinand, the sap, to stitch together Naples

and Milan. I was a child. How did I know the world

had such men in it?                                      

                                No, it was his dainty chick, his Ariel,

for whom he wept and stared. I was just his blood.

No good ever came from daughters.  So I watched him,

clung to his words as if they’d raft me home, studied

his ageing face as it corrugated and dissolved.

But it was Ariel he wept for.

 

WRITING TASK:  Why not have a go at your 

own ekphrastic poem? Find a work of art that moves you in some way and see where it takes you.