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
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.
Hydrangeas
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
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
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
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
and
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.
