Ecstatic and Ekphrastic: Hybrid Project Draft
Magritte, Rene. “About This Artwork: Rene Magritte, Belgian, 1898-1967. The Banquet, 1958.” Artists Rights Society. 2016. Art Institute of Chicago. 23 Feb. 2016. Web.
Ekprastic Poem
The Banquet
The sun is OUT
sheathed in green.
Something surfacing in the seering red
some texture, some name
something behind the sun spots and perfect shape.
The earth’s children is a harbor for her
the texture of a moon all origami-ed up
into the shape of the sun.
This is a vision of a shared shelter in the rising darkness.
Nature already offers its own reversal:
allowing the sun’s eternity to be silenced for the brief stretch of night,
allowing the trees to block their king, conquerer, and sire.
This painting, though–
is it a reversal of nature
or the revelation of it?
“You must witness me,” the sun says,
performing a kind of time-travel.
Is the sun not a stark and beautiful thing
meant to be beheld before all others,
all those hangers-on that depend on it so they can pretend to be eternal?
Be the sun
stand in front, where you belong.
Or perhaps you are the sun already
born in fire, dying in the green
framed by the fretful mortar of human ambition.
Could you not feast on this bright red burst
and let your appetite be sated by vision?
Don’t let yourself be spirited away, the sun tells you,
by anything less than death.
Critical Essay
Ekstatic and Ekphrastic: A Celebration of Rene Magritte’s “The Banquet”
My poem, “The Banquet,” was composed in response to Rene Magritte’s painting of the same name. There is a long history of ekphrastic poetry that I could excavate for laudable precedents, but I feel that Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” and Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night” are my clearest inspirations. I believe it is also essential that I explain the word/image theory informing my work and that I unpack how my theory deviates slightly from the norm. As such, I aim to explore poetic precedents that ekphrastically exult works of art, noting their strategies and modes of description, while unlocking those poems with the help of word/image theory.
First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge that ekphrastic poems are the products of ekphrastic hope, as described in W.J.T. Mitchell’s “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Mitchell defines ekphrasis as, “the verbal representation of visual representation” (157). Ekphrastic hope, therefore, is the phenomenon in which “the impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome in imagination or metaphor” (157). After all, how can an image be captured in words? Better yet, how can an image be captured in words that are not metaphor, that technique by which nearly anything can become anything else? That process of transmutation is what I intend to study here through my own theory of how ekphrasis takes place between poems describing artworks.
I am interested in how these celebratory word/image unions can draw the essence of the image out of its corporeal form by invoking it mentally through language—both imagined and re-imagined in an instant. I would define the essence of an image as the most crucial emotional and intellectual information we take away from the image; that which remains most clear after a long look or a quick glance. It is both the focal shapes (and gradations of color and illusion of motion and so on) in the image and the key feelings it draws out of us. Therefore, the essence of the image is slightly unique to each viewer. How, then, can a poem call forth an essence which is by definition different for viewer? Principally, I am curious about the way the image has a seemingly impossible out-of-body experience. I would define this moment as ecstasy, from the Greek word existanai, meaning to “displace, put out of place” (Harper). My concern is thus: how do ekphrastic poets create ecstasy in their work? How do they successfully capture an image’s essence? I chose “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” and “The Starry Night” because these are two poems that recreate images in words so well. They are thoughtful poems that are nonetheless bold in their claims to truly know the image they are describing. Furthermore, I suspected that their shared focus on nature would help me find ways to reconfigure the way nature has been portrayed in Magritte’s work.
Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” is remarkable for both its simplicity and its drama. Each word feels necessary because she, too, has “lopped the extremities” off of her work. Loy’s poem mirror’s Brancusi’s sculpture in that it has been pared down to the essential and that it is unusually contiguous, offering minimal pauses. In its smooth transitions and continuity, it, like a visual work of art, demands that its audience run its eyes over it continually in order to make sense of it. Consonance and assonance thickly link her words and ideas to one another, such that even quoting her poem seems to completely rob her words of their power. These sound-links also pull the reader inexorably down the page; they are compelled to read each next word in order to internally hear those sounds harmonize and create greater and greater chains of sound. This also has the interesting effect of unifying the poem through sensation (if not through subject and theme). The drama stems from Loy’s use of hyperbolic allusions. Her “gorgeous reticence” does not extend to her efforts to construct a kind of death-filled narrative for the golden bird. For instance, she likens the sculpture to the Egyptian god Osiris, as well as Jesus Christ. In as few words as possible, she has poised the reader to construct for themselves an archetypal narrative for the object—in which the object is suddenly capable of offering final judgement or of liberating one from sin.
In Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night,” we feel similarly compelled to keep reading, but Sexton draws us in though repetition and continual surprises. Like Sexton, she imposes narrative onto the painting, but she refers more to herself than to allegory. This is accomplished through the repeated line: “This is how I want to die.” Her use of the first-person perspective strengthens the poem, helping it own its subjectivity. Pronouns remain slippery throughout the work; one minute the painting is an “it” and the next it is “they,” the stars. We are also shocked by sensation in this poem—by “the hot sky” and by how “the night boils” as “the moon bulges in its orange irons.” Night, typically thought of as a cooler time of darkness and dormancy, suddenly explodes with heat and color in Sexton’s descriptions. Instead of trying to objectively describe the shapes and the movement in the painting, she boldly asserts her own reading and we begin to see the accuracy in her seemingly bizarre descriptions
Essentially, these two poems taught me that I need not avoid oddity. The unlikely accuracy of their comparisons (through allusion and metaphor) is not to be underestimated. Loy and Sexton also do not hesitate to announce the presence of death, which is inseparable from both the natural world and art. Through those meditations on death, they unhesitatingly impose philosophy and narrative onto artistic works that are by no means limited to their perceptions of what the art ‘means.’ I hope that I have expressed that same audacity in attributing a moral to Magritte’s painting. Like Sexton and Loy, I have opted to give my poem the same name as the painting that inspired it. That way, it has a clear link to the artwork and I am not tasked with coming up with a title that can encompass both my work and Magritte’s.
It is clear, from the passion with which they wrote, that Sexton and Loy truly cared about the artwork they were describing and that is what motivated them to write poems good enough—and bold and careful enough—to honor these artworks to the fullest. I chose Magritte along similar lines, selecting the painting I felt the most affection for. Additionally, I felt confident choosing it because, to the best of my knowledge, I will be the first to write an ekphrastic poem about it. (Although there was a rather off-putting poem about it posted by a mysterious “Thaxton” on Facebook just days before I selected this painting.)
Hi Eleanore,
I really like your idea of composing your own ekphrastic poem. I think one of the great things about your critical component is that it almost trains you to write your ekphrastic poem. It seems like you are beginning to have a good grasp of how to successfully write an ekphrastic poem by studying these poets. Good Job!
I think you are off to a great start! If I had to find one thing for you to work on, it might be trying to find some other critical sources dealing with ekphrasis differently than W.J.T. Mitchell. Most of your critical component consists of analyzing these ekphrastic poems, but criticism like W.J.T. Mitchell’s piece might also be helpful. I’m sure there are more authors out there to consider, and it might give you a few different perspectives as you continue with your project.
As you work on your project, it might be helpful to think about how you will present your poem. In class you said that you were definitely going to present the poem and painting together, but I think it would be cool if you found a way to present them separately and together. The poem doesn’t necessarily have to depend on the painting. As Bagwell said, it should be able to exist as its own entity. It would be really interesting to see how people interact with your poem when it stands alone vs. when it is presented with the painting. Just an idea! Ekphrastic poems don’t always have to be presented with the art they describe. For some of the examples Mitchell uses in his piece, like Achilles shield and Keat’s “Ode to a Grecian Urn”, are presented without the art they describe and there is debate about whether or not the pieces of art even existed or not, yet they are still considered ekphrasis.
Good star ton your project!