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Ekphrastic Poem

The Banquet

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This sun is outspoken, outrageous—

something surfacing in the seering red,

some texture, some name,

something behind the sun spots and perfect shape.

 

This is a vision of a shared shelter in the rising darkness—

the texture of a moon origami-ed into the shape of the sun,

unbelievably buoyant, hovering above the blue-black confusion of a soulful wood.

 

Nature already offers its own reversal:

allowing the sun’s eternity to be silenced for the brief stretch of night,

allowing the trees to depose the arbiter of their ascension.

 

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 and dying, sheathed in 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?

Could you not look at yourself and see it, really see it:

the dark, spindly legs of blind trees,

their frazzled green fingers spanning out to a sky that is the exact color of one raw open blister—

a story unto itself that is somehow still resisting being told?

 

Don’t let yourself be spirited away, you are telling yourself in this story,

by anything less than death.

 

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Critical Essay

Ecstatic and Ekphrastic: A Celebration of Rene Magritte’s “The Banquet”

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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 the best examples of ekphrastic poems for me to model my work after. I believe it is also essential that I explain the word/image theory informing my work and that I clarify 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 in order to inform my own work, while unlocking those poems with the help of word/image theory.

Word/image theorist W.J.T. Mitchell defines ekphrasis as “the verbal representation of visual representation,” while Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, a scholar on the relationship between visual art and poetry, more narrowly defines ekphrasis as “the poem that addresses a work of art” (157, 1). For the scope of my essay, these definitions are equally valid. First and foremost, I would like to acknowledge that ekphrastic poems are the products of ekphrastic hope, as described in Mitchell’s essay “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Ekphrastic hope is the phenomenon in which “the impossibility of ekphrasis is overcome in imagination or metaphor” (157). I will explore the impossibly successful strategies of two poets who ruminated on visual art and I will detail the rhetorical and thematic tools they used to trick readers into “’seeing’ it only through ekphrastic description” (Loizeaux 110). The slippery process through which a visual artwork can be called into the mind’s eye—and is inevitably altered by the descriptions that called into being—is mysterious to say the least. This process of transmutation is what I intend to study here through my own theory of how ekphrasis takes place between an artwork and an ekphrastic poem.

For my own interpretation of word/image theory, I am primarily 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 or the beginnings of narrative that it draws out of us. Therefore, the essence of the image is somewhat unique to each viewer.

How, then, can a poem call forth an essence which is by definition different for every viewer? As I will maintain later, a poem has to flaunt its lack of neutrality in order to do something interesting. However, in order to satisfy the reader’s expectations for an ekphrastic poem, the poet must offer accurate descriptions about the color and movement in the work, while also introducing a narrative element that reinvigorates the viewer/reader’s sense of the artwork. In sum, the poet strikes a delicate balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar in order to offer a description that appeals to viewers that all saw something slightly different when they viewed the artwork.

I believe that Loizeaux is correct when she asserts that in an ekphrastic poem, language is attempting to overwhelm the image in its original, solitary form and “turn it to its own needs” (14). For all that ekphrastic poetry is in service to visual art, it is equally possible (and perhaps inevitable) for poets like Sexton and Loy to hijack visual art for their own purposes. To do this, however, they must first call the image out of its corporeal form and let it inhabit their words in the mind of the reader. Through their poetry, the image experiences another seemingly impossible event: an out-of-body experience. I would define this moment as ecstasy, from the Greek word existanai, meaning to “displace, put out of place” (Harper). This echoes the etymology of ekphrasis, “from the Greek ek, ‘out’ and phrazein, ‘to speak’” (Loizeaux 12). Thus, the poem’s speaker ousts the image’s essence from its physical space and projects the image outward through language instead. My concern is as follows: how do ekphrastic poets create ecstasy in their work? That is to say, 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 and so joyfully. They are thoughtful poems that are nonetheless bold in their claims to truly know the image they are describing and in their decision to reshape it to mean what they need it to mean.

Mina Loy’s “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” is remarkable for both its simplicity and its drama. Each word feels necessary because Loy, too, has “lopped the extremities” off of her work. Loy’s poem mirrors 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 as a unit 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. Readers are compelled to read each following 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, as well as through subject and theme.

The poem’s dramatic power 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 Osiris—the Egyptian god of the afterlife—and Jesus Christ—a messiah whose willing death is central to his importance. In as few words as possible, she has poised the reader to construct for themselves an archetypal narrative for the object, a narrative in which Brancusi’s bird is suddenly capable of offering final judgement or of liberating one from sin. A reader may struggle to understand how an abstract bird sculpture could embody the passion of Christ, but in the midst of that struggle, they find themselves calling the image forth in their minds in order make possible connections. For instance, in rescanning the image mentally, I realized that the bird’s headlessness might be an implied death—a voluntary decapitation for the sake of perfection, in pursuit of divine form.

In Anne Sexton’s “The Starry Night,” we feel similarly compelled to keep moving down the page, but Sexton draws us in though repetition and continual surprises. Like Loy, 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.” Once again, I had to imagine the painting in order to grasp that by “they,” she is referring to the stars. Through this and other linguistic tactics, she keeps the audience on its toes and continually calling the image forth in their minds to double-check the meaning of her words.

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 in writing my own ekphrastic poem, I need not avoid oddity. The unlikely accuracy of their comparisons, through allusion and metaphor, is not to be underestimated. The parallels between deities and Brancusi’s artwork indicates Loy’s sense that this is a sacred sculpture. Sexton’s use of warmth conveys that her personal temperature is rising in excitement as she examines a painting that reflects a deep-seated desire within her. Loy and Sexton allow their oddity to surprise the reader into staying interested and to transmit information which is much less interesting when stated outright.

Neither of these poets hesitate to announce the presence of death, which to them is inseparable from both the natural world and art. Through these meditations on “sensational death,” they unhesitatingly impose philosophy and narrative onto other people’s artistic works; their perception of what the art ‘means’ doesn’t matter so much as their willingness to make it take on a meaning of their choosing (Loizeaux 110). My poem hopefully emanates that same audacity when it attributes a message 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. This is necessarily complicated by Magritte’s status as a surrealist painter, as his title is not easily reconciled with the apparent subject of his artwork. After studying my ekphrastic predecessors, however, I was clued into how to tie up Magritte’s surrealist loose ends. Through a balance of accurate ekphrastic description and the flair of an imposed personal narrative, my poem aspires to bridge the differences between a vague title and a seemingly unrelated work through the assertion of a satisfying personal meaning.

This reconciliation of irreconcilable elements is key thoughout Loy and Sexton’s poetry. For instance, in their work, you must collapse life and death into one another thematically and visually in order to make sense of nature. (We may observe this in Loy’s grand allusions to the bird’s birth coinciding with its death and in Sexton’s suicidal designs on an embryonic night sky.) 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 and, subsequently, I ended up with a natural scene that was saturated with death and unwellness.

In enact to this environment, I relied on my poetic predecessors’ tendency to call out colors and shapes that most viewers see, but attribute special poetic meaning to them—thus creating a new narrative out of the familiar visual elements of the artwork. The themes and tactics began to bleed into each other a little. Like word and image, they are not neatly separable—given to forming feedback loops that I felt obligated to keep in place in my own poem. For example, my use of color in my first draft was purely aimed at describing the painting, but by the second draft, all uses of color were linked to tone, theme, and narrative—particularly as they relate to death.

It is clear, from the passion with which they wrote, that Sexton and Loy truly cared about the artwork they were describing and that this care is what motivated them to write poems good enough—and bold enough—to honor these artworks to the fullest. I chose Magritte’s work along similar lines, selecting the painting that I felt the most affection for. Additionally, I felt confident choosing “The Banquet” because, to the best of my knowledge, I will be the first to write an ekphrastic poem about it.

As images surge to the fore in popular culture, it is becoming more and more crucial to understand the relationship between words and images—and by extension, if poetry is to remain a relevant pastime, the relationship between poems and visual art. The sense of rightness that resounds throughout Anne Sexton’s and Mina Loy’s poems must be appreciated and better understood if we hope to have a cohesive concept of the word/image relationship and its potential to put an ecstatic image in the mind’s eye. I hoped to both replicate that phenomenon in my own work in order to increase my understanding of ekphrasis and to enhance my understanding of ekphrasis so that I could write a better poem.

 

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Bibliography

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Harper, Douglas. “Ecstasy (n.).” Online Etymology Dictionary. 2016. 7 March 2016. Web.

Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Print.

Loy, Mina. “Brancusi’s Golden Bird.” W. W. Norton & Company, 1922. PDF. 31 March 2016. Web.

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.

Mitchell, W.J.T. “Ekphrasis and the Other.” Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago: 1994. 151-81. Print.

Sexton, Anne. “The Starry Night.” AllPoetry.com. 1981. 30 March 2016. Web.

Stollzfus, Ben. “Magritte’s Dialectical Affinities: Hegel, Sade, and Goethe.” Journal of Narrative Theory. 43.2. 2013. 111-136. ProQuest. 13 April 2016. Web.

Thaxton. “The Banquet.” Poetry and Visual Art Nexus. Facebook.com. 3 March 2016. 10 March 2016. Web.

Yarboro, Eleanor. “Ecstatic and Ekphrastic.” WordArt.SuzanneChurchill.com. Word-Art – ENG 393 – S16. 28 March 2016. Web.