{"id":1156,"date":"2010-03-04T09:42:33","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T14:42:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=1156"},"modified":"2010-03-08T13:42:15","modified_gmt":"2010-03-08T18:42:15","slug":"the-page-transformed-introduction-part-i-ekphrasis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2010\/03\/04\/the-page-transformed-introduction-part-i-ekphrasis\/","title":{"rendered":"The Page Transformed: Introduction & Part I – Ekphrasis"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Breughel's "The Fall of Icarus"<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

During the month of March, we’ll be exploring the theme “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & The Visual Arts” in our posts.\u00a0 We’re interested in ways in which poetry and the visual arts speak to one another, inform each other’s practices, and blend with one another on the page.\u00a0 We’ll begin with an examination of ekphrastic poetry, and will eventually move on to explore other areas of intersection – the book as a physical object of beauty, for example, and broadsides and typography (poetry as visual art).\u00a0 We also hope to feature conversations poets who engage in both the visual arts and poetry, as well as a couple of posts about visionary experimental figures like Theresa Hak-Kyung Cha, who pushed the boundaries of text as object.\u00a0 Our prompts this month will also work in with our theme, and (we hope) will provide exercises that ask you to creatively engage with and perhaps try out some of the topics we’ll cover in our Editors’ Picks and Interview posts.<\/p>\n

For this week and the beginning of next, we’ll be focusing on ekphrasis and ekphrastic poetry.\u00a0 The Academy of American Poets’ website gives what I think is a helpful definition of ekphrasis: “poetry confronting art.” The\u00a0 idea of the image which confronts and subsequently moves the poet to speak is clearly reflected in what is perhaps one of the best loved examples of American ekphrastic poetry: William Carlos William’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus<\/a>,” based on Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.”\u00a0 In his poem, Williams interprets the actions of the figures in the painting, highlighting the isolation of Icarus’s action in the larger context of the scene — while country people go about their daily lives, herding sheep and plowing fields, Icarus is visible only as a tiny pair of legs attached to an unseen body already engulfed in water.\u00a0 Only one man looks up to the sky, but has already missed the action.\u00a0 Williams plays powerfully on the desolate futility that he reads into Breughel’s interpretation of the myth:<\/p>\n

unsignificantly
\noff the coast
\nthere was<\/p>\n

a splash quite unnoticed
\nthis was
\nIcarus drowning<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Williams’ poem is certainly a famous one.\u00a0 But perhaps my favorite meditation on the commonalities between the work of the poet and painter in creating imagery that will resonate in the mind of the viewer or reader is Robert Lowell’s Vermeer-inspired poem “Epilogue,” which I will leave you with:<\/p>\n

Epilogue
\n<\/strong>by Robert Lowell<\/p>\n

Those bless\u00e8d structures, plot and rhyme\u2014
\nwhy are they no help to me now
\nI want to make
\nsomething imagined, not recalled?
\nI hear the noise of my own voice:
\nThe painter\u2019s vision is not a lens,
\nit trembles to caress the light.<\/em>
\nBut sometimes everything I write
\nwith the threadbare art of my eye
\nseems a snapshot,
\nlurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
\nheightened from life,
\nyet paralyzed by fact.
\nAll\u2019s misalliance.
\nYet why not say what happened?
\nPray for the grace of accuracy
\nVermeer gave to the sun\u2019s illumination
\nstealing like the tide across a map
\nto his girl solid with yearning.
\nWe are poor passing facts,
\nwarned by that to give
\neach figure in the photograph
\nhis living name.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

[Text of “Epilogue” courtesy of poetryoutloud.org<\/a>.\u00a0 To read more about ekphrasis, visit this article<\/a> on the Academy of American Poets’ website.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During the month of March, we’ll be exploring the theme “The Page Transformed: Intersections of Poetry & The Visual Arts” in our posts.\u00a0 We’re interested in ways in which poetry and the visual arts speak to one another, inform each other’s practices, and blend with one another on the page.\u00a0 We’ll begin with an examination […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false},"categories":[17,238],"tags":[239,240,243,241,242],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1156"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1203,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1156\/revisions\/1203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}