Ekphrastic Poetry: Part One

Fred Marchant said of many of the poems in my book Will There Be Music? that one might "call these poems ekphrastic...[or] an extended ode to the imagination and its many forms of expression." One of the goals of writing ekphrastic poems is to make them stand alone, to succeed without needing to see the work of art that is being written about. But no one can deny it is a pleasure to see both of them together, though few books of poetry come with illustrations.

I thought it would be fun to reveal some of the works of art that I was writing about in the twenty-four (my count) ekphrastic poems in my book. So this is Part One. In each part I will talk about a few of the poems, and reveal their inspiration.

"Paroxysms"
This poem is about my first year of college, when I was given permission to take three whole quarters of an upper-division class in Renaissance Art. The poem compares the paintings of the Mannerists, Madonnas with "elongated necks and twisted limbs" and those of their predecessors such as Raphael, "how the sweetness unnerved them." Two of Raphael's paintings are mentioned, Madonna of the Cardinal and Madonna of the Goldfinch. And in the final stanza, the landscape changes to that of "Rogier van der Weyden and the Hospice de Beaune." These are all references to paintings I later saw in my travels to Italy and France.

Parmagianino, Madonna
with the Long Neck

Raphael, Madonna
of the Cardinal

Nicolas Rolin, detail of
Rogier van der Weyden's
Last Judgment, Hospice de
Beaune

Nicolas Rolin was the man who founded the Hospice de Beaune. He also commissioned another famous work of art by Jan Van Eyck, The Virgin and Child with Chancellor Rolin, in which he is pictured seated with the Madonna and child. This work is referred to in another of my poems, "Chancellor Rolin Transported Downtown." In 2011 I decided to write a poem about a work of art to be featured in the Madison Art Society's annual show at the Scranton Library in Madison, Connecticut. This was part of a regular collaboration between the Society and the Guilford Poets Guild. I chose a pastel by Christine Ivers entitled "Empty Bed." I was intrigued by the title, and the way the man in the foreground was eyeing the nudes in an art gallery from his vantage point outside, looking through the window at night. My interpretation was that this was his consolation for having an "empty bed" at home. But what also captivated me was the way the whole thing reminded me of the Van Eyck painting. They both used three arches as a sort of motif. That was just the starting point as I ended up inventing a whole story that transcends many centuries, imagining Rolin as suddenly a modern figure who had once posed for a painting with a woman he knew...("We were playacting, she was a local model and the child, not hers"). There is another connection between the two works of art. The Christ child holds what is commonly referred to as an "orb and cross." If you turn this image upside down you get something that looks like the feminine symbol. And there is such a feminine symbol on the window of the art gallery in Ivers' work ("The insignia of Venus hanging over the entrance"). Here ends Part One.

Christine Ivers, Empty Bed,
pastel (by permission of the
artist)

Jan Van Eyck, Virgin
with Chancellor Rolin