Ekphrastic Poetry: Part Two, Feminism in Art

Giovanni Pisano,
Madonna and Child, 1301

This is the second part of an art tour based on some of the poems in my book Will There Be Music? In part one I recounted my experience taking Renaissance Art as a freshman in college. I had an amazing professor, Patricia Rose, who was at Stanford only a short while, and later had a long, illustrious career at Florida State. You might find it hard to believe, but this morning I was able to find, without too much trouble, my notes from her course. I wanted to look up what she had said (or what I had written down) about Giovanni Pisano's Madonna and Child in the Cathedral of Prato. This church possesses a relic known as "the sacred girdle," the one that Mary gave to Thomas (in Italian cintura, this girdle is more like a waist sash). My notes record how the mother and child are looking at each other, how the child is touching his mother's crown, and how the mother's body curved to receive the child. These are all details I remember noticing when I finally saw this work in 1967 when I was a student in nearby Florence. And years later, writing the poem "In the Bowery" I was reminded of the twisting of this woman's body, and how similar it was to the motions my mother made escaping her girdle ("our mother seen once struggling to throw her girdle to the floor"). A minor step in my feminist history: I never wore one myself.

Caryatids of the Erechtheion,
Acropolis

slopoet at the Acropolis, 1972

The poem "Caryatids" takes me back to the summer of 1972 when I backpacked through Europe for three months by myself, picking up various companions along the way. The caryatids of the Erechtheion were so inspiring, and years later I delved into the derivation of the word "caryatid," how it was a reference to the women of Karyae ("nut women [who] placed baskets of live reeds on their heads and danced"). I also made reference to how one of them was stolen by Lord Elgin, a theme that parallels real-life abductions of women. Before we turn to that theme, you might note this photo from 1972 to prove I was really there...

John Sloan, "The Picnic Grounds," 1906-7

Bernini, Apollo
and Daphne, 1622-25

A course on American Art led me to the works of John Sloan, and to one painting I was able to see in an exhibition, his painting "The Picnic Grounds," 1906-7. Years later this led to the poem "Trees Painted White," a meditation on those white trunks I had seen in Sloan's painting, and elsewhere in my world, trees treated for bugs and/or to retard sunlight ("lime in the whitewash choked the bugs"). The poem then travels on to the story of Apollo and Daphne, how she was being pursued by Apollo and the gods who were on her side suddenly changed her into a laurel tree. Of course, life as a tree was perhaps not a great option, but she at least escaped ravishment ("Daphne shrieked, ran pell mell away from lust"). Before I went to Italy for the first time in 1967 I had also had a course on Baroque Art, including Bernini, so one of my pilgrimages in Rome was to the Borghese Gallery to see his magnificent sculpture of this subject.

Posing with Henry Moore's
Draped Reclining Woman
at the Norton Simon Museum,
Pasadena, 1985

slopoet with Henry Moore's
Reclining Woman in front
of Leeds Art Gallery

I think in addition to wanting to view art, I sometimes had a secret desire to be part of art. The poem "No Breath, No Smut" mentions the curious tradition of tableau vivante, a practice I had seen at the almost tacky Laguna Festival of the Arts, where real people portray individuals from famous works of art ("the flutter of an eyelash allowed yet no pause to heave or sigh"). In the same poem I also refer to a game I made up, "Capturing Henry Moore," where it was my custom to climb up next to one of his pieces and try to mimic the pose. The first time I did this, I think, was in 1985, posing with Moore's "Draped Reclining Woman" at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena. Here I am in 1994 posing next to his Reclining Woman in Leeds.

I'm not particularly religious but nevertheless I've been drawn to

Hieronymus Bosch,
Crucifixion of St. Julia/
St. Wilgefortis.

stories from the Catholic faith, especially their saints. The female saints often had been young girls about to be married off by their fathers to some lucrative suitor. Yet their faith led them to reject these offers, often with tragic consequences. These are stories similar to that of Daphne, where the man is threatening to ravish them, and they find a way to escape. St. Wilgefortis' fate was especially tragic. When she refused the man her father procured for her, a miracle happened and she started to grow a beard. The man backed off, and her father was angry, had her crucified to punish her (see my poem "St. Wilgefortis," "there she hung in red gabardine, hair on her chin"). One particularly poignant painting of her is by Hieronymus Bosch, his Crucifixion of St. Julia, sometimes also referred to as the Crucifixion of St. Wilgefortis.

On a trip to France in 1986 I visited the Abbey of Charlieu in Burgundy. There I was able to tour the

Detail, Abbey of Charlieu

ruins with an amiable guide, a woman who pointed out to me all the details I shouldn't miss. Like the sculptural relief of a woman with a frog suckling her breast (see my poem "The Woman of Charlieu"). It was explained to me that this was a warning against the pleasures of sex, what would happen to the transgressor, in this case the woman's punishment in hell would be very grave indeed ("the snake curling around her legs, a sign the woman had been in sin").

Marcel Duchamp,
Nude Descending
a Staircase No. 2, 1912

My heroine in feminist art might be Marcel Duchamp's "Nude Descending the Staircase," referenced by another poem in my collection ("Duchamp's Nude Descending the Staircase"). At least that was my interpretation, as in this poem I imagined myself facing the challenges of advanced age ("her bones less dense, they said"), how it was a miracle really one can keep climbing and descending those stairs ("her daily descent into the ordinary").