ekphrastic poems fall 2013
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Art Confronting Art
For your next reading response and poem Im asking you to exploreekphrastic poetry.Ekphrasis (also spelled "ecphrasis") is a direct transcription from the Greek
ek, "out of," andphrasis, "speech" or "expression." It's often been translatedsimply as "description," and seems originally to have been used as arhetorical term designating descriptive prose or poetry. More narrowly, itcould designate a passage providing a short speech attributed to a mutework of visual art. In recent decades, the use of the term has been limited,first, to visual description and then even more specifically to the descriptionof a real or imagined work of visual art.
Reading Response Due Friday September 20:The poems that follow all take their inspiration from visual art, film,photography, and a national landmark. In addition to the guiding questions
from you syllabus, some additional questions you might explore for yourreading response include:- Whats the relationship between the poem and art object?- Does the poem extend, confront, subvert, contradict, offer a new
explanation, or detour entirely from the object of inspiration?- How do the poets use the art object as a springboard for their own
writing? Choose a specific poem and analyze this departure.
Poem Due Tuesday Sept 24:
I want you to write a poem inspired by an art object of some kind.
This can include paintings, photography (personal or public),sculptures, landmarks, structures (bridges, buildings, roads),graffiti, found objects, film, television shows, ballet, opera, or you-name-it. Only caveat: you must bring an image to share with theclass.
Grab someone from class and make a day of it; visit some museumsin NYC: http://www.ny.com/museums/Put an image of the art object on the dropbox of Sakai by Tuesdaybefore class.
Bring 25 copies of your poem to class on Tuesday.
As a wise man once said, make it work.
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ANTIQUITY CALLING
Looking at Mapplethorpes Polaroids, I learn that he
liked shoes and armpit crotch-shots of men and women,both shaved and unall giving a good whiff to the camera.But best of all are his pictures of ordinary phoneswhich convey a palpable sense of expectancy as ifat any moment, one of the fabulous, laconic nude menstrewn about might call. One could pick up the receiverand hear the garbled sound of ancient Greek and Romanvoices reveling in the background. But even when silent,the dingy phone is a sex organcock asleep in its cradle.
Elaine Equi
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A few Robert Mapplethorpe Polaroids:http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/polaroids
For more, google image search Robert Mapplethorpe Polaroids
http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/polaroidshttp://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/polaroids -
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THE STARRY NIGHT
That does not keep me from having a terrible need ofshall I say thewordreligion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars. Vincent Van
Gogh in a letter to his brother
The town does not existexcept where one black-haired tree slipsup like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.Oh starry starry night! This is howI want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange ironsto push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.Oh starry starry night! This is howI want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,sucked up by that great dragon, to splitfrom my life with no flag,
no belly,no cry. Anne Sexton
JOHN WAYNE'S PERFUMES
In Cast a Giant Shadow, John Wayne wore Claiborne Sport;in Flame of the Barbary Coast, Femme;
Dakota, Diorissimo.
In The Undefeated, John Wayne wore Unzipped;in Overland Stage Raiders, Opium;
Stagecoach, Snuff.
In The Alamo, John Wayne wore Anas Anas;inJet Pilot, Joop Nuit dEt;
Chisum, Charlie.
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In Barbarian and the Geisha, John Wayne wore Baby Doll;in Wake of the Red Witch, White Diamonds;
Baby Face, Boss.
In How the West Was Won, John Wayne wore Hugo DeepRed;
in His Private Secretary, Halston Sheer;Rio Lobo, Realities.
In Lady Takes a Chance, John Wayne wore Lucky You;in Sands of Iwo Jima, Sun Moon and Stars;
Hatari, Happy.Wayne Koestenbaum (2006)
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STEALING THE SCREAM
It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.That we know for certain, and what was left behind--a store-bought ladder, a broken window,and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.
And the rest? We don't know. But we can envisionmoonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything--the paintings,the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged
pattern;
the figure's fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironicby the fact of something happening; housesclapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeksalong the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;
the guards rushing in--too late!--greeted onlyby the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,a postcard: "Thanks for the poor security."
The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whisperingin the galleries: ". . .but what does it all mean?"
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Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping theframe,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.Monica Youn
WHY
I AM
NOT
A
PAINTER
I am not a painter, I am a poet.Why? I think I would ratherbea painter, but I am not. Well,
for instance, Mike Goldbergis starting a painting. I dropin.
"Sit down and have a drink"hesays. I drink; we drink. I lookup. "You have SARDINES init.""Yes, it needed somethingthere.""Oh." I go and the days go byand I drop in again. The
paintingis going on, and I go, and thedaysgo by. I drop in. The paintingisfinished. "Where's SARDINES?"All that's left is justletters, "It was too much," Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking ofa color: orange. I write a lineabout orange. Pretty soon it is awhole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should beso much more, not of orange, ofwords, of how terrible orange is
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and life. Days go by. It is even inprose, I am a real poet. My poemis finished and I haven't mentionedorange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a galleryI see Mike's painting, called SARDINES.
FrankOHara (1971)
THE RAPEOF GANYMEDE
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As Rembrandt saw it (the boys posteriorbare, fleshier than a mans; the black air,Macedonias smoke, the rosy Trojanall in a tizzy, his rags hitched up, urine
yellowing his left foot,the jut of his white gut),myth is a hoot. Look in the eagles eyes:hes lightly amused at the sizeof the brats fat hands, the fact of Ganymedes death-grip on a pair of dangling cherries, bothof which are overripethe eagle knowsthe weight of thugs, of thunderbolts, of Eros.
Randall Mann (2009)
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FACING IT
My black face fades,hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't,dammit: No tears.I'm stone. I'm flesh.My clouded reflection eyes melike a bird of prey, the profile ofnightslanted against morning. I turn
this way -- the stone lets me
go.I turn that way -- I'm insidethe Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the lightto make a difference.I go down the 58,022 names,half-expecting to findmy own in letters like smoke.I touch the name Andrew
Johnson;I see the booby trap's whiteflash.Names shimmer on a woman'sblousebut when she walks awaythe names stay on the wall.Brushstrokes flash, a red bird'swings cutting across my stare.
The sky. A plane in the sky.A white vet's image floatscloser to me, then his pale eyeslook through mine. I'm a window.He's lost his right arminside the stone. In the black mirrora woman's trying to erase names:
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No, she's brushing a boy's hair.
Yusef Komunyakaa (1988)
The Vietnam Veterans War Memorial in Washington D.C., built in 1982,
is a huge black granite wall carved into the ground. The over 58,000names are not listed in alphabetical order, but in chronological order ofdeath or capture.
june 20
i will be born in one week
to a frowned forehead of a womanand a man whose fingers will itchto enter me. she will crocheta dress for me of silverand he will carry me in it.they will do for each otherall that they canbut it will not be enough.none of us know that we will notsmile again for years,
that she will not live long.in one week i will emerge face firstinto their temporary joy.
Lucille Clifton (1993)
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june 20 was inspired by a photograph of the poets parents
STUDYIN ORANGEAND WHITE
I knew that James Whistler was part of the Paris scene,
but I was still surprised when I found the paintingof his mother at the Muse d'Orsayamong all the colored dots and mobile brushstrokesof the French Impressionists.
And I was surprised to noticeafter a few minutes of benign staring,how that woman, stark in profileand fixed forever in her chair,
began to resemble my own ancient motherwho was now fixed forever in the stars, the air, the earth.
You can understand why he titled the painting"Arrangement in Gray and Black"instead of what everyone naturally calls it,but afterward, as I walked along the river bank,
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I imagined how it might have brokenthe woman's heart to be demoted from motherto a mere composition, a study in colorlessness.
As the summer couples leaned into each otheralong the quay and the wide, low-slung boatsfull of spectators slid up and down the Seinebetween the carved stone bridgesand their watery reflections,I thought: how ridiculous, how off-base.
It would be like Botticelli calling "The Birth of Venus""Composition in Blue, Ochre, Green, and Pink,"or the other way around
like Rothko titling one of his sandwiches of color"Fishing Boats Leaving Falmouth Harbor at Dawn."
Or, as I scanned the menu at the cafewhere I now had come to rest,it would be like painting something laughable,like a chef turning on a spitover a blazing fire in front of an audience of ducksand calling it "Study in Orange and White."
But by that time, a waiter had appearedwith my glass of Pernod and a clear pitcher of water,and I sat there thinking of nothingbut the women and men passing bymothers and sons walking their small fragile dogsand about myself,a kind of composition in blue and khaki,and, now that I had pouredsome water into the glass, milky-green.
Billy Collins (1999)
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THEY KNEW WHAT THEY WANTED
They all kissed the bride.They all laughed.They came from beyond space.They came by night.
They came to a city.They came to blow up America.They came to rob Las Vegas.They dare not love.
They died with their boots on.They shoot horses, dont they?They go boom.
They got me covered.
They flew alone.They gave him a gun.They just had to get married.They live. They loved life.
They live by night.They drive by night.They knew Mr Knight.They were expendable.
They met in Argentina.They met in Bombay.They met in the dark.They might be giants.
They made me a fugitive.They made me a criminal.
They only kill their masters.They shall have music.
They were sisters.They still call me Bruce.They wont believe me.They wont forget.
John Ashbery
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(2010)Poem constructed of old
movie titlesAVE MARIA
Mothers of America
let your kids go to the movies!get them out of the house so they wont know what youre up
toits true that fresh air is good for the body
but what about thesoul
that grows in darkness, embossed by silvery imagesand when you grow old as grow old you must
they wont hate you
they wont criticize you they wont knowtheyll be in some
glamorous countrythey first saw on a Saturday afternoon or playing hookey
they may even be grateful to youfor their first sexual
experiencewhich only cost you a quarter
and didnt upset the peacefulhome
they will know where candy bars come fromand gratuitous bags of
popcornas gratuitous as leaving the movie before its overwith a pleasant stranger whose apartment is in the Heaven on
Earth Bldgnear the Williamsburg Bridge
oh mothers you will have made the
little tykesso happy because if nobody does pick them up in the moviesthey wont know the difference
and if somebody does itll besheer gravy
and theyll have been truly entertained either wayinstead of hanging around the yard
or up in their room
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hating youprematurely since you wont have done anything horribly
mean yetexcept keeping them from the darker joys
its unforgivable thelatter
so dont blame me if you wont take this adviceand the family
breaks upand your children grow old and blind in front of a TV set
seeingmovies you wouldnt let them see when they were young
Frank OHara(1960)
n.b. not an ekphrastic poem, but its about the movies and afavorite Frank OHara poem.