If Poetry is Art, is Art poetry?

• Ekphrasis is a literary device in which “poetry confronts art.” (poets.org)

• Many people use the term ekphrasis to refer to any poetry that is inspired by a piece of art.

Brainstorm activity: What links do you see between poetry and art?

poetry art

The Painting  

by John Balaban

The stream runs clear to its stones;

the fish swim in sharp outline.

Girl, turn your face for me to draw.

Tomorrow, if we should drift apart, I shall find you by this picture.

http://ekphrastics.blogspot.com/2008/03/painting-john-balaban.html

Temptation, after Chagall’s Temptation (1912)

By David Wright

My God, you know, how temptation sitsin the belly of the world, red fruit, round, already bitten.

You know it is not all that matters. Small, hooved creatures,tiny birds, Eve’s several glances, and the canopies of red and blue leaves matter as well.

The real fall will be to believe in Pablo.Apollinaire will love you, your round house and the herring brineon your father's hands.

Bella loves you, even as you grieve for the Shtetl, for the pale Christ.

I understand, my brother, the desire to pare a body into something that will serve beauty.

You understand, my brother, how the world revolves around the edges of the world.

Let the others eat their fill of square pears on triangular tables,suckle at the circles and the cones.

I want to eat, together, whatever we’ve been given.The moon behind the garden will be green and will disappear quite soon.

I want, as well, to thank you for this: I woke today and was surprised, like you, to see that I am still alive.

Source: http://ekphrastics.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2008-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2009-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=50

Why knowing is (& Matisse's Woman with a Hat)   by Martha Ronk

Why knowing is a quality out of fashion and no one can decide to but slips into it or ends up with a painting one has never seen that quality of light before even before having seen it in between pages of another book and not remembering who knows or recognizing the questionable quality of light on her face as she sits for a portrait and isn't allowed to move an inch you recognize the red silk flower on her hat and can almost place where you have seen that gray descending through the light reversing foreground and background as the directions escape one as the way you have to live with anyone as she gets up finally from her chair having written the whole of it in her head as the question ignored for the hundredth time as a quality of knowing is oddly resuscitated from a decade prior to this.

Source: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16582

Source: http://www.abcgallery.com/M/matisse/matisse80.html

On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery--Percy Bysshe Shelley

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/44/Medusa_uffizi.jpg

It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky, Upon the cloudy mountain peak supine; Below, far lands are seen tremblingly; Its horror and its beauty are divine. Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie Loveliness like a shadow, from which shrine, Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath, The agonies of anguish and of death.

Yet it is less the horror than the grace Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone;Whereon the lineaments of that dead face Are graven, till the characters be grown Into itself, and thought no more can trace; 'Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,Which humanize and harmonize the strain.

And from its head as from one body grow, As [ ] grass out of a watery rock, Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow And their long tangles in each other lock,And with unending involutions shew Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock The torture and the death within, and saw The solid air with many a ragged jaw.

And from a stone beside, a poisonous eftPeeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes; Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft, And he comes hastening like a moth that hiesAfter a taper; and the midnight sky Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.

'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror; For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare Kindled by that inextricable error, 35 Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air Become a [ ] and ever-shifting mirror Of all the beauty and the terror there— A woman's countenance, with serpent locks, Gazing in death on heaven from those wet rocks.

Now…let’s practice.

Think about our brainstorm of the relationship between art and poetry.

Get inspired by the examples we just read of ekphrastic poetry.

In groups of 2 or 3, your goal is to write you own poem based on a work of art of your choice.