“Glancing Light” painting by Colin Page
Join our fifth annual ekphrastic challenge, a collaboration between Page Gallery and The Poets Corner. The art will be available for viewing online October 10, and viewing in the gallery will begin October 16, 2025.
Submit a poem in response to any one of the images in the 2025 Art & Ekphrastic Poetry exhibition. Submissions open October 10 and close on October 25. Beginning October 10, we will accept submissions through Submittable.
Ten poets will be selected to read their poems on The Poets Corner over Zoom on Sunday, November 9. (Selected poets will be notified by November 5).
The artists will also make their own selections of poems to be read in the gallery (live) on Saturday, November 15.
You do not need to live in the local area to submit to the challenge—the entire exhibition can be viewed online.
Every year, the poets and the artists carefully deliberate over the submissions and curate a delightful mix of responses for the virtual and in-gallery readings. The submission fee is $3, which helps to cover the costs of the challenge. Middle or high school students entering the contest may request a free Student Submission form by emailing thepoetscornermaine@gmail.com or kirsten@thepagegallery.com. We encourage all submissions!
We’re excited to announce that this year The Poets Corner and Page Gallery will be producing a chapbook to celebrate with a selection of poems from the first 5 years of the Art & Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge . It will be available at Page Gallery in late November, so stay tuned for more information and updates about that!
What is ekphrastic poetry?
The term ekphrastic (also spelled ecphrastic) originates from a Greek expression for description. The earliest ekphrastic poems were vivid accounts of real or imagined scenes. Through effusive use of details, writers in ancient Greece aspired to transform the visual into the verbal. Later poets moved beyond description to reflect on deeper meanings. Today, the word ekphrastic can refer to any literary response to a non-literary work.
And here is an excellent description by Mark Doty:
“. . . I’d say that the best ekphrastic writing makes use of a work of art as a kind of field of operation, something to keep bouncing off of, thinking through. It becomes a touchstone for meditation. There’s an essay of Cole Swenson’s where she calls this “writing with.” That is also a way of bringing a work of art into the realm of time, since we change as we look and look again, and one thing painting cannot do is incorporate the passage of time, as music or poetry do.
What painting possesses that poetry cannot is an immediacy that bypasses the intellect; consider the difference between blue and the word “blue.” They can’t be the same. Yet what poetry can do is dive into the interior, make a record of the subjectivity of the maker in a more precise, directed way. And, as I said, poetry can occupy the dimension of time, which is unavailable to the painter except perhaps through working in series.
In a way, I suspect the difference between these media has to do the degree to which individuality is held in suspension within the work, how the signature of selfhood is preserved.”
—excerpted from The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty by Andrew David King in The Kenyon Review (December 2012).