“Glancing Light” painting by Colin Page
Join us for a live ZOOM reading for our fifth annual ekphrastic challenge, a collaboration between Page Gallery and The Poets Corner. NOTE: View the work online HERE, before the reading.
Ten poets, along with students will be their work on The Poets Corner over Zoom on Sunday, November 9.
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.
And for those of you wondering . . . 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).