Here’s a little party-banter riddle I like to amuse myself with: What is the classic example of a classic example? Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is a good contender, the classic example of ekphrasis. The poem is named so often as an instance of the genre, it may have warped the Greek word’s definition with its massive semantic gravity. Ekphrasis once meant description, all sorts, but now is used almost exclusively for the description of art objects.
This shift (a classic example of narrowing, in linguistics) is usually traced to one guy — the philologist and critic Leo Spitzer, who, in a 1955 essay on the ode in question, defines ekphrasis as “the poetic description of a pictorial or sculptural work of art.” (It’s nice to have a word for this in English, since we already have description.) He mentions Rilke, too, in passing, whose “Archaic Torso of Apollo” forms, along with “Grecian Urn” and Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a triad of classic examples. These poems cast long ekphrastic shadows.
All three, by chance, share the feature of lacking an overt I. There’s plenty of I in “Ode to a Nightingale” (“Do I wake or sleep?”), but the speaker of “Ode on a Grecian Urn” is theoretical, rhetorical, a stand-in for the plural humanity implied by “our” and “ye.” The first word of “Apollo” is “We” (“Wir”); its closing proclamation can be read as self-address but starts with “You” (“Du”). Again, no I. And though I imagine middle-aged Auden thinking his lines while strolling through a gallery, “Musée” uses no first-person pronouns at all.
To write about art might encourage some removal from the self, but nothing requires it. And so this accident of history has caused me to associate I-lessness with ekphrasis: a mode that elides the I as if some universal eye were speaking out. The invisible, anonymous describer of museum placards.
By contrast, in what I’ll go ahead and call the new ekphrasis (though we know nothing’s new in the multiverse), the I is highly present. Description, in this strain of recent poetry, is deeply inflected by a singular viewpoint. The poems could not be more intensely felt than those by Keats or Rilke, yet they have different effects — more embodied and more personal, even confessional.
Take Mary Helen Callier’s “The Battle of San Romano” (from her debut collection, “When the Horses”), a poem in five stanzas with several I’s each. “When I think about the hay, I think about what grew/beside it,” she begins — already hard to say if the hay is in the painting (a triptych by Uccello) or the speaker’s own past. We start in memory (“even then we’d known/enough to know it was better to run full force”), but does the painting trigger the memory, or the memory lead to the painting?
The second stanza lists what she’s not “drawn to” in the piece — “not the chaos of the foreground,” “not that distorted cipher of bodies,” “not the lances.” After a break, she adds, “It’s not the horse, lying loosed from God/that intrigues me.” (The denial feels Freudian; it’s such an intriguing image, and looking at the painting I’m unsure which horse she means.) Not until we’re midway through the third stanza do we learn what does compel her: “the hare sprinting off,” seemingly minor. Then the fourth stanza uses its I for irreverent speculation: “I bet his friends had said: Damnit, Paolo/be plain. Your hare is too big.”
Callier’s movement through the poem has a quality of leaping, giving chase, like our movement through her eyes around the painting. The insistence on a background detail as central makes the poem feel asymmetrical — teetering, unstable, an egg on a marble table. But she also seems to be saying, this is my Uccello, making no strong claim, as Auden might, to what the painting is “about” for anyone else.
“The Goatherd and the Saint,” by Sara Nicholson (from her book called “April”), has a similarly casual, digressive and slippery I, there, but hard to catch. The ekphrastic object is Bellini’s “St. Francis in the Desert.” Nicholson’s speaker speaks from the Frick, and pays much attention to this context: “I’m in love/With the way it seems to frown/Above the objets d’art/Arrayed about/The hall, stripping the last/Veneer of sentiment/From the neo-baroque flowering/Of these interiors.” Art is seen somewhere, after all, and on a day, and through a body.
In the new ekphrasis, the well known and easily looked-up exist in explicit, contrapuntal tension with the self, which is idiosyncratic and barely understood. “I admit/I’m afraid to look at/St. Francis’s eye,” Nicholson writes. “I can relate/To the awkwardness/Of the donkey’s/Backbone” … “My donkey, I think/He is happy.” “I bet,” “I think” — these phrases suggest a more humble, even shy approach to art compared to Keats, who goes so far as to speak for the urn. (The urn’s address to mortals always strikes me as a kind of non sequitur — who cares about beauty and truth, we are capable of dying.)
Perhaps the most personal, while also most mysterious, example of the new ekphrasis I’ve found is Allison Benis White’s “A Magnificent Loneliness.” White combines elegy and ekphrasis in spare verse that draws on four Monet works. In “The Woman in a Green Dress,” she writes: “This is all I want to say/about my life. When I picked up the feather,/I thought of her dress.” As it does for Callier, some aspect of the art gets entangled with a private recollection: “I remember,/as a child, before the light turned green,/knowing I did not know/(a first memory)/the woman in the next car, and she did not know me.” “Bear with me,” the poem says three times: an admission of frustration or inadequacy — description here is limited, more impressionist than the painting.
In “Women in the Garden,” White writes, “I am looking at the painting to save my eyes.” She adds, “The women are dead but can be spoken to” and, later, “I am touching the strange bouquet of the mind,/suicide.” This speaker seems to need the painting to think through grief. Art offers stillness, a dimension of permanence (“The woman in the white dress,” modeled by Camille Monet and long dead, “is still/running away”), some measure of relief.
Denis Johnson’s “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations Millennium General Assembly” (from a 1995 volume of new and collected poems) could serve as a precursor to what I’m calling new. Johnson’s description of the titular artwork, a visionary and mystical assemblage of found materials by James Hampton, can’t be extricated from his particular witnessing of it: “Sam and I drove up from Key West, Florida … I couldn’t take it all in,/And I was a little frightened.” It’s ekphrastic as well as biographical, a mini-portrait of the artist.
“I was his friend/As I looked at and was looked at by the rushing-together parts,” Johnson writes. These lines appear to reference both Rilke and Keats — Keats whose urn was “a friend to man,” and Rilke whose torso, headless or not, looked back.
All ekphrasis may have this effect on the writer, the reader: To look hard enough is to be seen, which is both comforting and startling.
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