A really long post about ekphrasis, my reading at the Ed. Po-Fest, and ending in a big glass of wine.

I've been promising to bore a few friends who weren't able to make it to the See This / Hear Me: Visual Poetry reading that was part of the Edmonton Poetry Festival with a vague re-enactment of my own portion of the presentation that night.  It was probably one of the coolest readings I've been a part of and the other readers were beyond brilliant: derek beaulieu, Daniel Scott Tysdale and Jolanta Lapiak.  A real honour to stand up with them and I encourage you to seek out their work. 

So.  Here goes. Some of this comes from the actual presentation/reading, and some comes from conversations before and after, over big glasses of wine. 

Because I've been writing and thinking about art for over a decade, not to mention living with an artist for about twice that amount of time, I thought it would be appropriate, if not completely and totally self-indulgent, to look at some themes that persist in my work, and continue to interest me.  Although ekphrasis is a term that most poets are familiar with these days, I remember using it while writing my first book, All the God-Sized Fruit, and always having to define it, to assure people I was not coughing: ekphrasis. Gesundheit!

Of course, I'm interested in the how of seeing, and I'm interested in the gestures of painting, the actual movements of brush, in the mud and muck and slobber of paint, and in the communion of colour.  The image below is a photograph I took recently of the palette of my partner, Robert Lemay.  To me, it's very cool that this rather abstract looking substance can turn into quite a realist painting through mixing, pushing, dabbing, daubing, buttering and etc. 

 

I'm also interested in modes of ekphrasis, in picture theories and in what W.J.T. Mitchell calls the gap between word and text.  I'm interested in finding ways around, or through, the understood competition between painter and writer (see the title poem in All the God-Sized Fruit for an earlier working through) in the ekphrastic mode.  I could go on about Mitchell's Picture Theory I suppose at length, but hey, I had time constraints the night of the reading, and as for right now, there's a glass of vino waiting for me at the end of this blog post.  (I try not to drink and blog these days...)

I've had the following quotation by Mitchell rattling around in my small brain for a decade now, and feel now it's a good time for the reveal:

“...we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them.”       (W.J.T. Mitchell, in Picture Theory)

I myself am still thinking about all the ways in which images / pictures operate on observers.  Honestly, what is to be done with or about them? 

Meanwhile, another topic I've been occupied with is that of fraudulence.  Also forgery, authenticity, and copying.  The first poem in my first book (ATGSF) is about an art forger, and I've just finished a novel-like book about the possible existence of a woman art forger.  So obviously, I'm also interested in getting away with things, but also with transparence and how we show our indebtedness to those from whom we thieve/borrow or to whom we allude.  The image above is from a village in China, Dafen, where they produce famous works to order.   

I think this one is mainly just me trying to work in a photo of myself standing in front of a Gentileschi painting at the Met.  A really great memory.  Okay, true that, but I was looking over my past work and thinking how I hadn't even SEEN an Artemisia Gentileschi painting when I wrote that first book I keep talking about and how I wrote an entire series of poems about her.  I only saw this painting last year.  While putting together this presentation for the Po-Fest I began toying around with this idea I've had for a while, where I write a whole book of what I call 'gesture poems' - where I translate paintings in a more abstract sort of way. Taking them back to the palette so to speak.  I wanted to write a gesture poem about the above painting, so I went to the Met site and started looking at this painting inch by inch, zooming in and then printing off select zooms, details, or whatever you'd like to call them. 

I mean, is that not amazing??  You can do it too, just go to the Met site and zoom away.  I spent a whole day looking at this painting when I should have been preparing for this presentation thingie or writing a poem.  When I wrote that first book, having black and white images reproduced in the book was a BIG damned deal.  Huge actually.  I could write several blog posts on that process but I have a feeling the effect would be acutely soporific. 

I couldn't help thinking through this intense and lovely day of procrastination about the ways in which technology changes how we approach an image, or an ekphrastic poem or passage in a prose work.  We know that when we're vieiwing a painting at the Met we can go home and check it out inch by inch online.  We can almost always very quickly look the image up after reading an ekphrastic poem.  But part of what ekphrasis was originally for, I think, is that it would allow the listener to shut their eyes and SEE the image, envision what isn't there - something they're not likely to have the opportunity to see.  You know, back in the day before WestJet, Google and airmiles at the grocery store. I mean, I seriously don't have any answers. Lord, I barely have time to write this crazy blog post before my daughter gets home from her yoga class.  And you should know, I broke down and am now having a glass of wine.  

The rest of the presentation by me, was a reading, where I read my shrimp woman poem from ATGSF with the image I'm talking about on the screen behind me.  There is a whole bunch of name-calling that went down in the contemporary criticism of the painting (which I'm sure would be much easier to track down now than it was in 1997 when I wrote the dang poem).  So, that's what that poem was trying to subvert/soften, goof around with.  

 

Then I read "Passages of Red" from Against Paradise which is about Titian's red drapery.  If you think about it, it's really a sort of gestures poem....I had been thinking about the process way back when. 

Then I read a poem from my latest book, Red Velvet Forest, a poem called, you guessed it, "Red Velvet." It's mostly about this painting, below, painted by my partner, Robert Lemay. 

I ended by reading a poem titled, "Notional Ekphrasis: Painting of Woman Sitting in a Museum Writing."  I like the whole idea of notional ekphrasis - describing a painting that you've imagined.  What I'm doing in this is fooling around with Mitchell's Picture Theory.  You know I was so nervous the night of the reading I probably didn't even mention that.  I was trying to embed his formulations of ekphrastic hope/fear/indifference and whatnot into the poem.  I thought it might be a good opening to that book I might write about the gestures of painting.  I actually think it's more of an essay than a poem when I look at it now.  The other question is, is it too long to post here?  But I'll give it a whirl and say arrivederci and head to my big glass of wine now. 

The essay/poem:

Notional Ekphrasis: Painting of Woman Sitting in a Museum Writing

Still. She sits, she stations herself. First in a hum a milling crowd. Before she had stood. This distance. That. Stood in the corner off to the side. Left. Returned. Is transfixed. Now sits elbow on crossed knee, back curved. Encounters, recognizes, hears hidden echoes. On the chestnut leather bench. Medium Firm. Posture. She thinks about her posture. Back not so straight as she’d like. Squints. Thinks wrinkles, crows’ feet, blinks, smooths. Alone now. Docent vacates. Can see a sleeve, a leaning against the threshold. Feels harmless, assessed. Thinks about wombs ports dominions. She raises her arm slightly. Strokes air alone, daub dab swish. Filled brimming with honeysuckled ekphrastic hope ecstatic. Secretly she had wished, wishes, she could paint. That she could merge with colour, Venetian pink, alizarin crimson, turmeric, common madder, verdigris. Takes out small leather bound notebook. Pencil point on paper. Rests. She gazes. Raises an eyebrow. Discerns, is ironic, melts, quavers, envies. Is pulled. She wonders what the painter kept, held back. The painting the paint the colours the brushstrokes – in turn violent and soothing and incomprehensible wild – the image enters her skin. Speaks to her. Begins a mute quarrel. She resists holds back she engages responds soaks up sensuously she understands. Shudders sparks breathless bliss. Closes her eyes, leans back, lips apart, listens, feels the sparks, the rhythms of intimate gestures. No, yes, now, leans in drowns in a din of colour, delightedly smitten, chosen to receive, to be astonished in this exact way. She is conscious, tranquil, she ponders the symptoms of Stendhal’s syndrome. Remembers Achille’s shield, remembers destiny, sincere trembling. Thinks about the unutterable order of things, their eloquent circuitry, of picture theories, of shift and turn, of representin’, of representation, of suturing text and image. The quarrel becomes louder, tense, she meets it she praises lingers languishes in deception juxtaposition translation replication. She gives and gives. She distorts, desires, invents. Battles struggles. What are limitations? Verklempt, she envoices, ventriloquizes gives voice. Critiques flatters falters is afraid. She fears collapse. Overcomes. Wades into illusion quill to lip. Truth? Reality? Souls revealed? She battens flattens returns to battle to antagonism she speaks to, speaks from, knows secrets knows silence embraces limitations enters the gap the convex mirror the rabbit hole the old duck-rabbit conundrum, hears vases talk, jars talk, pipes disclaim. Phantoms the gap between language and image. Is ambivalent. Has failed. Aesthetically. She sits in the site of minor yet glorious aesthetic failure. Wind knocked out of her. Deflated where before she had been elated. Ekphrasis as fraudulence, full knowledge of that, sunk, drowning, shuddering. She sits a sham without words beyond words pretty as a picture. Waits, hope, a lesser hope returns. She sits with beauty with truth with eye of the beholder, she’s been operated upon by images, been under surveillance, been invisible, just yesterday she bought the latest shade of lipstick. But now she sees an excess an interarticulated impatient moment. She collects unravelments excess with butterfly nets, looks over her shoulder. Fight gone out of her replaced with questions theories possibilities sensations interpretations conversions reconfigurations captivations awe. Stands. Takes one last sturdy look around the room, drinks of it, closes her notebook, takes it with her.