Ekphrasis: An Introduction by Brenda Cárdenas

Definitions and Writers’ Approaches to Ekphrasis

Ekphrasis is a writing practice or mode that dates at least as far back as the elaborate description of
Achilles’ shield in Homer’s The Illiad, and some scholars cite earlier examples. Over many years,
scholars have offered various definitions of ekphrasis, the most classic being James Heffernan’s “a
verbal representation of a visual representation” set forth in his book Museum of Words, which frames
the exchange as mimesis or translation (3). However, many contemporary scholars feel that this
definition limits too much what ekphrasis can do and what they’ve seen it do, and I agree with them.
They argue for more fluid and dynamic definitions of the mode. Here I’m referring to scholars such
as Barbara Fischer, Elizabeth Bergmann-Loizeaux, Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington,
Janée Baugher, Katie Geha and Travis Nichols, whose books and articles you can find listed in the
bibliography I’ve created and shared on this website. I would also argue that when a work of visual
art is inspired by a poem, that visual artwork is also ekphrastic.

Certainly, most ekphrastic writing will contain some description of the artwork or allude to some of
its visual aspects, but a strong ekphrastic poem moves beyond mere description and, instead,
engages in a conversation with the art or becomes what Katie Geha and Travis Nichols call “a
process of correspondence between words and images…” (15-18). They discuss the ekphrastic
poems in their catalogue Poets on Painters as re-presenting the paintings without resembling them.
Ekphrastic visual art should also move beyond illustration; the goal isn’t to illustrate the poem but,
rather, to engage in a conversation with it or simply to take inspiration from it.

In Museum Meditations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry, Barbara K. Fischer makes a
space for ekphrasis as “an interpretive occasion and a critical tool” (2). She points out that many
contemporary ekphrastic poems address non-representational visual works, while some “may not
represent their subjects at all, riffing off of their visual sources more tangentially or interrogatively”
(2). And in their article “Ekphrastic Spaces: The Tug, Pull, Collision, and Merging of the In-
Between,” Cassandra Atherton and Paul Hetherington, explore “the way ekphrastic poetry develops
complex and interart relationships that cause a fracturing and/or stretching in the perspectives of
both the poem and the artwork(s) it invokes” (1). Finally, Janée Baugher notes that ekphrasis might
allow for a deeper knowing, asks writers to respond to something outside their usual experience, and
to dwell in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts (23-24). The same would be true for the ekphrastic visual
artist.

These more dynamic and nuanced relations between word and image—especially notions of
ekphrasis as conversation, correspondence (Geha and Nichols) riff, or interpretive occasion
(Fischer)—are what I see happening in so many of the contemporary ekphrastic poems I’ve studied
and included on this website as examples.

The writing and the art might compliment or provide a counterpoint to one another. In some cases,
the art might become the springboard from which an exploration of personal experience evolves.
When we read an ekphrastic poem and view the art, we may want to ask ourselves what effects, new
ideas, and tensions emerge from the pairing of the two. Do they work together to create a third
space where the whole (the dyad) is something more or different than its constituent parts? Poets
have approached the venture in many different ways.

In her book The Ekphrastic Writer, Janée Baugher, provides a list of the narrative stances the
ekphrastic writer may adopt, and many of these stances can apply as well to the ekphrastic visual
artist who is responding to a poem:

• addressing the artwork (or poem) in its entirety

• treating only a detail of the artwork (or poem)

• narrating the artwork (or telling the image’s story)

• personifying the artwork (making a figure in it speak)

• interpreting or analyzing the artwork (or poem)

• objecting to or arguing with the artwork (or poem)

• addressing the artist (or poet)

• giving voice to the artist (depicting the poet)

• describing the artist’s (or poet’s) process

• supposing the goings-on inside the studio

• imagining the life of the model

• giving voice to the model (or I’d add addressing the model)

• remarking on the individual moment of viewing the artwork (or poem)

• responding to the artwork’s (or poem’s) essence or mystique

• adopting the artist’s artistic style (or the poet’s style)

• describing the form or shape of the artwork (or poem)

• describing the artwork’s (or poem’s) sound elements

• providing or responding to historical context

• following personal associations with the artwork/poem (memory, emotions, mood) (25-26).

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Elizabeth Bergman Loiseaux in Twentieth Century Poetry and the Visual Arts notes a stance that I would
add to this list:

• delivering the image’s (or poem’s) lesson: teaching the audience something that the poet has learned through viewing the artwork or that the poet feels the artist is trying to teach us (23). Or teaching the audience something that the artist has learned through reading the poem or that the artist feels the poet is trying to teach us.

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I would also add:

• responding to the artwork’s (or poem’s) cultural context

• describing something outside the frame of the artwork, for example, what happens next in the “story” or scene. The visual artist might also consider what might happen beyond the frame of the poem.

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I write ekphrastic poems because the artworks that inspire them draw me in and won’t let me go. They spark admiration, curiosity, critical thinking, relation. Some send me immediately into the memory of a personal experience. Sometimes the artist’s medium, perspective, or approach astonishes me. So often, I wish I could talk with the artist, and on the occasions that I’ve been able to do so, a fruitful exchange has always developed. The same has been true when artists have created works in response to my poems. It has always been a gift. I’ve created this project to bring Wisconsin poets and artists together, even if only when they are
creating works inspired by each other’s art, and to see what happens when we play the old game of
telephone with our words and images.

 

Works Cited
Atherton, Cassandra and Paul Hetherington. “Ekphrastic Spaces: The Tug, Pull, Collision, and Merging of the In-Between.” New Writing, Vol. 20, No. 1, 2023, pp. 83-98.
Baugher, Janée. The Ekphrastic Writer: Creating Art-Influenced Poetry, Fiction, and Non-fiction. McFarland, 2020.
Fischer, Barbara K. Museum Meditations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry. Routledge, 2006.
Geha, Katie and Travis Nichols, eds. Poets on Painters. Ulrich Museum of Art, Wichita State University, 2007.
Heffernan, James A. W. Musuem of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. The University of Chicago Press,1993.
Loizeaux, Elizabeth Bergmann. Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts. Cambridge University Press, 2008.