Ekphrasis: Writing Poetry about Art

The challenge of a poem, like a work of art, is the challenge of intimacy, what Mark Doty has called “the dark space within an embrace.” The significant closeness, in other words, of a painting, or a sculpture, or a photograph, that represents a version of our lives without language. Rothko’s famous assertion about art might also be an ars poetica, or at least an instruction about how to read a poem. In this creative writing poetry course, we will read several contemporary collections to consider this tradition of poetic expression in response to a range of artistic genres including Renaissance painting, Dutch still life, abstract expressionism, and 20th century photography and collage. We will explore each poet’s stylistic voice, aesthetic, and approach, and then choose works of art to respond to in our own poems. This course is generative: students will write and revise 5 new poems. Class time will be spent in discussion of assigned readings, specific works of art, and an online workshop of our poems each unit.