Audacious Ekphrasis

by Mary Bast

  "Oh hell, here's that dark wood again" by Mary Bast

If you want to know more about me, Googling my name will first evoke echoes of my now retired life as an Enneagram coach and related books. But I've also written several forms of poetry including ekphrasis, an audacious poetic form that's among many we encourage in our print journal.

You'll find a long history and many definitions of ekphrasis. I prefer the most open, contemporary version:

Ekphrasis: the intersection of verbal and visual arts.

As a visual artist I've explored many ways to interpret "the intersection of verbal and visual arts." For example, in response to Kim Addonizio's poem "Divine" (Oh hell, here's that dark wood again . . .), I painted "Oh hell, here's that dark wood again" (above) then reacted to my painting with the poem "Backdraft." 

Virtually any type of artistic medium may be the actor of, or subject of ekphrasis. I first learned about ekphrastic poetry in a workshop with Melanie Almeder, who drew our attention to two famous poems written in response to Pieter Brueghel's painting, The Fall of Icarus: William Carlos Williams' "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" and W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts." Note that Williams' poem to some degree follows the tradition of describing the visual scene (a farmer was ploughing / his field / the whole pageantry / of the year was / awake tingling / with itself), while Auden's interpretation is a bit wider (About suffering they were never wrong, / the old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position: how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window). 

Almeder invited workshop participants to write our own poems in response to the Brueghel painting, encouraging us to range as far as our muses would go. My poem "plummet" (published in Bacopa Literary Review 2012) imagined Icarus as a woman:

somewhere
there is an Icarus
a woman who flies 

on intricate
feathered web
of covert

sheath
shaft
veins

warm-blooded
she breathes faster
learns to soar

ignores
the admonition
do not fly too high

her efforts full
of sky
of wind

her breasts
still flecked with honey
dripped from wings' wax

heavy with her father's
architecture
heavier than water

when she dives
no sun's light
scuffs the surface

Remember Bacopa's poetry statement: We're looking for well-wrought poems in any form or genre, or none. Intrigue us, move us, surprise us with stunning imagery, lyricism, soundplay, structure. Disturb our well-trod patterns of thought.      

Submissions open until May 31, 2021

"Ascension" by Oliver Keyhani: Cover Art and Ekphrastic Micropoem

Artist and poet Oliver Keyhani's ekphrastic micropoem accompanied his 2020 cover art, Ascension: 

You were always looking for a way to bind the feathers of angels to a history of science. The living maintain a constant distance from the dead. I am now beating against your ribcage.

Deciphering: Layers Upon Layers of Art, Poetry, Art

by Senior Editor Mary Bast

I've written before of my love for ekphrasis, traditionally understood as poetry written in response to visual art. Wikipedia now more accurately describes the broader applications of ekphrasis: "Given the right circumstances, any art may describe any other art."

Thus my pleasure when Prose Poetry Editor Kaye Linden accepted Devon Balwit's ekphrastic poem for Bacopa Literary Review 2018, dedicated to the artist Melvin Way:

Melvin Way With One of His Poems

Seeing images of Way's work draws us deeper into Balwit's poem, especially the ending lines, You cannot look at surface only / but must dig down. Beneath is where you find / the much we rest on, the clamor, the ever- / multiplying root.

Balwit's title "Deciphering is Something Only I Can Do" echoes a line in Alanna Martinez's Observer article: "Deciphering the drawings is something only Mr. Way can do, but each is a sort of three dimensional thesis... compressed to four-inches-by-five-inches of a reused scrap of paper... a refined--almost elegant--haiku." Jerry Saltz, in "Studying the Masterpieces of Visionary Artist Melvin Way," further describes Way's artwork as "creating synaptic connections between real things in possible and impossible ways, all with great graphic imagination."

And Balwit does the same, creating synaptic connections between the possible and impossible layers of Way's art and the possible and impossible layers of the world around us.

Artwork by Mary Bast

Feasting upon this interstitching of poetry and artwork, I felt drawn to include a response to both in my mixed media piece, "Something Only Melvin Way Can Do," among a series of tributes to artists traditionally ignored in a white-male-dominated art world. (Melvin Way studied briefly at the Technical Career Institute before mental illness left him homeless, in and out of psychiatric care and the city's shelter system.)

*     *     *

Devon Balwit lives in the Pacific Northwest. She has six chapbooks and three collections out in the world. Her poems can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Rattle, Peacock Journal, Fire Poetry Journal, The Wild Word, The Ekphrastic Review, and many others. Her chapbook, Forms Most Marvelous, is available at dancing girl press & studio.

Bacopa Literary Review: a god falls from grace

by Bacopa Literary Review Poetry Editor Kaye Linden

Ekphrastic response to the Peter Breughel painting of Landscape With the Fall of Icarus.

an insignificant splash 

after such grandeur. Flying high in the sky next to the sun only to fall down in grace, fall down down slowly at first, tediously tedious when air currents waft his frail body back up up towards the sun only to surrender him down down to fall again, down towards earth in a tilting tumbling somersault that at another time might have felt like such fun but only if he could stay just in that moment and enjoy the ride up and down, but a crow laughs at his fall and Icarus wakes to the screeching in-between of sky and water and looks down (he should never have looked down) to see his face stare back from the water, mouth wide open in a silent scream soaring from the depths of his gaping throat, blue eyes staring, lengthy blonde curls floating around his head like a parachute, but not a parachute, a liability when water wets hair heavy weighing it down as he falls into his reflection, titillating upon the water, hearing the first drop, the second drop of the first splash, now hearing his voice high, tight calling for help, but the ploughman, the picnicker, the little child with a kite, turn to see the stupid disturbance from a stupid boy who really believed, really believed he would never die, that escape from a labyrinth meant wax wings waxing solid forever, that escape from prison meant playtime with sunbeams, not sliding down sunbeams, and the people look away look away from the red- faced god falling into human condition, the wide-eyed culprit who hits watery concrete, regal wings just behind his white legs, until his calls for help gurgle gurgle gurgle

and the world returns to its state of being the world again,

looking away. 

Bacopa's Submissions open until June 30, 2016