deepundergroundpoetry.com
Ekphrasis
Sad inverted siren thing,
beached
and lying helpless on
deserted sand,
wave lorn,
and gulping bootless air,
the scalloped triangle there
above your legs
now smelling
monthly womanish,
what man would swim to you?
You cannot be
one of the three
the harried wanderer
Odysseus
once lashed himself to hear.
He would not ever wish
to set his gaze on you
And you,
half fish
with gaping mouth of bone,
have no lips to shape around
a song.
Published 31st Aug 2021
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1st Sep 2021 6:40am
1st Sep 2021 4:04pm
Thank you! You are one of the few members of DUP who actually knows something about scansion and the linguistic and literary elements that a writing should have if it is to be considered poetry.
Magritte provides a lot of interesting material for ekphrasis.
Magritte provides a lot of interesting material for ekphrasis.
4th Sep 2021 00:35am
I was thinking about this comment, and a couple of thoughts occurred to me.
One, the greatest master of the image, in modernism, at least, is Williams. No one ever did the image better. If you want a sense of his mastery of the image in a poem, check out the book, Pictures from Breughel, which is a series of poems inspired by the paintings of the painter Breughel the elder, who based his many of paintings on literature, myth or the Bible or otherwise. Then Williams created poems which were deeply, almost purely imagistic, based on the literary paintings. Go figure.
Interestingly, Williams turned his back on meter, creating what he called the "variable foot." While I know how to scan, and use a couple of different metrical patterns in my poems, it's not necessary to a poem, to be written in meter. There's also syllabics, accentual-syllabics, and other ways of negotiating the line. What's more important is--if the poet chooses to use the line (i.e. not write prose poems)--then he must have some intelligence behind his use of it, a sort of aesthetic sense of what he's doing with the line, a conception of it, which the reader can discern, on an intuitive level, and learn, if "learn" is the right word.
Check out Pictures from Breughel...it's a great book, and your interest in both modernism & ekphrasis will be gratified.
Best,
Mark
One, the greatest master of the image, in modernism, at least, is Williams. No one ever did the image better. If you want a sense of his mastery of the image in a poem, check out the book, Pictures from Breughel, which is a series of poems inspired by the paintings of the painter Breughel the elder, who based his many of paintings on literature, myth or the Bible or otherwise. Then Williams created poems which were deeply, almost purely imagistic, based on the literary paintings. Go figure.
Interestingly, Williams turned his back on meter, creating what he called the "variable foot." While I know how to scan, and use a couple of different metrical patterns in my poems, it's not necessary to a poem, to be written in meter. There's also syllabics, accentual-syllabics, and other ways of negotiating the line. What's more important is--if the poet chooses to use the line (i.e. not write prose poems)--then he must have some intelligence behind his use of it, a sort of aesthetic sense of what he's doing with the line, a conception of it, which the reader can discern, on an intuitive level, and learn, if "learn" is the right word.
Check out Pictures from Breughel...it's a great book, and your interest in both modernism & ekphrasis will be gratified.
Best,
Mark
