I want you to read something beautiful from poet Anne Sexton, and I want you to see if you know what painting she is writing about:
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It’s easy to tell she’s writing about Van Gogh’s famous painting, “The Starry Night.” When poets write about art, that’s called “ekphrasis,” and yes, it is very much a thing today and yesterday.
Do you remember the story of Icarus whose father built him wings of wood and wax to escape captivity? This seems like a big mythic moment, yet Pieter Bruegel in a famous painting called “Icarus,” has a huge, busy landscape with a tiny splash in the lower right hand corner. Poet W. H. Auden looks closely at this painting and writes,
…the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
John Keats in the 19th century famously wrote an “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” He was looking at some scenes painted on a vase, one in which a lover pursues his beloved, and there they are caught in time. He’ll never catch her. Keats sees this and writes,
“More happy love! More happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
Forever panting, and forever young.”
Now I want to introduce you to Erica Goss. She is a poet, writer and teacher living in Eugene. She teaches writing classes focused on ekphrasis. On March 6, at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum, she will be giving a 90-minute presentation on this topic. The event begins at 5:30 p.m. and ends at 7:00 p.m. Consider yourself invited!
This is Sandy Brown Jensen for KLCC.
