Tag Archives: ekphrastic writing

Poems about Art: Finding the Heart Key

This beautiful painting, “Blissful,” is by the Colorado Painter Alicia Thompson. It was selected by Loveland, Colorado’s The Art Advocacy Project 2024. As one of the eight poet winners of the Loveland Poet Laureate Art and Public Places Program TAAP2D contest, I got the pleasure of writing this poem, “we make rivers,” in response to her painting.

How to honor the art of another? Look for the key to the artist’s heart. The key to this poem came from one tiny sentence in Alicia’s artist statement:

“The river helps me honor my lost child every time I let it into my mind, heart, and artwork.”

I don’t like to put my poetry online until it’s published elsewhere, but because “Blissful” and “we make rivers” will hang together at the Loveland Library for the next year, I think this poem is published enough: in the best of places and with the best of companions, artists and poets.

we make rivers

after the poems of nocturne, after
their hoar frost and their twilight deer
scattering into the winter undertow
like thin angels. after Van Gogh’s wheatfields,
after those uncertain crows we see slashed
slate or charcoal above a blood red road
–—the sadness will last forever, he said—
Van Gogh finally abandoning his heart
in a gesso of mustard grass.

a gazan mother pens her child’s name
into the tender flesh she fears will perish—
one more unbearable—
and I want to leave this poem now
with a flicker or maybe a kingfisher eyeing me
from a cottonwood: as if the birds were all glass,
a blue I could call singing, as if they could be some
metaphor here, beautiful, slipping through.

but look what you have made: your river light
flours the spackled air like bread
a mother who has lost everything, too,
kneads and kneads, her whole body bending into the bread, the river.
cerulean blue, burnt sienna, river stones
round as loaves— each of us is murmuring something
now, me and the birds, you and something so fragile, so human:

maybe love, or a riff on stars, or, maybe, tenderness
where my deer have touched your spring river
with their twilight mouths.

Kathryn Winograd

I read with (Marj Hahne, Lynne McNamara, Erin Robertson, Belle Schmidt, Valerie Szarek, Lorrie Wolfe, and Lisa Zimmerman at the Loveland Library on March 30th at noon. Everyone is invited for a beautiful event of poetry and art.

loveland public library with poems and paintings.

The Ekphrastic and Photopoetry: Announcing My Next Book, This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye.

This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye will be published in Spring 2024 by The Humble Essayist Press.

A hybrid photopoetry and prose book, This Visible Speaking takes its name from visibile parlare in Dante’s “Purgatorio,” the second part of Dante’s Divine Comedy when Dante climbs with the poet Virgil up the Mount of Purgatory and sees three engravings on the mountain so vivid it seems that what is engraved could speak. The beauty is so great that it can only come from God’s handiwork:

Colui che mai non vide cosa nova

                                              produsse esto visibile parlare

                                              novello a noi perché qui non si trova.                       

his was the speech made visible by One

                                              within whose sight no thing is new — but we,

                                              who lack its likeness here, find novelty.

                                                                                            (Purg. 10.94-96)

The Philosopher and theologist William Franke said that visible parlare, visible speaking, “exists not just in reified form as an object, but as language.”

Dante’s writing is an example of ekphrastic writing, which, in general now, is defined as poetry written about art, but back in ancient Greece ekphrasis meant “describing a thing with vivid detail” (The J. Paul Getty Museum). There are many beautiful examples of poetry written about art–John Keats‘ Ode On A Grecian Urn comes immediately to mind.

I found myself drawn to the art I found in nature and how photography can “fix” the images in time through what the first photographers called “nature’s pencil”–Light. This Visible Speaking: Catching Light Through The Camera’s Eye is my own quest during the shadows of pandemics and politics for that light through visual image and word, poetry and prose, and the voices of those first explorers of light. There is so much that can be discovered with “nature’s pencil” and the ekphrastic:

From Unlocking the Camera

Notice to the Reader
The plates of the present work are impressed by the agency of Light alone.
(William Henry Fox Talbot, 1800-1877).

Our key is a slip of metal, tiny and breakable. To keep the wildlife camera buoyant and steady above desire paths, not ours, where elk amble and a bobcat, a little nocturnal ghost we’ve caught twice on camera, preys on rabbit, we snug the camera lock’s black winding cord over the nubs of lost branches. A “tree’s self-pruning,” my daughter tells me–nothing to was over like loss, nothing to grieve. This is the bliss, I once read: the body and the being within magnified by the lens of a camera we can hold in our hands or tie to a tree . . .

If you are interested in doing some ekphrastic writing yourself, try The Ekphrastic Review‘s book, 31: a month of ekphrastic poetry exercises by Loretta C. Luzajic.

My book will be out in spring 2024. Watch for details to follow as they come!