Ekphrastic Poetry

Responding to flurries of circumstances around us is challenging. Ekphrastic poetry is a way of exploring a complex world, while working within containment. Ekphrasis is defined as the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device¹. The artwork’s reality holds the viewer within it, while also firing off personal associations that construct a second world—the world of the poem—then yield another world—the poetic space opened in the mind of the reader², replete with their associations. 

In Douglas Hofstadter’s essay on analogy, he states that cognition largely functions through analogical processes—continuously relating things to one another over time. His estimation of this process grants insight into how we acquire lexicons and craft poems. 

As we accrue experiences, their concepts cluster into a larger network of ideas; also setting the stage for metaphor. So, despite the initial impression that one relinquishes control of what can transpire while inside the world of someone else’s work, a different sense of agency exists here. One can play with their experiences within the artwork’s periphery. The pre-curated elements generate rich analogical responses—specificity lends the audience details that may translate into the personal, conceiving a chain of associations.

Poems often build on something identifiable (experiences lived physically or psychically, singularly or communally); then complicate it, so that it is seen anew³. Hofstadter mentions Richard Dawkins saying “a chicken is an egg’s way of making another egg,”—turning the line of causation “on its head.”⁴ Though I understand eggs as part of chicken reproduction, not chickens as “egg”struments, one can see his point: the line is malleable. Because causation is analogical; we anticipate what will happen by associating what has happened with the happening’s surrounding conditions. We extrapolate, trace back, imagine how one event caused another (with variable accuracy). In life, this is an asset and a detriment. In poetry, it can be a tool for transformation or subverting expectations. 

But what happens when causation is confused past the point of recognition? When so many variables in a poem interact, how do we deal with information that is disruptive to identification? Cole Swenson asserts there is utility in uncertainty amid this associative weaving. Swenson says that complete certainty suppresses the imagination. In “Noise That Stays Noise,” Swenson sometimes speaks of the poem as if it were a complex information system. Coherent within itself, but challenged by its own composition of other smaller, noise-generative systems: 

— the denotative system, the metaphoric system, the image system, the syntactical system, the rhythmic system, the system of sound relationships, and so on. What is information to any one of these subsystems may be noise to the others—⁵

— at a “higher” level of organization, such as that of the entire poem, they can work together to create a more complex body of information.⁶

In an ekphrastic poem, the referenced artwork helps organize information. While our perception pinballs from one activated analogy to another, we are secure in the framework of another’s composition. Though we contribute noise, we find it mysteriously at home in the Escher-esque mechanism of ongoing artistic and poetic conversation. 

Related/Mentioned Articles

• “A Belief in Ghosts: Poetry & the Shared Imagination" by Dorothea Lasky, JSTOR Daily
• “The Machine of Poetry,” by Matthew Zapruder, Powell’s Books
• “Analogy as the Core of Cognition,” by Douglas R. Hofstadter
• “Noise that Stays Noise,” Cole Swenson

Suggested Collaborative Exercise: 

1. Draw/paint/sculpt alongside your partner.
2. Write a stream of consciousness in response to your partner’s piece. 
3. Trade texts with your partner. 
4. Reformat the text into a different poetic format. 
5. Discuss outcomes.