What is Ekphrastic Poetry?Ekphrastic poetry explores art. Using a rhetorical device known as ekphrasis, the poet engages with a painting, drawing, sculpture, or other form of visual art. Poetry about music and dance might also be considered a type of ekphrastic writing. The term ekphrastic (also spelled ecphrastic) originates from a Greek expression for description. The earliest ekphrastic poems were vivid accounts of real or imagined scenes. Through effusive use of details, writers in ancient Greece aspired to transform the visual into the verbal. Later poets moved beyond description to reflect on deeper meanings. Today, the word ekphrastic can refer to any literary response to a non-literary work. SOURCE: Jackie Craven, for ThoughtCo.com, Feb. 2021 Techniques for Writing an Ekphrastic Poem
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| Under a Calder Mobile, August 1959 JACKIE CRAVEN A bird was missing, or maybe a boomerang, but a blue one fallen off the wire so the others hung crookedly, twirling and colliding when the window fan blew strong. Their shadows wobbled over the spoon-shaped chairs and the sofa where I drowsed, a child adrift in the summer heat. Dipping and swerving, the shadows became my father’s Thunderbird vanishing over a hill, then turned into a swirl of phantom birds-- Sofa to chair to beyond, sofa to chair and gone-- except for the heavy one that smothered me with the scent of cocktails and cigarettes. I woke beneath the damp weight of my mother, rocking as she moaned-- Do you love me? Do you love me more than him? SOURCE: Originally published April 15, 2020 AgniOnline https://agnionline.bu.edu/poetry/under-a-calder-mobile-august-1959 |
 According to The Old Farmer's Almanac this Friday (7-23-2021) is July's Full Moon. It is called the Buck Moon because the antlers of male deer (bucks) are in full-growth mode at this time. Bucks shed and regrow their antlers each year, producing a larger and more impressive set as the years go by. |
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| The Opposites Game BRENDAN CONSTANTINE for Patricia Maisch This day my students and I play the Opposites Game with a line from Emily Dickinson. My life had stood a loaded gun, it goes and I write it on the board, pausing so they can call out the antonyms – My Your Life Death Had stood ? Will sit A Many Loaded Empty Gun ? Gun. For a moment, very much like the one between lightning and it’s sound, the children just stare at me, and then it comes, a flurry, a hail storm of answers – Flower, says one. No, Book, says another. That's stupid, cries a third, the opposite of a gun is a pillow. Or maybe a hug, but not a book, no way is it a book. With this, the others gather their thoughts and suddenly it’s a shouting match. No one can agree, for every student there’s a final answer. It's a song, a prayer, I mean a promise, like a wedding ring, and later a baby. Or what’s that person who delivers babies? A midwife? Yes, a midwife. No, that’s wrong. You're so wrong you’ll never be right again. It's a whisper, a star, it's saying I love you into your hand and then touching someone's ear. Are you crazy? Are you the president of Stupid-land? You should be, When's the election? It’s a teddy bear, a sword, a perfect, perfect peach. Go back to the first one, it's a flower, a white rose. When the bell rings, I reach for an eraser but a girl snatches it from my hand. Nothing's decided, she says, We’re not done here. I leave all the answers on the board. The next day some of them have stopped talking to each other, they’ve taken sides. There's a Flower club. And a Kitten club. And two boys calling themselves The Snowballs. The rest have stuck with the original game, which was to try to write something like poetry. It's a diamond, it's a dance, the opposite of a gun is a museum in France. It's the moon, it's a mirror, it's the sound of a bell and the hearer. The arguing starts again, more shouting, and finally a new club. For the first time I dare to push them. Maybe all of you are right, I say. Well, maybe. Maybe it's everything we said. Maybe it’s everything we didn't say. It's words and the spaces for words. They're looking at each other now. It's everything in this room and outside this room and down the street and in the sky. It's everyone on campus and at the mall, and all the people waiting at the hospital. And at the post office. And, yeah, it's a flower, too. All the flowers. The whole garden. The opposite of a gun is wherever you point it. Don’t write that on the board, they say. Just say poem. Your death will sit through many empty poems. Source: The American Journal of Poetry |
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| “Seven Bridges Road” (Eagles):
| “Seven Nation Army” (White Stripes):
| “Take 5” (Dave Brubeck)
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| "Sixty-four now . . ." AGNES NEMES NAGY Translated from Hungarian by George Szirtes Sixty-four now. Summer. No use acting as if this were what I was quite expecting. Still there's a thaw, a soft appeasement, a gentle waking up and easement, this summer of my sixty-fourth commencing. |
| Numbers MARY CORNISH I like the generosity of numbers. The way, for example, they are willing to count anything or anyone: two pickles, one door to the room, eight dancers dressed as swans. I like the domesticity of addition-- add two cups of milk and stir-- the sense of plenty: six plums on the ground, three more falling from the tree. And multiplication's school of fish times fish, whose silver bodies breed beneath the shadow of a boat. Even subtraction is never loss, just addition somewhere else: five sparrows take away two, the two in someone else's garden now. There's an amplitude to long division, as it opens Chinese take-out box by paper box, inside every folded cookie a new fortune. And I never fail to be surprised by the gift of an odd remainder, footloose at the end: forty-seven divided by eleven equals four, with three remaining. Three boys beyond their mothers' call, two Italians off to the sea, one sock that isn't anywhere you look Mary Cornish, “Numbers” from Red Studio. Copyright © 2007 by Mary Cornish Source: Poetry Foundation |
| The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer AIMEE NEZHUKUMATATHIL Fredonia, NY Of course I regret it. I mean there I was under umbrellas of fruit so red they had to be borne of Summer, and no other season. Flip-flops and fishhooks. Ice cubes made of lemonade and sprigs of mint to slip in blue glasses of tea. I was dusty, my ponytail all askew and the tips of my fingers ran, of course, red from the fruitwounds of cherries I plunked into my bucket and still—he must have seen some small bit of loveliness in walking his orchard with me. He pointed out which trees were sweetest, which ones bore double seeds—puffing out the flesh and oh the surprise on your tongue with two tiny stones (a twin spit), making a small gun of your mouth. Did I mention my favorite color is red? His jeans were worn and twisty around the tops of his boot; his hands thick but careful, nimble enough to pull fruit from his trees without tearing the thin skin; the cherry dust and fingerprints on his eyeglasses. I just know when he stuffed his hands in his pockets, said Okay. Couldn't hurt to try? and shuffled back to his roadside stand to arrange his jelly jars and stacks of buckets, I had made a terrible mistake. I just know my summer would've been full of pies, tartlets, turnovers—so much jubilee. Aimee Nezhukumatathil, "The Woman Who Turned Down a Date with a Cherry Farmer" from Miracle Fruit. Copyright © 2003 by Aimee Nezhukumatathil. Source: PoetryFoundation.org |
| Summer ROBIN COSTE LEWIS Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God—His arrogance, His gall—to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice—telling you what you already know. Robin Coste Lewis, "Summer" from Voyage of the Sable Venus. Copyright © 2015 by Robin Coste Lewis. (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015) Source: poetryfoundation.org |
| Endless Summer NATE PRITTS . . . It was the summer I fucked up the summer fucked up me fucked up a fuck-up in the summer & I spent time laying under stars too much time I wasted the stars you lied to me under the stars & the summer was endless the summer endless it was an endless summer . . . . . . endless & I said things like “If I ever see you again” but I’ll never see you again I never saw you again I made sure of that & I circled the lake I went in circles the lake was endless it was summer I fucked up too much time & I never saw you again & I . . . . . . circled & it was endless & the stars lied to me the summer light moving so slowly I saw the summer light move endless & when I see you the trees will cluster green rage green trees raging with love endless love & I’ll never see you again I made sure of that . . . . . . wasted under the stars the slow summer light the endless fuck-up & you never again you lovely you summer you everything that is now never again whatever that may be the rage I loved me under the stars then & now endless wasting away me haze wandering around endless . . . . . . haze it was endless too much time & you lied to me & I said things like I can’t describe the air on my skin can you can you please I know it was important & the light from stars moved so slowly & you moved off forever how can you save everything everything important endless . . . . . . summer light the fuck-up the lake a circle circling the lake how can you save everything how can I answer you the light of summer stars I’m sorry for my light the endlessness of my endless & my fuck-up the me that is now looking back & thinking & this summer circling . . . Nate Pritts, "Endless Summer" from The Wonderfull Yeare (a shepherd’s calendar). Copyright © 2009 by Nate Pritts. Source: poetryfoundation.org |
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