ekphrasis presentation
TRANSCRIPT
Ekphrasis Poetry
Poetry using Art as Inspiration
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
Pieter Brueghel
William Carlos Williams
About suffering they were never wrong
The old Masters: how well they understood
In human position: how well it takes a place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just
walking dully along
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s
house
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster, 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 skym
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Pieter Brueghel
W.H. Auden
Is the identifying nomenclatureI received
before I embarked—
a shrewd silhouette passing overthe pink of a sky carelesslyblackening. Steel
girder foliage
crops up, angered by boot-cladankles trudging.
Rail fences sprawlwestward, parallel my destination;
a gnarled thorn-bush of iron,rust, knolls of industrial bones, piledupward as if swept together,an incomprehensible Babel, long
since collapsed, becoming anotherpart of the landscape. Perched at the summit,
surveying square miles,debris-filled surfaces, tiredstructures leaning idle,
I’m plotting a course—
catching my breath.
Hello, little voice—where is your mouth? That hollowcloset that cradled your teeth—pearls lined up on pink cushions— Where are the lips that kissed your mother goodnight? The eyesthat crinkled the skin around them like gathering velvet, as ripplingstream-water bubbled fromyour lungs in gales of mysterious laughter— Little, little voice, where have you gone—what has become of you?