‘Ekphrastic evolution: textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue in the poetry of
Ntozake Shange, Shin Yu Pai and Cecilia Vicuña.’
By
Tamryn Bennett
Tamryn Bennett
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
Honours thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the award of the
degree of Bachelor of Creative Arts (Honours) Creative Writing, University of
Wollongong.
2008
Abstract
Ekphrasis conventionally refers to the verbal representation of visual art.
Theoretical debates about this concept date back to the Homeric origins of this term
and are contextualised within this thesis. The theories of James A.W Heffernan and
Mieke Bal frame this examination of ekphrastic relationships between poetry and
visual art. Within this context, the thesis coins the term ‘textual-visual ekphrastic
dialogue’ to argue that ekphrastic discussion is more constructive than the traditional
rivalry between word and image. The chasm between ekphrastic theory and
contemporary practise is exposed through a comparative analysis of Heffernan and
Bal’s concepts applied to examples of dialogue in ekphrastic works by Ntozake
Shange, Shin Yu Pai and Cecilia Vicuña. Analysis of these works is also underpinned
by Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotic foundations that were later questioned by Roland
Barthes’ post-structuralist concepts.
Ntozake Shange’s Ridin’ The Moon In Texas is a collection of poetry and
prose ‘word paintings’ constructed as a call and response conversation between the
poet and visual artists. Shin Yu Pai’s Nutritional Feed is a collaboration with mixed
media artist David Lukowski in which she employs his paintings as ekphrastic
catalysts to explore themes of childhood and American culture. Cecilia Vicuña is a
poet, visual artist and performer, whose QUIPOem is an assemblage in verse of her
artistic practice which inextricably binds poetry and visual art.
By applying Heffernan and Bal’s theories to these three works, this study
Bennett
exposes the need for criticism to Tamryn
evolve beyond
disputes about paragonal struggle and
copyright
2008 the emergence of an ekphrastic
segregation between poetry and visual
art to recognise
dialogue if ekphrastic
theory
is to remain
relevant
to contemporary
practice.
Not to be
reprinted
without
consent
of the author
Interviews with the poets demonstrate
how
concepts
of
dialogue
and
collaboration are
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in operation within their work. This lends further support to the argument for a new
understanding of ekphrasis as a dialogue between word and image rather than a
representational rivalry.
Ultimately, this thesis concludes that theories of representational rivalry
between poetry and visual art have been surpassed by the dialogue and collaborative
conversations demonstrated in these works of contemporary ekphrastic poetry.
2
Statement of Sources
I certify that this thesis is entirely my own work except where I have given full
documented references to the work of others and that the material contained in this
thesis has not been submitted for formal assessment in any formal course.
Tamryn Bennett
Tamryn Bennett
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
3
Acknowledgements
My most sincere thanks are sent to my supervisor, Dr. Shady Cosgrove, and Wes
Chung for their encouragement, commitment and patience throughout this project.
Thank you to Shin Yu Pai whose openness in interviews and correspondences
continues to inspire. Thank you also to Alan Wearne and Dr. John Hawke for their
guidance and suggestions. A great big basket of gratitude also belongs to my family
and friends who have supported me and helped untangle the kite strings of this thesis
when they became caught on things.
Interview with Shin Yu Pai first published by Five Bells, Sydney, Vol 16, No. 2&3,
autumn/winter, 2009.
Tamryn Bennett
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
4
Contents
Abstract
2
Statement of Sources
3
Acknowledgements
4
Introduction
6
Contextualisation: framing ekphrasis
12
Methodology: the word and image opposition of Heffernan and Bal
20
Case Study One – Ntozake Shange: Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings
– Contesting ekphrastic confines
– Contextualising Shange’s cross-disciplinary conversations
– Conversation not competition: ‘Three Views of Mt. Fuji’
– Excluded ekphrastic voices: ‘Ridin’ the Moon in Texas’
– Modern Muses: Dream of Pairing
– Reinterpreting myth: ‘between the two of them’
– Reinterpreting representation: ‘Conversation With the Ancestors’
– Multiple Interpretations: ‘Who Needs a Heart’
– Concluding ekphrastic conversations
34
36
37
39
40
41
42
43
45
Case Study Two – Shin Yu Pai:Tamryn
Nutritional
Feed
Bennett
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– Interdisciplinary background and
collaborative
beginnings
– Speaking with
‘suck squeeze
bang blow’
Notartworks:
to be reprinted
without
consent of the author
– Verbal appropriation of visual
appropriation:
‘sonagram’ and ‘lucky strike’
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– Concrete ekphrasis: ‘corporate ladder’, ‘optometrist’, ‘bed-time story’ and
‘(brain) storm’
– Non-representational responses: ‘it does a body good’ and ‘heads up [7up]’
– Pai’s pretext: ‘the mr. butch show’
– Interpretation rather than illustration: ‘ibid x ∞’
– Concluding ekphrastic conflict
46
47
49
51
53
55
56
57
Case Study Three – The Precarious poetry and art of Cecilia Vicuña
– Weaving word and image: ‘Con-cón’
– ‘Entering’: QUIPOems past and present
– Ancient conversations: ‘K’ijllu’ and ‘The Resurrection of the Grasses’
– The metaphor of thread: ‘Poncho: Ritual Dress’
– Text and Textiles: ‘The Origin of Weaving’
– Ancient practice, contemporary media: ‘Hudson River’
– Interweaving interpretation: ‘A Glass of Milk’
– ‘Metaphors in Space’: the concrete roots of ‘Ceq’e’
– The precarious future of ekphrasis
58
62
65
67
68
70
72
73
75
Conclusion
76
Bibliography
81
Appendix: Interview with Shin Yu Pai
86
5
Introduction
‘You know, Phaedrus, that’s the strange thing about writing, which makes it truly
analogous to painting. The painter’s products stand before us as though they were alive,
but if you question them, they maintain a most majestic silence. It is the same with
written words; they may seem to talk to you as if they were intelligent, but if you ask
them anything about what they say, from a desire to be instructed, they go on telling you
just the same thing forever’
~ Plato, Phaedrus 275d, Trans R. Hackforth
‘Ekphrasis, then, has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis, it stages a paradoxical
performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting
to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it.’
~ Peter Wagner
‘Who ever writes about writing about artistic images will be a sort of triple fool.’
~ John Hollander
Ekphrasis describes the ancient rhetorical practice of rendering images into words.
Historically, this was limited to poetry written about paintings or sculptures. Since its
Tamryn
Bennett
Homeric origins, ekphrasis has been
stretched
to encompass responses in different art
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forms including
in response
to artworks,
paintings
architecture, or
Notmusic
to bewritten
reprinted
without
consent
of theofauthor
sculptures that re-present a www.tamrynbennett.com
fictional character from a novel, as well as a whole range
of modern and post-modern media unfathomable at the conception of the definition of
the term. Ekphrasis is also embedded inside larger texts and is alive in anyone’s
recreation of an image from a museum or film. Despite a recent resurgence in this
practice of cross-disciplinary description, the use of the term ekphrasis has continued
to decline. In a contemporary context, ekphrastic works are instead called
‘conversations’ ‘dialogues’ and ‘collaborations’. Although the scope of ekphrastic
responses has expanded significantly, ekphrastic theory has largely ignored these
recent developments. Within this context, the thesis argues that ekphrastic theory
based on ‘dialogue’ is more relevant to contemporary poetry than one based on the
traditional rivalry between word and image. While ekphrastic criticism has circled
around the canon and the concept of rivalry between poetry and visual art, it has lost
6
sight of contemporary ekphrastic ‘conversations’ that aim to resolve representational
frictions between the two forms. The result is a widening chasm between ekphrastic
criticism and contemporary ekphrastic practice.
Ekphrastic evolution and dialogue will be demonstrated through a close
analysis of three texts: Shange’s Ridin’ The Moon in Texas (1987); Pai’s Nutritional
Feed (2007); and Vicuña’s The Precarious (1997). Each examination is underpinned
by a comparative application of the ekphrastic theories of Heffernan and Bal. These
two theorists characterise the paradoxical poles of ekphrastic representation and
interpretation. Heffernan views the relationship between ekphrastic poetry and visual
art as a ‘contest between rival modes of representation: between the driving force of
the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image’ (1993,6). Bal calls
for an interdisciplinary interpretation: framing word and image interaction as co-
Tamryn
Bennett
dependent. Heffernan’s concept of
ekphrastic
competition is fuelled by binaries that
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can be understood
the semiotic
framework
set by of
Saussure.
Bal draws on
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without
consent
the author
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Barthes’ subjective post-structuralist ‘readings’ to question the binaries that bolster
the word-image opposition, recognising the common language between verbal and
visual art. Application of these theories reveals that the concept of competition is no
longer relevant to the contemporary ekphrastic poetry of Shange, Pai and Vicuña that
converses, rather than competes, with the images they evoke. Instead, the examination
of dialogue reveals the emergence of ‘peace talks’ between poetry and visual art, as
opposed to conventional ekphrastic theories that uphold the differences of the two
forms.
Through examination of this dimension of under-developed research in
emerging ekphrastic dialogue, this thesis coins the term ‘textual-visual ekphrastic
dialogue,’ to illustrate the reconciliation of word and image in contemporary
ekphrastic practice. This emphasis on ‘textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue’ departs
7
from traditional approaches to ekphrasis as a rivalry between poetry and visual art.
Also discussed is the implication of ‘textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue’ on the
concept of ekphrastic competition and conventional criticism. Investigation of these
ekphrastic dialogues illuminates the need for theory to evolve with developments in
ekphrastic practice if the term is to continue to survive and remain relevant in a
contemporary context.
Definition of terms
As this thesis traverses literary and visual disciplines it is important to define several
key terms to eliminate confusion of their multiple theoretical meanings. Within the
context of this study, ‘dialogue’ refers to the exchange of ideas, images, themes and
narratives between poetry and visual art. Dialogue is the word used by Shange, Pai
and Vicuña to describe their responses or ‘conversations’ with visual artworks.
Tamryn Bennett
copyright
2008
Although ekphrasis exactly describes
their process
of responding to visual artworks,
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
they favour the label ‘dialogue’
because it doesn’t carry connotations of
www.tamrynbennett.com
representational rivalry. The use of the term ‘dialogue,’ rather than ekphrasis, to
describe this process, can cause confusion between literary theory and art criticism
because it suggests an equal and ongoing visual and verbal response, which not all of
these works actualise.
In order to eliminate this confusion, this thesis, therefore, proposes the term
‘textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue’. This term anchors the interaction between poetry
and art to its ekphrastic foundations, while simultaneously dissolving the connotations
of rivalry via the exchange of dialogue. ‘Ekphrastic dialogue’ aligns the process of
response with ‘conversation’ instead of competition. Within this term, the word
‘textual’ appears before ‘visual’ because the process of ekphrastic response under
examination begins with the text of the poem. The word ‘visual’, inside this term and
8
throughout the study, refers to visual artworks that are responded to by poetry. The
terms ‘visual art’ and ‘image’ are used interchangeably in respect and reference to the
way ekphrastic theorists and poets, within this study, have used them.
‘Ekphrastic representation’ and ‘interpretation’ are the final two terms with
multiple meanings that require more specific definition within this study. ‘Ekphrastic
representation’, as defined by Heffernan, refers to the re-presentation of an idea,
image or object in a different medium from that of the original (1993, 4). In this
context ‘representation’ implies the ability of one media to resemble another, linking
it to imitation, fixed meanings and mimesis. Bal’s subjective, post-structural ‘reading’
and interpretation of word and image interactions counters the concept of objective
representation. Ekphrastic ‘interpretation’ recognises that the ‘reader and viewers
bring to the texts and images their own cultural and personal baggage’ (Bal, 1991, 12)
Bennett
which makes fixed representationTamryn
impossible.
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
Thesis overview
www.tamrynbennett.com
The introduction to the central arguments of this thesis is followed by chapter two,
‘Framing Ekphrasis,’ which contextualises ekphrastic poetry, ekphrastic theory and
the evolution of ‘textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue’. Chapter three, ‘Methodology,’
summarises the ekphrastic concepts of Heffernan and Bal. It discusses Heffernan’s
theory of ekphrastic representation, his paradigm of a gendered struggle for
supremacy between poetry and visual art, as well as the structuralist binaries that
inform his position. Bal’s intertextual interpretation of word and image is presented in
contrast to Heffernan’s theories. These oppositional frames are applied to each of the
case studies to demonstrate the divergence of ekphrastic theory from contemporary
ekphrastic practice.
9
Case study one, ‘Ntozake Shange: Ridin’ The Moon In Texas’, illuminates the
emergence of an ekphrastic dialogue through Shange’s ‘conversations’ with 15
artworks created by 15 different artists. The focus of this examination is Shange’s
poetry, which is written in response to contemporary non-representational artworks in
non-traditional media. Her rejection of the term ‘ekphrasis,’ in favour of a
collaborative ‘call-and-response’ dialogue with contemporary artworks in new
mediums, exemplifies an evolution in ekphrastic practice; a move away from
representational competition towards interpretive, cross-disciplinary conversation.
The second case study, ‘Shin Yu Pai: Nutritional Feed’, analyses an extended
ekphrastic dialogue between poet Shin Yu Pai and visual artist David Lukowski.
Examination of this intertexual ‘conversation between language and the visual’ (Pai,
2008) reveals ekphrastic developments that reconcile the competition between word
Bennett responses to nonand image. Pai’s new approachesTamryn
include collaboration,
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representational
in media previously
ekphrastic
criticism and
Notartworks
to be reprinted
without excluded
consentfrom
of the
author
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the textual appropriation of visual symbols.
In case study three, ‘The Precarious poetry and art of Cecilia Vicuña,’ the
investigation of ekphrastic dialogue takes a new direction via Vicuña’s poetry written
in response to her own visual artworks. Her inextricable binding of word and image
creates a symbiotic verbal and visual language, showing an evolution in contemporary
ekphrastic practice that extends beyond the word and image opposition.
This study concludes, having illustrated the emergence of ‘textual-visual
ekphrastic dialogue’. Through analysis of ekphrastic dialogues in these three texts, the
divergence of contemporary ekphrastic poetry from ekphrastic theory is exposed. In
order for ekphrastic criticism to remain relevant to contemporary ekphrastic poetry,
this thesis calls for the evolution in ekphrastic dialogue to be recognised and the
concepts of representational rivalry reviewed.
10
Contextualisation: framing ekphrasis
The ekphrastic canon
The history of the relationship between visual art and poetry is long and much
debated from mimesis to modern museums. Ekphrasis is the incarnation of this
relationship, originating in progymnasmata, ancient Greek rhetorical exercises that
practised rendering visual art, real or imagined, into vivid description. This process
was perhaps the ancient verbal equivalent to the modern day illustration plate or
reproduction.
The first commonly cited example of ekphrasis is Homer’s description of the
shield of Achilles in book eighteen of the Iliad:
…There were five folds composing the shield itself, and upon it
he elaborated many things
in his skillBennett
and craftsmanship.
Tamryn
He made the earth upon it, and the sky, and the sea’s water,
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and the tireless sun, and the moon waxing in her fullness,
and on
all the
constellations
that festoon
the heavens…
Not
toit be
reprinted
without
consent
of 1the author
(Homer. Trans Lattimore, 1951, 388).
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Other texts in the canon of ekphrastic poetry include: Virgil’s depiction of the shield
of Æneas in The Aeneid; Ovid’s representation of Philomela’s rape; Dante’s
description of the sculptures in Purgatorio; Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece;
Wordsworth’s ‘Peele Castle,’(1806) based on Sir George Beaumont’s painting and
Keats’ imagined artefact in ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (1819). This alchemic practice of
turning visual art into poetry continues with Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess,’ (1842);
Williams’ collected works in ‘Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems’ (1962);
Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts,’ (1940), also interpreting Brueghel’s depiction of
the painting Landscape Fall of Icarus (1558). According to Heffernan, post-modern
ekphrastic poetry is represented by Ashbery’s ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’,
1
The original shield was destroyed but recreations like Abraham Flaxman’s 1821 shield were based on
Homer’s description.
11
(1974) based on Parmigianino’s 1524 work of the same name. John Hollander’s The
Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Art (1995)2 comprises a more
comprehensive collection of ekphrastic poetry, but it is around these examples of
illustrious work that ekphrastic theory and criticism have been constructed and
continue to orbit.
Theory and theorists
Modern theoretical debates about ekphrastic poetry as a self-contained genre are
rooted in G.E Lessing’s Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry,
(1766). In this study Lessing calls for the separation of the ‘sister arts’, viewing their
irreconcilable differences of form, the motion of poetry and the stasis of painting, as
reciprocally limiting. It is this dichotomy that ignites contemporary theories of rivalry
Tamryn
Bennett
between poetry and visual art, word
and image.
Jean Hagstrum in The Sister Arts:
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The Tradition
of Literary
Pictorialismwithout
and English
Poetryof
from
to Gray
Not
to be reprinted
consent
theDryden
author
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(1958), challenges such segregation through a literary analysis of Horace’s dictum of
ut pictura poesis3. The translation of Horace’s dictum is often debated but broadly
understood as, ‘as in painting so in poetry’ (Wagner, 1996, 5). Also redefining
Lessing’s temporal and spatial boundaries is Murray Krieger’s seminal essay,
Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laocoon revisited, (1965). Krieger
develops his atemporal ‘ekphrastic principle’ by demonstrating the ability of
ekphrastic poetry to suspend time and enter the ‘still’ realm of plastic arts. His focus
is on the imagery of language and its ability to operate as a piece of visual art. Krieger
2
John Hollander is also responsible for the concept of ‘notional ekphrasis’ which refers to the
recreation in language of an fictional or destroyed visual artwork. Well know examples of this include
‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ and ‘My Last Duchess’ (1995).
3
In this investigation, Hagstrum coins the term Pictorialism. (C. A. Hill, M. H. Helmers, 2004) The
dictum of ‘the sister arts’ ut pictura poesis translates ‘as in painting so in poetry,’ and is attributed to
Horace.(Wagner, 1996)
12
builds upon this concept in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign, (1992)
increasingly injecting the idea of semiotic competition between word and image.
W.J.T Mitchell’s Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (1986) preserves the verbal
and visual art divide by historicising the foundations of this rivalry and the paragonal
struggle between text and image. The notion of a paragonal struggle between the
‘sister arts’ reinforces the representational competition and differences of the two
forms rather than their similarities as modes of expression. In Picture Theory: Essays
on Verbal and Visual Representation (1994), Mitchell reframes the word-image
opposition through a comparative study of three types of ekphrasis he defines as
ekphrastic indifference, ekphrastic hope and ekphrastic fear. Ekphrastic indifference
refers to the impossibility of description to ever achieve actual depiction (Mitchell,
1994, 152). In opposition, ekphrastic hope overcomes the image/text division to
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Bennett
‘make us see’ (Mitchell, 1994, 152).
The collapse
of these boundaries and the
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possibility ofNot
language
communicate
on the same
planeof
as the
image,
leads to
to betoreprinted
without
consent
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
ekphrastic fear (Mitchell, 1994, 154). This concept of language displacing image as
the only means of seeing has implications for the abandonment of traditional
boundaries between the poet and the visual artist, fuelling notions of ekphrastic fear.
It is ekphrastic fear that again feeds the concepts of representational rivalry and
friction between word and image.
In The Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery
(1993), James A.W Heffernan forms one of the most frequently used contemporary
explanations of ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of the visual representation’.
Heffernan’s literary enquiry employs semiotic and gendered studies of language to
argue that there is a reoccurring ‘representational friction’ (1993) between poetry and
visual art.
13
Offering an alternative to traditional theories of image-text rivalry is Mieke
Bal’s study, Reading “Rembrandt”: Beyond the Word-Image Opposition (1991). In it,
she transcends the divided and gendered hierarchy implied by the ‘word-and-image’
opposition via a co-dependent reading of the two art forms. This intertextual
interpretation forges the way for a dialogue between poetry and visual art. Although
this work takes a significant step towards eliminating issues of verbal-visual rivalry,
Bal still follows a similar analytical trajectory to previous theorists by focusing on
canonised works. Beyond the canon and concepts of representational rivalry is
Valerie Robillard’s essay, In Pursuit of Ekphrasis (an intertextual approach) (1998),
which acknowledges that ekphrastic writing has ‘out-run’ ekphrastic theory. Her
solution to this theoretical problem is to redefine the limited representational
boundaries of ekphrasis to include the ‘myriad of alternative ways in which
Tamryn
Bennett
contemporary literary works touch
on the visual
arts’ (Robillard, 52). Despite Bal and
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Robillard’s calls
inclusive approaches,
recent developments
in ekphrastic
Not for
to more
be reprinted
without consent
of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
poetry, that attempt to overcome the word-image opposition, have fallen outside of
the scope of all of critical studies. This thesis aims to inform this under-developed
dimension of ekphrastic research.
Ekphrasis and semiotics
The preceding list is by no means an exhaustive timeline of ekphrastic theory, rather it
outlines significant works in the field and demonstrates the pendulum of critical
perspective. Woven through these ekphrastic theories are various semiotic strands
from Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiosis to Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistic
foundations later extended by Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva,
Umberto Eco and Michael Riffaterre. These semiotic schools of thought are
intrinsically tied to the way the verbal and visual languages of ekphrasis are
14
understood and analysed. In the referential realm of ekphrasis, semantic systems of
‘natural’ and conventional signs are fundamental to the reading of both poetry and
visual art. Ekphrasis hovers between semiotic binaries such as word and image or the
motion of masculine text and the frozen feminine image. While there are valuable
studies of ekphrasis from both literary and visual art angles, like Michael Riffaterre’s
Semiotics of Poetry, (1984) and Bryson’s essay Semiotics and Art History, (1991) this
thesis focuses on semiotic theory approached from within the ekphrastic frame of
Heffernan and Bal.
Underpinning Bal and Heffernan’s theories are Saussure’s structural
framework and Barthes’ post-structural ‘reading’ of images and objects as well as
text. Both structuralist and post-structuralist schools have long supported analysis of
social experiences, particularly in literature. However, the perceived paragon of
Bennett
poetry and visual art has resultedTamryn
in split readings
of word and image until united
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through inter-artistic
investigations
Wendy Steiner,
Bal,ofBryan
Wolf, Norman
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reprintedbywithout
consent
the author
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Bryson and Peter Wagner (1982, 1991, 1990, 1988, 1996). The shift towards
interdisciplinary analysis acknowledges the often-ignored interactivity of text and
image in ekphrasis. This interpretive and intertexual trend coincides with the growth
of feminist criticism stimulated by examination of the gendered undercurrent in
ekphrastic poetry. The female perspectives of Bal, Robillard, Tamar Yacobi and
Sasha Roberts begin to address the imbalance of the traditionally male gaze in
ekphrastic poetry along with the male dominated arena of ekphrastic theory.
Visual poetry
Semiotics has also played a central role in the analysis of word and image in
illustrated books, artists’ books and concrete poetry, also referred to as visual poetry
(Khalfa, 2001). Despite containing aesthetic elements critical to ekphrastic poetry,
15
these genres have been largely excluded from studies of ekphrasis. Jean Khalfa
addresses their absence in The Dialogue Between Painting and Poetry: Livres
d´Artistes 1874-1999 (2001). Khalfa’s study exposes Bal’s idea of dialogue between
poetry and visual art as one that has long been in operation. It draws attention to
significant yet almost forgotten collaborations, such as Mallarmé and Manet’s joint
portrayal of Poe’s poem ‘The Raven’ in 1874, and Reverdy and Picasso’s Le Chant
des morts in 1948 (Khalfa, 2001). Willard Bohn’s survey, The Aesthetics of Visual
Poetry 1914-1928 (1986) abolishes the notion of a contest between poetry and visual
art. Instead, he views word and image in a state of absolute synthesis called visual
poetry (Bohn, 1986). Bohn argues that visual poetry operates as a dual sign in
language and visual art. Exponents of visual poetry in this study include Mallarmé,
Apollinaire, and to lesser extent, Pound. According to Bohn they attempted to create a
visual language, independent of, Tamryn
yet linked Bennett
to, linguistic meaning (1986). Again
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illustrating the
fusion
of word
and image
is Mary
Ellen Solt’s
study
Concrete Poetry:
Not
to be
reprinted
without
consent
of the
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
A World View (1968). This survey crosses continents to deliver a comprehensive
anthology of concrete poetry and surrounding theory. In concrete poetry, grammatical
and syntactical conventions are abandoned in favour of a constellation of words in
space and time. This synthesis of word and image, in visual poetry and artists’ books,
has begun to surface in contemporary ekphrastic poetry via the appropriation of
spatial and typographic techniques used to eliminate the word and image opposition.
Modern ekphrasis
There are a number of changes in the approach to poetry and visual art that have
resulted in the evolution of contemporary ekphrasis. The traditional need for
ekphrastic poetry to act as verbal reproductions, describing detailed brushstrokes, has
been replaced to a degree by the widespread availability of affordable image
16
reproductions4. Instead of strictly, or exactly, re-presenting the image or object,
contemporary collections like Shange’s, Pai’s and Vicuña’s engage in a ‘dialogue’
with visual artworks. Ekphrastic dialogue is characterised by a move away from
representational rivalry toward intertextual interpretation. This shift acknowledges the
interconnectedness as well as the individual merits of text and image. Other examples
of contemporary ekphrastic dialogues include: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge's collaboration
with Kiki Smith on the artist’s book Endocrinology (1997) ; John Yau and Thomas
Nozkowski's Ing Grish (2005); John Keene and Christopher Stackhouse’s ekphrastic
partnership in Seismosis (2006); Bruna Mori and Matthew Kinney's Derive (2006);
and Jane Miller and Beverly Pepper's Midnights (2007). The ‘call-and response’
exchange at the core of these works is exemplified by the handing back and forth of
drawings and poetry between Keene and Stackhouse during the creation of Seismosis.
Bennett
The poetic responses of the worksTamryn
listed extend
visual narratives, borrow icons or
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These new approaches to ekphrastic responses reflect a myriad of developments in
visual media, such as digital image manipulation, graphic design, film, installation,
photography. A cross-section of contemporary techniques used in the creation of
ekphrastic dialogue will be under analysis in Shange’s ‘conversations’ with artworks
in Ridin’ The Moon in Texas; Pai’s appropriative collaboration with Lukowski in
Nutritional Feed; and Vicuña’s weaving of poetry and art in The Precarious. These
poets and their texts will be contextualised within their respective case studies.
4
The prominence of visual reproductions and prints means that many artworks are seen for the first,
and perhaps only, time in this format. The development of this popular form of print mediation
challenges Heffernan assertion that, ‘[t]wentieth-century ekphrasis springs from the museum, the
shrine where all poets worship in a secular age’ (1993, 139).
17
Methodology
Heffernan’s museum of words
Ekphrasis occupies the curious and contested realm between word and image. For
centuries, theorists have debated the concept of ekphrasis as either a paragonal
struggle for supremacy between the verbal and the visual or a shared sphere of
representation for both poetry and visual art. In The Museum of Words, Heffernan
approaches ekphrasis from a literary perspective, viewing it as ‘a gallery of art
constructed by language alone’ (1993,8). His inquiry is restricted to a selection of
‘canonical specimens’ (1993,7) of poetry that trace the evolution of ekphrasis from
Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles to Ashbery’s mediation on
Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Heffernan’s ekphrastic theories echo
Bennett
long-held perspectives of rivalry Tamryn
between word
and image. He views the relationship
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between ekphrastic
and visualwithout
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representation: between the driving force of the narrating word and the stubborn
resistance of the fixed image’ (1993,6). This tension owes much to Lessing’s view of
the irreconcilable differences of temporal text and frozen symbols in space5. Heffernan
is focused on the differences of the two forms, rather than shared representational
ground upon which textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue becomes possible.
According to Heffernan the ‘paragonal struggle for dominance between image
and the word’ (1993,1) has allowed ekphrasis to survive from Homer’s time to our
own. The same paragonal energy responsible for the struggle between, and separation
of, the ‘sister arts’ may also be the cause of decline in the use of the term ekphrasis.
5
Lessing argued that ‘painting was incapable of telling stories because its imitation is static rather than
progressive’ (Mitchell, 1986, 40) like the linear accumulation of narrative in poetry. For Lessing these
differences helped to set poetry and visual art in opposition. Lessing’s view of painting as inarticulate
is questioned by Bal’s post-structuralist reading of images as texts whose symbols open windows into
visual stories.
18
To label a work ekphrastic is also to laden it with connotations of conflict and rivalry
between poetry and visual art. Consequently, poets like Shange, Pai and Vicuña shy
away from the term ekphrasis, favouring ‘dialogue’ to describe their works that seek
to converse on common ground rather than compete over differences. This decline in
the number of poets identifying as ekphrastic is problematic because ekphrasis is a
specific literary term that describes exactly the practice of poets responding to visual
art. While ekphrastic theory has circled around the concept of rivalry, recent works
like Shange, Pai and Vicuña’s that employ dialogue to reconcile the conflict between
poetry and visual art, have gone undetected in ekphrastic criticism.
Representational rivalry
Heffernan attributes ‘representational friction’ to ‘ the root meaning of ekphrasis:
Tamryn
“speaking out” or “telling in full”’
(1993, 6).Bennett
It involves prosopopeia, the envoicing of
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He conceives of the rivalry between word and image as a contest that is ‘powerfully
gendered: the expression of a duel between male and female gazes, the voice of male
speech striving to control a female image that is both alluring and threatening’ (1993,
1). Historically, the male poet and masculine voice of ‘[e]kphrasis speaks not only
about works of art but also to and for them’ (1993, 7). This thesis proposes an
ekphrastic dialogue that directly challenges this gendered supremacy of word over
image as it doesn’t seek to speak to or for but with the artworks.
The concept of ‘representational friction’ stems from a literary bias privileging
word over image. Heffernan’s theory of rivalry adheres to an ekphrastic hierarchy
6
Mitchell contends that this gendered division is the narrowest meaning of ekphrasis. He instead aligns
his argument with George Saintsbury who called for a more general application of the term that
includes any ‘set description intended to bring person, place, picture etc. before the mind’s eye’
(Mitchell, 1994, 153).
19
favouring vocal or verbal text over mute, visual text. Derrida’s recognition of multiple
‘readings’ of texts contests this voicelessness of visual artworks:
[t] he fact that a spatial work of art doesn’t speak can be interpreted in two ways. On the one
hand, there is the idea of its absolute mutism, the idea that it is completely foreign or
heterogeneous to word […] But on the other hand […] we can always receive them, read
them, or interpret them as a potential discourse. That is to say, these silent works are in fact
already talkative, full of virtual discourses.(Derrida in Peter Brunette and David Wills, eds.:
Deconstruction and the Visual Arts 1994, 12-13).
Visual artworks are amongst the oldest forms of communication. The potential for
discourse with artworks is realised in the dialogue and coexistence of poetry and
visual art in the works of Shange, Pai and Vicuña. The focus on representational
rivalry by theorists like Heffernan has meant that these recent developments in
textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue have not been recognised in ekphrastic theory.
The oppositional binaries of word and image at the core of Heffernan’s
ekphrastic theory can be understood through Saussure’s semiotic system outlined in
Tamryn Bennett
Course in General Linguistics. The
arbitrary string
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2008of verbal signifiers, signifieds and
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signs that govern words in language can also be applied to the visual artworks that are
the subject of ekphrasis.7 Saussure’s diacritical concept proposes that ‘in language
there are only differences’ (Saussure, [1916] 1993). The meaning of a sign is
dependent not only on the association between the signifier and signified, but also
upon its relational value within the semantic system. Value is both relational and
contextual to this conventional structure. To borrow Saussure’s example, red is
recognised because it is not blue or green. Similarly, words are defined and
categorised via their difference from images. These differences rely on binary
oppositions, which in turn fuel ekphrastic concepts of conflict between text and
image.
7
The relation of the Sausurean system to visual art is a delicate one. Although Saussure’s ‘science of
signs may have called for an expansion of inquiry beyond the domain of language, in practice the term
“signifer” is modelled on the linguistic case’ (Bal and Bryson, 193). This leads Bal and Bryson to
question if this proposed ‘expansion’ is an attempt to absorb ‘the visual domain into the empire of
linguistics’ (Bal and Bryson, 193).
20
Representing representation
Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of the visual
representation’8 (1993, 3) has been acknowledged by a string of contemporary
ekphrastic theorists including Mitchell, Hollander and Robillard. Through this
representational lens, ekphrasis is limited to imitation, a mimetic mirror that
‘represents representation itself’ (1993, 4). This is problematic for three reasons. The
first is that Heffernan’s definition proposes that absolute representation is possible. It
ignores the filters of context and medium that shape, and thus differ, all
representations.
Secondly, this definition assumes that visual art can achieve mimesis. In
Plato’s Theory of Art ‘the artist’s representation stands at third remove from reality’
(Plato. Ed. Cooper, 1997, 1203). The artist’s representation is a subjective
Bennett
construction, reflective of contextTamryn
and therefore
more suitably viewed as a form of
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interpretation.
Similarly,
ekphrastic responses
artworks of
arethe
channelled
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prism of individual experience. Each response differs with variables of time, space,
gender and race. An example of interpretive difference rather than absolute
representation is evidenced by a comparison of Auden and Williams’ individual
responses to the same artwork by Breughel, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1558).
Auden’s response in ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ (1940) includes detailed descriptions of
Icarus’ fall:
8
This definition distinguishes ekphrastic representation from two other forms of word and image
interaction, pictorialism and iconicity. Heffernan argues that ekphrasis must explicitly represent
representation rather than imply images in the way that pictorialism does. He uses the example of
Williams ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ to contend that although the poem ‘owes something to the
photographs of Alfred Stieglitz and to the precisionist style of Charles Sheeler’ (Heffernan, 1993, 3)
the poem is pictorialist rather than ekphrastic because it doesn’t directly reference Stieglitz or Sheeler
and therefore cannot truly represent their representations. The relevance of directly referencing an artist
in a collection of poems that responds only to their artworks is questioned by Williams’ Pictures from
Breughel and Pai’s Nutritional Feed. Repetition of the visual artist’s names in these kinds of
collections becomes redundant, a point that can be used to challenge Heffernan’s concept of
representation rather than open ekphrastic interpretation.
21
…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,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Williams, in ‘Landscape with Fall of Icarus’ (1962) observes the same scene as:
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning.
Despite responding to the same painting, interpretive elements of context, style and
technique result in the disparity of these ekphrastic poems. Breughel’s painting is
itself an interpretation of Ovid’s interpretation of the myth of Daedalus and Icarus.
Both of the poems observe different details about Icarus’ last moments and thus draw
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audiences to different conclusions.
Heffernan
acknowledges the differences of each
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response, ‘[w]hile
sounds likewithout
a man long
familiar of
with
museums
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masterworks they exhibit, Williams
often sounds like an amateur seeing a picture for
the first time’ (1993, 155). This comparison highlights the impossibility of an
absolute or definitive ekphrastic representation of a visual artwork. Instead, it reveals
the possibility of a more suitable ekphrastic definition for this study: the verbal
interpretation of visual interpretation. Heffernan’s notion of ekphrasis as an absolute
representation of a representation is thus contradicted.
The third concern raised by Heffernan’s definition is the impossibility of a
verbal description accurately depicting a work of visual art. Mitchell supports this
position by stating that:
[a] verbal representation cannot represent— that is, make present—its object in the same way
a visual representation can. It may refer to an object, describe it, invoke it, but it can never
22
bring its visual presence before us in the way pictures do. Words can “cite” but never “sight”
their objects9 (1994, 152).
Heffernan’s ekphrastic ideal of ‘representing representation itself’ (1993, 4) is thus
rendered unattainable. With the concept of ekphrastic representation now redundant,
the notion of ‘representational friction’ seems more like fiction. Without the prop of
representational rivalry, the boundaries and competition between the ‘sister arts’
seems somewhat artificial and irrational given that verbal and visual interpretations
operate on the individual merits of their specific media.
Restrictions of representation
Heffernan’s definition also restricts ekphrastic poetry to describing or re-presenting
the visual and nothing of the outside world that informs the creation or viewing of the
artwork. Such a definition may be applicable to traditional ekphrastic poetry based on
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formally constructed artworks, but even Heffernan is forced to depart from this
Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Ashbery’s poem moves beyond the definition of
representation and the borders of the artwork by drawing inspiration and content from
outside the artwork. This includes quotes from Vasari and Shakespeare as well as
contemporary commentary by art critic, Sydney Freedberg:
[r]ealism in this portrait/No longer produces an objective truth, but a
bizarria…/However its distortion does not create/ a feeling of disharmony…The
forms retain/ a strong measure of ideal beauty (Ashbery, 1985, 193).
The inclusion of this criticism illustrates a shift in ekphrastic poetry, from strict
representation of the artwork towards a literary interpretation and dialogue with it.
9
The difficulty of translating word into image and vice-versa is further emphasised by Khalfa’s
example of Albrecht Dürer’s interpretation of the birth of a prophetic voice (2001, 13). Dürer’s
illustrated translation of 1498 of the prophet ‘devouring’ God’s words, depicts him actually eating a
book because of the difficulty of drawing the process of absorbing a text. The difference in depicting
verbal and visual images helps to support a questioning of the relevance of representational rivalry.
23
Ashbery’s inclusion of art commentary not only supports a view of ekphrastic
interpretation, it is self-reflective of his context as an art critic. This example further
supports the argument for an evolution of ekphrastic theory in line with interpretive
developments in contemporary ekphrastic practice.
Heffernan’s definition doesn’t encompass dramatic changes in the production
of contemporary visual art or ekphrastic responses to artworks in these new media.
The content, media and style of contemporary artworks and artists have evolved
significantly since the creation of the paintings and sculptures that the ekphrastic
canon was founded on. Recent responses to these new forms, not just in poetry but in
music, theatre and film, reflect these changes; however, Heffernan’s ekphrastic
definition and theory has failed to keep pace with these developments. Movements
such as abstraction and post-modernism have facilitated a departure from the creation
Tamryn
of artworks with recognisable characters
or Bennett
myths like those in Breughel’s Landscape
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with the FallNot
of Icarus.
basedconsent
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cannot represent a representation that doesn’t exist. Instead, ekphrastic poetry must
evolve with the artworks it responds to, moving beyond representation towards
interpretation and dialogue. This argument is supported by Robillard’s questioning of
ekphrastic representation:
if we continue to base our understanding of ekphrasis primarily on the attempt of the
verbal to represent or describe a visual work of art, or even the ability to do this at all,
then how do we account for the myriad of alternative ways in which contemporary
literary works touch on the visual arts, some of which are themselves nonrepresentational? (1998, 53).
Ekphrastic responses to non-representational artworks are present in Shange, Pai and
Vicuña’s work. Their interpretation of non-representation artwork challenges
Heffernan’s definition of ekphrastic representation. Ekphrastic interpretations,
combined with dialogues between poetry and visual art, support the argument for an
evolution of ekphrastic theory. Understanding of new approaches to textual-visual
24
ekphrastic dialogue in contemporary practice could be enhanced through the
application of new perspectives on word and image interaction such as Bal’s.
Bal: beyond the word-and-image opposition
In contrast to Heffernan, Bal attempts to move ‘[b]eyond the word-image
opposition’10 (1991). In Reading ‘Rembrandt’, she crosses disciplinary borders,
applying her studies in literature, feminist theory, post-structuralism and narratology
to visual texts by Rembrandt11. Bal’s interdisciplinary interpretations of dialogue
between word and image challenge ingrained and gendered concepts of
representational rivalry between poetry and visual art12 (1991). She believes that ‘a
fruitful dialogue between the two disciplines is possible and welcome, and that
common concerns can be addressed in an increasingly common language’ (1991, xiv).
Tamryn Bennett
Rather than focusing on the representational
differences of poetry and visual art, Bal
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emphasises their
‘converse’without
via a shared
semioticofsphere
and analyses
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similarities in the way poetry and visual art communicate imagery and narrative.
While she is not considered a central ekphrastic theorist, her analysis of dialogue
between word and image offers an important counter to ekphrastic theories that have
circled around the concept of representational rivalry for centuries. Although Bal’s
investigation is retrospective and canonical like Heffernan’s, her theories are relevant
to a study of contemporary ekphrastic poetry. Bal’s evolutionary attempt to move
10
Bal hyphenates the terms word-and-image in an attempt to further dissolve boundaries between the
two forms. She believes the phrase ‘“word and image’ suggests that two different, perhaps
incompatible things are to be shackled together, the phrase emphasizes the difference, not the common
aspects of the two’ (Bal, 1991, 27).
11
According to Pollock, Bal’s investigation as a ‘visitor’ in the field of image analysis has been
criticised by art historians. In contrast, her cross-disciplinary ‘visitation’ has been heralded by literary
theorists like Bryson and Wagner as ‘innovative’ (Wagner, 1996, 3).
12
Bal calls for acceptance of views of theorists who ‘respond to art from a less pre-dominant social
position’ as ‘such a broadening is an indispensible next step toward a better, more diverse and complex
understanding of culture’ (1991, 14).
25
beyond the word-image opposition via dialogue offers a theoretical insight into
contemporary ekphrastic practice.
Interdisciplinary interpretation
Bal’s position as a feminist theorist, in the traditionally male-dominated ekphrastic
arena, begins to address the gender imbalance of some word-image theory. This
feminist perspective is coupled with inter-textual readings to question the gendered
privileging of poetry over visual art to communicate narrative. Bal confronts ‘the
overt emphasis on the word [that] hardly conceals an overwhelmingly visual
dimension in our culture, including both literature and the study of it’ (1991, xiii). By
employing a post-structural approach to reading artworks, she gives as much weight
to visual signification as verbal signification. Where Heffernan stresses the
Tamryn the
Bennett
voicelessness of visual art, Bal emphasises
ability of poets, art critics and
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13
Recalling
the biblical
stories
told by frescos
audiences toNot
read to
andbe
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images.
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and stained glass windows, she argues that the ‘verbality or “wordiness” is
indispensible in visual art, just as visuality or “imageness” is intrinsic to verbal art’
(Bal, 1991, 28). Ekphrastic poetry is possibly the clearest example of the ‘verbality’
in visual art as centuries of poets have transformed visual narratives and myths into
verbal ones. Returning to the example of Auden and Williams’ responses to
Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, both poems interpret the narrative told
through the artwork. In Breughel’s depiction of the myth, Icarus’ fall goes seemingly
unnoticed by the characters in the landscape. The opening line of Williams’ poem
13
Overlooked in both Heffernan and Bal’s arguments is the mute nature of poetry on the page.
According to J Hillis Miller, ‘[a]ny printed poem means death, the imminent approach of death, but it
is also dead. It is the corpse of its meaning, the spirit turned letter, mute marks on paper. The poem on
the page is a dead body’ (1999).
26
establishes that his response is based on this interpretation of events and not the
original myth:
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring… (1962).
The ‘verbality’ of Brueghel’s painting is evidenced by Williams’ ability to draw an
obvious narrative from the image. Auden’s ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’ also responds to
Brueghel’s specific interpretation of the myth:
[i]n 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…(1940).
These ekphrastic responses illustrate Bal’s concept of interplay between the
‘wordiness’ of visual art and the ‘imageness’ of verbal art. This co-dependent reading
enables similarities between poetry and visual art to be detected. Recognition of the
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Notoftoemerging
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the examination
textual-visual
ekphrastic
dialogues.
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potential for narrative exchange and discourse between poetry and visual art supports
The presence of Bal’s feminist perspective in ekphrastic studies raises the
issue of gendered responses to visual art. Bal draws attention to the impact of gender
on the reading of images. Pollock summarises Bal’s position by stating, ‘[m]aking art
and viewing it are shaped not only by the differences of class and historical relations,
but also by the dissymmetries of gender’ (1993, 531). This female perspective in
image analysis can also be applied to contemporary image production and ekphrastic
responses to it. Artworks in the ekphrastic canon, and responses to them, are maledominated. The post-feminist production of ekphrastic poetry by women may seem
innate but it is a component of contemporary practice that has been largely
overlooked in ekphrastic theory. This way of reading can also be applied to the
production of ekphrastic poetry. Whereas Heffernan focuses on the traditionally male
27
voice of ekphrastic poetry, Bal’s interpretation encourages female responses to
artworks. This evolution in the reading of word and image is increasingly relevant to
contemporary ekphrastic poetry where women like Shange and Pai respond to
masculine artworks. This gender reversal in ekphrastic response not only dissolves
binaries of masculine poetry and mute image, it represents a shift away from speaking
for artworks to a dialogue with artworks.
Beyond binaries
Bal applies the post-structuralist theories of Barthes and Derrida to word and image
interactions in order to question oppositional binaries and incite dialogue rather than
rivalry between the two forms. Her ‘readings’ of visual and verbal texts dissolve
notions of ‘representational friction’ by applying a deconstructionist lens to ingrained
Tamryn
Bennett
and gendered oppositions, ‘be they
man/woman
or word/image’14 (Pollock, 1993,
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531). Bal emphasises
thereprinted
interdependence
of word
on image
a shared semiotic
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without
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the author
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sphere. For word and image to maintain their relational value they must relate to one
another through a common language. According to Bal, within an ekphrastic context,
poetry and visual art rely on each other for meaning. This dialogue between the two
forms is upheld by Bal and reflected in the ekphrastic ‘conversations’ of
contemporary poets and visual artists. Bal’s interpretive reading of verbal and visual
texts is also linked to a post-structuralist approach and inter-textual discourse. The
concept of ekphrastic rivalry denies dialogue, positing ekphrasis as an isolated literary
genre rather than identifying it, as Barthes did, as a mode ‘that is transferable from
one discourse to another’ (Heffernan, 1993, 193). The trans-disciplinary applications
14
Bal merges feminist theory with Barthes and Derrida’s post-structural approach to reading and
‘deconstructing’ both verbal and visual texts. This perspective subsequently sees Bal favour multiple
interpretations of a text as opposed to fixed textual representations and meanings.
28
of ekphrasis and its ability to generate dialogue can be recognised in recent creative
‘conversations’ between visual art and music, theatre and performance.
Interpreting interpretation
Bal stresses the necessity of interpretation: ‘[s]ince readers and viewers bring to the
texts and images their own cultural and personal baggage, there can be no such thing
as a fixed, predetermined meaning’ (1991, 12). The subjective construction of
meaning has been demonstrated via comparison of Auden and William’s response to
the same artwork by Brueghel. Interpretive difference can similarly be evidenced by
the variation of media, style and expression in the visual interpretations of Medusa by
Caravaggio (1592-1600), Rubens, (1618) and Dali (1941). Bal’s method of
interpretation challenges Heffernan’s definition of ekphrasis as a form of absolute
Tamryn
Bennettinfluences. She argues that the
representation or imitation removed
from contextual
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meaning of verbal
texts is without
only possible
becauseofofthe
the author
tension between the
Not toand
bevisual
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pre-text and the text itself. This pre-text refers to the exchange of narratives and
images between poetry and visual art. Brueghel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
draws from the pre-text of Ovid’s interpretation of this myth. Ovid’s pre-text is in turn
absorbed into the painting which itself becomes a pretext for Auden and Williams’
poems. In responding to Brueghel’s painting, Auden and Williams also engage with
Ovid’s pre-text. This relationship between text and image is seen as intrinsically
bound by Bal. She argues that word and image are inseparable: ‘image does not
replace text; it is one’ (1991, 35).
The notion of ‘representational friction’ and ekphrastic rivalry is further
dissolved by Bal’s concept of pre-text as it exposes shared narratives and
15
Pollock, Griselda. Rev. of ‘Reading ‘Rembrandt’: beyond the Word-Image Opposition’ by Mieke
Bal. The Art Bulletin, vol. 75, no. 3, 1993: p530.
29
representational space between poetry and visual art. This is demonstrated in her
analysis of Rembrandt’s Biblical History paintings. Bal compares the story of Genesis
39 with Rembrandt’s painting, Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife (1655). The three
figures in the painting, presumably Joseph, Potiphar and his wife, were created in
response to the verbal narrative, yet their simultaneous appearance in the same room,
their gestures and expressions suggest a different encounter from the biblical tale.
Interpretation of the painting therefore requires a combined reading of the visual text
and pre-text. This example of a narrative shared between word and image strengthens
the case for interplay rather than representational rivalry. Bal’s concept of pre-textual
interchange is also relevant when examining ekphrastic responses to nonrepresentational artworks. Her understanding of pre-text can be applied to the work of
Shange, Pai and Vicuña as they each incorporate pre-textual narratives to interpret
Tamryn
Bennett
and create a dialogue with the symbols
in the
visual text.
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Bal’sNot
interdependent
interpretation
of poetry
and visual
artauthor
harks back to ut
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without
consent
of the
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pictura poesis (1991). This correspondence and symbiosis of word and image sits at
the other end of the spectrum from Heffernan’s concepts of competition between the
two forms. Bal’s analysis of shared narratives raises the question of why ekphrastic
poetry would seek to supplant the image it feeds on and evokes. A possible answer
can be found in the emergence of a symbiotic dialogue between word and image in
Shange, Pai and Vicuña’s recent works. Ekphrastic dialogue doesn’t attempt to
displace the ‘imageness’ of visual art or the ‘verbality’ of poetry. Instead, it reveals
the possibility for the two art forms to inform and enhance one another rather than
compete with and inhibit each other.
According to Bal, shared myths and images are at the core of the ekphrastic
canon and all exchanges between poetry and visual art. If notions of representational
rivalry are to be believed, they set ekphrastic poems, themselves consumed by and
30
indebted to image, against their own ‘imageness’ (Bal, 1991, 27). Similarly,
ekphrastic poets like Shange, Pai and Vicuña, who are themselves recognized as
visual artists and thus intrinsically connected to the realm of visual art production,
cannot be at war with their own images. The following case studies will argue that
ekphrasis has evolved beyond representational rivalry towards textual-visual dialogue
and coexistence of poetry and visual art. The progression of theories like Bal’s, that
move ‘beyond the word-image opposition,’ are essential if ekphrastic theory is to
remain relevant to contemporary poets, visual artists and audiences.
Tamryn Bennett
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
31
Case Study One
Ntozake Shange: Ridin’ the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings
Ridin' the Moon in Texas: Word Paintings is Shange’s sixth collection of poetry. She
conceived of this book not ‘as an explanation of a visual maze, but as a conversation
that goes on all night long…I speak to these sculptures, woodprints and paintings as I
would to a friend over coffee or champagne’ (1987). It contains a series of Shange’s
poems and prose poems written in response to 15 visual artworks across an array of
media16. Her poems are ekphrastic in that they are ‘based solely on the work of visual
artists’ (Shange, 1987). However, it is the way in which Shange explores the
interchange of word and image that makes this text significant in the analysis of an
ekphrastic evolution and the emergence of dialogue between poetry and visual art.
Tamryn Bennett
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Contesting ekphrastic
Not to beconfines
reprinted without consent of the author
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Shange’s motivation for Ridin' the Moon in Texas stemmed from childhood memories
of her father’s dark room and the ‘images that leapt out of his hands at all hours of the
day and night, whenever he opened that door. I saw color and I saw a story’ (Shange,
1987, xi). Her inspiration for a dialogue with visual art was also influenced by a move
from Manhattan to Houston where she:
…could not make a connection. I touched but felt unmoved. I dug soil, looking for
roots, finding none. I said to myself maybe my spirits are telling me I’m still in New
York skipping around Soho or 57th Street. This I rejected immediately. If I was
anywhere besides Texas, I was roaming the paintings and installations of artists
around the country whose work fed me the nonverbal ambrosia word-users hunger
for. I was hankering for communion with a community I’d lost, for dreams and
visions I couldn’t just fly up to. I asked a number of artists, some of whom were
friends, others unknown to me, if they would allow me to create a verbal dialogue
with their works, finding, seeking out what a poet might find in a tapestry or a
sculpture or a watercolour (1987, xi-xii).
16
Colour reproductions of each artwork accompany their poetic counterparts.
32
Thus the textual-visual ekphrastic ‘conversations’ of Ridin' the Moon in Texas began.
This evolution in ekphrastic practice will be analysed through a selection of Shange’s
poems including the title poem, ‘Ridin’ the Moon in Texas,’ based on Patricia Ollison
Jerrols’ photograph of the same name17; ‘Three Views of Mt. Fuji’ written in response
to Howardena Pindell’s abstract postcard collage; ‘Dream of Pairing (in four parts);
‘between the two of them’ [sic] in response to Wopo Holup’s embossed cement
plates; and ‘Who Needs a Heart’ (in three parts); (Shange, 1987). Her response to
each artwork ranges from a single poem, as in ‘between the two of them’, to three
separate poems on the same artwork as in ‘Who Needs a Heart’ and ‘Conversation
With the Ancestors’ (in five parts). This collection encompasses themes of AfricanAmerican connections to land in ‘Conversations with the Ancestors’, racial
stereotypes in ‘Ridin’ the Moon in Texas’ and the ownership of a heart in ‘Dream of
Pairing’.
Tamryn Bennett
copyright
2008illustrate a shift in contemporary
Shange’s responses to these
seven artworks
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
ekphrastic poetry, away from
concepts of representational rivalry such as Heffernan’s,
www.tamrynbennett.com
towards the end of the word-and-image opposition as championed by Bal. These
poems reveal an ekphrastic evolution on several fronts, beginning with Shange’s
concept of a ‘call-and-response’ textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue with artworks in
place of the ekphrastic tradition of speaking to and for images. Using the call-andresponse structure of African-American music and oral tradition, Shange allowed the
images to act as the call to which she responded in poetry. Despite the impression of
call-and-response, Shange’s dialogue is more akin to a monologue as the visual
artists’ responses to her poetry aren’t included in the collection. Similarly, the
collection doesn’t fit the category of collaboration as the works were not cooperatively created, but rather chosen later. Although the term ekphrasis most
17
The dates of artworks in these three case studies have not been included as they do not always appear
with the reproductions in the original text and are not the focus of these discussions.
33
accurately describes Shange’s poetic responses in Ridin’ the Moon in Texas, it carries
connotations of a context that are at odds with her concept of ‘conversation.’ Also
demonstrating the divergence of Shange’s practice from theories of representational
rivalry is her response to artworks from a cross section of new media and nonrepresentational media previously excluded from conventional ekphrastic poetry and
subsequently ekphrastic theory.
Contextualising Shange’s cross-disciplinary conversations
The following overview of Shange’s background and interdisciplinary influences will
help to contextualise her connection to, and creation of, textual-visual ekphrastic
dialogue in Ridin’ the Moon in Texas. Shange identifies primarily as a poet. She is
also a playwright, novelist, installation artist, black feminist and essayist. Born
Bennett
Paulette Williams in New Jersey Tamryn
in 1948, her
childhood was split between the artistic
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and intellectual
of her parents
and their
creativeofroll-call
of friends
Notinfluences
to be reprinted
without
consent
the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
including Paul Robeson, Dizzy Gillespie, W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White, and the
racism and violence she encountered as one of the first African-American children to
attend a non-segregated school (Blackwell, 1979). In 1966, Shange enrolled at
Barnard College. She graduated with honours in American Studies despite the
personal turmoil of her marriage breakdown and several failed suicide attempts. Her
studies continued with a Masters Degree in the same field, during which time she
changed her name from Williams to Shange18 (Kosseh-Kamanda, 2006).
Shange’s experiences ignited the investigation of race, gender and female
18
Ntozake Shange is pronounced En-toe-zok-ee Shan-gay, and is adopted from a Zulu dialect.
According to Kosseh-Kamanda, Ntozake translates as ‘she who comes into her own things’ and
Shange signifies ‘she who walks like a lion’ (2006). A statement often associated with Shange’s name
change comes from an interview with Neal A. Lester, in which she explained, ‘I'm a firm believer that
language and how we use language determines how we act, and how we act then determines our lives
and other people's lives’ (1990).
34
repression in her writing. She returned to her interdisciplinary roots in music and
dance to explore these issues, which led to her collaborative creation of a new genre
in American theatre, the choreopoem. This new genre blended poetry, music and
dance as exemplified in her first major work, For colored girls who have considered
suicide/when the rainbow is enuf: a choreopoem (1975). The cross-disciplinary
collaboration initiated in the choreopoem continues to influence her dialogue with
visual artists and artworks in Ridin’ the Moon in Texas.
Conversation not competition: ‘Three Views of Mt. Fuji’
Shange’s notion of an ekphrastic ‘conversation’ dissolves the theoretical antagonism
between verbal and visual forms by proposing a dialogue rather than a debate. This
sense of ekphrastic ‘conversation’ is heightened by Shange’s use of African-
Tamryn
American vernacular, slang and rhythms
as Bennett
well as unorthodox capitalisation,
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punctuation Not
and spelling.
In the prosewithout
poem, ‘Three
Viewsofofthe
Mt. author
Fuji’, based on
to be reprinted
consent
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Pindell’s artwork of the same name, Shange applies these techniques to retell the
story of Melissa and her sister on a drunken afternoon in an American town. The
poem is written as if spoken directly by someone inside the scene:
she got her sister to ride wit her to the liquor store / waz
most 10:00 awready / wdnt be no more wine till monday /
if they misst this. the fog lifted to let her thru. red lights
faded as she drew near. her sister waited in the car, chewing
gum. shakin her head/ melissa’s loosin [sic] her mind. &
she chewed harder19 (Shange, 1987, 19).
Shange’s broken sentences and informal spelling complement Pindell’s cut and paste
collage made from tempera, gouache and slices of postcards. Missing letters from
words like ‘wdnt’, ‘misst’, ‘thru’ and ‘shakin’ echo the cut out sections of the collage.
19
Through out this thesis every attempt had been made to remain true to the format, grammar, spelling
and punctuation of the poems as they appear in the original texts. This also applied to the punctuation
of poem titles. Where the symbol / appears mid sentence it is taken from Shange’s original use of the
symbol to represent a pause or change of direction in the text, a kind of hybrid poetry/theatre beat.
35
Imagery of a car moving through fog and sets of lights can be linked to the swirling,
rollercoaster motion of the postcards, which also ties into the scene of Melissa ‘shakin
her head’ and ‘loosin her mind’ (Shange, 1987, 19).
Shange constructs a ‘conversation’ with the image as if it were a bar full of
people talking and drinking at the ‘razzmatazz café’, ‘a poet’s bar / or a bar tended by
poets / a poet’s enclave / a poet’s shadow / somewhere safe to hide’ (1987, 19). She
interweaves direct speech with details of the fictional characters and bar to emphasise
the impression of dialogue. An example of this is Melissa’s interaction with a poet:
i didn’t call you. he snarled. tugging her arm up against his
chest. I didn’t want to see you tonight. he seemed more disappointed
than angry / more frightened than fearsome / melissa
lingered in the damp of his chest. i wanted to hear some poems.
i needed some poems and voices nearby. it’s not good to drink
alone. & she nodded toward her sister reading The Daily Life of the Aztecs under the
phone (Shange, 1987, 20).
The slide into first person narration
focuses Bennett
the audience on one specific conversation
Tamryn
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
of the exchange as ‘melissawww.tamrynbennett.com
lingered in the damp of his chest’ (Shange, 1987, 20).
in a bar full of voices. This perspective stresses the emotional and physical closeness
Melissa’s need for ‘some poems and voices nearby’ recalls the spoken element of
conversation, a form that eludes both ekphrasis on the page or the image it draws
from. This dialogue is continued in the form of a midnight phone call. After the bar
Melissa returned home and ‘climbed into her bed by the sea/ cried a thousand smiths/
each one breakin her skin…/& when he called/ she sounded regular…yes/ i’ll be
there’ (Shange, 1987, 22). This is the sixth direct reference in the poem to
conversation, phones and voices. Although the absence of Pindell’s response to the
poem prevents the ‘conversation’ from being completed in this collection, these
recurring references to dialogue establish the sense of a reciprocal relationship rather
than a ‘contest between rival modes of representation: between the driving force of
the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image’ (Heffernan, 1993,
36
6). This interchange, combined with the use of black vernacular and the call-andresponse structure, demonstrates an evolution beyond conventional ekphrastic forms
seen in Auden and Ashbery’s poems.
Excluded ekphrastic voices: ‘Ridin’ the Moon in Texas’
Shange’s use of dialogue and stylised use of black vernacular also challenges
gendered binaries of the ‘verbality’ (Bal, 1991) of poetry and the mute state of visual
art. This is exemplified in the title prose-poem ‘Ridin’ the Moon in Texas.’ The poem
was written in response to Jerrol’s photograph of an African-American cowboy who
is holding the reins of a horse and a can of orange soda. It is narrated by three
African-American women who are overturning the masculine stereotype of the
‘Houston Rodeo & Livestock Show’ by entering the ring:
Bennett
You know this is our night,Tamryn
the All-Women’s
Rodeo, Navasota, Texas, honey.
We the stars this evening, girl,
even
if
you
gotta itch in your twat—
copyright do
2008
them races come first—you got some business out yonder—huh!—
Not
tocheck
be Dallas—you
reprintedreally
without
consent
of chick
the author
you
better
gonna let
that Jamaican
use your horse
for calf-roping? (Shange,
1987,
6-7).
www.tamrynbennett.com
Shange’s use of black vernacular is not only reflective of her context or concept of
ekphrastic ‘conversation’, it also raises questions about whose voices have been
excluded from the canon of ekphrastic poetry. The ‘All Women’s Rodeo’ is a symbol
of female strength and independence where ‘them races come first’ rather than
gender. The concept of excluded voice and repression can also be linked to the
gendered origins of ekphrasis: prosopopeia. Prosopopeia traditionally involved the
male poet speaking to and for the mute, feminine image (Heffernan, 1993,7). ‘Ridin’
the Moon in Texas’ overturns this ekphrastic tradition by creating a conversation with
the artwork. In addition, the ekphrastic roles of masculine voice and mute female
image are inverted as the masculine image of a cowboy is responded to by a female
poet. The masculine image enters into a female driven dialogue: ‘[t]he hairs from her
37
thighs creeping like ferns from her navel. Women and horses. Black women and
horses. An all-women’s rodeo. What’s next?’ (Shange, 1987, 10). The role of
Shange’s cowgirls is manifold in that they readdress gender and racial stereotypes
while simultaneously defying the ingrained acceptance of a masculine ekphrastic
voice. This example of textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue in ‘Ridin’ the Moon in
Texas’ challenges gendered binaries which fuel concepts of ekphrastic rivalry.
Modern muses: ‘Dream of Pairing’
Shange’s poem ‘Dream of Pairing,’ written in response to Puryear’s minimalist
abstract painting of the same title, demonstrates the progression of ekphrasis in
response to contemporary artworks. The contemporary composition of the image is
reflected through Shange’s use of informal punctuation, grammar, rhythm and
Tamryn
Bennett
references to modern events, people
and icons:
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iNot
dreamto
of be
coupling
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discovering the stranger wo’d be one with me
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i dream all night long
of this man
his face changes but is always full of love
for me/ sometimes i manage to hold his hand
once we danced at Xenon’s to LaBelle
but it might have been the Jacksons
he threw me over his head & drew
me tween his legs like those old
WWII jitter buggers/ the way George
Faison did at Magique on Motown’s 25th
anniversary party… (Shange, 1987,53).
the author
The poem enters into a conversation with Puryear’s artwork by mirroring a ‘dream of
coupling.’ The first line of the poem teeters on the edge of a traditional ekphrastic
response in that it closely resembles the artwork, except that the ‘i’ of the first four
lines is invisible. Shange invents a vessel for dialogue since the artwork is void of
identifiable characters, myths and multiple layers of art criticism that conventional
38
ekphrastic poetry is often pinned to20. She draws on the universal connection of
dreaming of potential partners, as well as appropriating icons of popular culture, to
create a shared pretext and common language between word and image. This is
exemplified in popular social and cultural references to ‘the Jacksons,’ ‘WWII jitter
buggers’ and Motown. This poem speaks with a contemporary artwork via
contemporary culture and a shared context, whereas Heffernan and Bal mediate word
and image through the retrospective lens of the museum. Shange removes ekphrastic
poetry from the regulations of the museum to enter into a contemporary
correspondence. This new approach illustrates the need for ekphrastic theory to
evolve with developments in visual media and ekphrastic responses to contemporary
artworks.
Reinterpreting myth: ‘betweenTamryn
the two ofBennett
them’
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Shange’s response
non-representational
artwork
in newof
media
requires a shift
Not totobe
reprinted without
consent
the also
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
from ekphrastic representation to ekphrastic interpretation. Rather than representing
an artwork that is itself non-representational, she interprets it via txtual-visual
ekphrastic dialogue. This move towards interpretation contradicts Heffernan’s
insistence that ekphrasis ‘represents representation itself’ (1993,4). Her poem,
‘between the two of them,’ written in response to Holup’s embossed cement plates
titled Leda and the Swan, demonstrates this intertextual interpretation. Both the poem
and artwork reinterpret the myth. An example of Shange’s recontextualisation is
shown through her use of black vernacular:
it musta happened to you/it
couldn’t just be me/ who got her head turned
by a bird/ not an ordinary pigeon/hangs out
near Grand Central/or some cock parading
past Three Roses/ but a plush ol’
20
Puryear’s artwork is characteristic of the modern and post-modern movement away from a purely
representational aesthetic.
39
son of a gun / justa glidin’ through the water
leanin’ his head from left to right /
Cab Calloway in slow motion / with
eyes gazin’ blasphemous right thru to my G-spot (Shange, 1987, 59).
Colloquialisms like ‘it musta’ and ‘plush ol’ son of a gun’ transport the myth from its
ancient origins to the present day. The language of the poem also reflects Shange’s
culturally specific lens, which raises questions of individual influence and context that
contradict Heffernan’s definition of ekphrastic representation. Shange personifies the
bird as a cocky jazz musician akin to ‘Cab Calloway in slow motion’ (1987, 59). Her
stylised language and reference to Cab Calloway draw from African-American
popular culture. Her interpretation of the swan is dramatically different from Yeats’
1928 depiction, despite both poems sharing the same mythic pretext. Where Yeats
implied the rape with imagery like ‘her thighs caressed/ [b]y the dark webs, her nape
caught in his bill’ (1928), Shange’s response reflects a more sexually explicit context,
Tamryn Bennett
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‘with eyes gazin’ blasphemous right
thru to my2008
G-spot’ (1987, 59). These differing
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
ekphrastic ‘representations’www.tamrynbennett.com
demonstrate that ‘representation’ is not fixed. The poems
are instead interpretations. The existence of such diverse reinterpretations reinforces
the argument for ekphrastic interpretation and dialogue rather than representation and
rivalry. This comparison exemplifies the influence of individual experience in
ekphrastic responses and an evolution from representation toward interpretation.
Reinterpreting representation: ‘Conversation With the Ancestors’
Shange’s series of poems, ‘Conversation With the Ancestors,’ based on Arturo
Lindsay’s abstract painting, Indigo’s Emergency Care For Wounds That Cannot Be
Seen, present a combined example of the two previous points via its interpretation of a
non-representational artwork. The first poem in the series is ‘ancestral
messengers/composition 11’ (1987, 13). A direct ekphrastic representation of
40
Lindsay’s artwork could possibly result in a description of hand-written text and seashells overlaid on a background of indigo and pink paint. Conventional ekphrastic
poetry responds to identifiable figures and scenes, whereas here, Shange interprets
colour and text to create a ‘conversation’ with ancestral lands and spirits:
they told me to travel toward the sun
to lift my feet from the soil
engage myself to the wind in a dance called my own/
my legs, wings of lavender & mauve
they carried me to the sun-cave
the light sweet shadows eclipsing our tongues (1987, 13)
She inserts the characters of ‘me’, ‘they’ and ‘we’ into a visual landscape void of
human figures. This method of interpretation enables Shange to extend her
‘Conversation With the Ancestors’ so as to speak ‘in the tongue of the snake/ the hoot
of the owl/ tongues of our ancestors dancing with the wind’ (1987, 13). Under
Heffernan’s definition of ekphrastic representation, there is little room for this kind of
Tamryn
Bennett
interpretive dialogue with artworks
that ultimately
enriches understanding of both the
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artwork and Not
the poem.
poem moves
beyond
representation
thus eliminates
to beThis
reprinted
without
consent
of theand
author
grounds for representationalwww.tamrynbennett.com
rivalry.
Reinforcing this argument of ekphrastic interpretation are Shange’s multiple
responses to a single artwork. In ‘ancestral messengers/composition 13’ ekphrastic
interpretation is pushed even further. The poem again responds to Lindsay’s collage,
but Shange’s dialogue is now conducted with an invisible landlord and a character
called ‘señora rodriguez’ who is trying to transport a goat, via the elevator, to the 13th
floor of her apartment to provide fresh milk for her baby (Shange, 1987, 14). Despite
an absence of human figures and animals, the following extract shows how the poem
interprets the collage as if two figures and a goat were arguing:
no, señora rodriguez
you cannot bring the goat to the 13th floor
you must get rid of the chickens, too
yes, señora, i understand the
goat’s fresh milk is best for the baby
but the goat cannot go on the elevator to the 13th floor…
41
…it’s against the law, señora
how can i tell you the goat is not
against the law/ animals are not
against the law/ it’s just that
living creatures are not welcome here (1987, 14).
The motif of conversation and cultural practice reoccurs but the poem shifts focus from
ancestral lands to an inner city apartment where ‘living creatures are not welcome’ (1987, 14).
Language again serves as a vehicle for social critique in that the misinterpretation stems from
migration and displacement from land and a lack of understanding of cultural connections.
The fourth poem in this series, ‘2 march 1984 (cowry shells & heart)’ reinterprets the
same shells and shades of indigo and pink to now convey the ‘red then pinkish’ blush of ‘our
largest industry/our most marketable product’ (1987, 16): love. It begins with the
commodification of emotions:
we sing so much of love
we carry walkmans and sony tape recorders
am/fm stations blaring/even though
Tamryn Bennett
our rhythms
our guitar pulses
copyright
are prohibited on the subway
(1987, 16). 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
The commericalisation of love songs can again be read as a loss of connection to the tradition
of ‘our rhythms/our guitar pulses’ (1987,16). The ‘am/fm stations’ continue to blare
references to black singers like ‘chaka khan’ or ‘b.b.’s moans’ throughout the poem. These
African-American references emphasise the cultural specificity of, and individual
interpretation contained within, Shange’s responses.
In the fifth and final poem of the series ‘18 march 1984’ Shange returns to the theme
of ancestral lands where:
spanish moss men
machetes in hand
cut back the can the pines & cypress
take back the soil that is our own
the cotton red with blood
rice rotting our legs away (1987, 17).
This poem cycles back to the connections with land and’ soil that is our own’ as in ‘ancestral
messengers/composition 11’. The influence of pink and indigo is echoed in the imagery of
42
‘cotton red with blood’ (1987, 17) This spectrum of responses to the one artwork challenges
the relevance of fixed representation, especially in post-modern artworks, where meaning is
fluid. Not only has visual media evolved beyond representation, so too have contemporary
ekphrastic responses to it.
Multiple interpretations: ‘Who Needs a Heart’
Multiple interpretations of the same artwork also fuel Shange’s ‘conversations’ in the
poem ‘Who Needs a Heart,’ based on Linda Graetz’s painting of the same title. The
abstract painting, in varying shades of blood red, uses sharp angles to support a
comparison between a machine or industrial scene and the inner workings of a heart.
Shange responds to the acrylic heart by creating a human shell in the form of a
starving South African girl. The angles can be read as the bones of the starving girl,
Tamryn
Bennett
the red reflective of her fear and the
meat she
imagines:
copyright 2008
somewhere
in soweto there’s
a small girl
Not
to be reprinted
without
consent of
she’s brown thin & frightened
www.tamrynbennett.com
she eats cardboard
sometimes she’s hungry
and makes believe it’s bread and meat
warm meat with butter & salt (Shange, 1987, 33).
the author
The poem interprets and embodies the abstract lines and colour instead of directly
describing the red angles on the canvas. This is an approach supported by Bal because
of the way reinterpretation creates an exchange of meaning. Bal argues that ‘meaning
only becomes possible because of a creative, or rather created tension between the
pre-text and the text itself’ (Pollock, 1993, 530). In other words, the meaning of an
artwork is reliant on signs, symbols and stories inside and outside the work.
Ekphrastic poems like Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ or Ashbery’s ‘Self Portrait in
a Convex Mirror’ are imbued with, and surrounded by, the pre-text of myths and art
criticism. Contemporary artworks like Who Needs a Heart have few or none of these
pre-texts to draw from. Therefore, Shange fuses external experiences with an
43
interpretation of signs and symbols within the image. These external influences
enable different dialogues with the same artwork.
‘Pages for a friend’ is the second poem written in response to Graetz’s work.
Shange reinterprets the angles of the mechanical heart as the desperate isolation of
prairie women who lived through letters from friends. The red that previously
symbolised fear and hunger now triggers imagery of fire, loneliness and death:
pages for a friend kept many a prairie
woman / lingering by her fire in a sod house
from committing suicide / some prairie
women killed themselves anyway
the letters from their friends
crushed in their fists (Shange, 1987, 34).
Although the heart still seems present within the poem, Shange’s second
interpretation gives voice to a scene from a radically different social and political
perspective. The tone of hopelessness remains but the starving girl is replaced by
‘many a prairie woman/lingeringTamryn
by her fireBennett
in a sod house’ (1987, 34). The
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imagination Not
that saves
small girl in
Soweto consent
is nowhereof
in the
sightauthor
for the ‘prairie
to bethereprinted
without
www.tamrynbennett.com
women who killed themselves
anyway’ (1987, 34). Imagination was not enough to
transport them from their sod houses to somewhere else.
A young girl narrates the third poem in this series, ‘Walk, Jump, Fly’. Her
character is again distinct from the first girl in ‘Who Needs a Heart’ as she claws at
her ‘mommy’ for attention so she can tell her about the rollercoaster of school
emotions where nobody likes her then she gets ‘27 valentines’ (Shange’, 1987, 35).
‘Walk, Jump, Fly’ is different from the other poems in tone, style and point of view,
with the girl repeatedly calling out:
mommy can you see me now
mommy can i tell you something
mommy we need to give jesus
something he’s been in a cave for three days (Shange, 1987, 34).
44
The repetition of the question ‘mommy can i…’ for twenty seven lines out of the total
thirty six of the poem, emphasises Shange’s attempt to ‘converse’ with the artworks,
in this instance, by calling for an answer. These three vastly different dialogues with
Graetz’s artwork demonstrate an evolution towards ekphrastic interpretation and an
overcoming of representational rivalry.
Concluding ekphrastic conversations
The ekphrastic ‘conversations’ examined in this case study reveal an evolution in
contemporary practice that traditional ekphrastic theory has so far failed to
acknowledge. This progression beyond representational rivalry is evidenced by
Shange’s rejection of the ekphrastic label in favour of an interpretive dialogue with
artists and artworks. Her engagement with artworks in non-traditional media also
contends the concept of absolute Tamryn
ekphrasticBennett
representation as well as readdressing
copyright 2008
gendered stereotypes
by speaking
with
rather than
to or forofvisual
Ultimately,
Not to be
reprinted
without
consent
the art.
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
Ridin’ the Moon in Texas illustrates the ways in which contemporary ekphrastic
practice has exceeded the confines of ekphrastic criticism. This analysis of Shange’s
‘conversations’ enables a deeper dissection of other, more recent, developments in
textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue.
45
Case Study Two
Shin Yu Pai: Nutritional Feed
Shin Yu Pai is an American poet and visual artist. Her work consistently examines
interactions between visual and verbal languages. In Nutritional Feed, 2007, Pai’s
eighth collection of poetry, she engages in textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue with
David Lukowski’s artworks. Nutritional Feed is an interrogation of American culture
in which Pai and Lukowski critique force-fed ideology in popular culture, education
and the media. She describes this collaborative manuscript as ‘a conversation between
language and the visual,’(2008) rather than a collection of ekphrastic poems. Pai
began writing in response to Lukowski’s artworks during a residency at the
MacDowell Colony. As the ‘conversation’ continued, Lukowski ‘provided other
paintings which [Pai] composed responses for’ (Pai, 2007). This extended dialogue
Tamryn Bennett
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2008
between twenty-one poems, and an
equal number
of artworks, illustrates a significant
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
transformation in recent ekphrastic
practice via the collaboration of contemporary
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artists working with new media21. Pai’s approach contends conventional ekphrasis
that mediates images through the institute of the museum; instead, she directly
appropriates visual symbols as icons from modern artworks. The result is a symbiotic
conversation that questions the commercialisation and commodification of word and
image rather than a competition between poetry and visual art. This evolution in
ekphrastic practice will be examined via Pai’s poems ‘suck squeeze bang blow’;
‘sonagram’; ‘corporate ladder’; ‘lucky strike’; ‘optometrist’; ‘(brain) storm’; ‘bedtime story’; ‘it does a body good’; ‘the mr. butch show’ and ‘ibid x ∞’.
21
The equality of verbal and visual expression places Nutritional Feed into the category Khalfa calls
the ‘book of dialogue’ (Khalfa, 2001,159). This category is defined by ‘[t]he diversity of approaches,
intentions and creations’ (Khalfa, 2001, 159) of dialogue between poetry and visual art within the form
of the book.
46
Interdisciplinary background and collaborative beginnings
Pai’s practice oscillates between the often-oppositional realms of word and image.
Her interdisciplinary approach to textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue stems from her
background studies in Writing and Poetics at the School of the Art Institute of
Chicago and a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology at the University of Washington.
As a visual artist, her work has been exhibited at The Dallas Museum of Art, The
MAC, Harvard University and The Paterson Museum. She has collaborated with
artists across disciplines, working with Hedwig Dances, theatre et al, as well as
sculptor and video artist Larry Lee. In her first major collection of poetry,
Equivalence, 2003, Pai set out to ‘converse’ with artworks by Alfred Stieglitz,
Wolfgang Laib, Felix Gonzales-Torres, and Yoko Ono among others. The structure of
these ‘conversations’ echoed a sense of traditional distance as artists like Yoko Ono
are surrounded by ‘pretexts’ (Bal,Tamryn
1991) thatBennett
can influence responses to their artwork.
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Since then, Pai’s
continuedwithout
to challenge
ekphrastic
convention
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close collaborations with contemporary visual artists and experiments with
typographic elements of concrete poetry as seen in the visual text collaborations of
Unnecessary Roughness, 2005,with photographer Ference Suto and Structure of the
Inner Ear, unpublished, based on ink drawings by Steven LaRose. These crossdisciplinary collaborations inform her rejection of representational rivalry in favour of
textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue. Of her ekphrastic position she states, ‘I believe in
interdisciplinary virtuosity. Dialectics and binaries no longer interest me’ (Pai, 2008).
This perspective connects her to Bal in the attempt to move beyond the word-andimage opposition that divides poetry and visual art.
47
Speaking with artworks: ‘suck squeeze bang blow’
The collaborative approach to ekphrasis in Nutritional Feed dissolves disciplinary
boundaries that fuel notions of paragonal struggle between poetry and visual art. Pai’s
poetry sheds the gendered history of speaking to and for image; instead, it speaks with
visual artworks. The tradition of envoicing mute female images by male poets is
overturned in Nutritional Feed as the female poet responds to masculine artworks.
The focus is on a shared visual and verbal language of common cultural experience.
This is exemplified in the poem ‘suck squeeze bang blow’ based on the mixed media
artwork of the same name. The image contains Lukowski’s trademark appropriation
of popular cultural icons, in this case, the face of Charlie Brown and another gun
toting cartoon character dressed in pink pyjamas. In the middle of the artwork is the
underlined text link akin to the mantra of the internet age: ‘click here to apply’. In
Tamryn Bennett
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loosely
sewn
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to be reprinted without consent of the author
spaghetti western
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story of the good
& the ugly
response Pai creates a:
the bad
(2007, 50).
In the final line of the poem, Pai appropriates the text ‘click here to apply’ which
emphasises a common verbal and visual language. Both the poem and image reflect a
shared American experience of childhood cartoons with subtextual layers of violence.
This process of fluid exchange between word and image is a significant departure
from traditional ekphrastic poetry like Ashbery’s Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror,
which was written 450 years after the creation of Parmigianino’s original work.
Collaboration between contemporary artists intercepts the cycle of retrospective
criticism that has allowed a chasm to appear between contemporary ekphrastic
practice and ekphrastic theory.
48
Verbal appropriation of visual appropriation: ‘sonagram’ and ‘lucky strike’
Pai’s approach to ekphrastic collaboration moves closer to resolving representational
friction via shared visual and verbal cultural experiences. Of this method, she says
‘[t]o enter the conversation, I think it is important to understand the art-making
process and worldview [sic] of the other, in general. To get into the inside of that
experience’ (Pai, 2008). In response to Lukowski’s process of appropriating popular
culture, Pai ‘indulged in a creative experiment where [she] allowed [her]self to
respond to his work by appropriating his own process’ (2008). Her borrowing of
Lukowski’s icons, symbols and text enhances the sense of a dialogue, in that social
influences and political themes are reflected, repeated and expanded upon. Through
this shared language, Pai is also able to respond to the tone, style and pace of
Lukowski’s works in the same way she might to the mood of a person during
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This Not
idea of
shared
verbal and
visual language
exemplified
in the poem
to abe
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without
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conversation.
‘sonagram’ written in response to Lukowski’s work, massive coronary. In the
background of the artwork, behind a mass of arteries, are three painted MacDonald’s
Big Macs and a ‘Nutritional Facts’ table calculating the number of calories per serve.
Pai has responded by formatting the final stanza of her poem into the shape of the
‘Nutritional Facts’ table. The column that previously showed percentages of fat now
reads:
packaged
facts:
the temperature
the walls of
ascending
muscles, game
the red suit
is avoided/consumed
as recommended
quadruple
to avoid
nutritional
caloric units
of heat raise
within
the heart
descending
play
in amounts
perform
bypass
obstruction
49
the taste
of rawness
against feathers
weighed
Pai not only appropriates Lukowski’s use of symbols but also his critique of corporate
nutritional compromise and the impact calorie-soaked food has on the heart. Her
poem reflects and reinforces his questioning of mainstream, force-fed attitudes, be
they to food or media. This collaborative exchange between poetry and visual art
demonstrates the ability of ekphrasis to operate as part of an interwoven system of
visual and verbal signs and symbols that converse, rather than compete, with each
other.
An extended interchange of visual and verbal texts occurs in the ekphrastic
dialogue between the poem ‘lucky strike’ and the mixed media painting found the
pocket. Lukowski’s images of red and white bowling pins and the text ‘201 lbs’
Tamryn Bennett
invoke the epitome of American indoor
sports,2008
ten pin bowling. Despite the overt
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Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
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visual prompts, Pai’s response draws parallels to the title reference of a snooker
game:
on the pocket
eye-hand coordination
cuestick
eight
-ball crack
hot oracle
boner in
the corner
snatch (2007, 26).
Below this text Pai has inserted the circular logo of ‘Lucky Strike’ cigarettes,
simultaneously summoning bowling alley terminology while reversing the role of
verbal language in the appropriation of visual popular culture. Instead of passively
feeding on visual symbols and icons, like conventional ekphrastic poetry, Pai injects
her own into the poem.
50
Concrete ekphrasis: ‘corporate ladder’, ‘optometrist’, ‘bed-time story’ and
‘(brain) storm’.
Visual appropriation is a recurring technique employed by Pai to fuel textual-visual
ekphrastic dialogue with Lukowski’s artworks. Aside from copying icons, she
experiments with the visual fields of concrete and spatial poetry:
[b]y studying David’s paintings, obvious organic forms presented themselves to me, whether
the shapeliness of a poem or a physical structure – in the case of “bed-time story” – a boxlike form that would mimic a television set. The form of “optometrist” was not explicit in
David’s painting, but the title came [to] me [as] the perfect starting point to create a piece
resembling an eye-chart. I started with handsketching the shape of the poem and then filling
in the gaps (Pai, 2008).
Concrete poetry, like artist books and illustrations, are forms that have rarely been
considered inside ekphrastic studies, despite their response to visual artworks (Khalfa,
2001). The typographic assembly of Nutritional Feed forces the audience to view text
as a visual construction. In conventional ekphrastic theory and poetry, the spatial and
Bennett
visual significance of text is oftenTamryn
overlooked
as a means of evoking artworks. Pai’s
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spatial experiments
visual icons
and symbols
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be adaptations
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consent
of theenhance
authorthe poems’
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connection and ability to recall
the style of Lukowski’s artworks. For her, the decision
to create typographic ekphrastic response was intuitive:
‘It made sense in NF to incorporate multiple approaches to language…There is so much to
look at and talk about in David’s work that the polyvocal visual/ekphrastic approach felt
completely appropriate and true to the material’ (2008).
The exclusion of spatial arrangements of ekphrastic poetry is readdressed in the
analysis of four of Pai’s concrete, ekphrastic poems, ‘corporate ladder’, ‘optometrist’
‘bed-time story’ and ‘(brain) storm’.
In the poem ‘corporate ladder’, based on Lukowski’s artwork of the same
name, Pai shapes the text into a stepladder with each new line forming a rung. The
spatial arrangement of the poem does not distract Pai from the purpose of her
ekphrastic response as she creates a staccato, shopping list style string of advertising
slogans like ‘we want tuna that tastes great, not tuna w/great taste’ (2007, 18). This
51
list of brands and slogans is stylistically reflective of Lukowski’s layered collage of
tuna tin mascots, American dollar bills and other advertising material. Pai’s use of
advertising jargon and brand names increases the sense of a ‘conversation’ in that her
poems respond to a theme or topic in Lukowski’s artworks, the same way a person
might in a discussion. The poem ‘optometrist’, again shares its title with an artwork
but the connection between Pai’s spatial composition of an eye chart and Lukowski’s
cardboard cartoon figures is more ornamental than ekphrastically engaged. The six
lines of the poem reference visual components in the artwork like an inky fingerprint
and layered veneer of advertisements rather than responding to the social and political
issues raised in the work:
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Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
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Fig. 1 Shin Yu Pai. ‘Optometrist’ in Nutritional Feed, Advanced Readers Copy. Vermont:
Tupelo Press, 2007.20 August 2008 <http://www.kickingwind.com/92506.html>
The ‘imageness’ (Bal, 1991) of ekphrastic poetry is further emphasised by the spatial
composition of Pai’s poem. Similarly, the poem ‘bed-time story’ mimics the form of a
television set, complete with antennae. It was written in response to Lukowski’s
artwork which depicts a square of static inside a strip of yellow, red and blue painted
52
shapes. Pai borrows the artwork’s title, bed-time story, to engage in a cultural attack
on T.V dinners of ‘mac & cheese’ and ‘chicken pot pie’, childhood obesity and the
reality of television replacing parenting and bed-time stories. This ekphrastic dialogue
allows for a more overt verbal interrogation of what the media is feeding people.
Pai’s typographic arrangement of ‘(brain) storm’ explicitly references the
spatial experiments of concrete poets like Guillaume Apollinaire. The artwork is void
of traditional narrative so Pai instead draws on the media of cardboard boxes and
plastic, as well as the illustrations of wind pressure systems in the middle of the work.
It is the background text, ‘Aprilaire,’ printed on the cardboard boxes, that provides an
opening to reference Apollinaire rather than images in the artwork itself. Pai opens
the poem by repeatedly shaping the words ‘vapor’ into vertical lines that resemble the
movement of vapour or steam. This shape recalls Apollinaire’s poem ‘Heart’ with its
Tamryn
Bennett
‘flame turned upside down’ (Apollinaire
[trans.]1971,166).
Towards the end of the
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poem she returns
to the
subject of
the artwork
‘storms
& drafts’. The
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beenvironmental
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consent
of the
author
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final lines predict the fate of the artwork
at 25% humidity and dropping
the sketch begins
to fade
paint dried
solid remains (Pai, 2007).
Non-representational responses: ‘it does a body good’ and ‘heads up [7up]’
Another ekphrastic evolution exhibited in Nutritional Feed is Pai’s response to
Lukowski’s non-representational artworks. As this thesis has discussed, developments
in new visual media have resulted in some visual artists moving away from the
creation of traditional narrative or mythic artworks with defined characters.
Lukowski’s mixed media artworks exemplify this contemporary shift; his works, like
it does a body good or heads up 7 up, are reflective of personal experiences and
53
memories rather than identifiable representations. Pai explains that Nutritional Feed
contains personal narratives for the artists:
David’s childhood is in the paintings, and my childhood is in the poems – “it does a body
good” is about being lactose intolerant but being forcefed [sic] mainstream nutritional
values; “heads up 7 up” is about an American game that teachers subject their students to
– it’s really a classroom management tool that is unrelated to education – like the slogans
and practices that I was taught to integrate at an early age (Pai, 2008).
It is this kind of personal experience that informs the textual-visual ekphrastic
dialogue between Lukowski’s row of pale blue plastic milk cartons and Pai’s critique
of the construction of the nutritional pyramid. The artwork, titled 38,994 38,995 caps
to go for a school computer, references the competitions where school kids collected
milk caps to win prizes. To engage in a ‘conversation’ with the image, Pai draws on
her experience of being lactose intolerant. This context leads to her critique of the
construction of the Western nutritional pyramid in which she comments:
Tamryn
Bennett
the
food
pyramid 2008
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was not 3-5 built
Not to be reprinted
without consent of the author
by SERVINGS IN A DAY M.D.s
or nutritional
experts but the agricultural industry
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HOOD®ed promotions
from the diary farmers
of America
build strong teeth
&
bones,
grow
lactose
intolerance
flatulence
& the runs
Her response interprets Lukowski’s work rather than attempting to represent it. This
exchange of visual and verbal narratives demonstrates how context influences textualvisual ekphrastic dialogue.
In the poem ‘heads up [7up]’ Pai questions the motivation behind educational
drills like ‘stop drop & roll or duck & cover’ (2007, 14). The ordering tone of the
54
opening stanza, ‘nap time/ quiet time/ no more questions/ close eyes & follow
directions’ feeds on the critical spark ignited by Lukowski’s image of exposed brain
matter that a character from Doctor Seuss is fingering with an oversized glove. This
sense of command, combined with the line ‘socialize acculturate indoctrinate rules’
works to destabilise the ideology of educational programming. Again, in the final line
of the poem, ‘green eggs w/ham’ (2007, 14) Pai references Lukowski’s appropriation
of the childhood icon ‘The Cat in the Hat’. The example of ekphrastic dialogue in
‘heads up [7up]’ demonstrates the interconnectedness and interchangeability of verbal
and visual signifiers. This ‘increasingly common language’ (Bal, 1991, xiv) edges
word and image ever closer to overcoming theoretical opposition.
Pai’s pretext: ‘the mr. butch show’
Tamryn
Bennettnon-representational artworks
An understanding of Pai’s dialogue
with Lukowski’s
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can be enhanced
Bal’s concept
of ‘pretext’
herthe
ekphrastic
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to applying
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without
consentto of
authorresponse in
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‘the mr. butch show’. The poem’s title is taken from Lukowski’s mixed media
artwork which is characteristically void of identifiable characters; instead a row of
black and white block prints of a volcano have been glued on the right hand side
while the rest of the work is painted in patches of blue and yellow. It is Pai’s
pretextual experience of Mr. Butch, rather than a direct visual representation, that
allows her to engage in a conversation with the artwork. In an interview with La
Petite Zine, Pai describes Mr Butch as:
a 6-foot tall black homeless artist who hung out at the intersection of Harvard
Ave and Comm Ave. People who lived in Allston during a certain generation
knew Mr. Butch. He played guitar … in front of Marty's Liquors. He hung out
with B.U. students and went to their parties. He was a fixture on the Allston
scene when I lived in Boston from ’93-’97, and when we moved back from
2001-2004 he was still there… He contributed to cultural production by
playing his music on the street and being a very public personality (2008).
55
These encounters with Mr. Butch inform Pai’s ‘Q & A’ style dialogue with the
artwork. Like the majority of ‘conversations’ in Nutritional Feed about
commodification and commercialisation of culture, ‘the mr. butch show’ comments
on the way he became an icon:
appearing now
in the Allston
Panhandle
flat broke &
homeless (Pai, 2007, 40).
Pai and Lukowski’s pretextual histories of Mr. Butch have been channelled into very
different verbal and visual narratives, but through textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue
shared references are able to be tapped and thus non-representational artwork
translated.
Tamryn‘ibid
Bennett
Interpretation rather than illustration:
x ∞’
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Pai’s ekphrastic
to non-representational
subject of
matter
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without consent
the require
author
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interpretation rather than representation.
In an interview, Pai stated, ‘[m]y poems are
never intended to be “illustrative” of the works that they respond to, in the way that I
think that a lot of traditional ekphrastic writing tends to be’22 (Pai, 2008). Her poem
‘ibid x ∞’, based on Lukowski’s good morning, institute of health professionals,
exemplifies this shift from ekphrastic illustration to interpretation. The subject of the
artwork is a chimpanzee who is answering the telephone while making notes in a
book. Unlike traditional ekphrastic poetry, which describes the visual characters, Pai
pursues a political angle in her dialogue with the artwork. Her poem is aimed at
inciting a reaction to issues of exploitation and ‘unskilled labor over incremental
increases’ (Pai, 2007, 22) rather than replaying the image in words. Pai responds to
22
Khalfa’s position supports Pai’s rejection of ekphrastic illustration, arguing ‘it is now clear that if
interaction between word and images remains possible, it can no longer be illustrative’ (2001, 30). For
ekphrastic relationships to progress, poetry must move beyond the mimetic mirroring of images
towards interpretation of them.
56
the visual narrative of an abused chimpanzee with a list of words derived from
telephone operators but she doesn’t attempt to explicitly ‘illustrate’ the scene. Instead,
she incorporates adapted versions of visual elements from the image, like the circle
with a naïve eagle resembling a Morgan Dollar, in which she replaces the eagle with
the text ‘ibid. x ∞’ to suggest the continued exploitation of workers. The link between
verbal and visual language is made even more tangible via Pai’s appropriation of
Lukowski’s text ‘15 minutes’ and ‘castle’ which she uses to imply the escapism of the
fifteen minute lunch break dream of ‘castles in the sky’ (Pai, 2007, 22). This textualvisual ekphrastic dialogue demonstrates a development beyond both representation
and rivalry, or as Mitchell might concur, the vain attempt to verbally depict the visual.
Concluding ekphrastic conflict
Tamryn
Bennett
While ekphrastic theory has circled
upon itself
and the concept of rivalry, new works
copyright 2008
like Nutritional
that
employ dialogue
to reconcile
between poetry
NotFeed,
to be
reprinted
without
consentthe
ofconflict
the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
and visual art, have gone undetected. This examination of Pai and Lukowski’s
ekphrastic ‘conversations’ demonstrates the recent development of an increasingly
common language between poetry and visual art. Their textual-visual dialogue is
enabled through a break with ekphrastic convention, a move toward a synthesized
collaboration of contemporary verbal and visual forms. The notion of
‘representational rivalry’ is rendered obsolete in Nutritional Feed as Pai interprets
rather than represents Lukowski’s non-representational artworks. This emerging
textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue needs to be absorbed into ekphrastic criticism if
theory is to remain relevant to the symbiotic approach to word and image in
contemporary practice.
57
Case Study Three
The Precarious poetry and art of Cecilia Vicuña
The essence of Vicuña’s poetry and visual art in the Precarios/Precarious23 is
summarised by Eliot Weinberger’s quote from Wassily Kandinski:
[e]verything dead trembles. Not only the stars, moon, wood, and flowers of which the
poets sing, but also the cigarette butt lying in an ashtray, a patient white trouser button
looking up from a puddle in the street…everything shows me its face, its innermost being,
its secret soul ([1913] 1992).
Since 1966, the Chilean born poet, painter, performance artist, filmmaker and sculptor
has worked on an ongoing series of poems and visual installations called
Precarious24. Vicuña refers to these works as an ‘autobiography in debris’. This case
study will examine a selection of the poems collected in the book The Precarious,
published in 1997 as a retrospective
of Vicuña’s
poetry and visual art. The book
Tamryn
Bennett
copyright
2008installations and performances as
combines her poetry with photographs
of her visual
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
well as her personal commentary
on the collection of Precarious works that span
www.tamrynbennett.com
thirty years. This integration of poetry and visual art in her Precarious works are
defined as ‘visual poems’ by critics Lucy R. Lippard and M. Catherine de Zegher
among others. Vicuña’s role, as both the verbal and visual artist in The Precarious,
reflects the emergence of a textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue between poetry and
visual art that rejects ekphrastic boundaries and rivalry between the two forms25
(Lippard, 1997, 7).
23
The English translation of Precarios is Precarious, which will be used to title the collection
throughout this thesis.
24
Vicuna has been exiled from Chile since the political unrest of the early 1970s that stemmed from
the murder of then president Salvador Allende by General Pinochet (Lippard, 1997, 7). She now splits
her time between New York and South America.
25
Lippard aligns Vicuña’s interstice position to that of the shape-shifting coyote (1997, 8).
58
Vicuña’s Precarious installations are created from found objects: scraps of
cloth, stray feathers, shells, stone, wood, bone, animal hair and other debris that are
often woven together with brightly coloured thread. She then responds to these works
with spoken and written poetry. Herein lies the difference between this case study and
Shange’s and Pai’s: instead of responding to other artists’ works, Vicuña responds to
her own visual stimulus. Her response to visual artworks is not conventional or
collaborative like Shange or Pai’s, yet nothing in Heffernan’s, nor other ekphrastic
theorists’, definitions of ekphrasis excludes responses to an artist’s own artwork.
Vicuña’s responses to her own visual artworks illuminates the need for ekphrastic
theories, inparticular those that hinge on representational rivalries, to evolve with
changes in contemporary practice.
The Precarious poems under analysis in this study were all created in response
Tamryn Bennett
copyright
to Vicuña’s own visual artworks. These
poems2008
include ‘Entering’; ‘Con-cón,’ based
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
on her first site-specific sand
installation; ‘K’ijllu’; ‘The Resurrection of Grasses’;
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‘The Origin of Weaving’; ‘Poncho: Ritual Dress’; ‘Hudson River’ which was
informed by her floating of tiny ‘garbage’ rafts in puddles, gutters and the Hudson
River; ‘A Glass of Milk’ the simultaneous verbal and visual political protest and
‘Ceq’e’. Examination of these nine poems will demonstrate the existence of a
dialogue between Vicuña’s poetry and visual art, negating notions of ekphrastic
rivalry. This evolution in textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue will be revealed via
investigation of her attempt to break structural binaries, the use of ‘contemporary’ art
forms, her response to artworks conventionally considered non-representational and
59
her typographic and visual exploration of poetry as ‘metaphors in space’26 (Vicuña in
Lippard, 1997, 10).
In the Precarious works, as in all of Vicuña’s poetry, she is seeking to
reconnect the past to the present, to stitch ancient memories of land and culture to
modern life. This mission stems from her roots in Andean culture, her archaeological
process of digging into the ancient origins of verbal and visual languages as well as
the devalued and dying cultural practices of Andean textile art to rediscover ancient
meanings (de Zegher, 1997, 26). Vicuña uses thread in her poems as manifold
metaphors for the weaving of word and image, space and time, new and old cultural
practices and the linking of ancient languages to modern linguists. Language is the
primary poetic vehicle for her transcendence of time as ‘she engages in an obsessive
quest for the ancient meanings of words, submerging herself in an etymological
Tamryn
Bennett
labyrinth and discovering that palabras
(words)
are in fact combinations of other
copyright 2008
combinations’
(Méndez-Ramírez,
1997,
62). Byconsent
rediscovering
cultural
and linguistic
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to be reprinted
without
of the
author
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skeletons, Vicuña becomes a translator and medium for lost ancestral messages. The
pursuit of pure meaning and mythic origins in Vicuña’s poetry has led MéndezRamírez to compare her work with that of Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, Andrés
Bello as well as symbolist poets like Rubén Darío, Manuel González Martínez and
Octavio Paz (1997, 59). Yet Vicuña is not content to just uncover forgotten meanings,
she wants to reconnect the ancient to the modern, saying: ‘[e]verything is falling apart
because of a lack of connections. Weaving is the connection that is missing, the
connection between people and themselves, people and nature’ (Vicuña in Lippard,
1997, 11). Using literal and metaphorical threads she weaves poetry, art, music and
26
Vicuña’s Precarious works are considered contemporary in both their form and subject matter
despite being created from, and informed by, ancient Andean practices of weaving and word play.
60
nature into an intertextual web that crosses disparate disciplinary boundaries to
connect ancient traditions with contemporary practice.
In this collection, the subtitle of the written translation of Vicuña’s poems is
QUIPOem. This is derived from the quipu, an archaic Inca device of knotted strings
used to keep records (de Zegher, 1997, 34). The quipu became a lost art form,
replaced by alphabetic text after European colonisation (Lynd, 2005, 1591). Vicuña
employs the quipu in her Precarious works as a recurring textual and visual symbol
of the lost and excluded indigenous cultural practices which she is seeking to
resurrect. She conducted a similar dissection of the word precarious to extract its root
meaning and Latin origins precarius, from precis meaning prayer (Lippard, 1997, 10).
For Vicuña ‘prayer’ is ‘understood not as a request, but as a response, [it] is a
dialogue or a speech that addresses what is (physically) “there” as well as what is “not
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there,” the place as well as the “no
place,” the
site as well as the “non-site” (de
copyright 2008
Zegher, 1997,
20).toInbe
thisreprinted
sense, the verbal
and consent
visual art components
of The
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without
of the author
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Precarious can be understood as textual-visual ekphrastic dialogues because of their
intertextual communication. Of the three case studies in this thesis, Vicuña’s visual
poetry in Precarious is the closest to achieving a truly symbiotic dialogue between
word and image art because of the cyclical way that her poetry feeds into visual
artworks, which in turn inform her poetry.
The title Precarious also refers to the delicate fragments of ‘dying’ nature,
culture and language that Vicuña temporarily transforms into poetic sculptures before
they are washed away, lost, crushed or forgotten. Another narrative strand in these
works is ‘the marginal people—children, the insane the uneducated’ (Vicuña in
Lippard, 1997, 9) and the desaparecidos, the disappeared people27, whose existence is
27
The desaparecidos or ‘the disappeared ones’ is a term that refers to the mostly South American
political dissidents who became the disappeared victims of the military junta during the 1970s and the
61
and was precarious. The word precarious is also used to describe Vicuña’s use of
fragile and forgotten fragments of language and culture. She weaves both into delicate
poems and artworks that parallel the precarious nature of ancient practices in the
contemporary climate where everything is disposable. The fragility of life, nature,
culture and language is at the core of Vicuña’s Precarious poetry: ‘[w]e are made of
throwaways and we will be thrown away’(Vicuña in de Zegher 1997, 21).
Weaving word and image: ‘Con-cón’
Vicuña fuses word and image on the first page of QUIPOem in a reproduction of a
hand-sketched string that is interrupted by the text ‘the quipu that remembers nothing,
an empty cord’ (1997, 8). The poem ‘Con-cón’ recalls the ancient form of the quipu,
whose knots have been unravelled and the messages it once recorded, forgotten. This
Bennett
unravelling is used to critique theTamryn
erosion and
exclusion of ancient practices,
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particularly textiles,
culture. The
hand-sketched
continues across
Not to in
becontemporary
reprinted without
consent
of the line
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
the next page where it forms the words ‘is the core’ before again being broken by the
text ‘the heart of memory’ (1997, 9-10). This hand-drawn thread moves across the
rest of the blank page where it disappears into the fold of the book from which
emerges a photograph of Vicuña’s first Precarious visual work Con-cón, 1966. The
photograph shows the artwork Vicuña created from refuse found at a beach in Chile:
where the Aconcagua River meets the Pacific Ocean, each bringing with them the
rubbish collected on their migration. Vicuña gathered this garbage of feathers, stone,
driftwood, plastic and bone to create spirals of debris on the sand. Beneath the
1980s (de Zegher). In Chile and Argentina during the ‘Dirty War’ political dissidents were captured,
drugged and thrown out of airplanes into the Alanic Ocean. The absence of their remains enabled the
government to deny their deaths, claiming instead that they had ‘disappeared’. The disposable nature of
Vicuña’s artworks is connected to the memory of the people who were so wrongly disposed of.
62
photograph the written poem resumes, ‘the earth, listening to us’ (1997, 11). The
metaphor of the sand spiral as an ear is maintained in the final section of the poem:
The ear is a spiral
to hear
a sound within
An empty furrow
to receive
A standing stick
to speak
Piercing earth and sky
the sign begins
To write from below, seeing the efface (Vicuña,1997, 12).
Vicuña’s placement of the lines ‘to hear,’ ‘to receive,’ ‘to speak’ emphasises the
process of remembering the past. To resurrect these lost cultural practices the ‘sound
within’ must first be listened to, then received, and finally spoken to if ‘the sign
begins’ is to be reborn in contemporary artistic practice (1997, 12). Vicuña’s weaving
of disparate elements of text and image is echoed in the line ‘[p]iercing earth and
Tamryn Bennett
copyright
2008poetry and visual art together
sky’. The metaphoric needle and thread
that weaves
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
also binds earth and sky as www.tamrynbennett.com
binary symbols of difference. By writing ‘from below’ or
re-engaging with ancient origins, these boundaries can be effaced and past and present
cultures reunited. The six pages of ‘Con-cón’ not only replicates the fusion of word
and image through weaving, but a sense of dialogue as image is responded to by
poetry which again informs image.
‘Entering’: QUIPOems past and present
Vicuña not only recovers lost verbal and visual languages, she resurrects ancient
practices by creating a ‘conversation’ with them. The poem ‘Entering’ parallels the
production of Vicuña’s visual poems to the process of remembering ancient cultural
practices:
First there was listening with the fingers, a sensory memory:
the shared
63
bones, sticks and feathers were sacred things I had to arrange.
To follow their wishes was to rediscover a way of thinking: the
paths of mind I travelled, listening to matter, took me to an
ancient silence waiting to be heard.
To think is to follow the music, the sensations of the elements.
And so began a communion with the sky and the sea, the need
to respond to their desires with works that were prayers.
Pleasure is prayer.
If, at the beginning of time, poetry was an act of communion, a
form of collectively entering a vision, now it is a space one
enters, a spatial metaphor (1997, 131).
Vicuña’s metaphoric and actual use of thread reflects ‘a sensory memory’ of
‘listening with the fingers’ (1997, 131). The sacred ‘bones, sticks and feathers’ she
arranges in her visual installations like Con-cón, are similar to the materials used in
primitive rituals and offerings to Andean gods (Weinberger, 1992, x). Memory is the
central motif of this poem; the memory of ancient lands, cultures and languages. By
connecting and sharing the ancient materials of bones and feathers, Vicuña
Tamryn
rediscovers ‘a way of thinking’ that
enabledBennett
her to hear ‘ancient silence’ and thus
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begin a ‘communion
withreprinted
the sky andwithout
the sea’ (1997,
131).ofThis
Not to be
consent
thecommunion
author reveals
www.tamrynbennett.com
an evolution of poetry from a collective vision to ‘a spatial metaphor’ which Vicuña’s
visual poems enact. The weaving of past and present requires a level of spatial or
physical engagement. The notion is supported in the third last stanza where Vicuña
recalls the ancient Peruvian practice of ‘the diviner [who] would trace lines of dust in
the earth, as a means of divination, or of letting the divine speak through him’ (1997,
132). The final stanza of ‘Entering’ reflects the quest for unity between past and
present, sea and sky, that is threaded throughout the Precarious:
To recover memory is to recover unity:
To be one with the sea and sky
To feel the earth as one’s own skin
Is the only kind of relationship
That brings her joy ([1983-1991] in 1997).
64
To remember is to regain connection to the past. For Vicuña, this archaeological
process is achieved via a synthesis of verbal and visual art forms. The visual poems
‘converse’ with ancient practices through a common language of root meanings,
sticks, stones, feathers and bone, which restores unity between past and present.
Ancient conversations: ‘K’ijllu’ and ‘The Resurrection of the Grasses’
Vicuña’s poem ‘K’ijllu,’ based on her artwork of the same name, demonstrates an
extension of this communion between poetry and the past. The title of the work is
taken from the South American Quechua word for a fracture in a rock. In 1985,
Vicuña placed red pigment along a deep crack in a rock on Salter’s Island in Maine28.
Her performance appropriated the ancient Peruvian practice of tracing lines of dust in
the earth to enable communication with the ancient voices or the ‘sound within’
Bennett
(Vicuña ,1997, 12). This idea of aTamryn
conversation
with the past is supported by Lippard
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who views the
crack
as areprinted
portal for ‘communication
between
worlds
above and
Not
to be
without consent
of the
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
below’ (1997, 12). Unknown to Vicuña at the time, red ochre symbolises the ‘Red
Ochre People’ who had once lived in that area (Lippard, 1997,12). Their remains
were later uncovered nearby when the ochre they had been buried with seeped
through the ground. Vicuña then responded in poetry to the artwork as well as this
discovery:
Red dust in the k’ijllu crack.
The rock recalls a people that buried its dead with red ochre powder.
The earth leaked red orche, and a civilisation six thousand years old was discovered.
(1992, 20).
The ‘[r]ed dust’ signifies ancient blood-lines and the call for communion with these
ancestors. Her ekphrastic response moves beyond representation of the artwork to
28
Vicuña’s act of following lines with pigment refers to the ancient Peruvian practice of the diviners
who traced lines of dust in the earth as a way of letting the divine speak to them (Vicuña in MéndezRamírez, 1997, 61)
65
contextualise the discovery of ‘a civilisation six thousand years old’ (Vicuña 1992,
20). The creation of this work embodies a sense of textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue
in that Vicuña communicated with the past through, ‘the k’ijllu crack,’ which then
revealed an ancient civilisation that she responded to in poetry. This dialogue acts as a
bridging thread between the two realms of modern and ancient culture.
This search for, and restoration of, ancient languages is explicit in Vicuña’s
poem ‘The Resurrection of the Grasses’. The poem is based on her Precarious work
Sidewalk Forests, 1981; photographs of weeds and grasses growing out of cement
cracks which Vicuña called ‘air vents for the earth’ (1992, 19). Vicuña begins by
quoting Paz’s line: ‘Poetry is resurrection’ (1992, 7). She imagines, ‘waves/ of/ grass/
blades/ blades/ surging/ from the/ dead streams’ (1992, 7). This return of grasses to
polluted city streams and gutters symbolises the resurrection of ancient connections to
Bennett
nature. Within the poem, Vicuña Tamryn
discovers that
‘growth, green & grass/ originally had
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the same root:
ghre’
(1992,
7). The recovery
this sharedofroot
Not
to be
reprinted
withoutofconsent
themeaning
authorleads her to
www.tamrynbennett.com
29
search for the origins of the word poetry. She finds the answer in Nahuatl dialect,
where the word for poetry is xopancuicatl, meaning:
a celebration of life and cyclical time: the poem and poet become a plant that grows with
the poem; the plant becomes fibres of the book in which the poem is painted (Weinberger
in Vicuña, 1992, 8).
In The Precarious, this poem is reproduced on handmade paper where the words of
the poem are entwined with the fibres of the plant. This presentation reflects the
connection between language and nature, the dependency of poetry on the page to the
trees that are pulped and the need for ‘the resurrection of the grasses’ in order for
poetry to survive. Vicuña continues this ecological discourse by calling for renewal of
grasses, listing the places ‘around waterways/ in Brooklyn,/ Manhattan, Chile/ and the
29
Nahuatl is a dialect derived from Nahuan or Uto-Aztecan language and is still spoken in some rural
areas of Central Mexico.
66
Bronx’ where resurrection must take place. She ties the future of poetry to the rescue
of ‘the land grasses/ and the/ cochayuyo/seaweed/’ that ‘are intertwined/with
plastic/nets’ (1992, 8) The plastic nets symbolise the suffocation of waterways that
were once sacred rivers (Lynd, 2005, 1598). The connection to the past has been
choked with the by-products of consumerism. ‘The Resurrection of the Grasses’ is a
metaphoric and literal call, not just to remember, but to act. This is again echoed in
the final resounding line of the poem ‘resurrect!’ (1992, 8).
The metaphor of thread: ‘Poncho: Ritual Dress’
The metaphor of thread is a central tool in Vicuña’s weaving of disparate elements—
past and present, culture and language, poetry and visual art. This poetic device
allows her to thread together words and objects, not simply comparing them to one
another but becoming each other.Tamryn
Vicuña’s Bennett
poem ‘Poncho: Ritual Dress’ opens with
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‘hilo de agua/thread
of water’
and ‘hilo
de vida/thread
of life,’
which
she weaves as
Not to be
reprinted
without
consent
of the
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
one fabric to convey the interconnectedness of nature (1992, 13). The poem’s visual
counterparts are the artworks, Poncho of Five Squares, and Poncho of Five Strands.
In response to the loosely woven strands of thread in these visual works, Vicuña
writes: ‘the poncho/ is a book/ a woven/ message/ a metaphor spun’ (1992, 13). The
strands of the poncho communicate like lines of text in a book. This metaphor stresses
the ‘verbality’ (Bal, 1991) of visual artworks. Both form their messages to tell a story,
one textual the other visual. Thread can be read as an equivalent to the alphabet in
ancient culture, not only in the knotted quipu but in the pattern, colour and symbols in
fabrics. This ‘spun’ metaphor of the poncho as a book can be linked to Barthes poststructuralist proposition of reading images and objects as texts. These fabrics can be
studied as records and excluded female history, cultural identity, economy and ritual.
This idea is supported by de Zegher’s assertion that:
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[t]here is some evidence that a similar pattern of men’s verbal and women’s visual
modes of expression occurs among the highland Maya. Male members of the native
religious hierarchy use a style of speech in which repetition, metaphor, and patterns of
parallel syntax are common. The fine nuances, repetitions, and rhythmic yet
asymmetrical colour and design pattern characteristic of Maya women’s backstraploomed textiles serve in the female arena as the equivalent of Maya men’s complex
verbal play (1997, 28).
Vicuña’s metaphor of a poncho as a book works to recover visual languages by
encouraging ‘readings’ of the ‘woven messages’ in textiles that were lost and
forgotten through European colonisation. This ancient practice of tactile and visual
language underpins Vicuña ekphrastic response of creating poetry as ‘metaphors in
space’ (Vicuña, 1997, 10).
Text and Textiles: ‘The Origin of Weaving’
Vicuña’s metaphoric and literal use of thread exemplifies an evolution in ekphrastic
response to previously ignored art forms. Her response to these excluded art forms
Tamryn Bennett
also assists in the dissolution of ekphrastic
binaries
copyright
2008between craft and art, masculine
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
and feminine voice as well as word and image. This development will be examined in
the poem ‘The Origin of Weaving’30 which begins by exposing the root meaning of
the artworks Vicuña creates and responds to:
origin
from oriri: the coming out of the stars
weave
from weban, wefta, Old English
weft, cross thread
web
the coming out
of the cross-star
the interlacing of
warp and weft
30
The complete version of this poem first appeared in a selection of Precarious poems included in
Vicuña’s 1992 collection Unravelling Words and the Weaving of Water. An extract of this same poem
was reprinted in The Precarious under the title of ‘The Weaving of Words’. This study examines the
original version of the poem.
68
By exposing the origin of each word, the art of weaving is released from gendered
stereotypes that have seen textiles labelled a female craft, not an art form in the same
vein as sculpture or painting. The imagery of the webbed ‘cross-star/ the interlacing
of/ warp and weft’ evokes a constellation or matrix-like structure, the significance of
these symbols will be later discussed. The allusion of weaving life into existence
continues in the next five stanzas:
to imaging the first cross
intertwining of branches and twigs
to make a nest
to give birth
the first spinning of a thread
to cross spiraling [sic]
a vegetable fiber imitating a vine
the first thread coming out of fleece trapped in
vegetation
the first cross of warp and weft
union of high and low, sky
and earth,
Tamryn
woman and man
Bennett
copyright 2008
Not
bebeginning
reprinted
consent of the author
the
firstto
knot,
of thewithout
spiral:
life and death, birth and rebirth (1992, 9)
www.tamrynbennett.com
Repetition of the phrase ‘the first’ in every stanza emphasises the ancient origins of
weaving in nature ‘to make a nest,’ to ‘the first knot’ in a string or umbilical cord
signalling ‘life and death, birth and rebirth’ (1992, 9). Vicuña’s delicate word choice
exposes the beauty and artistry involved in weaving which enables the art form to be
revered in the same light as painting. The second theme ‘threaded’ through these
stanzas is a post-feminist and post-structuralist questioning of binary hierarchies like
craft and art, ‘high and low, sky and earth, woman and man’ (Vicuña, 1992, 9).
Vicuña uses the metaphor of weaving ‘warp and weft’ to connect the oppositional
binaries. This interwoven fabric references her own verbal and visual practices; from
her spatial arrangements of poetry on paper, to her artworks that entwine black and
white cotton to create ‘“a soft stairway” which she views as a model of subjectivity
69
not rooted in binary thought’ (de Zegher, 1997, 40). This weaving of poetry, image,
people, place and culture forms a ‘matrixial’ web according to de Zegher. The
structure and subject matter of these verbal and visual webs imply a coexistence of
binary oppositions rather than a rivalry between them.
Vicuña’s examination of textile origins is extended in the second section of
‘The Origin of Weaving’:
textiles, text, context
from teks: to weave, to fabricate, to make wicker or
wattle for mud-covered walls (Paternosto)
sutra: sacred Buddhist text
thread (Sanskrit)
tantra: scared text derived from the Vedas: thread
ching: as in Tao Te Ching or I Ching
sacred book: warp
wei: its commentaries: weft
Quechua: the sacred language
Tamryn Bennett
derived from q’eswa:
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rope or cord made of straw
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
to weave a new form of thought:
www.tamrynbennett.com
connect
bring together in one (1992, 11).
The root meaning of text is interwoven with textiles. Vicuña identifies the linguistic
origins of text in several cultures. This emphasises the connectedness of language to
the process of weaving and therefore the unifying value of textual-visual ekphrastic
dialogue to ‘bring together in one’ (Vicuña ,1992, 11) both verbal and visual forms.
Ancient practice, contemporary media: ‘Hudson River’
In addition to creating and responding to woven artworks, Vicuña produces and
‘converses’ with non-representational multimedia artworks. Her dialogue with these
artworks is interpretive, rather than strictly representational, as exemplified in the
poem ‘Hudson River’ which was based on the series of Precarious works titled
70
Hudson River. For the visual component of this work, Vicuña made several tiny rafts
from found refuse, feathers, plastic and pencils. She then sent them sailing in gutters,
puddles and the Hudson River where they entered ‘ a galaxy of litter’ (Vicuña, 1997,
85). The poem written in response to this artwork recalls her process:
I launched boats on the river, talking to it.
Changing signs, mine and those there by chance.
The boats and the trash, mingling (Vicuña, 1997, 85).
Her use of found materials as a means of communicating with the environment is
reflected in the line ‘talking to it’. The refuse rafts ‘and the trash’ mingle via a
common language. Both the artwork and her verbal response embody a sense of
reciprocity: ‘the essential law of the ancient world’ (Lippard, 1997,15). Of this
process, Vicuña says:
Tamryn
Bennett
[t]hese materials are lying down
and I respond
by standing them up. The gods created us
and we have to respond to the
gods.
There
only be equality when there is reciprocity.
copyright will
2008
The root of the word respond is to offer again, to receive something and offer it back
Not to
be reprinted
(Vicuña
in Lippard,
1997, 15). without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
In ancient cultures, shells, stones, bones and feathers were the offerings from and to
the earth. ‘Hudson River’ critiques the contemporary state of the environment via a
dialogue with plastic debris, condoms and cigarette butts. Whereas in ancient Andean
culture, communion occurred through offerings of shells, sticks, stone and bone, now
the common language between culture and nature is ‘trash’. These non-representation
works convey powerful narratives of environmental degradation and the loss of
connection to nature.
Vicuña’s dialogue with non-representational artworks also questions binaries
of high and low culture. By ‘talking’ to artworks that float in gutters and puddles, she
breaks with the ekphrastic tradition of responding to canonical paintings and
sculptures. Lippard also notes the unannounced nature of these works: ‘people could
71
find them, step on them, take them home ignore them,’ their fate is precarious31
(1997, 12). The stable and easily recognised symbols of paintings like Landscape
with Fall of Icarus have been replaced by ‘changing signs’ whose meanings are
dependent on ‘chance’. ‘Hudson River’ depicts ‘the boats and the trash, mingling’
(Vicuña, 1997, 85) but these fragile artworks could just as easily be stepped on or sink
once the poet looks away. Vicuña’s response to these non-representational artworks
exemplifies an ekphrastic evolution towards interpretation rather than representation.
Interweaving interpretation: ‘A Glass of Milk’
As this study establishes, Vicuña’s Precarious poems not only uncover connections
with ancient cultures, they also interpret and critique contemporary socio-political
environments. Vicuña’s move beyond direct ekphrastic representation towards
Tamryn
Bennett
subjective interpretation is exemplified
in her
most well known poem ‘A Glass of
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Milk’ based Not
on a visual
the sameconsent
name. Thisofvisual
poem was created
to be installation
reprintedofwithout
the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
in 1966 and demonstrates how contemporary politics influenced and infiltrated
Vicuña’s connection to the ancient cultural practices. Vicuña ‘announced the spilling
of a glass of milk under the blue sky. On the scheduled day [she] spilled the milk and
wrote on the pavement:
The cow
is the continent
whose milk
(blood)
is being
spilled.
What are we doing
to our lives?
‘A Glass of Milk’ differs from traditional ekphrastic responses in that it shares the
same contextual frame, and pavement as the artwork, whereas the ekphrastic poems
31
Vicuña’s continual collage-like collection of debris and spontaneous performances and production of
the Precarious have drawn parallels to dada artists, and especially Kurt Schwitters’ Merz (de Zegher,
1997).
72
of the canon are contextually removed from the artworks they respond to32. In this
poem, the cow ‘whose milk (blood) is being spilled’ is symbolic of the ‘milk crime’
in which 1,920 children in Bogota were estimated to have died from drinking
contaminated milk33 (de Zegher, 1997, 23). Vicuña’s response to this visual
installation, which she performed outside a government building by tying a thread
around the glass then pulling it, references the political pretext as well as the artwork
itself. This pretext is signified by the metaphor of spilled milk that evokes the dead
children whose ‘(blood)’ is on government hands. The final line of the poem, ‘what
are we doing/ to our lives?’ challenges the inaction of the government as well as the
public in failing to prevent the ‘milk crime’. It inverts the usual passive phrase ‘what
are we doing with our lives?’ to question the audiences silent involvement in the
taking of lives. ‘A Glass of Milk’ exemplifies Vicuña’s interpretive response to
TamryninBennett
political pretext and individual experience
place of impartial ekphrastic
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representation.
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
‘Metaphors in space’: the concrete roots of ‘Ceq’e’
Vicuña’s visual and spatial interpretation of poetry also plays out on the traditional
format of the page. Her spatial arrangement of written text is embodied in the poem
‘Ceq’e’. The title is defined by Vicuña as ‘[t]he Inca’s astronomical and ritual
calendar. The ceq’e were a virtual quipu of sight lines radiating out from Cuzco,
invisible lines whose “knots” were the wak’a, scared sites, stones and temples used as
markers for astronomical observation’ (1997, 138). The poem begins with the
32
That A Glass of Milk is not representational like Brueghel’s Landscape with Fall of Icarus doesn’t
impede its ability to communicate. The ‘verbality’ of spilt milk outside a government building is
almost deafening.
33
Vicuña adds in her notes that ‘[a] group of distributors were adding water and pigment to milk to sell
more’. According to de Zegher this practice went unpunished by the Chilean government at the time
(1997, 23).
73
assertion: ‘[t]he ceq’e is not a line, it is an instant, a gaze’ (1997, 110). Vicuña’s
statement stresses the visual and spatial component of communication. It calls for text
to be read as ‘an instant, a gaze’ in the same way as an image is absorbed. This
concept feeds directly into the body of the poem, which is laid out in the shape of a
ceq’e, with each line of the poem radiating from the hollow centre. The visual form of
the poem corresponds to its subject:
a mental quipu
to measure and mediate
a thought, radiating
an earthly sun
another meridian
seen from above
or from below
time’s ritual measure
a quipu that is not (Vicuña, 1997, 110).
In The Precarious, the arrangement of this text is also a ‘concrete’ ekphrastic
response to the photograph on the opposite page: a hand holding five strands of red
Tamryn Bennett
copyright 2008
Notisto
be reprinted
without
consent
the author
communication
bound
together as each
line of
the poemof
mirrors
a strand of thread.
www.tamrynbennett.com
and yellow thread that are tied to stones on the ground34. Verbal and visual
Vicuña challenges the boundaries between poetry and visual art by highlighting the
page as a spatial realm where text can be observed as an image, rather than
conforming to a set linear grid. This modern appropriation of the ‘mental quipu’
emphasises the negative space, the collective loss of memory. The ‘quipu that is not’
suggests that the ancient knots that signify sacred sites and events have been
unravelled. Vicuña’s quipoem recalls the element of ‘an earthly sun…time’s ritual
measure’ whose governing force on nature’s precarious existence has been forgotten.
The combined verbal and visual metaphor of an empty quipu not only binds word and
image but works to weave the memory of ancient culture into contemporary
ekphrastic practice.
34
In this context the term ‘concrete’ describes the spatial and typographic arrangement of poetry into
shapes that mirror the images and objects they are interpreting.
74
The precarious future of ekphrasis
This analysis of Vicuña’s interwoven fabric of poetry, visual art and performance
evidences an evolution in ekphrastic dialogue between word and image. Her dual role
as a poet and visual artist in The Precarious moves beyond disciplinary boundaries
and their binaries to defy Heffernan’s concept of representational friction. Vicuña’s
exploration of the origins of both verbal and visual communication exposes not only
the potential for an ‘increasingly common language’ (Bal, 1991) between the two
forms, but the ancient existence of such a dialogue. This metaphoric and literal
weaving of word and image enables communication between past and present cultural
practices. These communions have revealed the development of a web of symbiotic
responses between poetry and visual art to non-traditional media and non-
Tamryn
Bennett
representational art forms. Such an
expansion
of the scope of ekphrastic response,
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coupled withNot
a symbiotic
dialogue, has
begun to
reconcileof
issues
representational
to be reprinted
without
consent
the ofauthor
www.tamrynbennett.com
rivalry. Vicuña’s verbal and visual works expose the need for ekphrastic theory to
recognise the emergence of textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue to steady the term’s
precarious fate.
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Conclusion
The previous contextualisation, methodology and case studies have exposed the
emergence of textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue. This thesis contextualises the
evolution of ekphrasis from canonised poetry to contemporary examples of works by
Shange, Pai and Vicuña whose texts reconcile ekphrastic poetry with visual art via
interpretive dialogue that overcomes representational rivalry. Through the
comparative application of Heffernan and Bal’s theories to Ridin’ The Moon in Texas,
Nutritional Feed and The Precarious, the gap between contemporary ekphrastic
criticism and ekphrastic poetry has been explored. Examination of these three works
has revealed a number of ekphrastic evolutions. These include the labelling of
contemporary collections as ‘conversations’ and ‘dialogues’ rather than ekphrastic
poetry. The interpretation, rather Tamryn
than strict Bennett
representation, of visual artworks and
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responses toNot
non-traditional
media and
non-representational
is also critical
to be reprinted
without
consent of art
theforms
author
www.tamrynbennett.com
in the evolution of ekphrasis and texual-visual ekphrastic dialogue. Selected
contemporary examples support the assessment that ekphrastic poetry has ‘out-run the
critical theories which have sprung up to explain or question their achievements’
(Robbilard, 1998, 52). Therefore, the existence of textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue,
as a means of resolving ekphrastic rivalry, must be acknowledged if the term
ekphrasis is to avoid palling into obsolescence and ekphrastic theory is to remain
relevant to contemporary ekphrastic practice.
The first case study, Shange’s Ridin’ The Moon in Texas, illustrates the progression
towards ekphrasis as a ‘conversation’ rather than a competition. Despite the one-sided
nature of Shange’s dialogue with the artworks, her responses to artworks in the poems
‘Three Views of Mt. Fuji’ and ‘Ridin’ the Moon in Texas’ borrow vernacular and
76
rhythms from African-American oral tradition to emulate conversation. This approach
to ekphrasis as a dialogue between poetry and visual art contradicts many of
Heffernan’s core theories of representational rivalry. Shange’s ekphrastic dialogue
also questions the exclusion of African-American and female voices in ekphrastic
poetry and subsequently ekphrastic criticism. In the poems from ‘Dream of Pairing’
and ‘Who Needs a Heart’ Shange responds to non-representational artworks in nontraditional media, again overturning Heffernan’s notion of ekphrasis as ‘representing
representation itself’ (1993, 4). Her responses are reflective of developments in
artwork media and form. This evolution in ekphrastic poetry requires a similar
progression in the theory that surrounds it. In this sense, Bal’s interpretive
interdisciplinary theories of word and image interaction are well placed to enhance
understanding of Shange’s responses to artworks. Bal’s post-structuralist ‘reading’ of
Tamryn
pretexts and the ‘verbality’ of both
word andBennett
image can be applied to Shange’s
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interpretationNot
of myth
‘between thewithout
two of them’.
This of
poem
to bein reprinted
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thereinterprets
author both the
www.tamrynbennett.com
myth and visual artwork, thus reaching beyond representation and making issues of
representational rivalry redundant. Although Shange has not created a truly symbiotic
textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue between poetry and visual art, her responses to
artworks in Ridin’ The Moon in Texas demonstrate an evolution in ekphrasis that
edges ever closer to overcoming the word and image opposition.
The second case study, ‘Shin Yu Pai: Nutritional Feed’, demonstrates the
development of a shared verbal and visual language which supports textual-visual
ekphrastic dialogue. As discussed, Pai’s process of appropriating Lukowski’s symbols
in poems such as ‘suck squeeze bang blow’, ‘sonagram’ and ‘ibid x ∞’ exemplifies a
shift towards ‘an increasingly common language’ (Bal, 1991, xiv) rather than a
competition between poetry and visual art. Pai and Lukowski also ‘converse’ across
disciplines via shared social and political pretexts as illustrated in ‘the mr. butch
77
show’. Other ekphrastic evolutions include Pai’s spatial and typographic experiments
in poems like ‘corporate ladder’, ‘optometrist’, ‘bed-time story’ and ‘(brain) storm’.
This concrete arrangement of poetry has not commonly been incorporated into
ekphrastic responses that have instead focused on imagery inside the text rather than
the ‘imageness’ (Bal, 1991) of text itself. Pai also pushes Heffernan’s ekphrastic
confines by responding to contemporary non-representational artworks across new
media, as in the poem ‘it does a body good’. Her responses to Lukowski’s artworks
are interpretive rather than ‘illustrative’ (Pai, 2008). This interpretive intertextual
exchange renders the notion of representational rivalry obsolete. While Bal’s
interpretive approach to word and image is useful in the analysis of Nutritional Feed,
the extent and implications of such dramatic changes in responses to visual artworks
are yet to be widely recognised in ekphrastic theory. Although the poetry in this
collection is not responded to by Tamryn
Lukowski,Bennett
the development of a shared verbal and
copyright 2008
visual language
the two artists
and art consent
forms is anof
evolution
that facilitates
Notbetween
to be reprinted
without
the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
extended cross-disciplinary exchanges and future textual-visual ekphrastic dialogues.
In case study three, the evolution and divergence of contemporary ekphrastic
practice from ekphrastic theory is magnified via Vicuña’s dual role as poet and visual
artist. Her ekphrastic responses do not wage representational war with themselves,
instead her poems, like ‘Poncho: Ritual Dress’, complement their visual counterparts.
Of the three case studies, The Precarious comes closest to achieving a symbiotic
textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue because of the cyclical influence of visual artworks
on her poetry, which in turn feeds her artworks. Vicuña’s metaphoric and actual
weaving of word and image in ‘Con-cón’ overturns Heffernan’s concept of
representational rivalry. Her poem ‘Entering’ and the ‘Hudson River’ series also
question the ingrained binaries that inform disciplinary boundaries between poetry
and visual art, male and female as well as high and low culture. Similarly, Vicuña’s
78
spatial experiments in poems such as ‘Ceq’e’ fuse word and image as the text gives
voice to the ancient quipu while the quipu gives shape to contemporary text. Bal’s
concept of the ‘verbality’ of visual artworks and the ‘imageness’ of poetry can be
successfully applied to The Precarious. Vicuña’s dialogue with ancient Andean art
forms, found objects and installations further emphasise the evolution in ekphrastic
responses to non-representational artworks and non-traditional media. Bal’s theory of
pretext is also relevant in examination of poems like ‘A Glass of Milk’ which reflects
Vicuña’s connection to Chilean politics. This poem, as with all of the ekphrastic
responses in The Precarious, is interpretive rather than a set representation of a
representation as Heffernan contends. While Vicuña’s dialogue with her artworks is
seemingly internal, these poems, in both their visual and verbal forms, rely on
external forces of nature as demonstrated in the delayed ekphrastic conversation with
Tamryn
Bennett
the ‘K’ijllu’ crack after the rediscovery
of human
remains. Vicuña’s textual-visual
copyright 2008
ekphrastic dialogue
her own visual
stimulus
not onlyof
contradicts
ekphrastic
Not to with
be reprinted
without
consent
the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
theories of representational rivalry but questions the definition of ekphrasis itself.
The collection of new ekphrastic practices exemplified in these three case studies
constitutes an ekphrastic evolution. Although Shange, Pai and Vicuña’s texts each
achieve textual-visual ekphrastic dialogue to varying degrees, the push to reconcile
poetry and visual art, rather than fuel representational rivalries, illustrates a significant
divergence of ekphrastic practice from ekphrastic theory. These developments have
irrevocably questioned Hefferanan’s ekphrastic theories and, while Bal’s
interdisciplinary interpretation can be applied to changes in contemporary ekphrastic
practice, her focus is not specifically trained on such developments. The emergence of
ekphrastic dialogue, as outlined in this thesis, must be recognised within wider
ekphrastic criticism if theory is to remain relevant to ekphrastic practice. The future of
79
ekphrasis lies not only in the expansion of ekphrastic theory, but also in the extension
of textual-visual ekphrastic dialogues that encourage ongoing symbiotic exchanges
between poetry and visual art.
Tamryn Bennett
copyright 2008
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
80
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--- Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign. Baltimore: The John Hopkins
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Interviews:
Bennett, Tamryn. ‘Interview with Shin Yu Pai’, 21 March 2008.
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Interview with Shin Yu Pai
21 March 2008
TB: How would you describe the evolution of your ekphrastic practice from
Equivalence through to Nutritional Feed and in your current work?
SYP: The Equivalence poems were about conversations and dialogues with works of
art and specific artists – some of them deceased (Jackson Pollock, Felix GonzalesTorres, Joseph Cornell, etc.) Nutritional Feed was a similar dialogue process; though
the painter David Lukowski is a friend, we didn’t talk too much about his process or
context for the paintings and left the possibilities open for a conversation between
language and the visual.
TB: What importance do you place on your poems pushing beyond the traditional
representation of image and into a critical dialogue or extension of something within
the artwork you are responding to?
SYP: My poems are never intended to be “illustrative” of the works that they
respond to, in the way that I think that a lot of traditional ekphrastic writing tends to
Bennett
be. I’ve had readers describe myTamryn
work as poems
for artists, and poems for
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2008
museologists – I hope that they will illuminate some aspect of the intimate
experience that
have
certain works
of artconsent
and provoke
a similar
interrogation of
NotI to
bewith
reprinted
without
of the
author
experience in the reader – Iwww.tamrynbennett.com
think it would be incorrect to say that my poems
“illuminate some aspect of the work of art” – while there is a complementary aspect
of the poem to the visual object, the poems are never authoritative in their scope of
anything other than my own lived experience and way of perceiving and
experiencing the images around me. So the poems, like the images that I’m drawn to,
are really about something deeply personal within a specific experience and I think
that this is where the reader must be led, towards examining what this point of
personal connection for the individual is.
TB: To what extent does image feed poetry in your work? Is there a sense of call and
response at all?
SYP: In a sense all of the images in my poems are found – they come from some
lived experience in the real world (which includes visual art) which catches in the
mind and asks for interrogation – so in a sense, perhaps I am called to respond to
these images – or rather work out for myself what it is that these images bring to the
surface for me – what they reflect to me about something in my own experience that
needs to be articulated and worked through. My recent work post-NF draws a lot of
its imagery from global news stories and history.
TB: You have said that you ‘seem to conceive the book as a fully formed idea before
embarking on the project’. With such a synthesised approach to your production and
artistic practice what do you think of debates about rivalry between word and
image/poetry and visual art?
85
SYP: I’m not sure what rivalries you’re speaking of…. I believe in interdisciplinary
virtuosity. Dialectics and binaries no longer interest me. It’s why I study
anthropology.
TB: In the poems of Nutritional Feed you incorporate David Lukowski’s use of pop
culture and text. It seems as if to fully engage in conversation with his work you
almost become a part of it. How important is that level of engagement to your work?
SYP: To enter the conversation, I think it is important to understand the art-making
process and worldview of the other, in general. To get into the inside of that
experience. For instance, Recipe for Paper (from Equivalence) was inspired by
taking a papermaking class. For my Unnecessary Roughness series, I didn’t go out
and join any sports teams, but I read vintage sports manuals and rule books for
individual games and sports, like roller derby, that were raw material for my
collaborator’s project. Research is an important part of the process, understanding the
iconographic symbols and what they represent in the lexicon of a specific artist.
Because David’s practice is appropriative and to a degree, text-based, I indulged in a
creative experiment where I allowed myself to respond to his work by appropriating
his own process – it’s what made absolute sense at an intuitive level.
TB: Ekphrasis has conventionally separated itself from concrete and spatial poetry,
what was your motivation for combining the two in your work and more specifically
in Nutritional Feed?
Tamrynmultiple
Bennett
SYP: It made sense in NF to incorporate
approaches to language. The work
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2008
that I had been doing up until that moment with Unnecessary Roughness had begun
to play withNot
visual
and concrete
and spatial
poetry. of
There
so much to look at
tofields
be reprinted
without
consent
theisauthor
and talk about in David’s work
that the polyvocal visual/ekphrastic approach felt
www.tamrynbennett.com
completely appropriate and true to the material.
TB: Could you explain the process involved in the creation of poems like ‘Lucky
Strike’ and ‘Bed-time Story’ or any other in the Nutritional Feed collection?
SYP: With these poems, the form came first, then the concept. By studying David’s
paintings, obvious organic forms presented themselves to me, whether the
shapeliness of a poem or a physical structure – in the case of “bed-time” story – a
box-like form that would mimic a television set. The form of optometrist was not
explicit in David’s painting, but the title came me the perfect starting point to create a
piece resembling an eye-chart. I started with handsketching the shape of the poem
and then filling in the gaps.
TB: In summary, Nutritional Feed is a critique of American culture, are there more
specific themes or stories you wanted to give voice to?
SYP: NF is a critique of education, media and pop culture for sure – i.e. the
ideological apparatuses of the state, but I’m not sure that I would summarize the
project as a critique of American culture, perhaps an interrogation of American
culture. The project as a whole is deeply personal – David’s childhood is in the
paintings, and my childhood is in the poems – “it does a body good” is about being
lactose intolerant but being forcefed mainstream nutritional values; “heads up 7 up”
is about an American game that teachers subject their students to – it’s really a
86
classroom management tool that is unrelated to education – like the slogans and
practices that I was taught to integrate at an early age. Growing up in Southern
California – i.e. earthquake country – “duck and cover” was part of my kindergarten
experience. Of course if a 7.0 earthquake were to hit Riverside, CA, I doubt that
hiding under your desk would really save your life, so much as give the panicking
masses something to do during a natural disaster.
TB: How did collaboration with David Lukowski enable this more so than a
traditional writing process?
SYP: I’m not sure what “this” refers to in the above question. I’m not sure what
“traditional” refers to either. I think that individual writing practices are highly
idiosyncratic and always in evolution. At least, this is the case for my own work.
TB: Your poetry crosses boundaries of traditional ekphrastic representation into a
dialogue with visual art. Do you think ekphrastic theory should evolve with
contemporary practice to recognise a dialogue with visual art or are you happy to sit
outside those boundaries?
SYP: Theory can be useful to see a body of work with new eyes, but I don’t know
that ekphrastic theory is useful or interesting in the analysis here. Perhaps political or
cultural or linguistic theory. I just read Henry Louis Gates’ essay on Signifyin(g) –
and it was so clear to me what this critical writing illuminated for me what was
happening on an intuitive level as I was writing NF. Theory isn’t useful for me as a
Tamryn
Bennett
writer/artist until after the writing
process and
the work has been thought through and
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2008
put into the world.
Not to be reprinted without consent of the author
www.tamrynbennett.com
87