Ekphrasis – poetry derived from or inspired by a work of visual art – has a long history, including perhaps most famously poems by Keats (Ode to a Grecian Urn), and W. H. Auden (Musée des Beaux Arts).
Poets do often find affinities with painters and paintings.
Earlier this year I took part in a collaborative project between Eastbourne Poetry Café and the Towner Art Gallery, in which a group of local poets responded to the Towner's 'Sussex Modernism' exhibition.
My thanks to all who took part, and especially to the Eastbourne Poetry Café for including me. At first I thought it would be impossible to write in response to a retrospective art exhibition, but slowly the poems started to arrive...
Here's a link to some of what I wrote.
And here is one of the poems and its starting point, an uneasily beautiful watercolour by David Jones.
I loved Jones’s delicate, thoughtful paintings of the view from his studio in Portslade, made around 1927. Suffering from shell shock after World War I, Jones produced paintings that seem to be haunted by memories of the trauma he had recently experienced, across the sea that lay just beyond his balcony. The quote is from Jones’ epic war poem, set in the classical era but relevant to his own times too.
A Dissident Retreat
Oh blessed head, hold the striplings from the narrow sea
David Jones, from ‘In Parenthesis’
A studio facing the waves
should be a little bowl of peace
brightened by a salt breeze,
calmed by sea lullabies.
But the tide is always high
in this beachside house;
it swallows the balcony, spills
into the unfinished painting.
Water colours shiver the sky,
accumulate in clouds
that spread dark rumours
across the dissolving line
between this look-out
and what he’s not forgotten.
He sweetens the room
with a holiday deckchair,
flowers in shell colours.
But as he starts to paint, the chair
holds out a stretcher, the asters
stand watchful in their vase.
Poets do often find affinities with painters and paintings.
Earlier this year I took part in a collaborative project between Eastbourne Poetry Café and the Towner Art Gallery, in which a group of local poets responded to the Towner's 'Sussex Modernism' exhibition.
My thanks to all who took part, and especially to the Eastbourne Poetry Café for including me. At first I thought it would be impossible to write in response to a retrospective art exhibition, but slowly the poems started to arrive...
Here's a link to some of what I wrote.
And here is one of the poems and its starting point, an uneasily beautiful watercolour by David Jones.
I loved Jones’s delicate, thoughtful paintings of the view from his studio in Portslade, made around 1927. Suffering from shell shock after World War I, Jones produced paintings that seem to be haunted by memories of the trauma he had recently experienced, across the sea that lay just beyond his balcony. The quote is from Jones’ epic war poem, set in the classical era but relevant to his own times too.
A Dissident Retreat
Oh blessed head, hold the striplings from the narrow sea
David Jones, from ‘In Parenthesis’
A studio facing the waves
should be a little bowl of peace
brightened by a salt breeze,
calmed by sea lullabies.
But the tide is always high
in this beachside house;
it swallows the balcony, spills
into the unfinished painting.
Water colours shiver the sky,
accumulate in clouds
that spread dark rumours
across the dissolving line
between this look-out
and what he’s not forgotten.
He sweetens the room
with a holiday deckchair,
flowers in shell colours.
But as he starts to paint, the chair
holds out a stretcher, the asters
stand watchful in their vase.
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