photo by Robert Colasanto
The first ekphrastic poem I remember writing—before I’d even heard the word ekphrastic—had to do with loss and death. It was inspired by one of Cézanne’s still lifes, with a milk pitcher, baguette, knife and apples on a table whose cloth is swept up as if by sudden wind—as if someone’s just opened the door with terrible news. At the time, my mate was losing his sister to cancer, and although she was older than I was by a decade, she still seemed too young to die. So this feeling, that there was something fundamentally wrong about the way a life was about to be stopped, entered into my feelings about the painting, or informed them, or made me see the painting in a different way. It’s impossible to say, exactly.
What is possible to say is that ekphrastic poetry shouldn’t be an act of mere description. If you want a mere description of something, my nephew is fond of saying, take a photograph. If you want to interpret it, make a painting. I think the same thing is true with poetry. If you want a mere description, write a word picture. If you want an interpretation, write a poem (or an essay or short story or novel). I don’t want to privilege making over describing despite my telltale “mere”: I think we need both. But I think a poem that is only description of a painting is a word picture in disguise.
It interests me that loss was the subject of my first ekphrastic poem. If I look back at the many ekphrastic poems I’ve written since, including a cycle of poems on winter Impressionist paintings, they all have loss as their subject. I think the paintings have loss as their subject, too. Even photographs do, as Roland Barthes pointed out—every photograph reminds us of death, he says, since every photograph tells us This has been. As he painted, I doubt if Cézanne was thinking about loss. Enough has been written about his work and recorded from his own conversations and notes for us to know that he was thinking about form—spheres and cones and rectangles and rhombuses. He was looking at the structure of being in the world. But to examine the structure of being in the world is really to examine loss. What’s behind this amazing geometry of form? How does a study of it reveal both what we know and what we don’t know?
Over the years, as I’ve looked at paintings and read about painters and their art, I’ve come to think that every work of art is an act against loss. It’s not that artists are trying to immortalize themselves. It’s that they’re trying to make a stay against nothingness. The nothingness is there, implicitly, but what solace to have these apples, this knife, this bread. What comfort in the milk pitcher. Even if whoever let the wind in so suddenly is the bearer of terrible news, what joy that nothing is fixed in its place. The cloth will lift. The bread and apples will be eaten, the milk drunk, no matter the loss. Because behind every loss, there is still life.
Lynne Knight’s fourth collection of poems, Again, was published by Sixteen Rivers Press in 2009. She has also published three award-winning chapbooks. A cycle of poems on Impressionist winter paintings, Snow Effects (Small Poetry Press), has been translated into French by Nicole Courtet. Her awards include a Theodore Roethke Award from Poetry Northwest, a Lucille Medwick Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, an NEA grant, and the 2009 RATTLE Poetry Prize.
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I love the way the final lines of this beautifully reflective piece suddenly illuminate the double entendre of the phrase “still life.” Until now it has never before occurred to me that “still life” doesn’t only refer to objects caught in a moment of stillness but also can be an affirmation of what persists beyond one singular, seized moment. Thank you!
Lovely essay. I love your idea that paintings (and poems!) “make a stay against nothingness.”