Ekphrasis and the Feminine: Poetry That Moves Away from the Image

Abstract

This article will focus on three poets I consider as having practised innovative modes of writing with a visual artwork in mind: Anne Carson, Emily Berry, and Deryn Rees-Jones. In contrast to more traditional ekphrasis—exemplified by William Carlos Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel—the poets I examine do not gesture to figures or narrative. Instead, the artwork they engage with generates their poem. This approach might involve an image that is formally analogous with the poem, where the latter takes on visual elements of the former; an image as a source of inspiration, sparking associations; or an image that functions as a metaphor for the poet’s lyric themes, to mention just a few possibilities. ‘Expanded ekphrasis’ will refer then to the ways in which these poets move away from description and dilate the word–image relationship. I also place Carson, Berry, and Rees-Jones in a lineage of female poets interested in a non-descriptive response to the image. The ekphrastic poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, and Jorie Graham come to mind, and these also deserve acknowledgement. However, the three poets I analyse each demonstrate different ways ekphrasis has expanded over the last two decades. The significance of these poets as women will also be highlighted, and how they influence my own poems.

A standard definition of ekphrasis is provided by James Heffernan, who presents the term as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (Heffernan [1993] 2004, p. 3). I update this, however, in a way that takes account of how the practice has expanded since the turn of the twenty-first century, and now comprises other techniques and media, including music, movement, and architecture. As Renate Brosch proposes, ekphrasis can be defined as ‘[a] literary response to a visual image or visual images’. This highlights how ‘it is not a visual representation being represented but the perception of a visual image that is translated into verbal form’ (Brosch 2018, pp. 226–27). In fact, poets are now more interested in producing a new work of art or re-presenting, in another form, the image(s) that inspired them. This can also be perceived in terms of infidelity: not being faithful to the original artwork, by reproducing its figures or devices, but instead wandering away from or even spurning it (Campanello 2013, p. 88). Rather than ‘ekphrasis’, they are likely then to speak of ‘poetic responses’ or ‘answers’ to a visual source (Brandon et al. 2018). This is indicative of an expansion of ekphrasis beyond describing, narrating, or being fixed to a static art form, exemplified by William Carlos Williams’s ‘The Corn Harvest’ (Williams 2000, p. 216). The artwork can, therefore, be used as a springboard from which to transition to other concerns; a vehicle for collaborating with other poets or artists; a critical ‘filter’ or ‘processor for understanding’ ourselves (Donovan 2010); and so on.

The present moment of ekphrastic theory and practice offers alternatives to what David Kennedy calls the ‘representational model’ of ekphrasis (Kennedy 2012, p. 1): the idea that the poem represents the artwork and remains the central object to which the poem refers. Kennedy also critiques what Heffernan sees as ‘[the] paragonal […] contest between rival modes of representation: between the driving force of the narrating word and the stubborn resistance of the fixed image’ (Heffernan [1993] 2004, p. 6), while suggesting that this model has become too limiting. To resolve this, Camille Guthrie posits, in contrast to a verbo-visual struggle for authority, language seeking to gain mastery over the image, an ekphrastic mode of ‘stepping into the aura’. This is illustrated by Barbara Guest’s ‘Roses’ and Kevin Young’s ‘Cadillac Moon’, where, as Guthrie observes, ‘the relationship between poet and artist […] is not adversarial: it’s a response based on enthusiasm and engagement […] an interaction that doesn’t require a winner.’ With a poetics that, by extension, ‘revels in the image’, ‘asks’, ‘reveals’, and ‘wonders’ (Guthrie 2013), we can foster a dialogical rapport with the artwork, one that can be celebrated and reimagined, while holding sway in shaping the poem in both content and form. In addition, today’s ekphrasis is sometimes marked by resistance to what W.J.T. Mitchell refers to as a rhetoric of otherness, where the artwork is gendered female and the (often male) poet seeks to dominate it (Mitchell 1992). While we might contend that ekphrasis is rarely this simple, I am persuaded to think, like Kennedy and Richard Meek, in terms of an ‘encounter’ between word and image. Here, in contrast to what Mitchell suggests, rather than an object to be subjugated, the artwork becomes a catalyst for thinking. The poem is not subordinate to the image; rather, the encounter is reciprocal: the poem changes how we visualise the artwork, just as seeing the artwork shapes our making of the poem. This interaction is productive rather than reproductive, and it is open-ended: not aimed at recovering the meaning of the artwork but rather allowing new meanings to arise (Kennedy and Meek 2019, p. 14). Taking their ideas further, in my own poems I expand beyond the artwork as the central interlocutor. What has primacy in my writing is the affect (defined as raw and often bodily sensation), which is often verbalised as grief. I find this mirrored in abstract and formless artworks, which may give rise to my poem’s formal procedures, but my subject matter usually diverges and floats off independently. By theorising ekphrasis this way, I also widen the possibilities for writing about non-figurative art forms.

The ekphrastic techniques of Carson, Berry, and Rees-Jones have arisen from a broader shift away from description in the twentieth century (Loizeaux 2008, pp. 2–5). This is also clear in the poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, and Jorie Graham, among others (Hollenburg 2003). In-depth analysis of their writing is beyond the scope of this article. Yet, it should be noted that real or perceived marginality plays a role in the move away from the image; a subject position often occupied by contemporary women; and, as I imagine it, this is a position that is performatively reenacted in relation to the tradition of ekphrasis that precedes them. Therefore, what I see as common to these poets—and what has influenced my own practice—are their ways of expanding the possibilities of what ekphrasis can do. For instance, following their work, in my poems it is often difficult to discern a link with an artwork from my title or epigraph. I also refuse to hermeneutically render the silent picture ‘knowable’ or to extract its meaning or ‘truth’. In contrast, the artwork exists in parallel, in a metaphorical relationship with the lyric themes it mediates. I also read their approach to ekphrasis as a sideways door for lyric expression, one that acts as a third term in exploring grief or loss. While they accomplish this in different ways, their relationship with the image points the way towards how ekphrasis can help mediate complex thoughts and feelings, those that might overwhelm us if dealt with head-on. In Carson’s Nox, for example, grief is conveyed through the poet’s interaction with photographs, fragments of letters, and material traces (Carson 2010; Bell 2022, pp. 1054–59).

Writing as a poet also brings a particular kind of embodied knowledge and insight to bear in my analysis: I am not writing in a way that is disinterested, but through my creative practice of writing on grief. What follows, then, is not a scholarly attempt to establish a strict alignment between three poets; instead, they have each, in their own way, influenced how I write a poem in response to artworks that reflect my loss. The emphasis I give to certain aspects of their work is based on reading my own poems in dialogue with theirs, and I remain open to the possibility that, in doing so, I project my own emotional states. Reading poets through the interpretive lens of my own practice meets with the NAWE benchmark statement on creative practice research, which advocates a ‘symbiotic link’ between critical and creative writing (Neale et al. 2018, p. 4).

It is with this practice-led approach that I present my reading of Carson, Berry, and Rees-Jones, whose poems can be read in terms of an encounter, as suggested, but also as instances of moving away from an image or working in parallel with it. Rather than a dynamic where the aim might be empowerment or an effort to harness the image with lyrical precision, the poets that interest me, many of whom are women, appear to start from a place of mutuality or exchange, and what ensues in their interaction is a self that remains porous and receptive to the artwork. This might also be predicated on other ways of seeing, in contrast to an objectifying male gaze—the power dynamic where visual art portrays its subjects from a heterosexual, male perspective, transforming the object of vision into something to be possessed (Mulvey 1975, pp. 14–26). Such ways of seeing might initiate a symbiosis where both subject and object, poet and image, are permeable and fragile. This requires interdependence rather than a power differential: the poet and image working together, a two-way flow, a reciprocity. The artwork shapes the poem as much as the poet represents the artwork. With this approach in mind, I will argue that Carson, Berry, and Rees-Jones each develop expanded modes of ekphrasis that give expression to female experience, while my practice constitutes a potential further expansion, working with abstract or non-representational art forms.

I regard the feminine as a discursive or structural position: a way of being located in relation to power or symbolic authority. This idea is supported by Julia Kristeva’s claim that ‘the very dichotomy man/woman as an opposition between two rival entities may be understood as belonging to metaphysics’ (Kristeva [1979] 1986, p. 209). This perspective is still valid today, and the feminine as a subject position of marginality, while avoiding the rhetoric of otherness or rivalry, is consistent with my subsequent discussion, where I break down the opposition between subject and object, poet and image.

1. Anne Carson

Anne Carson, born in Toronto in 1950, is a Canadian poet and scholar, renowned for her experimental, genre-blending work that fuses ancient Greek literature with contemporary themes of desire, loss, time, and myth, often in hybrid forms of poetry, prose, and translation. Her poems also reveal a preoccupation with ekphrasis. As Carson admits, ‘I mostly think of my work as a painting’ (McNeilly and Carson 2003, p. 22). Monique Tschofen likewise points out that ‘to read the body of her work is to be immersed in an exquisite frenzy of the visible’ (Tschofen 2004, p. 31), while Oran McKenzie sees Carson as ‘a painterly poet in the sense that both vision in general and visual arts in particular play a central role in her poetics as well as her poetry’ (McKenzie 2015, p. 10). That ekphrasis is an enduring feature of Carson’s poetry is evident in her collections Short Talks, Autobiography of Red, Men in the Off Hours, Decreation, and ‘The Glass Essay’ (Carson 1992, 1994, 2000, 2006, 1995, respectively). In these works, as Carson explains, her writing is less about ‘the meaning of each individual word adding up to a proposition; it’s about the way they interact with each other as daubs of meaning’, [how] ‘things are placed next to each other’ (McNeilly and Carson 2003, p. 22). Carson expands ekphrasis by rejecting mimesis as a governing principle. Rather than reproducing the artwork, she juxtaposes it with fragments of classical texts, philosophical concepts, and desire. Meaning emerges through associations and tensions created by these heterogenous elements.

In doing this, Carson disrupts the ekphrastic mode we find in modernity. For Ruth Webb, this is limited to the ‘static’ and ‘objectified’ work of art, awaiting the poet’s verbal description (Webb 1999, p. 12), and epitomised by John Keats’s famous ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ (Keats [1819] 2016, p. 321). What we find, instead, is an ekphrasis that dilates the word–image relationship. This can be seen in ‘Hopper: Confessions’, from Men in the Off Hours (Carson 2000, pp. 49–59). Exemplified by her poem ‘Nighthawks’, her poems are like texts in parallel with the image and are a way of exploring philosophical questions. In ‘Nighthawks’ (from the sequence ‘Hopper: Confessions’), there is an explicit allusion to Hopper’s painting Nighthawks (1942), and the poem ends with a quotation by St. Augustine on the necessity of time (Augustine [397–400 AD] 2008, XI). Here, Carson bridges the 1942 stillness of Hopper’s painting with her twenty-first century lens, using St. Augustine’s reflections on time to propel the image and its meaning into the present. Carson reveals how ekphrasis, by gesturing towards a singular artwork (e.g., in the title), can operate on multiple levels and correspond with thoughts that arise when contemplating the picture. One of these is reflection (how a figure is reflected in glass or by another character), and in ‘Nighthawks’, this is represented by way of form. This includes her two six-line stanzas and how they resemble each other; a mirroring of end words (antistrophes), with rhyme when the words are not exact, while mention of ‘shadows’ and ‘widows’ also connects figuratively. The ‘you’ that Carson introduces in her first line, while referencing the female figure at the bar, evokes another ‘you’, one tangential to the image, and perhaps there are additional ones. Nonetheless, her phrase ‘institute of shadows’, her image of a ‘street black as widows’, and ‘tonight’, point to a shared lexis and semantic field with Hopper’s painting (Carson 2000, pp. 49–60).

In this instance, might the ‘you’ also refer to poetry and the ekphrasis (‘the rules of you’)? And might the repeated (first and final) line, ‘I wanted to run away with you tonight’, suggest an urge to associate away from the image? Might it also infer—supported by the Augustine quotation (‘time […] were not’)—a desire for the lovers (and maybe the poet) to escape time? Following this reading, this line also appears to act as a framing device, one that visually re-presents the rules which contain the poem. The ambiguity here also demonstrates what Wanda Campbell regards as a regular feature in Carson’s poems, where the more ‘traditional triangle of conversation between the experience of artist, poet, and reader’ is extended ‘to even more voices, a polyphony that challenges navigation’ (Campbell 2009, p. 10). While Campbell’s polyphony expands the ekphrastic triangle, I suggest that Carson pushes this further, carving out a space for a variety of marginal subject positions vis-à-vis the artwork. Among these is my own position as I write through grief, since this can place the grieving subject outside the expected return to work, relationships, and social routines.

Carson’s approach should be placed in the context of a feminist critique of the male gaze, expounded by critics such as Heffernan and Barbara Fischer. Fischer notes, ‘inter-art encounters […] seem to reproduce a hierarchical structure of dominance—male over female, text over image—in which “male” aligns with text, speaking, and beholding subject, and “female” with image, silence, and art object’ (Fischer 2009, p. 72). Carson’s ekphrases, such as the Hopper sequence, are a challenge to this paradigm: not looking with a desirous gaze but instead looking at the desirous gazes of others (Fischer 2009, p. 73). This mode might also be linked with poems by Kathleen Fraser and Cole Swensen, which, as Fischer is right to point out, ‘demonstrate that ekphrasis can expose and interrogate the objectification of women rather than duplicate it’ (Fischer 2009, p. 73). This is also indicative of specific kind of expansion: moving beyond traditional power dynamics while reclaiming female subjectivity.

An excellent example of the above is Carson’s ‘Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin’. In this poem, Carson refuses to objectify the drawing, assert distance from it, or make it speak. Instead, she responds to the image, as Tschofen considers it, ‘in the spirit of drawing: exploratory, experimental, and, like her grammatical form, conditional’ (Tschofen 2013, p. 240). Building on this perspective, I am led to interpret Carson as perceiving the artwork as though it is unknowable, spurning a surface we might view or imagine.

Carson’s poem is written in single lines, each marked by a space, each beginning with the word ‘If’. This arrangement of lines and the device of anaphora shape the form of the poem, which in no way resembles Goodwin’s drawing. Indeed, the form as I apprehend it is another way for Carson to resist any attempt at representation, narrative, or completeness. Carson’s register is ambiguous—suggestive of a hybrid text between a poem and an essay. This can be seen as another example of expansion: allowing an artwork’s form to push the writing beyond a received poetic form. While she provides the semblance of syllogism and propositional logic, these are subverted with conditionality and non-sense. In moments of dislocation and the fragmentary, we are told ‘the sequence doesn’t matter. /If it begins, a trickle, this thin slow falling of the mind’ (Carson 2006, p. 99). The poem does not rely on the more expected building blocks we may associate with the lyric poem; there is no metre, no rhyme; imagery is minimal, yet vivid when it appears (e.g., ‘If police in that city burnt off people’s hands with a blowtorch’, p. 97).

Carson’s motif of torture critiques the interrogation of images as a way to extract truth. This is done with a subversion of grammar and syntax (e.g., regular use of dependent clauses and conditionals, such as ‘If red is the color of art pain’, p. 99). These act within a wider disturbance ‘of genre, of person, of order, and of representation’, which are designed to expose techniques of control (Tschofen 2013, p. 235). This is also a means for Carson to reintroduce a female subjectivity that moves beyond passive objectification, giving voice to women’s embodied experience. Carson’s phrasing (‘If body is always deep but deepest at its surface’) indicates that grammar and syntax are mechanisms of containment, and they are analogous to a ‘perspective paradigm’ within the visual arts (Tschofen 2013, p. 236; Damisch 1995, p. 446). In her resistance to this, with her truncated or fragmentary sentences, Carson demonstrates how ekphrasis can be a process of reaching towards rather than trying to represent; a subverted grammar that admits to an artwork’s ineffability.

In Carson’s poem I find no unitary speaker; there is a shift in identity and address. The chief voice speaks in the third-person impersonal—the scholar who stands back from or above the text; she comments on colour, art, experience […] But the speaker also uses a second person address to counter this authoritative voice (as in ‘If you had the idea of interrogation’, p. 97). Carson rejects the idea that the image (as other) can be fully grasped, and her poem suggests a thinking process; it moves tangentially rather than linearly. In contrast, then, to what Murray Krieger called the ‘still moment’ of ekphrasis, which for him is marked by stasis, shape, closure, and silent presence (Krieger 1967, 1992), Carson’s poem moves away from the image, allowing the speaker to negotiate their own position relative to it. This tactic has been vital in my practice, as I have explored how a poem can move away from an abstract artwork. Likewise, my subject matter bears no direct correlation with the image, instead resonating with it, and not bound by imitation.

2. Emily Berry

Emily Berry is a highly respected contemporary English poet, born in 1981, known for her emotionally charged collections. Her poetry explores themes of loss, desire, and language’s limits. Declan Ryan places her collection Stranger, Baby, for instance, in a tradition of imbuing poetry with the capacity to bring back the dead or at least speak with them, and with this in mind, he associates her with Thomas Hardy, Ian Hamilton, and Denise Riley (Berry 2017; Ryan 2018). While Berry is undoubtedly dealing with serious themes, and at times writing from a place of vulnerability and disempowerment, humour and satire also play a part, as manifested in ‘Our Love Could Spoil Dinner’, from Dear Boy (Berry 2013, p. 3). These elements combined might be expressive of what Kristeva understands as the dissident power of women (Kristeva and Boucquey [1975] 1996, pp. 104–6): how they can be in a position (with poetry or otherwise) to unsettle dominant linguistic structures. I focus on Berry, however, since, like my own work, her poetry confronts grief and speaks to a lost love while referencing artworks. This complements my discussion of how female poets expand the tradition of ekphrasis, and analyses Berry’s poems in the context of elegy and my own work.

Indeed, it is possible to argue that elegy is the dominant form of Berry’s lyric, where ekphrasis functions as a subordinate mode or decoy in exploring personal themes. Rather than describe or engage with the artwork directly, Berry uses it as a jumping-off point for psychological excavation; a means by which the speaker can reveal difficult truths. I read this as another kind of expansion away, appearing to foreground a personal narrative, while making oblique reference to the image. This tactic is effective in conveying a destabilised speaker: the artwork, rather than reproduced, acts as a buffer for a vertiginous affective state.

In Berry’s Stranger Baby, I recognise at least three ekphrastic poems. These are ‘Girl on a Liner’, ‘Sleeping’, and ‘Drunken Bellarmine’. Like other contemporary examples of writing indirectly about an image (such as Ocean Vuong’s ‘Untitled [Blue, Green, and Brown]: oil on canvas: Mark Rothko: 1952’), Berry stages the artwork as a set of coordinates for writing about a personal loss (Vuong 2017, p. 47). Berry’s writing can be read as emblematic of a particular mode of ekphrasis in which troubling facts about one’s life can be written about through the mirror that an artwork presents. Berry is part of a recent lineage of female poets whose work is only minimally anchored to their visual source, where the latter acts as a springboard from which associations can arise or a screen for auto/biography (Graham 1996; Yoseloff 2011). Berry’s ekphrastic mode also conveys a ‘skittery’ quality (Hoagland 2006): her phrases and lines at odds with one another; they fly apart with centrifugal force; her reflections are more dissociative rather than coherently narrative: ‘This is the body’s way of handling emotion. /I am dreaming a lot about voyages’ (Berry 2017, p. 34). These are features often contained by single-line stanzas without a logical sequence, as can be seen in her poem ‘Sleeping’ (Berry 2017, p. 36). In my estimation, this is evidence that Berry moves beyond a simple reflection on her own life through the artwork. Instead, it is treated more like a dream symbol—semi-opaque and layered with multiple meanings—where unconscious thoughts or affects can find form.

The titles and epigraphs of ekphrastic poems in Stranger, Baby refer to actual artworks: ‘Girl on Liner’, a painting by Rose Wylie (1996); ‘Sleeping’, a painting by Paula Rego (1986); and ‘Drunken Bellarmine’, a mixed media piece by Renee So (2012). Wylie is known for her vibrant, playful style that depicts everyday life with a touch of whimsy; Rego’s figurative works are often psychologically intense and surreal; while So populates her images with cartoon-like or drunken characters. Aside from ‘Girl on Liner’ (modified as ‘Girl on a Liner’), Berry purloins the artwork’s original title, used as an epigraph under the poem’s title, with the word ‘after’. This suggests her poem was written subsequent to her viewing; yet the connection between word and image is deliberately vague. I adopt this idea in my own practice: to establish a tenuous link between the image and my poem, or to imply a metaphorical bearing. Is this also Berry’s rationale? In the poems I highlight, there are implicit references to the works to which they seemingly respond, but there is an absence of description or naming of specific visual components. Despite this, Berry’s themes resonate with those of the artist. This is clear in ‘Sleeping’, where family dynamics (between the speaker, her mother, and her sisters) hint at a congruence with the composition of Rego’s work, which comprises four female figures. The other artworks also include figures; though they are abstracted, rudimentary, and open to projection: Berry seeing herself, or her experiences, through the picture. Berry’s ekphrastic mode can thus be read as repositioning the artwork as a portal for self-exploration and revealing the speaker’s unconscious.

I am particularly intrigued by how the speaker of Berry’s ekphrastic poems is inhabiting an altered dream-like state of consciousness, where statements are presented in a jumbled or discordant way, as if collaged together. This can be seen in ‘Sleeping’: ‘That’s what we do in the desert. /I love it most when I’m asleep. /I don’t like it under the sun, with a desert bird to escape from’ (Berry 2017, p. 36). Berry is making use here of single-line stanzas, illustrating a skittish quality; thoughts are dissociated or disjointed, as we can also see in ‘Girl on a Liner’. A non-sequitur is apparent at the start: ‘This is the body’s way of handling emotion. /I am dreaming a lot about voyages’. Berry’s free verse is arranged into one continuous block, which suggests coherence, at least in a superficial sense; yet her oblique statements work seem to against this: ‘I am in a beautiful place/with birdsong and which smells of flowers; yet, /everything very skewed. I loved you, but not in a pure way’ (Berry 2017, p. 34). Here, I suggest, Berry embodies an alternative to dominant accounts of ekphrasis where the poet is assumed to be stable and in control of their aesthetic action (Cheeke 2010). Berry’s speaker, in contrast to the modern formulation (a subject contemplating a static art object (Webb 1999, p. 12)), seems to inhabit a state of agitation.

My sense of disjuncture when reading ‘Girl on a Liner’ is heightened by how the opening two lines are dramatically end-stopped. What follows is a polyphony or multi-layering of voices. From the beginning (in medias res) is a first-person speaker employing the pronoun ‘I’. The lyric ‘I’ transitions into the second person (‘I loved you, but not in a pure way’) and invokes, with detachment, other pronouns (‘they’, ‘he’, and ‘hers’). This shifts into a complex array of interpersonal relationships and code switching. ‘Girl on a Liner’ also includes italics, signifying either a personal writing to self or mode of inner speech (‘I wrote, Nothing in the outside world is changed’), and parts in quotation marks (‘What do you want?’ is not a simple question!’). Another device is a question and an answer: ‘What’s that noise? I expect it’s the sound of the train breaking down’, and ‘Does crying age one? If so, I suppose I’ve become very old’. This, along with the use of ellipses, suggests an inner dialogue, uncertainty, and the speaker’s effort to make sense of her identity (Berry 2017, pp. 34–35). In this unstable polyphony, Berry evokes a fluid female subjectivity, one unable to find a fixed perspective on the self or artwork. The latter is instead employed as an armature, around which her poem is constructed.

Looking again at the artwork, there is little figuration, save for a young woman with blonde hair, wearing a ball gown and waving a white handkerchief. It is likely that the image worked as an inspiration, jogging memories, perhaps, or activating repressed or censored thoughts, and it is dubious that Berry would deem it necessary to read the poem next to the image. Instead, as I have argued, Berry uses disjunction and collage, where each pronoun shift and fragmented line disrupts a linear narrative or distinct correlation with the artwork. Again, this is an expanded ekphrasis: not so much about describing the actual artwork, but rather its image (recalled or misperceived in the imagination), and how this serves as a catalyst for expressing a female subjectivity.

3. Deryn Rees-Jones

I now shift my attention to Deryn Rees-Jones, an acclaimed Anglo-Welsh poet and critic, born in 1968, whose ekphrastic work further complicates the intersection of writing about loss, gender, and visual form, introducing interdisciplinary connections between poetry, art, and science. While writing my own poems, I found her collection Burying the Wren (2012) particularly vital. This includes her ‘Dogwoman’ sequence that echoes Paula Rego’s pastel work, Dog Woman (1994). Although this poem is the focus of my analysis, Rees-Jones’ entire collection informs my practice: how she delves into monumental subjects through her exploration of the small and minuscule; her reflection on grief while not straying into confessionalism; her use of a poetic sequence to convey temporality; how her poems express unavoidable sentimentality through appropriate structures; and her use of repetition.

In Burying the Wren, Rees-Jones fuses ekphrasis with elegy, similar to Berry, and encompassing these is her exploration of metaphysical questions, around death, resurrection, and rebirth. I also have affinity with how Rees-Jones goes against the social mores of bereavement: in the ‘Dogwoman’ sequence, she allows the feral force of grief loose on the surface. She affirms the transformational power of loss, and, as Lytton Smith notes, ‘how death unravels and reanimates the self’ (Smith 2013). As such, Gareth Prior can assert that ‘boundaries, syntax and narrative all break down. As the opening line of “Dogwoman” states, “No one can love this horror, no one can want it.”’ Language warps to an incantation, a piling-up of unnerving fragments (“Dog sitting, dog listening, dog running with big joy … Dog blur/hellhound”), punctuated by almost unbearable poignancy (“Once, attendant in my blue dress, I hadn’t the words to call you back”)’ (Prior 2013; Rees-Jones 2012, p. 14).

Rees-Jones’ collection can be situated in the context of grief literature, sharing a lineage with, say, Alfred Tennyson’s ‘In Memoriam A.H.H’, through Douglas Dunne’s Elegies, and up to Fiona Moore’s The Only Reason for Time (Tennyson 1850; Dunne 1985; Moore 2013). As Rees-Jones sees it, this genre ‘highlights women poets’ uncertainties about their self-preservation and poetic determination’ (Rees-Jones 2005, p. 19). Male poets can also, however, be drawn to the dramatic monologue for similar reasons that women are, particularly when their self-preservation and poetic determination are questioned, in different ways. Rees-Jones analyses Carol Ann Duffy with this in mind, while focusing on her ekphrastic poem ‘Standing Female Nude’. For Rees-Jones, Duffy is dealing with a woman on the edge of society, and her ekphrasis (in the persona of a ‘river whore’) is making a condensed political point on double standards between men and women (Rees-Jones 1999; Duffy 1985, p. 44). My poems draw attention to my subject position in a similar way: I am vulnerable through trauma and grieving. This has, in my experience, exposed me to shaming and emasculation. Counterintuitively, vulnerability can be met with hostility, reminding loved ones or those in the community of their own pain or precarity. The mechanism here is that, rather than elicit sympathy, the vulnerable other becomes a target for projected anxieties, making expressions of loss liable to rejection as well as connection. This matters because it shows how vulnerability acts as a critical lens in reading contemporary ekphrastic grief poetry, rather than working only as personal testimony. I read Rees-Jones as presenting her work in these terms, where Burying the Wren avows ‘poetry’s ability to create prismic narrative structures that allow “story” to move beyond anecdote’ (Rees-Jones 2019a).

More pronounced though is her engagement with Paula Rego, informed by her critical book Paula Rego: The Art of Story (Rees-Jones 2019c). Rather than a shallow convergence between poet and artist, as often occurs, Rees-Jones views Rego as a teacher, one who has helped her to ‘develop imaginative structures’, and ‘prompted [her] to think about the relationship between the personal and political, the moment, and the historical’. Rees-Jones explains how Rego ‘creates a prism of meaning through image, and story, the personal and the fabular’ [and gave her] a way of thinking about giving form to complexities of experience in time’ (Turnbull and Rees-Jones 2019). This expanded mode is one where, rather than overt reference to a visual prompt, research into the aesthetics and formal choices of the artist work as a conduit between word and image. The poem is crafted through the artist in other words—through their working methods, and so on—while description is kept minimal.

In ‘Dogwoman’, the form is an obvious feature—a sequence that comprises eleven cantos, separated by asterisks, each of nine lines. These nine lines follow a regular pattern: four couplets followed by a single line. The use of cantos under the same title suggests the same subject (and image?), returned to over a period. This is implied also by the repeated use of ‘Now’ at the start of three of these cantos; each canto revealing a different perspective on the speaker’s canine identity. This form is a dramatic monologue—often employed by female poets to navigate the experience of resilience in the face of grief. From my experience, it is easy to grasp how ‘self-preservation and poetic determination’ can feel compromised as a result of loss, especially losing a partner supportive of one’s poetry—as was the case with Rees-Jones, with the loss of her partner, Michael Murphy. The dramatic monologue channels the anxieties and self-debasements Rees-Jones has written about, without lapsing into confessionalism: ‘For now I’m a woman/brought up by dogs, bitch in the muck and the blood and the dirt’ (Rees-Jones 2012, p. 13). The most striking feature is the anaphoric repetition of the word ‘dog’, which refers to Rego’s image, anchoring the ekphrasis and driving the poem forward, rhythmically and sonically. ‘Dog’ works as both a noun and an adjective at different points (e.g., ‘dog sudden’ or ‘dog blur’), sometimes as a kenning or part of a hard-hitting spondee (e.g., ‘dog now’ or ‘dog pause’). The latter also occurs elsewhere: ‘heart-hit’, ‘flesh-bound’, ‘pink teats’, and so forth (Rees-Jones 2012, pp. 13–14). Her poem features internal rhyme: in canto six, for example, there is ‘colour’, ‘mother’, ‘holler’, ‘squalor’, and ‘horror’. Her phrases, often short, imply a snarling, spitting action (‘Dog blood. Dog mess. Dog foaming/at the gates of hell’); sometimes they are portmanteaus or neologisms (‘dogbelly’ or ‘dogsoul’). This form assists in conveying a tone of defiance and anger. However, there is also a tinge of jubilation in her abject state; the shamelessness of revealing a beaten-down condition, reduced to animalistic drives and passions. In part, Rees-Jones’ imagery attests to this, with the ‘dog’ persona presented in graphic detail while in a series of uncompromising positions (‘crouched between my own thighs’, ‘my skirts pulled up’, ‘lying on my back, my legs outsplayed’). As stated earlier, the predominant theme is grief (‘No one can love this horror, no one can want it’); though maybe it is the effect of grief on identity, so that the loss is often double: in losing the other and one’s notion of self (constituted in and through the beloved). Such loss is often compounded by isolation and a pain with which no one wishes to empathise (‘No one can hear me in spite of the howls’) (Rees-Jones 2012, p. 13).

A dialogue with the visual arts runs through many of Rees-Jones’ other poems and collections; however, it is not often the case that an ekphrasis is flagged up as such. Certainly, there is no descriptive ekphrasis, and usually there is no epigraph. Often, an artist is mentioned, as is the case in ‘Grandma in the Garden’, where we find ‘one wild Modigliani eye hooking the clouds’ (Rees-Jones 1994, p. 18). On other occasions, Rees-Jones appears to have an image in mind, but this is subject to guesswork or inference. One example is ‘Cell’, where, when she writes ‘Imagine a landscape folded into a room: /moonlight like mist on the hills, /blackthorn and alder, the whole world pressed inwards, /a flower between the pages of a book’, the visual lexicon of Francesca Woodman can be seen in the mind’s eye (whose photography appears on the cover of Erato) (Rees-Jones 2019b, p. 5). Yet, because no artwork is named, I understand Rees-Jones as exploiting Woodman’s work to evoke her poem. Is it a remembrance with one specific image in mind? Or is it an amalgamation of Woodman’s opus or tropes? Either way, Rees-Jones’ approach has shaped my practice: a mode of ekphrasis at a further remove from those which begin with a particular artwork, then expand away from it. I like how an artwork can be misremembered, how ekphrasis might be based on a composite of two or more images, relating unfaithfully to the image, or using a collection of images to provide the cues that help construct my poem. In fact, Rees-Jones proposes that her connection with the visual arts is on some occasions subliminal or can emerge out of her experience of cryptomnesia. She states: ‘Sometimes I am making conscious connections, sometimes not, and what goes on unconsciously excites me’ (Turnbull and Rees-Jones 2019).

4. Further Expansion

Although there are occasional examples of poets responding to abstract art, such as Graham’s ‘For Mark Rothko’ (Graham 1979), where she moves out from the red of a Rothko colour field painting to the red of a bird in the speaker’s vicinity, I read my poems as a further expansion of this often-neglected sub-genre. With my practice, rather than being secured by a poem-image and subject-object boundary, I am immersed or engulfed by some images, those that mirror my grief or threaten me with a collapse of meaning. Here I am thinking especially of images that are formless, monochromatic, or with no recognisable signs. Their surface can be experienced as an affective intensity where language fails and selfhood is unsettled. Thus, I am looking for way out, an extrication or ‘exit strategy’—to escape from the image (Wright 2025). This action can be understood in terms of ex-phrasis: a neologism that refers to an entanglement with the artwork. Rather than a poet who is writing about or ‘into’ an image, my coinage refers to how a poet may begin in a state of crisis or abjection, where writing reconstitutes their psychic distance (Kristeva [1980] 1982, pp. 11–2). Accordingly, rather than proceed by metonymy—describing parts of the image in a sequential manner—my rapport is on the axis of metaphor. With Rothko’s Seagram murals, for instance, I journey away from the canvas, where my poem is not a representation, more like a substitution (Wright 2025, pp. 41–2):

5. Black on Maroon

After Mark Rothko 

• $$
• 1)
• $$
• Some leaves look like this,
• matt on tarmac.
• $$
• They glint where rain pools.
• All is camouflage.
• $$
• What else but a window,
• sill consumed by shadows.
• $$
• The black, liquorice-like.
• The light is sherbet.
• $$
• A car is maroon;
• organ walls, tissue …
• $$
• What’s left after the sky
• left its prophecy.
• $$
• The damask of the room
• on the wicker divide.
• $$
• Black on black, a single fishnet
• which isn’t mine.
• $$
• Black on black are the wigs,
• now no one’s at all.
• $$
• 2)
• $$
• Such colours, the shade
• of funeral balloons—
• $$
• mauves, maroons.
• And light: the kind that enters
• $$
• through a snail’s broken shell.
• In this place the pronouns
• $$
• are incinerated, walls close
• in with incremental force.
• $$
• Like a party where all
• the guests have left, where
• $$
• through the blinds
• sleeplessness is reaching
• $$
• towards distant cars.
• How your scarf droops
• $$
• to an innocent smile—
• how the planets
• $$
• promise to rise,
• though fall again.

Given that Rothko’s final works, like much abstract art, eschew perspective or narrative, influenced by Carson’s poems, I have written in sentence fragments (‘matt on tarmac’), elliptical syntax (‘What else but a window, /sill consumed by shadows’), and constructions that are deliberately unfinished with omitted verbs (‘The black, liquorice-like’). I perceive this withholding of grammatical completion as analogous to grief (my language evoking something missing) and the form of Rothko’s colour fields, in which elements are juxtaposed, but the connective narrative is suspended or unresolved (‘organ walls, tissue’). This way, I retain a formal tether with the painting, even if my subject matter is seemingly disconnected; its bearing is not mimetic, but rather metaphorical.

Other techniques employed by Carson, Fraser, and Swensen have been developed in my practice. These include verbal collage and assemblage, placing disparate images and registers beside one another without explaining their connective logic (‘A car is maroon; organ walls, tissue’), and a sequential structure rather than a contained ekphrastic lyric (Fischer 2009, p. 74): there is no stable encounter with Rothko’s picture, but rather a sequence of transformations (from ‘a window’, to ‘a car’, to ‘a party where all/the guests have left’). These are not random but move increasingly towards a psychological space. Such approaches should be considered in a context of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry which has attempted to draw on formal innovations of visual art from Cubism onwards (attested by the poems of John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, among others). Yet, while Carson, like Berry and Rees-Jones, respond to figurative artworks, I have expanded their techniques and applied them to abstract art. This has meant appreciating how fields of colour, pattern, and materiality (or what Kristeva calls the ‘semiotic’: the rhythmic, musical, and disruptive modality of ‘poetic language’, which she associates with the feminine) can be integrated in the ekphrasis (Kristeva [1974] 1984; Lechte 1991, pp. 124–27). In ‘Black on Maroon’, I first find myself immersed within the canvas. I then move out from the painting and into a psychical and domestic setting. I make no attempt to describe the painting; instead, the poem conveys a cascading set of associations—‘leaves’, ‘where rain pools’, ‘funeral balloons’—making metaphorical leaps from the painting’s colours to what resonates with me subjectively. The painting continually metamorphoses. I also turn the abstract painting into relational absence: Rothko removes figures, while I put absence in place of a figure: the ‘wigs’, ‘scarf’, ‘incinerated pronouns’, and so on, evoke the lost person without fully depicting them. In addition, grief is re-enacted formally, through ellipsis, isolated two-line stanzas, and objects detached from their owners. At the same time, Rothko’s painting, with its two vertical columns of maroon, is echoed with my two columns of text.

What I take from Berry is how she uses an artwork as a metaphor, through which she advances her theme (the lost other/lover). Like Berry, I read my poems as ‘a conversation with many other voices’; they can appear like a monologue, but they are more like a dialogue (Berry, in Webb (2017)). Primarily though, the most important ‘other’ in my poems is the grieved-over beloved, and like other poets I frequently write in the second person as an intimate address. Such dialogue occurs in other collections that each further the elegy, and have, like Berry’s work, been influential. Forrest Gander’s Be With (Gander 2018), with a sequence on the photographic artworks of Michael Flomen, and Ciaran Carson’s Still Life (Carson 2019), which includes ekphrases interspersed with meditations on death and intimate talk with his wife, are just two examples. Berry’s poems in Stranger, Baby can also be read as polyphonic and intertextual, involving quotations in or around her writing. I make use of a similar collaging technique in my work. In ‘Black on Maroon’, for example, I layer my visual perceptions of Rothko’s painting with the same title (‘black’, ‘maroon’, ‘light’, and ‘shadows’) with different imagery—natural (‘leaves’, ‘rain’, ‘sky’, and ‘snail’), material and domestic (‘damask’, ‘wicker’, ‘blinds’, and ‘scarf’), bodily (‘organ walls, tissue’), and cosmic (‘planets’, ‘prophecy’). I see these as collage-like since they are placed beside one another without being fully resolved into a single representational system. Their juxtaposition produces meaning. Tabulation is another device in Berry’s poems which I have looked to reinterpret. This can revisualise an abstract painting (columns of colour in Black on Maroon, as indicated), and gaps or silences in language, such as elisions around the lost other. Berry’s style also has a skittish quality I have looked to modify, dealing with traumatic grief and abstract works of art that are, like my memories, fragmented. I understand my poems, likewise, as centrifugal and disrupting linear narrative (lines or stanzas rearranged into a non-chronological or illogical sequences). I see this as analogous to how a sequence of events is thrown into disarray by trauma; a symptom of trauma being a distortion of time, where a chronology is uncertain.

Finally, my practice has been refined through my reading of Rees-Jones. I have been especially inspired by her collection Erato (Rees-Jones 2019b), which can seem like auto/biography but is ‘an experiment in narrativising real events in my life in documentary style and then juxtaposing those narratives with lyric’ (Turnbull and Rees-Jones 2019). This kind of juxtaposition is relevant for my own expanded ekphrases: often images into prose forms, then lyrics—or having prose poems and the lyric (sometimes in response to the same image) on the same page. Rees-Jones’ metaphor of a prism is striking and lends itself to the idea of how a given work (like a story) can be translated through narrative structures, framing devices, or means of refraction. Rees-Jones is writing at a time when hybrid literary forms are in vogue (McGuinness and Corby 2017), genres are blended, and where ekphrasis might go unrecognised or be subsumed under more prominent buzzwords, such as liminality or intermediality, or new structures to contain the lyric.

In conclusion, the ekphrases of Carson, Berry, and Rees-Jones are representative of a recent shift away from description or narrativising an image through a poem. It is significant that the poets are women and they occupy a subject position that can be deemed feminine—understood in this context as individuals rendered marginal within the dominant and Western symbolic order (Kristeva and Boucquey [1975] 1996, pp. 104–6). It is plausible that, given this position, artworks might call out to the poet, ‘speak’ to them, or resonate with their disempowerment; an identification with the artwork, in other words, rather than a sense of the image as ‘other’. What is likely to follow, then, is a passage towards dialogue or collaboration with (or out of) the artwork, rather than a combative attitude towards it, or a perpetuation of a dynamic of rivalry. I consider the present impulse towards inter-art encounters (with the artwork, with other poets, or visual artists) as part of this tendency. Moreover, whereas modern examples of ekphrasis, such as W.H. Auden’s ‘Musée Des Beaux Arts’ (Auden [1938] 2007, p. 57), are often suggestive of upholding a subject-object division, my approach sustains the porosity: the artwork as overwhelming or itself expansive (like Rothko’s colour fields), representing our emotions too well. Our process might then be characterised as extrication from the image or working in parallel with it; where we allow ourselves to identify with those visual forms that find us; to recognise our states of being in the image, rather than repress these for the sake of ascendency as ‘poets’ having written ‘about’ our chosen artworks.