Ekphrasis: Poems and Art
Image Credit: Cathleen Cohen
Welcome to a new Mad Poets blog, to be offered every two months.
It’s a pleasure to write about the relationship between poetry and other art forms, to examine ways that a various creative arts relate to each other.
The term ekphrasis can be defined narrowly as writing that describes a work of art in another medium-- paintings, music, photography sculpture and the like. It can also refer more broadly to the alchemy that happens when one medium tries to define and relate to another. This could refer to poems inspired by the visual arts or music -- and also the reverse! To my mind, ekphrasis can also encompass hybrid works, like artists’ books, author/illustrator collaborations and graphic poems.
Many scholars have written about ekphrasis and there are great resources online. Though not scholar of the topic, I have had a practice of writing poetry and painting for many years. Both are essential to my creative life. These art forms interact, challenge each other and open up many questions and tensions.
My aim in this blog is to feature the work of various poets and artists, to let you know of interesting viewing opportunities and to provide some angles that might prompt your own writing. Here are opportunities of interest:
The Work of MaryAnn L. Miller
MaryAnn L. Miller is a remarkable poet, printmaker, and book artist. Her approach epitomizes the gifts of ekphrasis and creative collaboration; she connects her poems to her own in order printmaking process. Not only that, she generously partners with many other creatives publish artists’ books and fine arts publications. Miller demonstrates how collaboration across art forms and individuals can lead to riches. I admire her vibrant collages and prints, which can be viewed online at https://maryannlmiller.com/ and at her studio in Hunterdon County, NJ.
Miller’s artistic journey is wide and deep. Encouraged by family and teachers for her early drawing and writing, she went on to study art education and school counseling. This led to years of teaching art and reading in NJ public schools. She received an MFA, studying intensively with the poet David Wojahn, then went on to become Resident Book Artist at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College for sixteen years. Following this, Miller founded Lucia Press in Clinton, NJ. She has been a designer and binder for books by Faith Ringgold, Duncan Bullen, Sam Gilliam, Curlee Raven Holton, Barbara Bullock, David C. Driskell, Nikky Finney, Nene Humphrey, Alison Saar, Richard Viera. Sharon Olds, Lee Upton, Jim Toia, Ross Gay, Khet Mar, Janet Taylor Pickett, Nestor Gil, and many others.
Miller demonstrates sensitivity and skill in her published collections, Locus Mentis (PS Books, 2012) and Cures for Hysteria (Finishing Line Press, 2018). Some of these poems explore her experience of Hyperkalemia Periodic Paralysis. She writes movingly of this neuromuscular condition, which caused her unpredictable bouts of paralysis until properly medicated when she was an adult. This is not her only topic, however. Family history, lived experience and references to visual art are interwoven throughout.
In her artist’s statement, Miller explains some of her process:
When I begin a print, I make a serigraph from which I add or redact parts. I use parts of other prints to add to the base or cover redacted places. These parts take on a different identity and value. I spend time reflecting and rearranging before I glue them. It’s a slow process toward resolution and one I liken to writing lines in a poem. Revising along the way, laying down a layer, breaking it, tearing it, enjambing in a new place, caesuras all over the place. Empty spaces are silence, the more silence, the quieter the print, the slower the eye travels. One can’t make prints without sequential thinking, and thought being given to color, form, and composition.
Art in the Time of Savages
by MaryAnn L. Miller
Along the border all drawings have
been taken down not one left
to point a direction for our feet.
We might know the way if we had
wings to spread above the shining
twist of water.
The place of no location has flung
us away from Frida’s baby.
Don’t come here
lullabies are spiders in the bed.
They plan to rub us out
before we can make frantic art
in a jackal world.
Our scraping must matter
it reverberates like
a green poppy sending smoke.
(Published originally in Ovanque Siamo 2018 and nominated for a Pushcart Poetry Prize, this poem will appear in Time is Snake's Tongue, Word Tech June 2023)
Art in the Time of Savages (MaryAnn L. Miller)
Prints available through https://www.ravenfinearteditions.com/
I am learning so much from Miller’s discoveries and experimentation. I admire her collaging, her arranging and rearranging texts as well as visual images. Her generosity and collaborative vision have led to many interesting projects. For example, she worked together with the poet J.C Todd on FUBAR, a book project inspired by one of Todd’s war poems. Miller created monotypes that became images for the book. Another of their collaborations, On Foot/By Hand, began at an artist residency at the Ragsdale Foundation. Miller is currently working on a project for Raven Studios involving the prints of Ifyj Chiejina, a Nigerian American artist.
The following poem will appear in her next collection, Falling into the Diaspora.
Thunder Storms
Can peace be gained until I clasp my wombat?
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
A magnolia unfurls her robe
in the Italian sky above Benevento
a globe of air becomes
temporale. My mother sits
on the basement stairs in Western
Pennsylvania protected from lightning
by a rubber mat;
she prays to Saint Barbara
holding her children too close.
In mother’s head-longing
to be American
she left me
on the Appian Way
her teenage gollies and goshes
a dialect I didn’t learn.
I wanted the mother language
clasped to my neck like a furry
pet raised in a forever home.
(Published in Mom Egg Review 2020)
Falling into the Diaspora. (Cover Art by Will Hubsher)
I invite you to learn more about the vibrant poetry and artwork of MaryAnn L. Miller, a generous, wise, and multitalented artist. She will host an Open Studio on Friday, December 2, 2022 sponsored by THAT (The Hunterdon Art Tour). Her website is www.maryannlmiller.com.
Cathleen Cohen was the 2019 Poet Laureate of Montgomery County, PA. A painter and teacher, she founded the We the Poets program at ArtWell, an arts education non-profit in Philadelphia (www.theartwell.org). Her poems appear in journals such as Apiary, Baltimore Review, Cagibi, East Coast Ink, 6ix, North of Oxford, One Art, Passager, Philadelphia Stories, Rockvale Review and Rogue Agent. Camera Obscura (chapbook, Moonstone Press), appeared in 2017 and Etching the Ghost (Atmosphere Press), was published in 2021. She received the Interfaith Relations Award from the Montgomery County PA Human Rights Commission and the Public Service Award from National Association of Poetry Therapy. Her paintings are on view at Cerulean Arts Gallery. To learn more about her work, visit www.cathleencohenart.com.