Stay Tuned: More Poetry and Images - and a TBA Competition 2
Ekphrasis Poetry
The connections between poetry and images are interesting, as they represent two art disciplines supporting each other--art within art. Certainly ekphrasis has had a longer span for development, yet filmmaking as an art discipline is gaining vast amounts of ground. This page is dedicated to those who have been inspired by still images -- and the many poems and poets waiting to inspire filmmakers.
Ekphrasis Poetry Examples
Number 1 Jackson Pollock
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Number 1
Jackson Pollock
1912 –1956
Oil on canvas,
68 inches x 104 inches.
Museum of Modern Art, New York
1948
Nancy Sullivan
Poet
Rhode Island
1930-2018
No name but a number.
Trickles and valleys of paint
Devise this maze
Into a game of Monopoly
Without any bank. Into
A linoleum on the floor
In a dream. Into
Murals inside of the mind.
No similes here. Nothing
But paint. Such purity
Taxes the poem that speaks
Still of something in a place
Or at a time.
How to realize his question
Let alone his answer?
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Pieter Brueghel, the Elder
1525-30 - died 1569
Oil-tempera,
29 inches x 44 inches.
Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
c.1555
William Carlos Williams
American Poet
1883 - 1993
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowningAre your customers raving about you on social media? Share their great stories to help turn potential customers into loyal ones.
The Sea Within
The Sea Within
Acrylic on Canvas
Painting & Poem by
Mark Tovar
Ojai, CA
2015
The sea is the water of life. It is love.
I love the sea for I am Aquarian/
and of the sea.
Love one another.
Let love be a moving between
the shore and the soul within your being,
for you are made of water.
You are made of love/
Love is the life force of the universe,
the giver of life.
Love is the Sea Within.
.
Lady in the Chair
Lady in the Chair
Giles Parish, 1930-2019
Acrylic on Canvas
30 inches x 40 inches
2014
Poem by
Lynn Moss Holley
Hollywood, CA
2016
The lady in the chair understands missteps.
She was to be a dancer, yet,
her feet led her astray to a chair.
She thinks she doesn't care
Contemplative. Thinking.
Looking at both sides of her ambition.
Still confused with too much thinking.
Nothing new to know perhaps?
Nothing more left on the floor?
Feet only.
Too soon to retreat to sleep
Too soon to ponder other ways to find a better footing.
A memory now of Rodin.
The Thinker was a misstep too, on a promise to be
Dante's Poet, yet
all hell broke loose and through the gates a fine mistake
The Thinker wakes
Accepted with applause
the bigger stage thus looming.
Yet, will change loom for her small cause to move and tap her feet?
She sits and thinks...
Perhaps the sculpture led the artist,
Or was it the poet who revised his name for future fame?
Were his feet to blame?
The lady in the chair is thinking
about the whole of it and
getting nowhere fast.
Ode on a Grecian Urn
Tracing by John Keats,
of an engraving
of vase by sculptor Sosibios
Rome
50 BCE.
Ode to a Grecian Urn
Poet John Keats
1795-1820
Published London
1819
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
.
The Shield of Achilles
Shield of Achilles
By W.H. Auden
1907-1973
London
Publish, London 1952
She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.
From The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden, published by Random House. Copyright © 1955 W. H. Auden, renewed by The Estate of W. H. Auden. Used by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.