Volume 119 Summer/Fall 2024 Guest Editor’s Note

Folio: Ekphrastic Poems

The term Ekphrasis comes from Greek descent meaning to out tell or to recount. This builds from the ancient and wonderful world of storytelling. Our earliest reference of this being from Homer’s Iliad. Of course, when we speak of ekphrasis, we are often asked to conjure our thoughts on John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” which at its heart is the depiction of our modern beauty as displayed in ancient architecture. It, in itself, being an ode meaning to praise or worship the very thing we are so uncertain of most of the time, Gods being depicted as Gods. Keats is asking us to encompass what we already ask ourselves, how do we define God?

This is the beauty of ekphrasis. Although the urn itself may have been just a pot for water, Keats saw a house to question God. Ekphrasis allows us to interpret the artist’s work as we may see fit. In his essay “Node 5: Ekphrasis and the Question of Perfect Equilibrium,” Gregory Pardlo explains ekphrasis as a process of balancing the art or the piece with the author’s words and thoughts. No one in the conversation between the art and the poem has all of the answers because this is a conversation between two or more people. This is what I search for in ekphrastic works, the middle ground of unknowing. As I approached the work of these talented writers, I wanted someone to show me what they didn’t know, what art they wanted us to excavate together. For writers such as Jim Whiteside, we are not only asked to examine the art, but also to examine what houses the art, the body and the museum. As Pardlo would put it, we are both inside the painting and in front of it, at equilibrium. Whereas, with Javeria Hasnain, we are placed firmly in front of the art, asked to contemplate how dancing can even exist in times of struggle. 

We are far removed from the days where ekphrasis sits only in art as a mouthpiece—music, film, and modern stage also can interact with the page and the poem. If we believe that we are spending time interpreting not the art we are seeing but the art from someone else’s mind, the leap that ekphrasis can also be from stage to page doesn’t seem that drastic. In Anthony Frame’s ars poetica, we are brought here by music, but we are held here by story, both from Tori Amos and by Frame. In Rosebud Ben-Oni’s work, we are asked to reimage the elements themselves as a new kind of art. I imagine this as ekphrasis living on a new tier, one where the art is not tangible or visible, yet we still see it. 

Ekphrastic works and the idea of art as interpretation has drastically evolved over the years, dissolved is the flat idea of art, however the breath of Keats can still be seen in this modern take on the tradition. We have asked more from our poetry than ever before, asking it to hold our arts in ways we cannot and the poem cannot often understand. We are never actually smarter than the poem but often the poem is not smarter than us either. This is the work of the ekphrastic, not just to evaluate, but to understand. I believe the work presented in this folio does that, asks us to suspend what we think we know and to find a new god, a new way to think.

— jason b. crawford