The ecstatic embrace of verbal and visual: Twenty-first century lyric beyond the ekphrastic paragone
2011; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 27; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/02666286.2010.516891
ISSN1943-2178
Autores Tópico(s)Public Spaces through Art
ResumoClick to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 – Cole Swensen, ‘To writewithize (as in ‘to hybridize,’ ‘to ritualize,’ ‘to ionize,’ etc.),’ American Letters & Commentary, 13 (2001), pp. 122–27. 2 – W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘Introduction’, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 2. See specifically the chapter ‘Ekphrasis and the Other’ for Mitchell's argument about ekphrasis as a relationship between others, pp. 151–81. 3 – Even though Mitchell updates his understanding of ‘the problem of the image’ in his more recent book What Do Pictures Want? (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), scholars of ekphrasis have not yet characterized how twenty-first–century visual culture affects our understanding of ekphrasis. Mitchell's project in What Do Pictures Want? seeks to understand the agency of the image, including its ability to desire as suggested by the title, but does not focus specifically on ekphrasis. 4 – James A.W. Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. 5 – See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (Minneola: Dover Publications, 2005). 6 – Swensen, ‘To writewithize,’ p. 123. 7 – Ibid., p. 122. 8 – Mitchell, Picture Theory, p. 159. 9 – Robert von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), p. 11. 10 – Swensen, ‘To writewithize,’ p. 124. 11 – Ibid., p. 123, emphasis in original. 12 – Lynn Keller notes that the form of Swensen's subtitles of ‘To writewithize’ mimic Olsen's ‘(projectile (percussive (prospective.’ For a full reading of Try’s ekphrastic project in relation to Swensen's own criteria set forth in ‘To writewithize,’ see Keller's article ‘Poems living with paintings: Cole Swensen's ekphrastic Try,’ Contemporary Literature, XLVI, no. 2 (2005), pp. 176–212. 13 – Swensen, ‘Ekphrasis that ignores the subject.’ Conceptual poetry symposium, University of Arizona Poetry Center, May 2008. [Accessed September 8, 2009]. 14 – Ibid. 15 – Ibid. 16 – Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989) gives a compelling argument that deconstructs the binary relationship between essentialism and constructionism to argue for a set of ‘essentialisms’ that might be useful for feminism despite the negative connotations that have been associated with essentialist strategies and theories of the subject. 17 – Barbara K. Fischer, Museum Mediations (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 143. 18 – Ibid., p. 146. 19 – Sharon Dolin, Serious Pink (New York: Marsh Hawk Press, 2003), p. 75. 20 – Ibid., p. 75. 21 – Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux, Twentieth–Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) p. 76. 22 – Fischer, Museum Mediations, p. 3. 23 – Taken as a whole the notes in relation to the ekphrastic sequences and the long lyric poem that make up Serious Pink suggest a lyric process of compilation not unlike the effect of Eliot's notes to The Wasteland. From a position of reader response, the experience of tracking down the referenced texts (and here, images) reveals the dizzying relationship between constructedness and abstraction, between allusive fragmentation and cohesion. As with The Wasteland, we are never sure how academic we ‘should’ be in tracing the correspondences and references in Dolin's notes — if, as Dolin hopes, the poems can ‘speak for themselves’ or if, as the material presence of the notes traditionally insists, we must fall back on re-creating the procedure of the poet's looking. 24 – Jean H. Hagstrum, The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Cray (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959). 25 – Fischer, Museum Mediations, p. 2. 26 – This makes Swensen, who writes from a position of critical awareness of the theoretical reception of ekphrasis, somewhat of an exception and a useful foil for bridging the gap between the art of poetry and its criticism. 27 – Loizeaux, Twentieth–Century Poetry and the Visual Arts, p. 195, note 36. 28 – Dolin, Serious Pink, p. 1. 29 – Lyn Hejinian, ‘The rejection of closure,’ in The Language of Inquiry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 40–58, here p.56. 30 – Gerald Nordland, Richard Diebenkorn (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 1987), pp. 94–95. 31 – Ibid., pp. 126–27. 32 – The Medusa Model casts the image as still, silent and feminized, offered up for the taking of the male poet's verbal control. In his study that looks at male-authored, canonical examples of ekphrasis, Heffernan identifies the Medusa Model as a moment when ‘the conflict between word and image becomes a conflict between male authority and the female power to enchant, subvert or threaten' (Museum of Words, p. 108). 33 – Adrienne Rich, ‘Notes toward a politics of location,’ Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979–1985 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1994), p. 71. 34 – A similar project that also troubles the apparent divide between language and the speaking subject is Lyn Hejinian's procedural long poem My Life, in which Hejinian builds the multiple experiences of autobiography through the serial return to a certain language and certain images, thus revealing the shifting and developing consciousness of the poem's speaker who is multiply-located in one body that moves through time. 35 – Dolin, Serious Pink, p. 21. 36 – Ibid., p. 76. 37 – Joan Mitchell: “… my black paintings …” 1964 (New York: Robert Miller Gallery, 1994). 38 – Linda Nochlin, ‘Joan Mitchell: A rage to paint,’ in The Paintings of Joan Mitchell, ed. Jane Livingston (New York and Los Angeles: The Whitney Museum of American Art and University of California Press, 2002), pp. 49–59, here p. 58. 39 – Ibid., p. 50. 40 – The poems that make up ‘My black paintings’ do not all seek out this same element of playfulness, though it is a distinctive strategy in light of the heavy emphasis on dark and emotional times in Mitchell's biography that art critics use to explain this period of her work. As Judith Bernstock warns, ‘The death of Mitchell's father in 1963, her mother's prolonged illness and her own unsatisfactory studio situation should be kept in mind in considering the brooding pictures that she created in 1964. She states that she was “trying to get out of a violent phase and into something else” ’ Joan Mitchell, 1988, p. 60. The ‘inward curdling “black paintings” ’ (Nochlin, p. 58) mark a stylistic shift in Mitchell's work, as ‘figure and ground are distinguished more clearly than at any earlier point in Mitchell's career … . [and] the beginning of a re-emergence of calligraphy is evident in a more fluid, less heavily weighted mass. Instead of complementary color juxtapositions, through which Mitchell generally evokes an impression of light, these pictures depend on tonal contrasts and modulations’ (Judith E. Bernstock, Joan Mitchell (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1988), p. 60). Thus, it is evident that Dolin has selected a series of paintings that mark a pivotal transition in Mitchell's perspective, and yet the agency of the visual is no longer under the artist's control. 41 – Rich, ‘Notes toward a politics of location’, p. 77, original emphasis. 42 – Dolin, Serious Pink, p. 45. 43 – See Jacques Lacan, “The mirror stage as formative of the I function,” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002). For Lacan's own ekphrastic discussion of the anamorphic image, see “Anamorphosis,” The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978). 44 – Ibid., p. 48. 45 – Ibid., p. 46. 46 – Ibid., p. 54. 47 – Ibid., p. 47. 48 – Ibid., p. 55. 49 – Ruth Webb, ‘Ekphrasis ancient and modern: the invention of a genre’, Word & Image, 15 (1999), pp. 7–18, here p. 17. 50 – Susan Sontag, ‘About Hodgkin’, in Howard Hodgkin Paintings (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1995), pp. 105–112, here p. 107. 51 – Ibid., p. 106. 52 – Ibid., p. 108. 53 – Ibid., p. 108. 54 – Jonathan Culler, ‘Deconstruction and the lyric,’ in Deconstruction is/in America, ed. Anselm Haverkamp (New York: New York University Press, 1995), pp. 44–51, here p. 46. 55 – Ibid., p. 47. 56 – Rich, ‘Notes toward a politics of location’, p. 64.
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