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Ekphrasis and Whiteness in Recent American Poetry

2014; English letters department of adab; Volume: 60; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.15794/jell.2014.60.3.004

2465-8545

Robert Grotjohn,

Language, Metaphor, and Cognition

The ekphrastic has become a frequent exercise for contemporary American poets. This study adds to the growing research on varieties of ekphrasis by discussing the various functions of whiteness in works by four poets. Natasha Trethewey, in her most recent volume, Thrall (2012), offers a series of poems inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Latin American casta paintings, which depict and catalogue variations of mixed-race couples and their children. After considering the eclipsing of whiteness in Trethewey’s “ethnic ekphrasis,” I will turn to the whiteness in Robert Hass’s ekphrastic on Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk titled “Art and Life,” from his National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning collection Time & Materials (2008), as an example of “elliptical ekphrasis.” The play on whiteness continues with Alice Fulton’s “fractal ekphrasis in “Close,” from her volume Felt (2001), in which she considers Joan Mitchell’s White Territory, an abstract expressionist painting. Finally, Harryette Mullens’ “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language” from Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), challenges the traditions of the ekphrastic and of poetry itself in her “post-ethnic/postekphrastic ekphrasis.”