Ekphrasis and the Feminine: Poetry That Moves Away from the Image

This article will focus on three poets I consider as having practised innovative modes of writing with a visual artwork in mind: Anne Carson, Emily Berry, and Deryn Rees-Jones. In contrast to more traditional ekphrasis—exemplified by William Carlos Williams’s Pictures from Brueghel—the poets I examine do not gesture to figures or narrative. Instead, the artwork they engage with generates their poem. This approach might involve an image that is formally analogous with the poem, where the latter takes on visual elements of the former; an image as a source of inspiration, sparking associations; or an image that functions as a metaphor for the poet’s lyric themes, to mention just a few possibilities. ‘Expanded ekphrasis’ will refer then to the ways in which these poets move away from description and dilate the word–image relationship. I also place Carson, Berry, and Rees-Jones in a lineage of female poets interested in a non-descriptive response to the image. The ekphrastic poems of Elizabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, and Jorie Graham come to mind, and these also deserve acknowledgement. However, the three poets I analyse each demonstrate different ways ekphrasis has expanded over the last two decades. The significance of these poets as women will also be highlighted, and how they influence my own poems.