166. Exposed, Beautiful, Sublime
Georgia O’Keeffe, Pelvis with the Distance, 1943
Ekphrastic writing is a space to meditate on a piece of art, to richly experience it, to tease out and multiply its meaning. It’s also art from art, beautiful in itself.
The Greek word “ekphrasis” means to speak out, to call an object by name. In the world of literature, it’s writing about art, rendering what you see in vivid detail, recording what it makes you think or feel, drawing meaning from it. A famous example is John Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which he studies the painted figures on an ancient vessel, frozen mid-dance, mid-song, mid-kiss, the trees that will never lose their leaves, and concludes with the famous line, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
But it’s not all ancient pottery and tubercular Romantic poets. Just last week, the Academy of American Poets published “Under the Tuscan Sun (2003): A Romance Interrupted” by Edil Hassan. It’s inspired by the film starring Diane Lane, where her character, who’s recently divorced, buys a villa in the Italian countryside and embarks on a golden-hued, life-affirming, short-lived love affair.
In the poem, Hassan imagines such a story with the heart-breaking complexity of real life, then strikes through certain lines to render it a rom-com, simple and happy, as in: “I don’t shed a single tear (I’m lying, enough to flood the piazza).” With the excised lines, Hassan nods at the truth, then the fantasy, and lets us feel the distance between them.
Ekphrastic writing is a space to meditate on a piece of art, to richly experience it, to tease out and multiply its meaning. It’s also art from art, beautiful in itself.
