PROBLEMS:
Hollander
- How does a poem (made of metaphors, other figures of
speech, and syntactical word structures) translate an
experience initially and essentially of space?
- How is such an experience of space to be represented in
writing?
- What about scale - how much prose goes for how much of
the image?
- How can a poem be written from the uncertain knowledge of
how we read a painting: top to bottom? bottom to top?
diagonally? code to code?
- What are the resources of narrative and lyric poetry
which can complicate and strengthen this mimesis of
mimesis?
- Does narrative pause for ecphrasis as for any
description, say, of a natural scene rather than a
landscape painting?
Krieger
- How can words try to do the job of the "natural
sign" (i.e., a sign that is to be taken as a visual
substitute for its referent), when they are, obviously,
only arbitrary-through conventionally
arbitrary-signs" All the complexities of my subject,
its unanswered questions, follow from the need to sustain
the two opposed halves of this puzzle.
- What, in apparently pictorial poetry, do words, can
words, represent?
- Conversely, how can words in a poem be picturable? or do
they somehow manage, instead, to represent the
unrepresentable, or at least the
"un-picturable"?
Jacobson
- Is ekphrasis possible? It seems to me that the best
examples of poetry written about images are (in
Hollander's phrase)"notional" ekphrases,
(Homer's shield of Achilles, Keats' Ode on a Grecian
Urn, Bishop's Large Bad Painting, etc.).
Why?
- One possible definition of Art is that it must be
"greater than the sum of its parts." If a great
painting is being put into poetry, are we hazarding
something less than the sum of its parts?
- Do poets write about an actual image in the same way they
write about an imagined image?
- Would someone ever write a poem if they had never seen a
poem to imitate?
- Why, when you see the movie before you read the book, do
the movie images (as movie critic Pauline Kael says)
"saturate" the book?
Hancher (as transcribed by the author of this
paper)
- What does it mean that for an ekphrastic poem the poet
and the reader are in a sense standing side by side
looking at the same image?
Read further into this paper?
Send questions or
comments to jjacobs1@d.umn.edu . Last
modified: 08/12/97