On Ekphrasis

Images to go with a few of my poems:

a few images of the European portrait miniature with twenty-three costumes (ca. 1650–1700, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston) in “Self-Portrait as Miniature with Mica Overlays” (published in Willow Springs, no. 91)

the postcard from “Elegy for Oneida Creek” (published in The Yale Review Online as Poem of the Week)

some of the photos from “In Lockdown, Looking Through Found Photographs” (published in DIAGRAM)

the found photo from “Three Children Covered Half by a Thumb” (slightly altered in the poem, and published in Narrative)

counterclockwise from top left, details from paintings by Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Leopold Schmutzler, Franz von Lenbach, and Ludwig Knaus, viewed at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle and mentioned in the poem “Museum” (published in Narrative)

at left, P. R. Vallée’s Harriet Mackie (The Dead Bride) (1804, Mabel Brady Garvan Collection of the Yale University Art Gallery), on which my poem “Harriet Mackie (The Dead Bride)” is based (published in Sycamore Review, Winter/Spring 2021); at center, Antoine-François-Jean Claudet’s [Multiple Exposures of the Moon] (1846–52, the Met), mentioned in my poem “Camera Obscura” (published in Two Peach); at right, Pierre-Louis Pierson’s Scherzo di Follia (1863–66, printed 1940s, the Met), mentioned in my poem “Lemon and Pins” (published in Cream City Review, Fall/Winter 2021)

And some of my favorite books that engage with art and ekphrasis:

  • Teju Cole, Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time (University of Chicago Press, 2021)
  • Nathalie Léger (tr. Amanda DeMarco), Exposition, orig. 2008 (Dorothy, a publishing project, 2020)
  • Amina Cain, Indelicacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2020)
  • John Berger (ed. Tom Overton), Portraits: John Berger on Artists (Verso, 2015)
  • Paisley Rekdal, Intimate: An American Family Photo Album (Tupelo Press, 2012)
  • Natasha Trethewey, Thrall (Houghton Mifflin, 2012)
  • Hanneke Grootenboer, Treasuring the Gaze: Intimate Vision in Late Eighteenth-Century Eye Miniatures (University of Chicago Press, 2012)
  • Claire Barbetti, Ekphrastic Medieval Visions: A New Discussion in Interarts Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011)
  • T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (Yale University Press, 2006)
  • James Elkins, Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings (Routledge, 2001)
  • Mark Doty, Still Life with Oysters and Lemon (Beacon Press, 2001)