Ekphrasis

As Sam Martin can no doubt attest, my quotation notebook contains some monsters as bad as anything that ever came out of Opus’s anxiety closet. (Though the closet originally belonged to Binkley.) He’s got a doozy today, by the way, I’d recommend you take a look at it.

Having begun the day with a discussion of an ekphrastic poem, I thought I might drag out this oldie from Murray Krieger, Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). It’s been lurking in my back pages since November 2005:

In the poetics of ekphrasis we find an ambivalence between, on the one hand, the defensive concession that language, as arbitrary and with a sensuous lack, is a disadvantaged medium in need of emulating the natural and sensible medium of the plastic arts and, on the other hand, the prideful confidence in language as a medium privileged by its very intelligibility, which opens the sensible world to the free-ranging imagination without being bound by the limitations of the sensible as revealed in the visual field.

I suppose this must have made some sense to me at the time I read it. I have a tendency to want to get some good out of every text I read. Looking at it just sitting here now, I wonder what in the world Mr. Krieger was on about.

I think it says we can’t be sure whether poetry uses art as a crutch or enhances it.

To which I would say, it does both, of course.

At least now it’s out of the closet.