Poetics 2

When I began the ekphrastic poem I viewed it as a communication with the art. The artwork I chose was a new mural in the business school called, “Illumination of the Mind”. It is a huge work and unable to be seen as a whole, so I focused on the right half. I wrote first about what struck me first, the bright colors and shapes. Then I focused on the forms those shapes and colors organized themselves to represent. At one place was a girl and at another a man. I then ventured into what the painting would physically say if the characters were alive. In other words I extracted the meaning in words, as it communicated to me in visual stimuli. What worked was the thought more than the execution. The wording was tricky and the structure hard to understand. Without the work itself the poem was difficult comprehend. Though Anne Sexton’s poem “The Starry Night” was the most influential sample I had read, the poem I came up with did not reflect my preference. The clear reference to the art work and my vulnerability to it were not expressed. I approached this poem with too much of an objective poem mindset. To rework it my imagination must delve into self and relate it to the physical painting. Instead of a commentary, the poem needs to be a conversation.