Poetics 2

For the Ekphrastic poem, I decided I would walk around the Philadelphia Art Museum until something caught my attention and then wrtie about that piece. I really wanted the art to catch my attention so I purposely walked around the museum at a normal pace, just glancing at the art as I passed. When the art finally chose me, I was standing in front of Winslow Homer's "The Lifeline" in the early-American exhibit. In a gold frame against a deep-red wall, I knew I had found my poem. I took a seat in front of the painting and began to write. My style of writing involves no stop-and-think. I just write what comes to me as it comes to me. The first thing my eyes went to was the first thing I wrote. Begining with the title, I incorporated the word "lifeline" into the first stanza. From there, I became the man in the painting to give it voice. As my eyes moved, my focus changed. The toughest thing about writing this poem was finding a painting to write about. I spent more time looking around the museum then writing. The other difficulty I had was finding the right words. I wrote it the way it came to me and I didn't like some of the phrasing but I had trouble finding another way of saying it. My main goal of this poem was to give the character in the painting a voice and I think I achieved that.