The ancient Roman poet Horace, in his Ars Poetica, has given us the expression ut pictura poesis, which can be translated as "poetry is like a picture," or possibly, "poetry should be like a picture." I assume that what Horace meant by that is that a poem should describe people, places, things, actions, etc. in such a way that the reader can see them in the imagination. This seems like the 20th-century poet Ezra Pound’s description of what he called phanopoeia, or image creation, as "the casting of visual images on the screen of the imagination."
I have worked with this aspect of poetry from time to time. When I was a student in Temple University’s creative writing program, I worked on the parallel between the poetic line and the draughtsman’s line, trying to make them coalesce. However, before I entered that graduate program, I had written a number of poems about works of art, both paintings and sculptures, over the summer of 1995. These two approaches to combining pictures and poetry came together in the presentation I gave at the Anthony J. Drexel picture gallery recently. A calligramme – poem the letters of which form an image that in some way illustrates the "content" of the words – is on the poster advertising the event, and the poems I wrote about my view of the art works in the Drexel Collection are below.
One thing I must point out, however: even though we are reproducing images of the paintings here, in many cases the significant aspects of those paintings can only be appreciated "live," up close. This article, then, is intended to inspire trips to the third floor of the Main Building on Drexel’s campus, to peruse the paintings and sculptures themselves, and to see whether the poems I’ve written about them bring out aspects of the art works themselves.
Don Riggs
1.Eduard Grutzner
shows a monk in a convent cellar
holding a glass of wine
up to the light.
The card says he was destined for the Church
but showed more interest
in the life of the Spirits
residing in wine-casks and tankards.
2. Lazlo shows Pauline Munn Doyle
with smooth flesh nested
in a shawl so very diaphanous
as to be little more than flashy brushstrokes.
Her exposed shoulder is sexier
than the bare breasts by Francois Boucher,
that frivolous Frenchman
whose nymphs and Venuses titillated palettes
of the ignobles of Versailles
before the Deluge.
Pauline's mother, next to her,
has eyes so nearly tragic
you'd think she was aware, in 1929,
her daughter would die in another ten years
at the age of thirty.