A common definition of ekphrasis is descriptive writing influenced by the visual arts. Beyond the written word, however, responding to art can engender self-reflection, creativity, and help writers to build characters, plot, and setting. This book unites the history and tradition of ekphrasis, its conventions, the writing process, and multi-genre writing prompts. In addition to subjects such as early art engagement, psychology, and the eye-brain-perception relationship, this book discusses artists' creative processes, tools, and techniques, and offers instruction on how to read art by way of deep-looking.

Join artist Terry Brett and poet Chip Webster on a journey to challenge and inspire each other with this collaboration of visual art and the written word. Poet and artist take turns daring each other to interpret the other's work. Can you determine which came first, the poem or the painting?

The ekphrastic poems presented in Artscapes dazzle with vivid imagery and expert wordplay, offering a refreshing and provocative examination of the artwork Lee Woodman has chosen to explore. Inspired by works from major museums, Woodman invites readers to walk into paintings, enter worlds triggered by sculpture, and eavesdrop on conversations with artists. She will take you to a roaring boxing ring in Washington D.C., a cave in Indonesia with forty-thousand-year-old paintings, and a harem’s den in Algiers. All is possible in poetry. A collection to enjoy on repeated visits.

A common definition of ekphrasis is descriptive writing influenced by the visual arts. Beyond the written word, however, responding to art can engender self-reflection, creativity, and help writers to build characters, plot, and setting. This book unites the history and tradition of ekphrasis, its conventions, the writing process, and multi-genre writing prompts. In addition to subjects such as early art engagement, psychology, and the eye-brain-perception relationship, this book discusses artists' creative processes, tools, and techniques, and offers instruction on how to read art by way of deep-looking.

Ekphrasis is the art of describing works of art, the verbal representation of visual representation. Profoundly ambivalent, ekphrastic poetry celebrates the power of the silent image even as it tries to circumscribe that power with the authority of the word. Over the ages its practitioners have created a museum of words about real and imaginary paintings and sculptures. In the first book ever to explore this museum, James Heffernan argues that ekphrasis stages a battle for mastery between the image and the word. Moving from the epics of Homer, Virgil, and Dante to contemporary American poetry, this book treats the history of struggle between rival systems of representation. Readable and well illustrated, this study of how poets have represented painting and sculpture is a major contribution to our understanding of the relation between the arts.

This innovative interdisciplinary study compares the uses of painting in literary texts and films. In developing a framework of four types of ekphrasis, the author argues for the expansion of the concept of ekphrasis by demonstrating its applicability as interpretive tool to films about the visual arts and artists. Analyzing selected works of art by Goya, Rembrandt, and Vermeer and their ekphrastic treatment in various texts and films, this book examines how the medium of ekphrasis affects the representation of the visual arts in order to show what the differences imply about issues such as gender roles and the function of art for the construction of a personal or social identity. Because of its highly cross-disciplinary nature, this book is of interest not only to scholars of literature and aesthetics, but also for scholars of film studies. By providing an innovative approach to discussing non-documentary films about artists, the author shows that ekphrasis is a useful tool for exploring both aesthetic concerns and ideological issues in film. This study also addresses art historians as it deals with the reception of major artists in European literature and film throughout the 20th century.

The subject of In the Frame is poetic ekphrasis: poems whose starting point or source of inspiration is a work of visual art. The authors of these sixteen essays, several of whom are poets as well as critics, have a twofold purpose: calling attention to the contribution women poets have made to this important genre of poetic writing and re-thinking ekphrastic poetry's motives and purposes. From Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop to Mary Jo Salter, C. D. Wright, and Susan Wheeler, many of our best women poets have done important work in this genre, and when they describe, confront, or speak for an image that is itself wordless, their motives are not only formal but aesthetic. Their poems also raise important questions, from a perspective that is often, but not always, gender-inflected about how art is made and displayed, experienced and valued, celebrated and commodified. Jane Hedley is K. Laurence Stapleton Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. Willard Spiegelman is the Hughes Professor of English at Southern Methodist University, and editor-in-chief of the Southwest Review. Nick Halpem is an associate professor in the English Department at North Carolina State University.

The process of shaping cultural identity in colonial Spanish America has occurred as much through the medium of pictures as through the medium of writing. Focused on writing that references visual texts (ekphrasis), Visions of Empire in Colonial Spanish American Ekphrastic Writing examined the way words about pictures in the writing of three Spanish American Creoles negotiate the challenges that confronted the ruling elite in Spanish America during the contentious period between the Conquest and Independence.

A collection of ekphrastic prose poems by mixed-media artist Lorette C. Luzajic. The poetry is inspired by a range of personal experiences, her travels, love and loss, and paintings from Picasso to Basquiat to Darger.

"A river's edge, if approached too close, can sweep a body beyond itself." In The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic!, Miah Jeffra perfects apostrophe as canticle, a host of heroes beckoning the reader a knee deeper into the waters of another selfhood, Madonna, Mary Shelley, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Plato, and Jeffra's mother among them. At once gossamer and gauze, Jeffra explores the nature of gender, sexuality, aesthetics, and love, taking a tiny hammer to the stability of the limits of perception, troubling the tether between perception and memory. At once memoir and cultural criticism, The Fabulous Ekphrastic Fantastic! discovers itself as a book about forgiveness, family, and the truths we find in "the lightness of a door," "the probability of a radio," the long line between one story and another.