Ekphrasis

Writing a Response

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Today I’m thinking about ekphrasis. For those of you who have never come across this word, it simply means a literary description of, or commentary on, a visual work of art. There is some debate about how to pronounce the word ekphrasis and it seems there are options. I’ve heard it spoken as… ek-fray-sis and ek-frah-sis, (you know, the to-may-to, to-mah-to thing?) and some people put the emphasis on the first syllable, EK-fra-sis. So, don’t be shy about saying it any way you like.

I had a bit of an ah-ha moment when I attended a seminar, titled ‘Other Worlds: Contemporary Ekphrastic Poetry’; it was held in the stunning art deco building, Senate House, at the University of London (pic above)—the architecture is truly awe-inspiring. But before I get into that, let me say that when I first heard about ekphrasis I associated it only with poetry, being a means of creating poems in response to works of art, specifically paintings. But, after hearing a number of people speak on the subject at the seminar, I’ve learned it’s quite a versatile method for creative writers and there are many more opportunities to use ekphrasis.

How ekphrasis works

This is how the method might work in practice:

1. You find a subject of interest, let’s say it’s a statue.

2. You’ll spend time with it, looking at it from various angles, perhaps studying its material and form in detail, close up and from a distance.

3. Then, with open mind, you allow or enable the statue to ‘speak’  to you in such a way as to suggest the form and content of the text. This is the beginning of a deeply personal conversation in which you’ll go back and forth to the subject with ideas. Perhaps you’ll weave a story, or several stories, around the subject.

In publishing the resulting text, you bring the existence of the statue to a new audience. But, just as the value of the statue as a work of art was never dependent on a written response, the writing produced is also not dependant on the statue—it  can be read separately, it has its own value as a piece of creative work. However, the two can be appreciated as one and, together, a new co-dependant creative work is produced.

As you may have gathered, you are not limited to producing poetry. You can work in prose to produce a narrative, and you can incorporate dialogue—be as creative as you like. Use the imagination. This is good news for fiction writers! And, although the ‘traditional’ choice of subject matter is a piece of art, I’m advised that the modern approach is more wide-ranging. Examples of subjects used by the seminar speakers extended from specimens in a natural history museum to a world contained in a computer game, and a hit song by the American rock band Nirvana.

Besides the wide range of inspirational pieces of art you might find, I learned there is such a thing as ‘notional’ ekphrasis, which is when you write about an ‘imagined’ subject. In John Mullan’s article, ‘Ten of the best: examples of ekphrasis’ published in The Guardian newspaper, he quotes the poem by John Keats, Ode on a Grecian Urn, saying that the urn ‘is probably a composite of several museum items’. So the idea of adapting or re-shaping a subject is another possible way to approach ekphrasis.

From this seminar, the big takeaway for me was that the natural world is also brimming with subject matter—the ekphrastic process is not limited to man-made art. So, finding a prompt in a place you find inspiring or meaningful is very worthy of your time. As I sat in the seminar listening to the speakers and feeling their enthusiasm, this was my ah-ha moment… I began to think that potentially, by its very nature, Place Writing is a form of ekphrasis. And now my mind is totally blown! I’m going to ponder on this a bit more and come back to it another time but I’d love to know what you think.

Whether you favour poetry or prose, I hope that by setting down some of the things I’ve learned about ekphrasis you might find new ways of approaching your writing. I’d love to know if you’re familiar with the process and whether you practice it, or whether this is a whole new area for you. I look forward to chatting with you in the comments.

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Credits, References, and Links:

Image: Inside Senate House University of London by Steve Cadman (CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons).

The seminar took place on 29 May 2024 and was organised by the Open University’s Contemporary Cultures of Writing Research Group. More information here.

John Mullan, (2009) The Guardian 14 November ‘Ten of the best: examples of ekphrasis.’

And you might want to see this post of mine! Hearth of the Home: An Exercise in Ekphrasis.