Enargeia also encompassed ekphrasis as a form of vivid evocation. The rhetorical device of enargeia was … a regular scholastic exercise of using words to create such a vivid, visual description that the object is placed before the listener's or reader's inner eye. If the need to write is inherent in our need to record our passage through life and the experiences accumulated along the way, then ekphrasis is one means of capturing our responses to the artworks we encounter on that journey, whether in museums, printed texts, or the electronic media.Īnswering the second question, Sager (2006) explains: Given this long tradition, one might ask: why do we still write ekphrastic poems? And, secondly, in what ways has the process of ekphrasis changed and developed since those early days? To the first question, Freiman (2012:5) cites this explanation from Susan Stewart (1993:31), who 'locates the need to write as being central to our sense of existence a means of "inscribing" space with language and repeating the process'. (Cunningham 2007:57)Ĭunningham argues thus in support of his opening assertion that 'Ekphrasis is certainly one of literature's oldest and longest lasting effects and practices' (2007:57). It is hard to imagine western literature … without what we can call ekphrasis - that pausing, in some fashion, for thought before, and/or about, some nonverbal work of art, or craft, a poiema without words, some more or less aestheticized made object or set of made objects.
Reading the poem in a filmic way allows the poet to controvert the implicit stasis of the painting and, through the transmedialisation of the visual to the verbal, to create a dynamic narrative 'script', using the poem's segmented structure, to explore the text's meaning by offering readers a vivid evocation of her experience of Marc's painting. These ekphrastic processes are explored in some detail.
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Then, the article argues that Oliver develops her poem as a filmic narrative, offering readers a series of 'segments' depicting various aspects of the evolving narrative as she visualises it. Thus, the punctum temporis (or pregnant moment) as a single scene from a film becomes the guiding metaphor of the article. The article modifies the frequently used metaphor of the painting as a single frame from a film, replacing the solitary frame with the idea of a single scene as more credible metaphorically, the scene itself being divided into several segments reflecting the poem's structure. The text is conceptualised as Oliver 's 'script' as it takes up Stephen Cheeke's suggestion 'to imagine what happens next' after the poet's initial interface with the stasis of the artwork's pregnant moment. His typology helps readers to consider answers to the following questions: what elements of the artwork does the poet make use of, and which does she exclude? In what ways are these elements deployed in the creation of her verbal text? And in broader terms, what is the nature of visual and verbal relationship in this particular poem? How tentative might that relationship be? After a description of Franz Marc's painting, The Tower of Blue Horses, as an Expressionist artwork, the discussion moves on to Mary Oliver 's poem. The discussion turns to Hans Lund's typology of the various verbal and visual relationships in ekphrasis that are open to the poet. Understanding this process enables readers to appreciate the ways in which Oliver adheres to, or diverts from, it in producing her poem about Franz Marc. They trace the steps a poet has to follow in order to produce an ekphrastic poem they follow consecutively, with the second depending on the first, and the third depending on the second. Siglind Bruhn's ideas about the three stages of the ekphrastic process are then outlined. More specifically, the discussion opens with a brief overview aimed at an understanding of ekphrasis to show how its development through the centuries has altered definitions of what constitutes ekphrasis and how these fresh understandings have broadened its possibilities for the modern poet. This article discusses Mary Oliver's poem, 'Franz Marc's Blue Horses', as an ekphrastic poem. 'Stepping into the painting': Franz Marc, Mary Oliver and the ekphrastic processĭepartment of English and Comparative Studies, University of Fort Hare, South Africa
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