Short poem FOR REY WRITER ONLY!

EXERCISE 1

The responses to the exercises that you bring to class and hand in here  should all be typewritten, and either double-spaced or with the spacing set at 1.5. Try to give whatever you write a title (not just "Exercise 1" but do indicate the exercise number at the top of page 1), number the pages. And don't forget to include your name.

Option 1, Ekphrastic Poem: “Ekphrasis” simply means “description” in Greek, but in English the word has come to mean “a poetic description of a work of art.” We've seen, in the readings that accompanied the images we looked at in class, several modern examples of the form: William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” W. H.  Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” poems by Oates and Carson on Hopper's Nighthawks, etc. Read all of the poems and look at all of the images available in the Readings folder before you begin. They differ greatly, and should suggest to you the range of possibilities. To write your own ekphrastic poem, visit a museum, gallery, or other exhibition space, choose an artifact (a painting, a sculpture, a mask, an urn, etc.), and follow these steps:

· Begin by noticing. Make a list of everything the image contains—everything.

· Make a sketch of the image. Your sketch should not be detailed. Just try to indicate, in an abstract sort of way, the image’s essential elements.

· Having examined what the painting depicts, begin looking at how it depicts. Here are the sorts of questions you should ask yourself: What medium did the artist use? (Is the image a photograph? A sculpture? A painting? A drawing? Did the artist use oil paint? Pencil? Papier-mâché?). What technical choices did the artist make? For instance, if the image is a painting, did the artist use short brush strokes or long? Apply paint thickly? Or so thinly that the threads of the canvas show through? If it’s a photograph, what is or is not in focus? Why do you think the artist made these choices? What effect do they have? How is the image composed? What is at the center of the frame? What’s in the foreground and the background? Are objects on the left balanced by objects on the right? Are there perpendicular lines? Curves? Are there visual rhymes (shapes or colors that appear more than once in the image)? How did the artist use light? Are there stark contrasts between light and dark, an effect known as “chiaroscuro,” from the Italian for “bright” (chiaro) and dark (oscuro)? Or is the entire painting suffused with light?  Is there a clear source of light? What direction is it coming from? Did the artist use bright colors? Somber colors? Pastels? No colors at all?

· Come up with five adjectives to describe the tone of the image or the feeling it evokes. Then pick two of these and illustrate with specific details what about this image suggests this tone or feeling.

Now write a poem about your artifact using one of the ekphrastic poems assigned for class as your model. No matter which model you choose, assume that your readers have never seen the artifact you are writing about. You will need to make them see it, experience it.