"For me, poetry is very much the time that it takes to unroll, the way music does...it's not a static, contemplatable thing like a painting or a piece of sculpture." John Ashbery
“A paradox: the same century invented History and Photography. But History is a memory fabricated according to positive formulas, a pure intellectual discourse which abolishes mythic Time; and the Photograph is a certain but fugitive testimony; so that everything, today, prepares our race for this impotence: to be no longer able to conceive duration, affectively or symbolically: the age of the Photograph is also the age of revolutions, contestations, assassinations, explosions, in short, of impatiences, of everything which denies ripening.” Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography
At the core of exphrastic poetry lies an ambiguity. As Ashbery so beautifully puts it, a poem 'unrolls' in time, whereas Barthes observes, images deny ripening. I would argue that the greatest exphrastic poem is Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn. Throughout Keats plays with this ambiguity, the poem is built around a paradox. He claims at the outset that the images on the urn 'express a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme' but the stanzas which follow explore how this is in fact a 'cold pastoral' - the imagery is centred on stymied intent and desolation:
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
... What little town by river or sea shore, Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel, Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?And, little town, thy streets for evermore Will silent be; and not a soul to tell Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
What draws me to exphrasis is the possibilities which open-up when you apply poetry's capacity to 'unroll through time' to static objects, like paintings or photographs. To go back to the Barthes quote, by inhabiting exphrasia's paradoxical territory perhaps it is possible to re-conceive duration, affectively or symbolically, the poem becomes an impure discourse, but one that seeks to re-assert 'mythic Time' -
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought/As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
With these thoughts in mind I have been looking back on some of my own efforts - for a long time I felt uncomfortable about writing poetry about paintings - it seemed a cop-out somehow, trading on 'ready-made' imagery. It was only when I came to think about the opening chapters of Camera Lucida and discovered an early work by Panofsky from the 1920s - Perspective as Symbolic Form that the potential of exphrasis began to occur to me. I think I failed to see beyond the Art Historian's 'pure intellectual discourse' and began to re-discover a more visceral relationship with pictures.
