“Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry.”
Likewise alternate years let our cut fields lie fallow,
And the idle ground hardened with neglect:
Or sow yellow corn, under another star, where you
First harvested beans rich in their quivering pods.
Eschewing this Latin classical view, early modernist William Carlos Williams rather suggests that we might as readily be enlightened by the sheer phenomenality of a threatened, but prematurely dispersed, summer thunder shower, one that disappears before it begins, yet we register its presence.
The storm
has proven abortive
but we remain
after the thoughts it roused
to
re-cement our lives.
For Williams, the ideation resulting from a poem is more accidental than intentional. Is art best pedagogical, or sheer sensory experience? Indian-born poet and journeying journalist Eugene Datta’s peripatetic writing stands poised between attraction to the high-art manner of ekphrasis and the straightforwardness of documentary. Many poems in Water and Wave, which was released by Redhawk Publications this year, exemplify this tension and raise a question about the nature of these two modes, which have long served as twin, competing paths for art. Ekphrasis is the use of detailed description of a work of visual art as a literary device. Typically, in the modern age, such sources have been paintings, known (excepting religious art) more for decorating space and stimulating the senses than for any directly edifying use. One immediately thinks of such poems as Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” by Brueghel, or Sylvia Plath’s “The Disquieting Muses” by de Chirico. Such poetry tends to be perceived as ultra-aesthetic, art wrapped in art, less gesturing to a social or theological world outside its confines than to reflection on art as such, like an ars poetica, or as a vehicle for strictly private concerns, as the poet “confronts” the painting, which in turn reverberates in his or her psyche in the form of writing.
Photographs may also serve as ekphrastic sources, to the extent they get perceived as visual art, rather than as documentary, therefore informational, in nature. Yet it took many decades after technical advances in photography for that medium to gain enough prestige and acceptance to feature in museums with equivalent status to its unblemished cousins, painting and sculpture. This slow growth may have had less to do with snobbery as with the cognitive impediment that universally tied photographs to “the real world,” and their massive appropriation by newspapers and political magazines to document what was “actually” going on around the globe. Over time, some photographs, despite the fact that a majority of people in the world have immediate access to a camera and flood the world with repetitive, banal imagery, stood out for their unblemished technique, thus came to be valued as stylized objects of art in their own right—in short, as artifice. Thereby, they became suitable to be studied by poets for the aesthetic and even oblique manner in which they interpreted human experience and the material world.
Nevertheless, this Virgil-Williams schism to an extent remains, given how most photographs, like film, even when distorted, continue to represent a direct (albeit fallible and sometimes false) window into so-called reality.
Datta’s poem “Leaving Irpin” begins with the following information:
After a photograph by Jérome Sessini
–The New Yorker, March 12, 2022
The “after” is perhaps the most intriguing word here. It is suggestive of how poets “translate” a cherished poet’s work from another language but suggest that the resulting poem is more an homage, thus ultimately original. (Viz Jack Spicer’s 1957 book After Lorca.) They grant themselves great leeway regarding the source material. Still, the combination above of geographic location, the mention of the photograph, its title and specific date of the magazine where it was published gesture toward the documentary primacy of the lived experience that was documented. At the same time, Datta’s following poem, while respectful of its trigger, takes necessary liberties.
He was going away; he was leaving
Irpin—his suitcase still upright, waiting—
a trustful dog next to the master’s body:
the hand that held it, half-open, blood-
smeared, the right foot pointing away.
who’s the one lying close by? A friend?
a brother? A co-escapee? Half-covered, half
on the sidewalk, across curbstones painted
yellow and white, plastic waste strewn
around. What’s on the mind of the soldier
kneeling on the monument? Head bowed
in grief, flag in hand, flowers in front of him,
two bodies behind—it’s much harder, he’s
learned the hard way, to do good than bad.
This scene of a journey aborted by a fatal and gruesome explosion is riveting in its particulars. Sessini’s “From the Frontlines” series of photographs, offering images such as the destruction of Syria, are vivid and bring us virtually close to scenes of political violence. A journalistic photo, such as the famous naked photo of the Vietnamese child Kim Phuc, wants us to smell the napalm and feel the suffering of the burn. Datta offers an equivalent stripped-down evocation, his couplets lean and no-nonsense, shorn of similes or overt metaphors, limiting itself to an unvarnished description of the setting of the departure. Further, it asks overt questions implied by the photograph. “Who’s the one lying close by? A friend?/A brother? A co-escapee?” The catalog of bloody hand, dislocated foot, another corpse, shredded plastic strewn about, suitcase and dog, together create a still life that is also an afterlife. The speaker’s voice draws a lesson for the disconsolate soldier, about good being harder than bad to achieve. Seemingly paradoxically, Datta attempts to wring ekphrasis out of what would best be described as an image meant to straight-up document the terror of war.
Unlike the case of Brueghel and de Chirico, with their mythic subjects of Icarus and the muses, we the indirect observers and late-coming witnesses, are invited to reflect on what “really happened.” There is an implied faithfulness to the event, within a narrow interpretation in “Leaving Irpin.” The poem makes it clear that it means no disrespect, grants itself no excessive freedom, and implies that the photograph, and behind it the lived moment, ultimately take precedence. Plath, on the other hand, takes maximum liberty to run riot over her chosen painting with her usual satirical jibes and even a pop culture reference: In the hurricane, when father’s twelve/Study windows bellied in/Like bubbles about to break, you fed/My brother and me cookies and Ovaltine.” De Chirico’s non-realistic painting for her is a mere pretext.
Are journalistic photos legitimate sources for ekphrasis, or are they impermeable to the extent that their purpose is primarily documentary and instructive, in the manner of Virgil?
In an enlightening email exchange between us, in answer to questions I posed, Datta, articulated his poetics as follows:
“The documentary element in some of the more narrative poems is due largely to an impulse, I suppose, to both catalog experience (on the assumption that it illuminates some aspect of the human condition) and report my affective response to it, being aware, of course, of the fallibility of such a project, what with the gulf between the experiencing self and the narrating self, the limited nature of experience itself and the imprecision (and therefore unreliability) of memory. Speaking of experience as a phenomenon, what I think I’m interested in is what it (experience) is beneath the various labels determined by notions of identity. These are some of the things that are at the core of my enterprise as a writer.”
What gets represented in this poem, despite its seemingly “objective” minimalism, is an understandable detachment from the overwhelming shock of the immediate, gruesome scene. Whether the speaker-poet were present as a photojournalist, directly observing this mayhem, or simply consuming the mediated image of another photographer, Datta’s answer, exemplified by his poetry, would lead me to the conclusion that we must expand our notion of ekphrasis, in terms of what constitutes “artistic” sources and our obligations to them, irrespective of their nature. Perhaps we do not owe the photograph or painting anything, as it simply represents a spur to creativity. For after all, in the end, the photograph here is a pretext for the subjective play of Datta’s affective response. The “experiencing self,” as in other poems in Water and Wave, gives way to the narrating self. He is “remembering” an experience he never had, the same way Plath and Williams “remember” the paintings they contemplated at the moment of composition.
Once the speaker’s psyche and voice are introduced via questions, the photo in a sense begins to dissolve, becoming secondary, important, vital in its own right, but not ultimately defining. Thus the fecund faithlessness of poetry. The poet does not have to have been literally present in order to enter with imaginative sympathy into the proffered scene, so that in effect, the devastating explosion passes through memory as much as any scene Datta directly witnessed in his reports of equivalent violence as a stringer. His consciousness is both that of the “embedded” reporter and mere compassionate human being. Like poets, journalists are interested bystanders, exquisitely alert onlookers whose best quality is the capacity for imaginative sympathy.
This notion is liberating for poets, knowing that we are not confined to the misleading solipsism of “drawing from life.” Novelists avail themselves freely of intertextuality, entering into conversation with authors alive and dead, ones they usually never met, staging a dialogue with the works that have affected their own trajectory as writers. They pilfer lives around them, usually without acknowledgment, searching for a higher, emblematic truth for which those lives are simply an occasion. A more generous notion of ekphrasis, one that in this case parlays journalism into poetic art, dissolves a rigid separation between what is aesthetic and what is documentary. As Philip Metres suggests in reflecting on ekphrasis, “Such poetry arises from the idea that poetry is not a museum-object to be observed from afar, but a dynamic medium that informs and is informed by the history of the moment.” Even when it does not try, its existence becomes social and it, in turn, may spark the invention of someone else. “Leaving Irpin” is defined more than anything by the speaker’s raw shock, borrowed from the photographer and refined and distilled into compassion, which for the reader, becomes an aesthetic experience of a social-political moment in time. In the end, a poem is always a poem and should not be expected to be anything else, no matter where it came from, or where it is headed.
Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.
