Ekphrasis and Eugene Datta’s “Water and Wave”

“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.”

May poetry improve us by instruction, the way soap scrubs away dead skin in a shower, or does verse most reach our being like sunlight reflected off lake water, warming us indirectly? Virgil, in his Georgics, opts for the former, as he instructs the citizen forthrightly in the tilling of land.

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.