Art and Inspiration

Jackie ♦ May 4, 2008 ♦ 2 Comments

In my quest to work hard on myself as a poet (one of my goals for this year), since it’s the area where I have the least formal training, I signed up for a four-session workshop on ekphrastic poetry. Ekphrasis is an approach that I have found intriguing for the past few years, and this workshop is conjunction with a wonderful photography exhibit currently running BMA, so I signed up and am already glad I did.

In our first session, we did an exercise using postcards of images that we passed around four times, so that we wrote a poem in response to four different images, only the first of which we chose for ourselves. I ended up with a great series, from Kara Walker to the North Pole, and am actually more pleased than I expected with the poem I wrote as a result. Then we went up to the exhibit to write a poem in response to one of the photos using a hermeneutic circle, another new strategy for me that I found fascinating. I chose a photo by Modernist photographer Edward Weston, and will be working on the poem over the next few days.

I haven’t been in a formal workshop setting since college, where I minored in creative writing, so I was a little apprehensive, but I am so glad that I am in the workshop, and it has already challenged me as a poet, which is exactly what I was hoping it would do.