[This week we are starting a series of postings with poetry and creative nonfiction writing exercises offered by writers who teach. No matter what genre you favor, try the exercises they describe, and you will most certainly surprise yourself with new and interesting writing. — ed]

The term ekphrastic comes from the Greek ekphrasis—ek “out of” and phrasis “speech or expression.” Ekphrastic poems have a long, rich history going back to the time of Homer, who described in great detail in The Illiad how Hephaestus, the blacksmith god, forged the Shield of Achilles.

Poets continue to be inspired by paintings, although in more recent times they have focused less on the details of the art and have instead interpreted, spoken to, or even tried to inhabit their subjects. Some examples of well-known ekphrastic poems are available at Poets.org and other sites:

W. H. Auden: “The Shield of Achilles” and “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Edward Hirsch: “Edward Hopper and The House by the Railroad”
William Carlos Williams: “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
X. J. Kennedy: “Nude Descending a Staircase”

Find these poems and read them aloud several times.

My own ekphrastic poem is about a Chagall painting. There are many beautiful paintings in the world, all deserving of poems, but in my poetry classes I like to use the paintings of Marc Chagall, the Russian painter, because his paintings do so well what we want our poems to do: take imaginative leaps. In his world, cows jump over the moon, newlyweds dance across the sky, fiddlers take flight, imagination rules! Thanks to the Internet, you can easily view Chagall’s paintings online at several websites, including artcyclopedia and masterworksartgallery.

Here’s a poem I wrote with my students in response to Chagall’s painting titled “The Shop in Vitebsk“:

The Shopkeeper, Waiting
Chagall: The Shop in Vitebsk
by Holly J. Hughes

Orange persimmons glisten in a string bag;
on the table, two plums, a mackerel await weighing.

In the shadows, the shopkeeper watches, about
to enter the room where wood planked floors sag

under the tread of feet, about to re-enter this world
where jars filled with spices line up in rank,

this world tidy, measured out, set of scales bearing
fine precision of fish bone, small heft of plum.

Here, even beauty can be weighed, measured,
before it drifts like smoke toward the sky.

What will he do when he returns? Will he measure
out a few rubles of sassafras, of comfrey? Or

will he pull out his violin, fiddle to the cow,
who will leap beyond the blue moon?

And what of the mackerel, persimmons, plum?
Will they too rise, weightless, while below,

everyone who enters will find what they need.

For more ekphrasis poetry and discussion of it try these sites:

The Poet Speaks of Art
Ekphrasis: Poetry Confronting Art
Notes on Ekphrasis by Alfred Corn
Take Your Turn

Find one of Chagall’s paintings that especially intrigues you, a painting that you’d like to study closely and then interact with in a poem.

1. Study the painting carefully, noting the colors, shapes, images, mood. Note, too, what’s happening in the shadows of the painting.
2. In a freewrite, describe what you see in the painting, using at least three concrete details and at least one simile and one metaphor.
3. Choose a figure in the painting and write from his/her/its point of view (the figure doesn’t need to be human). Let your imagination loose here, as Chagall does, so that your words are as free as his images.
4. Write several questions that are raised by the painting, but don’t try to answer them; just explore them.
5. Re-read your freewrite, underlining the strongest lines and images and the most interesting questions.
6. From these lines, images, and questions create a poem. In doing so, think about this as a jazz collaboration — or a dance– with Chagall.  Don’t worry about making literal sense; rather, try to convey the mood or feeling the painting conveys. Your poem should use enough specific details that readers might recognize the painting. It should also convey the imaginative spirit of Chagall and ask us to look at the world in a new, fresh way.
7. Try out several poetic forms — couplets, triplets, single stanza — to see what will work best with the spirit of the poem and painting. Try for an organic form, if you can, in which the content of the painting is somehow mirrored in the poem’s form.
8. Again, in keeping with the spirit of Chagall, try to avoid clichés or predictable language. Better not to follow a predictable rhyming pattern, but do pay attention to the music of the words, using alliteration, assonance, consonance, or internal rhyme when you can.

Additional Assignments

• Try using Chagall’s paintings as warm-ups for your own writing, choosing an image to respond to each morning before you write to put yourself in an imaginative frame of mind (instead of invoking the muse, invoke Chagall!)
• Choose another painter that you admire and write an ekphrastic poem about that painting, or a series of paintings.
• If you have a friend who is an artist, suggest collaborating on a series of paintings/poems.