ABSTRACT
Amidst the proliferation of poems about the visual arts in recent years, the ekphrastic work of three poets commands attention for its inventive form, sensory intensity, and critical acuity. Cole Swensen, Kathleen Fraser, and Anne Carson have expanded the possibilities of the genre by approaching the visual arts through "site-specific" practices: they compose ekphrastic poems through strenuous engagements with the place of the encounter. In this chapter, I adapt the concept of site specificity from its usage in the visual arts to emphasize the ways that these poets, as they focus their attention on art objects, produce work "that defines itself in its precise interaction with the particular place for which it was conceived" (Fineberg 322). To borrow another definition from art criticism, these poets strive to address and "incorporat[e] the physical conditions of a particular location as integral to the production, presentation, and reception of art" (Kwon 1). In the three examples I present, the particular location in question is a museum, a site that invites a complex series of meditations on art objects and their contexts in the past and present. In "Trilogy," from Try (1999), Swensen scrutinizes the acts of attention through which she interprets the noli me tangere theme in a museum gallery and its urban environs. In "Giotto: ARENA," from when new time folds up (1993), Fraser reads Giotto's frescoes at the Arena Chapel in Padua through the layers of commentary that surround them. In "Canicula di Anna," from Plainwater (1995), Carson enters the fortress that marks the medieval center of Perugia to dramatize an encounter with Il Perugino and his muse.
