ABSTRACT
The boom in ekphrastic poetry shows no signs of abating. The mode is ubiquitous in the literary magazines, where poems inspired by the visual arts continue to reflect and assess their museum contexts. In the Spring 2005 Ploughshares, Stephen Gibson turns from the thrashing bodies depicted on an "enormous canvas" of the Battle of Lepanto to nearby tourists wrangling with museum regulations (37—8). In the same issue, Rafael Campo describes "Making Sense of the Currency on Line for Le Musee Picasso" (21). Sherod Santos gives us "Girl Falling Asleep in the Museum Gardens" in the April 2005 Yale Review, and Tom Sleigh, in the most recent TriQuarterly, stares with "alien wonder" at a painting by Gerhard Richter and at other museum-goers in the gallery (149–50). Ekphrasis has become not simply a subgenre but a pervasive poetic strategy. Several notable first books of poems to appear in recent years feature an ekphrasis as catalyst, centerpiece, or guiding trope. Timothy Donnelly's "Anything to Fill In the Long Silences," after a mixed media work by Juliao Sarmento, mythologizes a scenario of protracted ekphrastic attention. Matthea Harvey's "Self-Portraits" map the varied topoi of lyric subjectivity in a series after Max Beckmann. The eponymous final poem in Brenda Shaughnessy's Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), after Dorothea Tanning, is an erotic-acoustic escapade through the painting's surreal playroom and the book's psychic territory. Several other recent collections, exclusively or predominantly ekphrastic, adapt the mode in the service of very different poetic agendas—Mary Jo Bang's The Eye Like a Strange Balloon (2004), Debora Greger's Western Art (2004), and Terri Witek's Fools and Crows (2003). Claudia Rankine's Don't Let Me Be Lonely (2004) builds an "American Lyric" around ekphrases of media images, including billboards, prescription drug labels, and stills from news coverage of racist violence.
