Saturday Poem - Williams
Oct. 2nd, 2005 02:31 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
framlingem(sort of - I completely forgot yesterday was Saturday. Don't ask me how, or why, cus I sure as anything have NO clue. It happens on occasion.)
Today's poem is ekphrastic. It is so ekphrastic, in fact, that I may not even tell you what ekphrastic means. Anyone know? At any rate, this is so ekphrastically ekphrastic that I just had to share. (Ekphrastic would be a wonderful Scrabble word, wouldn't it?).
It's by someone who is possibly my all-time favourite poet, William Carlos Williams. If you're into poetry at all, or had to do a section on it for an English class, you've probably read his plum poem, or his one about the red wheelbarrow. I love Williams' poems for their sketchiness - if they were visual art, they'd be one of those drawings which somehow manage to catch everything with a dozen pencil strokes. (Unlike, say, Keats, who liked to beat his readers over the head with the Sistine Chapel.) If they were an architectural style, they'd be deconstructionism - bare bones.
It's also about one of my favourite paintings, which, by contrast to the poem, is rich and full and varied - "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", by Flemish painter Bruegel, which you can see here: http://www.english.emory.edu/Paintings&Poems/Icarus.jpg . See if you can find Icarus.
"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
William Carlos Williams
Today's poem is ekphrastic. It is so ekphrastic, in fact, that I may not even tell you what ekphrastic means. Anyone know? At any rate, this is so ekphrastically ekphrastic that I just had to share. (Ekphrastic would be a wonderful Scrabble word, wouldn't it?).
It's by someone who is possibly my all-time favourite poet, William Carlos Williams. If you're into poetry at all, or had to do a section on it for an English class, you've probably read his plum poem, or his one about the red wheelbarrow. I love Williams' poems for their sketchiness - if they were visual art, they'd be one of those drawings which somehow manage to catch everything with a dozen pencil strokes. (Unlike, say, Keats, who liked to beat his readers over the head with the Sistine Chapel.) If they were an architectural style, they'd be deconstructionism - bare bones.
It's also about one of my favourite paintings, which, by contrast to the poem, is rich and full and varied - "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus", by Flemish painter Bruegel, which you can see here: http://www.english.emory.edu/Paintings&Poems/Icarus.jpg . See if you can find Icarus.
"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus"
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
William Carlos Williams
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Date: 2005-10-02 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-02 05:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-10-02 06:28 pm (UTC)- MD
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Date: 2005-10-02 07:54 pm (UTC)That's really cool. Thanks.