background preloader

EKPHRASIS

Facebook Twitter

Celebrate Poetry Month with a Free Printable! April is National Poetry Month and it’s a great time to celebrate poetry.

Celebrate Poetry Month with a Free Printable!

There are poetry-themed events and readings happening all over the country. A fun and easy way to bring some poetry into your family’s life this month is to learn about and write an ekphrastic poem! Guest Blog: 10 Examples of Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature. By Patrick Smith, Bainbridge State College, Georgia Writers have drawn on vivid descriptions of the visual arts to enhance their work since Homer famously used 130 lines to describe the chronicle emblazoned on Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of Homer’s Iliad more than 2,500 years ago.

Guest Blog: 10 Examples of Ekphrasis in Contemporary Literature

Ekphrasis—the representation in language of a work of art—acts as an organizing principle in poetry and fiction, making explicit the connection between art, storytelling, and life. Acting in multiple roles in contemporary literature—both as an interpretive key to a work of art (either real or imagined) and as a descriptive device that enriches narrative and explores the relationship between writer and audience—those descriptions create, Michael Trussler writes, “a kind of ontological miniature that signals a world beyond the confines of the text.” 1.

Academy of American Poets. Ekphrasis (also spelled “ecphrasis”) is a direct transcription from the Greek ek, “out of," and phrasis, “speech” or “expression.”

Academy of American Poets

It’s often been translated simply as “description," and seems originally to have been used as a rhetorical term designating a passage in prose or poetry that describes something. More narrowly, it could designate a passage providing a short speech attributed to a mute work of visual art. In recent decades, the use of the term has been limited, first, to visual description and then even more specifically to the description of a real or imagined work of visual art. The use of visual description in poetry is a huge subject, and a good treatment of the topic is found in Carol T.