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| Dr. Meta DuEwa Jones’ NHC Interview A short lecture in which Jones talks about her new project, “Mapping Black Diasporic Memory: The Alchemy of Ekphrasis.” Read more |
| Nia Iman Smith’s The Black Connection: Praise Poems Art Read more |
| Scalawag’s Ekphrastic Poetry Series Read more |
| Ed Roberson reads from “Architektonis: Twenty for the Chicago Architecture Center” Though Roberson is not writing about the work of Black Architecture, I think this represents an opportunity for Black poets to engage and document the work of Black architects, particularly as the future of structures designed and constructed by Black architects may be in question as cities “renew” themselves. Read more |
| Dr. Howard Rambsy II’s CulturalFront A short checklist of African American poets on artworks & artists. From his website: Poets are regularly responding to artwork and artists. Robert D. Denham’s Poets on Paintings: A Bibliography (2010), for instance, catalogs approximately 2,500 poems focused on paintings, a practice known as ekphrasis. Some of my recent research led me to look over other instances of African American poets (and a poet-short story writer) producing work about artists and artworks. What follows are some examples of poetry about artworks & artists. As always, the list is not exhaustive. Read more |
| POETS KEEP TALKING While this article is not related to Black Ekphrastic writing, it presents another model for how museums can work with Black poets to re-imagine museum spaces, the objects on display and the narrative attached to those objects. Read more |
| Freedom of Shadow: A Tribute to Terry Adkins by Douglas Kearney In this piece which Kearney playfully refers to as a “preemptive ekphrasis”, he lays out a project that he and the late artist Terry Adkins never got to complete, because of Adkins sudden death. Kearney uses his notes and their correspondence to pay tribute Adkins and, in so doing, points toward some great questions about ekphrasis, interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and a lot of other stuff too. A MUST read. Read more |
| Art Inspires Poetry: Smithsonian National Museum of African Art’s Divine Comedy Poetry Contest My poem “Below As Above” was inspired by textile artist and Painter Abdoulaye Konaté’s La Danse series and was the winner of The Divine Comedy Poetry Contest. Read more |
| Watching the Good Trains Go By: A Suite of Poems to Accompany Collages By Romare Bearden by Kevin Young Read more |
| Ekphrastic Poetry and the Middle Passage: Recent Encounters in the Black Atlantic by Carl Plasa During the mid-1990s, several black Atlantic poets produced ekphrastic responses to the visual memory of the transatlantic slave trade, most notably David Dabydeen, whose “Turner” (1994) is inspired by Joseph Mallord William Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On (1840). Since the time of “Turner”‘s first publication over two decades ago, however, a number of other important Black Atlantic poems in which ekphrasis meets the Middle Passage have appeared. This essay looks at three of the most salient recent examples of this trend, all of which have to date attracted little or no critical attention: Elizabeth Alexander’s “Islands Number Four” (2001); Olive Senior’s “A Superficial Reading” (2004); and Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’s “Portrait of Dido Elizabeth Belle Lindsay, Great-Niece of Lord Mansfield, and Her Cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray, c. 1779 (by unknown artist)” (2011). By bringing these three texts together, the essay enables us, in the first instance, to gain a sense of how the technique of ekphrasis has developed in the hands of twenty-first-century black Atlantic poets wishing to traverse anew the ground of Dabydeen’s pioneering imaginative experiment. More significantly, perhaps, it simultaneously builds on the work that “Turner” has elicited by further correcting the biases intrinsic to much of the existing criticism on ekphrastic poetry as a whole. Valuable as it is, such criticism is blinkered by a tendency to privilege texts where the poet’s gaze is white and thus remains blind to the rich alternative fields of vision that the black gaze opens up. Read more |
| Musical Ekphrasis in the Poetry NICOLÁS GUILLÉN, FEDERICO GARCÍA LORCA, AND LANGSTON HUGHES by Andrew Brennan Divett I know I said I was going to avoid music and I am not sure that the author is Black, but I really love the connections this graduate thesis is making. I have not read the whole piece yet (as of 4/18/2021), but from my first scan I am excited to expand the thinking that this piece suggests. Reading this with an Africana lens, the 3 poets he chose, suggest an Early 20th Century Pan-African Ekphrasis. Though Lorca is not “African” his work on Duende, the impact of Harlem and his creative reflections on Harlem, and the fact that “Black” people, the Moors, ruled the Iberian Peninsula and the Andalusian region of Spain for more than 700 years. Read more |
| June Jordan’s Who Look at Me Asian American scholar, Erica Kanesaka Kalnay notes in her essay Orange and Sardines: Art and Ekphrasis in the Writing Center that June Jordan wrote a book called Who Look at Me, Kalnay notes: In June Jordan’s Who Look at Me from 1969, the young African American poet speaks back to paintings of the Western tradition that objectify members of the African diaspora. Jordan demonstrates one way in which the politics of ekphrasis can be harnessed to reconfigure the power relations between subject and object. Casting the gaze back on the painter, she writes, “I am black alive and looking back at you” (31). This ” looking back” and addressing the white gazer is somewhat of a departure from what we focus on here, but given the time this book was published, I think it is significant to look at this piece as a critical Black ekphrastic text., despite the fact that she is not responding to Black artists. I think it is worth reading the rest of Kalnay’s essay to think more about how we build a Black Ekphrastic Critical rubric. Read more |
| Collages Inspired by Langston Hughes Poems Acquired by Morgan Library Although these are collages inspired by Langston Hughes’s poetry, I decided to still include this article because I think it is important “who we are to each other” and we find ways to be in conversation and communion with one another’s work. Read more |
| MoMA’s Poetry Project features ekphrasis by Crystal Williams (Faith Ringgold), Robin Coste Lewis (Barbara Chase-Riboud), and Yusef Komunyakaa (Wilfredo Lam). I also include Aracelis Girmay‘s poem to Ana Mendieta’s Nile Born here because Mendieta’s piece speaks to Cuba’s African roots. MoMA’s Poetry Project also includes some beautiful work by African American poets , Ross Gay ( Cy Twombly) and Wendy Walters (Constantin Brancusi), but their poems are not about Black artists. Also on MoMA’s website a celebrated panel of poets responding to Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series in series called One-Way Ticket |
| Poet Joy Priest responds to two pieces, Frank Bowling’s Night Journey and Jeanine Michna-Bales’ Hidden in Plain Sight, Rose Mont Plantation, Sumner County, Tennessee from the upcoming exhibition Afro-Atlantic Histories @ The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Ghosts In Schools, a poem by Joy Priest that brings together lines from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and a painting by Kara Walker Read more here “We Had Dreams Named After Us” After Johannes Barfield’s De-Extinction Elixir ~ by Joy Priest Read more here |
| Jamaican poet Kei Miller engages with the artwork artists Ebony G. Patterson, O’Neil Lawrence, Judith Salmon, and Laura Facey Read more here |
| DC Based poet Brandon D. Johnson responding to Archibald Motley’s Plotters |
| Dr. Howard Rambsy II , On Jacob Lawrence, John Biggers, and William J. Harris’ , poem The Beauty of Bareness Read more here You can also hear Dr. Harris read this poem and another one based on Romare Bearden’s collage The Cardplayers on PennSound at an event called “Reading in the Wexler Studio at Kelly Writers House, November 5, 2015” Read more here Here is another piece from Dr. Rambsy’s Cultural Front on Dr. Harris’s card player poem and about other card player paintings in the “Western canon.” Read more here |
| A poem by Robin Coste Lewis and homage to Jack Whitten. Mother Church Number Ten: Homage to Whitten from Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula Magazine |
| A poem by Shayla Lawson in response to Lorna Simpson’s 2013 video piece ‘Chess’ from Hauser & Wirth’s Ursula Magazine click here to read it |