Quote from Speculations: Contemporary Poetry and Painting, by Fred Moramarco
“Reading poems, we convert their language to the visual images they evoke in our mind’s eye. A poet who writes about a painting performs precisely the reverse activity. By converting painterly images to words, he/she “envoices” a canvas, finding a language for the ineffable world of colors and forms. It is virtually impossible to respond to and understand poetry without recourse to visual images; it is obviously impossible to convey one’s sense of a painting’s meaning without language” (pp 25).
Excerpt from Mourning Picture, by Adrienne Rich
“Out of my head, half-bursting,/still filling, the dream condenses–/shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew./Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the light/carving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,/under high early-summer clouds,/I am Effie, visible and invisible,/remembering and remembered.”
Moramarco’s essay discusses the relationship and history of visual art and poetry coming together, and specifically uses the above paragraph to explain how they overlap. This is something I agree with wholeheartedly, as the combination of art forms is an exercise that produces incredible work, with poetry being the writing form that I believe has the least roots in hard reality and is thus best able to explore the world of images and confusing feelings. Meanwhile, this excerpt from Rich’s poem, which is the most figurative and ends on the poem’s conclusion, expresses how the subjects in “Mourning Picture” occupy a space between the reality of grief and the surrealism of memory. The child in this painting is very likely dead, and yet Rich’s poem shows how she remembers her world even as her parents grieve over her. The excerpt from Rich’s poem encompasses the meaning behind this quote from Moramarco’s essay, as Rich gives the painting a new angle from which to consider and more fully understand its different interpretations. This does raise the question of what can be achieved in the art world when more mediums are brought together, but, more importantly, what interpretations could be represented yet aren’t? What are we, as artists and analysts, missing? How can one move beyond the literal and historical meaning of a painting to find the emotions undiscovered in different perspectives?
