Frame to Frames update: Lois P. Jones & Elena K. Byrne – powerful ekphrastic competition poem
Leading American poets Lois P. Jones and Elena K. Byrne have teamed up to compose an arresting ekphrastic poem on the festival painting Huapango Torero by Ana Segovia, for Frame to Frames: Your Eyes Follow ekphrastic poetry film competition this year. The event will be screened as part of FOTOGENIA festival in Mexico City 23 November–2nd December. I cannot think of two poets more experienced in this field and I am truly humbled that they have responded to the painting in such an inspiring way. SEE BELOW FOR THE POEM.
Alongside collaborator Australian filmmaker Jutta Prior, Lois was the first winner of Frame to Frames with her poem ‘Reflections on La Scapigliata (the girl with disheveled hair)’ based on the painting by Leonardo da Vinci. I would urge you to read her collection Night Ladder (winner of the 2017 Best Books Award) by Glass Lyre Press for a truly exceptional lesson in crafting poetry; of an interweaving across time, through the metaphysical, the spiritual, and with a highly attuned imagination and curiosity – see ‘Picasso’s Garden’ for Dora Maar, or ‘Rilke’s Maid, Leni at the Little Castle of Schloss Berg’. I was lucky enough to catch Lois and Elena at Cheltenham Poetry Festival 2022, discussing their work and comparisons between English and American poetry. Lois introduced a new series of poems on Rilke, visiting where he lived for the last years of his life. She noted how poetry arose for her from the viewpoint of Rilke’s housekeeper. It felt as if she were walking beside her protagonist, and present at the time.
If you need one book on ekphrastic poetry If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing) by Elena Karina Byrne is in a class all of its own. Comprising a remarkable 66 poems that interweave artworks with the author’s life experiences, we are taken on a journey where painting and viewer seem to inhabit the same space. Divided into three sections Rock, Paper and Scissors we shift from Francis Bacon to Cindy Sherman, Hieronymus Bosch to Joseph Cornell with such ease and joy, that it is as if you are in a private gallery of the author’s making; reinterpreting far more than is visible to the naked eye. Every line, riddled with a consistently visible intelligence and driving instinct, seems to speak volumes, for example the title ‘Turner, Strapped to the Mast, – 1969’, and we shift so easily from the concept to her father teaching her how to draw, to the Romans and coloured glass. On the opposite page ‘Awol Erizku’s Rescued High Cactus’ shifts into a much darker sphere, relating the horrific experience of her cousin Mark’s body found in a desert. Every page, as a different ‘exhibit as poem painting’ if you like, forces you to stop and assess every encounter very much on its own terms. But you are standing with the author whispering in your ear.
Both these poets (whose biographies show you how endlessly hard working and talented they are across many areas) seem as happy radiating themselves as verbs as much as nouns; disappearing into the paintings, people and places they are taken by, and surfacing with so much treasure to discover. How the visual image inspires the word is a constantly fascinating area, and in Lois and Elena we have two textbook examples to follow. But going one stage further than that, I cannot help but ask how do two poets collaborate on one poem? This is not a script, or maybe somehow a poem can be something like a script, but how can two highly individual authors reach a decision on the right word, that they may have just arrived at through instinct. I understand it was the first time for them, which is truly unbelievable, and that they would like to collaborate again (very believable).
Lois and Elena respond:
Because poetry is already a form of collaboration between one’s mind and the world, between one’s emotional geography and the physical place in which we find ourselves on a timeline, our collaboration to write this ekphrastic poem felt natural – the process revealed an epistolary-like exchange. Once we decided on a stanzaic structure, we were able to take turns with the ideas. A call-and-response dance, a poem of one mind. Influenced by the images from the painting and what those inspired, the music of language filled the room of the poem. We realized that a persona poem might best reflect the beautiful strength of conviction that was apparent in this artist’s oeuvre.
However it was achieved here is the poem that was inspired by Ana Segovia’s memorable painting Huapango Torero (courtesy the Karen Huber Gallery).
Here are the entry details again including the poem ‘Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca’.
Submissions are requested for video poems under 10 minutes based on paintings or other works of art. All entries in English must have Spanish subtitles, and Spanish entries subtitles in English. Other languages subtitles in English. Entries can also be inspired by the important Festival Painting Huapango Torero (courtesy Karen Huber Gallery) by leading Mexican artist Ana Segovia. Deadline: 30 September 2023. [huapango means ‘a fast and complicated dance for a couple, performed on a wooden platform to accentuate the rhythmic beating of heels and toes’. The painting is based on a traditional painting where boys would go into bulls’ fields at night to practice bull fighting.] The festival poem by leading American poets Elena Karina Byrne and Lois P. Jones is inspired by the painting to also use or write your own!
CALL in English with Poem and Painting
More Information in Spanish & Spanish and English entry forms: https://liberatedwords.com/2023/05/16/
Send ENTRY FORMS to Sarah Tremlett at liberatedwordspoetryfilms@gmail.com
Self Portrait with a Line from Lorca
after the painting Huapango Torero by Ana Segovia
Can I measure this distance between barbed wire and stone
wall bearing all the red delirium of spring,
between dawn and hunger and who has the upper hand…
How is it that something as small as a pistol or a knife can do away
with a man who is a bull? Or
a woman crowned by the farewell party of free speech?
There’s just this rose in my fist, and in the other, a pale sheet,
not of surrender but the torn petticoat from Lorca’s white
wedding. It was enough to hollow my mind. Enough to enter
this field the way I enter a sky full of bedroom windows.
One, witness to a bystander’s silence,
one is my child self, and another, the face of the bull.
You can’t see them, but women are singing across
the sugarcane, the sorghum, avocados,
and the wild Blue Agave. Their song carries me into the evening.
To know, like night, I begin again, entering these selves as
I climb through, step over each threshold
of who I am to test this outlawed animal mettle of our
youth, because I want to know who you are under this half-
blanched moon at the side of the hour’s
road and its unending fields that I now claim as my own.
———-
The poem in Spanish can be found here
https://www.elenakarinabyrne.com
