Instructor Jack Christian is the author of the poetry collections Family System (2012 Colorado Prize, U Press Colorado) and Domestic Yoga (2016, Groundhog Poetry Press). He is working on a third collection of poems that respond to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist landscape paintings. His poetry, art criticism, and essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ArtForum, Slate, Cleveland Review of Books, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere.

Read an Interview with Jack about Writing Poems About Paintings. 

Join us for a 6-week poetry workshop course focused on writing and sharing poems that respond to paintings and other works of art.

As a poet, I've always been attracted to the interplay between the stillness of visual art and the linear movement of writing that must move through time in order to be read. Anyone who has ever attempted to describe a picture understands this: to describe is to alter, and to alter is to create. Sometimes I think the whole tradition of ekphrastic poetry stems from poets crawling inside this basic tension and becoming enamored of the power it suggests: By describing what I see, I make the artwork move.

In this light, it becomes sweet, funny, and sad that John Keats, in "Ode on a Grecian Urn," would use the linear unfolding of his words to lament the unstoppable passage of time. Through this he arrives at a multi-layered paradox: The lovers on the urn can never kiss, but they will never die, while Keats might kiss his beloved but they will both eventually have to die. Which would you rather? Both! Neither! Keats replies.

I like to think how good it must have felt to write "Oh happy love! more happy, happy love!" in the poem's second stanza, by which point Keats is starting to feel himself. I picture him smiling with tears streaming down his face. There is nothing better than being alive, and, at the same time, being alive is often unbearable. I fell more in love with poetry, and with ekphrasis in particular, when I realized how quickly and powerfully the simple act of describing leads a writer like Keats to such a divine and revelatory place.

That's what I'd like this course to be about: A six-week, communal practice where each of us selects an artwork that makes it a little easier to face the blank page, and our wonderment at all the places where that simple act ends up taking us.

COURSE STRUCTURE:

We'll share a single poem each week, respond to one another's poems, and celebrate our work.

Each week, I will provide one or several images for students to respond to if they wish (you will always be allowed to respond to any image/artwork you choose), along with examples of poems about paintings by poets such as Ranier Marie Rilke, Marianne Moore, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Anne Carson, Paisley Rekdal, Rick Barot, Terrence Hayes, and others.

I will also invite each of you to submit images for group inspiration and more examples of ekphrastic poems as you encounter them in the wild. In this way, we will build our own loose anthology of images and poems, and, through our own writing, we will make our own contributions.

Does this sound like fun? The course will begin during National Poetry Month (i.e., April) and run straight through the heart of spring. This should allow us not only to consider en plein air paintings, but also to get outside and write some en plein air poems.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS: