The idea behind the podcast is to document my journey to learn the art of haiku and by doing so I hope it will give you new ideas and help you to improve your haiku writing too. You can find the podcast on our website, iTunes, Soundcloud, Stitcher and Tunein radio. Perhaps you could find a little time to give us a review? It helps to promote the podcast. Thanks so much.
This week I’m happy to welcome Veronica Hosking as our guest poet. She lives in the US in an area I have not yet visited, the desert! But more about her, later in the podcast.
As you will know if you listened to last week’s podcast “The Birds”, I was having a crisis of confidence that was affecting my ability to write. I still am…
So I decided to try something new.
Do you remember Tim Gardiner from #9 of the Haiku Chronicle? He was working as the resident poet at the Munnings Art museum in Essex in the UK. You can find out more about him on the show notes for that episode, which are on the poetrypea website.
Anyway this week I decided to emulate and write Ekphrastic haiku, to see if it would help the problem I was having with my writing.
What is Ekphrasis?
If you have a look at Wikipedia, it asserts that it’s a vivid, often dramatic, verbal description of a visual work of art, either real or imagined.
Michael Dylan Welch tells us that when we react to a work of art by writing poetry we can go further than a mere description of it. He says “To my mind this response can take any direction, any form, any tone. It can be literal, imaginative, whatever the poet wants.”
I thought that this could be a fascinating way to reset my Haiku writing. And, as Miriam Louisa Simons says in The Awakened Eye “Often the resulting poems convey a deeper symbolism than is obvious; they can open up a surprising new dimension of meaning.”
Inspired by my reading, I took myself off to the to The Kunsthaus in Zürich.
I spent an afternoon wandering through the galleries. There were a number of artists sitting in front of the paintings, trying to copy them, but as far as I could see no one, apart from me observing the paintings and writing poetry. I thought as I wandered about, how great this would be for literature classes in school to come and write about what they were seeing in the artworks.
Anyway It was a really fascinating exercise and I came up with a number of raw Haiku which I can work on, which you will find on the poetry pea website in the daily Haiku section. And I’ve put a couple of links on the sownotes to other Ekphrastic work.
This is one I wanted to share with you. It was inspired by a photograph by Jeff Wall called Tattoos and Shadows 2000. He is an award winning Canadian Photographer.
shadows
paint tattoos
on tattoos
It made me see dappled sunlight with a whole new eye. I would recommend this as exercise to get those creative juices flowing.
I have one suggestion for submissions today. That is “The Ekphrastic Review”.
It’s a website dedicated to Ekphrastic writing. They accept submissions of any kind of poetry, micro, flash, and shorter fiction, and interesting reflections, essays, and other prose about or inspired by art, poems, prose. Check out the link and see what you think.
If you would like to know more about Veronica Hosking our guest today plesase go to the Guest Haiku section of our website.
Ekphrastic Works
Ducks in search of the moon
Steven Carter Ekphrasis Haibun
