Poetry&Stuffby
MARNE KILATES
MARNE
S
KRIPTS
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
from
Antinostalgia & the Tokhang
Rhapsodies
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
Poems 2022
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
From Mga Biyahe, Mga Estasyon
From Journeys, Junctions
(a collection of travel poems)
Art or Just a Lot of Air?
In the poem, Auden opens with the statement, “About suffering, they were never wrong/ The Old Masters.” (As I am revisiting this introduction almost three years after I conceived it—it is 2018 now, which is the peculiar time of post-truth, alternative facts, and fake news—many authors advise us that re-reading Auden is as important as going back to Orwell and their lessons on the tensions between power and truth.) Auden goes on to describe the bucolic scene and details of the painting—the sunny seascape, the city and castle ruins hazy in the distance; nearer to the viewer are the farmer plowing his field and the shepherd herding his flock; and almost unseen in the corner, off the cliff and shore, a pair of legs flailing as its torso plunges into the dark water. The description ends with the almost casual remark that the ship passing below the cliffs “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.”
When Auden is able to do that in such a nonchalant manner but leaves you with some tightness in the gut (he doesn’t say, for example, that Icarus had failed in man’s first attempt to fly, “echoing” Breughel’s silence on the matter), it was then I first felt aware of the poet’s power of contemplation, of him being able to articulate what the painting did not say—or what the painting was in fact saying. It was then I discovered and probably term itself as well.
Ekphrastic poetry, by virtue of its name, is as old as Homer, or art itself, which is its subject. Somewhere in the latter books of the Iliad the epic poet describes the shield Hephaestus forged for Thetis in replacement of the one that her son, Achilles, had lost (the circumstances of such loss being a long story by itself). And this first ekphrastic poem is not even about a painting or a picture. It is the description of the Greek classical life—citizens going about their lives in the agora or square, the farmer farming, young people dancing, soldiers making war, and many other scenes, all of them in circular succession, and circumscribing them, the rolling, scrolling waves of ocean. Yes, all in a circle, as if in a merry-go-round, because these scenes are carved on the face of the circular shield. But the shield is nonexistent except in Homer’s description, in a poem, until in the 1800s, a London sculptor casts a bronze shield based on the blind poet’s words—a reverse ekphrasis. This tells us about the reflective and reflexive character of ekphrasis—of looking at something or the world and looking back or on itself as it looks at the world—which is the general character of art itself.
​
​
​
...vividly or dramatical
HE AIR INSIDE THE FRAME" is the title for my imagined or anticipated collection of “picture poems,” or more properly called ekphrases (singular, ekphrasis; adjective, ekphrastic). As defined by Frederick de Armas, an ekphrasis is “a description of a work of art as a rhetorical exercise.” The Greeks used the word (from ek and phrasis) or “out” and “speak,” respectively, to mean to call out or proclaim an inanimate object by name. Perhaps like the first man or woman naming things.
Today the word is used more technically as the term for a poem that vividly or dramatically describes—verbally—a visual work of art, real or imagined. Or more simply, a poem based on or inspired by a work of art, which can be a painting, sculpture, or even music, dance, a scene from a play, and a photograph.
My planned collection gathers 65 ekphrastic poems (more or less, as some poems have been grouped into cycles or suites) from eight books of poems I have written over the last four decades. Plus a few new ones, and sampled in this online medium. That covers more or less the entire period I have engaged my muse since I left Legazpi City in 1977 to work in Manila up to now. Surely, I didn’t know the Greek term then. When much later I came across the word I tended to avoid using it as I felt it was a bit too academic, or even pretentious, for my purposes (though I can’t think of many reasons to object to what is “academic,” but pretentious, surely). But it was mainly because I didn’t want to turn away readers who were or are so few to start with.
​
On the other hand, my interest and inclination towards the visual arts have never diminished since I started making drawings in childhood, and later creating my own comic books with a friend (who was also a would-be poet), then “graduating” into colored pencils and watercolor. At the same time, I looked up to the eldest brother who painted and later worked as an illustrator for one of the comic-book publications in Manila. In all cultures, we are told, the instinct and skill to draw develops in a child early, while writing needs to be taught, usually in school. Which is to be expected since writing is a more complicated use of language, and for a child, another stage or method of acquiring knowledge. In other words, my connection with the visual arts and with words always remained with me even as I tended more towards the latter, eventually, and which probably led all the way to this kind of poetry.
​
As I’ve said elsewhere, my favorite and the first ekphrastic poem I have ever encountered is “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden. The artwork that inspired Auden’s poem is “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Breughel the Elder, one of the famous Flemish painters of the 13th century. The painting is housed in the Museum of Fine Arts in Belgium, which Auden visited in the 1930s.
"T
ly describes...
