This essay was originally published in 2024 by the Sebastopol Center for the Arts in the Reverberations 3 exhibition catalog, which is available for purchase here. 

Welcome to this third volume of Reverberations, in which the Sebastopol Center for the Arts has paired Northern California poets with individual works of art owned by intrepid Sonoma County collectors. Creativity grows tall and wild in these parts, and the ekphrastic poems that have resulted from this matchmaking are no exception.

For those new to the word, ekphrasis is a verbal or written “description” of a work of visual art. Because a poem is a work of art (a picture composed of works), the most successful ekphrastic poems seek to tango with their subject matter rather than narrate. It can be intimidating to approach a great work of visual art on an equal footing. Still, when a poet brings their own imagination, history, and curiosity into the mix, the results are far more expansive than what an “on the nose” pictorial description would yield.

To a certain extent, all poems, like all works of art, contain a quality of self-portraiture. In my own case, the intermingling of the self happens naturally in the process of spending time looking at a work of art, allowing patterns, textures, imagery, and direct associations to emerge. As was the case with this project, in which my muse was the brilliant photograph “Shells” by Edward Weston, I began to free-associate the personal with known details about the artist and to play a bit the unique language of photography as an art form.

Weston’s first camera was a Kodak Bulls-Eye. I jotted down that word. I then added others to the list: west, F-stop, aperture, and monuments. Studying the photograph, I noted it as a staged shot of two different shells nested to appear as a single form. It was impossible not to note the shadowy, pale curves as sensual. I’m not given to overtly undressing my emotions, but Weston’s image made me feel I’d be doing it a disservice not to embrace whatever Dionysian drive I could muster to meet his expressive efforts halfway.

A shell can protect but also serves as a reminder of vulnerability. It can be a mask. Weston’s placement of one shell (the nautilus) within another (the abalone) makes the former a support system while the latter seems to gleam and stretch towards the viewer. Is it a healthy relationship? Am I anthropomorphizing? I consider the lyrical balance that the two figures achieve, which appears mutually satisfying. From a different angle, the roles might appear reversed. Dare I suggest a toppling or shall I celebrate the grace of equipoise? I accept Mr. Weston’s hand and step to the dance floor, dipping pen and all.

Having opened the lens and thrown light on my own process, I read back through the other poems in this collection to reflect upon how the other poets have approached their muses. What tears and joy, fear and resolve will they have woven into their words? In my new role as reader, my own past and present will still enter the three-way tango. This creative chain – from artist to writer to reader – is a vital element in the alchemy of ekphrastic poetry. Therein lies the reverberation.

My eye lights first upon the poem “Psyche’s Other Box” by Fran Carbonaro with its architecturally clipped phrases, interspersed backslashes, and the cutting line “holy coffin of remembrance.” The artwork this poet responds to is a photorealistic oil painting titled “Collective” by Monika Rosa of what appears to be a long vertical line of office files of varying tones, some of which are bound with or contain ribbons. No words are visible. The poet seems to have dug within herself to pull forth or “tip the vault” on her own secrets. Even her words are arranged on the page in the manner of files. The form, inspired by the painting, becomes the perfect container for this affecting overspill of “the sacred file” or story of the “you” addressed by the poem.

The poet Dean Rader’s most recent book Beyond the Borderless: Dialogues with Cy Twombly is an extended exploration of and testament to the generative force of ekphrasis. For Reverberations 3, Rader was paired with Mission School artist Alicia McCarthy, known for painting bands of vibrant color into textile-like weavings. Rader has designed a poem that creates its own warp and weft; images enter, then re-enter in shifted form. His quatrains honor the four corners of McCarthy’s square composition. The heart, another four-chambered entity, beats throughout. From the rapture of color, Rader transmutes the pulse of McCarthy’s painting into language; his words oscillating around the push and pull of desire – are we driving to the center of a maze or seeking the way out? To enter his poem is to reenter yourself, to get lost, and to find lightness in “a window of infinite frames not unlike the soul.”

Kehende Bediru sits down with “The Poet in the Dining Room”, a lithograph by the expressionist Mexican artist José Luis Cuevas, who broke with the social realist tradition of nationalist muralism to render raw and often unsettling figures. The scene that the poet Bediru is asked to digest is a sparse and surreal interior populated with ghostly forms and rather menacing faces. From this prompt, Bediru turns the darkness upside down filling his reader with delicious poetic morsels, emerging from thoughts of family dinners as a child. Here are some to feast upon:

I imagine that when poets gather,
they gather in the unfolding of words to remind you of mutuality, how
you could have become a townsong, the little light on, in the kitchen,
a little bit of found art, figurative lectures, early mornings…

Christina Bensadoun brings us a bilingual response to Robert S. Neuman’s abstract oil painting “Barcelona, 1957”, elegantly capturing the essential elements and experience of being in dialogue with a work of art that disobeys rules of realism, such as horizon lines. Abstract art, particularly from its influential heyday in the post-world wars 1950s, captures a truth beyond surface recognition. Like poetry, it disrupts easy expectations to provoke deeper consideration. In both, rhythm and texture (whether of words in the mouth or paint on the brush) are key tools of communication. Bensadoun also deftly focuses on the symbolic possibilities of color and plums them for historic resonance, an aspect emphasized by giving the primary voice to the Spanish language:

Blanco colonizador / White for the Spanish colonizer
Negro de Moros sentenciados / Black for the sentenced Moors
Verde de siglos de pecado / Green for centuries of sin

Suzanne Maxon addresses “Onion Fields”, a large oil painting by the late Hung Liu with a poet’s rake, turning the image over and over to reveal the inner radiance of its “dry broken stalks”. Liu was inspired by Dorothea Lang to whom she felt connected through the latter’s meticulous photographs of the fruits of American labor, including onions. Liu knew the pain and hunger represented in those images directly, as she had toiled in the fields of Communist China during the Cultural Revolution. Maxon composes a stunning ode to the two women whose artistic work made an “alter to all the invisible faces” of the workers. In doing so, the poet employs her “labor of language” to create a “field of resonance” upon which she lays an offering of gratitude for the gift of their art.

Matt Gonzalez is paired with Ed Ruscha’s “Your Space Gravure”, a photogravure with aquatint and hard ground etching that focuses the eye on a slightly pocked, perhaps metallic billboard against a minimal background. Facing the mysterious anonymity of this “blank” sign, the poet elects to explore the private space of his own reflections. As lovers are said to see themselves through the gaze of the other, the poet etches lyrical lines into what Ruscha has left unmarked and unsaid. I particularly admire the moving lines: No sign reflecting radiance can tell us where to go / An invitation to put shadows or clouds in it…I’ll presage the hazards to avoid.

And finally, what does John Briscoe bring forth from the “Paint Can” of Wayne Thiebaud but a tour of the history of modern art from Warhol to Hokusai to Monet. From this playful space, the poet paints an intensely moving closing stanza whose reference to “the last stage curtain” and eternal eigengrau (seen by the human eye as perfect darkness), alongside the “melted crayons” of youth reads like an elegy.

Long may such resonance reanimate the human condition