The Ecstatic Ekphrastic: Craft Workshop

Special Topic Workshop: 1 Session
Instructor: Terry Blackhawk

Deadline to Register: October 16, 11:59 pm

Poets since Homer and his description of the shield of Achilles in The Iliad or Keats with his urn have found inspiration in rendering or responding to visual art in writing. In a process known as ekphrasis, i.e. the detailed description of a work of visual art, the intersection of the verbal and the visual creates a rich field for reflection and inspiration. Through the process of “entering,” the object of art becomes an object of contemplation and otherness, creating an alternate reality. How can we characterize and/or adopt the stances or approaches that poets take when diving into a work of art? How can we increase our capacities of observation and attention in the presence of art? We will discuss ekphrastic poems by a variety of contemporary poets — such as Mark Doty, Rita Dove, Elizabeth Bishop, Lisel Mueller, Jim Daniels, Czeslaw Milosz — and engage with reproductions of art to create a mindset from which we can launch our writing. 

Terry Blackhawk is the author of six collections of poetry, including Escape Artist, winner of the 2002 John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, and the recently released One Less River (Mayapple Press, 2019), called by Patricia Hooper an “unspecified story of loss and recovery, of grief and the many meandering paths away from grief. . . . a luminous and rewarding book.” Founder and Executive Director of InsideOut Literary Arts Project (1995-2015), Detroit’s legendary poets-in-the-schools program, she has taught creative writing pedagogy for graduate students in Oakland University’s Reading and Language Arts Masters Program, and developed graduate level courses on ekphrastic writing, which she taught at the Detroit Institute of Arts.