I am thinking these days about one of my favorite ekphrastic poems, Alice Fulton's "Close," the first poem in Felt (W. W. Norton, 2001). It responds to Joan Mitchell's "White Territory," but I hadn't seen the painting when I fell for the poem. What I love about it is the way it tries to get me close to the painting, how it makes me feel the tricky, charged intimacy of that encounter. Right-justified, the lines run right up to the edge of the page, as if pushing us to see what isn't there. The poem opens like this:
To take it farther would mean dismantling doorframes,
so they unpacked the painting's cool chromatics
where it stood, shrouded in gray tarpaulin
near a stairwell in a space so tight
I couldn't get away from it.
I could see only parts of the who,
I was so close.
I was almost in the painting,
a yin-driven, frost-driven thing
of mineral tints
in the museum's vinegar light.
To get any distance, the canvas or I
would have to fall down the stairs
or dissolve through a wall.
It put me in mind of winter...
I miss being that close to paintings in this pandemic winter. Scale, proximity, lighting, relation to the human in the room. One of the last actual exhibitions I went to see, roughly a year ago, was at the Princeton Art Museum, of Helen Frankenthaler prints, room after gorgeous room. The show was called "Seven Types of Ambiguity," after William Empson's essay on reading poetry. The prints were all glass-faced, so my photos bring back my own floating through the rooms:
I gave up long ago trying to avoid reflections in the glass; I like their memorializing the visit, my having been with the art, the way the prints began to transform the space I moved through, behind my back.
Fulton puts us "in mind of winter" to conjure not only Mitchell's scumbled whites, but also to invite the company of Wallace Stevens' "Snow Man," who must have a mind of winter not to think "of any misery in the sound of the wind." The snow man, who,
...nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
Some of the most powerful non-representation art makes us confront this: the x-ing out of the human in the scene, a conversion into radically negative capability. How can one enter into what is happening here?
The ending of Fulton's poem returns to Stevens, shifting from where we've put the painting to where the painting puts us. It's not, whatever the winter, a cold response:
You put me in mind of winter where I live,
a winter so big I'll have to dismantle myself
to admit it: the always winter
and its consolations of flint.
This is not an illustration.
It's what I saw when the airbag opened,
slamming me with whiteness like the other side.
I came to consciousness on braced arms,
pushing my face from the floor
in order to breathe,
an arm's length from unbeing, as it seems.
I was what flashed through me
in full frost. We were life to life,
in our flesh envelopes,
insubstantial, air to air and you and I.
Though we could see only parts of the whole,
we felt its tropism.
We leaned toward, liked,
its bitter lungs. We almost were that
winter tissue and cranial colored paint.
We were almost in the picture. We were close.
We left each other a note.
"We leaned toward, liked, / its bitter lungs."
Here's another, closer picture from the Frankenthaler exhibition. I'm closer to the glass and it's started to swallow me up--though maybe you can see my arm holding the camera to the right. Someone in the middle is falling down a rabbit hole. Into the painting? Out of it? "We were almost in the picture. We were close. / We left each other a note."
Because I so miss this being-with-pictures, as I miss so many other kinds of being with, the poems (ekphrastic and otherwise) that give felt dimension back to me, that get me to see feelingly, are the ones I want most now.
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