Why (&How) Black Ekphrastic?

WHY

In 2009, I worked with American Poetry Museum (founded by Jon West-Bey), as a Curator for about 2 years. We had been hosting INTERSECTIONS our reading series at Arch Development’s Honfleur Gallery in Anacostia for two years. I also took over hosting duties for HOME a reading series International Arts & Artists Hillyer Artspace.

During that time the American Poetry Museum began a partnership with the Phillips Collection to present a series of programs called Poetic Voices. It was a series of events that included several panels, a jazz show, and what we called a Poet’s Tour. In the Poet’s Tour, I selected works of art from The Phillips Collection’s permanent holdings, some of which were on the wall and some weren’t; but it was very cool to dive in and learn a little bit more about the collection. In the purest sense, this was one of my earliest public attempts on this scale at writing, ekphrasis. Poetry inspired by visual art.

I called my tour, “With A Poet’s Eye” because I think that poet’s see the world a little differently. More specifically I think that poet’s by nature are interdisciplinary because often our work aims to synthesize different art forms and ways of seeing and being. Additionally, many poets take great care in deploying a poem on the page not just for literary purposes and prosody, but also to accomplish visual purposes and objectives. Douglas Kearney, Chaun Webster, Evie Shockley, and Jonah Mixon-Webster are just a few working in the manner today.

Not all of the poems that I wrote made it on the tour, but I wrote poems in conversation with works by Horace Pippin, Elizabeth Murray, Gene Davis, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Cezanne and I am sure at least one other I am forgetting. The process of thinking about the world of this art really got me thinking about ekphrasis, so I Googled it to learn more

Almost everything I found was written by white poets writing about works of art by white artists and white critics writing about those white artists and white poets. I would say this was the genesis of Black Ekphrastic because it was then that I started to seek out, not just Black poets writing about art, but also Black poets writing about Black Art. I thought this was necessary because at the same time, in the art world, Black Art critics were not getting the exposure they warranted, so I thought Black poets could stand in as a type of critical voice, eye, and pen addressing Black Art.

HOW ( or some of it anyway…)

Quite honestly I envisioned this website as a book project, an anthology of creative and scholarly work that looks at how Black creative writing and arts by Black artists engage with one another. Hopefully, one day that will happen…

Although music and rhythm factors heavily in the work of both Black creative writers and artists of other disciplines, I have decided to try not to include poetry that focuses on them here….for now. I think it is too easy to look, listen to, or engage with Black creative writing and say “Rhythm” or “Musical;” yes we bring all of that, but we always bring much more. There are so many ideas embedded in the work of Black artists and the musicality, while important, is often just a device for delivery to ensure that the messages or ideas in the work get embodied. The music and rhythm are often not the ends, but the entry into the ideas. 

The notion of Black Ekphrastic, takes music and rhythm (or anti-music and broken rhythm) for granted, in search of other engagements that have not historically been tended to, more specifically, engagements with sculpture, architecture, dance/movement/theater, etc. I think all those things include musical sensibilities, so “music” is almost included by osmosis.

All of that said, there are some exceptional examples where Black poets engage with Black music that I imagine will have to be talked about here, but there is a mountain of scholarly and creative work already written about the relationship between Black Poetry and Black Music, I interested in asking and answering some other questions about looking at Black creative writing and Black artistic production.