At the request of our workshop participants, including some accomplished artists, this workshop explored the connection between poetry and visual art from a few different angles.
The first angle was to explore a poem about a famous work of art: ‘Starry Night’ by Ann Sexton (1928-1974). The poem is prefaced by a quotation from Vincent Van Gogh, who of course painted the famous image ‘The Starry Night’.
That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars (Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother).
Sexton explores in her poem some dark themes, seeing in the sky a ‘great dragon’ and the world as something she can barely tolerate. Not everyone in the group felt her reading of the painting aligned with how they viewed it but the conversation was a powerful one. Read the poem here.
From here we moved on to a poem W.H Auden, Musée des Beaux Arts (1938), where the poet reflects on what is depicted in the painting, after Peter Breughel, from the late 1550s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
We compared Auden’s poem to that of William Carlos Williams, which explores the same painting, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Finally, we turned to the poem Everyday Around the World a Woman is Pulled into Blue (After Kara Walker’s “Blue, 2020), by contemporary American poet and artist, Krista Franklin.
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