Writing Exercise: Ekphrastic Poetry

Recommended Ages: All! William Carlos Williams wasn't the only poet to write about Brueghel's painting, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." Another -- more famous -- poem about this painting is W.H. Auden's "Musee Des Beaux Arts."

The two poems and Brueghel's painting make a great lesson for high schoolers.

Auden's poem begins:

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters; how well, they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

This week's writing exercise: try your hand at an ekphrastic poem.

Choose a favorite work of art -- one that would stop you as you walked through a museum or gallery to have a conversation. What is it about the painting that "talks" to you?

Mine is by Mark Rothko (54).

I'm prepping for a poetry residency at Norwood Elementary in Dundalk, MD tomorrow, so time is short. Each Poetry Friday, I visit Laura Salas' blog: 15 Words or Less Poems. That blog, and my time constraints, inspired me to keep it short!

I know I'm not supposed to see realistic objects in a Rothko painting, but...

Torii at dusk,

I approach you.

What is beyond

your gate? Sleep,

dense as stone.

Have a fantastic ekphrastic experience, y'all.