Abstract
This essay locates our understanding of poetry in a kind of phenomenological trust in the body’s sensory experience—one that coincides with (but doesn’t necessarily parallel) the poet’s sensory experience in writing the poem. Grounded in the philosophical writings of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and using as a case study the ekphrastic poetry of Margaret Atwood and Marianne Moore, this essay posits that the kind of attention to detail demanded by the ekphrastic poem’s focus on and description of the perceptual encounter with the art object can be taken as a method for reading the lyric poem as perception in language. The theoretical approach outlined here can transform the teaching of poetry by shifting students’ experiences of poetry from the solely intellectual practice of exegesis to a whole-body sensory experience of language, sound, form, and vision.
Outside the classroom words have their own chemistry….
–Gerald L. Bruns, What Are Poets For?
The operation of expression, when successful, does not simply leave to the reader or the writer himself a reminder; it makes the signification exist as a thing at the very heart of the text, it brings it to life in an organism of words, it installs this signification in the writer or the reader like a new sense organ, and it opens a new field or a new dimension to our experience.
–Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception
I would like to thank the editors of this collection, Tyson E. Lewis and Megan J. Laverty, for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this essay. This work was supported by an NEH postdoctoral fellowship in poetics at the Fox Center, Emory University.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
See, for example, Lesley Steven’s “Sister Arts or Sibling Rivalry? Cezanne and the Logic of the Senses,” Word & Image 24.2 (2008): 152–161.
- 3.
See Hagstrum (1958, pp. 66–70) on the renaissance origin of the paragone between poet and painter.
- 4.
See Keefe (2011).
- 5.
As US poet laureate Natasha Trethewey has put it, “Historically, women’s roles in the service of art is [sic] clear in how mad people were at Victorine Meurant, who was the model who posed for Manet’s ‘Olympia.’ Rather than really getting mad at Manet, people got mad at her because she was this brazen hussy who dared stare out of Manet’s painting” (Haney p. 28).
- 6.
- 7.
As Leavell notes, Moore and Dürer were very alike: “Like her he was an innovator, heralding a new period in art history; also, like her, he was fascinated by detail and influenced by technology. Printing was still a new invention, and Dürer made the woodcut and copper engraving respectable art forms” (215). In making a respectable art form of the engraving, Dürer also helped to introduce a major shift in the relationship between words and images. That is, because of their relatively easy reproducibility, woodcuts and engravings were used in texts as either functional, accurate representations (as the photograph would initially be considered) or as illustrations. Both functions established these prints with a hierarchically lower status than their verbal counterparts. However, Dürer’s influence made reproducible prints equal and independent art objects by freeing them from the responsibility of translating words into images (as in an illustration) or representing with accuracy (as a news photo would).
Bibliography
Atwood, M. (1995). Manet’s olympia. In Morning in the burned house (pp. 24–25). New York: Houghton Mifflin.
Benjamin, W. (1986). The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction. In Illuminations. New York: Shocken Books.
Brodsky, J. (2002). How to ‘See’ with the whole body. Visual Studies, 17(2), 99–112.
Bruns, G. L. (2012). What are poets for? An anthropology of contemporary poetry and poetics. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press.
Bryson, N. (1983). Vision and painting: The logic of the gaze. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Carman, T. (2012). Foreword. In Phenomenology of perception (pp. vii–xvi). London: Routledge.
Collins, B. (1996). Introduction to poetry. In The apple that astonished Paris. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press.
Collins, L. (2010). The wild being of Louise Bourgeois: Merleau-Ponty in the Flesh. Romance Studies, 28(1), 47–56.
Costello, B. (1981). Ut Pictura Poesis: Moore and the Visual Arts. In Marianne Moore imaginary possessions (pp. 186–214). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Dewey, John. (2005). Art as experience. Pedigree, New York, NY.
Hagstrum, J. H. (1958). The sister arts: The tradition of literary pictorialism and english poetry from Dryden to Gray. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Haney, D. (Fall 2004). A conversation with natasha trethewey. Cold Mountain Review, 33(1), 19–34.
Heffernan, J. A. (1993). Museum of words: The poetics of ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Keefe, A. (2011). The ecstatic embrace of verbal and visual: 21st century lyric beyond the Ekphrastic Paragone. Word & Image, 27.2, 135–147. Print.
Kristeva, J. (1984). Revolution in poetic language. New York: Columbia University Press.
Leavell, L. (1995). Marianne Moore and the visual arts: Prismatic color. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP.
Loizeaux, E. B. (2008). Twentieth century poetry and the visual arts. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (2012). Phenomenology of perception (Donald A. Landes, Trans.). London: Routledge.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1993). Indirect language and the voices of silence. In The Merleau-Ponty aesthetics reader (pp. 76–120). Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Sense and non-sense. Chicago: Northwestern University Press.
Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Moore, M. (1981). The complete poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Viking [1967].
Moore, M., & Willis, P. C. (1986). The complete prose of Marianne Moore. New York: Viking.
Paul, C. (2002). Poetry in the museums of modernism: Yeats, pound, moore, stein. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
Moore, M., & Grace, S. (2003). The poems of Marianne Moore. New York: Viking.
Schulze, Robin G. (Spring 1998). Marianne Moore’s imperious ox, imperial dish and the poetry of the natural world. Twentieth Century Literature , 44(1), 1–33.
Weatherhead, A. K. (Dec 1964). Two kinds of vision in Marianne Moore. ELH, 31(4), 482–496.
Webb, R. (1999). Ekphrasis ancient and modern: The Invention of a Genre. Word and Image, 15, 7–18.
Webb, R. (2009). Ekphrasis, imagination and persuasion in ancient rhetorical theory and practice. Burlington: Ashgate.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Keefe, A. (2015). An Organism of Words: Ekphrastic Poetry and the Pedagogy of Perception. In: Lewis, T., Laverty, M. (eds) Art's Teachings, Teaching's Art. Contemporary Philosophies and Theories in Education, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7191-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-7191-7_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-017-7190-0
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-7191-7
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawEducation (R0)