Ekphrastic spaces: the tug, pull, collision and merging of the in-between

ABSTRACT Although James A.W. Heffernan influentially defines contemporary ekphrasis as ‘the verbal representation of visual representation’ (1993, 3), we argue for a more dynamic and fluid understanding of ekphrasis. In particular, we focus on the multiple and indeterminate perspectives created by ekphrastic poetry, emphasising the way ekphrastic poetry develops complex and interart relationships that cause a fracturing and/or stretching in the perspectives of both the poem and the artwork(s) it invokes. A powerful in-between or liminal ekphrastic space is created in which meanings tug, pull, swirl and merge. As new meanings are created ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, Victor W. 1979. “Betwixt and between: The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage.” In Reader in Comparative Religion: An Anthropological Approach, edited by W. A. Lessa and E. Z. Vogt, 234–243. New York: Harper and Row, 234), an ekphrastic point of view emerges, problematising and questioning both-artworks-at-once and highlighting the provisional as it probes what can possibly be said in language about modes of artistic representation in artworks. Additionally, because poetic ekphrasis cannot fully represent, and always reinterprets, another artwork, it is engaged in processes of substitution through which poetic tropes stand in for some of the content of the original artwork. In applying these ideas to the relationships of ekphrastic prose poems to works of visual art, we explicate works by David Grubbs and Lorette C. Luzajic, as well as our own ekphrastic prose poetry.

textual fragment that engages with the visual arts ' (2009, 1) often understood to be paintings, sculptures or photographs. Influentially, James A.W. Heffernan defines contemporary ekphrasis as 'the verbal representation of visual representation' ([1993] 2004, 3): that turns on the antagonismthe commonly gendered antagonismbetween verbal and visual representation. Since this context is fought on the field of language itself, it would be grossly unequal but for one thing; ekphrasis commonly reveals a profound ambivalence toward visual art, a fusion of iconophilia and iconophobia, of veneration and anxiety. To represent a painting or sculpted figure in words is to invoke its powerthe power to fix, excite, amaze, entrance, disturb, or intimidate the viewereven as language strives to keep that power under control. ([1993] 2004, 7) However, Heffernan's view of ekphrasis as pitting two different kinds of representation into a paragonal struggle, though influential, has been much debated. We would join with a variety of scholars who argue that the definition of ekphrasis should extend further than Heffernan allows in his emphasis on visual art, and for it to be inflected differently.
Increasingly ekphrasis, including ekphrastic poetry, is being discussed in terms of relatively unfixed and more-or-less equal exchanges. The traditional emphasis on the paragonal struggle in ekphrasis is fading as theorists lose interest in trying to claim primacy or superiority for either the artwork 1 or the literary work. In this respect, Ann Keefe argues for 'understand[ing] the space of the ekphrastic poem as an open and fluid one of exchange between the arts' in order to 'complicate the historically inscribed generic boundaries and power dynamics inherent not only in the verbal/ visual exchange but also in the social relationships of inequality that have become mapped onto the ekphrastic encounter ' (2011, 135). Furthermore, Emily Bilman emphasises this ekphrastic fluidity by asserting that 'Ekphrastic poems are like the reflections of natural forms on a river, oscillated by a breeze, whose study explores the ekphrastic relation as a dynamic and evolving process between the poet, the painter, and the reader-perceiver ' (2013, 4).
Ekphrasis also provides opportunities for writers to suggest new or different ways of viewing an artwork (or artworks) or reading their own texts that may not fully conform to pre-conceived expectations of an ekphrasis. For example, Valentine Cunningham comments on the 'modernist and postmodernist skepticisms about the aporias of art history and art criticism, [and] the difficulties implicit in the attempt to translate the visual into the verbal ' (2007, 67). He also addresses the sometimes surprising or disconcerting use of ekphrasis by particular writersand, among other examples, he discusses Julian Barnes invocation in A History of the World in 10½ Chapters of Théodore Géricault's painting, The Raft of the Medusa. He says of the painting, '[t]here it was, and here it is. But the text's readings of it dissolve … into unresolved questions, mysteries, silences, negatives, gaps, aporias, disappearances ' (67). More generally, David Kennedy and Richard Meek give emphasis to the idea of ekphrasis as 'a variety of encounters: not only between word and image, but also between literary texts ' (2019, 14-15) and this idea of an 'encounter' is also prominent in Kennedy's earlier work, where he states he is attracted to the term 'not only because of its meanings of an accidental unexpected meeting, but also because of its sense that as a consequence of such a meeting there is a change of direction ' (2012, 22).
Our particular interest is in the ways in which poetic ekphrasis continually inflects 'reality' through various oblique perspectives, conceptualisations or transformations, to the extent that it exemplifies the tendency for poetry to approach its subject matter slantwiseas in Emily Dickinson's injunction, 'Tell all the truth but tell it slant - ' (1998, 1089). In other words, like all forms of speech, ekphrasis can only ever indirectly gesture toward that which exists or is considered 'real'. Notwithstanding this, Cunningham points to the wide array of poetic and fictional works that, in one way or another, employ ekphrasis to lay claim: to the absolute thereness of an aesthetic object, the thereness writing is (rightly) so doubtful about, and seeks to corral that evident … empirical, real, truthfulness for itself and its own doings. It wants the real presence of the made object to rub off, as it were, on its own proceedings. (2007,61) There is, of course, an irony built into such a literary tactic because, as Cunningham acknowledges, these ekphrastic gestures are founded on the knowledge that there are 'no natural signs in view. All the objects of the ekphrastic gaze are made ones. Doubly so, in fact, for these made objects are also re-made out of words ' (2007, 68). Further, although: paintings, and the plastic rest, seem as if they could be the kind of texts to overcome … the aesthetic tension, the tension of art, in the direction of positive presence, realism, truth, thereness … [t]hey do not overcome the tension, because what is truly insurmountable can never be surmounted. (Cunningham 2007, 71) This is to say that ekphrastic writingsometimes implicitly, sometimes explicitlyreminds the reader that, like artwork, it is only ever an imperfect and incomplete (or even inaccurate) representation of things that are or might be. It achieves this by taking something that is circumscribed and artificialthe artworkas (at least part of) its subject.
Related issues are addressed in Simon Critchley's study of Wallace Stevens' poetry, Things Merely Are (2005). Critchley contends that 'the real is the base … from which poetry begins', and 'that reality is the necessary but not the sufficient condition for poetry ' (2005, 27), asserting that poetry is 'the experience of failure ' (6). This, he says, is because reality 'retreats before the imagination that shapes and orders it' and, furthermore, 'the mind cannot seize hold of the ultimate nature of the reality that faces it ' (6). Instead, poetry presents 'a transfigured sense of the real ' (27; emphasis original). Where ekphrasis is concerned, the 'real' is, as it were, at least doubly transfiguredin the artwork the poetry takes as its ekphrastic subject, and in the poem that engages with that artwork. Thus, one of the achievements of poetic ekphrasis is to point to the problematic or shifting relationship between what poetry claims to represent and actual events or things in the world. Critchley comments that there is a strand of literaturehe mentions Francis Ponge's Le parti pris des choses (Taking the Side of Things) as an examplethat 'tries to let things thing, as it were, to let substantives verbalize: letting the orange orange, the oyster oyster, the palm palm, and so on ' (2005, 86). However, even in such cases, Critchley says that 'literature is the ever-failing attempt to see things as they are, in their porosity and denseness, in their earthiness and mineral quality ' (86).
In this light, and notwithstanding the proliferation over recent decades of so-called confessional poetry that appears to speak of 'real experience', it is useful to reflect on what poetry represents and 'sees'. We have argued elsewhere that poetic forms of saying and seeing are certainly not congruent with the 'real' and that, for example, the American, Sharon Olds' poem 'First Sex', is poetic artifice: Even if the poem may have started out by reviewing an incident from Olds' autobiography, the moment it invokes a past event as being of continuing significance as an articulation about experience in general, it becomes genuinely poetic and lyrical. (Hetherington and Atherton 2021, 7) In other words, poems always transform aspects of the 'real' into poetic figurations rather than directly representing 'reality'. This is beautifully illustrated by the most admired ancient example of ekphrasis, Homer's digressive passage on Achilles' shield in the Iliad.
This passage uses the ekphrastic mode of writing to invoke an idea of social order at once close to and distant from the world presented in the Iliad and the lives of its protagonists. Here is a short excerpt from Richmond Lattimore's translation, which sounds like a factual description of a scene from life except that it reminds the reader, in phrases such as 'poles of silver [part of the metal from which the shield is made]', that this is a depiction of a depiction: He made on it a great vineyard heavy with clusters, lovely and in gold, but the grapes upon it were darkened and the vines themselves stood out through poles of silver. About them he made a field-ditch of dark metal, and drove all around this a fence of tin; and there was only one path to the vineyard, and along it ran the grape-bearers for the vineyard's stripping. Young girls and young men, in all their light-hearted innocence, carried the kind, sweet fruit away in their woven baskets, and in their midst a youth with a singing lyre played charmingly upon it for them, and sang the beautiful song for Linos in a light voice, and they followed him, and with singing and whistling and light dance-steps of their feet kept time to the music. (1967,390) This is part of a complex picture of the kosmos and society as it is, or might have been, outside of the relentless theatre of war (although, in a salutary gesture, warfare is also depicted on the shield)a kind of visual paradigm of archaic Greek life that functions to remind the reader of what is lost to those who have journeyed to fight in Troy, with a powerful emphasis on the quotidian. Karel Thein contends that: The shield may contain gods at war and free-wheeling monsters, but the true "wonder to behold" is that they do not outshine the subtler animation of the ordinary … .
[Of] two distinct types of imaginary scale … the first is derived from the universe and gods, the second from human actions. The latter prevail by the sheer force of the number of lines that describe them, which confirms that the shield, the exemplary artefact of divine origin, makes only sense in the man-made world. (2021,96) In doing this, the ekphrastic passage as a whole also functions to provide an alternative lens through which the reader may 'see' the Iliad's action, thus complicating and problematising the Iliad's more general narrative point of view; and also representing an idealised and pointed frame through which to view that narrative. Indeed, as Michael Squire argues, The Iliad's ornate but impressionistic description of its protagonist's shield enacts a narrative pause from the poem: if the scenes that Hephaestus actively crafts upon the shield are introduced at a representational remove from the Iliad's own action, the narrative frame of the poem nonetheless colors this evocation of both war and its imagined alternative; all this, moreover, within a described object that will prove quite literally instrumental within the Iliad's own bloody climax in ensuing books. (2018,6) Ekphrastic poetry that refers to an actual or notional work of art -Homer's passage is an example of notional ekphrasisalways has this potential to create a layered or multifaceted point of view. This is because it sets the artwork and what it depicts, conceptualises or suggests against additional poetic content or perspectives, some of which consist of imperfect textual substitutes for aspects of the original image. In this way, ekphrastic poetry simultaneously invokes and deviates from the artform with which it engages because language always fails to fully represent or encompass an artworkand because it also always reinterprets that artwork, whether intentionally or not. Furthermore, if a poem re-presents an artworka painting or piece of music, for examplea complex and perhaps unresolvable relationship is established between several different domains. These domains are the artwork; the poem that represents or re-interprets it; the original 'reality', history or idea from which the painting or piece of music was derived; and the reader-viewer's point of view. Notional ekphrasis adds another layer to this already rich set of deviations because, as Renate Brosch argues, it 'belongs to the category of the imaginary; its invention of an image to be visualized in the reader's mind partaking of the same dependence on context and convention that any fictional world-making does ' (2018, 235).
Such a multifaceted relationship may also be further complicated by the inclusion in the ekphrastic poem of additional material that does not specifically relate to the artwork to which it responds. Such ekphrastic relationships contain their own tensions or contradictions and are, to some extent, indeterminate or shadowy. Thus, the combination of perspectives derived from joining poetry and an artwork, and expressed through the ekphrastic relationship, always represents a constellation of perspectives that cannot entirely cohere. Peter Wagner writes that: Ekphrasis … has a Janus face: as a form of mimesis, it stages a paradoxical performance, promising to give voice to the allegedly silent image even while attempting to overcome the power of the image by transforming and inscribing it. (Wagner 1996, 13) Whether or not ekphrasis is always trying to 'overcome' an image's powerand we doubt that this assertion holds trueas a result of this 'paradoxical performance' there can be no clear verbal 'window' onto any artwork where poetic ekphrasis is concerned. Although Elizabeth Loizeaux points out that traditional 'discussions of ekphrasis have tended to rely on a concept of verbal representation as transparent window ' (2010, 19), such a concept has never really been accurate. For instance, even an ekphrastic passage as early as Homer's is shadowed by ironies and unresolvable questionsas Thien states, on Achilles' shield 'everything keeps happening, but nothing reaches a determinate outcome ' (2021, 95), while Squire comments that 'the completed object endlessly defers its own completion ' (2013, 160-61) and that the shield's scenes are 'projected into a sort of multitemporal limbo ' (161). More generally, W.J.T. Mitchell writes, 'Ekphrastic poetry is the genre in which texts encounter their own semiotic "others," those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, plastic, graphic, or "spatial" arts ' (1994, 156). Such encounters do not represent a seamless interart suturing; rather, they are typically characterised by various uncertainties and undecidable issues connected to their failure to fully mesh. In this way, ekphrastic poetry opens what we call ekphrastic spacesin-between places of contemplation and questioning. Such ekphrastic spaces foreground the fact that all art is shifting and that art transfigures, quizzes (and sometimes misrepresents rather than represents) the 'real'.
As a result, this paper extends Michael Benton's statement that '[t]he reader/viewer is one and the same person, seeing double in the role of ekphrastic spectator ' (2000, 43) to argue that poetic ekphrasis tends to fracture the reader/viewer's vision into multifaceted or multimodal points of view. Because good poems and good artworks are usually separately complex and ambiguous, the ekphrastic point of viewenabled by the opening of ekphrastic spacesimplicitly acknowledges that joining or admixing of such complex works creates multiple, sometimes disjunct perspectives. The result may be like a kind of alchemy, including some of alchemy's failures and, in saying this, we are also reminded of writers such as Niels Koopman, who have referred to ekphrasis as 'an intermedial phenomenon ' (2018, 3). In recent years this use of the term 'intermedial' has helped modify the way ekphrasis is conceived, so that, for example, Leena Eilittä writes that one 'form of intermediality draws attention to works of art in which there is a reference to another artwork or to another artistic system … for example, in literary texts which describe a painting or a piece of music ' (2012, viii). We discuss the idea of intermediality further below and, in doing so, explore the nature of the ekphrastic spaces we have mentioned.

Ekphrastic poetry, the in-between, and ekphrastic spaces
As early as 1966, Dick Higgins used the term 'intermedial' to 'emphasize the dialectic between the media' that, he claimed, 'have broken down in their traditional forms ' (in Stiles and Selz 1996, 729). Where poetic ekphrasis is concerned, theories of intermediality tend to emphasise the interactive nature of the relationship between poem and artwork. Christian Emdem and Gabriele Rippl express this as follows: those occasions when texts describe objects of visual culture or images evoke complex references to the world of texts. Intermediality, in its minimal definition, seeks to stake out the space in which images and texts, visual culture and print culture, collide, refer to each other, and even converge. (2010,10) Gabriele Rippl also suggests that 'the term ekphrasis describes any instances where one medium is evoked by another, and the specific qualities and differences of the respective media are therefore highlighted ' (2010, 48).
Furthermore, Liliane Louvel extends these ideas in fruitful ways, in her discussion of Paul Durcan's ekphrastic poetry, stating: The reader looks at the painting reproduced in the book and reads the printed poem and hence there is a see-saw movement between word and image … The reader-spectator receives two joint representations: that of the model (the painting) and that of a representation (the poem) of a representation (the painting) … The circulating ekphrasis, which has been narrativised, pushes one to go back to the image while reading the poem, for the image both replaces the text and is replaced by it and by the other image which subverts the original and which is inscribed in the inner 'screen' of the reader-spectator-voyeur. Hence the advent of what I call 'the pictorial third' … which is in-between word and image, neither one nor the other. (2012,(15)(16)(17) Such quotations not only further demonstrate that the paragonal idea of ekphrasis has largely been superseded by recent theory but that at the heart of developing contemporary conceptions of ekphrasis is the consideration of the dynamic created between a poem (in the case of ekphrastic poetry) and an artwork.
This idea of what is between or in-between is not new, of course, with Christer Johansson and Sonya Petersson observing that '[a]nything that is in-between is also about the crossing of borders ' (2018, 11; emphasis original). In the ekphrastic space, borders are crossed between one kind of artwork and another; and between one artistic mode and anotherbut crossing these borders does not simply involve the see-saw movement mentioned by Louvel, or even a 'pictorial third'as suggestive as that idea undoubtedly is. Instead, in ekphrasis, the reader-viewer will often cross into an indeterminate and unspecified place that does not entirely rest with language or another form of artistic representation. In that space, they may be simultaneously tugged at by different forms of art but unable to come to rest in either. In such a dynamic, the ekphrastic poem tends to pull the artwork it alludes to or invokes towards language and interpretation, just as the artwork exerts its own gravitational pull on the poem. It is as if each work begins to stretch, and in-between the works, in the ekphrastic space, the push and pull of both works of art (or, in some cases, multiple works) exerts considerable pressure. They reader-viewer may soon experience a feeling akin to being shaken and tossed.
Such ideas suggest the concept of the liminala term that has perhaps been overused in recent decades but which is useful in discussions of in-between space. In summarising the history of the term's use, Bjørn Thomassen states: At its broadest, liminality refers to any 'betwixt and between' situation or object, any inbetween place or moment, a state of suspense, a moment of freedom between two structured world-views or institutional arrangements … Liminality opens the door to a world of contingency where events and meaningsindeed 'reality' itselfcan be moulded and carried in different directions. (2014,7) The idea of the liminal is especially relevant insofar as it reflects the ekphrastic position. W.J.T. Mitchell writes that: [t]he ekphrastic poet typically stands in a middle position between the object described or addressed and a listening subject … Ekphrasis is stationed between two 'othernesses', and two forms of (apparently) impossible translation and exchange: (1) the conversion of the visual representation into a verbal representation, either by description or ventriloquism; (2) the reconversion of the verbal representation back into the visual object in the reception of the reader. (1994,164) Mitchell characterises this ekphrastic relationship 'as a ménage à trois in which the relations of self and other, text and image are triply inscribed ' (1994, 164).
However, the betwixt and betweenness of poetic ekphrasis is not always about translation and conversion. The ekphrastic poet may try to convert, for example, a visual image into poetrywhich is certainly one of the ways ekphrasis has long been understoodbut, in and of itself, that will not necessarily make good poetry (or, for that matter, good art criticism). Instead, much ekphrasis takes an artwork simply as a point of departure, and moves away rather than toward it in its ekphrastic gestures. The ekphrastic space is then opened up by a third notion posited by the poet; a notion that might be summarised as the place where we may laterally consider that 'other' artwork. In other words, ekphrasis is often not so much about a see-saw movement as about a way of conjuring a true liminality, in the sense that Victor W. Turneras he develops Arnold van Gennep's ideascharacterises as part of various 'rites of transition ': All rites of transition are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen), and aggregation … [D]uring the … [second phase, the] liminal period, the state of the ritual subject (the 'passenger') is ambiguous; he passes through a realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. (1979,235) Although Turner in his essay is discussing the ritual transitions of human beings rather than poetry, his insights are able to applied analogically to the way ekphrasis functions. In ekphrastic poetry, the ekphrastic space is created by a poet taking an artwork as a point of departure and creating a poem that passes through a new imaginative proposition in order to arrive at a fresh state of understanding or representation. As a result, part of the push and pull of ekphrasis is also a simultaneous journeying away and towards; of being in a truly liminal and transitional space where past assumptions and expectations do not necessarily hold and where outcomes, poetic or otherwise, are not known. Poetic ekphrasis thus represents a disturbance in the existing field of literature because, in every ekphrastic work, poetry is to some extent 'othered' by inviting an artwork into the field of literature and, in doing so, holding out the promise of perceiving things differently. Indeed, this may be twinned with Brosch's statement concerning ekphrasis that, 'One of its most powerful instruments lies in exploiting the contrast between two different forms of expression to symbolize or evoke alterity and Otherness ' (2018, 233). As poetic ekphrasis disturbs in this way, so it recalibrates the lens of poetry, which begins to 'see' sometimes obscurelywhat language has not itself directly expressed.
The ekphrastic space that is constituted by this process is necessarily a stepping away from what has been and what will bea way of being in-between, in motion and without clear coordinates; a space of ambiguity and doubt. It is a contested and uncertain space where the poet may not hope to fully interpret or re-represent an artwork but may contrive to yoke two (or more) modes of perception into a new poetic formulation. Such poetry is inevitably questioning and is usually a form of puzzling-out; and it tends to highlight the provisional as it probes what can possibly be said in language about modes of artistic representation. For example, even a famous and much-discussed notionally ekphrastic work such as John Keats ' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' inhabits this space of undecideability becauseas his poem knowsthe urn is unspeaking and whatever the poet thinks it might say is always speculative. The wonderful and famous conclusion to the poem acknowledges how little the poem knows, even after contemplating the urn over five stanzas and fifty lines: '"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,"that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know ' (1895, 297). The ekphrastic space opens up the field of poetry to the intrusion of what it cannot encompass or contain and thus pushes the poetic into a transitional and inquiring mode where the reader-viewer may never be entirely comfortable or ever fully convinced of what may finally be said or understood.

The ekphrastic prose poem and the artwork
We have previously argued that the fully justified and rectangular prose poem is in some respects analogous to works of visual art such as photographs or paintings because 'both hang in the space, much as on a gallery wall' (Hetherington and Atherton 2020, 155). In the context of our discussion of ekphrasis above, we are especially interested in an understanding of a prose-poetic ekphrasis that contemplates the relationship between prose poetry and all artworksmany of which are more unruly in their shapes and modes than paintings or single photographs. This is interesting partly because, in many cases, prose poetry bears a close visual resemblance to artworksnot only paintings and photographs, but also musical scores (which often appear in broadly rectangular shapes on a page), films and other screen-based artworks. Furthermore, some prose poets understand the shape of the rectangular prose poem as analogous to the shape of a stage where theatre, dance and musical performances take place, and thus consider it a form highly suited to a poetic ekphrasis that refers to such performances.
For example, David Grubbs' Now that the Audience Is Assembled, uses a book-length sequence of prose poems to conjure a musical concert. Here is part of this notional ekphrasis: The figure slowly makes as if to remove an instrument from a case whose contours remain obscure. For all we know the case has always been leaning in the corner of this darkened, already stage-lit room. Always behind the door that just closed itself. Or was it closed by a swift, unnoticed hand? There was a door ajar upstage center and then it was closed and the room sealed. When's our start time? (2018,2) In this work the rectangular prose poem becomes both 'stage-lit room' and stage itself, even as the prose poem box is ruptured by the self-reflexive line, 'what's our start time?' This is a technique Grubbs uses frequently in order to fracture and problematise the ekphrastic point of view and to acknowledge that the performance space he conjures and the space of his prose poem have not only somewhat awkwardly collided but remain in continual tension and motion.
The excerpt quoted above, and the prose poetry sequence as a whole, quickly become representative of an indeterminate and in-between place that is neither fully situated in language or in music. It is akin to the space between the 'stage-lit room' and stage that the work foregrounds. The phrase, '[f]or all we know' signals the prose poem's hesitancy in the face of its creation of this ekphrastic space and, indeed, becomes an acknowledgement that representation, however it occurs, is fundamentally provisional and uncertain. The reader-viewer is obliged by the work to experience the tug and pull of the fractured and swirling ekphrastic space as the prose poem and notional musical performance stretch toward and away from one another. There are even playful gestures at a kind of performative mimesis, such as when bold, capitalised and unevenly spaced type is twice used on one page to indicate disruptive momentsas in the following: (2018,62) In reviewing this work, John F. Barber writes of a 'hallucination of swirling words cascading over and around themselves as descriptions of an imaginary, but all too real musical performance ' (2018, n.p.)yet even this description demonstrates how the modes of language and music are in an uneasy interplay and tension in the work's stretching ekphrastic spaces.
Lorette C. Luzajic's poignant prose poem, 'Mizuko Kuyo' is written as an ekphrastic response to 'Mizuko Kuyo gardens, Japan' (2021, 5), which she signals in the poem's epigraph. The term 'mizuko' is Japanese for 'water child' and refers to a child 'lost through abortion, miscarriage, stillbirth or infant death' (Anderson and Martin 1997, 128) and the Mizuko Kuyō is a ceremony to entrust the child's spirit to the afterlife. While the ceremonies occur in many Buddhist temples throughout Japan, Luzajic's reference to 'gardens' suggests it is likely she placed the jizo statue in Zojoji Buddhist Temple in Tokyo's 'Garden of Unborn Children'. Jizo gardens are filled with stone statues of the bodhisattva, who is the protector of children, and many are personalised with bright bonnets and toys to memorialise specific children and, in this way, aid the grieving process.
However, it is only in Luzajic's epigraph and one sentence in the prose poem that the ekphrastic visual stimulusa Japanese garden in a Buddhist templeis referenced, demonstrating the broad approach to an understanding of what an artwork is in ekphrastic terms. The majority of the prose poem works in the interstices between the narrator's evocation of the stillborn child, her 'cold form against my tired breasts, just for a moment' (5) and a period of time '[y]ears later' when she commemorates the child by placing a jizo statue in the garden. The pull and tug of the past is invoked and, as it were, dramatised because while the narrator revisits the pastand continues to dwell there imaginativelythrough employing a commemorative statue as an act of homage, the prose poem primarily, although insecurely, situates her act of ekphrasis in the present day.
Luzajic's work is expressed in three short sections. Visually, the internal spaces between these sections break apart or rupture the prose poema metaphor for the narrator's grief. Moreover, the long, thin spaces (the blank lines) between sections are liminal spaces where absence dwells in the shadow of the sentences on either side: (1) My water baby: tiny golden feet, each toe a plump raisin. This is what I have lost: the future I made, that fate chose to deny me.
(2) I named her Judith. It came to me when I held her cold form against my tired breasts, just for a moment.
(3) Years later, visiting Japan, I add a jizo statue to the garden of lost children. In the silence, the sound of heaven pulling down. (2021,5) Furthermore, Luzajic reinscribes the narrator's outsider status in the repurposing of Japanese words and ideas to demonstrate the universality of the loss of a child and a community of mothers engaged with the spaces of grief.
In Japan, parents (most often mothers) decorate the jizo statues in order to personalise them. The narrator in this prose poem personalises her stillborn child by naming her Judith. Thus, the Buddhist Mizuko Kuyō ceremony and jizo statues are twinned with the invocation of the Old Testament's Book of Judith in what Elizabeth G. Harrison argues is the 'recognition of the existence of spirits of dead children and their need for care ' (1999, 793). This transitory space between the living and dead, a kind of indeterminate middle or in-between spaceand a space often associated with the concept of purgatoryis fundamentally liminal. It is represented visually in the ghosted lines and also in the way the narrator carries and perpetuates the memory of the stillborn child throughout the prose poem. It ends with an ekphrastic tugging and pulling: 'In the silence, the sound of heaven pulling down ' (2021, 5).

Our ekphrastic prose poetry practice: two examples
In writing ekphrastic poetry we have both been aware of the sometimes-eddying challenges of ekphrasis. Some of Cassandra Atherton's work reanimates portraits by the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood while juxtaposing Lizzie Siddal's life (especially in her role as muse) with the characterssuch as Opheliashe adopted as a model. Atherton's use of ekphrasis also harnesses overlapping and nearly simultaneous references to various Pre-Raphaelite paintings in combination with allusions to the stories and mythology surrounding the Pre-Raphaelite's 'secret society of seven men'. The ekphrastic prose poetry that results may be described as an illuminating form of somewhat blurred and indeterminate vision, as life and art are fractured and merged in ways that create various tugs and pulls in the ekphrastic spaces created by these works. Atherton's prose poems also tackle tropes about the propagation of myth and of cultural assumptions more generally. This is evident in her response to Dante Gabriel Rosetti's painting, Veronica Veronese which, in a complication or enriching of the ekphrastic relationship, includes a quotation inscribed in French on its frame. The quotation has been attributed to The Letters of Girolamo Ridolfi but it was most likely written by Rosetti: Suddenly leaning forward, the Lady Veronica rapidly wrote the first notes on the virgin page. Then she took the bow of her violin to make her dream reality; but before commencing to play the instrument hanging from her hand, she remained quiet a few moments, listening to the inspiring bird, while her left hand strayed over the strings searching for the supreme melody, still elusive. It was the marriage of the voices of nature and the soulthe dawn of a mystic creation. (Rowland Elzea's translation, qtd. in 'Veronica Veronese' n.d., n.p.) This demonstrates a self-reflexive approach to ekphrasis where Rossetti plays with dual representations, so that in many ways the poem and painting press in on one another, and also seem to circle each other. This sense of complex interplay between word and image is something Atherton elaborates in her ekphrastic prose poem, simultaneously foregrounding and rewriting understandings of Alexa Wilding's role as Pre-Raphaelite model: Veronica Veronese (1872) Long days dreaming of a luthier's hands on her ribs, back and belly. Gentle, prolonged touch, he would take his time with the purfling. Late in the afternoon, she'd draw the green velvet curtains and he'd call her his red-hued beauty. She imagines vibrating under his expert fingers as his hands trace the curve of her ribs. He'd leave the smell of linseed oil and Venetian turpentine in her bed, a treble timbre between her sheets. Hoping for an encore, she'd spend the evening trying to recapture his music on the soft spruce of her belly. (Atherton 2020, 7) In this work the male gaze that is so often directed at women is turned around so that, as it were, the woman depicted in the painting considers her own sense of a relationship well beyond anything involving the reader-viewer. This ekphrastic point of view allows the 'seen' and painted model to become the prose poem's active protagonistand not only active as a speaking voice, but active as a woman fully engaged in her own intimate relationship.
Thus, the prose poem fractures conventional ways of seeing by implicitly critiquing the way women who have posed for male painters have so often been reduced to the status of 'muse' and sexual partner. Here, the ekphrastic space is inhabited by the gravitational pull of the painting's beautiful and Romantic depiction of its subject in tension with the opposing force of the prose poem's more contemporary viewpointwhich dynamically subverts and reinflects the image. Both painting and prose poem stretch toward one another and, as they do, also move forward into a multifaceted liminality that is ambiguous and somewhat doubtful; a contested space encouraging the reader-viewer to leave many of the painting's known interpretations behind in order to reconceptualise the work.
In 2016, Recent Work Press published a book length sequence of ekphrastic prose poems by Paul Hetherington entitled Gallery of Antique Art. These poems take the reader on a tour of an imaginary or notional art gallery in Rome as each prose poem represents one room in the galleryand there are even individual works for the café, gallery garden and gallery shop: Ninth Room (Perambulation) I'm standing quietly and a painting speaksof how there were floods for nearly a week and not far from here the Tiber rose. But, after all, a tour's arrived and a guide's instructing her group: "It's neat how he's painted her feet." They move on and I examine again the Virgin with crucified child. Desert sun bakes the blue of her griefit's almost all she knows. And grace she carries; divinity that dies; the world's long heaviness. She'd hold him forever if time would stand still. She'd let him go if she could. (Hetherington 2016, 26) The prose poems in this book not only quiz various actual and notional artworks, but they are in an ekphrastic dialogue with the outside world, and with history. Dominic Symes has written of this sequence that there are: three main instances … where the time in which the poet is writing disturbs the stilled time of the artwork. Firstly, this occurs in instances when the real world interrupts the imagined world of the artwork … Secondly, it occurs when the flow of time in the poet's experience is broken by a stationary meditation on the immobility of the artwork, such as an apostrophe … Thirdly, it occurs when the poet exercises their evaluative agency and through some critical stance offers resistance against the artworks' illusory properties. (Symes 2018, n.p.) This ekphrastic sequence movesor, more accurately -fluctuates between viewer, artwork and external issues. Its point of view encompasses the personal, the historical and the political in juxtaposing collective and/or received responses to various artworks with the intensely individual responses of the sequence's personaea collective 'we' representing two people walking through the gallery. Their combined perspectives are shifting and unstable because the tug and pull of the ekphrastic space they inhabit and move through, continually and pressingly demands that they modify their perspectives, consider their own positions and 'see' what they encounter in a variety of waysto the extent that they 'are framed and jostled by paintings that won't leave us alone ' (41). And, additionallyas in the work quoted abovetheir joint perspective occasionally fractures into an uncertain, sometimes puzzled single persona, or 'I', who, for instance, hears Bach's well-known Cello Suites but queries 'what it is ' (2016, 24); or recognises his daughter in a stranger 's portrait from 1753 (27).
In this way, the prose poetry sequence continually questions the complex relationships between contemporary and quotidian experience and centuries-old works of art. And, as the Gallery of Antique Art is animated by the expression of multifaceted perspectivesall of which are bound to poignant understandings of grief and mortalityso the sequence emphasises that poems cannot hope to interpret or re-represent non-literary artworks except as part of dynamic, historically-informed, contingent and highly subjective encounters. In this instance, ekphrastic prose poetry becomes a series of probing questions and meditations on the to-and-fro tension within, and the betwixt and between nature of, the ekphrastic space.

Conclusion
Dario Gamboni quotes a comment from 1902 by the French visual artist, Odilon Redon: The sense of mystery consists in continuous ambiguity, in the double and triple aspects, hints of aspects (images within images), forms that are about to come into being or will take their being from the onlooker's state of mind. (Gamboni 2002, 9) Referring to a statement by Marcel Duchamp, Gamboni then writes of the '"potential images" … that depend on "the onlooker's state of mind"' and the 'importance of ambiguity, indeterminacy and polysemy in modern art ' (9). Such 'double and triple aspects' and 'hints of aspects' are one way of characterising a contemporary poetic ekphrasis that aims to unsettle conventional views of art, to reconsider the import of images that we all believe we know, and to quiz the nature of the complex relationship between poetry and art. Such a poetic ekphrasis creates sometimes turbulent and frequently transitional ekphrastic spaces which examine both the compatibilities and incompatibilities of poetry and art, along with the provisional nature of any ekphrastic relationship. Such an ekphrasis also reminds the reader-viewer that, where art is concerned, no single and fixed interpretations prevail. Instead, the ekphrastic act emphasises the contingent nature of the relationships that art has to acts of interpretation, to other works of art and even to 'reality' itself.
The ekphrastic space is thus a salutary and liminal one, characterised by collisions and mergings of sense and meaning and the destabilisation of existing understandings. It is inherently unstable, because it tends to carry understandings forward without letting them easily (or ever) settle, and without any certainty as to where new insights may lead. Instead, a sense of the ambiguous and indeterminate; and of the shifting and shadowy, remains attached to ekphrastic spaces, which are also characterised by what is fractured, multifaceted, disjunct and admixed. As a result, ekphrastic poetry has an important function in asking the reader-viewer to 'see' and think again; to consider what art knows and what 'reality' may be; and to question the ways in which individual subjectivity is informed by multiple, often fragmented, sometimes incoherent relationships and perceptions. Note 1. We use the term 'artwork' to avoid giving priority to visual art over other forms of art, such as performances of music, dance, film and video games. Furthermore, we eschew the terms 'non-literary work' and 'non-textual work' for their failure to fully acknowledge the use of text in diverse kinds of artworks or the ambiguity of the word 'literary'.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributors
Cassandra Atherton is Professor of Writing and Literature at Deakin University and has been a Visiting Scholar in English at Harvard University and a Visiting Fellow at Sophia University, Tokyo. She is the recipient of numerous national and international research grants and awards. Her books of prose poetry include Leftovers (2020) and Fugitive Letters (2020) and, with Paul Hetherington, she is co-author of a scholarly study of the prose poem for Princeton University Press (2020) and coeditor of the Anthology of Australian Prose Poetry (2020).
Paul Hetherington is a distinguished scholar and poet who has published numerous full-length poetry and prose poetry collections and has won or been nominated for more than thirty national and international awards and competitions, most recently winning the 2021 Bruce Dawe National Poetry Prize. He is Professor of Writing in the Faculty of Arts and Design at the University of Canberra, head of the International Poetry Studies Institute (IPSI) and joint founding editor of the international online journal Axon: Creative Explorations. He founded the International Prose Poetry Group in 2014.