Ekphrasis and the Fabric of the Familiar in Mary Jo Salter's Poetry
by Jonathan F. S. Post
It isn't quite true that if you crossed Elizabeth Bishop with John Ashbery, you could then number Mary Jo Salter among their painterly offspring, but this improbable fancy does underscore, at once, both her deep attraction to the visual, in its many shapes and manifestations, and her quirky, uneven footing in two strands of contemporary American verse associated with ekphrastic poetry in particular. One, of a more domestic order, might be said to travel through Bishop. It typically includes the objet trouve or the odd family heirloom, like the painting, "about the size of an old-style dollar bill," done by her "Uncle George," that Bishop so patiently and lovingly describes in her celebrated "ars poetica" called "Poem." A carefully composed modesty is a condition of its imagined being: ut pictura poesis --"as in painting, so in poetry." In English, the tutelary spirit for this Horatian figure is George Herbert (a foundational poet for Bishop), whose following lines from "The Temper" also form the epigraph to Salter's first book of poetry, Henry Purcell in Japan (1985).
How should I praise Thee, Lord! How should my rhymes
Gladly engrave Thy love in steel
If, what my soul doth feel sometimes,
My soul might ever feel!
As Herbert's reference to engraved rhymes indicates, this is a poetry that aspires to a perfect fusion of form and praise; but--and the balancing turn is both inevitable and crucial to what Seamus Heaney calls Herbert's "daylight sanity and vigour" --it also willingly acknowledges, and appreciably accepts, smaller artistic victories as part of the limited conditions of living in this world. This more mundane Herbert, the artful master of parables and plain speaking, who is not the Albrecht Durer of Renaissance devotional poetry seeking to write rhymes engraved in steel, still lives with modern and contemporary poets like Bishop and Salter, even if, with Dickinson and Larkin, they sometimes "cheat"--the word is Bishop's --on his theology.
A second tradition, orchestrated in part by scholarly and theoretical pursuits, harks back to Homer and the famous depiction of Achilles' shield in Book 18 of The Iliad . More readily associated, as epic generally is, with the sublime, this version of the visual descends through a number of western canonical texts often bearing dynastic or imperial themes, and includes the likes of Virgil and Shakespeare, but its urgencies can be felt as well of late in Anthony Hecht's "The Venetian Vespers," Richard Howard's "Giovanni da Fiesole on the Sublime, or Fra Angelico's `Last Judgment'" and Jorie Graham's The End of Beauty .
Again, betraying its epic roots, the relationship between poetry and painting in this tradition is often characterized by critics not as one of Horatian geniality ("as in. . .so is") but in the heroically fraught language of combat ("as in. . .so isn't"). As initially set forth in Leonardo's High Renaissance concept of the paragone, painter is pitted against poet (to say nothing about the poor laboring sculptor). And within the field of modern studies, written in the aftermath of Lessing's famous distinction between the two art forms (one being spatial, the other temporal), and fueled more generally by Harold Bloom's agonistic theories of influence, an eminent picture theorist like W. T. Mitchell can ultimately conclude that, "like Stevens's jar, Achilles' shield illustrates the imperial ambitions of ekphrasis to take `dominion everywhere'." Although one might have thought James Heffernan saw the situation differently--he proposed a potentially elastic definition of ekphrasis as simply " the verbal representation of visual representation " in his influential Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (1993) --his study actually supplies a Laocoon-like finishing touch to the paragonal struggle between poetry and painting. Ekphrasis remains the arena of large predicaments and statements: the founding of empires, mythic rape, matters of Truth and Beauty, a postmodern age finding its convex image in a deflected "mannerist" other, but not necessarily a place of much joy or pleasure. Simply looking, if there ever was such an occasion, is pointedly not the point.
Mary Jo Salter is clearly attracted to some of these larger themes. The sublime itself comes up as a topic in "Art Lesson," from Sunday Skaters (1994), as she muses over the question, "Why has Iceland no Tiepolo?" on her way to offering a funny shaggy dog story with a local, Frostian answer: "When you have to watch your footing, you don't look up." Likewise she addresses, explicitly, matters of beauty in the same collection in "Boulevard du Montparnasse," while trips to the Louvre and visits to Venice put her in some elevated company: Titian, the mosaics of St. Marks. She is often moved, too, by what she sees, although she instinctively shies away from a rhetoric of unimpeded emotional "transport." Meditating on a Titian "Entombment," for instance, as part of a sequence of poems called "The Jewel of the World" in A Kiss in Space (1999), she can enter into the religious drama of the scene as one who knows the story and can sympathize with the characters: "Held still by his ring / of mourners in a winding-sheet, his weight / is nearly more than anyone can bear." But her passion lies elsewhere in the poem, as becomes radiantly clear near the end:
The story hangs from his suspended frame
only because we know it; have seen him rise
in other galleries, stepping from each tomb
As if from a refreshing bath.
Prolific Titian lovingly stroked more
farewells like these in light and shadow,
Christ's head at the right, then at the left;
one ends up at the Louvre, two at the Prado,
the world abloom with entombments.
What's "refreshing" here, it should be said, is simply the surge of good feeling by the poet for the artist. As we step over that final enjambment into the last stanza, we step into a world bright with possibility. "Prolific Titian" emerging in name, as if fresh from a bath, too, stroking his way through painting after painting, is indeed a nice touch, as is the sonic connection made through all those l 's until we arrive at the last line, giddy with internal rhymes as well: "the world abloom with entombments." The happenstance of artistic creation, as Aristotle understood, is itself a kind of miracle, a bloom--one at the Louvre, two at the Prado--and also the sense that artistic love, not church commissions or a system of patronage, lay behind these strokes, although they probably did. Yes, a nice touch (literally), not a formula: Christ's head at the right, then at the left--the intimacy of the artist for his, or her, subject.
One of the pleasures of Salter's ekphrastic poetry is the obvious joy she takes in celebrating the accomplishment of other artists ("How should I praise Thee, Lord!"): for thinking a Titian to be a "Jewel" and risking the cliché; or for depicting, in delicate detail, the exquisite fan painting by the late seventeenth-century Chinese court artist Li Shih-Cho in a poem called "Late Spring" from Unfinished Painting (1989), and in shaping her stanzas in fan-like imitation to match. Her verse has often been seen as a product of time spent in distant lands, but it might be more accurate to think of Salter, like Shakespeare's Rosalind, as possessing a traveler's wooing eye, somehow both innocent and educated, praising and appraising the sights--those latter interlocking attributes being part of her maternal inheritance, as we shall see. Poem after poem verify the old equation between ekphrasis and enargia . What is visually entrancing invites vivid description, even homage by imitation--a kind of love. The eros of the eye links painter and poet, even if the objects to which they are "drawn" must, by nature, differ.
Salter's most notable experiments with ekphrasis, however, are not usually prompted by high art, although the sequel on Titian's "Massive Pieta, " now in the Academia, is a studiously engaging look at the master's late style in his last painting. (The poem also reflects Salter's interest in viewing the work not as a final example of Titian's " paragone with Michelangelo," often noted by art historians, but as a family narrative embedded in the creation of this pearl of "great value.") Rather, they belong, as even the Titian poems tend, to the less exalted world of the domestic and the down to earth--even the concrete, it should be said. If there is "a certain parasitism" involved in writing about "existing works of art," as some poets have felt, the worry might be said to shrink with the scale of the work itself.
Indeed, if the last quarter of a century has witnessed an explosion of interest in local ekphrases of all sorts, Salter makes acute use of some of the poetic fall-out. In A Kiss in Space, she crafts, for instance, a home-made "Magnet" poem of her own in response to Alfred Corn's "Self-Portrait with Refrigerator Magnets," in her case of one "on the door of the fridge" bearing "Essence-of-kid" in the "fingerpainted imprint" of a daughter's hand. (The cozy diction tells us of her willingness to sound like a sentimental "mom.") Still in the house, so to speak, and same volume, "Home Movies: A Sort of Ode" shows her enduring a father's attempt to turn his "camera to subjects more / artistic or universal." Her own preference is for viewing reruns that capture incidentally scribbled signs of the personal as she rediscovers ("And look") a "Grecian / urn of sorts" in a stoneware kitchen bowl. " Of sorts" initiates the slide from the High Romantic Ode, continued in her Bishop-like inclination (spelled out in Bishop's "Poem") for "looks" over "vision."
Salter likewise enjoys playing loopy games with familiar household items: videos, in a villanelle on her husband's recursive desire to watch Myrna Loy reruns ("Video Blues"); and a collage, which gets blended into "college" in "Collage." For more serious musings, nearly every volume includes poems on photos and family snapshots--the most ambitious being the three-part sequence, "In the Guesthouse," from Open Shutters (2003). But a sense of loss, of temporality and change, of the ephemeral associated with "art"--however defined--shadows most of her ecphrases (as, indeed, her poetry more generally, as her best reviewers note). As with her recent poem in The American Scholar on Bernini's bust of Costanza Bonarelli (Autumn, 2004), they are products of the mutable, material world as seen by a mutable, aging, keen-sighted "I" or "eye"--to allude to a pun exposed and explored in her little "baroque" marvel on the hidden mysteries contained in the four-letter name "Liam," (reminiscent of Herbert's "Jesu"), again from A Kiss in Space.
Still, if a wide-angle survey of ekphrasis in Salter points to the subject's ubiquity as a sign of our visually saturated times and selves--ekphrasis might not be imperially ambitious, just everywhere possible--only a close-up view can reveal the special, nuanced hold the topic has in her poetry. I am thinking, in particular, of her book of poems bearing the explicitly ekphrastic title, Unfinished Painting and, more specifically, of the unlikely pair of answering ekphrases, "The Birth of Venus" and "Unfinished Painting," which frame the opening sequence of poems also bearing the same title as the 1989 book. Both poems pay homage to unknown "artists," which is part of their attraction. Titian, we know, will survive just fine without an ekphrasis, even if his monumental Pieta was finished not by his hand but (in any irony that Salter savors) by the hand of his student known as Palma il Giovane. But not so with these two otherwise, potentially forgotten, works. Their status as unfinished ephemera provides the occasion and the need for the poetry they inspire--indeed, their incompleteness calls out for a different hand in kind, as it were. And both remind us of the root meaning of amateur, as some one who attempts something out of love, again like the poet, who is enlisting poetry's ancient Orphic claim to rescue them from obscurity for no other apparent reason than affection. (Salter's formalism, like Herbert's, allows plenty of sentiment.) But an unlikely pair of poems, nonetheless, as are "L'Allegro" and "Il Penseroso," for one describes a humble street artist, "here, in the sun," indefatigably copying in chalk Botticelli's familiar figure of "Venus," even under the threat of rain, while the other unveils a portrait of the poet's mother, whose unfinished painting of her son forms the shadowy subject of the poet's elegiac musings.
I'm not sure whether Salter intended "The Rebirth of Venus" as a riposte of sorts to Ashbery's fiendishly slippery sestina, "The Painter," but, anchored in alternate rhyming quatrains, her lowly street artist stands (kneels, rather) altogether free of the frustrations and indignities that plague Ashbery's aspiring artist. There is no adequate way to represent this poem, except in full:
He's knelt to fish her face up from the sidewalk
all morning, and at last some shoppers gather
to see it drawn--wide-eyed, and dry as chalk--
whole from the sea of dreams. It's she. None other
than the other one who's copied in the book
he copies from, that woman men divined
ages before a painter let them look
into the eyes their eyes had had in mind.
Love's called him too, today, though she has taught
him in her beauty to love best
the one who first had formed her from a thought.
One square of pavement, like a headstone (lest
anyone mistake where credit lies),
reads BOTTICELLI, but the long-closed dates
suggest, instead, a view of centuries
coming unbracketed, as if the gates
might swing wide to admit, here, in the sun,
one humble man into the pantheon
older and more exalted than her own.
Slow gods of Art, late into afternoon,
let there be light: a few of us drop the wish
into his glinting coinbox like a well,
remembering the forecast. Yet he won't rush
her finish, though it means she'll have no shell
to harbor in; it's clear enough the rain
will swamp her like a tide, and lion-hearted
he'll set off, black umbrella sprung again,
envisioning faces where the streets have parted.
From the opening description of him in a posture that fuses reverence and hard work to the concluding heartfelt but humorous prayer of encouragement by one artist for another, the poem forms, as Anthony Hecht has argued, a joyous response to Plato's criticism of art as "an inferior imitation of the ideal." Here is copying galore--"wide-eyed," concentrated, exuberant: poet depicting artist depicting Botticelli depicting the Idea of beauty, but in a more intricately artful order that keeps attention focused on the material beauty being looked at and copied, indeed highlighted by the poet's copying out that most familiar of prayers from Genesis in an effort to see this act of creation to its conclusion: "late into afternoon / Let there be light."
For all its play with reflection and resemblance, however, the poem does not dissolve into a post-modern hall of ever-receding mirrors. What stands out, in fact, like a silhouette in allegorical clothing, is the old fashion dedication of this lion-hearted craftsman to his calling. He performs out in the open, in front of others; he is at home with a centuries-old subject. Indeed, indifferent to daily time, he makes love slowly and carefully to his own creation ("Yet he won't rush / her finish"), even if it means leaving her vulnerable to bad weather. There will be others, in time, because the gates of the past are open to him, and so, too, are the avenues of the future. Citing his principal source in caps, this unnamed "he" is, it must be said, firmly part of a well-traveled male line.
If we see his mastery as a glimmering reflection of his gender, as I am suggesting, in no way, however, does Salter allow it to tarnish our--or her--view of his merits, which are deserving of a place in the pantheon. But it does throw into dramatic relief the shift in focus toward the maternal artist in "Unfinished Painting," and it hints, too, why this poet, who is also female, is particularly drawn to ekphrases as both a family inheritance and a means to explore, at a slight distance, artistic matters of both immediate and broad artistic concern to her. In an essay that appeared in The New Republic (March 4, 1991) called "A poem of one's own: what, if anything, is a `woman poet'?," Salter reflected extensively on the paradoxes of being a "woman poet," and at one point, recalling the allusion to Virginia Woolf in her title, remarked: "the means by which most men writers throughout history have discovered how to speak selflessly of the broadly human, the universal, the spiritual is through selfishly shutting themselves off from domestic distractions." Her street artist in "The Rebirth of Venus" is a version of this male writer. (What could be more broadly universal than Botticelli's "Venus," in this case chalked out in public with no thought but for the task?) And her mother in "Unfinished Painting" is an example of the selfless "other." She is the woman whose work doesn't get beyond the home.
"Unfinished Painting" is not a polemic but a pensive descent into the tender burden of "domestic distractions." As an ekphrasis generated by a forgotten object--in this case, a painting found in the basement--it is one of several that show the lasting influence of Bishop, a crucial female model for Salter, but a poet who, unlike Salter, always resisted the limiting adjective "woman" before the noun. (Dickinson, of course, is the other.) Acutely aware of this difference and of belonging to a later moment in history, Salter concluded her essay, in fact, by declaring, as a sign of artistic freedom, her wish to "see the word `woman' in italics in some poems, and in parentheses in others, and we won't read it at all in others," and the comment has proven to be accurate with regard to her own poetry.
"Unfinished Painting" we might consider to be an example of woman in parenthesis (in several senses), just as her ekphrasis, "Young Girl Peeling Apples," to be discussed shortly, is an instance of woman in italics, and "The Rebirth of Venus"--notwithstanding its title--perhaps not at all about woman, except as imagined by man. The difference is mainly one of subject emphasis, since all Salter's poems are manifestly artful, indeed, few more so than "Young Girl." In the case of "Unfinished Painting," Salter foregrounds the matter of her mother's painting, of course. A copy even appears on the original book jacket. The poem is also one of several notable examples in her oeuvre of an ekphrasis serving as an emblem poem. ("Poppies," from Sunday Skaters , is another, again involving memories associated with her mother.) Its formal strategy is to turn the descriptive act of ekphrasis in the first two stanzas into an extended meditation that gradually reveals a mother's domestic habits and character. Her partially completed painting thus serves as the complex emblem of her certain love for her son and her own uncertainty over the place of painting in her life.
The crux of the poem, then, is what to make of an unfinished thing. Here is its richly burnished beginning:
Dark son, whose face once shone like this,
oiled from well within the skin
of canvas, and whose liquid eyes
were brown as rootbeer underneath
a crewcut's crown, just washed,
his body's gone unfinished now
more than thirty years--blank tent
of bathrobe like a choirboy's surplice
over the cassock's stroke of color,
a red pajama collar.
In deference to her slighter subject, Salter has reduced the line by a foot (or two feet in the case of the last line) from the pentameter of "The Rebirth of Venus," and in place of a repeating pattern of regular end-rhyme quatrains, she has chosen a more idiosyncratic mix of internal and imperfect harmonics ("son" / "shone"; "within" / skin"; 'brown" / "crown"; "color" / "collar"). The sharp, finished, defining edge of "art" is not what this poem, or her mother's painting, are about. Rather, in diction as plain and luminous as the dawn, Salter describes the stir of emotions, the lyrical blend and blur of domestic life and love that underlies a mother's impulse to paint:
Drawn as if it might reveal
the dotted hills of Rome, a drape
behind him opens on a wall
she'd painted with a roller once.
Everything made at home--
she made the drapes, she made the boy,
and then, pure joy, remade him in
a pose to bear his mother's hope:
the deep, three-quarter gaze; the tome
he fingers like a pope.
Is this the History of Art
he marks her place in, or--wait--
that illustrated Brothers Grimm
she'd inscribed for him, his name enclosed
within it like a heart?
The few perfect rhymes, like "hope" and "Pope," speak to a mother's dressed-up wish to tailor a son's future, just as the distant echoes of "home" and "tome," then "Art" and "heart," point to the gulf between the interior life of domestic desire and the hard choices that would need to be made if she were to win a place in Gombrich or Janson.
That conflict, of course, lies at the heart of the poem, but Salter will not rush the poem's finish. "Hard to sort out. . ." she goes on to say, with the tell-tale, trailing ellipses leaving the matter deliberately open to speculation at this point:
. . . She rarely put
the final touch on anything
when he was young. It seems that bringing
the real boy up had taken time
away from painting him
(no crime); she also failed to think
of him--back then her only child--
as truly done, and one child only,
but marvelled as he altered like
the light she painted by.
With its fine mesh of Frost and Bishop, its New England-sounding country wisdom amid crafted pauses and parenthetical asides, she portrays the complex mix of domestic "distractions" that kept the mother from ever finishing the painting. These admit, as well, to inherent impediments in portraying a changing subject--the growing boy--in a temporally fixed mode, and yet not to frustration on the mother's part, who sees the child's growth as a marvel of changing light. Salter is infinitely generous, it seems, in her reflections "(no crime)," and only gradually do we arrive at the real answer. In response to what we can only call the higher laws of time and poetry, her thinking quietly insists on completing itself:
. . .Like, too, the image he's retained
of the sun in her, now set,
her eyes that took him back, and in,
squinting as he squirmed, appraising,
praising him again,
so that, when sifting through her basement
stacked with a dozen such false starts,
and lifting this one, lighter than
he thought it ought to be, to frame
and hang in his apartment,
he saw in his flushed face how she'd
re-created there what rose
and fell in hers: the confidence
she forfeited each time she dared
think of an audience.
Who (she must have asked) would care ?
He does: that finished head conveys
still to him how, sought in a crowd,
a loved one stands apart--he's taller,
comes in a different shade.
Salter's mother has none of the street artist's worldly confidence, it need hardly be said. And yet what can look like defeat from one perspective--yet one more example from the past of a "false start"-- can assume the face of victory from another, as the last stanza makes clear in the shift to the present tense. The son who now stands apart in a crowd does so because of what the partially completed portrait, the "finished head," signifies about a mother's love. Nicely caught by Salter in the play on "light," this picture catches the son's attention for being "lighter than / he thought it ought to be." And the poem catches ours for the same reason: in the radiant way it transforms the image of the "dark son" at the outset into a "different shade" by the end. That final classicizing touch suggests, paradoxically, not just the son's special coloration and character but their source as well in the shadow that is his no longer living, yet still present, mother. We might also regard so nuanced an appraisal as part of a mother's wider artistic legacy in a "female 'tradition'--however wobbly and uneven it is--," as Salter ruefully notes in "A poem of one's own," a legacy now reconceived and continued by the poet in a different medium. Such subtly shaded praise is one way for a daughter to claim a place for both beyond the parenthesis of the unfinished, as the title of the poem, amplified into book's title, with a copy of the painting on the cover, pointedly declares.
Salter's most perfectly finished ekphrasis is not, however, the one to her mother, but a poem whose making might be said to replicate the sense of "pure joy" the mother experienced in painting the boy to fit the shape of her hopes. "Young Girl Peeling Apples," from Sunday Skaters , is a rare instance in Salter's visually rich verse of a pure, or classic, ekphrasis, by which I mean a poem that is completely dedicated to describing a specific painting, indicated in the poem's title, with the painter's name, in this case the seventeenth-century Dutch artist, Nicolaes Maes, figuring parenthetically, in catalog fashion, as the poem's subtitle. The painting, moreover, can be viewed by the interested general reader since the original is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, even if Maes is not a major name and therefore remains something of a poet's find. The title also spells out Salter's continued interest in exploring the female domestic subject, but in this case, as we discover, by shifting focus away from the household distractions that impede perfection to appraising the layered acts of concentration that uniquely link subject, artist, and poet.
In fact, to look at Maes's painting (fig.1) in light of another from the same genre popular in Dutch art of the period--say Gabriel Metsu's Woman Peeling an Apple , from the late 1650s, in the Louvre (fig. 2)--is to recognize the particular force behind Salter's claim in "A poem of one's own" that every work of art "is unique." For if Metsu's woman is likewise busy peeling an apple, both her brandished knife and outward stare (to say nothing about the dead rabbit awkwardly displayed on the table) are completely antithetical to the aura of warm, supreme quiet and inward focus that Maes creates and which Salter is drawn to "copy." What could be more unique, we might ask, with Herbert in mind, than a poem written in the shape of the thing it would commemorate? Only a poem, Salter suggests, that further reflects, through its syntax, the process of concentrated thinking that the young girl's actions seem to embody. A single, lengthy, suspended sentence, the poem is a challenge to quote and get the finely crafted lineation accurate:
It's all
an elaborate pun:
the red peel of ribbon
twisted tightly about the bun
at the crown of her apple-
round head;
the ribbon coming loose in the real
apple-peel she allows to dangle
from her lifted hand; the table
on which a basket of red
apples
waits to be turned into more
white-fleshed apples in a water-
filled pail on the floor;
her apron that fills and falls
empty,
a lapful of apples piling on
like the apron itself, the napkin,
the hems of her skirts--each a skin
layered over her heart, just as he
who has
painted her at her knife
paints the brush that puts life
in her, apple of his eye: if
there's anything on earth but this
unbroken
concentration, this spiral
of making while unmaking while
the world goes round, neither the girl
nor he has yet looked up, or spoken.
There is so much to appreciate here that we hardly notice that the poet says nothing about some of the picture's other striking stylistic attributes: the dramatic play of light and darkness, for instance, that helps to identify Maes as a student of Rembrandt (the kind of sharp luminescence to which Salter immediately attends in her early poem on Vermeer's "Officer and Laughing Girl" in Henry Purcell in Japan ); or the intricate double design in the oriental carpet on the table, popular in domestic scenes of the period and which must have cost the painter many hours of labor to produce. To widen the frame to include these effects might readily blur the poem's focus on concentration itself, elegantly realized in the slow, stanza-by-stanza unfurling of sensuous imagery. It would also more certainly obscure the poem's play with color--what I want to call the politics and poetics of pigmentation.
So much depends in this poem, not on "a red wheel / barrow," but on "the red peel of ribbon," that it is difficult to read "Young Girl Peeling Apples" without thinking of Williams--soon we'll arrive at "white-fleshed apples in a water-/ filled pail on the floor," rather than "rain / water / beside the white / chickens"--especially in light of Salter's confession in "A poem of one's own" that the male trio of double Ws (William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, and William Carlos Williams) are overrepresented in the canon and have "at times bored me nearly to tears." As one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of Poetry , Salter might be especially prone to feeling their combined masculine weight, but she also understood that "the problem with taking men poets down a peg. . . is that it's awfully hard to do so with discernment."
"Young Girl Peeling Apples" is nothing if not discerning, and if Williams is being recalled here, it is in the service of illustrating another kind of poetics altogether, one that originates in the female domestic household and yet is also more extensively and richly metaphoric--more Herbertian or Dickinsonian. "It's all / an elaborate pun." The immediately expansive opening might almost serve, in fact, as a Dickinsonian article of poetic faith according to Salter, given her knowledgeable slant on this hometown poet, whose mantel she wears as "Emily Dickinson Senior Lecturer in the Humanities" at Mt. Holyoke, one that receives a further, more explicitly feminine / feminist, twist or spiral in the figure of the young girl at the originating center of picture and poem. How much more interesting it is to see what "she" is doing , the poem suggests, than it is to be presented with a wheel barrow next to chickens--"she" being the young girl and the poet. How much more interesting it is to think, further on, of the artist drawn to the young girl out of affection, painting her (the "apple of his eye"); to be made aware, furthermore, of "this spiral / of making" and of the poet's share in it, looking at the picture (the apple of her eye) and then capturing in this blazon of her making, the young girl's ripeness; to think in light of the rich pigmentation of puns, than it is to look, supposedly, prosaically, at only the thing itself, seemingly untouched by its creator. "Young Girl Peeling Apples" doesn't just enshrine a silent moment of concentration, then, with poetry, as usual, doing the talking. That is, it doesn't just insist on its own unique status as a work of art. As an ekphrasis, a spiral of making while unmaking, winding its way into the canon, the poem urges us to see a world layered with relations, with "life's artful correspondences"--to borrow the punning phrase Salter uses in "Dead Letters" as a link to her mother in the last poem from Unfinished Painting . "As in. . . so is."
Heaney, The Redress of Poetry (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), p. 9.
Quoted from Joseph Summers, "George Herbert and Elizabeth Bishop," in George Herbert in the
Nineties: Reflections and Reassessments , ed. Jonathan F. S. Post and Sidney Gottlieb (George Herbert
Journal: Special Studies and Monographs, 1995): 57. The letter from which the word is quoted is not
included in Elizabeth Bishop, One Art: Selected Letters , ed. Robert Giroux (New York: Farrar, Straus and
Giroux, 1994).
Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994): p. 180.
Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery (Chicago, University of
Chicago Press, 1993), p. 3. The historical accuracy of Heffernan's general definition is challenged by Ruth
Webb, " Ekphrasis Ancient and Modern: The Invention of a Genre," Word and Image 15.1 (January-March
1999): 7-18. See also John Hollander's learned guide to different kinds of ekphrases in The
Gazer's Spirit: Poems Speaking to Silent Works of Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).
The western origins of this tradition are brilliantly recovered by Michael Baxandall, Giotto and the
Orators: Humanist observers of painting in Italy and the discovery of pictorial composition, 1350-1450
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), pp. 78-97, in particular.
Peter Humfrey, Painting in Renaissance Venice (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 211.
James Merrill, "Notes on Corot," in Poets on Painters: Essays on the Art of Painting by Twentieth-
Century Poets, ed. J. D. McClatchy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), p. 311.
Hecht, On the Laws of the Poetic Art (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 28.
See Salter's extended essay, "Puns and Accordions: Emily Dickinson and the Unsaid," Yale Review 79
(1990): 188-221.