How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem

Choose an artwork that speaks to you in some way. Ideally, this will be a piece that inspires you or moves you. Perhaps it is a painting you remember fondly from your youth. Maybe it’s an amphora that was recently on display at a local museum. It could be any of these things or anything in between!

Ask yourself:

1. What do you want to highlight about the piece?
2. Is there anything that stands out in the foreground, or would you rather draw the reader’s attention to the background?
3. What is the subject of the artwork? What do you think was the artist trying to communicate?
4. What does the artwork imply? What values does it espouse? What cultural Zeitgeist does it capture? Does it glorify or vilify a certain group of people or place or time in history?
5. Are there figures in the painting? Try naming them, even if the names do not end up in the final draft of the poem.
6. What, if anything, would you like to reply to or critique about the piece? Now is your chance!
7. What would you like to add to the artwork? Consider this carefully, because your words will change the meaning of the piece through the interaction between poetry and more physical art forms.
8. How would you modify the artwork, if you could have asked the artist to change one detail?
9. Whose perspective is the artwork from?
10. What emotions does the work of art evoke within you? Don’t worry about having a ‘right answer.’ What might make one person feel ecstatic joy might have another furiously stamping away, while a third person begins to cry and a fourth is utterly unmoved.

Also take note of the medium and the dimensions. Is it a large or small work of art? Does it tower above you? Or do you feel giant beside it? Why did the artist make each of the choices they did, in terms of the composition and the thematic content?

Consider that the artwork already communicates a great deal and that the purpose of ekphrasis is not necessarily to faithfully render the work of art on paper – likely, that’s already been done! You are allowed to change things about the artwork in your poem. You can imagine that the painting is aged beyond recognition, or that it is so new that the paint is still drying. You can write about a shard of pottery yearning to be whole or an entire piece that had survived all these years intact.

In your poem, you can play with what the original piece communicates to the viewer. Perhaps it is a pastoral scene that you imagine has changed in the past few hundred years. Or perhaps it’s a more recent abstract, and you have the creative freedom to interpret it as you will.

Strike a balance between descriptive, concrete details and more airy abstractions. In this case, the artwork does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of the visual details, but you might want to include auditory or tactile sensations, tastes, or smells, or juxtapose some other detail from the natural world or an object your life that does not appear in the original artwork.

Consider also what to leave in, and what to deliberately leave out. Absence says as much as presence in an ekphrastic. If a central figure is missing, it makes a certain statement.

You might also want to try creating a persona who has a slightly (or entirely) different worldview from your own who is imagined viewing the piece of art for the first time, or perhaps the thousandth. You might want to imagine a persona viewer who has seen the piece so many times it has become commonplace and faded into the fugue of the background, or even a child who is visiting a particular museum for the first time and has never seen anything quite like what you are writing your ekphrastic in response to.

“How to Write an Ekphrastic Poem” by Caitlin Cacciatore is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.