Art Poems

1. Art Poems Let the paintings INSPIRE YOU!

2. Let’s get CREATIVE! • Today you will view some brilliantworks of art and read numerous art-inspired poems. • By the end of tomorrow’s period, you will write your own original EKPHRASIS (poetry inspired by visual art). • Experiment with language by using: • SIMILES • METAPHORS • PERSONIFICATION • ONOMATOPOEIA • ALLITERATION • RHYME • RHYTHM

3. Let’s get WARMED UP! “There is no picture and no poem unless you yourself enter it and fill it out.” -Jacob Bronowski

4. The Orchardby Nelly Erichsen How do the colors used set the mood of this painting? What is happening between these two people? Are they making up? Breaking up? Is one person going away? Are they from the same social class? Why are they meeting in the orchard?

5. Country Dog Gentlemen Roy De Forest How many dogs do you see? What are the dogs thinking? Does this painting make dogs seems like friends or foes?

6. The Automat Edward Hopper What is this woman thinking about? Why is she only wearing one glove? Pay attention to the brush strokes and colors. How do these things affect the tone? What effect does the drooping hat have on the viewer?

7. The Herring Net Winslow Homer What tension is present in the painting? How old are each of the people? What is their relationship? What effect does their hidden faces have on the viewer? How does this painting portray nature? What could you “rename” this painting as?

8. Different Approaches Writing about art

9. The StreetStephen Dobyns Across the street, the carpenter carries a goldenboard across one shoulder, much as he bears the burdensof his life. Dressed in white, his only weakness istemptation. Now he builds another wall to screen him. The little girl pursues her bad red ball, hits it oncewith her blue racket, hits it once again. She mustteach it the rules balls must follow and it turns herquite wild to see how it leers at her, then winks. The oriental couple wants always to dance like this:swirling across a crowded street, while he gripsher waist and she slides to one knee and music risesfrom cobblestones--some days Ravel, some days Bizet. The departing postulant is singing to herself. Shehas seen the world's salvation asleep in a cradle,hanging in a tree. The girl's song makesthe sunlight, makes the breeze that rocks the cradle. The Street Balthus 1933 Describing the Scene

10. The Street (continued) The baker's had half a thought. Now he stands like a pillarawaiting another. He sees white flour falling like snow,covering people who first try to walk, then crawl,then become rounded shapes: so many loaves of bread. The baby carried off by his heartless mother is very old andfor years has starred in silent films. He tries to explainhe was accidentally exchanged for a baby on a bus, but he canfind no words as once more he is borne home to his awful bath. First the visionary workman conjures a great hall, thenhe puts himself on the stage, explaining, explaining:where the sun goes at night, where flies go in winter, whileattentive crowds of dogs and cats listen in quiet heaps. Unaware of one another, these nine people circle aroundeach other on a narrow city street. Each concentratesso intently on the few steps before him, that not onecan see his neighbor turning in exactly different, yet exactly similar circles around them: identical livesbegun alone, spent alone, ending alone--as separateas points of light in a night sky, as separate as starsand all that immense black space between them.

11. The Poppy of Georgia O’Keeffe By Janine Pommy Vega In the carmine extravagance the skirts of a Spanish dancer swirl flamenco rhythms, castanets exuberant dancer drumming her heels on a wooden floor staccato barks, deep intricate guitars the energy pulsing from the dark surrounds and enters The Poppy is wide open her petals curve like the skirts of a mountain filled with the morning sun we climb and reaching the pinnacle shout like the flower in strict discipline, in eloquent satori in the wild graced of black and red. Poppy Georgia O’Keeffe 1927 Relating the image in the painting to something else

12. I Saw the Figure Five in Gold Charles Henry Demuth 1883-1935 Expressing an awareness of himself observing the painting

13. Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad Edward Hirsch Out here in the exact middle of the day,This strange, gawky house has the expressionOf someone being stared at, someone holdingHis breath underwater, hushed and expectant; This house is ashamed of itself, ashamedOf its fantastic mansard rooftopAnd its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamedof its shoulders and large, awkward hands. But the man behind the easel is relentless.He is as brutal as sunlight, and believesThe house must have done something horribleTo the people who once lived here Because now it is so desperately empty,It must have done something to the skyBecause the sky, too, is utterly vacantAnd devoid of meaning. There are no Trees or shrubs anywhere--the houseMust have done something against the earth.All that is present is a single pair of tracksStraightening into the distance. No trains pass. House by the Railroad Edward Hopper 1925 Exploring the relationship between the artist and the subject of the painting

14. Edward Hopper (continued) Now the stranger returns to this place dailyUntil the house begins to suspectThat the man, too, is desolate, desolateAnd even ashamed. Soon the house starts To stare frankly at the man. And somehowThe empty white canvas slowly takes onThe expression of someone who is unnerved,Someone holding his breath underwater . And then one day the man simply disappears.He is a last afternoon shadow movingAcross the tracks, making its wayThrough the vast, darkening fields. This man will paint other abandoned mansions,And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly letteredStorefronts on the edges of small towns.Always they will have this same expression, The utterly naked look of someoneBeing stared at, someone American and gawky.Someone who is about to be left aloneAgain, and can no longer stand it.

15. Girls on the Bridge Derek Mahon Audible trout,Notional midges. Beds,Lamplight and crisp linen waitIn the house there for the sedateLimbs and averted headsOf the girls out Late on the bridge.The dusty road that slopesPast is perhaps the high road south,A symbol of world-wondering youth,Of adolescent hopesAnd privileges; But stops to findThe girls content to gazeAt the unplumbed, reflective lake,Their plangent conversational quackExpressive of calm daysAnd peace of mind. Grave daughtersOf time, you lightly tossYour hair as the long shadows growAnd night begins to fall. AlthoughYour laughter calls acrossThe dark waters, Girls on the Jetty Edvard Munch 1899 Imagining a story behind the scene depicted in the painting

16. Girls on the Bridge (continued) A ghastly sunWatches in pale dismay.Oh, you may laugh, being as you areFair sisters of the evening star,But wait-if not todayA day will dawn When the bad dreamsYou scarcely know will scatterThe punctual increment of your lives.The road resumes, and where it curves,A mile from where you chatter,Somebody screams. The girls are dead,The house and pond have gone.Steel bridge and concrete highway gleamAnd sing in the arctic dark; the screamWe started at is grownThe serenade Of an insaneAnd monstrous age. We liveThese days as on a different planet,One without trout or midges on it,Under the arc-lights ofA mineral heaven; And we have come,Despite ourselves, to noTrue notion of our proper work,But wander in the dazzling darkAmid the drifting snowDreaming of some Lost evening whenOur grandmothers, if grandMothers we had, stood at the edgeOf womanhood on a country bridgeAnd gazed at a still pondAnd knew no pain.

17. American Gothic John Stone Just outside the framethere has to be a dogchickens, cows and hay and a smokehousewhere a ham in hickoryis also being preserved Here for all timethe borders of the Gothic windowanticipate the ribs of the housethe tines of the pitchforkrepeat the triumph of his overallsand front and centerthe long faces, the sober lips above the upright spinesof this couplearrested in the name of art These twoby nowthe sun this high ought to bein mortal timeabout their businesses Instead they linger herewithin the patient fabricof the lives they wove he asking the artist silentlyhow much longerand worrying about the crops she no less concerned about the cropsbut more to the point just nowwhether she remembered to turn off the stove. American Gothic Grant Wood 1930 Imagining what was happening while the portrait sitters posed for the painting

18. The Village of the Mermaids Paul Delvaux 1942 Trying to figure out what the painting is about

19. Before the Mirror John Updike How many of us still remember when Picasso's "Girl Before a Mirror" hung at the turning of the stairs in the pre- expansion Museum of Modern Art? Millions of us, probably, but we form a dwindling population. Garish and brush-slashed and yet as balanced as a cardboard Queen in a deck of giant cards, the painting proclaimed, "Enter here and abandon preconception." She bounced the erotic balls of herself back and forth between reflection and reality.   Now I discover, in the recent re- trospective at the establishment, that the vivid painting dates from March of 1932, the very month which I first saw light, squinting nostalgia for the womb. I bend closer, inspecting. The blacks, the stripy cyanide greens are still uncracked, I note with satisfaction; the cherry reds and lemon yellows full of childish juice. No sag, no wrinkle. Fresh as paint. Back then they knew how, I reflect, to lay it on. Girl Before a Mirror Pablo Picasso 1932 Discussing the history of the painting

20. Mourning PictureAdrienne Rich They have carried the mahogany chair and the cane rockerout under the lilac bush,and my father and mother darkly sit there, in black clothes.Our clapboard house stands fast on its hill,my doll lies in her wicker pramgazing at western Massachusetts.This was our world.I could remake each shaft of grassfeeling its rasp on my fingers,draw out the map of every lilac leafor the net of veins on my father's grief-tranced hand. Out of my head, half-bursting,still filling, the dream condenses--shadows, crystals, ceilings, meadows, globes of dew.Under the dull green of the lilacs, out in the lightcarving each spoke of the pram, the turned porch-pillars,under high early-summer clouds,I am Effie, visible and invisible,remembering and remembered. Mourning Picture Edwin Romanzo Elmer 1890 Speaking as the voice of a character from the painting

21. Let’s get WRITING! Let ART be your INSPIRATION!

22. DIRECTIONS • Read through the ART POEM handout. • Log on to a computer and Open the Online Classroom website: www.hinglk.weebly.com • Click open the “Art Poem Directions + Art Poem handout” links. • Browse the websites – they contain a lot of art to choose from! • Choose one piece of art – PAINTING or PHOTOGRAPH + IT MUST HAVE A TITLE/ARTIST identified – no google images • Copy/Paste the art into a Word document OR SAVE the picture in your H-Drive to make a watermark . • Generate ideas by completing the ART POEM handout, then write your original poem. • Refer to ART POEMS handout for information on poem requirements & grading • (fill it out and turn it in with your poem – NOT stapled!!!) • PRINT YOUR POEM IN COLOR (MC Color Laser)