Art Inspires the Written Word

November 27, 2024

This free workshop led by author and creative writing director Iain Haley Pollock built upon Kristine Mays’ exhibition “Rich Soil,” in the Jay Estate Gardens. Pollock offered the sculptures as an inspiration to explore ekphrastic poetry. The root of the Greek word ekphrasis means “to describe” or “to tell over.” Contemporary ekphrastic poems often seek to “retell” a piece of visual art in ways that make connections to the poet’s experience and emotional life, and thereby laying bare some deeper truth in the piece of art.

The workshop began in the gardens observing and describing Mays’s sculpture installation before moving indoors to look at examples of ekphrastic poems from Rainer Marie Rilke and Matthew Olzmann. After learning these examples, workshop participants will write poems of their own based on a piece or collection of pieces in “Rich Soil.” The workshop was open to poets of all levels. A poetry workshop in Spring 2025 is planned

Thank you to Dave Donelson for sharing his poem here.

Rich Soil Wireforms
From above the garden beds,
Figures of twined wireform
Cast shadow nets
On soil once tilled
By other figures then enslaved.
Two dimensions pose as three,
Lifted on iron armatures
Depicting motion in required aspects
Of time across space,
Speaking of life in required aspects
Of toil in bondage.
Wire frocks caught in mid-swirl
Without limbs or heads.
Was the pain of womanhood
Too great?
Wire torsos stopped in mid-leap
Without legs or faces
Were the muscled men bound
Too tightly?
But above the leafless stems,
Androgynous figures dance
In wireform flings of joy.
Full-formed, fully-bodied, now free.
Replete with their own identity.
–Dave Donelson

Photos by Kim Crichlow