Brushstrokes and Fonts

Is painting poetry or is poetry painting? Seems like a an odd question, except when you consider the similarities. Poems use language to offer the reader/listener sensory images that lead to emotional responses. Paintings, whether abstract or representational, usually forego the use of text and still create sensory resonance through their portrayed images. 

There seems to be a natural confluence between poetry and visual art sometimes as fertile ground to express more than words or visuals alone. This dance between mediums has been taken up by poets and visual artists for centuries. Japanese culture produced the haiga, a combination of a haiku poem with a painting. Haiga paintings and poems were intended to be complementary, not explanatory. In western culture a similar practice referred to as ekphrasis developed. Ekphrasis, a Greek word, that translates to ‘description’, also has a storied history with poets from the romantic era, like John Keats, to present day poets such as, Blas Flanconer, creating in this form. 

I’ve been writing haiku poems off and on for many years, but only discovered haiga a few years ago while researching for a poetry workshop I was giving that focused on Alan Ginsberg’s American Sentences, a form he developed that was based on haiku. Around the same time I was invited to be a jury member for a local ekphrastic poetry contest where artists entered paintings that were then selected by writers who created a poem about the painting of their choice. Four years later I took off my jurist robes to focus more intensely on a new poetry collection which is almost reaching completion. But the lure of haiga and ekphrasis still speak loudly to me as my own creative practice moves within both poetics and visual art. 

If you would like to try your pen at writing an ekphrastic poem, you might be interested in checking out the Ekphrastic Poetry contest at the Nanaimo Arts Council. It’s a fun way to experiment with a new poetic form and you might just find yourself adding ekphrasis to your own poetic techniques. 

This haiku came to me the other day as I was reviewing postings on my website’s art galleries. Now paired with one of my cityscape paintings, I think  it can also stand as a haiga!