Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge

Picasso's Tomato Plant image is from Pablo Picasso Gallery Paintings(1941-73)
Between the third and twelfth days of August 1944 Picasso painted
nine pictures of a tomato plant perched on a window sill, all on identically sized canvases
Ekphrasis: writing that comments upon another art form, for instance a poem about a photograph or a novel about a film. Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a prime example of this type of writing, since the entire poem concerns the appearance and meaning of an ancient piece of pottery Ekphrastic Poetry Examples
How does one approach this poetry form? Become physically comfortable and committed to a long period of time in front of the art. If possible sit in front of the work and attempt to become one with it. If you have permission, take a photograph of it and carry it with you or prop it in front of your computer, especially for the revision process. Since while writing poetry “it all depends on the questions that you ask,” ask yourself and ask the painting about the movement in the piece. What is going where? Ask about color, light, shape/form, subject/items, geometry/direction/balance, relationship/tension, taste, sound. Is anything here making noise? Is anyone/anything speaking? Can you create dialogue? Monologue? If you can’t take a photo of a museum piece, try a “naive poet’s sketch” of the piece just to remind yourself of the elements of the painting, its flow, and relationship of the subjects. Elastic Ekphrastic; Another Way Toward Poetry

Should you accept this challenge E-mail me OR add your poem at COMMENTS

If Picasso
Late summer,
Bold strokes celebrate
Pablo's harvest;
Sunny day,
The tomato plant
Looks happier;
The phone rings,
A plant paperweights
A few haiku scribbles;
This could very well
Have happened,
If Picasso was a haijin;
--gillena cox; TT

Tomato
Pablo knew that was one ugly pot.
Broken, pieced together from one, two, three
Different shards, bright shining pieces
Fashioned together with dull, with red,
With white from birth, a hand held enough
Soil to cover its bottom, to cover a seed
So tiny it was amazing the crop.
A green, then red crop, a child to mature adult.
Pasta was on his mind, pasta covered rich and thick,
Red sauce clotted with ripeness, basil and onion,
Sweet peppers, olive oil dripping rich from hot buns.
Pablo knew, it begged for wine.
--Donald Rhodes; South Carolina

The Eternal
In the tomato plant
In a broken pot
Picasso scores the
Shades of four seasons,
In a single canvas
The brushstrokes
In blue and yellow
Hides a sky and sun
Nurturing the plant for
Time eternal
--Devika Jyothi; New Delhi,IN

briefly punctuating
summer at its height
the tomato period
--Cindy Tebo; Catawissa,US

Amidst the cubes
you are the living structure.
Amongst the grey
you are my red and green.
And after all this daily dust and dumbness
you promise me a viral meal.
--Ralf Bröker, Germany


The poems in this Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge remain the property of each individual author and should not be used without permission