For lack of a better introductory sentence, the Poetry Foundation has a pretty little project happening:

“As a way to help readers discover (or rediscover) our archive, poetryfoundation.org has invited some of today’s most vital graphic novelists to interpret a poem of their choice from the more than 4,500 poems in our archive, reaching from Beowulf to the present.” 

My favorite to date is A.E. Stallling’s “Recitative” illustrated by R. Kikuo Johnson. 

This is interesting to me on a number of levels, especially when I think about the ekphrastic poem. In my mind, the best ekphrastic poem are those that exist in the same world as the painting, but are distinctly independent from the painting; poems for which the painting is the point of entry into a given world, that make sense to a reader who has never seen the painting, but that take on additional meaning once the painting is viewed. 

“The Starry Night” by Anne Sexton is most likely my favorite, but–of course–one can’t argue with “Musee de Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden, either. Both of these poem create something new, and, for me, have changed the way I understand “The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh or “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Bruegel–to whom I’ll attribute the latter painting despite an apparent controversy, but only because I don’t know any better and like making links. 

I can’t help but wonder whether these graphic novelists took on the Poetry Foundation’s reverse-ekphrastic project with the same expectations of their art, but I’m sure they faced similar challenges. Regardless, it seemed like a good enough reason to pontificate, and pontificate I did. Lovely.