I was on the train from my teaching job, in the short passage between tunnels we could see the sun quitting us at the cruel hour of 4pm. My afternoon had been spent with a child on too much sugar. In the waning hours of the school day, I asked why it had been so difficult to complete their schoolwork. “Birch sugar” they had confessed after rolling around on the floor and trying to eat an entire piece of paper. Birch sugar. I don’t think I would be able to resist either. But I might be able to pull it together for the sake of my teacher who worked so hard on my lesson plans. I have to laugh at myself.
One of my fellow teachers and I chatted before our tracks diverged about Ben Lerner, “Topeka School” nearly finished in my backpack.
“Have you considered Ekphrasis?” he asked. “Ben Lerner writes about it a lot, he practices it I’ve heard.” Ekphrasis, a blunted word, awkward to sculpt with the mouth, and yet somehow tempting. To my imagination the E is permanently capitalized and lords over the kphrasis completely without consciousness. No, I had not heard of the term, but it might be an interesting word to begin carrying. The word describes a practice that originated in Greece, ἐκφράζειν ekphrázein, ‘to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name’ according to good old Wikipedia.
The term is generally a writing exercise to describe a piece of art. But in Greek it could broaden to describing anything with deep intention and detail. The exercise prompts the writer to look at what they are writing about with distance, to encounter it with the awe of, the handmade, worked on, imagined, loved, hated, demolished and borne from the spirit of another human – or as it may be – the world, even the abandon of wings.
For younger students who are just learning parts of speech I like to use artwork to let loose interesting adjectives, nouns, verbs, and adverbs tucked into their minds: the person depicted shines, the cat is gray. Profoundly simple observations. So much of teaching is naming what a student already knows, and giving them permission to keep exploring these abundant mysterious ecosystems which are their care and birthright, to unfurl in this life the infinite and incredible knowledge they already have within them.
Ekphrasis may be from the Classical Greek origin, leading the way toward the Renaissance, and the creation of the individual, whether the individual takes the form of the character, the rock, or the artwork. To describe a piece of artwork is to believe it is finite, to write against the limits of the painting, to engage the limits of the lines it portrays. And perhaps the practice can be used as a simultaneously questioning of those very containers that are created in the painting, to imagine beyond them. No matter the age of the student, Ekphrasis reminds us that art is not ours alone, it will constantly be reinterpreted. The writing, like the painting, is a game of telephone, connecting us to one another, ourselves, and with the rest of the world.
Remedios Varo Creation of Birds 1957
Bending Tree Education 