Women painting words and writing pictures: re-configuring verbal and visual art in contemporary British women’s poetry

Abstract

The lineage and the language of the so-called ‘ekphrastic’ poem, popularised by male Romantic poets as John Keats in “To a Grecian Urn” (1819) or P.B. Shelley in “On the Medusa of Leonardo Da Vinci” (1819), seem to reaffirm the notion of the woman as aesthetic object and of the man as observer or contemplator. Traditionally, the poems that associate the verbal and the visual tend to establish a tension between the act of looking and the act of reading, which in turn accentuates the objectification of the woman verbally represented on the page. But if the theories about the interaction of verbal and visual artistic media are as old as poetry itself (Horace’s Ut pictura poesis), the notion that the ‘ekphrastic’ process can imply the control and possession of the woman represented in that work of art is relatively recent. This paper proposes to analyse the way in which contemporary British women’s poetry, embodied by such diverse authors as Stevie Smith, Lynette Roberts, Liz Lochhead and Carol Ann Duffy, contested and re-used the technique of ekphrasis in order to adapt it to its own purposes. The respective works of Lochhead and Duffy not only revise the traditional representation of woman through art history but also suggest the verbal as a form of revision, a reconfiguration of the visual and of the limitations that it often imposes. In turn, Smith’s work suggests the importance and the ambivalence of the act of seeing, it is a mixed art that uses the friction between the visual and the verbal (rushed sketching and parallel commentary) as a deliberate strategy of contestation. Roberts, as an assumed painter and poet, insists on the separation of the several media that she utilises, sensing that her profusely coloured verbal art should evoke the visual without recurring to the illustration as such. These women poets and artists seem, therefore, to reconfigure and problematize the supremacy of the verbal through the strategic use of the visual in their own art.