Between Ekphrasis and Memoir: 2 Ambiguating Poems

Ekphrasis “address[es] – and sometimes challenge[s] – the great divide between spatial and temporal experience” (Hirsch, 2014, p. 196). Traditional ekphrasis is verbal description of (encounters with) a haptic/visual object. Memoir involves articulating in words both the contents of remembered experience and the experience of remembering. This pair of poems takes a strictly ekphrastic artefact and juxtaposes it with an autobiographical, “situated” poetic artefact. Thus counterpointed, the definitions of each, as ostensibly straightforward ekphrasis or memoir, become unstable. Attempts to disambiguate the modes of pure ekphrasis or detailed memoir falter at a close reading of the actual techniques mobilised in each case. As Kaplan (2009) notes, citing Corn, “many contemporary examples of ekphrasis are broader and ‘tend to unite ekphrasis with the autobiographical tradition’” (n.p.). Adding this to Hirsch’s observation (above), we argue that this pair of auto-ekphrastic poems tests and complicates the boundaries between these modes, to further query: what constitutes the representational per se? As a practice-led inquiry into memory’s relation to “current” experience, it returns the creative writer (or critic) to the philosophical contention that we dwell almost-exclusively in the representational, whether artwork or life – but also that art-making (as process) might permit glimpses of what subtends this register.