EKPHRASIS MAGAZINE
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NOTE: If your piece isn't similar at all to these in form, content, structure, style, etc. or responds to a different kind of art than these, do not worry! These are just a few samples of the vast expanse of ekphrastic art, and we share them to better illustrate the term for those who may be unfamiliar with it.
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Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
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About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.


In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Picture
Red Canna, Georgia O'Keeffe

Having a Coke With You (excerpt)
Frank O'Hara 
                                                                                 I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together for
the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse
                     it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

Picture
Picture
The Fall of Icarus, Pieter Breughel

What are the consequences of silence?​
Bhanu Kapil

53. Red Canna, I see you. Edge of. What I saw: a flower blossoming, in slow motion. Not specific enough. Okay. No. Cannot. Red Canna, I veer into you. I am not in one straight line. Red Canna, I see you. 1904. The University of Arizona Museum of Art. Opening in slow motion: are you okay? Are you okay? Can you hear me? (I can't)

That's how it begins: impenetrable.
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The book of two words I happen to see, out of the corner of my eye, on a wall. Such slowness.

These words took years to arrive.

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The Polish Rider, Rembrandt van Rijn 


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Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, Marcel Duchamp

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