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Sarah Hollan-Batt

Published source: Holland-Batt, Sarah (2018) Ekphrasis, photography, and ethical strategies of witness: poetic responses to Emmett Till. New Writing, 15(4), pp. 466-477.

Abstract

Photographs that bear witness to the violence and suffering of history clearly hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for contemporary poets, as the vast body of poetic ekphrases of such images attests. In writing such poems, however, poets are confronted with fraught ethical and aesthetic questions, including: how can the ekphrastic poem empathise and engage aesthetically and ethically with the suffering of others? How can the poet write in a position of witness when absent from the event itself? What techniques, stances and other strategies can the ekphrastic poem deploy to testify to the abject photograph? This article addresses these questions via the timely case study of poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, a subject of renewed interest in the wake of the furor surrounding artist Dana Schutz’s contentious 2017 ekphrastic painting Open Casket. This article considers poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of Till by contemporary poets Kevin Young and R.T. Smith, and identifies metapoeticism— drawing attention to the poem’s status as a poem, and to the poet’s necessarily piecemeal and partial knowledge of the event—as a key strategy that fosters ethical engagement with the abject image.

Keywords: ekphrasis; poetry; photography, Emmett Till; ethics; metapoeticism

1. The Documentary Photograph as Ekphrastic Subject

Ekphrasis is undergoing a revival at present among contemporary writers (Krauth and Bowman 2017), who are increasingly drawn towards the photograph, a subject of ‘very recent lineage’ (Hollander 1995, 69) in the long history of the ekphrastic mode. In particular, documentary photographs that bear witness to conflict, violence and human suffering hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for poets, as they rob the viewer of ‘the alibi of ignorance’, and ‘demand not just our interest but our response’ (Linfield 2010, 46). Yet the photograph poses unique aesthetic and ethical challenges for the ekphrastic poet—challenges that arise from the photograph’s simultaneous status as both art object and document (Jussim 1989, 17). This article reports on the ethical challenges inherent in ekphrasis of photographs, and examines identifies key strategies contemporary poets adopt in order to undertake poethical ekphrasis of photography. The photograph, unlike the painting or the sculpture, makes claims to veracity and reality: the viewer ‘can never deny that the thing has been there’ (Barthes 1980, 76); as Sontag says, ‘from being “out there,” the world comes to be “inside” photographs’ (1977, 80). Consequently, at first blush, the photograph seemingly eludes Heffernan’s seminal definition of ekphrasis as ‘verbal representation of graphic representation’ (1991, 299): Photography marshalled into the ekphrasis process something other than painting, etching and sculpture art forms: convincingly, photography put a

‘reproduction’ of reality itself – seemingly without second-handedness – into the minds of viewers. (Krauth and Bowman 2017, 5) While the photograph has an aura of truth and verisimilitude, it is as much a representation as any painting or sculpture. Its artistic, aesthetic and compositional qualities assure its status as an art object, even while it makes claims to truth that other mediums do not. Sitting at the uneasy nexus of evidence and art, the photograph, like the painting, is ‘neither a real object nor an imaginary object’ (Barthes 1985, 150). The photograph has been revolutionary as a democratic journalistic tool that has conveyed the scale of twentieth century atrocities to a distant public in a way that would have been unthinkable a century ago, but also a source of distinct discomfort among critics who have documented its rise. Among the most serious critiques levelled at the documentary photograph is that it is pornographic (Sontag 2003, 85), bombarding the viewer with a spectacle that incites either excitement or detachment from the events it depicts. This conception of photography argues that the photograph has done more to inure us in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to violence than to awaken us to the reality of suffering (Sontag 1977, 20-1). Barbie Zelizer agrees, stating that photographs of the injured or dead ‘achieve what [they should] stifl[e]— atrocity’s normalisation’ (Zelizer 1998, 212). Compounding these concerns is the secondary question of the photograph’s inherent ahistoricity and amorality, its dependency on how it is ‘identified or misidentified; that is, on words’ (Sontag 2003, 29). Despite its ‘seemingly intrinsic bias toward realistic representation’ (Jussim 1989, 12), the photograph is ‘contingent’ (Barthes 1980, 34) insofar as it exists without a caption, date or place to anchor it to its historical moment. As John Berger says, ‘all photographs are ambiguous…[and] have been taken out of a continuity’ (1995, 91). The photograph poses profound ethical conundrums for both photographer and viewer which are magnified in the case of documentary photographs of pain and suffering:

The ‘taking’ of human subjects by a photographer (or a writer) is a concrete social

encounter, often between a damaged, victimised and powerless individual and a

relatively privileged observer, often acting as the ‘eye of power’, the agent of some

social, political or journalistic institution (Mitchell 1994, 288). The subject’s privacy is invaded, often without consent, at a moment of vulnerability, injury, or death; the corresponding image endures, reminding us ultimately of the ‘death of the photographed’ (Cadava 1995, 224). Sontag defines the power dynamic even more bluntly: ‘to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed’ (1977, 4). Photographs of the dead and dying pose the most acute ethical questions, both for the journalist or photographer, who must often decide whether to intervene or to document, but also for the viewer, who must ask why they are looking, and the ethics of doing so. The ethical quandary documentary photographs pose reach further degrees of complication when considering the added layer of interpretation and artifice of the ekphrastic encounter. If ekphrastic texts are intrinsically ‘about learning to see, to read visual texts, [then equally] they also concern domination and power’ (DuBois 2007, 46); the ekphrastic poem affords the poet hindsight, a privileged perspective on the past borne of distance and time. Poets are often compelled to write ekphrastic responses to documentary photographs, invariably (although not always) writing in the position of a witness to an event neither experienced nor witnessed firsthand. John Berger articulated the ethical conundrum of ekphrasis most powerfully:

In the relation between and photograph and words, the photograph begs for an

interpretation, and the words usually supply it. The photograph, irrefutable as

evidence but weak in meaning, is given a meaning by the words. And the words…are

given specific authenticity by the irrefutability of the photograph. Together the two

then become very powerful; an open question appears to have been fully answered

(1995, 92). The stakes for the ekphrastic poet are high. In seeking to respond and ‘lend a voice to suffering’ (Adorno 1973, 17-18), the ekphrastic poet risks not only crassness or sentimentality, but charges of unethically appropriating the image for their own artistic effect and gain, and of attempting to monolithically impose meaning onto the image. This poses the question: how might the poet engage with the abject and traumatic history such a photograph testifies to without risking gratuitous sensationalism? What techniques, stances and other strategies do poets deploy in writing about the testimony of abject photographs? How can the ekphrastic poet, to borrow Sontag’s phrase, comprehend and represent the pain of others? This article seeks to answer these questions by looking at the timely case study of poetic ekphrases of the iconic post-mortem photograph of lynching victim Emmett Till, a frequent subject of ekphrasis in literature and art brought into renewed debate by the recent exhibition of American artist Dana Schutz’s contentious ekphrastic painting Open Casket at the 2017 Whitney Biennale (Tomkins 2017). In particular, I examine two recent contemporary ekphrastic poems that respond to the historic image of Till’s body—Kevin Young’s ‘Money Road’ and R.T. Smith’s ‘Dar He’—and identify poetic strategies at work in each that allow ekphrasis to move beyond re- presentation of representation, and into engaged witness. I argue that metapoeticism—a relatively under-theorised form of the metaliterary (Casas 2011)— offers new possibilities for ethical witness in the ekphrasis of the photograph. 2. Appropriation and Representation: Emmett Till and the Post-Mortem Photograph

In March 2017, a heated controversy broke out in the American art world over the Whitney’s exhibition of a painting by white artist Dana Schutz called Open Casket, depicting the mutilated body of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till. Till was fourteen years old when he was brutally lynched in Money, Mississippi after buying a pack of bubblegum at Bryant’s Grocery and purportedly whistling at a white woman named Carolyn Bryant, an accusation which Bryant herself recently recanted (Peréz-Peña 2017). Schutz’s painting—which rendered Till’s severely maimed face in a smeary abstract impasto—references the historic postmortem photograph of Till, taken at a Chicago mortuary by photographer David Jackson for Jet magazine (Harold and DeLuca 2005, 278). The iconic photograph was taken at the request of Till’s mother Mamie Till Mobley (Anderson 55), who stated that she wanted ‘all the world’ to witness what had happened to her son (Jet 9). The post-mortem image of Till is unique among photographs of lynching victims, which were overwhelmingly taken by participating members of the violent mob to reaffirm the white supremacist ideology, emphasise black guilt and criminality, and to delight in the spectacle of the maimed black body (McTaggart 2014, 794); significantly, the image of Till does not document the lynching itself but rather the aftermath, and was taken at the behest of his family. Mobley’s insistence that her family’s trauma be made public ‘allowed a body that meant nothing to the criminal-justice system to stand as evidence’ (Rankine 2015). Jackson’s photograph was published to an initial audience of 400,000 in Jet, and subsequently became an archetypal image of American racism and a galvanising moment in the civil rights movement (M. Berger 2017). The Jet story also featured a photograph of a smiling Till with his mother; consequently, as Shawn Michelle Smith (2015) notes, ‘paired images of Till are iconic’; it is impossible to see ‘the first image without conjuring the second’ (23). The paired photographs that have come to signify Till’s lynching, however, contain a void (Goldsby 1996, 263): they do not show his murder, which occurs in the ellipsis between them; the violence of his lynching ‘remains unseen, forever caught somewhere between the two photographs’ (S.M. Smith 2015, 25). The disjointed pairing was presented to the 10,000 mourners who visited Till’s open casket in Chicago (Goldsby 1996, 250): taped to the lid of Till’s coffin were three images of Till, smiling and dressed for Christmas the year prior, accompanied by Till’s body, ‘in all its grotesque abjection’ (Harold and DeLuca 2005, 79). Schutz’s painting Open Casket joins a long line of ekphrastic literary works that have engaged with, represented and re-presented the photograph of Till across many mediums, stretching back to the immediate protest works in the weeks after Till’s lynching, including Langston Hughes and Jobe Huntley’s song ‘The Money,

Mississippi Blues,’ (Kolin 2009, 455), to Bob Dylan’s 1962 song ‘Death of Emmett Till,’ and poems by leading African-American poets Gwendolyn Brooks, T.R. Skelton and Hughes. These initial responses have been joined by a vast number of responses by poets including Audre Lorde, Yusef Komunyakaa, Kevin Young, Roger Reeves, Phillip C. Kolin, Donald Platt, Marilyn Nelson, Quan Barry, Sam Cornish, R.T. Smith, Cornelius Eady, Wanda Coleman, Douglas Kearney, and Elizabeth Alexander, among others (Metress 2008; Cushway 2016). In her painting, Schutz portrayed Till as he appeared in the post-mortem photograph, and was accused by artist Hannah Black in a widely-disseminated open letter of ‘transmut[ing] Black suffering into profit and fun,’ (cited in Z. Smith 2017), blocked from view by activists inside the gallery wearing shirts that said ‘Black Death Spectacle’ (Tomkins 2017), boycotted, and criticised for its ahistorical and insensitive appropriation of the historic photograph, including by art historian Maurice Berger, who called Open Casket inscrutable and even grotesquely decorative. It lives outside of historical context….[and] reads like it was made in a historical and cultural vacuum. It’s missing the diligence necessary to grasp the original photo’s cultural and social meaning (M. Berger 2017). The Schutz controversy opens up important questions for poets that are both particular to the highly charged and emotive image of Till and the associated questions regarding race, representation and appropriation of black suffering, but also speaks more broadly to how ekphrasis may witness the photograph, particularly the documentary photograph. If, as Foucault (2002, 9) says, ‘it is in vain that we say what we see; what we see never resides in what we say,’ then what can the ekphrastic poem add to our understanding of historic images while undertaking Maurice Berger’s ‘necessary diligence’? How can the poem, as Zadie Smith (2017) asks, ‘go deeper’? I turn now to two contemporary poems that illuminate new possibilities of an ethical ekphrastic response.

3. Poets Respond to Emmett Till: Kevin Young and R.T. Smith

Kevin Young’s (2016) poem ‘Money Road’ stages the ekphrastic encounter during a road trip to Money, Mississippi, ostensibly taken as a pilgrimage to find itinerant blues singer-songwriter ‘Robert Johnson’s muddy / maybe grave.’ Young’s lines are inflected with the syncopated rhythms and enjambments characteristic of his blues poems; these formal qualities immediately place the poem in conversation with historical blues songs written about Till such as Langston Hughes’s ‘Money, Mississippi Blues.’ Young’s poem proceeds by digressions and riffs that allow the poem to teeter between two temporalities: that of the present-day road trip, and the violent and traumatic history of the landscape the speaker and his companions drive through. The poem approaches its ekphrasis of the image of Till slowly, building up dread as the car speeds through a seemingly contemporary landscape of ‘Bud & Louisiana / Hot Sauce’ that gives way to a persistent haunting in the shape of ‘little / ghosts of snow, falling faint // as words.’ As the road trip continues past evidence of the antebellum past in the form of ‘grand houses / & porte cocheres’, the speaker notices ‘markers of what’s / no more there’: he sees that even the ‘underpass / bears a [memorial] name’, and says, seemingly flippantly, ‘it’s all / too grave’. But the pun on ‘grave’—meaning both serious but also the site of interment—exposes history’s looming presence. This ghosting of the past reaches an absurd iteration when the poet drives past sham simulacra of ‘fake / sharecropper homes’ and ‘cotton planted / in strict rows’ for tourists. This gentrified, staged version of history provokes the speaker to enter the poem in first person for the first time, calling the polite spectacle ‘a quiet // snow globe of pain / I want to shake.’ The poet’s jolting reaction against the staging of history prompts him to turn directly to the ghost that has haunted the poem thus far: Till. ‘While the flakes fall,’ the speaker tells us, ‘like ash we race / the train to reach the place / Emmett Till last // whistled or smiled / or did nothing.’ The poem’s syntax speeds up to replicate the sudden and urgent incursion of history; the word ‘race’ hangs, laden, on its enjambment before the shock of the next line, where it is clear that the speaker means to hurry, rather than race as a verb, that is, we are raced, we perform race. The boundaries between living and dead and present and past begin to converge via the paradoxical figure of snow, which is simultaneously embodied and bodiless, floating and insistent, urgent and slow. At this contingent point, where history haunts the present, the speaker addresses Till himself in the second person, reminding him of the ‘men / who yanked you out / your uncle’s home / into the yard, into oblivion.’ The speaker lingers on the huge gin fan that was ‘lashed & anchored // to [Till’s] beaten body’—the same gin fans, he says, that ‘still turn’ in the present, signifying an ongoing threat. Young’s ekphrasis is a radically metapoetic one: his poem constantly reminds the reader of the intervening years between the now of reading and the time of the photograph, while bringing the two temporalities into continual contact. Once the speaker has shaken the ‘quiet // snow globe of pain,’ stirring up the past and bringing it into forceful contact with the present, he is finally able to directly address the image of Till’s corpse itself and the abject horror of his injuries directly:

….Shot, dumped,

dredged, your face not even a mask—a marred,

unspared, sightless stump—

all your mother insists

we must see to know

What they did

To my baby. The true

Tallahatchie twisting

South, the Delta

Death’s second cousin

Once removed. You down

For only the summer, to leave

The stifling city where later

You will be waked,

Displayed, defiant,

A dark glass.

There are things

that cannot be seen

but must be. Buried

barely, this place

no one can keep—

Young’s decision to directly address Till throughout the section that describes his postmortem photograph reminds us, again, that while Till is dead he is ‘Buried / barely.’ The second-person address conjures Till as both the ever-absent and ever- present interlocutor of the poem. Till’s paradoxical liminality is also emphasised in the poem’s description of the act of looking. ‘We must see to know’, Mamie Till tells us in a verbatim quote, but seeing is not easy; as the speaker says, ‘there are things / that cannot be seen / but must be,’ and the knowledge that comes from Till’s death is impartial and unfinished. ‘Yet how to kill / a ghost?’ the speaker asks rhetorically, and later, answers his own question with ambivalence: ‘I don’t / yet know.’ Young’s poem concludes with a benediction or prayer of sorts, the last line of which finally breaks the poem’s strict form with a single-line stanza:

Now winter will out—

the snow bless

& kiss

this cursed earth.

Or is it cussed? I don’t

yet know. Let the cold keep

still your bones.

This ending suggests a complicated knot of meanings bound up in the figures of winter and snow: their cold signifies the speaker’s grief, Till’s chilling injuries, and Carolyn Bryant’s and the perpetrators’ unspeakable callousness, but also a benevolence that will ‘bless / & kiss // this cursed earth,’ and will ‘keep / still’ Till’s bones. Young’s usage of the verb ‘keep’ is significant: Till here is both kept in the sense of being preserved and remembered in the photograph, but also frozen in his death, kept from living, forever ‘still’ in his bones. And even at the poem’s close, Young emphasises the unknown, unknowable and lost history of Till’s death: it is unclear whether the earth is ‘cursed’ or ‘cussed’, in the same way as it is forever unclear what Till said to Bryant, whether he ‘cussed’ her or was ‘cursed’ by the circumstances of his race and his time. Ultimately, for Young the ekphrastic poem is a space where witnessing takes place while absolution, resolution or conclusion do not; the ekphrastic poet re-presents the past, and makes it present, while always metapoetically acknowledging his own role as a latecomer to the history he testifies to. The second poem considered here, R.T. Smith’s (2007, 9-13) ‘Dar He’—a poem which takes its title from Mose Wright’s widely-reported but now-debunked (R.T. Smith 2007, 9) courtroom identification of Roy Bryant as the perpetrator of Till’s lynching—offers a markedly different ekphrasis of the image of Till. Unlike Young, Smith is not African-American; rather, he is a white poet who witnessed the events of Till’s death and the trial on a ‘flickering new TV’ as a seven-year old child, in the company of suburban parents who, he tells us, even now ‘have no love / for any race darker than a tanned Caucasian.’ Smith’s poem begins with the adult poet, alone and in a contemplative mood, listening to ‘wild tribes of cicadas’ and drinking ‘expensive / whiskey’ at night, serenely ‘longing / for the lost energies of innocence’ (9). A wasp sting pricks the poet and reminds him that it is ‘nearly half a century’ since ‘that nightmare / in Money, Mississippi’; the poet rehashes the events of Till’s murder, describing the injuries Till sustained during his murder with steadfast realism, interrupted by a swiftly-dismissed comforting fantasy about the beauty of the gin fan (9). Till, he notes, was

…lashed

with barbed wire to a cotton gin fan whose vanes

might have to him seemed petals of some metal flower,

had Bobo – as [Till’s] friends called him – ever seen it. (9)

The speaker of Smith’s poem learns about Till’s brutal death while surrounded by the suburban comforts of a ‘fine dinner’; his parents’ views, however, are that ‘the boy should have been smarter and known never // to step out of his place, especially that far South’ (10). Recalling the callous views of his parents from his present-day vantage point, the speaker feels the ‘stigma of such personal history’, and questions his own acquiescence and uninquisitive mind as a child: ‘Did I / even guess, did I ask how a word or stray note could give birth / to murder?’ The speaker acknowledges that it was only the doggedness of Mamie Till—‘without whom / it would have all passed in the usual secrecy’ (10)—that ensured that Till’s death still haunts him, due to the publication of the photograph of Till’s body, ‘maimed beyond recognition,’ in Jet. Yet the somewhat recapitulative tenor of the poem, with its restatement of historical fact, takes a turn as the poet tells us he is still haunted by the way in which the trial of Till’s murderers ‘played out in my mind like a scene / from some reverse To Kill a Mockingbird – or worse, / a courtroom fiasco from a Faulkner novel’:

…the prosecutor asked Mr. Wright if he could find

in the room the intruder who snatched his nephew

out of bed that night, and the old man – a great uncle,

really – fought back his sobs and pointed at the accused,

his finger like a pistol aimed for the heart. ‘Dar he,’

he said, and the syllables yet echo into this raw night

like a poem that won’t be silenced… (11-12)

The poet’s comprehension and imagining of the events are tinged with metapoetic and filmic echoes, drawing our attention to the way in which, more broadly, his understanding of Till’s lynching and the trial have been mediated through visual media and literary narratives. From the ‘flickering’ television coverage of the trial to Mose Wright’s testimony, with its unreal air of a courtroom drama, the poet suggests, our entire comprehension of the events of Till’s lynching are already re-presentations, already staged and dramatised in various ways. The echoing of Mose Wright’s accusation, ‘Dar he,’ as he identified the perpetrator, comes to resemble the chorus of ‘seventeen-year’ cicadas, who are buried underground; as a child, the poet tells us, he called

The insect infestation ferros, thinking of Hebrew

captivity in Egypt and believing they were chanting

free us… (11-12)

The cicadas’ underground hibernation is figured as captivity and mass slavery; their sawing call is a cry for liberation that recalls the vast movement for civil rights that swelled following Till’s death. Past and present begin to fuse in the poet’s mind: he images ‘that some fifty years back’ the cicadas formed ‘a river of sound all night extending lament // to lamentation’ as Till was murdered, and comes to feel increasingly uneasy about sitting ‘under sharp / stars which could mark in heaven the graves // of tortured boys’ (12-3). This discomfort culminates in a feeling of implication and guilt, not only as a passive bystander or witness to history, but a participant:

…I have been less than innocent this entire

life and never gave a second thought to this:

even the window fan cooling my bedroom

stirs the air with blades, and how could anyone

in a civilised nation ever be condemned for

narrowing breath to melody between the teeth,

and if this is an exercise in sham shame I am

feeling, some wish for absolution, then I have to

understand the wave of nausea crossing me,

this conviction that it is not simple irony

making the whir of voices from the pine trees now seem to say Dar he, Dar he, Dar he. (13)

The poet moves from the position of passive bystander—a child who digested the story secondhand via unsympathetic parents and the white media—to guilty party who has benefitted all his life from his whiteness. The fan blades in his bedroom become, paranoically, the blades of the gin fan hung around Till’s neck, and the cicadas’ buzzing becomes the chanting of Wright’s accusatory phrase. Smith’s poem, like Young’s, shows the poet intervening into the scene of the ekphrastic image as a witness, but unlike Young, whose poem testifies to the horror of the event itself, ensuring that the horrors of the past are not buried under the obliterating snow, Smith witnesses his own role as a participant in a white culture that once perpetrated these injustices during his lifetime. The poet’s ‘conviction that this is not simple irony’ is both a conviction in the sense of a belief but also a sentence; he is convicted of his ‘safe face’ which has allowed him to take a passive and inactive role in a system and culture that allowed Till’s death to occur.

Towards an Ethical Response: Metapoeticism and the Temporality of the Photograph

In these two poems by Young and Smith, metapoeticism emerges as a key technique via which each poet negotiates the complex challenges of responding to a documentary photograph. Metapoeticism can be broadly understood as reflexive and self-conscious movement within the poem that draws attention to the poem’s constructedness and its status as a poem; critical to the metapoetic enterprise is analytical language, reflexive language, and critical language (Casas 2011, 8). Metapoetry ‘orient[s] itself in practice to unmask power and its inscriptions in language’; chief among the powers it seeks to unmask is the poet’s own authority (Casas 2011, 8). Thus, in the metapoetic ekphrastic act, the poet not only tacitly acknowledges the ‘unbridgeable hermeneutic gap between poetry and the real’ (Barry 2002, 157) but overtly allows the difficulties inherent in the encounter to enter into the body of the poem itself. The poems accede to the impossibility of their task as they are in the moment of executing it: photographic ekphrasis, they suggest, is simultaneously necessary and beyond the bounds of possibility. The question of how the contemporary poet witnesses abject history in the ekphrastic poem becomes the subject of the ekphrastic poem alongside the photograph itself. Metapoetic ekphrasis casts the encounter between poet and photograph as one that is mediated through an individual subjectivity, and thus piecemeal, idiosyncratic and partial. The metapoetic turn in the ekphrastic poem shatters any illusion of ekphrasis as an act of simple translation, reframing it as an ultimately more vexed and complex enterprise. The second strategy at work in these poems is a corollary of the first: each stages the ekphrastic encounter as a site of multiple converging temporalities, where the present is haunted or ghosted by the past, and the past is inflected with the present. This approach allows the ekphrastic poem to position the photograph’s meaning as contingent, and evolving rather than hegemonic; it exists and means in multiple temporalities at once. Rather than seeking to simply replicate the image in its original context—as Schutz’s painting Open Casket arguably did—these poets acknowledge the belated vantage point from which they are undertaking their act of ekphrasis, and the lacunae and silences in their re-presentation of history, ‘the abyss between the moment recorded and the moment of looking’ (J. Berger 1982, 89). The multiple temporalities inherent in the metapoetic ekphrasis allow the poet to counter Maurice Berger’s concern that the ekphrastic work not exist ‘in a historical and cultural vacuum’ by positioning the photograph firmly in the present, while simultaneously also considering its ‘original cultural and social meaning’ (M. Berger 2017). Metapoetic ekphrasis, then, reckons with the past from a contemporary vantage point, locating a photograph’s meaning somewhere between the two. This speaks to the fundamental condition of the photograph as an aggregate of past and present, a simultaneous medium which does not so much stop time as obliterate it (Jussim 1989, 51). Metapoetic ekphrasis draws together the poet in the present and the time of the photograph, which is both dated to the instant of its taking, but also timeless, eternally present. In this way, the metapoetic ekphrasis replicates the condition of the photograph itself as, as Barthes (1980, xi) defined it, as a document of ‘witness, but a witness to something that is no more.’ Acknowledging the poet will forever be separated by space and time from the instant of the photograph, metapoetic ekphrasis suggests that while photographs speak to us, and we speak back, the conversation always fails. Sontag (2003, 125-126) says these dead are supremely uninterested in the living: in those who took their lives; in witnesses—and in us…We don't get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like. This may be true, but these metapoetic responses resoundingly demonstrate that verisimilitude is not always the object of ekphrasis. Metapoeticism necessarily undermines and critiques any claims ekphrasis may make regarding its own authenticity or authority as a translation or replication of the past. In doing so, it offers the contemporary poet an ethical space in which to encounter history. References

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