Elevated (Horror) Ekphrastic: A Look at “Blue Poles” by Elizabeth Rosell
An ekphrastic poem is a bit of a trickster. It may wear the guise of “buy one poem get one art piece free,” but it isn’t always the bargain one may think. I like to say an ekphrastic poem has hidden fees. The poem itself must stand alone as a poem while ensuring the referenced art isn’t merely decoration. Then there are choices. Responding to a popular piece means the writer must overcome certain familiarities. (My wife once said “Everyone knows why Bruce Wayne becomes Batman. Stop showing it!” Same energy.) On the other hand, responding to a relatively unknown piece may require a bit of exposition, sometimes slowing down the work. Balancing description, interpretation, and innovation while brilliantly paying homage to the artwork that inspired it, “Blue Poles” by Elizabeth Rosell stands out as an example of ekphrastic excellence.
At first glance the poem—inspired by the Jackson Pollock work of the same name—looks simple. With such frenetic work as Pollock’s, you may expect similar velocities: long lines like slashes on the page or perhaps a certain kind of jaggedness in spacing or alignment. Regardless of the relatively uniform line lengths, there’s an unnerving quality within them. The poem astutely brings out the violence of Pollock’s “action painting.” Rosell describes a scene of “medieval torture” where the poles are “people, strung up” with “Their heads turned to skulls.” The poem is a reaction to the painting almost as much as it is to the style of painting.
If Pollock’s painting captures the act of creation, Rosell’s poem manages to capture the mood of that kinetic and chaotic moment. There’s an intensity which the speaker almost revels in. From the repetition of “Drip, drip, drip” to the nearly playful “blah blah blah” (reminiscent of the “La, la, la” in “Music Swims Back to Me” by Anne Sexton), it almost feels joyfully unhinged. The poem may be frightening but doesn’t it feel like the poet had fun making it? The tone is intentionally muddled, too. And when I say “muddled” I mean in the way a bartender crushes fruits and herbs to make a delicious mess of flavors.
When I first looked at the poem, the nuts and bolts of Rosell’s work, I tried to make it grammatically conform to itself. All of it left me unbalanced. Things felt out of place. But whenever I’d add this or remove that, it didn’t feel right. It was like a scene in a horror movie (in the best way). I’d hang the cross on the wall or place the doll in the closet, next day the cross would be upside down, the doll sitting on a rocking chair watching me. I’d add a period or remove some questions marks, it resisted until I put everything back.
“Blue Poles” the poem is a terrifying vision of “Blue Poles” the painting. I don’t often find poetry that fits the function of horror as well as poetry but this one absolutely chills me. The imagery, the tone, the punctuation. The discord is played well in Rosell’s hands. Rereading the poem, looking at the painting by “Jack the Dripper” as Pollock was nicknamed, I begin to understand why Rosell found such violence here. The painting, Pollock, and the poem, all pull from the same creative and chaotic source but all are able to honor that source. “It looks random, but you meant it,” the poem concludes. It is clear Pollock and the poet both knew what they were doing all along.
