Skip to main content

Seagull: Symbolic Objects at Rest


Harnessing the Power of Symbolic Objects for Good

Some things I love about this photo:

1. Color
2. Allegorical Content
3. Center of Focus

Here is a palette of colors: aqua, deep cadet, dove gray, spackle white, matte steel, and yellow. Everything is cool, working toward a cohesive tone. It all belongs to the same landscape, a particular mood.

In this one image we have a seagull, an anchor, a boat, and the sea. All of these are literal things that are found in each other’s company, but they are all also supercharged with meaning when taken out of their ordinary context and say, for example, dropped into a Biblical quote or a Victorian morality story. What I love about this collection of symbols is that they act as themselves rather than the things they stand in for, so the immediate response is to the thing itself.

The center of focus on this photo is interesting—it works in some ways like a triptych. The seagull immediately gets attention, having the most animation, but the anchor is in the center of the photo. Behind the dull-colored anchor, the white muck that covers the boat is scraped away from a bright blue docking post.

My idea from this photo is a triptych, or a poem with three strong central images. I’d like to take a symbol, take it back to its literal object-ness, and surround it with two other objects from a scene that makes sense to its thing-ness. I think I’d put the weightiest symbolic thing in the middle, something alive in the first stanza, and a brilliant piece of landscape behind it. I’d be sure to fill in with details like texture (mud, grain, screen, dirt-spatter, nubble) and color.

Maybe I would suggest movement in the past, or movement about to happen, and name the poem “Still Life of a _____”

My example would be a wedding ring, a kitchen sink, and an insect on the window—maybe a grasshopper, a moth, or right now in Georgia, a pair of love bugs (which look a lot like two stink bugs doing it). Depending on which insect I gravitated toward, it would be a different poem. Right now I'm thinking, "Still Life of a Carpet Moth."



Thanks to Stock Xchange for the photo:http://www.sxc.hu/photo/602368
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock" Jayme Ringleb

"Self-Portrait as Medusa in Shock, " Jayme Ringleb, Puerto Del Sol Online, is such a lovely and challenging ekphrasis. I won't quote any of it, because there is this seductive kind of movement in the poem, like very classy striptease, a dance of veils, or the pulsing of a jellyfish, that when relaxed, its nearly transparent arms floating away from the body, allows you to see more clearly through what when held tightly concealed those mysterious internal structures. The layers of ekphrasis in this poem are constructed like a nesting doll, each stanza with a lovely similarity, a theme, but each leading more intimately to the interior. The poem begins in the natural world of the jellyfish, which is written over by classical myth that shares the creature's name, which in turn is compared to Biblical stories of resurrection, before the poem finally turns toward memoir. There the poem compares this idea of the classical Medusa, being confronted by her own fatal image t...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ghosts

After Cara Mujer some silences, like soured linens, the too long gone on uncleanness in dreams, smells become characters that speak and move one of you, in a house of so many empty rooms you offer but my child will not sleep a billowing curtain is some historical, hysterical woman in a red floral print she will not quit her haunting until a tall opera singer blasts the hallway with her clear supersonic voice one of you, you come to my house while it is being built, I have to wrestle the door moulding from your hands and ask you to leave one of you, I find you dressed as a teacher in the back pews of religious high school assembly with my old bible/computer science instructor, and I mutter through the sermon and the children ask me to leave these vapors and their faces take so long to wash out
Post a Comment
Read more

Poem on Poem Ekphrasis: Brian McHale's Feminist Reading of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet

In Brian McHale's The Obligation toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems , he starts his chapter on Susan Howe's The Europe of Trusts with a short introduction to the idea of silence of women and the canon, describing "Berryman's 'Homage'...as a kind of parable" of "the received version of literary historiography" in which women are silent or overwritten (205). McHale argues that Berryman's "poetic 'homage' to the precursor-poet consists in silencing her." (205) Anne Bradstreet , in "Upon a Fit of Sickness" writes, 'Bestow much cost there's nothing lost,/ to make salvation sure,/ O great's the gain, though got with pain, / comes by profession pure." In "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" , Berryman says as Bradstreet's persona "Hard and divided heaven! creases me. Shame /is failing. My breath is scented, and I throw / hostile glances towards God. " You mig...
1 comment
Read more