It's that time, last semester of my MA at Georgetown. I'm part of the group that gets to try out the new way to earn a degree here, with a final capstone project "e-portfolio." I've been working on ekphrasis for about a year, writing on ekphrasic works by Elizabeth Bishop and CD Wright, working on ekphrasic poems for my chapbook
Fugue in the Key of Machine, and nonfiction pieces. What is left for my capstone? I could, and probably will, revise my academic work to submit it to literary journals that accept such pieces. But for my capstone I'm debating between two more creative projects.
1. Video-Poem
2. Web-comic
"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...
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