"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 to the idea of memoir itself.
Ringleb's poem challenges the idea that self-examination and memoir are healing in his poem's recounting of the intense, identity-shattering shock of being outside one's self enough to see that self. Through this tangle of conflicting, layered, and tense glances, Ringleb enacts a moment of self-estrangement similar to that of one of Elizabeth Bishop's best, "In the Waiting Room." And like Bishop, the next and final movement is to reflect (HA! See what I did there) on the fragile nature of the interior self--a construct too easily shattered, in both poems, by a moment of ekphrasis, of seeing one's self "reflected" by the experience of identifying with the depiction of the other in art. For Bishop, this was when the speaker of the poem identifies herself with the women in the photographs in the National Geographic. For Ringleb, the reflection is more dizzyingly doubled--the speaker of the poem identifies with characters in stories, like that of Medusa's face beheld in the mirror-polished shield, who are stunned by seeing themselves.
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