Transculturalism, Transformation and the Visual Arts in Contemporary British Women’s Poetry

Abstract

This article establishes the works of women poets in the UK, especially those of non-white and mixed-race ancestries, as major players in poetic ekphrasis. Ekphrasis has been defined as ‘the verbal representation of a visual representation’ (Heffernan 3). Building on the critical studies of the ekphrases by twentieth-century women poets, this article recognizes the increasingly multicultural landscape of contemporary British ekphrastic poetry and engages in detailed studies of the ekphrastic poems from Grace Nichols’s Picasso, I Want My Face Back (2009) and Pascale Petit’s What the Water Gave Me: Poems after Frida Kahlo (2010). The two case studies demonstrate how women poets of non-white and mixed-race ancestries return to engaging with art from a diasporic perspective or art from a foreign culture and to exploring the potential and limits of art as a life-, self- and trauma-transmuting agent. The article simultaneously reveals the diverse purposes of ekphrasis in contemporary poetry, as seen in the ekphrastic practices of Nichols, Petit and other women poets.

Keywords:

• contemporary poetry
• transculturalism
• transformation
• woman of colour
• mixed-race woman
• ekphrasis

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to Elsa Braekkan Payne for introducing Pascale Petit’s poetry to me and Hugh Haughton for guiding me through the initial stage of my ongoing ekphrastic journey. I also need to thank Pascale Petit for her continuous support.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article was originally published with errors, which have now been corrected in the online version. Please see Correction (https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2023.2224641)

Notes

1 Others include Catherine Paul, with Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore, Stein (2002), and Barbara K. Fischer, with Museum Meditations: Reframing Ekphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry (2006). See also Hedley's edited volume In the Frame: Women's Ekphrastic Poetry from Marianne Moore to Susan Wheeler (2009).

2 ‘Feminist ekphrasis’, as Loizeaux has defined it, can be written by men; and Nichols’s feminist ekphrasis based on Picasso’s portraits of Dora Maar is preceded by that of Irving Feldman in his 1964 poem ‘Portrait de Femme’, which describes Maar in Picasso’s art as ‘poked fun at, feeling doubtless’ but ironically ‘honored’ by the ‘satirist’ (Feldman 1964: 188).

3 The descriptions are adapted from Kahlo’s own words (‘The crash bounced us forward and a handrail pierced me the way a sword pierces a bull’) and those of her then-lover Alejandro Gómez Arias (‘Frida was totally nude’ and ‘the gold fell all over the bleeding body of Frida’) (Herrera 1989: 48-49).

4 There is now a ‘largely female sub-tradition of ekphrastic writing based on the art and biography of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo’ (Huen 2019: 3). For instance, in The Stinking Rose (1995), the Indian poet Sujata Bhatt meditates upon the colour black by referring to Kahlo’s use of the colour: ‘how black the hairs of your monkey/especially in Fulang-Chang and I’ (Bhatt 30).