Ekphrasis, photography, and ethical strategies of witness: poetic responses to Emmett Till

ABSTRACT

Photographs that bear witness to the violence and suffering of history clearly hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for contemporary poets, as the vast body of poetic ekphrases of such images attests. In writing such poems, however, poets are confronted with fraught ethical and aesthetic questions, including: How can the ekphrastic poem empathise and engage aesthetically and ethically with the suffering of others? How can the poet write in a position of witness when absent from the event itself? What techniques, stances and other strategies can the ekphrastic poem deploy to testify to the abject photograph? This article addresses these questions via the timely case study of poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, a subject of renewed interest in the wake of the furore surrounding artist Dana Schutz’s contentious 2017 ekphrastic painting Open Casket. This article considers poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of Till by contemporary poets Kevin Young and R.T. Smith, and identifies metapoeticism—drawing attention to the poem’s status as a poem, and to the poet’s necessarily piecemeal and partial knowledge of the event—as a key strategy that fosters ethical engagement with the abject image.

KEYWORDS:

• Ekphrasis
• poetry
• photography
• Emmett Till
• ethics
• metapoeticism

Acknowledgement

Extracts from ‘Dar He’, Outlaw Style: Poems by R.T. Smith © 2007 by The University of Arkansas Press. Reprinted with the permission of the publishers, www.uapress.com. Extracts from Kevin Young's poem ‘Money Road’ (first published in The New Yorker) are being reprinted with the permission of Kevin Young.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Sarah Holland-Batt’s most recent book of poems, The Hazards (UQP), won the 2016 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry, and was shortlisted for the New South Wales Premier’s Kenneth Slessor Prize, the AFAL John Bray Memorial Poetry Award, the Queensland Literary Awards Judith Wright Calanthe Award, and the Western Australian Premier’s Book Awards. She is the recipient of the W.G. Walker Memorial Fulbright Scholarship, fellowships from Yaddo and MacDowell colonies in the United States, the Australia Council Literature Residency at the B.R. Whiting Studio in Rome, and a Sidney Myer Creative Fellowship, among other honours. She is Editor of The Best Australian Poems 2017, and the poetry editor of Island.

ORCID

Sarah Holland-Batt http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6471-7738