There is a certain intellectual ethos in Sara Nicholson’s April. And it’s hard for me to get a handle on the source for it. Is it the New Lyric style—how it feels conversant with its subject matter? Is it the subjects it approaches? Approaching topics like infinity or archetype? Like in the poem “A Crown for Iris,” she wonders aloud: “What is the infinity in infinitude?” Phrases like this are so natural to the work. She has such ease with complex topics. At the same time, I can read the poem for its light hold on irony, how it plays with infinite-type words and their simultaneously contradictory and complementary positions. I can also read it for its wonder. How it moves into surprise and then through it, confident the poet’s stance will find yet one more surprise to relate. There are so many ways to read Nicholson. And they’re all acting in harmony. It’s like how I wish understanding as an activity was for me. Where I could feel my understanding mind as a momentum and a firmness. And given this overwhelming authority in the book, I was a little cautious coming to the poems that could be read with an ekphrastic lens, especially the poem “The Goatherd and the Saint.”
But, then, I’m never sure I understand what an ekphrastic poem is supposed to be. According to the Poetry Foundation glossary, the ekphrastic poem is a “vivid description” of the scene in a work of art. I’ve also heard ekphrasis could be where the art acts as an objective correlative. What the poet might want to emotionally register about a state of mind finds parallel to the artwork described by the poem. Kind of like the “show don’t tell” method of writing, where the artwork is the “show.” I don’t often find either of these instances, though. In practice, I feel most poems endeavoring to be ekphrastic register the poet’s “response” to a work of art. “I was in an art museum, this art made me think of something, and then I realized something new.” A reductive characterization, perhaps. Or a redirect of Abrams’s “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” Substitute “art” for Abrams’s “nature.” Ekphrastic poems like this might aspire to be Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” but, in the end, they occupy a more casual realization. It’s just a day for poetry in the museum. Maybe I’m too obvious about how unenthusiastic I am for ekphrastic poems. Like many readers, I’m dissatisfied with formulaic poems. But I think I’m mainly reacting to poems that reduce visual art to the poet’s casual realization. Not that I’m looking only for profound ekphastic work. More that I want poems alert to the the playful registers available in visual art. From my reading, the formula-driven ekphrasis seems like a hard habit to break. Once poets have matched their poems to an art work, they can only hold the art in high esteem.
In Nicholson’s poems, however, the art feels dimensional. She is amongst the art, and also observes the art, and also situates the art as an object exhibited in a place, and the nature of that place changes by virtue of the fact that there is art there. For me, Nicholson’s poem “The Goatherd and the Saint” operates using a conventional ekphrastic level. But, then, the authority she had established in other poems carries over. This is the same poet who had endeavored to register the many ways infinity can be considered in this world. What is she going to think about art?
Not surprisingly, the poem is especially interested in composition versus focus. Like the infinite that might be observed in the infinitesimal, the detail in a painting can be analytically exhausted and still not have one meaning to settle on. The compositional focus in a Fragonard painting, one of her examples, can point directly to a sentimental meaning, but think of the type of people in this painting, who you, reader, might be in relation to them, how people from the time when this was painted would or (more likely) would not identify with them. As with “A Crown for Iris” and its measured investigation of the infinite, Nicholson’s ekphrasis is not about finding conclusion, it’s about her thinking and how when you’re thinking you can feel yourself being led to conclusion, but, as I think her poems would caution you, don’t take any conclusion as a final conclusion. More thinking is more pleasure. Yes, when I read her poems I feel the might of understanding, its firm, established state of mind. But think, conclusion would effectively withdraw me from that state of mind.
Of course, art need not exist for art’s sake alone. One of my favorite moments in “The Goatherd and the Saint” is when the poet considers herself looking at paintings in the Frick, the wealth that established the Frick, her complicity in sustaining that wealthy position with her $22 ticket price, and then the surprising coincidence that wealth is being represented in each of the paintings she’s writing about. And like the infinite in the infinitesimal, why wouldn’t anyone have thought of that before? It’s the substantiality of something that feels so indisputably evident, and, at the same time, it feels the poet was the first to discover it. That, for me, is Nicholson’s magical treatment of the ekhprastic.