Ekphrastic Writing by Janée J. Baugher

Wednesday, January 01, 2020 11:52 AM | Debbi Lester (Administrator)


After Allison Collins’ 2002 painting, “Steptoe Butte”


The squares of yellows and oranges like a library—all angles in their places until an unsuspecting hand…a melding, a greeting of hand to angle, of that which is fresh and sinewy and pale to the stacks, a landscape of yellow boxes and orange boxes amid a landscape of green expanse and lavender above. Who lingers here and who drives through. Who knows how to mix the rhythm of green—that undulation of grass not yet harvestable for straw, but plumbing in nutrients, hay perhaps, grain or crops, those that someone nods to on his way to the city where cement stacks ride on brick and the sky turns a pink some nights because of the smog, and it makes him recall the purity of a lavender sky astride the velvety green of field, makes him recall the symmetry of these shapes like books on the shelf of his own body.



Janée J. Baugher

Janée J. Baugher is the author of two ekphrastic poetry collections, The Body’s Physics and Coördinates of Yes. Her poetry and prose have been published in Tin House, The Writer’s Chronicle, Boulevard, NANO Fiction, Nimrod, and The Southern Review, among other places, and sheteaches at Richard Hugo House. In autumn 2020, McFarland will publish her academic book, Ekphrastic Writing: A Guide to Visual-Art-Influenced Poetry, Nonfiction, and Fiction.

   
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