Melanie Almeder wrote two seperate essays for Place of Mind. The Necessary Angel and This Tropic of Resemblances

The Necessary Angel

The conversation between artists and poets, between sound and image, is as ancient as the Anasazi/Hisatsinom rock drawings of Kokopelli, the flute player. In modern art and literary studies the term “ecphrasis” has come to describe poetry and art in conversation across time and culture. In western traditions, historians have traced what they believe is the inception of ecphrasis back to either Plato’s Phaedrus, or to a passage in The Illiad where Hephaestus makes the shield for Achilles. Homer goes into great detail about the god Hephaestus’ work; knowing he cannot keep Achilles from his fated death, from his birthmark vulnerability, but desiring to make him a powerful object to shield him into his death, Hephaestus puts his full energy into his craft. On the shield he forges the very images of the cosmos itself, complete with the planets’ positions, the stories of cities and power, the stories of marriage and dancing, of warring and death.

No matter what culture historians examine to trace the genealogical origin of ecphrasis, the conversation between art forms has always contended with issues of home and exile, love and death, the passages between worlds and nations, and, ultimately, the oldest question of the relation between the “I” and the “thou.” The poet Rilke once wrote, “And who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’ hierarchies?” Poetry and art have always been in a call-and-response relationship to each other—and throughout time, whether it was in Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” or Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts,” the same forms have worked the hierarchies to ask about the nature of identity, of love, of suffering and mortality. In ecphrasis there is always a will for the image to have the transformative power of Kokopelli or to be a kind of shield to raise against the times, whatever the outcomes may be.

Richard Blanco and John Bailly are working in the lineage of ecphrasis. In their call-and-response they ask of their own lives (and of the lives of nations) how we create identity as we move through worlds, how we find echoes of our own personal histories in the larger stories of our times, and how we imagine the listener, the “thou” to which a poem or a painting is addressed, whether that “thou” be a love, a family member, a god, God, another version of the self, a member of the audience. Blanco and Bailly work these questions through images from the World Wars, from Cuba, from Miami, from dreamscapes, and from memory. What is so very interesting and valuable about their collaboration here is that they have offered us frozen moments of their conversation. In offering us these moments (and not foreclosing their work with summary or lecture), they invite us to make connections between their pieces and to enter the conversation ourselves. What do we see in Little Havana? Do we have a “Gulf Motel” of our own—places of the mind so vivid, so powerful they shape our dreaming and our waking lives?

The poet Wallace Stevens claimed that great art musters an equal force to the force of our times, a kind of Necessary Angel. Blanco and Bailly have achieved such a necessity—an art that because it is so dynamic, because it asks us to take part in it, rises, with risk, humanity, and elegant integrity, to meet our times.

Melanie Almeder

1  James Heffernan, Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from  Homer to Ashbery. University of Chicago Press, 1993.

John Bailly, Daphne Majors, 2006

Melanie Almeder was raised in Atlanta, Georgia and southern Maine. Her first book, On Dream Street (March 2007), won the editor's prize from Tupelo Press. Her poems have appeared in a range of journals, including Poetry, Five Points, The Georgia Review, The Seneca Review, and The Courtland Review. In recent years she has done collaborative projects with visual artists in France, Ireland, Finland, and Minnesota.  

Melanie Almeder 's book can be purchased by following the above link.

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The poems of Richard Blanco

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Richard Blanco *** Place of Mind *** John Bailly