levelheaded: feeling unobservant around a woman

This isn’t the first ekphrastic poem we’ve published, but it is probably the one with the most parentheses, brackets, and braces. Even at a glance, it’s clear the poem relies on punctuation in its to approach Picasso’s 1937 portrait of Dora Maar, The Weeping Woman.

In breaking the poem into segments and subsegments, the poem enacts what a viewer sees in the painting. In one aside the speaker tells us “a pebble is thrown / through a mirror,” describing the effect the painting has on the viewer and explaining the poem’s approach to its own “splinters.”

More practically, the punctuation helps us understand the simultaneity of the poem’s moments. With all the parentheticals removed, the poem might look something like this:

I’m attempting to approach her

but

I’m perplexed

by the reflections. Her hair is

combed free of entanglements

revealing an ear

pinned to her head.

What’s the protocol,

should I address her?

It’s only then, I notice

she’s weeping.

The parentheticals give us nice bits of additional description (“anemones / ladled out / of native seas” or “a teardrop / wriggling on a hook”), but even without the additional “splinters,” the poem takes a slant approach to the painting. Why, for instance, would the speaker “approach” and “address” a woman in a painting? These words—“approach” and “address”—work in a number of ways. Most obviously, they’re a poetic way of telling us he walked up and looked at the painting. But they also give the woman in the painting a life of her own. The speaker approaches and addresses her, not the painting. In doing so, the speaker transforms his interaction with art into a human interaction.

And the poem itself may be the “address” he makes to the weeping woman. It’s only after the speaker considers making an “address” that he notices the most important, glaring detail of the painting—her weeping. The repeated “I” makes clear the speaker/viewer is central to this poem’s point. Like all ekphrastic poetry, this poem is necessarily about how an observer interprets and interacts with art. However saddening its subject—a woman weeping at the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War—the painting has no power except within an audience who’s willing to provide thoughtful attention.

– The Editors
P.S.: This poem also relies on some knowledge of—or ability to Google—Picasso’s painting. For us, it’s worth considering how this poem might work without an explicit reference to Picasso’s painting? Would we understand its nod to Cubism? Does any of this matter? If you’d like to send us your thoughts, we’d like to hear them!