EkphrasisSo my English teacher was telling us about this literary term, "ekphrasis", which refers to a piece of art that is written/composed/designed to represent a totally different piece of art created by somebody else. An example of this would be Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn", his poem that's all about this...Grecian...urn...or Auden's "Shield of Achilles", which we read today in class. Anyway, my teacher was talking about how these kinds of poems in particular have to be about an actual artistic thing that someone else has made, which is why they can't be written about landscapes or nature. ...or can they? Ekphrasis by Eruvyweth That matter should be matter, and not otherwise, and that space should have no texture and particles should, that bond and substance should obey some laws and not others, innumerable, unthinkable always astounds me. That there should be this thing called “rough” and that thing called “flexible”, and that they should both spring out of the same, and this changing its size, multiplying (somehow) downward, but mostly upward— anchored, no less, by a chunk of rock in the universe— and that it should feel forces and wavelengths and earth and sun although they are not what it is, and that it should drink something un-rough and formless and should then proceed to transform that into itself and yet should remain, all the while, a tree puts to me a most puzzling query. That I would look at this thing— be able to look at it, even— and see it in my head, and think it finished and declare a job well done, brilliantly, clap hands as a leaf falls, tiny universe, stretches the whole earth into wonder before me. I would never, you see, have thought of making it change colors. | 
