The Gurney: Poetry, Ekphrasis and the Abject Image

This research project, situated in the field of creative writing, comprises a creative project, my third book-length collection of lyric poems, The Gurney, and an accompanying exegetical essay, “The Unmistakable Topography of a Body: Poetry, Ekphrasis and the Abject Image.” In The Gurney, I pursue themes and subjects that have preoccupied me as a poet to date, including ekphrasis, travel, violence and extinction in the natural world, the end of love, and the intersections between place, landscape, and history, as well as the new personal and confessional territory of my father’s descent into Parkinson’s Disease and dementia. The Gurney is divided into five sections: 1) “The End of Love,” poems that both celebrate and lament love; 2) “Inner Infinity,” poems that explore the animal world and the forces that threaten it, such as environmental degradation and extinction; 3) “The Argument with Beauty,” ekphrastic poems that grapple with a range of subjects, including abject photographs, paintings and other media; 4) “Light Years,” poems that explore landscape, place and history; and 5) “The Grip,” poems centring on my father’s physical and mental frailty in the grips of late Parkinson’s Disease.

The accompanying exegetical essay, “The Unmistakable Topography of a Body: Poetry, Ekphrasis and the Abject Image,” examines the phenomenon of poetic ekphrasis of abject historic photographs, focussing particularly on images of the dead and dying body. In it, I seek to comprehend how poets write ekphrases of documentary photographs—especially those documenting extreme forms of violence—and identify a number of techniques and stances operating in the poems that illuminate possibilities for my own practice. In my first chapter, I begin by defining photographic ekphrasis and illuminating the aesthetic and ethical challenges inherent in writing about the documentary image. The following two chapters are devoted to case studies of two iconic documentary images of the dead and dying body: Richard Drew’s 9/11 photograph of an unidentified World Trade Centre victim, The Falling Man, and David Jackson’s post-mortem image of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till. In my second chapter, I focus on poems by Wisława Szymborska, Simon Armitage, Galway Kinnell responding to Drew’s The Falling Man, and identify metapoeticism as a key ekphrastic strategy that allows the poet to position the photograph’s meaning as contingent and evolving rather than hegemonic. In my third chapter, I use poems by Kevin Young, Roger Reeves and R.T. Smith responding to Jackson’s photograph of Till to examine the converging temporalities in photographic ekphrasis, and argue that metapoeticism allows the poet to reckon with the past from a contemporary vantage point, locating a photograph’s meaning somewhere between the two. I conclude my essay with a reflection on the ways in which my critical inquiry has inflected and informed my creative practice, and identify the future directions that have opened up for my poetry as a result of my research.