P.K. Page's "Inebriate": A Gloss on a Glosa

Abstract

I am interested in poems about poems. What should we call them? They are obviously a kind of ekphrasis: art that comments on art. But the term ekphrasis is more commonly associated with poems about visual images than it is with poems about poems. In his frequently cited study of ekphrasis, James A.W. Heffernan stresses its pictorial focus. He says that ekphrastic literature can be understood as “the verbal representation of graphic representation” (299). It “typically delivers from the pregnant moment of graphic art” what Heffernan calls “its embryonically narrative impulse.” Through this kind of narrative deliverance, ekphrastic works “make explicit the story that graphic art tells only by implication” (301). In her commentary on John Ashbery’s iconic and ekphrastic “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,” Helen Vendler expands the conception of art about art: