An interview with poet Beth McDermott, author of Figure 1, offers compelling insights into the nature of poetry and its dynamic relationship with other artistic disciplines. This excerpt suggests that poetry is to other art forms a permeable boundary, a space for conversation, and a tool for exploring depths beyond the immediate frame. McDermott’s work, deeply rooted in the ekphrastic tradition, highlights how engaging with visual arts, music, and even dance can enrich poetic practice and understanding.
McDermott describes Figure 1 as a collection in conversation with art and the natural world, drawing on the ekphrastic tradition to engage with works from Vermeer to Hockney. This immediately establishes a core principle: poetry need not exist in isolation but can thrive in dialogue with other media. By analyzing and responding to paintings, photographs, and other artistic expressions, poetry gains new avenues for exploration, interpretation, and meaning-making. It’s not merely describing art but entering into a reciprocal relationship with it. McDermott notes her fascination with framing – exploring what exists outside the immediate visual or conceptual boundary of an artwork or image. This process of looking beyond the frame, of considering the historical context or hidden elements, is a poetic act in itself, demonstrating how poetry can extend and challenge the perceived limits of other forms.
Her interest in placing poetry in conversation with other disciplines stems from a genuine engagement with their discourses, even without proficiency in them. Discussions of documentary filmmaking, album covers, and musician interviews informed her workshops. This underscores that the connection isn’t just about subject matter but about the ways other arts use form, rhythm, image, and structure. Thinking about a word specific to another medium can unlock connections within language and the world, showing how poetry can borrow methodologies or perspectives from other fields to inform its own construction and thematic concerns. The very act of translation, of moving from one art form’s language to another’s, reveals poetry’s adaptability and capacity for synthesis.
One powerful dimension of ekphrasis, as McDermott practices it, is its relationship with silence and absence. Drawing on the historical context of ekphrasis as a descriptive practice for absent artworks, she highlights how evoking a work not physically present is inherently about absence. More profoundly, she seeks out the “microscopic or hidden elements” within an image – what isn’t easily observed or what the frame intentionally excludes. Poetry, in this context, becomes a means of filling those silences, of bringing the absent or the hidden to the forefront, offering “an account that is mysterious or even chilling.” This suggests that poetry’s role in relation to other arts is often to explore the unspoken, the unseen, or the omitted, adding layers of meaning that might otherwise be missed.
Furthermore, McDermott discusses ekphrasis as a “powerful tool to move beyond the autobiographical while still getting at emotional and philosophical truths.” This is a crucial point regarding poetry’s function. For writers who struggle to rely solely on personal experience, engaging with other art forms provides a necessary remove, a different starting point. By responding to a painting, a piece of music, or a photograph, the poet can explore universal themes and deep emotions through an external lens. The artwork serves as a kind of mediator, allowing the poet to channel personal truths through a less direct, potentially more universal, or formally inventive route. This reinforces how engagement with other arts provides poetry with diverse structures and subjects, facilitating emotional and philosophical exploration indirectly.
McDermott also touches upon the technical aspects of poetry, mentioning her experimentation with prose poetry and the challenges of making a sentence “rhythmic without line endings.” This relates to discussions of form poetry and what is metre in poetry. While ekphrasis provides thematic and structural inspiration, the underlying craft still requires attention to rhythm, flow, and structure, whether in traditional forms or in the fluid boundaries of prose poetry. Her reflection on how prose poetry can be associated with both “liberation and formal experimentation” and seen as a “box or block” highlights poetry’s ongoing negotiation with its own constraints and possibilities, a negotiation perhaps informed by the varied structures encountered in other art forms.
Teaching also plays a role in shaping her artistic practice, requiring her to articulate poetic concepts in ways “legible” to students and colleagues in other disciplines. This need to break down poetry into process-oriented and technique-driven components reinforces her own understanding of craft. Creating rubrics for what poetry “should entail” based on collective study underscores the analytical approach necessary for both teaching and writing. This suggests that understanding poetry’s internal mechanics is enhanced by needing to explain it, much like analyzing the technique behind a painting or a musical composition can deepen one’s appreciation of those forms. Poetry, seen through this lens, is not just inspiration but also a craft with discernible techniques and structures, comparable to the techniques found in other arts.
Poet Beth McDermott, author of Figure 1, discussing ekphrasis and poetry's connection to art
Ultimately, this excerpt suggests that poetry is to other art forms a fluid collaborator and interpreter. It can analyze, respond to, draw inspiration from, and even critique the output of other creative fields. Poetry offers a unique linguistic and structural framework through which to re-experience, re-interpret, and add new dimensions to paintings, music, performance, and more. McDermott’s perspective demonstrates that poetry’s engagement with other arts is not merely supplementary but fundamental to broadening its scope, deepening its emotional resonance, and pushing its formal boundaries. It positions poetry as a central hub in the ecosystem of artistic expression, capable of absorbing influences and generating new insights across disciplines. Her work encourages readers and writers to look beyond the written word in isolation and see poetry as a vital, interactive participant in the larger world of art.