Ekphrasis, photography, and ethical strategies of witness: poetic responses to Emmett Till

Abstract

ABSTRACTPhotographs that bear witness to the violence and suffering of history clearly hold a great imaginative thrall and impetus for contemporary poets, as the vast body of poetic ekphrases of such images attests. In writing such poems, however, poets are confronted with fraught ethical and aesthetic questions, including: How can the ekphrastic poem empathise and engage aesthetically and ethically with the suffering of others? How can the poet write in a position of witness when absent from the event itself? What techniques, stances and other strategies can the ekphrastic poem deploy to testify to the abject photograph? This article addresses these questions via the timely case study of poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of 1955 lynching victim Emmett Till, a subject of renewed interest in the wake of the furore surrounding artist Dana Schutz’s contentious 2017 ekphrastic painting Open Casket. This article considers poetic responses to the post-mortem photograph of Till by contemporary poets Kevin Young and R.T. Smith, and identifies metapoeticism—drawing attention to the poem’s status as a poem, and to the poet’s necessarily piecemeal and partial knowledge of the event—as a key strategy that fosters ethical engagement with the abject image.