Abstract

This article investigates Tamar Yoseloff’s different engagements with the visual arts in her ekphrastic poems by focusing on her first collection Sweetheart (1998). There are many critical studies about the poetic ekphrastic tradition, but there is rarely an in-depth investigation into a poet’s dedication to ekphrasis. This article suggests that Tamar Yoseloff’s dedication to ekphrasis is traceable to her earliest work. With a close analysis of three poems from Sweetheart—‘The Two Fridas’, ‘The Arnolfini Marriage’ and ‘The Visible Man’, I argue that the book is a sustained exploration of the autobiographical and biographical enigmas represented in visual artworks and artefacts, as well as our identification with these enigmas. It is hoped that this article could initiate a discussion about the tradition of poets dedicated to ekphrasis being as long as the tradition of modern ekphrasis.

Highlights

  • Tamar Yoseloff, born in New Jersey in 1965 and based in London since 1987, is a poet dedicated to the visual arts in her writing and in her teaching of creative writing as a freelance tutor

  • December 2013), the blog has been exploring ‘the intersections between poetry and art’ (Yoseloff 2013). It is the ‘intersections’ between poetry and the visual arts Yoseloff returns to exploring in her poetry

  • With the new term ekphrasist, controversial as it might be, and with the focus on a contemporary ekphrasist, I hope to initiate a discussion about the tradition of poets dedicated to ekphrasis being as long as the tradition of modern ekphrasis

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Summary

Background

Tamar Yoseloff, born in New Jersey in 1965 and based in London since 1987, is a poet dedicated to the visual arts in her writing and in her teaching of creative writing as a freelance tutor. She started her online blog Invective against Swans in September 2010, and as she states in a post of the same name Formula for Night: New and Selected Poems (Yoseloff 2015) Across her career, she has been consistently writing about a vast range of plastic arts, including Dutch painting, abstract expressionist art, conceptual sculpture and photographs. I want to continue with Loizeaux’s recovery of such an enlarged sense of modern poetic ekphrasis, which could address both the artwork itself and the creation of it. I hope to initiate a discussion about the tradition of poets dedicated to ekphrasis being as long as the tradition of modern ekphrasis

Tamar Yoseloff as Ekphrasist
The Hidden Sweetheart
Conclusions: ‘What’s at the Heart of My Heart?’

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