The American Academy in Rome held the Janet and Arthur Ross Rome Prize Ceremony on April 14 at New York’s Harmonie Club to announce the winners of the 2011–12 Fellowships. The ceremony was well attended by over three hundred guests, including many Academy Trustees, Fellows, and Residents.
After the Rome Prize winners’ names were announced, the audience enjoyed a program entitled “Poetry, Visual Art, and Place,” presented by the Academy’s Andrew Heiskell Arts Director Karl Kirchwey (1995 Fellow), Trustee Mark Strand (1983 Resident), and Rosanna Warren (2001 Resident)
The poets read their own works as well as poems by other writers, including the nineteenth-century Trastevere poet Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Jane Flanders, Thom Gunn, Adrienne Rich, the Polish Nobel Laureate poet Wislawa Szymborska, and Richard Wilbur (1955 Fellow).
The three poets explored the connection between poetry and works of visual or sculptural art (so-called ekphrastic poems) and between poetry and geographical place, specifically that of the city of Rome.
Strand read his pair of villanelles entitled “Two DeChiricos,” with the Italian artist’s paintings The Philosopher’s Conquest and The Disquieting Muses accompanying them. He then read Wilbur’s beautiful poems “Piazza di Spagna, Early Morning” and “A Baroque Wall-Fountain in the Villa Sciarra.”
Warren followed with two searching poetic meditations of her own, one set in the AAR Bass Garden (“Eclogue”) and one set in the Roman Forum and then in the front courtyard of the AAR (“What Leaves”). She proceeded to read two poems by Belli, both in their English translations by Mike Stock and, with great spirit, in their original Roman dialect. Warren concluded with a reading of Gunn’s early meditation on Caravaggio’s Conversion of St. Paul in Santa Maria del Popolo.
Kirchwey shifted the focus briefly to the New World with a reading of Rich’s poem “Mourning Picture,” based on a dreamlike funerary landscape, set in the Berkshires of Massachusetts, by the nineteenth-century painter Edwin Romanzo Elmer.
As an example of what is called “unassessable actual ekphrasis”—a poem about a work of art that cannot be positively identified, as, for example, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn”—Kirchwey read one of his translations from Paul Verlaine’s first book, the Poemes saturniens (just published by Princeton University Press), in which Verlaine describes a portrait of Cesare Borgia once attributed to Raphael but now thought to be by Parmigianino. He then read his own poems “Body and Mask,” about a decorative plaque in the Villa Doria Pamphilj, and “Santa Maria in Trastevere,” addressing some lines of Ezra Pound’s about the familiar Trastevere church as well as the apse mosaics of the Virgin and Christ enthroned.
Kirchwey next presented a very different kind of ekphrasis, Flanders’s poem “The House That Fear Built,” taking its form from the childhood ditty “The House That Jack Built” but addressing an iconic photograph from the Holocaust, that of a soldier training his gun on a boy with his hands over his head in the Warsaw Ghetto in the spring of 1943.
Kirchwey concluded by reading Szymborska’s brief and epigrammatic poem based on Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting Two Monkeys. Strand, Warren, and Kirchwey then responded to questions from the audience.