Ekphrastic Approaches in Twenty-First Century Poetry Writing Out

Introduction

Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick

1  Movement into Words, Words into Being: Yoann Bourgeois and Being in the World

Jen Webb

2  Cornelia Parker’s Cold Dark Matter, Exploding Form, and the Poetics of Grief

Patrick Wright

3  The Art of Disaster: Ekphrasis and the Windscale Fire

Jennie E. Owen

4  The Poet as a “Spectator of Calamities”: Violence, Spectatorship and the Speaker in Photojournalistic Ekphrasis

Sarah Holland-Batt

5  Recharging Climate Change with Akram Khan’s Jungle Book Reimagined

Amina Alyal

6  “Sometime a lovely boy in Dian’s shape”: Ekphrasis in the Stage History of Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II

Edwin Stockdale

7  Peckinpah Suite: Revisiting the Films of Sam Peckinpah in Verse

Paul Munden

8  How Dedushka or Nesting Ekphrasis (and Melophrasis) Evolved from My Own Practice in Writing The Detective’s Chair: Prose Poems about Fictional Detectives

Anne M. Carson

9  Art Adjusted: Encountering Larry Eigner and Ekphrastic Experiences

Kane Holborn

10  Ekphrasis and the Sacred: Mining our “Inmost Reality”

Niloofar Fanaiyan

11  Protest, Art and Ekphrasis in the Digital Age

Isabella G. Mead

12  “Playing Different Tunes”: Collaborative Ekphrasis on The Dark Side of the Moon

Oz Hardwick

13  TELEPHONE: A New Approach to Studying Ekphrasis and Intersemiotic Translation

Nathan Langston

Biography

Amina Alyal has published co-edited academic collections including Victorian Cultures of Liminality (Cambridge Scholars, 2018), and Classical and Contemporary Mythic Identities (Edwin Mellen, 2009), and creative writing collections including Everyone’s a Seed (Yaffle Press, 2026) and Tasseomancy: Creative Responses to AI (The Tea Set, 2024). She has published two solo poetry collections and several collaborative collections. She writes theatre reviews and programme notes. Based at Leeds Trinity University, she has co-written and performed for words and music with Oz Hardwick and Karl Baxter, Kaminari UK, the Japanese drumming group, and Leeds Lieder.

Oz Hardwick is an international award-winning poet, and Professor of Creative Writing at Leeds Trinity University. He has published “maybe fifteen?” full collections and chapbooks, most recently Retrofuturism for the Dispossessed (Hedgehog Poetry Press, 2024), as well as countless individual poems in journals and anthologies. With Anne Caldwell he edited The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry (Valley Press, 2019) and Prose Poetry in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2022); and with Cassandra Atherton he edited Dancing About Architecture and Other Ekphrastic Maneuvers (MadHat Press, 2024).

"Marvellously provocative and boundary-crushing, Ekphrastic Approaches in Twenty-First Century Poetry: Writing Out brings together practitioners, critics and scholars in conversations about the transformative power of ekphrastic practice. In essays that capture the diversity and efflorescence of contemporary ekphrastic poetry, editors Amina Alyal and Oz Hardwick prioritise work that challenges traditional notions of the relationship between art and poetry and confronts “the why and the how of ekphrastic poetry”. This collection uncovers the alchemy at the heart of twenty-first century ekphrasis and ushers the reader into its liminal spaces, inviting them to revel in the form’s metamorphic dynamism."

 --Cassandra Atherton