​Ekphrastic poetry has come to be defined as poems written about works of art; however, in ancient Greece, the term ekphrasis was applied to the skill of describing a thing with vivid detail. One of the earliest examples of ekphrasis can be found in Homer’s epic poem The Iliad, in which the speaker elaborately describes the shield of Achilles in nearly 150 poetic lines:
                                                           
And first Hephaestus makes a great and massive shield,
blazoning well-wrought emblems all across its surface,
 
And he forged on the shield two noble cities filled                            
with mortal men. With weddings and wedding feasts in one
 
And he forged the Ocean River’s mighty power girdling
round the outmost rim of the welded indestructible shield.                                        
(The Iliad, Book 18, lines 558–707)
                                                           
In addition to the descriptions of a work of art, an ekphrastic poem usually includes an exploration of how the speaker is impacted by his or her experience with the work. This week, I encourage you to test out this fun poetry form!
 
To get you started, here’s some of my favorite paintings I studied in my Art History class this semester.

Written by Ellie M.

Yesterday before the rains came, my friend studied first the darkening sky, then me.

“If we time it right, we can walk to Skyspace and get caught in the rain.”

“Let me get my shoes,” I said.

We walked, got poured on, sat in Skyspace for a while, talking about the way the water ran off the roof and about the respect we have for people who not only know what they like but also do it; we talked about why introspection does not inherently indicate a humanities major and why sometimes “low-class” art is the stuff that sticks with you; we talked about going home and not going home and birds.

It got me thinking about how fast-paced my life has become - every conversation serves a purpose, now, where I'm either searching for information or trying to make someone laugh, but there's that lovely forgotten in-between space where rainy days and late-night chats reside, driven not out of a need to vent but a mess of ideas and words that have stuck themselves in your head and need to come out.

There is an art to these conversations, much like there is an art to storytelling. Words become images. Thoughts form of their own accord, just like stories take on lives of their own. These conversations are hard to put down. They're self-propelling and wandering, both passionate and impassioning. The good ones leave you thinking long, long after the words have been said.

Communication in college trenches tends so frequently to be a one-sided affair. Here is what I think. This is why I'm right. But there is so much beauty in discovering what collaboration can produce, in equalizing the listening and the responding.

Conversations are a lot like stories. If you let them happen to you and ascribe value to them the way we carry a story's moral or quotable moments with us, you'll recognize the narrative, the catharsis, the conscious escape that we find in books. It's all there in the everyday, in the sparkling opportunities we have to make the mundane something extraordinary, something unusual, something important. This is important. Listen, but only until you must speak.

And now, you must speak.

​Written by Kristen H. 

One of my favorite things about writing and literature in general is that it’s always a description of the world in all its crazy complexities. Sure, you could be reading about hobbits and dragons, or journeying through intense space caves, or trying to sort out the thoughts of an unreliable-narrator-slash-serial-killer-maybe, but no matter where you are, you’re being constantly bombarded and confronted with these subconscious little blips of humanity. That’s why it becomes something of a social responsibility of a writer to make sure they’re actually describing humanity – in all its messed-up glory, you could say, or in a way that’s just right. Plus, Hollywood has been calling for a more representative sampling of the world, and literature can do that, too.
 
I find my writing enhanced with every single class I take; the magic of education (especially humanities education, sorry at my STEM-y friends) lies in the ways it really unpacks the things we take for granted all the time. I write near-exclusively in worlds that aren’t this one (yeah, that means fantasy). With every political science class I take, I think more critically about the social structures at work. With every English class, I’m thinking about what people can read through the words I choose, and the intricacies and implications of how my writing will read against the social and cultural map we’re up against. Sometimes, I feel like I’ll never get enough of the knowledge of this world to make a perfect equivalency in the pages of a book.
 
And yeah, because none of us do. In fact, research doesn’t need to be some complicated thing. I don’t – as a friend of mine explained to me recently – need to take a full-blown seminar on immigration just to write about an immigrant. But, I do need to think about what I’m writing, and I need to know the realities of what’s out there. And that’s where the rest of my recommendations come in: there are a whole scope of blogs and websites in the world that are explicitly designed to give you those quick research tips, those actualities and stereotype-busters that will make you a better, well-researched writer.
 
So, here you go – do research fast!!! with these quick and easy links:
 
Most of these are unapologetically Tumblr blogs, because I take my writing tips in small doses while trying to fall asleep and wake up.

• http://thewritershelpers.tumblr.com/ Helpful for literally everything. Tips you don’t expect to get, but then realize you really needed.
• http://referenceforwriters.tumblr.com/ Tends to be more specific pieces of information, so maybe not everything will be relevant, but a whole bunch of it will be.
• http://howtofightwrite.tumblr.com/ It’s all about fight scenes, which can be extremely helpful if you’re doing anything with any sort of action. Medical stuff comes up, too!
• http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/ Resources specific to accurately and without-stereotype write about racial and ethnic diversity.
• http://www.springhole.net/writing/responsiblewriting.htm A bit more hit-or-miss, but maybe there’s a topic on here that you haven’t actually thought about.  
• http://www.writing-world.com/index.shtml Okay, maybe this page isn’t the most visually appealing, but there are a bunch of specific links and tips to be found about genre here.
• https://blog.reedsy.com/worldbuilding-historical-fiction For historical fiction, this article can be a really great springing-off point to find where to go next in your research needs.

 
Research is a really weird thing. It can be sparked by inspiration just from visiting a museum, it can be applied from a semester of a research project, or it can plop down from above thanks to a simple interview or visit to a webpage. And it makes a big difference in how you’ll feel in your own work. So, when the writer’s block hits or you just want to procrastinate some school work, maybe turn your attention to the research ahead of you, and see what happens.
 
Written by Erika S.

Finding my voice has proven to be the most difficult part about being a writer. Since I started writing a few years ago, I have been tormented with the unreasonable fear that I sound like whoever I am reading at the moment. And often when I write, I experience the chiasmatic sensation of exhilaration and plagiarism: it excites me to be intensely engaged with a text and to recognize work being done on the syntactical level; however, I tend to feel like a fraud, a literary pirate…and an unsuccessful one at that…when I catch myself using a particular author’s style or lexicon (Confession: I have cribbed my punctuation habits from an amalgamation of Pynchon and Faulkner—hence the ellipses…dashes…semi-colons…all working to protract tiresome digressions.) Anyway, it always takes some time to sort through these contrary feelings. I tell myself that everyone learns by reading those who come before them. I try to ease my anxieties about literary piracy by calling transgressions ‘references’ or ‘allusions.’ But the self-doubt and self-consciousness remains, and I find myself delaying projects in order to more fully develop my own distinct style. I think that the paralysis induced by self-doubt comes from a fear of observation. Whatever I may tell myself about learning from mistakes, my ego always finds a way to make its voice heard; so rather than venturing out on my own—to make mistakes and hopefully discover something about my writing along the way—I use my favorite author’s as blueprints for style, imagery and diction. And while there is nothing inherently wrong with this, I feel as if it has hampered my ability to sit down at my computer and write on a regular basis.

I think that this sensation taps into something commonly experienced by those of us who write. On one hand there are the constant confrontations with failure and the subsequent fear of ineptitude. And this is made worse by the fact that we are not the arbiters of our work; rather, our work, an extension of ourselves, stands bare and defenseless against the criticisms of a detached audience. And what worse criticism could be leveled than banality or pedantry? I don’t know about you, but it terrifies me to think that I may be received as unoriginal. Which is why I have committed myself to a new exercise that will hopefully develop confidence in my voice independent from those who influence me. But first, I would like to demonstrate how engaging with an author can re-shape prose.

I’m currently working on my capstone essay about the process of myth-making in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, particularly how the narrators construct representations of black and female subjectivities that ensure subordination. I am using a theoretical framework, as laid out in Michel Foucault’s History of Sexuality, to discuss overlaying systems (culture, race, gender, sexuality, law) and the multilateral exertion of power in the Postbellum South. The idea has proven to be sufficiently difficult to untangle without worrying about how the two authors, Faulkner and Foucault, have influenced my writing style. Both authors craft long, winding sentences that operate by circumlocution rather than strict definition. What I mean is that they dance around what they are trying to say; they surround their desired concept rather than trying to pin it down with a needle. This style does not work well in a form that requires concision. Nevertheless, I find myself preyed upon by paronomastic predilections, my love for language and alliteration, and the unwinding beauty of thoughts scrolled down screen—a stream of syllogisms in need syntactically for structure that mediates and facilitates the care and complexity manifest in its discursive elements—like the ramifications of warbling wistaria vine twice-bloomed in breezes still of summer and reaching not only for the underlaid lattice but by trace scent as well…miasmal-distillant: an effluvium moving as if a shadow, nearly unobservable, but essential for the auditur to truly know what lay before them.

Lately I have written a lot of sentences like that one…and they typically take so long to craft that I lose whatever momentum had propelled me to the keyboard in the first place. What’s worse, I lost my train of thought while working on that just now…so forgive me if the rest of this blog post goes to shit. Anyway, while that sentence explains how syntax and imagery can enliven whatever you are trying to say, it defeats itself on the surface by applying the very strategy that it touts. It requires to be unwound, and the influence of Faulkner and Foucault’s writing styles have had a negative impact in this scenario. Repeatedly, these types of mistakes remind me that I have yet to establish an independent voice. I lack confidence in my own prose that should act to resist the impulse to imitate other authors. So to remedy this, I have purchased a cloth-bound notebook (this way I can slip it between books on my bookshelf and not fear someone cracking it open.) I have promised myself to write in it every day for the next month, at which point I will assess the viability of this technique in establishing my own voice. I have given myself a few ground rules to make sure that I avoid some of the pitfalls that I noted above:

1. Do not re-read anything until the month is up
2. Neither praise nor shame yourself while writing
3. Do not use the OED or Historical Thesaurus
4. Hide notebook between sessions
5. Write in the morning, read and be social in the evening

​For me, disconnection is paramount in this exercise. I cannot try to do this on my computer because I will violate every rule stated above. These rules intend to promote continuity of thought and discourse, which I believe to be fundamental in mapping out thought-processes and idiosyncrasies. Furthermore, should you want to adopt this idea, adaptation is obviously permitted. I work best in the mornings, so I use that time to my advantage. Others may prefer to work late at night. I prefer sleep. Finally, one last point about finding an independent voice: influence from other writers will be and should be apparent. I don’t want to be misunderstood as thinking that a writer’s voice must exist in a vacuum. Community and communication exist before, and are essential to independent expression. It would be foolish to believe that a truly singular voice could exist in language—a system that operates by reference. My own qualm comes from too heavy a reliance on certain authors’ style, but I will gladly use my best Faulkner impression when the mode seems appropriate. I just don’t want to spend my life as a writer chasing ghosts.

Written by Caleb S.