Just home from Milan and my first 'category 3' workshop with the topic "teaching poetry for enjoyment and assessment"; while there I happened upon an organ concert featuring relatively obscure Bach cantatas and fugues in a basilica down the road from the Duomo, which is magnificent. We were able to use the final session of the second day to go downtown and into a museum exhibiting Alphonse Mucha, a main developer of Czech art nouveau. Our goal on Day 3 was to take in the visual art and turn ideas and impressions into poetry--a process called 'ekphrasis' (demonstrated well in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and also in prose works, like Dostoevsky's Prince Myshkin recoiling over Holbein's "Dead Christ Entombed").
Intuitively, I could have based my own poem on Mucha, having seen his work all around Prague. Instead, I cast my mind ahead to a biennial teaching of The Tempest, my fourth favorite Shakespeare play: it's not set in Milan but rather framed by it, as I hope my own ekphrasis relays. I'd welcome any better title than "Renaissance bridge"...
Nativity scenes are big in Italy and big enough in countries north. While 'ekphrasis' is a term all too new to me, Joseph Mohr has demonstrated it on the sly, no matter who has painted in their walk of faith the Savior "born to us this day." Let us continue to animate this story!
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