Poetry in the Museums of Modernism

Ekfrasen som begivenhet

“…Dette er ikke bare fysiske lokasjoner, men institusjonelt organiserte premissleverandører for en egen billedkultur. Teoretikere som Heffernan (1993), Paul (2002) og Fischer (2006) har alle tematisert viktigheten av museet som premissleverandør for moderne ekfrase. Som Jacques Rancière påpeker med hensyn til museet, er slike institusjonsbaerende steder ikke begrenset «to a specific building» -men peker utover det, til «a form of apportioning the common space and a specific form of visibility» (Rancière 2009, 69).…”

Taking you back: Region, industry and technologies of living history at Beamish

“…The use of demonstrators reconstituting the world of the past – to enable greater empathy with stilled lives of the past – is undone by its articulation of the past as needing recreation, vivification. Similarly, Catherine Paul notes that sites such as Beamish are ‘not real, though they claim to be realistic; different enough from our present-day life to seem worthy of attention; and significantly, familiar enough to feel safe’ (2002: 228). They function as a cordon sanitare , one preserving the purity of the present from the taint of the past: the past is completed and neatly contained.…”

Poems after Poussin: MacNeice, Yeats and Durcan in the National Gallery of Ireland

“…His idea is, however, shared by Catherine Paul in Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (2002), where she investigates relationships between modernist writing and the history and ideologies of museums in relation to the work of Yeats, Ezra Pound, Marianne Moore and Gertrude Stein. 20 Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux's TwentiethCentury Poetry and the Visual Arts (2008) similarly asserts that 'One of the distinguishing features of twentieth-century ekphrasis is that it is fully born of the museum age', and begins by questioning why so many twentieth-century poets turned to the visual arts as subjects for their poems, discussing the role of the art museum (its history, ideologies and modes of display) in the ekphrastic process. 21 Bringing Yeats's poem 'The Municipal Gallery Revisited' (1937) in line with other canonical modernist texts in close dialogue with museums, Paul and Loizeaux build on an essay by Edna Longley that drew critical attention to the prevalence of poems on paintings in Irish poetry since Yeats.…”