Echrasses means description in Greek, but when poets undertake

Echfrasas we're talking about art and more than that we're making poems that

not only describe art, they tap deep into the work of artists to ask bigger questions about our languages and our experiences in the world.

This week's episodes are all in conversation with art,

and those magnificent poems on art.

They are only possible through the work of the institutions that care for,

share, and support the work of artists. We encourage you too to visit and support these museums, galleries, and art spaces. I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. The Slowdown.

In writing about a specific work of art, I enjoy how a Frastic Poets invite me to meditate upon suggested themes and approaches that I had not considered before. The intentions of artists often elude me, especially non-figural and abstract art. Many do not want their canvases quickly consumed like fast food mills. I get that.

For what is behind some art is a disruption, a provocation, a protest against convention. Artworks that ask of me

patience to assume a different relationship to time and to my humanity.

For this reason, I almost never dismiss art as self-indulgent.

I tried to let a canvas unfold and reveal itself.

I practice slow attentive looking.

I sit for long stretches in museum galleries and study every inch of a painting.

Even still, I miss a lot. Fortunately, poets possess an equally expansive intuition, a proclivity

towards image-making that meets head-on the most difficult of artists.

In responding to works of art, poets performed the gift of interpretation.

By turning language into a critical practice, they find pathways into paintings and teach us how to see what they see.

They make the paintings speak.

I enjoy how the author of today's poem guides us through a canvas by poet and Chinese ink painter

Loa Ching.

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