Death of the Poet

(Originally published November 1, 2020)

I vividly remember struggling to understand the word my comparative literature professor had just spoken, on our first day of an Asian literature survey course: ekphrasis. It was an intriguing, incomprehensible and humbling word. While I understood the general concept, the explanation of a word that means “to make the visual verbal” felt fuzzy around the edges of my brain.
But this was a concept that wouldn’t let me go. Did it apply to all mediums? Was it ekphrasis if a composer was inspired by poetry, or if a choreographer was inspired by nature, etc? Sixteen years later, I still love considering the ways in which artists draw inspiration from each other and merge creative disciplines.
Two weekends ago I had the opportunity to hear the Evansville Philharmonic perform TJ Cole’s “Death of the Poet”. It’s a haunting musical piece inspired by a painting called “Death of the Poet Walter Rheiner (1925)” by Conrad Felixmüller. The painting imagines the tragic early death of a poet from a morphine overdose. The tragedy is compounded by the poet’s biography- his cocaine addiction began as a response to World War I. Cole’s work spoke to the growing sadness in me about the events of 2020. The world’s tragedies this year, while individual, have felt intensely communal; sitting alone in the balcony and listening to live music for the first time in many months, suddenly I couldn’t stop tears from rolling down my cheeks.
Listeners had been encouraged to make art inspired by the music, and I thought about how I might attempt to capture what this song brought up for me. I kept picturing a twilight at the edge of the world, and Marina Amaral’s colorized photo of soldiers standing in the ruins of Aachen’s cathedral during WW II came to mind. Watching the twilight of a world through the glass windows of a battered cathedral wall- beauty that has triumphed over ruin- became the image that stayed with me as I listened to Cole’s music.What strikes me powerfully in Felixmüller’s painting is the use of subdued neon tones. There’s so much frantic energy in his vision of the city, but it’s harsh and slightly sinister, radioactive in a way. There’s an ambivalence in Rheiner’s body language- although he appears to be falling out of the apartment window, his body is half turned back, as if he wants to reverse course and return to a moment before the fatal overdose. Bernard Knox has written of the poet Euripides, “They found exposed in his tragic plays the desperation of the human spirit, the misery of the human condition, in a civilization which had reached the end of its spiritual reserves and, as it looked forward, saw, like the prophet on the Olympia pediment, nothing but disaster to come”. I imagine Rheiner standing at his window and considering the city stretching out below. Perhaps he would have agreed with Knox and found it difficult to imagine anything but disaster in the future.
I would have continued with these dark thoughts as I worked on my own painting, except that another piece of music intruded- I watched a figure skater effortlessly glide around the ice to “Clair de lune”. Itself inspired by a French poem, the notes seemed to counterbalance the sadness of Cole’s piece. Where “Death of the Poet” surges into an unbearable climax, Debussy’s music ripples in graceful arcs before fading into stillness. Verlaine’s poem speaks of “fountains sobbing in ecstasy” in the light of the moon, and I love this translation because that merging of sobbing and ecstasy feels like the only way to describe embracing life and survival in the midst of tragic circumstances. It made me think of resilience in times of relentless heartache, of the power the arts have to display beauty’s triumph over ruin.
Maybe it’s odd to think so strongly about resilience while listening to a song about a poet’s death, but that has been the overwhelming feeling for me as I consider this song, this painting, this year, and beautiful lives that ended much too soon.