EKPHRASIS: Art & Poetry

Edited by Liz Blood

Ekphrasis is an ongoing series joining verse and visual art. Here, poet Steve Bellin-Oka responds to a painting by John Wolfe while recalling the life and death of Matthew Shepard, a 21 year-old student who was killed in an anti-gay hate crime in Wyoming in 1998.

Poem after John Wolfe’s “Residence, Anadarko Okla.” for Matthew Shepard

If we think of time as a whole bolt of cloth we cut swatches from, blue cotton that begins slowly to immediately

fray, then for a moment you were the newest well-built thing in the world:

the perfect angle of your peaked roof, the unwarped frames of your windows, the glass so clear it almost isn’t there.

Then those who planned you hanged white curtains, arranged the furniture—

the table in the kitchen with its smooth wood legs, the brown leather loveseat against the dustless living room wall.

The closets grew gray suits, a patterned morning dress with sunflowers, the yellow

still brilliantine and deep twenty years before it faded to newly ripe lemon rind. And the bassinet in the other room upstairs,

the one whose walls they papered with cartoon race cars. As the body does,

when it’s allowed to grow older, the bones of the house eventually will begin to creak, the plumbing to lose in its constant wrestle

to contain the push of water that flows like blood through arteries. But that much

is the future: as the painter puts away her brush, the canvas filled with another well-made thing, the house you grew up in

with its green lawn and shrubs spreading forever out of the frame, no one knows but she

how they will beat you and hang you like a picture on a cattle fence outside of town. No one knows you will not live. No one knows

John Wolfe, Residence, Anadarko Okla., 2019, acrylic on panel, 36” x 36”

John Wolfe was born in Vernon, Texas in 1947. He attended public school in Davidson, OK, college at Southwestern Oklahoma State University, and graduate school at the University of Central Oklahoma. John taught for 35 years in Mid-Del Public Schools and was an adjunct at Rose State College and Adams State University in Alamosa, CO. Now in retirement, John is a full-time studio artist. Steve Bellin-Oka is a 2019–2020 Tulsa Artist Fellow in poetry. He is the author of Instructions for Seeing a Ghost (University of North Texas Press, 2020), which won the Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry, as well as two chapbooks, Dead Letter Office at North Atlantic Station (Seven Kitchens Press, 2017) and Out of the Frame (Walls Divide Press, 2019). His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including Nimrod International Journal of Prose and Poetry, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and Four Way Review, and have received nominations for both the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net prize.

Marianne Nicolson (Dzawada’enuxw First Nation/Canada) KanKagawí (The Seam of Heaven), 2018, Glass and wood, Two glass panels, each 8 feet high

new complex will serve Oklahoma City-area students and children, impacting the artistic community into the future.

Rand Elliott’s design for the Oklahoma Contemporary building, with a façade that reflects back Oklahoma’s changing light from sunrises to sunsets to sun-showers, is an attraction in and of itself. To me, the porousness of the façade with nature—boundaries between interior and exterior dissolve in a hazy colored reflection—symbolizes openness and connection. Rather than being a container for art, the center is an organic part of its community.

The beauty of the plains is that no matter where you’re standing, everyone has the same view. Pandemic or not, Oklahoma Contemporary has been working diligently for ten years to give that view to everyone, and we can’t wait to see it. n

Penny Snyder is an avid museum-goer, urban explorer, and writer. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2016 and is the PR & Media Manager for the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. Read more of her writing at penny-snyder-writes.squarespace.com.

Leo Villareal (NY), Star Ceiling 2, 2019, LEDs, custom software & electrical hardware, aluminum, 120” x 240” Photo: Alex Marks.

Camille Utterback, Entangled, 2015. Dual channel interactive installation on scrims. Commissioned for Installation at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. Photo credit JKA Photography, 2015.