Beautiful, yet heavy

We live in a beautiful but terrifying world...dread is facing something squarely. I am drawn to poets who do this; they look at things and do not look away. -- Anne Simpson

I'm working on a paper for my Canadian Ekphrasis class right now. This is the class that has been keeping me going this semester. I am so deeply in love with it. For those of you who don't know, ekphrasis is poetry that is "poetry that speaks to or of an art object" (definition taken from Peter Barry's article "Contemporary Poetry and Ekphrasis"). Anne Simpson, one of the poets I'm working with, wrote a corona responding to seven works by Brueghel and a series of photographs of the Staten Island landfill where the debris from the World Trade Center after 9/11 was sorted. It's heavy stuff. Profoundly beautiful, yet terribly heavy. After a few hours I start to feel odd, like I've become weighted down by something, shackled by a grief and horror that is both my own and yet not mine at all.