Ekphrasis & the Deep Voice

A four-week online Zoom workshop with Jack Grapes & Baz Here

Ekphrasis or writing that responds to or describes visual art, is one of the oldest moves in Western literature, from the shield of Achilles to Keats’s urn to Frank O’Hara drafting Lunch Poems on his breaks at MoMA. But ekphrastic writing often stalls at description. The painting gets named. The image gets summarized. The poem stays outside the work. How do we move from looking at the image to writing around and through it? Or as Rilke wrote,

The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
That I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my senses, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
in the ponds broken off from the sky
my falling sinks, as if standing on fishes.

– Rainer Maria Rilke,
“Moving Forward,” tr. Robert Bly

This four-week online workshop pairs Jack Grapes’s Method Writing—the practice of writing from the deep voice rather than the intelligent voice—with ekphrastic technique. You’ll learn how to look slowly—in the spirit of Rilke’s sustained attention to something until it begins to look back—while considering, with Berger, what the image assumes about who is looking and who is being looked at. You’ll explore the punctum (the detail that pierces) and write from the place where the image meets what you’ve been keeping.

Over four 3-hour sessions on Zoom, you’ll generate three to four finished pieces, work with multiple ekphrastic modes, and develop a sustainable practice for writing into visual culture you encounter.

For Who?

Writers at any stage; visual artists who write; anyone whose work moves between looking and language.

Details

Dates: Tuesdays, June 16, 23, 30, and July 7, 2026

Time: 2:30–5:30 PM PST (3 hours per session)

Format: Live on Zoom

Cost: $340

Registration: https://forms.clickup.com/9014407564/f/8cmtwcc-2894/INZF21GXLICD9Y9NIF