Curating Fragments: Found Ekphrases volumes 1& 2

In his essay ‘Self-extraction’, Ross Gibson suggests that ‘new creation comes not from some urwelt where ever-originating inspiration burns, but from the everyday world where all that is extant is ready for re-fashioning’ (2014: 9). He goes on to suggest that this ‘re-fashioning’ might take the form of ekphrasis which he defines as ‘the practice of glossing one mode of expression with another mode (2014, p. 12)’. The vast store of digitised information available via the internet (particularly of visual archives) provides opportunities for something that is at once, after Gibson, everyday but orients itself towards a longer tradition – that of ekphrastic poetry. Combining found poetry with an ekphrastic manoeuvre, the poems in this paper are constructed from photographic archives (taken in this case from the NASA and Kodak collections on Flickr) and online searches done using the catalogued title of the photograph. These produce odd and often surprising conjunctures between the photograph and text, and between various pieces of text as they are ‘found’ from the search engine. Together these constructions (picture and text) are traces of the original content, worked into pieces that combine to exceed the sum of their parts that, in their repurposing, haunts the originals.