Why I Write Ekphrastic Poetry Inspired by My Art and Photography

A queen buff-tailed bee takes a rest on my finger. Photography by Janice Gill

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Brave queen bumble bee

Rests lightly on my finger

Bee whisperer buzz!

Janice Gill

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There is something I do that I do not often talk about.

Alongside my art and photography, I write poetry.

It feels strange to call it a secret, because it is not something I am ashamed of.

It is simply something I have kept close.

Private.

Sheltered, perhaps.

A quieter part of my creative life that sits behind the work people usually see.

The poems are often ekphrastic, though I do not always think of them in technical terms when I am writing them.

Ekphrastic poetry is poetry inspired by visual art, and in my case that usually means poems that grow out of my own photographs and artworks.

Sometimes an image seems complete in itself.

Sometimes it leaves an echo behind, and the poem begins there.

I suppose that is the simplest way to describe it:

first the image, then the echo.

When an image is not the end of the story

Much of my work begins with atmosphere.

Light through mist.

Water holding the sky.

The stillness of a bird.

The presence of a tree.

Old stone.

Weather.

Distance.

Silence.

I am often trying to capture more than the thing itself. Not just what something looks like, but what it feels like to stand before it.

The hush of a place.

The memory in it.

The sense that something is being held there, just beyond words.

And yet sometimes words come anyway.

Not while I am making the work, usually.

The making asks something different of me:

looking, editing, adjusting, composing, deciding.

But afterwards, when the image is finished and I can sit with it quietly, something else begins to stir.

A line arrives.

Or a phrase.

Or simply a feeling that wants another shape.

That is when I write.

Not to explain the image, and not to describe it in some literal way, but to enter it more deeply.

To find out what it knows that I have not yet fully understood.

The bee photo above doesn't show how I felt at that moment, the poem reminds me what a buzz I got that something so small and fragile decided to rest with me.

A second way of seeing

Writing poetry from my own art feels like stepping through a second door.

A photograph may hold a moment perfectly well on its own, but a poem lets me linger inside that moment.

It lets me follow the undercurrent.

Sometimes it draws out an emotion I had only half recognised when I was creating the piece.

Sometimes it reveals what I was really responding to all along.

A branch becomes resilience.

Mist becomes uncertainty, or softness, or grief.

A bird becomes watchfulness, solitude, or hope.

A landscape becomes a state of mind.

Poetry moves differently from art.

An image can arrive all at once, while a poem unfolds slowly, line by line.

One is immediate.

The other is patient.

I love that difference.

I love the conversation between the two.

It feels less like translating and more like listening.

Why I keep it for myself

Ekphrastic poem in response to a photograph of the sea at sunset. Photography and poetry by Janice Gill

I run a creative business, and I care deeply about it.

I want the work I share to connect with people.

I want my prints and paintings and photographs to find homes where they will be loved.

I want my website and shop and blog to grow.

I want everything I build around my work to be thoughtful and beautiful and sustainable.

But business, even creative business, has its own language.

It asks practical questions.

Will this sell?

Who is it for?

How should it be presented?

What should I post next?

Is this the right choice for my audience?

Is it clear enough, strong enough, marketable enough?

Those questions are not wrong.

They are part of the reality of trying to make a living from creative work.

But they are not the whole story.

Poetry lives somewhere else entirely.

It does not ask to be useful.

It does not ask to be visible.

It does not care whether it fits a collection, supports a launch, helps with sales, or performs well in any measurable way.

It asks only to be written.

That is such a relief.

The importance of having something that belongs only to you

I think it matters, especially when your art is also your work, to have a creative space that remains untouched by commerce.

A place where nothing has to become content.

Nothing has to become a product.

Nothing has to justify itself.

For me, poetry is that place.

It is a private room I can step into when everything else becomes too public, too structured, too tied to outcomes.

In that room, I do not have to think about algorithms, presentation, pricing, keywords, or whether something is good enough to show.

I can simply respond.

Quietly.

Honestly.

Without an audience in mind.

There is something deeply restorative in that.

It reminds me that creativity did not begin as a business.

It began as attention.

As feeling.

As wonder.

As a need to answer the world in some way.

Poetry takes me back to that beginning.

And I think that matters more than ever.

A hidden source of nourishment

There is pressure now to share everything.

To turn every interesting thought into a post, every process into content, every private spark into something polished and public.

But not everything flourishes in the light.

Some things need to remain a little hidden in order to stay alive.

Not hidden out of fear, but out of care.

Protected from noise.

Kept close enough to remain true.

That is how I feel about these poems.

They nourish something in me that the business side of creativity cannot reach.

They help me process what I have seen and made.

They let me sit with beauty, sadness, memory, transience, and all the other things that pass through art but are not always easy to name.

They ask nothing from me except sincerity.

And perhaps that private nourishment feeds the public work too.

Not directly, not strategically, but quietly, in the way roots feed whatever rises above them.

The life behind the work

I expect many artists have something like this.

A hidden practice.

A notebook no one sees.

A ritual.

A fascination.

A form of making that exists away from the marketplace and away from opinion.

This is one of mine.

Behind the photographs, behind the paintings, behind the finished pieces people encounter on my website, there are sometimes poems.

Small, private responses.

Another way of seeing.

Another way of telling the truth.

I do not know whether I will share more of them one day.

Perhaps I will.

Perhaps I will not.

For now, it is enough to know they are there.

A quiet thread.

A second voice.

A secret, if you like.

And one that reminds me that not everything I create has to be for the world.

Some of it can be just for me.

Do you have a creative outlet just for you? Feel free to let me know in the comments.