Poems of the Winter Palace
Barbara Krasner
Bottlecap Press, 2025

The Night Watch
Barbara Krasner
2025​

The Ekphrastic Review: Barbara, you have two recent ekphrastic collections and a major body of poetry and stories inspired by visual art. Tell us something about yourself, your background, and about how you came to the ekphrastic life. When did your passion for paintings start? How did it evolve? Why is art important?
 
Barbara Krasner: I suppose a relationship with art first started in college when I signed up for an art history course. But I found the first class boring and I dropped it. Then in 2005, I accompanied a work colleague on junket to Manhattan and took myself to The Frick and the Guggenheim. I loved the eclectic mix at The Frick and the special Russia! exhibit at the Guggenheim. I scrapbooked my visits and later added trips to MoMA and the Met.
 
But my relationship took a new turn in the fall of 2024 when I had to deal with a second and more serious bout of an autoimmune skin disease initially triggered by the COVID booster in late 2021. I became obsessed with art in my steroid-driven insomnia. I re-watched Lust for Life, Pollock, and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris. I saw Frida for the first time. I read book after book about Lee Krasner, because she, too, suffered from insomnia after Pollock’s death. I read Kahlo’s journals. I wrote poetry and a magical realism short story where a Holocaust survivor artist enters his own painting, gets advice from Chagall and spots Kahlo as the wounded deer.
 
Art has been integral to my healing process, hanging it on my walls, reading about it, watching films, and since May 2025, I’ve been able to see installations in person at the Met, the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. I also earned a World Art History certificate from Smithsonian Associates in 2024-2025.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: Your book, The Night Watch, is titled after a Rembrandt painting. What is the significance of this work to you?
 
Barbara Krasner: When I visited the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in May 2024, I was struck by how Rembrandt’s The Night Watch was installed as a sort of shrine, the Dutch national treasure. I analogized the home guard and their little girl mascot depicted in this painting to the Nazi occupation and Anne Frank. 
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: These poems blend the historical, art, and personal history. How did this collection come together?
 
Barbara Krasner: These collections reflect my own intersectionalities as a historian, genealogist, and student of language and literature. The throughline, though, is that I personally encountered each of these works of art in Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, and New York City. They each made an impression on me. I took pictures of the paintings. The Night Watch is on the wall closest to my desk, for instance, as is van Asselijn’s The Threatened Swan and Brueghel’s Massacre of the Innocent.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: In your chapbook, Poems of the Winter Palace, you curate artworks from the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and write about them. Tell us about this museum. How did you get there? How did this collection come together?
 
Barbara Krasner: I visited Leningrad and the Hermitage on the cusp of the Soviet collapse in May 1990. There always seemed to me to be such tension between these “decadent” works of the tsarist period and the Soviet era. I knew that I’d have to spend Thanksgiving 2024 in immuno-isolation because of my autoimmune disease. I decided I would give myself a mini writing retreat instead. I ordered a book about the Hermitage, studied it, and tagged artwork that I felt some sort of connection to. While my turkey wings roasted on that Thursday, I wrote in response to the images I curated. That day’s writing became the foundation of Poems of the Winter Palace.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: Were there any poems in either of these collections that proved especially challenging to write? Why?
 
Barbara Krasner: “Song for Amsterdam” in The Night Watch wasn’t “singing” until I associated a Van Gogh painting with it. “The Threatened Swan” also didn’t come together until I allowed myself to become completely vulnerable and write about an emotionally difficult time in my life, turning me into the threatened swan protecting a child. Similarly, in Poems of the Winter Palace, “Seventeenth-Century Savior” in response to Frans Hals also took some perseverance to get the persona of this gentleman right.
 
The biggest challenge was writing in response to Frederick Leighton’s Flaming June. It wasn’t until I thought about the characters Cora in Downton Abbey and Gladys in The Gilded Age that I remembered a talk about American dollar princesses I heard at an academic conference. With the concept of dollar princess, the poem had a throughline.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: Can you share something about a favourite poem in each collection, one that is especially near to your heart?
 
Barbara Krasner: I have two favourite poems in The Night Watch. The first is “My Father Smoked the Seventeenth Century.” I can still see my father’s cigar boxes featuring Rembrandt’s The Syndics on the lids. The second poem is “Dollar Princess on the Palazzo.” I saw this Frederic Leighton painting twice, once at The Frick and again at the Met. That tangerine colour still fills me up.
 
In Poems of the Winter Palace, I’d have to say my favourite is “The Sorrows of Young Werther” after Caravaggio’s The Lute Player. There’s just something so forlorn in the face and in the vanitas elements of the painting. Although I also associate this painting with an awful night of my own physical suffering in November 2024 that landed me in the ICU, I appreciate how my background in German literature helped me analogize this character to Goethe’s Werther, both situations of unrequited love.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: Tell us about your ekphrastic process. What are some of the ways that you approach artworks in your writing? Are there incidents of unexpected surprises when you work? Do you rely on what you see and feel, or is research part of your process?
 
Barbara Krasner: Katharine Hepburn’s crackerjack character Bunny Watson states in the film Desk Set, she associates many things with many other things. I do too. I apply a mix of approaches, depending on what the artwork brings up for me. I may research the specific painting and/or the artist. The greatest example of that was responding to The Ekphrastic Review Writing Challenge of In the Studio by Marie Bashkirtseff. I read her two-volume memoir to write a sestina. Usually, though, I’ll see the art and an idea will immediately spring to mind. This happened recently at The Barnes Foundation’s exhibit, “From Paris to Provence,” in Philadelphia. When I saw Renoir’s Sailor Boy, I thought about my son and the sailor suits he was photographed in as a toddler, and also a porcelain doll a friend gave us that had my son’s name and wore a sailor suit. As the poems in both The Night Watch and Poems of the Winter Palace attest, some are persona poems—a fictional character or the artist and some deal with my own family history or people I know. In developing my own methods, I’ve found your ebook, Fifty Ekphrastic Approaches, inspirational and helpful.
 
​The Ekphrastic Review: What are you working on now? What’s next for Barbara Krasner?
 
Barbara Krasner: I work on multiple projects at any one time, both poetry and prose. I’m submitting three poetry collections: (1) a non-ekphrastic full collection dealing with family history; (2) an ekphrastic full collection with themes of immigration and pain; and (3) an ekphrastic microchapbook written in response to the work of Lee Krasner. Other works in progress include: (1) another non-ekphrastic full collection dealing with family history; (2) another ekphrastic full collection that hasn’t found a theme yet, but I’m titling it Better Living through Butter; (3) a genealogical memoir about the grandmother I never knew, which will use photographs as ekphrastic inspiration and structure; and (4) a historical novel about a Holocaust refugee in 1951 America. In the back of my mind, I’m ideating about a full-length collection written in response to the art of Kahlo, Carrington, Varos, Rimmington, and Tanning. I continue, too, to be fascinated with the art of the Brueghels and Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner (after all, I am a Krasner). I’m playing around with other themed ekphrasis like Nazi stolen art and harlequins.
 
I am also planning trips to return to the Barnes Foundation, the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the upcoming surrealism exhibit, MoMa, the Met, and for the first time since 1985, the National Gallery. That’s all this fall. I will make plans to visit the Baltimore Museum of Art (largest public holding of Matisse) in the spring while there for a conference and to the Boston Museum of Fine Art and Mass MoCA in the summer. 
​

Woman Holding a Balance
 
Her face serene and her untroubled  concentration
draws our gaze, as our eyes dart over 
the string of pearls and the gold chains 
slung carelessly over the edge of her jewelry case.
 
A painting of the last judgement 
hangs on the wall behind her
suggesting there are lives in the balance. 
 
As if they were placed on a scale,
here the object, here the colour,
never more, never less
than is needed for a perfect balance.
 
It might be a lot or a little but
that depends as always on
the exact equivalent of the object.
But the dishes are empty,
she seems to weigh air
she is expectant, but of what?
 
The tiny scales are empty. 
Is the woman weighing souls? 
Or merely the light glinting 
off the metal balance?

The Geographer
 
The calm geographer seems a world away,
his gaze drifting off into the distance.
A room cluttered with objects that gesture 
to a broader world: maps, rolled up vellum sea charts, 
a chart of the coasts of Europe on the wall,
the globe turned to the Indian Ocean.
 
The light falls on his papers and forehead,
the outside world drawn into the seclusion 
of his study as he explored the world beyond Delft.
The Dutch oversea empire was then 
at its full extent, with cargos of spices, 
silks, teas, coffee, and teak constantly 
arriving from distant colonies and trading posts.
 
What interests him is the information merchants bring back. 
Information he collected, analyzed, and synthesized 
into sea charts and maps that merchants took back 
into a wider world now better understood. 
 ​

​A Lady Writing a Letter with Her Maid
 
Again the maid and mistress 
but no exchange between them.
The mistress is absorbed in writing 
a letter, the maid lost in thought, 
arms clasped in front of her,
looking at something out the window. 
 
Writing a letter takes time. 
The light muted by the translucent 
linen curtain over the window.
 
In the foreground on the floor 
a crumpled letter, stick
of sealing wax, and a detached seal.
 
Has she has just received a letter,
opened it and thrown it on the floor
and drafts an emotional response?

​Dennis Maloney 
​
Dennis Maloney is a poet and translator. A number of volumes of his own poetry have been published including: The Map Is Not the Territory,  Just Enough, Listening to Tao Yuan Ming, The Things I Notice Now, The Faces of Guan Yin and Windows. A bilingual German/English volume, Empty Cup was published in Germany in 2017. Clearing the Stream: New & Selected Poems will appear in 2025 from Walton Well Press.

​Beatrice Cenci, Roman Warrior
 
Centuries since my father
soiled my girlish linen
 
and I called all the angels
from the clouds to sing in
 
my ears, to eclipse his grunts,
to soothe my own terror,
 
I haunt the Ponte Sant’Angelo,
steps from where my head was
 
severed for what they called
patricide, I, preservation.
 
On the bridge, I shadow the girls
with older boyfriends, tweaking
 
their hair to keep them alert,
tripping their men on the cobbles.
 
The Angels of the Passion watch
from their plinths – coaxing me,
 
laughing – but always with their
weapons upheld, ready to defend.

Nuala O'Connor ​

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her writing been widely published, and won many literary awards. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the 2025 Dublin Literary Award and shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. She won Irish Short Story of the Year at the 2022 Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in 2025. www.nualaoconnor.com

​Edge of Time
 
I come here to come once more 
to the edge of things, to imagine  
what might arrive in the leaving and return
of ocean’s cold surprise against my feet 
on the edge of blue. I study that line, 
walk a long time on this shore as the waves 
with their questions advance and recede. 
My body at their side can’t help but answer, 
edging in to catch the waves at their peak.
Their white insides curling above my head,
I dive wholly into their open face.
 
I’ve seen those who have gone too far out 
flirting with the edge of tide’s time.
The lifeguard whistle blows to say come back,
come back, before it’s too late.  All of us 
on edge, on shore, watching, waiting.  Our gaze 
lingers to see white sails passing further out  
on the horizon, the emptiness stretching,
the waves advancing from the edge of time.

Denise Pendleton

Denise Pendleton lives in mid coast Maine having returned, despite intentions otherwise,  to the town where she was born and raised. She is retired from a career of promoting reading and writing which often dovetailed with the arts and humanities.  Under her leadership, Picturing America, a project of the National Endowment for the Humanities, was integrated into the classrooms of hundreds of rural early childhood educators, giving them a view of history through the visual arts.  Pendleton holds an MFA in Poetry from Washington University; her poems have appeared in dozens of publications.

Phantom Trees

for Frank
 
There is a framed painting, by an unknown artist, hanging in the hallway that leads from our front door to the kitchen. I picked it up at a thrift store several years ago. I loved it, then and now, although I essentially forgot about it until Frank went ape over it.
 
The 24- inch square  painting is housed in a two- inch hand painted gold frame which Frank adores and says will be perfect on a south-facing bedroom wall to complement his antique gilded mirror.
 
The six birch trees in the painting are leafless, their ashen limbs stretching up, intertwined, into a shadowy pale cerulean blue sky. At their feet, on the horizon, phantom like shadows hover in a yellowish haze. The trees' roots at first appear to be a thin line of bloody red but then dip into a pond of metallic gold where they become just slightly visible. It is this golden pond that has caught Frank's attention and obsession. And mine.
 
Frank has done work for us before and he has become a friend, although we mostly see him when we have a job for him to do. This time he is painting our living room and seniorizing our home with bars and railings. He is a perfectionist in the best sense.
 
I want that painting, he says, with such enthusiasm and brashness that it takes me off guard. I love it, he says. I say we do, too. He persists for a few days asking what he can pay me for the painting. I laugh but ask him to please not ask me again, for now.
 
I am thinking about times when I could have relinquished something to someone I knew needed it more than me, but I didn't— whether my time, my feelings or thoughts, or an object we both loved. I decide not to live with that regret again.
 
Maureen Sauvain O’Connor
 
Maureen Sauvain O’Connor is a poet, flash fiction writer and psychotherapist. Her clients have brought meaning and depth to her life and the work has helped to create a space for her own  self-exploration and writing. She is grateful, too, for the inspiration provided by the magical gardens, outside her writing window, tended by her husband and daughter.
 

Don't miss this special workshop on writing horror with horror in art history!

This session includes a zoom presentation on art history's ghosts, monsters, witches, and murder! We will also talk about the craft of writing horror.

The next three days are asynchronous and generative, with you writing poems or stories on the darker side.

​More info and registration:

The Table
 
All the pleasures of the table, spread out
on a white linen cloth:  one hard roll
nestled in a napkin, smear of butter
on a plate, grapes in a wicker pannier,
pyramid of lemons in a woven basket.
And Marthe, Bonnard’s wife, in the corner,
her faced turned in shadow.  Each object
is bathed in radiant light.  It’s momentary,
this snatched capture of food, wine, sunlight,
beloved partner, but doesn’t the transience
add to the pleasure?  Looming behind her,
the dark blue door of the future, where
all of this has vanished. . . . .
 
**

This was first published at Pensive.

 
L'Amandier en Fleurs

Every spring, it forces me to paint it, Bonnard said,
and in this last version, one week before he died,
the subject fills the entire frame.  There is no ambiguity
or irony; it’s the glory of this particular almond tree
and his delight in it.  Which is how I feel about
my little orchard, the one my husband planted
before went into the light:  two apple trees, two pears,
two cherries (both sweet and tart), two plums.  When 
they blossom, the hillside turns into a froth of surf, 
a mid-winter blizzard, a billowing tulle gown.  
When the bloom is over, petals rain down, pink and white,
spent confetti after the party is over.  And then, so slowly 
it’s imperceptible, the branches fill with fruit.  On the canvas,
Bonnard’s surfaces tremble; everything is in a sort of flux.  
As am I, selling this home of forty-five years, dismantling 
this life we built together, diminishing down to a small apartment.  
It’s only stuff, I keep telling myself.  But the yard and garden--
how I hope the new owners will love it as much as we did, 
won’t chop down the trees for easier mowing, won’t let 
the perennial beds return to grass.  In Bonnard’s painting,
dots of titanium white, cadmium yellow, cerulean blue 
become a dazzle of blossoms, exploding to fill the canvas, 
one tiny glimpse of what heaven might be like. . . .
 
**

Barbara Crooker

This was first published in The Paterson Poetry Review.
        
Barbara Crooker is author of twelve chapbooks and ten full-length books of poetry, including  Some Glad Morning, Pitt Poetry Series, University of Pittsburgh Poetry Press, longlisted for the Julie Suk award from Jacar Press, The Book of Kells, which won the Best Poetry Book of 2019 Award from Poetry by the Sea, and Slow Wreckage (Grayson Books, 2024). Her other awards include: Grammy Spoken Word Finalist, the WB Yeats Society of New York Award, the Thomas Merton Poetry of the Sacred Award, and three Pennsylvania Council fellowships in literature.  Her work appears in literary journals and anthologies, including The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 
www.barbaracrooker.com

On Seeing Jerry Siegel's Portrait of Brigitte Bidet
 
Three housemates in Sacramento long ago
wanted photos of themselves in drag
more than they wanted electricity. 
Their dilapidated Victorian 
stood dark and open to the heat.
When they emerged, I posed them  
against an overgrown hedge,
the tall blond in the centre, 
a voluptuous brunette on each side.
Their pearls and bracelets sparkled. 
Their ball gowns were masses of gold,
ruby, and topaz against green privet.
When they stopped fidgeting and stood up straight, 
I snapped eight shots, then packed my gear
and left for my next appointment. 
 
There is no self, say the Buddhists,
or if there is, it changes like the light
as dry wood burns, like a dancer 
who leaps and tumbles, prances, turns,
and never stops. How many versions
of ourselves can we know? 
 
When Joshua Ratcliffe becomes 
another self, she's glamorous 
in an all-out Hollywood way,
not Ingrid Bergman, more Mae West, 
Jayne Mansfield, or Madonna. 
Brigitte Bidet interviews drag stars
on YouTube. Check her out.
And in Atlanta's Starlight Cabaret
her early ballet training 
makes her a paragon of grace.
 
In Jerry Siegel's portrait, Brigitte 
is confident of her beauty. 
The edge of her wig appears
across her forehead, not as a line,
but just as a hint that another woman,
or even a man, can emerge
when he or she is needed. 
 
Siegel's portrait returns me 
to Sacramento, a summer's day
when I wanted cool San Francisco,
when colour prints were still expensive, 
and when AIDS, the internet, YouTube, 
RuPaul, and The Lady Chablis
were not yet imagined. Now Brigitte
and Joshua seem two sides 
of a single coin, and when she synchs 
Madonna's "Express Yourself," she drops 
from a spin into a deep split, 
arms raised, big smile, the crowd goes wild.
"An expression of pure queer joy," she said,
"a pulling apart of gender and class." 
 
Joshua said, "It's important to be fish."
From online queens I learned only 
that fish, alien, and bug are modes
of being drag pretty. When I asked 
my granddaughter what that meant, 
she said that women do not discuss 
that topic with their grandfathers. 
 
I know so little, but I'm all for the joy
that humans of every persuasion 
can feel when we gather to celebrate 
ourselves in all our imperfect beauty. 
 
Decades ago Pepper Labeija, 
the second mother of the House of Labeija, 
said her New York family "had a whoopsie time,
because when fairies come out to stomp,
they know no colour line." 
Joshua said, "If it doesn't have rhinestones on it,
I don't want to look at it." 
Siegel said, "I'm not making a statement. 
I'm just trying to tell a story."

Steve Harrison

After Steve Harrison retired from the software industry, he began teaching World Literature at his local community college, attending poetry workshops, and writing poetry. He lives in Auburn, Alabama.