 Flowers on a Train, by Laurel Benjamin Sheila-Na-Gig Editions, 2025 https://sheilanagigblog.com/shop-sheila-na-gig-editions/laurel-benjamin/ ebook from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Flowers-Train-Laurel-Benjamin-ebook/dp/B0F96SS9DN The Ekphrastic Review: Tell us about Flowers on a Train. How did this collection come together? Laurel Benjamin: Most of the poems came together in the last five years. There is a biographical arc here, with pieces about family, memory, and identity, though the poems are not arranged chronologically. I could see a better path guided by theme, then moving a few pieces around so the sections didn't feel so neat. I couldn't have done this project without brilliant poet-friends like Sandra Fees and a critique from mentor Eileen Cleary, with whom I'd taken workshops. The author and artist Megan Merchant is a guide, as her revision workshop posited the idea of wisdom in the poem and how to connect figurative language. The work of readers and mentors not only made a difference within that set of poems and that manuscript, but also influenced craft going forward. The Ekphrastic Review: Many of the poems in this collection are ekphrastic. Tell us something about your ekphrastic journey. Has art always been important to you? In what ways does art inspire you as a poet? Laurel Benjamin: My mother led me through San Francisco Bay Area museums and galleries. I grew up taking ballet, playing piano, then oboe, making art patterned or graphic, more than imagistic or landscaped, and considered art school. A relationship with the arts and conversations about the arts played a large role in my development as a person. Yet that relationship with art changed in 2021 when I took my first online workshop with Canadian artist and writer Lorette C. Luzajic, who runs The Ekphrastic Review. In these sessions, people wrote to classical, ancient, and modern art and shared their results. I decided to start an ekphrastic writers group that fall, dedicated to community as much as writing. That group has been going ever since, where I post prompts every week and writers respond then provide supportive suggestions. This is where I develop most of my writing these days. What ekphrastic writing offers is a chance to have an unexpected experience, find a setting or idea outside of one's self or to find a mirror the self, to find an escape into the art, or speak from the point of view of the art or something in the art. Ekphrastic prompts also offer the gift of imagery. Ekphrastic writing has become like food, necessary for survival. The Ekphrastic Review: How has your relationship to visual art changed through ekphrasis? Laurel Benjamin: I devour art now, and much of it not the kind my mother liked, or myself of past times, specifically abstract painting. Recently at the San Francisco MOMA I walked through the Joan Mitchell show, abstracts covering entire walls. I came away with a couple favourites. The through-line of the story here is the willingness to grapple with abstracts in my own way rather than feeling left out. In one of Lorette's workshops, where we studied a collage that had so much going on, she instructed us to just take a section of the painting and focus on that exclusively instead of being overwhelmed. That approach has released expectations provided a key into the secret garden of images. The Ekphrastic Review: What is your ekphrastic process like? How do you choose artworks to write about, or do they choose you? Laurel Benjamin: I go down rabbit holes searching online for art. I try to buck my personal taste to a certain extent, but listen to it at the same time. Sometimes an art exhibition will present something unexpected. For instance, Mary Cassatt at Work, shown at the San Francisco Legion of Honor in 2024, dedicated one room to her pastels. A different technique than oils, yet the resulting details felt similar. Other techniques of hers were groundbreaking. Then online, I look for upcoming artists with various backgrounds in a variety of countries, who are promoted not only in art magazines, but also on museum and exhibition sites. I find depth in a combination of painting, photography, sculpture, and installations. The Ekphrastic Review: You have several poems after Leonora Carrington and also Johannes Vermeer in this book. What draws you to these artists? Are there other painters that you return to over and over? Laurel Benjamin: Carrington and Vermeer are among the few I give credit to in the book, but most poems in the collection are ekphrastic. The aim is for the work to be stand-alone, meaning not reliant on the art. As for Carrington's surrealist paintings, my poem "The Bird Men," after The Bird Men of Burnley (1970), uses a magical realism response, where men in the painting threaten the birds and the speaker. They represent all the ills of society. Her images gift a kind of freedom in writing, and allow disparate images to arise; whether they coalesce in the poem is the challenge. Some works in the famous Vermeer exhibition (Rjiksmuseum, Amsterdam, 2023), had never been shown to the public, 28 of 37 total works. A film of the exhibition at my local theatre included an art expert's narration. Vermeer's piece, The Art of Painting (Allegorie op de Schilderkunst) (1666-68), is typical of the artist, depicting a woman inside a canal house, and in this case an artist's model. Yet we're not sure if she is a professional model, a worker, or his daughter. In my poem, "Lower Your Eyes," I bring in doubt, try to capture the time and place from the point of view of a young woman with few options. The Ekphrastic Review: Not all of the poems in the collection are ekphrastic, although I would say they carry the spirit of art with them in the imagery and sensibility and references to other kinds of art such as music and literature. How do you decide which poems will be ekphrastic? Where else do you derive inspiration from? Laurel Benjamin: Once an ekphrastic writer, always one. Poems that don't directly arise from images provide their own. Food, women's bodies, heritage, nature, music, are themes that dominate my work. Inspiration comes from a grocery store trip where bits of conversation are interspersed with the memory of my mother and I at Woolworth's eating liver and onions, or a tremor (I live in earthquake country, between two faults). A yearly trip to the Monterey Bay elicits a scene where along the shore a dead seal is having it's insides ripped out by the "knitting needle beaks of vultures." When my new neighbours cut down the two backyard trees at their move in party, I think of the Japanese who dominated this area, and who were rounded up and taken to internment camps. My morning walk presents a whole tree of bluebirds, where I "wait for the wavering kew in succession." Visiting cousins back east, in retrospect, I consider the bagel woman and everything she lost leaving the old country, where my Jewish family escaped. I started to think about the work of women, and the work I did when very young, like "shit jobs like ABC legal and the flower shop," taking an hour by streetcar to arrive at minimum wage A&W, as well as a law firm file room where "photos learned to drag themselves from their sleeves," showing horrific photos of women who'd sued for IUD malfunction. I attend classical music concerts regularly, and in one poem I complain directly to Beethoven. I'm also an early jazz fan, and in another poem I'm listening to Woody Allen at a New York jazz club, when my mind leaves the scene for 1920s Paris. The Ekphrastic Review: Was there a poem you found especially challenging to write? If so, why? Laurel Benjamin: "Gingko" was a response to a Pep Ventosa piece (New York, Three, 2019.) He snaps hundreds of photos from different angles around a subject, merges them, capturing more than one moment in time. I wrote about a memory of high school chemistry, yet the poem ended up completely different. The subject was a specific tree on my neighbourhood walk, yet I didn't know why that "meeting" had such significance. Eileen Cleary asked "What's the poem about?" Spelling it out in plain language to her gave me a way in, desperation of having a mass removed from the abdomen. I threw out the first third of the poem. The leaves of the tree shimmer side by side, saying "You will heal." The Ekphrastic Review: What’s next for Laurel Benjamin? What are you working on right now? Laurel Benjamin: My next collection, Written Into the Curve of the Sea's Open Throat, will be published in 2026 by Shanti Arts. In Flowers on a Train, we journey to different places and times, while Curve stays with themes of women, Jewish women, Jewish heritage, reproductive issues. The concept of compromise connects up the themes. A different twist, yet ekphrastic images again propel much of the work. I am currently working on a third collection focused on California. I've lived here my whole life, recently started writing poems about the rugged coast, mountains, trails, along with the San Francisco Bay and life around it, the foghorns and trains. So it's very atmospheric. ** Read Laurel Benjamin in The Ekphrastic Review: Watermelon of Forgiveness (nominated for the Pushcart Prize) https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/watermelon-of-forgiveness-by-laurel-benjamin Missing Artist Found in the Railyard https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/missing-artist-found-in-the-railyard-by-laurel-benjamin Kim's Vietnamese Cafe https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/kims-vietnamese-cafe-by-laurel-benjamin My Mother Read Szymborska https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/my-mother-read-szymborska-by-laurel-benjamin
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The Ekphrastic Review
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January 2026
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