The Night Watch and Poems of the Winter Palace: Interview with Barbara Krasner

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. 
​

Barbara Krasner with Van Gogh and Gauguin

Barbara Krasner with Lee Krasner's Untitled Composition

Read Barbara in The Ekphrastic Review:

The Appropriation of Brueghel:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-appropriation-of-brueghel-by-barbara-krasner

Gertrude's of South Orange:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/gertudes-of-south-orange-by-barbara-krasner

Five After Frida Kahlo:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/five-after-frida-kahlo-by-barbara-krasner

The Cancer I Don't Write About:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/the-cancer-i-dont-write-about-by-barbara-krasner

Two After George Bellows:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/two-after-george-bellows-by-barbara-krasner

Four After Pieter Brueghel the Elder:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/four-after-pieter-brueghel-the-elder-by-barbara-krasner

Two After Salvador Dali:
https://www.ekphrastic.net/the-ekphrastic-review/two-after-salvador-dali-by-barbara-krasner