Arden Levine is the author of Spoke (The Word Works’ Hilary Tham Capital Collection, 2026; National Poetry Series Finalist, 2024), and Ladies’ Abecedary (Harbor Editions, 2021). Her poems, essays, and reviews appear in AGNI, Barrow Street, Harvard Review, Indiana Review, RHINO and elsewhere, and have been featured by Poetry Society of America, Poetry Foundation, and WNYC's Radiolab. Arden is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and serves on the boards of Beloit Poetry Journal and No, Dear. She lives in New York City and works in urban housing policy and community development

Describe your ekphrastic process. Do you have a favorite prompt or way in? 

By bank shot. Or by sneaking up. I mean that kinda literally: When you approach an artwork (even a familiar one) like you and it intend to surprise each other, you might notice in it something that no one has before: perhaps its size relative to its surroundings or a mundane feature that suddenly hits you harder diagonally than straight on. Ten years ago, the Met Breuer had an incredibly impacting Diane Arbus exhibit (“In the Beginning”); each of her photographs hung on individual column-like partitions, creating for the viewer the effect of walking a pedestrian-clogged street scene within the galleries. I’d first seen these images in folios two decades prior, but this unexpected way of engaging with her startling silvertone-captured human subjects was, for me, exactly the right way. Novel encounters create new cognitive routes to poems, which in turn show us how to give ourselves a start (in both senses of the word).

What attracts you to a work for ekphrasis? How do you know you've got a good subject?

When I don’t really know what to do with it at first. I want to be astonished and klutzy and without immediately-accessible good words. If the artwork is marvelous, it is also complete; it has the full complement of its own vocabulary. So, I add nothing to it by creating a poem, which is the best kind of challenge. A good ekphrastic subject is like a beloved or a fantastic crush; you’re dazzled by the joy of seeing and experiencing them as a singular being and you just want to figure out how to have a conversation without sounding like too much of a doofus. My poem in Metphrastics isn’t even expressly about the Man Ray photogram it contemplates; that artwork is too perfectly self-contained to poem about directly, so I changed to wide-angle and wrote about someone studying the image (and observing herself, and scrutinizing the concept of a gaze). And we’re back to the idea of the novel encounter: More than teaching me how to see his work, Man Ray gave me a whole new set of lenses.

What's your favorite piece at the Met?

The Living Room from the Francis W. Little House (colloquially, “the Frank Lloyd Wright Room”). I’m not big on simulated living quarters in museums, but (as my career involves housing policy and city planning) I’m definitely a big space-and-place person. And the difference between a typical period room and this room is not only its austere curation but its absences; it’s the “room” itself that the person within it is meant to notice. I also enjoy that despite being immediately adjacent to the Charles Engelhard Court (another full-lunged breathing space in the American Wing but also one of the most bustling locations in the museum), this room itself remains consistently and reverently silent. I’ve spent time in and among a number of Wright residences (from Fallingwater to the Pope-Leighey House to the Usonian enclave) and these spaces all feel common to each other, like the open areas of a page with an economy of well-selected statements. 

Do you have a favorite ekphrastic poem?

Three of them, contemplating paintings from three different eras, all of them treating women’s unseen labor with reverence:

“Lave” by Patricia Spears Jones, invoking “Panel 57” of The Migration Series (1940-41) by Jacob Lawrence. (I’ve written about this poem, and the book that contains it, here.)

“Vermeer” by Wislawa Szymborska, which transfigures the small spout-poured rivulet of “The Milkmaid” (1658) into a universe.

“From My Box of Tangled Memories” by Allison Blevins, who lets Joan Mitchell’s “Ici” (1992) tell her what she must do with her hands.

What advice would you give a writer who would like to try ekphrastic poetry?

Think of it less as a writing exercise than a perceiving exercise. Ekphrasis should be like those art class exercises where we draw the contours of our hand while looking at our hand rather than the paper, producing a right-brained interpretation that may look nothing like the hand but perhaps represents it all the more fully. Also, if you feel compelled to return to the same subject, artwork, or artist because you just keep wanting to put your arms more tightly around it, that’s not a failing; that’s a match. I think about Raymond Dufayel, the character in the film Amélie, who spends decades painting copies of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (housed at The Phillips Collection, my other favorite museum in my other hometown); he endeavors, through this practice, to truly see one character in the scene who is both central and obscured. Which feels like a good summary of poet’s work.

What excites you about the Metphrastics project?

That it will encourage nerdy writer-types to descend upon the Met in great poeming coteries. Isn’t that the late-night museum party we’ve all not-so-secretly been hoping for?