#8: What Is An Ekphrastic Poem? What Is Fan Poetry?

Towards the back of my zine I’ll Never Get Over Any Of Them is one of the shortest poems I’ve written, titled After ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’. It goes like this:

After Professor Marston And The Wonder Women

you assign us each a main character

a real person who existed

we think about who they are alone

who they are together

and our answers change

‘I want to live in a house with you both,’

you say,

‘I want to have kids’

we all volunteer to die at the end

I wrote this after watching the 2017 movie with two partners. It follows Professor William Moulton Marston and his wife Elizabeth as they fall in love with their lab assistant, Olive. The Marstons worked in psychology and developed DISC theory, a theory of human behaviour they later infused with theories of BDSM. They invented the lie detector, though it’s now considered defunct. And Mr Marston is credited with the creation of DC’s Wonder Woman, whom he based on Elizabeth and Olive. But most importantly, the three of them built a life together until Mr Marston died of cancer in 1947. Elizabeth and Olive lived together for another 43 years, until Olive’s death in 1990. Elizabeth lived to be 100.

After ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’ is an ekphrastic poem. You can probably now guess what that means from context, but essentially ekphrasis is the process of responding. Ekphrastic poetry is traditionally poetry which responds to a piece of visual art, but poets have expanded its meaning to any response – whether to music, a movie, an interview, an ad, or another poet’s performance. 

But wait, I hear you saying. That sounds a lot like fan poetry. Just like fan fiction is fiction written in response to existing work, surely you can just write poetry which does the same?

The answer is yes, you can.

Just like fan fiction usually engages with a work by offering a new perspective on it, filling in a gap or adding a new element to it, fan poetry can do the same. This is where the two genres differ; where fan poetry usually engages directly with the text in a fannish way, ekphrastic poetry usually focuses on an emotional response. In After ‘Professor Marston And The Wonder Women’, for example, I recounted my emotional experience watching the movie instead of inserting myself into it.

Have you written any ekphrastic poems, reader? Any fan poems to show? Or do you have a text you want to see reflected in a poem?

Word Count: 427