Out of Speech by Adam Vines. LSU, 2018. 78 pp. $17.95 (paperback)

Reading Adam Vines’s collection of ekphrastic poems, Out of Speech, is like walking through a museum. The speaker makes no pretense to bury his subjectivity, but instead presents us with a full experience of the galleries, including encounters with other museum-goers, the physical exhibition space, and, most importantly, the speaker’s memories and imaginings brought forward by the art.

The museum environment is evoked, often comically, as a counterpoint to fine art’s high-brow tradition. Boys take aim with finger-guns at Robert Indiana’s The American Dream #1 in “Iconoclasts.” Elsewhere, the speaker ironically answers rhetorical questions from fellow museum-goers, and even fantasizes about carving “with my pen the front / leg of Yellow Cow / for brisket” (“Social Capital and the Introduction of the Vanilla Egg”) in order to disrupt the museum’s order. He wonders, “Would everyone // unplug, order the blue ribs, / the black hooves / halved from me?” rather than keeping “our headphones // still cupping / our ears / for safety // from each other.” This moment of disconnect captures the lonely business of art-viewing. The speaker’s desire for communion is then ironically met with pretentious voices which only cloud the gallery.

We see cerebral art viewers characterized by their own words in “Overheard”—a poem of found language responding to de Kooning’s Evacuation. The speakers take on lofty tones to impress one another, noting “Teeth, teeth, typical / de Kooning teeth” and “Early Black Period— / one show, his breakthrough.” Rather than responding with overt critique, Vines exhibits the found language as if to invite the reader to enter into her own conversation with the poem, or else silently chuckle at the conversation of passing strangers. These museum-goers stand as foils to the tourists in “Back to the Old City” who bus to the Philadelphia Museum of Art only to “gather around / Rocky’s knees, // fists balled / above their heads” with no interest in the art inside. The poet-speaker stands between these extremes, approaching art with both unabashed playfulness and awe for its power to influence our experience of the real world.

By contextualizing artworks in terms of their viewers, Vines brings art out of the ethereal, and into the everyday. For instance, our speaker, abiding by the critics’ directions, resists reading metaphor into an abstract painting, but, after a litany of tempting images present themselves, admits, “in my ramblings / here, I find my father, // cord pulled while / on the pot, embolism” (“Scholar’s Advice”). He thus places that painting not only into a history of scholarly interpretation but also a network of personal memories which spring to mind and become equally important to his experience of the painting. A similar effect is achieved in “My View From Here,” which uses a series of similes as sentence fragments to liken the abstract figure in Yve Tanguy’s Les Vues to a running man, a stranger met in a hotel bar, a deceased friend, and a fish. Though the poem’s individual images are clear, for a reader unfamiliar with Les Vues, they may seem as blurred as the painting’s own smudged subject when Vines’s similes mix. The poet, however, embraces this blurring and brings the various images together in the closing lines:

like the me I see now
in Les Vues, the grey smudge
and outline of something
that they never catch up to
no matter how fast they run,
no matter how long I wait for them.

The poem starts and ends with the painting, but allows for free association with reality in the middle, so the two worlds bring one another to life.

Readers desiring a poem hyper-focused on Les Vues may be disappointed by the detours into memory in “My View From Here.” Such readers may cry that the poet has walked out of the museum and left the ekphrastic task behind him. But, unlike Keats or even Auden, whose eyes remain fixed on their focal art objects, Vines’s success lies in the marriage of traditional ekphrasis with the personal lyric. When he enters the museum, he brings with him all of his private life and inner world, asserting all of it worthy of poetic exploration.

In order to juggle layers of metaphor, the multiple readings of an image, and the parallel worlds within an artwork and surrounding it, Vines’s poems often take very short lines and stanzas, such as in “No One Is Knocking,” whose couplets are each only three or four words long, allowing the poem to meander from one element to the next. To step back and see the whole image by the end of the poem is a bit of a shock after communing quietly with each of its brushstrokes. The short lines and stanzas throughout Out of Speech thus evoke the leisurely pace of a museum-walker.

Vines is not a strictly narrative poet, but his verse still tends to engage paintings in ways that explore narrative meaning. The poems often expand upon artworks by extending their scenes into possible pasts and futures, such as in “Borders” when, after observing the painting from the subjective first person, viewing and then re-viewing it from a closer distance, the speaker predicts, “She will not / talk tonight. He hasn’t / talked for years.” This extended scene lives in our heads and changes the way we see the image.

Still, Vines acknowledges that potential interpretations exist independently from the original artworks. The narratives constructed by the speaker exist only in a liminal space which never supersedes the paintings, such as in “Cranes Arcing Like Static”” when the speaker ponders what the pictured woman is writing or making:

Or maybe these
are poems she will

fold into origami: cranes,
1,000 of them, Sadako,
for healing, 1,000 poems

for healing. But she
would not know
about Sadako.

Not only does the speaker begin in the hypothetical, but he also then corrects himself for imposing his interpretation onto the painting. While a traditional ekphrastic poet may insist on the objective only, Vines does anything but. His view is a possibility, even in “Re-Stroke I” when the speaker admits, “I want to re-stroke the canvas, // harden that afterthought.”

As Out of Speech steps out of the ekphrastic tradition of curated objectivity, it offers readers a look into the museum, captures our interest in the social world, and butts up against intellectual tradition. We should visit Vines’ poems for the same reason we enjoy museums: for the chance to see through fresh eyes, to imagine foreign worlds together, and to revisit forgotten parts of our own minds which are called forth by the art.