I wrote this poem at the end of last year, 2025. It was inspired by a prompt in a literary journal that posts a piece of artwork each month and solicits ekphrastic poems inspired by the piece. The artwork that they posted one month last fall is titled grief seance: disjecta membra. I started brainstorming some words and scribbles about this artwork.
At the time, I was reading The Collected Poetry of Nikki Giovanni and I came across several poems that felt connected to this piece of artwork. This led me down a path of discovering the poetic form called the “glosa”, which is originally a Spanish form which involves referencing four lines of another poet’s work. I started trying to figure out which four lines of Giovanni’s I might use to build out my ekphrastic poem.
Around the same time, I came across the “cento”, which is a poem that pulls lines from other poet’s work. The original artwork was subtitled “disjecta membra”, which means, essentially, bits and pieces of art (pottery, literature, cultural artifacts, etc….) that have survived. Imagine the flotsam and jetsam of an archeological dig.
This drew my attention to the poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats because it is not only ekphrastic, it is about an ancient piece of pottery. In grief seance, the woman at the center of the work appears to be in the process of being freed from a large piece of pottery or an urn. One of the things that I most admired about this painting was that it felt full of movement and the woman at the center seemed on the cusp of a great change. She appears to be about to take a step forward. When I read a bit more about John Keats, I learned that he was quite fixated on the idea of “immortality” and certainly Ode on a Grecian Urn seems to me an ode to these moments frozen in time. I wanted this poem to bring these different ideas into conversation.
So I decided to use four lines from Keats’s poem for the “cabeza” (or head) of the glosa.
I was still reading Nikki Giovanni’s work and kept coming across lines that felt like they belonged in this poem. That’s when I decided that this poem shouldn’t just be a conversation with John Keats but to bring a multiplicity of voices. So it would be a cento too. All of the poems I decided to references were written by women and the idea of a poem written with the “disjecta membra” of the feminine called to mind a patchwork quilt. The woman in the painted is nude and I thought that maybe she’d like a quilt, not to cover her body but to keep herself warm.
Thus spurred a week or so of reading and noting and pulling lines from dozens of poems and stitching them back together. It was a lovely week.
It was during this time that I learned from the poet Nadia Alexis that the journal I was going to submit to didn’t have a great track record of publishing writers from the global majority and those who have traditionally been marginalized in publishing. This was disappointing by not surprising. Still, I was so enjoying clipping and sewing that I carried on and completed the poem. I did still submit it to the journal. Needless to say, it wasn’t accepted. I had already learned and grown so much through this process of creation that I barely noticed the rejection.
Rhena Writes 