There’s a long tradition of poets writing “Self Portrait” poems, and visual artists perhaps have an even longer tradition.
The Cleveland Museum of Art lists about 200 works in their online collection alone which include the words “self portrait” in their title or attribution. To say nothing of the myriads of poems with “self portrait” in their titles, or even whole collections of poems that refer to the self. Artists — when nothing else comes to mind, remember, there’s always yourself to consider as a subject. Even some of the earliest cave drawings have an aspect of self-reflection — handprints surrounding the effect (memorialized or prayed for) brought about by going hunting with those hands.
Faithful or fanciful, in a hat, with a hat, frowning, in a mirror, in a cracked mirror, with head (well, wouldn’t you usually have your head while portraying yourself?), and so on. Self as devil, self with muses, self reconstructed.
It’s easy to see why artists use themselves as models — they’re the cheapest models around, and if you make them look bad, well, they never really take you to task over it.
Poetry is sometimes considered to be such an autobiographical art that you might as well label every poem a self-portrait.
But that is a modern, even postmodern, view of poetry. It seems “normal” to us because we’re living contemporaneously with this idea. But at various points in time, the “appropriate” subjects of poetry were anything but the self. Poetry was to be elevated, not concerned with the grunge of reality. A self-portrait poem was a statement indeed in those times, more so if it approached the confessional nature we’ve come to take for granted in contemporary poems.
Self-Portrait poems, if they ever went out of style, are more back in vogue than ever. Perhaps it has to do with a selfie culture, a mindspace where depictions of ourselves are both anticipated and expected to be staged. We don’t think the selfies posted on-line are “real”–we know you’re all putting a good face forward, at least usually. To the best of your ability. Possibly retouched to get rid of the smudge of mascara…
If he were alive today, Rembrandt (above) might be the King of Selfies. He left behind something like 80-100 self portraits. The small masterpiece depicted above is almost the same size as a selfie on Instagram — 2 15/16 inches by 2 1/2 inches. The iPhone 10 display is about 2.8 inches wide.
So is this a poem masquerading as a selfie, a selfie masquerading as a poem, or something else entirely? I’ll let you decide.
Self-Portrait with Jam
Ghost,
just
barely.
Behind you.
Behind me. Behind
my eyes whether I agree or
not. DNA winds its way about the body but
never asks permission. You think you know the ghost in question, but there are more out there:
chained up history the next link’s not able to break
even if weak spots were found. Escape
impossible, shade
always cast,
just
there.
Above is the unintentional selfie that prompted this poem. What I meant to do was take a picture of the Smucker’s recipe to have at hand while I made the bar cookies. If you want to make the recipe shown above, I can vouch for it – mine turned out great. I used apricot jam and peanut butter in the filling. Because if you can layer with jam, of course you can layer with peanut butter and jam!
Missed a poem? Links to prior poems can be found on this page.
Artwork photos from Cleveland Museum of Art used by permission of their Open Access collection rules.