For my response to a portrait/picture of a person, I chose Girl Running with Wet Canvas (Wet Paint) by Norman Rockwell, because I think it’s a really interesting painting that leaves a lot to the imagination, and is hence good source material for an ekphrastic poem. It appeared to me that the girl in the painting had painted a very beautiful artwork, although she seems preoccupied with something else. As such, I chose to personify the world of her painting (“birds left to freeze / foxes left to starve”) and dramatize the act of painting as something akin to being the creator of a world. To achieve this goal, I made the form of the poem in such a way that for the first stanza, each line was longer than the last until the middle of the poem, when they decrease in size back to one word. I did this to create the sense of creating something big and majestic from small beginnings, in this case creating an entire world with paint. It was somewhat challenging to choose places to end lines that fit this shape, as I had to change a few word choices, and the shape isn’t perfect, some lines are longer or shorter than the previous when they should be the opposite, but this doesn’t hinder the effect too much. To do this, I had to use a lot of enjambment—barely any lines end at the end of a sentence—which also serves the purpose of making the poem seem continuous, almost like one nonstop paragraph rather than a poem separated into lots of smaller chunks. I did this as I thought it helped the poem seem as though it painted a more holistic picture rather than a series of events as other poems might, and it also makes the poem seem as though it describes something large and majestic. Only the last line of each stanza is end-stopped, and this is very important for the end of the first stanza, as this is the end of the aforementioned continuous paragraph, and I think it is important that there is a break there before the second stanza, which has only one word on each line, and contrasts with the first stanza in this way, as it is written to feel as though there is a break between each word, rather than lots of words and continuous enjambment as in the first stanza, and this serves to highlight the contrast between the complexity of a painting and its simple basis of canvas and paint. However, I also extensively tried to link the world of the snowy painting with the idea of paint and vice versa, I describe the snow as a canvas covering the tree, and the paint as an ice covering the canvas. I refer a lot to elements of the snowy painting, the snow, and it is rather small so it is hard to tell, but I felt like some of the shapes look somewhat like birds or foxes, or if not, then this is an extension of the visual. However, I only refer to the girl who herself made the painting vaguely, which seem unusual, as she is the most important part of the picture, but I did this intentionally, as the personified creatures in the painting wouldn’t know she existed—she would be somewhat akin to an apathetic god, uncaring for her creations, as she is distracted by other things, and I tried to portray her in this way; while she is not explicitly referenced much, the poem does refer heavily to her influence on the world of the snowy painting.