Ekphrasis—poetic response to art—has always existed in India, as Vinay Dharwadker points out in his introduction to excerpts of his translation of Kalidasa's Abhijnanashakuntalam. In classical Sanskrit and other regional literatures, we come across stories of paintings created from the descriptions of the speaker, especially when princesses describe to the sakhi/friend the prince they dreamed of or glimpsed, or vice versa, in the case of Dushyanta describing his love, Shakuntala, in Kalidasa's play. That humans use one art form to respond to another medium is not unusual in the realm of the imagination. But what is unusual is each poet's unique response to a work of art, showing the trajectory of coming together of two imaginations—that of the poet and of the artist. Each such meeting is awe-inspiring.

Thanks to artist Nirmal Raja and Aroon Shivdasani (IAAC, NYC), whose networking drew many South Asian artists to present a gallery of work. Paintings by Aaliyah Gupta, Anujan Azhikode, Haresh Lalwani, Ela Shah, Kartik Trivedi, Nirmal Raja, Pallavi Sharma, Reeta Gidwani, Salma Arastu, Sangeeta Reddy,and Venantius Pinto, accompanied by their beautiful artistic statements, have inspired a plethora of poems. Additionally, this issue is buttressed by general ekphrastic poetry and general poetry sections. Incredibly, the diaspora poetry issue brings together South Asian poets from the U.S., Canada, U.K., Sweden, and the Caribbean, and also seasoned and budding poets. The popularity of ekphrastic poetry is made evident in this issue and in the foregrounding of ekphrasis in recent books by Meena Alexander, Ravi Shankar, and Sudeep Sen. It is indeed beyond the scope of this editorial to applaud each and every one of the contributors in the general category. We are humbled by the overwhelming response to our call for work and are grateful to the Museindia team, particularly to Surya Rao and Charanjeet Kaur, to split the diaspora issue into double issues, one for poetry and one for prose. Each year we are awed by their diligence in promoting South Asian literature on the world stage. Theirs is indeed a labor of love.

Ekphrasis invites poets to journey beyond what they immediately see, into the space between seeing and meaning making. It is the imagination's zone that poets are familiar with. As Saleem Peeradina notes, visual media "lend themselves to this expansion from the image at hand to what lies beyond its frame." Ekphrasis is challenging, because as poets we don't want to be presented with an agenda; we savor the mystery of the blank page and build with the first word or image surprising ourselves with the complete poem. In practicing ekphrasis, the poet works with an image produced by an artist from his or her imagination. So do poets simply copy this image into words? Or do poets naturally tend to go beyond simply recreating the painted images?

In the poems gathered here, the poets reveal some of their techniques of ekphrasis. The poems we have here in this issue startle with their response to the artwork and show us the meaning of ekphrasis. For Debjani Chatterjee, ekphrasis means presenting the emotional intensity of the artwork. Debjani's haiku "Weathering" captures her perception of Aaliyah Gupta's painting, "Weather 2." The haiku in its economy of words, and the use of biological language, such as "sperm" and "ova," picks up on the chaos that has to be weathered for any creation to happen. On the other hand, Kanaka Sathasivan opens a psychological doorway; in describing Anujan Azhikode's painting, she goes into the emotional space of two people "inches apart" but unable to see each other as we confront her final appeal, "So you see me? / Am I in you?" Notice that in Ravi Shankar's poem, the only description we get on Pallavi Sharma's painting is several stanzas down—"grass in the suitcase, a few / shovelsfull of dirt, green sprouts to check / through customs." Shankar weaves a grand intellectual inquiry into the idea of movement itself, what it leaves behind and what it carries in its momentum. In his note about his poetic process, he explains that the painting "joined the tropes, that of the natural world and that of the migratory world of transit, revealing the secret wish of the traveler to take some part of home to the place being visited."

While ekphrasis calls for an intense attention to details of the artwork, it also allows the poet to take a poetic leap—and we see that athletic display in many of these poems. For example, Suniti Namjoshi sees the painting "Carry-On" as an invitation she is sadly unable to accept, for she wonders how "to green / a damaged planet." Similarly, "Curious cow" by Usha Akella becomes a cow of the mind "taxiing on," weaving together images of cow and taxi and the abstract image of mind. Salma Arastu's painting in Pramila Venkateswaran's poem, "Lyrical Calligraphy," conflates lettering and the body in the grammar of the line, thus lifting observation to a heightened level: "our bodies' bold Arabic / etched into the world spelling their ochre." Anujan Azhikode's painting becomes in Sat Paul Goyal's poem, an ode to the human heart that is paradoxically encased and expansive.

We also see the shock of associations in many of the poems. In Meena Alexander's poem, "Lavinia Writes," which describes Monet's Giverny, we don't expect the violent image of the raped woman. The stories in and around us, float into our seeing, creating juxtapositions, and ironies in the architecture of ekphrasis. Some poets journey to the land of make-believe that art allows, and transform it into reality, as in Usha Kishore's "Mermaids."

Observation is the poet's job, so looking at artwork is continuous with the act of observing. I'm here merely to scrutinize / the master's genius, the play of light / on hair and limbs, on line and form," writes Ralph Nazareth in "At the Met Surrounded by Courbet's Nudes." But the poets seldom stop there. Association and observation work hand in hand, thus lifting ekphrasis from mimesis. Debjani's "Cloud Palace," is a ghazal on Raja's painting, reflecting patterns of associations. Debjani notes, "Just as certain age-old images stand out in a ghazal and conjure up many associations, Raja's visual images serve the same function in my poem: kites, butterflies, various colours, clouds and palace. I have also imposed a pattern in the very structured seven couplets, the first of which repeats the end-word, and the final signature couplet which provides a link to Kalidas." Such observation can also lead to a philosophical declaration, as in the conclusion of RK Biswas' poem, "Exiled": "distance is the beast / crouching beneath sentiment."

Some of the poets use the personal pronoun, thus making the painting their own; they enter it and tell their own story, as in Saleem Peeradina's "Embedded." His lines, "These fingers are strangers to dirt. I have not earned /These jewels gifted by those whose limbs have sweated /In the fields" reveal the poet/speaker's rumination about his life. What does an urban poet know about anything agrarian? An irony picked up in Namjoshi's poem as well! Thus the poems in both ekphrastic sections are like crystals, reflecting off of each other, moving, re-shaping; they provoke, question, offer a different angle on a painting, invite us to see a work with new eyes. As Yogesh Patel observes, "as artists we are at all about communicating something unperceived." Note the use of the "you" in Shanta Acharya's "L'Atalier Rouge," which is directed to Matisse—humanizing the artist by bringing him into the conversation. She writes, "While working you never try to think, only feel / and connect – woman and man, earth and sky, / tree like a human body, human body like a cathedral,/ studio like a private universe-" highlighting the affective aspect of art, which is a reminder to the poet not to lose that in his/her focus on craft, a point echoed by RK. Biswas: "A poem for me succeeds only when it brings to life that first emotion." 

Are X-Rays part of visual media? Sudeep Sen's poem, "Aorta Art," presents medicine as art: His poem views the installation of a heart x-ray rotating on its axis:

illness radiating inner beauty —
hidden architecture, looped,
dancing in secret helixes.

Innovation in ekphrastic poetry greets us at every turn. Yogesh Patel's take on Reeta Gidwani's art is a case in point. Trying to find words to articulate the fourth dimension of Gidwani's cubes, both poet and artist inquire into the ultimate meaning of form, the edge of form, its plasticity.

Vinay Dharwadker's excerpts of his translations of ekphrastic passages from Kalidasa's play anchor this issue in Indian literary tradition, while at the same time placing the ekphrastic poems here within a global, cross-cultural tradition.

The paintings, with the poems by their side, gain in meaning for the audience as well for the artists. In this jugalbandhi, all are winners—the artists, the poets, and the readers who are offered a bonus with each poem.