Poet Keith Ratzlaff’s favorite word is iris. His mother grew them around the house when he was a kid. His wife also grows them. He thinks the origin of the word is Persian. “It’s a word that has traveled a long way… Iris,” he says. He pronounces it in an almost musical whisper. “Iris. The muscles around your mouth don’t contract around it. It’s all air.”

In the spring of 2010 Ratzlaff was a guest instructor for Randolph College’s Visiting Writers Program teaching a class on Ekphrastic poetry. “The purist definition would be a verbal or literary representation of a visual work. In textbook Ekphrastic poetry, the artwork and the poem relate one to one. The art and the poem have a fusion.”

Instead of this more restrictive view, Ratzlaff encourages his students to use the art as inspiration—“to use the still moment of the painting or photograph and give it voice or movement… a dialog that can be far ranging. Any time the arts talk to one another can be an Ekphrastic moment.”

Ratzlaff suggests that the first Ekphrastic poem new writers attempt should not be about art they love. He advises, instead, to choose something they are not sure of. “This is good advice for poetry in general,” he says. “If you are so sure about it, there is no discovery about the work or about yourself.”

Ratzlaff began writing poems as a child in his hometown of Henderson, Nebraska, on a typewriter his father brought home from the office. He once wrote a poem for each member of his family, which included five brothers and sisters, comparing each of them to a flower. However, it wasn’t until age twenty-five in graduate school that he began to think of himself as a writer.

Ratzlaff’s most significant experience with Ekphrastics came when he lived in England for a year. He was experiencing a serious writing block partly because his Midwestern voice didn’t match his surroundings. He walked into an exhibition of Paul Klee’s artwork and saw Klee doing something in his art that he wanted to do in his writing. Ratzlaff immediately began doodling verbal sketches of the Klee paintings right there in the gallery. Suddenly he was engaged in language in a new way. “One of the things Klee gave me was a frame to give voice to a particular thing. It was such a relief, because I had been blocked for two years.”

Ratzlaff picks up a copy of his book of poetry, Dubious Angels: Poems after Paul Klee, from his desktop and flips through drawings of angels by Klee. “They’re poignant.” He flips to another. “Grotesque,” he says. “Rude.”

When he was approached about teaching at Randolph College, he looked at the online collection of the Maier Museum of Art and was impressed. He asked if he could hold his class in the Museum gallery. Ratzlaff enjoys teaching the class while surrounded by the artwork. He loves Robert Rauschenberg’s 1973 serigraph, Watermark, in the Museum’s collection. Rauschenberg uses a visual technique to create “combines”—collages in which many pieces come together and relate to one another to make sense as a whole. Ratzlaff has been working with poems in what he calls a collage method where he throws things together, takes them apart again, and puts them back together to make political and cultural statements, much like Rauschenberg’s visual collages.

Ratzlaff also gets inspiration for his writing from watching people or reading. “The New York Times is a great source. I read the paper before I write every day. The everyday world ought to give us everything we need, and art is part of the everyday world,” he says.

Most often, Ratzlaff’s creative writing process begins with sitting at his desk. He looks out the window, and he looks around the room. His triggers are almost always visual. He also walks outdoors and writes notes in a small black notebook. After his arrival at Randolph College, he made some verbal sketches in the College’s Dell.

Ratzlaff feels strongly about the importance of revision. He believes that work often does not come out whole on the first try. When he thinks he has something in his verbal sketches, he types it into the computer, prints it out, and scribbles on it. He then types the revision into the computer, prints it out, and scribbles on it again. He might do thirty to fifty revisions until he feels the poem is done. He likes to keep every draft. “I have a hard time throwing them away,” he says. Yet he rarely looks at the drafts he keeps. He laughs and says, “We make funny rules for ourselves.”

Ratzlaff gave a reading of his poetry in Randolph College’s Jack Lounge on March 24th, 2010. He says he does not get nervous when doing readings. He enjoys them. Classes, he says, give him more butterflies. “In class you never know. Students are variable.” The poet seems at ease as he stands at the podium before the crowd. He is wearing small round glasses and a full beard mixing with gray. He reads his poem, Dill, about his 93-year-old mother’s last garden before she moved from her home into an assisted living facility.

The garden is small
Two tomatoes, one cucumber, some transplanted pansies
The iris need lifting
But she’ll leave that for someone else.
“Whoever,” she says.

The word “iris” comes out of Ratzlaff’s mouth, all air.