"Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt" by Jorie Graham

The poem "Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt" by Jorie Graham contains such vivid descriptions of certain paintings. As I was reading the poem, in my head I could actually picture what the paintings must look like. Jorie Graham does such a great job in reacting to what she is looking at in such a detailed way. This made me want to see which paintings inspired Jorie Graham to write this poem. One of my classmates pointed out the website http://www.iklimt,com/work.html . This website was extremely helpful because they gave you a little bit of information about each of the paintings. On this website there are many different pieces of Gustav Klimt's artwork. Two of the paintings that I believed inspired Jorie Grahams poem are "Beeches" and "The Bride". I believe that she is referring to "Beeches" because one of the lines in her poem states "crossing this yellow beech forest" which could very well be describing this painting. The line "rendered in graphic, pornographic, detail--something like a scream between her legs" made me think it was referring to the painting of "The Bride". I noticed that many of Gustav Klimt's paintings contained different nude women. It was definitely a re-occuring theme in his artwork. There was also a lot of paintings referring to life and death. I also read on the website that he started painting a lot of life and death after the death of his son. I believe that Jorie Graham's poem directly reflects many of the pieces of art on this website, especially "Beeches" and "The Bride". All of Klint's paintings were very in debt and very interesting, just like Graham's poem.