Ekphrastic Poetry Takes on Unlikely Universes
Poets use Words to Paint Narratives Based on Art October 10 in Portland, Maine at Unlikely Universes at Oak St. Lofts Gallery.
As part of Ann Tracy’s Unlikely Universes exhibition at the Oak St. Lofts Gallery, 72 Oak St., (between Congress and Cumberland Sts.), Portland Maine, a performance of Ekphrastic Poetry is set for Saturday, October 10th at 4 pm. Annaliese Jakimides, and Lily Brown, both award winning poets, are the featured performers for the Ekphrastic Poetry Performance afternoon in addition to Ann Tracy reading some of her haiku she has written about the work.
Jakimides has been shaped by her first-generation-American family in inner-city Boston, followed by decades raising her own in a small northern Maine town. She is cited in state and national competitions and nominated for Pushcart Prizes and Best of the Net, more than 1,000 short works—prose and poetry—have appeared in magazines, journals, anthologies, and audiobooks, on radio and stage. Recent or upcoming publications include essays and short stories addressing liminal space, transformation, obsession, and more. She’s the co-book writer of the musicals Love Affair and Café Berlin. A freelance editor and facilitator, she’s worked with the Maine Humanities Council, Maine Arts Commission, and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, among others
Brown is the author of Blade Work, winner of the 2026 Maine Literary Award for poetry and the New Measure Poetry Prize (Parlor Press, 2025); Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland State University Poetry Center); and several chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Ugly Duckling Press). She lives in Maine with her family and works as a writing teacher.
Tracy is also a writer and has worked as a journalist as well as a playwright and poet with some of her work produced by Beyond the Proscenium Productions in Sacramento. She is a New England native who lived in Maine from kindergarten through 3 grade in Cape Neddick and then her family moved south to Massachusetts and then west to Colorado. After meeting her husband in Colorado, they moved first to Wisconsin and then to Northern California where they lived until their 2011 move to Portland Maine. Tracy’s work can be found at the Maine Art Collective Gallery, 9 Moulton St. (Off Commercial St) in Portland’s Old Port area.
This limited edition series by Ann Tracy is based on her photographs of colorful painting residue containing microplastics from acrylic paint, which reminded her of both the Hubble Space Telescope photos and of a concept from the string theory in physics which multi-universes are present but not detectable in our 3-D universe.
“I am a ‘tree-hugger’ and have been aware of the many environmental challenges we continue to face since the 1970s, said Tracy. “But it was brought into sharp focus when my husband and I moved up to Rockport to a house with a septic system and I realized that everything would eventually go into the groundwater, where we and others in our neighborhood get water for our wells.
To green my studio practice, I devised a very low tech system involving washing brushes in a metal cup and then pouring that colored liquid into an aluminum pan, where it then evaporates. As I worked on paintings for a show, some swirling, colorful drama was occurring in that pan that I was able to photograph.
My images reminded me of the Hubble telescope photos of the universe. This in turn led me to think of the string theory of physics, where multiple universes exist at the same time. Since I was creating universes, why not populate them? At least I won’t be putting micro-plastics into the water in our universe, on the only planet we have. “
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