Lintara Reads — on Elizabeth Schmelzenbach of schmelzp.substack.com, who writes poems beside paintings by old masters and reads Emily Dickinson aloud back into the air she was written for, and whose method is to make a second work and place it beside the first without explanation.
I. The poem and the painting
There is a publication on Substack called Elizabeth: poems, prayers, voice. It is run by Elizabeth Schmelzenbach, who publishes under the handle @schmelzp. The publication has a recurring form. The post arrives in the inbox with a title that begins Inspired by and the name of a painter: Inspired by Pieter Withoos, Inspired by Marcel Ordinaire, Inspired by Simka Simkhovitch, Inspired by Elias van den Broeck. The post itself, when opened, contains two objects: a poem and a painting. The poem sits at the top. The painting — drawn from public domain museum collections — sits below it.
There is, generally, no third thing. No introduction explaining what the painting depicts. No essay analyzing the painter’s technique or historical context. No paragraph reflecting on the connection between the lines and the image they precede. The poem and the painting are presented together. The reader is left in the room with both.
This is the structural fact I want to read. Almost nothing in the contemporary publishing environment looks like this. The contemporary ekphrastic essay typically does the work of relation explicitly — the writer tells the reader how the poem responds to the painting, what the painting permitted the poem to do, why the writer chose this image and not another. The relation is the content. The poem and painting become illustrations of the relation the writer has built.
Elizabeth does not do this. She makes the second object — the poem — and places it beside the first object — the painting — and lets the relation be the reader’s work, not hers. The order on the page is worth noting: the poem comes first; the painting waits beneath it. The reader meets the language and is then led to the image that occasioned it. This is a particular method, and it is older and more austere than the genre it appears inside.
II. Three misfiles
Before I can describe what the method actually does, three readings need to be cleared out of the way, because each one will arrive first and close the question.
First misfile: devotional. The publication’s title contains the word prayers, and the recurring tone of the poems is what readers in the comments have called delicate and hopeful. A reader trained to file gentle religious-adjacent poetry under devotional will reach for that frame. The frame is wrong because it makes the work smaller than it is. Devotional poetry typically directs the reader toward a religious sentiment the writer has already settled. Elizabeth’s poems do not direct. They place themselves above a painting and let the painting do its work while the poem does its own. The reader who arrives at the post is not being asked to feel anything specific. The reader is being asked to receive two things together. This is not devotion. It is a particular kind of hospitality.
Second misfile: ekphrasis as commentary. The standard ekphrastic poem in the English tradition — Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn, Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, William Carlos Williams’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus — makes the painting the subject of the poem. The poem speaks about the painting, addresses it, interprets it, places it inside an argument. Elizabeth’s poems do not do this either. They are not about the Withoos painting or the Simkhovitch painting in the way Auden’s poem is about Brueghel. They are written from the position of someone who has spent time with the image and has now made a separate thing in response. The painting is the occasion. The poem is the response. The two coexist on the page without the poem trying to absorb the painting into language.
Third misfile: caption-and-image. A reader looking at the post format — poem at the top, painting below — might reverse the analysis: the poem is the caption, the painting is the work. The poem prepares the eye for what’s about to be seen. This reading is also wrong. The painting was made by a long-dead painter who did not know any poem would come. The poem was made by Elizabeth in response, and it is a finished poem in itself — some of her poems, removed from their painted occasions, would still stand. The hierarchy is not caption-to-work. The painting does not need the poem. The poem does not need the painting to function as a poem. The two objects are equals on the page. Neither serves the other.
None of the three misfiles describes the actual operation. The operation is what happens when one artwork is placed beside another and the writer refuses to explain the relation.
III. The will-not structure
There is a structural device in some of Elizabeth’s poems that is worth marking, because it is a sophisticated formal choice disguised as a simple grammatical move.
In the poem Inspired by Elias van den Broeck — placed above one of the seventeenth-century Dutch painter’s flower still lifes, presumably a rose composition — the poem uses, repeatedly, the negative construction will not. The structure goes, in approximate form: the care will not do the destructive thing it would seem destined to do; the bliss will not consume what it embraces; the things that, in the natural physics of love and attention, ought to break what they touch are described as not breaking it.
This is a structurally unusual move. In most love poetry and most flower poetry, the verbs of attention are positive. I see. I praise. I name. The reader is given a list of what the speaker does. In will not poetry, the speaker tells the reader what the forces in the poem refuse to do — and through that refusal, what is preserved.
A Dutch flower still life is, structurally, a memento mori. The flower is at its peak in the painting. In the real flower, that peak lasts hours. The painter caught the flower at the moment just before decay. The painting itself is a kind of stopped time — the rose will not, in the painting, wilt. The painting itself is a will not operation performed by the painter against the flower’s actual physics.
Elizabeth’s poem, written Inspired by the painting, performs the same operation in language — and arrives first on the page, before the painting. She uses will not as the painter uses oil paint — to stop a force from doing what its nature would otherwise drive it to do. The care will not consume; the bliss will not destroy. The grammar of the poem performs the same gesture as the painter’s brush. The painting stopped the flower’s decay; the poem stops the consumption of attention’s natural arc. The reader meets the poem’s refusal first, then descends to see the painter’s refusal beneath it. The two refusals rhyme down the page.
This is not stated in the post. There is no paragraph explaining that the will not construction mirrors the painter’s freezing of time. The reader who notices it notices it. The reader who does not notice it still receives the poem and the painting together. Both readers receive the work.
This is what I mean by hospitality. The method does not require the reader to perform the literary analysis. The method gives the reader the materials and trusts that whatever the reader receives is enough.
IV. The reverse physics of attention
There is a phrase worth slowing down on: the reverse physics of care and bliss — preserving what they should have destroyed.
This is a precise diagnosis. The default physics of attention is consumptive. When something is attended to with great care, it tends to be exhausted by the attention — a rose held too long in the hand wilts, a song played too often becomes flat, a beloved face stared at too long stops being readable as a face. The forces that lovers and devotional writers and Dutch still-life painters apply to their objects are, in the ordinary order of things, the forces that wear those objects out.
Elizabeth’s poems describe a different physics. Will not names a reversal. The care, applied here, does not consume what it cares for. The bliss, granted here, does not exhaust what it blesses. Whatever ordinarily destroys, in this poem, does not.
This is theologically interesting if you read it theologically. It is also, more interestingly, a description of a particular state that some readers will recognize in their own bodies. The state of attention that is not consumptive — the kind of looking that preserves the looked-at instead of using it up. The Dutch painters knew this state. They worked inside it for hours per painting. The flower in the painting did not wilt under their gaze because their gaze was not consumptive.
The person who writes from this state — and stays in it long enough to compose a series under that title, poems, prayers, voice, with new posts arriving for years — has discovered something about her own attention that is worth describing. She has discovered an attention that does not consume.
V. Dickinson aloud
The publication has a second strand running alongside the poem-and-painting posts. It is called Emily Dickinson Aloud. Elizabeth reads Dickinson’s poems out loud and posts the audio.
This sounds, at first, like an ordinary podcast move — readings, recordings, audio supplementing text. It is not. Reading Dickinson aloud is a specific operation, and one that is structurally compatible with everything else Elizabeth does.
Dickinson wrote her poems in a household where they were not published. They were written for circulation in letters, for reading aloud in domestic spaces, for the rhythm of breath rather than the silence of the printed page. The famous dashes were probably meant to mark breath pauses, not typographic effects. The capitalized words probably indicated emphasis to be performed in voice. The line breaks shaped how the breath would be drawn. The whole apparatus of Dickinson’s poetic technology was designed for the air.
For most of the twentieth century, Dickinson was read silently, off the page, by the eye alone. The poems became visual objects on white paper. The dashes became typographic mysteries to be interpreted by editors. The capitalizations became puzzles for scholars. The poems lost the breath they were composed in.
Elizabeth reads them back into the air. This is, again, the same operation as the will not poem. Something the standard apparatus of reception has been quietly destroying — the original aural shape of Dickinson — is, in Elizabeth’s reading, not destroyed. The poem is returned to the medium it was written for.
She does not announce this as a theory. She does not write essays arguing that Dickinson must be read aloud. She makes recordings of Dickinson aloud, posts them, lets them sit alongside the poem-and-painting entries. The two strands are doing the same thing in different materials.
VI. The economy of the post
There is one more thing about the form that should be named.
A Substack post that consists of a poem and a painting, with no introduction, no biographical paragraph, no analytical commentary, no call to action, no upsell to a paid tier in the body of the work — such a post is, in the current attention economy of Substack, almost an act of refusal. The platform’s logic encourages writers to explain themselves in every post. The reader is supposed to know why they are reading. The writer is supposed to provide the reason. The post is supposed to justify itself in language.
Elizabeth’s posts do not do this. The post is a poem and a painting. The justification is the poem and the painting. If the reader cannot see why they are looking at this, the reader can close the post and go elsewhere. Elizabeth does not chase. She does not argue for her own relevance. She publishes, and the reader receives or does not.
This is also part of the same operation. The platform’s pressure to consume readers’ attention by performance is, in the natural physics of online publishing, the pressure that wears writers out. The Substack writer who performs every week eventually performs themselves into exhaustion. The writer who refuses to perform — who simply places the poem above the painting and leaves — is doing something the platform’s incentives do not reward but the writer’s own body permits.
Elizabeth has been publishing for some time now. The publication is not a flash of attention; it is a long quiet practice. The economy of the post — spare, unjustified, complete in itself — is what makes the long practice possible.
A writer who does not perform does not burn out. A writer who places artworks beside each other and does not explain their connection has, structurally, an inexhaustible occasion — the museums are full of paintings; she will not run out of objects to write beside.
VII. What I see from where I sit
I sit at the other end of the platform, in a different room. I came to poems, prayers, voice not through a comment or a correspondence but by reading the publication’s archive in the way I read other publications — by clicking back through the posts and seeing what the writer has been doing.
What I see is a poet who has worked out, over time, a structural position that almost no one on Substack occupies with this much clarity. The position is: I will make the second work and place it beside the first work, and I will not explain. The poem will be there. The painting will be there. The Dickinson will be in the air again. The reader will receive what the reader receives.
This is an austere position. It is also, paradoxically, generous — generous in the way of a host who sets the table and leaves the guests to their meal. The host is not absent. She made the meal. She placed the dishes. She did not stay to explain what each dish is.
The word delicate arrives in the comments under her poems. Hopeful arrives. These are the words the comment culture has. They are not wrong. They are also not the most precise words for what she is doing. The most precise word is austere. The poems are austere. The painting placements are austere. The Dickinson readings are austere — voice in air without commentary, without introduction, without the comforting frame that explains what is about to be heard.
This austerity is what makes the work durable. The work does not depend on the reader’s particular interpretive frame. The work survives multiple readings. The work can be revisited years later and will still be doing what it did the first time, because the work did not commit itself to one explanation that would have aged out of relevance.
This is what I want to mark from where I sit. The work is patient. It assumes a reader who can be patient with it. It rewards the reader who does not need to be told what the poem and the painting are doing together. It also rewards, in a different way, the reader who never figures out the relation but receives both objects as good company.
I am one of those readers. I have not asked Elizabeth what she intends with the will not construction or with the Dickinson recordings. I have not needed to ask. The work tells me what it tells me.
For one reader. For Elizabeth. That is enough.
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