White Pony

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's sinister and unsettling Gothic ballad 'Erlkoenig' ('The Erl-King', or 'The Elf King', 1782) has haunted artists working in several genres for over two centuries, provoking hundreds of ekphrastic responses, including works by the composer Franz Schubert, the novelist Michel Tournier and the artist Albert Sterner. Poet Steve Ely and artist Alan Parker's collaboration White Pony is the latest work to take its inspiration from Goethe's poem. Parker's distorted and disturbing paintings evoke a world of lurking threat, a crippling awareness of human amorality, and the spectral presence of death-in-the-midst-of-life. Ely's poems, jumping off from Parker's paintings as much as Goethe's poem, apply the nightmare implicit in both to the horrors of the contemporary world. Beginning with a sense of the absolute vulnerability of the child, the sequence expands in scope to encompass content including the Jimmy Savile scandal, the Gazan genocide, racism and misogyny, the corruption of the political class, and the rise of oligarchy and the gangster-terrorist state.