Reading ekphrasis across the factional lines of lyric and avant-garde poetic traditions, and bringing the terms of that divide under review, this interdisciplinary study examines contemporary poems about the visual arts that foreground and interrogate a museum setting. Analysis of museum-sponsored anthologies, and readings of poems by John Ashbery, Richard Howard, Kenneth Koch, Kathleen Fraser, Cole Swensen, Anne Carson, and others, highlight the importance of poets’ “peripheral vision”—notice of the institutional conditions that frame encounters with art. Challenging critical emphasis on ekphrasis as either fertile reciprocity between “sister arts,” or paragonal and often gendered struggle for dominance, this study sees ekphrasis as a form of critical mediation, and a museum visit as a space for interrogation, a forum for questioning oppositions that have preoccupied literary criticism for the past 50 years: homage and innovation, modernism and postmodernism, subjectivity and collectivity. Ekphrasis becomes a strategy for negotiating these impasses—a mode of political inquiry, a meditation on canonization, a venue for comic appraisal of institutionalization, and a means of “site-specific” feminist revision—in a vital synthesis of critique, perspicacity, and pleasure.