The ekphrastic has become a frequent exercise for contemporaryAmerican poets. This study adds to the growing research on varieties ofekphrasis by discussing the various functions of whiteness in works byfour poets. Natasha Trethewey, in her most recent volume, Thrall (2012),offers a series of poems inspired by 17th- and 18th-century LatinAmerican casta paintings, which depict and catalogue variations ofmixed-race couples and their children. After considering the eclipsing ofwhiteness in Trethewey’s “ethnic ekphrasis,” I will turn to the whitenessin Robert Hass’s ekphrastic on Vermeer’s Woman Pouring Milk titled“Art and Life,” from his National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winningcollection Time & Materials (2008), as an example of “ellipticalekphrasis.” The play on whiteness continues with Alice Fulton’s “fractalekphrasis in “Close,” from her volume Felt (2001), in which she considersJoan Mitchell’s White Territory, an abstract expressionist painting. Finally, Harryette Mullens’ “Xenophobic Nightmare in a ForeignLanguage” from Sleeping with the Dictionary (2002), challenges the traditionsof the ekphrastic and of poetry itself in her “post-ethnic/postekphrasticekphrasis.”