Poems and Painting

It's an ideal situation for poets to interpret a painter's world, especially when those artists are figurative and their work implies relationships between the objects and people on the canvas, suggesting a narrative complexity. The basic problem to overcome, though, is finding an equivalent tone and language that conveys a strong sense of the visual style while also suggesting its narrative thread. I've written a few poems after artists' work, not that any of them have been successful by any terms I'd care to lay out, but the efforts have been an interesting practice in jumping over the tropes one might normally rely on and instead developing a new rhetoric. Staying with a style one knows when attempting to get inside another man's art can result in a poem that reads more like a product, as I noticed in a poem I came across recently, "Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad" by Edward Hirsch.

Normally I like Edward Hirsch a good deal, but this attempt to unearth the hidden essence of Edward Hopper's ideally isolated landscapes makes me think it is a tad overwritten. The details seem entirely ready-made: This man will paint other abandoned mansions, And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly lettered Storefronts on the edges of small towns. Always they will have this same expression,

The utterly naked look of someone Being stared at, someone American and gawky. Someone who is about to be left alone Again, and can no longer stand it.

Artifacts from the prop department. This reads more like scene descriptions one finds in parentheses in an early draft of a film script. The camera lingers on the badly lettered sign, the camera pans the closed storefronts, the camera pulls back to a vista that reveals the town in bas-relief against a mountain range, with houses huddled in tight clusters that encircle the center of town. It is rather dramatic, visual, and effective, if one were watching a movie made from our supposed script. But we aren't, and Hirsch's descriptions seem more instructive than revealing. Hopper's advantage is that he could suggest relations between his human figures, to one another and to their surroundings, with his magnificently broad strokes and blurred, subdued tones, and yet maintain the essential isolation of each element on his canvas. His contexts are subverted by the existential singularity of his subjects. His streets, sunlight, and characters are all shown to be locked in. The effect is visceral; one gets his mood in a rush, and one garners more perception the longer one studies his best paintings.

The narrative, of course, is implied, and this is where Hirsch's poem becomes mannered, in its attempt to do verbally what Hopper achieves through composition, light, and spatial relationships. Hopper doesn't simply depict isolation; he makes us experience it. The relationships between people and objects are suggested, but never entirely resolved. The viewer is left to inhabit the distance between them, to feel the tension between their apparent connectedness and their fundamental separateness. Hirsch, on the other hand, describes the elements, suggests the rather obvious relations between them, and then backpedals to conclude, finally, that the American malaise is one of totalizing estrangement.

What seems missing is a language capable of reproducing something of Hopper's experience of looking: his silences, his spatial tensions, his ambiguities, his peculiar emotional temperature. Rather than allowing the narrative to remain suspended in the visual details, Hirsch explains what those details are supposed to mean. It's a poem full of tricks and moves, and it makes one wish for a more plainspoken, less qualified tone poem, one that doesn't try so hard to uncover the hidden meaning of the paintings but instead finds a way to inhabit their mystery.