Influences: Edward Hopper

Let us guess that whenever we read a sentence & like it, we unconsciously store it away in our model-chamber; & it goes, with the myriad of its fellows, to the building, brick by brick, of the eventual edifice which we call our style. – Mark Twain

I didn’t realize until years later how much of my work and my practice as a writer may have been influenced by my early love of Edward Hopper.  Like many in my dorm, I had a poster of Nighthawks on the wall, and the more I saw of his work, the more I responded to it.  In doing so, I suspect, I was unconsciously absorbing a number of lessons. 

Hopper paintings are spare with clean lines.  They have unexpected perspectives and odd angles.  The bottoms of cars are cut off, so that you can only see their tops.  A lighthouse may be shown off to the side.  The angle-of-vision may be coming from above or below; however, it doesn’t call attention to itself (or how clever the artist is).  These aren’t Dutch camera shots.  Rather they attune you to ways of seeing the world.

            Richard Hugo once said that he was given the advice to never write a poem about subject matter that needed a poem written about it.  (You think the subject itself, your mother’s illness say, is enough to evoke emotion in the reader.)  Hopper doesn’t do obvious dramatic moments or star portraits or the stereotypical icons and landscapes.  Instead, he paints everyday locations and lives – gas stations, offices, movie theaters. As he once put it, “Maybe I am slightly inhuman… All I ever wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house.”

            He focuses on simple objects and moments, but they are charged with energy and emotion.  In Office at Night, a boss and secretary work.  A piece of paper has fallen.  Should she pick it up?  If she does, how?  Because of the smallness of the space, if she bends over one way, her butt is presented to her boss; the other way displays her cleavage.  There is the implicit tension and eroticism of looking; their two desks face each other. They are with one another, next to one another, all day.

In Nighthawks, a couple sit beside one another.  He smokes. She has placed her hand near him, towards him, but they don’t touch. The frisson of closeness, the melancholy of not touching.  Our isolation even as we are adjacent. (Hopper once said “the loneliness thing is overdone” but he didn’t say that it wasn’t there or inaccurate.)

              Sometimes it’s the spacing and juxtaposition that suggests the dynamic.  Sometimes it’s the title itself.   A woman sits naked, except for slippers, looking out an apartment window.  Is it night?  Early morning?  No, it’s “11 a.m.”  In a different work, a woman sits on the edge of a bed.  A car can be seen through the window.  The title “Western Motel” not only gives information, but is enormouslysuggestive.  Traveling.  The West.  Transit.  What’s she running from?  Or to?

            At some point, I realized that admiring Hopper wasn’t cool.  After all, too many people liked his work.  He was considered a kind of “art” lite, better than Norman Rockwell of course, but along the same lines in terms of simplicity.  A moody artist for angsty youth.  So, I took down the Nighthawks poster and rarely mentioned him.  Then several years ago, on a trip to DC, I went to a Hopper exhibition at the National Art Gallery.  For the first time, I stood before the originals, and their power struck me anew. I had been right when I was younger; these pieces were amazing.  I felt ashamed by my shallow disregard.  The more I looked at these paintings, the more I saw.  And, as I read the catalogue about Hopper’s discipline, his relentless revision, and his commitment, I realized that I still had much to learn from him.  His work is back up on my wall.

Fine. Good. Okay.

            I grew up in northern Indiana where the land and the language are flat.  Unlike Zora Neale Hurston who arrived in New York with “a map of Dixie” on her tongue, I don’t come from a community with a rich oral culture or one that reveled in language play.  In fact, it often was the opposite.  We were suspicious of people who were too glib.  I took enormous offense in graduate school when a professor wrote on a paper that an observation was “clever.”  Clever was an adjective applied to lawyers who got ax murderers off on technicalities.  Clever was suspicious verbal ingenuity.  Clever was not a compliment.

The Eskimos may have fifty words for snow, but we would make one word have fifty different meanings.  In particular, we made heavy use of “Fine,” “Good,” and “Okay.”  Depending on how it’s used, “fine” could mean “Great” or “I hear you” or “Get away from me” or “Okay” or dozens of other things.

            I spent a year in Europe, met the woman I would marry, re-thought and re-arranged my life, and when I came home and my father asked, “How was France?” I said, “It was fine.  Fine.”  And he replied “Good.  Good.”

            When my father broke his neck, I called him almost every day to check in.  I would ask, “How are you, Pop?”  He would say, “Fine.  Fine.”  I would respond, “Good.”  And that would be that.  “Okay, I’ll talk to you later.”  “Okay.”

            In part, this may be why people are surprised that I write poetry.  It seems unusual for someone so laconic.  But, it also explains why I write the type of poems that I do.  Yes, the intonation of “good,” “fine,” and “okay” provides a great deal of information, but often the words are superfluous.  My father already knew my time in Europe had been life-changing; a woman was coming back to the States with me.  When he broke his neck, I didn’t have to say I was concerned when I called, the concern was obvious in the fact I was calling.  And, of course, he was “fine.”  He was still alive after breaking his neck for god’s sake.

            So, mostly, I write without frills or curlicues in a language that isn’t particularly “poetic.”  I look for the gesture, the revealing moment, the woman putting her hand on her partner’s leg during a dinner party which says, “Careful. You’re talking too much. Reign it in.”  Often it’s something that may not seem important at the time – a conversation in the grocery, a man washing a car, or in the case of the following poem, the putting on of a scarf.

A Winter Dialogue

We decide to take a break from the eating, drinking,

and arguing -- our traditional holiday pastimes --

to walk around the ice-encased neighborhood.

In the hallway, we sort through the piles of coats,

hats, and gloves, pulling out what we think we need,

and when I get to the door my father calls me back

to drape a scarf around my neck.  In my forties,

I don’t like scarves anymore than when I was six,

but, now, having kids, I recognize what his fingers

are trying to say as they adjust the wool, and, I hope,

he recognizes what I’m trying to say by not moving.

It’s not much, but since neither of us needs anything

the other can buy, we try to exchange what we can,

a protective touch and a willingness to be touched.

An Easter Poem (of a sort)

Easter Sunday

After I come back from a long run,

my wife sends me to the grocery

for fresh garlic, pears, more wine,

a good loaf of bread.  There, I help

myself to samples, a cookie, a coffee,

and balancing these, I slackly steer

the cart with an elbow until I encounter

an old lady blocking the produce aisle.

In black church clothes, she squints

at something cupped in her hands.

At first, I think it’s a list or a recipe

then I realize it’s a small bible.

I see her again in the baking section,

her face still inches from the book

nothing in her cart.  The third time

I realize she’s near, right behind me,

in the checkout lane, I’m tempted

to reach out and make sure she isn’t

some figment risen from a childhood

I thought had been sealed off long ago,

an admonishment for my spending

this day as a contented animal,

unshaven, unshriven, piling up

a cart of this world’s pleasures.

from Love and Other Collisions (Press 53)

Hondo and the Sacketts to Ulysses and Prufrock

When I was young, I wanted to be a mountain man or cowboy, and that’s one of the reasons I ended up getting into poetry.

The first poem I consciously sought out was Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “Ulysses.”  This was because I loved the Westerns of Louis L’Amour.  As a kid, I read his work over and over, and the characters in his books loved literature.  Often they would refer to “Ulysses” and Shakespeare and Plutarch’s Lives, and, because I wanted to be like them, a strong independent frontiersman (in suburban Indiana) I went to the library and checked out these works.

The appeal of “Ulysses” is straight-forward, particularly its rousing last line:  “to strive, to seek, to find and not to yield.”  I didn’t know who Ulysses was, but I understood this desire to travel, this wanderlust, and the sentiment:  “How dull it is to pause, to make an end,/To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!/As though to breathe were life.”  And it made sense to me that this feeling was universal.   The mountain men and cowboys had it, the Victorians understood it, the ancients did, and so did a Hoosier in the 70s.

L’Amour’s characters carried poems with them and within them, and I began doing so as well.  I memorized “Ulysses” and find myself returning to it over the years.  In fact, I suspect that some day, I will offer a course called “Ulysses in America” and look at works that deal with this figure.  The novel Cold Mountain, for example, would be on the syllabus as would the paintings of Romare Bearden.  As Frost says, “way leads on to way” and book leads on to book (and link to link).  

Reading pulp fiction Westerns influenced me as a reader and a writer, but not, as it turns out as a rider.  Although I pretended my bicycle was a mustang (and even named it), when I finally had the chance to be around horses, I discovered that I'm intimidated by them.  Man, those things are big.