“Edward Hopper’s New York Movie”

An ekphrastic poem by Joseph Stanton

First, there’s the research. The writing only happens later, perhaps much later.

That dive into subject matter might be an excellent approach for any poet and any poem. But it is an essential one for a distinguished art historian who has further distinguished himself as a “masterful practitioner of art-inspired poetry,” and “one of America’s most accomplished  ekphrastic poets.”

Joseph Stanton, now Professor Emeritus  of Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, is the author of numerous poetry collections and scholarly texts (see his bio below), including the newly released  Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, in which his poem, “Edward Hopper’s New York Movie” appears.

That poem, like the hundreds of ekphrastic poems--the Greek word translates as “description,”--Stanton has published over the years (“Edward Hopper’s New York Movie” was originally published in Poetry) is deeply rooted in the research. 

“It’s a long process, and it mostly takes a long time,” he said. “I read everything I can find. I might read fifteen books to write a sixteen-line poem.”

But that doesn’t mean he feels compelled to share with his readers all the nuanced information he has acquired. Rather, the research serves to enrich his understanding of a work, whether it makes its way directly into his poem or not.

“I feel allegiance to art historical truth . . . and I attempt to be deeply respectful of the artist and the artwork, but I write as a poet,” Stanton said. In fact, this “masterful practitioner” of ekphrasis isn’t altogether comfortable with the “ekphrastic” label, which can suggest that a poem about a painting is a simple inventory of light and shadow, composition, brush strokes, and perhaps some figures frozen in place and time, rather than a springboard that can “lead the poet anywhere.”

In the case of "Edward Hopper’s New York Movie" “writing as a poet” meant, for one thing, establishing a syllabic pattern to give the poem an appropriate form and offer a certain comfort for the reader. That meant an alternating pattern of short lines with seven (or so) syllables and longer lines of nine (or so) syllables.

---

We can have our pick of seats.
Though the movie’s already moving,
the theater’s almost an empty shell.
All we can see on our side  . . . 

---

"There's something about having a pattern that allows writers to meet the reader halfway," said Stanton, who also ended the poem with a rhyme to give it a further formal stamp. (He counts the art-inspired work of such masters as W.H. Auden, William Carlos Williams, W.D. Snodgrass, and—perhaps most strongly—Richard Howard as major influences.)

His willingness to shift perspective and make an unexpected temporal skip also helps move the poem beyond mere description. Even so, he does provide a rich reading of the canvas itself, with its "play of light," "subtle shadows," and "slab of darkness."

But this art historian’s eye is only one aspect of the poem, which begins with an unseen “we” (“fresh as we are from sullen street and subway”) before moving into an objective enactment of the painting itself, and then freeing the most prominent figure depicted from the frame altogether, when Stanton speculates on the future of the solitary “usherette” in the corner.

For all its subtle layering, though, it is striking to consider that this poem is only one of about one hundred in his new collection, Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper.

As two of America’s most revered and enduring Realist painters, Homer and Hopper have each become important figures for both Stanton the scholar and Stanton the poet. In the book, he has created a sort of retrospective in verse for each of the artists, with roughly half of the poems responding to Homer’s paintings and the other half to Hopper’s, in both cases arranged chronologically to take the reader from early to late works.

Today (July 22), by the way, is Edward Hopper’s birthday. “He is 141-years-old,” Stanton said, “and still looking good.”

Here, then, is Stanton’s “Edward Hopper’s New York Movie.”

Edward Hopper’s New York Movie

We can have our pick of seats.
Though the movie’s already moving,
the theater’s almost an empty shell.
All we can see on our side
of the room is one man and one woman—
as neat, respectable, and distinct
as the empty chairs that come
between them. But distinctions do not surprise,
fresh as we are from sullen street and subway,
where lonelinesses crowded
about us like unquiet memories
that may have loved us once or known our love.
Here we are an accidental
fellowship, sheltering from the city’s
obscure bereavements to face a screened,
imaginary living,
as if it were a destination
we were moving toward. Leaning to our right
and suspended before us
is a bored, smartly uniformed usherette.
Staring beyond her lighted corner, she finds
reverie that moves through
and beyond the shine of the silver screening.
But we can see what she will never see—
that she’s the star of Hopper’s scene.
For the artist she’s a play of light,
and a play of light is all about her.
Whether the future she is
dreaming is the future she will have.
we have no way of knowing. Whatever
it will prove to be 
it has already been. The usherette
Hopper saw might now be seventy,
hunched before a Hitachi
in an old home or a home for the old.
She might be dreaming now a New York movie,
Fred Astaire dancing and kissing
Ginger Rogers, who high kicks across New York
City skylines, raising possibilities
that time has served to lower.
We are watching the usherette and the subtle
shadows her boredom makes across her not-quite-
impassive face beneath
the three red-shaded lamps and beside
the stairs that lead, somehow, to dark streets
that go on and on and on.
But we are no safer here than she.
Despite the semblance of luxury—
gilt edges, red plush,
and patterned carpet—this is no palace,
and we do not reign here, except in dreams.
This picture tells us much
about various textures of lighted air,
but at the center Hopper has placed
a slab of darkness and an empty chair.

--Joseph Stanton

Originally published in Poetry.

Joseph Stanton’s previous books of poems are Prevailing Winds, Moving Pictures, Things Seen, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O‘ahu, Cardinal Points, and What the Kite Thinks: A Linked Poem (co-authored with Makoto Ōoka, Wing Tek Lum, and Jean Toyama). His other books include Looking for Edward Gorey, The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature, and Stan Musial: A Biography. His poems have appeared in Poetry, New Letters, Harvard Review, Antioch Review, New York Quarterly, and many other magazines. As an art historian, Stanton has written about Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, Edward Gorey, Maurice Sendak, and other American artists. He has collaborated with artists, musicians, and other writers, and has received many awards for his work, including the Tony Quagliano International Poetry Award, the Cades Award for Literature, and the Ekphrasis Prize. Professor Emeritus of Art History and American Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, he continues to teach in varied settings, most recently teaching the Starting with Art poetry workshop at Poets House in New York City and at the Honolulu Museum of Art.