Prompt: Hopper and Poetry

I have been a longtime admirer of the haiga which combines haiku poems, calligraphy and painting. Haiga (俳画, haikai drawing) is a style of Japanese painting that incorporates the aesthetics of haikai.

They were typically painted by haiku poets (haijin), and are often accompanied by a haiku poem.

The paintings, like the poetic form it accompanied, were simple observations of the everyday world.

Poets have frequently been inspired by art - paintings, sculpture and other forms. The name of this kind of poetry is ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis means "description” in Greek and older ekphrastic poems tend to focus on sometimes elaborate descriptions of the art. An example of this is Keat's “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” John Keats does go beyond description in his speculation on the identity of the lovers who appear to dance and play music on that urn.

For our April writing prompt, we set two restrictions on your poem. First, we are interested in poems that go beyond description. Be a poet who interprets, inhabits, confronts, speaks to and reflects on the “action” of a painting and amplifies or expands its meaning.

Our second parameter is that you use a painting or drawing by American artist Edward Hopper. He is one of the most popular of modern American artists and some of his paintings have been widely used, reproduced, even parodied.

Hopper art is easy to find online. I suggest taking a look at wikiart.org's collection of almost 200 of his works. You'll see his very famous Sunday Morning and Nighthawks but I suggest you might choose one of his lesser known paintings or drawings.

His painting Gas suggests so many stories: Where is that Mobil station? How different was a gas station in that time? Who is that man - owner, worker? What mood does the poem suggest? Who just left the station after filling up?

You might also look at his paintings grouped together by themes or motifs that inhabit his work, such as couples or windows.

You will not be the first poets to use Hopper. There are two poems I will post on our website for this prompt.

One is "Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room" by Victoria Chang, excerpted here.

While the man is away 
telling his wife 
about the red-corseted woman, 
the woman waits 
on the queen-sized bed...

...That is all 
the artist left us with, 
knowing we would turn 
the woman's stone into ours, 
a thirst for the self 
in everything—even 
in the sweet chinks 
of mandarin.


The second model poem is "Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925)" by Edward Hirsch. Here is an excerpt:

Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant...

Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts

To stare frankly at the man...




Submission Deadline: April 30, 2018

​Some additional sources you may want to consult about poets reacting to art.

Museum of Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery

english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems

rattle.com/poetry/extras/ekphrasis/

          

The One Day Poem Pavilion

The One Day Poem Pavilion is a very cool art and poetry project. Using a complex array of perforations, light passing through the pavilion’s surface produces shifting patterns, which transform into the legible text of a poem.

The results of an extensive exploration with shadows, the One Day Poem Pavilion demonstrates the poetic, transitory, site-sensitive and time-based nature of light and shadow.

Using a complex array of perforations, the pavilion’s surface allows light to pass through creating shifting patterns, which–during specific times of the year–transform into the legible text of a poem.

The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different shadow-poems according to the solar calendar: a theme of new-life during the summer solstice, a reflection on the passing of time at the period of the winter solstice. The time-based nature of the poem–and the visitor’s time-based encounters with it–allow viewers to have different experiences either seeing a stanza of the poem or getting the whole poem. All of these possible experiences are equally valuable and have meanings unique to the individual. This technique has the potential for producing particular effects and meanings within an architectural environment. Without the use of a source of power other than the sun, this project uses light and shadow to push the boundaries of communication and experiential delight.

VIEW A TIME LAPSE to see the full effect

The Rainbow at the Edge of the Shadow of the Egg

From an interview at neh.gov, John Updike talks about his early ambition to be a visual artist.

"I don’t know at what age I began to look at the comic strips, the funnies so-called. I think my first coherent artistic ambition was to become a cartoonist. It was also the era in which the early Disney films were coming out—the animated shorts plus Snow White. Snow White came out, I think, in 1937, when I was five.

Anyway, all this imagery—these bouncy creatures, irrepressible little animations without any of the Depression worries that filled my household—all this seemed to offer real escape from my life into a better world.

My mother—she was another only child, raised on a farm—had artistic ambitions, literary ones. The local public schools offered art instruction in those days; there was no question of art not being one of the subjects you were taught. Depression or not, school budgets kept it in the curriculum. Not like now.

In addition to that, we happened to live across the street from the only artist in Shillington, a man called Clint Shilling; he was descended from the Shilling who created the town. At my mother’s request, Clint gave me some lessons when I was about eleven or twelve. All this was instructive.

It was instructive to try to look at something in terms of line and color. I remember one lesson—and I’ve written about this, and I don’t want to repeat what I’ve already put in print—where Clint put an egg in the sun on a piece of white paper and said to paint what I was seeing.

What he could see was a little rainbow at the edge of the shadow of the egg, which I couldn’t see until he pointed it out. That art lesson has stuck with me maybe more than any I’ve had since. The rainbow at the edge of the shadow of the egg. You can find it in a poem of mine called "Midpoint."