The Poetry of Solitude: A Tribute to Edward Hopper Book

If one artist's work sums up what millions of us have been going through during the pandemic, it's the painter Edward Hopper. His images of solitary, seemingly uninhabited buildings and blank-faced people staring out windows or nursing late-night cups of coffee are universal, but they resonate so much more when we're all in isolation.

This book brilliantly combines a couple dozen Hopper paintings and drawings with poems inspired by his works. The poems were collected and are introduced by Gail Levin, who has written several books on the artist and organized many of his exhibitions.

As with much poetry, it's hard to capture a poem's essence in a review or to cherry pick lines that work out of context.

The late, great poet John Updike has pride of place with the first poem, "Two Hoppers," which contrasts two portraits of solitary women in rooms ("Girl at Sewing Machine," from 1921, and "Hotel Room," from 1941) and concludes by comparing the artist to Vermeer.

Then, as if in a relay race, Larry Lewis takes up the baton of "Hotel Room" and imagines the woman's journey to get here ("outside this room I can imagine only Kansas: / Its wheat, and blackening silos, and beyond that, / The plains that will stare back at you until / The day your mother, kneeling in fumes / On a hardwood floor, begins to laugh out loud.") and her inability to catch the train and move elsewhere ("You've kept on sitting here for forty years - alone, / Almost left out of the picture, half undressed.")

The fine poet John Hollander takes on two of Hopper's empty building paintings, "Seven A.M." and "Early Sunday Morning," and finds a philosophy in them that brings to mind the work of Wallace Stevens.

John Stone, a poet unknown to me (like more than half in the book) also deals with "Early Sunday Morning," imagining things that are left out of the picture. He ends it with these haunting lines:

As important
as what is
happening

is what is not.

So true. And applicable not just to painting but to art of any kind.

Hopper's most famous painting, "Nighthawks," provided a detail for the book's cover and understandably provoked the most poetic responses, five in all. Joyce Carol Oates comes up with a long poem that imagines the man and woman seated next to each other are having an affair, while Ira Sadoff imagines what the man seated by himself, the one with his back to us, is thinking. Susan Ludvigson dreams up a scenario in which the couple at the cafe are her parents.

Some poems are brief haiku-like efforts, while others are twisty puzzles to be solved.

My only disappointment is that no poet took on "New York Movie," the painting featuring the female usher standing against a wall, lost in thought in a near-empty theatre.

My favourite poems are the ones that comment on details that make you see a painting in a new way. Here's David Ray's "Automat," inspired by the work that features a woman in a stylish coat and hat nursing a cup of coffee alone:

One at one table,
one at another

Her stray hair is stroked
(by her). He reads Wall St.

It's quite classic -
separate tables

brass glistens on,
polished spittoons

and reflected lights
a highway out to hell,

black as hell.
Extent of human reach, nihil,

and loneliness burning loud
like lamps left on

That "highway out to hell" and the idea of putting the words "loneliness, "burning" and "loud" together and comparing them to "lamps left on" are genius.

I have a feeling I'll dip into this volume again and again, probably with the help of one of those lamps left on.