Morning Passion — Images by kenne
MORNING PASSION
Lorca’s mode of thought
The demon and the angel
Living the duende.
— kenne
Archive for the ‘Edward Hirsch’ Tag
Morning Passion 2 comments
Lorca’s mode of thought
Capturing The Moment — Stagecoach Driver 3 comments
Stagecoach Driver — Image by kenne
Westward the wagon jolted
along the ruts and trails,
along the interminable course of empire,
while the sun took a long time going down in the fields.
The earth was slow and hard
and there was nothing to see but land:
it was not a country at all
but the sketch of a country,
the material out of which countries are made.
— from “Nebraska, 1883,” by Edward Hirsch
The dust of travel still clings to his body,
and particles of sunlight fade on his skin.
What has happened to the eternal presences?
— from “The Renunciation of Poetry,” by Edward Hirsch
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Some Go Hunting For Light 6 comments
Edward Hopper’s Lighthouse Village, Cape Elizabeth (1929)
Maine house, 1998, by Michael H. Coles
There is so much I love about the art of Edward Hopper, which is why I continue to turn to his work — so on the pulse of us as Americans. I have never been to Maine, let through painting like Lighthouse Village, I feel as if I grow up in Cape Elizabeth — his inspiration allows my imagination to capture reality.
“I once told Hopper that he shows us who we are,” said poet William Carlos Williams. “He’d have no part of my enthusiasm, or extravagance. ‘Yes, I try,’ he said–and then he spoke about ‘light,” how hard he looks for it. He told me to go ‘hunting’ for light, and I liked hearing him use that word–seeing his face get lit up as he spoke!” (“Seeking Maine’s Light,” DoubleTake, Winter 2000)
The Michael H. Coles photograph of a Maine house taken not far from where Hopper painted Lighthouse Village illustrates how Hopper was able to capture the light.
kenne
Edward Hopper, Self-portrait
Edward Hopper and the House by the Railroad (1925)
by Edward Hirsch
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;
This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.
The House by the Railroad by Edward Hopper 1925
But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here
Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no
Trees or shrubs anywhere–the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.
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. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.
And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.
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.
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Angel In Vortex Leave a comment
Angel In Vortex — Image by kenne
“The angel comes with windy upward drafts, with transcendental longings; the Duende arrives with demonic undertow, with downdrafts of emotion. Both are fundamental inner disturbances, fissures of being, ways of putting the self at risk, liberating figures. They are extremities of human imagination. There is a place on the endangered shoreline where they seem to meet and where they may be indistinguishable from each other.
. . . Rilke wrote: ‘Works of art always spring from those who have faced the danger, gone to the very end of an experience, to the point beyond which no human being can go. The further one dares to go, the more decent, the more personal, the more unique a life becomes.”‘
— from The Demon and The Angel; Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration, by Edward Hirsch
“Man’s ability to measure the spiritual, earthbound, and cosmic, set against his physical helplessness is his fundamental tragedy. The tragedy of spirituality.”
— Paul Klee
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Between Light And Shadows — Making Something Visible That Might Otherwise Be Invisible 7 comments
“Morning Sun” Painting by Edward Hopper
Life and art are defined by what lies between light and shadows. In Holland Cotter’s April 30, 2007 article in the New York Times, he wrote, “A certain slant of light was Edward Hopper’s thing. And he made it our thing, hard-wired it into our American brains:”
Ever since seeing Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks” at the Art Institute of Chicago as a young man, I have been seduced by his work — not because he hard-wired my brain, but because of the human ability to distinguish between an object and its background. The contrast between light and shadows catches the eye, which is why Hopper’s work is so seductive — it is the essence of the “Hopper Effect: the impression of everyday life touched with secular sanctity. ”
Poet L.E. Sissman was so captivated by Hopper’s work that he wrote “American Light: A Hopper Retrospective.” Written in five parts, the first part is subtitled “Hopper.”
A man, a plan, a spandrel touched with fire,
A morning-tinted cornice, a lit spire,
A clapboard gable beetled with the brow-
Shadows of lintels, a glazed vacancy
In shut-up shopfronts, an ineffably
Beautiful emptiness of sunlight in
Bare rooms of which he was the sole inhabitant:
The morning and the evening of his life
Rotated, a lone sun, about the plinth
On which he stood in granite, limned by light
That lasted one day long and then went out.
Edward Hopper’s “Nighthawks”
Yes, it’s all about what falls between the light and the shadows,
as Joyce Carol Oats writes on Hopper’s “Nighthawks” in Transforming Vision – Writers on Art:
The three men are fully clothed, long sleeves,
even hats, though it’s indoors, and brightly lit,
and there’s a women. The woman is wearing
a short-sleeved red dress cut to expose her arms,
a curve of her creamy chest; she’s contemplating
a cigarette in her right hand, thinking that
her companion has finally left his wife but
can she trust him? Her heavy-lidded eyes,
pouty lipsticked mouth, she has the redhead’s
true pallor like skill milk, damned good-looking
and she guesses she knows it but what exactly
has it gotten her so far, and where? — he’ll start
to feel guilty in a few days, she knows
the signs, an actual smell, sweaty, rancid, like
dirty socks; he’ll slip away to make telephone calls. . .
“. . . People the vacuum with American light.” — the last line in T.S. Sissman’s poem on Edward Hopper.
“There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge…” — Rod Serling, Twilight Zone.
I feel that in the images I capture, I’m always trying to capture that middle ground between light and shadow — maybe Edward Hopper was too.
Some may think of the space between light and the shadow as the twilight zone; I think of it as what the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca called duende, which, as Edward Hirsch has put it, “. . . it makes something visible that might otherwise be invisible, that has been swimming under the surface all along.” Too many more to count
kenne
Between Light and Shadows — Image by kenne
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- Edward Hopper’s Paintings as Photographs (NSFW) (tracesofthesoul.wordpress.com)
- Solitude, Loneliness, and Edward Hopper’s Message (healthstream.typepad.com)
- Essay #2 – Edward Hopper (hljohnsuark.wordpress.com)
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Edward Hirsch — “Green Couch” 1 comment
Edward Hirsch Reading at Lone Star College – Montgomery, Writers In Performance Series (April, 2010) — Images and Video by kenne
GREEN COUCH
by Edward Hirsch
That was the year I left behind my marriage
of twenty-eight years, my faded philosophy books, and
the green couch I had inherited from my grandmother.
After she died, I drove it across the country
and carried it up three flights of crooked stairs
to a tiny apartment in west Philadelphia,
and stored it in my in-laws’ basement in Bethesda,
and left it to molder in our garage in Detroit
(my friend Dennis rescued it for his living room),
and moved it to a second-floor study in Houston
and a fifth-floor apartment on the Upper West Side
where it will now be carted away to the dump.
All my difficult reading took place on that couch,
which was turning back into the color of nature
while I grappled with ethics and the law,
the reasons for Reason, Being and Nothingness,
existential dread and the death of God
(I’m still angry at Him for no longer existing).
That was the year that I finally mourned
for my two dead fathers, my sole marriage,
and the electric green couch of my past.
Darlings, I remember everything.
But now I try to speak the language of
the unconscious and study earth for secrets.
I go back and forth to work.
I walk in the botanical gardens on weekends
and take a narrow green path to the clearing.
Related articles
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Philip Levine — The Voice Of The Voiceless And That’s The Simple Truth 2 comments
Philip Levine — Image by kenne
Writers In Performance Series, Mid-1990’s — Images by Nancy Parsons
Voice of the Voiceless
Life,
life is simple,
we make it complicated —
that’s the simple truth.
Today,
I found myself reading
the poems of Philip Levine —
blessed with the gifts
of listening and observing;
enabling him to care,
he has called the
“voice of the voiceless”.
Above all,
Levine is a story-teller
of people decaying
in the spoils of the rich,
speaking directly
from the front lines,
bearing witness to
worker revolutions, faded.
By writing about work,
Levine writes about life.
Waiting,
waiting in the work line.
Waiting,
waiting in the assembly line.
Waiting,
waiting for the next task —
not changed from the last.
I, too,
worked an assembly line.
I, too,
bless the imagination
that have given me
myths I live by —
images created by
my visionary power
to bear witness.
I, too,
sing America —
that’s the simple truth.
— kenne
p. s. The other day I was listening to NPR when I heard that Philip Levine added another award to the many this great American poet has received, the American Academy of Poets life-time achievement award (Wallace Stevens Award). Levine, the 2011 U.S. poet laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner for his book, “The Simple Truth” is one of my favorite living poets. It was not long after this book’s publication that we were honored to have Levine read at Long Star College – Montgomery, Writers In Performance Series.
Laureate Philip Levine, Working Class Poet
by Robin Bates
An Abandoned Factory, Detroit
by Philip Levine
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,
And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy.
Related articles
- Poet Philip Levine wins $100,000 prize (sacbee.com)
- Poet Philip Levine wins $100,000 prize (timesleader.com)
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Culture Comes To Conroe, Again Leave a comment
Writers In Performance Series – Image by kenne
In his book, The Demon and The Angel, Edward Hirsch wrote of Federico Garcia Lorca believing that when the duende (the mysterious power of creativity that results in a work of art)) is present in poetry, the poet can be sure of being loved and understood. The duende was diffidently present last Thursday when Hirsch read from his latest publication, The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems. The reading was followed by a Q & A session. For Hirsch, life, and therefore his poetry, is all about relationships:
Tonight when I knelt down next to our cat, Zooey,
And put my fingers into her clean cat’s mouth,
And rubbed her swollen belly that will never know kittens,
And watched her wriggle onto her side, pawing the air,
And listened to her solemn little squeals of delight,
I was thinking about the poet, Christopher Smart,
Who wanted to kneel down and pray without ceasing
In everyone of the splintered London streets,
— from “Wild Gratitude”
kenne
Kenne Turner, Edward Hirsch & Dave Parsons – Seventeen Years Out
