Not for nostalgia
Robert Stewart
Lifelines: Poems for Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper, by Joseph Stanton, Shanti Arts Publishing, 2023.
A poem in LifeLines, by Joseph Stanton, itself called “The Life Line, 1884,” based on a painting of that title by Winslow Homer, depicts a man and woman hanging from a breeches buoy, being hauled across storm-heavy seas onto a rescue ship outside the frame, likely off the coast of Massachusetts. Although the poet creates a ghostly scene—personal and even slightly sexual, as if the two were alone, hanging out in the panoramic storm—I am pushed, simultaneously, to another panorama, of August 2023, where the U.S. Navy moved aircraft carriers into San Diego Bay at my old base, NAS Coronado, in preparation for hurricane Hilary, the first tropical storm in the region in 80 years. The breeches buoy was fresh news in 1884, but the waves now are bigger and more expansive with the great warming of the planet, tempering my approach even to a poem’s hopeful lifeline.
The first 100 pages of Lifelines devotes itself to poems about Homer’s art, Stanton being a professor emeritus of art history, among other trades; the second part of the book devotes itself to poems about Edward Hopper. Nothing about my reading or the art discussed in this book is nostalgic. I should be discussing Stanton’s craft, his alliteration and irony, the internal dynamics of poetry, and how, for example, Stanton’s poem about Hopper’s “Nighthawks, 1942” delightfully puts Hopper, himself, and wife,
Josephine, at the diner counter, probably 11 p.m., Stanton says, for a “moment of respite” after seeing a play off Broadway.
Stanton has, indeed, written one of the most engaging poems I have read about that artwork—and I have read a few—so I do him a disservice by relating the work and the poem to certain events of city-life now. About the same time of night, 11 p.m., in early August 2023, thousands of people in New York City’s Union Square threw a mob-style tantrum because they falsely had been offered free computers and video games by a socialmedia celebrity. It would have been through the same five-block stretch that Hopper and Jo would walk home from that diner, according to the poet, at that exact time, to Washington Square. Look at the map. Look at the artwork. Perhaps a critic would see in “Nighthawks” images of loneliness, detachment. I see those, yes, and also, as of 1942, I see civility.
The poems in this book put me in a state of meditation, illustrating, at least, how each individual is an eccentric reader, so the reception of a book of poems to the public cannot be controlled or predicted. Just write the poems, I remind myself; a book has its own life. So, “Defiance: Inviting a Shot, 1864,” art by Winslow Homer and the clarifying poem by Stanton, show a Confederate soldier taunting the Yanks atop a trench, and another in black face, says the poet, “the essence of the defiant / idiocy that was the Rebel cause.” Do we need more to recall how recently the right-wing, white-nationalist idiots invaded the nation’s capital in their ludicrous costumes, and stood atop desks, on Jan. 6, 2021?
I am reminded of a poem about Edward Hopper’s “Sea Watchers” by another poet, Dennis Finnell, in which a couple has come from the city to find peace and sleep, “their chests rising and falling all night long,” says the poem, “and the sea is the sea again, only darker.” Here, Finnell places an emphasis at
the inevitable point, where human manipulations and ideologies fade. Stanton’s poem about Hopper’s Cape Cod still has its “bitter air,” even if sensed only by a dog.
While the visual art discussed in Lifelines reflects the 19th and early 20th centuries, it also carries an assumption that nature and even our construct of civilization will provide some continuity to the human story. Art, itself, seems to exist to a degree for that reassurance, though Stanton’s wit plays on the contrast between human possibility and actuality, an ongoing struggle. In “Winslow Painting in the Tropics,” a poem based on such paintings as “A Garden in Nassau, 1885,” Stanton says, “The local whites are represented / only by their bleached walls, / which serve to keep the blacks / away from the bleached houses.” Poets and painters depict what they see, if they see straight, and confront audiences years later (years hence, I might say, anachronistically) with what has become anachronistic and what has not. The poet here uses lyrical repetition to underscore the irony of the scene, and I recall how a white politician recently would throw paper towels to hurricane victims in the Caribbean and then helicopter home.
We seem to have built houses on sand, as with Hopper’s “House on Dune Edge, 1931,” where, the poet points out from a 1984 photo, the old turret remains, “if not the dune or its edge.” How much shore erosion occurs by human influence or not is hard to say, but climate erosion, coral death, and drought make us aware of our own hand. Sometime around 2010, the poet Gary Snyder told me that the drought-weakened conifers in his region of Northern California were all dying due to pine beetles. This, from the poet of “Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier Than Students of Zen.” What, I wondered, are we left with as artists if the structures of our images disappear?
I have always sought in art some ascendant chord, at least a moment of hope to contrast, if needed, with danger and loss. I am there, now, with Lifelines, in the promise of its title. “We must lose our earthly paradise,” asserts Gaston Bachelard, “in order to actually live in it, to experience it in the reality of its images.” I take that to mean hope lies in awareness, a state of nondelusion. Stanton’s poems are stark and lovely, and, in their stark loveliness, suggest the actuality of then and now. Some people would say that is no way to read a poem.
I say, the poems provoke my response. “The way into the city is darkness,” writes Stanton of Edward Hopper’s “Approaching the City, 1946.” A train approaches a shadowed underground, Stanton writes in this villanelle, with its refrain, attempting “a thought we can approach but not express.” Only the art of painter and poet can make sufficient the expression. The image projects its darkness but also, as he says, “prospects for joy or grief or tenderness / keeping in mind the sky’s pale blue surround.” As such, a poet who writes about visual art must bring to it perceptions and revelations of his or her own. This book, being that way, points to the sky. It says to the reader: Look up.