Summertime - Edward Hopper

I might have guessed you'd pick out Summertime.
The Nighthawk's low-life chic is not at all
your style. At dawn, as pale ephemeral
light sanctifies the seedy side-street's grime,
autumnal sunshine streams into the room
to find a woman waking-up alone;
angelic brightness never will atone
for emptiness—your nagging sense of doom.
The images that haunt your hidden dream
can never grace your wall. Instead you choose
a scene of inadvertent hope. Above
a solitary girl, white buildings gleam;
she waits, in cotton frock and high-heeled shoes:
the Summer breeze enfolds her like new love.

This poem started with a chance comment by a colleague. I can't remember why we were looking at Edward Hopper's 'Summertime', Maybe a student had included it in a Media Studies or English project that we ended up double marking; anyway, out of the blue my colleague just said 'if I ever leave, I'd love to have a poster of that picture as my leaving present'.

Summertime, 

When she did leave a year or so later, I did not get to have a say in what was bought, so her wish was not fulfilled. Afterwards I felt that I should have been more insistent, so as a gesture, I wrote this sonnet and pasted it under an image of the painting ripped from the web and sent it to her as a belated good-luck message. Judging from posts on the Sonnet Board when I workshopped the piece, that must have been around August 2002.

As I wrote it, I remember thinking about the place of Edward Hopper within the development of Twentieth Century painting. In fact, the whole question of 'form' within contemporary culture was beginning to exercise my mind. In Britain, the divide between form and 'abstraction' never really materialised as a fully fledged 'spat' in the way writers of 'free verse' and poets of a more formal disposition trade insults in America. The whole position of poets in relation to their 'tradition' is different. In Britain, it is difficult not to acknowledge the influence of 'the greats'. As a British poet, at best we stand on the shoulders of giants, at worst are eclipsed by their shadow.

As I began to communicate more with American writers I realised that English Literature, in its traditional sense, presented a different challenge to them. To some extent the development of American art and culture during the Twentieth Century almost can be seen as a continuation of the Boston Tea Party, as writers,.artists, musicians and film-makers all carved out a style, a voice and a 'look' that was undeniably 'New World'. So far as poetry was concerned, I concluded that I was woefully ignorant of American poetry apart from Eliot and  Pound, a vague remembrance of Hart Crane and e.e. cummings, and a snippet or two of Ginsberg. The only American poet that I could honestly say I knew in depth was Sylvia Plath. What I also began to realise was that the poets I was in contact with were mightily touchy about their decision to  write in form; I got the impression that I had stumbled upon a group of writers for whom writing in form was regarded by other influential critics and editors as a form of revisionism, though as yet, I had not become familiar with 'New Formalism' as a movement.

If asked by one of my new buddies what I 'majored' in. Then I would have had to say, 'History of Art', and the area where I had most knowledge was the rise of modernism from mid Nineteenth Century Realism through to Pop Art and Colour Field Painting in the early 1960's. At university in the 1970's I certainly had been fully inducted into the orthodox account of the rise of modernism in art  typified by a programme such as Robert Hughes' 'Shock of the New' (1980). Even now, I would not fully refute the central tenet of this account that Modernism was a complex and multi-faceted response to the assumptions behind 'Realism'. As the Twentieth Century progressed developments in physics, linguistics, psychology, geology and cosmology all pointed to the same thing, that the everyday, commonplace reality we inhabit is underpinned, constructed even, by hidden forces, structures and processes. The major movements in Art - Cubism, Expressionism, Dada and Surrealism, De Stijl, Abstract Expressionism, all could be interpreted as differing responses to these major shifts in the Western world view. No doubt students of Literature, Music and Social Scientists all could articulate parallel responses.

Now this stacks-up quite neatly so long as you separate high culture from popular culture and remain content to see the former as significant and serious and the latter as mere entertainment and ephemeral. It's difficult to refute that the forms and to some extent the content of Nineteenth Century Realism and Romanticism continued to enjoy a happy afterlife last century within popular culture. The stirring opening chords of John William's Star Wars theme  are unmistakeably Wagnerian in their conception. Popular song from 'I'll be Seeing You' through to 'My Way,' 'Yesterday' to more recently, the X factor winning song 'Impossible' all use recognisable rhetorical devices, formal rhyme schemes and received structures that are distinctly 'pre-modern'.

The 'persistence of memory' interests me as much as the 'shock of the new'. For this reason I am drawn to artists such as Hopper whose work is a mixture of tradition and innovation. Perhaps it's why I prefer to write in within received structures myself, exploring contemporary content but using traditional forms.