Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems
by James Hoggard
9780916727550 Cost: $16.00
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Critical Praise for Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems
- The voice of this book is Hopper's, the poetic craft is Hoggard's. For anyone who is fascinated by Hopper's images, reading this book is like encountering one possible version of Hopper's "primary imagination"—that part of him that was compelled, by what he saw in the world, to respond passionately and deeply.
— Reginald Gibbons, author of Creatures of a Day, Finalist, 2008 National Book Award
- James Hoggard's account of his long fascination with Hopper is so finely tuned that it's as if Hopper, ever the skeptic, resonates in response, and channels himself through Hoggard's poems to recreate the psychic matrices of his own creations. Drawn from language as sparse and telling as the painter's gestures, these poems provide "a local habitation" for Hopper's scenarios and personae, with a consanguine authenticity that is utterly convincing.
— William Pitt Root, author of White Boots and Faultdancing
- In 1962 the painter Edward Hopper said, "Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was paint sunlight on the side of a house."With spare, sure strokes, in a passionate and graceful series of poems written in Hopper's imagined voice, James Hoggard takes the risk of rendering the painter startlingly more human. Triangles of Light deepens our experience of Hopper's haunting work and the visionary spirit that created it. Your own light and shadows may change indelibly.
— Naomi Shihab Nye, author of 19 Varieties of Gazelle and I'll Ask You Three Times, Are You OK?
Reviews
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"... ideal companions to the best biographies and analyses of the great artist."
Booklist
Hoggard assumes the persona of the great American realist artist Edward Hopper to talk about 51 artworks from throughout his long career. Hoggard has obviously studied Hopper and the psychology of artists fairly intently. As the title suggests, major concerns of the poems are light and shape. Formal matters, however, unavoidably evoke emotions and memories. Often Hoggard's Hopper ripostes to critics with reductive asperity; of Drug Store, a 1927 oil, he says, "I know this looks like reportage / but it's fiction, an invention / of reds and blues and greenish blacks / in a grid whose gestures / chant mysteries to me." He is angrily impatient with sexualized readings, especially when they include presumptions about his life. It helps Hoggard that Hopper's typical imagery is so familiar, so that a mere title--each poem bears the title of the picture it's about--conjures characteristically Hopperish sparse interiors, deserted-seeming landscapes, and averted faces. Perhaps the best thing about these poems is that they seem ideal companions to the best biographies and analyses of the great artist.
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Reviewed by Ray Olson, Editor, Booklist
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"... an imaginatively plausible expression of what he sought and how he sought it."
amazon.com
I have always been attracted to Hopper's paintings--how his very human colors and decisive strokes give such depth to what might otherwise have become forgotten scenes--and how appealingly American he is. Now, through Hoggard's poems, I have something else; if not the painter's own words, certainly an imaginatively plausible expression of what he sought and how he sought it. Also, in reading Triangles of Light, I found a reaffirmation of my belief that all art is interdependent and mutually enriching--that all creative endeavor rises out of other creative endeavors. The book gives poetic joy, makes us understand Hopper more fully, and stands also on its own--with poems that are memorable in their own right: lines like "a huge conflagratory fire: sand and water becoming flame", or "His interruptive silences assail her..." I like those--and there are many. (Finally, for those interested in the book as a work of art and a labor of love: Triangles of Light is sensitively designed and beautifully assembled.)
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Reviewed by Sofia Starnes
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Texas poet interprets Hopper paintings
San Antonio Express-NewsJune 28, 2009
Iconic American painter Edward Hopper died in 1967, but his geometrically composed paintings endure because of the powerful stories revealed only where light and dark meet.
Texas author James Hoggard spent decades seeing and interpreting those stories. Like taking dictation from Hopper's ghost, Hoggard has written 51 poems based on paintings and etchings for Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems.
The speaker in the poems is Hopper, as Hoggard imagines what the painter would say. In assuming Hopper's cranky, contrarian voice, Hoggard enhances it with his own surprising twists of ironic insight that characterize Hoggard's previous fiction, nonfiction, poems, plays and journalism.
Look, for example, at Hopper's 1925 painting "St. Francis' Towers" depicting an old Santa Fe, N.M., church. Then read Hopper saying, in Hoggard's poem of the same title: "Keeping my lyrical impulses at bay, / and inclined to help disaster strike, / I've signed these roofs with checks of light."
Then look at the painting again. The "checks of light" jump out and startle like lightning, instantly crystallizing the meaning of the painting and the poem, namely the ugliness and decay that accumulates unnoticed.
Poetry rarely rewards this much.
Light is the life force for all painters, but Hopper combined light and shadows with geometry, notably triangles, to sharpen his themes of solitude, discord and mystery. "Light is where self is," one poem argues.
"The blur of the road says time / is passing fast ... and the world is a dream I've scarcely seen" describes a deep-thinking gasoline station attendant, as his wife calls for him from a window, in Hopper's 1956 oil "Four Lane Road." The couple highly resemble Hopper and his wife, Jo, as depicted in Gail Levin's fine 1995 book, Edward Hopper: An Intimate Biography.
Hopper's 1946 painting "High Noon" presents a woman in a doorway, her robe open. The better story Hopper tells, in Hoggard's poem, is "the way noon light, / slapping a white wall hard, / makes triangled shadow-fields / as sensual a presence as hair."
Hopper's art leaves much to imagine, hinting among the angles at what cannot be painted. Hoggard's poems acknowledge this with multiple complaints of what cannot be seen or known. What noise is the woman on the bed reacting to, as the curtain blows inward? "... maybe a memory turned her, / some past hope or fear recalled" is the speculation for the 1921 etching "Evening Wind."
Hoggard suspects Hopper, who lived mainly in New York City and Cape Cod, suffered from depression at a time before doctors could make a diagnosis. One dawn, Hopper went missing during a Santa Fe trip. Jo found her husband at a rail platform, sketching a locomotive, leaving out the scenic mountainous backdrop.
"Noise and oil and rust and track / worth a helluva lot more to me / than nature and pueblo crap" explains the 1925 watercolor "Locomotive, D. & R.G."
Hoggard, who is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern State University in Wichita Falls and a former Texas poet laureate, has published 19 books. Triangles of Light is his fourth from San Antonio-based Wings Press and an achievement as lasting as art from a master.
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David Hendricks is an Express-News business writer and columnist.
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A Painter Speaks in Poetry
Texas Books in ReviewWinter 2010
Having known James Hoggard's work for many years, I was curious as to why he would base a series of poems on the work of American artist Edward Hopper. After reading his revealing and thought-provoking introduction to Triangles of Light, I learned much about the inspirations that led to his writing poems in the voice of the painter, beginning with the Texas poet's discovery of Hopper and other American artists through his elementary school art teacher. Comparing Hopper's work to that of American modernists like Eugene O'Neill, Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, T.S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, the latter a favorite of the painter's, Hoggard conceives the idea that such writers and contemporaneous artists like Hopper had discovered meaning in their age's fragmentary, "intense but godless and pointless world" through their own art works produced as extensions of their selves. Having only seen a few of Hopper's paintings and etchings, I could still not quite understand why Hoggard and a number of other poets had taken a special interest in Hopper's art and wondered what it was that drew them to the New York painter's stark, flat, even drab canvases, despite their blocks of color and their trapezoids and triangles of light.
Once I had read Hoggard's introduction and several of the poems in Hopper's voice, I set the book aside with the intention of coming back to it after I had looked into and at more of the artist's work. Only then did I remember that Chilean poet Enrique Lihn, whose work I have translated over the years, had written a poem entitled "Edward Hopper," in which (in my own translation) Lihn reports that the artist painted "the place in which actions occurred and / or are about to happen ... a world of cold things / and rigid meetings between living mannequins," or he painted "the gleam of twilight rails/ ... a road without beginning or end/ a Manhattan street between this world and the other." I also recalled that Houston-born B. H. Fairchild had written a poem entitled" All the People in Hopper's Paintings," and on rereading his piece in The Art of the Lathe from 1998, I found that he related to Hopper's paintings because their people "were touched by the light of the real," but more personally "were lonely / as Iwas and lived in brown rooms whose / long, sad windows looked out on the roofs of brown buildings in the towns tha t made / them lonely." In an interview, Fairchild referred to a book on Hopper written in 1994 by poet Mark Strand, in which I found that Strand had questioned "why vastly different people should be so similarly moved when confronted with [Hopper's] work." Strand asserts that "Hopper's paintings are not social documents, nor are they allegories of unhappiness or of other conditions that can be applied with equal imprecision to the psychological make-up of Americans." Essentially Strand is captivated by the fact that Hopper's works are "saturated with suggestion," and he declares that "invitation to construct a narrative for each painting is ...part of the experience of looking at Hopper," that "the shadow of dark hangs over [the paintings], making whatever narratives we construct around them seem sentimental and beside the point," and that his Pennsylvania Coal Town is actually transcendent.
In returning to Hoggard's book, I could see that he was quite aware of all the possible, even contradictory narratives in Hopper's work and that he had brought them to life through his invention of the painter's voice, aided apparently by the biography by Gail Levin. But contrary to Strand's declaration, Hoggard makes the narratives that he has constructed around Hopper's works both unsentimental and to the point. Like Strand, Hoggard observes the artist's structural use of the triangle, what Strand calls at times "pictorial geometry" and" geometric calm" and Fairchild refers to as "a pyramid of light." Yet Hoggard goes further and interprets such" geometry" as "both crutch and guide .... No shape was more stable than the triangle. Nothing matched it for preventing collapse." Just as Strand notes that Hopper" did not idealize his figures," Hoggard has the artist declare "my world/forbids you to drift/to places where sweetness sits." One of the poems closer to home is Hoggard's piece on Hopper's 1925 watercolor, Locomotive, D. & KG., in which the painter begins by stating frankly that
Santa Fe was too damn pretty...
and I didn't like the stuff
the natives had for sale turquoise and
silver and corn beads though I did
like the way the indios
seemed inclined to be distant,
sweetly laconic,like stone
That world, though, wasn't my world --
New Mexico a damn fool dream...
I don't give a damn
about piñon pine and aspen stands
or a bunch of goddamn mountains
reputed to hemorrhage like the Lord
Hopper's no-nonsense utterance represents but one voice in which Hoggard has the painter speak his mind. Other Hopper voices range from being philosophical about to being analytical of his work, as when he says of the woman in his Cape Cod Evening: "Hell yes, she's unhappy: / alone out here near the woods/with her troglodytic mate spending too much time / tossing trinkets for a dog," or his voice can be revelatory of his attitudes toward life and art, as when he contrasts his paintings with those of Magritte:
I don't need people
floating goofball through my skies
or breasting through my walls
Inanimate things,
like planes of light, door and sea,
speak well enough for me
Nothing's inviting me out
into oblivion of sky or sea,
and nothing says stay put
Hopper's voice is, in many ways, Hoggard's own characteristic speech, his own recognizable tough, uncompromising approach to the art of poetry. I can hear the Texan in person, in his many books of poetry and in both his non-fiction and fictional prose. It is now quite obvious to me that Hoggard has seen in Hopper's work a reflection of his own values and his own practice. Once again the poet puts lines on his own poetics in the painter's mouth: "[W]hat I've done here / is what I've always done:/ chuck anything that's crap.
-- Reviewed by Dave Oliphant, author of Harbingers of Books to Come
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"... provides insight into what so many people want to know: what artists think about when they create ..."
Southwestern American LiteratureFall 2009
While reading some criticism of contemporary American poetry, I came across a disheartening argument: Americans prefer voice-over to voice and the hum of a television in another room to intimate conversations with people. Basically, this critic argued that contemporary American poetry has no distinguishable voices. Saddened, I decided to put poetry away forever. However, later that night I turned to James Hoggard's Triangles of Light: The Edward Hopper Poems. I hadnt read much of Hoggard, and my knowledge of Hopper was minimal, but after reading Hoggard's collection of poems and viewing some of Hopper's paintings, I felt some solace in the fact that American poetry could have recognizable voices, and it did -- James Hoggard's.
Hoggard, a former Poet Laureate of Texas, is the Perkins-Prothro Distinguished Professor of English at Midwestern University in Wichita Falls and has authored 19 books. He received the Lon Tinkle Award for Excellence Sustained Throughout a Career in 2006 from the Texas Institute of Letters and served two terms as its president. Although he is well known as a poet, he has also made a name for himself as a short story writer, novelist, playwright, essayist, and translator. One of his previous collections of poetry, Wearing The River (2005), won the PEN Southwest Poetry Award, and no doubt his Triangles of Light will also be award-winning.
Triangles of Light is a fascinating collection. Hoggard takes on the persona of Edward Hopper, the American Realist known for his use of geometric shapes. Hoggard writes in the voice of Hopper and conveys what the visual artist might have thought as he looked at his subjects. The poems share titles with Hopper's paintings, and the collection includes an index of paintings and etchings in the back so readers familiar with Hopper's work may turn directly to a particular painting-inspired poem. However, readers may benefit from reading the collection straight through, as Hoggard has organized the poems by subject, shape, and mood, with black and white prints of Hopper's "Approaching a City" (1946), "Night on the El Train" (1920), and "Italian Quarter, Gloucester" (1912) marking the sections. Whatever method readers choose to piece together the poems, Hoggard's interpretations of Hopper are sure to deliver to both those readers familiar with Hopper and those not. And the persona Hoggard employs is so realistic that readers unfamiliar with Hopper will feel the need to know more about him, as well as read Hoggard's other works.
Hopper's paintings often carry themes of solitude, introspection, and loneliness, and Hoggard succeeds in his attempt to capture these themes in his poetry. For instance, in the poem "Sunlight in a Cafeteria," the speaker -- Hopper -- articulates that he "can draw figures / and light on walls / but not always the face / whose facile gestures / sometimes bother [him]." In another poem, "Night Windows," Hopper looks on a lighted window at a woman in her negligee, bent over in search of something, exposing her thighs and curves. In a lonely voice he curses the reader -- who is thrust into the role of viewer -- for accusing him of visually raping his subject. The voice is bitter and real, ending with a "damn you" directed to the reader.
Triangles of Light was produced by Wings Press, an intimate publisher in San Antonio. Eco-minded readers will appreciate that the collection was printed on paper containing 50 percent recycled fiber. However, readers who prefer a sturdier bookthis edition is very lightmay be bothered by this environmentally-friendly production choice. For avid readers of ornate poetry, Hoggard's collection might disappoint, since his lines and images are as simple as the shadows and geometric shapes that Hopper uses in his paintings, although there is beauty and grace in that simplicity and realism for both artists. For those unfamiliar with Hopper, or for those seeking visual stimulation, the collection features only four Hopper prints, so having a supplementary resource containing Hopper's work might be helpful.
Hoggard's Triangles of Light provides insight into what so many people want to know: what artists think about when they create and when they look back on their work. Although Hoggard cant be Hopper, in this collection, as simplistic and realistic as he writes, he might have come as close as anyone will.
About This Author
Read more about James Hoggard HERE.