Joseph Stanton's "Edward Hopper's 'New York Movie'"

The Daily Poem

Goldberry Studios

Education For Kids, Arts, Kids & Family

4.6 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 9 July 2024

⏱️ 9 minutes

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Summary

Today’s poem (from an art scholar and master of ekphrastic poetry) features another classic Hopper painting and a contemplative trip to the movies. Happy reading!

Joseph Stanton’s books of poems include A Field Guide to the Wildlife of Suburban O‘ahu, Cardinal Points, Imaginary Museum: Poems on Art, and What the Kite Thinks, Moving Pictures, and Lifelines: Poems for Homer and Hopper. He has published more than 300 poems in such journals as Poetry, Harvard Review, Poetry East, The Cortland Review, Ekphrasis, Bamboo Ridge, Elysian Fields Quarterly, Endicott Studio’s Journal of the Mythic Arts, and New York Quarterly. In 2007, Ted Kooser selected one of Stanton’s poems for his “American Life in Poetry” column.Stanton has edited A Hawai‘i Anthology, which won a Ka Palapala Po‘okela Award for excellence in literature. Two of his other books have won honorable mention Ka Palapala Po‘okela Awards. In 1997 he received the Cades Award for his contributions to the literature of Hawai‘i.As an art historian, Stanton has published essays on Edward Hopper, Winslow Homer, Maurice Sendak, Chris Van Allsburg, and many other artists. His most recent nonfiction books are The Important Books: Children’s Picture Books as Art and Literature and Stan Musial: A Biography. He teaches art history and American studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa.

-bio via Poetry Foundation

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios. I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Tuesday, July 9th, 2004. And this is movie week here on The Daily Poem. As I mentioned in yesterday's episode, the summertime has always been, for me, associated with the cinema, not just with watching movies, but with
0:22.0	going to the movie theater. It may be partly because my maternal grandfather, a man of many
0:29.1	talents and many trades, was for a long time a projectionist in Phoenix, Arizona. And there,
0:36.0	a place that humanity really has no business trying to continue
0:39.0	living, going to the movie theater is an important summertime ritual because it means
0:47.2	now, at least, an air-conditioned reprieve from the heat outdoors. I'm curious if listeners from other parts of the
0:57.0	country have similar associations or not. At any rate, today's poem captures that experience.
1:05.6	In fact, it is set in many ways in a theater very much like one that my grandfather worked in for many
1:13.5	years built in the golden age of the cinema. The poem is Edward Hopper's New York movie.
1:21.8	Edward Hopper made an appearance in one of last week's episodes, at least as an illusion,
1:27.1	but this poem is a true
1:29.3	eqfrastic poem. A New York movie is the title of one of Hopper's paintings, which I won't
1:36.4	describe for you because our poet, Joseph Stanton, does a fine job of that in the poem.
1:44.0	Though the scene is a movie theater, the main subject ends up being an usheret,
1:50.7	waiting in the wings as the movie plays.
1:55.2	And the painting itself invites us to contemplate not so much what's going on on the big screen,
2:02.1	but what's going on inside of her.
2:04.6	And Joseph Santon's poem here does a wonderful job of that.
2:09.0	She's contrasted with the moviegoers in the seats.
2:14.4	There are a few, but they are separated.
2:17.2	This is pretty typical of Edward Hopper.
2:20.4	I think I used the phrase last week, alone together. One of his specialties when he has human
	...

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