All the melancholy of America is in Hopper's paintings and Strand's lyrics
Conference at night by Edward Hopper 1949 (Getty Images)
immortality and nostalgia
Verses that tell of moodiness, fragmentation, the twilight landscape, along with paintings in which the characters are trapped in the space of their own waiting. Concepts that are also valid for our times
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The melancholy of America is all in the paintings of Edward Hopper and in the lyrics of Mark Strand . Born to a Jewish family in Canada but raised in the United States, Strand taught Literature at Columbia University: in 1990 he was named Poet Laureate, while in 1999 he received the Pulitzer Prize thanks to the collection Blizzard of One. Lo Specchio Mondadori now welcomes in its series the substantial volume Tutte le poesie (translated by Damiano Abeni with Moira Egan) which brings together texts from Sleeping with one eye open (1964) to Almost invisible (2012), with two fundamental prose works such as The alphabet of a poet and Notes on the craft of poetry.
Forty-eight years of writing, between cohesive, dry and more airy compositions, prosimeters and touches of black humor, surrealism and expressive simplicity, dreaminess and silence. Do they tell us something about today's United States? Maybe so. Strand's fragments of verse tell of humor, fragmentation, the twilight landscape, desire . But they do so with an almost maniacal composure, giving the reader the impression of being faced with very controlled anxieties. Inhabited by the thought of death as a source of inspiration, Strand is an intimately postmodern poet, like his American (and non-American) colleagues of his generation: but in a different way. Hysterical realism, alienation and uprooting act in him with a sober, moderate sense of form and abstraction.
What he said of Hopper applies to himself (in Edward Hopper. A Poet Reads a Painter, translated by Damiano Abeni and Moira Egan, Donzelli 2016): “In Hopper’s paintings, what happens are things that have to do with waiting. Hopper’s people seem to have no occupations whatsoever . They are like characters abandoned by their scripts who now, trapped in the space of their own waiting, must keep themselves company, without a clear destination, without a future”.
A lover of Dante and Italian culture, of Rilke and Virgil, a versatile, self-deprecating author, attracted by the “ultimate otherness” of the zenith, Strand has given voice in particular to absence as a propellant of reality, a “something that provides a gap” to be filled. Here is his best-known text, a true manifesto of poetics: “In a field / I am the absence / of the field. / And / always like this. / Wherever I am / I am what is missing. / When I walk / I divide the air / and always / the air flows back / to fill the spaces / where my body had been. / We all have reasons / to move. / I move / to hold things together”. (This poem was apparently written in twenty seconds during a card game.) Walking through Strand's verses we find a lot of wind, trains and farms, a mirror, the harshness of Utah, the ocean and the lakes, Hades, the garden: each object seems to speak to us of a joy, presupposed by the very difficulty of the joy of writing.
Perhaps the hope of immortality or the sting of nostalgia . “I remember as a young girl, when dusk gave way to darkness, I would lose myself among the yellow stars of the jasmine. And I would drift in a voluptuous version of the galaxy, farther and farther, away, farther. That was joy, that drifting.”
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