Transcript

I’m Ada Limón and this is The Slowdown.

One of the things I love about art is how we bring ourselves to whatever it is we are experiencing. Whether we want to or not, we see ourselves in the film, the poem, the painting, the song. Art is like this room we walk in and it’s not a mirror exactly, but if we’re finally quiet enough, we can see ourselves reflected fully, and so we move from room to room and confront ourselves again and again.

Growing up with a mother who is an artist was always interesting because if I saw something in her work when she was standing there, sometimes she would say, “Well not really.” It was funny to have the artist there to actually disagree with you and put you straight about her intention. But sometimes, I was spot on. Once, when we were driving from San Francisco to Sonoma, I was on Highway 121 and right across from Ram’s Gate Winery, I saw a tree that sort of stuck out to the side of a soft golden hill and I said, “Oh my god, mom, that’s your tree, that’s your painting!” And it delighted her to know that I had seen it and could point it out among the hundreds of trees that flecked the landscape in the valley.

But most of us don’t have the opportunity to talk to the artist, or even if we do, we might be disappointed. Georgia O’Keefe famously denied that her incredible flower paintings were meant to connote female sex organs in any way, to which I will only respond, “Ahem.” And then of course there’s the paintings that can be interpreted many different ways. Once, right after my stepmother died, I went to Amsterdam with my friend Jen and everything I saw in Vincent van Gogh’s paintings were things that were absent, things that were missing, a loneliness, a grief. Because when we walk into a room of paintings we often find, to our confusion, ourselves.

It’s part of the magic of visual art, the way we can all see one thing and watch as it metamorphosizes into the thoughts in our mind. Poems can be like that too. The reader brings her whole world to the page and because of that, the poem changes and becomes something new altogether.

Today’s poem is a wonderful ekphrastic poem that examines just that, the feeling of bringing yourself to a painting and yet still discovering the wonder that is there.

Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room
by Victoria Chang

While the man is away
telling his wife
about the red-corseted woman,
the woman waits
on the queen-sized bed.
You’d expect her quiet
in the fist of a copper
statue. Half her face,
a shade of golden meringue,
the other half, the dark
of cattails. Her mouth even—
too straight, as if she doubted
her made decision, the way
women do. In her hands,
a yellow letter creased,
like her hunched back.
Her dress limp on a green chair.
In front, a man’s satchel
and briefcase. On a dresser,
a hat with a ceylon
feather. That is all 
the artist left us with, 
knowing we would turn
the woman’s stone into ours,
a thirst for the self
in everything—even
in the sweet chinks
of mandarin.

"Edward Hopper Study: Hotel Room" by Victoria Chang from CIRCLE copyright © 2005 Victoria Chang Used by permission of Southern Illinois University Press.