I was about halfway up the trail that climbs a sheer canyon wall, when the cliffs across the cirque exploded with a roar. My head jerked up, and I lost my balance. I jabbed my cane into the ground behind me to get steady. Then a dark triangular shape, moving so fast that I follow it, past overhead, crossed the patch of sky, and disap- peared over the hills on the other side. The entire valley reverberated and just as quickly fell silent again.
Wow! French Air Force Phantom jet. I remembered that a couple of them, in tandem with some drones, had smashed Moammar escape column into bits. What an awful way to go. I turned again to the climb ahead and trudged up toward the horizon. I remember exactly how Mother and I found a village tucked away in the mouth of a limestone canyon in southern France.
recommendation, maybe. In any case, made an effort ever since to get here whenever we can. I suppose only archae- ologists can tell how long been people here. A little stream, the Verdus, through the whole length of the village, whose shape is dictated by the sides of the valley and was no doubt the reason for settling here. At the foot of the village, the Verdus falls into the Herault River, a drop that would have gladdened the heart of any medieval miller.
Whatever its precedents, the little valley entered modern history in 804, when William of Orange (Guilhem in the southern France Occitane dialect), after helping his cousin Charlemagne defeat the Moors in Barcelona, decided to retire and devote the remainder of his life to prayer and Guided by St. Benoit of Aniane and armed with a piece of the true cross given him by Charlemagne, he retreated here and began building his abbey church and mon- astery, which have stood here ever since. They suffered a great deal during the French Revolution, and in later years from neglect and penury part of the sculpture was sold to the Cloisters Museum in New York City but the village has lately been restored to better, perhaps, than its original charm and glory. Steel plates in the narrow cobbled streets attest to utilities buried beneath. A plaque beside the street leading westward uphill to the abbey proclaims that you are following a bit of the ancient pilgrim trail of Chemin de Compostella, which ends eventually in western Spain.
In front of the abbey, in the Place de la (obviously not a medieval The deep footsteps of monks See Lange, Page B5 He became famous for his oil I was just a year ago that I was appointed poet laureate of Vermont, at which point, exactly, I chose to write these col- umns. I began the with a trib- ute to Ruth Stone, and it seems somehow to do the same at the end of 12 months. Her voice is one that many, many of us miss, though happily we can go back to her work. For example: Communion Birds circle above the hay barn. terrible earnestness.
A young bull gets up from the mud; The tuft under his belly like a clump of grass. He bellows; his curly throat stretched up, His head half turned yearning upward from the wood slatted pen Where he sleeps or tramples the way it is. sloughed manure. The birds gather to cheep in unison. A row of oak trees shining like waxed veneer Rages down wind-break.
The sky, vague blue behind a gauzy cumu- lus; Pale fall sunlight glazes the barn shin- gles. Now a chorus of bulls forcing music out of their bodies, Begins and begins in And the birds, undu- lating and rising, circle And scatter over the fall plowed strips. What they are saying is out of their separate- ness. This is the way it is. This is the Ezra Pound once opined he ists in literary studies to note an did little else as a critic that natural object is always the adequate Well, no.
Not always. Not by any means. But sometimes it is. Or rather, it almost is. For the most part, acute natural observation is allowed to speak for it- self in the poem above.
There are only two lines on which more soon that seem to go beyond rich evocation. look at some basics of that evocation. The poet invites us into her work by noticing things familiar to all, even as she phrases them in extraordi- narily fresh ways (how perfect, say, is that word in line And we need not be special- alternation here between the singleness of that young bull and the various groupings (other bulls, birds, even clouds, trees and furrows). We are led both to contemplate the abundance of the world and, at the same time, if perhaps unconsciously, to con- sider the individual as opposed to the throng. All of which sets us up for those marvelous two lines, in which we are told and Ruth Stone here and elsewhere serves as a battering ram not only against Ezra Pound but also against that old workshop-worn mantra, that, whatever the group or groups we belong to, way it involves, our ineluctable from one another.
I presume to speak for every other poet, but my sense is that, like many close poet-friends, I write with an awareness of, and In frustration is its balm See Balm, Page B5 I 1927, an oddly matched couple drove their used Dodge into Vermont to check out the scenery. The man: tall and long- limbed. Laconic to the point of near silence. People found it hard to warm up to him. The woman: voluble and full of life, as if her personality were trying to make up for her small stature.
The couple enjoyed that trip, which soon led to more and longer stays. The pair would even- tually become famous, but their visits here have remained mostly unknown. Those trips are minor footnotes in the great career carved out by the man, Edward Hopper, with the invaluable help of his wife, Jo, his tireless sup- porter. Still, it is fascinating to glimpse the art world that Edward and Jo Hopper inhabited and chose to leave behind occasionally in search of fresh material in the rural world of Vermont. From stray threads, scholar and writer Bonnie Tocher Clause has pieced together an absorbing account of those visits in her new book, ward Hopper in A different view During his time in Vermont, Hopper created nearly two dozen has a home in South Royalton, watercolors and a handful of land- theorizes that Hopper prob- scape sketches.
These pictures neatly with the image we too photographically realistic, commonly have of work. too freighted with social has been little commented on, let paintings of haunt- ingly lonely scenes, many of them urban. His most familiar painting is perhaps which depicts a seemingly hushed, late-night scene in a brightly lit urban diner. Critics comment on the sense of quiet tension that pervades many of paintings. His Vermont pieces lack that tension, but they share the feeling of calm, which distinguishes them as works by Hopper.
As Clause explains in her richly detailed book, Hopper was familiar with the most prominent Vermont land- scape painters of his day Luigi Lucioni, Paul Sample and Henry Schnakenberg but preferred to roadway. steer his own course. Clause, who ably found paintings commentary and alone explored. In her research, just too pretty. Hopper was in- terested in making pictures that were honest depictions of Vermont but which avoided the expected.
In them, no covered bridges or white churches, and few farm build- ings. Instead, he preferred hillsides and river views. Though he include peo- ple in his Vermont paintings, Hopper expunge evi- dence that this is a settled state. At glimpse, some of his Vermont paint- ings can appear to be simply scenic landscapes, but the artist has left in several times in the late the road running beside the river, the gravel pit carved into the hillside and the fence posts that line the The world book is a neat bit of his- torical reconstruction. Until now, the time in Vermont Clause delved into the Hopper Research Collection at the Whit- ney Museum of American Art in New York City, where she studied Josephine invaluable pa- pers, including her catalog of her work and her personal correspondence.
Clause even tracked down the son of the farm family with whom the Hoppers boarded for two sum- mers. He has long since moved to California. To tell the story of brush with artistic greatness, Clause had to explain the art world in which the Hoppers lived. Edward was by no means the icon then that he is now, 45 years after his death. For years, he worked as a commercial artist, doing art painting on the side.
Despite having his work included in shows of the Whitney Studio Club, which would evolve into the Whitney Museum, Hopper sold pieces only sporadically. The Hoppers lived outside the New York art world as much as they could. That was choice. It suited his brooding and introverted personality. Clause makes a point of describing the artist colonies that thrived in towns like Cornish, N.H., and later in town of Man- chester.
These were places for artists to gather and cama- raderie and inspiration. Hopper, Vermont Far from NY, the artist found something he was seeking ART IN AMERICA PHOTO Edward and Josephine Hop- per pose for a snapshot in 1934. They visited Vermont 1920s and 1930s. MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON, PHOTO Edward Hopper painted Branch of the White River, in 1938. See Hopper, Page B2 B1 Magazine Vermont Sunday Living Gardening Books The Times Argus Sunday, November 11, 2012 The Rutland Herald Willem LANGE Yankee Notebook Sydney Lea On Poetry.
