'Loving the Past But Settled in the Living'

In 1994, the late Helen Pinkerton published Bright Fictions: Poems on Works of Art, a chapbook of twenty-seven poems about paintings, sculptures, pottery and photographs. Her publisher was the poet R.L. Barth. Helen’s ekphrastic poems are not art criticism or mere descriptions of subject matter. They are more fanciful than that and sometimes read like contemplative fables. Helen projects her imagination sympathetically into the works and their creators. One of my favorites in the series is about an artist unknown to me before first reading her poem some years ago: “On Gari Melchers’s ‘Writing’ (1905) in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.” Helen uses the first line (and the third line and the title) of Wallace Stevens’ “The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm” as the poem’s epigraph: 

“How often did she make such quiet, one wonders,

This woman writing at a covered table—

Full summer light warming the roseate hues,

Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.

A Wedgwood pier glass shows three Roman figures

In ritual dance—cool neoclassic Graces—

Beside a clay pot of geraniums.

Her taste eclectic—like our modern lives—

Loving the past but settled in the living,

 

“She seems meticulous—even, perhaps,

Like Edith Wharton, passionate for order,

Feeling, as she did, that in house and novel,

‘Order, the beauty even of Beauty is.’

Stevens, though you sought order in the sea

And grander heavens, the threat of nothingness

Unmanned you. Most women have no time for such,

For fate constrains them to immediate means,

The quiet art of keeping calm the house.”

 

When viewed for the first time, Melchers’ palette is stunning – “roseate hues, / Mauve, red, and pink of dress and cloth and room.” Often, portraits of writers at work indoors are heavily shadowed, very serious and almost grim. Melchers’ painting is a sumptuous celebration of the writer and writing – and of painting. Outside, it’s summer. Indoors, facing the faceless woman are the Graces – the goddesses of beauty, grace and charm – the virtues of all good art. The quoted line is taken from Thomas Traherne’s “The Vision.”

 

Imagining the writing woman as Edith Wharton (whom Helen’s teacher, Yvor Winters, thought superior to Wharton’s friend Henry James) is inspired. I especially admire Helen’s knock at Wallace Stevens, who could be awfully fey when entering his philosophical mode. Call it noble feminism – or simply dismissing a clichéd notion about sexual roles. The poem’s first line – “How often did she make such quiet, one wonders” – suggests we may be witnessing not a routine event but a privileged moment. What she’s writing we’ll never know.

 

[You can find the poem in Taken in Faith: Poems (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2002) and in A Journey of the Mind: Collected Poems of Helen Pinkerton 1945-2016, (Wiseblood Books, 2016). Helen died on December 28, 2017, at age ninety.]