Last month, National Poetry Month San Antonio invited the community to write ekphrastic poems in response to artwork in local museum collections. South Texas poets submitted entries inspired by works on view at area museums. We congratulate these winners for their outstanding poems written in response to Houses on the Hill by Paul Cezanne.
In addition, our selected poet Alexandra van deKamp, Executive Director of Gemini Ink, selected Edward Hopper’s Corn Hill.
Judges were Jim LaVilla Havelin, Eddie Vega, and Linda Simone. Many thanks to the participants, winners, and judges for sharing your talent!
WINNING POEMS
About Paul Cezanne's Houses on the Hill
Houses on the Hill exhibits Cézanne’s confidence in using color during the last years of this life. With a fully loaded brush, he painted overlapping vertical blocks of various greens to describe foliage on the hillside. Using dark blue, he delineated the houses, bushes in the foreground, and a hint of a boat at the right. Horizontal strokes of green, blue, and orange suggest a river bank. Subtle violets fill in the planes of the houses, and a jumble of light blue floods the sky above the hill.
Corn Hill
by Alexandra van de Kamp, Executive Director of Gemini Ink
Maybe I am not very human. What I wanted to do was paint
sunlight on the side of a house. – Edward Hopper
Hopper has set six houses on a summer hill. They look out
at a sea just outside the reach of the frame, caught
in the cinnamon light of afternoon. These houses are
their seeing—they hum with it; quietly ablaze with invisible
tapestries of thought. I know, you might ask, does a house
think? But can we really say it does not?
A house is a thumbprint of use, a bookend of history,
so much breath pressed into it. Around their shapes,
an amber hillside throws itself down like a rumpled
carpet. Night-green rocks interrupt its seaward spill.
That old, unselfish light is one I’d walk a long way
to bask in. Who does not want, as these houses want,
to be lulled by light, signatured with its weight?
They sit on a hill named after the Pilgrims who stole corn
from the Nausets and later returned to compensate them
for the loss. A tendril of history that is at the start of a long,
tormented, and incompletely told story. And how many
stories does a house hold? How many houses
abide within you? Can you count them? Do they come back
as a windowsill’s white ledge, glass doors leading to a
dining room, a carpet’s blue swirl? Each fragment saying:
“See, you have never left me. I float inside you.”
And float is what these houses do; hammocked
in this late summer light, articulate in their solitude.
