Room in New York, in Nebraska

The current issue of Prairie Schooner is only the second time Edward Hopper’s Room in New York has appeared in the journal, despite the painting having been in the University of Nebraska’s art collection for the last ninety years, and always only a few minutes’ walk from the Schooner offices. (It currently hangs in the Sheldon Museum of Art on campus; it’s rarely loaned out, due to its popularity.)

As a student of the university in the 1980s, I loved being in such close, ironic proximity to perhaps the most iconographic portrait of New Yorkers by one of the city’s most popular mythmakers. I discovered Hopper as a farm kid and movie buff: the 1981 musical Pennies from Heaven, with Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters, included tableaux modeled after Hopper’s Nighthawks and New York Movie (despite being set in Chicago).

I became more familiar in college. My art history professor lectured about the cages Hopper put his people in: the lack of a doorknob in Room in New York; the lack of a door in Nighthawks. Freshman year, I bought a poster reproduction of Nighthawks at a cheap-art sale (for dorm wall décor) in the student union, then naively invested in having it custom framed, which was about $100 more than I thought it would be (and $100 more than I had; I had to save up for some weeks before I could get it from the gallery).

The only other appearance of Room in New York in Prairie Schooner was in a black-and-white portfolio of university-owned artwork in the Spring 1977 issue. On the occasion of the journal’s fiftieth anniversary, Schooner editor Bernice Slote and then-director of the University of Nebraska Art Galleries Norman Geske selected works from the journal’s first issues in the 1920s and 30s.

But Hopper has shown up in a few poems: “Suburbanite” (Winter 2002), a sublime study of color by Melissa Morphew, includes this passage:

When her favorite color was red –
chocolate dipped strawberries, taffeta hearts,
maraschino cherry Cokes,
Eva Gardner lipstick blotted
on rumpled white cotton, the neon glare wind-rush
of candy apple Ford Fairlanes –
                             she dreamed of 2 a.m. cities,
high-rises glistening like cubist Christmas trees,
scribbling film-noir epics
on the napkins of all night diners, outlining
her loneliness in Edward Hopper bas-relief.

And here’s Edward K. Derby’s poem about Hopper’s “Cape Cod Evening”: (Summer 1990)

Cape Cod Evening

The dog is listening to something, probably a whippoorwill or some evening sound.
—Edward Hopper

Standing in tall grass like fur,
facing the wind and light, not the house,
the dog is listening to something.

The woman crosses her arms, cold,
trying to hear the phone, or the radio,
or some evening sound.

The man finds something old
in the grass, puzzled, thinking,
the dog is listening to something.

They are deep in grass with no walkway,
uneasy with the house, or themselves,
or some evening sound.

One locust tree reaches to a closed window.
The man and the woman wait for the dog.
The dog is listening to something,
or some evening sound.

Covers of the Winter 2002 and Summer 1990 issues of Prairie Schooner