Kaaterskill Clove, Joseph Stanton
Shanti
Arts Press, 2025
Early nineteenth century North America knew itself – through its writers and artists, as well as outside observers – as a thinly-inhabited land, part pristine Eden and part desolate wilderness. Of all the artists whose images contributed to this perception, arguably none made as deep or as lasting an impression as the Hudson River School painters. Their landscapes, mainly of the Northeastern American mountains and forests, depicted a natural environment of expansive scale and emotional force. In Kaaterskill Clove, his new collection of ekphrastic poems, Joseph Stanton writes in response to their work and shows what it still can mean to us, nearly two hundred years after it was created.
At the time they were created, the landscapes of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church, Sanford Robinson Gifford, Albert Bierstadt, Asher B. Durand and others were bound up with the idea that the grand scale and sweep of the rugged American landscape would give rise to a particularly American style of art. Although critic Benjamin T. Spencer would describe this a century later as a “topographical fallacy,” it nevertheless is true that the Hudson River painters attempted to address something deeper than the stylistic possibilities then thought to be open to American artists. Their vision, essentially Romantic, was of a vast and partly untamed land in which the human presence takes an ambiguous place both at home in and transcended by the powerful forces of nature.
It is just this complex relationship of the human to the natural that Stanton focuses on in many of his poems. Here, for example, is the beginning of his poem about Thomas Cole’s 1838 View on the Catskill, Early Autumn:
Cole loved this hillside
overlooking a creek
a picnic spot, a short
walk from his home.
He shows his wife and
child at play…
Stanton describes a scene of domestic idyll, of Cole’s wife and child playing in a sunlit clearing by the water: nature in its benign form. But there’s more to it than that. Looking more closely at the painting, Stanton sees a harbinger of disruptive change in its details:
In the distance we can see the mountains
that edge the Hudson
River.
Approach within a few
inches
of the canvas and you can
spy
the smokestacks of the
growing village
that crowds the far side
of the river.
By the time Cole painted
it,
this view could no longer
be seen
because a railroad had
cut through it…
A very close look is needed to see the houses, smoke rising from the chimney of one of them, in the middle distance. It’s an easily missed detail, but for Stanton, it becomes the painting’s center of gravity and the latent meaning of the family idyll. The human presence, so seemingly minor here, is about to expand, alter, and eventually overwhelm the landscape. Which it in fact did. As Stanton notes, by the time Cole painted the picture some of the forest had already been cleared away for construction of the Canajoharie and Catskill railroad. We might even see a premonition of the intrusion of the human on the natural in the way Cole has balanced elements of light and dark: given the predominance of shadow covering the valley, it seems likely the painting depicts a moment in late afternoon. After reading Stanton’s poem, we might see the lengthening shadow as a metaphor for the encroachment of human development on the local ecosystem.
But the human encroachment on and despoliation of nature isn’t the end of the story, as Stanton shows with his ekphrasis of Cole’s The Course of Empire: Desolation (1836), the last of a series of five paintings Cole made depicting the life cycle of an empire from its raw tribal beginnings to the height of its wealth and dominance and ending with its inevitable destruction. Desolation shows the moonlit site of what once was a hegemonic city but now is a ruin being reclaimed by the surrounding vegetation. Stanton’s response to the painting takes the form of a loose sonnet culminating in a rhyming couplet that serves as both an epitaph and an expression of hope for regeneration:
The Empire’s
deconstructed; its frenzied screams
have becalmed, the harbor
now abandoned.
All that’s alive here is
a scatter of trees
and, perched on a capitol
Corinthian,
a heron nesting as if a
world could go on and on--
despite all loss, despite
all despair,
as if new life could
happen anywhere.
The poem’s modified sonnet form, occasional rhymes, and inverted phrase “capitol Corinthian” (which uses Cole’s original spelling for the architectural feature) lend it a quasi-archaic character that fits the temper of the painting.
Many of the paintings Stanton writes of carry a force that derives from their ability to evoke a sense of the sublime – that feeling of awe and exaltation, tinged with an undertone of terror and existential unease, that one might feel when viewing a rugged landscape from the distance and security that an image in a painting affords. The representation of nature as sublime was a hallmark of the Hudson River painters. Sanford Robinson Gifford’s A Gorge in the Mountains, Kaaterskill Clove is one example. Gifford portrays an abyssal ravine on an autumn afternoon in a hazy sunlight that half-dissolves its distant contours into a wash of gold and yellow-green. The loftiness of the view, the vastness of the geological features, and the pervasiveness of a light that paradoxically obscures rather than illuminates some of its objects – all of these are qualities Burke identified as characteristic of the sublime. In Stanton’s reading of the painting this scene retains its ability to awe, but his focus is on the human story it implies, as embodied in the foreground figures of a hunter and his dog:
Gifford gives us a
cluster of birches
on a precipitous ledge at
far left.
The birches and the ledge
are vivid,
sharp-edged in detail in
the gleam
of the late-afternoon
light of the sun
that shines center-cut
directly at us.
Below the ledge a hunter and his dog
struggle upward towards
this amazing
view of a vast ravine,
bright
and golden, dazzled by
delicate
mists rising from lakes
and ponds
and creeks and the dimly
visible
line of white that is, we
know,
the tumbling falls of
Kaaterskill…
We cannot quite make out
the disk
that is the sun, it’s a
near-white,
a pure, unrelenting
intensity.
A clearing in the deep
distance
holds a small house,
tiny,
from where we stand.
Smoke rises from its
stack,
speaking of a fireplace,
where a stew is cooking,
for the belated hunter,
whose return is,
perhaps patiently,
awaited.
The view is “amazing,” the ravine is “vast” and the light “dazzl[ing]” – qualities of the sublime, to be sure, but what ultimately engages Stanton is the hunter, whom he imagines as being out late and perhaps a cause of worry to the people waiting for him in the distant house. It’s a choice of the concrete over the abstract, and the homely over the metaphysical.
As throughout the collection, “Kaaterskill Clove” gives us a sensitively detailed description of the painting written with plain language. The poem is structured in neat, six-line stanzas and additionally features frequent alliterations that move the rhythm along and provide at least one visual pun: the recurrence of the letter “v” in “view of a vast ravine” cleverly mimics the plunging shape of the cleft. Beyond its descriptive fidelity to the images on the canvas, the poem elaborates a narrative possibility that Stanton sees in Gifford’s painting. This reflects Stanton’s expansive approach to ekphrasis, which sees paintings as what he has elsewhere called “frozen moments” – scenes that have “multivarious narrative implications” waiting to be articulated through imaginative interpretation.
The narrative Stanton finds implied in Martin Johnson Heade’s 1868 Thunderstorm on Narragansett Bay, an ominous seascape of black storm clouds and rain over some small boats and smaller human figures by the waterline, focuses on the scene’s psychological dimensions. Stanton writes of the boats “hurrying back toward shore,/ driven by the dark and what the dark portends” – an “unrelenting argument of heavy weather,/ its shouted rhetoric of rain and wind.” The potential for destruction is in the air, literally; the storm’s threat is read off of it as a portent, as one would read a sign. But in the closing couplet Stanton suggests that an element of psychological ambiguity is at play as well, when he writes of the scrambling figures that “They know that even this garish sky can be/ a comforting sort of grief, a dark abode.” What he captures here is one of the paradoxes of the sublime – the strange sense of satisfaction that accompanies the terror, or what Kant in his third Critique described as a “negative pleasure.”
When we respond to the painting of a landscape we respond as much to the artifice of the painting’s way of making the landscape present as to the landscape itself. Nature here isn’t natural so much as humanized -- mediated through the means and conventions attendant on representation. Stanton brings this out in his poem on Albert Bierstadt’s Among the Sierra Nevada, California (1868):
Bierstadt built his
grandeurs piece by piece
from quantities of
sketches and photographs.
Stereographs helped him
to grasp
and render meticulously.
He wanted to be
theatrical,
but he wanted, too, to
get
all the details correct,
absolutely
and three-dimensionally
right.
He gives us Sierras, lit
by a sun
whose light explodes
through the clouds
gathered on and amidst
snow-capped peaks.
As usual, Bierstadt makes
it more
of a profundity than it
could
by any shift of eye or
mind --
possibly, plausibly – be…
What we see in this proto-Photorealist painting has been carefully crafted, put there through a series of technologically afforded choices that result not only in a picture, but in a “mythos, too wonderful to be true,/ while looking, to our eyes,/ entirely and ridiculously real.” Bierstadt’s simulacrum is striking not only for its accuracy, but for its dramatic enhancement of the scene it depicts. The reality it conveys is hyperreal, its beauty is at once profound and “ridiculous.”
Stanton’s own use of artifice in his poems is present but understated. His tone is conversational and his language direct and unpretentious; his occasional use of rhyme doesn’t call attention to itself. He has a good eye for the kind of detail a more casual viewer might overlook, which allows him to expand on some of the nuances in the paintings. The inclusion of color reproductions of most of the paintings he writes about is a welcome feature of this stimulating collection.
Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes about the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, The Amsterdam Review, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Rain Taxi, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, Open Doors Review, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, Point of Departure, and elsewhere. His essays on poetics have appeared in the books Telling It Slant (University of Alabama Press), and The World in Time and Space (Talisman House); he is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press. His score Boundary Conditions III appears in A Year of Deep Listening (Terra Nova Press). Website: https://danielbarbiero.wordpress.com.
