Transforming Vision: Writers on Art

by Edward Hirsch

In this unique and lavishly illustrated gift book, famous writers, including John Updike, Wallace Stevens, Joyce Carol Oates, and Philip Levine, contribute poems and prose--most never before published--on artworks found in one of the country's preeminent museums. 70 illustrations, 63 in color.

Genres: Art, Poetry, Nonfiction, Writing, Criticism

143 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 1994

About the author

Edward Hirsch is a celebrated poet and peerless advocate for poetry. He was born in Chicago in 1950—his accent makes it impossible for him to hide his origins—and educated at Grinnell College and the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Ph.D. in Folklore. His devotion to poetry is lifelong.He has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a MacArthur Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, a Pablo Neruda Presidential Medal of Honor, the Prix de Rome, and an Academy of Arts and Letters Award. In 2008, he was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.
bio-img
Edward Hirsch’s first collection of poems, For the Sleepwalkers (1981), received the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award from New York University and the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets. His second collection, Wild Gratitude (1986), won the National Book Critics Award.
Since then, he has published six additional books of poems: The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994),On Love (1998), Lay Back the Darkness (2003), Special Orders (2008), and The Living Fire: New and Selected Poems (2010), which brings together thirty-five years of poems.Hirsch is also the author of five prose books, including A Poet’s Glossary (2014), the result of decades of passionate study, Poet’s Choice (2006), which consists of his popular columns from the Washington Post Book World, and How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller. He is the editor of Theodore Roethke’s Selected Poems (2005) and co-editor of The Making of a Sonnet: A Norton Anthology (2008). He also edits the series “The Writer’s World” (Trinity University Press).Edward Hirsch taught for six years in the English Department at Wayne State University and seventeen years in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Houston. He is now president of the
John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Reviews

[Eric Byrd · Rating 5 out of 5]

Guy Davenport with his geography of American Gothic puts the others in the shade.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great book of art and writing about it.

The quality of the art collection at the art institute is as good as it gets here in the states. The book contains everybody from Grant Wood to Picasso to Degas to Rodin and on and on.

And the writing is also terrific. There are writers you recognize immediately like Joyce Carol Oates and John Updike and writers you don't necessarily recognize but are glad you've met at last.

Right now the book is selling for a couple bucks, and it's a bargain you'll not see again in this lifetime.

[Sherry (sethurner) · Rating 4 out of 5]

This a beautiful book, with around fifty paintings from the Art Institute of Chicago. Chicago is a hundred miles from here, but it's an easy train ride, so I visit the Art Institute two or three times a year. Familiarity with the paintings makes the book seem like a new look at old friends. In it authors including Saul Bellow, Delmore Schwartz, Francine Prose, Rita Dove, Willa Cather and Stanley Kunitz write essays, stories, poems about the the artworks - including Matisse's Woman Before an Aquarium. This book should appeal to both fans of art and of literature.

[Ruta · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are many reasons to love this book: for the range of literary pieces, for beautiful reproductions, for Edward Hirsch's elegant introduction. I discovered Ivan Albright's art. A painter, on his death bed he wrote:

Things most important to me are lost
And in their place rises colossal
terror and fear and nights of eternal length
Bring uncalled for colors and sounds
And mirrors appear that were not
there before and half alive
They slip about the room waist high

This is the quiet harrowing truth that I understand.

[michael reid rubenstein · Rating 2 out of 5]

rather topical but nice reproductions of paintings. the joyce carol oates piece about hopper's "nighthawks" painting is terrific.