Long Island Triptych

Lindley Williams Hubbell (1901-1994) received a Yale Younger Poets Award in 1927, and his work afterwards appeared from several major U.S. publishers. Then in 1953 he moved to Japan and liked it so much that he never again left the country, taking Japanese citizenship in 1960. His most significant book, the last to appear in the U.S. before his departure, was Long Island Triptych and Other Poems (1947). In this book - and especially in its title poem separately reissued here - he broke through from his early style of short, finely cadenced lyrical poems to an ambitious and original modernism. In an afterword, editor Paul Rossiter argues that this modernism was inspired by the work of his friend Gertrude Stein, and especially by her writings on Cézanne, Picasso and the cubists.The panels of the triptych focus on three Long Island neighborhoods - Greenpoint, Ridgewood, and Glendale - and each includes a great variety of material contained within a formal structure as rigorous as that of an analytic cubist work by Braque or Picasso. In a late essay comparing Gertrude Stein's work with that of the cubists, Hubbell states: 'as the Cubist painter took an object apart and then reassembled the parts according to a completely autonomous sense of design, so she disintegrated her ideational content and reorganized it into a purely formal design'. This taking apart and reassembling of multiple viewpoints is what Hubbell does with his three neighborhoods. The result is a festival of particulars held in a multi-faceted unity by the overarching poetic form.