Sons Are Liars

However ugly life appears
to be it’s good: so wrote Isaiah
Berlin to mollify the fears
of his dear mother. Sons are liars.

Timothy Garton Ash reviews Letters,1928-1946, by Isaiah Berlin (CUP) , edited by Henry Hardy (“A Genius for Friendship, ” New York Review, September 23,2004) . Like Clive James, he is puzzled the way that Berlin had so little to say about the events of the 1930’s and the Holocaust that followed but this poem was inspired by something completely different:

There is a moving early letter from the nineteen-year-old Shaya, as he was then known, to his spirited, musical, romantically aspiring mother, Marie, consoling her (“I know that your position is not sweet”) for the frustrations of living with the pedestrian caution of his merchant father, Mendel Berlin. “Remember, life is Good; and always will be Good however ugly it looks….” Somehow that remained Isaiah’s belief through all the horrors of the twentieth century, and this fundamentally optimistic, life-affirming attitude is one of the qualities that made him such a stimulating person.

9/15/04

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Irony Of Nonexistence

Nonexistence flows from what is unpronounced,
the dried source of a watershed,
cisternal spaces in the head,
the prey at which no cat of Schrödinger has pounced.

Irony, the only way to coexist
with non-existence deconstructed,
like texts when reason is deducted,
is like frog prince that is begging to be kissed

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviews “For Common things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today” (Alfred A. Knopf) by the 25 year old West Virginian, Jedediah Purdy. Purdy argues that irony such as that personified by Jerry Seinfeld, harms 'common things, ' by which he means all that is public, shared and ordinary. Thomas Carlyle wrote in 'Sartor Resartus': 'An ironic man, with his sly stillness and ambuscading ways, may be viewed as a pest to society.' The epigraph to his book comes from Czeslaw Milosz: 'What is unpronounced tends to nonexistence.'

I copy below the 9/9/99 Vorlage of this poem:

NONEXISTENCE

Nonexistence flows from what is unpronounced,
the dried source of a watershed,
cisternal spaces in the head,

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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They Called Him Meyer July

They called him Mayer and July,
in Poland, though July became
for him quite obsolete, this name
changed into Kirschenblatt. Here’s why
we ought still to remember Mayer.
As Kirschenblatt, and born in Apt,
the place which in old age he mapped
with an artistic, frenzied fire,
he used to paint each street where he
grew up, before Apt was destroyed
by Nazis. It is not a void
today since he made sure we’d see
the place as it existed still
within his mind. More than Chagall,
he made sure it would not be null.
On paper, paint he used to spill
brought life back to the Jews we see
as if alive while in the mind
of those who have not left behind,
as he did not, their memory.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Daughters Of The Moon

DAUGHTERS OF THE MOON

In “Daughters of the Moon, ”
the moon falls to the earth,
and ends up very soon
where there's not a dearth
of ladies in a park
who, working with a spanner,
dance, nakedly quite stark
each one of them Diana,
abandoned dancing
among abandoned cars,
which I find as entrancing
as Venus is to Mars.

Joseph Farrell reviews Italo Calvino’s “The Complete Cosmicomics, ” translated by William Weaver, Tim Parks and Martin L. McLaughlin in the TLS, July 3,2009:

The later cosmicomic tales deal with days nearer our own times, and with people who live in places like New Jersey and drive cars, rather than plod over uncharted areas of the cosmos. It is possible to detect a darker side in the last stories. IN “Daughters of the Moon”, the moon falls to the earth, as in one of Leopardi’s poems, but this time it is in New York, and the moon ends up in a scrapyard with abandoned cars, to be greeted by a group of naked New York maidens, all called Diana. The scrapyard is as central as the burnt-out moon, and the tale is a protest against futile consumerism as well as a work of fantasy.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Erudition And Despair

Erudition and despair,
thriving symbiotically,
synergistically, a pair
devoid of what, erotically,
might seize the readers by the guts,
consume in their banality
and soi disant finality
my work with ifs and ans and buts.

All my insights merely heightened
awareness of how incomplete
were my attempts be enlightened,
seeking goals I could not meet.
If were not so erudite,
perhaps I could give up despair,
but though God’s great, and always right,
that doesn’t mean He must be fair.

Richard Bernstein, reviewing Lyndall Gordon's 'T.S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life' (W. W. Norton) ('Portrait of a Visionary In a Heap of Broken Images, ' the NYT, August 18,1999) writes:

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Thrills

Can there be thrills without soupcon
of fear, can sex in private places
be as exciting as the fun
of sex in public, where disgrace is
a risk sex gamblers like to take
to trump love made inside a closet?
With fear a thrill will raise the stake,
and risk the forfeit of deposit,
and since the fear gets less each time
the thrill occurs, new risks are taken
until they escalate to crime,
where thrills, like fear, are godforsaken.

Inspired by Dan Neil’s review of the Nissan GT-R (LA Times, April 16,2008, “Uptight, outta sight: a marvel of power and speed, the Nissan GT-R is so safe and serene that it is curiously lacking in thrills”) :

[F]for all it’s pants-ripping performance, the GT-R is surprisingly––amazingly––not all that exciting to drive. Oh yeah, there’s epic velocity here, and yet, because there is so much assurance, so many electronic layers of self-preservation, there isn’t much frisson or fear. Without fear there is no fun, which anyone who’s had sex in a public place can tell you…Despite the GT-R’s official nickname, “Godzilla, ” it’s more like 2 tons of fluffy kitten.

4/16/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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War And Gore

A series of catastrophes that ends
in victory: thus Clemenceau once defined
war.
Gore
once spilt from victory cannot be refined;
and is the price of all its dividends.

Inspired by a saying of Georges Clemenceau, French Prime Minister after November 17,1917 who supported the policy of total war – “We present ourselves before you with the single thought of total war” ––and the policy of “la guerre jusqu'au bout” (war until the end) , stated: “War is a series of catastrophes that ends in victory.” This saying of Clemenceau was quoted by Robert Messenger in a review of a book about the battle of the Marne,1914 by Holger H. Herwig (“The Cruel Path to Impasse, ” WSJ, December 3,2009) . He points out that the reason why Germany was unable to win the war in 1914 is because the Schlieffen Plan that Helmut von Moltke wsa supposed to implement was too vague and von Moltke “let his disputatious commanders––some brilliant, some over the hill––make their own decisions, all too often conflicting. The result was chaos, and yet the Germans nearly won, thanks to the excellence of their troops.”

12/3/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Festivate Fornication

For festive fornication give me wine,
apart from which all I require now
is holding both your melon breasts in mine,
and time, at least as much as you'll allow.
Strait is the gait for sinners but for lovers
it's wide, but if you want me to be frisky,
lie patiently for me between your covers
until I've fortified myself with whisky,
plus some Cialis to make sure I don’t
end up this evening with a beg-your-pardon,
in case precautions such as these ones won’t,
despite your wine and breasts, cause me to harden.
Lie patiently, I said, but tell the truth,
I want to hear the magic words, I love you,
Then pull on me as dentists do a tooth
to fill your cavity when I’m above you.

Inspired by Marc Porter-Zasada's response to my poem “Oh Mistress Mine”:

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Smart Men Who Cheat

When women see you’re smart they think you are a cheat,
and if you try to win their trust they’ll be dismissive.
If you don’t cheat you challenge women whom they meet,
and so be made to smart when they become derisive.

The problem is that if you want to be what you
are not you suffer an internal exile, and the drama
of insignificance you suffer is a cue
for women who can penetrate your cheating armor.

Inspired by a saying of Emile Cioran (1911–95) : “It’s awful to be Romanian: you never win the trust of any women, and serious people smile at you dismissively: when they see that you are smart, they think you are a cheat.” This piece of wisdom was quoted by Costica Bradatan in his review of Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston’s “Searching for Cioran” in the TLS, October 9,2009. Cioran, Bradatan writes, “suffered the drama of insignificance, ” and all his life wanted to be “something else: Spanish, Russian, German, cannibal––anything but what I was.” His dream, says Bradatan, was “to become a stranger” so that exile became his vocation, as he pointed out in his Sylogismes de l’amertume (1952) .

10/31/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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She's Got That Vibe

She’s got that vibe
that all our tribe
puts under raps,
and I, too, am smitten
because she’s forbidden,
like apples, perhaps,
that, shared in the garden
caused Adam to harden,
when Eve said to him, “Try it! ”
Out of bounds tasted sweeter
to Adam, whose peter
propelled him to buy it.
It seemed so dimwitted
to take what’s permitted,
he left that for fools,
which we’re not in our tribe,
when we let her prescribe
what is wrong, breaking rules.

The BBC reports today:

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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