Not Communicating To Oneself
Listening to Beethoven we sense
the inspiration pouring from the master.
Johann Sebastian Bach sounds as intense,
but far more distant from disaster.
He seems to want to have a conversation
with anyone prepared to pay attention.
Although we lose him when his great elation
exceeds the limits of our comprehension,
we know that he is trying to communicate,
as if he’d just found, lying on a shelf,
the notes he’s trying to communicate
to us, and not, like Ludwig, to himself.
The proofs of Beethoven’s profundity
lay in the notes that for him had no sound,
while Bach, with effortless fecundity,
encouraged all of us to be profound.
J. M. Coetzee contrasts his relationship to the music of Beethoven and J. S. Bach. Whereas he imagines Beethoven as a genius from whom inspiration pours forth while oblivious to the people who may be listening to him he imagines J. S. Bach as a teacher who is attempting to instruct him while he sits next him while he is playing. As a rider, Coetzee added that there are moments when J. S. Bach’s inspiration exceeds the listener’s comprehension. These are the moments of his greatest inspiration. Listening to this report I was reminded of Richard Eder’s comment on Ceotzee when reviewing his book “Diary of a Bad Year” (“A Writer, A Muse, Their Laundry, ” NYT, January 1,2008) :
I think of the childlike simplicity of late Beethoven on a profound return trip from profundity.”
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Happiness Is....
HAPPINESS IS…
Happiness is your accepting your
gravely flawed reality,
realizing that there is a cure,
your potentiality.
Deborah Copaken Kogan writes in an NYTBR 5/27/12 essay about Erich Segal's 1985 book "The Class" ('Only Yesterday") :
Ultimately, "The Class" makes the reader feel sorry for its men, whose constant jockeying for fame and power, for "significance, " undermines any gratitude they might have felt for those gifts they possessed in such abundance — life, love, a shot at tomorrow — while simultaneously making them suspicious of those very same ambitions in their Radcliffe classmates. "I mean, brains are O.K. for a girl in moderation, " Andrew Eliot wrote in his diary, "but the Radcliffe types are so... intellectual — and competitive — that they sometimes make you forget why the Lord created women." Though, of one female character Segal wrote: "Fanny had a talent he had not encountered in all the girls he'd dated in America. She was happy just being herself." Perhaps that's what we "competitive Radcliffe types" actually brought to both Harvard and the Harvard narrative — heck, what women have brought to every formerly all-male university and institution: an understanding that while a fancy degree and external validations are nice, they are the icing not the cake; that "happiness" can only be found in acceptance of the flawed self.
5/38/12 #10339
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Consolation Cannot Be The Prize
Sad and angry, consolation
cannot be the prize,
though neither zeal nor agitation
can help to amortize
the feelings of despair and grief,
or blow away the blues
when desperate with disbelief,
and sad from self-abuse.
Agitated with great zeal,
prizes in your grasp
are, when you’re sad and angry, real
as air that makes fish gasp.
My friend Barbara Burbanks, shocked by my poem “Autobiography, ” wrote to me: “You keep writing poems about sad relationships and sexless lives, ” so I decided to write an upbeat poem for a change, but this is what emerged. The poem, revised on 11/30/09, was inspired by words spoken on the BBC regarding the poet Christopher Hill, who was giving a lecture about “Coriolanus” in the Purcell Room of the Royal Festival Hall:
The American critic Hugh Kenner once criticised Geoffrey Hill's poems by saying that language should not be agonised over like Christianity is. It is, I think, Hill's distinction that in volume after volume from the early 'For the Unfallen' to the recent 'The Triumph of Love', he has shown not only how that agonising might take place, but has proved its necessity in our modern world of atrocity and horror amid the failure of adequate response by the professional religious. 'What is the poem? ' asked the narrative voice at the end of 'The Triumph of Love.' What figures? And the response that voice supplies is, 'say a sad and angry consolation.' The voice goes on, 'that's beautiful, once more a sad and angry consolation.'
11/28/00,11/30/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Gusto, Brio And Panache
Gusto, brio and panache
happy writers have, who dash,
while those lack élan and verve
scribe slower, fearing they may swerve,
which doesn't matter if you've brio,
panache and gusto, happy trio,
but does if you have no élan
or verve, not just an also-ran
but, what's far worse, an also-walker,
and, yet more horror, also-talker.
The ones who stand and wait to serve
because they lack élan and verve
won't slow down writers who are rash
and with their brio, gusto dash,
because panache provides the torrent
that those who're slow may find abhorrent,
for those whose writing style is speedy,
of gusto, brio never needy,
in flights of fancy won't be flustered
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Craft, Faith And Narrative
Craft, faith and narrative all fuse,
creating medieval art;
if you add the inspiration of the muse
you get the Bible. À la carte,
it serves you narratives and laws and psalms
created with both faith and craft,
but ultimately it’s the muses’ charms
that turn the inspiration’s draft
into a record of encounters made
with God by people searching for
a destiny that they cannot evade
by writing, their esprit de corps.
Its manuscript is not illum-
inated, since it comes from ages
that though dark became the wonderwomb
whose generations are its pages.
Roberta Smith writes about the renovation of the medieval galleries in the Metropolitan Museum (“Illuminating the Dark Ages, ” NYT, December 5,2008) :
Of the three great artistic histories that extend for many centuries, and galleries, from the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Byzantine-Medieval epic is the most discreet. The Egyptian and the Greek and Roman wings are signaled by highly visible statues and tombs that start waving hello almost before you clear security. In contrast, the story of art starting in Bronze-Age Europe lies mostly out of sight in galleries that lie beside and behind the Grand Staircase…. As part of the Met’s original, central structure, the new Medieval Art gallery has always been a heavily trafficked intersection. It shouldn’t really work as a gallery of sacred art and yet it does. Its many small objects draw you close, away from the bustle, into a realm where craft, faith and narrative were
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Mate-man, Mate-woman
Mate-man, mate-woman were expressions
Jack London’s wife and Jack would use,
not only in their mating sessions
but whenever they would schmooze.
Daddy-boy and Mother-girl
were alternatives, but I
prefer the mate words when I whirl
my woman round while feeling spry.
Partners should not be a daddy
or a mother when they mate,
for how could they then be the baddie
whom lusty lovers love to date?
I get pleasure in abundance
from my mate, though she’s a mother,
Croydon hoyden she, I London’s
imperfect product whom no other
has managed to call from the wild,
domesticate, however rash
I used to be, a London child.
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Making Memory A Blessing
MAKING MEMORY A BLESSING
Making memory a blessing,
is hard, since it more often is a curse,
the dissonance and dispossessing
of the past, which when put into verse
is seen in its full beauty and
reminds us painfully that paradise
is lost, which, we must understand,
we can't by means of poetry reprise.
Some find great pleasure being sad
in its surroundings, but I'd rather dwell
in a future not yet bad,
although I fear it may become a hell.
Inspired by a poem by Dana Gioia:
THE LOST GARDEN
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Ears Of Corn
In the synagogues they pray with ears
of corn, and listen to the shadows’ sound,
because no still and silent voice for years
has whispered, and no glory is around.
Yet it is not blaspheming with the breath
to try recapturing was has been lost,
refusing to acknowledge that famed death
of God a great unglaublich scholar glossed.
The evidence that He once lived is soft,
but those who pray don’t care it isn’t hard,
or that a great philosopher has scoffed
about what can’t be found by Scotland Yard,
for by their prayers they choose to shame the dark,
dark places where the doubting mind would mourn,
providing an occasion for their spark
to find an Alien hiding in the corn.
Inspired by Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London”
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Winter's Whitest Spurts
Although John Clare declared that he
saw spring in winter’s whitest spurts,
for many this is hard to see
when, freezing, all our body hurts,
and winter’s direst discontent
makes cold blasts pierce the frozen soul.
We wonder where the summer went
when icy winds exact their toll,
and whistling toll for all of us
on nights we wish would be more silent.
each blast a blaring blunderbuss
that’s aimed to make us all an island,
disconnected from the spring
and summer, fall, that we remember
when we for warmth our cold arms fling
around each other in December.
Inspired by John Clare’s “The Winter’s Spring”:
THE winter comes; I walk alone,
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Karl's Daughter
Eleanor, Karl’s daughter died
a Jewess and a suicide.
How sad the combination. Patriarchs
are perilous, and Marx
was no exception. To be born
from such a man can make one mourn,
and make one search for roots, but she
felt only death could make her free
Don’t blame the Marxman though, but rather
he lover, for she loved her father
no less than him who gave no ring
to her, one Edward Aveling.
Fathers, lovers both tie shackles,
and can both create debacles,
and though they both claim to redeem,
they often shatter self-esteem.
If you’re a daughter or a lover
from both of them you should take cover,
though if you find your roots you may
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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