Clash Of Civilizations
With prescience, he sang the about the clash
that faces our uncivil civilizations,
whose differences might lead to nuclear ash
descending from the skies on all the nations.
He wrote that peaceful plowshares would be turned
to swords because of differences between
religions whose intensity still burned,
destructively addictive as morphine,
far more intensely in the heart and mind
than ideologies that atrophied
like plants for which the prophet Jonah pined
when Ninevites accepted his new creed.
The clash that Samuel Huntington foresaw
materialized, we saw, on 9/11
when we found out some people wish to soar
straight from earth’s kingdom to hubristic heaven,
and in autos da fe compound their error
by their rejection of reality, and try
to change the universe with acts of terror
performed the very moment that they die.
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Kara Mustafa
Retreating from the gates of Wien,
capital of empire holy, Roman,
Kara Mustafa next was seen
in Belgrade. Like a woman
degendered by defeat he raised
no skirt to show his legs but beard,
exposing to the ones who gazed.
his throat. Though other men have feared
their executioners, Mustafa
presented to the silk garotte
his skin just like an orange Jaffa
ready to be peeled. The knot
was tied around his neck, he died,
and dying thus proved heroic
that in his life. Mustafa sighed,
but laughed, because he died a stoic,
to the executioner presenting
with ease, without complaint, a throat
that never wasted time lamenting
his fortune, though scaped like a goat.
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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Clay Feet
“D’you think God knows what He is doing? ”
a few bold angels dared to ask
when He created Man. At their first viewing,
they saw that He had botched this task,
because He’d left Man’s legs unfinished,
and though his brilliant brain held sway,
his human stature was diminished
because he stood on feet of clay.
A golden oldie now, Man’s not
improved in time, and every gate
of paradise is closed, and what
the angels said explains his fate.
God made his brain more brilliant than
the apes from which he had descended,
but giving feet of clay to Man
made him than angels far less splendid.
Roberta Smith (“Golden Oldies with a New Sparkle, ” NYT, October 30,2007) writes about an exhibition of three of “The Gates of Paradise” by Lorenzo Ghiberti at the Metropolitan Museum:
Most of the historic sculptures, frescoes and edifices of early-15th-century Florence are not the least bit portable. It’s simple: You want to see them, you go to Florence. But right now nearly a third of one of the city’s greatest glories can be seen without leaving town, by visiting “The Gates of Paradise: Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Renaissance Masterpiece” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. This show presents 3 of the 10 gilded bronze reliefs that decorate the doors created by Ghiberti from 1425 to 1452 for the 12th- to 13th-century Baptistery of San Giovanni. Newly cleaned, they have never looked more golden or less oldie. One of the treasures of the early Renaissance, the 17-foot-high doors depict Old Testament scenes in a radically new fusion of physical action, emotional intensity and narrative complexity. Especially the three reliefs at the Met. Their subjects are Adam and Eve, Jacob and Esau, and David and Goliath. Each is pictorially unified and yet, in a different way, almost cinematic in effect… Ghiberti’s feeling for physical detail and emotional nuance keeps his surfaces alive, edge to edge. As Adam and Eve’s story unfolds, for example, angels register everything from joy to skepticism to alarm. (An angel watching God awaken Adam seems to be asking, “Does he know what he’s doing? ”)
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Rumination Haj
Caught in an expressive cul-de-sac,
all imagery goes down the tube
iconoclastically, with lack
of space that curves when artists cube,
on a rumination haj,
searching an interior Mecca
thoughts collected as collage,
minimally like a Necker.
David Hadjou reviews John Adams’s Hallelujah Junction (“Music Lessons: A memoir by the composer John Adams is a collage of memory criticism, theory and ruminations on creativity, ” NYT Book Review, October 26,2008) :
Commonly mistaken for a minimalist, Adams has employed the minimalist aesthetic primarily as a point of departure. He recognized fairly early that “minimalism as a governing aesthetic could and would rapidly exhaust itself, ” as he writes here. “Like Cubism in painting, it was a radically new idea, but its reductive worldview would soon leave its practitioners caught in an expressive cul-de-sac.” Adams’s importance as a composer is rooted not so much in his having done anything new, but, rather, in his having done very well the things he has done: operas (“Nixon in China” and “The Death of Klinghoffer, ” both staged by Peter Sellars) , symphonic choral works (“On the Transmigration of Souls, ” an elegy to the victims of the Sept.11 attacks, which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 2003) , piano pieces and a dozen or so other major compositions of various kinds. His music is minimal in the sense that Adams employs as few materials as necessary, rather than as few as possible, though he strives for and tends to achieve a maximalism of effect. With “Hallelujah Junction, ” Adams has put in prose an argument against the ideology of aesthetic continuum, a case that his music has always articulated eloquently by example. “That particular continuum I found ridiculously exclusive, being founded on a kind of Darwinian view of stylistic evolution, ” he argues. If a composition “didn’t in some way advance the evolution of the language, yielding progress either by a technological innovation or in the increasing complexity of the discourse, it was not even worth discussing.” Who cares? John Adams. And, so, now do we.
10/26/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Gross National Happiness
Gross national happiness now in Bhutan
is the goal, and not gross national product;
happiness great but not gross is my plan,
and the bottom line I’ve always buttocked.
Naturally there will be many naysayers
who claim that this line is fallacious,
but bottoms like summits of high Himalayas
aren’t gross when they’re firm and curvaceous.
Inspired by an article on Bhutan in the NYT on Bhutan by Seth Mydans in Thimphu (“Recalculating Happiness in a Himalayan Kingdom, ” May 8,2009) :
If the rest of the world cannot get it right in these unhappy times, this tiny Buddhist kingdom high in the Himalayan mountains says it is working on an answer. “Greed, insatiable human greed, ” said Prime Minister Jigme Thinley of Bhutan, describing what he sees as the cause of today’s economic catastrophe in the world beyond the snow-topped mountains. “What we need is change, ” he said in the whitewashed fortress where he works. “We need to think gross national happiness.” The notion of gross national happiness was the inspiration of the former king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck, in the 1970s as an alternative to the gross national product. Now, the Bhutanese are refining the country’s guiding philosophy into what they see as a new political science, and it has ripened into government policy just when the world may need it, said Kinley Dorji, secretary of information and communications. “You see what a complete dedication to economic development ends up in, ” he said, referring to the global economic crisis. “Industrialized societies have decided now that G.N.P. is a broken promise.” Under a new Constitution adopted last year, government programs — from agriculture to transportation to foreign trade — must be judged not by the economic benefits they may offer but by the happiness they produce. The goal is not happiness itself, the prime minister explained, a concept that each person must define for himself. Rather, the government aims to create the conditions for what he called, in an updated version of the American Declaration of Independence, “the pursuit of gross national happiness.”
5/8/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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In The Lake On Rosh Hashanah
When into a lake we dive
we do not aim get from a to b,
but just to feel that we’re alive,
which also is the reason we
should be immersed now in each other
as we would be if we’d dived in
a lake, and not attempt to smother
our feelings as on Yom HaDin,
when we’re immersed in prayer to God,
but love-soaked so that we can be
a couple that does not find odd
the romance of its repartee.
Written for Linda on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5770 for Linda after reading Joe Morgensten’s review of Jane Campion’s movie “Bright Star” (“Ode to a Romantic Biopic: ‘Bright Star’: Cornish inspires as Keats’s love, ” WSJ, September 18,2009) :
In “Bright Star, ” a dramatization of the intense though unconsummated love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne, the filmmaker Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (apart from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress) . Yet the effect is exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable. It's like the dive into a lake that Keats evokes to explain the experience of poetry. The point, he explains to Fanny, is not to get to the other side, but to luxuriate in the lake.
On Poets.org a reviewer writes:
One of the most intimate early scenes of the relationship takes place over an impromptu poetry lesson, though Keats is suspicious of Brawne. When she asks for an introduction concerning 'the craft of poetry, ' Keats dismisses the notion: 'Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all.' As the conversation continues, however, Brawne earns Keats's trust, and he offers a more useful explanation: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it's to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
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Difference In The Dark
They say the pot calls every kettle black
and pokers poke fun always at a shovel,
and chiropractors call a doc a quack,
but please don’t call my home sweet home a hovel.
They say that every lawyer is a shark,
and that a sexy woman has to be a slut,
but I can’t tell the difference in the dark,
or when the light’s on, when my eyes are shut.
When standing up, a man deserves applause,
but if he can’t, what should you call his poker
when narrative can’t keep up with the laws
of nature, and the poker is a joker?
Inspired by a review by Charles Rosen of a new edition of the Essays of Montaigne published by Pléiade (NYR, February 14 2008) :
He was, in fact, only fifty-five years old, but he was already experiencing the sense of old age. In another essay he describes what advancing years have done to him. “I can no longer make children standing up” [perhaps that was considered a proof of virility in his time]….
A view of adultery as completely natural is developed at length…At one point he addresses all male readers directly: “And of you have cuckolded somebody”-and that logically means it will happen to you. In the East Indies, he reports, a married woman is expected to be chaste, but she is allowed to abandon herself to any man who gives her an elephant. The essay best reveals an essential trait of Montaigne: he had almost no sense of guilt-regret often enough, of course, but no guilt It is no wonder that he thought repentance more a nuisance than a virtue. “On Some Verses of Virgil” is not only a nostalgic and frank discussion of sex, but also a collection of misogynistic anecdotes and jokes, banalities and classical traditions, largely to establish that it is absurd to force women to live by rules fashioned by men, and to require them to believe that that are not interested in sex, when they are in fact more lascivious than men—having so much less to occupy them…The coexist happily. And the idea is reinforced by further commonplaces:
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Good Night, My Darlings
When life gives a bum rap, don’t kvetch and don’t bitch,
for weeping solves nothing, it’s better to chortle
when forced to strike out once delivered the pitch
that tells us the game’s up since we’re only mortal.
“Good night, my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow, ”
the famous last lines of Sir Noël, no coward,
are well worth recalling when, grieving with sorrow,
despair grows like weeds in the hearts when joy flowered.
John Simon reviews “The Letters of Noël Coward, ” edited with commentary by Barry Day (“Sir Noël’s Epistles, ” NYT Book Review, November 25,2007) :
The astute English critic Kenneth Tynan identified Broadway humor as being chiefly of two kinds: Jewish and homosexual. He might have called it kvetch and bitch, perfectly good types, but not really British. Noël Coward, who was only one of those two things, specialized in neither type in his oeuvre. He kept it all for his correspondence. So “The Letters of Noël Coward, ” edited and commented on by Barry Day, may come as a surprise to most readers. It abounds in both kinds of humor, as only Sir Noël (knighted very late in life owing to obstruction by Winston Churchill) could dish it out. But it follows like Day the knight that, given the editor’s several books of Cowardiana, what we get is much more than just Coward’s letters, however delectable…
As Tynan perceptively wrote, “Coward took the fat off English comic dialogue; he was the Turkish bath in which it slimmed.” In 1973, at a gala performance of the revue “Oh, Coward! , ” he made his last public appearance (I was there) . Leaning on Dietrich more than escorting her, he was asked if he enjoyed the show. Answer: “One does not laugh at one’s own jokes — but I went out humming the tunes.” On the closing night of his life, in Jamaica with his secretary Cole Lesley and his companion, the actor Graham Payn, he took leave with, “Good night, my darlings, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Dead on the morrow, he didn’t get to see them. But we, happily, will see him in his immortal plays, as another famous Scotsman put it, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.
11/26/07
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Judges Have Their Druthers And Ireland Howled
Thierry Henry touched the ball,
by ref unseen, and wasn’t fouled;
the world observed the ref not call
a penalty, and Ireland howled.
Once Maradona claimed the hand
of God had scored the winning goal;
because God’s head is in the sand
rule breakers often are made whole.
Some of us go out with calls
that shouldn’t have been made, but others
go out because there are huge walls
of silence. Judges have their druthers.
Lynn Zinser writes about a foul committed by Thierry Henry which enabled France to become eligible for the World Cup in soccer in 20010, while causing Ireland to be eliminated (“Add Thierry Henry to List of Sports Villains, ” NYT, December 2,2009) :
Move over Bill Belichick, the sporting world has a new lead villain. In the United States at least, he will seem an unlikely one, because beyond being the handsome soccer player in that Gillette ad with Tiger Woods and Roger Federer, Thierry Henry isn’t exactly a household name. But in the tiniest second it took Henry to nudge the soccer ball with his hand toward his foot to set up France’s winning goal in a World Cup qualifier against Ireland, he became globally hated. The aggravating factors in this scenario are that Henry a) is French, which gives a lot of people a running head start on hating him and b) admitted using his hand while shrugging off responsibility for Ireland’s fate by saying, basically, “Tough noogies.”This has not gone over well, particularly in Britain, where the headlines are brutal. That’s because Henry’s “Hand Gaul” (love those British headlines!) snuffed out the hopes of a plucky Irish squad trying to make its first World Cup since 2002, where their team highlight was the star player Roy Keane getting in a dustup with the coach. Now they’ll be known for being robbed by Henry, and Henry, as Martin Rogers writes on Yahoo.com, will forever be known as a cheat on par with Argentina’s Diego Maradona, who has taken the opposite tack and refuses to own up to the 1986 “Hand of God” goal.If he actually cared about such things, Belichick might consider sending Henry a hoodie in thanks for taking him off the top of the most-
12/2/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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In The Lake Before Rosh Hashanah
When into lakes we choose to drive
it’s not to swim from a to b,
but just to feel that we’re alive,
which also is the reason we
have plunged so fully in each other,
as if together we’d dived in
a lake in which we do not smother
our feelings as on Yom HaDin,
when we’re immersed in prayer to God,
love-soaked, undried, which helps us be
a couple that does not find odd
the romance of its repartee.
Written for Linda on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 5770 for Linda after reading Joe Morgensten’s review of Jane Campion’s movie “Bright Star” (“Ode to a Romantic Biopic: ‘Bright Star’: Cornish inspires as Keats’s love, ” WSJ, September 18,2009) :
In “Bright Star, ” a dramatization of the intense though unconsummated love affair between the young Romantic poet John Keats and his younger neighbor, Fanny Brawne, the filmmaker Jane Campion has performed her own feat of romantic imagination. The production is modest in physical scale, mostly reserved in tone and touchingly simple in design (apart from Fanny's dazzling wardrobe, which is justified by her gifts as a seamstress) . Yet the effect is exhilarating, and deeply pleasurable. It's like the dive into a lake that Keats evokes to explain the experience of poetry. The point, he explains to Fanny, is not to get to the other side, but to luxuriate in the lake.
On Poets.org a reviewer writes:
One of the most intimate early scenes of the relationship takes place over an impromptu poetry lesson, though Keats is suspicious of Brawne. When she asks for an introduction concerning “the craft of poetry, ” Keats dismisses the notion: “Poetic craft is a carcass, a sham. If poetry doesn't come as naturally as leaves to a tree, then it better not come at all.” As the conversation continues, however, Brawne earns Keats's trust, and he offers a more useful explanation: “A poem needs understanding through the senses. The point of diving in a lake is not immediately to swim to the shore; it’s to be in the lake, to luxuriate in the sensation of water. You do not work the lake out. It is an experience beyond thought. Poetry soothes and emboldens the soul to accept mystery.”
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