Barack Being Ambushed

I could see Barack Obama
to a wall (street) being pushed.
If slammed this way by a slammer,
he could claim he’s been amBushed,
but if driven quite insane
by peace processes where none
exist, men might claim that Hussein
a victory at last had won,
becoming not his middle name,
but first. We’ll have to wait and see,
and hope that BHO won’t game
with Jews as does the BBC,
but if we see Obama’s shove
transformed from pseudo-friendly push,
we’ll have to reconsider love,
while reminiscing about Bush.

Inspired by Thomas Friedman’s column in the NYT, January 7,2009 (“The Mideast’s Ground Zero”) :
Hamas’s overthrow of the more secular Fatah organization in Gaza in 2007 is part of a regionwide civil war between Islamists and modernists. In the week that Israel has been slicing through Gaza, Islamist suicide bombers have killed almost 100 Iraqis — first, a group of tribal sheikhs in Yusufiya, who were working on reconciliation between Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds, and, second, mostly women and children gathered at a Shiite shrine. These unprovoked mass murders have not stirred a single protest in Europe or the Middle East. Gaza today is basically ground zero for all three of these struggles, said Martin Indyk, the former Clinton administration’s Middle East adviser whose incisive new book, “Innocent Abroad: An Intimate Account of American Diplomacy in the Middle East, ” was just published. “This tiny little piece of land, Gaza, has the potential to blow all of these issues wide open and present a huge problem for Barack Obama on Day 1.” Obama’s great potential for America, noted Indyk, is also a great threat to Islamist radicals — because his narrative holds tremendous appeal for Arabs. For eight years Hamas, Hezbollah and Al Qaeda have been surfing on a wave of anti-U.S. anger generated by George W. Bush. And that wave has greatly expanded their base. No doubt, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran are hoping that they can use the Gaza conflict to turn Obama into Bush. They know Barack Hussein Obama must be (am) Bushed — to keep America and its Arab allies on the defensive. Obama has to keep his eye on the prize. His goal — America’s goal — has to be a settlement in Gaza that eliminates the threat of Hamas rockets and opens Gaza economically to the world, under credible international supervision. That’s what will serve U.S. interests, moderate the three great struggles and earn him respect.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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All Minds Must Moulder

ALL MINDS MUST MOULDER

All minds when they start to age must moulder.
This is the price we pay for growing older,
and in the process all minds must forsake
their glory, like a mouldering wedding-cake.
Unlike a wedding-cake, though, mind improve
before age makes them moulder, and may prove
to be a greater treat, with the allure
of older vintages when they mature,
transcending taste of younger one like chateau-
bottled wines, so that the wedding gateau-
yes, even in its prime when wedding-nightly,
is put to shame, though it is less unsightly.

MArgalit Fox writes an obituary of Adrienne Rich, who died at the age of 82 in Santa Cruz on 3/27/12 ("A Poet of Unswerving Vision at the Forefront of Feminism, " NYT,3/29/12) :

Triply marginalized — as a woman, a lesbian and a Jew — Ms. Rich was concerned in her poetry, and in her many essays, with identity politics long before the term was coined.She accomplished in verse what Betty Friedan, author of "The Feminine Mystique, " did in prose. In describing the stifling minutiae that had defined women's lives for generations, both argued persuasively that women's disenfranchisement at the hands of men must end.
For Ms. Rich, the personal, the political and the poetical were indissolubly linked; her body of work can be read as a series of urgent dispatches from the front. While some critics called her poetry polemical, she remained celebrated for the unflagging intensity of her vision, and for the constant formal reinvention that kept her verse — often jagged and colloquial, sometimes purposefully shocking, always controlled in tone, diction and pacing — sounding like that of few other poets….
Once mastered, poetry's formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against, and by her third collection, "Snapshots of a Daughter-in-Law, " published by Harper & Row, she had pretty well exploded them. That volume appeared in 1963, a watershed moment in women's letters: "The Feminine Mystique" was also published that year.

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Triptych

Prelude, climax, aftermath,
that is the story of our lives, triptych
that takes away from he who hath,
without bell, book or even candlestick,
what he regarded as his own,
his life, which will be confiscated and
leave him with nothing, all alone,
trite triptych trash within a no-man’s land.
His narrative is adumbrated,
returning earth to earth, to adamah,
where he as prelude was created,
to be mere aftermath, from climax far.

Adamah is Hebrew for “earth, ” and the root of the name of “Adam, ” which in the Creative narrative denotes “First Man, created from the earth” (Gen.2: 7) .

Inspired by an article by Alan Jenkins in the TLS, December 5,2008 (“Human Meat”) . He writes:
That so many of Bacon’s motifs derived, in complex, vigilant ways from photography and film is entirely consistent with his acute awareness that these new art forms had rendered representation in painting obsolete, and with his horror of mere “illustration”. This was not to say that painting should not deal in “fact”: just that fact comprehended more than what is “seen naturally”. “One wants a thing to be as factual as possible and at the same time as deeply suggestive or deeply unlocking of areas of sensation other than simple illustration of the object”, as Bacon put it to David Sylvester. He was also one of the most literary of painters, an admirer of Ulysses, an avid reader of poetry and drama who saw that the Oresteia and T. S. Eliot’s Sweeney Agonistes were blood relations, who liked to quote lines from both yet who repeatedly and sometimes fiercely repudiated attempts to read “a story” into his own work.
But he insisted too much. At one level, his habit of working in triptychs, and at a deeper one the suggestiveness he often in fact achieved, not just in triptychs but in single paintings, militates against that very insistence. It is hard to look at such works as the “Crucifixions” of 1962 and 65, “Lying Figure” (1969) , “Triptych, Studies from the Human Body” (1970) or “Triptych March 1974” without a sense of prelude, climax and aftermath – though not necessarily in that order. Some such adumbrated narrative, an intimate human drama about to be embarked on, concluded or aborted also haunts the restrained and very beautiful portrait studies of a suited “Man in Blue”, his face and hands bright-lit on a deep blue ground, that are at once the most “readable” of all Bacon’s male figures, and the most ambiguous.

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When Life Is Not A Drama

When life is not a drama or
a comedy, it’s farce that though we try we can’t ignore
when falling on our arse.
When people hear this in a rumor,
often quite distorted,
it stimulates their sense of humor
as soon as it’s reported.
Embarrassment like this becomes
for us the bottom line
that’s cherished by our so-called chums
who love to see us whine,
and though they seem to sympathize
once we have bruised our butt,
they really laugh and analyze
the farce’s final cut
that’s edited to show how we
at best are merely clowns,
and really cannot wait to see
the mirth of our meltdowns.

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Speaking Of Love

SPEAKING OF LOVE

As soon as we have spoken of it,
we are doomed to earn
the love we crave, and come to covet
that for which we yearn.
There are consequences to
the words we speak: take care
to hold your tongue, for billets-doux
are often hard to tear.
Expressing what can’t be explained
may be more foolish than
unleashing dogs that should be chained
if things don’t go to plan.

Inspired by some lines from a poem by Mary Jo Salter which James Longenbach quoted, reviewing her book “A Phone Call to the Future” (“Formalities: Mary Jo Salter’s elegant poetry can hide eviscerating question, ” NYT Book Review, March 9,2008) :
Salter’s latest collection, “A Phone Call to the Future, ” offers severely winnowed selections from her previous five books along with an ample collection of new poems. What she has omitted is as revealing as what remains. While her first book, “Henry Purcell in Japan, ” is introduced here with a poised villanelle about King Lear’s daughters, it once began with a poem far more suggestive of Salter’s sensibility — a sensibility repulsed by gory images of the dead Jesus in a Catholic church, preferring to dwell in an aesthetic realm of pure spirit: “His wounds look fresh, but it’s not this sight / that shocks me so much as His man-made skin: / He’s waxen, slick as a mannequin.” This poem, “For an Italian Cousin, ” is cast in envelope rhyme (abba) , the form that Tennyson, most elegant of English poets, employed in his long elegy “In Memoriam.” Reading the elegy, Verlaine said that Tennyson had a lot of reminiscences when he should have been brokenhearted. Salter’s elegance feels similarly motivated by a distaste for the unseemly. But what makes Salter worth reading — what makes her stand apart from the merely polemical elegance of the New Formalism — is that she herself is appalled by this distaste. While many of her poems are burdened by a need to dispense wisdom (“love dooms us to earn / love once we can speak of it”) , her best are driven by a compulsion to confront the inexplicable. Her second collection, “Unfinished Painting, ” includes “Elegies for Etsuko, ” a long poem about a friend who committed suicide.
And now love’s pain, your curse,
is all I have. Forgive me... What worse

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Ain't Gonna Work On Your Farm No More

I ain’t gonna work on your farm no more
I ain’t gonna scrub all your floors,
I ain’t gonna take all your friends who ignore
what I do when they hide behind doors
where they pay no attention to stuff that I think,
and say, when they pay me a dime,
that I ain’t entitled to spend it on drink,
or ladies who show me good time.
I ain’t gonna work for your children or friends
who preach of the law and the Lord,
and hear all those messages God never sends
to people with who He is bored,
like I am. I ain’t gonna work on your farm,
instead I will write me a song,
and pray that its words will all sound the alarm,
for I expect to be back before long.

Mark Z. Barabak (“He’s Digging ‘Farm, ’” LA Times, June 26,2008) writes that Barack Obama’s favorite Bob Dylan song is “Maggie’s Farm, ” performed in 1995 at the Newport Festival, when he turned electric and never looked back:

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Poetry, Not Prose

Tom Friedman says that we need poetry, not prose,
to get this country into better shape.
Although we surely know a rose would be a rose
if called by any other name, a grape
becomes much more when sublimated into wine,
and politics don’t matter till its message
becomes poetic. Prose won’t help to make it shine,
and all predications politicians presage
won’t come to pass unless they’re elevated with
poetic language that shifts paradigms,
and brings into reality what seemed mere myth,
promoting the prosaic with its rhymes.
We need a narrative that we can memorize,
not complicated data on a chart,
and yearn for tuneful songs that we can harmonize,
and poems we love learning off by heart.

Inspired by an Op-Ed article by Thomas Friedman in the NYT, November 1,2009, exhorting President Obama to be more poetic (“More Poetry Please”) :
More and more lately, I find people asking me: What do you think President Obama really believes about this or that issue? I find that odd. How is it that a president who has taken on so many big issues, with very specific policies — and has even been awarded a Nobel Prize for all the hopes he has kindled — still has so many people asking what he really believes? I don’t think that President Obama has a communications problem, per se. He has given many speeches and interviews broadly explaining his policies and justifying their necessity. Rather, he has a “narrative” problem….

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Midlife Crisis

Shorthand for trying
to put the clock back and to be
as in your twenties and to flee
all thoughts of dying,
midlife crisis
puts into new perspective work,
enabling you to be a jerk,
not Dionysus.

Richard A. Friedman, a professor of psychiatry at Cornell University, writes about the midlife crisis in the Science Times of ther NY, January 15,2008 (“Crisis? Maybe He’s a Narcissistic Jerk”) :
With the possible exception of “the dog ate my homework, ” there is no handier excuse for human misbehavior than the midlife crisis. Popularly viewed as a unique developmental birthright of the human species, it supposedly strikes when most of us have finally figured ourselves out — only to discover that we have lost our youth and mortality is on the horizon. No doubt about it, life in the middle ages can be challenging. (Full disclosure: I’m 51.) What with the first signs of physical decline and the questions and doubts about one’s personal and professional accomplishments, it is a wonder that most of us survive. Not everyone is so lucky; some find themselves seized by a seemingly irresistible impulse to do something dramatic, even foolish. Everything, it appears, is fair game for a midlife crisis: one’s job, spouse, lover — you name it. I recently heard about a severe case from a patient whose husband of nearly 30 years abruptly told her that he “felt stalled and not self-actualized” and began his search for self-knowledge in the arms of another woman. It was not that her husband no longer loved her, she said he told her; he just did not find the relationship exciting anymore. “Maybe it’s a midlife crisis, ” she said, then added derisively, “Whatever that is.” Outraged and curious, she followed him one afternoon and was shocked to discover that her husband’s girlfriend was essentially a younger clone of herself, right down to her haircut and her taste in clothes. It doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to see that her husband wanted to turn back the clock and start over. But this hardly deserves the dignity of a label like “midlife crisis.” It sounds more like a search for novelty and thrill than for self-knowledge. In fact, the more I learned about her husband, it became clear that he had always been a self-centered guy who fretted about his lost vigor and was acutely sensitive to disappointment. This was a garden-variety case of a middle-aged narcissist grappling with the biggest insult he had ever faced: getting older. But you have to admit that “I’m having a midlife crisis” sounds a lot better than “I’m a narcissistic jerk having a meltdown.”

© 2008 Gershon Hepner 1/15/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Refinement Of A Pot

Refinement of a pot appears effete
if you don’t like irregularities.
Once baked inside a kiln the searing heat
preserves forever angularities
that may be smoothed while it is wet and warm,
yet only when it’s finally been glazed
are faults seen in perspective, in a form
that sometimes tells the viewer: be amazed.

Inspired by Christopher Knight’s review of an exhibition of the pots of the Biloxi potter, George E. Ohr, in the American Museum of Ceramic Art in Pomona (“Pottery with a Modernist twist, ” LA Times, December 26,2007) :

Ohr was a certified eccentric, not least as indicated by the 20-inch mustache he reportedly draped over his ears to keep from getting it tangled in the spinning potter's wheel. But he was nonetheless a gifted journeyman. The son of an Eastern European immigrant blacksmith, he was taught the potter's traditional craft by an Alsatian father-and-son team, first in Biloxi and later in New Orleans.
Ohr learned how to prepare clay, build kilns and manipulate standard glaze formulas. He also spent two years traveling the Midwest and the South examining rival production facilities, to better know the competition. He regularly visited (and sometimes showed his wares at) giant trade shows, such as Chicago's famous 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. The souvenirs sold at these fairs, such as the Christopher Columbus coins designed by the preeminent sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens for the Chicago extravaganza, might also have provided inspiration. The Pomona show includes five so-called 'brothel coins' that Ohr made for the Gulf Coast tourist trade. Each small, unglazed clay disk pairs words with a low-relief image to make a verbal-visual rebus: 'I love U' written above a leaping deer; 'let's go 2' above a bed; and other, bawdier couplings. A far cry from Saint-Gaudens' lofty allusion to classical Roman coins, Ohr's comic souvenirs reflected his own oddball character. In a nation uncomfortable with art, being wacky could function as a defensive mechanism - as a wink and a nod that minimized the threat of being taken seriously. With nothing left to lose after his pottery burned to the ground, Ohr unleashed his expert technical skill. Rather than return to producing utilitarian dishes and vases for the home, he began to play with conventional ceramic forms. He began to make art. Pomona is the first stop on a tour prepared by Biloxi's Ohr-O'Keefe Museum of Art, whose large collection happily survived the brutal assault of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Twenty-eight of the pieces are from the museum's collection, while the rest have been lent by private collections in Mississippi and California.

12/27/07

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Blazing Through All Precedents

Blazing through all precedents,
Supreme Court Justices have customarily abused
omnipotence until as decedents
they are compelled by death, an act of God, to be recused.

Of corporate money there’s no dearth
in politics, said John Paul Stevens, arguing in dissent;
decisions with some moral worth
are lacking in the Highest Court, should have been his lament.

Inspired by a comment by Justice John Paul Stevens, cited by Adam Liptak in an article on him in the NYT, January 25,2010 (“After 34 Years, a Plainspoken Justice Gets Louder”) :
The Supreme Court announced its big campaign finance decision at 10 in the morning last Thursday. By 10: 30 a.m., after Justice Anthony M. Kennedy had offered a brisk summary of the majority opinion and Justice John Paul Stevens labored through a 20-minute rebuttal, a sort of twilight had settled over the courtroom. It seemed the Stevens era was ending. Justice Stevens, who will turn 90 in April, joined the court in 1975 and is the longest-serving current justice by more than a decade. He has given signals that he intends to retire at the end of this term, and his dissent on Thursday was shot through with disappointment, frustration and uncharacteristic sarcasm.He seemed weary, and more than once he stumbled over and mispronounced ordinary words in the lawyer’s lexicon — corruption, corporation, allegation. Sometimes he would take a second or third run at the word, sometimes not. But there was no mistaking his basic message. “The rule announced today — that Congress must treat corporations exactly like human speakers in the political realm — represents a radical change in the law, ” he said from the bench. “The court’s decision is at war with the views of generations of Americans.”..
“It is difficult to convey how thoroughly egregious counsel’s closing argument was, ” Justice Stevens wrote of a defense lawyer’s work. “Suffice it to say that the argument shares far more in common with a prosecutor’s closing than with a criminal defense attorney’s. Indeed, the argument was so outrageous that it would have rightly subjected a prosecutor to charges of misconduct.” In the second case, Justice Stevens did vote to uphold the death sentence, saying that even a closing argument worthy of Clarence Darrow would not have spared the defendant. That carefully calibrated distinction was of a piece with the view he announced in 2008 in Baze v. Rees, when he said he had come to the conclusion that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment. But he went on to say that his conclusion did not justify “a refusal to respect precedents that remain a part of our law.”

1/25/10

poem by Gershon Hepner
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