Dina Vieny, Maillol And Matisse

When posing for Maillol she looked quite obese,
since Aristide thought fat is fine,
but having been drawn by his good friend Matisse,
she left him reduced to a line.

Inspired by an obituary of Dina Vierny, Aristide Maillol’s model, by William Grimes (“Dina Vierny,89, model for Maillol’s sculptures, ” NYT, January 27,2009) :
Ms. Vierny was a 15-year-old lycée student in Paris when she met Maillol, in the mid-1930s. The architect Jean-Claude Dondel, a friend of her father’s, decided that she would make the perfect model for the artist, who was 73 and in the professional doldrums. “Mademoiselle, it is said that you look like a Maillol and a Renoir, ” Maillol wrote to her. “I’d be satisfied with a Renoir.” For the next 10 years, until his death in a car accident in 1944, Ms. Vierny was Maillol’s muse, posing for monumental works of sculpture that belied her modest height of 5 feet 2 inches. By mutual agreement, the relationship was strictly artistic….Her Rubenesque figure and jet-black hair indeed made her, as Dondel had predicted, “a living Maillol, ” memorialized in works like “The Seated Bather, ” “The Mountain, ” “Air, ” “The River, ” and “Harmony, ” his last, unfinished sculpture. Maillol also turned to her as a subject for drawings and painted portraits, like “Dina With a Scarf, ” now in the Maillol Museum.
In 1939, Maillol took refuge at his home in Banyuls-sur-Mer, at the foot of the eastern Pyrenees. There, Ms. Vierny, who had already begun working for a Resistance group in Paris, was approached by the Harvard-educated classicist Varian Fry, whose organization in Marseille helped smuggle refugees from occupied France into Spain. Unbeknownst to Maillol, she began working as a guide, identifiable to her fleeing charges by her red dress. The work was doubly dangerous because she was Jewish. Ms. Vierny soon began dozing off at her posing sessions. The story came out, and Maillol, a native of the region, showed her secret shortcuts, smugglers’ routes and goat paths to use. After several months of working for the Comité Fry, Ms. Vierny was arrested by the French police, who seized her correspondence with her friends in the Surrealist movement but failed to notice stacks of forged passports in her room. A lawyer hired by Maillol won her acquittal at trial, and to keep her out of harm’s way the artist sent her to pose for Matisse in Nice. “I am sending you the subject of my work, ” Maillol told Matisse, “whom you will reduce to a line.” Matisse did several drawings and proposed an ambitious painting that he called a “Matisse Olympia, ” after the famous painting by Manet. When Maillol heard that the project would take at least six months, he hastily recalled her to Banyuls. She also posed for Dufy and for Bonnard, who used her as the model for “Somber Nude.” In 1943, Ms. Vierny was again arrested, this time by the Gestapo, in Paris. She was released after six months in prison when Maillol appealed to Arno Breker, Hitler’s favorite sculptor.

1/27/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Escaping Into Solitude

Escaping into solitude,
avoiding hunters’ need to roam,
I long for the latitude
to find my longitude, my home,
where the goddess who presides
over hearth and in the kitchen
born one week before the Ides,
lets me worship her and richen.

Michiko Kakutani reviews Diane Middlebrooks’ “Her Husband: Hughes and Plath: A Marriage” (Viking) in The New York Times, October 14,2003:

The portrait that emerges is that of a selfish artist who 'lived for poetry, with single-mindedness of the sort he had long ago discerned in W. B. Yeats, the first poet who ever seized his imagination.' Together, he wrote in a letter quoted in this book, Plath and he found a way to 'sacrifice everything to writing.' Without each other, he contended, he would probably have wandered off to Australia, and she would have become a professor and written books on the side. He told a friend that the marriage had been 'marvelously creative' for him for half a dozen years.
But he found it surprisingly easy to move on then, leaving Plath and their two children, when he 'wanted to be out from under her watchfulness, ' in Ms. Middlebrook's words. Because the marriage was an emotionally fraught and artistically productive relationship, the narrative of 'Her Husband' cannot help but fascinate, providing new tidbits of information and insight to anyone who has followed the melodrama of the poets' relationship and the scholarly deconstruction of their art and their lives.
The problem is that Ms. Middlebrook insists on subjecting Hughes's life to a relentlessly Freudian and often highly speculative reading, not dissimilar to that in her 1991 biography of Anne Sexton. And in placing Hughes on the couch she demonstrates an unfortunate tendency to overemphasize the autobiographical elements in his poems (at the expense of his imaginative transactions) and to gloss his actions and choices with a thick patina of psychological determinism.
She writes that the Hughes poem 'Song' is 'quite evidently a poem about the impact of Sylvia Plath on Ted Hughes, even if it was inspired by another woman and written more than half a dozen years before Hughes met Plath.' And she predicts that 'Hughes's access to poetic inspiration was eventually going to require two specific forms of rebellion against domesticity.' Both 'would be enacted against the women in his life, selfishly and sometimes cruelly': the first being an 'escape into solitude, ' the second being what she calls 'the hunter's freedom to roam, ' a need nourished, she contends, in his childhood, when he would escape his mother's suffocating hold by going out on the moors to hunt with his older brother, Gerald.
Hughes was a devotee of Robert Graves's book 'The White Goddess, ' which held that poetry evolved from masculine rituals of devotion to the Goddess thereby preserving humanity's connection to nature's cycles of birth and destruction. It is Ms. Middlebrook's theory that he found his muse in Sylvia Plath and that he saw their marriage as 'the doing of the White Goddess, ' which he was powerless to resist.

10/14/03

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Man Who Mistook His Mistress For A Violin

The man who mistook his mistress for a violin
is the subject of a book by J. M. Coetzee.
Mistaking music for a mistress is a sin
more serious that to eat bread without saying motsi.

When sex becomes a contest in which you subject
erotic will to your opponent who’s a wench,
don’t treat her like a piece of bread and don’t object
if she declares she is not ready yet to bensch.

Motsi is the Hebrew name of a piece of bread a Jew may not eat before saying a blessing, hamotsi lehem min ha’arets, meaning “He who brings forth bread from the earth.” Bensch means “bless, ” and in the context of eating bread it refers to the blessing that in Hebrew is called birkat hamazon, meaning “the blessing for food.” Coetzee’s description of himself as “the man who mistook his mistress for a violin” is clearly an allusion to Oliver Sacks’s story of the man with visual agnosia who mistook his wife for a hat.

The poem was in part inspired by Tim Parks’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s “Summertime: A Fiction, ” a novel that may or may not be autobiographical (“The Education of ‘John Coetzee, ’” NYR (February 11,2010) :
Following Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) , Summertime concludes J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy. It is a teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be. If Boyhood and Youth were remarkable for Coetzee's use of the third person (the author declining to identify with his younger self) and the present tense (a narrative device more commonly associated with fiction than memoir) , Summertime takes both distancing and novelizing a step further. Despite our seeing Coetzee's name on the cover and hence assuming the author alive and well, we are soon asked to believe that he is now dead, the book being made up of five interviews conducted by an anonymous biographer who is speaking to people he presumes were important to the writer during the years 1972–1975.
Coetzee writes about the affair he has, possibly fact, possibly fiction, with a psychotherapist called Julia:
John, she says, was actually “a minor character” in a drama played out between herself and her husband. While the latter was traveling, the lovers enjoyed an “erotic entanglement” in the marital bed. Yet John was peripheral to her life; at the one moment when she was ready to leave her husband and he could have become a major player, he “took fright” and snuck out of the hotel where she was sleeping….Certainly there’s comedy to be had in the description of this willfully unassertive man partnering a woman who sees sex “as a contest, a variety of wrestling in which you do you best to subject your opponent to your erotic will.” “He was not in my league, ” Julia complains. When John tries to persuade her to moderate her lovemaking to fir the slow movement of a Schubert string quintet, the better to “re-experience” the sexual feelings of a bygone age, Julia shows him the door. “The man who mistook his mistress for a violin, ” she comments.

1/30/10

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Narratives

Narratives we tell to show
who we believe we are deceive
the listeners who are forced to go
with that one version they receive,
because we’ve may others we
can tell to different people to
impress them with our pedigree
and perspicacious points of view.
Do we from truth take long excursions
by changing tales about ourselves,
to find as many different versions
as books in volumes on our shelves?
No, there’s some truth in each refrain,
for every life is like a ballad
with different verses that explain
its variations, each as valid
as the next one, contradictions
all harmonized with disappearance
of prejudice about the fictions
that help to give the facts coherence.

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Misaking A Mistress For A Violin

MISTAKING A MISTRESS FOR A VIOLIN

The man who mistook his mistress for a violin
is the subject of a book by J. M. Coetzee.
Mistaking music for a mistress is a sin
more serious than to eat bread without saying motsi.

When sex becomes a contest in which you subject
erotic will to your opponent, wife or wench,
don’t treat her like a piece of bread, and don’t object
if she declares she is not ready yet to bensch.

Motsi is the Hebrew name of a piece of bread a Jew may not eat before saying a blessing, hamotsi lehem min ha’arets, meaning “He who brings forth bread from the earth.” Bensch means “bless, ” and in the context of eating bread it refers to the blessing that in Hebrew is called birkat hamazon, meaning “the blessing for food.” Coetzee’s description of himself as “the man who mistook his mistress for a violin” is clearly an allusion to Oliver Sacks’s story of the man with visual agnosia who mistook his wife for a hat.

The poem was in part inspired by Tim Parks’s review of J. M. Coetzee’s “Summertime: A Fiction, ” a novel that may or may not be autobiographical (“The Education of ‘John Coetzee, ’” NYR (February 11,2010) :
Following Boyhood (1997) and Youth (2002) , Summertime concludes J.M. Coetzee's autobiographical trilogy. It is a teasing and surprisingly funny book, at once as elaborately elusive and determinedly confessional as ever autobiography could be. If Boyhood and Youth were remarkable for Coetzee's use of the third person (the author declining to identify with his younger self) and the present tense (a narrative device more commonly associated with fiction than memoir) , Summertime takes both distancing and novelizing a step further. Despite our seeing Coetzee's name on the cover and hence assuming the author alive and well, we are soon asked to believe that he is now dead, the book being made up of five interviews conducted by an anonymous biographer who is speaking to people he presumes were important to the writer during the years 1972–1975.
Coetzee writes about the affair he has, possibly fact, possibly fiction, with a psychotherapist called Julia:
John, she says, was actually “a minor character” in a drama played out between herself and her husband. While the latter was traveling, the lovers enjoyed an “erotic entanglement” in the marital bed. Yet John was peripheral to her life; at the one moment when she was ready to leave her husband and he could have become a major player, he “took fright” and snuck out of the hotel where she was sleeping….Certainly there’s comedy to be had in the description of this willfully unassertive man partnering a woman who sees sex “as a contest, a variety of wrestling in which you do you best to subject your opponent to your erotic will.” “He was not in my league, ” Julia complains. When John tries to persuade her to moderate her lovemaking to fir the slow movement of a Schubert string quintet, the better to “re-experience” the sexual feelings of a bygone age, Julia shows him the door. “The man who mistook his mistress for a violin, ” she comments.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Chocolate In Chaco

They’ve been drinking chocolate in
the canyons of the southwest. Chaco
is where the ritual would begin,
enhanced by peace-pipes of tobacco.
It used to give the Indians highs
in 600 BCE,
before they came to compromise
with coffee. Chocolate makes you free
of any hang-ups you have got,
and makes you want to plight your troth
to girls who drink it with you hot
with frenzied fervor for its froth.

It is the aphrodisiac
I always use when I am trying
to get a girl into the sack.
The greatest chocolate is for dying,
and it is comforting to know,
when giving it to your companion,
that it was used as quid pro quo

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Emulation

Dependence leads to emulation,
but sadly creativity
demands thereafter separation,
with hypersensitivity
the reason often for defection
of emulator, who betrays
his master by his rude rejection.
Disengaged like divorcés,
regretting the dependence that
had once inspired them both, they lose
their symbiosis and combat
each other with conflicting views,
and claim they always had suspected
the other was far less inspired
than they, and ought to be rejected,
the sell-by date now long expired.

Inspired by an article Holland Cotter on an exhibition of the art of Titian, Tintoreeto and Verones at the Boston Museum of Fine Art (Passion of the Moment: A Triptych of Masters, NYT, March 12,2009) :

The show is about three such personalities: Tiziano Vecellio, or Titian; Jacopo Robusti, known as Tintoretto; and Paolo Caliari, called Veronese. All three shot off sparks as they reforged painting as a medium. And all three had feverishly competitive overlapping careers. These masters of 16th-century Venetian painting were no Holy Trinity. They were a discordant ménage-a-trois bound together by envy, talent, circumstances and some strange version of love. This is the story the exhibition tells through 56 grand to celestial paintings — no filler here, not an ounce of fat — sorted into broad categories (religious images, portraits, belle donne) and arranged in compare-and-contrast couplings and triplings to indicate who was looking at whom, and why, and when. And that story is set against a larger historical narrative that goes something like this. Before the 16th century Italian art was dominated by two cities, Florence and Rome, and by two kinds of painting: fresco and egg tempera — water-based, fast-drying, smooth-surfaced — on wood. Venice lay outside this mainstream. Fresco wasn’t viable in the city’s humid atmosphere; tempera had problems too. Then, at the end of the 15th century, oil painting, still little known in the rest of Italy, was introduced, and Venetian art caught fire….Finally into the arena strode a third giant, and a somewhat gentler one, Veronese (1528-88) . Named for his native city and still in his teens when he hit Venice, he was quickly acknowledged to be a prodigy, fully formed. Titian became the artist he was through long growth, Tintoretto by sifting and synthesizing influences. Veronese was Veronese from Day 1. Ingratiating in manner, he was a painter of fine texture, sweet color and courtly reserve. Patrons who found Tintoretto too outlandish gave Veronese their business; the elderly Titian took him under his wing. And from the 1540s to the 1580s Venetian painting became a three-way dance among these three men, a tricky choreography of emulation and rejection, dependence and separation. You can follow the moves in a cluster of steamy paintings of nudes at the center of the show, installed in a gallery with crimson walls and tasseled curtains. The Titians — the “Danae” from the Capodimonte Museum in Naples, “Venus with an Organist and Dog” from the Prado, “Venus With a Mirror” from the National Gallery of Art in Washington — are stop-and-stare fantastic.

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Grief Is A Paradox

GRIEF IS A PARADOX

Grief is a paradox, the presence of an ab-
sence, mushroom cloud where there once was Elugelab.

This couplet was inspired by a poem by Robert Pinsky, "Grief, " in the June 7th 2012 edition of NYR, which was printed after an amazing article by Jim Holt, reviewing Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson:

The computer, one might well conclude, was conceived in sin. Its birth helped ratchet up, by several orders of magnitude, the destructive force available to the superpowers during the cold war. And the man most responsible for the creation of that first computer, John von Neumann, was himself among the most ardent of the cold warriors, an advocate of a preemptive military attack on the Soviet Union, and one of the models for the film character Dr. Strangelove. As George Dyson writes in his superb new history, Turing's Cathedral, "The digital universe and the hydrogen bomb were brought into existence at the same time." Von Neumann had seemingly made a deal with the devil: "The scientists would get the computers, and the military would get the bombs."…
And what was MANIAC used for, once it was up and running? Its first job was to do the calculations necessary to engineer the prototype of the hydrogen bomb. Those calculations were successful. On the morning of November 1,1952, the bomb they made possible, nicknamed "Ivy Mike, " was secretly detonated over a South Pacific island called Elugelab. The blast vaporized the entire island, along with 80 million tons of coral. One of the air force planes sent in to sample the mushroom cloud—reported to be "like the inside of a red-hot furnace"—spun out of control and crashed into the sea; the pilot's body was never found. A marine biologist on the scene recalled that a week after the H-bomb test he was still finding terns with their feathers blackened and scorched, and fish whose "skin was missing from a side as if they had been dropped in a hot pan."

GRIEF, by Robert Pinsky

I don't think anybody ever is
Really divorced, said Lenny. Also,
I don't think anybody ever is
Really married, he said. Because

English was really his second language
And because of Yiddish and its displaced
Place in the world, he never really

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Irony And Unthinkability

Just like football helmets that create
illusions of invulnerability
irony can’t truly mitigate
the trauma of unthinkability.

Lacking helmets football would not be
the game it is, but they do not protect
the wearer any more than irony
protects politically the incorrect.

The trauma that’s inflicted when a skull
is fractured is no less than the concussion
that’s suffered by those people who are dull,
but miss the irony of a discussion.

Inspired by an article in the WSJ on November 11,2009 (Is It Time to Retire the Football Helmet? New Research Says Small Hits Do Major Damage—and There's Not Much Headgear Can Do About It, by Reed Albergotti and Shirley S. Wang) :

This football season, the debate about head injuries has reached a critical mass. Startling research has been unveiled. Maudlin headlines have been written. Congress called a hearing on the subject last month. As obvious as the problem may seem (wait, you mean football is dangerous?) , continuing revelations about the troubling mental declines of some retired players—and the ongoing parade of concussions during games—have created a sense of inevitability. Pretty soon, something will have to be done. But before the debate goes any further, there's a fundamental question that needs to be investigated. Why do football players wear helmets in the first place? And more important, could the helmets be part of the problem? 'Some people have advocated for years to take the helmet off, take the face mask off. That'll change the game dramatically, ' says Fred Mueller, a University of North Carolina professor who studies head injuries. 'Maybe that's better than brain damage.'
The first hard-shell helmets, which became popular in the 1940s, weren't designed to prevent concussions but to prevent players in that rough-and-tumble era from suffering catastrophic injuries like fractured skulls. But while these helmets reduced the chances of death on the field, they also created a sense of invulnerability that encouraged players to collide more forcefully and more often. 'Almost every single play, you're going to get hit in the head, ' says Miami Dolphins offensive tackle Jake Long. What nobody knew at the time is that these small collisions may be just as damaging. The growing body of research on former football players suggests that brain damage isn't necessarily the result of any one trauma, but the accumulation of thousands of seemingly innocuous blows to the head…

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Singing In Your Reign

SINGING IN YOUR REIGN

You are the seemly raiment of my heart;
that's why I now am singing in your reign,
for you're my queen who rules me with the art
of Cupid, to transfix me without pain
with artful arrows Cupid shoots from your
direction, having been by you directed.
His aim is just as steady and as sure
as yours, and does not need to be corrected.
I'm living in a house that's dedicated
to corporeal correction, which is stupid,
but thanks to you my spirit is elated,
in thrall to you while threesoming with Cupid.
This sonnet is no quid pro quo or payment
for what you have done, it is my raiment.

John Heilpern (Newsmen of La Mancha, " Vanity Fair, January 2011) writes about Sidney Harman:

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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