Menhaden

Unfortunately, the menhaden
will soon be more extinct that Latin,
since they are fast-depleting assets
which, overfished for fatty acids
with which we our lipstick and our paint
and salmon feed without constraint,
no longer thrive, and can’t be found
where they once were. Long Island Sound
is muddy now, like Chesapeake,
the Bay where fishers used to seek
these fish that filter water and
make sure it isn’t full of sand
and algae that cause it to be
as fresh as they every sea
should be. Their loss should sadden
our hearts more than the loss of Latin.
Few people now care for the Aenid,
and for the sea, when algae green it,
will care still less, and once we’re forced
to give up fish for liverwurst,

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Poetic Thoughts

Pure poets think poetic thoughts,
and never write them down,
subjecting them to poet courts
to bury with a frown,
but I write nearly all of mine
in verses all the world
can read, and do not wilt or whine
when some abuse is hurled,
because the purpose of my writing
poetic thoughts is not
to be regarded as exciting,
sensitive and hot,
but to engage with my own mind,
and what is overheard
are shades of thoughts I leave behind
to bury, word by word.

Dana Goodyear writes in the New Yorker (“The Moneyed Muse: What can two hundred million dollars do for poetry? ” February 19 and 26,2007) , about Ruth Lilly’s two hundred million dollar bequest to Poetry, and the problems facing the boar in its quest to promote poetry to the general audience rather than to people within the poetic academy:
The Wayfarers’ Club, a century-old organization that John Barr joined when he moved to Chicago, meets in a formidable stone building with a large awning across from the Art Institute. The Wayfarers’ membership typically includes the presidents of both the University of Chicago and Northwestern, the director of the Art Institute, business leaders, and, in the past, according to David Hilliard, the club’s secretary and treasurer, “real moguls.” The smell of cigar smoke lingers in the halls. On a foggy, chilly night late last year, Barr was scheduled to make a twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation about the foundation and the Lilly gift. Hilliard’s wife, Celia, a Chicago historian, has been on the board of Poetry for nearly thirty years and is on the committee to select an architect for the new building. “The magazine was always a very important anchor for poetry in Chicago—with Carl Sandburg and the hog butchers and all that, and Gwendolyn Brooks and Bronzeville, ” she said. “It was a headquarters for poets, even if they didn’t come from Chicago. There used to be a little restaurant called Le Petit Gourmet, on Michigan Avenue. Harriet Monroe would have readings, with Sandburg playing his guitar.”
A server hit a glockenspiel to signal that dinner was prepared, and the Wayfarers and their guests adjourned to a panelled room with casement windows and heavy upholstered valances. Barr arrived in a crisp white shirt, navy blazer, and striped tie, and sat at a table with Penny—petite, blond, coral lipstick, gold watch—the Hilliards, and a couple of other board members and foundation employees. Conversation turned to the controversy over Barr’s essay. Celia politely said that she still hadn’t read the latest letters to the editor. “Make sure you’re sitting down, ” John said. “We got a lot of mail—it was one of the higher mail-drawers yet.”

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Genesis Of Genocide

GENESIS OF GENOCIDE

Jewish history comes with homily,
the seder shared by all the family
the best example. When men talk about
the Holocaust the homilies they're taught
homogenize the fate that menaced us
the Jews, with that of gentiles. Genesis
of genocide is changed: the hermeneutic
of revision makes it therapeutic
for those who wish to drive Jews from their land.
"The Jews, " they say, "have like the Nazis sinned,
creating victims just as Nazis did,
replacing Hitler with the settlers' God, "
revisionists exclaiming "Out of order! "
when hearing at the end of every seder
the mantra, "Next year in Jerusalem! "
while they as chauvinists condemn
the Jews, in spite of their thousand years
of blood and sweat and toil, and lots of tears,

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Not Catchers In The Rye

Pretension, balancing banality with self-
effacement leads to phoniness,
and although Holden Caulfield is not on the shelf,
his author lives in loneliness,
a great observer of all false sophistication,
replacing the imperative
of thought with style and, with comedic contemplation,
the funny nerve of narrative.
For those of us who are not catchers in the rye,
it seems the author dropped the ball
his literature’s epiphanies by leaving, sine die,
Damascus, far more dead than Paul.

Inspired by an article on J. D. Salinger, who turns 90 on New Year’s Day, by Charles McGrath (“Still Paging Mr. Salinger, ” NYT, December 31,2008) :
On Thursday, J. D. Salinger turns 90. There probably won’t be a party, or if there is we’ll never know. For more than 50 years Mr. Salinger has lived in seclusion in the small town of Cornish, N.H. For a while it used to be a journalistic sport for newspapers and magazines to send reporters up to Cornish in hopes of a sighting, or at least a quotation from a garrulous local, but Mr. Salinger hasn’t been photographed in decades now and the neighbors have all clammed up. He’s been so secretive he makes Thomas Pynchon seem like a gadabout. Mr. Salinger’s disappearing act has succeeded so well, in fact, that it may be hard for readers who aren’t middle-aged to appreciate what a sensation he once caused. With its very first sentence, his novel “The Catcher in the Rye, ” which came out in 1951, introduced a brand-new voice in American writing, and it quickly became a cult book, a rite of passage for the brainy and disaffected. “Nine Stories, ” published two years later, made Mr. Salinger a darling of the critics as well, for the way it dismantled the traditional architecture of the short story and replaced it with one in which a story could turn on a tiny shift of mood or tone….. In general what has dated most in Mr. Salinger’s writing is not the prose — much of the dialogue, in the stories especially and in the second half of “Franny and Zooey, ” still seems brilliant and fresh — but the ideas. Mr. Salinger’s fixation on the difference between “phoniness, ” as Holden Caulfield would put it, and authenticity now has a twilight, ’50s feeling about it. It’s no longer news, and probably never was. This is the theme, though, that comes increasingly to dominate the Glass chronicles: the unsolvable problem of ego and self-consciousness, of how to lead a spiritual life in a vulgar, material society. The very thing that makes the Glasses, and Seymour especially, so appealing to Mr. Salinger — that they’re too sensitive and exceptional for this world — is also what came to make them irritating to so many readers.Another way to pose the Glass problem is: How do you make art for an audience, or a critical establishment, too crass to understand it? This is the issue that caused Seymour to give up, presumably, and one is tempted to say it’s what soured Mr. Salinger on wanting to see anything else in print.Sadly, though, Mr. Salinger’s spiritual side is his least convincing. His gift is less for profundity than for observation, for listening and for comedy. Except perhaps for Mark Twain, no other American writer has registered with such precision the humor — and the pathos — of false sophistication and the vital banality of big-city pretension. For all his reclusiveness, moreover, Mr. Salinger has none of the sage’s self-effacement; his manner is a big and showy one, given to tours-de-force and to large emotional gestures. In spite of his best efforts to silence himself or become a seer, he remains an original and influential stylist — the kind of writer the mature Seymour (but not necessarily the precocious 7-year-old) would probably deplore.

12/31/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Prosaic

If poetry’s pronounced prosaic,
like Prozac thought to be archaic,
prescribed for those who are depressed,
with prose preferred by all the rest,
should I consider that I’m dated,
out-rhymed and out-alliterated
by cruel haters of all verse
who poetry pooh-pooh and curse,
especially the rhyming kind
to which prose preachers are unkind
more than to verse so free it looks
like prose that’s printed in their books?

Of course I’m dated, but so what?
Prose writer is what I am not
by birth or inclination, so forgive
the way I write so I can live
with meter, rhyme, and let me scan,
though I am an archaic man,
and keep you daily up to date

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Swashbuckling

Demanding either ahs or chuckles,
I am an artist who swashbuckles,
performing before ears that hear,
and eyes that read, what is most dear
to the magician in me, sleight
of mouth with which I gravitate
above the ground of common sense,
beyond the past and present tense,
by twisting words like wires Calder
once twisted, and the authors Alter
has found in many Bible tales
twist words as if they were entrails,
serious topics that with whimsy
fligh high with fancies that sound flimsy.

Without ifs or ans or buts
my poems, aiming for the guts,
have spirals echoing the mobiles
of Calder, with phonetic foibles
I hope the reader will enjoy

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Great Conductors

Hans Richter Parsifal did not conduct,
and to the National Gallery he never paid
a visit, but he showed Franz Strauss who never sucked
just how the horn in Meistersinger should be played.

Franz Strauss refused to play a second time
for Hans von Bülow Meistersinger’s second act;
Hans begged his pardon when Franz told him: “I’m
retiring, since you for the hornist show no tact.”

There is an incident reported about the premiere of Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg. The first version: during a rehearsal Strauss complained about the terrible demanding horn part, but Hans Richter, Wagner's secretary & former first horn at the Viennese Kaerntnerthor Theatre (Beethoven's Sonata op.17 had been premiered there; forerunner theatre of the Imperial Opera House) , was present & asked Strauss to lend him his horn & played the passage from the endings of the second act flawless, but giving the horn back with the comment With your B-flat-horn you will have difficulties always; the F-horn sounds much better.
I do not believe this anecdote to be true. Even an already warmed up horn player of excellent qualities might have difficulties with the Pruegelszene How can a conducter to be (Richter became the first world famous conductor; he led the first Ring in Bayreuth 1876) , who had not played his horn for a while, play this passage flawless without any warm-up. A myth only! Richter used this complain about B-flat horn also, when he conducted in Bayreuth. He recommended the use of the single F horn always. No wonder. He came from Vienna.
The second incident happened after the end of the dress rehearsal of Mastersingers. Hans von Bülow wanted to repeat the ending of the 2nd Act again, but Strauss refused to do so, telling von Bülow that he could not do it again, as being exhausted already. If you cant do it again, so you must better ask for retirement! , replied von Buelow to Strauss. But Strauss left the pit and asked the opera's administration for immediate retirement. So Hans von Bülow had to come to Strauss house at the Pschorr Estate, ask for pardon, which was granted, - so the premiere of Mastersingers was saved.
There is an incident reported about the premiere of Die Meistersinger von Nuremberg. The first version: during a rehearsal Strauss complained about the terrible demanding horn part, but Hans Richter, Wagner's secretary & former first horn at the Viennese Kaerntnerthor Theatre (Beethoven's Sonata op.17 had been premiered there; forerunner theatre of the Imperial Opera House) , was present & asked Strauss to lend him his horn & played the passage from the endings of the second act flawless, but giving the horn back with the comment With your B-flat-horn you will have difficulties always; the F-horn sounds much better.
I do not believe this anecdote to be true. Even an already warmed up horn player of excellent qualities might have difficulties with the Pruegelszene. How can a conductor to be (Richter became the first world famous conductor; he led the first Ring in Bayreuth 1876) , who had not played his horn for a while, play this passage flawless without any warm-up. A myth only! Richter used this complain about B-flat horn also, when he conducted in Bayreuth. He recommended the use of the single F horn always. No wonder. He came from Vienna.
The second incident happened after the end of the dress rehearsal of Mastersinger. Hans von Bülow wanted to repeat the ending of the 2nd Act again, but Strauss refused to do so, telling von Bülow that he could not do it again, as being exhausted already. If you can’t do it again you had better ask for retiremen! replied von Bülow to Strauss. But Strauss left the pit and asked the opera's administration for immediate retirement. So Hans von Bülow had to come to Strauss house at the Pschorr Estate, ask for pardon, which was granted, - so the premiere of Mastersingers was saved.

8/25/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Smooth And Amiable, Opaque

Smooth and amiable, opaque,
with facades like scrims, genteel,
my friends are ones you ought to take
unseriously, and for a meal
just when you think you’ve nothing better
to do, like watching television,
or sending the White House a letter,
or working out with great precision
your taxes for another audit.
Should it be that you don’t wish
to do these things and can afford it,
invite your friends to where the fish
is tastier than what you eat
at home, and then, when you come back,
resolve that you will not repeat
such invitations till you crack,
or there is nothing on TV,
and you’re not writing letters to
the President––since you can see,
unusually, his point of view––

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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Solving Mysteries

SOLVING MYSTERIES

Deep mysteries may be solved by analytic clarities,
but then dissolve as you dismantle their disparities,
their solution, if not leading to their dissolution,
depleting them of mystery which has suffered diminution.

Andrew Miller, whose latest novel Pure is about to be published, reviews Peter Carey's The Chemistry of Tears (NYTBR,5/27/10) :

In Peter Carey's 12th novel, much depends on two voices. The first belongs to Catherine Gehrig, an horologist working at the (fictional) Swinburne Museum in London. We join her — she begins to speak to us — at the very moment she learns of the sudden death of her lover, Matthew Tindall, Head Curator of Metals at the same institution. For 13 years, Catherine has been Tindall's mistress. He was older, married, a father, but the pair of them lived a blissful, secret life together. Now Tindall is gone — felled by a heart attack on the Underground — and gone with him, in Catherine's mind, is all good, all possibility of happiness….
Her boss gives her a project, which involves reading a pile of antique notebooks:
The notebooks introduce us to the novel's second voice, that of a wealthy mid-19th-century Englishman, Henry Brandling. As a voice, a narrator, Henry is not, at least at the start, much easier to be with than Catherine. He is fulsome, sentimental, the doting father of an ailing son, a boy whom Henry's wife, still mourning the death of another child, will neither nurse nor comfort. Henry seeks to keep the boy alive by continually exciting his interest in the world, but each success is temporary, and the next focus of interest, of enchantment, must always be more thrilling. So he decides to commission the building of an automaton, and not just any old automaton but a duck — he has seen a picture of it somewhere — that will eat grain, apparently digest it and then, with a whirring of springs, excrete the residue. To get it made he travels to Germany, to the Black Forest, and to the "mighty race of clockmakers" who live there. The notebooks are the journal of his travels, his search for a master technician.
Catherine, reading in the annex or (breaking all museum protocols) at home in her flat, calls Henry's narrative "intriguing, " but the diaries are often dense, awkward to read, somewhat dull. There is at first a type of comedy — the bumptious Englishman abroad, continually misunderstood by or misunderstanding his hosts. But then the tone darkens and takes on the feel of a fairy story by the Brothers Grimm, or something out of those monstrous cautionary tales in Hoffmann's "Straw Peter."
Henry finds his master clockmaker, a large, physically threatening man called Sumper, but Sumper isn't interested in a fecal duck. He has something much grander in mind for Henry and his son, and he teases Henry, torments him, hinting at mechanical wonders of an order the Englishman has not the wit to imagine. He recounts his adventures in Queen Victoria's England, where he worked as assistant to an inventor called Cruickshank, a character clearly modeled on the great Charles Babbage (whose prototype computer, the Difference Engine, has been reconstructed at the Science Museum in London) .
It is here, perhaps, in the watchmaker's hallucinogenic parable, that we come to what Carey is playing with in this novel: the illusory versus the actual, the mechanical versus the organic. The gap, if any, between that which, in its complexity, imitates life, and that which is living and may possess something else, something that isn't simply part of the works. A soul! Carey, of course, isn't going to come down on one side or the other of this venerable debate. Instead, he puts into the mouth of Catherine's boss the still persuasive Romantic plea for ambiguity, for the power and beauty of mysteries, for defending these from "analytical clarities." The closing scenes, in which Catherine and her young assistant finally recreate what Henry Brandling brought back from the forest, are among the best in the book, and the moment when it — the not-a-duck — is set in motion is thrilling.

5/28/12 #10340

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Better, Deeper, More Intelligent

Better, deeper, more intelligent,
and sensitive than us, Jane Austen
provides a literary environment
in which we all, by getting lost in
admiration for her heroines,
feel so diminished we conclude
whichever of the many heroes wins
their heart is an unlucky dude.

Riding with her, dressed by Abercombie
and Fitch is not the sort of way
I’d like to spend my time. I’m not a zombie.
Perhaps because I am not gay
I can’t relate to all the topics Jane
obsesses on, and in Northanger
Abbey heroines would all complain
I was a crashing bore and wanker.

“Why couldn’t all these heroines go out
and get a job? ” was asked by Emma––

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poem by Gershon Hepner
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