From Gehinnom
From Gehinnom to the middle class
they moved, and they became
a memory collectively of mass
destruction, living flame,
the Holocaust that some of us now call
the Shoah and, like divers,
plumb depths to find their traces and to haul
wrecked hulls that lack survivors.
Leon Wieseltier, addressing The Jewish Center in Los Angeles on Yom Ha'Shoah,5758, asks: 'Who are the survivors? They are the ones who may dispense with collective memory, because they rely on personal memory.' He says of the survivors: 'They went from Gehenna to the middle class...and we must bow our head to their normalcy. For it is a spiritual achievement, one of the greatest spiritual achievements in the history of our people.'
11/7/98
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Nonexistence
Nonexistence flows from what is unpronounced,
the dried source of a watershed,
cisternal spaces in the head,
the prey at which no cat has pounced.
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt reviews 'For Common things: Irony, Trust and Commitment in America Today' (Alfred A. Knopf) by the 25 year old West Virginian, Jedediah Purdy. Purdy argues that irony such as that personified by Jerry Seinfeld, harms 'common things, ' by which he means all that is public, shared and ordinary. Thomas Carlyle wrote in 'Sartor Resartus': 'An ironic man, with his sly stillness and ambuscading ways, may be viewed as a pest to society.' The epigraph to his book comes from Czeslaw Milosz: 'What is unpronounced tends to nonexistence.'
9/9/99
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Appearing Tpo Be Sad
Writing plays appearing to be sad
for people who are humorous, Anton
prevents us all from forming our foregone
conclusions about what is good or bad.
Because they both are linked, you have to laugh
both at what’s funny and what’s sad, he found,
for crying will not help you hear the sound
that splits the sides of sadness into half.
Hilton Als reviews a production of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” in The New Yorker, March 24,2008 (“Servants of Art”) , and quotes Nabokov, who observed in 1981 that Chekhov wrote “sad books for humorous people. Things for him were funny and sad at the same time, but you would not see their sadness if you did not see their fun, because both were linked up.”
3/19/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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After Romance Of The Damned
After romance of the damned
in a distant archipelago
the veteran, once he’d been Vietnamed,
discovered war won’t let a fellah go.
What determines one’s whole life
can make a person turn into a mensch;
before he proves this to his wife
he learns about it from a willing wench.
Inspired by a comment R. J. Kitaj made, explaining his experiences in the merchant marine that inspired a 1960 painting from “In Our Time” called “O’Neill” reproduced in “The Prints of R. B. Kitaj, ” by Jean Kinsman, with an afterword by the artist (Scolar Press,1994) :
…first romance in a brothel archipelago which would determine one’s whole life romance of the damned…But if it didn’t, it would make one a mensch.
1/15/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Not Just A Bad Review
We’d not have had a Tisha B’av or Holocaust
if they’d just given us a bad review,
but we’ve been killed by them, not just divorced:
that’s what we mean by “hard to be a Jew”.
The Arabs say we are the favorite folk
of which they wish to be entirely rid;
unfortunately this is not a joke:
it’s still true that it’s shver tsu sayn a yid.
Kenneth Turan, senior movie critic for the LA Times, addressing an audience at UCLA today, was asked whether he thought the role of Jews has historically been fairly represented in Hollywood movies. He replied that it was impossible to do so. “After all, ” he said, “historically Jews haven’t just got bad reviews. I wish that were all that they’ve received.”
11/27/07
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Mozart Clarinet Quintet
For six months in Berlin he languished
as inspiration fled,
in Prussia feeling very anguished,
until into his head
the sound of strings with clarinet
restored his spirit and
blew wind to make, with string quartet,
a quintessential band.
For this we must offer our thanks
to clarinetist, Stadler,
who, as inspirer, ranks
above this grateful bardler.
In 1788 Mozart spent six months in Berlin, where he went after his success with “Le Nozze di Figaro”. In that period he wrote only one work––but what a work! He was inspired to write it after hearing Anton Stadler playing the clarinet in Vienna. Not until Brahms would anyone come close to the inspiration that he showed in the divine Quintet for Clarinet and Strings.
1/15/2001
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Blue Moon
There’ll be a blue moon on the last day
of two-thousand-nine. The fast day
that preceded it, Asarah
B’Tevet acting as a thorough
preparation for it revel-
ation, giving us a devil-
may-care attitude to what
we might expect next year, or not
expect, depending if the moon
makes us as blue as it as soon
as New Year which will surely wane
like all years of which we complain.
Revelers ringing in 2010 will be treated to a so-called blue moon. According to popular definition, a blue moon is the second full moon in a month. But don't expect it to be blue — the name has nothing to do with the color of our closest celestial neighbor. A full moon occurred on Dec.2. It will appear again on Thursday in time for the New Year's countdown.
12/29/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Whatever Happened To Benjamin?
Whatever happened to Benjamin
when he got bored with young Elaine?
He learned that it’s more fun to sin,
because sin tends to dull the pain,
and more thrills come from stolen kisses
than ones made by a marriage licit.
That’s why he left Elaine, and Mrs.
Robinson each night would visit.
Inspired by a performance of “The Graduate, ” which Linda and I first saw at the Curzon Cinema in London in 1968 but never really appreciated, despite its amazing soundtrack, until we saw it again about forty years later. Linda’s comment to this poem wsa “like plastic, ” which made me realize that the movie has a inclusion. At the beginning Mr. Robinson advises Benjamin to think about plastic, and he ends up marrying a piece of it.
6/3/08
poem by Gershon Hepner
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The Milkman Cometh
When I see the milkman coming,
I don’t experience an intending.
That logically is the upsumming
up messages that I’d be sending,
but if I stopped to ask him where
he might be heading with the jug,
intention with him I would share,
and could not longer this offshrug.
Written while checking the proofs of my forthcoming book, Legal Friction: Law, narrative and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel:
inspired by words of Ludwig Wittgenstein that I cite on page 52:
When I see the milkman coming, I fetch my jug and go to meet him. Do I experience an intending? Not that I know of. (Any more than I try to walk, in order to walk.) But if I stopped and asked, “Where are you going with that jug? ” I should express my intention.
3/3/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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Pure Music
Pure music tells no clichéd tale
concerning God or love or conquering sword;
it is composed in that fair higher scale
of consciousness where facts may be ignored.
Opera is music that’s adulterated
by literature we call scenario and libretto;
like music we should keep our feelings understated,
not trading them like merchants in a Venice ghetto.
Edmund White writes about the way he prefers to write to the accompaniment of music in the NYT, June 18,2001 (“Before as Rendezvous with the muse, First Select the Music”) . He writes:
Unlike fiction, music is not about mothers-in-law or failed marriages. Of course opera and ballet and program music can be narrative but only because they are adulterated by literature, the libretto or scenario.
6/18/01,11/6/09
poem by Gershon Hepner
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