Poetry by Gershon Hepner

"Sperm donors cannot be anonymous, "
declares the California Court Supreme.
The father of the sperm, eponymous,
derived from products of a daywet dream,
ejaculated into tubes and frozen
in liquid nitrogen and left to freeze,
and like the Israelites by God then chosen
to fertilize fair females for high fees,
must leave the closet, genie of the sperm
that once united with the mother's ovum
by mechanisms that make Cupid squirm,
since donors of the mothers do not love 'em.

A dream deliberately wet and sticky
may be productive but for sperm whose donors
have been held up in banks life may be tricky
when hand-produced by donor who are loners.

8/24/00

Said Sandy Koufax: "I could pitch another game, "
significantly adding then, "But why? "
When you can see I'm writing just the same
as I have done before, please let me die.
To say the same thing twice is very bad,
and if you say it for a third time you
strike out, but repetition's more than sad:
it is a deadly insult to the new.

3/7/06

"I do respect the word of God, "
said Eve, indignantly, and blushed,
like red, forbidden apples. "Rot! "
the serpent said, for Eve looked flushed.
He offered her the fruit that matched
the color of embarrassed skin,
quite confident the plot he'd hatched
would cause concupiscence and sin.
Eve looked at it and was impressed
but wondered, would she be exempted
of punishment, as she confessed,
"It looks delicious; I feel tempted."
The serpent brought it to her nose
to help her savor its sweet smell,
and said to her: "Do you suppose
that eating this could lead to hell?
Believe an apple in the hand
is worth far more than paradise
God promised: you should understand
his words are just a pack of lies.
This fruit, the only one that He's
forbidden you to touch or eat,
is like the day that you must seize
to make your earthly life complete."
"If I should do this, I'd be shot, "
Eve said, but as she pouted
the serpent felt her skin grow hot,
opining wickedly, 'I doubt it! "
He knew that she could not resist
the apple's joyous geometry,
and say, when she and Adam kissed,
"To hell with anthropommetry."

This poem, written at the beginning of a vacation on which Linda and I were driving towards San Juan Bautista, was inspired by anthropometry, a real word describing the way that couturiers sketch their models in three dimensions with the aid of computer imaging. The word is related from anthropomorphism. Anthropommetry is my neologism, describing man's relationship with apples.

8/3/98,5/29/06

Anticipatory nostalgia means
regret for what you've not lost yet,
recalling present acts like scenes
that future failures force you to forget.

8/12/05

Frenchmen who the side that's darker see
are claiming that the US is the anti-France,
and therefore bashing Monsieur Sarkozy
as if he wore blue jeans and not smart pants,
and drank just Coca-cola, not champagne,
supported rock 'n' roll and Hollywood,
rejecting bread I'll mispronounce as pain,
not nasally as pain as French bread should,
just for the sake of rhyme, to be sarcastic,
suggesting with my anti-French panache,
that God, like me, is not enthusiastic
about the way that Frenchmen like to bash
the USA, which is God's country now,
not France, and lives there surely as He used
to do in France, His sometime sacred cow,
until the Vichy chickens came to roost.
As the anti-France, the US now
is an abstraction, incarnation of
all evil like a dar cat's night meow
or Noah's raven--that's why they play dove.

Roger Cohen writes in the International Herald Tribune that Frenchmen now regards the UnitedStates as the anti-France ('United Stated as the Anti-France, ' January 31,2007) :

Does the United States, the real country, exist in the French mind, or has America become a kind of Gallic fantasy, a dark specter to be deployed for political ends, a sort of ultimate negative against which the qualities of France shine? That question may seem outlandish. The web of connections between the two countries is intricate. In general it is easier to fantasize about the unknown than the known. But the United States seems curiously impervious to French knowledge because the French prefer to preserve the
country in the realm of the imaginary. There are deep roots to this fantasy. Some lie in the rivalry of two universalizing powers, in the Gaullist myths forged to rebuild French pride after the humiliations of World War II, and in the persistence of a left-of-center political culture that holds Yankee free market forces to be anathema. Being the anti- France, the United States, it often seems, cannot be seen for what it is. So freighted is America with meaning, it ceases to be visible. It becomes an abstraction shaped by prejudice rather than a country intelligible through experience. It serves a purpose at the price of being severed from itself. These reflections stirred on reading an eloquent example of Gallic delusion: the statement just published by Ségolène Royal's Socialist Party about Nicolas Sarkozy, her chief opponent in the French presidential election. This 87-page work amounts to a relentless exercise in Sarkozy-bashing through his depiction as that incarnation of menace: a card-carrying crypto-American. Entitled 'The Worrying 'Quiet Rupture' of Mr. Sarkozy, ' and displayed on Parti-socialiste.fr, the party's home page, the work begins by asking: 'Is France ready to vote i2007 for an American neo-conservative carrying a French passport? ' That gets the ball rolling. The party's core argument runs roughly as follows: America is bad, Sarkozy is its agent, ergo he is dangerous. The publication really has little more to say about Royal's enter-right rival. One chapter is entitled 'Nicolas Sarkozy or the Clone of Bush.' A memorable sentence, among many such gems, says: 'Yesterday Europe was importing jeans, coke, rock 'n' roll and cinema from the United States. Now Nicolas Sarkozy is proposing that we import God! ' Apart from hipping God from Galveston to Dieppe and so destroying the lay French state, Sarko is accused of heading up 'a sort of French subsidiary of Bush and company.' He's said to manipulate the suffering of French Jews to partisan ends nd to pander with equal unscrupulousness to the sensibilities of Catholics and Muslims. 'When one listens to Sarkozy, one would think one was listening to the evangelist George W. Bush addressing Hispanics of Catholic tradition in the last campaign, ' the pamphlet opines.

1/31/07

For a reverence she thought was right
she practiced her devotion,
and till the corpses both were out of sight
hung fiercely to the notion
that those who've died deserve as much respect
as those who carry on,
but who can blame survivors who suspect
that she, like Metatron,
would like to be the one who's in control?
She crosses that fine border
that circumscribes the playing field whose goal
is set for law and order.

12/28/04

Antiquities that are the oldest
and classiest and rarest
in the world entice the boldest
collectors of the fairest,
while suffering as victims, raped
by dealers who displace
the objects they find fairly shaped,
while they remove all trace
that helps identify the source,
from context separating
the object, like a cruel divorce
that even carbon dating--
the dating not of singles but
antiquities, of course--
cannot restore. This glorious glut,
brought like a Trojan horse,
by dealers who invade museums
with gifts they bear from Greeks,
leads experts, with their steep per diems,
to turn their lower cheeks.

3/29/06

Anxiety of influence caused Schoenberg to despise
"Salome", Igor to hate "Ariadne upon Naxos";
we hate to see reflections of ourselves in others' eyes,
believing that our only movement is on our own axis.
In a world in which we are so selfishly self-centered
we like to think that we're unique and sui generis,
one of a kind, whereas we'd all be better off if mentored
by spirits to whom we're both genial and generous.

Alex Ross ("The Last Emperor") writes in the New Yorker on December 20,1999 about the influence of Richard Strauss's first two operas, "Salome" and "Elektra" on other musicians, and the anxiety of influence exhibited by Schoenberg when hearing the former and Stravinsky when hearing "Ariadne auf Naxos":
Nearly every twentieth-century musical history you can find will state something to the effect that Strauss "flirted" with atonality in "Salome" and "Elektra" and then "retreated" to tonality. In the eyes of certain critics, Strauss was guilty of feminine weaknesses: stylistically, he was thought to be capricious and superficial, and several times he was called womanly in print. But the famous flirtation with atonality was a mirage-a distortion on the lens of modernist criticism. "Salome" and "Elektra" seem to turn toward atonality only because atonal composers copied them. Schoenberg's "emancipation of the dissonance" was, in part, an excision of Straussian dissonances from their surrounding chordal patterns. When Schoenberg and Berg heard "Salome" in Graz, they were listening closely. (Berg heard the opera six more times the following year in Vienna, and his debt would become clear in "Wozzeck." That work's sinister "primary" chord, which is generated from a modified whole-tone scale, is essentially identical to the motif of Salome's madness.) The vituperation that Schoenberg and his followers heaped on Strauss displays something of the anxiety of influence: Strauss had to be knocked down because he had given them too much. The same anxiety may color Stravinsky's invective. It is telling that Stravinsky was particularly incensed by "Ariadne auf Naxos, " whose neo-Baroque manner predates his own efforts in that line.
What irritates the modernist sensibility is Strauss's love of disorder, his horror of clean forms. Those who accepted Adolf Loos's condemnation of ornament as crime sentenced Strauss to death. True, his works contain awesome lapses of taste-usually in the latter half of a piece, and usually in a bland major key. Yet what is bad in Strauss cannot be separated from what is human in him. In a century overpopulated by "the lunatics of one idea, " as Wallace Stevens put it, Strauss is majestically messy and down to earth. At the end of his life, he said, "I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer." He was probably right. Then again I have a hard time thinking of composers of the last hundred years who rose any higher. Should I consider Schoenberg first-rate when his music never makes me smile? Should I venerate Stravinsky when his music never makes me cry? Perhaps all major twentieth-century composers have been a shade second-rate. They have lacked the unself-conscious assurance of the older masters. There is no longer a climate in which such assurance could grow: the music-mad culture that produced Mozart and Beethoven is unthinkable. Around the time of that shattering performance of "Salome" in Graz, the audience began to split apart. Composers were no longer addressing humanity; they were writing for a subculture. Strauss was among the first to see it happening. He may even have thought about it on the morning after "Salome" as the rain pattered on the terrace and he remembered the young men who called themselves his admirers.

11/27/06,5/14/07

I wonder where they come from, all your brilliant
apercus. Are they from hindbrain that's resilient
to trauma, and remains alive when we're in coma,
or is the midbrain source of every verbal homer,
not striking out when putting thoughts in motion,
beyond the bleachers brimming with emotion.
I doubt that they are from the left side of the brain,
because they lack its logic, and appear insane
at times, which might suggest their origin's the right
side of the brain, the one that gives an artist sight
beyond constraints of logic that you find confining,
when writing apercus, confirmed sometimes by signing.
But there's another possibility one should
consider. I'm referring to the site that bridges
the left side to the right, the place where wizard witches
stir cauldrons with ingredients that say: "Just connect! "
It is the corpus that's callosum, I suspect,
where you are privileged to find your apercus,
though sometimes, please admit, it's I who give you clues.

Inspired by Linda who has recent been feeling tremors with her seismographic left leg and now believes that she is feeling them on the right side of her brain. Jezebel is prepared to give her a PET scan.

11/29/06

From Hart Crane the title,
though given by Martha
to Aaron's recital;
there's nothing he'd rather
have chosen. Entrancing
the music, that smiling,
has beats that keep dancing,
and spring while beguiling.

Denis Bartel on KUSC this morning played a recording of Aaron Copeland describing how he came to write "Appalachian Spring". The work was commissioned by Martha Graham but when he played it for her six months later he told her he had no title for it. "Appalachian Spring, " she said, and told him that that phrase appears in a poem by Hart Crane:
O Appalachian Spring! I gained the ledge;
Steep, inaccessible smile that eastward bends
And northward reaches in that violet wedge
Of Adirondacks!

1/10/08