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Documentaries have always inspired me in narrative filmmaking.

quote by Griffin Dunne
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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….
“Obama’s election marked a shift — from a politics that celebrated privatized concerns to a politics that recognized the need for effective government and larger public purposes. Across the political spectrum, people understood that national renewal requires big ambition, and a better kind of politics, ” said the Harvard political theorist Michael Sandel, author of the new best seller — “Justice: What’s the Right Thing to Do? ” — that calls for elevating our public discourse. But to deliver on that promise, Sandel added, Obama needs to carry the civic idealism of his campaign into his presidency. He needs a narrative that will get the same voters who elected him to push through his ambitious agenda — against all the forces of inertia and private greed. “You can’t get nation-building without shared sacrifice, ” said Sandel, “and you cannot inspire shared sacrifice without a narrative that appeals to the common good — a narrative that challenges us to be citizens engaged in a common endeavor, not just consumers seeking the best deal for ourselves. Obama needs to energize the prose of his presidency by recapturing the poetry of his campaign.”

11/1/09

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.

Inspired by Benedict Carey, who writes about narratives we tell of our lives (“This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It, ” NYT, May 22,2007) :

For more than a century, researchers have been trying to work out the raw ingredients that account for personality, the sweetness and neuroses that make Anna Anna, the sluggishness and sensitivity that make Andrew Andrew. They have largely ignored the first-person explanation — the life story that people themselves tell about who they are, and why. Stories are stories, after all. The attractive stranger at the airport bar hears one version, the parole officer another, and the P.T.A. board gets something entirely different. Moreover, the tone, the lessons, even the facts in a life story can all shift in the changing light of a person’s mood, its major notes turning minor, its depths appearing shallow. Yet in the past decade or so a handful of psychologists have argued that the quicksilver elements of personal narrative belong in any three-dimensional picture of personality. And a burst of new findings are now helping them make the case. Generous, civic-minded adults from diverse backgrounds tell life stories with very similar and telling features, studies find; so likewise do people who have overcome mental distress through psychotherapy. Every American may be working on a screenplay, but we are also continually updating a treatment of our own life — and the way in which we visualize each scene not only shapes how we think about ourselves, but how we behave, new studies find. By better understanding how life stories are built, this work suggests, people may be able to alter their own narrative, in small ways and perhaps large ones. “When we first started studying life stories, people thought it was just idle curiosity — stories, isn’t that cool? ” said Dan P. McAdams, a professor of psychology at Northwestern and author of the 2006 book, “The Redemptive Self.” “Well, we find that these narratives guide behavior in every moment, and frame not only how we see the past but how we see ourselves in the future.” Researchers have found that the human brain has a natural affinity for narrative construction. People tend to remember facts more accurately if they encounter them in a story rather than in a list, studies find; and they rate legal arguments as more convincing when built into narrative tales rather than on legal precedent.

5/22/07

poem by Gershon Hepner
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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.

12/8/08

poem by Gershon Hepner
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I hope that not only my documentaries, but everybody's documentaries, last. It will really confuse historians in the next century, because they'll have, in addition to all the print material, they'll have all these pictures to look at.

quote by Frederick Wiseman
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One of the reasons to do documentaries is that. There's more sense of creating something, more sense of my own soul in the documentaries than in movies, because I don't write the movies I do.

quote by Michael Apted
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The difficulty with the present state of affairs is that there is no legislation on the sources of funding for the Polish film industry. There is no legislation concerning filmmaking. And, there is no legislation on television that would be beneficial to filmmaking.

quote by Andrzej Wajda
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A novelty in Polish filmmaking was that it was possible to find funds for a big production. However, at the same time, the state budget committed less and less money to filmmaking.

quote by Andrzej Wajda
Added by Lucian Velea
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Typhoon

typhoons are not that strong
sometimes
they behave like
critics, passing by an
island, saying, hey you
are not an island after
all, you are just a hill
fit for a Bollywood
scene

I am in that island
feeling some itch
of its breeze, but i was too
busy then
climbing one
of the narrative trees
there

and he asks
is there such a thing
as a narrative tree?
i crack the nut
and drink the clouds
there
and he is filled with
so much
awe,
he gets itchy
and scratches
all the skins
and even the bones
he rattles like
a snake
and wants to bite

the narrative tree
has everything
to offer
gentle, and soft
and conversational

but he wants to deny
this kind of tree
saying
there is no such
thing as that
and this

oh my, what a man
he is

[...] Read more

poem by Ric S. Bastasa
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Wayang Kulit

the unique world of myths
symbols and religious beliefs
most difficult to understand

the puppet master, or dalang
tells his story by projecting
the shadows of the puppets

he manipulates behind
a white screen and a large lamp
he plays several characters at once
basically an epic narrative

shifting from Old-Javanese
to the High-Balinese
singing and hitting a box
to mark the rhythm

a good dalang
is a one-man-show
being in turns smart
funny and melancholic

borrows the frame
of his narrative
from the great epics
of Indo-Javanese tradition

the Ramayana
the Mahabharata
although other stories
may sometimes be used

he then creates his own episodes
usually concerning a hero's quest
for a magical weapon, heavenly secret or partner

the hero, accompanied by buffoons
succeeds eventually after tortuous adventures
in the wilderness and fights with evil giants

the two sets of puppets
the heroes on the right
the villains on the left
symbolise eternal struggle
between good and evil

but for the audience
dalang's ability to poke fun
at everyone through mouths

[...] Read more

poem by Ahmad Shiddiqi
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Am Inspired, Are You?

inspiration is not desired
to be inspired
it is discovered
and authored
it is rewarded
and guarded
by the power to live
the hour to give
an inspired
soul a sense to express,

so, i am inspired
now,
are you?
if so,
spread your wings
and fly
within you,
reach out your hands
and touch the sky
(and beyond)

stay motivated
and inspired...

if not, ask why not yourself?
why not you inspired from yours' sense?

poem by Onalethuso Petruss Ntema
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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.

3/13/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Deeds And Relationships

Deeds that you perform have life
like living beings. Every action
is virtually the deed’s midwife
whose job is to prevent retraction
of something that may either lead
to benefit or punishment,
the punishment part of the deed,
like an investment, spent
long after it has been performed.

We reap from deeds what we have sown
not as a measure made for measure,
but because the deed has grown,
and finally provides displeasure
if the deed was wrong, and when
correct and virtuous can provide
a benefit like interest men
deserve––and God does not deride.

Relationships are forms of deeds––
we reap what’s sown in them, the joy
or pain that they provide not seeds
but capital that we enjoy.
For what is wrong in them we must
not judge, but must remember they
are built with tendencies to bust,
like people whom God built from clay.

Inspired by Klaus Koch’s explanation of retribution (“Is there a Doctrine of Retribution on the Old Testament? ” in James L. Crenshaw, ed. Theodicy in the Old Testament (Philadelphia: Fortress Press,1983) ,57–87, p.59, cited in Vince Endris, “Yahweh versus Baal: A Narrative-Critical Reading of the Gideon-Abimelech Narrative, ” JSOT 33(2008) : 173–95, p.187. Endris writes:

While modern views tend to believe that actions are judged (by Yahweh) either good or bad according to a previously established norm, in the Israelite understanding there was no ‘norm’ and actions were not judged. Rather, there was a built-in and inherent connection between an action and its consequences’. Yahweh’s role, then, is not as a judge who ‘deals out reward and punishment on the basis of an established norm, but rather somewhat like a “mid-wife who assists at birth” by facilitating the completion of something which previous human action had already set into action’.

1/21/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Girl And Gun

“All that you need is a girl and a gun
if you making a film, ” said Jean-Luc Godard.
In the dark with a girl you can have as much fun
as a guy who’s been laid in a film that is noir,
but if, when you switch on the light, you discover
the girl isn’t loaded, walk out of the trailer,
and if she complains that you’ve been a bad lover,
take out a revolver with which you can nail her.

Inspired by Manohla Dargis’s review of Gustav Deutsch’s “Film 1st, a Girl & an Gun” in the December 2,2009 NYT (“The Old Clips, A Paradise Found and Lost”) :
“To make a film, ” Jean-Luc Godard once memorably said, “all you need is a girl and a gun.” (A little money helps.) In “Film Ist. a Girl & a Gun, ” the Austrian director Gustav Deutsch complicates this witty, deceptively simple formula with a wealth of found footage (material shot by others for other purposes) borrowed from film archives from around the world. As the title suggests, there are girls (voluptuous, ecstatic, threatened) and there are guns (hard, phallic, threatening) along with something of a narrative. If the narrative that Mr. Deutsch has created is rather less thrilling than his mostly silent and often glorious images, this is nonetheless a story well worth considering, and watching. Using material gathered from the likes of the Imperial War Museum (in Britain) and the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction (at Indiana University) , he has fashioned something of an origin story about cinema itself. It’s a tale that begins with an unidentified image of a woman in buckskin shooting at some targets and ends with a cowboy bandit pointing his gun at the camera, an image appropriated from Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 short, “The Great Train Robbery, ” one of the most famous in cinema history. Tucked between these loaded images, as it were, is a vision of cinematic paradise, found and lost.
Tumult of a kind pursues the shooting woman (nothing new there) in the form of a mesmerizing, mysterious shot of what looks like an archery target in flames and some text (“at the first Chaos came to be”) from “Theogony, ” an epic Greek poem by Hesiod about the origin of the world. The archery target gives way to fiery orange images of billowing smoke and some electronic thrumming. (The intermittent score tends to underscore the obvious.) The thrumming turns to droning, the smoke turns to lava, followed by more Hesiod (“wide-bosomed earth”) , a woman with bountiful breasts, “Paradeisos” (Greek for paradise) and naked beachfront frolickers…
Women turn out to be the fly in the ointment in “a Girl & a Gun.” (“Dead flies cause the ointment of the apothecary to send forth a stinking savor” or so it says in Ecclesiastes.) Among the many images that follow, many beautifully and floridly tinted, are sleeping, dreaming and fornicating clothed and unclothed women. In one early section, a woman drowsing in a steam room seems to dream of both an undulating jellyfish and a swimming man. In another section, a woman watches a man spin four strange dials hidden behind a cabinet, as if he were initiating her into a secret world. (On the soundtrack, you hear “she dies.”) A world, a subsequent shot suggests — of a woman reading a newspaper with the headline “Cine Monde” — that has been made from images…With “a Girl & a Gun, ” Mr. Deutsch brings in Eros and Thanatos to a seductive if familiar end.

12/2/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Plant An Apple Tree

Some people once to Martin Luther turned
and asked: “What would you do, sir, if you learned
the world would end tomorrow? ” to which he
replied: “Good question. Plant an apple tree.

If they would ask me the same question, I
would say: “Here’s what I’d do before I die.
I’d write a poem, which I would address
to God. Perhaps He hardly could care less
about my verses than He does about
the tree of Luther and can do without
them both, but I will challenge Him to find
a poem He can plant inside His mind.

James Newton Howard whose 'Defiance' score competed for an Academy Award has written a 19-minute orchestral piece that will premiere as part of the Pacific Symphony's annual American Composers Festival, beginning Thursday in Costa Mesa. Its inspiration came from a statement by Luther: , as Jon Burlingame reported in the LA Times, February 22,2009:

Howard reflected on the commission recently while seated at a keyboard in his Santa Monica studio. 'This is a soul-cleansing process for me, ' he said, 'to be able to write completely unrestricted, provide my own narrative and work with Carl St.Clair and an orchestra the caliber of Pacific Symphony.' Yet, he added, 'Having no restraints is liberating and terrifying. I can't hide behind a movie - the music will be evaluated on its own merits.' Howard felt he needed a narrative. He remembered a quote from Martin Luther: 'Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.' 'I was struck by the overwhelming positivity of that statement in the face of the possibility of the world ending, ' he said. 'The world is in deep crisis now in so many ways, I wanted it to be about grace in the face of tremendous difficulty. That's what inspired me to begin the piece.'

2/23/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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I'm Godless. I've had to make my God, and my God is narrative filmmaking.

quote by Darren Aronofsky
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The Restoration Of The Works Of Art In Italy

LAND of departed fame! whose classic plains
Have proudly echo'd to immortal strains;
Whose hallow'd soil hath given the great and brave
Daystars of life, a birth-place and a grave;
Home of the Arts! where glory's faded smile
Sheds lingering light o'er many a mouldering pile;
Proud wreck of vanish'd power, of splendour fled,
Majestic temple of the mighty dead!
Whose grandeur, yet contending with decay,
Gleams through the twilight of thy glorious day;
Though dimm'd thy brightness, riveted thy chain,
Yet, fallen Italy! rejoice again!
Lost, lovely realm! once more 'tis thine to gaze
On the rich relics of sublimer days.

Awake, ye Muses of Etrurian shades,
Or sacred Tivoli's romantic glades;
Wake, ye that slumber in the bowery gloom
Where the wild ivy shadows Virgil's tomb;
Or ye, whose voice, by Sorga's lonely wave,
Swell'd the deep echoes of the fountain's cave,
Or thrill'd the soul in Tasso's numbers high,
Those magic strains of love and chivalry:
If yet by classic streams ye fondly rove,
Haunting the myrtle vale, the laurel grove;
Oh ! rouse once more the daring soul of song,
Seize with bold hand the harp, forgot so long,
And hail, with wonted pride, those works revered
Hallow'd by time, by absence more endear'd.

And breathe to Those the strain, whose warrior-might
Each danger stemm'd, prevail'd in every fight;
Souls of unyielding power, to storms inured,
Sublimed by peril, and by toil matured.
Sing of that Leader, whose ascendant mind
Could rouse the slumbering spirit of mankind:
Whose banners track'd the vanquish'd Eagle's flight
O'er many a plain, and dark sierra's height;
Who bade once more the wild, heroic lay
Record the deeds of Roncesvalles' day;
Who, through each mountain-pass of rock and snow,
An Alpine huntsman chased the fear-struck foe;
Waved his proud standard to the balmy gales,
Rich Languedoc ! that fan thy glowing vales,
And 'midst those scenes renew'd the achievements high,
Bequeath'd to fame by England's ancestry.

Yet, when the storm seem'd hush'd, the conflict past,
One strife remain'd–the mightiest and the last!
Nerved for the struggle, in that fateful hour

[...] Read more

poem by Felicia Dorothea Hemans
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This Poem is Dedicated to Karen Carpenter....Nightengale of Our Times

She was an icon in her own time
She sang like a nightingale
With the sweetest of sounds
As it cascaded through the air
Her voice was more than anyone could say
She made you cry and laugh
As she sang her songs of old
The tunes and the melodies
That made me sing and dance
From one end of the house
To the other, singing, dancing
She inspired me to dance
She inspired me to sing
And her brother that wrote
The songs she sang
Inspired me to write
The rhymes and words
That I love so well
They worked as a team
They grew from strength to strength
And inspired so many to aspire
To be just like them

poem by Kaila George
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Mile High

West of the Mississippi
Once the stronghold of the Sioux
A stranger swaggers by
His spirit glowing through and through
Inspired by a vision
A journey back in time
Where warriors were nurtured
And eagles soared miles high
A vivid apparition
Lodged deep within his mind
A people trapped in bondage
Reluctant witnesses to a tragic and staggering genocide
Voices in the distant
Wailing so profound
Until a silent whisper
Thundered from the clouds
………..“In the days my daddy wandered
Through concrete jungles
Thick with tundra
Vines of hate and blind resentments
Harvest tons of violent tensions
Clothes still soaked with perspiration
From crippling loads of wage-less labor
………. So master says…….
Dress your wounds and mourn your love ones
Hold on to faith and seek religion”…………..
He journeys back to the present
Focused, determine, motivated and inspired
Reaching down for the straps on his worn and dusty boots
As strategic social shackles stymies growth and desire
On each and every corner, every pulpit, and every soapbox
The onus of change is placed upon the victims
While the illusions of prosperity escapes the masses
The valiant are crucified and ridiculed for exposing the system
How do we repair the countless disorders that afflict us?
How do we heal wounds that have never been cleaned?
If we are truly citizens, are not all Americans responsible for our burdens?
How can we repair something that requires a national theme?
Our ills are America’s ills
Our failures are America’s failures
They are “the tragic result of slavery, racism, and segregation”
As so eloquently stated by Martin Luther King
This nation, built on the backs of slaves
Has a tremendous debt to its victims
Instead we have inspired legislation
For every other entity to manipulate the system
1.6 Billion in reparations to Japanese Americans
Casinos and Gambling right to the descendants of Native Americans
Over 3 Billion a year in aid to Israel
And Prison cells, institutionalize racism, and second class citizenship for African Americans

[...] Read more

poem by Mustafa Marconi
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Kara Mustafa

Retreating from the gates of Wien,
capital of empire holy, Roman,
Kara Mustafa next was seen
in Belgrade. Like a woman
degendered by defeat he raised
no skirt to show his legs but beard,
exposing to the ones who gazed.
his throat. Though other men have feared
their executioners, Mustafa
presented to the silk garotte
his skin just like an orange Jaffa
ready to be peeled. The knot
was tied around his neck, he died,
and dying thus proved heroic
that in his life. Mustafa sighed,
but laughed, because he died a stoic,
to the executioner presenting
with ease, without complaint, a throat
that never wasted time lamenting
his fortune, though scaped like a goat.

Inspired by a review of “The Enemy at the Gate” by Andrew Wheatcroft, reviewed by Eric Ormsby in the NYT Book Review on June 14,2009 (“Empires in Collision: In the 17th century, Habsburgs and Ottomans clashed over the city of Vienna”) :
Wheatcroft, the author of several earlier books on both Habs¬burgs and Ottomans, states that he set out here to portray the Ottoman “face of battle, ” borrowing a phrase from the classic work by John Keegan, and in this he succeeds; his narrative is thrilling as well as thoughtful, a rare combination. Even so, a subtle imbalance prevails. The Ottomans inspired dread in their enemies; fear was part of their arsenal. But, as Wheatcroft repeatedly demonstrates, the Habsburgs were fearsome too, and perhaps even crueler than their opponents, engaging not only in full-scale massacres but in flayings, beheadings and impalements. Perhaps because Wheatcroft hasn’t drawn on Ottoman Turkish sources, his Ottomans, for all his skill at depicting them, appear oddly imperturbable. After Kara Mustafa’s debacle before the walls of Vienna, he retreated to Belgrade; there, on Christmas Day 1683, he greeted the sultan’s executioners, kneeling with “stoic Ottoman calm, ” and even courteously lifting his beard to expose his throat to the silk garrote. The story is legendary, and Wheatcroft recounts it well. Still, here as elsewhere, we’d like to hear the fierce heart beating beneath the legend.

6/17/09

poem by Gershon Hepner
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Of the individual poems, some are more lyric and some are more descriptive or narrative. Each poem is fixed in a moment. All those moments written or read together take on the movement and architecture of a narrative.

quote by Marilyn Hacker
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