Allowing Spaces To Be Blank Poem by gershon hepner

Allowing spaces to be blank
creates a hidden presence for
the inspiration you can draw
by drawing from the mind,
a bank in which the thoughts you stored
lie unproductively, and find
ideas that you had left behind,
to be from blanks, when checked, restored.

Blank spaces are not solid, but
you’ll only find them if you dig,
researching them, a truffle pig
whose nose is sharp and mind not shut,
discovering within the hollow,
provided that your search is stolid,
the evidence you think is solid,
supporting views you chose to follow.

Inspired from a blog in the NYT in which I learned a new word, digg––digg.com, a user-driven news Web site, brings together hundreds of thousands of people to do the work of finding, submitting, reviewing and featuring news stories drawn from every corner of the Web––and was reminded about Willa Cather’s amazing story “The Sculptor’s Funeral, ” which, as the blogger points out, leaves blank spaces that create an “inexplicable presence”:
In Willa Cather's 'The Sculptor's Funeral, ' a train pulls up to a snowy Kansas town, carrying a coffin. The story is up now at Harper Perennial's site Fifty-Two Stories, which, as you might guess, will be posting a story a week all year long. So far, they've posted pieces by Mary Gaitskill, Louise Erdrich, Tom Piazza and Tony O'Neill, all contemporary authors with books from the publisher. Cather's story will be in their April collection 'The Bohemian Girl: Stories.' Originally published in 1905, the story can also be found elsewhere on the Internet, but the Fifty-Two Stories version is laid out well (and you can digg it) . After reading the minimalists that came later in the 20th century, a story like Cather's 'The Sculptor's Funeral' seems like it is naming pretty much everything. But it's interesting to look back and see where she was deliberately leaving blank spaces, creating an 'inexplicable presence' in the quiet form of the sculptor, whose imaginative art was lost on the place he called home.

© 2009 Gershon Hepner 2/20/09