Can'T You Hear The Screams? Poem by gershon hepner

Can’t you hear the screams that people all around
call silence, and ignore?
You could, perhaps, if you were open to their sound,
responding to their roar
as you might to ejaculations of white paint
that call for a response in red.
Respond to screams before their sound becomes as faint
as words you know you should have said.

Inspired by a report on a new exhibition of work by Francis Bacon at Tate Britain, and an e-mail from Joseph Greenberger urging people to respond to the silence that greeted the antisemitic ravings of President Ahmadinejad at the United Nations yesterday, when Hillary Clinton refused to appear at a demonstration against this genocidal policy because Sarah Palin had also been invited. Obama Michael Kimmelman, reviewing the Bacon exhibition in the NYT, September 25,2008, cites Karl Georg Büchner (“Old School Bad Boy’s Messy World”) :
Some really appalling late pictures, like a large triptych from 1976, which some squillionaire recently paid a fortune to buy, look horribly overstuffed with ugly heads and tired gimmicks, as if Bacon, worried he had exhausted the empty stretches of color he so often painted, didn’t know when to stop filling the canvas up. Whether, during these last decades, he came merely to parody himself, painting too slickly, is the only real subject of debate the exhibition has aroused. The answer is, yes, sometimes he did. All the same, he made, out of the blue, “Jet of Water, ” a great ejaculation of splashed white pigment, which looks stunning. Despite his blindness to pure abstraction — which, having a tendency toward decorativeness, he feared led only to empty gesture — he devised a Rothko-like picture, sinister and wry, called “Blood on Pavement.” Even the second version of that early triptych of figures at the base of a crucifixion turns out to have its own eloquence, almost daring a viewer to find it too beautiful. Cunning and self-conscious, glad to outrage, with the delicacy of those blurry but somehow distinct faces and electric palette, conjuring up Carnaby Street, his work translates quite easily to a new century. So does the sweaty sex and violence, luxuriant but couched in aloofness and girded, always, by grand allusions to old masters and learned texts. Karl Georg Büchner, the 19th-century German playwright, speaking of which, once asked a question that Bacon must have come across. “How, ” Büchner inquired, “can you not hear the terrible screams all around that we call silence? ” Through the popes and Willy Lomans and so much else that Bacon painted, they make this exhibition sing.



9/25/08