Icecaps On A Seismic Crack Poem by gershon hepner

Though icecaps on a seismic crack may melt,
and plates that are tectonic
erupt, give up your share of Schmertz of Welt,
and be instead ironic,
regarding ruefully forthcoming falls
from fortune and from fame
as signs and signals not for puts but calls.
Expect to win the game
that prophet punters are predicting you
will lose. The earth may quake
and icecaps melt, but that should be no cue
for worry, big mistake,
yes, even when all things go badly wrong,
because nobody will
despite their worries be around for long.
No one has time to kill!
Time kills all people, so the heat
and earthquake that you fear
should not make you unmerry. Drink and eat,
perhaps for one more year.

Inspired by an article by David Littlejohn on Robert Lepage, who is preparing a new production of Wagner’s “Ring” at the Metropolitan Opera (“…from the Visionary Robert Lepage”) :
New York's Metropolitan Opera has taken a major risk in hiring Robert Lepage to create its first new version in 23 years of Wagner's 'Der Ring des Nibelungen'—the most challenging work in the operatic repertoire. But if General Director Peter Gelb's gamble pays off, the company may be in for one of its greatest theatrical triumphs when 'Das Rheingold' premieres a year from now, and the Lepage cycle is presented complete in 2012. Last year, opera-goers in New York got to see Mr. Lepage's spellbinding version of Berlioz's 'Le Damnation de Faust' at the Met, which will be given seven more times this year. Not so much an opera as sequence of musical-dramatic scenes, 'Damnation' was given an intense and convincing unity it had probably never before revealed, thanks primarily to the fertile imagination and technological ingenuity of Mr. Lepage and his collaborators. Audio-visual techniques had been devised to alter the scenery (birds fly in different directions, projections and colors vary) as the volume, pitch and movements of the singers and orchestra change. This is surely an innovation Mr. Lepage will make use of in the 'Ring'—a perfect example of the integrated 'total art work' Wagner sought. In 2007, Mr. Lepage's Wild West version of Stravinsky's 'The Rake's Progress' was the most interesting work of the San Francisco Opera's season. He turned Tom Rakewell into a spoiled child of the Texas oilfields who meets Baba the Turk (a bearded beauty) at a Hollywood premiere, marries her and settles into a Malibu beach house, plays cards with the devil outside a shabby Las Vegas casino, and ends up broke and insane….
This genial genius tells me (in intimate, rapid, French-salted English) : 'My main inspiration [for [he Ring] is Iceland.... My first love is geography and geology, I go there a lot.... The Icelandic sagas were used by Wagner to force the mythic relation of Germany away from Greece and Mediterranean to its Nordic roots. Iceland is another planet. A world unto itself. It's a cauldron, a huge giant ice cap on top of a seismic crack. Whether it will last, we don't know. The ground is extremely hot, they don't even heat houses. You can swim in heated lakes in the snow. So when you go there, and you think of the 'Ring, ' you cannot think of the 'Ring' as the same world.'

10/22/09