Prosaic Poem by gershon hepner

If poetry’s pronounced prosaic,
like Prozac thought to be archaic,
prescribed for those who are depressed,
with prose preferred by all the rest,
should I consider that I’m dated,
out-rhymed and out-alliterated
by cruel haters of all verse
who poetry pooh-pooh and curse,
especially the rhyming kind
to which prose preachers are unkind
more than to verse so free it looks
like prose that’s printed in their books?

Of course I’m dated, but so what?
Prose writer is what I am not
by birth or inclination, so forgive
the way I write so I can live
with meter, rhyme, and let me scan,
though I am an archaic man,
and keep you daily up to date
with verse that prose-pros love to hate.

Inspired by an article on Kurt Weill by Matthew Gurewitsch in the NYT on November 19 [“The Weill (Almost) Nobody Knows]. Gurewitsch writes about a revival of Weill’s “Maria Galante, ” which Weill wrote in Paris in 1934. It is written in the acid style that made “Threepenny Opera” such a success, and which he abandoned afer he emigrated to the United States. Acid style wsa to Weill what rhyme is to me:

Festive as the title may sound, “Marie Galante” — based on a novel by Jacques Deval — turns out to be a gritty shocker. It opened to mixed reviews on Dec.22,1934, when Weill was in Paris, on the run from the Nazis, and closed the first week of January 1935. (A Jewish cantor’s son, Weill was born in Germany in 1900. He got out just in time, in 1933. In 1935 he landed in New York, where he died in 1950.) A foundling and born sex kitten, Marie blossoms quickly, giving herself freely at first, just for pleasure. Then she starts taking money because she has to. When a ship captain dumps her in Panama, she lucks into higher fees spying but pays with her life.Mr. Clarac, the director, relates “Marie Galante” to a tradition of film noir that continued in France long past the war years, citing titles like “Le Quai des Brumes, ” “Pépé le Moko” and “Les Orgueilleux.” But it is also very much a product of its time and place. “The plays in Paris then were not nice and pink and sweet, ” Mr. Clarac said recently from Marie’s home port of Bordeaux, which is his home also. “The idea was that stories set in a very simple, poor, low-class milieu achieve a kind of universality. Everyone is kind of blasé, tired, washed out. There are no happy characters in ‘Marie Galante.’ Panama may sound exotic, but for those who live there, it is not. It’s superhot and superhumid, nobody has any money and everyone is in exile.” Several songs from “Marie Galante” popularized by Weill specialists like Teresa Stratas and Ute Lemper are sung not by Marie but by other drifters and misfits. The lyrics, by Deval and Roger Fernay, are rough stuff, conjuring nightmares of sexual degradation, mutilation, a boy-eating ogre, a train bound for glory and a fairy-tale king who cheats on the queen. Weill’s music gives them punch and edge and sometimes a desperate longing. His score also features a ravishing instrumental number, which Fernay at an unknown later date retrofitted with lyrics as “Youkali: Tango Habañera.” The vocal version was published in Paris in 1946. The New York production assigns it to Marie, an unauthorized choice but one that seems hard to fault. To Ms. Bayrakdarian the tango is “the song and dance of the common people, the oppressed and disadvantaged, helpless strangers in a strange land, desperately seeking escape.” “Marie embodies these qualities, ” Ms. Bayrakdarian continued. “She is fiery but inconsolable, always hoping for salvation, for Utopia. As for ‘J’Attends un Navire, ’ I believe the song is her mantra to distance herself from her harsh reality, the song she sings to herself every time she has a new customer.”

11/10/08