Sad And Empty Poem by gershon hepner

Sad and empty, having finished
something long, I now report
I don’t think I’ll feel diminished
if I now write something short.
If I add another line
to this poem it will be
too long, so I will now confine
myself by being kind to me
and you, and ending this brief verse
with this line and two others. Three
should be enough to end the curse
of being empty, sad but free.
You may choose not to listen, I
now in four more to go must add.
It’s longer than I hoped, but try
to bear with me, for I am sad.

Inspired by David Foster Wallace’s description of his feelings when he had completed a long book, as I have also recently done (D.T. Max, “The Unfinished: David Foster Wallace’s attempt to surpass “Infinite Jest, ” The New Yorker, March 9,2009) :

“Infinite Jest, ” which came out almost a decade after “Broom, ” was a vast investigation into America as the land of addictions: to television, to drugs, to loneliness. The book comes to center on a halfway-house supervisor named Don Gately, a member of Alcoholics Anonymous, who, with great effort, resists these enticements. “What’s unendurable is what his own head could make of it all, ” Gately thinks near the end. “But he could choose not to listen.” Through the example of Gately, “Infinite Jest” offered readers an oblique form of counsel, but Wallace had mixed feelings about the book. The critic James Wood cited “Infinite Jest” as representative of the kind of fiction dedicated to the “pursuit of vitality at all costs.” At times, Wallace felt the same way. “I’m sad and empty as I always am, when I finish something long, ” Wallace wrote to Franzen, shortly before the book’s publication. “I don’t think it’s very good—some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.”

3/7/09