September 11,2009 Poem by gershon hepner

September 11,2009

Rating: 5.0


Blake listed as his primary residence
imagination, where eternal and real,
collide, providing both a certain sense
that nobody can see or smell or feel.
I share this residence with him and burn
just like his tiger in a mental night
where symmetries that others can’t discern
seem obvious to me in that bright light
that only the imagination can
provide, because the real unlit is dark
unless illuminated by the talisman
provided by imagination’s spark
that helps us to connect the ruin of the state
to dogs that starve, and horses we misuse,
and hares we hunt, and what this very date
occurred eight years ago, no longer news
we bother with, unless, as we
should do, we use imagination to
interpret what is real though we can’t see
the sense for which it is the crucial cue.


Inspired by an article by Holland Cotter on an exhibition on William Blake’s world, featuring the Milton-inspired “mirth, ” at the Morgan Library and Museum (“The Palace of Imagination, ” NYT, September 11,2009) :
William Blake — artist, poet and irritated ecstatic — listed as his primary residence the Imagination, a combination of creative command post and psychological refuge where, as he put it, the eternal and the real meet. William Blake — artist, poet and irritated ecstatic — listed as his primary residence the Imagination, a combination of creative command post and psychological refuge where, as he put it, the eternal and the real meet. The place you might actually run into him, though, was London, where he was born in 1757 and spent nearly his whole life. Within the city he changed homes many times but found that each new one was much like the last. Wherever he ended up, it seemed he knew the neighbors. Always there was the old man upstairs with a Jehovah beard and a voice like a whirlwind, and always the young rebel in the basement with no good on his mind. All pubs he frequented had the same clientele. Socrates would dropp in one day, Michelangelo the next. John Milton and the prophet Isaiah were regulars. Blake would sit, take notes and sketch portraits until the archangel Gabriel showed up and nudged him back home to work. Blake didn’t mind the nudges. He lived to work, and he produced a lot: engravings, drawings, watercolors and handmade books of a gemlike funkiness. A substantial selection of this material is in the show “William Blake’s World: ‘A New Heaven Is Begun’ ” at the Morgan Library & Museum. Drawn entirely from the Morgan’s collection, it gets the fall season off to a transporting start. There are many ways to think of Blake, probably none completely right, none entirely wrong. He was one of art’s great visionaries; he was an ingeniously quirky small-time illustrator. He was a political radical who despised politics and a social reformer who verged on being a sociopath. His moral thinking could be prescriptive but also munificent: all power was corrupting, no form of sexual love was a sin. His empathy with the sentient world was profound and interconnective:
A dog starv’d at his master’s gate
Predicts the ruin of the state.
A horse misu’d upon the road
Calls to heaven for human blood.
Each outcry of the hunted hare
A fiber from the brain doth tear.

9/11/09

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