World's Greatest Listener Poem by gershon hepner

You’re the world’s greatest listener,
and not a farbisseneh,
unlike those dour creatures
whom Kleinzahler features,
describing New Jersey.
You always show mercy
to me, though fact checker
on all of my pecker
peccadillos, resolving
to go on absolving
my faults, though they’re major.
My words I don’t plagiar-
ize, no need, their mine,
and yet you say, “Fine! ”
whenever you listen,
not ever farbissen.

D’you know of my latest
adventures, the greatest
of shondes I’ve ever
committed? How clever
of you to forgive me.
I hope you’ll outlive me,
and hear the confessions
of those whose professions
aren’t poetry. Rhyming
resonates with two-timing,
and you need a fellow
who’s meek, mild and mellow,
who only needs e-mails
to make love with females,
and doesn’t need eartime,
for week, month or year time,
and won’t make you listen,
till you are farbissen.

Inspired by a review by Marjorie Perloff of the poems of August Kleinzahler’s latest poems, “Sleeping It Off in Rapid City, ” in the TLS, July 15,2008:

Compared to the sheer, unrelieved ugliness of Kleinzahler’s New York, the London of T. S. Eliot’s Waste Land seems almost pastoral. In his recent Paris Review interview, Kleinzahler declares himself to be indebted to Basil Bunting, and, behind Bunting, to those great Modernists Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. But neither Pound at his most vituperative nor Williams, surveying the “waste of broad, muddy fields” of New Jersey (his native state, as it is Kleinzahler’s) , has produced a body of writing in which disgust, nastiness, and revulsion loom as large as they do in poems like “Meat”, or, for that matter, in Kleinzahler’s prose memoir Cutty, One Rock (2005) . Take the following send-up of Garrison Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac:
'But I, for one, have never in my lifetime seen the situation of poetry in this country more dire or desperate. Nor is the future promising. Cultural and economic forces only suggest further devastation of any sort of vital literary culture.... What little of real originality is out there is drowning in the waste products spewing from graduate writing programs like the hog farm waste that recently overflowed its holding tanks in the wake of Hurricane Isabel, fouling the Carolina countryside and poisoning everything in its path.'
Waste products again. Never mind that Kleinzahler has held visiting professorships in some of these gradute writing programs. In principle, he is allergic to such institutions, as he is to the memory of his suburban childhood, dominated by Mother, a “frightful snob”, who “didn’t like children, least of all her won”, Father, whose “job was to make money, then lose it, make it again, except when he was reading the paper, which was filled with information how to make money”, and other relatives, such as Great-Uncle Ja-Ja, who “resembled an engorged frog with thick, black-rimmed glasses and smelled of gherkins”, and Grandmother Nancy Farbisseneh, “a tiny dour creature originally froma bog outside of Kiev”. In this “vomitorium”, “It was the dog who raised me through countless hours with the sagacity and bearing of a Ugandan tribal chief”.

7/15/08