Consolation Cannot Be The Prize Poem by gershon hepner

Sad and angry, consolation
cannot be the prize,
though neither zeal nor agitation
can help to amortize
the feelings of despair and grief,
or blow away the blues
when desperate with disbelief,
and sad from self-abuse.
Agitated with great zeal,
prizes in your grasp
are, when you’re sad and angry, real
as air that makes fish gasp.

My friend Barbara Burbanks, shocked by my poem “Autobiography, ” wrote to me: “You keep writing poems about sad relationships and sexless lives, ” so I decided to write an upbeat poem for a change, but this is what emerged. The poem, revised on 11/30/09, was inspired by words spoken on the BBC regarding the poet Christopher Hill, who was giving a lecture about “Coriolanus” in the Purcell Room of the Royal Festival Hall:
The American critic Hugh Kenner once criticised Geoffrey Hill's poems by saying that language should not be agonised over like Christianity is. It is, I think, Hill's distinction that in volume after volume from the early 'For the Unfallen' to the recent 'The Triumph of Love', he has shown not only how that agonising might take place, but has proved its necessity in our modern world of atrocity and horror amid the failure of adequate response by the professional religious. 'What is the poem? ' asked the narrative voice at the end of 'The Triumph of Love.' What figures? And the response that voice supplies is, 'say a sad and angry consolation.' The voice goes on, 'that's beautiful, once more a sad and angry consolation.'


11/28/00,11/30/09