Free Poem by gershon hepner

A line of Pollock dips and slides and skitters,
while bringing joy to every Pollock fan,
so why should mine cause sniggering and titters
by people so unschooled they cannot scan?
My words, I think, are surely as spontaneous
as paint that on the Hamptons used to drip,
so don’t leave me to hang, for I’m as zany as
a dominatrix who has lost her whip.
My lines, like Pollock’s, often may seem spattered.
like my allusions here to B and D,
but when ideas chaotically are scattered
it lets the paradigms in prisons free.

Alexandra Peers (WSJ, August 9,2006, “Summer Art Mystery: Who Painted Those ‘Pollocks’? ’”) writes about a cancelled exhibition of paintings at the Guild Hall museum in East Hampton. It had been planned to exhibit paintings purported to be by Jackson Pollock discovered by Alex, the son of Herbert and Mercedes Matter in a storage locker in Wainscott, NY. Although the trove was declared authentic by Ellen Landau, a professor of art history at Case Western Reserve University, there is considerable skepticism about this opinion. Alexandra Peers writes:

The real issue I, of course, what the works look like. While Jackson Pollock became famous for his chaotic, splattered art, a good Pollock sings. When you pick a line, or a color, and try to follow as it dips and skitters and slides along the canvas, it produces a meditative state, a smile, even excitement. Critics of the Matter Pollocks say the colors are too bright, the movement too flat, the lines too cramped for them to be genuine Pollocks.

7/9/06