Love Story Poem by gershon hepner

As news about myself I bring,
of Erich Segal now I sing.
He was a classicist in Yale
who wrote successfully a tale
of love, a story making him
extremely rich. It is my whim
to emulate him, God be will-
ing. I won’t read John Stuart Mill
while making love with you, but write,
in the middle of the night,
not blockbusters like Erich Segal,
but poems, far less full of treacle.
Although they’ll rarely mention death,
they’ll often make you hold your breath,
providing you far greater thrills
than Segals and John Stuart Mills,
providing you pay close attention
to dirty details, and dimension
of other things I have to offer,
which in some ways may fill your coffer,
and make sure that I do not perish
while emulating, poorly, Erich.
Erich Segal, a Yale classics professor turned popular writer whose first novel, “Love Story, ” became a staggering commercial success if not quite a critical one when it appeared in 1970, died on Sunday at his home in London. He was 72.The cause was a heart attack, his daughter Francesca said on Tuesday. Mr. Segal had been ill with Parkinson’s disease for 25 years. Published by Harper & Row, “Love Story” was the novelization of a yet-to-be-produced screenplay by Mr. Segal. It chronicled the fate of star-crossed lovers, the highborn Oliver Barrett IV and the working-class Jennifer Cavilleri, who meet at Harvard, fall in love and, over the strenuous objections of Oliver’s family, marry. She dies, he cries and the story ends. The novel spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list. It has sold tens of millions of copies and been translated into many languages. Released to great fanfare on the book’s coattails, the movie, starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw, appeared at the end of 1970. In a 2000 article, Variety called it “the first of the modern-day blockbusters, ” writing that it had grossed nearly $200 million and saved its studio, Paramount Pictures, “which was facing imminent destruction.”…
From the 1960s to the 1980s, Mr. Segal taught classics at Yale. He continued to work as a classicist long after he became a successful novelist, holding visiting professorships at Princeton, Oxford, the University of London and elsewhere. Mr. Segal first envisioned “Love Story” as a film. According to many published accounts, his screenplay was rejected by several studios as too sentimental for the time. Paramount urged him to release it as a novel first. The novel’s prose style ran from the telegraphic (“That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me.”) to what might easily be taken as comic (“ ‘Jenny, for Christ’s sake, how can I read John Stuart Mill when every single second I’m dying to make love to you? ’ ”)


1/20/10