Poet Lady Poem by gershon hepner

Impartial, loving, wise, serene,
poetess you are my lady,
showing like the newborn moon
my dark side, in your shelter shady.

You find me when I’m feeling lost,
controlling all my verse as muse,
while stimulating my testost-
erone whose force you don’t refuse.


Inspired by a review by Kate Christensen of Arthur Phillips’s novel “The Song is You” (“Always on my Mind, ” NYT Book Review, April 12,2009:
When the novel opens, Julian is a New York-based advertising director whose marriage has fallen apart after the death of his 2-year-old son. Aimlessly adrift in a snowstorm one night, he wanders into a Brooklyn bar and happens to hear a young Irish singer named Cait O’Dwyer: “She sang with her eyes closed, and her dark red hair fell over her face until she pushed it away with both hands.” Julian’s canny director’s eye fuses with his broken heart and turns him into not just a fan but a would-be muse. He stumbles home with her demo. The male muse is an unaccountably rare thing in art, with the exception of the men who inspired the likes of Auden and O’Hara — that is, men who were as sexualized and fetishized as their female counter¬parts, celebrated for their beauty and passivity. Where does that leave female artists looking for inspiration? Stranded, as Robert Graves recognized. “Woman is not a poet, ” he wrote in “The White Goddess.” “She is either muse or she is nothing.” And a woman who does write poetry “should be the visible moon: impartial, loving, serene, wise.” She has to serve as her own inspiration; she can’t find a man to do it for her. Phillips turns these conventions on their head and gives them a spin. Julian is no muse of passive beauty; he is the New Muse, a testosterone-driven, active muse who allows himself to be as affected by his artist as she is by him; he collaborates with her as much as he inspires her. At one of Cait’s gigs, he gives the bartender a series of coasters on which he has written his opinions of her performance. He knows she’s received them when she writes a song using one of his phrases, “Bleaker and Obliquer.” The game is on. Julian is the shadowy man in the back at her shows who sees her more clearly than anyone else; she’s the gorgeous, haunting singer whose songs always seem to alter his course in moments of crisis.


4/16/09