Resonance Of Reticence Poem by gershon hepner

When paying Genesis we visit
I think we get a better sense
by listening to its reticence
than hearing what it makes explicit.

A picture isn’t always worth
a thousand words, mere resonance
not only has more elegance,
but lifts us up, not down, to earth.


Inspired by Robert Alter’s review of R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis” in TNR, October 21,2009 (“Scripture Picture”) , where Alter writes:

Crumb’s Genesis is a bold undertaking, and many readers will be grateful for the many delights afforded by its visual inventiveness. But every artistic medium takes advantage of its own resources, and these ancient Hebrew stories use the resonance and reticence of well-chosen words to proliferate possibilities of meaning, and to crate access to the inner zone of human experience in multifarious ways. They cannot be pinned down, which is one of the sources of their power and their beauty.


10/17/09