Revels With Devils Poem by gershon hepner

REVELS WITH DEVILS


Neat moralistic bows should not tie up
all ends of the stories that we love to hear:
there are devils around, and it's great fun to sup
with many of them. Blow a flea in the ear
of those who expect to hear only of revels
whose endings are happy, join them, and rejoice
in disasters befalling not only on devils
but good guys whenever they've made a bad choice
on the merry-go-round we call life, where the ladders
are ones from which we are all destined to fall,
not recovering once we've been bitten by adders,
happy endings to tales that are true not at all
convincing to children whose minds are made giddy
by fairy tale endings they no more believe in
as you recall you did when you were a kiddie.
Though devils today are still into deceivin',
they don't deceive children in ways they once did;
between them and our children there's mutual respect
for feelings on which you cannot put a lid,
although moralistically far from correct.
The wild things are out in the wild, to exclude
them from company that we consider polite
not an option except for those men who delude
themselves, dark in the daylight as night.

Margalit Fox writes an obituary on Maurice Sendak in the NYT,5/9/12:

Maurice Sendak, widely considered the most important children's book artist of the 20th century, who wrenched the picture book out of the safe, sanitized world of the nursery and plunged it into the dark, terrifying and hauntingly beautiful recesses of the human psyche, died on Tuesday in Danbury, Conn. He was 83….
In book after book, Mr. Sendak upended the staid, centuries-old tradition of American children's literature, in which young heroes and heroines were typically well scrubbed and even better behaved; nothing really bad ever happened for very long; and everything was tied up at the end in a neat, moralistic bow….
Despite its wild popularity, Mr. Sendak's work was not always well received. Some early reviews of "Where the Wild Things Are" expressed puzzlement and outright unease. Writing in Ladies' Home Journal, the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim took Mr. Sendak to task for punishing Max:
"The basic anxiety of the child is desertion, " Mr. Bettelheim wrote. "To be sent to bed alone is one desertion, and without food is the second desertion." (Mr. Bettelheim admitted that he had not actually read the book.)
"In the Night Kitchen, " which depicts its young hero, Mickey, in the nude, prompted many school librarians to bowdlerize the book by drawing a diaper over Mickey's nether region.
I sent this poem to Andrei Codrescu, whom I compared to Maurice Sendak. His response was:
I do appreciate it, and flattered by your Sendak analogy. I just don't want to die right now, ok? Can I publish your poems in my secret magazine, Exquisite Corpse? Go to corpse.org, click on big NO and it will open for you - it's various, sophisticated, goofy, and fun. Andrei

5/9/12 #10142