Swashbuckling Poem by gershon hepner

Demanding either ahs or chuckles,
I am an artist who swashbuckles,
performing before ears that hear,
and eyes that read, what is most dear
to the magician in me, sleight
of mouth with which I gravitate
above the ground of common sense,
beyond the past and present tense,
by twisting words like wires Calder
once twisted, and the authors Alter
has found in many Bible tales
twist words as if they were entrails,
serious topics that with whimsy
fligh high with fancies that sound flimsy.

Without ifs or ans or buts
my poems, aiming for the guts,
have spirals echoing the mobiles
of Calder, with phonetic foibles
I hope the reader will enjoy
as if they were a mobile toy
whose batteries won’t fall apart
unless they’re battered by your heart.

Holland Cotter reviews an exhibition of the work of Alexander Calder (The Paris Years,1926-33) in the Whitney Museum (“Calder at Play: Whimsy in Simple Wire, ” NYT, October 17,2008) : :
Calder didn’t start out with ambitions to be an artist; if anything, he was pulled in the opposite direction. He watched his father, a professional sculptor, fret over commissions and struggle with money. So when it came time for college the young Calder chose an engineering school in New Jersey over art school. But of course he was an artist, a natural. He may just not have known at first what that meant. Even as a child he was astonishingly inventive. The tiny figure of a rocking-horse-style bird shaped from brass sheeting is, for economy of form and conceptual daring, one of the more radical works in the show. He made it when he was 11. He made stuff all the time. He was one of those people with nonstop eyes and hands: every scrap of stray matter was a candidate for transformation. Give him some wire, clothespins and a scrap of cloth and, presto chango, you had a bird or a cow or a circus clown: nothing, then something, which is what magic is. There’s a hyperactive pace to his early career. While working at engineering jobs after college, he was also drawing like crazy and designing toys. In 1923 he enrolled at the Art Students League to study painting; John Sloan and George Luks were his teachers. At the same time he took on illustrating gigs for publications like The New Yorker and The National Police Gazette. His academic drawings from the time are gauche and ordinary. The staying-still-in-a-studio they required obviously cramped his style. Much fresher is the dashed-off, manic-looking magazine work. And his Ash Can School-type paintings of New York scenes — a drunken party; a trip to the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus — have a gawky spark of life. Then there are his pen-and-ink drawings of zoo animals. They’re in a different category, almost by a different artist, one more relaxed and assured. Often done as one continuous line, they are like an effortlessly sophisticated form of penmanship. So are some of the openwork sculptures of bent and twisted wire that he began to experiment with at this time. In 1926, with all these balls in the air, he suddenly moved to Paris, because motion for him was a stimulant and because he felt that Paris was the hot place to be, which it was. With its crowded cafes, charged thinking, endless talking and jumpy personalities, the city was hyperkinetic. Calder fell in love with it. And, although he continued to return to New York for long stretches, he made Paris his home base for seven years. His wire sculpture took off there. Several examples in the form of portrait heads are the first thing you see when you step off the elevator on the Whitney’s fourth floor. They’re an arresting sight, in a gently wow-inspiring way. Wows were what Calder was after, along with chuckles and satisfied ahs. He was a showman, a performer. “See what I can do, right before your eyes, without even trying? ” his art seems to say.

10/17/08