Turning On A Paradigm Poem by gershon hepner

Turning on a paradigm,
I have tried extremely hard
to be godly in my rhyme,
hoping to be avatarred,
but it’s sad to say my ratin’
ain’t as high as I’d have liked,
since a “get behind me, Satan, ”
always seems to have me psyched.

Maybe I should free my verses,
liberating them to search,
unparalleled, for universes
where I may be read in church,
paradigm made avatar
in a world made free of rhyme,
and regarded as a star,
interest rated over prime.

This poem was inspired by two articles. Last night I read Daniel Mendelsohn’s review of Sophia Coppola’s “Marie Antoinette” in the New York Review of Books. He writes:
It's easy to see how Sofia Coppola, with her artistic interest in the emotional lives of troubled young women forced to choose between inner impulses and external obligations, would have been moved by the sympathetic presentation of the Queen's hapless life in Fraser's somewhat revisionist biography, and would choose it as the subject of her next film—a period film about a subject very much alive for this particular filmmaker. And, it would seem, very much alive to the general public, as suggested not only by the ongoing stream of biographies, novels, films, and documentaries about Antoinette, but by the intense emotional reaction to her most recent avatar, Princess Di: another clueless, well-intentioned teenager married off into a cynical court who found distraction first in spendthrift excess and devotion to fashion, and then in motherhood and an attempt to find some serious and private satisfaction in a life that had to be lived in the public eye; another woman, heedless and foolish at first, who seemed to achieve some real distinction as a person only at the time of her death, in shockingly violent circumstances, in her late thirties.
This made me think about what avatars are. This morning in the LA Times, Mike Bresnahan quoted the Clipper forward Elton Brand regarding Kobe Bryant’s role stellar role in the defeat of the Clippers. “They got a lot of offensive rebounds and turnovers, you just can’t do that. And then down the stretch, when you’ve got a guy like Kobe who can hit the big shots, you just can’t put yourself in that position.

And I wondered what does “you’ve got a guy like Kobe” actually mean? How does it differ from: “You’ve got Kobe”? And the answer clearly is that Kobe has become a paradigm and an avatar, representing an abstract ideal of basketballdom rather than a flesh and blood basketball player.



11/22/06