The Top Ten Epigrams of All Time

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

It is better to light a candle than curse the darkness.—Eleanor Roosevelt

If you can't be a good example, you'll just have to be a horrible warning.—Catherine the Great

If life were fair, Elvis would be alive and his impersonators would be dead.—Johnny Carson

Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.—Oscar Wilde

To err is human, but it feels divine.—Mae West

An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.—Mohandas Gandhi

For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.—Virginia Woolf

I'm not offended by dumb blonde jokes because I'm not dumb, and also I'm not blonde.—Dolly Parton

He does not believe, who does not live according to his belief.—Sigmund Freud



In April 2014 A Poet’s Glossary by Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch was published. As Hirsch writes in the preface, “this book—one person’s work, a poet’s glossary—has grown, as if naturally, out of my lifelong interest in poetry, my curiosity about its vocabulary, its forms and genres, its histories and traditions, its classical, romantic, and modern movements, its various outlying groups, its small devices and large mysteries—how it works.” Each week we will feature a term and its definition from Hirsch’s new book.

epigram: From the Greek epigramma, “to write upon.” An epigram is a short, witty poem or pointed saying. Ambrose Bierce defined it in The Devil’s Diction­ary (1881–1911) as “a short, sharp saying in prose and verse.” In Hellenistic Greece (third century B.C.E.), the epigram developed from an inscription carved in a stone monument or onto an object, such as a vase, into a literary genre in its own right. It may have developed out of the proverb. The Greek Anthology (tenth century, fourteenth century) is filled with more than fifteen hundred epigrams of all sorts, including pungent lyrics on the pleasures of wine, women, boys, and song.

Ernst Robert Curtius writes in European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1953): “No poetic form is so favorable to playing with pointed and sur­prising ideas as epigram—for which reason seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Germany called it ‘Sinngedicht.’ This development of the epigram necessarily resulted after the genre ceased to be bound by its original defi­nition (an inscription for the dead, for sacrificial offerings, etc.).” Curtius relates the interest in epigrams to the development of the “conceit” as an aesthetic concept.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined the epigram in epigrammatic form (1802):

What is an epigram? A dwarfish whole;
Its body brevity and wit its soul.

The pithiness, wit, irony, and sometimes harsh tone of the English epigram derive from the Roman poets, especially Martial, known for his caustic short poems, as in 1.32 (85–86 B.C.E.): “Sabinus, I don’t like you. You know why? / Sabinus, I don’t like you. That is why.”

The epigram is brief and pointed. It has no particular form, though it often employs a rhymed couplet or quatrain, which can stand alone or serve as part of a longer work. Here is Alexander Pope’s “Epigram from the French” (1732):

Sir, I admit your general rule,
That every poet is a fool:
But you yourself may serve to show it,
That every fool is not a poet.

Geoffrey Hartman points out that there are two diverging traditions of the epigram. These were classified by J. C. Scaliger as mel and fel (Poetics Libri Septem, 1561), which have been interpreted as sweet and sour, sugar and salt, naïve and pointed. Thus Robert Hayman, echoing Horace’s idea that poetry should be both “dulce et utile,” sweet and useful, writes in Quodlibets (1628):

Short epigrams relish both sweet and sour,
Like fritters of sour apples and sweet flour.

The “vinegar” of the epigram was often contrasted with the “honey” of the sonnet, especially the Petrarchan sonnet, though the Shakespearean sonnet, with its pointed final couplet, also combined the sweet with the sour. “By a natural development,” Hartman writes, “since epigram and sonnet were not all that distinct, the pointed style often became the honeyed style raised to a higher power, to preciousness. A new opposition is frequently found, not between sugared and salty, but between pointed (precious, over­written) and plain.”

The sometimes sweet, sometimes sour, and sometimes sweet-and-sour epigram has been employed by contemporary American formalists, such as Howard Nemerov, X. J. Kennedy, and especially J. V. Cunningham. Here is a two-line poem that Cunningham translated in 1950 from the Welsh epi­grammatist John Owen (1.32, 1606):

Life flows to death as rivers to the sea,
And life is fresh and death is salt to me.

Excerpted from A Poet’s Glossary by Edward Hirsch. Copyright © 2014 by Edward Hirsch. Used by permission of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.



collected in
collection
A Poet’s Glossary
Each week we feature a new term from Academy Chancellor Edward Hirsch’...

I cannot forget...
אני לא יכול לשכוח

©  STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
12 Shevet 5778 / 28 January 2018
revised:
3 Iyyar 5758 / 28 April 2018
19 Iyyar 5778 / 4 May 2018
20 Iyyar 5778 / 5 May 2018
21 Iyyar 5778 / 6 May 2018

Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan' (1964):
'Forget the dead you've left, they
will not follow you'

W.G. Sebald z"l (1966):
'And so, they are ever returning to us,
the dead'

I.

the Path / derekh is silent,
a vacuum,
resonating with the
footsteps of tzaddikim, whose
teachings transcend(ed)
the Kingdom of Night...

where there was no longer
kefitzat ha'derekh
shrinking of the road
jumping the Path
teleportation.

...un die vvelt hot geshivign,
taught Reb Elie Wiesel z"l...
& the world remained silent.

not existing for themselves,
the tzaddikim speak with the
Shekhinah from their throats,
and the mar'ot johanna
visions of johanna
are witnessed by breslover
chavurot on desolation row,
murmurations of starlings
overhead.

listening to them, we survive
to walk / dorekh
the Path, with kabbalists z"l,
R. Chiyya & R. Yose,
the chevraya kadisha
the holy companions,
a derekh through the sea,

away from the energy vampyrism
& relentless phantasmagoric
cyberstalking of
the phantasmagoric Queene,
who engages in quacker
cross-contamination,
while prising her mindfully
plagiarising lips (a mirror image
of a death's-head hawk moth)
for a crucifictionist wafer:

a tax-deductible, copyright charity
deduction for ontological delusions
long after midnight,
clutching her cossetted Yehu'di
hatreds like
a perforated osculatorium,
because, שמח בחלקו.

    ****

Reb Uri Tzvi Greenberg z"l, 1923 [trans.
Michael Weingrad]:
'For so long there has been no water
in the wells. Only curses. ...& suddenly
the icons scream in Yiddish'.

II.

Light is the absence of Darkness,
to acknowledge Rav Rebecca
Newberger Goldstein.
& the holy slow train moves
(when it does)
sideways across flat earths.

consider the post-Auschwitz dilemma for
an opus dei natz'ri  who cannot grasp
the etymology:

prae / before + posterus / coming after
praeposterus / reversed, absurd.

did Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan' influence the
teachings of R. Yitzhak Luria z"l ?

III.

memories are stalking & ambuscading,
& as you said, Reb David Meltzer z"l,
'the Yehu'di in me is the ghost of me'...

& now the hourglass is invisible...

the windows of perception
to be peered into,
not out of,
as hairline fractures
develop in the retinas of narrow-ruled
yellow writing tablets masquerading
as frenetic mirrors,

never glimpsing tzefiyat ha'yeshu'ah,
the expectation of salvation.

& we are here,  
witnessing cyberian corpses
erecting three-way mirrors to their
obbligato and  mindfulness for girl
children...the mantras of a white
supremacist ****** ****** trained to
effect genocide  at a distance, his
audible hungering  for the  rapture  
of an endloesung in his drive-by
dark carnival, having no
farraginous self to say farewell to.

Lilith, the Midrash teaches, ate the
'bones' of Her enemies, but the
****** uses prayer beads as
majong ***** fired from his cap gun.

IV.

'she' stands on the bamboo porch,
thinking the lotus leaves floating by
are a reflexion of 'her' crumbling
totenkopfverbaende phantasies.

long after midnight, she shrieks to
a cyberian Mytilene, her mind so narrow,
thoughts are forced to crawl through her
fossilised ***** majora, which she identifies

as a personal luchot ha'edot, the glass
**** molded by her proboscis tongue,
as it fabricates yet another delusion
of a 1967 that never happened.

'she' turns, stepping onto an
embroidered nationalsozialist
matt,  'her'eyes a frail ambassador
of demure malice.

it is a moment such as this, when 'her'
desire of wanting to have been an
Auschwitz  Aufseherin, cannot be  
masqued  as a playful Latrodectus mactans.

ephemeral fabrications cling to 'her' --
an unbroken dance of impetuous
mirrors, as 'she' remains on the
porch, clutching 'her' 'we' aliases,

thinking, somehow, they are 'her'
aharon ha'bris...



V.

interlude / הַפסָקָה

Kafka z"l:
'I am divided from all things
by a hollow space'

Shabtai Zisel / 'Bob Dylan':
'I felt that place within, that
hollow place, where martyrs
weep, & angels play with sin'

Rav Yitzhak Luria z"l:
after tzimtzum,
the withdrawal of
'ehyeh 'asher 'ehyeh,
there came to be
halal ha'panui,
'the hollow space'

R. Shabbatai Sheftel ben
Akiva Horowitz z"l, 1719.
Shefa tal [Frankfurt edition]
3.5, 57b [Hebrew]:
'Before the world's bere'****,
'ayin sof withdrew into its essence,
from itself to itself within itself.
It left halal ha'panui within its
essence, in which it emanated
and created' [emended from Reb
Daniel Matt 1995]

VI.

sh'ma...'mir veln zey iberlebn, iberlebn, iberlebn'
(Lublin Chassidim z"l, 1939)...
hear: 'we shall outlive them, outlive them,
outlive them'...

why did R. Moshe Sofer z"l teach
'Chadush aser min ha'toray' / 'What
is new is forbidden in the Torah'?

the trolls here & what they call 'poetry':
collections of letters on a flickering
moon-glow  computer screen behind
a suburban curtain,
letters having no glyphs or sounds,
all encased in Sho'ah denial...

and yet. white supremacist sock monkeys
cannot silence the memories of the
thousands of Yehu'dit children z"l
burned alive on pyres, June-August 1944,
in the holy natz'ri village of Auschwitz,
in october country.

לעולם לא עוד לעולם לא עוד

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
...with thanks to my akhim / brothers & poets,
D.J. Carlile & George Dance & Will Dockery
for reading previous drafts...
...and to the memories z"l of David Meltzer 17 February 1937-31 December 2016
& Anthony Scaduto 7 March 1932-12 December 2017...chaver'im / friends
& for the 'or from R. Paul Laderman z"l &
R. Meyer Goldberg z"l

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
STEPHAN PICKERING / חפץ ח"ם בן אברהם
Torah אלילה Yehu'di Apikores / Philologia Kabbalistica Speculativa Researcher
לחיות זמן רב ולשגשג...לעולם לא עוד
THE KABBALAH FRACTALS PROJECT
לעולם לא אשכח



IN PROGRESS: Shabtai Zisel benAvraham v'Rachel Riva:
davening in the musematic dark

Far FAR from the world.... WORLD...
                       whorled my world

HERE condensed here con CON
                             con-densed dying densed

a **-HOme mmmme-me hewn in stone

Prison for prison pri pri pri sonnnn

here a drop of silence echoes
                          si lence sisisilensilensilense

pins pins pins dropped, trickling distant water
                                             trick-ling

in the pud-dle a mud-dle cal-led li-fe

a cave home, far away from home, is this

a noise of thoughts, rushing past
a gorge of silence.

how it was meant to be?

consuming homes in deluge, after the rains,

trickle silences, replaying lives, screened
all around in silken mists

lightning bolts prising open recesses dark.

We were probably thirteen. I told
my parents I'd be bowling, borrowed
five pounds and you
did the hard part. Asking men out-
side the off-licence to help us.
I tried to make if look like we were old-

er or together but it wasn't
long before we had the bottle
or six of Bacardi Breezer. Prising
each lid off with my keys,
you picked out seats from the dusk
deserted cricket stand.

A couple through, you showed me
how to put my hand in someone's pants
as sticky alcopops slopped
round and down again. I couldn't open
our last nightcap so we stamped
its neck against a brick and doubled up.

We didn't kiss goodbye, just
staggered into swaggers step
by step across the Common.
My mouth fizzed with syrup
residue and blood from broken
glass.

Next time
hatches will batten down,
slumbers start,
laces tied
and
cold proof coats dry
before loose leaves
struggle to stay.
Plans,
preparation against a season.
Until
blossom begins,
prising open hibernation curls
with the promise
of something.

Prising through the fog like creeping fingers
headlights approach slowly, glaring and foul
from beneath the obscurement of mist,
a demoniac engine gurgles and growls.

A 1958 Plymouth Fury, one beauty of a car,
spoilers whistling, axels whispering

[THIEF]

ancient, but without sentiment -
the grills above her bumper curved into slender-hooked teeth

blood-red and fat, a body that's sleek,
bloated, ready to chastise;
one twisted zygote, a devil's reject -
from the depths of a broken heart, tendrils of fury begin to rise

blue-smoke billowing behind in transient swirls,
my mind bends as reality curls,
still lay here and she's getting closer -

and closer -

[- oh leave me be -

- just let me go -

- crawl someplace where your face won't show -]

She can't understand that my love for her is no longer,
she can't seem to understand that my resistance to her charms is so much stronger -

and still she speeds along the highway
taking the night and violently painting it red,
her wheels squealing towards
the dusty asphalt where I lie my head,

speeding along

not slowing down -

["Hey stop! No please STOP!!!"]

///CRUNCH///..-.

Insidious......deceptive...
under cover of the dark...
Inveigling....creeping...
grasping at my heart!

Whispering.....yearning....
suggesting, but discrete....
Implying....hinting...
paths that cross and meet.

Howling ......longing....
echoing deep inside.....
Tempting......prising....
forcing feelings to collide!

Gasping.....screaming.....
whimpering my plea.....
Unclasp my soul with both hands....
and set it roaming free.......

I am the earth, you the tree
                           oh, grow, grow
Some fire spouts from the heat of the tongue.

A silver candlestick on the table
               strike a match
And the world is lit.

Come, drink it now with me
             one smile, two kind words
Wrath easy vanished.

From where comes light in so dank a corner?
           like prising one word from fissures tight
But wonders never cease.

Ask me what's going on
and I think,
then I'll tell you

they're not building a bomb
we
are the bomb
that is what's going on.

unlit but fused
and we're going to be used.

This is the minefield from which we cannot escape
this is today and tomorrow won't wait.

It wasn't always like this
even in the dark ages when
they illuminated pages
manuscripts
but
that's been stripped away
all we have today
is
the gnawing sensation
that a great conflagration
is due.

The rapture will come
not with a heavenly choir
but with explosions from
the barrel of a gun.


Complain?


Tell me to whom?

Boom
another gun blast

you'd better believe it
the clocks running on
fast

overdrive.

Survive?

you might do
but you won't find an Eve
believe me.


I've written a will

there'll be no one to leave
my earthly possessions to,
still,
it's one of the things that we do.





Guess I'm through sermonising
priding myself
that it wasn't me prising
the lid off
Pandora's box.

Yesterday wept bitterly
at the threshold
when I left her,
gently prising my fingers free
of her clutching hands.

Will I see you again, she asked.
Maybe, I mumbled
and I stepped out
into the twilight.

Tomorrow stood there
waiting like a bride
shy, tremulous
drawing little rings in the sand
with her toes.

I hurried towards her.
I was aware of the sand
slippingawayfromundermyfeet
like the last grains
hurtling down the neck
of a ruthless hourglass.

Come to me, my love, I whispered
as I grabbed her hungrily.

If you rode off into the sunset
I'd bet you'd get lost.

But every sunrise
I've seen with eyes
mottled green by envy
has stunned me

and memory allows me
the vows I have taken
to forsake all the dark nights
in favour of dawn.

Prising open my eyes
from the old age that ties
me to a fleshed out weak frame
and conquering fear
I sip coffee with She,
a
lady I like to call mine.


Friday is my day when
the weekend fits to me
like a pair of old slippers.

Time
being a friend to me
though an enemy
of some
gives me the pleasure of
seeing one more sun.

Streets full of shadows  
and long rows of daffodils that
have not yet awoken

a broken cycle by
the traffic lights
which are permanently
red,

Hot chestnuts are not stolen
just hot and
policemen with lots to do

and on the omnibus
the radiatior plays
Handel,
water music to soothe
troubled minds.


Though tossed aside by the
turn of the tide it is still not
my time to ride into the sunset,
I take
as much pleasure from this as the
first kiss in Eden.

Endless love
My brother is a commander
On the high seas
Never speaks to me
Now that he has mastered
Prising sky from sea.
The destroyer of love
But he too must see
It was a pyrrhic win
When the lovers meet