Thees  past few months David’s widow Phyllis has been putting up some of David’s work on a website: David Gershator’s Home Page. https://www.davidgershator.net/  One can sample some of his gifts on that web site.

              Tehran are many ways to view someone’s life and works assuming they’ve been generous  enough to offer them to the public. One should say that it’s rich fun to be a polymath and creative genius like David Gershator. Everything David did  including his dreams was animated by his brilliance; it illuminated his ordinary daily experience. It was a trove of constant delight to be who he was.        Even as a genius he wasn’t typical of the ilk. David was one of the mot charitable men I’ve met. He never pushed his gifts almost to a fault. Not being  for others was unimaginable to him. He went out of his way to help other people.  

            Like his great friend Enid Dame he was a transparent personality who never lied, always said what he thought, endured some pique from others because though always polite he was never a politician nor cautious  in stating his civil assessments. Since David made a living  as a professor in a cutthroat college system  he  was isolated by his character  from it in away that could have been hard on his purse. That’s another way to see David Gershator. He certainly was unappreciated as a scholar and ignored by the Academy completely for any of his creative  talents.

            A third way to view David is to admire his adaptability. When he couldn’t make a living as a professor he thrived as a home repairer and landlord. He  was an Israeli, not a native born American, but he used English with a breezy facility few Americans have achieved. David’s verse has the voice of a hip and cosmopolitanism New Yorker often  traveling on an exotic road and taking in the colorful miracles on his journey. Enid thought he was the greatest poet in America. That might be faint praise but maybe he was. 

            His free verse is  usually jocular, cleanly crafted, filled with exhilaration at the chimeras in front of him of the phenomenal world. It aims at the sublime. It also mirrored his table talk. David always seemed astonished  at the existence of reality itself.  He was also very fluent in Spanish.   

            David had a very idiosyncratic way of embracing  Judaism. “I don’t have any of the presumptions of East European Jews,’” he said. He didn’t. He said he was an atheist but was fascinated by and worked visually as a printer with Kabbalah sources. Much of his visual artwork is animated by his Kabbalistic studies. He wrote a version of a Haggadah that he felt spoke for him more than the traditional one. 

            He was very different than his father, an emigrant from Riga to Haifa, who was a veteran sojourner of Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, ones much more in the Latvian mode. David’s father had a heavier personality than David. One always felt that David was in a Bergsonian way delighted  to be alive. It’s mirrored in his poetry. He wasn’t a whiner.   

            David knew intimately a lot of the well known poets of his day including Allen Ginsberg. Nobody among them push him though they recognized his talent and achievement. One of course might ask  seriously what anybody could for anybody in the poetry world. At bottom whoever might be the deliverers of goods that they feel Americans  can be enriched by don’t include poetry as part of their line of viable merchandise. 

            Even the poets we  are taught to value like Poe and Whitman died broke.  If one is a poet one has to think instantly of holding down a second job. James Whitcomb Riley read his verse as part of an act in a circus. Like David, some of David’s contemporaries like Leonard Cohen and Ed Sanders  could also sing and took their talent into the more capacious  music business.

            Poetry like the Arts generally is an area is which originality and novel  reflections are a virtue. The rest of life isn’t as sympathetic to those qualities. One of the reasons people are writers is that they can be more of themselves than they could be in most jobs. Poetry has no interest in stale craft and homogeneity. 

            This means that is one is in the social company of such people one is likely to be more enriched and amused by them than if one cultivates the  proximity of clerks. David as a social companion  is a good example of this national cleavage  in values. In the wrong circles his originality could seem to the commonly cozened  like a sign he was not loyal to their orthodoxies. It’s a curious paradox that  the colleges in America make their living from supposedly explaining  as if they were puzzles the work of  the very people whom they would find were they alive a rank chamber anethama.

            England has a place for eccentrics America lacks. It might be part of the reason why they have had them as an enrichment more than America has. England tends to think of Scots, Irishmen and Welshman as somehow English if they are poets but not Americans. It might be their revenge for our successful revolution.    

            David was a great performer . He read with a kind of enthusiasm that made one feel whatever he said was important. He played the guitar in a simple but fluent manner and did calypso songs. He lived in St. Thomas for twenty years though he also had a home in Brooklyn’s Carroll Gardens. It’s natural for a poet who can sing to set his verses to music. David felt close to the perky West Indian sound in his lyrics and melodies. It had a sardonic quality that spoke for him.

            Given his multitude of  talents many people knew only a part of David.. In St. Thomas where he taught, people called his doctor, professor. Others probably only knew him as a master of house repair. A third group were aware he was the resident authority on Garcia-Lorca in New York. He didn’t set out to do but his life was compartmentalized with his various gifts not notably connected to one another. An only child, he might have been for all his aimabiel social skills a loner more than anyone knew he was. He didn’t talk about his inner life. He didn’t travel with a crowd. He didn’t have a court of admirers. One discovered him with no  sign from him that he was somebody. He clearly liked his own company.

            Reading David’s verse  puts one in a world very different than any other poetry. It isn’t reflective in a Keatsian way though it haps upon the occasional phenomena he comes across; it’s more of a surrealistic account of the magical objects of the verse itself. The poet most like David is Guillame Apollinaire, not anyone writing in English. Like Apollinaire David has an urbane  boulvard sophistication  that is raffish and charming.

            It’s the poetry of someone who lives in a great city in peacetime and has a passionate delight in an improbable world filled with  nuggets of beauty. His effects are exillalrting. They take up an acrobatic fantasy on a high wire becausue they are freeverse and rquiriethe eact word at all tiems to be effective. Although they seem to be tossed off casually in a rhapsodic mood he worked at these poems with care and some very dogged industry to get that impeccable mot juste. 

            It’s a very singular voice. One might liken it to the eyes of a little kids looking into the window of a candy store.  Yet it has all the insouciance of a traveler who has been many places and has honed his  perception of the phenomenal and animate in some exquisite  lapidary manner. The lines are well larded with humor and cynicism that elevates the sublimity from anything shallow or  naive.

            One can see some of the many faces of his  genius on this web site.