Showing posts with label letters. Show all posts
Showing posts with label letters. Show all posts

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

To Have Been: Old Letters

To keep old letters,
or to throw them away?--
much more difficult
than Hamlet's question.

Letters from my mother
in her neat handwriting--
to me when I taught
in Germany. Letters

from former girlfriends--
& "girlfriend" now seems
as antique as ink missives
crawling along mail routes.

I hate to destroy someone's
writing. I see the people
sitting at a desk or a table,
taking time to shape sentences,

to somehow slip news
and feeling into scrawl....
sealing the envelope....
attaching stamps....

Words, preserved--
a pickling of thought.
Eventually we all have to
wreck evidence of our lives:

To have been, or not to have been.


hans ostrom 2023

Monday, May 4, 2015

The Post and the Cinema

I grew up fond of the post,
its letters and envelopes,
typed script and cursive,
stamps and addresses.
Its pace of weeks and days,
years and months.
Its slow magic. Now
it labors, a harried
beast with no charm
and many enemies.
I'm used to its
alleged replacements,
but once I loved the post.

I used to fall into cinema
as if it were a liquid dream,
a pool of better reality.
Now I see through it to
the cynicism, the
racism and capital,
bad writing, bad acting,
no acting, no point.
Hollywood's a sewage-
processing plant by another
name. I like some films
all right. But I used
to love the cinema.

It's another thing
to watch, is all,
institutions altered,
dead, or dying,
drifting by like dirigibles.



hans ostrom 2015


Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Corresponding With Nostalgia

(re-posting one from 2009)

Corresponding With Nostalgia

The correspondence used to be
Composed of pulp and ink,
Now seems elaborate and slow,
Indeed antique, I think.

The mail comes digitally now,
Encoded on the air.
Yes, personality persists.
And no, it isn't fair

To say we write robotically.
The wait and weight of post--
The palpability of what
I read, I miss the most.


Yet now I'm totally plugged in,
Am tethered to my screens.
I send and post, receive and text.
("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)

A letter to Nostalgia, yes:
I think that's what I'll write.
It will come back: "No such address."
Electrons are Nostalgia's site.
*
*
Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Monday, May 11, 2009

Corresponding With Nostalgia


Nostalgia's a fact of life because it springs from routine, it provides an easy if illusory alternative to bothersome change, and it may be legitimately related to things that worked pretty well in our lives. Things in the past were not necessarily worse, even though our tendency is to over-estimate them (arguably).
*
In my case, an example of the latter (things worked all right) would be . . . the post office. In a relatively remote mountain-town, the post-office provided one obvious link to the world at large. It provided one of the most stable routine's of the day--going to get the mail.
*
I inherited my father's 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, which I am steadily refurbishing but not restoring; he purchased it new, and by 1997, when we left us, he had put fewer than 50,000 miles on it. Here's a rough guess: at least 25% of those miles were put on when he drove the truck to town to "get the mail." (We had no rural delivery, except of a newspaper or two.) The round-trip was probably around 3 miles.
*
I also remember liking the musty smell of the old post office; oddly enough, my dad helped build the new post-office (which is now old), including a nice stone-facade in which he embedded venerable gold-mining implements. I also liked the highly ritualized transactions of buying stamps, getting mail-orders, opening the wee mailbox, and so on.
*
One ritual that still obtains in the town is that, when someone dies--especially after a long illness and even if they have moved away--someone attaches a notice of the event to the glass doors of the post office. Email and voice-mail have yet to replace this mode of communication that precedes an official obituary.
*
Post-offices still seem busy, but I suspect they're far less busy with personal correspondence, which is delivered via various incarnations of phones and computers (and phones are computers). At the same time, neuroscientists might argue (I guess) that nostalgia is a matter of electrons, too--located in the electrical wiring of our brains.
*
A wee ballad, at any rate (and postal rates always go up; why, in my day, a stamp cost only . . .):
*
*
Corresponding With Nostalgia
*
*
The correspondence used to be
Composed of pulp and ink,
Now seems elaborate and slow,
Indeed antique, I think.
*
The mail comes digitally now,
Encoded on the air.
Yes, personality persists.
And no, it itsn't fair
*
To say we write robotically.
The wait and weight of post--
The palpability of what
I read, I miss the most.

*
Yet now I'm totally plugged in,
Am tethered to my screens.
I send and post, receive and text.
("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)
*
A letter to Nostalgia, yes:
I think that's what I'll write.
It will come back: "No such address."
Electrons are Nostalgia's site.
*
*
Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom