Friday, August 26, 2011

Eyes on the Road

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Eyes on the Road

I don't like to keep my eyes on the road.
I like to keep them in my head.

I imagine a long highway covered with eyeballs,
hear the sound of car-tires striking them,

see what's left--miles of slime on asphalt.

Motorists  pull over. They and their passengers
run into woods, retch and moan near ponds,

where frogs lift their eyes out of water, stare.

Hey, now: something amphibian in human eyes,
which blinking keeps wet and dry land
keeps focused. 

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age o...

Proverbs, I

The Best Book On Racism in the U.S. in Decades

I've just read the best book on racism in the U.S. in decades. It is The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander. Alexander is a former attorney. She has a gift for amassing crucial detail, weaving into a brisk narrative, but not cutting corners.  She used to be a litigator. From her book, I've deduced that one of her techniques in court must have been to let the evidence speak for itself when it is overwhelming.


I hope I don't mangle her thesis too much as I paraphrase it.  It is foregrounded by a sketch of American history, which includes (of course) slavery, followed briefly by Reconstruction, followed immediately by the era of Redeemers, white folks who wanted to "redeem" society.  We all know about the KKK and white terrorism and Jim Crow, as well as de facto Jim Crow in the North, which affected housing and schools, etc. Two keys to Jim Crow were disenfranchisement and using the law to retain de facto slavery. That is, on a massive scale, white folks would have Black men, especially, arrested on any pretext, sent to prison, but then "hired" out as workers, with no pay.  Alexander documents this beautifully.

Fast-forward to 1980 and the Rise of Reagan. She documents how Reagan and his regime invented a war on drugs out of whole cloth.  They deployed a massive PR program, even, to scare (white) people and link the "war" to Nixon's "law and order" schtick.  In the PR program, drugs were linked almost exclusively to Black people. Enforcement was federalized and militarized.  Do you remember a time when most cities and towns didn't have a SWAT team? Me, too. Now everybody has a SWAT team, and through various means such teams and other local law-enforcement are linked to the FEDs. The same thing has happened with the "war on terror," of course.  Reagan's Feds leaned heavily on state and local officials to join "the war on drugs"--or else.


Results: About half of all Black men in the U.S. are either in prison or declared felons or both.  That's right. About half.  And guess what?  Black folks are no more likely to use or sell drugs than White folks. Alexander has the data. A vast percentage of the people in prison are in there for possessing drugs--and not for sale. And often just weed. Add the extreme sentencing-guidelines, including the 3-strikes law, and the picture gets worse.  Alexander also demonstrates, again with data, that the U.S. imprisons more ethnic minorities than either Russia or China. 

 Basically, Jim Crow went underground--or hid in plain sight: at least as White folks are concerned.  White folks have been conditioned to associate drug-use with Black and Brown folks, to be indifferent to Draconian drug-laws and drug-sentences, and to be indifferent to the erosion of the 4th and 8th amendments.  Alexander demonstrates that illegal search and seizure is a thing of the past--especially for Black and Brown folks. Police routinely stop people and ask if they may search them. Few people have the confidence or wherewithal to say, as they should, "No."  Of course, add in the Patriot Act, and the 4th amendment is moot.

Alexander further argues that the election of Barack Obama is more of an irony than a milestone, and that Black "exceptionalism" has always been a tool of White bigotry and indifference.  "See--he made something of himself, and we voted for him! How can you say racism persists?"

Of course, none of this is news to most Black folks. They live under these conditions. Of course, a majority of White folks will resist the arguments because they need the myth of a nation that has gotten better and better, that has made Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero with his own Washington monument (in white, ironically).

Interestingly, Alexander argues that indifference, not bigotry, is the main issue.  If the police harassed White folks and broke into their homes under the weakest of pretenses proportionally to the way they do with Black and Brown folks, all these issues would converge into an emergency.  I've never been stopped for driving while White.  I've never--never--met an adult Black man who hasn't been stopped for driving while Black.

If you react fiercely against these arguments, that's fine.  In fact, this means there is no argument, in the sense that Alexander or I or anyone else is unlikely to change your minds. So it goes.

If you respond skeptically, all the better.  That is, in fact, where Alexander began.  She was skeptical of the pattern that seemed to be emerging as she studied the problem.

If you're comfortable with the prison population jumping from 300,000 (1970) to over 2 million (today); if you're comfortable with prisons being filled mostly with Black and Brown folk; if you're comfortable with half of Black men being felons and thus disenfranchised, excluded from housing and employment programs, and essentially doomed; if you think the U.S. has made "a lot of progress" in race; if you think we live in a color-blind society--well, you're among a large majority.

If you think these conditions are scandalous, alarming, and wrong, please read the book. Or if you don't want to or can't afford to buy the book just yet, google Michelle Alexander on Youtube, and catch a summary of her argument.


Your Condition

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Your Condition

People will think something
to keep your condition from
affecting their view of life,
especially when their view
of life has contributed to
your condition. If indifference
doesn't work, they'll likely
blame you entirely for your
condition and suggest you
take full responsibility,
which will of course be
finely choreographed with
their taking no responsibility.
People hate to have their
indifference disrupted.
All of which is a funny
thing--funny-peculiar,
as Eudora Welty wrote,
not funny-ha-ha. Still
you'll laugh. Probably.
Maybe. At first.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Monday, August 22, 2011

With More Noise Comes More Silence

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With More Noise Comes More Silence

All right, don't get back to me, then. In
this age of proliferated communication,
silence too is on the rise. People ignore
or do not respond to messages, questions.
Silence is a response. It baits assumptions,
massages insecurities. It leaves you alone

with yourself, and there's that submerged
piece of you that's almost glad. There's
a pleasing ache in isolation sometimes--
like that of muscles after work or sport.

And you're asked, by yourself, "Just what
were you expecting, fool, in return for your
message, your question?"  You choose
not to respond to yourself.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

"Fall Wind," by William Stafford

"Flight-Attendant's Instructions Song," by Cosmo Monkhouse

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Thoreau on Scholars

From a friend in Boston:


Thoreau:  "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men."

Poem: "Professors of Literature"

--Intentionally painting with a broad brush here. There have been and still are splendid professors of literature. I studied with a couple of them.



Professors of Literature

They don't love books so much
as covet them, jealous of students
who want casual affairs with novels
or poems. They imagine themselves
to be dead authors' agents, lawyers,
conjurers, explainers, personal friends,
stunt-doubles: "indispensable." They
behave like security-officers prowling
canons and eras.

They tend to hate themselves, each
other, and simple questions. They
dislike students except for the ones
they collect like figurines. They
make stuff up about books and
poems but aren't imaginative.

They hate to teach rhetoric, which
is a real education, as those Greeks
and Romans knew. They excrete
things to quibble about and catch
arrogance like the flu. They love
to speak in codes of theory about
theories of codes, but they always
forget to bring evidence along.
They hate writers.

Too many are small, nasty packages
of wasted thought. A fair percentage
are bullies, also lunatics obsessed
by light-bulbs they mistake for the moon.

Their parties are no fun, are a kind of
humorless hell, though cackling can
be heard, as is the case with hazing.
They treat secretaries and
waitresses like shit. The
truth is, universities wouldn't miss
them much if they were to run off
like rabid dogs, the circuits of
their narcissism finally fried.


Creative Commons License Hans Ostrom

For the Number Four," by Hans Ostrom

Friday, July 29, 2011

"pity this monster," by e.e. cummings

What Are Your Favorite Words?

When I teach poetry-writing, I sometimes invite students to make lists of their favorite words--favorite chiefly because how they sound or intuitively "feel" to the writer, and favorite (secondarily) because of some personal connection to or memory about the word. I advise the students not to include too many words that they like simply because of a concept the word represents, like "freedom," unless the sound appeals, too.  But of course I don't "prohibit" such words. 

Such a list is useful in itself, but then you can also begin to work toward a poem by stringing some of the words together--going from specific language (with no subject in mind yet) toward a subject--and there's no rush.

Here's a link to a poem I read for Youtube, one made up of some of my favorite words; it's just a list poem, with "of" thrown in a lot as a kind of binding agent, mortar:

"Genitive Case"

Thursday, July 14, 2011

British Poets--Youtube

It turns out I've read 88 poems by British poets on Youtube. The most viewed is "Cherry Ripe" by Robert Herrick--I don't think I read it very well because I tried to sound like a market-barker in the first few lines. The least viewed is "On Gut," by Ben Jonson.  Anyway, here is a link:

British poets

"Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman," by Max Beerbohm

Tuesday, July 12, 2011

"Sestina: Ellis Island, Amelia Earhart," by Hans Ostrom

Novel Out a Year--Set in the Sierra Nevada

HONORING JUANITA, a novel I wrote, has been available for about a year. It hasn't appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, but I imagine that's just an oversight. It's a contemporary tale set in the Sierra Nevada and concerns a woman who decides to protest the building of a dam on a pristine alpine river. Her husband happens to be the county sheriff, so he has to arrest her. Complications ensue, as they often do in novels. A secondary plot is historical--the lynching of a Mexican woman during California's Gold Rush.  This part's based on an actual event that happened in a town near where I grew (a town by the name of Downieville). Anyway, these stories were something I'd wanted to write since I was in about the fourth grade--well, at least the historical plot was. 

The novel-publishing world is mad to categorize novels--just look at any literary agent site. Of course, "romance" is the big category. But then there's chick-lit, fantasy, multi-cultural, "literary," mystery, and so on.

 HONORING JUANITA seems to have a bit of the "women's novel" about it, as far as I understand that category. And multi-cultural: Juanita is/was Mexican, and Mary Bluestone & her husband Lloyd are of mixed ethic backgrounds.  And environmental?  Is that a fiction-category? Also relatively short. Don't you love relatively short novels? I do, even though the enormous WAR AND PEACE remains my all-time favorite piece of fiction. But just looking at one of Georges Simenon's thin Maigret novels makes me smile. I see I've digressed.



HONORING JUANITA is available in traditional form for $11.95, less than that used on amazon, and VERY cheap on Kindle: less than a dollar! Such a deal. This post constitutes my major advertising-push and has left me exhausted.  A link:

HONORING JUANITA

Poems (Translated) From the Sanskrit

Here's a link to poems from the Sanskrit I've read for Youtube--all very short, and all (or most) from John Brough's wonderful translation--Poems From the Sanskrit--from Penguin, a book that should be on poetry-readers' shelves, in my presumptuous opinion:


Sanskrit poems

Saturday, July 9, 2011

Langston Hughes's Poems--Youtube

Here is a link to the poems by Langston Hughes that I've read for my Youtube channel (which is named langstonify, after all)--and grateful acknowledgement is hereby sent to Knopf and the Estate of Langston Hughes; if you don't own Hughes's Selected or Collected yet, you might want to get them.  --A highly under-rated poet, still.

Hughes poems

Friday, July 8, 2011

Amusing Poems

Here is a link to some amusing poems (well, I think they are) that I've read on my Youtube channel:

Humorous Poems

Monday, July 4, 2011

Animal Poems

Here is a link to the "Animal Poems" playlist on my youtube channel, langstonify. By the way if you're a) a poet, b) stuck regarding what to write about and c) interested in getting un-stuck, writing a poem about a creature, any creature, usually gets things going, although a pet-creature is not always the best way to go.


Animal Poems

Friday, July 1, 2011

Thursday, June 30, 2011

Wednesday, June 22, 2011

"the two hanks," by Carter Monroe

"Grief for the Number Ten," by Hans Ostrom

"Heaven," by Robert Creeley

How Novels Begin: OLIVER TWIST, by Charles Dickens

If They

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If They

If they aren't going to be near your death-bed,
If they never thought well of you,
If they never thought of you,
If they belittled everything you did even
If they thought of you,

If they never helped you dig
in the ground when you were
digging in the ground,
If they never helped you get
better when you were ill,
If they never gave you a break,
If they never helped to fix
your leaking roof,
If they never paid for a drink,
If they never had a kind word
for you or anybody else,
If they sucked up to power
and back-stabbed their associates,
If they never thought things through,
If they thought empathy was for suckers,
If they never listened,
If they never knew one goddamned
thing about you & never cared to,
Et Cetera, then

Why do you care what they think
about you, about people you care for,
and about matters dear to you?
If they are whom they have shown
themselves to be, then let them
drift on their own sea and disappear,
and disappear.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Cedar

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Cedar

Think red cedar consider aroma mountain geology owned science Descartes God wheat bread ground fire husbandry gather stay goat dog domesticate darkness fear myth anything can kill hope medicine faith.

Cedar consider stare wind touch-red-bark, smell cedar-sap. Memory light/no light, life/no life. Red resin. Consider cedar. Think cedar your life memory green memory red thick bark.

Yellow pollen wheat faith science knows nothing sure is ground fear darkness and cold death faith cedar rooted in ground in soil in rock. Water.

Thursday, June 2, 2011

Red Polka-Dot Dress

[re-posting this one from another blog, Red Tales]


There is a photograph of his mother wearing a dress with red polka-dots on a white background. The photograph is a color print from the negative film of a snapshot taken after the mid-point of the 20th century.

This is the most famous dress his mother owned, as things turned out. He thinks about her putting it on that day to get ready for the party, a summer-party in the High Sierra. He thinks of her thinking that the party will be a good time, an open field of behavior, an earned respite from the work of raising three children and tending one husband in rugged country 4,500 feet above sea level.

The son knows she doesn't, on that day, see the dress as a symbol in so many words or thoughts. But he imagines she looks at herself in the circular mirror of the "waterfall" bureau, imagines she sees the dress contrasting with her deep summer tan and blue eyes just so. The image she sees is attractive, and it satisfies her. The party is going to happen. She and her husband are hosting the party. The husband is not an easy husband to have. His personality is as hard and well defined as a sheer stone bluff in the Sierra. He is a rugged, overwhelming man, with a grudge against life that's masked by a child's sense of mirth, a prophet's sense of will, a peasant's capacity to toil, and a glad smile as broad as a highway-billboard. Luckily, liquor makes him gladder still. The son knows the mother knew of other women's husbands whom liquor made mean, made violent.

At the party, there will be work but also other women to do the work, so the work will seem like part of the party. There will be laughter, liquor, and food--and several compliments about the dress, which seems that day to be the perfect summer-dress, sleeveless, cotton, red polka-dots on a white background. Everyone at the party will know a great deal about World War II, hard work, the Great Depression, and the English language as spoken colloquially in the United States of America.

None of it will escape the avalanche of time, although snapshots, saving the dress, and nonfiction writing are amusing tactics of delay, the poignant motions of an amateur magician's hands, with Death sitting in the audience like the bald figure in Bergman's The Seventh Seal.

Thank God, he thinks, his mother didn't come close to thinking thoughts as melodramatic as "none of it will escape the avalanche of time," etc., that day. Thank God his mother never saw The Seventh Seal and asked him questions about the film. He would have tried to answer the questions, and his mother would have remained unconvinced by the answers. She would have disliked the film as much as she disliked puppets of any kind.

The white dress with red polka-dots fit, the alpine sun shone, friends and acquaintances arrived, and everyone acted as if they weren't about to die, and when people act that way, and they should, they seem untroubled and, indeed, immortal.

By his accounting, all the adults who attended that party are dead. The polka-dotted dress hangs in the closet of a daughter-in-law, and one of the cousins, the many cousins, painted a watercolor featuring the dress hanging on a clothesline. The dress is a cut and stitched quaint decorated piece of cloth. The snapshot lies between pages on a shelf somewhere.

Everything is taking place and changing at a speed humans cannot, do not, and best not comprehend fully. In a way, the party was over before his mother ever put on the dress, but she didn't see it that way, and that day, that's part of what mattered, he thinks.

The scandal of time is that it allows humans just enough time to arrange their thoughts and manage their habits so as to avoid confronting the scandal of time every moment. Scandalously, time makes routine seem reasonable and a bright dress permanent, and it makes summer-parties seem like a fair exchange.

How Novels Begin: "The Spy Who Came In From the Cold," by John Le Carré

Wednesday, June 1, 2011

Dissertation: A Poem

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Dissertation: A Poem

Recent scholars have overlooked
the fact that I need a topic for
my dissertation, so I'm inventing
one and pretending my dissertation
will fill a niche.  This study, then,

brings together punctuation-marks,
words, phrases, clauses, sentences,
paragraphs, and page numbers
in a way that will help it slip past

my dissertation-committee, who
doomed themselves to read
dissertations, or to pretend to,
by writing one themselves, or

pretending to.  The weight of
Sisyphus's boulder divided by
the weight of a dissertation
equals the weight of absurdity
generated by the process of

writing a dissertation. As a
genre, "dissertation" is like
a carcass picked at by
vultures who aren't hungry.
The carcass isn't going any-
where, and even the vultures
don't like looking at it.

I assure you, however,
moreover, and heretofore,
that my dissertation will rise
from the dead, will have flesh
on its html bones, and will

carry me into a town where
I shall be doctored. A
dissertation is a required
thing, as is all hazing: this
is one important them walking
through my dissertation.

Copyright 2011