A poem from African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle and Song, edited by Kevin Young (2020):
reading/video:
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Wednesday, October 28, 2020
New Anthology of African American Poetry
Kevin Young has edited a new anthology of African American poetry--just published by the Library of America. It includes poets not usually seen in anthologies as well as poems not usually seen by poets we're accustomed to seeing. It's a great book.
African American Poetry: 250 Years of Struggle & Song (LOA #333): A Library of America Anthology (The Library of America) edited by Kevin Young
Sunday, October 25, 2020
"It's This Way," by Nazim Hikmet
Reading/video of a short poem by Nazim Hikmet, poet and political prisoner in post-WWII Turkey.
Saturday, October 24, 2020
"To a President," by Walt Whitman
Reading/video of a short poem by Walt Whitman--the poem is directed to James Buchanan, widely thought to be the worst president in American history:
"Woods," by Wendell Berry
Reading/video of a short poem by farmer, environmentalist, poet, and essayist Wendell Berry:
Friday, October 23, 2020
"Once the Wind," by Shake Keane
Reading/video of a short poem by Ellsworth McGlanahan "Shake" Keane (1927-1997), jazz trumpeter and poet from the island of St. Vincent:
Thursday, October 22, 2020
"The Old Marrieds," by Gwendolyn Brooks
Short poem by the Pulitzer Prize winning poet Brooks (1917-2000)--and a rare poem that begins with the word "But."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25Ew31iICl4
Tuesday, October 20, 2020
"The Thing," by William Carlos Williams
A little weary of your phone? Williams sympathizes. Video/reading:
Monday, October 19, 2020
Saturday, October 17, 2020
Beyond the Humptulips River
Sand daubers seem to skate
on the sheen left by retreating
surf. They move like freshly
hatched spiders. They were
called to be birds. We
were called to be humans
and have names for birds
and everything else.
Yesterday, my love and I
crossed over the Humptulips
River, glancing past bridge
beams at a big muddy flow.
Today, we're watching
gray waves, looking at
shivering stiff foam stacked
near driftwood. We're
saying human things.
It turns out we want
more and less of life
simultaneously. Same
old story. The surf's steady
roar can be used as a
lullaby noise or heard as
the indifferent voice of reality:
that thing against which
we bump up.
hans ostrom 2020
You, Sir, Are Morbid
Where you are well into
your sixth decade & you
think often of how you're
going to get it, it being
the absence of being.
Shot? It's America, so
yeah, good guess. Cancer?
You tried that once.
Going all the way with it:
how much pain? Acute
pneumonia: the long drowning.
Heart attack: hurt and horror.
Stroke: same. Dementia--
you're dying but it seems
like someone else is?
You always were morbid,
weren't you? Because
thinking the worst seemed
to help you pretend to
control things. Ah, that's
it--you'll probably die
trying to control something.
Which, in the abstract,
is kind of funny. Oh, well,
as a sage of the Sierra Nevada
once said to you, "Kid,
we gotta die of something."
hans ostrom 2020
Thursday, October 15, 2020
"Woods," by Wendell Berry
Reading/video of a very short poem by Wendell Berry about walking in the woods. Berry, a farmer, has published widely acclaimed poetry, essays, and fiction.
Tuesday, October 13, 2020
"Desert," by Josephine Miles
Reading/video of a short poem by Miles (1911-1985), who was a remarkable poet and scholar--and a remarkable person. In childhood she was afflicted with severe arthritis, and as an adult she had highly limited use of her hands, legs, and feet. I saw her read at the University of California, Davis, and an assistant carried her into the room. The reading was great. She graduated from high school in Los Angeles--John Cage was a classmate. She earned a B.A. in English at UCLA and a Ph.D. at Berkeley, where she taught her whole career. She pioneered quantitative research in the humanities, and using a punch-card computer, published a concordance to the poetry of John Dryden. Her own poetry garnered her much acclaim. She was an early supporter of Beat poetry and helped Alan Ginsberg get Howl published. She was especially interested in different modes of diction in modern poetry.
link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd-JZHpF7pc
Monday, October 12, 2020
Oblique Review
This novel contained
sentence after sentence
with only punctuation
to control traffic.
As I read the novel,
the weather went
from sunny to rainy
and back again.
I find that climate
is an infinite novel
with new weather
chapters periodically.
It's funny (peculiar)
how words trick
a reader's mind into
creating a novel.
Readers should get
paid more for doing
all the work. Every
art form got taken
over by industry,
so that novels became
manufactured goods, see?
This novel is okay by me.
hans ostrom 2020
Unicorn, Sole Horn
A unicorn
is a sole horn
improvising freely in the mist
of a forest,
in the midst
of an old store
of lore.
A unicorn
is a horse
with a point used to anoint
a fantasy,
a something
to see in
the mind
as unmagical
days and
mechanized
ways in a
transparent maze
grind on.
hans ostrom 2020
Friday, October 9, 2020
"Again and Again," by Rainer Maria Rilke
Short Rilke poem translated by Edward Snow, from the Uncollected Poems of Rilke's.
Reading/video:
Unfinished Reading
Books you don't finish reading
are like mountains you don't
finish climbing or comparisons
like this that don't seem quite right.
They are like acquaintances who
don't become friends. (This seems
better.) You have been told or
think you see what's up ahead,
but a weariness sets in. Let
the book be great for others,
you think. Just leave me out of it.
I've resigned from the reading of
The Fairie Queen, Clarissa, The
Castle of Crossed Destinies,
The Charterhouse at Parma,
countless portly mystery novels.
I pretended to finish Paradise
Lost but, as with the film,
The Titanic, I had guessed the ending.
I forced myself to climb Mann's
Magic Mountain. It took
decades, and it wasn't worth it.
When Sam Johnson (who
said of Paradise Lost, "No one
wished it longer") got tired
of a book, he threw it across
the room. Bolder than I,
he didn't resign from reading.
He fired the book.
hans ostrom 2017
Thursday, October 8, 2020
Women, Books, Making a Living
Apparently one of my major
aims in life was to get a lot of
books, bring them home,
and read them more or less
at the same time. Also, I
developed an interest in
women--individually
and as a form, a genre,
of human being. Soon
I began to receive messages
about "making a living,"
which (I get it) is important
but which is immeasurably
tedious when contrasted
with books, women, and
women-and-books. Is the
way I look at it, apparently.
hans ostrom 2020
"Tears Fall In My Heart," by Paul Verlaine
Reading/video of a poem by French Symbolist and so-called Decadent, Paul Verlaine (1844-1896)--translated by Richard Greene:
Wednesday, October 7, 2020
"On the Nature of Love," by Rabindranath Tagore
One of the better known poems by Tagore (1861-1941), poet, composer, philosopher, fiction writer, artist--astoundingly talented. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913.
Reading/video:
Tuesday, October 6, 2020
"Musical Instrument," by Luis Cernuda
Reading/video of a short poem that, in a flash, presents a theory of creativity. Luis Cernuda was a Spanish poet who spent much of his life in exile from Franco's regime.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Lsiw5zTWf8
"Sonnet XIII: The Light That Rises from Your Feet to Your Hair," by Pablo Neruda
Reading/video of a poem by Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin:
Monday, October 5, 2020
Emily Dickinson writes of hauntings: "One Need not be a Chamber to Be Haunted"
Video/reading of a poem by Emily Dickinson--number 407 or 670, depending upon the numbering system.
Duty
After a life, or most of one,
of doing his duty, meeting
his responsibilities and obeying
their orders, he found he couldn't
relax as others did. He made
too much even of small tasks,
compelled himself to follow
through, stay strong, be there.
Voices of authorities past
gabbed in his head. He vowed
that one day he would not do
what he was supposed to do.
But would he follow through?
hans ostrom 2020
A Thin Smile in the Rain
When you wait a long time
for something that will never arrive,
you're not waiting. You're
hoping. You're pretending.
Or: something about you
likes that feeling of disappointment,
the sense in which the world
is unforgivably hard
but you're not giving in.
You find it's a bit like walking
in rain without hat, coat, or
umbrella and not minding--
your hair, face, clothes,
and shoes soaked. People
look at you and look away.
They act like you don't know
you're wet. You set your
thin smile. And keep walking.
hans ostrom 2020
"Ghosts," by Elizabeth Jennings
Just in time for Halloween, a poem by British poet Elizabeth Jennings, "Ghosts," video/reading:
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