Poets

One orders French wine and quizzes me about
who (what poets) I know and what I've read.
He's not quite insufferable.  He seems to think
he's hot shit. I start to get bored.

Another one sings a verse of a bluegrass song
on voice-mail--in tune, on pitch, with a
Carolina accent.  And another

edits a prestigious anthology which a
prestigious scholar skewers in a review,
and I don't care because their prestige
seems like a well preserved automobile
from 1936. Plus with the Internet,

anthologies don't matter, and
prestige is a penny stock.

Millions of others are just starting,
farting around with words.  It's a fine
thing to try to imagine: millions of poets
writing, clotting in cafes, tapping
on screens, falling asleep after
a swing-shift, wondering why White
people are so crazy, trying to get
another poet in bed.

Me: never prestigious, my obscurity
well seasoned, robust, full bodied.
The fascination with poetry stays
fresh.  The uncertainty about poetry's
place in society enlarges.

Anyway, it's one word. After another.


hans ostrom 2016

A Night of Bluegrass

Go ahead and cut the top off-a that mountain
to get your coal, Mr. High Pockets. You
can't cut that high-pitched wail out of the air
where the mountain was
and shall ever be, in God's eyes.

And all them strings get picked and strummed,
chorded and teased, til a tune is tightly braided,
careful and true, like the long gray hair
of a matriarch reading her Bible in blue
moonlight, rocking and praying. She's

as heart-broken and reconciled as a ballad
about some young'ns gone too soon. Music
of the hills distills sadness, strains it
through an upright tradition
that Nashville goddamn tried to ruin.
But could not.


hans ostrom 2015

Happy Birthday to Carter Monroe

A post by Ms. Fouquet elsewhere on the inter-webnets alerted me that it's the birthday of North Carolina poet, publisher, and sage Carter Monroe.

Here is a reading of his poem, "the two hanks":

Everyday Speech #3--The 'S' Word in the U.S.

The 'S' word--shit: virtually ubiquitous in U.S. talk. (The rest of the world observes, "We knew all along you were full of it!")

I was reminded of the ubiquity when Carter Monroe, poet, publisher, novelist, and sage, sent me the following list:

Good as shit
Bad as shit
tasty as shit [most amusing]
fast as shit
slow as shit
hard as shit
soft as shit
funny as shit
mad as shit
interesting as shit
boring as shit
smart as shit
stupid as shit

Then there's "I'm tired of this shit" or the working person's generalized complaint, often muttered with a sigh, "Well, . . . shit."

And the universal exclamation of praise: "Great shit!"

And the universal exclamation of dissatisfaction: "Shitty!"

If not an empty signifier, it is at least word that will wear any disguise.

True, other cultures like their shit-words, but most probably don't deploy it as variously as the U.S.

In the 1970s, one heard, "Man, that's some good shit," in re: some of the worst marijuana in the history of humankind. Stems and seeds, as we used to say, back when people apparently smoked stems and seeds. Or so I've heard.

Of course, Freud might have observed something about childhood development and literal shit when examining such a list, and Americans are known for their arrested development (eternal teen-agers, is the rap on us), but there's just no way to prove that kind of speculation. I think it has more to do with Americans' predilection for efficiency in *some* areas of speech, with American coarseness (which even "refined" people like to flaunt so as to project another dimension to their image, or so they think.

When I or anyone else made a hash of something on the construction-job, my father, boss, would occasionally say, "That looks like a mad woman shit." Fantastically colorful expression, so to speak. I don't know why it had to be gendered. That inclination to depict women as mad, perhaps: Sandra Gilbert and others have written about that.

Even when my brothers and I were young lads, the Old Man's parenting style was end mischief as quickly as possible, usually with a direct order: "Knock that shit off" = stop what you're doing. Or "Don't be such a shit-head" or "Don't act like a shit-head to your brother." I responded well to such directives because they were clear, uncluttered, and I didn't get the feeling I was being trained in a broader sense, although "Don't act like a shit-head to [in this case] your brother" does implicitly look forward to shit-head-less days.

"Deader than hell . . ." Everyday Speech #2

"[It] killed him deader than hell." I heard my uncle say this when I was about 15 and changing tires on a dump trunk. He was talking about a fellow who had crawled under a dump truck to remove the jack when the jack failed, and the dump-truck crushed the man. "It killed him deader than hell," my uncle said, finishing the cautionary tale.

So: degrees of death, as if you could be just slightly dead or all the way up to deader than hell. Great vernacular touch there.

I heard it said by many men of my parents' generation. I never heard a woman say it.

I've corresponded with a poet- and publisher-friend in North Carolina who remembers hearing the same phrase, so it's apparently not regional. (My uncle was a native of Indiana, where he drove a car for a boot-legger, among other things, before moving to California to run heavy equipment, etc.)

Probably, it's not a phrase that will survive the Boomer generation, a few of whom might still say it.

A similar but more widespread phrase was, of course, "deader than door-nail," which I never liked because door nails are inanimate. I did, however, like the rhythm and alliteration.

Poems by Carter Monroe

Carter Monroe is a fine poet as well as a small-press publisher of poetry and fiction. Here is a link to some of his work, including the poem, "Ten Beers and Six Cigarettes":

link to poems

The Commonplace Sage

The sage on the mountain's a commonplace
sage. He's suspicious of gurus. He invites
you to spend only what you have, buy
no more than you need.  The commonplace

sage tells poets they're only as good
as their latest poem. A laurel's just
a shrub. The sage says if you want
to argue politics, debate yourself.

Sage suggests you re-familiarize
yourself with arithmetic, popular
music, and the software known
as Crap Detector 2.0.  Thinks

you might want to find the good
sense you misplaced when you
were a big deal there for a while.
This common sage sings a tune

or two, and wow: here comes a
herd of memories across a neon
pasture, and the needed card
floats up on the river, and

Frank Zappa clowns around in

heaven with Steve Allen's toupé.

Hans Ostrom, 2012

Carter Monroe on Jack Spicer

Here is a link to a post by Carter Monroe on the 9th Street Laboratories blog.  Monroe, as you may know, is a poet, novelist, publisher, and music-expert hailing from North Carolina.  I sometimes refer to him as the sage of N.C., in fact.

Spicer was one of the troubled geniuses of the Beat Movement in San Francisco, pushing the limits of poetry and counter-cultural thought as much as he could and influencing a range of writers, including Robert Duncan. In my view, Spicer also anticipated much of what LANGUAGE poetry has attempted to do.

In the post, Monroe notes Spicer's influence on his own work and places his reading of Spicer in a biographical and cultural context in the 1970s.  The post includes excerpts from Monroe's "Spicer Series" of poems--great work.