Contrarian Poets

Not that you asked, but from my earliest days of reading poetry up to now, I've been drawn to the poetry of contrarians who chose not to fit into the popular or popular-literary conventions of the day. Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are good examples, and I started reading their poetry when I was a teen. True, Dickinson worked in what fit loosely into ballad/hymn traditions, but disrupted most of the conventions with regard to subject matter, meter, rhyme, and world-view. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who usually had his poems get around to praising God, but I had the sense that wasn't his main emphasis, which was on exploding the iambic line. Like Dickinson, he had an unusual worldview insofar as he was drawn to what was imperfect, improvised, messy. "Pied Beauty" expresses this view best, perhaps.

Then there's Karl Shapiro and Langston Hughes. Shapiro was in some ways part of the literary establishment insofar as he edited Poetry magazine, taught at big universities--as many poets did after World War II--co-wrote a book on English/Irish/Scottish/American prosody, and early on worked in rhyme and regular meter. But as with Dickinson and Hopkins, he disrupted the tradition as much as he worked within it. As to subject matter, he wrote about killing flies, auto wrecks, troop ships, and the like, though he could produce a good love poem here and there. He deliberately cultivated an eccentric image of himself, as a Jew who was far from orthodox, a Jew who thought Pound shouldn't get the Bolingen Award because of his fascism, an "atheist who says his prayers," a "bourgeois poet" in an era when the alleged anti-bourgeois Beats were all the rage, and so on. He belonged but thumbed his nose at belonging. He mocked at will.

Smack in the middle of the Modernist era, Hughes wrote accessible verse about a wide swath of Black experience. He did the latter way before it became a crucial part of African American literature. It was as much a political, existential stance as it was a literary one. Like William Carlos Williams, he occupied the accessible turf of Modernism, contrary to Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and all their deliberately "difficult" imitators. Hughes also went all in on socialist politics in the 1930s--until Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Hitler started his race war and Stalin conducted his own genocide. Again, based on existential reality, Hughes supported the war against the fascists.

Luckily, I was able to take classes from Shapiro, and maybe that reinforced my contrarian nature. I chose not to pursue an MFA and preferred to earn a Ph.D. I was never part of any local, regional, national, or online movement, clique, or club. This wasn't out of a desire to make a point; really, it's just that I didn't enjoy or need that kind of thing, for whatever reasons. It is true that, having grown up in a town of 225 in the High Sierra, I was indeed a hick with a built-in eccentricity feature. I was West Coast, and in spite of all the powerful regional movements in American poetry, the East still rules. I grew up in an era when there were legions of male poets who fashioned themselves hard-drinking tough guys who, when they taught classes, liked to be cruel, or to not show up, and to cultivate some version of a renegade persona. It got so de rigeur that I recoiled from it.

Nowadays, I avoid all the online groups and cliques, although I say, "More power to them." Whatever gets and keeps poets writing is more or less all right with me. I'm still drawn to poetry that goes against the grain in some easily discernible way. I never got the hang of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, although I got what they were aiming for. Too often, it just seemed like gibberish or, when not gibberish, excessively taxing on the reader's patience.

I think much African American and otherwise "ethnic" poetry--Latino/a/x, Asian American (many sub-groups), Native American--brings a huge amount of energy and innovation to poetry and is often the best of the Spoken Word stuff.


hans ostrom 2019

The Mother of All Poems

When I think about writing the mother
of all poems that is to say a big serious
poem about my mother, I think about
the poem I wrote, in Karl Shapiro's class,
about how a piano contains all notes,
all potential melodies, etc., in some kind
of ideal way. And after I read it, Shapiro
said to the class, "D.H. Lawrence wrote
a poem about a piano, but it was really
about his mother; he was in love with
her." I found the comment unhelpful,

plus suggestive of incest. Oh, well:
workshops. I also think of my mother
and her low tolerance for nonsense,
such as puppets and murderers.  She
sat on the jury that convicted serial
killer Larry Lord Motherwell (ahem),
which was the name he, Frank
Eugene Caventer, gave himself,
a nom de meurtrier.

Ma wanted to make sure Motherwell
got the gas chamber, and she never forgave
the one juror who prevented that.
Anyway, I really don't feel like writing
an ambitious poem about my mother.
It seems like too much work for too
little gain, and I don't know--
Freud, Shapiro, and millions of
other people have kind of ruined
the subject for me.  My mother liked
to drink Hamm's beer out of the can.


hans ostrom 2017

Self-Contradiction Blues

Self-Contradiction Blues

"I am an atheist who says his prayers"

--Karl Shapiro, The Bourgeois Poet

He's a hick who got
cosmopolized, a fierce
coward and a timid stalwart.
He's a shrewd fool, a
half-assed genius, and
a morbidly morose optimist.

He adores libraries
and hates the intelligentsia.
He considers himself
a feminist but would stare
at women's naked breasts
until the end of Time,
transfixed, forever adolescent.

He's a lost soul but a found
failure, lazy and obsessive,
driven and languorous.

An over-achiever who
never measured up. A
glad-handing recluse,
quick and dull, exuberant
and plodding, fanciful,
serious, frivolous. He's
nothing but exists.



hans ostrom 2013

"Tobaconnists," by Karl Shapiro

University of Puget Crows

Once again this summer on the campus of the University of Puget Sound, the sign is out. It's a small temporary sign beside a walkway that runs underneath tall fir trees. It says something like, "Caution--Crow Nesting Area."

The crows' nests have eggs and/or young crows in them; therefore, the parents are in dive-bomb mode.

I actually don't mind being dived at by crows. I have a love/hate relationship with them. I love them, and they hate me. It's nothing personal on their part. It's just business. They find it advantageous to live around humans and other animals that leave food around, but they don't like humans. You can tell by the way they look at us.

Of course, the crows live on campus all year. Occasionally I'll try to chat one up as I walk to or from a class. Usually I say, "What are you doing?" I'm actually glad the crow can't talk back (in English) because, given the crow-personality, the bird would probably say, "What does it look like I'm doing?"

To like about crows:

1. They act like they own the place, any place. And I suppose they do.
2. They're sleek and black--"like gangster cars," as I once wrote in a poem.
3. Their eyes aren't exactly on the side of their heads, as most birds' are; they're almost moved up to the predator-position.
4. They seem to view flying as a chore. They much prefer hopping or strutting. When they do take off, they seem to be enjoying flight about as much as a man with bad knees enjoys climbing stairs. They seem almost too big to fly, but they climb into the air eventually. Once up there, they do fine, but they still don't like to work at it. They prefer to glide--a short distance, and then stop, perch, and start an argument.
5. Allegedly, they can count. (I'm not kidding, but I don't know exactly how ornithologists established this.)
6. They share information. In fact, crows in this area have an enormous convention on Whidbey Island, or so I have read. No word as to whether they where small crow name-tags. Also, in one experiment, they were shown to remember a human who wore a mask. To put the matter colloquially, in the crow community, word gets around.

I don't know what word has gotten around about me, but crows like to yell and dive at me. I haven't ever been hit by one, but I keep my head (and eyes) down, just in case. Otherwise, I'm vaguely amused by the attack. One of my former professors, the late Karl Shapiro, wasn't so lucky. A crow at a university in Chicago actually attacked him--not just one dive-bomb, but an attack. A scuffle. Karl managed to ward off the bird with his black umbrella, and then of course wrote a well crafted, humorous poem about the incident.

So there's Karl's poem, and Poe's famous raven poem, but the best poetic treatment of crows may be Ted Hughes's wonderful book-length work, titled simply Crow. It captures the spirit of crows, or what humans take to be that spirit.

In summer, the University of Puget Sound is a place where some summer school classes are offered, where high-school students and their parents take tours as they go through the painstaking process of choosing a college, where professors work on their research and writing, where organizations have their conferences (Methodists, cheerleaders), where the groundskeepers must work hard to keep the flourishing vegetation in order, and where frisbee-throwers, skate-boarders, and dog-walkers take advantage of the space.

Most of all, it becomes the University of Puget Crows, where large black birds take parenting and feathered family values seriously.

Top 50 Science Fiction Novels

The photo is of Arthur C. Clarke



I just posted on this topic over on my department's blog, but if by chance you like lists and/or are looking for a list of sci-fi novels to work through, here is one:

http://www.epic-fantasy.com/

I'd describe myself as a reader who's always dabbled in science fiction, but I'm about as far from being an expert on the subject as Pluto (which is still a planet, in my opinion) is from Mercury. However, I know quite a few people who do qualify as experts, and they tend to have strong opinions that don't mesh with the opinions of other experts. Also, the fact that list rather loosely mixes sci-fi, fantasy, and more-or-less realistic fiction that is merely speculative (like On the Beach) is no doubt a bone of contention, like the bone that goes up in the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Please pretend the titles are in Italics.

I don't know of any well known poets who also dabbled in sci-fi writing, but I'm sure there must be, or must have been, some. Richard Hugo wrote one genre-novel--a detective novel with a great title: Death and the Good Life. Karl Shapiro wrote a realistic novel, Edsel. As far as I know, neither writer tried more than one novel. Poet Stephen Dobyns became a bona fide writer of crime fiction.

I'll just add that a lot of sci-novels have terrific poetry-like title. I mean, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,--what a great title for a poem that would have been! In cinematic form, it became Blade Runner, but you knew that.

Anyway, the list:

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Long-Lived Authors: Harper Lee, Karl Shapiro, Philip Roth

I was talking with another writer the other day, and he was observing that, when he was a very young writer, he often heard other youthful scribblers romanticizing such concepts as "surrendering your life to art" and "living hard and dying young [in relation to writing]."

I understand the romantic appeal of these ideas; on the other hand, in order to write, one does have to remain alive. It's just kind of the way things work.

So I want to say word in favor of writers who live, survive, thrive, and persist--who keep on truckin' and keep on keepin' on. Among them is Harper Lee, author (as you well know) of To Kill A Mockingbird. She recently turned 83. She's kept on writing, but she's chosen not to publish much. Philip Roth is still going strong at . . . age 73, I believe. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., lived into his 80s, as did Karl Shapiro (1913-2000). In fact, a posthumous edition of Karl's last poems was recently published by Texas Review Press. It's called Coda, and it shows how splendidly Shapiro kept writing poetry well into his late 70s. He never lost his eye for detail, his love for the whole lexicon, his confident voice, and his iconoclasm. He stayed funny. Bless his heart.

Stanley Kunitz lived for 100 years and wrote for most of those.

Keep writing and keep living--it's a both/and kind of thing.

Biblical Capitalism?

I was on my way to a used bookstore today when I drove past a church, and it had one of those signs on which you can change the words as often as you like. It is a Presbyterian Church.

The sign read, "Capitalism/Biblical/Practical." I thought at first that the sign referred to three different worldviews or epistemologies. You know, like C, B, or P: choose one! But then I realized (correctly, I think; or if not, then my realization was a delusion) that the sign was suggesting capitalism was not just practical but supported by the Bible.

Is that theologically and historically correct? --To assert that capitalism is Biblical? I don't think it is. Isn't capitalism as we know it more or less one function of industrial society? And I don't think the words "capital" or "capitalism" appear in the Bible, in Hebrew, Greek, Latin, or English. We'll leave aside, for the moment, what Jesus's attitude toward wealth seems to be in the Gospels. Is there an Aramaic equivalent to "capitalism"? Hmmmm.

Anyway, at least the sign made me wonder, and I do know that the "gospel of wealth" is popular in certain Christian circles. To which I say, "Oy," or maybe "Get thee behind me."

I expended some cash but not real capital on the following books:

A first edition of Karl Shapiro's Essay On Rime, a book-length poem about prosody. (Hey, watch the prof. party down at a used bookstore.)

Oxford Blood, a mystery novel by Antonio Fraser, widow of Harold Pinter. I once interviewed her about her book on Henry VIII's wives. It was one of my favorite interviews during my three years as a part-time "books" columnists. Pinter called her during the interview--honest, I'm not lying. He did not ask her to put me on the phone. Oh, well. One with whom I live will read the mystery first. It has already disappeared into her reading-sphere.

And Triumph: The Untold Story of Jesse Owens and Hitler's Olympics, by Jeremy Schaap.

I didn't find any books on Biblical, practical capitalism, but I must also admit that I did not look for any.

The Golden Age

(image: Poet and critic Randall Jarrell, with cat)










A colleague and I gave a paper on George Orwell at a conference recently, and I just noticed how odd the term "give a paper" is. In this case, it means that we collaborated on a 15-page single-spaced essay, submitted it, summarized it at the conference, and then responded to reactions.

As the discussion expanded, professors (mostly of political science, in this case) began to complain about students, especially students' not wanting to learn but instead merely to accumulate credits toward graduation. Passing over the issue of whether all students are the same, my colleague spoke up and said, well, when I was an undergraduate, that was pretty much what I was interested in--graduating.

The interchange reminded me of a quotation from Randall Jarrell, specifically from an essay called "The Taste of the Age":

Randall Jarrell
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
The Taste of the Age

That is, we tend to glamorize our own days in college and believe that students now are radically different. I don't think they are radically different, except perhaps insofar as I think they have had to mature--or at least to absorb more information--than we were. Jarrell's quotation reminds us to be careful not to think too highly of the past and too lowly of the present.

As a poet, Jarrell was extraordinarily empathetic, seemingly able to inhabit the emotions and perspectives of others. (He is most famous for the six-line tour-de-force, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"). As a critic, he was fierce and acerbic. Karl Shapiro once said that after being reviewed by Jarrell, he felt as if he'd been run over but not killed.

Some things were probably better in "the good old days," whatever era to which we'd like to attach that phrase. But probably relatively few things. The problem is that we really can't compate year X to year Y--to get the full sense of how things really were back there in year X, for us, for everyone--including those who were weary of those yellow Golden Age days.

Promptly Write Poetry

I was cleaning up my computer's "desktop," which is neither a desk nor a top (an uppermost surface), and I ran across a list of "prompts" or "ideas" for poems--each prompt designed to help students start writing a poem.

*

Probably, the issue of whether to use prompts in creative-writing classes (or simply in one's own writing) is less contentious now than it was 10-20 years ago. In all the creative-writing courses I took in college, we were given almost no prompts. In one class, however, Karl Shapiro gave us a semester-long task of writing poems about a poet whose worked we liked. I chose Hopkins and wrote a series of poems about him.

*

I guess one argument against "assigning" poems or providing prompts is that poetry is supposed to spring purely from inspiration. Of course, a nearby philosopher will immediately order, "Define 'inspiration.'"

*

With regard to this issue, I'm terribly biased, so much so that I co-wrote a book, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively that discusses different aspects of writing poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction but that, in each piece, ends with some ideas for writing. In a way, it's a book full of prompts, topics, tasks, assignments, experiments, triggers, suggestions (choose your favorite term).

*

I'm the sort of writer that often likes to be given tasks or challenges, and I actually think many poets fall into (or wander into) this category. To some degree, Shakespeare challenged himself (or maybe one of his friends challenged him) to write a sonnet that disrupted conventions of sonnets when he wrote "Sonnet 18." "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It's as if he's asking himself more than he's asking the imaginary listener. Much of the poem is taken up with his showing that the comparison isn't a good idea, so Shakespeare is writing a kind of counter-sonnet that refuses to make conventional comparisons. His implicit poetic answer to the question is, "Well, I shall and I shan't--watch this."

*

Sometimes the challenge or prompt is as simple as. . . trying to write a villanelle, a sestina, a sonnet, or a pantoum, etc....or trying to write a poem in one long sentence...or trying to write a poem on a topic about which you've written a poem: refrigerator, feet, landfill (e.g.). Often, that is, "inspiration" may spring from a fairly plain task one gives oneself or from an idea or an experiment someone asks you to try. Once the writing is underway, we might find more inspiration, more reasons to keep wanting to write the thing.

*

Anyway, here are the prompts I found on my non-existent but nonetheless cluttered "desktop," in the unlikely event your're interested:

Write an homage-poem about a favorite writer. You need not be enthralled by the writer or her/his work, but you should like a lot of the writing, and you should feel a strong connection to it or to her/him (as you imagine her/him—after all, the writer may have died long ago). But it’s fine to have mixed, ambivalent feelings toward the writer and his/her work. (Auden wrote an homage to Yeats; Ginsberg wrote an homage to Whitman.)

Write a poem about a time when you were excluded from a group or, at the very least, when you believed yourself to have been excluded from a group.

Pick an age, more or less arbitrarily: 11, 9, 15, 13 years old. Then write a poem in which you completely make up an “autobiographical” event. But it should seem real, not farcical or over the top. And it might even capture an emotion you might have felt at that age, even if the “facts” of the poem are entirely fictional.

Write a poem that begins, “After you lied to me, . . . .”

Write a poem that begins, “After I lied to you, . . . .”

Write a poem about an animal you have observed closely—but not a pet. It has to be an animal you’ve watched—maybe smelled or heard, too. --You know, like that one horse that slobbered on you, or the spider that lives in your bathroom.

Quickly list ten verbs, in the past tense. Then start a poem that draws heavily on this list of verbs. Let the language pull the subject. Follow the verbs. See where they go.

Write a poem consisting of 10 images you associate with a given topic, thing, subject. You might start by making a list of topics, things, or subjects--or even by asking someone else help you make the list. When you write, make your language precise. Present the images. Then see where the poem takes you.

Think of a strong emotion—fear, love, disgust, outrage. Then write a poem about something neutral—tea, a boulder, being in the library, whatever. Let the emotion drive the poem—but not overtly. Leave the emotion under the poem, like molten but unseen lava.

Write a poem that is somehow concerned with the topic of shame, but be concrete—trust the images.

Poets Who Paint, Painters Who Write

(image: painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti)

I've never had an art-lesson, and it shows. But I've been trying to paint and/or draw for decades. A few things have turned out okay, including an acrylic painting of a doe and a fawn, wherein the doe's backside faces the viewer. People seemed amused by that choice. I did some really weird facial caricatures in chalk-on-paper that make me laugh. I show them to almost no one. Then I did this big smear-paint-on-canvas thing, dominated by red, and I didn't think much of it (and still don't) and would have kept it in hiding except people with whom I live liked it enough to hang it--on the wall, I mean. This comes under the category of "go figure." I'm also an inveterate doodler, especially in meetings, and especially if I know where the meeting is heading. While I'm waiting for it to get there, I doodle, mostly faces, not faces I'm looking at, just faces.

Karl Shapiro painted a bit, I think, and so did John Betjeman. Kenneth Patchen actually made drawings to accompany his poems. I don't think they're very good, but what do I know? Blake, I guess, is the all-time champion, creating stupendous illuminations and engravings connected to his work. Dante Gabriel Rossetti painted very well and wrote very well.

So here's a shout-out to three bloggers who are poets who paint and painters who write. In some ways, blogging is a great medium for the writer/painter or painter/writer (and "painter" is kind of a place-holder for all sorts of visual art, including digital collages, photography, videography, etc.). In a weird way, the Internet is helping us loop back to medieval times, when texts were routinely illuminated and the visual & textual got on quite well. The bloggers:

http://francaldwellsnotebook.blogspot.com/ and on this one there is a link to another site with images of the blogger's paintings

http://ascribbleorasonnet.blogspot.com/

http://loosejuicyart.blogspot.com/

And here's a link to Deb Richardson's site. She does quilts and visual collages (including the Emily/Elvis one up top):

http://www.debrichardson.com/artquilts.html

William Stafford and the Super Bowl

I wonder if poet William Stafford ever watched the Super Bowl. I doubt it. I also doubt that he believed himself to be superior to such mass entertainment. I suspect he might have simply not been interested in the game.

I've been reading his book, An Oregon Message, a book of poems published in 1987. Somehow I ended up with an autographed copy. I'm no handwriting expert, but my wild guess is that Stafford was left-handed. At any rate, he was roughly 73 years old when he published this book, and he prefaced it with this note, which I think I'll reproduce in full:

"My poems are organically grown, and it is my habit to allow language its own freedom and confidence. The results will sometimes bewilder conservative readers and hearers, especially those who try to control all emergent elements in discourse for the service of predetermined ends.

Each poem is a miracle that has been invited to happen. But these words, after they come, you look at what's there. Why these? Why not some calculated careful contenders? Because these chosen ones must survive as they were made, by the reckless impulse of a fallible but susceptible person. I must be willingly fallible in order to deserve a place in the realm where miracles happen.

Writing poems is living in that realm. Each poem is a gift, a surprise that emerges as itself and is only later subjected to order and evaluation." (page 10 of the paperback).

As always, Stafford is sly--even in this preface. "Organically grown" not only alludes to a Romantic (as in British Romantic, Wordsworth, et al. ) point of view, but also to the term "organically grown," which had become ubiquitous in American marketing of food in the 1980s. With regard to art and poetry, "organic" doesn't have the "granola" connotation many people immediately think of. It's not a "touchy-feely" term. It simply refers to the way in which a poem or another kind of art finds its form, as opposed to filling up a predetermined form like a mold. You might think of "organic" in this context as the opposite of "formulaic."

I observe with pleasure the Christian--in the broadest sense of the term--note in the preface: a poet or a person has to be willingly fallible, as opposed to willful or arrogant, to receive poems. Of course, one need not be a Christian or even necessarily a person of faith to approach art this way. One need only be receptive in a certain way. Patient.

In Stafford's view of writing, one receives the language. This point of view does not, of course, mean that whatever one receives is good. It simply means that whatever one receives, one receives--a gift to consider. Then you take a look at it. Maybe you put it in a bit more order. Maybe you evaluate it. Maybe you decide you don't quite know what to make of this gift, so you put it on a shelf for a while.

This is the kind of "theory" of creativity that most literary critics don't get because they need something either more outlandlandish and grandiose or more logical. Stafford's way is too "in between." Perhaps it's too simple.

But to think of a poem as a gift, perhaps a modest gift indeed (who knows?), is a nice way of looking at poetry. Wait for the words. They usually arrive. After they arrive, take a look at them and see what you have. It's a bit like panning for gold. And almost no one pans for gold to get rich. One pans for gold because one enjoys panning for gold.

But what really astonishes me is that, at 73, Stafford apparently still felt he had to explain himself, his way of writing. True, it's not as if he were insecure or revealed insecurity in the preface. And there's some wry humor in these paragraphs of his. (In another book, in reference to critics, he says simply, "Thanks anyway."). Nonetheless, by age 73 Stafford had produced so much interesting poetry that one would think he wouldn't need to "explain" himself. It makes me a wee bit sad that he felt that way.

I met him once, in 1974 or 1975, when he came to read at U.C. Davis. He wore a simple "dress" shirt without a tie. I liked his laconic, clear way of reading. As was the routine then, we all gathered in a small classroom in Olson Hall. Maybe there were 20 of us. Ridiculous. He deserved an audience of hundreds. But so it goes with poetry. After the reading, we gathered at Karl Shapiro's house for a reception, and I asked Stafford about imagery. Shapiro rather liked poems to be overloaded with imagery, whereas (it seemed to me, a mere youth), Stafford was a little more comfortable with conversation in his poems, even as they included fine imagery. I forget his answer to my question, which probably wasn't phrased very well. I had to leave soon after that because, of all things, I was horrifically allergic to Shapir's cat. So it goes.

But oh my goodness am I enjoying the poems in An Oregon Message, poems Stafford waited for and received.

Happy New Year From Emily and Elvis

Karl Shapiro published an essay called "The Career of the Poem." I haven't read it in ages, but I recall that, in part, it continues his genial quarrel with T.S. Eliot's poetry. Mainly, however, I remember having been mystified by the title and having thought, "How can a poem have a career?"

Probably the only poem of mine to have a "career" is "Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven." By "career," I mean the poem seems to have gone on a journey of its own and to signify a wide spectrum of things to a variety of readers. It's a modest journey, to be sure; the poem is hardly famous. But for reasons I can only guess, people often respond to the poem favorably. Editors have asked to reprint the poem a few times, and (here's a scary thought), I think the poem may have ended up in some collection that's used in a few Advanced Placement English classes in high schools. The poem also gets posted on blogs from time to time. And a collage-artist named Deb Richardson constructed the collage, based on the poem, that appears above. Thanks again to her.

My ambition for the poem was simple: I wanted to publish it at least once. That was achieved in the late 1980s, in a magazine called The Sucharnochee Review. ("I'm Sucharnochee. Who are you? Are you Sucharnochee, too?") From there the poem seemed to manage its own odd wee career, without a manager, an agent, or an entourage.

So here's the poem again, this time functioning as an indirect Happy New Year from Emily and Elvis to poets, poems, blog-posters, rockers, listeners, and readers here, there, and everywhere. After the poem appears a short form of its resume, which reflects its career, which (oh, my) is in its second decade now.

Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven


They call each other `E.' Elvis picks
wildflowers near the river and brings
them to Emily. She explains half-rhymes to him.

In heaven Emily wears her hair long, sports
Levis and western blouses with rhinestones.
Elvis is lean again, wears baggy trousers

and T-shirts, a letterman's jacket from Tupelo High.
They take long walks and often hold hands.
She prefers they remain just friends. Forever.

Emily's poems now contain naugahyde, Cadillacs,
Electricity, jets, TV, Little Richard and Richard
Nixon. The rock-a-billy rhythm makes her smile.

Elvis likes himself with style. This afternoon
he will play guitar and sing "I Taste A Liquor
Never Brewed" to the tune of "Love Me Tender."

Emily will clap and harmonize. Alone
in their cabins later, they'll listen to the river
and nap. They will not think of Amherst

or Las Vegas. They know why God made them
roommates. It's because America
was their hometown. It's because

God is a thing without
feathers. It's because
God wears blue suede shoes.



By Hans Ostrom, The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006). Published previously in the Sucarnochee Review, The Washington Post Book World (“Poet’s Choice” column by Rita Dove), 13 Ways of Looking For a Poem, by Wendy Bishop (Longman), and Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free (Warner Books). Copyright Hans Ostrom.

The Trouble With Nouns

The first book my former teacher, Karl Shapiro, published was called Person, Place, and Thing--the old-fashioned definition of a noun. (He may have self-published a book before this one appeared.) I still think it's a heck of a title for a book of poems. It suggested that Shapiro was writing more or less in the vein of William Carlos Williams and other Imagists ("no ideas but in things," as Williams writes in Paterson), although Shapiro's poems tend to be robust, full figured, not spare and spidery like those of H.D. (for example) or Amy Lowell. To some degree, the poetry of Shapiro is where the poetry of Williams and Auden meet--an American view of things (sometimes literally things) combined with a British sense of language, irony, and poetic form.

Aside from "show, don't tell," the other most ubiguitous piece of advice people like to hurl at new writers is "use active verbs." (Forms of the verb "to be" are not considered active.) Verbs, verbs, and more verbs--that's the advice. One must look with suspicion of not disdain on adjectives and adverbs. One must be unimpressed even with nouns, allegedly. Occasionally, such advice (however well meant and possibly even useful) brings out the contrarian in me. Hence the following poem:

The Trouble With Nouns

*

*

"The trouble with nouns," the man said,

"is that they just sit there, doing nothing."

I didn't know why he viewed this situation

as problematic. I like entering a cafe (for

instance) full of nouns that are just sitting there.

I don't want them to get up and accost me. I

like it when nouns keep to themselves, don't

open fire, don't start arguments or act out

an impulse to create conflict, as if

the Nounville Cafe were the scene of a one-act

play or the setting of a short story. I sit amongst

nouns with a kind of noun-like lassitude.

Someone enters the establishment, stares.

We stare back, we nouns. The look on

the newcomer's face suggests the nouns

and I appear to be menacing, although or

because we just sit there in our nounish diffidence.

Some people think nouns are trouble.

*

*

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Boring

An apt title for the blog, don't you think? Speaking of boring, I looked it up in the OED online--a terribly boring thing to do if, unlike a tiny percentage of the population, you think (quite rationally) that looking words up on the OED is tediously nerdy or nerdily tedious, or just plain wrong. Anyway, some info:

1840 T. HOOK Fitzherbert III. iv. 66 Emily was patiently enduring..Miss Matthews's boring vanities.

I was a bit surprised that the word, with this connotation, apparently arose in the written language so relatively late, a mere nine years before the California Gold Rush, which was probably more boring than its name makes it sound. Digging for gold is terribly boring work, although my father didn't think so.

Anyway, it looks as though the adjective, as deployed this way, springs directly from boring as in boring into--like a drill. Monotonous, unrelenting. Let us leap to the next point and avoid a boring transition:

Karl Shapiro, among others, insisted that the single most reliable test of a poem's worth [aside from historical worth, etc.] was whether the reader wanted to read it again--not necessarily right away (although that would be fine), but tomorrow, or next week, or five years from now. I think this also means that the poem isn't boring, but I suppose the poem has to be more than just not boring. Now a hop, as opposed to a leap:

Samuel Johnson, one of the most discerning readers ever, apparently got bored with one of the great poems ever, Paradise Lost. He agreed that Milton's blank-verse tour de force, or tour de paradise, was terrific, but he also famously said of the epic poem, "No one wished it longer." I feel the same way about films by Oliver Stone and John Cassavetes, not that the latter two are in Milton's league; on the other hand, did Milton ever direct a film? I think not. A sideways hop:

My "urban hike," which I attempt to take every other day (cycling in place on the other every other day, speaking of boring [but heart healthy, or so they tell me] exercise), takes me on the same vaguely circular route. Going in a different direction helps, and sometimes I stop halfway and do something, like drink espresso or observe Moldavians. Today, however, I was thinking that what really makes a familiar route interesting is simply paying attention. To the tiniest scrap of something someone throws away, for example. Or one weird rock. Or what people try to do with and to their yards. Or a cat, watching you as if you were dinner.

A high school teacher, attempting to teach us to write poetry, made a similar point. He told us to go outside and "really look at the world"--and then write. His implicit argument was that whatever one saw (and heard, etc.) was interesting, by definition, because it existed and because we would, he hoped, apply attention to it. I think it was a vaguely Zen point he was making, and I'm not sure whether "vaguely Zen" is redundant or not. It's still a great prompt for writing a poem--or story or essay: A) Assume that wherever you are, you are in an interesting place, and B) just observe the heck out of the place, pouring your attention into it and receiving all its particularity in return, and C) write.

Write.

Extremely Narrow Sonnets

Some poets like to write in traditional forms, some like to write in free verse, some like to do both, and some like to monkey with traditional forms. Some poets like to do all four things, and I am one of them, and I am also a person who likes to use "monkey" as a verb, an idiomatic move I permanently borrowed from my parents' generation.

Sherman Alexie monkeyed with the sonnet-form by writing fourteen rather large prose-poetry paragraphs. Instead of fourteen lines in a metered, rhyming scheme, there are fourteen large chunks of writing, much of which concern American history and American Indians (or Native Americans--although I gather the former term is back in use). I like Alexie's poem, and I like what he does with the sonnet, which in my view he treats as an old-fashioned constricting form--a figurative reservation, if you will, from which Alexie wants to escape. He explodes the form, to good effect, in my opinion.

My present aims are much more modest and, arguably, whimsical. I wanted to write the narrowest sonnet possible. I'd already written a sonnet that rhymed on its left side. That is, I used the Shakespearian-sonnet rhyme-scheme and the usual iambic pentameter, but the rhyming words occurred at the beginning of each line, not at the end, so of course the rhyming-effect is completely different. I just thought it needed to be done--done, but not repeated.

A traditional sonnet is ten syllables wide and fourteen lines high. As my late friend Wendy Bishop noted, it is a 14X10 poem. Wendy was extraordinarily imaginative, but she had a great practical side, too. She also thought of the sonnet as a poem that could fit on a postcard. I think she even had her students literally write sonnets on (onto) postcards.

I supposed, then, that the narrowest possible sonnet would be composed of 14 letters that formed words vertically. Here is an example:

Wafer-Thin Sonnet

I
l
o
v
e
y
o
u,
m
y
d
e
a
r.

I like this because it fulfills the 14-line criterion, and its theme is the same as 57. 5% of all sonnets, based on no research and a blind guess. But you do have to figure that tens of thousands of sonnets have had a thesis-statement similar to "I love you, my dear," don't you?

But then I thought that I'd gone too far (or not far enough) because the rhyming had disappeared. So I decided to write an extremely narrow sonnet that still rhymed, and here it is:

Extremely Narrow Sonnet

How 'bout
If we
Went out
To see
What you
And I
Might do
And why?
Let's set
A date
And let
Our fate
Unfurl--
Or curl.

So I kept the basic rhyme scheme of a Shakespearian or English sonnet: ababcdcdefefgg. And in the interests of narrowness, I used one iambic foot per line. An even narrower sonnet would keep the rhyme scheme but just use one word per line; that would be tough. Take a whack at it, if you like.

The purpose of such foolishness? Partly, it's foolishness for its own sake. And, well, as W.H. Auden said, of his poetic vocation, "I like to play with words." He did not say "I like only to play with words," and his poems demonstrate just how much more he liked to do with poetry. But playing fanciful, whimsical games with form is not a bad thing to do after one has been hitting the serious poetry-writing hard for a while, and I think a playful connection to venerable forms actually complements a conventional connection to them. It's good training--discipline, if you will--to try to write a genuine Shakespearian sonnet--but in a contemporary idiom. It's also good to explode the sonnet, as Alexie did. It's good to "stab" the sonnet, as Shapiro claimed to do. And it's good to monkey with the sonnet. All are ways of living with words, as musicians live with sounds and rhythms, strictures and improvisations, the old and the fresh.

I invite you to attempt to monkey with villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets--ballads, too, perhaps. Venerable, venerated forms can withstand whimsy and deconstruction. Sonnet 18 by the Shakemeister General isn't going anywhere.

Thing-Poems for Spring?

For college-teachers, these early days of January compose the interval in which we create plans for courses we are slated to teach in Spring. Our quirky little name for such plans is "syllabi," the plural of "syllabus." Before one of my recent high-school reunions (I suspect it was one I did not attend), a former classmate found my home-page on the Internet, and I put syllabi from courses on there. He sent me an email in which he claimed never to have used the word, "syllabus," in his life, partly because he hadn't (he informed me) gone to college. (At least at our high school, in our era, one did not hear or see the word "syllabus".) The remark was his not-so-subtle attempt to point out the obvious: I am a nerd. I always was a nerd, even though I played sports, came from the backwoods of the High Sierra [something hickish this way comes], and didn't wear horn-rimmed glasses or compete in debate-tournaments. I wrote back and told him that if I hadn't become a professor, I probably wouldn't have occasion to use the word, either. I mean, it's not like I derive measurable satisfaction simply from saying or writing "syllabus," nor am I attempting to put on airs by using the word. When one works a job, learns a trade, or joins a profession, one picks up the lingo, that's all. When I worked as a carpenter's assistant, I used the words "partition," "truss," "stud," "joist," and "eight-penny [nail]," but it wasn't personal.

Working on a syllabus for a poetry-writing class, I went in search of some thing-poems: poems that express some kind of concentrated, fanciful, and/or vivid view of an object (although I often lump poems about creatures and vegetation into this category, too.) William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheel Barrow" is a classic example of a thing-poem--and an ironic one, for the main thing that makes the poem famous (arguably) is the line "So much depends," not the description of the barrow, per se. One impetus behind the writing of thing-poems in the early 20th century--an impetus that has persisted--was the desire to get away from flaccid poems about emotions and abstractions. A thing-poem may certainly evoke emotions and imply concepts, but the first task is to look at and to represent a concrete thing. "No ideas but in things," wrote Williams, in his poem, "A Sort of Song."

Of course, by the time the class reaches the official day for thing-poems, we will have already read and discussed--and written--thing-poems, including Williams' famous one. But on that official day, we will, I decided, discuss the following poems (from The Norton Anthology of Poetry):

1. "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins--a counterintuitive choice, I must admit. The title suggests something theological. But the poem itself is a tribute to "dappled things," "stuff" (not Hopkins' word) that on first glance looks like a bit of a mess but on closer inspection is beautiful. The implicit advice is to look for God's grandeur in ordinary, mixed up, disheveled things of this world.

2. "To a Chameleon," by Marianne Moore. This is not her most famous poem, but in my opinion it is as good as if not better than her most famous poems.

3. Charles Simic, "Watch Repair." Simic gives us an accessibly surreal, whimsical look inside a watch--an old-fashioned watch, not a digital one. I've probably mentioned this poem before on the blog.

4. Eric Ormsby, "Starfish." An accomplished, effective poem. I may also use "Skunk Cabbage," by Ormsby.

5. "Facing It," by Yusef Komunyakaa. This poem concerns a visit to the Viet Nam War Memorial--and the wall itself. Obviously, this is a potentially treacherous subject for a poet to take on, but Komunyakaa has the chops, and the poem is terrific.

6. "The Ant Hill," by Cynthia Zarin. Fresh description.

The anthology doesn't include another favorite thing-poem of mine--and one students tend to like: "Manhole Covers," by Karl Shapiro. His descriptions and comparisons are exquisite, and tells us (or reminds us of) why we sometimes find these huge round metal plates so fascinating. I still stare at and read the words on one near campus frequently.

Any thing-poem enthusiasts out there? It's okay to include plants and animals, in my opinion.

The most famous thing-poem in English? That's a question guaranteed to start an argument among syllabus-wielding nerds. I'll get the argument going by claiming the answer is "Ode on a Grecian Urn," by John Keats. Hang that answer on a joist and see how you like it (the answer, not the joist).

The Fly Is Welcome to Share

I enjoy this poem from William Oldys, whose life and writing-career took place chiefly in the 18th century, although he was born in 1687.

On a Fly Drinking Out of His Cup

By William Oldys (1687-1761)

BUSY, curious, thirsty fly!
Drink with me and drink as I:
Freely welcome to my cup,
Couldst thou sip and sip it up:

Make the most of life you may,
Life is short and wears away.
Both alike are mine and thine
Hastening quick to their decline:

Thine 's a summer, mine 's no more,
Though repeated to threescore.
Threescore summers, when they're gone,
Will appear as short as one!

I find much to like in just three stanzas, including the assonance in line one (curious/thirsty); the phrase "sip and sip it up"; and the assertion that once a segment of time is gone, it looks about the same as any other segment of time. It's a poem with modern sensibilities; or rather, our sensibilities do not seem to have changed all that radically compared to those of Oldys's era.

Apparently, however, the conventional wisdom back then was that flies lived a whole summer, whereas, if I'm not mistaken, their life-span is a matter of hours. (This just in from one of my colleagues in science who studies fruit flies: the life-span of most flies is more properly measured in weeks, not hours; my apologies to flies, those who study them, and those who drink with them.) Also, we associate flies with the spread of bacteria and other sources of disease, whereas Oldys seems fine with having the fly drink from his cup. Maybe the sensibility here is not so much modern as it is Zen-like, to the extent that Zen Buddhism takes a radically democratic view of all creatures.

Finally, I take pleasure in comparing this poem to Karl Shapiro's poem, "The Fly," which begins, "O hideous little bat, the size of snot," and proceeds to get more miffed with the fly from there. In class once, Shapiro claimed that he wrote the poem while serving in the military in the South Pacific during World War. He said he had a lot of pent-up rage toward the military, and he channeled it all into an irrational rage against a fly. What a great strategy for writing a poem: take the emotion one feels for one situation and rewire it to a completely different subject. Shapiro was an iconoclast by nature and by nature not a joiner of any kind, so the conformity of military life must indeed have induced some rage.

Was the beverage in Oldys's cup alcoholic, and if so, what does alcohol do to a fly? I guess it turns the creature (the insect, I mean) into a barfly.

Guest Poet: William Kupinse on Rejection

Rejection is a matter of fact for all working, publishing poets.


When I was an undergraduate, I remember thinking that all living, well known poets simply had to send whatever they wrote to a magazine or (in the case of a book-manuscript) to a publisher and the work would quickly get into print.



I was taking a class from Pulitizer-Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro at the time. He was just over 60 years old by then, had won the big prize and other prizes, had published numerous books, and had even edited arguably the most important literary magazine in the U.S., Poetry, in Chicago. He had signed a contract with the New Yorker magazine whereby he would send the prestigious magazine his new poems first before sending them elsewhere.


But one day he brought in a poem called "Humanties Building," and he said that the New Yorker would publish it only if he made certain changes, and he wanted our opinion of the poem. It was the only time he ever shared his work with us--published or not--and I think he did so because the building he described was the one in which the English Department was housed: Sproul Hall at U.C. Davis. After class, several of us students talked, and we all simply couldn't believe that the New Yorker wanted him to change the poem--or else not publish it. I remember one fellow saying that Shapiro shouldn't "give in," should refuse to make the changes. How naive we were!


Many years later, Karl's longtime publisher, Random House, simply dropped him, letting his books go out of print and expressing no interest in publishing any new books he might write. Another very well known poet was visiting the campus at the time, and I mentioned this news to him. Instead of expressing sympathy for Karl's situation, he said, "That doesn't compare with all the things that publishers have done to me!"

The experiences of these two "war horses" of American poetry helped me put my own stacks of rejection-slips from magazines and publishers in perspective, but what really helps to put rejection in perspective is poet William Kupinse's poem on the subject. Bill has kindly allowed me to post the poem on the blog:



REJECTION LETTER

By William Kupinse

It comes by stealth amid the circulars and bills,
the print of the S.A.S.E. uncanny
as catching yourself in a shop window mirror.
But instead of “who’s that . . . Hey, it’s…not so bad,”
this glimpse of self’s a backhand cheekward slap.
“Thank you, but we will not be publishing your . . .”
Or, more honestly, “We wish we could reply
to each submission individually. . .”
Something in the photocopy process makes even kind attempts
sound patronizing: “As James Fields wrote to a young
Walt Whitman, we’re sorry, Walter, but . . .”

I’ve been tearing open, reading, and resealing
through the magic of obsessive imagination
just such a letter, as I recline in Dana’s
automobile, a vehicle whose faint pungency
is liberated by a springtime afternoon
as we head north to Seattle. By the paper-mills of Fife
I confess: the letter has me blue. She nods,
recounts her psychology abstract shot down—
no expenses-paid trip to Bologna for her.
I nod; it is sometimes a kindness
to recommend your failure to a friend,
when it’s half-buried in forgetting’s murk.
We need a word for such an act;
like Schadenfreude, but more upbeat.
It could not be a German word;
it would need to come from India, or Sweden.

I lean back, farther still, into myself,
and think of all the world’s psychologists typing abstracts
and all of time’s poets licking envelopes,
and everyone trying to better everyone else,
and I think of nature red in tooth and claw,
and of chimpanzees besting other chimpanzees,
and of chimpanzees typing furiously
while glancing at the heroic couplets of other chimpanzees,
and I think of Darwin getting a leg up on Wallace and Lamarck,
and I think of every grade school boy wanting
to be an astronaut or fireman or president.

And I think of the man the country calls president
and what weird family systems therapy it would take
to sort him and America out, and how he
could never best a soul in any unrigged contest,
yet he gets to use this remarkable stationery
that always gleans a personal response.


Copyright 2007 by William Kupinse

Haircut

Here follows a miscellany regarding haircuts:


I got a haircut on Sunday.

Up through the middle-school years, my father cut my hair and that of my brothers. He had purchased some clippers, probably from a mail-order catalogue (Montgomery Ward). He gave us all buzz-cuts, and he had a buzz-cut, too, so I'm sure we looked like a family of Marines or a cult of some kind. Only my mother, the sole female in the family, was allowed something besides a buzz-cut. She chose something akin to a Katherine Hepburn parted-look, right out of the 1940s. Good for her.

Rain, shine, snow, or sub-freezing North Wind at 4,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada, my dad always cut our hair outside. That way he didn't have to sweep up anything. Ever had your hair cut while the snow is falling--around you? I have. It's become a fond memory, but its becoming a fond memory took decades, believe me.

The buzz-cut didn't become a problem until a)I turned 12 or 13 and, like every other kid who turns 12 or 13, became hyper-self-conscious and b) longer hair became the fashion, owing in part to the arrival of the Beatles in . . . 1964--if I have my history right. I entered high school in 1967, and long hair was not just a style but a statement. And there I was with my buzz-cut. Damn.

Things have come full-circle, and I'm back to a modified buzz-cut, spiked up with some hair-gel.

The culture of hair and hair-cuts is endlessly fascinating, of course, especially in the U.S., where the meaning of hair is conditioned (so to speak) by so many factors: ethnicity, politics, gender, images of sexuality, class, age, and--above all--relentless advertising, which has convinced us that hair is alive; it isn't; only the follicles are, I believe.

Interestingly, I am well past the self-conscious era of my life, at least with regard to haircuts, so when I went to work today, I was surprised when many people registered recognition that I'd gotten a haircut. I'd actually forgotten that I'd gotten one. My standard blast-from-the-past response is, "No, I got my ears lowered." My head seems to get bigger (I'm not referring figuratively to ego, although that's possible, too) and more perfectly cubicle as the years go by. I attribute this phenomenon to my being partly Scandinavian, as Americans once referred to Swedes as "square-heads." Cube-heads would have been more accurate. . . .Today a student said, "At least you still have hair" (meaning, I suppose, that a lot of other men don't still have their hair and that, even if my haircut looks stupid, at least I have hair to cut).

I also think the etiquette surrounding the question of noticing someone's haircut is interesting. Are you supposed to comment on someone's change of "hair style"? If you just say, "So, you got a haircut," are you leaving some rhetorical space open that could be filled by the following assumption: "...and it looks [or you look] funny"? Sometimes people add, a bit late, ". . . . it looks good!" Once more with feeling, please.

Barber shops, per se, have almost disappeared in most mid-sized to large cities, at least on the West Coast. Franchises like Hair Masters have replaced them. You can get a relatively inexpensive haircut at the franchises, but elsewhere, you have to drop some serious coin to have somebody work the scissors or the clippers. I think the first haircut a child receives is still a big deal, probably across all cultures. In spite of the women's movement and feminism, women's hairstyles have remained fairly stable, with regard to length and (added) coloring and other treatments. In the U.S. most women still seem to shave their legs and under-arms, too. I wonder why that's so. Anthropologists would know, perhaps. . . . In spite of or maybe because of my buzz-cut in the late1960s and early 1970s, I was a big fan, as a spectator at least, of the afro. Mainstream magazines deployed photos of afros to suggest radicalism, I remember. Angela Davis's afro became a symbol of radicalism (to some), I recall. Me, I liked it when NBA players started "wearing" afros, and I liked movies such as Shaft and Superfly in which the afro made appearances. (The sound-tracks were what sold me on the movies, however, I must admit.) I thought Joe Willie Namath's long hair was cool, although I realize I probably have to point out that Namath was a famous football player at the time. (Joe Who?). . . . .To date, I have not gotten my hair "permed." I think I probably won't, ever. When I was a kid, I wondered about that term, "permanent," applied to a hair-treatment that was so obviously temporary. Older now, I've given up on the possibility that the language connected to such things as grooming might make sense.

The best hair-story I know is still the one with Rapunzel, but I love the "Barber Shop" movies, all about African American men in barber shops, and I love Eudora Welty's story, set in a hair-parlor, "Petrified Man." It is a perfect short story. My favorite hair-poem is Karl Shapiro's "Haircut," which John Updike includes in his recent selection of Shapiro's poems. The movie (based on the musical) Hair is not as bad as you might think it would be (there's a stirring recommendation), even if it makes you wince in a few places. Treat Williams is the star, and Milos Forman directed. Beverly D'Angelo is in it, too.

Not that you asked, but "haircut" or "hair cut" seems to have entered the English language in the early 1800s. Words in which "hair" now appears have proliferated to such a degree that the OED can barely keep up.

"Hey, you got your hair cut. . . . . It looks good!" Right.