"The Waning Moon," by Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Sultan at Sunset

Thirty feet up, the hummingbird hovered,
looking at sunset behind blue, wrinkled
Olympic Mountains. After a long day
of nectar-hauling, why not? Sitting facing

East, I watched the bird watch. I then
saw it trace with its body an enormous
precise circle in air.  Wondering what
or if this circle signified was a gift

grand enough for a sultan.  The invisible,
unforgettable shape suggested geometric
graffiti, avian ritual, or a secret signal
to the sun.  I almost applauded.

The whirring bird zipped off to close
the astounding performance: what a pro.
As Sultan, I decree my hummingbird
equal to Whitman's eagle, Poe's raven,

the crows of Ted Hughes and Al
Hitchcock, Shelley's and Mercer's
skylark, and Bukowski's murdered
mockingbird. (I refuse to discuss

Yeats's rapist Zeus-goose.) The effect of
this decree, the Sultan does not know.


hans ostrom 2017

Why Poets Do Well In Any Economy

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Poets do well in any economy because no economy has ever been especially good for poets. "The economy is bad?" poets ask. "Well, I'll be darned."

Pick any allegedly extra-active poetic period--the Beat period in the U.S., for example. The economy was riding high after World War II, the Beats were changing poetry, and President Eisenhower was on the golf course. Good times, except for the examples cited in Ginsberg's Howl. Okay, so there were a lot of examples.

By the way, this was back when Republicans behaved as adults; can you imagine the general in charge of D-Day wasting energy and being rude by yelling at someone, a la Rep. Joe Wilson, who is a guest in his professional house? Republicans need to ask themselves, "What would Eisenhower do?" Answer: Pass pragmatic, effective health-care reform, stop going to the well of hate-speech, and not behave like a "jackass," President Obama's term for Kanye West's behavior at one of those awards shows so central to the betterment of humanity. West should have asked what No-Drama Obama would have done (not been at the awards show in the first place).

But back to those Beats. Did they do anything to harm the good economy? No. Did they help? Of course! They filled coffee houses and bars, and they started at least one venerable small business, City Lights Books. When the economy turned sour soon thereafter, you didn't hear poets complaining, partly because they were complaining about other things, such as racism.

At any rate, here is a list of reasons why poets do well in any economy:

1. Poets are used to not getting paid much, if anything, for their poetry. In an odd way, then, they are recession-proof, and they've always had to have a day-job, or a night-job, or two jobs.

2. Poets, unlike many novelists and all pundits, are frugal with words. Poets Know Frugal.

3. Poets tend to be generous with money. If you meet one at a cafe or a bar and buy a copy of his/her chapbook or ask him/her to sign a copy, the poet will be so ecstatic that he or she will buy you several rounds of libations.

4. Poets can smell rotten metaphors right away. So when Reagan's team used "trickle-down economics," all poets knew right away that this wasn't good, especially for those being trickled upon. "The Patriot Act." Poets know the Patriot Act was mis-named and has created not a single patriot. Poets can tip you off to mischievous political speech, regardless of party-affiliation.

5. Almost all poets know enough about what they don't know to stay away from economics, and in a bad economy, the last thing we need is more economists, and in a good economy, we don't need any economists to tell us it's good.

An exception to this rule is Ezra Pound, who, like Ron Paul, got obsessed with the gold-standard and got immersed in especially awful anti-Semitism. He also made radio broadcasts on behalf of Mussolini because he thought fascism had good economic solutions. Because the U.S. was at war with Italy, Pound got arrested and eventually ended up in a mental hospital in Baltimore. After a while, he was allowed to leave and to live out his days in Italy.

A lesson is: Italy is great, but stay away from economics, poets! It is a dismal "science", not a legendary art.

6. Poets often read and write so carefully that they pay attention to syllables, not just words. Note E-CON-o-my. Bernie Madoff and bankers who operated as loan-sharks put the CON in economy, and the regulators did nothing more than say "O, my." Result: Disaster. Poets saw this coming. It was a syllable-thing.

7. You can trust poets at least to do no harm to the economy. True, Wallace Stevens worked in insurance, and James Dickey worked in New York advertising, but neither absconded with funds, ran Ponzi schemes, or cheated shareholders (as far as I know). James Merrill, of the Merrill in Merrill Lynch (by relation), did not get involved in the business and spent a lot of time writing long poems.

8. Poets are highly employable because they're usually socially flexible. Not in every case, but in most cases. There may be times, however, when a manager will notice that a poet is writing a poem on the job (in both senses of that phrase).

9. As Percy Shelley noted, "Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world." Most people focus on the "legislators" part of that quotation. Poets focus on the "unacknowledged" part. Unacknowledged is good. I wish Re. Joe Wilson and Senators Baucus and Grassley would go unacknowledged for a while.

10. Almost all poets have consumed their share of coffee, tea, and/or wine--the kind of basic stuff upon which economies have relied for thousands of years. We do our part.

One Degree of Separation

Here is a poem by Robert Browning, and the "Shelley" of the first line is Percy Bysshe Shelley, famous British Romantic poety who died young and whom Browning, of a later generation, would have seen as a poetic hero:

Memorabilia

1
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems and new!

2
But you were living before that,
And also you are living after;
And the memory I started at--
My starting moves your laughter.

3
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand's-breadth of it shines alone
'Mid the blank miles round about:

4
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A molted feather, an eagle feather!
Well, I forget the rest.

A note in the Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume Two (Fifth Edition), p. 1250 says, "Browning reports that he once met a stranger in a bookstore who mentioned having talked with Shelley. 'Suddenly the stranger paused, and burst into laughter as he observed me staring at him with blanched face. . . . I vividly remember how strangely the presence of a man who had seen and spoken with Shelley affected me.' "

So to some extent, the poem is about "degrees of separation," in this case only one degree, between us and someone we think of as almost super-human, or at least special: a great artist, a great performer, someone who has achieved much, someone with a lot of power. The stranger thinks Browning's reaction is funny because, after all, the stranger is simply talking about having talked once to another human being.

The "six degrees of separation" concept is meant, I think, to show how interconnected everyone is, at least in some mathematical way, even in a global society of--what are we at now, seven billion" (And of course, the imagination can make no distinction between one billion and ten billion; at some point, the imagination shuts down.) Perhaps the concept also makes ordinary, nondescript people think that they are always only six degrees away from--what? Celebrity? "Immortality"?

An author whose work I've spent a lot of time studying is Langston Hughes. Three times I've had an experience similar to Browning's. I got to meet and to speak briefly with the jazz musician, Billy Taylor, who knew Hughes. I also heard photographer Roy DeCarava speak at a conference; he and Hughes had collaborated on a book. And at the same conference, I met a woman who had visited Hughes once, not long before he died. She described how he lit one cigarette after another and how the ashes fell on his clothes and how he casually brushed the ashes off while he talked. For some reason, I cherished that odd detail; maybe it helped make Hughes "plain," to borrow Browning's word. I'm sure at some point I got the vacant look that Browning got in front of the stranger in the bookstore, as I thought to myself, "Wow, I'm talking to someone who talked to Hughes, a poet I really admire, and one of the few writers, dead now, I would have liked to meet."

Back to Browning's poem: I love the shift in stanza three. It seems like a complete change of subject, and it may be disconcerting to some readers, but of course Browning is merely developing a comparison, and we soon find out that picking up an eagle's feather is a bit like meeting the stranger who spoke to Shelley: it's something to hang on to, a talisman. And the eagle-feather works nicely a place-holder for Shelley, who wrote Prometheus Unbound and Mont Blanc, and whose imagination soared to great idealistic heights. Of all the Romantics, William Blake included, Shelley probably took the most chances, tried most to make poetry do as much as it could, worried least about looking before he lept.

Browning is of course best known for his dramatic monologues, including "To His Last Duchess," but I also like this smaller lyric, "Memorabilia," which was published in 1855. Shelley drowned accidentally off the coast of Italy in 1822. He was only 30. Langston Hughes died in Spring of 1967, at age 65. I had not heard of him or of his poetry yet. I started high school in the fall of that year. The first African American writer whose work I remember reading was James Baldwin. I found a copy of The Fire Next Time in the back of a classroom and read it straight through. I do not have a vivid memory of when I first encountered Hughes's work.

Shifting presumptuously to a first-name, zero-degree-of-separation basis, let us say "Well done!" to three departed poets who achieved so much so differently: Percy, Robert, and Langston. Calling Browning "Bob" would, I believe, cross the line, however.