Elegy for Robert Bly (1926-2021)

Flying white hair, cravats, vests,

panchos. Sing-speaking your poems
as you played the lute. Sixties protest
poems, great leaps to Spanish and French
surrealism, a carom north to Friends, You Drank
Some Darkness Swedes. A farm-boy
Norwegian who went to Harvard (and
dated Adrienne Rich once), a troubadour
who hustled a living on the college tour
but would never get stuck in Swamp Tenure.

Once when I saw you read, a student got
up and left, and you said, "Where are you
going--to masturbate?" You were like

one of those friends I hated to go to bars
with--you liked to start fights (without fists.)

Bless you for trying to unharden the arteries
of American poetry, for riffing like a standup
comedian, for making poems explode
and burying Modernists. Then came
your "Men's Movement," well meant
but tin-eared, and Iron John, a Cinderella
for men. After I became a prof,

you came to campus and got the Methodists
dancing to a Brazilian chant. We walked
across campus and you couldn't help but
skewer other poets. When we parted,
you asked, "Are you fond of me, Hans?"
"Yes," I said, "I'm fond of you, Robert." Needy,
like a three-year old. Brilliant, like a mad
scientist. Big hearted--in defiance of cold
fathers everywhere. Well done and--
literally--good show, Robert. I see you
there, dancing on the moon.

"Gratitude to Old Teachers," by Robert Bly

A poem in blank verse--not typical of Bly. But it has his characteristic surrealism, offering a striking comparison, to say the least, all in the context of walking across a frozen lake, no doubt in Minnesota. Bly's book about surrealistic poetry, Leaping Poetry, is terrific. 

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PngPw5xK3Fs

Some prompts for writing L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry and/or surrealistic poetry

(Some prompts we used in a poetry class today, based in part on some reading we did (Breton's Surrealist Manifesto, poems by Hejinian, Bly, and Tate, among others.)

#2 was the most popular choice, followed by #4


1. Describe any ordinary task or activity—brushing your teeth, buying a cup of coffee, whatever—and interject random images, actions, or utterances to create the effect of a dream.
2. Write down memories of your life, one sentence per memory, but put them in random order. Events, images, things you said, things you heard others say, etc.
3. Think about a boring situation you had to/have to endure. Waiting at an airport. Listening to a professor. Etc. Then describe it with a list of extravagant comparisons. “Waiting at the airport is like cooking dragon-flesh with a Zippo lighter.” And the similes should be unrelated to on another; that is, you are not developing a conceit.
4. Describe a situation or an event that, as you recall it, did in fact seem surreal at the time. Try to capture that quality of surrealism.
5. Write down things (phrases, utterances, opinions) you hear quite a lot—from friends, room-mates, professors, co-workers, family, people you overhear. They should be unrelated. Don’t try to organize them.
6. Think of unrelated objects. A blender, a shovel, a book, a hubcap (e.g.). For each object, describe an action, which need not be logical. “The book ate a moth.” One description or action per object, then move on to the next object and its action.


hans ostrom

Thirteen Ways

(image: Wallace Stevens)

We're going to discuss Wallace Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" today in the poetry-writing class. Then we'll do some writing based on prompts springing from the poem--and from other poems that express multiple perspectives.

Arguably, the poem is Stevens at his best: philosophical but whimsical, very playful with language, and pleasantly self-conscious about imagination and imagining. The poem is indelible.

For some reason, I don't like his use of Roman numerals to number the sections. They seem too heavy for the poem--maybe that's it.

If forced to pick a favorite way, I'd probably go with XII:

The river is moving.

The blackbird must be flying.

Here we have quintessential "poetic 'logic,'" and also the kind of primitive logic that sometimes operates when one is in or around nature. The lines provide the kind of "leap" that Robert Bly treasures and that he claims isn't in American poetry to a sufficient degree. I also appreciate how comparatively flat the phrasing is--in comparison to that of other sections, where the lingo is lush.

*

Sometimes readers new and not so new to the poem get frustrated by some of the sections, which seem too cryptic to them. The poem is really a bit of linguistic jazz, so listening to it as jazz and not worrying about decoding every "note" comprise one way around the frustration.

My friend, co-writer, and co-editor, the late Wendy Bishop, wrote a superb creative-writing textbook that takes its name from Stevens' poem: Thirteen Ways of Looking For a Poem. It's full of good poetry, great discussions of writing poetry, and superb specific prompts for poems. Published by Longman. And Wendy's own collected book of poems is My Last Door.

And here's hoping the week goes well for you in at least thirteen ways.

More Snow-Poems Piling Up

A valued reader of the blog and professional writer from Minnesota reminded me that Ms. Emily Dickinson wrote quite a few snow-poems. Living in Amherst in Winter had to have been rough at times, what with no insulation or central heating. I wonder what kind of cook-stove the Dickinsons had in that house. I also wonder what the hardwood of choice was for burning--maple? Oak?

I also forgot to mention Robert Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields (speaking of Minnesota), arguably the book that made Bly a nationally known poet.

Then there's George Keithley's magnificent book-length narrative poem about the Donner Party. Snow certainly played a role in that awful drama. (The photo is of Donner Pass.)

The Surrealistic Gamble

I reckon almost any time a poet publishes a poem, even when the publishing is in the form of handing the poem to a person, she or he gambles. The stakes aren't high, financially or otherwise, except, I suppose, in some rare, extreme instances. The poet gambles that the reader will want to read the poem, will read it, will understand what the poem is up to, and will then appreciate what the poem is up to. Also, a poet may have some feelings or pride invested in the poem; poetry is "art," after all, so allegedly there's more at stake emotionally than there is, say, in a draft of a report, but I think people who draft and share reports--in a business or a not-for-profit organization--probably feel as if they're as much at risk as the poet who shares a poem, and if their job is at stake, they may feel much more at risk. Yes, poets should take pride in their work and be invested in it, but I also think it's possible to over-dramatize what's at stake in a poem.

But back to poetry itself: I think that, in the case of poems that deploy surrealism in one form or another, the risk that the reader won't "get" the poem almost always increases significantly. Robert Bly, for one, would adamantly insist that the risk is always worth it. He wants poems--his and others'--to "leap." He celebrates the surrealistic work of Spanish poets, for example, and he often derides American poetry for being flat-footed, for only hopping, at best. (One book he wrote on the subject is in fact called Leaping Poetry, as in poetry that leaps, that associates rapidly and freely, not as in jumping over poems.)

I think a poet hopes that the juxtapositions, associations, and non-rational, intuitive leaps will convey meaning, perhaps in the way our dreams convey meaning to us--but not in the way our dreams fail to convey meaning to others when we tell them about our dreams. (It seems not even psychiatrists are interested in the dreams others, even paying, clients have; the stock of dreams has gone through the floor since Freudian and Jungian heydays.) Maybe there's a rough, workable analogy to jazz here. The jazz musician hopes the listener will "get" the leaps of improvisations.

I was mulling all of this over when I decided to post the following surrealistic poem, which I think hops, at least; maybe it leaps, according to Bly's criteria; but maybe it also falls flat after it gets up in the air. I like the poem well enough, he said, feinting with damned praise, but with surrealism, I'm almost never sure what the reader will think, whereas with other kinds of poems that may be quite imaginative but not surrealistic, per se, I usually fee as if I can predict roughly how a reader will respond. Oh, well: it may be surrealism, but at least it's only four brisk stanzas of the stuff, so there's that.

Oranges Night, Oranges Day

Morning tosses oranges to night,
which juggles then peels them,
inhaling a blossom-rubbed
sea-breeze. Peeled whole oranges

become lanterns lit by juice.
They quiver at the sound
of a midnight train, its long
announcement preceding it

into town. The sun steps off
the train carrying a valise
in the shape of a quarter-moon.
The sun has traveled all night

and wants a bath,
maybe a glass of orange juice,
perhaps a nap beneath
gray flannel clouds.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Yes We Know a Banana: A Thing Poem

A thing poem is a poem about--you guessed it--a thing. --An object, an item.



In News of the Universe: Poems of The Two-Fold Consciousness, poet, Men's Movement leader, and Jungian Robert Bly argues that the thing poem is new to the West (as in Western civilization); actually he argues that old German riddle-poems (about things) were in the right ballpark but that the West abandoned such poems. It's pretty easy to come up with thing poems written after the riddle poems in the West, however. Swift's poem about a rain-shower in London is really about a sewer-system. Keats wrote about an urn, Wordsworth about a locomoitve, Dickinson about all sorts of things. Bly's interested in a particular kind of thing poem, however, one in which the poet doesn't merely describes but free-associates. Bly might argue that poets should let their unconscious or submerged-conscious mind go to work on the object, just as our dreaming minds go to work on objects, associating freely and surrealistically. Elsewhere Bly has argued that mainstream English and American poetry hasn't done enough of this "leaping," this association. There's too much flat-footed, linear description in the tradition, from his point of view, if I'm representing his view correctly. He's passionate and insistent about his Jungian approach. Me--I'm no Jungian; or if I am, I am one by accident; or I am one and I don't know it--maybe that's the point of Jungianism. But I do like to read and write thing poems, and when a poet gets stuck, turning to the writing of a thing poem is usually a good way out. It's a way to get back to basics. Look at something, write about it, let your mind play carom-shots off it.



Here is a thing poem about a banana. I have given it the second most predictable title I could think of, not "Banana" but "Of Banana." I rather like that old-fashioned use of "of," to mean "concerning."



Of Banana


An armada of curved yellow boats
sails from tropics to a blue northern bay.
On surrounding hills, something
has happened to snow, which is
warm but not melting, is firm
and edible. Modestly we chew the snow.

In the cobbler’s workshop, scraps
of gold leather darken with age.

Tiny faces appear in fog, recede.
Air tastes of smoke and vanilla.

I shall ask that to your door be delivered
a bouquet of enormous commas
with which to punctuate sections
of lush rhetoric you bought at auction.
It is not the least I can do.

Harvesters are chopping, hacking
at sun’s abundant fruit.
Eros arrives in a Panama hat, promoting
a golden fertility symbol. From dense trees,
bright birds deride phallocentrism,
and why wouldn’t they?

Here, dear, are a few soft, white coins
with which to purchase sated hunger
before you walk back in the world,
before you must decide
how many of what to buy.

Here, dear, is charcoal. Please
use it to draw lines on thick, soft yellow paper.
Now peel back the paper to reveal the essence
of what you thought you were drawing. Are
you hungry?

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

The Ode, the Elegy, the First Draft

Today in the poetry-class I teach, we discussed two venerable types of poetry, the elegy and the ode. Among the topics we touched on was the apparent fact that it is difficult to identify subjects about which to write a serious ode, partly because "all the good ode-subjects have been taken" (at least at first glance it seems that way), partly because we live in skeptical, cynical, jaded times, and partly because the ode itself is encountered most often as a parodied form in advertising. Ultimately we brainstormed a list of possible subjects for serious odes. The list included mud; phobias; plastic; relatively invisible or under-valued persons who "serve" us as baristas, janitors, or waiters (etc.) [and most in class had worked in such jobs]; electricity; and food. The topic of food triggered a nice transition into our reading and discussion of Pablo Neruda's splendid "Ode to the Watermelon," as translated by Robert Bly.

When we discussed possible topics for an elegy, a poem about loss, we set aside the most obvious topic: the death of a loved one, and we brainstormed a list of "lost things" about which we might write an elegy. The list included health, wealth, virginity, hair, jewelry (or some other object with symbolic and/or commercial value), pets, space (for example, a field on which houses were later built), security, winter (for example, in some regions where it used to snow in winter, no snow now falls), one of our senses, keys, childhood, adolescence, and a wallet.

We saved 12-15 minutes toward the end of class in which to begin to write a poem, or at least to work our way toward a poem. Occasionally in that amount of time, one can come up with a whole draft, or at least a draft ("whole" is debatable).

For the heck of it, I decided to post the first (and so far only) draft I wrote, as is. I chose to write about a lost wallet.

[no title]

The first time I lost a wallet,
I didn't lose it--it was
stolen from a gray metal locker
I had not locked.

I remember sitting on the bench
in the vacuum left by theft.
I knew then what I don't
know now: the exact amount
of money stolen; the name
of the girl in the photograph;
and to whom the phone numbers
belonged. Those area-codes signify

much smaller geographic areas
now, and now my wallet is obese, swelled
with fatted plastic cards and multiple
ways of proving I exist. The first lost
wallet moved, thin and quickly, through
the crowd, possessed by a satisfied
thief, whom I wish well.