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

Blues for Esther Wagner

[Esther Wagner (1928-1989) earned a B.A. and a Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr. She taught at several liberal arts colleges, including the University of Puget Sound. She was a well read, generous conversationalist, colleague, and critic. She co-authored a novel, The Gift of Rome (1961) with one of her husbands, John Wagner. T.S. Eliot was a friend of her father's family, and she became friends with Erle Stanley Gardner, among other writers.]


It's too sad, darling.
But never mind, never mind.
Darling, never mind.

Let's pour a glass of sherry
and some goldfish crackers
and have a nice long chat.

Yes, we knew Eliot--Chicago.
We children referred to him
as Uncle Tom, darling--funny,
now that I think about it.

I always tell young people,
if you're sitting on a tack,
get up. This applies
to bad marriages, of course.

I'd glad you like Jarrell,
darling.. . . One encounters
ennui at mid-career. It
happened to me. If felt I'd
seen it all, read it all.
And for me, his poetry
came along at just the right time.

I don't believe in guilt,
I mean the emotion. A waste of time.
I also don't make any judgments
about people's sex lives--
consenting adults, you know,
and anyway, sex makes everyone
a little mad at one time or another.

Well, yes, it's hard to see
one's friends fall off the perch,
one by one. It's too sad. But never mind.

Get me another glass of sherry,please,
darling, and a beer for yourself--
and of course, I don't allow
beer bottles in the living room,
so do get yourself a glass.

Yes, the death's head on the ceiling,
above my bed. It's morbid to some.
Memento mori, darling.
It focuses the mind.

When I'm dying, I should like
to watch Roman Holiday
one more time. Lovely movie.

It's getting dark. And the rain.
It's too sad. But never mind,
darling. Never mind.


hans ostrom 2015

"The Wind Sprang Up at Four O'Clock," by T.S. Eliot

Poets Born In September

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Who are/were some poets born in September? I'm glad you asked.

Theodore Storm, German poet. What a great last name for a poet. "Hi. Storm's the name, and poetry's the game."

T.S. Eliot, American and British poet, also known as Tse Tse [fly]--one of Ezra Pound's nicknames for him; and as Old Possum.

Robert Burns, poetic king of Scottish poetry and song. Allesandro Tassoni--Italian, as you might have guessed.

Siegfried Sassoon, British poet and "trench poet" from the Great War. Reed Whittemore--also a translator, if memory serves.

William Carlos Williams, American (of course), and one of those poets from whom other poets may learn a lot (in my opinion).

Michael Ondaatje, Canadian poet and novelist. He published a book of poems with "rat jelly" in the title. How great is that?

Jaroslav Seifert, Czech poet. I wonder if George Siefert, former coach of the San Francisco 49ers, is related to him.

Elinor Wylie--American poet, novelist, and nonfiction writer.

And Edith Sitwell, officially Dame Edith Sitwell, British poet. My favorite poem by her may be "Still Falls The Rain," and I have a recording of her reading it.

So much depends upon the red wheel barrow and on September poetic birthdays. I also have a brother who was born in September. The gift is in the mail, bro.

Poem by Paul Valéry

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I've been enjoying re-reading the anthology, French Symbolist Poetry, translated by C.F. MacIntyre and published by U.C. (Berkeley) Press. It features poems by Nerval, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Corbiere, Mallarme, Rimbaud, LaForgue, and Valéry. These poets were original in their own right but also influenced poetry in English, including that of Yeats, Eliot, and Pound.

One by Paul Valéry caught my eye--titled simply "Caesar." It starts this way:

Caesar, serene Caesar, your foot on all,
hard fists in your beard, and your gloomy eyes
pregnant with eagles and battles of foreseen fall,
your heart swells, feeling itself the omnipotent cause.

It ends this way:

The spacious world, beyond the immense horizon,
the Empire awaits the torch, the order, the lightning
that will turn the evening to a furious dawn.

Happily out on the water, and cradled in hazard,
a lazy fisherman is drifting and singing,
not knowing what thunder collects in the center of Caesar.


What makes this a "symbolist" poem as opposed to just a regular old poem? The striking juxtaposition of images, I think--so striking that they begin to generate surrealism without generating confusion: "hard fists in your beard," for example--this isn't a logical, "realistic" image, but it makes emotional sense. The same goes for "thunder collects at the center of Caesar." Here Caesar becomes an institution or a phenomenon, or both--but not just a leader, dictator, or man.

Arthur Symons' Poem On June

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Arthur Symons (1865-1945) may be best known for his short but influential book, The Symbolist Movement In Literature, which affected the work of Yeats and Eliot, among others. He was a poet as well as a critic, however. And he obviously knew a thing or two about hats.

Here is a poem from his book, Silhouettes (1892). Obviously, it's romantic, perhaps too sweet for some, and not surprisingly, it's been set to music; and yes, it rhymes "June" with "moon." Nice ending, though.

In The Fountain Court

The fountain murmuring of sleep,
A drowsy tune;
The flickering green of leaves that keep
The light of June.
Peace, through a slumbering afternoon,
The peace of June,
A waiting ghost, in the blue sky,
The white curved moon;
June, hushed and breathless, waits, and I
Wait too, with June.
Come, through the lingering afternoon,
Soon, love, come soon.


by Arthur Symons

Foggy Couplets

Couplets in the Fog


Fog's a species of weather--
gray, like a pigeon's feather.
Auden once wrote, "Thank you, fog."
Sandburg thought of cat, not dog.
Fog's in Eliot's Unreal City--
yellow fog, what a pity.
Call it mist, call it fog:
Still you tripped over that log.
If you can, take off work.
No sense traveling in that murk.
Anything you try to say
will come out mumbled, foggy gray.
The fog is subtler than the snow.
And so it's the more dangerous foe.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Fooling Around With Surrealism

There's not a lot of time left in the semester, so we had to race through the topic of surrealism today. A student made the apt point that a "manifesto of surrealism" seemed liked an instance of hypocrisy: we need a manual of rules for telling us how to break the rules?!

We also talked about the important role surrealism played in Modernist poetry; arguably the most famous Modernist poem, The Waste Land, is surrealistic.

Sometimes it's easier to start talking about surrealism in connection with painting, so I established a spectrum between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with Dali and Pollock thrown in there somewhere for kicks. Almost everyone in the class loved paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, thought Dali was amusing and relatively accessible, but didn't quite know about Pollock. I described Warhol's film of the egg, and they didn't seem amused, although a couple of them noted that showing such a film would make people reconsider the practice and act of viewing films.

We then read a poem by Charles Simic, and one by Theodore Roethke. In the Simic poem, the key is that he begins by refusing to see the fork (in this case) in a routine way. The poem assumes we are seeing a fork for the first time, and that assumption is the trigger for surrealism. Roethke's poem takes a different approach. It is more like expressionism. It presents a kind of violent, confused emotional response to something ordinary--cuttings, as in cut flowers or cut willow branches. Surrealistic images spring from the emotional response, the inner turmoil. But again, the poem refuses to be merely descriptive.

We then talked about why anyone would want to write surrealistically. Answers: to represent reality more faithfully than realism (ironically); to break through the confines of conventions and predictable genres or modes (like the contemporary first-person, autobiographical narrative poem); to explore the unpredictable murk of the psyche.

I had also asked the class to bring relatively ordinary objects from home. These included a penny, a 2 dollar bill, a black candle, some kind of mysterious lamp shade, a stuffed animal that looked like a kitten and actually seemed to breath (this item freaked out everyone), a deer-skull, a watch, and dice.

We then began to write poems about the objects--our object own or someone else's. The poems needed to be "surrealistic" in some way--that is, not simply and conventionally descriptive. Robert Bly calls this kind of poetry "leaping poetry," and he argues that there's not enough of it in the American tradition. Of course, as I mentioned to the class, the trick is to make sure the reader has a prayer of making those leaps with you.

At any rate, I chose the dice (or die) someone had brought--red, with white dots. I couldn't resist. This is the draft I wrote:

Dice

Fold night several times until
it becomes a cube. The North Star
shines on one side, Orion's Belt
on another, and so on. Repeat the
process. You have two cubes.
Now let your fist swallow both
die. Hold your fist high, shake
it against the sky defiantly.
Make a wager with God.
Toss the cubes onto
a flat black velvet night. Look
at the way the constellated cubes
have come to rest, inert
and grave. Of course, you've lost.
The House always wins. God is
the House. The sky is God's casino.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

One By D.H. Lawrence

A student recently asked me what I thought of D.H. Lawrence's writing. She had been reading some of his short stories, including "The Horse-Dealer's Daughter," in another class, and she didn't like them much. I told her I thought Lawrence, especially as a fiction-writer, may be the kind of writer who, as the years pass, seems more tied to (in this case) his era than was the case earlier. I told her that, to some extent, he had used writing to attack behavior he didn't like, especially repression and the deadening forces of modernity. Put more simply, his stories and novels now may seem a little clumsy and/or over-the-top, especially with regard to sex.

I also told her I preferred his poetry to his fiction (although I do still like some of the fiction), partly because I found it more subtle. I encouraged her to read the poem, "Snake," for example.

Here's another poem by Lawrence, not as famous or as good as "Snake," but still interesting:

People

by D.H. Lawrence

THE great gold apples of light

Hang from the street's long bough

Dripping their light

On the faces that drift below,

On the faces that drift and blow

Down the night-time, out of sight

In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night

Distilling over me

Makes sickening the white

Ghost-flux of faces that hie

Them endlessly, endlessly by

Without meaning or reason why

They ever should be. The scene reminds me of the London-Bridge scenes in T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. For me, one intriguing surprise in the poem is that Lawrence praises the beauty of streetlights. I assume that at the time they were gaslights, which probably did project a light that might have haunting beauty. Certainly, Lawrence is riding his hobby-horse: modern people are dead inside. But it's a short ride, at least, and the imagery succeeds, in my opinion. By the way, I still rather like the little known "bio-pic" about Lawrence, Priest of Love, in which Ava Gardner has a small role.

An Image Almost Too Good For Its Own Poem

I ran across a poem by D.H. Lawrence I hadn't read before: "People." When I saw the title, I thought of the song that Streisand made famous, but Lawrence's poem goes in a different direction, to put it mildly.

People

by D.H. Lawrence

THE great gold apples of light
Hang from the street's long bough
Dripping their light
On the faces that drift below,
On the faces that drift and blow
Down the night-time, out of sight
In the wind's sad sough.

The ripeness of these apples of night
Distilling over me
Makes sickening the white
Ghost-flux of faces that hie
Them endlessly, endlessly by
Without meaning or reason why
They ever should be.

(Some of the lines are supposed to be indented, but alas, the blog-machinery is single-minded when it comes to the left margin.)

I think of this lyric as Lawrence's counterpart to Eliot's The Waste Land, and especially to one of Eliot's recurring images: the crowd flowing over London Bridge. Although the intensity of Lawrence's and Eliot's dissatisfaction with modern civilization was about the same, their reasons differed. Lawrence believed people had become worn down, domesticated, and enervated by modern existence. He wanted people to be more earthy and spontaneous, and although he hated how lethal labor could be (he grew up in coal-mining country), he never thought himself above the working class into which he was born. Eliot, on the other hand, believed modern society had cut itself off from nourishing roots of faith, tradition, and order. Working-class folk seemed to repulse him, and middle-class folk were a target of his satire. Eventually, he'd proclaim himself a royalist, an Anglican, and a literary conservative.

The image of the streetlight-as-apple is so surprisingly good, however, that it almost displaces the rest of the poem. I almost don't want to hear about those people on the street who don't know why they're alive and whose faces are made ghastly and ghostly by the gaslight. It's a sly image, too, because it likely induces many readers to think of the Edenic apple.

When I think of this poem later, I'll think of that apple-image, and--taking nothing away from Eliot's masterpiece--I'll smile at how efficiently Lawrence's lyric evokes its own kind of waste land. And I may even remember the title (which has nothing to do with that captivating image), and thus hear Barbra's voice.

Putting Poems in Their Place(s)

Another blogger I read regularly wrote a post about poetry and a sense of place, and after reading the post, I thought about poets who have seemed (to me) to be especially good at evoking a sense of place.

I thought of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travelogue that includes poetry--haiku. There are crisp, vivid images of the countryside through which he walks, but the book also includes images of the common-folk he meets along the way. Of course, especially after the Romantic era, we may be inclined reflexively to think of "nature" when we think of "place" and poetry, but upon further inspection, even "nature poets" usually include human beings and their behavior in their poems. For instance, Robinson Jeffers was, arguably, not just a poet of place but a philosopher of place; his poems often express a moral outlook that aggressively prefers nature to people. But, paradoxically, he still needs to mention people, even as he often finds they don't measure up to nature--that hawks, for instance, seem to have more integrity and dignity than most people.

In the Jeffers-vein of poetry situated in California lies the poetry of William Everson (Brother Antoninus) and Gary Snyder. Snyder's The Back Country includes poems of place from around the globe, but Turtle Island is set chiefly in Northern California, as are many of Everson's later poems. Bill Hotchkiss's poetry is set almost exclusively in the Sierra Nevada, with some poems from the southern Cascades. When it comes to Alaska and poetry of place, John Haines is the go-to poet, methinks, but a former student of mine, Jessy Bowman, has some great Alaska poems, too, as does Art Petersen.

But what of urban places? Well, ironically, Mr. Lake Country, William Wordsworth, has that terrific sonnet about London, as viewed from Westminster Bridge. Ferlinghetti has that memorable, funny poem written from the point of view of a dog wandering through North Beach in San Francisco. Philip Levine has some great gritty Detroit poems, and Rita Dove evokes Akron from a variety of perspectives. I guess Sandburg wrote what we think of as "the" Chicago poem, but I'd bet there are a lot of Chicago poets and readers of Chicago poetry who wish that poem hadn't been written.

We tend to think of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in terms of Modernist fragmentation, myth, and elaborate allusiveness, but in some ways it's best read as a picture of "the city"--a depressing picture, certainly, but what did we expect from Eliot? I remember attending a reading/talk by Stephen Spender, at which he said that he believed Eliot (in that long poem) wanted to write "a series of satiric sketches about urban life." That seemed like such a sensible, accurate description of the poem--and a great counter-weight to the overblown criticism written about Eliot's work. . . .

. . . .I love Langston Hughes's vision of Harlem in the 20th century--in Montage of a Dream Deferred. It isn't a vision of a place so much as it is a vision of people in a place--and in myriad situations dictated by history, ethnicity, economics, personality, gender, and sexuality.

Oddly enough, when I think of such places as L.A., Paris and other cities in Europe, and places in the American South, and when I then think of writers whose work is situated in such places, I tend to think of novelists and/or short-story writers--and sometimes of detective writers--rather than poets. I'll need to give more thought to who are the poets of L.A. and Paris, Berlin and the Rhineland, and the urban and rural South. If you have some suggestions, let me know.