To Eddie Some Weeks After the Winter Solstice

Oceans are the ultimate artists, Edward,
more variously capable and constantly
original than earthquakes, rivers, ice,
and erosion. Of course, human art,

in contrast to all of these, is not
really in the conversation. Human art
is always a bit of a knock-off.
Sculpture, painting, surrealism,
realism, epic tales, Dada, absurdism,
comedy, tragedy, scrambled genres,
modes, and impulses, and forms
we cannot even grasp abound

in oceans, by oceans. The oceanic
opus is constantly changing,
ever-expanding, and utterly
unconcerned about audience,
remuneration, and critical success.

Sad Plato, when he was thought-seeking
for ideal forms, should have recalled
the ideal generator of forms:
the sea! The Greek seas alone
would have cheerfully overwhelmed
Plato's wee dialogues and allegories
and turned them into fantastic
shapes to nourish starved imaginations.

What do you think about that, Eddie
of La Jolla? I know how you like your
Plato and his greatest invention Socrates,
who, like a professional wrestling
star, always won his contests.

As you warm up your pipes to sing
in response to me, Eddie, let me stand you
to a salty tequila cocktail, an
ocean unto itself, some say.

hans ostrom 2016

"Lunar Paraphrase," by Wallace Stevens

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.

Whom the Students Like: Poets

(image: ice cream fit for an emperor)

So I gave a test in the Introduction to Poetry Writing Class. I suppose it's unusual to give tests in creative-writing course, but there are other good reasons to do so besides the fact that it goes against the grain. We use a textbook [this time it's Kevin Clark's The Mind's Eye, which includes a lot of contemporary poetry] and the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and we do a fairly sustantial unit on prosody and traditional verse-forms, so although of course much of our time is spent on the students' poetry, we also read a fair amount.

On the test, I included a question about a favorite poem of theirs we've read so far--either in the Norton or in Clark's book. Shakespeare may be the earliest author I assign, although at some point, I usually discuss the English ballad tradition briefly as well as Anglo-Saxon poetry and how (for example) it influenced Hopkins.

Anway, here are the students' answers:

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"

Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" [we spend some time discussing the ways in which the text of the poem doesn't "say" what people now assume it says] [2 votes]

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" [2 votes]

Countee Cullen, "Yet Do I Marvel"

Norman Dubie, "Poem" (about a child burying a hairless doll)

Barbara Hamby, "Vex Me"

Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" [3 votes]

John Donne, "The Flea"

Theodore Roethke, "The Waking" [2 votes]

Wilfred Owen, "Dulce Et Decorum Est" [2 votes]

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" [3 votes]

I was surprised by the fact that both Stevens and Eliot received multiple votes--Stevens, especially, because I had assumed the students had found "The Emperor of Ice Cream" to be too perplexing, although I try to show that it's really not as perplexing as all that (I assumed I'd come close to failing in this regard). We will have read more women poets by the time the second test comes around, but even so I was surprised poems by Hannah Stein and Ruth Stone (for instance) didn't get a vote. On the other hand, this is a vote only for one poem.

Hey, What's The Deal?

"Deal" seems to be a word with multiple personalities. The OED online lists four separate noun-versions, with sub-definitions within those categories. The first version has something to do with portions or parts, such as a "deal" of land, as in a portion of land. The second version has more to do with sharing or transaction, and one species of this version historically has been used to refer to "transactions of a questionable nature," out of which sprang expressions like "raw deal" or "bad deal." But you can have good deals, too, of course: "We good a good deal on our new car." "Big deal" seems to be used largely in a sarcastically way: "You stepped on my toe." Answer: "Oh, big deal [get over it]."

"No deal" seems suggest, or perhaps even denote, "No, I do not wish to do business with you" or "No, we do not have an agreement."

Believe it or not, "deal" also was used to refer to sexual intercourse; the citations are to British texts from the late 1500's.

"Deal" can also refer to a slice of a log--but mainly pine or fir (soft wood). So when Wallace Stevens refers to a piece of "deal" furniture in his famous poem, "The Emperor of Ice Cream," he's referring to an inexpensive piece of furniture, such as a chest of drawers made of pine-wood. Of course, "deal" also means distribute--as in dealing cards, and as in the figurative "deal me in," meaning that one wishes to have a portion of some activity or enterprise distributed to him or her, or more specifically that one wants to join a card game and, presumably, is eager to distribute his or her money to others, under the pretense of "gambling." Casinos never gamble, of course. Their "deal" is to make money, steadily and predictably.

Persons in my parents' generation and films from that era seemed to like the expression, "Hey, what's the deal?!" It seemed to be a way of questioning inappropriate behavior, to let somebody know you noticed something wrong. "What's the big idea?" seemed to be a cousin to this expression. "Hey, Bub [or Buster], what's the big idea?" That sounds so Forties to me.

Sometimes people seem to identify their employment or type of business by using the word "deal": "I deal strictly in commercial real estate." "We deal in higher-end jewelry." "I just did a deal in Colorado, as a matter of fact." Ah, to do a deal.

In professional sports, when one player is "traded" to another team, sportscasters (and what a word sportscaster is!) often report, "He was dealt to the Phillies from San Francisco," almost as if the player were flung across the continent like a playing-card; well, I suppose in some ways he was.

My father tended to refer to people who seemed suspiciously busy and self-important as "wheeler-dealers." Somebody who was slick, who had something to sell, and/or who seemed to be involved in many things but not to do much real work--this was the classic "wheeler-dealer," in his world-view. At some point, you could count on my father also observing, mildly, without anger, that this "wheeler-dealer" was also "full of bullshit." This is a very complicated condition, metaphorically, to be a wheeler-dealer full of bullshit. It's quite a burden, really.

In the following poem, "deal" refers to an implied transaction, a business-deal of sorts, really the ultimate contract :

What The Deal Is, Apparently

I did not know it then, but
as I was being biologically
conceived and cellularly developed,
I was borrowing my one and only
life. By being born and continuing
to be, I signed a contract with
eternity. In return for one life, I
agreed to live it, receiving rights,
privileges, wretchedness, befuddlement,
appetites, and terror pertaining
thereunto. This life is the only
situation I, in my one-time capacity
as me, will know. The whole
set-up seems bizarre, but there is
no other, according to the contract.
This is the deal.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom