Kildeer

("The flight of the Kildeer is strong and rapid, and is at times protracted to a great distance. It skims quite low over the ground, or plays at a great height in the air, particularly during the love season, when you may see these birds performing all sorts of evolutions on wing."  audobon.org)

Kildeers, about the size of flickers,
screamed across the pasture, summers.
Their shrieks were very fine, accomplished,
their low, straight routes efficient.

Thank God I didn't try to make them
symbolize or teach: what a bore,
a lugubrious Wordsworthian chore. 
No. Just the kildeers, fast fliers,

loud criers, going fast from copse
of oaks to stand of pines. 


hans ostrom 2017

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.

One By Poe

Some of my colleagues in the English Department are working hard to put together a conference about and celebration of Edgar Allen Poe and his writing. The event is called (wait for it) SymPOEsyium. Poe's 200th birthday is in January; the event is in February. A colleague and I are going to discuss Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition." There's going to be a parody-of-Poe contest, and maybe someone will open a cask of Amantillado sherry. Of course, the jokes about pendulums, live burials, and ravens abound.

I just re-read the following not-famous (also known as obscure, I suppose) poem by Poe, and I found it pleasing in some respects. The influence of Wordsworth--perhaps Coleridge, too--is evident, I think. The focus on the poem seems to be on how the river is in one sense an emblem of art but then on how it becomes a mirror that reflects a woman's face but, more importantly, reflects the adoration of someone who admires her. Of course, we've come to expect a reference, oblique or direct, to Narcissus in poems about water, but that's really not what Poe seems to be up to here. The woman isn't admiring herself.

I like the reference to "old Alberto's daughter," as if the reader is supposed to know who that is, and the line "the playful maziness of art" is most amusing, sounds modern, and doesn't quite sound like Poe. The expression freshly portrays the way a river--which seems quickly to become a brook or a creek--represents art; more typical ways would be to think of the river's flow as similar to the imagination's flow, or to conjure images of sources--headwaters, etc. "Playful maziness of art" I found to be a good surprise. Addressing the subject of the poem right away, followed by an exclamation point, was something of a conventional move, to say almost the least, in the 19th century, as was personifying nature. The poem is derivative, but it has its original moments, and for Poe, it's light, so it has that going for it, too.










To a River





by Edgar Allan Poe





Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow


Of crystal, wandering water,


Thou art an emblem of the glow


Of beauty- the unhidden heart-


The playful maziness of art


In old Alberto's daughter;


But when within thy wave she looks-


Which glistens then, and trembles-


Why, then, the prettiest of brooks


Her worshipper resembles;


For in his heart, as in thy stream,


Her image deeply lies-


His heart which trembles at the beam


Of her soul-searching eyes.

Multiple Realization and Poets

Sometimes, after my mother (R.I.P.) would do something based on intuition, she would say, "Don't ask me why [I did that]." "Don't ask me why, but I had a feeling there was a rattlesnake there, so I didn't lift up the box."

Don't ask me why, but I've been reading some philosophy of science, though I haven't probed the depths as extensively as the Hyperborean,whose blog is on my list.

Specifically, I've been reading Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction, by Samir Okasha. These very short introductions from Oxford U.P. are nifty little books. As is often the case with books, I'm drawn to these because they're physically pleasing--thin, nicely designed, easily fitted in the back pocket. I think I own about 10 of them now, everything from short intros to the Koran and to Islam to short intros on Descartes, Spinoza, Literary Theory, and Ancient Philosophy. If you know the subject already, the books are great refreshers, with updates on newer literature in the field. If you don't know the subject, they're great introductions (indeed) and point clearly to additional reading.

Among the topics I was drawn to in Okasha's book was the concept of multiple realization:

"How can science that studies entities that are ultimately physical not be reducible to physics? Granted that the higher sciences are in fact autonomous of physics, how is this possible? According to some philosophers, the answer lies in the fact that the objects studied by higher level sciences are 'multiply realized' at the physical level" (p. 56). The example of the concept Okasha deploys is demotic: ashtrays. That is, you can have a theory of or a design for ashtrays, but then when you go out into the world, you see that ashtrays are multiply and, figuratively speaking, infinitely realized. Even two ashtrays based on the same design are different. One has a nick in it, for example, or it's slightly warped. So any one ashtray cannot be completely reduced to the physics underlying. Another science, or two, is necessary to explain that one particular ashtray you're looking at.

I like this concept because it articulates the way in which what is always seems to outrun or disrupt what is thought about what is. I like it also because I think poets are drawn more to the particular manifestations of reality as opposed to reality as generalized by scientists, custom, and so on. That one particular bird, city street (and moment on that city street), interchange with a person, sweater, kiss, cloud, or copy of Kant's writing (the copy with the coffee stain on page 92): these highly specific realizations are what, in most cases, first hook a poet's interest. Poets aren't necessarily opposed to concepts or categories, and a lot of poets, I think, aren't in fact interested in the particular. But most are. In this sense, the poetic way of looking at the world is not so different from the scientific way. I think in another context, Emily Dickinson (for example) would have become a botanist or an entomologist. Her poems are far more grounded than most readers expect or think. Almost all of them begin in close observation of a single realization: not "snake" in general, but a snake, seen on that day. Also, Wordsworth liked geometry--because it was, in his view (and according to the etymology), it was the science of measuring the earthy [geo + metric]. That is, it had to do with the planet that supported his beloved lake country and its multiple realizations. Most mathematicians now, I gather, do not think of geometry as the science of measuring the earth but as just another conceptual framework--another dialect of math, as it were.

Don't ask me why, but I think I'll end this particular realization of the blog here.