The Mother of All Poems

When I think about writing the mother
of all poems that is to say a big serious
poem about my mother, I think about
the poem I wrote, in Karl Shapiro's class,
about how a piano contains all notes,
all potential melodies, etc., in some kind
of ideal way. And after I read it, Shapiro
said to the class, "D.H. Lawrence wrote
a poem about a piano, but it was really
about his mother; he was in love with
her." I found the comment unhelpful,

plus suggestive of incest. Oh, well:
workshops. I also think of my mother
and her low tolerance for nonsense,
such as puppets and murderers.  She
sat on the jury that convicted serial
killer Larry Lord Motherwell (ahem),
which was the name he, Frank
Eugene Caventer, gave himself,
a nom de meurtrier.

Ma wanted to make sure Motherwell
got the gas chamber, and she never forgave
the one juror who prevented that.
Anyway, I really don't feel like writing
an ambitious poem about my mother.
It seems like too much work for too
little gain, and I don't know--
Freud, Shapiro, and millions of
other people have kind of ruined
the subject for me.  My mother liked
to drink Hamm's beer out of the can.


hans ostrom 2017

Certain Beverages

Hot chocolate is independent, comforting, and interesting,
like a tastefully dressed and perfumed woman
sitting at a bar who knows how to hold a conversation.

A shot or more of vodka is like a broad, iced
highway when you've just been handed
the keys to a black Corvette with failed
headlights and bald tires.

A German beer from the tap
is a highly trained, reserved professional,
absolutely dependable.

If you specify the red wine as Beaujolais,
then I will want to be of assistance
to multiple French women at once,
most likely in October, in Paris, and forgive me
if, momentarily, I confuse the situation
with paradise. As to retsina,

God help me, I did love it, as one
might love an athletic, deceptively
savvy woman from a rural province.

If you would ask me about God,
I would refer you to clean alpine creek-water.


hans ostrom 2016

Poems by Carter Monroe

Carter Monroe is a fine poet as well as a small-press publisher of poetry and fiction. Here is a link to some of his work, including the poem, "Ten Beers and Six Cigarettes":

link to poems

162 Beers; More Than a Woman

So we trekked to Seattle today for a bit of business, and then we had dinner at a place called the Tap Room Grill. One of us (me) was out of place because the joint seemed geared to young urban professionals. I'm not young, I'm just barely urban (and not urbane), and although I have a profession, I don't really look professional.

The place's claim to fame is that it has 162 different kinds of beer available. That's impressive, and that's too many. At some point, the tyranny of choice (not quite as bad as the tyranny of no choice, I admit) kicks in. I wonder if anybody comes in and just gets stuck in a an Escher-loop by reading the beer-menu. Because I was going to operate a motorized vehicle weighing thousands of pounds, I went with the the one kind of mineral water they had, San Peligrino.

The conversation at our table focused chiefly on movies, for I was with the family's movie-expert, so expert that he actually knows how to download sub-titles for obscure foreign movies and has an encyclopedic knowledge of arcane strains of the horror-genre. Recommendations included a film called Torso and one called, I think, Shocking Mall. Then there's one that sound like a whimsical take on the chainsaw-movies; it's called The Tool-Box Massacre, or something like that. We both like Jim Jarmusch films, including Dead Man, with Depp (Robert Mitchum's final movie), and Coffee and Cigarettes.

On the music machine in this place, they played the Bee Gees' "More Than a Woman." My goodness, that took me back a few eons. Many of my associates at the time despised the Bee Gees for starting the disco-rage, killing off rock and roll (so the reasoning went), and leading to the unimpressive 1980s. I remember some of my friends being most amused by Paul Simon's comment that the Bee Gees sounded like singing dolphins. I thought that was pretty funny, too, but I also thought it may have been sour grapes. Also, I think music that gets people up and dancing in any particular eon is okay. Saturday Night Fever wasn't a bad movie, either, especially insofar as it took the trouble to look at working-class issues.

The Bee Gees did mystify me with some of their lyrics, however. "I Started a Joke" is a bit Kafkaesque. And "More Than a Woman" is perplexing. Is the woman a Supreme Commander or a demi-god? Is she Woman 2.0? Is she a Woman and also a CEO of the speaker's corporation? Or maybe the woman isn't just a woman but a trans-gendered person. Maybe that's it.

A bonus on the way home was that I got to hear "Boogie Shoes" by K.C. and the Sunshine Band, a group also despised by some of my friends back in the day but not by me. "Boogie Shoes" always struck me as more of a funk-song than a disco-song, and a darned good funk song. I'd recommend for your Ipod. What I liked about K.C. was that he was completely unpretentious, unlike some singer-songwriters we might mention from the 1970s and 1980s.

Somehow, however, I've misplaced my boogie shoes. They were more than some footwear to me (more than some footwear, more than some foot-wear to me).

Before we pulled into the driveway, I got to hear "Throw It Up" by Little John, or is it L'il John? He's so over the top that he amuses me to a laugh-out-loud extent, and of course I thought of Chapelle's impression of him and laughed more. I'd guess Little John's music is not on the Ipods of Clinton, Obama, and McCain.

Guest Poet: Jared Leising on Beer, Ted Kooser, and Other Matters

Here is a fine poem by Jared Leising, a writer and professor in the Pacific Northwest and author of the chapbook, The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio:



The Drink Ted Kooser Owes Us All


Twenty-four hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not.

- H.L. Mencken


I go to Safeway
to buy a six-pack.
Somebody’s taken
a bottle from the
last pack, so now it’s

a fiver, dammit.
Was it Kooser?—that
geezer (my mom finds
cute) who wrote about
the miracle of

a lone beer bottle
standing right side up
and empty along
the highway—each line
three syllables long,

each stanza three lines.
My students read this
without awe, as though
they’ve done this plenty
after polishing

off a bottle at
fifty, cruising down
Aurora, tossing
emptiness to wind.

by Jared Leising


Copyright 2007 Jared Leising