"Watercolor," by Hans Ostrom (Lyrics) and Christine Grebiana (Music)

"Portrait of a Lady," by William Carlos Williams

Watercolor

The painter sharpened blurs,

smudged lines, herded blends,
let pigment and water dance
in cosutme to visual elliptical
tunes. That is not a poplar,
that is not a house, nor is
that a field! Yet, once wetly,
now dried, they seem so very well.

hans ostrom 2025

The Goddess Dusk

At dusk

she reclines, a
goddess infused with gold
light, luxuriant in liquid
soft warmth.

hans ostrom 2025

painting by Alphonse Mucha (1899)

An Image of Spring Wheat

Emerald-green spring wheat

in Tuscany unrolls its carpet
up to a hilltop and blue sky.

Up there to the right
gather cypress trees in a
clump like conferring monks.

Across the top of the hill,
two electrical lines sag
between two cruciform polls.

A photographer has snapped
this image with a legendary
Hasselblad. The scene ordered

him to do so. Then, a guest
late to dinner, he rushed off
and forgot the lens-cap. In

the morning he returns. The
hill doesn't look the same. Of
course not. He smiles. He

scans the green grass,
searching for the cap. He
finds it, glances back up

at the cypresses, which
gossip about him. A bird
lands on one of the wires.

hans ostrom 2024

A Summer's Day

 

in response to seeing the painting, "To a Summer's Day," by Bridget Riley, at theTate Modern Art Gallery, London. Image of painting courtesy Tate Gallery, copyright 2014 by Bridget Riley


A shimmering glare comes off
the river, a wavy shiver. Air
becomes a stream of blues
and greens, sheens and browns
and creams. Summer

swims in such blendings
and brief blindings, dives
into pools of light, laps
with wavelengths
at the feet of lovers. Oh,
yes, summer waves and hovers.

Bach: Goldberg Variations

Icicles leap off eaves,

land and dance
in geometric patterns.

Fractals fly in squadrons,
dropping musical notes
on plowed furrows.

Now toy soldiers march
across a bright stage &
a ballerina flutters

round them like a butterfly.
Oh, piano! You really will
do anything

the fingers, hands,
heart, head, ears,
and art ask of you.

hans ostrom 2023

Office at Night

 

image: Edward Hopper's painting "Office at Night," 1940

It's 1940, and Pearl Harbor
has yet to wake Americans up
to historical catastrophe. City lights
illuminate her, voluptuous in blue
but ignored by the pale manager
droning out his own letter, which
she typed perfectly. It's Friday,
after five. Her desk is cleared,

she's ready to slam the black
steel drawer on another week
and meet the gals for a drink,
go home, kick her black heels
off, free her body from fashion
unclip the hose and roll them
off, strip the rest, and
sink nude into hot suds.

She stares down her olive
drab boss, whose wife's holding
his dinner at home and wobbling
under a headache. The office
is running out of air.

hans ostrom 2022

"The Beach at Petites Dalles"

painting by Berthe Morisot, French Impressionist. Also known as "On the Beach" 

Prelude to storm: sky's pallor rebuffs the sun,

green sea regurgitates the waves, and people
trouble yellow sand. Dressed in black,
they seem to mourn the summer or dare
humidity. The painter's pleased. The
palette of the day adores her brushes. Her
work's a frolic of adept daubs and dabs
that play with the play of light.

hans ostrom 2022

Clark Terry's Ballads

(recording: Clark After Dark)

Come inside, where it's mellow dusk
and bourbon brown. I can turn it into noon
at any time, then back to blurry twilight. All
right, come outside--look: red, yellow, and blue
blossoms still want your attention.  Listen

to vespering birds, hear wordless
words of traffic, of trees in rustle
and streets in hustle. Back inside
we'll take note of desire, climb a set
of stairs, so easily. We might be

caught unawares by something sweet
smiling there in mischievous shadows.
It could be us in mirror. It could be
a woman or a man or a ghost. Or just
the house itself, itself, listening.


hans ostrom 2020

"After Listening to Music From Duke Ellington's Orchestra"

A few frozen pleasantries to begin--
then some roots cultivated in reverse,
starting with tendrils down deep,
ending where taproot meets trunk-tree.
Posterity. What do you mean? I told you
I might call. I told you in the Fall!

All I had was a pair of deuces. (This is
one of those stories.) Next thing
nobody knows, I'm on top of a brass casino,
which I own, watching hawks glisten as
they glide. Now everyone's showing up,
all black limos and white surfboards;
and robodots and king snakes, the red
and the black. If music isn't from God,
it soon will be. And the filigree.

You just knew we had to get muddy
and moody, and Jesus Muhammad Moses
Mary and the Buddha-man: here come

visions of a visage, Ellington's,
carved in black and tan marble.
Time never stops playing,
so why should he?


hans ostrom 204

"Venus Transiens," by Amy Lowell

Bond of Union

(after M.C. Escher's Lithograph, "Bond of Union," 1956)


We first met in a vat of soup,
you and I. The bubbles entranced.
Then they turned into spongy spheres,
and the soup evaporated entirely.

More adventure: our insides--
brains and guts, bones and such--
departed. We became mere ribbons
of being, me with my sad goatee,

you with your lovely mouth
and luxuriant hair. We discovered
but one ribbon became us. So we
move cautiously now and try

not to attribute blame.


hans ostrom, 2013

"Tour of a Painting"

"Chardin's 'Still Life With Fish,'"

Big Guitar Blues

Big Guitar Blues

   Inspired by three works of art (assemblage and acrylic paint) by Becky Frehse:  

Col Legno Battuto, Divisi á Due, and Playing By Heart (2010)

An old guitar enlarges, disrupts my evening, goes

through the roof, and multiplies its frets on up. I fetch

a step-ladder and start climbing between the d

and f strings. In night-air soon wind strums strings

and they buzz me to my bones. It doesn’t take long

to climb past that circular cave-mouth (weird echoes)

and get  too high—nice view of city lights: I feel

as if  I had to mention  that. Knuckles numb,

I start to hum a song I think the strings imply,

as now I hear all six and keep on climbing. Where

does this neck end? Won’t neighbors have reported

this by now? Mist has wetted frets. I slip, barely

hook my elbow on the pipe-sized string, recover.

I’m old, cold, and tired. Now one by one, each string

groans like a different-voiced, mournful beast. Somewhere

in clouds, some picker’s  tuning up. O man, O woman,

I got me some of them gargantuan guitar blues,

and I got my slippers on, not shoes.

Hans Ostrom 2011

Still Life With Fish and Other Stuff

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Chardin's Still Life With Fish


In Jean-Siméon Chardin's "Still
Life with Fish, Vegetables, Gougères,
Pots, and Cruets," the paint becomes
Plexiglass because it seals off odors
I seek. Or should I say "aromas"--odors
that are formally attired? Chardin's

manipulation of pigment teases me
with an imaginary robust stench of
a French kitchen, dead cool slimy fish
hanging over vegetables and such.
Chardin invites me to the unstill
kitchen, then closes the glass door

firmly, and I'm left with an inedible,
unsniffable scene. Well done, monsieur,
to taunt the nose of an olfactory voyeur
in the deep-freeze of an art gallery.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

On Hobbema's Painting

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(the Hobbema painting is owned by the Getty Museum now)


About Hobbema's Landscape

(Meindert Hobbema, 1638-1709)


In Hobbema's "A Wooded Landscape with Travelers
on a Path through a Hamlet," clouds, trees,
and shadows overwhelm travelers and buildings.
Even a patch of sunlight, mid-painting, might
be ominous, a precursor to thunderstorm. Villages,
hamlets, and no-account small towns live on
the edge of being devoured, one way or another.
They are beside nature's point--are one tornado,
flood, avalanche, or economic downturn away from
obliteration. I'm sure Hobbema had something else
in mind with these pigments, the tracks left by
his brush-strokes, but I do like how he knew
foliage, clouds, and shadow lord over a mere
hamlet made of brick and milled wood.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poet + Museum = Poem

(image: interior of Hagia Sophia)

I did write a post concerning "homeopathic treatments for writer's block" once, but otherwise I don't recall posting anything like "an English assignment," chiefly because it seems like such a nerdy, English-professory, assignmentish thing to do.

However, one of the few readers of this blog recently asked, "Where do you find your creativity?" and a) I haven't answered that question, b) I'm not sure how to answer it, but c) one way to answer it is very specifically: by suggesting a task for anyone (including oneself), any poet, in the unlikely event that person needs a task to spark the writing or the "creativity."


Before I give the task, I should probably answer the question more generally.
I like how the question is phrased, first of all--using "where" as oppposed to "how." Poets or any artists can find stuff (now there's a precise term) to interest them anywhere. So I guess one answer to the question is, "Almost everywhere." Places, situations, language (especially odd overheard phrases), conditions, new places, familiar places, strange places, work-spaces, and so on.

Another answer is that I don't feel especially more creative than other people. I think I've always just liked to write, especially poetry, and if you enjoy "doing" some kind of art, then the creativity usually arrives in a steady flow, a trickle, at least. I don't enjoy writing fiction nearly as much as poetry, so when I'm writing that, I'm aware that sometimes the creativity is running a bit low. So I guess the answer is that one finds the creativity in the making itself.


Now that that paragraph is, thankfully, done with, here is an assignment I give poetry classes. It entails visiting a gallery or a museum, although one could just as easily pick up an art- or photograph-book of some kind and go from there.

But as I almost suggested earlier, posting an "assignment" may be taken as an insult, especially by those who know quite well what they want to write about, thank-you-very-much. If you count yourself in that number, you have my apology. Then there are people who recoil from the very idea of "assigning" a poem, although I think this assignment is so loose that it almost avoids the stigma of being an assignment. Almost. Anway, if you're in the anti-assignment group, you, too, have my apology. In the unlikely event you are a poet or are wanting to write a poem and might like something new or unexpected to write about, here 'tis:


An “ekphrastic” poem is one that is in some way inspired by a work of art, usually a work from a non-literary art. W.H. Auden’s “Museé des Beaux Arts” is one of the best known examples from 20th century poetry. In the poem, Auden argues that paintings by Old Masters such as Brueghel reflected a particular view of suffering. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium” is another example; it focuses on the art in a church called Hagia Sophia in Constantinople/Istanbul. That poem seems to express a desire to live permanently in an ideal world of art. Our field-trip today takes us to [ ] Gallery, which features two exhibits, The Island and Juxtaposition, which hold especially rich possibilities for poetry. Look at the exhibits and then find a space on the floor, have a seat, and write either notes toward a poem or a poem or both. The poem might react specifically to one piece in one exhibit; or it may embody an overall reaction to the exhibit; or it may concern a topic triggered by the exhibit. The references to the art-work might be strong and obvious, subtle, or ultimately even non-existent. That is, the poem will begin as something that plays off the exhibits or a piece in the exhibits, but its real subject might be something else that springs from your memory and/or the process of writing itself.