"I Many Times Thought Peace Had Come," by Emily Dickinson

 Reading/video of a short poem, #912, by Dickinson, and a happy [let us hope] voting day to you:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BclJi99wcpw

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

Poetry Consulates

Pushkin loved the idea of St. Petersburg
and the bronze horseman who saw
the city before it was built. Langston
Hughes loved the idea of Harlem,
also some people there. Did Baudelaire
love Paris? Splenetically, perhaps.
I don't think Dickinson loved
any cities. The village of her mind
sufficed. It pleases me to think
of all the poets writing now
in Istanbul and Mainz, Hong
Kong and Honolulu, Uppsala
and Houston, Brasilia and Berlin,
Tehran and Tangier and all
the other cities where poets
live, every city in other words,
in their words,  which
follow their cities around,
no matter how often the
cities change disguises. Poets'
words attach themselves to love
and food, despair and dreams. If
only these poets could meet
and read their poems and argue
but not fight, ask questions
about language and children,
mountains and rivers. Should we
build poetry consulates in all the cities
we can? Surely it couldn't hurt.


hans ostrom 2019

"American Poetry Managerial Decision," by Hans Ostrom

"And now out of the dugout strides the pitching coach, Cotton Mather. He signals for the closer, Emily Dickinson."

"That's right, Chuck, Manager Frederick Douglass has decided to remove starting pitcher Walt Whitman  and take his chances with the diminutive right-hander."

"Well, Juan, Walt had  very little control tonight, and his line-count was way up there. I think it's  good move, Juan."

"Me, too, Chuck. I mean, you have to like Whitman's swagger, the way he sings himself, but it's hard to argue with Douglass's move. Dickinson has been in these situations before!"

"You  bet, Juan--and here's Emily throwing her warm-up tosses to catcher Henry "The Hammer" James.  Her lines get there in a hurry, but she also has that uncanny ability to take a little something off the rhyme. She keeps the other team off-balance!"

hans ostrom 2014

"The Difference Between Despair and Fear," by Hans Ostrom

"Much Madness Is Divinest Sense," by Emily Dickinson

"This Is My Letter to the World," by Emily Dickinson

"Faith Is a Fine Invention," by Emily Dickinson

Video: "Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley In Heaven"

Re-posting the short film based on my poem of the same title.

"Come Slowly, Eden," by Emily Dickinson

"Conjecturing a Climate," by Emily Dickinson

"I Could Not Drink It," by Emily Dickinson

"The Sky Is Low, The Clouds Are Mean," by Emily Dickinson

Official American Poetry

Official American Poetry is a corporation like
any other. It has executive officers, middle-
managers, salespeople, controllers, and share-
holders. It operates major retail outlets

such as anthologies, presses, workshops,
and MFA programs. There are Academies
and Institutes, with canons on the parapets
and reviewers pouring hot grease on the mob.

Official American Poetry (OAP) frequently
says, "We are unamused by most american
poetry." When OAP notes an Interesting
Development, then OAP buys it up to

maintain market control. It bought up
Dickinson and Whitman, Plath and Sexton,
the Beats and LANGUAGE. There is insider-
trading, lobbying, and influence-peddling.

There's the awkward American imitation
of royalty (Pound crowning Eliot). OAP
is a tower of glass and steel. If you want
to try to try to trade independence for

recognition, go for it. Good luck.
Otherwise, just keep walking. And
writing. That's what Walt and Emily would do.
Bukowski and Bob Kaufman, too,

and this is not to mention,
and this is not to mention
all the poets alive, above and
under ground both at once.


hans ostrom 2013

Poets and Their Readers

Some poets don't think
they owe supposed readers anything.
Some poets think they owe them
a lot. Some poets think they don't
have readers, so they may think,
"What's the difference?"

And some poets think readers
have it coming, "it" being a kind
of punishment or lesson: a riddle,
a bricolage of confused allusions,
an insult, a dismissal, or some other
gesture of superiority.  Me,

I think I owe readers something,
maybe a lot. But I'm rarely
fully certain what I owe, and
I don't know most of my readers
but am fully certain there aren't
that many.  I don' know

what Emily Dickinson thought
she owed ostensible readers
or who she imagined them
to be.  Maybe she assumed
people who like birds, the play
of words, whimsical comparisons,
and reticent irreverence might
enjoy what she wrote.  I'm fully

certain she wrote, "publication
is the auction of the mind,"
a statement that does and doesn't
seem to concern readers.  Also,

I'm fully certain that I've written
"fully certain" too many times here
and that if Dickinson's poetry were
a store and readers customers,
I'd think it was as well stocked
as anyone's store.  --Nothing
against other stores, of course.


--Hans Ostrom, 2012

White Silence

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White Silence

Emily, I love you, but some
truths can't be told slant.
This country's never made
right what it did and does
to Black folks. On that score,
its soul is rotten and always
will be until it makes things
right. Its edifices will forever
be without foundation until
it makes things right.

Emily, more White folks
need to break this White silence,
which covers the U.S. like
Antarctic ice. It is White folks
who must insist at last
that this nation face itself
at what it did, and what it does.

Copyright 2012

Moon Poems

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(image: Swiss cheese, the chief component of the moon, in spite of astronomers' and astronauts' protestations to the contrary)
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Not that you asked, but my favorite moon-poem is W.H. Auden's "This Lunar Beauty," chiefly because of the rhythm, which subtly echoes that of Jon Skelton's poetry.

Other good moon-poems include "Under the Harvest Moon," by Carl Sandburg, famous Swedish American; "Autumn Moonlight," by Matsuo Basho [how many haikus have a moon-image in the them, I wonder?] ; "Length of Moon," by Arna Bontemps; "The Moon Versus Us Ever Sleeping Together Again," by Richard Brautigan [I think we have a winner in the title-competition]; "The Moon Was But a Chin of Gold," by Emily Dickinson [I think we have a winner in the comparison-competition, and what a shock that's it's D: never mess with Ms. D.]; "Blood and the Moon," by W.B. Yeats; and "And the Moon and the Stars and the World," by Charles Bukowski.

Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley on Youtube

Thanks to film-maker Joe LaSac, Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley are now on Youtube, as dramatized by actors and imagined in a poem--and by a fine film-maker. Take a look!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naa3oK4zWxQ

Picnic At Emily Dickinson's House

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(Logo: Emily Dickinson Museum)
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If you should find yourself in the vicinity of Amherst, Massachusetts, next weekend, you might want to visit the Emily Dickinson Museum, where a poetry picnic will occur on Saturday, June 13, from noon to 2:00 p.m. As the Museum's web site notes, two houses linked with Dickinson have been preserved: the homestead and her brother, Austin's, house, which is called the Evergreens. Here is a link to the site:


http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/

Lyric Craving

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Lyric Craving


Sometimes I crave a lyric poem
That springs like a clear creek,
A regulated rush of words
To zap a weary week.

A yellow butterfly in air,
A jet-trail frozen high:
Such images are welcome, too.
They fill the lyric eye.

In Housman and in Dickinson;
In Langston; Auden, too.
There's often something sharp and quick.
The words are right and few.

I'll go read these, and others, too:
The Spare Ones, let us say.
I'll sip the water from the creek
And slake the thirst today.

Copryight 2009 Hans Ostrom