Island Life

A lot of people in this neck of the woods, or neck of the waters, live on islands and commute via ferries, and other people have "vacation property" on the islands. I like to visit islands sometimes, but I don't think I'd like to live on one, no matter how big it is. I get a little uneasy, eventually, on islands, so I suppose I should be extra-careful about being ship-wrecked. Here's a poem that springs, I think, from that uneasiness:

Island Fever

There’s not enough of here. We’ve memorized
the coastline, and we plan for surprising storms.
Native birds are too big, loud, and bright
for the venue. West manufactures
“beautiful sunset” every day. Our drinking-
water smells of boiled crabs. Every porch
sags with rot. We loathe tourists because
they fall for all the island’s gimmicks, including
sand, palm trees, and our menus. No one ever
meant or was meant to live here: Long-boats
of natives’ ancestors got shoved here in
an anomalous storm. Later arrivals were
victims of delusional cartographers. Well,
we’re all cousins now, so what's an islander to do?

Like us, our children
play with their food, make islands of mashed
potatoes in seas of gravy. This pile of rock
is slightly higher than the reefs—a volcanic
achievement that’s become a “romantic
get-away.” We don’t wish the ocean ill
but want just once to walk in any
direction on an aimless plain and not
bump into anything soon or
something we knew was coming, and
we know something like a tsunami is coming,
or a hurricane, or the theoretical tourist that will make
the total weight of the island's population too much.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2007

Answering Questions In Poems

In his book, The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (W.W. Norton, 1979, but still in print), Richard Hugo includes a chapter on "Nuts and Bolts" in which he gives such specific advices as "use no. 2 pencils," "never erase--just cross out [lines or words you don't like as you write]", and "If you ask a question [in a poem], don't answer it, or answer a question not asked, or defer. . . .If you can answer the question [in a poem], to ask it is a waste of time" (p. 40).



Of course, the business about pencils is a bit tongue-in-cheek--but also refreshingly specific, especially in contrast to the tired, vague advice usually given to writers, such as "write what you know" or "show, don't tell." Because poetry and fiction concern imagination, or making things up, one is always writing what one doesn't know even when s/he is writing what s/he knows. And sometimes it's better to tell rather than show. You just never know.



A student in class reacted to some of this advice (from Hugo) by saying that it made him want to do just the opposite of what Hugo advised; he had the "don't-tell-me-what-do-do" response, not a bad one for a poet to have. Probably Hugo himself would endorse the reaction, and of course most writers and teachers of writing assume that when they give advice, it will be taken, dismissed, and/or modified but that each of these three responses is fine as long as it works. No doubt Hugo deliberately gives specific advice on seemingly trivial matters (in some cases) just to get poets thinking specifically about how they write, not to get them to write exactly as he does.



In the following poem, I think I unintentionally followed Hugo's advice about not answering questions. The poem does ask and answer questions (a no-no), but, arguably, it also answers questions not asked (okay according to Hugo's "rules"). (It's interesting that all politicians answer questions not asked, but probably not for poetic reasons.) The poem first appeared in Poetry Northwest (Spring 1987), a venerable magazine (founded at the University of Washignton, edited by David Wagoner for a long time) that went out of business but was just revived--in Oregon, I believe. Rather belatedly, I'll "dedicate" the poem to the late Richard Hugo. I never met him, but we exchanged letters once in which fishing was mentioned. Here's the poem:





From Another Part of the Forest


How are you today?
Ten dead fish float in the lake.

May I help you?
Five cattle lie in the shade.

Won’t you please sit down?
A bobcat rakes a deer’s back.

Do you love me?
A butterfly folds up its wings.

What are you waiting for?
Seven geese waddle toward a pond.

Are you sure?
A frog jumps from a log into mud.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom. First published in Poetry Northwest (Spring 1987).

Here Come the Spiders

My wife saw a large spider in the bathroom.

It's September, so many spiders are on the move, going--I assume--for more warmth, heading inside "our" abodes, which they think of as space to be shared; into garages, sheds, and woodpiles.

I almost never murder spiders. Usually I just leave them alone, and after a while they're not where they were. Sometimes I get a piece of cardboard, induce the spider to climb aboard, and take the spider outside.

All spiders look intricate; most spiders look menacing, at least to the common-folk like me. Upon further study, they seem either inordinately calm or astonishingly hard-working, artistic, and busy.

Once or twice I've had the privilege of seeing hundreds of tiny spiders burst forth from eggs in a spider's nest. Amazing. Like a little teeming city of commuters coming to life out of nowhere. I wonder what percentage of them become adult spiders.

I wish I knew more about that which allows spiders intuitively to measure the spaces of a web as they build it. A metaphysical question: Can spiders' webs be considered art? Maybe it's simply a definitional question.

Not that it matters, but I don't really like the Spiderman movies. In fact, I think I've seen only the first one. It's nothing personal. I just think the premise is kind of dumb. I think I'd rather he really turn into a spider, the way the fellow actually turns into a fly in The Fly. But then he wouldn't be spider-man, I guess. He'd be Spiderspider.

A poem, then, for September and for spiders on the move:

Spiders’ Migration

Northern Hemisphere, September: spiders
come inside. They slip through seams
to here, where summer seems to them
to spend the winter. Their digits tap out
code on hardwood floors. They rappel
from ceilings on out-spooled filaments
of mucous, measuring the place. Sometimes
they stay just still. Paused. Poised.

It’s not as if spiders wait for us
to watch them, or even as if they
wait. Rather, octavian motion
is so easy, syncopated, and several
that stillness surely exhilarates spiders
just arriving from the Northern Hemisphere.
It’s time for us to enter equal days and
equal nights, to pluck the filament between
fear of and fascination with spiders
moving in.

Hans Ostrom. Copyright 2007.

Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth

My favorite pair of roommates in an imaginary heaven (of sorts) is Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley, chiefly because they constitute the first pair I put in a poetic heaven. In second position is the pair of Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth. All poets are notoriously if not intentionally fuzzy about how the idea (or image or phrase) for a poem arose. In this instance, I think I knew I wanted to pair Freud with someone. I associate Freud with appetites (literal and figurative), so I believe I then jumped from that association to Babe Ruth, he of legendary appetites, and then I probably thought Ruth would indeed do well as a contrast to Freud because Ruth's profession was physical, not intellectual. And of course Freud was all about the perils of early childhood, so "Babe" is a lucky nickname. Both were "giants," of a kind, in the 20th century. As Elvis is profane in contrast to the "sacred" Emily, so Freud (I guess) is sacred to the vulgar Ruth--or whatever (or quid-quid, as a friend likes to say). In any event, I thought that one kind of heaven, from Freud's perspective, would be a place where he would encounter an enormous problem to solve, psychologically. Babe Ruth is his problem, and that's a good thing. Here's the poem.

Sigmund Freud and Babe Ruth in Heaven

by Hans Ostrom

Sigmund sits in a cool dugout,
theorizing The Babe,
who daily trots out in Heaven’s perpetual
Spring Training and wrists
pitches over marble walls. The Babe
plays in his underwear, looks like a white
radish atop toothpicks. Dr. Freud

is addicted to a revulsion he feels for this
Orality of a man, who even in Heaven
devours raw steak, rashers of bacon, barrels
of ale, potatoes, fudge, cigars, brandy.
Ruth’s lips are immense. His voice burbles
up like raw crude. The doctor cannot keep

himself from watching George Herman’s buttocks
flinch when he turns on a pitch. Wearing
a Brooklyn Dodger’s cap, Freud scribbles
notes toward a paradigm of Baseball As Dream.
At home plate, Bambino belches, breaks wind.
The doctor is discontent. Apparently, there’s
no treatment for this Promethean-American adolescent--
voracious as a bear, incorrigible as a cat.

Babe calls Sigmund “Doc,” of course.
When they play catch, Babe bends curves
and floats knucklers--junk for bespectacled Doc,
who squints and shies when ball slaps mitt. The ball
falls out as often as not. Sometimes, though,

a principled grin grows on Freud’s grizzled face.
For the doctor is day-dreaming he’s a boy
in Brooklyn--that Herr Ruth, Der Yank, is his step-father.
When the ball does slip snugly into dark webbing,
no sting, Freud feels the power of Catch as Ritual.
Hey, there you go, Doc! growls His Babeness—
and spits brownly, O prodigiously onto Heaven’s green.

from The Coast Starlight (2006), by Hans Ostrom

The Ode, the Elegy, the First Draft

Today in the poetry-class I teach, we discussed two venerable types of poetry, the elegy and the ode. Among the topics we touched on was the apparent fact that it is difficult to identify subjects about which to write a serious ode, partly because "all the good ode-subjects have been taken" (at least at first glance it seems that way), partly because we live in skeptical, cynical, jaded times, and partly because the ode itself is encountered most often as a parodied form in advertising. Ultimately we brainstormed a list of possible subjects for serious odes. The list included mud; phobias; plastic; relatively invisible or under-valued persons who "serve" us as baristas, janitors, or waiters (etc.) [and most in class had worked in such jobs]; electricity; and food. The topic of food triggered a nice transition into our reading and discussion of Pablo Neruda's splendid "Ode to the Watermelon," as translated by Robert Bly.

When we discussed possible topics for an elegy, a poem about loss, we set aside the most obvious topic: the death of a loved one, and we brainstormed a list of "lost things" about which we might write an elegy. The list included health, wealth, virginity, hair, jewelry (or some other object with symbolic and/or commercial value), pets, space (for example, a field on which houses were later built), security, winter (for example, in some regions where it used to snow in winter, no snow now falls), one of our senses, keys, childhood, adolescence, and a wallet.

We saved 12-15 minutes toward the end of class in which to begin to write a poem, or at least to work our way toward a poem. Occasionally in that amount of time, one can come up with a whole draft, or at least a draft ("whole" is debatable).

For the heck of it, I decided to post the first (and so far only) draft I wrote, as is. I chose to write about a lost wallet.

[no title]

The first time I lost a wallet,
I didn't lose it--it was
stolen from a gray metal locker
I had not locked.

I remember sitting on the bench
in the vacuum left by theft.
I knew then what I don't
know now: the exact amount
of money stolen; the name
of the girl in the photograph;
and to whom the phone numbers
belonged. Those area-codes signify

much smaller geographic areas
now, and now my wallet is obese, swelled
with fatted plastic cards and multiple
ways of proving I exist. The first lost
wallet moved, thin and quickly, through
the crowd, possessed by a satisfied
thief, whom I wish well.

Are You Ready for Some Football? Yes and No.

'Tis the season for football in the U.S., little rectangles of grass lit up on Friday nights in innumerable towns, suburbs, and cities, littler rectangles of pixels and High Resolution lit up with college and professional football on Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Thursday--oh, heck, every day of the week.

I played football in high school. I was a second-string quarterback as a freshman, and my longtime friend Ronn English and I still cherish a black-and-white photograph of us: I have just pitched the ball to him, "sweep right," our classmate Rick is blocking for him, Ronn is about to take off, and I'm about to turn and look for someone to block. Such moments and photographs make all the endless practices and physical pain seem, briefly, to be "worth it," but upon further review, I'm not sure, nor do I think many football players are, even the very wealthy, although at the time, of course, to play seemed like a terrific idea. The ratio of moments-actually-enjoyed to moments-of-exhaustion-pain-and/or-boredom amounts to too small a fraction, and the more scientists learn about concussions (among other injuries), the less football seems like a net-gain.

As a junior and senior, I played safety, the furthest position back on defense, responsible for defending against the pass and for tackling anyone who has escaped defensive linepersons and line-backers. (I'm sure a conventional football fan would just love my use of "lineperson," but in fact women are beginning to play high school football.) Mostly I remember the collisions, my body meeting the body of someone running with the football. Velocity and mass, muscle and bone. I also remember the hard fields, which turned to dirt and mud in autumn; --also the odd co-mingled sounds of the fans, the cheerleaders, the grunting players, traffic far off in the night, a referee's whistle, coaches yelling, the echo in the helmet....

The following poem, "High School Football," first appeared in the South Carolina Review. The poem about high-school-football in the U.S. is James Wright's "Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio" (and yes, we have no apostrophe in Martins). Last year a visiting poet-and-professor said he might teach Wright's poem and mine together, and of course I was cheered by that prospect; it's not everyday that a poet has a poem put in the company of one by James Wright. Experiencing that comparison felt every bit as good as intercepting a pass, something I did, officially, only three times over two eight-game seasons. The poem:

High-School Football


We stuffed our crotches into hometown pants.
Clacked on concrete out to mud and grass.

Hit each other. Bled. Got dizzy.
Sweat, got knocked down, got up,
got down, puked, hit each other, bled.
We were having fun.

I swear reasons existed then
for playing. Honest I swear
there was a girl on the goal line
promising a slow dance. A referee
waited to whistle me into manhood.

We were not good.
Often we had to buy the ball back
from the other team. Once were down
forty points before the game began.
Our coach sold real estate at half-time.
Our cheerleaders hung us in effigy.

We pounded each other
until no one was left on either team.
The pads and helmets and shoes
went on grunting and blocking and tackling.
Fans stayed to see which set
of equipment would win.

We could hear that Homecoming crowd
roaring in the stadium
as we loaded the cars. We drove
to the bus station, took
the midnight express out of there.

(first published in the South Carolina Review, Winter 1985).

I became a fan of the professional Oakland Raiders in a highly circuitous, even accidental, way. I grew up in a canyon of the Sierra Nevada, pre-cable, and the only television-signal that made it into the canyon was that of an NBC affiliate in Sacramento. NBC broadcast games played in the brand-new American Football League, and Oakland was the AFL team from California, so I became a fan of that league and that team by default. Oakland's owner, Al Davis, a former English major, became an interesting cultural figure; he is self-admittedly obsessed with football; he has even said that he has led "a tunnel-life." He is the first NFL owner to have hired an African American coach and a Latino coach, and the first to have hired a woman executive. A colleague and friend who grew up in Ballard (Seattle) before the Seahawks existed is also a longtime Raider fan--and a New York Yankee fan. Apparently he has chosen well, considering the "world championships" (American overstatement at its best or worst) both teams have accrued. The Raiders have fallen on hard times, but the Yankees persist, in part because of a robust bankroll and a determined owner. Capitalism and professional sports seem to be happy companions.

I don't really watch football on TV anymore, not in a sustained way. I glance at it. I leave the TV on, so it becomes a virtual campfire. Occasionally I'll walk past it or sit down for a few moments and catch a few plays. The cat will be asleep nearby. The only televised sport my wife is interested in watching is professional tennis; she claps and cheers.

You don't have to be Kafka to realize that such apparently meaningful spectacles of sport (such as football games) are, in fact, absurd, but there is still some kind of creature-comfort to be had from watching football, at least for many men (and some women), partly because old memories visit, partly because a football-play is a little drama performed in (usually) less than 12 seconds, and partly because the game and the game-as-broadcast are so highly ritualized. And there are good memories of specific players, the Oakland Raiders being known as a haven for cast-offs, eccentrics, tricksters, and not-so-gentle giants. Ultimately, football on TV is a visual lullaby.

Goodnight, James Wright, wherever you are; and let us say a prayer and/or hold a good thought for Kevin Everett, injured terribly in a professional football game two weeks ago.

Theology and Banking

The title "theology and banking" might lead one to conclude that the topic in question relates to money-making mega-churches or the vast holdings the Vatican is alleged to possess, or perhaps to the adage about rich fellows attempting to reach heaven being like camels trying to pass through the eye of a needle. Instead the title refers to a poem in which a person goes to a bank in search of things religion more customarily provides and to a church for what banking more customarily provides. It's an easy mistake to make, partly because some bank-buildings look like places of worship and vice versa.

Theology and Banking

He tried to confess
his sins to a bank.
He told the teller

about his specific
enactments of sloth,
deception, cruelty, lust.

Did he have an account?
she asked. Everyone,
he replied, has an account

in Heaven. Would he step
aside to let the next
person in line advance?

she asked. Yes, he said,
but first I need to withdraw
forgiveness, quite

a lot of it. She summoned
Security, who said they
would have to ask him

to leave. He said he
would have to ask them
to forgive him. They

said they excused him. No,
not excuses, he said—
forgiveness. They took him

to the door and beyond. He
wandered to a church
and deposited some money.

May I have a receipt? he asked.
Yes, a liturgical minister said,
and gave him a wafer, a sip

of wine. He ate and drank
the receipt. Will you tell me
my current balance? he asked.

Yes, the minister said, you are,
like everyone else, overdrawn,
so I wouldn’t push it. Go now

and sin much more frugally
if sin you must; and
apparently, you must.

--Hans Ostrom, Copyright 2007

Social-Security Poem

I and many people about my age assume that Social Security will be toast (to use a highly specialized term from economics) by the time we retire. Ever since late November, 1963, when the president was shot multiple times in broad daylight, we've been a skeptical, even a cynical, lot--well, many of us have, anyway. I just assume that the phantom Social Security Fund will end up in the virtual pockets of virtual banks and other corporations. I will not be "shocked, shocked" to find out that there is gambling at Rick's in Casablanca.

I know as much about economics as I do about computers--just barely enough to get by. Economics and computer-technology don't make sense to me, nor do they not make sense. To me, they just are. They exist, and to make my way in life, I need to know a bit about them both, a very little bit, such as how to "re-boot" a computer (notice that boots are not involved), or that it is better to have some money than it is to have no money (what "money" actually is--that's a separate question).

I believe that the following poem, which isn't very long, exhausts almost all my knowledge of economics, which I believe to be the most elaborate magician's trick in all of human history. From where I'm sitting, the essence of economics is sleight-of-hand, and whenever I hear a term like "free market," I feel like giggling because not a single free market has existed, ever. To be a free market, a market would have to be free of human participation.

To put a positive spin on the situation, I'd say my knowledge of economics is very economical. The poem is spoken by someone who is trying to explain economics economically--in about 225 words.


Social Security: An Introduction


Certain numbers represent uncertain amounts
of money, which consists of texts (paper, metal)
on which numbers are printed. The certain numbers
just stay numbers unless you are allowed to let
them stand for something you want to get
and get it. This is called exchanging numbers
for something you want, or “buying.”

According to legend, some of the numbers
are kept by the State in the Department of Numbers.
The numbers change all the time but remain
kept by the State, which knows they are your
numbers because it has your number.

Still another number represents an amount
of years you will have managed not to die.
When this amount of years is big enough,
you may start using some of the State-kept
numbers to stand for things you think you
need to get and get them.

Getting these things is supposed to help
you to continue to manage not to die
until the time when nothing you get
can keep you from dying. The capacity
to use numbers to get things to keep you
from dying is sometimes called social
security. Certain numbers symbolize
this security. They are kept by the State.

Social security is really more personal
than social. Go over your records carefully.
Their information is not secure. Plan ahead
but look behind you. If you have questions,
call this number.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Animals: What Do They Know, and When Do They Know It?

"What did he know, and when did he know it?" This is one of several famous lines that arose during the Watergate hearings in the early 1970s, before Richard Nixon (to whom "he" refers) resigned.

I think all pet owners indirectly, implicitly ask the same questions about their pets. I don't think I have ever met a single pet-owner who did not, at some point, talk to the pet as if the pet were not just human but a human who spoke (and perhaps even read) in the same language as the owner. I did come close to meeting such a person--in Germany. He owned a bird. My wife asked him what the bird's name was. He said, "It has no name. It is a bird." Ah, Germany! But of course even this logical German spoke to the bird, in German, and spoke to the neighbor's dog, in German.

To what extent are animals conscious in the way humans are conscious? To everyone from pet-owners to animal-rights activists to scientists, this question fascinates endlessly.

Every day I wonder what our cat--a Russian Blue named Lisa Marie--is thinking. I ponder the logic of her actions. I told a friend, "I believe that cats have a good reason for doing everything they do but that often we are unable to detect the logic behind what they do." Defects in their behavior may actually be defects in our ability to follow cat-logic. (Alluding to a photograph of her cat, another blogger wrote, "This is an ears-back situation." I love that line, partly because it expresses cat-logic.)

Sometimes I tell the cat about a news-item that troubles me, partly because I enjoy the absurd theatre of talking to a cat, but also because it's quite comforting when the cat remains calm, unmoved by news that troubled me. Except when cats themselves are over-reacting, they usually caution us, with their behavior, about over-reacting. Very few things are worth interrupting a nap over, for example. Cats spend their energy very carefully.

The following poem wonders what raccoons know and when they know it:

Raccoon Consciousness

It’s said raccoons, for instance,
are not conscious of being conscious.
Those who say so reserve the right
to deny self-consciousness to others.

As if to prove such so-sayers
wrong, a fat raccoon waddled
regularly into our urban yard
around noon, after storing

two young ones inside a hollow,
hallowed elm. Through glances,
posture, and unintimidated wariness,
she appeared to suggest wisdom,

not to mention disdain for
the pretentiousness of non-raccoon
life. She gobbled earthworms
with gourmandic zest, cooled

her belly on wet grass,
yawned, groomed her hands,
fixed black eyes on me,
who stared at her through glass.

She seemed to know a lot,
including that she knew.

Moths

I've been thinking about all the relatively common creatures with which I've shared my time on Earth. For example, I can't recall a summer in which I didn't see houseflies or gnats. Robins and bees and I have always lived adjacent to each other, more or less. Apparently mites live in all of our beds, or so I've been told.

Raccoons have walked in and out of my life, chiefly at night, and I used to go with my father and his hound dogs when he "hunted" raccoons. Actually, he just liked to tree them, "tree" being a hunter's verb for using dogs to induce the hunted to climb a tree. For some reason, my father liked to do this in the winter. I recall my feet freezing in insufficient "galoshes," and I recall the excitement of the hunt wearing off rather quickly. Once the raccoon was "treed," my father would shine a flashlight on its perturbed face, call the dogs back, put them in the back of the truck, and off we'd go, back home. The raccoon must have thought, "What the hell was that all about?!" Not a bad question, actually. My father really liked the sound of hounds' voices--and getting out in the cold, clear air underneath stars. That was what that was all about.

I don't ever remember living in a room, apartment, or house that wasn't visited by moths, either on the outside (fluttering around a porch-light) or on the inside (clinging quietly to a wall or the inside of a lamp-shade, or living in a closet). I remember seeing some extraordinarily bizarre and beautiful moths in the Sierra Nevada. I wish now that I'd taken the time to learn their names--I mean their scientific names, not Bob or Alice the moth. The stillness of moths fascinates. Sometimes moths make me think of butterflies who decided to become priests, nuns, rabbis, or Buddhist monks.

The following poem concerns cohabitation with moths. It was first published in a magazine called The Kerf, published by the College of the Redwoods in California. "Kerf" means the track or cut left by a saw. Strangely, I had never heard or read the word, and I grew up with a carpenter-father and in a region where logging and wood-cutting were commonplace. So when the magazine accepted the poem, I looked up the word. It's a good word; it sounds nice. Here's the poem:

Moth Anxiety

One result of Evolution
is that two small moths and I
are in this room now. They

live on my wall, gray flecks
on pale paint. Maybe they

move when I sleep. When I’m
awake, they’re still.

I’ve seen moth-holes in sweaters
but never caught moths eating.

Why don’t moths live amongst sheep
and cut out the middle step of knitting?
Is there such a thing as a moth-idea?

Do those new to English wonder
about “moth” and “mother”?

What’s the name of the enzyme
allowing moths to digest wool?

My wardrobe-door is open.
The moths remain,
composed, upon my wall.

first published in The Kerf (2004), ISBN 0-9746274-0-2 (p. 34).

Trees on College Campuses

The management of trees on a college campus is something of an industry, even a sub-culture, unto itself. The trees symbolize Nature, of course, the idea being that even as we lead the so-called life of the mind, Nature is still there, outside the window. Trees are second only to ivy, I think, with regard to the landscape of college campuses. You gotta have that ivy, even if you're not in that league!

The trees have to be planted, watered, pruned, and cleaned-up after. At the college where I teach, crows live in the trees and dive-bomb people in the spring and early summer. I love crows, and I don't mind being dive-bombed by them. They're big, feisty, independent, and a little clumsy. Once a bald eagle glided in and landed on a fir tree on campus. Last year a terrible wind-storm left the campus blanketed thickly with boughs. When the facilities-folk must cut down a diseased tree, they always alert the campus first, so that no one, and especially no environmentalists, will get upset. Sometimes trees are planted in honor of people, and if a tree lasts long enough, it usually becomes a symbol for something more than just Nature. There's a massive sequoia on campus, and it's become something of a mascot. It oversees the cafeteria, as well as the cherry trees that were planted in remembrance of Japanese-American students at the college who were interred during World War II. The tree just stands there, unaware that it's reminding us that it will outlast all of us, that whatever importance we imagine we have brought to the campus is utterly illusory. It's a cautionary tree; reversing roles, it cuts us down to size.

Here's a wee, whimsical poem about trees on college campuses; well, at least it's intended to be whimsical.

Trees on a College Campus

They try to organize into a grove.
We’ll have none of it. Our curriculum
is severe. We rigorously prune and thin.
We launch lectures until sap retreats.
Huge firs outgrow us, write poetry
on the wind. The madrona
with eczema has stopped listening
to us. It gleefully flunks it quizzes
and will never contribute to
the Annual Fund. Elms chain-smoke
smog. The forest has stopped sending
its children to our college. Never
mind. Our tall standards and
broad lawns will see us through.

Blank Verse for Karl Shapiro

I took classes from the poet and professor Karl Shapiro, at U.C. Davis, in the late 1970s. Karl won the Pulitzer Prize for V-Letter and Other Poems; he went on to publish many volumes of poems; he edited Poetry, the most prestigious poetry magazine in the United States; he wrote a novel and books of essays; and, with Robert Beum, he wrote a splendid book on prosody--the study of verse: The Prosody Handbook: a Guide to Poetic Form. I've always wanted to use the book in a class, but it had never come out in paperback, and it even went out of print for a while, but then Dover Publications brought it out in paperback form, so I'm using it in a poetry class this term, at long last. It was first published 1965 but holds up extremely well. Shapiro himself wrote masterfully in verse-forms before shifting to free verse and, in The Bourgeois Poet, to prose-poems.



So when I decided to write an homage-poem "for" Karl, after he died in 2000, I knew I wanted to use some kind of traditional form, so I chose blank verse: unrhymed iambic pentamter. On page 141 of The Prosody Handbook, Shapiro and Beum write, " Blank verse is undoubtedly the easiest kind of verse to write. One does not have to search for rhymes or move them into the right places, and one does not have to worry about the confines of a stanza. To juxtapose words so that every other syllable receives a stress is not much of a problem. But because it is so easy, and because it is such a spare form, it is one of the hardest to master. The absence of rhyme and stanza form invites prolixity and diffuseness--so easy is it to wander on an on. And blank verse has to be handled in a skillful, ever-attentive way to compensate for such qualities as the musical, architectural, and emphatic properties of rhyme; for the sense of direction one feels within a well-turned stanza; and for the rests that come in stanzas. There are no helps. It is like going into a thick woods in unfamiliar acres."



So I ventured, without "helps," into unfamiliar acres with the following poem:



Karl Shapiro

(1913-2000)


Shapiro was by nature Luddite and
Iconoclast--ironic then that he
So liked to frame his poetry with lines
Laid out like rows of bricks, with stanzas of
Fixed persons, places, things. He played a lot
At saying No but never thunderously—
The Beats embarrassed him. He rather liked
The post-War comforts brought to us by Ike
And Coke and IBM. Mischievously conform—
That’s what he did. A solidarity of one
Appealed to him—bad bourgeois white-haired boy
Who’d hurt a fly but little else, and then
Only with imagery of snot and rage
That scanned. He was a little bored by fame,
By his own poetry, by life on land-
Grant campuses, where doe-eyed kids would turn
In heart-felt free-verse stuff to him.
One hopes that Wystan Hugh was waiting when
Shapiro entered Afterlife’s Drugstore.
Perhaps the two every so often cruise
In a Corvair, smoke cigarettes, quote Yeats
And Keats, mock Eliot, admit they’re glad
That lust for beaus and belles belongs now to
That other life; and prosodize until
Nebraska cows come home—Imperial Wys,
Old Karl Jay, the blue-eyed brightest Beep
From Baltimore. Of course they need not love
Each other, and they died already, so
What’s left is love of words and irony;
Satiric tendencies;--oh, and Eternity.

--Hans Ostrom © 2006 from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006 (Indianapolis: Dog Ear Publishing, 2006).



In The Prosody Handbook, Shapiro and Beum say that variations on iambic pentameter are expected in blank verse. Such variations include an "inversion"; for example, the line that begins with "Only" starts with a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed one [ON-ly], so the iamb is inverted. And sometimes it's kosher to let a line run long; for example, in the line with Coke and IBM, I have one extra foot or unit of iambic pentameter, so it's actually hexameter.



Some allusions: One of Shapiro's poems, "The Dome of Sunday," mentions "row-houses and row-lives"--a reference to the sameness of suburbia. . . .One of Shapiro's early volumes was called Person, Place, and Thing [the definition of a noun]--what a great title for a book of poems. . . . ."No, in thunder," comes from a piece of writing by Melville--a letter, I believe. . . . . In class once, Shapiro talked about having met and talked with the famous Beat poet Alan Ginsberg, and it was clear that Karl thought Alan was a little bit "out there.". . . . Shapiro enjoyed the ironies of being what he called "a bourgeois poet," and he shortened the term to The Beep. . . . . One of his most famous, most widely anthologized poems is "Drugstore"--the kind of drugstore that had a "soda-fountain." It was a poem about American youth in the 1950s. . . . . One of Karl's later volumes was called White-Haired Lover; his thick hair had gone all white fairly early. . . . ."Land-grant campuses" refers to the University of Nebraska and the University of California, Davis, two places at which Karl taught. He edited Prairie Schooner at the U. of N. . . ..Karl smoked cigarettes, but at one point, he tried to switch to smoking a pipe. He'd bring the pipe to class, but he wasn't very good at keeping it lit, so sometimes he'd strike match after match. We students used to laugh about it after class. . . . . Shapiro was acquainted with Eliot, but Eliot's somewhat reactionary politics, his pretentiousness, his religious conservatism, and the occasional hint of anti-Semitism made Karl uneasy. . . . Auden was Shapiro's favorite poet. In a poem titled "September 1939," Auden wrote, "We must love each other or die," but he later revised the line out of the poem, saying that we die whether we love each other or not, but of course he was willfully misinterpreting the line, and I think he thought it was just too sentimental. . . .Karl also admired Keats's achievement in formal verse, as well as Yeats's, although I seem to remember Karl's having referred to Yeats's beliefs (the gyres and all that) as "goofy." . . . Karl's full name was Karl Jay Shapiro, and he grew up in Baltimore. . . . . Even after Ralph Nader had attacked the Chevrolet Corvair, Karl kept his and kept driving it around Davis; it was just like Karl to be stubborn--or oblivious?--in that way. The color of the car was silver. Davis was a very small town at that time, so occasionally you'd see Karl parking the thing in the lot next to the big grocery store near campus.



In the 1970s and 1980s, the English Department at U.C. Davis was housed in Sproul Hall, a nine-story office-building revealing no architectural imagination. Karl's poem "Humanities Building," published in the New Yorker, describes that building, which in the poem he calls a "plinth." Nice word, plinth.



So there we have it, some blank verse for an expert on prosody, an independent thinker, and a fine poet, Karl Shapiro.

Clough (Rhymes With Tough) and Ten Revised Commandments

Here's a poem from 1862 that seems to resonate nicely in 2007; the poem presents a revised version of the Ten Commandments:

The Latest Decalogue

by Arthur Hugh Clough

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipped, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for for they curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but needst not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

The sum of all is, thou shalt love,
If any body, God above:
At any rate shall never labour
More than thyself to love thy neighbour.

from Victorian Poetry: Clough to Kipling, edited by Arthur J. Carr (2nd edition), New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1972), pp. 25-26.

Clough--pronounced "Cluff"--experienced something of a classic Victorian crisis of spirituality. The Victorians, at least those who had time to think about things, had to contend with Origin of Species (1859), which indirectly called into question a literal reception of the Bible's report about how Creation came to be, and they had to contend with what was known as the "Higher Criticism" of the Bible--an approach that was more historical than theological. Such criticism was symbolized by a biography of Jesus written by a German named Strauss. The very idea of approaching Jesus an as historical figure was, understandably, a blow to conventional theology.

Clough was at Oxford when some of this tumult occurred, and the tumult included the Oxford Movement, a kind of struggle between Anglicanism and Catholicism. Thereafter, Clough had trouble accepting traditional dogma, but he also developed a sour view of a world that seemed to have no spiritual anchorage, so "The Latest Decalogue" satirically derides a morality of convenience.

The lines about "graven images" make me think of debates about whether to keep "In God We Trust" on American currency. I'm pretty sure Clough would argue that the debate--regardless of which side one takes--is beside the point. It's the money, not the slogan, that's being worshipped, so who cares what's printed on the money? The poem cautions against cursing, but only from a practical standpoint: we're in a modern age now when curses don't work, so don't waste your energy. Yes, it's still a good idea not to kill anybody, but don't go out of your way to prevent others from killing others. This made me think of how I did almost nothing to try to stop the U.S. from invading Iraq and thereby killing thousands of Iraqi citizens and getting thousands of Americans killed or wounded. As with cursing, adultery is still a bad idea, but only because of practical concerns, suggests the poem. Honor your parents--and anybody else who's in power and can help you get ahead. Don't covet, but continue to compete like a maniac in the economy of capital and laissez faire. Clough wrote when England was, arguably, at the height of its colonial prowess, so there is a sense in which England coveted all the world's goods, just as the U.S. seems to covet all the world's markets and most of the world's inexpensive labor. But fear not: we are a Judeo-Christian nation! Of course we don't covet! And we may not hate our neighbors, Clough suggests, but it's imperative to love yourself more than anybody else. Take care of Number One.

Clough was good friends with Matthew Arnold, author of the famous (and well parodied) "Dover Beach." Oddly enough, although Clough was born in England, he spent his early years in the U.S.--in Charleston, South Carolina--before returning to England to go to school. He came back to the U.S.--to New England--in 1852 and got to know Emerson, Lowell, and Longfellow (see the brief biography in the Rinehart edition cited). Unfortunately, he contracted tuberculosis, and he died in Italy in 1861 (he was born in 1819). So "The Latest Decalogue" was published posthumously.

A side note: I think it may have been George Bernard Shaw who observed that all you need to do to realize how difficult English is to learn as a second language is to think about how differently such words as "enough," "though," and "slough" (and Clough) are supposed to be pronounced. A second side note: I can almost never think of the Ten Commandments without thinking of Mel Brooks's schtick wherein he plays Moses, who walks out from behind a rock with two stone tablets and proclaims that he has 20 commandments--then he drops one tablet, which breaks--then he recovers and says "make that TEN commandments"--to proclaim. Clough's humor is a little more subtle, to say the least, than Mel's.