Essential Reading from the Middle East

Concerning some essential reading (in my opinion) from the Middle East, by way of San Francisco and Guantanamo:


According to amazon.com, a book called The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks, has earned the following "honors":

Amazon.com Sales Rank: #3,396 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

#1 in	Books > Religion & Spirituality > Islam > Sufism
#1 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Authors, A-Z > ( R ) > Rumi, Mevlana Jalaleddin
#2 in	Books > Literature & Fiction > Poetry > Ancient, Classical & Medieval

That's right: Number One in Sufism (okay, let's assume that's not a massive category), but also Number One in Literature and Fiction by an author whose last name begins with R, and Number Two in all of Ancient and Classical & Medieval Poetry. And roughly 3,400th of all books sold on amazon.com. Sales position 3,400 (roughly) at amazon.com is pretty high up there for any book, but for poetry? Almost incredible.

Why is the translated (by Coleman Barks) work of a medieval poet from Afghanistan so popular in the U.S.? Well, I think Rumi's work earned the popularity the old fashioned way. It's terrific, even as one supposes the translation, which is no doubt excellent, does not do it complete justice. In an English translation, we can't get the full sense of Rumi's talent for rhythm and meter, but his gift of imagery, his wit, his learning, his intelligence, and his vast breadth of interests come through, as does his generous spirituality. Here's a snippet that may exemplify the combination of wit and spirituality often found in Rumi's work:

from On Resurrection Day

by Rumi, as translated by Coleman Barks

On Resurrection Day your body testifies against you.
Your hand says, "I stole money."
Your lips, "I said meanness."
Your feet, "I went where I shouldn't."
Your genitals, "Me, too."

The Essential Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks (Harper San Francisco, 2004), expanded edition.

Rumi was born in 1207 and died in 1273.

Barks writes (p. xvii), "Because of these troubles we are living in, I want to call attention again to Rumi's role as a bridge between religions and cultures. . . . Interfaith hardly reaches the depth of his connecting. Rumi speaks from the clear head at the center." One illustration of this connective quality: Rumi is the favorite poet of a Jesuit parish priest in Tacoma.

If you haven't looked into The Essential Rumi yet, give it a try, and it's the kind of book a person may just leap into at any point--no reading from page 1 to 300+, please, unless you simply must read that way. Jump in an have a look around. Move fast until you find something you like, and I think you will. Fair warning: You may find yourself continuing to read when you have allegedly better things to do.

As essential as Rumi, I would argue, if much more tied to the political moment, is Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak, edited by Marc Falkoff, a professor of law who represents some of the prisoners at Guantanamo (University of Iowa Press, 2007). It's a painful book of poems to read, to say something close to the least. It's also a mortifying, shaming book for an American to read. Some of the poets have been released from the prison--but only after years of abuse and of being deprived of due process, and in many cases, after having been detained for no good reason. That is, even if one sets aside whether the prison is morally or legally correct (I really don't want to set these questions aside), one must conclude that many of the prisoners were clearly detained because of a combination of overzealousness, greed, rough politics (especially in Pakistan), and/or incompetence on the part of Americans and others. The collection is one of those books of poems that pulls you in opposite directions. It forces you to see, again, that the differences between Guantanamo prison and a concentration camp are difficult to cite, and yet it confirms the essential power of language and, more specifically, of poetry. I'm not sure it's proper to speak in terms of a "national shame" because I don't know if nations can be shamed. All nations are institutions of power. But people of and in nations can be shamed. From the dust-jacket, a comment from poet Robert Pinsky:

"Poetry, art of the human voice, helps turn us toward what we should or must not ignore. Speaking as they can across barriers actual and figurative, translated into our American tongue, these voices in confinement implicitly call us to our principles and to our humanity. They deserve, above all, not admiration or belief or sympathy--but attention. Attention to them is urgent for us."

Pinsky may be anticipating the reaction of those who suspect that some of these poets might be, for lack of a better term, "bad guys." Pinsky does not respond by pointing out that even the detention of bad guys is supposed to be governed by international law and respect for human rights (how naive this sounds in these jaded times). Nor does he point out that even from the point of view of the jailors, some of these men should never have been arrested, let alone jailed. Instead he suggests, implicitly, that as you hold on to your skepticism, your worries, your anger, or your fear, pay attention. Read what some of these prisoners say. Then consider your principles and your humanity. Attention to the prisoners in Guantanamo is, as Pinsky argues, urgent for us, but it is also urgent for the prisoners.

Haircut

Here follows a miscellany regarding haircuts:


I got a haircut on Sunday.

Up through the middle-school years, my father cut my hair and that of my brothers. He had purchased some clippers, probably from a mail-order catalogue (Montgomery Ward). He gave us all buzz-cuts, and he had a buzz-cut, too, so I'm sure we looked like a family of Marines or a cult of some kind. Only my mother, the sole female in the family, was allowed something besides a buzz-cut. She chose something akin to a Katherine Hepburn parted-look, right out of the 1940s. Good for her.

Rain, shine, snow, or sub-freezing North Wind at 4,000 feet in the Sierra Nevada, my dad always cut our hair outside. That way he didn't have to sweep up anything. Ever had your hair cut while the snow is falling--around you? I have. It's become a fond memory, but its becoming a fond memory took decades, believe me.

The buzz-cut didn't become a problem until a)I turned 12 or 13 and, like every other kid who turns 12 or 13, became hyper-self-conscious and b) longer hair became the fashion, owing in part to the arrival of the Beatles in . . . 1964--if I have my history right. I entered high school in 1967, and long hair was not just a style but a statement. And there I was with my buzz-cut. Damn.

Things have come full-circle, and I'm back to a modified buzz-cut, spiked up with some hair-gel.

The culture of hair and hair-cuts is endlessly fascinating, of course, especially in the U.S., where the meaning of hair is conditioned (so to speak) by so many factors: ethnicity, politics, gender, images of sexuality, class, age, and--above all--relentless advertising, which has convinced us that hair is alive; it isn't; only the follicles are, I believe.

Interestingly, I am well past the self-conscious era of my life, at least with regard to haircuts, so when I went to work today, I was surprised when many people registered recognition that I'd gotten a haircut. I'd actually forgotten that I'd gotten one. My standard blast-from-the-past response is, "No, I got my ears lowered." My head seems to get bigger (I'm not referring figuratively to ego, although that's possible, too) and more perfectly cubicle as the years go by. I attribute this phenomenon to my being partly Scandinavian, as Americans once referred to Swedes as "square-heads." Cube-heads would have been more accurate. . . .Today a student said, "At least you still have hair" (meaning, I suppose, that a lot of other men don't still have their hair and that, even if my haircut looks stupid, at least I have hair to cut).

I also think the etiquette surrounding the question of noticing someone's haircut is interesting. Are you supposed to comment on someone's change of "hair style"? If you just say, "So, you got a haircut," are you leaving some rhetorical space open that could be filled by the following assumption: "...and it looks [or you look] funny"? Sometimes people add, a bit late, ". . . . it looks good!" Once more with feeling, please.

Barber shops, per se, have almost disappeared in most mid-sized to large cities, at least on the West Coast. Franchises like Hair Masters have replaced them. You can get a relatively inexpensive haircut at the franchises, but elsewhere, you have to drop some serious coin to have somebody work the scissors or the clippers. I think the first haircut a child receives is still a big deal, probably across all cultures. In spite of the women's movement and feminism, women's hairstyles have remained fairly stable, with regard to length and (added) coloring and other treatments. In the U.S. most women still seem to shave their legs and under-arms, too. I wonder why that's so. Anthropologists would know, perhaps. . . . In spite of or maybe because of my buzz-cut in the late1960s and early 1970s, I was a big fan, as a spectator at least, of the afro. Mainstream magazines deployed photos of afros to suggest radicalism, I remember. Angela Davis's afro became a symbol of radicalism (to some), I recall. Me, I liked it when NBA players started "wearing" afros, and I liked movies such as Shaft and Superfly in which the afro made appearances. (The sound-tracks were what sold me on the movies, however, I must admit.) I thought Joe Willie Namath's long hair was cool, although I realize I probably have to point out that Namath was a famous football player at the time. (Joe Who?). . . . .To date, I have not gotten my hair "permed." I think I probably won't, ever. When I was a kid, I wondered about that term, "permanent," applied to a hair-treatment that was so obviously temporary. Older now, I've given up on the possibility that the language connected to such things as grooming might make sense.

The best hair-story I know is still the one with Rapunzel, but I love the "Barber Shop" movies, all about African American men in barber shops, and I love Eudora Welty's story, set in a hair-parlor, "Petrified Man." It is a perfect short story. My favorite hair-poem is Karl Shapiro's "Haircut," which John Updike includes in his recent selection of Shapiro's poems. The movie (based on the musical) Hair is not as bad as you might think it would be (there's a stirring recommendation), even if it makes you wince in a few places. Treat Williams is the star, and Milos Forman directed. Beverly D'Angelo is in it, too.

Not that you asked, but "haircut" or "hair cut" seems to have entered the English language in the early 1800s. Words in which "hair" now appears have proliferated to such a degree that the OED can barely keep up.

"Hey, you got your hair cut. . . . . It looks good!" Right.

A Less Well Known Lazarus from A Less Well Known War Poem

In class we recently studied some poems about war, including such "standards" as Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" and Randall Jarrell's "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." Among the less well known poems we studied was "Still Falls the Rain" (1942), by Edith Sitwell, which--between the title and the poem--suggests that the topic is "The Raids. 1940. Night and Dawn." By "raids," of course, is meant the nightly bombardment of England, especially London, by German aircraft.

However, the poem turns out not to be about life (or death), per se, in London during the bombing. There are no images of the bombed city or of bomb-shelters. Instead the poem begins this way:

Still falls the Rain--
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss--
Blind as nineteen hundred and forty nails
Upon the Cross.

That is, the poem begins not so subtly. It places the raids squarely in the midst of general human suffering and sin and in a Christian tradition and does not concern itself with this particular war (World Warr II), with the Germans, or with the British. It appeals to Christ insofar as he suffered, believe Christians, for the sin that, among other things, apparently keeps driving people to make war, so Sitwell is not focusing on who is bombing whom or on who "started" the war. As far as her poem is concerned, humankind started the war. She also alludes to Cain and, not honorifically, to "Caesar's laurel crown" (as contrasted, implicitly, with the crown of thorns). Conventionally, of course, we may be accustomed to thinking of World War II as needing to have been fought and to thinking that "the good side" won, so Sitwell's poem is disconcerting insofar as it perceives the war from a completely different framework, just as Robinson Jeffers, in his poems, viewed the war as a clash of empires. Neither Sitwell nor Jeffers takes a conventional, "popular" view of the war.

Later in the poem, the speaker urges Christ to "have mercy on us--/On Dives and 0n Lazarus./Under the Rain the sore and the gold."

The reference is not to the "famous" resurrected Lazarus but to a chapter in Luke (16, verses 19 and ff.), in which there is a rich man [Dives] who wears fancy clothes and dines extravagantly every night. A beggar named Lazarus appears outside the rich man's house, hoping for some crumbs but getting none. He's covered with sores, which the rich man's dogs lick. Thus the dogs treat Lazarus better than their master does. Dives and Lazarus die, the former going to Hell and the latter to Heaven. According to Jesus, Dives then looks over to the other side (to Heaven) and asks Abraham to send Lazarus over with some water. Abraham responds by saying (to paraphrase), "Sorry, it's too late; you made your choice when you were alive, and now you and Lazarus will be separated by a chasm."

By coincidence, this parable from Luke was the subject of a homily at my parish the same week, and the priest pointed out that even in Hell, Dives "doesn't get it." In Hell he behaves like a selfish rich person and asks Abraham to treat Lazarus as a servant. In a sense, the priest said, Dives's Hell is self-created; it is as much a mind-set as anything else.

But Sitwell's poem lumps Dives and Lazarus together, as the rain (and the bombs) fall, and asks Christ for mercy for everyone, rich person and poor person alike.

The parable--which Christ tells to the Pharisees, by the way--is hard to take because there's no second chance for Dives. The poem is hard to take because Sitwell sidesteps conventional ways of looking at war, at Germany's raids on England, and at World War II, and she goes straight for a Christian theme. I told the students it was perfectly all right not to like this poem, as long as they understood it--understood why they disliked it. Ironically, it may be easier to like "Dulce et Decorum Est," in spite of of the graphic images, because to mock empty, easy patriotism is more conventional now than asking Christ for mercy during a war. Sitwell not only invokes religion in time of war but a particular religion. She also invokes a less well known Lazarus from the New Testament.

We also studied some poems by an American Iraq-war veteran, Brian Turner, who has published a book of poems with Alice James Books in Boston. He, too, does some unconventional things with war poetry. You might look for his work.

A Haunting Little Poem

Here is a poem by Arna Bontemps (1902-1972), novelist, poet, editor, nonfiction writer, and children's author--and a member of the Harlem Renaissance (Langston Hughes and Bontemps were the best of friends):



Length of Moon



Then the golden hour
Will tick its last
And the flame will go down in the flower.


A briefer length of moon
Will mark the sea-line and the yellow dune.


Then we may think of this, yet
There will be something forgotten
And something we should forget.


It will be like all things we know:
A stone will fail; a rose is sure to go.


It will be quiet then and we may stay
Long at the picket gate, --
But there will be less to say.



The poem first appeared in the magazine FIRE!!, edited by Wallace Thurman and other younger members of the Harlem Renaissance, and published in 1926. Like a lot of little magazines ("little" referring simply to circulation and subsequently connotating a literary magazine), this one survived but one issue.

Bontemps' poem is one of those wonderful but small poems that get lost in the shuffling of literary history. Such poems may not end up in one of the well known anthologies and therefore their fate is left to libraries and/or to a few scholars who may study the author. Such poems are not lesser in quality than many of the much-anthologized poems and are greater in quality, arguably, than some very famous poems. I call Bontemps' poem "little" only because it is an unpretentious, one-page lyric poem; in other ways, it's big.

Bontemps invents a form for himself here--a three-line stanza rhyming aba, followed by rhyming-couplet stanza. The voice of the poem is understated, and the images are terrific. Any poem that announces itself as being about the moon will cause temporary concern because we fear a cliche is coming, but with Bontemps' poem, there's no cause for worry. The images echo those found in Zen poetry or the poems of Rumi; they are sharp but not forced to carry large symbolism. The poem unfolds quickly but quietly until suddenly we realize that it is, in part, about a couple; perhaps they are courting; perhaps they realize the relationship isn't going well; we can't say for sure. All we know is that "there will be less to say." I think the intentional (apparently) ambiguity works superbly there. Whatever is going on with the (two?) people, "there will be less to say" after they have experienced, together, the image of monnlight on dunes and the sea-line. And in way, after we experience such a scene, there should be less to say, for the scene has said something, has pierced us with some kind of meaning, some change in consciousness. When I first read the poem, I didn't expect it to end at the "picket gate," with "less to say." It's a surprising ending, but not a melodramatic one. It's a haunting poem, but it's by no means a gothic moon-poem or a cliche moon-love-poem. I admire its spare strength, its restraint, its capacity to arrange the images so that they communicate multiple meanings. I love the image of the flame going down in the flower, as if flowers were small lamps, the wicks of which were turned down at dusk.

"There will be something forgotten/And something we should forget." How cryptic! What will they forget? Surely they won't remember every detail of the scene. What should they forget? Harsh words? Some kind of betrayal? The lines that follow don't "answer" the questions raised by the previous lines. Instead they give the bigger answer: all things pass, not just a rose, which we know is short-lived, but also stones, which will be eroded or otherwise disintegrate, and which--as parts of foundations--will fail.

A coda: Bontemps wrote a terrfic novel, better known than this poem but probably still under-rated, called Black Thunder, which retells the story of a slave-rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser.

Surrealism and Children

Our son is heading toward age 19; meanwhile, many of my colleagues have young children and in some cases have just started a family.

An older colleague once said to me, when our son was young, "You tend to be so focused on whatever age or 'phase' your child is in that you block out everything that came before as well as any thoughts about years to come." There's some truth to that. When I consider my younger colleagues and their children, I really have to work to reconstruct what it was like for my wife and me when our son was 1,2, 3, 6, 10, and so on.

One thing I do remember is how surrealism comes naturally to children. Their use of language is so playful and protean that they come up with extraordinary combinations of words and phrases. Their word-associations are ingenious. Also, everything is essentially a play-thing to them, so they tend to see the functional in artistic terms, just as Dali saw the functional clock as something that might melt as it hung from a limb in the sun. The older we get, the more likely--for a variety of reasons--we are to channel the surrealistic impulse away from us and become routine, rational, and perhaps plodding creatures.

I think I wrote the following poem when our son was four, five, or six years old--as I said, it's so hard to go back and recover moments precisely. I do recall that I was reading a paperback anthology of surrealistic European and American poetry at the time, as well as doing the maintenance-thing in the back yard of the house we lived in then. Henri Michaux was a French surrealist poet. The poem:

Miscellany: Michaux, Back Yard, A Son, Poetic Ambition, Oz

Henri Michaux says, “The ambition to write
a poem is enough to kill it.” The following words
have been reluctant to join an ambitious poem:
Epicondylitis. Actuarial. My son brings me half an acorn,
which looks like an owl's face. He turns over aluminum
chairs so they look even more like junk, or art.
“Do we need tools out here?!” he asks, with authority.
Not yet five, he can prophesy the joy
of chainsaws, V-8 engines, weed-eaters, snow-
blowers—stuff that makes us a snarling, fuel-drunk breed.
“The little I want, you never bring,” said Michaux
to his own life. His life listened—sure it did, uh-huh,
the way a stump pays attention to mockingbirds.
Digging in dirt, my son says to no one,
“I’ll get you and your little dog, too!”

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Headline: "Hans Is Hick, Says O.E.D."

. . . So I have this poem about being a hick. Being a hick, I titled the poem, "Hick."

Before I posted the poem, I wanted to check on the etymology of "hick," something I should have done as I was writing the poem; oh well, you can't think of everything.

I consulted the Oxford English Dictionary online (which constitutes a kind of Shangri-La for hicks who are also nerds), and here is what I found:


a. An ignorant countryman; a silly fellow, booby. Now chiefly U.S.



1565 HARDING in Jewel Def. Apol. (1611) 529 Be it that Hicke, Hob, and Hans, of your Sects haue impudentlie accused him.

Source: OED online.



I was not surprised that the first definition of the first noun-version of "hick" is "an ignorant countryman" or "a silly fellow," although "booby" came as a bit of a surprise and has different connotations for me. Nor was I surprised that, once having jumped across the Atlantic, "hick" pretty much changed its citizenship.

But then I look at the first cited example of "hick" ["Hicke"] in print, and I find that my first name is lumped together with "Hicke," so that a Hans is apparently and officially a Hicke! How fabulous is that?! And apparently some hicks impudently accused somebody of something. I can see how hicks might be regarded as impudent, especially in Britain.

It is a difficult sentence to parse, that first citation. Does it mean, "Given the fact that Hicke, Hob, and Hans of your group (Sects) have impudently accused him, ...."? Or does it mean, "It is a fact that Hicke, Hob, and Hans [bumpkins all?] have impudently accused him"? Or does it mean something else? Hmmm. At any rate, Hicke and Hans appear cheek-by-jowl, to use a bit of a hickish term. (I wonder if Hob has anything to do with hobo. I shall need to return to the O.E.D.)

The second version of "hick" as a noun is the same thing as a hiccup, but I've almost never, if ever, heard it used that way. And "hick" can also be a verb, meaning to hiccup--but is extremely rare, methinks, unless the Brits use it that way.

Hick vs. Redneck: I think a hick is just a person from the country--a person with distinctly rural roots, whereas a Redneck, I think, may be more likely to be a person from the rural American South, to be white (with a red neck), and perhaps to come with more stereotypical baggage--in reality or by perception. I believe the first time I saw "red neck" (referring to white Southern rural folk) in print was when I read All The King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren, in high school, although I had heard the term before, of course. I found the narrative to be captivating, but I haven't read the novel again. I liked the movie-version with Broderick Crawford but not the newer one with Sean Penn.

What are the characteristics of a hick? I mention a few, by implication, in the poem below. But before that, here's a brief list:


1. A hick grew up in a very small town. Is anyone who grew up in a very small town necessarily a hick? No, but growing up in a very small town dramatically increases the odds of a person's being a hick.

2. A hick almost always comes from a working-class family. Is everyone from a working-class family a hick? No. Most people from working-class families in Boston or Atlanta, for example, probably aren't hicks. The combination of very small town and working class has a lot to do with one's being a hick.

3. A hick grew up accustomed to certain eccentricities, which only later were discovered (by the hick) to be eccentricities. Other people don't do it or say it that way, the hick learns. Who knew?! The hick learns that the world is full of "other people."

4. People change; education and re-education (the second sounds so menacing) are possible; nonetheless, in spite of undergoing transformations, a hick will still never quite fit in. Something hickish, however minor, still this way comes. A hick is often an accidental non-conformist, and s/he may have heard the term "non-conformist" somewhat later in her/his life than other people heard it in their lives.

5. A hick is easily impressed by almost any "new thing," but at the same time a hick is suspicious of people who think they are important (and a hick may in fact loathe his or her own self-importance); a hick combines naivete and skepticism in unexpected ways.

6. A hick is likely to display some awkwardness in social situations, even if the awkwardness is slight. The hick may or may not be aware of the awkwardness but in most cases is aware of it but is powerless to stop it or may, in fact, decide not to stop it--out of habit or stubbornness or mischievousness.

Contrary to popular opinion, hicks are not necessarily uncomfortable in cities. They do, however, tend to navigate or negotiate cities idiosyncratically. They may abruptly ask strangers for directions or use unusual landmarks, for example; or they may take circuitous routes. Non-hicks do not like to travel with hicks, for a variety of reasons, in most cases.

But many hicks do enjoy urban centers. They may find the behavior of urban dwellers risible, however. Hicks, for example, tend to be amused by New Yorkers' need to appear extremely busy, important, and eternally, perpetually Late for an Important Appointment. Of course, New Yorkers, in order to survive, have learned to wear the mask of someone who is allegedly busy, important, in a hurry, impatient, and From New York, even if, especially if, they are Not From New York--and may, in fact, be hicks passing as urbanites! The horror!

For the record, I grew up in a town that allegedly had and has a population of 225. During most winters, the population seemed more like 125. The town is in the backwoods of California's Sierra Nevada. The town is called a city. "Sierra City." Clearly, a hick named the town. To be fair, I must acknowledge that during the Gold Rush, briefly, Sierra City had a population of about 3,000 miners, but it was more of an encampment, and 3,000 does not a city make.

My family lived almost in the center of town, in a house my father had built, but here comes the telling, almost Dickensian, hickish detail. When I was six years old, my father announced that Sierra City was becoming "too crowded"[actually, its population had remained static], so he moved us all about a mile outside of town, built another house, and felt more at ease. I don't recall his inquiring as to how any of us had responded to the transition. He assumed we all agreed that in spite of what the Census suggested, Sierra City had indeed become "too crowded" and that we, too, had reacted negatively to this "crowdedness."

In any event, here's the hick (or Hicke, or Hob, or Hans) poem:



Hick


He grew up assuming others
had a right to speak
before he spoke.

He grew up in a region
named Not Really.

He eats too fast in restaurants,
walks too slowly in cities,
does his own repairs.

Elegance makes him claustrophobic;
opulence, morose.

The entitled fascinate him.
He watches.

Shown evidence who he is and
what he does might
matter, he doubts it.

I know him: he hangs on
to worn-out things too long,
for at his house of fears,
someone’s always about to
break in and confiscate it all.

The grin—too broad. The stare—
too intense. He embarrasses me.
There he is—hanging back,
watching. Oaf.

from The Coast Starlight, copyright 2006.

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