Richard Brautigan wrote a humorous little poem called "Haiku Ambulance," which pokes genial fun at haiku-conventions--and himself. I won't spoil it for you.
From his poem, I borrowed the title of the following poem, "Zen Ambulance," which plays with the venerable philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" David Romm, on a site called www.spectacle.com, adds an interesting variable: What if you leave a tape recorder (on) in the forest and the tree falls? No one is there, but the sound is recorded. But then I guess you'd have to prove the sound on the recorder represents the sound of the tree falling, so then you'd have to call witnesses with expertise in sound-recording, air-displacement, and so on.
In any event, the zen-tree fell on the following poem:
Zen Ambulance
If a tree fell in the forest,
and you were in the way,
you might be killed. If you
fell in the forest, and
the tree were in the way,
the tree would probably be
fine. If no one is in the forest
to see a tree fall, termites,
fungi, and bacteria
still devour the fallen
wood. If no one
is in the forest to see you fall,
let’s hope you can get up.
If a Zen monk stops you
in the forest, say hello,
and if you have some trail-mix
and water, offer to share them
with him. If he falls, don’t just
stand there, and under no
circumstances clap. Help him up.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Tuesday, October 16, 2007
Ten: One of the Great Numbers
According to the computers comprising the machinery behind blogging, I just wrote my 110th blog-entry. In honor of the number ten, then, which "goes into" 110 eleven times and must be used in calculations--by us and our machines--billions of times per day, a poem:
Grief For The Number Ten
What would we say about
ten if it died? –The 1
and the 0 lying in a box
of cotton, a salacious minister
sliding into the crowd
to read the unimportant
Tenth Psalm. "Oh, Ten,
we would think, you were right
in the midst of everything
we thought about numbers.
You unified by dividing.
You got those zeros rolling
in a train roaring past that
pipsqueak town, Arithmetic,
into Infinityville." Or maybe
we’d just look at our fingers,
count like crazy, hymning
& humming desperately.
The data suggest we,
take away ten, are nothing.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom
The Whole Heaven-Thing
I have a friend who happens to be a fine poet, and he likes poetry to stick to imagery. In his view, the image is not just the heart but the skeleton and everything else of the poem. I like imagery, too, and I'm sure we were both influenced by our reading of Modernist poets (including Imagists) and of all the poets who came after. He's been especially influenced by "deep image" poets. Robert Bly talks a lot about "the deep image" (Bly is a Jungian), although I don't know that my friend necessarily thinks of imagery in Bly's specific terms.
Although I like imagery, sometimes I like poems just to talk, however, and lots of times I read poems for the old-fashioned reason of their "music," their work with words as units of sound, or as signs of units of sound, or just as the play of phrases and sentences. Sometimes I like poems that speculate, too--poems that offer quick little bursts of argumentation or philosophizing, even though both these words have their negative connotations. My friend, I suspect, just thinks of such poems as being sententious, so I hope he doesn't read this one, which is about the whole heaven thing, because if he reads it, he might give me hell.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Although I like imagery, sometimes I like poems just to talk, however, and lots of times I read poems for the old-fashioned reason of their "music," their work with words as units of sound, or as signs of units of sound, or just as the play of phrases and sentences. Sometimes I like poems that speculate, too--poems that offer quick little bursts of argumentation or philosophizing, even though both these words have their negative connotations. My friend, I suspect, just thinks of such poems as being sententious, so I hope he doesn't read this one, which is about the whole heaven thing, because if he reads it, he might give me hell.
Terribly Important
I wonder if I’ll be welcome,
and welcomed, in Heaven. I
wonder if Heaven exists, even
as I’ve risen from the font and
have acceded to Pascal’s reasoning
on behalf of faithful wagers. How
would I like to be welcomed there?
What a question! The answer is
I must not care--meaning I’d like
the welcome not to be anything
I might have predicted. Heaven
must be a wonderful surprise,
a way of being so different
that none of our machinations need
apply. Heaven must be where
all necessary love exists. What
a statement! More statements: Heaven is.
Heaven is necessary, but I am not.
To speculate: Perhaps Heaven exists
for the unnecessary; maybe it converts
even nothing into something terribly
important. Heaven must be as
terribly important as we erroneously
believe our activities to be.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Sonnet For an Actress
Here's a sonnet for an actress. Which actress? No one in particular, though Julie Christie or Jacqueline Bissett might work in my case. Readers may substitute their own actress or actor, for the poem seems to be about "beauty" and notions of beauty, as they're projected onto and by the culture, whatever that means. I think it means that in a culture of mass media, especially cinema and television, media-icons, however short their iconic lifespan (as opposed to their biological lifespan) may be, help define beauty--for better or worse or both.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Sonnet for an Actress
You should have seen her yesterday.
She was more beautiful than our
Idea of beauty; and the way
She carried beauty in her hour
Unveiled achievement by a body
Unmatched by art. You should have seen
Her. Yes, our gaze was always ready.
What, though, did her beauty mean?
Did she embody what we thought?
Or did she teach us to desire?
And were we seeing what we sought,
Or held in spell by beauty’s choir?
Confused, nostalgic—what to say?
If you’d just seen her yesterday . . . .
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Theatrics Again
At one point in War and Peace, Natasha goes to the theater, and for one reason or another (chiefly her own shifting affections), she can't concentrate on the play, so she looks at the rest of the theater-goers and otherwise focuses on the reality of the theater-itself as opposed to the pretend-reality on stage. It's a great fictional way to represent her inner turmoil, but as I suggested in an earlier post, it is similar to my own experience of theater. I often pull back from the suspension of disbelief and start looking at the ceiling or a fly on the curtain or whatever.
There is such a thing as theater of the absurd, which willfully disobeys longstanding conventions of theater, partly in order to dramatize the absurdity of existence, as perceived by the playwright. I suppose Waiting for Godot is a good example.
In another sense, all theater is absurd (and there's nothing wrong with that), or so I claim in this poem:
There is such a thing as theater of the absurd, which willfully disobeys longstanding conventions of theater, partly in order to dramatize the absurdity of existence, as perceived by the playwright. I suppose Waiting for Godot is a good example.
In another sense, all theater is absurd (and there's nothing wrong with that), or so I claim in this poem:
Theatrics
There’s no theater that’s not
theater of the absurd because
in every case humans sit
observing humans acting
like humans. Every human
in the whole theater-building
has a task, which both is
and is not what brought each
task’s corresponding human
to the building. The building
is a product of innumerable
tasks. So is the play. All tasks
are ultimately meaningless.
So is the play. The theater-
building is filled with pretending
humans watching other humans
pretend, and this is reality,
and this is play, and if God
doesn’t exist, then none of it
means anything ultimately,
and if God does exist, then
none of it means what it purports
to mean, and one additional absurd
thing is how ordered, dutiful,
polite, and amused we are as
we perform our tasks. We play
the game of As If as if it
weren’t a game, and that is
acting, and that’s absurd, and
that's quite a performance.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Pledge of Allegiance
I'm from a generation of Americans that had to say the "Pledge of Allegiance" every day, at least in grade-school. I can't remember if we kept saying it in high school. "Had to say" is a bit strong because it was just automatic, just as we "had to have" recess and "had to" ride the bus.
I recall that almost everyone (in third or fourth grade, say) had trouble with the word, "indivisible." Kids had trouble saying it, and some people said, "invisible," which in some ways is more accurate because "one nation under God," which "indivisible" modifies retroactively, is an abstract concept--the "nation under God" isn't visible to anyone; only little scenes from it are. Anyway, nobody ever handed out the text of the pledge and went through it to explain what a "republic" was or that the word was "indivisible" not "invisible." A little primer on the pledge would have been helpful.
I remember that at some point, being a literalist, I had trouble with the concept of pledging allegiance to a flag. I could understand pledging allegiance to a friend (say), or a pet, perhaps even a nation (although I don't think I pushed it that far--"nation" is a large concept for a grade-schooler). I couldn't visualize my having allegiance to a piece of cloth. I think I was the kind of learner who needed to visualize things. Of course, the sense of the pledge is that you are pledging allegiance to the nation by pledging allegiance to a symbol of the nation, but I couldn't wrap (so to speak) my literal mind around that concept back then. If they wanted me to pledge allegiance to the nation, they should have cut out "the middle-man" of the flag--that was my thinking back then.
Apparently, the pledge was written by one Francis Bellamy, who was--if I have the story straight--a Christian Socialist. --That's right: a Christian (a Baptist, I think) who believed in left-leaning politics. How ironic. --Because now right-leaning Christian Republicans seem to "own," so to speak, all issues related to the flag. That's another irony, in some ways, because Jesus Christ made that interesting (and logical) distinction between God and Caesar. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"[such as taxes, or a pledge to be loyal to the Roman Empire], but keep all that separate from your spiritual life; don't confuse the nation or the empire in which you live with God's province. Isn't that the sense of what Jesus says? I think I have it right. But of course some people believe the U.S. is a Christian nation, even though a lot of U.S. citizens (born or naturalized) are Jewish, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Hindu, Universalist Unitarian, agnostic, atheist, and so on. And more practically, there seems to be political hay to be made from issues related to the flag and to connecting the U.S. with one particular creed.
Anyway, Bellamy published the pledge in an adolescents' magazine (in 1892, I think) and later people started saying it in schools and at meetings. I think Congress still says it. Apparently, because of a federal-court ruling in 2006, you can't force kids in public school to say it anymore. I don't know that you ever could. Who's going to check to see if a kid is just mouthing the words or not? There's no way to insure quality-control.
And as a friend of mine once pointed out, one of the most likely persons to take an oath of loyalty would be a disloyal person--like a spy. I imagine some KGB agents said the pledge of allegiance at meetings they had infiltrated, back in the day.
The following poem plays off the pledge, not as a parody, for I actually remember the pledge fondly, partly because of the "indivisible/invisible" confusion, partly because I remember how we 8- ,9- , and 10-year-olds rushed through it, as if we were racing--as kids will (we might as well have been speaking Swedish or Czech, for heaven's sake), and partly because it reminds me of how literal-minded I was and am. The following poem may attempt to imply that almost everyone is so busy trying just to be themselves and get through the day that a pledge to an indivisible republic is a pretty tall order.
Pledge
I pledge allegiance to the flagging
spirit of hope in the united cells
of my cerebellum, and to
the republic of individuation
for which they stand, one
person, under the impression
he exists with liberty— just this, for now.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
I recall that almost everyone (in third or fourth grade, say) had trouble with the word, "indivisible." Kids had trouble saying it, and some people said, "invisible," which in some ways is more accurate because "one nation under God," which "indivisible" modifies retroactively, is an abstract concept--the "nation under God" isn't visible to anyone; only little scenes from it are. Anyway, nobody ever handed out the text of the pledge and went through it to explain what a "republic" was or that the word was "indivisible" not "invisible." A little primer on the pledge would have been helpful.
I remember that at some point, being a literalist, I had trouble with the concept of pledging allegiance to a flag. I could understand pledging allegiance to a friend (say), or a pet, perhaps even a nation (although I don't think I pushed it that far--"nation" is a large concept for a grade-schooler). I couldn't visualize my having allegiance to a piece of cloth. I think I was the kind of learner who needed to visualize things. Of course, the sense of the pledge is that you are pledging allegiance to the nation by pledging allegiance to a symbol of the nation, but I couldn't wrap (so to speak) my literal mind around that concept back then. If they wanted me to pledge allegiance to the nation, they should have cut out "the middle-man" of the flag--that was my thinking back then.
Apparently, the pledge was written by one Francis Bellamy, who was--if I have the story straight--a Christian Socialist. --That's right: a Christian (a Baptist, I think) who believed in left-leaning politics. How ironic. --Because now right-leaning Christian Republicans seem to "own," so to speak, all issues related to the flag. That's another irony, in some ways, because Jesus Christ made that interesting (and logical) distinction between God and Caesar. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"[such as taxes, or a pledge to be loyal to the Roman Empire], but keep all that separate from your spiritual life; don't confuse the nation or the empire in which you live with God's province. Isn't that the sense of what Jesus says? I think I have it right. But of course some people believe the U.S. is a Christian nation, even though a lot of U.S. citizens (born or naturalized) are Jewish, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Hindu, Universalist Unitarian, agnostic, atheist, and so on. And more practically, there seems to be political hay to be made from issues related to the flag and to connecting the U.S. with one particular creed.
Anyway, Bellamy published the pledge in an adolescents' magazine (in 1892, I think) and later people started saying it in schools and at meetings. I think Congress still says it. Apparently, because of a federal-court ruling in 2006, you can't force kids in public school to say it anymore. I don't know that you ever could. Who's going to check to see if a kid is just mouthing the words or not? There's no way to insure quality-control.
And as a friend of mine once pointed out, one of the most likely persons to take an oath of loyalty would be a disloyal person--like a spy. I imagine some KGB agents said the pledge of allegiance at meetings they had infiltrated, back in the day.
The following poem plays off the pledge, not as a parody, for I actually remember the pledge fondly, partly because of the "indivisible/invisible" confusion, partly because I remember how we 8- ,9- , and 10-year-olds rushed through it, as if we were racing--as kids will (we might as well have been speaking Swedish or Czech, for heaven's sake), and partly because it reminds me of how literal-minded I was and am. The following poem may attempt to imply that almost everyone is so busy trying just to be themselves and get through the day that a pledge to an indivisible republic is a pretty tall order.
Pledge
I pledge allegiance to the flagging
spirit of hope in the united cells
of my cerebellum, and to
the republic of individuation
for which they stand, one
person, under the impression
he exists with liberty— just this, for now.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Theatrics
I've engaged literally in theatrics only a few times, although life requires some form of performance most of the time. Teaching, everyday politeness, and responding to unexpected questions, for example, are three kinds of interaction that require a level of performance.
I remember Larry King's having interviewed Marlon Brando toward the end of Brando's life. It was a terrible interview because King was intimidated by Brando, and Brando was being Brando. At one point, however, Brando tried to demystify acting. He asked King to imagine a real-life circumstance in which you're sitting at a bar having a drink when a stranger comes up and sits beside you and behaves somewhat oddly. Brando started to say, "So when you respond to that person, you're acting--you're presenting yourself so as to have some control over what seems a strange, possibly threatening, situation" [or something like that--I'm paraphrasing]--but then King cut him off and asked something uninteresting (to me).
I wanted Brando to finish the thought, the kernel of which seemed to be that everybody acts all the time. Of course, that's different from being a trained actor who actually gives a sustained performance, but Brando was trying to teach King about one simple basis of acting.
I tried out in high school for the lead role in The Crucible and so overwhelmed the director of the play, Mr. Murphy, that I was cast in a bit-part, as Ezekiel Cheever, the court-bailiff. I think Mr. Murphy just needed bodies; otherwise, I may not have been cast at all. Perhaps the apex of my acting-career occurred when the actor playing the judge blanked on his lines. He was supposed to order me to bring in the prisoner. I waited a beat, and then I ad-libbed, "Shall I bring in the prisoner, judge?!" The judge-actor said, "Thank you!"--a wonderful double-entendre. Decades later, I "acted" in a short film called Cliche and thereby, absurdly, landed my name on IMBD.
When I go to live theater, I often watch the edges of the performance--actors' shoes, the faces of other people in the audience, the ceiling. I don't do this in any obtrusive way, and I'm sure the actors would rather I suspend disbelieve completely and get immersed totally in the drama. I do re-focus on the drama, but I also like withdrawing from it for a moment. I especially like plays in which people come on the set to change the set right in front you. I pretend the people are actors pretending to be set-changers.
I don't know the theater-world well at all, but I assume that back-stage people get weary of actors and that actors, by the same token, feel as if they're the ones risking everything out there. With regard to plays or films about theater, I'm partial to The Dresser (1983), a film with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay; Shakespeare in Love; Anton in Show Business (a play); and a recent film, Bigger Than the Sky (2005), which is about a regional theater (Portland, Oregon) that puts on Cyrano; the director casts in the lead-role a person with no training in acting, and we go from there. The film seems to capture "theater-people" well, at least as I see them from the outside of that world, and it's a very thoughtful presentation of the phenomenon of regional theater and the obstacles such theater faces with regard to what to produce, how, and why.
Here's link to a nice poem, by Clay Derryberry, about theater:
http://www.artvilla.com/wordplay/?p=602
And this little poem concerns theater-backstage, at least I think it does:
Properties
Reality doesn’t just come out of nowhere.
We sawed boards into shapes of clouds,
worked polymers into blue sky.
Adam and Eve enter left, spew their lines,
name a fashioned set. Backstage we hear
each board creak. The sky moans like a sick duck.
Somehow the better drama’s back here—
heat coming off the stage-manager’s neck, lust
unspoken between me and the set-dresser.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
I remember Larry King's having interviewed Marlon Brando toward the end of Brando's life. It was a terrible interview because King was intimidated by Brando, and Brando was being Brando. At one point, however, Brando tried to demystify acting. He asked King to imagine a real-life circumstance in which you're sitting at a bar having a drink when a stranger comes up and sits beside you and behaves somewhat oddly. Brando started to say, "So when you respond to that person, you're acting--you're presenting yourself so as to have some control over what seems a strange, possibly threatening, situation" [or something like that--I'm paraphrasing]--but then King cut him off and asked something uninteresting (to me).
I wanted Brando to finish the thought, the kernel of which seemed to be that everybody acts all the time. Of course, that's different from being a trained actor who actually gives a sustained performance, but Brando was trying to teach King about one simple basis of acting.
I tried out in high school for the lead role in The Crucible and so overwhelmed the director of the play, Mr. Murphy, that I was cast in a bit-part, as Ezekiel Cheever, the court-bailiff. I think Mr. Murphy just needed bodies; otherwise, I may not have been cast at all. Perhaps the apex of my acting-career occurred when the actor playing the judge blanked on his lines. He was supposed to order me to bring in the prisoner. I waited a beat, and then I ad-libbed, "Shall I bring in the prisoner, judge?!" The judge-actor said, "Thank you!"--a wonderful double-entendre. Decades later, I "acted" in a short film called Cliche and thereby, absurdly, landed my name on IMBD.
When I go to live theater, I often watch the edges of the performance--actors' shoes, the faces of other people in the audience, the ceiling. I don't do this in any obtrusive way, and I'm sure the actors would rather I suspend disbelieve completely and get immersed totally in the drama. I do re-focus on the drama, but I also like withdrawing from it for a moment. I especially like plays in which people come on the set to change the set right in front you. I pretend the people are actors pretending to be set-changers.
I don't know the theater-world well at all, but I assume that back-stage people get weary of actors and that actors, by the same token, feel as if they're the ones risking everything out there. With regard to plays or films about theater, I'm partial to The Dresser (1983), a film with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay; Shakespeare in Love; Anton in Show Business (a play); and a recent film, Bigger Than the Sky (2005), which is about a regional theater (Portland, Oregon) that puts on Cyrano; the director casts in the lead-role a person with no training in acting, and we go from there. The film seems to capture "theater-people" well, at least as I see them from the outside of that world, and it's a very thoughtful presentation of the phenomenon of regional theater and the obstacles such theater faces with regard to what to produce, how, and why.
Here's link to a nice poem, by Clay Derryberry, about theater:
http://www.artvilla.com/wordplay/?p=602
And this little poem concerns theater-backstage, at least I think it does:
Properties
Reality doesn’t just come out of nowhere.
We sawed boards into shapes of clouds,
worked polymers into blue sky.
Adam and Eve enter left, spew their lines,
name a fashioned set. Backstage we hear
each board creak. The sky moans like a sick duck.
Somehow the better drama’s back here—
heat coming off the stage-manager’s neck, lust
unspoken between me and the set-dresser.
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Monday, October 15, 2007
The Evolution of Gossip
According to the OED online, here is the original meaning of gossip, the noun:
"One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism. a. In relation to the person baptized: A godfather or godmother; a sponsor. Now only arch. and dial."
From this meaning, the word evolved slowly, next referring to women in attendance at a baptism, then to "idle" women, then to the conversation in which "idle" women indulge, and so on, until now one meaning of gossip is something like "conversation full of rumor" or "idle, potentially negative conversation about people" (these are my definitions, not those of the OED, in case that wasn't obvious). And we now have the accompanying verb, "to gossip."
One can imagine women involved in a baptism conversing, and one can imagine men (for example) ultimately deciding that this was "idle" conversation. It is interesting that "gossip" was thusly "gendered" early on. "Women gossip; men don't." Right.
I think there are two basic kinds of gossip, one good and one not good. The not-good kind is the kind we usually regret after we indulge in it: talking negatively about someone, with a certain schaudenfreude. The good kind is a means by which information is spread informally, especially within well established social, professional, or political institutions. The more tightly such institutions try to control the flow of information, the healthier gossip is, even if one assumes (as one should) that a certain percentage of it will be inaccurate. Gossip as an underground river of information is, I think, a good thing, and it may well have functioned that way in groups of relatively powerless women. Moreover, small communities (a corporation, a town) need gossip in the sense of news-passed-along, not in the sense of mere rumors, negative talk, or false information. But information passed by word-of-mouth, even in, perhaps especially in the age of multiplied media, is still crucial to communities. For instance, I would argue that leakage of certain information from the branches of the federal government is good, and it is of course ironic that G.W. Bush would clamp down like Super-Nixon on leaks within his own administration but then pardon someone convicted of leaking information about a U.S. spy. I would argue that he was clamping down on a good kind of gossip and pardoning a bad kind.
However, it's the not-so-good gossip I had in mind, probably, when writing the following poem:
"One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism. a. In relation to the person baptized: A godfather or godmother; a sponsor. Now only arch. and dial."
From this meaning, the word evolved slowly, next referring to women in attendance at a baptism, then to "idle" women, then to the conversation in which "idle" women indulge, and so on, until now one meaning of gossip is something like "conversation full of rumor" or "idle, potentially negative conversation about people" (these are my definitions, not those of the OED, in case that wasn't obvious). And we now have the accompanying verb, "to gossip."
One can imagine women involved in a baptism conversing, and one can imagine men (for example) ultimately deciding that this was "idle" conversation. It is interesting that "gossip" was thusly "gendered" early on. "Women gossip; men don't." Right.
I think there are two basic kinds of gossip, one good and one not good. The not-good kind is the kind we usually regret after we indulge in it: talking negatively about someone, with a certain schaudenfreude. The good kind is a means by which information is spread informally, especially within well established social, professional, or political institutions. The more tightly such institutions try to control the flow of information, the healthier gossip is, even if one assumes (as one should) that a certain percentage of it will be inaccurate. Gossip as an underground river of information is, I think, a good thing, and it may well have functioned that way in groups of relatively powerless women. Moreover, small communities (a corporation, a town) need gossip in the sense of news-passed-along, not in the sense of mere rumors, negative talk, or false information. But information passed by word-of-mouth, even in, perhaps especially in the age of multiplied media, is still crucial to communities. For instance, I would argue that leakage of certain information from the branches of the federal government is good, and it is of course ironic that G.W. Bush would clamp down like Super-Nixon on leaks within his own administration but then pardon someone convicted of leaking information about a U.S. spy. I would argue that he was clamping down on a good kind of gossip and pardoning a bad kind.
However, it's the not-so-good gossip I had in mind, probably, when writing the following poem:
Of Gossip
Braised café buzz, whispered
faux intimacy, secrets that dearly
desire to fail—gossip,
which idles like the motor
in a cat’s throat.
It is flashy and frothy,
is fascinating, briefly, like a minnow.
Gossip struts,
the short-legged mayor
of Talk’s Township, proud to know
what it imagines it just found out,
eager to get busy and pass it along.
The Things We Can't Quite Throw Away
Probably you've read Tim O'Brien's great long story, "The Things They Carried," they being American soldiers in Viet Nam, the things being. . . all manner of things.
In class we talked not so much about the things we carry but about the things we can't quite throw away--things that might accompany us from move to move but that don't fit easily into any justifiable category: functional things; heirlooms; collectibles; and so on. We were in the process of brainstorming possible sub-categories of "thing poems."
I remembered a pickled baby octopus my mother had purchased for me as a souvenir at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. The year was 1965, and the chief purpose of the trip was to take me and my two brothers to see Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants play at Candlestick Park. In 1965, a baby octopus was considered an appropriate souvenir, and I was fascinated with the thing. Still am. Can't quite bring myself to throw it away, even though I realize how inappropriate it is in 2007. A poem that came from the prompt, "things we can't quite get rid of":
The Pickled Octopus
Why do I own a brown
baby octopus, pickled in a jar
of formaldehyde, purchased in 1965
at Fisherman’s Wharf,
specimen as souvenir?
The bulbous-bodied octopus
leans permanently in broth,
suction-cups revealed. Fascinated
for four decades, I’m
asking for advice.
Is the octopus in the jar
right or wrong? To be hidden
or displayed? If I dispose of it—
how? Would you like to see it?
Tell me the truth.
Hans Ostrom Copyright 2007
In class we talked not so much about the things we carry but about the things we can't quite throw away--things that might accompany us from move to move but that don't fit easily into any justifiable category: functional things; heirlooms; collectibles; and so on. We were in the process of brainstorming possible sub-categories of "thing poems."
I remembered a pickled baby octopus my mother had purchased for me as a souvenir at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. The year was 1965, and the chief purpose of the trip was to take me and my two brothers to see Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants play at Candlestick Park. In 1965, a baby octopus was considered an appropriate souvenir, and I was fascinated with the thing. Still am. Can't quite bring myself to throw it away, even though I realize how inappropriate it is in 2007. A poem that came from the prompt, "things we can't quite get rid of":
The Pickled Octopus
Why do I own a brown
baby octopus, pickled in a jar
of formaldehyde, purchased in 1965
at Fisherman’s Wharf,
specimen as souvenir?
The bulbous-bodied octopus
leans permanently in broth,
suction-cups revealed. Fascinated
for four decades, I’m
asking for advice.
Is the octopus in the jar
right or wrong? To be hidden
or displayed? If I dispose of it—
how? Would you like to see it?
Tell me the truth.
Hans Ostrom Copyright 2007
Seriously Sick of the Muse
The 19th-century British poet Thomas Hood has a nice little poem in which he expresses weariness with the pressures of writing poetry, with the obligation to be a Serious Poet. The poem, by title, is dedicated to Minerva, Roman goddess/muse of poetry and other arts. The poem also mentions Thyrsis, a singing shepherd in Virgil's poetry, and it alludes to Pallas (Athena), the Greek predecessor of Minerva.
To Minerva
by Thomas Hood
My temples throb, my pulses boil,
I'm sick of Song and Ode and Ballad--
So Thyrsis, take the Midnight Oil,
And pour it on a lobster salad.
By rain is dull, my sight is foul,
I cannot write a verse, or read,--
Then Pallas, take away thine Owl,
And let us have a lark instead.
Thus Hood, on a lark, so to speak, produces an anti-serious-poetry poem.
In honor of Hood and poems written on a lark (to give Minerva a coffee break), a poem that larks about:
Just Between You and Me
I ponder you. You ponder me.
Thus we create a palpable
ponderability,
a kind of interstasis
or interpersonal oasis
that’s both and neither
Other and Self.
Shuck and jive and humming hive,
the twixt between us is alive.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom
To Minerva
by Thomas Hood
My temples throb, my pulses boil,
I'm sick of Song and Ode and Ballad--
So Thyrsis, take the Midnight Oil,
And pour it on a lobster salad.
By rain is dull, my sight is foul,
I cannot write a verse, or read,--
Then Pallas, take away thine Owl,
And let us have a lark instead.
Thus Hood, on a lark, so to speak, produces an anti-serious-poetry poem.
In honor of Hood and poems written on a lark (to give Minerva a coffee break), a poem that larks about:
Just Between You and Me
I ponder you. You ponder me.
Thus we create a palpable
ponderability,
a kind of interstasis
or interpersonal oasis
that’s both and neither
Other and Self.
Shuck and jive and humming hive,
the twixt between us is alive.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom
Fourteen Lines: Sonnet-Addiction
The sonnet-form of poetry has been around for about 800 years. That's a long time, from where I'm sitting, but maybe not from where geology is sitting.
It's a form that should be worn out by now (indeed, most working poets today probably view it as a worn out form), but it's simply too addictive--to poets as well as readers of poetry--to be abandoned. From an American perspective, one might compare it to the blues form or the three-chord country-and-western song. In one sense we feel as if we've heard it all before when we think of these forms, but on closer inspection, the possibilities for variations and innovations within the tight form are endless, and indeed one source of fascination is what the next person will do with the form, given the form's tight guidelines. The tension between tight, conventional form and innovation becomes a source of inspiration and interest. Of course, it's always possible to disobey a form's guidleines significantly, something that happened when the sonnet-form lept, so to speak, from Italy to England.
"Sonnet," so the story goes, springs from a similar word in Italian that means "little song" or "little sound." Apparently it began life as a song-form within larger works, in Sicily, at the court of Frederick, in the 1200s. We associate the form now with the Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch, and his sonnets refined the octave [8 lines]/sestet [6 lines] form. It's easier to rhyme in Italian than in English, so Petrarch was able to use as few as four rhymes over the 14 lines. Thomas Wyatt tried to keep the Petrarchan form going in English but started to vary the rhyme-scheme, and his iambic pentameter was pretty rough. As we know, Shakespeare put the real English stamp on the form, solidifying the three-quatrain/couplet form, which, among other things, allows for more rhymes. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter tends to be more regular than Wyatt's; that's for sure. Shakespeare also deviated from and even made fun of conventions of the sonnet. For example, in Sonnet 18, he asks, "Shall I compare thee [his beloved] to a summer's day?" The rest of the sonnet implicitly answers, "Yes and no," because he does draw comparisons but points out their inadequacy, thereby disrupting the convention of describing someone's beauty in terms of nature (a.g., a woman's complexion = that of a rose). Not to get too cute, but Sonnet 18 is both a sonnet and a meta-sonnet, a sonnet that shows off the poet's awareness of the tradition in which he writes.
Like Dickinson's poetry, sonnets are often met with resistance because they can seem too formal, encoded, and remote--something that belongs to dusty volumes in libraries or only to English teachers. But once you crack the surface, so to speak, they're very satisfying little puzzles to work on, and they often make quick little arguments, often feinting in one direction, going in another direction, and ending with emphasis, surprise, or both. And by the time Countee Cullen writes his famous sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel" (in the Harlem Renaissance), almost any subject is open to the sonnet; it's no longer a song of love. "Yet Do I Marvel" may well be my most favorite sonnet of all time, with all due respect to the Shake-meister-general.
In one sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading can be described as a figurative addiction, not so different from that to crossword puzzles or soduku. In another sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading are like a big ongoing party you can visit. It's a welcoming tradition. That one is welcome doesn't necessarily mean that the sonnet one tries to write will succeed or that every sonnet one reads will be satisfying. It just means a grand, flexible, evolving tradition continues--a moveable feast.
I usually have students (as poets or readers) write a "sound sonnet," in which individual lines or sentences make sense but in which the sonnet overall need not, and indeed should not, make sense. The idea is to liberate the students from having to mean so that they may focus on the meter and rhyming, the building of three quatrains and a couplet. Ironically, the hardest part of the exercise turns out to be not making sense. In most cases, the "sound sonnets" quickly begin to be about something.
I invite you to write a sound-sonnet, a 10 [syllables; every other syllable stressed] X 14 [lines] poem, as my late friend Wendy Bishop referred to it. Try not to mean!
I participate in the tradition chiefly by reading (and teaching) sonnets, but every so often I attend the party as a writer. In the following sonnet, I decided to have the poem try (at least) to meaning something, I decided to stick with the English or Shakespearian form (three quatrains and a couplet), I decided to adhere, with a few variations, to iambic pentameter, but I also decided to be flexible with the rhyming by using some slant- or half-rhymes.
Making the Soul’s Re-acquaintance
It seems you must give up your long-term lease
On being right and wronged, righteous and hurt.
No doubt there’s someone else who would be pleased
To lord over that haughty piece of Earth.
Move to a cottage of humility,
Cross-breezes, and a pantry full of jars
That hold your faults, preserved for scrutiny.
Live with the wretchedness of who you are.
Chop kindling from the stump of your assumptions,
And ask forgiveness from each simple wall.
It won’t be long before you sense resumption
Of simple gratitude for life and all.
Of course you’ll want to pray again, poor sod.
But keep it basic: pray there is a God.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom.
Here's a wonderful site, by the way, for sonnet enthusiasts, addicts, or casual visitors:
http://www.sonnets.org/
It's a form that should be worn out by now (indeed, most working poets today probably view it as a worn out form), but it's simply too addictive--to poets as well as readers of poetry--to be abandoned. From an American perspective, one might compare it to the blues form or the three-chord country-and-western song. In one sense we feel as if we've heard it all before when we think of these forms, but on closer inspection, the possibilities for variations and innovations within the tight form are endless, and indeed one source of fascination is what the next person will do with the form, given the form's tight guidelines. The tension between tight, conventional form and innovation becomes a source of inspiration and interest. Of course, it's always possible to disobey a form's guidleines significantly, something that happened when the sonnet-form lept, so to speak, from Italy to England.
"Sonnet," so the story goes, springs from a similar word in Italian that means "little song" or "little sound." Apparently it began life as a song-form within larger works, in Sicily, at the court of Frederick, in the 1200s. We associate the form now with the Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch, and his sonnets refined the octave [8 lines]/sestet [6 lines] form. It's easier to rhyme in Italian than in English, so Petrarch was able to use as few as four rhymes over the 14 lines. Thomas Wyatt tried to keep the Petrarchan form going in English but started to vary the rhyme-scheme, and his iambic pentameter was pretty rough. As we know, Shakespeare put the real English stamp on the form, solidifying the three-quatrain/couplet form, which, among other things, allows for more rhymes. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter tends to be more regular than Wyatt's; that's for sure. Shakespeare also deviated from and even made fun of conventions of the sonnet. For example, in Sonnet 18, he asks, "Shall I compare thee [his beloved] to a summer's day?" The rest of the sonnet implicitly answers, "Yes and no," because he does draw comparisons but points out their inadequacy, thereby disrupting the convention of describing someone's beauty in terms of nature (a.g., a woman's complexion = that of a rose). Not to get too cute, but Sonnet 18 is both a sonnet and a meta-sonnet, a sonnet that shows off the poet's awareness of the tradition in which he writes.
Like Dickinson's poetry, sonnets are often met with resistance because they can seem too formal, encoded, and remote--something that belongs to dusty volumes in libraries or only to English teachers. But once you crack the surface, so to speak, they're very satisfying little puzzles to work on, and they often make quick little arguments, often feinting in one direction, going in another direction, and ending with emphasis, surprise, or both. And by the time Countee Cullen writes his famous sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel" (in the Harlem Renaissance), almost any subject is open to the sonnet; it's no longer a song of love. "Yet Do I Marvel" may well be my most favorite sonnet of all time, with all due respect to the Shake-meister-general.
In one sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading can be described as a figurative addiction, not so different from that to crossword puzzles or soduku. In another sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading are like a big ongoing party you can visit. It's a welcoming tradition. That one is welcome doesn't necessarily mean that the sonnet one tries to write will succeed or that every sonnet one reads will be satisfying. It just means a grand, flexible, evolving tradition continues--a moveable feast.
I usually have students (as poets or readers) write a "sound sonnet," in which individual lines or sentences make sense but in which the sonnet overall need not, and indeed should not, make sense. The idea is to liberate the students from having to mean so that they may focus on the meter and rhyming, the building of three quatrains and a couplet. Ironically, the hardest part of the exercise turns out to be not making sense. In most cases, the "sound sonnets" quickly begin to be about something.
I invite you to write a sound-sonnet, a 10 [syllables; every other syllable stressed] X 14 [lines] poem, as my late friend Wendy Bishop referred to it. Try not to mean!
I participate in the tradition chiefly by reading (and teaching) sonnets, but every so often I attend the party as a writer. In the following sonnet, I decided to have the poem try (at least) to meaning something, I decided to stick with the English or Shakespearian form (three quatrains and a couplet), I decided to adhere, with a few variations, to iambic pentameter, but I also decided to be flexible with the rhyming by using some slant- or half-rhymes.
Making the Soul’s Re-acquaintance
It seems you must give up your long-term lease
On being right and wronged, righteous and hurt.
No doubt there’s someone else who would be pleased
To lord over that haughty piece of Earth.
Move to a cottage of humility,
Cross-breezes, and a pantry full of jars
That hold your faults, preserved for scrutiny.
Live with the wretchedness of who you are.
Chop kindling from the stump of your assumptions,
And ask forgiveness from each simple wall.
It won’t be long before you sense resumption
Of simple gratitude for life and all.
Of course you’ll want to pray again, poor sod.
But keep it basic: pray there is a God.
from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom.
Here's a wonderful site, by the way, for sonnet enthusiasts, addicts, or casual visitors:
http://www.sonnets.org/
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Car-Pooling
I haven't had to carpool much in my life, thank goodness, but I do appreciate the way English so quickly absorbs such concepts and turns them into verbs. My sense is that languages like Swedish and German have more trouble doing that, and this is probably to their credit, at some level. English seems to be the great vacuum-cleaner of languages.
I have taken a fair number of public-buses in my work-life, and of course I have given and taken rides in cars to work-related destinations, but not really on a regular basis. For the better part of two decades, I've lived some 5 minutes from where I work, and we just moved again, in part to escape what had turned into a very difficult commute of 20-30 minutes (one way, for about five years). To many people, I realize, such a commute would be a piece of cake.
My uninformed sense of things is that Americans still don't take to carpooling. As bad as the traffic is in this area, one still sees many, many cars with one driver in them. There's something about the American temperament that wants to drive alone, traffic jams, global warming, petroleum prices, and going-to-war-for-oil be damned. I think I share the temperament, unfortunately; it's just that I've been lucky enough to live near my job. I think I'd rather take a bus (or a train) than car-pool, for some strange reason. I'm very glad to be able to walk to work now, leaving a lot of gasoline languishing in the tank.
In any event, here is the only carpooling poem I've written (and good luck with your commute, wherever you are--Tokyo, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seattle, San Diego, Oklahoma City. . . . .):
I have taken a fair number of public-buses in my work-life, and of course I have given and taken rides in cars to work-related destinations, but not really on a regular basis. For the better part of two decades, I've lived some 5 minutes from where I work, and we just moved again, in part to escape what had turned into a very difficult commute of 20-30 minutes (one way, for about five years). To many people, I realize, such a commute would be a piece of cake.
My uninformed sense of things is that Americans still don't take to carpooling. As bad as the traffic is in this area, one still sees many, many cars with one driver in them. There's something about the American temperament that wants to drive alone, traffic jams, global warming, petroleum prices, and going-to-war-for-oil be damned. I think I share the temperament, unfortunately; it's just that I've been lucky enough to live near my job. I think I'd rather take a bus (or a train) than car-pool, for some strange reason. I'm very glad to be able to walk to work now, leaving a lot of gasoline languishing in the tank.
In any event, here is the only carpooling poem I've written (and good luck with your commute, wherever you are--Tokyo, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seattle, San Diego, Oklahoma City. . . . .):
Carpooling
I’ll meet you where horizon
catches a ride with the tollway
and There tells Here where to go.
The Commissioner of Asphalt
will snip a ribbon, a way will
open, and we’ll commute on
into Nowhere. We’ll sing of
carts and dirigibles, trucks and
tri-planes, trains and schooners
and other means of trans-
importance. We’ll best be getting
along into the shaking sky. Why,
we’ll be late and early
both at once, nearing and
disappearing. Together!
Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom
Dreams, the Old-Fashioned Kind
If dreams, the kind that come with sleep, were a stock, we would say that they probably peaked in the early post-Freudian era and that then the bottom fell out of them. Nobody can say for sure what they're for, and Freud's & Jung's "interpretations" were simply interesting guesses that told us more about Freud and Jung than about dreams. There's simply no evidence that a book you or I "see" in our dreams means what Sigmund, Carl, you, I, or anybody else says it means. If anything, there has to be a statistically better chance that you know what the book means in your book-dream than anyone else, since you, at least, are the resident historian of your life.
As far as I can tell, almost everyone seems to agree that one's own dreams can be quite interesting (or not) but that the moment you tell your dream to someone else or someone tells his or her dream to you, the listener stops listening because other people's dreams are boring. Moreover, psychologists and psychiatrists don't seem to want to hear about dreams anymore. In fact, I suspect there's an inside joke in that profession whereby if you run out of things to ask the client, ask him or her about his/her dreams, right before minute 49 turns into minute 50. "Oh, I'd love to hear more about that dream, but we're out of time!"
The only "dreams" you hear about anymore are the aspiration kind--you know, all about "realizing your dreams," which is basically the same as achieving goals. Probably dreams (the sleep kind) fulfill some kind of biochemical, neurological function, flushing the wiring after a long day or helping the brain deal with stress physiologically. I assume the biochemists are working assiduously on that, especially if the pharmacological corporations think they can sell pills based on the research eventually. Dream-enhancers.
Dreams may also tell you what you may already know, namely that experience X had a powerful impact on you. For example, I still have anxiety-dreams about not passing some imaginary class in graduate school and not earning my Ph.D., which I earned in 1982, for heaven's sake, but I've just told you about a dream, and we know that no dreams but your dreams are interesting to you, so I'll stop. A poem, then:
As far as I can tell, almost everyone seems to agree that one's own dreams can be quite interesting (or not) but that the moment you tell your dream to someone else or someone tells his or her dream to you, the listener stops listening because other people's dreams are boring. Moreover, psychologists and psychiatrists don't seem to want to hear about dreams anymore. In fact, I suspect there's an inside joke in that profession whereby if you run out of things to ask the client, ask him or her about his/her dreams, right before minute 49 turns into minute 50. "Oh, I'd love to hear more about that dream, but we're out of time!"
The only "dreams" you hear about anymore are the aspiration kind--you know, all about "realizing your dreams," which is basically the same as achieving goals. Probably dreams (the sleep kind) fulfill some kind of biochemical, neurological function, flushing the wiring after a long day or helping the brain deal with stress physiologically. I assume the biochemists are working assiduously on that, especially if the pharmacological corporations think they can sell pills based on the research eventually. Dream-enhancers.
Dreams may also tell you what you may already know, namely that experience X had a powerful impact on you. For example, I still have anxiety-dreams about not passing some imaginary class in graduate school and not earning my Ph.D., which I earned in 1982, for heaven's sake, but I've just told you about a dream, and we know that no dreams but your dreams are interesting to you, so I'll stop. A poem, then:
Dream On
A small council
of evolutionary matter
in a county of the brain
knows the real purpose
of dreams, a purpose
wholly unrelated to what
we imagine dreams do
for, to, with us. So I
dutifully dream, as if
it were a chore that came
with sleeping (it is), as if
I were a member of that small,
secret provincial council,
which meets in a lodge
somewhere off of Highway Zero,
East of West, as if I had
a choice in the matter of
dreams, the dreams of
matter.
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