Regarding "Off"

Children and occasionally adults sometimes say a word over and over again, rapidly, until the word becomes just a sound, representing nothing, meaningless, vaguely silly. Similarly, anyone who writes, including but certainly not exclusively poets, will sometimes look at a familiar word--and look at it and look it--until it becomes unfamiliar. The writer sees it differently, perhaps even examines it for what it really is, an object formed by ink on a page, or a digitized virtual object on a screen.

This happened to me with the word, "off," for some reason, perhaps partly because "of" is buried in "off"; perhaps partly because you hear people say things like, "Well, I'm off, then," or, "I guess it's time to shove off," or, "Are you off at 1:00?", or "Come off it, will you?!"

I believe variations on the infinitive "to get off" can also have sexual connotations, and I think I've heard "off" used in TV dialogue as a verb meaning "to kill," as in "He offed him."

In any event, a small poem grew from the loam of my temporary obsession with "off," an obsession undoubtedly harder to justify than Gertrude Stein's with "rose":

Of Off

Shove Off, and it shoves back--
or seems to do so with its
stalwart inertia of absence.

A hard west wind pushes
through the O, and two F’s
stand like trees on a ridge,
boughs blown easterly.

It is not the moon
that switches tides off,
on. Rather, just
off-hand, you might say it is
relation’s ships: sun, moon, earth.

Something is in the offing,
we sometimes say, off-
handedly. Offing is the season
of imminence. If you cannot wait
for what waits in the offing,
then be you with off.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

James Weldon Johnson and Bill Cosby

I watched Larry King interview Bill Cosby and his co-author, Professor Toussaint, about their book, Come On, People, which speaks to the ways in which African Americans can address problems in their communities and families. Cosby's gotten some grief for the book and for speaking out, partly, in seems, because his thesis has been mis-construed. Even Larry King asked him, "But aren't many of these problems the result of racism in America?" And Cosby answered, of course--he'd never suggested they weren't. Cosby seemed to be running into one of the primary logical fallacies of television interviews: the false dichotomy, which dictates that the root of a problem must be either X or Y but never both X and Y. Cosby's point: both. All Americans have a responsibility to address American problems, but he just happens to be focusing now on what African Americans might do in the meantime, for America-in-general doesn't seem to be in a great rush to solve the problems.

King and his guests reviewed some of the statistics: African Americans make up 12 per cent of the general population but 44% of the prison population. The average lifespan for African Americans is six years less than that of the general population. In some cities, the high-school drop-out rate of African Americans is 50 per cent.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)--African American poet, novelist, songwriter (he wrote "Lift Every Voice" and other popular songs), editor, diplomat, and professor--has a nice little poem that pertains to the topic:

To America

by James Weldon Johnson


How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking ’neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?

I love this poem in part because it gets to the nub, or a nub, of the matter. Whatever problems plague African Americans are problems for the whole nation to confront and solve, not shifting blame, going for easy excuses, or making things worse along the way. In fact, the "us" in the poem could represent not just African Americans (about whom Johnson was writing) but any group experiencing widespread difficulty: the homeless; the working poor; single parents; physically and psychically wounded soldiers coming back from Iraq; all people without health care or with shaky health care. In Johnson's time, even more so than in ours, the "widespread difficulty" lay with how the U.S. viewed and mistreated its African American citizens; therefore, Johnson, in his poem, was asking the question of the source of the difficulty, America.

How would you have America, America? Implicitly, that's also Johnson's question. If a 50-year-old white woman is laid off, loses her health-care insurance, and can't go to the doctor, and if a 16-year old African American man drops out of high school, the woman and the young man have a problem, but so do their families, their community, and their nation: us. America should want the woman to have health-care, no matter what, and America should want to get the lad back into school. How would we have it? Much better--especially for those who have it bad.

A Little Bit of Housman

Here's a fine but lesser-known short poem by A.E. Housman:

XVII

The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:
My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.
But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,
The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.

Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.



There's much to like in just eight lines. A bouncy anapestic meter dominates and is appropriately inappropriate to the glum point of view, and Housman sets us up nicely to expect "my troubles are few" in line two, but he gives us "my troubles are two," and at that moment, the rest of the poem becomes irresistible. We have to find out what those two ("Only two?" we think) troubles are, and they are, merely (!), the head and the heart, which "reave" him. "Reave" means, according to the OED online:

"To commit spoliation or robbery; to plunder, pillage."

Thus is the speaker of the poem "bereaved."(Later spellings of the word included "reive" and "rieve," and I believe Faulkner has a short story called "The Rievers," which Hollywood filmed.)

The poem ends with the speaker's expressed wish to be more like what he imagines "ordinary" people to be: content with victuals and able to sleep easy. "Flint in the bosom" I take to mean a toughness in the face of passion or sentiment; the heart is hardened. "Guts in the head" can be taken to mean mental courage, or it could be taken to mean not-so-smart but the better for it. I think I'd go with the former interpretation, but "guts in the head" is a great surprising phrase with which to end the poem, even if, or especially because, it gives us quite an image with which to grapple: a head full of guts.

A gem, this poem.

Financial Advice

With the news that the housing-crisis (foreclosures; stalled sales; "credit-crunch") may affect the economy severely unless the government acts to get the flow of credit going again, I thought it might be time to break out a poem that expresses less than full confidence in such concepts as "investments" and "retirement." I once read the poem to a group from a Board of Trustees with significant fiduciary responsibilities. Before I read the poem, I assured those present that the poem was in no way a comment on their management of funds. Several in attendance were multi-millionaires, and they seemed genuinely amused by the poem. If I had millions of dollars--heck, even one million--I might find the poem more amusing. Anyway, here 'tis:

Animals And Investment

1. The Managed Fund

Crows guarded his retirement plan.
They marched around its perimeter.
Squirrels managed the fund.
They wore small green visors,
used their cheeks as briefcases,
embezzled by accident, forgetting
where they buried the dividends.

2. Fixed Income

One day so dispirited by his work
was he that he decided to retire.
He asked to begin to withdraw
his pension. The account-manager,
a raccoon, presented a box to him,
removed the lid, and waddled away.
The new pensioner peered in.
Feathers and leaves were all
the box held. His income was fixed.

from The Coast Starlight (2006), by Hans Ostrom

Some Favorite First Lines

In no particular order, here are some of my favorite first lines of others' poems:

O hideous little bat, the size of snot

(Karl Shapiro, "The Fly")

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet #30)

Because I could not stop for death

(Emily Dickinson)

We real cool. We

(Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool")

What happens to a dream deferred?

(Langston Hughes, "Harlem")

By the road to the contagious hospital

(William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All")

Glory be to God for dappled things

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur")

Is there any reason why a poem shouldn't

(Mark Halliday, "Functional Poem")

Body my house
my horse my hound

(two lines, I know; May Swenson, "Question")

i sing of Olaf glad and big

(e.e. cummings)

I hold my honey and I store my bread

(Gwendolyn Brooks, "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell")

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

(Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse")

When snow like sheep lay in the fold

(Geoffrey Hill, "In Memory of Jane Fraser")

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

(Kenneth Koch, "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams")

Nothing is plumb, level or square:

(Alan Dugan, "Love Song: I and Thou")

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

(W.H. Auden, "Lullaby")

If a Tree Falls On a Poem

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

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.

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.

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:

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

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

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:

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.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom