Why Is Snow White?

I grew up around snow--at about 4,000 feet above sea-level in the Sierra Nevada. That was about 1,000 feet lower than the really serious snow, but each winter we still got storms that dumped a foot here, two feet there, sometimes four feet. Before I was born, the infamous storm of 1952 hit, and it dumped so much snow that drifts piled above the roofs in town and cut the town off. Highway-plows were completely useless against such a volume of snow. Lore has it that some pregnant women, among others, got nervous.

Some people who grow up around snow remember it fondly and become lifelong ski-enthusiasts, etc. I associate it with work: shoveling, walking in it, putting chains on tires, getting cold, driving in it with appropriate caution (why some people speed up, only God knows), stoking wood fires. Snow and I are acquaintances, not enemies but not friends.

According to a variety of sources on the internet, snow is white because when light enters it, light gets bounced around off all the crystals that make up snow, and the light basically gets bounced right out. I think this happens fairly rapidly, as light is known to be in a big hurry all the time. Anyway, when it comes out, our eyes "read" it as "white." I remember digging paths through snow to and from the house, however, and essentially a snow-corridor took shape. The sides of the corridor looked positively blue at times, I assume because the light came out and/or went in at a different angle. . . . There is nothing quite like the silence of a snowed-over field, if the wind isn't blowing.

A wee poem, piled only four lines high, about a snow-childhood, then:

Childhood, Sierra Nevada

Snow fell on me.
I fell on snow.
Why it was white
I didn’t know.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

By the way, the name "Snow White" has always puzzled me. I gather it's supposed to suggest virginity or purity. But imagine meeting her in the village. "Good morning, Snow. What's going on?"

This, That, and The Other Thing: Our Lives

I like that pat answer people sometimes give when you ask, "What have you been up to?" "Oh, this and that," they say. It can be a way of saying, "None of your business," or of saying, "It's too complicated to go into now," or "You are not the person I was hoping to speak with right now" or "Mere words cannot describe what I've been up to."

But it can also be an accurate response, for our lives are occupied by This and That. This is the thing occupying us most intensely right now, whereas That is what might be on our minds, a constant thing we have to deal with, a relationship, a political cause--whatever. Our days are concerned with the This of our lives and the That of our lives, hence this wee poem:

The Position I Hold

I work for the Office of This and That.
Currently I am Vice President for the
Development of This.

For many years, however, I worked
as District Manager of That.

In many respects This and
That have been my life.

When people ask me at a party,
“What do you do?” I say, “A little bit
of This, and a little bit of That.” I’m not lying.

-Hans Ostrom

Best of luck with this, that, and the other thing--life itself. Peace be with you, and also with you.

Poem As Very Short Essay; or Essay as Very Short Poem

'Tis the season on many college campuses for students to write many, many essays, a.k.a "papers." Here's a little poem that takes its shape from one shape the essay sometimes takes. The poem first appeared in Willow Springs, a magazine published at Eastern Washington University, which has a fine M.F.A. program in writing.

Bread and Bus: And Essay

by Hans Ostrom

Somebody is always,
always baking bread. It’s
been that way for thousands,
thousands of years.

Additionally, if life
is short, then there is
no such thing as
a long bus ride.

In conclusion, the bus
rolled onto a street
of shops, and we smelled
bread, baking; baking bread.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

May your day be filled with the smell of freshly baked bread. And if you're working on an essay, good luck.

Haiku; Basho; Sneeze

Although one of my favorite books of poetry is Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as translated in English, I hardly ever try to write haiku. Many poets specialize in the form--poets writing in English, I mean. Basho's book is great because it's part travelogue, part autobiography, part meditation, and part poetry. The poetry's interwoven with the narrative, and occasionally he'll invite someone he meets to write a poem with him. In my hands, the haiku-form just seems artificial in a way that the sonnet-form, though difficult, does not. I feel as if I'm writing in a form I don't understand fully, and I assume that there are all sorts of cultural assumptions lying behind the haiku form. For example, the 17 syllables may mean a great deal in Japanese for reasons I don't fathom, but in English, what's the difference between 17 and 16 or 17 and 15? But I certainly enjoy haiku written by other poets, and the focus on clear, "hard" imagery has a lot in common with the Imagist movement.

Anyway, here's just one haiku:

Allergic Haiku

mold, pollen, weeds, dust--

sealed building full of bad air—

she wheezes; sneezes


A-choo.

Bricks

I'm living in a brick house for the first time in my life. I like it just fine. Brick houses always look appealing from the street because you don't see peeling paint, and bricks pretty much stay bricks: they hold their shape and color. I've heard that brick houses don't fare too well in earthquakes, but I don't know that for a fact.

My father, a stone mason, loathed bricks. Basically, he refused to lay them. I think the process was simply too boring for him, and although he would have been furious if someone had referred to him as an "artist," he liked the fact that no two rock walls or fireplaces looked the same. He liked composing the things.

We've always bought highly used homes--a couple were even Victorians houses, ancient by American standards. No matter how much the previous occupant cleans up outside, there always seem to be things of interest (but of no or little use) left behind, such as an oddly shaped piece of metal, a broken chair, or just one brick. The just one brick is the topic of this poem.

Brick

A brick never set
into wall or walkway

seems all rectangular

for nothing, red out
of embarrassment or alarm:

Brick emergency! I need

to be part of something,
mortared into solidarity!

The isolated brick gives

the impression of being aware
of its situation, although

that is impossible.

What will happen?

Weather will get to it.
Or it will break. Anyway

it’ll return to soil, finish
the trip from clay to mold

to kiln to being brick to dirt.

Recommended Poems

I use a huge anthology in one of my courses, and the book is one of the best of its kind I've seen in a while. It's The Wadsworth Anthology of Poetry, edited by Jay Parini.

The other day, I told the students that each of them could pick any poem at all from the massive book--a favorite of theirs we hadn't yet discussed in class. Most of the students are 20-21 years old, so although the sample is statistically unreliable, the list of poems the students chose does provide a window on what some "youths" [of course, this must be pronounced "yutes," as Joe Pesci's character pronounces it in My Cousin Vinny] like in the way of poetry. Here's the list, in no particular order:

"My Grandmother's Love Letters," by Hart Crane
"America," by Robert Creeley
"since feeling is first," by e.e. cummings
"Morning Song," by Sylvia Plath
"Night Mirror," by Li-Young Lee
"Lucy Gray," by William Wordsworth
"Fog," by Carl Sandburg
"Those Winter Sundays," by Robert Hayden
"America," by Allen Ginsberg
"Ode to the Beautiful Nude," by Pablo Neruda
"The Road Not Taken," by Robert Frost
"The Idea of Order at Key West," by Wallace Stevens
In Memoriam, by Alfred Tennyson
Howl, by Allen Ginsberg

Holding Back; Emerson

Here's a lesser known poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson:

Forebearance

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Hast thou named all the birds without a gun;
Loved the wood-rose, and left it on its stalk;
At rich men's tables eaten bread and pulse;
Unarmed, faced danger with a heart of trust;
And loved so well a high behavior
In man or maid, that thou from speech refrained,
Nobility more nobly to repay?—
O be my friend, and teach me to be thine!

This is a complex little poem. It certainly is about holding back, refraining from killing birds when looking at them will do just fine; from picking a wild rose; from letting fear get the better of you in a tough situation; and--perhaps my favorite--refraining from complimenting someone for their good behavior. In one sense, of course, we have been taught that such compliments, when properly offered, are polite and generous. Emerson's poem seems to suggest, however, that there are times when withholding the compliment leaves all the nobility to the person who behaved nobly; one refrains from "joining in," I guess, or from basking in the other person's glow. Perhaps the one puzzling reference is to being invited to a rich man's "table"--to his house for dinner--and to be served "bread and pulse." In this case, "pulse" doesn't refer to heart-beats or, obliquely, blood. It refers to food deriving from anything in the bean-family--probably a kind of mash made of beans. So I guess if you're invited to a rich man's house and expect the food to measure up to the stock-portfolio and instead you get "mere" bread and beans, hold back. Don't complain or let on that you're disappointed. Eat what is put before you. Thank the hosts.

I enjoy the last line very much because the speaker suggests that he's "not quite there yet." He can admire forebearance but hasn't gotten the hang of it yet, so he'd like a forebearing friend to teach him.

I believe the poem was published in 1842. Sometimes now you see forebearance spelled without the e after r.

Since Emerson's often linked to (Walt) Whitman in a Transcendental way, I thought I'd toss in a little poem about the sort of person who is not Whitman-like, who prefers not to "sing myself" (sing herself), who holds back (the "light under a bushel-basket syndrome"):

Not Whitman

She, too, would sing herself
if such a song seemed not so
indulgent, presumptuous.
She leaves her blades of grass
lying under drifts of reticence.
What she knows, you may
know, but only if you ask,
and even then she may answer
only by asking you to sing a little
something of yourself.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Why Do I Like Crows?

My sense of things is that crows are not popular. They're large, loud, and insistent--and these traits are supposed to be exclusively human, aren't they? There are a lot of crows in a lot of places, and if your residence or place of work is next to tall trees, there may well be crow- families in your neighborhood. The nests are huge. The perch on top of schooners and whalers wasn't called the crow's nest for nothing. Crows don't sing or do acrobatics in the air. They're very clear about the fact that they're not here for our entertainment. They seem to eat anything, as do seagulls (are both considered carrion-birds?), but most people think seagulls have some counter-balancing positive attributes.

I like crows, even when they dive at me as I walk across campus in Spring. I don't know exactly why I like them. As with cats, their selfishness doesn't seem personal; it's just business. That may appeal to me. --Although I doubt if either crows or cats would enjoy the comparison.

Once Ted Hughes published his book-length collection of crow-poetry, aptly named Crow, the rest of us were left to pick up scraps, rather like crows. I guess the same might be said of Hopkins and his falcon-poem, "The Windhover," although Yeats, at least, managed to write an equally famous poem that included falcon-imagery (in the service of his idiosyncratic "gyre" theory of history): "The Second Coming." And Robinson Jeffers went ahead and wrote his hawk poems. This business about someone's having written "the last word" on a subject can't be taken literally by poets, after all. One must press on. So here's a crow-poem, but it's really more about why on earth I'm partial to crows:

Annual Interrogative

Crows in soupy light stomp
around broad lawns, pick at buffets
of bugs, shake sandwich-wrappers.
Perturbation is part of
the ravenous package of traits crows
have hauled with them over eons.
These birds have something to say
as they lift themselves and climb
the wind clumsily. They complain,
harangue, object, savage, and smart-off;
they pronounce CAW in several dialects,
are more menacing when they’re
silent, hopping sideways, holding
a grudge with an open beak, fixing
you with a stare, filing away your
coordinates for later air-attacks.
They’re miffed, moody, pessimistic, and
heavy-footed. Why I like them
more than more charming birds
is an annual interrogative I caw—
why?!—to myself.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

William Miller; Golf Poems

Here is a splendid poem by William Miller that gives us a fresh perspective on golf. The poem is from findarticles.com. Copyright information appears after the poem.

Night Golf

by William Miller

After dusk, on moonlit nights,
the caddies returned to play
their version of the game.

Once more, it was a black
and white world, though
they owned it now,
tamed the course
shot by shot.

They learned to play
by feel, almost like
blind men swinging
in the shadows.

But they got better
than any mill owner
who played his poor game
of slice and curse.

One day they would play,
prove themselves
forever in the daylight world.

That day was coming soon,
or so they hoped,
as they carried heavy bags
in the hot sun
for men who called
the oldest, "boy."

"William Miller teaches African American literature
and creative writingat York College of Pennsylvania.
He has published four books of poetry and
eleven books for children. COPYRIGHT 2002
African American Review."
* * * * *

Golf

by Hans Ostrom

On vast manicured pastures,
eccentric members of an obscure religious cult
seek the hard white spherical fruit
of the mythical snow-tree. Smaller
than a plum, the nutty fruit sometimes
soars away from these people; sometimes
it bounds like a rabbit into the woods;
or rolls like a perfect ice-ball
formed by a child's hands, only
to come to rest, and to melt,
in a patch of pale sand in the pasture.

Morose assistants accompany the members
of the cult and carry bags of arcane, ceremonial
weapons. Sometimes the believers stand
over the white delicacy as if they were grieving.
Sometimes, with enormous, sad deliberation,
they push away the nut with one of the weapons,
which seems more sword than club, more club
than sword. The rolling nut disappears into
a tiny rodents' hole. The believer then retrieves it,

examines it with something like regret,
then hands it to his or her assistant. People
from the village sometimes observe these
inscrutable rituals. They gather in groups,
herded behind ropes. Sometimes they applaud,
as if commanded to do so. Mostly they watch
in anxious silence. They concentrate on
the believers' every move, even when
a believer is merely walking and the white
nut is not nearby. No one seems to know
what any of this activity means.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Speak For Yourself

Warning. Red alert. Or at least maybe a burnt-umber alert. (I need to find out what umber is and who first burned to make that color.) Preachy poem ahead. Detour advised.

Can’t Complain, Am Concerned

Life provides me with assistance,
which includes oxygen, sunshine,
water, memory, blueberries, garlic,
recordings of Dinah Washington,
Rubenstein, and Johnny Cash,
cardamom, bookstores, a bed,
birds, and affection. Such largesse.

I’m wealthier than royalty
of previous eras, travel more
comfortably than Vikings,
Marco Polo, and Eisenhower.
I don’t have very much power,

one might allege,
but the same one might cite
my extraordinary American
imperial privilege.

Mere me, ordinary I: I
am one of the most expensive
people in history. I’ve worked,
but who hasn’t? There are a few,
I know, but for many, just
living is the hardest job of all.

A question of society
persists, is more than a
question of propriety:
how shall those who have
behave toward themselves
with regard to those who have
not or much less? Shall we bless
ourselves by making the
blessings go further, as a frugal person does
with what a frugal person has?
Or shall we condemn ourselves
by doing no good with having it good?

“Speak for yourself.” A fair point.
What is it I should
be doing to do the best with doing well?
is a question worth my asking myself.
"Shut up." Consider it done.

Hans Ostrom

Skaters Captured

I'll continue my intermittent posting of Imagists' poems with one by John Gould Fletcher (1886-1950):

The Skaters

by John Gould Fletcher

BLACK swallows swooping or gliding
In a flurry of entangled loops and curves,
The skaters skim over the frozen river.
And the grinding click of their skates as they impinge upon the surface
Is like the brushing together of thin wing-tips of silver.

(The word "surface" belongs at the end of the fourth line in this five-line poem.) This poem embodies the Imagists' dicta of treating "the thing" (usually something experienced through the senses, not a concept like "love") directly, writing sparely, and not being obligated to use conventional verse-forms or even previously common verse-techniques like rhyming. Although the Imagists often didn't rhyme or write in verse-forms like the sonnet or the ballad, they still paid great attention to language and the sounds of words, as this poem shows. "[T]he grinding click" seems like the perfect way to describe the sound of skates on ice. Maybe, like me, you think of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover," in which Hopkins compares a hawk's flight to skating, just as here Fletcher compares the skaters to swallows in flight, and there certainly is a sense in which swallows, perhaps even more than hawks, skate on the air.

Lorine Niedecker: Nothing Personal

I just ran across a curious, humorous poem by Lorine Niedecker (1903-1970), a native of Wisconsin and a poet often grouped with William Carlos Williams and Hilda Doolittle because of her spare rhetoric and imagery. Here is the poem:

My Friend Tree

by Lorine Niedecker


My friend tree

I sawed you down

but I must attend

an older friend

the sun.


from The Academy of American Poets site: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/729

When we see the title, "My Friend Tree," we're likely to dread reading the poem because we assume it will feature sentimental personification of the tree. Well, in this one we get the personification, but it's nothing personal; it's just business: the tree has to come down, presumably to let some light in. The phrasing is child-like in its simplicity and funny because of how the speaker breaks the news to the tree, after it's been sawed down. Niedecker's background was working-class, I gather, and she lived for a long time on an island in Wisconsin, so I can envisage her sawing down a tree.

Mary Ann Wishes For Rose-Rain

I was talking with a colleague who is teaching a course that includes the great Victorian novel, Middlemarch, by George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans. We were observing that many passages in the novel are poetic because the phrasing is so superb, heightened without going over the top. Here is a little poem by George Eliot:

ROSES

You love the roses - so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be
Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!

George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] 1819-1880

I find much to like in this little blank-verse poem. The speaker addresses "You" and even mentions that this "You" loves roses. But by the end of line one, the poem has turned permanently to what the speaker loves, wishes for, and imagines. What a great surprise. We think the poem is going to be "to" and "about" this "You," but it's not. The poem seems to be literally about rose-rain and figuratively about wishing for something you know won't happen but enjoying the wishing just the same. Comparing roses or rose-petals to sweet-smelling feather is good, too, even if "light as feathers" is and probably already was a cliche.