My Father Quoted Longfellow

My father's reading-tastes were eclectic. He read two daily newspapers and a weekly one; the Reader's Digest; a magazine from the American Legion; a magazine for (ra)ccoon-hunting-hound enthusiasts called Full Cry; westerns (Louis L'Amour, Zane Grey); books about the Gold Rush; lots of state-government documents; and technical literature on how to put things together.

Every once in a while, however, when we were building a house or a stone-wall, he'd quote Longfellow, usually the opening lines of "The Village Blacksmith," but sometimes one line from the following poem:

A PSALM OF LIFE

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

WHAT THE HEART OF THE YOUNG MAN
SAID TO THE PSALMIST

TELL me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream ! —
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.

Life is real ! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal ;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way ;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.

In the world's broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle !
Be a hero in the strife !

Trust no Future, howe'er pleasant !
Let the dead Past bury its dead !
Act,— act in the living Present !
Heart within, and God o'erhead !

Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time ;

Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o'er life's solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.

Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate ;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.

The line my father quoted was the first one of stanza #2, except he reversed the order of the sentences. He'd say, referring to nothing in particular but perhaps to work-itself, "Life is earnest. Life is real!" It was understood that one was just supposed to listen to the quotation and not ask questions about it, and usually, right after quoting the line, he'd give an order having to do with work. The rest of the poem does not seem to reflect my father and his attitudes much--except for the last stanza, which is not a bad summation of my father's view of life: Get up early, do your job, be physically fit, don't whine, and wait. Wait for what? Oh, the arrival of Full Cry, or of summer, or the weekend (when you might go looking for gold), or hunting-season, or the next day of work, or one of his eccentric friends, who might show up with anything (like a bear-cub on a leash, a barber's chair, or a bag of paperback westerns). "Be not like dumb, driven cattle!" That, too, reflects his view of humanity. He thought anyone who lived in the suburbs or in cities was the equivalent of a dumb cow. Masses of people were, to him, by definition merely herds of conformists. But he really wasn't a recluse. In his small town and small circle of friends, he was quite convivial. He liked to go to Reno and gamble--twice a year. The rest of American suburbia and cities might as well have not existed.

"Life is earnest, life is real!" I can hear him saying this, as much to himself as anyone else--followed by "Mix me a batch of mortar, and not too wet this time, goddamnit." Life is real. Life is earnest: rather like Samuel Johnson's attempt to refute Berkeley's idealist philosophy--by kicking a stone and saying to Boswell, "Thus I refute Berkeley."

Water-Boarding Is Torture; "Unidentified" Means "Unidentified"

Poets are known for using figurative language and for taking words out of customary contexts, so to some degree they, like politicians and pundits, are known for playing "fast and loose" (whatever that means) with the language--if for purposes different from those of the pols and the pundits. However, poets tend to work within such tight limits--often in less than one page--that they tend to examine every word. Therefore, poets can sometimes be mystified by how politicians and pundits seem not to understand a given single word.

For example, the new attorney general of the United States couldn't say whether water-boarding is torture. He said he would need to see whether it was listed in some policy that dubbed it "illegal" before he could give a straight answer (I am paraphrasing, of course).

Thanks to a former soldier who had water-boarding demonstrated on him and on video, everyone knows exactly what water-boarding is. It's bringing a victim close to drowning, repeatedly. What creditable definition of torture would not include such a practice? Answer: none. The new attorney general was hiding behind a prospective legal definition when the question wasn't legal in nature. The question was this: Do you think water-boarding is torture? The only correct and proper answer is this: "Of course I do," followed, if he were feeling especially frisky, by, "What, do I look like a moron?" But that question may not have been regarded as rhetorical by those interviewing him.

For another example, Dennis Kucinich admitted to having seen an unidentified object in the sky. After he admitted that, Chris Matthews, who tends to combine a smug insider's attitude with an astounding incapacity to listen (even to himself), mocked Kucinich for admitting to having seen "UFOs." A UFO is an unidentified flying object, and "flying" is in this case understood to suggest "something in the sky," so whatever object the thing is or is not, it may seem to be floating, gliding, or hovering, not literally, narrowly "flying."

"Unidentified" means "not [yet] identified." It does not mean "identified" [as an alien craft]; otherwise, the "un" wouldn't be there. "Unidentified" clearly suggests that the person simply can't identify the object--yet. During the debate, Tim Russert allowed as how only 14% of the American people "believe in UFOs." Probably what the poll and Russert mean is that 14% of the American people believe in the existence of alien space-crafts. Of those American people who understand what "unidentified" means, 100% must necessarily believe in unidentified "flying" objects--meaning they believe it's possible, even probable, that a human being might see something in the sky and not know how to identify it without more observation and/or information.

That the new attorney general couldn't say bluntly that water-boarding is torture is further evidence that our government supports practices we identify as evil when others engage in them. That alleged reporters like Matthews and Russert don't know what "unidentified" means may be evidence that aliens have taken over our mass media--aliens who left their dictionaries home.

Poets aren't perfect, but we know torture when we see it demonstrated on video, and we know what "unidentified" means.

First Clear Memory?

In a poetry-class today, the students reported on "statements of poetics" written by Dylan Thomas, Philip Larkin, Frank O'hara, and Denise Levertov. Then we had about 15 minutes left in which to write, and I gave the students 17 prompts, all having to do with childhood. In response to one or more of the prompts, they could generate material in any way they wanted: free-writing, listing, starting a poem, etc.

I chose the prompt concerning one's first clear memory of childhood. Of course, the idea of having a first clear memory is debatable, made more debatable by the discipline of psychology. How do we know it's the first clear memory? Maybe earlier in our lives we had a clear memory that was of an even earlier time, but now we've replaced it. Or maybe the memory is as much a fiction as it is a faithful mental photograph of a very early "real" event in childhood. Or maybe we've repressed the first clear memory. What is a clear memory? Memory is such a complicated concept these days.

In any event, I came up with the following first draft of a poem about what I imagine to be my first clear memory from childhood. I'd always wanted to write about this memory, but I didn't get around to it until today.

First Memory: Snowbound

I am, and I am in snow. That is my first
clear memory. I’m on my back, and snow
surrounds me. I know I’m small. I feel
excessively bundled, although “excessively
bundled” is language that will come later.
It's been injected into the memory to help
account for a feeling. I feel excessively
bundled in black clothes, my face encircled
by a hood. Cold snow has risen up around me.
It is a problem. Immobile, I look up into
what I’ll describe now as the blank non-sky
of a snowy day. Adult faces appear above me.
They appear to laugh. I do not hear. They speak.
I hear words as sounds not words. The faces and voices
do not appear to take my being stuck—and now
anxious— seriously; the memory includes this
judgment. The memory ends there with me stuck,
over-bundled, cold, anxious, walled in by snow
I fell into backwards. History records that I
was extracted from the snow. My first clear
memory does not jibe with history. It leaves
me held in snow, looking up, restrained, alone.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Reacting To Rain

I took one of my classes to the cafe this morning to buy the students a hot beverage and have them work in groups on a project. Each semester I try to take each class to the cafe once; doing so is one of the benefits of teaching at a small college, for at a larger university, I'd probably have a lot more students in one or more of my classes, and the nearest cafe might not be within a short stroll's distance.

However, Murphy's Law dictated that today the fiercest rain-and-wind-storm would arrive, making our 100-yard trek less than ideal but, on the other hand, making the hot beverages even more welcome once we arrived.

Even in this era of severe droughts, people who aren't farmers or fire-fighters tend to react negatively to rain, especially if it's wind-driven. "It's horrible out there," people say. On student in another class said, "On days like this, we should all just agree that we're going to stay home." Of course, people who live in truly difficult wintry climates, including Alaska, would mock our Pacific Northwest discomfort with storms; we are used to rain but, oddly enough, still unamused by genuine storms. We like our rain to be docile. In any event, most of us on campus are not farmers, who look at weather a little differently. Here's a short poem about that topic. I think I wrote it about five years ago.

Not Farmers

When cold rain
comes after long
drought, we are
supposed to be
delighted. We are
grim. We lower
our heads and
herd ourselves toward
workplaces. Spectacles
get wet. Thoroughfares
clog. The TV-figure
talking of weather
becomes manic,
gestures like a drunken
mime. Dead
vegetation stays that
way, only it’s
soggy. “We needed
this rain,” we
say to each
other, not quite as if
we mean it. We
stand in our soggy shoes.
We look longingly
across vast asphalted
distances at vehicles
that will carry and
cover us. Our discomfort
descends on us like a low-
pressure front. We
do not think of thirsty
roots feeding food
appearing on our tables
months from now.

Copryight 2007 Hans Ostrom

Fingernails

In adolescence, I bit my fingernails. Later I stopped. A carpenter's assistant for many summers, I performed the ritual of hitting my left thumb with a hammer, losing the nail--that black cloud of blood lying under there like a thunder-cloud. If memory serves, I didn't get my first professional manicure until after I was forty. I think I've probably gotten three more since then. In my figurative neck of the literal woods, a manicure for men was of course unheard of, and if it had been heard of, it would certainly have disrupted certain constructions of "manhood." Now, I gather, manicures for all manner of men are routine, and apparently wide-receivers in the National Football League are known to get manicures and pedicures--protecting the feet so the feet can get the body to where the pass needs to be caught by the hands, which make the money. When an old coach on television learned of this, he shook his head gravely. Another clear boundary of manhood erased! Football players going to a salon! Mercy!

Now I have a split thumbnail, and I gather it will be split for the duration. I have not heard of a way of inducing the split to heal itself. I blame the breakdown on too much yard-work.

In any event, I've clawed my way through several drafts of a fingernail poem, and here 'tis:

Fingernails

by Hans Ostrom

Neither bone nor skin nor food,
fingernails are tools we mouth,

deploy, and decorate. None
of us is ever so civilized—

whatever civilized means--
that we won’t, when

need be, start to claw,
scrape, dig—evolutionary

eons collapsing, leaving
residue of whole lost worlds

in our instinctual hands. Just
to scratch the scalp is such

a human gesture—and not; such
a basic lice-finding task—and not.

If your fingernails are soiled, they
file a report on your social status.

If they are manicured, they may
purr concerning leisure’s delicacy. If

bitten, they murmur of gnawing self-
doubt. If artificial—how fascinating.

I have heard that employees of alleged
civilized societies pull out fingernails

with pliers. This is torture: remember?
It is blood underneath human fingernails.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Tiny Doctors

My wife came up with the term "tiny doctors," but I can't remember how or when. She may have been thinking of Elton John's song, "Tiny Dancer," and misspoke, but in any event, the term has been a source of humor in our family for quite a while. I took its silliness and ran with it into a poem, which turned out to be something of a Twilight Zone episode in short-poem form:

Tiny Doctors

Tiny doctors come down the street.
Their tiny white coats flare in sunshine.

Our neighborhood’s an ailment
they’ve come to diagnose.

Run away, we say to the tiny doctors,
this place cannot be cured.

They do not listen. They are tiny
determined doctors. They’ve brought

their training with them. They
surround our symptoms. We

lock them up in basements,
one by one. Tiny doctors, so

surprised, very captive. We treat
them well but keep them, poor

tiny doctors, poor miniature,
misplaced physicians.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Colloquy With a Cat

Here is a less the buoyant but nonetheless amusing poem by Weldon Kees (1914-1955), musician and poet. It features a kind of conversation with a cat, a colloquy that allows the speaker to talk over some issues with himself, perhaps. (The poem appears elsewhere online, at poemhunter.com and bryantmcgill.com.)

Colloquy

by Weldon Kees

In the broken light, in owl weather, Webs on the lawn where the leaves end, I took the thin moon and the sky for cover To pick the cat's brains and descend A weedy hill. I found him groveling Inside the summerhouse, a shadowed bulge, Furred and somnolent.-"I bring," I said, "besides this dish of liver, and an edge Of cheese, the customary torments, And the usual wonder why we live At all, and why the world thins out and perishes As it has done for me, sieved As I am toward silences. Where Are we now? Do we know anything?" -Now, on another night, his look endures. "Give me the dish," he said. I had his answer, wise as yours.

More Poetic Math

Here's another poem on math, from a poet's perspective:

Doing Another Kind of Math

by Hans Ostrom

Bach over Blues
times Rock over
Mozart equals

music cubed.

Fox plus bear

divided by snow
equals dream.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Math and I

Mathematics and I were good friends up through geometry in high school. I'm not bad at arithmetic, I loved geometry (I think because I could visualize it), and I did fairly well at basic algebra. When I ran into trigonometry in high school, I had a bad teacher, but in truth, a good teacher would not have helped me much. It all seemed like gibberish to me, and I had this sneaking suspicion that "they" were simply making things up. None of the silly marks on the pages seemed to correspond to any world I knew. Of course, I was wrong. I was probably walking across bridges and riding in cars, the design of which had been affected by trigonometry.

Here is what one poet (me) does with math (the last line refers, rather too obviously, to one of my favorite poems, W.H. Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," and there needs to be an accent over Musee, but I don't know how to make the blog-program cooperate):

Equation

by Hans Ostrom

Let mathematics represent mathematicians.
If algebra stands for their desire to operate
on the world from a goodly distance,
then geometry enacts a will to map turf,
stylize hearth, fortify cave, codify material
units. Arithmetic equals
greed, larceny, accumulation, gambling, and boredom
divided by

revenge, obligation, display, and patience.
Trigonometry cosignifies rational madness,
which can be expressed as
Icarus
leaving body, soil, pragmatism, and parentage
behind for rare atmosphere and rush
of Platonic calculation—his mind finally
off and liberated from short distances
between mediocre points within the Labyrinth,
itching for a hit of Apollonian insight, yearning
to glimpse God’s system of accounting tersely for
everything.

And let Daedalus occupy a point
on plain and solid ground, having already
calculated the rate of his son’s descent,
impact imposed by physical laws,
interval required to reach the body,
which will have, he reckons,
washed ashore right about . . . there.
About suffering, some Old Masters did the
math.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Road Not Taken--Misintepreted Instead

As my friend Bill, a scholar in political science but a fan of selected poetry, likes to note, Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" may well be the most widely misinterpreted and therefore misused poem in American literature. When people refer to the poem, they usually mean their reference to suggest that taking the road less traveled is a brave choice but a choice that is often rewarded. Taking that road is an admirable, independent thing to do, people imply, when they allude to Frost's poem.

The problem is that the poem doesn't, in fact, imply that sentiment. In fact, after the person "speaking" the poem has a look at the two roads, this is what he does and why he does it:

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.

Actually, then, both roads received about the same amount of traffic. One "wanted wear" just a bit more than the other, but "the passing there/Had worn them really about the same." Moreover, on that particular morning, "both . . . equally lay/In leaves no step had trodden black." So this "road less traveled" business is largely an illusion and vastly overemphasized in the "common wisdom" about the poem. One road was about as busy as the other, and let's face it: both were country roads, so we're not talking about an interstate highway vs. a country road.

More trouble for the common (mis)-interpretation occurs in the last stanza:

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Notice that the speaker is projecting himself into old age, and he has decided ahead of time what his story will be when he gets that old. No matter what really happens between now (when he takes one road) and then (when he's old), he's going to claim that a) he took the one less traveled by, even though that will be an exaggeration and b) his taking this road "has made all the difference," even though he cannot yet know what effect taking that road will have on his life. Basically, the last stanza makes this a poem about how we fabricate our autobiographies. It's not really a poem about the virtues of taking the road less traveled. So all the high-school yearbooks that quote from the poem are quoting from it for the wrong reasons. But it doesn't matter because the accepted popular interpretation is "already on the books," and there's no way to correct it, except in this or that English class, which will have no effect on Received Opinion. Nonetheless: a tip of the cap to my friend Bill, who fights the good fight, not only with regard to this poem but in other matters connected to Received Opinion.

Oddly enough, I grew up "in a wood," near a place where two country roads diverged, so my reading of the poem was always colored by that fact. A provincial lad, I read the poem provincially (I think that's a tautology). I wrote a poem about that--my reading of the poem, not the tautology:

Two Roads Redux

Two roads diverged
in a wood. One had been named
Wild Plum Road and appeared
on U.S. Forest Service maps.
The other one was once called
the Old County Road, now just
the road, and did not appear on maps.

The unmapped road led to land
our father had built a house on when
to him the town of 200 seemed too
crowded—his words. We took the road
less traveled most of the time because
it led to and from our house.
We took Wild Plum Road
when we went fishing, or let hounds
go for a run, or cut firewood. We never

took it to go pick wild plums, which we

picked elsewhere: go figure. Who knows
what difference any of this has made?
I will say this: it was just like our father
to live on an unnamed, unimproved road.

When I first read Frost’s poem,
I figured the guy talking was local and took
both roads from time to time, and I wanted
to be told precisely where the roads led—
I mean, everybody in that town had to know.
That would have made all the difference
to me and ruined the poem for everyone else.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Poem: Psychic School

Here is another poem by Michelle Jones, a writer living in the Pacific Northwest:

Psychic School

by Michelle Jones

My mother is a psychic, or she wanted to be,
or maybe she just had this strange dream once.
In the barn, she burned her Ouiji board,
after she saw the ghost by the river.

My mother went to Colorado, and Virginia,
and after Nantucket, when she came back,
she raised a porcupine from the woods.
She predicted that porcupines have more lives than cats.

My mother also talks to her plants,
and her orchids are prettier than mine.
Love is memorizable, she says.

Once I saw my mother smashing dishes
in the garage. I thought it was a game
so I carried the broom like a champion,
and she laughed.

My mother tells me I’m going to marry a man
like my father.

She told me, he was better off dead once.

Later, she told me about the dogs in the kitchen,
with blood on the floor, quills on their tongues,
and my mother cried until the morning.

Copyright 2007 Michelle Jones

Among the many elements to like in this poem is the vivid ending. I have a similar memory from childhood, for my father always had three or four hunting-dogs, and they were almost never allowed in the house. But I do remember one hound having gotten into a scrape with a porcupine, and the dog had several quills in its mouth, so he was allowed inside for treatment. The quills are devilishly designed, amost like a fish-hook. We lived very far from the nearest veterinarian, so my father had to take the quills out himself. The best, perhaps only, way of getting some out was to pull them all the way through the skin, so of course there was a lot of blood, as in the ending of the poem. I also remember being astonished an how stoic the dog was.

List-Poem by the Numbers

The "list-poem" is one of the oldest modes of writing. Homer made long lists in his epics, for example, and I guess poets, being human (I'll assert this for the sake of argument), simply have that list-function in their brains, a function that Evolution must have selected early on. To Do: stay alive; find water; run from large predator.

Even if one doesn't end up writing a list-poem, listing is a heck of a way to prepare to write a poem. Such a preparation-list can be composed of images, associations that spring from a topic, phrases--almost anything, really. The title-poem of the late Wendy Bishop's book of poems, My Last Door, is a list poem, a catalog-poem, in which "Let my last door . . ." is repeated throughout the poem. So a list-poem can also develop into a kind of chanting-poem, incantatory.

Here's a short list-poem paying homage to the number 2:

Fortuitous Twos

by Hans Ostrom

A pair of spats. Two herons,
early morning, bending

necks to water. Windows
on each side of a carved door.

Cells dividing in a newborn baby.
A mother and a daughter

singing two-part harmony.
Two lovers waking up near

the ocean. Two moons circling
one planet. A couple of old men

golfing in a thunderstorm
two minutes before midnight.

Horns on a moonlit skull,
two miles from the water hole.

This first appeared in Wendy Bishop's textbook, 13 Ways of Looking for a Poem, still in print from Longman.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Homeless

Television-news told me today that almost 200,000 of the homeless citizens in the U.S. are veterans of the military. I think that approximately 25% of the homeless were in the military, whereas only about 14% of the population is composed of former military-veterans.

Almost all cities seem confused by "the homeless problem." When homeless persons establish encampments--under bridges, for example--cities ultimately disband them. But if the homeless congregate near businesses or homes, the police move them from there. Neighborhoods trying to improve themselves are not happy to see meal-distributors show up to feed the homeless because the homeless might bring other problems, like crime. A group for whom my wife and I make sandwiches ran into that problem; the police told them to stop distributing the sandwiches in a certain area of the city. The same goes for shelters: where should cities put them? Should there be shelters on military bases for veterans who are homeless?

The following poem is several years old and goes back to a period when many homeless persons were congregating in our city's main library:

Homeless Citizens in a Library

People have retreated
from the outside
of not having homes
to the inside of not
having homes. This
week that’s the public
library. Amongst books
and terminals, people
sit and lie, squat and
sleep. In bathroom stalls,
a few sell sex or chemicals.
Something needs to be
done about this problem.
Let’s run a keyword
search. Let’s look
for authors of this failure,
Let’s identify the complete
title of our responsibility.
Let’s use our library-cards
and borrow the brains, will,
and humanity to get these
people the help they need,
to get us
people the help we need.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom