Poets Today

Although I read and teach a lot of Old School poetry, I also try to continue to read contemporary poets, although it's hard to keep up with the all the poetry that's out there. That's not cause for despair; it's actually cause for celebration. Professor and writer Judith Johnson, I believe, applied the term "a false economy of scarcity" to the impulse some people have to create narrow canons of literature--an impulse that may be guided in part by a fear of abundance. An abundance of literature may make some people feel as if literature is "out of control." It may be out of their control, but it's not out of control. Some people may feel as if, with new literature pouring out all the time, "the standards" may disappear. Canons shift all the time; just look at any poetry anthology from the 19th or early 20th centuries. Standards vary according to criteria, in spite of a yearning to establish the indisputable list of great works.

Among the contemporary poets I've enjoyed reading are, in no particular order, Natasha Trethewey, Marilyn Chin, Mark Halliday, Jim Daniels, Virgil Suarez, Rita Dove, and Kevin Clark--to name only a handful. I like some of Sherman Alexie's poetry, and I've enjoyed poems by Gary Soto, too. I'm partial to my late friend Wendy Bishop's posthumous collection, My Last Door, but I think even if I hadn't known Wendy, I'd be impressed with it.

I also just like reading poetry in the magazines in which I publish, or in magazines I just pick up. Often I don't remember the name of the poet whose work I like. But there's good poetry appearing all the time. In recent years, I've placed a few poems in British magazines, and it's nice to see what sorts or things are going on poetically over there. I've read a smattering of contemporary Swedish poetry in Swedish, and I even translated one. It's by Marie Silkeberg, from her collection, Black Mercury. It appears in a book I wrote with Wendy Bishop and Kate Haake, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively. Here's the untitled poem (in English):

Mother! my son called in the night.
Mother! I can't see you.

You can, my precious.
You can see my voice.

Listen to the sky now, so wildly blue,
And to black birds when they fly.


Thanks again to Marie Silkeberg.

Copryight Marie Silkeberg; translation copyright Hans Ostrom 2007.

Anne Finch Likes Herself

You get the feeling from Walt Whitman's Song of Myself that Walt loved himself. Good for him; and he got some fine poetry out of that self-regard.

A more difficult, or at least an as difficult, kind of poem to write is one in which the poet describes satisfaction with herself, or at least self-acceptance.

Anne Finch (1661-1720) seems to have written such a poem, logically titled "On Myself."

On Myself

by Anne Finch

Good Heav'n, I thank thee, since it was designed
I should be framed, but of the weaker kind,
That yet, my Soul, is rescued from the love
Of all those trifles which their passions move.
Pleasure and praise and plenty have with me
But their just value. If allowed they be,
Freely, and thankfully as much I taste,
As will not reason or religion waste.
If they're denied, I on my self can live,
And slight those aids unequal chance does give.
When in the sun, my wings can be displayed.
And, in retirement, I can bless the shade.

This is an intricately original poem. As can often be the case with sonnets from the period, the syntax isn't always easy. To what, for example, does "their" refer to in line four? My guess is that it refers to "other people," not to trifles, for it wouldn't make sense for the trifles to move their own passions.

To some degree, the poem seems to concern a self-restraint that comes easily to the person. She doesn't deny herself things by means of excruciating self-discipline, but if she doesn't experience certain pleasant things, she is content nonetheless. Both reason and religion seem to serve as guides, but she seems to work easily within the guidelines, which do not seem oppressive. She describes herself as "weaker"--meaning what? That she is "of the 'weaker' sex"--a woman? Or that she doesn't have appetites as powerful as those of other people?

The concluding couplet sets itself apart from the rest of the poem; the couplet seems to leap to the image of a winged creature--butterfly? bird?--in sun and shade. But the leap seems to work, reinforcing the sense in which the person is both balanced and content with the balance.

Appreciating Cedar Trees

According to my blog-hit-counter, "I" just passed the 1500-hit-mark, although when I log on to my own blog, I think I'm counted as a hit, so we must take that dizzying number with a grain of smelling salts. I realize some blogs get that many hits in less than a minute. Even so, I'm mightily impressed with my 1500. If someone had spoken the phrase "blog-hit-counter" to me in 1971, or even in 1999, I may not have guessed they were speaking English.

Today's poem concerns cedar trees, which many people appreciate. They are aromatic. They are gracefully attired. Their bark is intricate. Their wood is easy to work with and, because of the resin, stands up to rot better than pine. Then there are the famous cedar-chests and those Cedars of Lebanon.

Where I grew up in the Sierra Nevada, cedars composed a good percentage of the forest's population, but they were not in the same abundance as pine trees or fir trees. Some of the old-growth cedars were massive, their bark as thick as a fist.

Here, then, is a kind of homage to cedar trees:

Cedars in Space

If there is what
we call life
elsewhere in the All,
I hope it includes
cedar trees, which are
excellent forms of what
we call life, really aromatic,
interesting nodes of
the All. I look outward
to a time when
an intergalactic
Cedar-Appreciation Festival
is held on what we call
an annual basis.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Alfred Austin Can't Sleep

Below is a poem about insomnia I hadn't read until today; it's by Alfred Austin, who was Poet Laureate of England in the Victorian period.

A Sleepless Night

by Alfred Austin

Within the hollow silence of the night

I lay awake and listened. I could hear

Planet with punctual planet chiming clear,

And unto star star cadencing aright.

Nor these alone: cloistered from deafening sight,

All things that are made music to my ear:

Hushed woods, dumb caves, and many a soundless mere,

With Arctic mains in rigid sleep locked tight.

But ever with this chant from shore and sea,

From singing constellation, humming thought,

And Life through Time's stops blowing variously,

A melancholy undertone was wrought;

And from its boundless prison-house I caught

The awful wail of lone Eternity.

The beginning of the poem may be a bit confusing unless we recall that Aristotle believed that the sun, the moon, and the stars were all attached to spheres, and that these spheres operated in harmony. So although almost no one believed that theory in Austin's time, Austin is probably using Aristotle's idea figuratively, so that the planets chime like a clock. I don't think we're supposed to believe that the planets are literally audible.

The synesthesia--or deliberate mixing of senses--of "cloistered from deafening sight" works well. (Apparently, synesthesia may also refer to an actual condition, in which, for example, a person might associate numbers with colors.) It works well, I think, because "cloistered" from sight, lying in bed, we do tend to turn things over to the ears, whereas when we're up and about, our focus on things we see may make us less aware of what we hear.

The person in Austin's poem seems to welcome this "cloistered" situation and enjoys listening to what he might not have heard were he awake and looking out a window, but probably most insomniacs get annoyed by hearing every little noise. Almost everything seems too loud when you can't sleep. "Life through Time's stops" refers, I believe, to an organ, which has stops that an organist manipulates. The sonnet ends more gloomily than we might have expected: ya think?! It takes a morose Victorian turn, just when we thought the guy was fairly sanguine about being awake at night.

One More By Alice Meynell

Here is another poem by Alice Meynell (1847-1922), whom I mentioned in the previous post:

The Poet and his Book by Alice Meynell

Here are my thoughts, alive within this fold, My simple sheep. Their shepherd, I grow wise As dearly, gravely, deeply I behold Their different eyes.

O distant pastures in their blood! O streams From watersheds that fed them for this prison! Lights from aloft, midsummer suns in dreams, Set and arisen.

They wander out, but all return anew, The small ones, to this heart to which they clung; “And those that are with young,” the fruitful few That are with young.

When I began to read the poem for the first time, I almost cringed because I didn't think the extended comparison between sheep and poems was going to work, partly because of the age-old Judeo-Christian comparison between humans/souls and sheep. Ah, but Meynell uses the comparison surprisingly and smartly, in my view anyway. The sheep (poems) were fed by a variety of streams, watersheds, and pastures--ideas for poems, in other words. The implication that the poet likes "the small ones" best rings true; for quirky, private reasons, poets will often like the poems others don't necessarily like. And the final extension of the comparison is to suggest, or at least to hope, that some of the poems will inspire others' poems, will bear literary "young." Through the post-feminist critical lens, we marvel that Meynell felt obligated to write about the poet and "his" book, when rather obviously she was meditating on her own work and her attitude toward it later in life. Surely, the sheep/poem comparison will still seem too cloying to some, but what Meynell actually does with the comparison is pleasant and instructive to observe. I enjoyed watching her work in this poem, a small one.

Poem By Alice Meynell

Below appears a poem by Alice Meynell, who is known as a Victorian poet but lived well into the 20th century. She was born in 1847 and died in the year my mother was born, 1922.

November Blue by Alice Meynell

The golden tint of the electric lights seems to give a complementary colour to the air in the early evening.—Essay on London

O heavenly colour, London town Has blurred it from her skies; And, hooded in an earthly brown, Unheaven’d the city lies. No longer, standard-like, this hue Above the broad road flies; Nor does the narrow street the blue Wear, slender pennon-wise.

But when the gold and silver lamps Colour the London dew, And, misted by the winter damps, The shops shine bright anew— Blue comes to earth, it walks the street, It dyes the wide air through; A mimic sky about their feet, The throng go crowned with blue.

Lights Out at the Mall

We went to the mall tonight, and only one store was open. The rest of mall was shut down because of a power-outage. Apparently, a fuse had exploded in the Food Court and fouled up the wiring throughout the mall. The one open store had its own back-up generator, we were told.

The whole situation seemed to have symbolic meaning, but I couldn't quite grasp the meaning. I imagine the retailers were furious; this is the time of the year when they make their profits, or so I'm told. The King and Queen of the Food Court must have been furious. In the one store that was open, the drinking-fountain didn't work, and someone had put a sign up that said "Broken"--twice. I found that to be slightly mysterious. Below "Broken" appeared "Broken." I like it when businesses put up signs like that--hence this poem, written a while ago:

Excuse Our Mess

We’re slightly understaffed
today, so we ask that you
serve yourself some basic
humanity. We’ve had to
downsize our commitment,
so we no longer process mercy
at this branch. If you like,
we can take down your
information and enter it into
our database, where it will
remain forever young.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Thomas Hood on Autumn

I recently returned to a poem about autumn by Thomas Hood, a lesser known British writer of the Romantic period; he was born at the same time as the French Revolution and died in 1845. The poem is a bit too long, and it's uneven, but there is still much to like about and to learn from it.

Autumn

by Thomas Hood

I Saw old Autumn in the misty morn
Stand shadowless like Silence, listening
To silence, for no lonely bird would sing
Into his hollow ear from woods forlorn,
Nor lowly hedge nor solitary thorn;—
Shaking his languid locks all dewy bright
With tangled gossamer that fell by night,
Pearling his coronet of golden corn.

Where are the songs of Summer?—With the sun,
Oping the dusky eyelids of the south,
Till shade and silence waken up as one,
And Morning sings with a warm odorous mouth.
Where are the merry birds?—Away, away,
On panting wings through the inclement skies,
Lest owls should prey
Undazzled at noonday,
And tear with horny beak their lustrous eyes.

Where are the blooms of Summer?—In the west,
Blushing their last to the last sunny hours,
When the mild Eve by sudden Night is prest
Like tearful Proserpine, snatch'd from her flow'rs
To a most gloomy breast.
Where is the pride of Summer,—the green prime,—
The many, many leaves all twinkling?—Three
On the moss'd elm; three on the naked lime
Trembling,—and one upon the old oak-tree!
Where is the Dryad's immortality?—
Gone into mournful cypress and dark yew,
Or wearing the long gloomy Winter through
In the smooth holly's green eternity.

The squirrel gloats on his accomplish'd hoard,
The ants have brimm'd their garners with ripe grain,
And honey bees have stored
The sweets of Summer in their luscious cells;
The swallows all have wing'd across the main;
But here the Autumn melancholy dwells,
And sighs her tearful spells
Amongst the sunless shadows of the plain.
Alone, alone,
Upon a mossy stone,
She sits and reckons up the dead and gone
With the last leaves for a love-rosary,
Whilst all the wither'd world looks drearily,
Like a dim picture of the drownèd past
In the hush'd mind's mysterious far away,
Doubtful what ghostly thing will steal the last
Into that distance, gray upon the gray.

O go and sit with her, and be o'ershaded
Under the languid downfall of her hair:
She wears a coronal of flowers faded
Upon her forehead, and a face of care;—
There is enough of wither'd everywhere
To make her bower,—and enough of gloom;
There is enough of sadness to invite,
If only for the rose that died, whose doom
Is Beauty's,—she that with the living bloom
Of conscious cheeks most beautifies the light:
There is enough of sorrowing, and quite
Enough of bitter fruits the earth doth bear,—
Enough of chilly droppings for her bowl;
Enough of fear and shadowy despair,
To frame her cloudy prison for the soul!

No later than the early 20th century, personifying a season or other elements of nature was considered a worn-out poetic technique, even a kind of fallacy, although personification, per se, is not off limits. Much depends on how it's deployed. In Hood's poem, it's deployed too predictably, although he surprises us by apparently changing the gender of autumn from male to female as the poem proceeds. I do find many of the observations and much of the concrete imagery appealing here. The poem is aware of its surroundings, and we get a glimpse of moss, squirrels, swallows, bees, and even ants. I do appreciate the "fact" that, in stanza one, the dew pearls the "coronet" of corn. That's not bad at all. And the simple question, "Where are the songs of Summer?" remains poignant. The late American poet Richard Hugo, in his book on writing, The Triggering Town, advises poets not to answer questions they ask (in poems), and with regard to Hood's question, I think I agree. The question is effective as is.

Often, especially in the Pacific Northwest, where summer can be nasty, brutish, and short, you hear people say, after October has once again appeared seemingly out of nowhere like an unpleasant relative, "Where did our summer go? We didn't really have a summer . . . ."

Salamander and Cellini

More on salamanders, on which the previous post touched: Here is an excerpt from the Victorian Thomas Bullfinch's study of mythology and lore; the excerpt concerns Benvenuto Cellini, the Renaissance artist and writer, born in 1500:

THE SALAMANDER

The following is from the “Life of Benvenuto Cellini,” an Italian artist of the sixteenth century, written by himself: “When I was about five years of age, my father, happening to be in a little room in which they had been washing, and where there was a good fire of oak burning, looked into the flames and saw a little animal resembling a lizard, which could live in the hottest part of that element. Instantly perceiving what it was, he called for my sister and me, and after he had shown us the creature, he gave me a box on the ear. I fell a–crying, while he, soothing me with caresses, spoke these words: ‘My dear child, I do not give you that blow for any fault you have committed, but that you may recollect that the little creature you see in the fire is a salamander; such a one as never was beheld before to my knowledge.’ So saying he embraced me, and gave me some money.”

It seems unreasonable to doubt a story of which Signor Cellini was both an eye and ear witness. Add to which the authority of numerous sage philosophers, at the head of whom are Aristotle and Pliny, affirms this power of the salamander. According to them, the animal not only resists fire, but extinguishes it, and when he sees the flame charges it as an enemy which he well knows how to vanquish.

What an extraordinary story! The father uses boxing the ears as a mnemonic device! Used enough times, the device would render the child incapable of remembering anything. Was the blow worth the money and the embrace? I think not. I'd not heard of the lore about salamanders' apocryphal ability to withstand fire. Somehow, somewhere, their amphibious love of the damp got expanded into asbestos-like qualities, which of course makes me think of Senator Clinton's prepared quip in last night's debate; she referred to wearing an "asbestos pants-suit."

Salamander

I must be in a mood to count my blessings today because I seem to be focusing on how lucky I was to grow up where I did--in the Sierra Nevada and in a meadow between mountain-peaks, with a creek running through my parents' acre of land. Growing up, I explored the creek tirelessly; to biologists, children, and perhaps geologists, creeks are endlessly fascinating. On one particular fortuitous day, I found a salamander. What a tiny, intricate creature a salamander is. This poem harkens back to those creek-days:

Salamander Confession

It’s been so long since
I’ve seen a salamander.
I’m wistful for those suction
feet, explorations of a dark-moss
creek. Back then we needed
our skinks and lizards,
our snakes and ant-lions.

Something was always eating
something and we got there in time
to watch. I can’t get over
how dull careers are, how
there’s nothing but
humans in the buildings
of our time. No wonder.

Ant-lions are splendid, too. They create a tiny crater in the dust. An ant walks into the crater and can't climb out because it keeps sliding back down the steep slope of the crater. The ant-lion lurks beneath the dirt at the bottom of the tiny crater, which is less than an inch wide at the top. When the ant is tired and slips down for the umpteenth time, the ant lion grabs it and eats it. My cohorts and I sometimes put ants in the craters. That seems terribly cruel now, but I think we regarded the activity as an experiment.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Poems We Carry With Us

I've lived in well over a dozen different abodes in my life, not counting the temporary housing of the outdoors, friends' and family's homes, hotels, motels, and train-stations. Two of these abodes have been overseas (which sounds like an old-fashioned term, probably because it is): an apartment in Mainz, Germany, and one in Uppsala, Sweden.

I was trying to think if there was some item that had been with me through all those moves to different locations. I do remember a pair of wool socks I must have hung on to for over 20 years, but finally they disintegrated. There's a pickled octopus and there are some baseball-cards; they've come with me on most, but not all, of the stops. The octopus has never been to Europe, nor have the cards.

Several poems, in one form or another, have accompanied me. I think I wrote the poem below over 25 years ago. I don't remember having published it, but I might have: one loses track. I've revised it numerous times. In any event, in handwritten, typed, "word-processed," or electronic form, it's traveled with me and in a sense lived with me. How odd. Or maybe not odd at all: Of course poets carry poems with them, and some of these poems are old inanimate friends, rather like a pair of socks. The poem:

January Twenty Eighth

by Hans Ostrom

Tonight I witnessed eight geese as they glided
over a city. They muttered like sleepers.
City lights faintly articulated
wide wings, gray undersides.

The true, ghost-like pattern of birds
seemed not to move in but with
darkness, traveling with the shadow of Earth,
towing daylight behind like gold fabric
toward a point of wintering.

Was the emblem of an unfrozen estuary
fixed in each bird’s mind,
a gem of foreknowledge burning like an ember?

Later, in the last hours before
somebody’s birthday,
I felt inhumanly old and longed
to comb sorrow from the air.

I thought of an old woman
holding up a hand mirror,
brushing shadows from her hair
out into rooms
of an enormous house at evening.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Poem By Kevin Clark

Poet, professor, and scholar Kevin Clark has just published The Mind's Eye, a splendid guide to writing poetry. It was just brought out by Pearson-Longman in paperback.

Kevin and I go way back. He was the first-baseman and I an outfielder on an intramural softball team at U.C. Davis. Somehow our team won a championship. Kevin was known for great defense and consistent hitting, while I was known for somewhat reckless play in the outfield and the occasional head-first slide.

Kevin's also the author of In the Evening of No Warning, a superb collection of poems.

Here's a poem from Kevin; it's a smart contemporary sonnet, in which the imagery, phrasing, sound, and sense mesh perfectly:

MATERIALIST NOIR

By Kevin Clark

Love must ride a weak carrier wave here
In the land of just the facts, ma’am. Let me
Promise― The post-coital scent of your hair,
Your dreams in code, your eyes steeped clear as tea,

The white heroin of your inner thigh…
I’ve hidden each essential gift in rooms
Far from those detectives who have to try
All evidence for unimpeachable proof

Of absolute zero. ―And I should know,
I’m one of them questioning two selves: Dead
Sure and Maybe Not. When you radio
Me from behind your book, from deep in bed,

From the patio dahlias, there’s no place
the cops find us. We’re gone without a trace.

Copyright Kevin Clark 2007; first published in Askew.

The Orthodoxy of Imagery

Once the Imagist movement, free verse, and Modernism hit Poetry a hundred years ago (or so), the image became the defining element of poetry. If you're writing a poem, the one thing you have to have in there is imagery--words that create images in the readers' minds; that's the conventional wisdom. It's also pretty good wisdom--"No ideas but in things," as W.C. Williams put it. Or, when in doubt, write something that will make a picture.

At the same time, poets should resist orthodoxy, even if the orthodoxy is good advice 90% of the time. There's no need to fear abstract language as if it were a disease, for example; and sometimes poetry is made good and even great by language that doesn't convey imagery. So, yes, the Imagists, et al., were on the right track, but there's never only one track in poetry.

Here are some favorite image-free lines from poems that have endured:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" --from Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, the opening line. What a great way to open a poem! Yo, Shake, well done! The line is "spoken" to someone, a "thee," but it also sets a task for the poet. Now, we readers might associate "summer's day" with imagery of our own, but the line itself contains no imagery. But what a great line of poetry. It is image-free but rhetorically interesting.

"The world is too much with us/Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers." --Wordsworth's famous poem, of which the first line is the title. No image here, but splendid lines of poetry.

More lines from Wordsworth, these from "Resolution and Independence," stanza 6:

My whole life I have lived in pleasant thought,
As if life's business were a summer mood;
As if all needful things would come unsought
To genial faith, still rich in genial good;
But how can He expect that others should
Build for him, so for him, and at his call
Love him, who for himself will take no heed at all?

Nice stanza! The speaker is confessing to having been something of a privileged, passive optimist, and he follows the confession with a great rhetorical question.

And the famous lines from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty./ That is all ye know on Earth and all ye need to know." A droll reader might respond that he or she also needs to know how to use public transit, a toothbrush, and--these days--an ATM, but that droll reader would also be a smart-aleck. Anyway, Keats's lines will last longer than that urn did!

from Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode," stanza 3:

My genial spirits fail;
And what can these avail
To lift the smothering weight from off my breast?

"Smothering weight" is close to being an image, but it isn't an image. It's general--but it nonetheless conveys a feeling we often have when we are dejected. And there's something fine about the direct observation, "My genial spirits fail." I prefer that to an image Coleridge might have reached for. And I sure like his use of iambic meter here.

from Thomas Hardy, "Hap," the first stanza:

If but some vengeful god would call to me
From up the sky, and laugh: "Thou suffering thing.
Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,
That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!"

Hardy's writing a theological poem of sorts, and this stanza expresses a preference for a vengeful god over no god at all. The sense, the rhythm, the phrasing, and the rhyme carry the lines--without imagery. But what a great presence of "voice" these lines have, and the lines set up Hardy's theological "problem" well.

Here are some lines of despair from a poet who most certainly did believe in God, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

No worst, there is none. Pitched past pitch of grief,
More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.
Comforter, where, where is your comforting?
Mary, mother of us, where is your relief?

The idea, the voice, and Hopkins's great sense of sound carry these lines. The lines do not, strictly speaking, convey images, but they're nonetheless specific--and riveting.

Some famous image-less lines from Yeats's "The Second Coming":

The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity."

To be fair to Yeats and the orthodoxy of imagery, the poem does famously end with a sphinx-like beast that "Slouches toward Bethlehem to be be born[.]" Now that is quite an image.

And a poem from Langston Hughes, called "Motto":

I play it cool and dig all jive.
That's the reason I stay alive.
My motto, as I live and learn,
Is Dig, and be Dug, in return.

These lines are funny, warm, and generous; a voice you want to hear speaks through them; and they're rhythmic. --No imagery, per se, but what a terrific poem.

So the question for poets and readers of poets is not "Imagery or abstraction?" Poets may use both, and a more pressing question is this: "Is the language--whether it conveys an image or not--interesting--does it engage the reader?" Poets would do well to lean on imagery early and often, but they would also do well to follow their instincts, even if their instincts tell them just to "say something." The something may not have an image, but it may still work, for a variety of reasons. If it doesn't work, 0ne can always rewrite it (even after it's published, as W.H. Auden famously did, much to the objection of scholars and critics), and maybe an image in its place will indeed be better.