Gull

"Gull" is a most satisfactory word. It can be a noun, of course, referring (as the OED online told me) to any web-footed, long-winged bird of the Laridae and Larinae families. But it can also be a noun that refers to a naive person, one who can be "gulled": fooled or conned. One may "gull" someone, then; hence the term gullible, I infer. But to gull can also mean to drink--to gulp, and to hollow out.

But back to those Laridae and Larinae families: Gulls of various kinds seem ubiquitous near all seashores and at many land-fills and lakes. I've seen them near fast-food restaurants, too; for some reason, the sight of a gull there is terribly amusing.

The other day, we went to lunch at one of the places on Commencement Bay in T-Town, and on the railing outside sat the largest gull, by far, any of us had ever seen. I mean, the body looked like that of a large goose or an immense chicken. It almost crossed the line into turkey territory. The massive gull, mostly white, sat there for a long time, looking through the window at us diners. Sometimes the look on a gull's face is as amusing as that on a cat's face. Your rational mind tells you that the bird- or cat-brain is small, that there can't be that much going on up in the attic, but your intuition whispers to you that the creature is really thinking things over.

That piercing cry of gulls is quite appealing (to me), and the few times I've been ocean-fishing, chiefly for salmon (many moons ago), I enjoyed watching the gulls follow the boat. I don't have any desire to kill and/or to eat a gull (my, that was an abrupt shift of topics), but I wouldn't mind hearing from a reliable source who has tasted cooked gull-meat. There seems to be this built-in taboo against eating gulls and ravens, and I'm not interested in disrupting the taboo. I'm just curious about whether anyone at any time has actually tried, literally, to eat crow--or gull. At the moment, I'm too lazy to do the research, but I'll rouse myself soon.

It's frightening to think how many poems may have been written about gulls. The seashore is, after all, where poets and gulls converge. Sandpipers, too: you have to figure there are several million poems about sandpipers.

The following poem refers obliquely to gulls--and, in the title, directly to gulls. But it's not a gull-poem, honest. I'm not trying to gull you.

Her Gull Sadness

Today’s sadness surged out of nothing
specific, rose and rolled against her.
Large not fierce, it held
her in place, took away a will to go,
to try, to hope. There’s always everything
to be sad about, this sadness seemed to assert.
She thought about canceling the rest
of life’s appointments. She wanted
to lie down in dirt like a weary hound,
sleep, not dream—please, no dreams.
The sadness subsequently withdrew,
as some sadnesses do. It left like a slack
tide, nothing personal. All the shells
it left behind were broken, and even if whole,
they wouldn’t have been pretty anyway.
Here she stays, feeling slow and vaguely
ridiculous, like gulls, the disappointed gulls.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Charles Wright

I've been reading Charles Wright's Appalachia (1998), a fine book of poems. Wright's work has won a National Book Award and a Pulitzer. He has a distinctive way of phrasing his poems so that they seem "spoken" casually but are actually quite precise. He really likes to spread the poems out on the page, too. The poems in this book mix meditations on landscape with those on death and art, and Wright seems especially interested in boundaries and interfaces between mind and landscape, body and landscape, perception and nature, and that old stand-by, mutability.

I especially like these lines from the poem, "Body Language":

The human body is not the world, and yet it is.
The world contains it, and is itself contained. Just so.
The distance between the two
Is like the distance between the no and the yes,
abysmal distance.

I typed those last two words as they appear--one space to the right of the comma after "yes," but dropped one line; but I fear the blog-program will move the lines to the left margin.

Most of the poems are in first person, present tense, in the poet's voice or persona, and that persona does a lot of sitting, then getting up to look outside, or to walk outside and look at leaves or stars or landscapes. I found this a wee bit repetitive, but then all poets repeat themselves, have their obsessions. The clarity and intelligence of the poems in this book are memorable and admirable, though--no doubt about that. A very satisfying read. I'm glad I picked up (and paid for!) the volume today at a used-bookstore.

It's All In the Wrist

I suffer from lateral epicondylitis, which is an epic name for a demotic affliction better known as tennis-elbow. I got it from typing; repetitive motion strikes again. More precisely, I got it from mousing. The wrist moves just enough and just often enough, in my case, to make the tendon stretch too often, and a pain in the elbow materializes. The pain feels as if it's in the bone but is actually in the tendon, which is apparently attached to the bone. There's this little velcro thing you put around your fore-arm that allegedly relieves the tendon, and I also wear a brace (when I remember) that keeps the wrist immobile. But what I really need to do is to change my typing and mousing techniques and learn to rest the forearm on the desk, as well as to type with the keyboard lower. In other words, I have only myself to blame, whereas millions of workers out there have their repetitive-motion jobs to blame.

As I mentioned to some of my students, you know you're a nerd if you get hurt typing.

A shot of cortisone every now and then seems to help. Does the needle really need to be that long?

A doctor told me that one other "level" of treatment is to sever the tendon from the bone. I looked at him with disbelief, chiefly because I was experiencing disbelief, and I believed a silent look was better than shouting, "Are you out of your effing mind?" or "And you call yourself a doctor!" He said, "No, really--the tendon floats around for a while and then reattaches itself."

The reasoning behind this other "level" of treatment seemed counterintuitive to me. Tendons floating around? Is that really a good idea?

Poetry always helps, too, of course; it's one of the real unsung (so to speak) homeopathic treatments--or "levels of treatment." It beats the heck out of floating tendons, anyway. In any event, I wrote a thing-poem about the wrist, not necessarily my wrist but the wrist. My wrist was probably thinking, Why doesn't he just speak the poem and not make me type it? Everybody's a critic. Before I post the poem, I'll wish you healthy typing, and I'll hope your days are not filled with harmfully repetitive motion.

Wrist

1.

The road narrows as it approaches the river.
The bridge is brief as bridges are. Beyond it,
five separate routes materialize. Seeming
parallel at first, the routes diverge.

2.

When I looked at her brown wrist
that 15^th summer, I fell in what-I-thought-
was-love. I don’t blame myself
for having thought me into love.
Her wrist was better than ideal because

it existed. So did she. Aristotle always
held a better hand than Plato’s, as it were,
for he knew real beat ideal
every time because it showed up.

The rest of what I knew that summer
seemed useless. That's because it was.
I do hope she kept the bracelet.

3.

His wrists were placed under arrest
and bound. They were charged, booked,
arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced.
Loyal to his wrists, he went
to prison with them.

4.

The other day a woman’s wrists asked her
why she’d worked so hard. She said because
she wasn’t born a Rockefeller, for example.
The wrists said, “That’s what we thought.”
With the help of her wrists, she picked up
a tool and went back to work.

5.

By means of repetitive motion,
Industrial Society declared war on The Wrist.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Nicki Leone on Reading

Here is a link to an excellent essay by Nicki Leone on reading and where it can take us, literally and figuratively; the essay is called "Literary Expeditions," and it's a gem:

http://www.bibliobuffet.com/bb/content/view/183/193/

Genres I Have Known--And the Toughest One I Know

"Genre" is a funny word--funny "peculiar," not funny "ha-ha," to quote from Eudora Welty's perfect short story, "Petrified Man." Once upon a time, it (the word, genre) was used to refer to immense historical paintings; now it refers to a kind or a type of almost anything. It has become an especially slippery word with regard to kinds of writing. Arguably, "the novel" is a genre, but then critics, publishers, bookstore-owners, writers, and agents will speak of "genre-fiction," and what they mean is novels that are written to fit in such categories as romance, mystery-writing, westerns, and so on. And then we get into "sub-genres," and that way lie several genres of madness.

Using the term to describe kinds of writing, I hereby confess to having written pieces of writing in the following genres. A "p" appears after a genre of which one or more pieces have made it to publication, for whatever that is worth (not much, as it turns out):

Anthology (which requires a mixture of writing and editing)--p

Aphorisms, book of (I actually started to write such a book, but I quickly realized I was not sufficiently wise or aphoristic, I stopped, thank goodness.)

Article, general (in the magazine, Writer’s Digest, for example)—p

Article, scholarly—p

Audit-report (I only edited these, but sometimes I rewrote whole sections; these were performance-audits, not financial ones)—p (but only in-house, as it were—but available to the public)

Autobiography—an extremely short one, in third grade; fragments of others languish in notebooks

Book review—p

Cartoon—[not even remotely close to the solar system adjacent to publication]

Case-statement--this is a genre in the not-for-profit world

Chapbook (mini-book of poems)-p

Chapter [in a collection of scholarly articles, for example]--p

Column--p (in a medium-sized metropolitan daily, twice a month for 3 years; how real weekly or daily columnists keep going, I do not know; bless their hearts.)

Conference-paper (oy, what a genre!)

Criticism, book of--p (on Langston Hughes's short fiction)

Dictionary-entry (for the New Dictionary of National Biography [Oxford U. P.], for example)--p [not the same as an entry in a Webster's-like dictionary or lexicon, of course]

Dissertation

Email—p (p in the sense that all of us who write and send emails publish them; in a away, even if we don’t send them, we publish them; what a brave new world); believe it or not, there are scholars out there who try to define and discuss "electronic mail" as a bona fide genre.

Encyclopedia—(wrote one; edited another)—p

Encyclopedia-entry--p

Essay (although most have been in the article, chapter, news story, review items already listed)—p

Grant-proposal/application

Joke--so hard to write

Letter (as in “to the editor”)—p

News article (sports only, and only for small dailies and weeklies)—p

Novel—p

Obituary--p

Play (but only a one-act)

Poem—p

Poetry collection—p

Post—as in blog-post

Reference-guide (a book-length, annotated bibliography)—p (with my pal, Tim Lulofs)

Report—mostly curricular ones, therefore mostly academic, but not always

Review-article (an odd academic genre)—p

Screenplay—“p” in this case would refer either to purchased or produced or both; neither, yet, but keep you fingers crossed; on second thought, un-cross them.

Short story—p

Textbook—p (sole author and co-author)

Text-Message—p (for explanation of p, see “Email”); I'm awful at this genre; family-members mock my text-messages; the tiny key-pad mocks my thick fingers; I feel as if a reader-over-my shoulder is saying "WTF!"

For me, the hardest genre in which to write is the novel--by far. I've published one novel, a mystery (sub-genre, "police procedural," technically). I have completed five others, three of which really stink, and I'm their parent, two of which I am close to liking. (Too bad the "fiction-market" seems to be going to that hot place in a hand-basket.) So at the moment, I am one-for-six in the publication-of-novels department, but I feel lucky just to be one-for-anything. (Sometimes when baseball players get in a slump, observers say they are "one for June").

From my perspective, novels ask everything of the writer--and seemingly all at once. I feel awkward writing them in a way I don't even when I'm writing short stories, which are a cousin of the novel. True, it is extremely hard to write an excellent or even a very good poem, but even when I come up short, I know it, and I know why, and I can move on, whereas with a novel, I might write (and rewrite, and rewrite) hundreds of pages and then realize it all stinks--but not really know how to fix it. I feel as if I'm the captain of a large ship, and the steering no longer works. I know many fiction-writers, however, who feel the same way about poetry. They feel as if they simply can't write poetry, even when I try to tell them, "Of course you can."

Co-authoring and co-editing anything are extremely hard, but I've been lucky. If you and your co-author or co-editor a) can converse frankly but politely and b) have the same work-ethic, even if you have different work-habits, then chances are you'll be okay. Even so, the process will be hard. To modify the old joke, get any two writers (or editors) in a room, and you'll have at least three opinions on any subject.

After I wrote a few screenplays and took an intensive workshop from a pro, screenplay-writing (or screen-writing: what an odd term) seemed quite manageable. The problem with them, of course, is multifaceted: there are a million screenplays; nobody really wants to read them; as William Goldman famously wrote, "nobody knows anything" in Hollywood; even if by some fluke you sell one, it might get buried or rewritten beyond recognition or both; it's a murky genre, at best, because producers, directors, and editor actually make the product; it's basically a Hollywood genre; and so on, and so forth. Among the countless characteristics that prevent me from being a real screenwriter is that I tend to want to write films I'd enjoy watching.

I felt a bit at sea, or at least at lake, with the one-act play because I don't know a lot about stage-craft. However, I did feel as if I knew how to write something that actors and a director could run with, so to speak. That is, I tried to stay aware that I was writing for the stage, not the page.

I have not written science fiction or fantasy, nor have I tried to write a graphic novel. I haven't written a cook-book, but I wouldn't mind trying, if only I knew more about cooking! I haven't tried to write pornography or even erotica, although I've written scenes in fiction and screenplays that might qualify as "erotic." I haven't tried to write a self-help book or a how-to book. I haven't tried to write a television-pilot or a radio-play. I haven't tried to write a biography, but I think great biography-writers are to be cherished.

I never wrote a telegram, but I did receive one--once only. I had to drive down to a Greyhound bus station to pick it up.

I wouldn't mind getting a play produced, a screenplay sold, a short-story collection published, and at least two more novels published--this is, after all, the silly season of resolutions, also known as pipe-dreams.

Should I try to write an "Op-Ed" piece at some point? Nah. But you should!

The Surrealistic Gamble

I reckon almost any time a poet publishes a poem, even when the publishing is in the form of handing the poem to a person, she or he gambles. The stakes aren't high, financially or otherwise, except, I suppose, in some rare, extreme instances. The poet gambles that the reader will want to read the poem, will read it, will understand what the poem is up to, and will then appreciate what the poem is up to. Also, a poet may have some feelings or pride invested in the poem; poetry is "art," after all, so allegedly there's more at stake emotionally than there is, say, in a draft of a report, but I think people who draft and share reports--in a business or a not-for-profit organization--probably feel as if they're as much at risk as the poet who shares a poem, and if their job is at stake, they may feel much more at risk. Yes, poets should take pride in their work and be invested in it, but I also think it's possible to over-dramatize what's at stake in a poem.

But back to poetry itself: I think that, in the case of poems that deploy surrealism in one form or another, the risk that the reader won't "get" the poem almost always increases significantly. Robert Bly, for one, would adamantly insist that the risk is always worth it. He wants poems--his and others'--to "leap." He celebrates the surrealistic work of Spanish poets, for example, and he often derides American poetry for being flat-footed, for only hopping, at best. (One book he wrote on the subject is in fact called Leaping Poetry, as in poetry that leaps, that associates rapidly and freely, not as in jumping over poems.)

I think a poet hopes that the juxtapositions, associations, and non-rational, intuitive leaps will convey meaning, perhaps in the way our dreams convey meaning to us--but not in the way our dreams fail to convey meaning to others when we tell them about our dreams. (It seems not even psychiatrists are interested in the dreams others, even paying, clients have; the stock of dreams has gone through the floor since Freudian and Jungian heydays.) Maybe there's a rough, workable analogy to jazz here. The jazz musician hopes the listener will "get" the leaps of improvisations.

I was mulling all of this over when I decided to post the following surrealistic poem, which I think hops, at least; maybe it leaps, according to Bly's criteria; but maybe it also falls flat after it gets up in the air. I like the poem well enough, he said, feinting with damned praise, but with surrealism, I'm almost never sure what the reader will think, whereas with other kinds of poems that may be quite imaginative but not surrealistic, per se, I usually fee as if I can predict roughly how a reader will respond. Oh, well: it may be surrealism, but at least it's only four brisk stanzas of the stuff, so there's that.

Oranges Night, Oranges Day

Morning tosses oranges to night,
which juggles then peels them,
inhaling a blossom-rubbed
sea-breeze. Peeled whole oranges

become lanterns lit by juice.
They quiver at the sound
of a midnight train, its long
announcement preceding it

into town. The sun steps off
the train carrying a valise
in the shape of a quarter-moon.
The sun has traveled all night

and wants a bath,
maybe a glass of orange juice,
perhaps a nap beneath
gray flannel clouds.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Dickens: In Print, Or On Screen, Or Both/And?

When is it all right to give a loved one a gift that you know you will enjoy, too? I don't think I'm a good judge of this question because I'm the defendant.

I recently gave my wife a boxed set of DVDs--multiple BBC series based on novels by Dickens: Our Mutual Friend, Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Hard Times, and Martin Chuzzlewit [I may have missed one.] In my own defense (I can't afford a lawyer, so I will have a fool for a client, as the saying goes), I will say that my wife enjoys Dickens on film and in print as much as I, and that we enjoy watching Dickens on film together more than we do separately. Nonetheless, . . . .

I happen to like the BBC's way of adapting fiction in general and Dickens in particular. The BBC's approach seems to be to keep much of the original language, as well as the bones of the plot; to hire good costume-designers; to hire able actors and exquisite character-actors; and to keep the film-making simple. The BBC seems to film efficiently--lots of interiors and close-ups, not much fancy camera-work, little wasted motion.

But I acknowledge that the BBC series may be too boring for cinema-purists, and for Dickens- purists, any film-version may be heresy. I'm in the camp that likes Dickens both in print and on screen, although of course I like some of the novels much more than others and some of the adaptations much more than others; indeed, I've deliberately avoided some adaptations. The experiences of reading a long novel and viewing a long (by video-standards) series are different, but in the cases of the BBC and Dickens, the experiences overlap, partly because the language is honored, as are the zest and exuberance of CD's fiction.

We started with an episode of Our Mutual Friend tonight--with its great opening on the Thames, and a father and his daughter making a living by retrieving floating corpses. Dickens, of course, wastes no time and no corpses, so the corpse figures immediately and significantly into the almost instantly twisted plot. The father relieves the corpse's pockets of money. His former partner floats by in a boat. --Former because he allegedly took money from a man who was not yet quite a corpse. (Timing is everything in show-business, and every profession has its ethical standards, I guess.). They argue. The father shouts, "To what world does a dead man belong? To the other world! To what world does money belong? To this world!" . . .And so Dickens' most money-obsessed (arguably) book--er, BBC series--begins.

The episode refreshed my memory of how rhetorical Dickens' work is, not just in terms of his prose style, which is often Ciceronian, but also in terms of arguments, in which all his characters engage, regardless of their status, age, situation, or gender. The ancient joke about hockey is that you go to a fight and a hockey-game breaks out. With Dickens' work, I often feel as if I read (or, in the case of the DVDs, view) arguments, and a novel breaks out. The arguments and style are so superbly executed that the prose becomes poetry at times, as in the beginning and the end of A Tale of Two Cities.

Incidentally, I plead guilty, or at least nolo contendere, to the charge of "gifting" self-interestedly, as well as to the charge of treating "gift" as a verb--a linguistic development of which I became aware only a few years ago. And just this year, I heard for the first time "re-gifting" uttered. Hmmm.

Homeopathic Treatments for Writer's Block

The chief way in which I have responded to writer's block has been denial. I just keep writing. Maybe stubbornness is a better descriptor than denial in this case. Being involved with or interested in several kinds of writing helps, so if you find yourself unable to write one thing, you can shift to another. But I try not even to take that exit, and if poetry, for example, isn't going well, I just stick with it; sometimes the results aren't pretty. But I refuse to acknowledge the block, and I keep the pen or cursor moving. No one ever said the job of a poet was going to be easy (wink).

A digression with(one hopes) a point: when I was attending U.C. Davis, I tried to go to as many poetry readings as I could, but I missed one by Denise Levertov, unfortunately. I didn't get another chance to hear her read, as things turned out. One of my classmates reported not just that the reading was good but that Levertov suggested that poets should not force themselves to write. As reported by my classmate, Levertov's view was that writer's block was a self-imposed neurosis. I take her point, if indeed that was her point, but at the same time, poets (for example) often teach or have other day-jobs, and/or they have families to take care of, and sometimes the opportunities to write aren't abundant, so simply waiting out the dry spells or the writer's block is not always an attractive option, and often neurosis isn't the problem; it's just that you had set aside this hour, day, or week to write, and the writing's not going well, so what might you do?

Here, then, are some homeopathic treatments (in addition to denial and stubbornness) I've found helpful for poets' writer's block:

1. The list. Make lists of anything and everything (I exaggerate, of course). Words, phrases, things, memories, peeves, names. At first, you can even do this like a robot. Your heart doesn't have to be in it. Rather quickly, however, you will become interested in, intrigued by, or fascinated by this or that list. You'll "get into it." The list or an item, word, or phrase on the list will suggest a poem--or, if you get lucky, the list will turn into a poem, or at least a rough draft of same.

2. Official language. Use what normally would be regarded as inappropriate language to write a poem about a given subject. For example, write a love poem in the form and language of a memo. Or use the language of a late-bill-notification to write about birds or a garden or a capitalist. The contrast between the language and the subject sometimes creates a productive, poetic "torque." Sometimes something witty, uncanny, or at least surprising occurs. W.H. Auden was extremely good at borrowing official language and using it in poems, as in "The Unknown Citizen." He even slips some into his grand elegy for W.B. Yeats, when he is "talking" about the temperature outside.

3. Be literal. (Part of my background is Scandinavian, so this comes naturally to me, as does stubbornness.) Write about your own personal writer's block. Writing on the Edge, a journal published at U.C. Davis, has a continuing series of one-panel cartoons featuring the image of a literal writer's block--a cube. Is your personal block made of wood, granite, plastic, post-consumer fiber, iron, or glass? Where do you keep it? How big is it? Do you try to camouflage it? Do you call it a "nightstand"?

4. Homage. Write an homage-poem for anyone or anything you think deserves the honor. A dead writer--or a living one. The one honest politician you met in your life (as if). An aunt. An obscure actor. (I would probably choose Warren Oates, R.I.P.). A film-maker: my choice might be Preston Sturgess, R.I.P.

5. Report. Write down things you hear people say, signs you see, everyday oddities, and so on. Today I went to the pharmacy, and I overhead a woman say, "Go home, take drugs, and get in bed: that's all that I can do." I thought that might work as a first line for a poem. There's a nice rhythm to the phrasing, for one thing. . . . My brother-in-law, who is something of a free spirit, once said, not as a boast but merely as a casual observation, "I don't believe I've ever owned a house-key." He's owned lots of houses, but he never carries a house-key. Think of the implications! Think of the possible poems!

6. Write a poem that is imagined voice-mail from, well, anyone you like. It's your poem, and it's your voice-mail. Richard Nixon, Paris Hilton, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Zora Neale Hurston, Franz Kafka, or Napoleon (I guess you'd need an automatic translator for the latter two, or you'd have to write the poem in Franz's and the Napster's native language.) The sister or brother you never had. The person who taught you to drive a car. God.

7. Poets stress sound and image so much that sometimes focusing on odors suggests a fresh way to write a poem. Get some spice-bottles out, open them, and take whiffs. What comes to mind? Any memories? What is the worst thing you've ever smelled? What were the famous odors of high school? Of your worst job?

8. "Why did we think that was normal?" Maybe your family or your friends used to do something that, back then, seemed normal, or at least unremarkable--routine. For example, because we lived in a remote canyon in pre-cable days, our television could receive only one channel, and if a snowstorm came--forget about it. Routinely, then, my father would go outside, often in freezing weather, and rotate the antenna. One of his children would be posted at the open door (cold wind rushing in), yelling reports to him about whether "the picture" had improved. It was all futile, farcical, and--in retrospect--absurd. But at the time, we thought of the activity as a routine way of "watching television." And later it made for an okay poem as well as for some astonished, embarrassed wonderment.

Block that block!

Thing-Poems for Spring?

For college-teachers, these early days of January compose the interval in which we create plans for courses we are slated to teach in Spring. Our quirky little name for such plans is "syllabi," the plural of "syllabus." Before one of my recent high-school reunions (I suspect it was one I did not attend), a former classmate found my home-page on the Internet, and I put syllabi from courses on there. He sent me an email in which he claimed never to have used the word, "syllabus," in his life, partly because he hadn't (he informed me) gone to college. (At least at our high school, in our era, one did not hear or see the word "syllabus".) The remark was his not-so-subtle attempt to point out the obvious: I am a nerd. I always was a nerd, even though I played sports, came from the backwoods of the High Sierra [something hickish this way comes], and didn't wear horn-rimmed glasses or compete in debate-tournaments. I wrote back and told him that if I hadn't become a professor, I probably wouldn't have occasion to use the word, either. I mean, it's not like I derive measurable satisfaction simply from saying or writing "syllabus," nor am I attempting to put on airs by using the word. When one works a job, learns a trade, or joins a profession, one picks up the lingo, that's all. When I worked as a carpenter's assistant, I used the words "partition," "truss," "stud," "joist," and "eight-penny [nail]," but it wasn't personal.

Working on a syllabus for a poetry-writing class, I went in search of some thing-poems: poems that express some kind of concentrated, fanciful, and/or vivid view of an object (although I often lump poems about creatures and vegetation into this category, too.) William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheel Barrow" is a classic example of a thing-poem--and an ironic one, for the main thing that makes the poem famous (arguably) is the line "So much depends," not the description of the barrow, per se. One impetus behind the writing of thing-poems in the early 20th century--an impetus that has persisted--was the desire to get away from flaccid poems about emotions and abstractions. A thing-poem may certainly evoke emotions and imply concepts, but the first task is to look at and to represent a concrete thing. "No ideas but in things," wrote Williams, in his poem, "A Sort of Song."

Of course, by the time the class reaches the official day for thing-poems, we will have already read and discussed--and written--thing-poems, including Williams' famous one. But on that official day, we will, I decided, discuss the following poems (from The Norton Anthology of Poetry):

1. "God's Grandeur," by Gerard Manley Hopkins--a counterintuitive choice, I must admit. The title suggests something theological. But the poem itself is a tribute to "dappled things," "stuff" (not Hopkins' word) that on first glance looks like a bit of a mess but on closer inspection is beautiful. The implicit advice is to look for God's grandeur in ordinary, mixed up, disheveled things of this world.

2. "To a Chameleon," by Marianne Moore. This is not her most famous poem, but in my opinion it is as good as if not better than her most famous poems.

3. Charles Simic, "Watch Repair." Simic gives us an accessibly surreal, whimsical look inside a watch--an old-fashioned watch, not a digital one. I've probably mentioned this poem before on the blog.

4. Eric Ormsby, "Starfish." An accomplished, effective poem. I may also use "Skunk Cabbage," by Ormsby.

5. "Facing It," by Yusef Komunyakaa. This poem concerns a visit to the Viet Nam War Memorial--and the wall itself. Obviously, this is a potentially treacherous subject for a poet to take on, but Komunyakaa has the chops, and the poem is terrific.

6. "The Ant Hill," by Cynthia Zarin. Fresh description.

The anthology doesn't include another favorite thing-poem of mine--and one students tend to like: "Manhole Covers," by Karl Shapiro. His descriptions and comparisons are exquisite, and tells us (or reminds us of) why we sometimes find these huge round metal plates so fascinating. I still stare at and read the words on one near campus frequently.

Any thing-poem enthusiasts out there? It's okay to include plants and animals, in my opinion.

The most famous thing-poem in English? That's a question guaranteed to start an argument among syllabus-wielding nerds. I'll get the argument going by claiming the answer is "Ode on a Grecian Urn," by John Keats. Hang that answer on a joist and see how you like it (the answer, not the joist).

Bowl Season

Marketing turns everything into a season; if something is a season, a sense of urgency can be created around it, and a sense of urgency might lead people to spend money. So, or example, we are very close to the "Spring Fashion Season," not because Spring is near but because the marketers have sold all the Winter clothes they're going to sell.

Now the season of football "bowls" is upon us--or upon those of us who pay the slightest attention to bowls of this kind (my wife pays no attention, whereas I pay token attention). Two football teams are invited to play a game in a stadium; the game is sponsored by a corporation and televised; money streams in; the colleges the football teams represent get some of the money. At home or in bars, we are allegedly entertained by the spectacle. There is something called "pageantry." There are tight close-ups of cheerleaders. You get the idea.

"Bowl" as applied to stadia and to games played in the stadia is an Americanism, according to the OED online, which cites the following early appearances of the word:

1913 Yale Alumni Weekly 4 July 1073/1 I voice the thanks of all Yale graduates for the ‘Bowl’... I am glad that Yale..prefers the good old word ‘bowl’ with its savor of manly English sport, to the ‘coliseum’ of the Romans or the ‘stadium’ of the Greeks.

1923 Pasadena (Calif.) Star-News 1 Jan. 1 Cheered to the echo,..a crowd of about 50,000 people in the great Rose Bowl, Pasadena's new Stadium in the Arroyo Seco

That the writer in the Yale Alumni Weekly yearned for a word that would provide a "savor of manly English sport" suggests an insecurity about masculinity and Americanism that I associate with Ivy League universities and with academia in general. I think Americans and Brits both think that "real academia" exists in England and elsewhere in Europe, but not in America, even at Harvard and Yale, even though the latter two universities can afford to buy any scholar from any country any time they want.

I'm not sure I agree that "bowl" provides a savor of anything manly or English or even sporting. It seems rather domestic, which might make it masculine, feminine, neither, or both--but not necessarily "manly." I may be wrong, but I think those gladiators in the coliseum were pretty darned "manly," both in the sense of being violent and murderous (two things we associate with men) and in the sense of how Hollywood likes to portray gladiators: muscle-bound, shaved, oiled, and scantily costumed (Victor Mature, Kirk Douglas, Brad Pitt, and that Australian guy). I think literary critics call this "over-determined" masculinity. (See the remark about insecurity above.)

The second citation makes me wish they'd named the stadium "Arroyo Seco" instead of the Rose Bowl. How poetic "Arroyo Seco" is--great syllables, great rhythm! Rose Bowl sounds rather morose, like two blasts of a foghorn. Does it (the former) mean "dry gulch"? I think so. But that's okay. It's not like the Rose Bowl is really a bowl full of roses, so we're not going for literal denotation.

In my ever-more-distant youth, there were only three bowls of much--let's say any--significance, to the degree bowls can have significance: The Sugar Bowl, the Rose Bowl, and the Orange Bowl. Then there came along the Blue Bonnet Bowl and the Sun Bowl. Then a proliferation of bowls occurred, and they took on highly visible sponsors, so now we have the All State [insurance] Sun Bowl or the IBM Rose Bowl or whatever. I think there are over 30 bowl games now. Some of the teams in the bowls have records like 7-5. At least one of the bowls might be called the Barely Competent Bowl.

Bowls I would like to see played, to make "bowl season" more interesting:

1. The Despair Bowl, featuring the two worst teams in college football. Different faith-traditions could sponsor this bowl and offer hope to the teams and their long-suffering fans.

2. The Absurdity Bowl, in which, if a team "scores," points are subtracted, not added. So if a team scored a lot, the scoreboard would read "-58" or something like that. The defenses would attempt to let the offenses score; they would be hospitable, polite, and supportive. The offenses would be inoffensive, reticent, and shy.

3. The Don't Go To War Unless It's Absolutely Necessary Bowl, featuring teams from the military academies. Before the game, all in attendance would pray in their own fashion that the players would never have to see military action and especially not have to suffer wounds or get killed in combat, ever.

4. The Poetry Bowl, in which players from the two teams would choose their favorite poems and read them aloud to the crowd during the four timed quarters. There would be a half-time, during which the teams could change their strategies and consult different anthologies. Judges would determine which set of poems was more interesting and which team gave better readings. All the players would earn academic credits in English at their respective universities.

5. The Zen Bowl, featuring no teams, only spectators, who would file in and look at the empty field. Cheerleaders representing no teams would "cheer" silently.

6. The Interpretation Bowl. This would be an ordinary football game, but on television, you could select different commentators to describe and interpret the game. The menu would include political scientists, feminist scholars, anthropologists, game-theorists, mathematicians, physicists, psychologists, and so forth. Everyone at home would get the deeper meaning of their choice.

7. The Out Bowl. This would be a game between two teams composed of players from all teams across the nation--perhaps East and West. Players would be invited to come out as gay, but no player would be outed without his permission. One aim would be to assemble enough gay players to field two teams. Another aim would be to help the United States get over its homophobia and realize that about 10 per cent of any given group--including athletes--is gay. (Consider the appeal of gladiator-movies.) I predict that this Bowl will not occur soon.

8. The Soup Bowl. Innumerable corporate sponsors would support this Bowl lavishly, but all the profits would go to feeding the homeless, who would be able to attend the game for free (if they so desired), after a good meal, a hot shower, and a fresh change of clothes.

Putting Poems in Their Place(s)

Another blogger I read regularly wrote a post about poetry and a sense of place, and after reading the post, I thought about poets who have seemed (to me) to be especially good at evoking a sense of place.

I thought of Basho's Narrow Road to the Deep North, a travelogue that includes poetry--haiku. There are crisp, vivid images of the countryside through which he walks, but the book also includes images of the common-folk he meets along the way. Of course, especially after the Romantic era, we may be inclined reflexively to think of "nature" when we think of "place" and poetry, but upon further inspection, even "nature poets" usually include human beings and their behavior in their poems. For instance, Robinson Jeffers was, arguably, not just a poet of place but a philosopher of place; his poems often express a moral outlook that aggressively prefers nature to people. But, paradoxically, he still needs to mention people, even as he often finds they don't measure up to nature--that hawks, for instance, seem to have more integrity and dignity than most people.

In the Jeffers-vein of poetry situated in California lies the poetry of William Everson (Brother Antoninus) and Gary Snyder. Snyder's The Back Country includes poems of place from around the globe, but Turtle Island is set chiefly in Northern California, as are many of Everson's later poems. Bill Hotchkiss's poetry is set almost exclusively in the Sierra Nevada, with some poems from the southern Cascades. When it comes to Alaska and poetry of place, John Haines is the go-to poet, methinks, but a former student of mine, Jessy Bowman, has some great Alaska poems, too, as does Art Petersen.

But what of urban places? Well, ironically, Mr. Lake Country, William Wordsworth, has that terrific sonnet about London, as viewed from Westminster Bridge. Ferlinghetti has that memorable, funny poem written from the point of view of a dog wandering through North Beach in San Francisco. Philip Levine has some great gritty Detroit poems, and Rita Dove evokes Akron from a variety of perspectives. I guess Sandburg wrote what we think of as "the" Chicago poem, but I'd bet there are a lot of Chicago poets and readers of Chicago poetry who wish that poem hadn't been written.

We tend to think of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land in terms of Modernist fragmentation, myth, and elaborate allusiveness, but in some ways it's best read as a picture of "the city"--a depressing picture, certainly, but what did we expect from Eliot? I remember attending a reading/talk by Stephen Spender, at which he said that he believed Eliot (in that long poem) wanted to write "a series of satiric sketches about urban life." That seemed like such a sensible, accurate description of the poem--and a great counter-weight to the overblown criticism written about Eliot's work. . . .

. . . .I love Langston Hughes's vision of Harlem in the 20th century--in Montage of a Dream Deferred. It isn't a vision of a place so much as it is a vision of people in a place--and in myriad situations dictated by history, ethnicity, economics, personality, gender, and sexuality.

Oddly enough, when I think of such places as L.A., Paris and other cities in Europe, and places in the American South, and when I then think of writers whose work is situated in such places, I tend to think of novelists and/or short-story writers--and sometimes of detective writers--rather than poets. I'll need to give more thought to who are the poets of L.A. and Paris, Berlin and the Rhineland, and the urban and rural South. If you have some suggestions, let me know.

Holmes For Christmas

I didn't receive any books of poetry for Christmas, but I did get the third volume of Leslie Klinger's new annotated edition of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes fiction. This volume includes the novels; it's published by W.W. Norton, and it replaces Baring-Gould's famous annotated edition. Klinger has the last two volumes of tales to go before finishing the complete annotated set. For every page of fiction, there are usually at least three or four long notes, just to give you some idea of how detailed the volumes are. They also include splendid illustrations and bibliographies. Klinger is an extremely professional amateur scholar, a lawyer by trade but a Holmesian at heart. His scholarship is superb.

I have long thought that the appeal of detective fiction in general and Holmes-fiction in particular was similar to that of poetry; in the case of both genres, there are certain well defined conventions within which the author is supposed to work, but at the same time, aficionados of detective fiction and poetry are always ready to entertain a disruption of the conventions--as long as it works. Among the more satisfying improvisations in the Holmes canon is his "defeat"; the genius is outwitted in "A Scandal in Bohemia," by the woman--and an American!--Irene Adler.

In addition to reading poetry (Cavafy and Housman at the moment), I'm also reading detective fiction. I just finished A Man's Head, a Maigret novel by Georges Simenon, and I have to say it ranks with the best Maigret novels. I think my favorite may still be Maigret's Revolver, but A Man's Head is superb. As usual, there is a great deal of pipe-smoking, brooding, drinking, and eating--as well as detecting. Freud, a detective in his own right, might claim that Maigret has an oral fixation. I'm part way through an Agatha Christie novel featuring Poirot, Murder in Retrospect. It's one of the later ones, and it's not bad at all. Christie, via Poirot, seems to come out in favor of modern (that is, surealistic) painting; that was a bit of a surprise.

I gave books for Christmas, too. One family member received The Jane Austen Cookbook, which, in addition to including recipes, includes information about dining practices in Austen's era and social class. Another family member received a travel-memoir about Sicily.

If you a) take part in a gift-tradition of some kind this time of year and b) like books, I hope some gift-givers came through for you. In any event, we are into the prime reading weeks of the year--deepest, darkest December. Put a soup or a stew on the stove, get a real or faux fire going, and crack open a good book. Salve for the soul.

Amusing English

As the semester comes to a close, many students, professors, and members of the staff express fatigue. One of my colleagues said she felt "overwhelmed," and then she added, "Does anyone ever just feel 'whelmed'?"

I'm reluctant to claim that English is stranger than other languages when it comes to oddities such as the one my colleague pointed out. I've studied Spanish, Swedish, German, and a smattering of Latin and French, however, and those language do seem more regular in the way they "manufacture"--and spell--words; and English is notorious for being more extraordinarily inclusive--some might claim cannibalistic--than other languages. With regard to the sheer number of words Brits, Canadians, and Americans use, for example, English is much bigger than German. If I am recalling correctly what a German teacher once told us, German has a working vocabulary of about 60,000 words, whereas that of English may be twice as large. (And now, of course, I will need to check these pseudo-factoids, after I finish the post.) When I was in Sweden, some Swedes were about as proud as Swedes ever get about the fact that their word, "ombudsperson," had been devoured by English. (In Sweden, it's unseemly to appear proud of anything; celebrities and others from the U.S. should be sent there to detoxify the ego.) Only about 8 million people have Swedish as a first language, so other languages tend not to borrow much from Swedish.

Sometimes in class when we touch on how difficult English must be to learn as a second or third language, I mention the words "enough," "bough," "through," "threw," and "thorough" and suggest how just these five words would raise enormous difficulties for a new student of English.

In any case, my colleague's comment got me to thinking about other oddities:

1. If someone can be "feckless," can someone else be "feckful"? Apparently not. "Feck," according to the OED online, shares roots with "effect" and "effective," it seems. How about "fecky" or "feckie"? (And don't you love Stephen Colbert's coinage, "truthiness"?)

2. The same goes for "ruthless" versus "ruthful." If "ruthless" is a pejorative adjective, wouldn't "ruthful" be an honorific one?

3. Is the opposite of "exhausted" "inhausted"? As if! How about just "hausted"?

4. Sometimes I am precipitous in my actions. When I am excessively cautious, should I be described as "postcipitious"? Or maybe I'd just be late in that case.

5. When I feel as if I should express thanks, I am "grateful." When I feel the opposite, I don't think of myself as "grateless." And shouldn't "grateful" really mean "full of the capacity to scrape"?

6. Most people, not just English teachers, know how useless the word "incredible" now is. When people say "that's incredible," they don't mean that the thing is not believable; they do mean that the thing is good, but "incredible" is used so frequently that it doesn't even mean that anymore. It just seems like a worn-out word. Maybe we should say "That's ultra-credible" instead. It's funny that saying "That's credible" really isn't much of a compliment. It seems to imply something like "Well, it sounds as if you're telling the truth for once."

7. I like the word "discombobulated." I always have. However, one cannot be "combublated," apparently, or even "bobulated." ("Oh, man, I got so bobulated last night!") And how did "bob" get in there? Was the word originally "discomrobertulated"?

I hope your day has been just right--combobulated in just the ways you like it to be.