French Writing

Someone once told me I was too much of "a should-person." In her opinion, I tended too much to tell myself I should do things. Sometimes I'm multiply focused, a condition which often exhibits the symptoms of distraction, because I tell myself I should be doing x, y, z, and, oh yea, w, too--and why not a and m? Sometimes I'm ultra-focused on one task or project, a trait I learned and/or inherited from my father, who could be dogged, determined, and relentless when he wanted to be so. At other times, I simply take on too much. And at still other times, I invent almost-preposterous "shoulds." For example, I tell myself I really should publish the two novels I have, finally, completed, but to a large degree, that matter doesn't rest with me. That is, I really should try to get the two novels published; easier said than done. (A friend of mine just "sold" her novel to a big publisher. The news absolutely delighted me. It was lovely to learn of the breakthrough. I was vicariously ecstatic.)

For another example, I tell myself I really should read more French writing--in translation. My opportunity for learning to read French well passed long ago. I did take one year of French in college, and my teacher praised my accent in this way: "Your application of a Spanish accent to French is interesting, Monsieur Ostrom." Lo siento mucho, Mademoiselle.

I have read and do like Balzac's fiction. Balzac's writing is a bit like Dickens's in its panoramic, manic vision of society and its layers, but it has somewhat less melodrama and a lot more earthiness. I have read and do appreciate Descartes' philosophy. I think I have read almost everything by Camus, and I like both his fiction and his nonfiction more than a lot. A bit of Zola and some Stendahl. Colette: I love the Claudine novels; they're so smart, so quick and alive. I've taught them (in the one-volume, translated Penguin set) twice. Sartre, who leaves me cold, for some reason. Some of Jacques Prevert's poems. I tend to read about Simone Weil, as oppose to reading what she herself wrote. Quite a lot of Baudelaire and some of the French Symbolists. Vast heaps of Simenon novels. As terrific as they are in English, they must be heavenly in French. An anthology of translated surrealist poetry, which I loved. That's about it, I'm afraid. Awfully spot. I really should read more French writing. (I've seen a lot of French films. Does that count?)

So many shoulds, so little time.

Birds At Evening

Among the ways in which I've been inordinately fortunate is to have lived for large parts of my life in at least two places with superb populations of birds: the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. I spent a fair amount of time in California's Central Valley, too, and that's a pretty darned good place for birds as well. Sweden is interesting bird-territory, too. I don't remember much about German birds. A friend of mine is living in Indiana temporarily, and the envy I feel for his being able to observe cardinals may be approaching the level of sin, according to John James Audobon, if not the Catholic Church.

Before we moved into the present abode, we had a place in the quasi-country, with lots of trees, shrubs, and flowers, nearby lakes, and a our own small pond. It was an okay neighborhood for humans, but for birds, it was truly upscale. They wanted for nothing, especially when I spent wads of cash on suet and seeds for them, maintained bird-houses, maintained not just the pond but a bird-bath, chased away stray cats, hung moth-balls to ward off raccoons from nests (it works), and let some shrubs grow into dense trees, which to birds are exclusive condominiums. For example, we had a holly "bush" that had grown into a 17-foot tree: Trump Towers. I almost hired a crow or a seagull to serve as the doorman.

The great choral cacophony of birds, especially at evening, from Spring through Fall is one thing I miss about that place. The sheer amount and variety of activity, sound, and bird busy-ness created such exuberance, such a comic display of life, that you couldn't help but smile, even as you toiled in an unmanageable garden or tried to unwind after a stressfully tedious or tediously stressful day. As a subject, birds are almost irresistible to poets--and therefore dangerous. One is likely to get trite or sentimental, or to go over old poetic ground. Also, after what Dickinson, Hopkins, and (William) Everson (among others) did with their bird-poems, the poetic bird-stask is daunting, to say almost the least. With trepidation, then, I post the following poem, which I exhumed, like a lost potato, from the loam of my hard-drive. I post it not just with a poet's trepidation, but also with an amateur's appreciation for some good bird-times.

Birds At Evening

Evenings, birds convene
in trees and shrubs, in sky
and fields, fill air
with sound, thesis of which is
we’re alive; repeat: we’re alive.

Bodily harmonies rise,
spill out of beaked mouths (alive).
Birds can wait,
know, react. They cannot
hope but do embody hope

by going on, by feeding
and feathering, by trickling
water down their throats, by
flitting, flying, hopping,
looking. --By shrugging

feathers into place. No look
is more alive than a bird’s glance:
old news--but still. . . . Night absorbs
last avian riffs, alive . . .live . . .
ive . .e . . Beaks close, and eyelids

shut from the bottom up.

No so much to comment on my own poem (a terrible faux pas), as to add a reinforcing coda: The way birds fluff their feathers out of and into shape has always cracked me up; it sometimes reminds me of Italian-American men "shooting the cuffs" of their tailored shirts. And, unfortunately, I do fancy the idea of birds' "songs" having a thesis. I like birds, and I'm an English teacher, so that nerdly fancy is explicable if not forgivable.

Good Old Negative Capability

John Keats invented the term "Negative Capability," in a letter. The capability is that which allows one to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at once--and let them stay there, each with equal weight. Keats described the capability as "negative," I infer, not because it was bad but because it required restraint, pulling back from that instinctual, rationalistic desire to declare one idea the winner. Life is either hopeless or it isn't, for example.

American writer James Baldwin echoed Keats without naming him as he concluded his famous essay, "Notes of a Native Son." The essay details one of the worst moments in Baldwin's life. His father has died. Baldwin is still in is teens but is essentially the head of the family, which is desperately poor in Harlem. He never understood his father, nor his father him. He doesn't have proper clothes to wear to the funeral, and Harlem has just exploded in a race riot because a white policeman has shot a Black man for suspicious reasons. He may be at the period in life when he most needs a father--and his father has died. Baldwin reports summoning the will from some unknown reservoir of determination to decide that, to survive and thrive, he must hold two opposing ideas in his had at once and forever. Idea one: Life is unjust--and especially unjust for African Americans, and demonstrably unjust for him--and will remain so. Idea two: One must never stop struggling against the injustice. That is, there is no resolution to the injustice, but you have to struggle--not just seem to struggle--as if there resolution might be possible. No crying in baseball (a tip of the cap to Tom Hanks), no seeming in the struggle.

I was reminded of Keats and Baldwin today after I attended what I'll call an activists' meeting on campus. For the immediate moment, the topic of the meeting isn't important (although it will be tomorrow morning), and this isn't the place to reveal particulars of processes under way. After about three hours, we broke for a late lunch, and I ended up dining with two impressive students: smart, informed, activist in their own ways, but by no means starry-eyed or naive.

One of them asked me how long I'd been at the college, and I told him 25 years. He then opined that it must be depressing or at least wearing to revisit the same old issues year after year with little progress. I agreed with him, but I added that, over a 25-year span, one at least has the chance to perceive some change, whereas over the usual 4-year span of an undergraduate's time on campus, nothing seems to change. I also pointed to one rather significant, concrete example of a fine academic program that had arisen from similar activism some 15 years earlier. The other student said something like "and while we're working on this problem, there's a war on." --His point being, I think, this: so many issues, so little time. One throws oneself at a local issue, only to look up and realize how many national and global issues persist.

That's where Keats and Baldwin come in. Nothing much is going to change, even over the course of a lifetime, or lifetimes (ouch), but one must live one's lifetime as if much change is possible. It's not pretending--because you don't make believe that injustice has suddenly disappeared, and you don't over-estimate your powers. It's not denial--because you are well aware of such lovely circumstances as futility and such phenomena as constituents who are natural allies becoming "enemies" strictly out of pride. It's Negative Capability. A mental, perhaps even spiritual, juggling act. Two ideas, two opposing conclusions, up in the air of the mind at the same time, each given equal weight. A more colloquial version of N.C. might be "keep on keeping on."

Keats was headed for death from tuberculosis when he wrote his letter, and Baldwin was, arguably, at the lowest point of his life with no evidence that there was an "up" from that lowest point. In their own ways, both prevailed. Yes, I know they were the exceptional of the exceptional, but it's not as if one has to compete with Keats and Baldwin. One merely has to keep on keeping on. Breaks, naps, and good night's sleeps are not only allowed but vital, so there's that.

New Cabinet-Positions Needed

Now that a certain percentage of the U.S. population is going to elect a new president, I believe it's time to think about some new cabinet-positions.

I'll get the most self-centered one out of the way first: I think the absence of a Secretary of Poetry has represented a glaring oversight from the beginning of the republic into our present imperial period. Let's take care of that after the next election. I want some press-conferences where reporters pepper the Sec. of Poetry with questions about trochaic meter, surrealistic imagery, and women coming and going into rooms speaking of Michaelangelo.

I'd also rename the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: The Secretary of Housing and Urban Humanity. We seem to do the development-part real well. For whom and how are different questions.

Arguably, we need a Secretary of Consequences, whose job it will be to predict what will flow from a president's decisions, precipitous and otherwise. She or he would soon probably be known as the Sec. of Uh-Oh or the Sec. of Oh, No. In this new department, perhaps there could be an Under-Secretary for History, her or his main job being to remind people that bad (and good) ideas have a history.

I'm not sure we still need a Secretary of the Treasury because there's nothing left in the treasury. Perhaps he or she could simply become the night-janitor. We need, instead, a Secretary of Debt. I believe I could get the support of Ron Paul and several recluses who live in the Mojave Desert in old Airstream trailers for this idea. Not a groundswell, per se, but, hey, you have to start small, and, in the case of Ron Paul, weird. How he manages to answer every debate questions with "The gold standard," I do not know, but I'm impressed.

I'd go back to the old name for the Secretary of Defense: the Secretary of War. It was refreshingly counter-Orwellian. I would then add a Secretary of Peace, for symmetry and out of blind hope.

A Department of Rhetoric is clearly needed. The Government Accounting Office now investigates how money is mis-spent. Although nothing is done with these investigations, it is good to know something close to the truth. The Sec. of Rhetoric would be responsible for analyzing the rhetoric of top-level politicians and explaining the traditions out of which the rhetoric sprang, the logical fallacies, the good and bad appeals, modus ponens, modus tolens, and so on. All politicians are slick. Congressperson Socrates is a politician. Therefore, . . . .

Apparently we have a Secretary of the Interior, which sounds vaguely contemplative but which actually operates the Forest Service, against whom my father held a life-long grudge involving their (its) alleged incompetence. If this department concerns itself with the outdoors, wouldn't it be better named the Department of the Exterior? Then the Department of the Interior could advise people either on decorating-choices, their inner lives, or digestion.

Do we need a Secretary of Philosophy? I would argue Yes. When Clinton quibbled with the meaning of "is," that was an obvious Wittgenstein-move, and the U.S. Dept. of Philosophy could have stepped in. Bush II is obviously an absurdist. The Secret Service's code-name for him is probably Gregor Mendel. Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, is obviously counter-Nihilist and a bracing attack on post-Modernism. As I've noted before, that McCain calls what is a "bus" the "Straight-Talk Express" is a sophisticated irony with which philosophers could help. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama chant "Yes, we can." This implies a belief in free will. What would be the U.S. Department of Philosophy's stance on this?

Good night, and good luck.

Badger

I saw a badger once and once only in the Sierra Nevada. I was riding around with my dad in his pickup, in the back-country. I can't remember what the specific quest was--firewood, perhaps, or merely flight from boredom. No doubt he said, "Look at that--that's a god-damned badger," and left it at that. The badger was pretty impressive in its own way--low to the ground, garbed in some good-looking fur, and awfully determined. The sighting was but a glimpse--off it went, bothered, on those big paws with long claws--really low to the ground.

It's a bit odd that "badger" was turned into a verb, meaning to tease or to harangue incessantly (or at least that's my definition), and we're used to hearing it in TV court-dramas: "Your honor, I object; counsel is badgering the witness." I guess the connection is that badgers dig incessantly, looking for food--including rodents, I have learned; so "counsel" digs into the witness. But badgers seem to want to be left alone; they do not seem to aspire to become attorneys. According to the OED online, "badger" became a verb very late in the 18th century.

Unfortunately, some people still trap badgers for the fur and hunt them for--I don't know what for: just to kill them, I guess. Steve Jackson's badger website suggests badgers usually live 2-8 years in the wild, more like 14 in captivity, and, in one case, up to 26 years. Various kinds of badgers include the honey badger, the hog badger, the Eurasian badger, and the ferret badger.

Badgers are related to ferrets and weasels. I think some people call lawyers "weasels," so I guess it's technically possible to hear someone in a court-room say, "Your honor, I object; the weasel is badgering the witness."

The American badger's Latin name is Taxidea taxus, and apparently the one I saw was from the Taxidea taxus jeffersoni sub-group; another sub-group is jacksoni. Why the scientists used Jefferson and Jackson, I do not know--and I'm sure those names arose well before Steve Jackson started his site in the U.K., so we mustn't jump to conclusions. From the website, I learned that those who study the badger have a heck of a time determining their population, but badgers are spread broadly from the upper mid-western states to the west and widely over western Canada, too.

Here's a link to the badger-site, which has some photos of handsome badgers, and of one badger who is yawning (after a tough day of digging, no doubt). Badgers seem just to throw themselves into any activity, and this badger is really yawning. I mean, he or she is going for the yawn in an inspiring way.

http://www.badgers.org.uk/badgerpages/american-badger.html

Here's a badger-poem I wrote quite a while ago. I think I may have included it in the Collected Poems I put together, but I just added an epigraph from Jackson's website. I don't know if philosophers, let alone linguists, would approve of the word or the concept, "badgerness," but it amuses me (that makes one of us).

Regarding Badger

"A loner, it is always digging."

--Steve Jackson

I have seen the badger,
and I approve. Its body
argues for badgerness. The
rhetoric is fierce, furry, low,
leveraged, and necessary.

I prefer not to point to tall
buildings and small computers
and say Look at what we’ve done!
I am, however, in favor
of sewer systems, electric light,
and medicine. Have we
done right by the badger?

That’s a measure of civilization,
too: a judgment to limit ourselves,
to leave badger and woods
alone enough and well.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

500,000 Iraqi Children

With three other professors and a member of the staff, I'm helping to facilitate an Iraq War Discussion Group where I teach. It's an official course, but it's worth only 1/4 of the academic credit usually earned in a course, it's graded on a pass/fail basis, and it meets only once a week. We try to talk about our various responses the war but also to present information about the history of the region (going back to antiquity), the British involvement during and after World War I, and the U.S. involvement in Iraq for decades. Of course we also talk about events, issues, and controversies related to the war as they arise, including those connected to the presidential primaries in the U.S.

Today we talked a bit about the first Gulf War. One of the professors, a political scientist, mentioned that he is reading a book in which a CBS "60 Minutes" interview with then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright is mentioned. The interviewer, Leslie Stahl, first notes that by most estimates, the international sactions against Iraq in the 1990s had directly or indirectly caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. She then asked Madeline Albright if this loss of life was worth what the sanctions were aiming to achieve. The Secretary of State answered, "Yes."

My colleague also mentioned that the U.S. had not only supported Iraq's regime during Iraq's war with Iran but that it had also, essentially, looked the other way while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds. He suggested that the U.S.'s "looking the other way" (my term, not his) might have contributed to Saddam Hussein's sense that the U.S. would not react to his invading Kuwait--an invasion that led, of course, to the first Gulf War, and later to the sanctions--and ultimately, I suppose, to the current war, for it seems the second president Bush believed he had to finish the war begun by the first presdient Bush. Precisely why the U.S. invaded Iraq the second time, I still don't know. Plausible reasons range from oil to Bush II's need to prove something to trying to introduce American-style capitalistic democracy to the region. Implausible reasons now include the weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist. A reason invented after the fact is that Saddam Hussein was a terrible, murderous dictator. The facts suggest he was indeed that, but Bush, et al., did not at first use that as a reason to start the war. Only after the weapons of mass destruction proved illusory (or always were illusory, as Colin Powell's "testimony" to the U.N. suggested, from the first) did this reason form part of a retroactive argument. There was also an assertion about Iraq's connection to terrorists who attacked the U.S., but that connection proved to be flimsy, at best. A reason to perpetuate the war now advanced (by McCain and others) is that to leave would embolden terrorists who are now in Iraq, but a counter-argument is that the terrorists would not be there if the U.S. hadn't invaded in the first place.

There's no good way to create a transition from these topics to a poetic one, so I will simply and abruptly mention that the site and project, Poets Against the War, is in its 7th year and has accumulated roughly 22,000 poems from around the world, as well as publishing an anthology, supporting politically oppressed writers worldwide, and continuing to express a variety of views against the war in Iraq. The site's main page also points to selected poems it receives each month, and for November 2007, there is mention of a poem by an alum of our university and a former student of mine, Sarah Borsten.

The link to the main page of Poets Against the War is http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/,
and Sarah's poem is mentioned on the left-hand column.

Villanelle: The Villain, L

The villain, L, disrupts this life of ours,
And is, as the imbuer of desire,
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.

Sometimes the villain, L, recedes and cowers,
And lurks as others rush to douse a fire.
The villain, L, disrupts this life of ours.

Is L for Love? For Longing, Lonely hours?
For Lust or Loss? Or maybe just for Liar,
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.

Could it be Language? Our Linguistic powers--
That signifying engine which won’t tire?
The villain, L, disrupts this life of ours.

(In many languages other than ours,
A different letter shall be used to hire
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.)

Or L for Light, fiated Big-Bang’s flowers?
By light, we know and, knowing, we desire.
The villain, L, disrupts this Life of ours,
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

One By Jeffers

I know two colleagues where I teach, neither of them professors of English, who enjoy the poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), known for--well, for many things. He anticipated so-called "eco-poetry" by many decades; he often expressed a kind of anti-humanist ("inhumanist") philosophy, arguably close to Stoicism but also involving anti-imperialist ideas and a sense in which one might benefit ethically from living close by and observing raw nature.

Jeffers built his own stone house near Carmel, by the sea, in California; he built his poems with deliberate rhetoric, long lines, an austere tone, and clarity. His work is often thought to occupy a place between that of Whitman and that of writers loosely associated with the Beat Movement--Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, and Gary Snyder, among others. In fact, Rexroth, Everson, and Snyder were pretty far removed from Beat poetry; mostly they were otherwise occupied, even though Snyder certainly knew the gang at City Lights Books and is allegedly the basis of a character in one of Kerouac's novels.

Jeffers, like Langston Hughes and William Blake, is one of those poets with great appeal outside colleges and universities. The Hughes conference I attended in 2002 (he was born in 1902) included both academics and "plain old citizens." The Blake Conference I attended in Santa Cruz in the 1980s drew academics, of course, but also ordinary folk interested in visual art and people who literally viewed Blake as a prophet. I'll never forget one fellow who casually suggested that everyone go out and do "some ecstatic dancing" in the forest after one of the sessions. I was tempted to join him and the group, but having grown up in the woods, I knew that the forest and ecstatic dancing didn't really mix. It's just too easy to fall over a log or off a rock.

Oddly enough, Jeffers and Hughes got to know each other in the 1930s, when Hughes was staying with a friend in Carmel, Noel Sullivan, and working on some stories that eventually showed up in The Ways of White Folks. Hughes attended at least one cocktail party hosted by Jeffers, whom one does not associate with such conviviality after having read his poems. Differences between the work of Hughes and Jeffers abound, and many are obvious; at the same time, both are plain-spoken poets who didn't much care whether English professors liked their work.

Here's one by Jeffers that's in the public domain. It's from his book Tamar, and unfortunately, the blog-machinery will make at least one of the long lines spill over:

To The Stone-Cutters

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

Sometimes Jeffers is so morose that he makes me smile, and although his phrasing is almost always clear, it is also often surprising. "[Y]ou foredefeated/Challengers of oblivion/Eat cynical earnings . . .". Reading the poem again, I found myself settling in with the first two phrases here and then being surprised (again) by "Eat cynical earnings." It's startling, and it also begs to be interpreted several ways, but the rhetoric is that of direct address: "You . . . eat . . . earnings."

Many undergraduates understandably do not take immediately to Jeffers' poetry. After all, most of them are enjoying life and rightly expressing optimism and hope. Suddenly there's this guy "looking forward" to when the earth will die and the sun flame out. Robinson "Happy Go Lucky" Jeffers, at your service. Anyone up for an Ingmar Bergman film?

An obvious question to ask readers of the poem is this: Do you find the "honey of peace" in Jeffers' newish old poem? Speaking only for myself, I don't necessarily find "honey" in the poem, but I find the peace of familiarity in "watching" Jeffers meditate on stone-cutters, poets, and a geologic scale of time.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Displacement

I was reading some poems by Gwendolyn Brooks again, in preparation for teaching them. She was born in 1917 and died in 2000 and was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, if memory serves. Her most famous poem is "We Real Cool," which is indeed a great poem in an invented form, and a poem that's efficient in the way Dickinson's poems are. A great deal of business is transacted, so to speak, in just a few lines.

But Brooks' range was amazing, both in terms of style and voice and of subjects that interested her. Many of her poems are rooted in her neighborhood of Chicago (like "kitchenette building" and "The Bean Eaters"); indeed, the prize-winning volume is entitled A Street in Bronzeville.
She wrote excellent short narrative poems--"Sadie and Maud" is a famous one--and longer, more meditative pieces like "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith." She moves easily between more formal verse and free verse, is a virtuoso deployer of rhythms and diction, and displays a clear, sharp intelligence in every poem.

Partly because of temperament and partly because she started writing in the 1940s, she arrived a bit late at the political-activist eruption of the 1960s--but arrive she did. She changed publishers for activist reasons--in part to make her books more affordable for working people. She wrote some superb socially conscious poetry, including "Riot." Her homage-poem, "Malcolm X," is pithy.

Of her "neighborhood" poems, "the vacant lot" (yes, she uses no capitalization in the title) is one of my favorites. The speaker remembers the last three people--Mrs. Coley and her two children--who lived in the house that was removed to create the vacant lot. The memory is sharp and humorous, but one subtext of the poem is that the poem, the memory, is the last anyone will hear of all the history that occurred in that vacant lot. Circuitously, it's a poem about urban displacement, or urban revision, which seems constant.

I saw/heard Brooks read at U.C. Davis. Her husband was with her, and at her insistence, he read some of his poems after she did. He was a modest, wry man, and before he read, he said, "Simple logic dictates that I should have read first." We laughed, for who among us would have liked to read our poems right after Ms. Brooks had read? Of course, she had intended to honor him and his own work, but she'd put him in a tough spot, so she laughed, too.

In honor of her and her husband, I'm replicating the folly by posting a poem after talking about hers. Simple logic dictates that I should have started with my desultory poem and then moved to the main act, Gwendolyn Brooks. But no. That would have been too easy. As far as I know, this poem concerns urban displacement, too; hence the title, I reckon:

Displacement

Well, I went downtown.
They’d moved it. Some dirty bricks
were left behind, some people.
A few old buildings stood—
rats in elevator cars, For Lease
signs in windows, stench of mayoral
promises in a dumpster.

I started screaming, couldn’t stop,
stacked echo on echo, splendid rage.
My outburst brought police. They
took me to a place to which
Downtown had been transferred.

For every question they asked,
I asked two. In the hasty move,
city ordinances had been
misplaced. No one
could specify with what I should be
charged. Upon my release, I asked
myself what’s right for me to do?—an
old-fashioned interrogative that
would have played well in Old Downtown
but not, alas, in the New Here District,
where bright, new office buildings
and slick, wee bistros will sit on
an immense investment of capital.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Unique But Constant

For some reason, I'm intrigued by the idea that, or the phenomenon whereby, each day all of us in modern, mobile societies see several, many, perhaps even hundreds of people precisely once in our lives; the moment when we encounter them and they us is vivid. That is, the sensory information about them is clear and accurate. Moments, minutes, or hours later, however, all trace of them is gone from our minds, our sense of experience, our memories, and all trace of us is gone from their minds, senses of experience, and memories. These encounters are unique, but the phenomenon is virtually constant--a steady stream of once-only, momentary encounters that are quite real--particular and concrete--but then gone, as if they were unreal.

This situation was true even in the micro-town in which I grew up. In Winter, if we went into town, we would know all the people we saw. They would at least be acquaintances we'd seen before, and we would at least know their names and a bit about them. (This circumstance is one of many reasons the pace of life is so slow in micro-towns; people have to talk to each other; deliberation is required.) Just as likely, we'd know them well, share a history with them. But in summer, when tourists streamed through town, we might encounter people exactly once, so even in an extremely rural, remote town, the automobile brought this unusual everyday anonymity, this constant flow of unique encounters, into play.

I think philosophers, psychologists, or neurologists are better suited to write about this subject than a poet, or at least better suited than this particular poet. But I gave it a whack anyway, more or less to get it out of my system:

Idiosynchronized

People we see once: flood of faces, coats,
collars--on avenues and plazas, in markets,
theaters, bars, banks, hospitals. A bent

shape hoeing weeds: one of us saw it once
one place one time from a train: This
is an example but only of itself. Its

singularity can’t be transposed. Imagine
you remember the person who interested you
terribly in that café that morning that city.

Sure it happened, but you don’t remember
because once was not in fact enough. People
we see once are our lives: Forgetting

them (we must), we lose whole arenas
of the lived. Even ghosts return, but not
this vast mass of once-only-noticed

which composes medium and matrix
of our one time here. We are adjacent and
circumstantial to strangers, just one jostle

of flux away from knowing next to everything
about their lives. The river of moments takes
a different channel; the one moment is nothing now.

The once-only appear, then appear to go
to an Elsewhere that defines us. They go on
to get to know who they get to know.

Their lives are theoretically real to us, like
subatomic particles. To them their lives
are practically real to them. From their

view, ours are not. We know they were there,
vivid strangers, because they always are,
every day. Like a wreath floating

on the ocean, memory marks a space
abandoned. In large measure life is
recall of spaces occupied. History

consists of someone who insists on being
remembered, someone who insists on
remembering, combinations of both. Familiarity

and routine join to work methodically; they
manufacture things in recall. Vivid strangers are
incidentally crucial, indigenous to a

present moment that is like a mist
over a meadow, rising, evaporating
just when we arrive, past as we are present.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Extremely Narrow Sonnets

Some poets like to write in traditional forms, some like to write in free verse, some like to do both, and some like to monkey with traditional forms. Some poets like to do all four things, and I am one of them, and I am also a person who likes to use "monkey" as a verb, an idiomatic move I permanently borrowed from my parents' generation.

Sherman Alexie monkeyed with the sonnet-form by writing fourteen rather large prose-poetry paragraphs. Instead of fourteen lines in a metered, rhyming scheme, there are fourteen large chunks of writing, much of which concern American history and American Indians (or Native Americans--although I gather the former term is back in use). I like Alexie's poem, and I like what he does with the sonnet, which in my view he treats as an old-fashioned constricting form--a figurative reservation, if you will, from which Alexie wants to escape. He explodes the form, to good effect, in my opinion.

My present aims are much more modest and, arguably, whimsical. I wanted to write the narrowest sonnet possible. I'd already written a sonnet that rhymed on its left side. That is, I used the Shakespearian-sonnet rhyme-scheme and the usual iambic pentameter, but the rhyming words occurred at the beginning of each line, not at the end, so of course the rhyming-effect is completely different. I just thought it needed to be done--done, but not repeated.

A traditional sonnet is ten syllables wide and fourteen lines high. As my late friend Wendy Bishop noted, it is a 14X10 poem. Wendy was extraordinarily imaginative, but she had a great practical side, too. She also thought of the sonnet as a poem that could fit on a postcard. I think she even had her students literally write sonnets on (onto) postcards.

I supposed, then, that the narrowest possible sonnet would be composed of 14 letters that formed words vertically. Here is an example:

Wafer-Thin Sonnet

I
l
o
v
e
y
o
u,
m
y
d
e
a
r.

I like this because it fulfills the 14-line criterion, and its theme is the same as 57. 5% of all sonnets, based on no research and a blind guess. But you do have to figure that tens of thousands of sonnets have had a thesis-statement similar to "I love you, my dear," don't you?

But then I thought that I'd gone too far (or not far enough) because the rhyming had disappeared. So I decided to write an extremely narrow sonnet that still rhymed, and here it is:

Extremely Narrow Sonnet

How 'bout
If we
Went out
To see
What you
And I
Might do
And why?
Let's set
A date
And let
Our fate
Unfurl--
Or curl.

So I kept the basic rhyme scheme of a Shakespearian or English sonnet: ababcdcdefefgg. And in the interests of narrowness, I used one iambic foot per line. An even narrower sonnet would keep the rhyme scheme but just use one word per line; that would be tough. Take a whack at it, if you like.

The purpose of such foolishness? Partly, it's foolishness for its own sake. And, well, as W.H. Auden said, of his poetic vocation, "I like to play with words." He did not say "I like only to play with words," and his poems demonstrate just how much more he liked to do with poetry. But playing fanciful, whimsical games with form is not a bad thing to do after one has been hitting the serious poetry-writing hard for a while, and I think a playful connection to venerable forms actually complements a conventional connection to them. It's good training--discipline, if you will--to try to write a genuine Shakespearian sonnet--but in a contemporary idiom. It's also good to explode the sonnet, as Alexie did. It's good to "stab" the sonnet, as Shapiro claimed to do. And it's good to monkey with the sonnet. All are ways of living with words, as musicians live with sounds and rhythms, strictures and improvisations, the old and the fresh.

I invite you to attempt to monkey with villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets--ballads, too, perhaps. Venerable, venerated forms can withstand whimsy and deconstruction. Sonnet 18 by the Shakemeister General isn't going anywhere.

Poem About Reading

Here is a second guest-poem by Patrick Bizzaro, this one concerning reading (among other things):

LIKE A READER
aaaaaaa for Dave Bartholomae

I love to open a book
some previous owner
has marked and folded,
a book that turns
magically
to a page read
more often than others,
to a margin
filled with pencil prints,
checked lines,
paragraphs in brackets.

And I love the reader
I do not know
who argues with the author,
corrects him,
circles typos,
accuses the author
of plagiarism or at best
of dialog with some other writer.

I love it best
when that reader assumes
a reference to someone
who lived after
the author, someone, perhaps,
the author created,
like a character outside the book,
like a reader.

Patrick Bizzaro

Copyright 2008 by Patrick Bizzaro

Guest Poem By Patrick Bizzaro

I'm delighted to post a "guest poem" by a colleague and friend from East Carolina University, Patrick Bizzaro. Patrick is also the author of a fine book on teaching creative writing, Responding to Poems, published by the National Council of Teachers of English, and he's also written criticism on the work of poet Fred Chappell. Here is the poem:

FIRST PHOTOGRAPH
for Antonio

The frame
that held my photograph
of you being born
kept changing shape.
It pushed in on you
from all directions,
clamped down
until I could tell,
when your head shrunk
into a wrinkled photo
of a baby’s birth,
you began to wrestle back.

Less moving
picture than a series of stills
presenting themselves to me now,
weeks later,
in no particular order,
the frame stretched
to fit your head
as though the photo of you being born
changed to fit its frame.

But there was a moment,
when seeing your head
deep inside the frame
of your mother’s precious parts,
foolishly noting aloud
your head’s simple size,
I thought this photo,
any photo of any birth,
impossible to frame.
So I concentrated instead
on my part in this,
circling with both hands
the all-important left leg
I’d been assigned to hold. Fortunately,

there were people in the room
determined to see this event
develop. Looking up, I watched
one possible photo after another
snap by—any one of which I might freeze here
into words—and, quite frankly, for the first time
that day or night or whenever it was
a plot entered the room, a storyline,
a sequence of tangible events
moving toward some ultimate resolution.

And though distracted by
the breaths of someone
in the distance, I noticed
all the possible first photos of you
as they changed shape
to fit this frame of your mother.
Your shape,
your mother’s shape,
became something mutual,
some unspoken agreement.
The knot on your head nodded
to everyone in the room
you would do your part.
It tightened until
it was no longer a photo of you, Antonio,
but instead a video
of a proud if undersized Sumo
entering the delivery room.
Standing beside your mother’s
left leg, I looked down for the first time
into your face and saw
you, my son,
entering the room,
the knot at the top of your head gone,
your skull in the frame
taking a shape
I recognized as skull,
your shoulders, slanting
to form a small arrow,
pointing at some target
only you could see
between your mother’s knees.

Patrick Bizzaro

Copyright 2008 Patrick Bizzaro