In Praise of Agatha and LT

In addition to reading some poetry while we were at the (Washington) coast, I read an Agatha Christie novel, There Is a Tide, more recently known as Taken at the Flood. It's taken (so to speak) me decades to warm up to her books, and I still don't like them all, but I'm now very fond of the Poirot books. The Clocks is my favorite. There Is a Tide is a terrific Poirot book, too--and it's also a very good novel of manners--the crime and detection aside.

It includes some extremely astute observations about post-WW II England, its economy, the status and self-doubt of men who did not go to war (some farmers were exempt, for instance), and the views of women who did serve (as nurses, for example), who had "seen the world," and who returned with ambitions to be more than housewives and to live somewhere besides a cozy village. In the book, there's also a sense in which England no longer knows who or what it is when it isn't fighting the Germans anymore.

Christie's novels tend to develop a bit slowly during the first 30-40 pages, but one's patience is usually rewarded because her plotting is superb, deceptively tight, and she works well with an ensemble cast. There Is a Tide turns out to be a gem, and the bonus is that I secured an older, very pulpy paperback with a lurid cover--my favorite. Hats off to Agatha and Hercules.

As if reading Agatha Christie novels weren't sufficiently nerdy, I now rush to heap praise on LibraryThing, a site on which one catalogues all one's books, "tags" them, ranks them, reviews them, and on which one may join groups based on authors, genres, topics, periods and eras of literature, and so on. It's just too much fun. One may instantly generate "author clouds"--the more books you have by an author, the large the font is for that author's name in the cloud. One may also generate a photo-collage of one's authors. I was explaining all this to some people at a restaurant, for some inexplicable reason, their eyes got glassy. ("Check, please!") Gee, I wonder why.

There's a group on LT called The Black Orchid: A Nero Wolfe Group, dedicated (obviously) to Rex Stout's famous detective, and the conversational threads on there are hilarious--for their minutiae, their passion for Wolfe and Archie, their discussions of food, orchids, and NYC, and all manner of things, with wildly circuitous detours. I also started several groups--one called Working Class, one called The Harlem Renaissance, and one called Karl Shapiro and Company--all about mid-20th century poetry. --Also one on Robinson Jeffers and one on Langston Hughes. The latter two have yet to "take off," as it were.

It's astonishing (perhaps it shouldn't be) how much bibliophiles from every culture on the planet have in common. There are versions of LT in numerous nations and languages, but they are also linked to the main (U.S.) LT site, so I can (for example) get to the Swedish site via a group called (with typical Swedish obviousness) Swedish Thing. The conversational threads on that group-site are few, measured, deliberate, serious--and of few words, whereas Americans and Brits do tend to go on a bit (like some bloggers).

It's too bad (or maybe not) that bibliophiles don't have more political clout. --Which makes me think of one of my very favorite droll bumper-stickers: I PLAY THE BAGPIPES, AND I VOTE. Bag-pipe players and bibliophiles--political forces with which to be reckoned. Something arcane this way comes. Mere eccentricity is loosed upon the world, the ink-dimmed tide is loosed, and what rough first edition, its hour come round at last, falls off the shelf in Toledo to be read?

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory

Today is an anniversary of the Traingle Shirtwaist Factory fire, a tragedy in general and, more particularly, a tragedy in the history of labor and of women's labor. Another blogger alerted her readers to the annivrsary, and she included a fine poem she wrote that evokes the infamous fire. Here's the link to poet Karen J. Weyant's site:



http://thescrapperpoet.blogspot.com/

I think you'll really enjoy the poem.

More Poet's Political Questions

Some more political questions from a poet's point of view:

1. Because reporters don't seem to ask good questions anymore, why don't they ask candidates who their favorite poets are? Sure, it's irrelevant to the election, but so are most of the other questions. I figure Obama would answer straight-up. I think there's a 35% chance he'd say Langston Hughes, chiefyy for the sense of humor, not necessarily for the ethnicity. I figure the Clintons (plural) would stall, consult their team, do some polling, and then (if it were today) name a poet from Pennsylvania. I figure John McCain would get angry and hell at the reporter, "What kind of question is that?! Shut up!"

2. Why doesn't Ralph Nader run for mayor of a city first? Why does he always have to start at the top? How about mayor of Toledo? What if we made Ralph activist-poet-laureate?

3. Will the Dems manage to lose what most political scientists view as the easiest election to win in decades? Or should I ask, How will the Dems lose . . . .?

4. If "gay marriage" is, as some allege, a "threat" to heterosexual marriages [I still don't get how it could be a threat, and I'm still in search of one good example of such a threat], does it then follow, logically, that gay divorce would be a threat to traditional divorce and therefore an aid to traditional marriage, meaning we should make gay marriage legal so that gay divorce would be legal?

5. In the 2004 election, the GOPers allegedly used ballot initiatives on gay marriage to get out (so to speak) the vote on their behalf, in Ohio, for example. What ballot initiatives are they planning this Fall?

6. Instead of sending all taxpayers (in certain brackets) a $600 refund, why doesn't the government "bundle" that money and give it to the people who can't make their house payments?

7. What is one success Bush has had? I thought about this question hard, and I came up with the following: he has given a lot of money for AIDS relief in Africa (even though he insists on so-called abstinence programs). That's a good thing. I'm even willing to take the Iraq war off the table and say that people can agree to disagree about that. But leaving that off the table, what remains? Economy = bad. Environment = bad. Eroded civil liberties = bad (in my opinion). Foreign policy [even excepting Iraq] = bad. Support for veterans = bad. Energy = bad. Response to disasters [Katrina] = bad. Speeches = bad. Appointments = bad (strictly from a competence-angle). Polar bears = bad. Immigration = no policy one way or the other; a zero. Closing gap between rich and poor = bad. But I suppose some people want that gap to widen--I mean, seriously, from some kind of effed up philosophical point of view.

8. Would anyone be in favor of electing Obama, Clinton, and McCain and giving them each roughly 16 months in office? I guess we'd simply draw straws to see who started first. Or we could give each one 8 months and then hold a referendum to see if we wanted that person to continue. Why wait four years to see how bad things can get? Society moves at a much faster pace than it did in, say, 1808, so should we speed up the presidential cycle?

9. Did you get the sense, as I did when I watched Obama giving his speech on race, that he was thinking, "I can't believe I have to explain such simple things to [white] people"? I thought it was a great speech, but I did sense an understandable weariness on his part. A kind of "I thought we covered this already in high school history" feeling.

10. Is Obama essentially doing to the Clintons what Bill Clinton did to Bush I and Bob Dole? Hoisted on his [Bill's] own . . . ?

11. Who would be in favor of a heavy tax on presidential campaigns? Not on the people who give money, mind you, but on the candidates' campaign-machines. I'd put the money directly into Medicare, Social Security, and/or homeless programs. That way, society would benefit from each campaign, no matter what. And we'd take the money from them right away, before they spent it on attack-ads or whatever. Right off the top.

12. Does Congress matter anymore? Is it even logistically possible for any Congress to say No to any president at this point? Are we pretty much working with elected dictators at this point?

Ashbery, Dunn, and Kunitz

At the beach on the Washington coast, I read three books of poetry by three venerable poets: Where Shall I Wander [no question mark] by John Ashbery; The Insistence of Beauty, by Stephen Dunn; and a later Selected Poems (circa 1995) by Stanley Kunitz.

Although Ashbery is of the New York School and bears some relation to L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E* poets, he's pretty much a school unto himself, drawing on a vast range of diction, creating expressionistic collages of language, infusing his poems with allusions and droll linguistic wit, and almost never, it seems, being interested in straightforward rhetoric, accessible narrative, or otherwise conventionally representational poetry. I've always found his poems to be amusing and extremely clever, but I don't like them as much as many of my cohorts do. I tire of them quickly, and I do get the sense that sometimes he's just effing around--that one could take out a couple lines and replace them with other lines, give the poem to someone, and not have that person catch the switch. (I can't imagine doing that [and getting away with it] to poems by Housman, Hopkins, Dickinson, or Auden, for instance, but I think it would work with some of Ashbery's poems.) As linguistically rich and surprising as his poems are, there is nonetheless something insular or insulated about the work. I start to yearn for poetry that's more sanguine, robust, and grounded, less academic, upper-middle-class, and enervated. Ennui abounds. A lot of his poems sound like J. Alfred Prufrock on roids or Franz Kafka on laughing gas. But Ashbery's an extremely famous, celebrated poet, so I think I'm in the minority in my view; also, Ashbery's ear for all the odd phrases we're flooded with each day is extraordinary; out of nowhere will come a line like, "Attention shoppers."

Dunn's poetry is quite clear and grounded, and his voice is interesting. This particular book is a bit too insular for me--not in the way Ashbery's is, however. The book seems centered on Dunn's own immediate experience, including such things as romantic break-ups. I found myself wanting a broader range of experience represented, and sometimes things got predictable. In a poem apparently about a new lover, he speaks of the woman's former lover and brings in the old reference to three people (figuratively) being in the bed. That idea seems worn out. "Grudges" is an intriguing, well crafted villanelle, modified, about 9/11. It doesn't quite capture the global nature of the mess we're in, however. For me, it personalized 9/11 a bit too much--shrank the event. There's more than a grudge involved when planes get flown into towers and the U.S. invades a country for trumped up reasons--at a cost of a trillion dollars. Like Ashbery, however, Dunn is a venerable, much celebrated poet--of the plainer style.

I read Kunitz's book third and was glad to do so, for I felt as if earth, sky, water, air, fish, ordinary folk, fire, wood, recognizable landscapes, and less preciously rendered experiences were suddenly let back into the room. Things had gotten a bit stuffy with Ashbery and Dunn. As much as I enjoyed Ashbery's rare, relentless cleverness and Dunn's spare, self-grounded work, I was really hungry and thirsty for the kind of poetry Kunitz writes, so the order of the reading worked out beautifully.

Anyway, props to these three veterans of American poetry. Solid books, established reputations.

Dig It

One doesn't hear the term "dig it" much any longer, in the colloquial sense of "enjoy it." I have not pursued any research on the etymology of this connotation, but I suspect that it may have originated in African American vernacular expression, gotten absorbed into the broader popular culture (including the "Beat Generation"), and then lasted a while--into the 1970s, perhaps even the 1980s? When people use the term now, they tend to use it derisively, gently mocking how out of date it is. In the 1990s, there was a quasi-Hip-Hop group called Diggable Planets, which produced some very intriguing music and lyrics. But that group, too, was deploying the term wryly.

I have a good friend, a longtime friend, who works at Microsoft now. He's one of the funniest people I've ever met, and among his schticks is a faux-hip one, in which the persona goes around saying, "Hey, I can dig that!" He happens to be a fabulous musician, so ironically, when it comes to music, he can play things that are genuinely diggable, even as, in one of his comic personae, he mocks the "cool" white bourgeois dude who's tragi-comically "hip."

I do wonder the extent to which "dig" is filially linked to the term "groove." One gets in the groove or finds something groovy, just as one digs or digs into an experience, but can one dig a groove? Hmmm. Perhaps one shouldn't use "one" when writing about "dig"--speaking of tragi-comically [un]-hip.

"Can you dig it?" is a rhetorical expression, although I believe in a tune by the group Chicago ("Saturday in the Park," if memory serves), the question is not treated thusly. "Can you dig it?" is followed by "Yes, I can." Chicago produced a great sound there for a while, but even from the beginning, the group was a bit nerdy. Nerd rock.

Anyway, here is a wee riff on the term "dig it":


Imperative Mood

When he said, “Dig the well,”
He wasn’t speaking Jazz or Beat
Or asking you to move your feet.
He meant shovel, and he meant hole.

The water-witching’s done, son.
Find that water-table,
If you’re able.
Dig the well good. Get it done.

It is not to my credit that I couldn't resist writing "Dig the well good." It amuses me, but I do apologize. Can you dig it? Don't answer that.

Obama's Speech

Luckily, I had the time to watch all of Barack Obama's speech about his pastor in particular and "race" in general today. Especially for a politician, Obama came perilously close not just to telling the truth but to indulging in complexity--two things we've come not to expect or accept from our political speakers.

Although the facts show I'm a privileged white male, I'm in the "minority" on a couple of issues. First, I didn't find the Reverend Wright's excerpted comments offensive or even incorrect. "G.D. America" was a bit over the top, theologically, only because I reckon it's G.'s decision whether to D. anyone or anything. But even that phrase wasn't over the top if you place it in the context of prophetic preaching. Look at the Books of Isaiah and Jeremiah, for example: preaching that calls down the thunder and makes the Reverend Wright seem mild, no offense to him intended.

Second, I'd prefer to retire the word "race" as it applies to categories of people, simply because there is no basis for this categorization in science. However, I understand the argument that because racism is alive and well, we might as well keep "race" in play. It's just that I'm persuaded by the human-genome project and its apparent discovery that our entire gene-pool may be traced back to what we might call Eastern Africa. That's where the "race" began. The stuff about Caucasians, "Orientals," Anglo-Saxons, "whites," "blacks," and "Negroes" is just invented nonsense. But I'm willing to defer to those who want to keep "race" in the lexicon for strategic and tactical purposes. Recently, scientists have found three or four genes that control skin-color--but they control skin-color, not "race."

Because I teach African American literature, I talk every day--or every M-W-F--about what Obama talked about--just not as eloquently. Or more accurately, my students and I talk about such topics--the complexities of spirituality and race, class and race, how a sense of "whiteness" depends on a complicated view of "blackness," how white folks are privileged to be "tired of talking about race," whereas black folks have to think about the topic all the time, and so on.

Of course, the mainstream commercial media and right-wing hucksters smell blood, ratings, and money in the water, so they'll continue to "harpoon" Obama--David Gergen's phrase. A moderate Republican, Gergen liked Obama's speech but allowed as how, in his opinion, the right would relentlessly attack now, no matter what Obama said. To his credit, Gergen seemed disgusted by the predictable harpooning.

Having read the works of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Wallace Thurman, George Schuyler, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, Amiri Baraka, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Iceberg Slim, Chester Himes, Rudolph Fisher, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and W.E.B. DuBois, among others, I would have regarded the Reverend Wright's comments as unremarkable. The media ginned up the controversy, as far as I'm concerned, and as far as I'm concerned, I'm constantly amazed that African Americans aren't more angry, dispirited, and incensed. I can't think of another ethnic group from which fate and history have exacted more suffering and asked more resilience and patience. That Obama was so resilient, patient, articulate, and nuanced today impressed me, even if, in my opinion, there was no controversy to begin with. No offense to the Reverend Wright, but his righteous indignation and its targets are not news, nor should they be. That they are news may mean that the U.S. is a bit more "static" than Obama's speech allowed. To me, white privilege looks as implacable and immovable as ever, but I'm willing to follow the lead of Obama's speech and think the best I can of this society. And Obama, in the words of Langston Hughes, let everyone know that he is "still here." (Hughes's "Still Here" is one of my favorite poems, incidentally.) To his credit, Obama expects more from his nation than I do; he is more optimistic than I. Good for him. Good, I hope, for us, too.

Fiction v. Poetry

I sent off sample chapters of not one but two novels I've finally completed. I'd sent a rare double-query to an agent, and the agency wants to have a look at both books, which are quite different from each other. All prayers, good thoughts, and karmic vibrations are welcome, of course.

For me, fiction is hard labor. There's just no two ways around it, as my mother used to say. Poetry is work, certainly, but I feel as if I have some control; even if a poem is turning out badly, I can recognize as much and quickly start again or revise or put the poem on hiatus. With fiction, I can write chapters and chapters, drafts and drafts, and still not know quite what I have. I'm much more comfortable with nonfiction prose--reviews, essays, textbooks, journalism, scholarship.

I've met quite a few writers whom I regard as "pure" fiction-writers; they really seem to know their way around fictional narrative writing. Many of them look at poetry and shake their heads; they don't even attempt it. One fiction-writer I know flatly says, "I don't know anything about poetry."

Quite a few poets are once-only novelists: Karl Shapiro published one novel, Edsel (great title); James Dickey published one (yes, that famous one on which they based a Burt Reynolds movie: "Aintree?! You can't get there from here, boy!"); and Richard Hugo published one--a mystery novel called Death and the Good Life (great title). I think Rita Dove has published only one novel.

At the moment, the most prolific double-genre writer that comes to mind is Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men, World Enough and Time, much poetry). I think Stephen Dobyns started as a poet and became a rather prolific mystery-writer. The fiction-machine, Joyce Carol Oates, writes plays, but I don't think she writes poetry. John Updike writes relatively light poetry. I remember reading his volume, Midpoint, about 30 years ago--or more.

I've published just one novel so far--a mystery novel that was, I found out later, a "police procedural"--because its detective is a sheriff. These other two novels have taken forever and a day to finish. Two long, strange writing-and-revision roads. Maybe they'll get published; maybe not. But it was good to get a yes to a query and fun to send them off--with the SASE, in which I expect to see them again, rejected but still my pals.

Greed Gone Wild, Lobbying Gone Looney

Maybe this is what the late 1920s felt like, financial "systems" (ha!) out of control, waves of foreclosures, no sensible planning on the part of private or governmental institutions, the never-free, loaded-dice "free market" cannibalizing itself.

What rational nation cuts taxes after hurling itself into an unnecessary five-year-plus war? Only George Herbert Hoover Bush would pull such a stunt, which enables the very rich to suck up loose cash but ruins the economy as a whole and devastates working people.

I was talking with a realtor today, who explained that after "the Fed" pumped a bunch of money into the banking system, with the idea of lowering interest-rates and getting the economy going, many makes raised interest-rates so that they would make money at both ends--from the Fed handout and from small investors (like home-buyers). Thus they stash a lot of cash, make the quarterly books look good, and raise the price of their stock. Meanwhile, the economy continues to slump, and the gap between rich and poor widens. Why wouldn't Congress (for example) regulate such behavior and instruct the banks that if they get an influx of cash for the government, the mustn't raise interest-rates? Congress/the Fed did step in to save Bear/Stearns--because they were afraid of a stock-crash. Save Bear/Stearns, but to hell with the working-class family in foreclosure. The realtor told me he has a client who can barely make house payments. He wants to negotiate a deal with the bank, but the bank won't negotiate with him unless he goes into foreclosure. It's in the bank's interest to see him fail, I guess. And the banks don't have to pay attention to Congress because banking-lobbyists own Congress.

Don't you just love the argument that lobbying, a synonym for bribery, is protected free speech? Checks, currency, and wire-transfers of money--from banking lobbyists to a congress-person's campaign, e.g.--do involve numbers and letters: texts, if you will. I will grant that technical point. But only amounts of symbolic stored energy are being expressed. No one is speaking, writing, performing, or peacefully protesting. They're just bribing.

I'm tempted to argue against lobbying and even to argue for outlawing it. I'd allow anybody to give any information they wanted to legislators. I just wouldn't allow any money to go from lobbyists and their employers to legislators. In fact, I'd require lobbyists to take a vow of poverty. Non-profit organizations would take care of their basic needs. Ideas, jokes, poems, riddles, statistics, reports, theories, draft-bills--yes to all of these. Money--no. It's not speech. It's money. Gifts--no. Favors--no. Maybe one batch of home-made cookies per year, that's it.

On second thought, however, I think I'd prefer to make lobbying not illegal but even more obviously crass and vividly bad for the common good. Like automobiles in NASCAR, legislators should have to wear patches and decals on their clothes representing every entity that's given them money. Failure to represent a lobbyist with a patch or decal would mean the legislator would have to give the money back--in a public ceremony.

And while I'm at it, let me say how disappointed I am in the Poetry Lobby. What are they doing? Why aren't they pushing the poetry-agenda more fiercely? Where are their offices, their newsletters, their think-tanks, their phony corporations, their email-alerts? I want Emily Dickinson's image to replace Jefferson's on the nickel, for instance. The Poetry Lobby could push for that. E.D. never owned slaves, and she wrote over a thousand great poems. TJ helped draft a few "founding" documents, but he's gotten enough press. He can give up the nickel.

I'd like a National Poet's Reserve. If you joined, you'd have to go to a workshop once a month and agree to be ready to be called up to active duty--for example, if the governor needed some sonnets written, or if an ailing poet needed some help with meals or errands. I'd like to see the U.S. step up poetry-exports, and I want NASA to send some poetry-satellites in orbit, so the spoken word could be broadcast around the globe more vigorously. I'd like to see the villanelle put on the Endangered Form-Poem list, and I want us to drill for poetry in Alaska. Poetry Lobby, where are you?

Deep

In a class today we talked about imagery, symbol, metaphor, and so on--the stuff of literature, but also the stuff of what we say and write, read and hear, every day. For instance, I heard someone speculate today that the Democrats will go into the November election "deeply divided." Why "deeply"? How deeply? What is the unit of measurement?

I do agree, of course, that the Democrats have an uncanny ability to find ways to lose presidential elections. This time, the Clintons seem to be in denial about the math and simply won't give up until a) many voters are embittered and unmotivated b) the current Demo money-advantage has dried up and c) the Republicans are once again positioned, essentially, to sweep the South, steal another state or two, and win. In my disinterested moments, I'm fascinated by this negative talent. The Democrats are so reliably inept. They lost to George W. Bush--twice! Yes, I know about the cheating in Florida and Ohio and the Supreme Court decision (Bush v. Gore) at which people will howl with laughter years from now. But why was the absurdist performance-artist, Bush, even close enough to win by cheating? He is a chronically failed businessman who went AWOL in military service and was addicted to cocaine. His own family, if accounts are to be believed, think he's the family loser. And the Democrats couldn't beat him! They can't even conduct basic primary elections in two of the most important states. This is disorganization that verges on the self-destructive. Maybe they were permanently infiltrated by Republicans back in the Nixon days. But "deeply" divided? I don't know.

We do seem to like these "depth" references. "Deeply" in love. "From the bottom of my heart." "He is deeply disturbed." "The depths of the soul." "Deep resentment." "Deeply wounded." Then you think, well, even full-figured people aren't really that deep. I mean the distance from any exterior point on the skin's surface to the innermost point--between spine and stomach?--isn't that far. "Depth psychology." Huh? Just drill down a few inches, and you're at the core of the brain.

Deeply convinced that the Democrats will lose deeply in the depths of Autumn, I dredged up an old "depth" poem in their honor.

In and Out of My Depths

My innermost being is a point located
somewhere between my spine and navel.
The very core of my being is a vertical line
intersecting with that point and situated
close to the bottom of my heart.

I plan to use a global-positioning satellite
to find my subconscious mind one day.
If I find it, it will become my conscious
mind, and I won’t have found it. Oh, well.

When I nap, my psyche naps with me.
In fact my psyche’s like a cat,
following me around the house. My dreams
happen inside my head—I’d say about
three inches deep, maybe less.

I can’t ask my brain why it dreams any more
than it can ask me why I sleep. The depth
of my soul—I wouldn’t know about that.
That is God’s business. I’m way
out of my depth on that one.

The rib-cage, friends, is a shallow basket,
and the skull, after all, is a shallow bowl.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

How to Read Dickinson's Poetry

I'm guest-teaching for a colleague tomorrow, discussing imagery and symbolism (in literature) with the class and analyzing, with them, Dickinson's poem 591 (which used to be 465), "I heard a fly buzz [...]. " Whenever I have doubts about my chosen main way of earning money (teaching literature and writing), I think of being able to analyze a Dickinson poem, and suddenly it all makes sense again. I have a friend who teaches Constitutional law, and he probably has at least one topic that similarly reaffirms his choice of professions.

--Not that Dickinson is easy to teach. In fact, she's unnecessarily hard to teach, chiefly because of the baggage the culture, the critics, the anthologies, and some other teachers have heaped on her poetry and our image of her. To use an old-fashioned phrase, people get "hung up" on all sorts of nonsense that simply isn't there, in the poetry. Often, when I go into a classroom, I'm facing all the things Dickinson isn't, the preconceived notions, so I try to get around those.

So my "rules" for reading Dickinson's work are as follows:

1. Her poems are to some degree like crossword puzzles or soduku. There is always a solution to the confusion. There is, in fact, never any (lasting) confusion.

2. To the extent her poetry is mystical, philosophical, or spiritual, it is so grudgingly; that is, her work is always firmly attached to the earth, sometimes directly to earthy imagery. One key, then, is to find what that more concrete thing is to which the spirituality (assuming the spirituality really is there) is tethered. Or: Always prefer the simpler explanation to the "confusion." And: Never leap to the spirituality or "mysticism." Because she's never in a hurry to get there, and she never stays there long.

3. Take out the dashes. Put in your own punctuation. Get comfortable with the poem. Take out your punctuation. Put the dashes back in. Or: don't make a big deal of the dashes. She didn't punctuate because she didn't publish. All the pauses, etc., were in her head. The dashes are a combination of universal place-holders and a writing-quirk. She wasn't trying to be difficult. She just didn't imagine the poems would go to print. Same thing goes for the capitalization. Just a quirky habit. Ignore it.

4. She never makes mistakes. She just makes quick moves. (See #1--there is no confusion.)

5. If she hadn't been a poet, she would have been a scientist. She observes everything very carefully. She's an empiricist. (See # 2.) (Just look at her descriptions of bees, snakes, and birds.)

When, for example, in 591, she writes, "And then the Windows failed," she means the windows of the house failed to work because she (the speaker of the poem) died. Or: dead people don't see through windows, even if, in literature, they're still allowed to speak poems. Emily will go only so far with poetic license. She won't go so far as to suggest dead people can see through windows. She's practical. When, at the end of the poem, she writes, "I could not see to see," she means that, owing to death, her brain has ceased to function, she is no longer processing sensory data, and therefore does not have the capacity ("could not see") to see.

Dickinson remains the smartest, drollest, most original, and yet still most earthy poet I know. It's hard to think of one important thing the Modernists did, for example, that she didn't anticipate. Things you find in Pound, Williams, Auden, Yeats, Lawrence, Cullen, Moore, cummings, Eliot, Woolf--they're there in her work. The outlook is Modern. It is feminist. It is anti-establishment. It is anxious (in the sense Auden meant the term). It is imagistic (Williams, Pound). It is new. "No ideas but in things" (Williams). The phrasing and especially the rhyming and improvisation with meter are Modern. She's still hip. Known as a recluse, she lived in the world--the tactile, stinky, pungent, messy world of the house, the garden, and the woods. When the "I" dies in 591, "the King" is witnessed (no confusion there--but plenty of room for debate), but note that he is preceded and followed by this: a common housefly, which is blue--meaning a "blue-bottle fly," meaning a fly the color of glass left in the sun for a long time (see number 2 above).

I like Housman almost as much as Dickinson, but his range is much more limited. There's more true joy in her work than his. I like her rich simplicity as much as I like that of Langston Hughes's, but she is even quicker, less predictable, and a little more tricky. L. and E. share a great sense of whimsy--but usually with an edge; they're not just playful. Williams's imagery is often as vivid, but her point of view is more original. You never know what Yeats or Pound might drag in (like a cat) to a poem, but she can be just as surprising. Eliot has gravitas, gotta give him that, but pound for pound (ezra for ezra), her poems can go 15 rounds with his. In her own way, she's as sexy and exuberant as Neruda (with adjustments made for lingering Puritanism), as defiant as Jeffers.

Eliot and Pound threw more allusions by volume into their poems, but she is as allusive--just more efficient, and less insecure. They seem to need to show off. She doesn't.

She's not "the Belle of Amherst." She was just one hell of a hardworking, focused, precise poet. --With the gift of, not so much talent (though she sure had that), but of believing, unwaveringly, in her talent. She justs didn't know (cf. "see to see"); she knew she knew--how to write.

Sonnet With A Low Battery

Having written a sonnet that rhymes on its left, as opposed to its right, side, and an extremely narrow sonnet, I will now continue my assault on the form by writing a diminishing sonnet, a fading lyric that starts out robustly in the usual iambic pentameter but withers to monosyllabic lines. At the same time, I attempt to adhere to the 14-line limit and to follow the Shakespearian or English rhyme-scheme, based on quatrains and a couplet.

Diminishing Sonnet

I have this sonnet, and its battery
Is running down. The sonnet's theme,
I think, is flattery.
--Not, it would seem,
The best
Thing.
Psst:
Sing!
Of
What?
Love,
nut.
Oh,
no.

There we have it, an entropic sonnet that goes from iambic pentameter to mono-meter in 14 lines, includes an internal dialogue, and rhymes best with Psst. I think of it as an old wind-up sonnet that came along before sonnets could run on long-lived batteries.

I'm considering the possibilities of a square sonnet, not "square" as in the way the Beatniks used the term (although maybe that, too), but geometrically square. This could be achieved simply by playing with spacing, of course, but maybe I'll go for a more figuratively square sonnet and write 14 lines with 14 words in each line. I could also throw in an acrostic or two--top to bottom and/or diagonal. This is starting to sound not simply like lyric madness but Shakespearian soduku. Somehow, I think John Donne would have approved.

I Think of Russell Baker

As I'm attempting to recuperate from the flu, which seems to bear no relation to the "flu vaccine" I was given earlier in the year (I do wonder if they injected me with sugar-water), I've been inflicting cable-news on myself. So I watched the Spitzer-debacle unfold yesterday. Of course, the cable-outlets covered almost nothing but the scandal; meanwhile, the U.S. president had just vetoed a bill that would have banned water-boarding because water-boarding is, irrefutably, torture. Nor did the president argue that water-boarding is not torture. Instead, he chose to make the one argument that is easily disproved. He implied that "it works," whereas everyone who seems to know anything about interrogation claims that torture "doesn't work" in the sense Bush understands (?) the terminology.

So the governor of what envisages itself to be our most important state pays several thousands of dollars for sex and drags his wife to the ensuing press-conference, and a president once supported by "the Christian right" takes the side of Pontius Pilate and vetoes an anti-torture bill. It all made me think of the title of a book by Russell Baker--a book of humor, meant to salve minds as they attempt to confront absurdity. It's called So This Is Depravity.

It could be--and has been--worse. In Mississippi, where there's a primary election today, it could be 1958 instead of 2008. Sometimes thinking about African American history (for example) provides some perspective.

Nonetheless: Why is Bush president? Why are Rove and Libby not serving time for outing spies? Why is Guantanamo not closed? Why is it legal for Bush to practice torture? Why was it legal for Bush to invade Iraq? By what laws, if any, are Bush, Cheney, and Blackwater bound?

The Milky Way

I almost never read scientific articles unless I'm in a waiting room. That's a pretty desultory way of keeping up on stuff scientists are up to, but probably even they can't keep up. Recently I read an article about the Milky Way and the fact that it, too, would go the way of the dinosaurs at some point and disintegrate. It's not like this is going to happen next week, but nonetheless, the news made me a little sad.

According to the OED online, one of the earliest references to the Milky Way was Chaucer's, and Milton & Pope also referred to it in their poetry:

a. The irregular, faintly luminous band that circles the night sky, now recognized as composed of billions of stars and corresponding to the main disc of our galaxy, in which are located most of its stars, including the sun; =

GALAXY n. 1a.

c1450 (c1380) CHAUCER House of Fame 937 Se yonder, loo, the Galaxie, Which men clepeth the Milky Wey. 1556 R. RECORD Castle of Knowl. 105 The Milkye way in heauen, whiche many men in England do call Watlyng streete. 1615 H. CROOKE 455 As we thinke the via lactea or Milky Way in heauen is occasioned by an infinite number of small starres. 1667 MILTON Paradise Lost VII. 579 The Galaxie, that Milkie way Which nightly as a circling Zone thou seest Pouderd with Starrs. 1733 POPE Ess. Man I. 104 Far as the Solar walk, or Milky way.

I guess I see how someone might regard that luminous band of stars as a "way," but I probably wouldn't have described it in that manner. I don't have any bright, so to speak, ideas about what to replace "way" with, but the word just doesn't seem quite grand enough for that stellar spectacle.

To some degree, the phrase "billions of stars" means something to me. I understand it. But to a large extent, it's meaningless because I can't picture the immensity of that immensity--multiple billions of things that are like the sun.

Anyway, I wrote a poem about the impending demise of the Milky Way:

The Matter of the Milky Way


In a magazine
on astronomy
I read today that
the Milky Way
will also disintegrate.

Juxtaposed against
such change,
my experiences,
memories, and ambitions
are telescopically
less than microscopic.

Yet my life feels important
to me. --Habit,
I suppose. A person
goes on even as
it’s clear a powerful
case can be made
for the idea that nothing,
not even matter, matters.

But I’m not going to make
that case because I
have to go to work tomorrow,
and you never know—
I might have a few laughs,
feel the spirit.

I’ll see people I like
and one gray cat. I'll
view this bankless river they call
the Internet, which
must be observed with interest
in some parts of the Milky Way.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom