What Is the Cruelest Month?

English professors still love to quote The Waste Land, "April is the cruelest month," especially professors who teach on a semester-system that ends in early-to-mid-May. Another year of academia is ending, another semester is ending, acute senioritis has set in (and the rest of the students are antsy, too), and just when everyone on campus thinks her or she can't do one more thing, five more things get scheduled. So if you hear an English professor mutter this phrase, he or she is doing so not merely to sound pretentious.

In the upside-down world of The Waste Land, regeneration can be a bad thing, so that's one reason one voice in the poem asserts that April is the cruelest. In other parts of the poem, voices express yearning for regeneration that refuses to arrive.

But what, in fact, is the cruelest month?

When I was in grammar school, I probably felt as if November was the cruelest month because the days were dark and cold in the Sierra Nevada, playing outside was a brutal affair, and the 12-mile (one-way) bus-ride to school seemed awfully dreary.

When I was in late grammar-school, September was the cruelest month because summer was still pretty much one long holiday, and I could only just bear the thought of going back to school.

I rather enjoyed most of high school--the academic part was okay, I played sports, I had some good friends, and what wasn't to like about the young women? Also, I'd begun to work full time during the summer as a laborer, first at a gravel-plant, then as a carpenter's helper/hod-carrier, so June became the cruelest month; gone were the sunny afternoons after class when I could just hang out with friends when classes were done. (I gave up baseball after my sophomore year, so after basketball season was done, I didn't have a practice to go to.)

Once I got to college, I don't think any one month was the cruelest. I seem to remember liking the summer-work as a laborer (I'd become more skilled, and I liked making that cash), and after I turned 21, I could work 8 hours during the day and either go fly-fishing in the evening or go to one or both bars in town, and I do remember feeling some dread in early September, knowing I'd have to head back to college, hit the books in a Ph.D. program (which did not seem to be pointing directly at employment; almost every job advertised by the MLA, anywhere in the country, drew 200+ applications), and teach one freshmen-writing class per quarter. I knew I didn't want to be a laborer the rest of my life (labor is a young person's game), but it was hard to beat working outside in the Sierra Nevada, living near trout-streams, and being able to drink in funky rural bars).

Now, I think November is back at number one on the Cruel chart. Gloom descends on the Pacific Northwest, and rain settles in. In our first year in the Pacific Northwest, it rained every day that November (we know because we counted), and it seemed to get dark at 2:00 p.m. Also, the flu virus for which we are unsuccessfully vaccinated each year (they must just shoot sugar-water in our veins) seems to get busy in November.

Pacific Northwesterners tend to loathe June because it can behave very badly and be cloudy and cold--at a time when everyone feels entitled to summer. July, August, September, and even a big hunk of October can he heavenly up here, however.

I think any time you're out of work makes for a bad month. I tend not to say "April is the cruelest month" because I feel lucky to have a good job, especially when the price of gasoline (a price that must devastate most working folk) and food are rising so fast.

I've never been a big fan of March, and I don't ever remember disliking January. "March," I think, is a dumb name for a month, whereas "January" sounds pretty good. Sure, it's cold in January, in the Northern hemisphere, in most places, but at the same time, January never lied to anyone and said, "I promise to be warm and sunny." January just goes about its business, which is to be cold and icy but to start lengthening the days. Back in the day, I remember wanting the professional golfer Don January to win a tournament because I thought his name was cool.

May the month of May treat you well.

Poemhunter's Top 25

Poemhunter is an online site featuring the poems of venerable poets as well as those of anyone who wants to post his or her poems on there. It's a great place to visit--a vast arena of poetry that all sorts of people visit. Of course, as a pedantic scholar, I must caution that the versions of poems you find there may not be accurate, so if you want to insure that you have the more or less correct edition of a poem, you need to go to "the standard edition." Apparently, the top 25 poets--based on how often the poet's "page" and his or her individual poems are "hit" or clicked on--are as follows:

1. Langston Hughes
2. Pablo Neruda
3. Maya Angelou
4. Shel Silverstein
5. William Shakespeare
6. Joe Fazio
7. Robert Frost
8. Charles Bukowski
9. Emily Dickinson
10.Edgar Allan Poe
11.Sylvia Plath
12.Walt Whitman
13.Jack Prelutsky
14.Gwendolyn Brooks
15.Dylan Thomas
16.William Blake
17.Elizabeth Bishop
18.ee cummings
19.Allen Ginsberg
20.Roald Dahl
21.Ogden Nash
22.Billy Collins
23.Dorothy Parker
24.Ted Hughes
25.Philip Larkin

How about that? Langston Hughes, #1. That's all right by me. He never pretended to be the poet of the people, but he also never tried not to be a poet of the people. I expected Neruda, Frost, Shakespeare, and Angelou to be up there. Silverstein isn't a complete surprise. I don't know the work of Joe Fazio, so I'd best look into that. Same goes for the work of Jack Prelutsky. Roald Dahl is a surprise, only because I think of him as a prose writer. Nash and Parker are a bit of a surprise, only because I might have assumed their work was getting dated, but I guess amusing light verse does and should have staying power. I love the eclectic mix of poets in the top 25; probably the list tells us, among other things, that it would be difficult to define the "demographic" of those who visit the site. I've posted some poems on there, and far and away the poem that gets the most hits is the one on Langston Hughes. This surprised me because most people who aren't poets or academics don't like poems on poets, but then I realized that because Hughes is the number one poet on the site, my poem was likely to get some echo-traffic from his site. Poemhunter may be the biggest "anthology" of poetry in history. It seems to have some ancillary sites--such as Poemsabout, a site that seems to link directly to Poemhunter but that has its own domain. I wish I knew more about sites that are kind of pilot-fish for larger sites. Wikipedia, for example, seems to be followed by lots of pilot-sites these days.

Anyway, go post a poem on poemhunter, or look up that favorite poet of yours, or search by topic. I rather like the warehouse, wholesale feel of the site.

When Poetry Dies

Poetry dies at sea in sight
of Guantanamo's prison.
Poetry dies in taxes
that pay for the horror
in Guantanamo's prison,
in Bagram's prison.
Poetry dies in the waiting
for the waking nightmare
of an evil regime to end,
in the waiting for sawdust-
speeches to end and for
language, for law, to begin again.
Poetry dies as it looks up
to see tax-forms dropped
like leaflets on the grounds
of Guantanamo's prison,
of Bagram's prison.
Poetry dies a dry death
at sea, dies when morality
disintegrates more thoroughly
than depleted uranium
inhaled by Iraqi children.
Poetry dies while we're
watching the news. Poetry
dies when we know
Guantanamo's prison is ours/
Bagram's prison is ours/
/our responsibility/our money/
our Federal Bureau of
Investigation/whose agents
went to Guantanamo and saw
what they knew to be wrong/
and came back/and said
nothing/ and what's
wrong goes on, and on past the sea's
horizon, goes on all day, all
night at Guantanamo, at
Bagram. Poetry dies when
our president/our congress/
ourselves observe due process
replaced by indefinite
imprisonment and torture,
by rendering, by euphemism.
Poetry dies as it pleases, and
as it stands by. Guantanamo's
prison says please stand by
for these messages, which
will be right back to distract
you, pay no attention to the
president who stands behind
the podium and torture. Poetry
dies when we stand in wet sand
by the sea in sight of what is wrong
and cannot move, and can do nothing,
and cannot stop horror done.
Prisoners die in Guananamo's
and Bagram's prisons. Minds and
consciences die there as well.
Poetry dies in paralysis of complicity.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

http://www.democracynow.org/2006/2/27/worse_
than_guantanamo_u_s_expands

Bad Supreme Analogy

From an article in April 23rd's USA Today (p. 4A), by Joan Biskupic ("Justices Split Over Campaign Financing"), I learned that Justices Scalia, Kennedy, and Alito "were the most critical of the provision" that limits what House-of-Representatives candidates may contribute to their campaigns from their personal piles of money. Apparently the provision is about to kick in--unless the Supremes kick it out.

I have a friend and colleague whose chief research- and teaching-field is Constitutional law, but I see no reason to consult him or anyone else before offering my own analysis and thereby exposing how little I know on the subject. That would be too easy. I find it's better to blog first and seek information later. Call it lazy, call it crazy, call it ill-advised, or call it post-modern--it's still the bad way I intend to proceed today.

According to Biskupic, "Scalia derided the idea that government should level the field in any way: 'What if one candidate is more eloquent than the other one? You make him talk with pebbles in his mouth or what?'"

Ah, the speech of scholars. I feel safer with such minds sitting on the Court, or with such a Court sitting on its minds.

Scalia's analogy is between money spent to buy television-advertisements, the main weapon in modern political campaigns, and pebbles in "his" (a candidate's) mouth. I enjoy Scalia's assumption that the candidate will be male.

I hope the lawyer he was deriding asked Scalia, "But what if the more eloquent candidate is out-spent by the less eloquent but vastly more wealthy candidate to such a degree that she or he cannot get the eloquent message out to citizens?" In other words, I believe Scalia's analogy is faulty in its comparison of something that might personally stifle a candidate (pebbles in the mouth) and the one external, impersonal thing that buys candidates' access to a crucial mass medium (television): money.

"Leveling the field," to use the worn analogy that appears in the article, would indeed insure that such capacities as eloquence, intelligence, and experience are visible to interested citizens, with regard to all candidates. Moreover, if one candidate is able grossly to out-spend the other, then the outspending has become the equivalent of pebbles in the other candidate's mouth. For example, if I were a candidate and were able to buy 100 TV ads to my opponent's 1, then in what sense would my personal pile of money not be a silencing, "chilling," or pebbling factor in the campaign?

Social Darwinists might argue that if candidate A earned his or her pile of money fair and square, then he or she was obviously and naturally selected in this "free-market" economy and deserves the fruits of such social adaptation. This argument places the money-making "trait" at the top of a list of priorities. But should it be at the top of a list of priorities for someone running for Congress? Also, what if the money is merely inherited? From a social-Darwinian perpsective, the person with the money that he or she did not earn is being "privileged," then, not because of personal strength or adaptability but solely because of the luck of the draw. If most Congressional races were between candidates with inherited wealth, would that be a good thing? I suspect some Republicans and Democrats would argue, "Yes." I think some members of both parties favor an oligarchic form of government.

But what do I know? I have pebbles in my blog.

Want to Write a Ten-Line Poem for Tuesday?

Following is a "prompt" for a ten-line poem. Of course, such prompts in and of themselves still strike many writers and readers as counterintuitive if not absurd or insulting, a prevailing assumption being that poems spring from poets naturally and need not and cannot be elicited by anything as formulaic as a prompt--an assignment. I

In The Triggering Town, however, Richard Hugo--arguably as intuitive a poet as there ever was--praised assignments given to him and others by their teacher, Theodore Roethke. Hugo describes one such assignment in the book, and the assignment is brutal in its requirements. Hugo maintains that as one part of the mind focuses on the artificial limits of the assignment, another part goes in unpredictable but productive directions, and you come up with material you probably would not have discovered otherwise. Of course, all prompts and assignments come with a codicil or two: one always has the right to rewrite the draft so drastically that traces of the prompt may disappear altogether; one has the right to take just one line, image, or idea from the draft and go off in a completely different direction; and so on. So this really isn't like paint-by-numbers because you can paint over the canvas as much and as often as you like.

In fashioning the prompt, I borrowed some other notions from the Triggering Town, including Hugo's suggestion that poets should let themselves be led on--to the next word or the next line, for instance--more because of sound or arbitrary decisions than because of a more linear or single-minded desire to pursue a message, as one does, for example, in an essay. Also, Hugo disliked "connective" or "transition" words such as "but," "however," and "although." He also suggests that if a poet asks a question in a poem, he or she should not then answer the question; otherwise, he argues, the question wasn't worth asking (from a poetic point of view). I'm just paraphrasing what he wrote, so don't kill the messenger.

If indeed you're tempted to be prompted, take pleasure in the writing, and probably everything will work out just fine. And we're making a poem here--a first draft, at that--not performing emergency heart-surgery. So there's that. You'll notice that the topic and "sense" of the poem are left entirely up to you. The prompt:

A ten-line, free-verse poem. Start by writing a first line. Then follow steps 1 through 11.

1. Rewrite the first line, rearranging the syntax:

Example:

The blue lake still resembles slate.
The still lake is slated to resemble blue.

2. Write a second line in which, at some point, you repeat a sound from the first.

3. If the second line did not end in a one-syllable word, make sure, now, that it does.

4. Phrase line three has a question.

5. In line five, do NOT answer the question in line four but do include a word that includes the letter “u," and make doubly sure this line contains an image.

6. Line six should be either a very short line or a very long line—in relation to previous lines.

7. Take a break and review lines one through six. Cross out any connecting words like and, but, while, although, so, or then.

8. Line 7 should include words of one syllable each. You are allowed one exception.

9. To start line 8, write a last word of that line. Now finish line 8 by working backwards, moving to the next-to-last word, and so on, until you write the first word of the line.

10. In line 9, write anything you like but make the sound and rhythm similar to those in line 8.

11. Do whatever you want in line 10.

Poem from the Friday Challenge

A colleague and poet took up Friday's challenge, which was as follows:

I selected one word each from the [love] poems [selected by students from the Norton anthology] and invited the students to try to write a poem that successfully incorporated all the words. Here is the list, in case you'd like to accept the challenge, too: ask, eye, felicity, medicine, neutral, spoken, bread, satisfaction, cloud, absence, murmur, difficult, beauty, we, hold, live, delight, cold, compare, and sunlight.

She wrote the following fine poem (which works very well as a whole piece but which, in my opinion, also has two especially splendid lines--the second and the next-to-last):


Poets Asking Metaphors



We ask:
What’s felicity to the eye, and what’s medicine?
And, what is neutral?
Does spoken bread yield satisfaction?
And, does absence murmur?
And, is beauty too difficult?
We hold, we live, we delight in this cold.
We compare this cold with sunlight.



by Tamiko Nimura Copyright 2008 Tamiko Nimura

Love Poems and a Friday-Challenge

The students in a class I'm teaching chose one love poem each to discuss, and I left the definition of "love poem" up to them. They selected the poems from The Norton Anthology of Poetry, which now seems to weigh about 30 pounds.

Their choices, in no particular order:

"To My Excellent Lucasia, on Our Friendship," by Katherine Philips
"Love's Growth," by John Donne
"Talking in Bed," by Philip Larkin
"Unfortunate Coincidence," by Dorothy Parker
"The Ghost in the Martini," by Anthony Hecht
"Separation," by W.S. Merwin
"The Passionate Shepherd," by Christopher Marlowe
"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," by William Wordsworth
"One Flesh," by Elizabeth Jennings
"The Canonization," by John Donne
"When We Two Parted," by Lord Byron
"Whe You Are Old," by W.B. Yeats
"After Making Love," by Galway Kinnell
"Lullaby," by W.H. Auden
"Litany," by Billy Collins
"Sonnet 18," by William Shakespeare

I selected one word each from the poems and invited the students to try to write a poem that successfully incorporated all the words. Here is the list, in case you'd like to accept the challenge, too:

ask, eye, felicity, medicine, neutral, spoken, bread, satisfaction, cloud, absence, murmur, difficult, beauty, we, hold, live, delight, cold, compare, and sunlight

Revise, Revise

Yesterday in the poetry class, we worked on revisions. Sometimes I use "guided revision," whereby I have students choose from a menu of different options for revising. So we did that kind of thing with one poem, then simply had one other reader suggest how to revise another poem, and finally did some quick work on revising titles.

My suggestions for revising titles included the following: make a short title long, or make a long one short; look at the last line of one or both poems and see if a title is lurking there (perhaps with slight adjustments); write a title that is a complete sentence, such as "Maggie Ate My Shoe"; write an "ing" title, such as "Picking Gooseberries" or "Walking to Work in the Snow"; write an old-fashioned title that tells what the topic of the poem is, preceded by Of, Concerning, or About--examples include "Of Renting," "Concerning My Disloyal Friend," or "About Looking for Work"; write an intentionally alluring or figuratively seductive title, such as "Edgar Allan Poe's Secret Lover" or "Why I Have a Third Ear." A student prudently asked, "What if the poem isn't about that?" I said, "That might be a problem, but let's just take it one step at a time."

I often write and/or revise along with students, partly to get across the idea that writing and revising are work for everyone; that "the teacher" isn't somehow above the fray. Also, it helps me see how I might improve a task or "lesson" or activity I've invented. So I revised a poem I'd had sitting in a notebook for a long time, and I found a new title for it by using the last-line suggestion mentioned above.

I Know and Don't Know

In March dirt sticks to itself like tar:
I thought this as I dug in a garden plot.
Then I looked up, noted pink cherry-blossoms,
looked further up--and there was March's
boring disorganization of clouds. Then, back
to digging, I went further into mind
to imagine my years, traceable to California,
where my father had found comfort in digging
with pick and shovel because (I surmise)
it's different from talk, reduces the equation
to you versus planet, is difficult, necessary,
and absurd. Digging holes or ditches is
for a Sisyphus who doesn't like to move
from one spot. Returned from mind to garden
plot, I looked up and saw a black
cat watching me dig as I dug. Then a bird
in a beech tree made a sound in its throat
like a stick hitting a hollow wooden block.
Stuck together, this digging, seeing, hearing, recalling,
surmising, and thinking annoyed me, as March,
in fact, irritates a lot of people I know and don't know.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

ABC = All But Comatose

Well, I tried. I watched the Democratic debate, hosted by ABC News, for 50 minutes. Then I couldn't take it anymore. The pressing issues of the day, according to George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson, were the following:

1. What Obama meant by "bitter."
2. What actually happened when H. Clinton landed in Bosnia once.
3. The matter of wearing a flag-pin on one's lapel.
4. The (retired) pastor of Obama's church.

Why not ask about the exact blend of rayon and cotton in Obama's socks or the precise shade of Clinton's makeup? Why not really drill down into the big issues?

Why is George Stephanopoulos even in a position to be asking questions? He was a hack in the Clinton White House whom Bill Clinton and James Carville mocked. Why is the unctuous, pompous Charles Gibson in a position to be asking questions? He's like the stuffed-shirt straight man in a Marx Brothers movie. As Butch said to Sundance, "Who are these guys?"

Two wars, economic collapse, environmental collapse, the largest prison population in the industrial world, a chasm between rich and poor, no solution to the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, a Vice President who wants to be a dictator and who got liquored up and shot his friend in the face, a circus clown as president, a Congress that seems to be on a permanent morphine-drip, a Supreme Court that looks like the Spanish Inquisition, a concentration camp in Guantanamo, a Justice Department that argued in favor of torture up to the brink of organ failure, the use of ethanol helping to worsen famine worldwide (feed cars, not people), the proliferation of nuclear weapons, and so on--and what do Fatuous Gibson and George Boretheshitoutofus ask about?:

Flag pins, the Bosnian tarmac 15 years ago, a retired pastor, and the word "bitter." I'm now convinced that all journalists except Helen Thomas have been taken over by the pod-people of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and are incapable of asking pertinent questions.

I ask of American journalism what I believe Casey Stengel once asked of his hapless New York Mets, as he watched them flinging themselves around the diamond like characters from Monty Pythons's sketch, "Twit of the Year": Can anybody play this game?

Of course, because HC is behind, she was only too happy to play the pin-the-flag-on-the-pastor's-tarmac game of trivia, but at least Obama had the decency to look nauseous and to ask, implicitly, "Who cares about this shit? People are out of jobs and homes." Not that Obama is some kind of hero. It's just that his brain seems still to work, so of course he was perplexed (as any normal person would be) by George and Charlie.

Is All But Comatose still owned by Disney? Are any television-journalists required to study journalism anymore?

Poem By Katie Cugno

Here is a poem by Katie Cugno (that's Ms. Cugno to some), who kindly gave me permission to reprint it from her blog; the sounds and imagery of the poem are splendid:

The Shingle Life

by Katie Cugno

Sneakily surveying the scene
rain spatters and bursts
at the seams
shattering through dreams
of the asleep

streams charge,
change jingling onto shaking shingles
after jumping (joyous) from the sky
anxious to rouse a ruckus
on the roof
jitterbugging into tin and wee hours,
co-mingling caution with wind

Success: the innards of this monster have been rattled--
roused as well as ruckus--
rest abating,
guts awakened and waiting
for the storm to stop
or the roof blow off

brave shingles grow afraid as well
shuddering and fluttering they
stutter and mumble to one another

will we make it, this time?

will wind subside before
we lose...our lives?


As hopefulness sways,
and faith like rest abates
a shingle is broken and bounces away


the others dismay
for a moment
but then notice
their own attachment still
to the roof.


Always to the roof.

Through the howling scowling wind and rain,

The ones who remain remain attached,
and afraid...


and some stationarily stuck
shivering shingles
stop and think wait,
to where could that wind rip a shingle away?

to certain sudden death...
or freedom, by a bay?
Free from constraints,
Far from battery by beating rain...


And the next little shingle that flittered away
lifted its own single self from its space
and fluttered--
not stumbled or violently tumbled--
off to freedom
from sleet, snow, most wind...

and rain.

To live a cozy little life on a bay.

Copyright 2008 by Katie Cugno

He Heard Dead People

The kid in The Sixth Sense sees dead people, and unfortunately, I guessed what the hinge of that movie was way too early, so it got a bit tedious for me. But it was an interesting film. I think the director, M. Night, started to imitate himself, and things haven't gone so well since then. I wasn't even tempted to see the one about the woman in the swimming pool. I saw clips of it on TV, and I just thought, "Drain the pool; that ought to do it."

Edgar Lee Masters heard dead people, at least when he sat down (or stood up) to write A Spoon River Anthology (1916), still a great achievement--and perhaps an overlooked one now--in American poetry. The premise is simple: dead people from a small town finally have their say; they speak interior monologues through Masters' poetry. The poems resonate for me because they're so tough, taciturn, and down to earth, and because they do remind me of people I knew in a small town. However, I don't think you have to be from a small town to enjoy Masters' poems. Here's one called "'Indignation' Jones." That has to be one of the great nicknames--Indignation. It could apply to all of us at one time or another.

"Indignation" Jones

YOU would not believe, would you,
That I came from good Welsh stock?
That I was purer blooded than the white trash here?
And of more direct lineage than the New Englanders
And Virginians of Spoon River?
You would not believe that I had been to school
And read some books.
You saw me only as a run-down man,
With matted hair and beard
And ragged clothes.
Sometimes a man’s life turns into a cancer
From being bruised and continually bruised,
And swells into a purplish mass,
Like growths on stalks of corn.
Here was I, a carpenter, mired in a bog of life
Into which I walked, thinking it was a meadow,
With a slattern for a wife, and poor Minerva, my daughter,
Whom you tormented and drove to death.
So I crept, crept, like a snail through the days
Of my life.
No more you hear my footsteps in the morning,
Resounding on the hollow sidewalk,
Going to the grocery store for a little corn meal
And a nickel’s worth of bacon.

I love the false pride of Indignation Jones, even in death. He thinks his coming from "Welsh stock" is something special. The part about having been to school and having read some books is poignant--painfully insufficient evidence for the assertion he's trying to prove. Masters' sense of what somebody like this might say is spot-on.

The poem makes me think of two men I saw this past Saturday. Before I went to Mass, I stopped to pick up some groceries, and a ragged, gaunt, bearded man was crouched behind a wall near the store. He whispered, "You wouldn't have some change . . . ?" At first I didn't know where the voice was coming from, but finally I located it. I went over and pulled a bill out of my wallet, and the fascinating thing is that he knew it was a five-dollar bill even before I did. "You're giving me a five?!" he said, incredulously. "Yes, sir," I said. I gave it to him, and he said, "God bless you." As I returned to my car, I glanced at a woman who was near her car; she had apparently observed the wee scene, and she had a bemused smile on her face. I don't think she disapproved of my giving the guy money, but I'm not sure she entirely approved either.

Then I went to church, and as I walked toward the entrance, I saw another homeless man who'd wedged himself into a nook of the church's exterior and was having a nap. He didn't wake up. He was gone when I came out. It's not uncommon to see homeless persons around our parish because there is a big food bank connected to the parish, and their is a "hospitality kitchen" that serves a meal a day. Also, economically strapped people can get free bus-passes from the parish.

Indignation Jones wasn't homeless, apparently, but he was dismissed in his town, and in his posthumous monologue, he tries to explain that he was somebody. Of course, everybody is somebody, but when someone crosses a line--into being a recluse, a pariah, or a homeless person--they officially become nobody. They have to crouch and whisper. They feel as if they have to creep, "like a snail": what a great simile.

When I see people like the ones I saw Saturday, or when I think of Indignation Jones, I think about what might have happened to keep them from crossing that social line, and I think about what might happen to bring them back across. I know the answers aren't simple. But at one point, presumably, these people were relatively content, functioning people, more or less accepted by society. One wants to hit "rewind" and go back to some mythical crucial moment when it all changed, and change that moment. It's a sentimental desire, I realize. So we write poems out of empathy, or give five bucks, or work on "the homeless problem." Or we ignore "the snail" entirely.

In poems, sometimes the best details are the oblique ones, and I love how this poem ends with the corn meal and the nickel's worth of bacon. Perfect. These details make me think of all the obscure, strange, reclusive "old timers" I saw in my hometown. One was an old miner, Bill Nichols, who seemed to wear the same pair of bluejeans and the same flannel shirt year-round, and never to take a bath. He lived in a shack outside of town. We used to take a bus 12 miles to another town to school, and every once in a while, Bill would flag down the bus and hitch a ride. Often he was wearing a holster with his six-gun: I'm not lying. Bill was from a claim-jumping era when you had to pack heat. Bill wore a gun on his hip, the way some older women wore a feather in their hats. Nowadays, I think, a bus driver would a) not stop for a hitch-hiker an b) even if he or she were tempted to stop, would probably look at the gun and think, "Maybe not today."

Murder-Mystery Poem

In a course on the Harlem Renaissance, we finished Rudolph Fisher's detective novel, The Conjure-Man Dies, not long ago. It's a well plotted novel immersed in Harlem society of the 1930s, and it also plays some inventive riffs on detective-novel conventions. Fisher tries to get it all in there: amateur-genius detective, police-detective, gothic elements, a locked room of sorts, the gathering of suspects, a whiff of the supernatural, science and forensics, and so on. Fisher, a physcian and experimenter with X-Rays, unfortunately died in his 30s; otherwise we might have a series of detective novels from him, but it's nice at least to have this one. On my own, I've been reading some detective novels by Michael Innes, Agatha Christie, and Chester Himes, too. Himes's crime novels are set in Harlem, too, but their grittier and more hard-boiled than Fisher's book.



A great afficianado of detective fiction, W.H. Auden wrote a kind of tribute-poem for the genre. Auden very much favored the "village cozy" subgenre of the form, and in an essay, he developed a rationale for his preference, asserting that the setting of the murder should be Edenic. Here's a link to his detective-story poem:



http://www.uwo.ca/english/canadianpoetry/cpjrn/vol32/diemert.htm



I decided to write a murder-mystery poem, too:



Murder-Mystery Poem


Among fictional live bodies lies a fictionally dead one,
made so not by itself but by one or more bodies who
had minds, means, and opportunity
to kill. Identification ensues. Who is dead, who
killed, who will mislead, confess, and reveal? Enter


empiricism, wearing a thick coat and having a look
around with those unmistakable Aristotelian
eyes. The empiricist is foe of secrecy, friend
of plodders who trod paths of data, and assistant
to the plot. In death, on ice, a body in this fiction
forms information incarnate. It is cause


for apprehensiveness and apprehension,
justice and correction. Ah, there in a meadow
of likelihood stands a murderer, defined
by spores of imperfection and pride, caught
by humble fact, a residue of act. Under
arrest, a fictional transgressor is held, as I,


satisfied, hold the soft paperback book in my hands.


(Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom)


The last line alludes to one of the main reasons I like detective novels: I love the feel of those pulpy paperbacks in my hands. I've been reading them for several decades, after all, and the physical aspect of a book contributes a lot to the experience--if, that is, you're a bibliophile. If you haven't read an Innes book yet, you might try From London Far, and even if you're not a detective-fiction fan, you'll probalby enjoy The Conjure Man Dies.

If you're a poet and haven't done so yet, you ought to write a poem about a kind of reading you like to do, or a memory of reading, or a genre. Or an homage to a favorite writer. The homage need not be full of unalloyed praise; it might express ambivalence, or even a kind of love-hate attitude toward the writer and/or her/his works.

Dickinson and Hope

Having promised solemnly, as opposed to effervescently, yesterday to write something more hopeful today, I must immediately call in reinforcements in the form of Emily Dickinson's poem #254 (according to one counting-scheme):

"HOPE" is the thing with feathers--
That perches in the soul--
And sings the tune without the words--
And never stops--at all—

And sweetest--in the Gale--is heard--
And sore must be the storm--
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chillest land--
And on the strangest Sea--
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb--Of Me.

It's almost always unwise to paraphrase a Dickinson poem, so I won't, but I will say that the poem makes me consider whether hope is given to most people, as part of the hardware and software package, at birth. The speaker in this poem reports having heard hope "in Extremity" --in extreme situations--but, returning to the equation of hope to bird, reports that even in such moments, when hope is arguably as important as it ever is, it doesn't ask anything in return; were it a bird, it wouldn't even ask for a crumb.

What hope has to offer to us as so many apparently intractable problems face us: well, there's the usual--things could be worse. Also, people seem at least ready to acknowledge there's a problem, Houston, with the globe's environment, Bush's catastrophic foreign policy, and race in the U.S.. The present twenty-something generation in many parts of the world seems precocious, alert, and tenacious. I feel as if I should knock on wood while saying this, but the prospect of thermo-nuclear apocalypse seems much less likely now than it did in the 1950s through the 1980s. Although Bush expanded the executive branch's power to the brink of dictatorship (arguably), there's a chance Congress might reel in the next president in this regard. For communication between peoples and fresh ways of getting and analyzing information, the Web seems to be a net-gaine (pun intended). The need to use alternative fuels (something that seemed obvious to many decades ago) seems to be close to being accepted as fact. And finally, in Tacoma, the sun is out, meaning this is our fifth try, I believe, at Spring. We'll see how it goes. The things with feathers seem pleased, and students from Hawaii are preparing for a Luau.