The Poem Is

The Poem Is


The poem is a woman who
would sing if she weren't so
weary. The poem is a man
who would get up and fight
if he weren't so old. The poem
is a child who would come out
of the room if the world
weren't so strange.

The poem is a mountain
that would be green if
water flowed there. The
poem is a city that would
treat people right if only it
weren't a city. The poem

wants to meet a poem
that understands what
it's like to be the kind of
poem the poem is.

The poem would be epic
if it were arrogant. It would be
lyric if it weren't so lonely.

The poem breaks like a dry
stick and heals itself
miraculously and leans
on itself as it takes a walk
through the woods. The
poem thinks magically.
That is the job of the poem.

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room


The room waited. No,
that's not true. The room
was empty, so we said
it had been waiting for people
to enter it. They entered
it. We were already there,
waiting. We watched them.
They waited. All over the
planet, operators are
standing by. A man is being
recorded shouting, "But
wait--there's more!" "What
are you waiting for?: that
is a command poorly
disguised as a question.
"I can't wait": this is best
translated as "I am saying
something as I wait." Once
someone told me, "Wait
here." I did so. I am in
fact still waiting. Here.


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Democracy Today

Democracy Today

A politician's head swelled
and burst out of a televising screen,
crashing onto the floor of my room,
rolling to my feet, where it lay,
face up, a grin glued on like a photo
of a keyboard, eyes fixed wide open,
genderless features painted
with studio-makeup, hair
formed like fine-spun fiberglass,
forehead shining like porcelain.

I howled, jumped up, ran
out the door into the street,
where everyone wore masks
that looked like the face on
the floor of the room I'd fled.
"We're all going to vote!" the
masked crowd cried.
"You will join us!"


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

For Rose-Gardeners

Is there a flower that humans have been more obsessed by than the rose? Maybe the cherry-blossom; and, indeed, the rose-obsession may be more Western--Greco-Roman/Euro-American--than Eastern. And it's a bit ironic that the rose itself is a bush, a shrub, and of course the cherry is a tree.

Lilies, orchids, daffodils, and poppies have all drawn their share of attention. But especially in Western religious and poetic traditions, the rose seems to have it all going on. Bill the Bard, Robert Burns, Bill Blake, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and even George Eliot (in a wee poem) have famously weighed in on the rose. Rose-poems must number in the millions.

To those who grow roses--or, more accurately, assist roses in their growth--the rose tends to discard its several cultural symbols and starts to represent work, a battleground (chiefly person v. fungus and person v. aphid), a vegetative entity with diva-like whims but also astonishing resilience, and unrequited love. Yes, rose-gardeners fall in love with their roses, in many cases. It's not a pretty sight. That's when the whole thorn v. blossom mythology kicks in.

I had a 20-year fling with roses. Mulching, pruning, spraying (I stuck to organic sprays like neem oil, and a mild, non-detergent soapy spray does just fine with aphids), weeding, staring. A lot of staring. And sighing--in frustration. Fertilizing (I liked organic fertilizers). There is, of course, the illusion that it's all worth it--such as when you pick what really looks like the perfect rose--a blossom, say, from a Mister Lincoln--and the color & perfume really do almost make you swoon, and then you show it to someone else, and they almost swoon. From different objective distances, however, one may raise all sorts of objections to the time and energy spent on roses, to the Rose Industry (floral shops, rose "breeders," garden shops), and to the culture's rose-fetish.

Oddly enough, the most amazing roses I've seen are wild ones growing in a pasture in the Sierra Nevada. They basically turn into huts--an igloo of vines. Once one of our neighbors read about how much Vitamin C was in rose hips--those knots that grow after the petals have fallen--and she began to brew and drink rose-hip tea. Apparently the wild rose-hips had something else in them, however, because she got a little loopy and had to give up the tea. Jonesing for rose-hips. Wow.

Solid tips I picked up over the years: in the Pacific Northwest, prune roses on or near President's day; prune roses into a kind of bowl-shape, and attempt to eliminate the branches on the inside (roses seem to need some space "inside" to ventilate themselves; don't over-fertilize (I know: but what does that mean?) ; checking for aphids is actually more important than waging war on them (when you see them, spray a mild solution of Ivory soap on them; also, ladybugs really do like to dine on aphids).

In the imaginary court of gardening, roses and I reached an amicable rose-divorce. When I stroll past an impressive rose garden, I am most intrigued--and then fatigued, as I imagine all that work, the constant attention.

I did exceptionally well with two kinds of roses, both venerable--Queen Elizabeth and Mister Lincoln, one pink and the other red. I did okay with Peace roses, too, and I had pretty good luck with yellow roses--Sun Sprite was one I liked. A rose called Oklahoma did not do well in the Pacific Northwest, at least for me (and I'm a rank amateur), but that one had my favorite rose-aroma. Roses by other names didn't smell as sweet, nyuk, nyuk.

A poem, then, for rose-gardeners (I think it's in iambic tetrameter):

For Rose-Gardeners

To one who cares for roses, rose
Refers to the whole plant; the flow-
Ers are a kind of coda. To one
Who cares, the tale is in the soil,
Which should be dark and rich and loose.
It should be mulched, and it should breathe,
Perhaps give off a faint bouquet
Of chocolate. The tale proceeds
In pulpy roots of rose, and in
The branches which shoot up so fast
The green-and-purplish growth can seem
A little other-worldly. Leaves
Have much to say as well. They should
Be waxy and deep green but are
Impressionable, go black or brown
Or yellow from the merest wink
Of fungus. Thorns amaze--ornate
Medieval armor for a plant. If
The flowers come and keep coming,
Then one who cares for roses has
Assisted earth and plant to tell
The story well and now may stare,
May bend to sniff perfume or clip
In twilight of a long ritual--
The caring for the whole rose plant.

For Groundskeepers

On a rainy Monday in the Pacific Northwest, here's some blank verse for groundskeepers.





For Groundskeepers


At universities and schools, at parks
And hospitals, at bureaus and museums,
Banks and supermarkets, rows of shops,
Amidst steel and glass, beside the wood,
The brick, the concrete, walls, walks, facades,
In stadia at which rich athletes play,
There are the grounds, that space where those who plan
Our public spaces want to keep the Earth,
A.K.A. Nature, domesticated--kept
As in maintained. And after builders have
Departed and investors disappeared,
Now that the planners have moved on to plan
Their other things, responsibility for care
Resides exclusively with those who keep
The grounds; who dig and clip and weed and care,
Remove what's dead, restrain the growth that has
Become obese or weird. "Groundskeeper" is
One name by which they go. They are by all
Accounts almost invisible, paid not enough,
And tasked too much, no doubt, but genial
In most respects, it seems; the work with soil
And shrub, with grass and tree, must teach
A kind of patience; people who pass by,
Oblivious to the keeping grounds require,
Must also cultivate a sanguine view.
The litterer, the snob, the ones who've never
Held a shovel, wheeled a barrow: no sense
In getting angry at such folks, who are
Less sensitive than plants. Ah, well: Here's thanks
To those who keep our grounds, who care for our
Exteriority. Our cities and our towns,
The places where we work and where
We recreate would be oppresive or
Hard blighted spaces, were it not
For ones with barrows, clippers, spades.
Appreciation's due to those who keep
For us the grounds, who keep them up for us.

Hans Ostrom


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Picking Blackberries

On one of my urban-hike routes, there are blackberry bushes, hence blackberries. It is August, and humid; therefore, the blackberries are ripening.

I happen to be a veteran blackberry-picker, having picked berries in my youth in the Sierra Nevada, where the blackberries ripen rather late, as late as September, just barely ahead of the frost and the snow.

Poets like to write poems about blackberries, for some reason. For some reason, I've never gotten a poem I like out of the blackberry subject. But that's okay. Blackberries are enough.

Picking blackberries is most satisfying to the single-minded, persons vaguely driven, determined, perhaps a wee bit compulsive. One must ignore how lonely the first berry looks in the container. One must be ready to experience minor thorn-damage on one hand. (one must never wear gloves.) The technique I prefer is to load up one hand with several berries, retrieve the hand, and dump the harvest in the container. But it's not good to get too greedy with one handful.

The more one picks, the more one sees additional ripe berries. It's some kind of Zen thing, I think.

One mustn't eat any berries until late in the game. It's not professional. Also: delayed gratification.

Not-quite-ripe berries don't want to come loose, but you can use them to pull the vine closer to you.

Soon the container is heavy and full, black and gleaming. The image of a pie, or simply berries in cream, materializes.

Blackberries are enough.

Exonerate the Snake?

Some blank verse for Friday, then:

Exonerate the Snake?

The Bible and John Milton blame the Fall

On Slim--the slender slitherer alleged

To have approached Ms. Eve and sold her on

The idea of the Fruit. With deference

And all respect that's due and duly orthodox,

I have my doubts. The snake? A pea-brained length

Of skinny tubing lying in the grass?

A narrow fellow, as Ms. Emily said?

Okay: I know a boa can enwrap

A human or a cow and swallow whole.

Sure, cobras, vipers, rattler, and mocassins

And such can strike and kill. But please. Hold on.

Be serious. If we insist on saying snakes

Must take the fall for loss of Paradise,

It seems we run the risk of looking low--

Yes, lower than the snake. We chose to cast

Off innocence for worldliness, and God

Said, "Fine. I call it sin, and I say it's wrong.

What's more, I think it's dumb. Your lease is up.

Get out of Eden." What happened then, it seems

Was something between God and human kind.

To blame a lowly flicker of the tongue,

A crawler with cold blood and clammy hide,

Seems more than just a bit convenient.

Let's take the rap. The fault was ours, not Snake's.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Ricked!

Thanks to someone vastly more attuned than I to the nuances of Internet culture, I have learned of the practice known as "Rickrolling." In the 1980s, a British singer named Rick Astley recorded what became a popular tune, one that I'd put in the disco category. Astley has a rather impressive baritone voice, which seems incongruous in relation to his physical appearance: He seems to be of relatively small physical stature, with red hair, not that red hair runs counter to baritone-status; anyway, it's one of those cases in which the person in possession of the voice is a bit of a surprise.

His big hit was "Never Gonna Give You Up," and, music-videos having been in their infancy back then, his video is nerdy and dorky, to use technical terms. Basically it's just Rick singing and doing some basic moves. Not quite explicably, he sometimes appears in a trench coat. Sometimes the alleged scene is a club--but the club is empty, and it's daytime. A female dancer or two materialize, and the bartender becomes a dancer at some point. There is not a "plot" to the video, and I say thank God to that. Who wants a plot in a music video? Indeed, who wants a music video? A few have been interesting, but basically, it's a moronic, corporate genre.

The video is so bad that it's good, and the song blends a great, trained voice with a fairly dumb disco song. All the elements are there, in other words, for camp, and I gather that things campy in this day and age can be turned into Internet pranks of the harmless variety. So people apparently trick their friends into viewing the Astley video on youtube, and allegedly hilarity ensues.

Nerdy and dorky, I am both amused by and sympathetic to Mr. Astley. Chiefly, he seems to have been working the job (my agent got me into this?) and in no way seems to take the video seriously. More nerdy than Rick, I find the lyrics interesting because they exemplify iambic tetrameter. In fact, one could substitute "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright/In the forest of the night," and have a splendidly surreal combination, a fearful symmetry, of Rick Astley and William Blake. "Tyger, tyger BURN-ing bright, in the forest OF THE NIGHT!" Blake is never gonna give up that tyger.

In the lyrics, there's also an interesting bit about the persona of the song offering "total commitment," which other fellows do not offer the beloved, it is argued. Perhaps he's threatening to have his lover committed to an insane asylum, OR he's offering to commit himself voluntarily to such a facility. "I'm never going to give you up, but at the same time, I'll be safely behind bars, getting treatment!" Of course, there's a chance that commitment refers to something else.


For a very good, frivolous time, check out the Astley video, rick-roll yourself, and have a grin or two in these dour times. Join the people who've been ricked!

A link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

And thanks to Mr. Astley and his most impressive baritone.

The Centers Hold

"Things fall apart," Yeats famously wrote, "the center cannot hold." I always found "things fall apart" to be a refreshingly imprecise bit of phrasing.

Yeats's poem came to mind yesterday as I passed a business-sign for Neovita, which describes itself as a "Foot Comfort Center." I'm not sure what they do in there, but I had visions of all feet being treated like Roman emperors, bathed, massaged, entertained, read to. Maybe there are foot-therapists on duty to whom the feet can talk about their problems--nightmares about blisters, that traumatic hang-nail in childhood, impossible expectations placed on the feet by the parental Body.

"Center" is a great all-purpose moniker. Think-tanks and thinly veiled political shops, which seem to have proliferated in the last 20 years, like the term. The Center for Strategic This and That, the Center for Family Something, etc.

I had a part in establishing two Writing Centers, or Centers for Writing Across the Curriculum. One basic idea behind them is that since writing happens in almost all disciplines, it should be taught in all disciplines and not seen merely as an "English" subject. The first one I worked at was in a temporary building on one edge of campus, so it really wasn't in the center of much. The other one, however, is pretty much centrally located on campus.

I hope Periphery catches on at some point. The Periphery for Strategic Studies, The Periphery for American Family Values. These might be interesting think tanks, featuring people who are on the outside looking in and therefore in possession of valuable perspective. In Yeats's terms, they'd be falcons who couldn't hear the falconer, but maybe they could hear other important stuff, and who says falconers know everything? The falcon does all the work, after all. Just ask the Center, I mean the Periphery, for International Falcon Studies.

What, Conservatives Worry?

When conservatives worry about McCain, then I get even more worried about McCain. Hawk-faced Pat Buchanan, noted isolationist and perfecter of the chop-motion while talking and giving speeches, said [on CNN] President McCain would make Cheney look like Ghandi--not physically, I assume, but by comparison. (Buchanan did not seem to intend the comparison as a compliment; with Buchanan, one feels one has to add that information.) Andrew Sullivan, one of those seemingly very bright people who nonetheless swallowed Bush's bait about WMD's and tried to cough it up long after the hook had been set, has posted quite an interesting anti-McCain video on his blog. Here is the link:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/08/taking-back-t-5.html

Probably the most compelling speaker on the video is Scott Ritter, one of innumerable people who seemed to know what they were talking about during the "run-up" to the war and who was therefore ignored, dismissed, and attacked by Bush and the Surrogates.

A mere poet, I do wonder what the military and the intelligence agencies think of Bush and what I deduce to be his compulsive recklessness and lifetime of being unaccountable. He has been reckless in going to war, in conducting the war and the occupation, in the unprecedented use of contractors, in the breaking (John Murtha's word) of the army and Marines, in forging documents (see Suskind's book, and apparently Suskind has the audio tapes to back up the findings), and in betraying spies. Mustn't even the professionals regard Bush as reckless and incompetent? I don't know.

A mere poet, I wouldn't mind if Obama and McCain would agree to read Wilfred Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" out loud and then comment briefly on it.

A mere poet, I wonder if Putin and McCain are some kind of international marriage made in Hell.

A mere poet, I do wonder what a mere citizen can do to prevent President Bush, President McCain, perhaps even President Obama, from attacking Iran.

Too Sad, Darling

Too Sad, Darling

(in memory of Esther Wagner)

We go from no
memories and all
experience to combinations
of experiences and memories to
no experiences and all
memories. Life

at first opens up all
around our minds and us. Then
the thing known as Later
abandons the mind to its own
paltry self, its wee storehouse
of snapshots, shreds of dialogue,
and remember that time?

"Too sad, darling," is what
the grand woman said,
with a laugh,
"but fix yourself something
to drink and one for me.
Sit down and we'll talk,
reminisce, just us,
about experience."

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Bollocks

Owing to a chance interchange at Starbucks, we have found ourselves considering the Britishism, "Bob's your uncle," which has netted us a poem, among other things.

Another Britishism that intrigues me is "bollocks." A bollock is a testicle, so bollocks are multiple testicles, but according the OED online, one may "bollocks" something, as in mess it up; there is a verbal form, in other words. If you're tempted to suggest "that makes no sense," simply consider how often Americans think or say "he sure effed that up." Think about it. When I was in Sweden, a Swede, mystified by the amount and variety of American cursing, said, "You know, we really have no curse words based on sexual activity." He didn't sound as if he regarded this as something lacking in Swedish.

I think every Hugh Grant movie I've ever seen has had "bollocks" in the script. Maybe the situation is similar to Christopher Walken movies, wherein Christopher is allowed to dance--in some fashion. (My favorite Walken quotation: "I'm not sure what the worst movie of all time is, but I'm sure I acted in it.")

Sometimes I think the British simply say "balls" in place of "bollocks." Is that right? Of course, it's impossible to try seriously to trace the "logic" of such cursing. I suppose you could try to make a case for "bullshit" being more "logical" than "bollocks," inasmuch as bullshit is waste material and therefore ostensibly worthless, except as fertilizer, but on the other hand, "bollocks" is more absurd. "What a load of bollocks!"

According the OED online, the etymology of bollocks goes back to a noun referring to a sacrificial knife. Ouch.

The OED also includes a quotation from one of my favorite English poets, Philip Larkin. If you haven't read his poem, "This Be the Verse," you really must.

1940 P. LARKIN Let. 9 Dec. in Sel. Lett. (1992) 4, I suppose my writing is terrible. Sod & bollocks, anyway. Not to mention cunt and fuck.

What I like about this quotation is that it qualifies as scholarly because the OED uses it, and that it seems as if Larkin, in his letter, catches himself cursing and then, like a naughty boy, finds cursing so pleasurable that he curses some more. And like many of us writers, he's unamused by his own writing.

At any rate, Bob is your uncle, the one who says "bollocks," not to mention--well, anyway.

Bob Is Your Uncle, The Sequel

Someone from our nation's heartland read the previous post and produced a fine poem in response to the prompt concerning "Bob's Your Uncle." So in case you want to read the poem (I submit that you should want to read it) and don't want to go through the comments, here it is:

Bob Is Your Uncle

I’m not sure you understand
what I’m trying to tell you.

That man in the armchair,
feet up, snoring softly,
the one you call your dad,

his name is Robert, so we
all call him Bob. It suits him.

Bob has three brothers.
The two you know, the two
who take you hunting and
tease you about your cowlick,
and one you don’t.

The one you don’t know
left town a while ago. Twelve
years and six months, but
who’s counting? Not me.

Anyway, it’s time you know,
time for you to know, whether
you want to know or not.

That man, Bob, is your uncle.
There. You have it.

Submitted by Lars, August 8, 2008 8:52 AM, all rights reserved