Transactional Poem

Transactional Poem


Although we've never met
and odds are never will, we
virtually converge here on line 3.
I deliberately left imagery home
because I wanted to meet you
unspecifically as I write and you
read this. I figured you didn't
want to be imagined, for you
already exist. You are who

you are, not what anyone
says you're like. Similitude
is difference with a mask on.
What happens next is that
you think what you will
inside your life, mind, body,
moment. You are the only

you you'll ever be, a verifiable
rarity. It is good to meet you
here without having to know you,
and there's a good chance you may
feel the same. Your reading this
transactional poem is what the poem
means. You perfect it by being there
and here. Reading, you finish the poem
I'm about to finish, none too soon.

In poetry, this qualifies as business
transacted. It's been a pleasure doing
language with you.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Creeks

Creeks



Should you be granted the luxury
of listening to a creek, you'll hear
sounds inside sounds, trickles within
rushes, and a constant water-sigh,
an exhalation of sound. Memory
hears names of alpine creeks: Deer
Creek, Haypress Creek, Hackman
Ravine. There's the unnamed creek
that carries water from the abandoned tunnel
of the Monarch Mine. Each of these

creeks featured an improvised mix
of bedrock and gravel, bank and bar,
riffle, pool, fall, foam, and whirl. Each
had systems of life--bird, bug, moss,
brush, fern, trout, worm. Sometimes
a deer: touching the glassy top of water
with a glossy black nose. Sometimes

something demanded
your respect--for example, a bear
making a splash of things and broadcasting
its bear-body, bashing brush, looking
at the creek as if the creek might be
swallowed in a gulp. A few times there

was I, absolutely incidental to the watershed,
hiking through holy sunlit days, flicking a fly
out on a leader, watching for fish, breathing
in shadows of ancient cedars, listening
to creek-water as it dropped into this
pool, space and time.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

Details Inside

Last night, we were pumping gasoline into an automobile, and I looked at an exterior wall of the the gas-station, and I saw a sign that "said," "Buy 5 car-washes and get the 6th one free. Details inside."

I wondered what additional details lay inside. Maybe if I were to go in there and to inquire about the information on the sign, an employee would say, "Well, I think you'll find the details ironic. You actually don't get the 6th car-wash free!" Or perhaps she or he would have said, "No one has asked about the details before, so I'm ashamed to say I don't know what they are." Or: "You may not believe this, but if you purchase 5 car-washes, you automatically become a Knight of Malta."

I assume the details are, in an actuality inside the gas station, mundanely legalistic. You probably have to purchase the car-washes with a form of American currency--not that American currency actually exists. No rubles, no semi-precious gems. Or you have to purchase the car-washes all within 12 months. Or perhaps if you've purchased a used Soviet tank from the Black Market, you are not allowed to try to drive it through the car-wash.

That's why I didn't inquire. I wanted to make up some mythical details. I also thought, however, that a great generic title for almost any poem would be "Poem: Details Inside."

Dancers at Last Call

Dancers at Last Call


Where Zeno's paradox, Jesus's orthodox, and science's
anti-dox intersect stands my belief--nervously, like
a solitary traveler waiting for a bus that's more
rumored than scheduled. Science transforms mystery
into temporary knowledge, but mystery's infinite
at least, so we'll always not know. Incarnate, God
transmitted some counterintuitive news:
word, light, love, and peace are the way,
not war, invention, industry, and empire.
Who knew? The human response to the bulletin
was to hang the incarnation out to dry. Sigh.

Nonetheless, the wisdom haunts us, hounds us
down the positively positivist ages. By means
of knowing, we can never cross Zeno's line
of mystery. By means of belief, we hope we can
cross over, but hope lives in later. Faith
and science each need the other like two
dancers in a bar when Last Call comes. They
clutch one another, shuffle, and try to think
of something to say. The bartender, Zeno,
will count the tips and lock the door
behind them when they leave and get
slapped with cold wind and dark early
hours of tomorrow outside.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Stick

I was walking across campus today when I overheard a conversation between students. The topic seemed to concern one person's wish to have another person drive his car somewhere. She did not seem entirely committed to the proposition of driving his car. He seemed to be marshaling arguments---until a logistical question popped into his mind. He asked, "Can you drive a stick?"

What a lovely question, especially if you are unfamiliar with American English. "Drive a stick? No, as a matter of fact, I've never driven a stick. Are you mad?" Stick-shift, obviously, was the term in play, but even that term attracts fascination. I believe it springs from a healthy desire to reduce technology to the basic. "Yeah, whatever, it's a lever, and it's connected to a transmission, but I say it's still a stick."

Shifting topics abruptly, I'll mention that, regardless of what toys we acquired for our son when he was quite young, sticks were his favorite implement of fun when he was 4 and 5 years old. We lived in Sweden for 6 months at that time, and he amassed quite a collection of Swedish sticks, which look remarkably like American sticks.

I suppose there's an argument to me made for sticks having been the first human tools, although Kubrick focused on the bone in his famous cinematic rendering of an evolutionary epiphany.

"Stick" is one of those words poets need to keep nearby. Verb and/or noun, with multiple meanings in both parts of speech. A single, brisk syllable. Open to rhyming. A doorway to numerous subjects.

"Stick a feather in your cap, and call it macaroni." Now, that is a folk-song line that continues to perplex me. "No, thank you, I don't have a cap, and if I did, I wouldn't want to stick a feather in it, and even if I stuck a feather in a cap, I wouldn't call the feather or the cap macaroni. What you're asking is excessive. Good day to you, sir."

And looping back to the semi-original topic, let me say that I am surprised (but shouldn't be) how many persons do NOT know "how to drive a stick." My son knows how to drive a car with a stick shift, and he also earned his Ph.D. in stick-driving by practicing on a 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, with none of this "syncro-mesh" nonsense, and no power steering--so while you're madly trying to get the thing in gear, you're also wrestling with the wheel.

Stick.

Stories the Mainstream Media Ought to Cover

Not that you or anyone or the mainstream media asked, but following are some stories/topics I wish the mainstream media would cover. How do I define the mainstream media? By example. Example one: Any city's large daily newspaper, and in most cases, it's just one large newspaper. Example two: large news networks, cable and otherwise. Example three: "national" dailies like the New York Times or the Christian Science Monitor.

1. Themselves. I want them to cover themselves. I know; this sounds silly. But I really would like the Tacoma News Tribune to report on how its being part of a huge chain of newspapers affects the way it reports news. I'd like the media to cover the unprecedented consolidation of the media, in other words. But of course this is a story they won't cover, and it's probably a story they can't cover because their interests and the story, arguably, conflict.

2. What is happening to soldiers and contractors who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. What are there lives like? What are the effects of so many tours of duty and so much trauma?

3. Protests. I think the media do a lousy job of covering anti-war protests, and in some cases, I think they're missing some significant stories about the police's abuse of people and rights. Of course, being a police-person in a protest isn't an easy job. Policing isn't an easy job. Neither is protesting. Both the police and the protesters have to do things right; each has a professional responsibility, as it were. I think in some instances the police have become unprofessional and abusive. Maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to tell, though, from watching and reading mainstream news because they don't seem to dig into the story.

4. Oil. How about getting some plain facts out there? The U.S. "own" about 4% of the oil that's left and it uses about 24% of the oil worldwide. This means drilling is a moot point. Also, most of the oil from Alaska (for example) does not go to the U.S. market. It goes to the world market.

5. The extraordinary, almost unchecked growth of the Executive Branch, in terms of power. Presidents from both parties are responsible for this growth, and I'd argue that Bush II + Cheney are just an extreme example of a trend that's been growing for a long time. The issues dovetails with a lot of other ones: Church and State; the role of Congress vis a vis military action; "signing statements"; civil rights; proper responses to global warming; the imperial tendencies of the U.S.

6. Poetry. I'm kidding. I really don't need the mainstream media to cover poetry. On the other hand, if they just read some great poems out loud on TV, that might fill time better than some of their stories. Who knows?

7. What is everyday life like for most people in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the globe?

Unexpected Turns in Poems

Here is a short poem by Irene Rutherford Mcleod, a British poet born in 1891. The poem is from an anthology published in 1920 and edited by Louis Untermeyer. I like the poem, especially the first two stanzas. The last stanza presented me with something I hadn't expected and to which I didn't respond all that favorably.

Is Love, Then, So Simple

By Irene Rutherford Mcleod

Is love, then, so simple my dear?
The opening of a door,
And seeing things all clear?
I did not know before.

I had thought it unrest and desire
Soaring only to fall,
Annihilation and fire:
It is not so at all.

I feel no desperate will,
But I think I understand
Many things, as I sit quite still,
With Eternity in my hand.

Great title and great first line, in my opinion. We're used to reading poems and other things that complicate love. Mcleod decides to go against that grain and present love as simple. In the middle stanza, the poem seems to disrupt conventional poetic treatments of love, such as those found in traditional sonnets, famous for their intentionally over-blown rhetoric.

I found myself still very much in sync with the poem through the first half of line 3 in the last stanza, but "With Eternity in my hand" is surprisingly conventional and grandiose. I didn't see that turn in the poem coming, and when it arrived, I didn't like it. I think I may have preferred an image of the two people who are "in" the poem--the hint of a scene, a suggestion of intimacy, but nothing over the top. I still like the poem, and in some ways, I like the fact that Mcleod chose to end it in a way I wouldn't have ended. I don't mind differences of opinion and tactics between me (as a reader and poet) and another poet. It's pleasurable to see another poet making a different choice, and other readers may have good reasons for liking Mcleod's choice here. I still like the poem also because the deliberately plain rhetoric, combined with a lyric-form, works nicely. The form is traditional, but the rhetoric is modern, especially by 1920 standards.

About The Author, All Right, Already

A genre unto itself is the "about the author" page or paragraph that appears on the back of a book, on a dust-jacket, or at the end of a book, among other places. I've had to write such things, or edit ones editors have written about me, and they're awkward and artificial. It's a form of bragging, of course, so there's really no lovely way to write the thing; on the other hand, I suppose a reader or two might want some information about the author.

For a while, in the 1960s and 1970s, it became not just customary but obligatory for poets, in the "about the author" paragraph, to mention what sorts of things they'd done besides writing (or teaching), and the more gritty, the better. So male poets especially mentioned that they had picked fruit for a living, or shipped out on a freighter, or worked as a fry-cook. At some point in the late 1970s, maybe the early 1980s, I remember the poet Philip Levine, who had working-class roots, implicitly mocking such references in an "About the Author" paragraph; he wrote something like, "Philip Levine has held a variety of stupid jobs."

Anyway, a while back, I was playing around with a send-up of the about-the-author pieces, including the ones I've written and read about me.

About the Author, All Right, Already

Wagging the Marsupial is Shillbay Scrum's thirteenth
book of poetry. Scrum is a member of the National
Academy of Poets (NAP) and has been on the receiving end
of a Flugelhorn Grant, a Braunschnoz Prize, and the
Agewart Medal from the American Awardamantine
Foundation. Violet Redbeak, Monopoly Professor
of Literature at Varhard University, has written
of Scrum, "His work amorously massages our eyeballs
and testifies with aching penance to the beauty of
ugliness. His unique, piquant, uncompromising voice
scrapes our nasal passages and reminds us that
we are human, not amphibian." Scrum
is Extinguished Professor of Rarity at Central
Pomp State University, Brine-Wreck-on-Hudson,
where he has never taught. He divides his time
between New York and New York. Scrum's next
book of poems will be his fourteenth.

In A City

In A City


Anyway, you're in whatever city the city is,
the one next to a harbor or a river or both or
a lake, toxic water at any rate, and of course
a big percentage of the buildings are tall--
density is money--and prestige is squeezed
into selected leased spaces, and you stop,
take effects in via senses conditioned by
memory, reason, digital imaging, and
Pavlovian repetition, and in spite of it all,
you think, "Well, I'm glad no overt war appears
to be occurring here, and I can breathe, kind
of, and these people sure work hard, but this
isn't very good, this spectacle, this big-ass
urban production, this extraordinary
collection of hard surfaces, motors, pipelines,
wires, and compressed gases," and you yawn,
and a stranger is gratuitously but unoriginally
rude to you in a way that elicits pity for
yourself, the other person, and everyone,
including the bustlers bustling past.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

A September Poem by Auden

Here is one of W.H. Auden's more famous poems, "September 1, 1939." It's famous in part because it responds to Germany's invasion of Poland and what people knew would be the beginning of a European war. It's also known for being a poem that Auden himself came not to like. He went so far as to remove it from collections, alleging that he didn't like the line "we must love each other or die," asserting that whether we love each other or not, we die--but I think even he knew that that wasn't the original rhetorical point in the line. I especially appreciate how the poem replicates a complicated, multifaceted response to an event of terrible global impact, and how it demonstrates Auden's comfort with many different levels and sources of diction and vocabulary.



The poem appears on the Academy of American Poets site.




September 1, 1939


by W. H. Auden



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.


Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.


Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.


Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.


The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.


From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?


All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Updates are Ready to Install

[image is of the Magna Carta]








Updates Are Ready to Install


USA needs to reboot
the republic, erase viruses
of repacity, racism, monopoly,
milidustry. USA needs to enlarge
its memory and improve its
applications. Also, the simpler
computations have yet to be
completed: feed the hungry,
house the homeless, love
the cast aside, lift the worker,
limit the powerful. Let people
mediate their own media,
decide what's news to them.
Let us click and drag unused
icons to the recycle-bin. Let
justice and old Magna-Carta
ways rise to the level of
the desktop. Let USA
interface with its ideals,
become user-friendly
to citizens of the commons.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

If

If


If the clock were to stop,
time wouldn't notice. If
the creek ran dry, it wouldn't
run at all. If "if" didn't exist,
I'm sure the other words
would miss it. If there
weren't any war, we'd
be much better off, and
that reasoning's too obvious,
and if one says such a simple
thing, then one might be
accused of using "if" as a happy
hallucinogen. Then again,

if we don't think of its and
the imaginary whats they inspire,
then we might as well proceed
to stop proceeding at all and act
as if all the possibilities
had already up and iffed
themselves away.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Novel: A Sonnet

When I was at Powell's Book Store in Portland recently, I saw a volume of "three-sentence novels" by a European writer. I should have purchased the book, but I'll track it down eventually.

The book reminded me of some "one-page novels" that a former professor of mine, the late Elliot Gilbert, used to write. Elliot was a marvelous professor of Victorian literature, wrote smartly on Kipling (of all people), and also knew a lot about such topics as detective fiction. He was married to the noted poet and feminist critic, Sandra Gilbert.

In any event, I decided to write a "novel" in fourteen lines--a novel stuffed into a sonnet.


Novel: A Sonnet

There was a place where people lived a long,
Long time. They soaked the place with their despair
And overloaded it with lore and song.
And then one day a stranger traveled there.
His presence was an irritant and salve,
Of course--that dual role which strangers play.
He saw someone and something he must have.
His getting them, however, would betray
A secret waiting for him all along.
A certain pressure grew under the weight
of character and fate combined. A wrong
Occurred and love turned into hate.
In more detail, the story stretches out
Three hundred fifty pages, or thereabouts.


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom