Joke as Genre

A while back I bought a book called Stop Me If You've Heard This: A History and Philosophy of Jokes, by Jim Holt. It pretty much does what the title suggests, touching on major theories of humor, acknowledging how funny and absurd it is to try to generate a theory of humor, and breaking down how and why jokes work or fail. If there's one big missing piece, it's a rhetorical one--namely, the rhetorical concept of audience, and even more broadly, of culture or "rhetorical community." For example, when the effects of feminism began to be felt in the 1960s and 1970s, many jokes that had once been standard fare were no longer funny, and the people who used to tell them unselfconsciously, even proudly, were taken aback. Of course, they often blamed the cool reception on "political correctness" or the alleged "humorlessness" of women. No. Times and the culture had changed, as they always do. Rhetoric and humor have always had to adapt to changing communities, as Aristotle well knew.

Based on my reading of the book, I've been trying to write jokes, just to experiment with them as a genre of writing. One element running through my life is that I've often been willing to try things I know, a priori, I may not be very good at, may even be awful at. So, for example, I took a ballet class when I was about 20. There were about 50 women and three men, and I was easily the worst dancer. But I learned what I wanted to learn--some basics about ballet, from a dancer's (sort of) perspective. I've also acted in two short student-directed films, just to see what it's like to act in front of a camera. I actually did okay, partly, I think because I didn't try to act. I just "was" who I was supposed to be (according to the script and the director) and left it at that. In high school, I desperately wanted to play the lead in The Crucible, but after the audition, all I got was the role of Ezekiel Cheever, bailiff. During one performance, I did save a scene by ad libbing when the actor playing the judge forgot his lines and froze. I wrote a one-act play recently. It's not very good.

So I didn't start writing jokes with the hope of their being funny to anyone but me, and I don't have career goals in comedy, to say almost the least. But I am fascinated by the form jokes can take--by jokes as a genre, as verbal constructs, if you will. In some ways, they're like very short poems.

I've tried out a couple jokes on my classes this week, just to test them (the jokes, not the classes). Of course, this experiment has led to brief discussions (before and after class) about favorite jokes and favorite comics. All of these students are about 20-21 years old. As far as I could tell, none had ever heard of Jack Benny (pictured) or Henny Youngman, nor did I expect them to have done so (times and culture change). But historians of popular American humor will remember Benny as a master of timing and of the deadpan response, and of course Youngman is the Mozart of the one-liner. I also came to appreciate Benny because one of his sidekicks was Eddie Anderson (character name, "Rochester"), an African American actor and comedian. True, in the the fictional world of Benny's TV show, Rochester did work for Benny, so the Black man was still working for the White man. But Rochester was not deferential, and the fictional (and probably professional) relationship between the two men was enlightened, at least by the standards of the times.

Holt goes over the usual theories of jokes--surprise, superiority, the sense in which the audience is asked to figure out a puzzle, suppressed aggression, and so on. He also discusses famous and eccentric collectors of jokes, as well as famous joke-forms (three men walk into a bar, etc.) and comedians.

Two jokes I wrote that made me laugh are as follows; however, I did not expect them to succeed broadly, and they haven't. But I even like the fact that they more or less failed because the information helps me understand the genre better.

1. When I was a child, I was very lonely because my family hid from me a lot.

2. My girlfriend told me she wanted to start seeing other people. So I said, "Okay," and I removed her blindfold.

My wife thought #2 was mildly funny, and she thought #1 was not funny at all. My classes thought neither joke was very funny, and one student said, "But you're married--you don't have a girlfriend, do you?" And I said, no, it's just a joke, a verbal experiment, not autobiography. I want to know what you think of it as a joke.

Another student who is studying joke-writing told me that #2 might be funnier if I had given it a longer build-up. Two other students thought #1 was very sad. That is, they didn't read it as a joke but as some kind of autobiograhpical statement.

I like #1 because I tend to like dry, deliberately flat-footed jokes, and I liked the dumb literal-minded logic of loneliness springing from people's hiding from you, not from anything emotional.

I like #2 because I think the surprise is pretty good and because it plays with literal and figurative meanings of "see." For some reason, I think the blindfold is funny, too--partly because of the ambiguity. Does the girlfriend wear the blindfold because she wants to? Just what is the deal with this blindfold, anyway?

Of course, much depends on who is delivering the joke and to whom, and my delivery of jokes has always been bad. #1 might possibly be funny if it were delivered by a professional comedian who had a loser-persona. #2 might be funny if it were delivered by a professional with an absurdist persona, like Stephen Wright. Nonetheless, neither joke is successful standing alone on its own merits. They're simply like unsuccessful sonnets or ballad-stanzas. The form is there, and there's a hint of the requisite surprise, puzzle-solving, and superiority (etc.), but not nearly enough of what's necessary.

As I think I've written here before, "the joke" has to be one of the most demanding genres of writing.

Please read Holt's book. You'll enjoy it, and you'll be enticed to quibble with the various theories of humor and jokes.

Devout Atheist Dust-Up

There's a dust-up going on at the state capitol in Washington (Olympia). Apparently there's some kind of multi-faith display, and the people in charge of the display included some kind of poster developed by atheists, who wish to celebrate the Winter solstice and to express their view that religion is merely mythic and fantastical and should therefore be dismissed.

Apparently the poster was stolen and ended up at a country-and-western radio station in Seattle. (?) Then it was returned. But then yesterday, some 500 protestors showed up demanding that the poster be taken down. I gather most, though not all, of these protestors were Christian, or claimed to be. The governor doesn't like the poster, but she says the attorney general tells her the atheists have a constitutional right to post their views in the display.

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Of course, the most reasonable response to this dust-up is "Who cares?" Given all the problems government needs to work on, I don't want it spending one second on this debate.

Assuming, for the sake of argument, that we do and should care, however, my second response is that if a Christian (for example) believes himself or herself to be solidly faithful, then what effect could the poster possibly have on the person's faith? Moreover, if a Christian really does perceive the atheist to be an "enemy," then the Christian is supposed to pray for the enemy.

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Third, one of the protestors is the wife of a well known pastor near Seattle who preaches "the gospel of wealth," lives in a mansion, owns a helicopter, and so on. Arguably, "the gospel of wealth" is a greater threat to traditional Christianity than the atheist's poster. Arguably, the teachings of Jesus do not promote the pursuit of wealth, although I'm sure the pastor has worked out his argument for why Jesus would have owned a helicopter.

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Fourth, if the atheists really are devout materialists, scientific positivists, and scoffers at faith-in-mystery or faith-in-God, then why do they want to celebrate the Winter solstice? Following their line of thought, the solstice springs from the phenomena of the earth's orbit and its tilting, so what's to celebrate--the accidents of planetary formation and gravitational force?

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Fifth, it is alleged that dismissing religion as mere counter-factual mythology constitutes "hate speech." I don't think so. I think the dismissal is simply an expression of disagreement. Hate speech would be something like, "Imprison all Christians at Guantanamo!" or "I hate Buddhists!"

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The dust-up suggests that some religious persons and some atheists give religion and atheism bad names. How about if all the groups represented at the capitol participated in a friendly competititon to see which group could distribute the most blankets, clothing, and food to homeless persons in the state of Washington? Helping the homeless does not go against any major faith tradition of which I am aware, and it certainly in no way contradicts atheism. It is also a better use of time than squabbling about a poster that expresses opposition to religion. Counterintuitively, the winner of this competition would be allowed to display the smallest poster next year--would have earned the privilege of displaying the most humility, that is.

Superiority

Superiority


He looked out his window.
A stream of people flowed
past his abode. The fact
and number of them startled
him. He turned and asked
his cohabitant, "Who are they?"
She said, "They're just some
of the people who think they're
better than you are." "Better
at what?" he asked. "At nothing--
or everything. Superior. They're
better overall than you." "They
know me?"he asked. "Of course
not," he said, "Don't be ridiculous.
Or be ridiculous. They don't need
to know you. They're superior."
"Oh," he said, as if he understood.
"What should I do?" he asked her.
"Probably what you've always done," she said.
"Work. Keep to yourself. Stand by friends."
"Am I better than anyone?" he asked.
"Of course not," she said, laughing.
"No one is better than anyone else.
Remember? Jesus, don't you know
anything?" she said. "Don't take
that superior tone with me," he said.
They shared a bit of a laugh,
cooked some food, and ate it.
He looked out the window again,
and all the superior people were gone.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Budgetary Work

I've been working on a university budget-committee this semester. Why a poet and an English professor would end up on such a committee is a good question. I'm surprised someone didn't say, "Put down the spreadsheet, sir, and back away from it slowly." Of course, all the major budgetary decisions are made elsewhere, and certain established realities (such as how much money is available and how much non-debatable things like maintaining Building X costs) further limit the paths such a committee may tread.

Interestingly (well, it interests me), "budget" in English seems originally to have referred to a leather bag, at least according to the OED online:

1. a. A pouch, bag, wallet, usually of leather. Obs. exc. dial.

The OED traces this denotation back to the early 1400s. Not until the early-t0-mid 1700's does "budget" start to refer to a record or prediction of money/capital expended.

I guess one could argue that although we do still keep money in such things as wallets and bags, we keep most of the real money (assuming money is real) in unreal spaces: in online, virtual-reality accounts. We "transfer" X number of dollars from account Y to account Z, but nobody ever touches an object symbolizing value, energy, or worth--until someone later watches an ATM spit rectangles of paper out, and, astoundingly, other people accept these rectangles in return for a bag of rice or a cup of coffee. That all of this perplexes me is yet another reason to wonder about my presence on a budgetary-committee.

With regard to the "home" budget, I'm about as sophisticated as Fred Flinstone. I figure you have to have some money coming in, and you have to keep an eye on the money going out, and you better have some back-up plans, as well as some money "stored" literally or figuratively, such as in a "bank" (but now we're back to virtual reality) or "real estate" (I "own" a rectangle of "undeveloped" dirt in California, for example, and in theory, I might be able to induce someone to give me money in return for it.) The tale of how I purchased the dirt (also known as a parcel or a lot) and when will and should wait for another day. I had no business buying it, and how I scraped the dough together TO buy it remains vaguely mystical.

At any rate (let's say 6%, nyuk, nyuk), a poem regarding budgetary work:

Budgetary Matters

The spreadsheet is all before you. The farther

left you travel, the more desireable things become.

Indeed the items named seem not just necessary

but inevitable, prophesied. As you travel toward

the reckoning right hand of calculation, the less

possible things seem. You think of Zeno's Paradox.

You begin to feel an urge to save rubber-bands

and bits of string, to eat left-overs and sew

your own clothes. When you finally arrive

in the severe, humorless zone of the numbers-column,

you then descend toward the hell of the Bottom Line,

which is, oddly enough, often represented by two lines.

At that line, expenses devour entrails of income.

Accountants costumed in gray feathers perform

a ghastly arithmetical dance. You hear someone

mumble, "Nothing we can afford is worth doing,"

to which you respond, "Nothing worth doing

is quantifiable." You stand up and demand

to know the origin of money. You are forcibly

exported from the room. As you depart, you

hear someone say, "I think we just found

some extra money in the budget."

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Thinking Is Free + Rodin and Rodan

Rodin's most famous sculpture has always puzzled me, and I suppose this reaction is good because the figure represented could be seen as puzzled, too. The source of my puzzlement springs entirely from the fellow's right elbow, which rests on his left knee. This position seems too awkward to fascilitate thinking. I think most people would put the right elbow on the right knee. Most people might put some clothes on before sitting on a rock to do some thinking, but this a separate issue, and Rodin probably wanted to show how well he could sculpt a representation of a body, as opposed to a representation of trousers on a body.

I do like the fact (or figure) that the fellow is sitting on a "rock" or some kind of mineral-surface because art (the sculpture) blends seamlessly with fact (the material of the sculpture). For similar reasons, I like some of Michelangelo's unfinished sculptures because the artistic forms seem to be struggling, as if propelled by their own wills, to emerge from marble.

Coincidentally, I learned about Rodin and his famous sculpture about the time I was also watching Japanese monster-movies on television, and one of the monsters was Rodan, a kind of dinosaur (which I did not find to be frightening, and which I knew to be a small rubbery model). The French pronunciation of Rodin sounded similar to "Rodan" to me, except for the hard "n" in the latter, so, bizarrely, I've always associated the sculpture with the cinematic monster, which was, of course, a wee sculpture of its own in reality, there on the "set" of the Japanese horror film.

Sadly, these musing constitute merely a circuitous, insufficiently thought-out prelude to a poem about thinking. I should probably apologize for that, I think.

Thinking Is Free

Thinking is free while supplies last.

Supplies may always last because there's

almost no overhead, so to speak,

at the Thought Factory, which supplies

thoughts to consciousness more

frequently than demand demands,

but that's all right because consciousness

has almost unlimited storage-capacity,

and it's not really a market, for thinking

is free. When you're asleep,

the Thought Factory ships surrealistic

cinema to neuro-theaters inside

consciousness, a part of which likes

to stay awake and watch brain-movies

while you snore thoughtlessly.

Don't ask permission to think or pay

entry-fees to exercise thought. Go

on thought-binges. Start a Thought Club.

Launch your thoughts into the digital ether--

what a gas. If you think an evil thought,

you'll know it when you smell it. Cull

it out, and put it in a mental bin

marked "Faulty Product." Otherwise,

just keep thinking as much and as

often as you like. Astoundingly,

thinking is free.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Screens

Screens

I can't get away from illuminated screens. They
are where I go, watch what I do, write what I
write, tell what I know. Their light lies on me like
fine dust. They count key-strokes and stamp
time. They thicken the reduced sauce of my
personal numerology. I don't know what I would
do without screens, and I'd be willing to try,
but things have gone too far, and screens are not
about to disengage from me. I go from screen to
screen. That is the pattern and path of my life. It is
a digitized, visual existence--algorithms and
pictures, not sentences and thoughts. Some
people take photos with screens of people on screens.
Some screens spit cash at me. Others receive
my numbers and reduce my income.
Wow. I am observed observing, read writing,
seen hiding. One of my screen-machines eats
cookies and spam. I gather anyone with a screen
is targeted by means of the screen. This
Age in which I live is lit up, shining, flat,
and virtual. It is one or more times removed
from itself. Screens invade and insulate.
Screens virtually haunt me like rectangular ghosts.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

A Slice of Poetry

A Slice From a Poem's Center


...It's too late tonight
to start a poem, or to finish
one, so all that's possible
is to present the middle,
where these dry pine-needles
lie and the pastor's daughter
swims naked in a mill-pond,
and a meteor drags a line
of fire across black sky
above Siberia once only
in all of Time. In other
words, . . . .

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Fooling Around With Surrealism

There's not a lot of time left in the semester, so we had to race through the topic of surrealism today. A student made the apt point that a "manifesto of surrealism" seemed liked an instance of hypocrisy: we need a manual of rules for telling us how to break the rules?!

We also talked about the important role surrealism played in Modernist poetry; arguably the most famous Modernist poem, The Waste Land, is surrealistic.

Sometimes it's easier to start talking about surrealism in connection with painting, so I established a spectrum between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with Dali and Pollock thrown in there somewhere for kicks. Almost everyone in the class loved paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, thought Dali was amusing and relatively accessible, but didn't quite know about Pollock. I described Warhol's film of the egg, and they didn't seem amused, although a couple of them noted that showing such a film would make people reconsider the practice and act of viewing films.

We then read a poem by Charles Simic, and one by Theodore Roethke. In the Simic poem, the key is that he begins by refusing to see the fork (in this case) in a routine way. The poem assumes we are seeing a fork for the first time, and that assumption is the trigger for surrealism. Roethke's poem takes a different approach. It is more like expressionism. It presents a kind of violent, confused emotional response to something ordinary--cuttings, as in cut flowers or cut willow branches. Surrealistic images spring from the emotional response, the inner turmoil. But again, the poem refuses to be merely descriptive.

We then talked about why anyone would want to write surrealistically. Answers: to represent reality more faithfully than realism (ironically); to break through the confines of conventions and predictable genres or modes (like the contemporary first-person, autobiographical narrative poem); to explore the unpredictable murk of the psyche.

I had also asked the class to bring relatively ordinary objects from home. These included a penny, a 2 dollar bill, a black candle, some kind of mysterious lamp shade, a stuffed animal that looked like a kitten and actually seemed to breath (this item freaked out everyone), a deer-skull, a watch, and dice.

We then began to write poems about the objects--our object own or someone else's. The poems needed to be "surrealistic" in some way--that is, not simply and conventionally descriptive. Robert Bly calls this kind of poetry "leaping poetry," and he argues that there's not enough of it in the American tradition. Of course, as I mentioned to the class, the trick is to make sure the reader has a prayer of making those leaps with you.

At any rate, I chose the dice (or die) someone had brought--red, with white dots. I couldn't resist. This is the draft I wrote:

Dice

Fold night several times until
it becomes a cube. The North Star
shines on one side, Orion's Belt
on another, and so on. Repeat the
process. You have two cubes.
Now let your fist swallow both
die. Hold your fist high, shake
it against the sky defiantly.
Make a wager with God.
Toss the cubes onto
a flat black velvet night. Look
at the way the constellated cubes
have come to rest, inert
and grave. Of course, you've lost.
The House always wins. God is
the House. The sky is God's casino.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Sexual Orientation

Sexual Orientation

First of all, what an unusual term. Second,
which parts of the body ought to face east
during sex? Third, if there were a formal
introduction, what society could agree
about who should lead and take
the workshops and what topics should be
covered and uncovered? Fourth, people
aren't ships or compasses. They're
people, and desire is a kind of tautology,
a self-evident definition, a personal
rendition of emotional music. Fifth, the
sun seems to rise, people have sex, the
sun seems to set, people have sex, and
thus has it been so since so long ago, it
seems like forever. Therefore and sixth,
is it past time to love and let love, to
realize adults young, old, and middling
will find their landscapes of desire
using maps that make the most
sense to them and sensing direction
from a most mysterious magnet indeed?


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

The Right to Keep and Bear Memoirs

Yesterday was a darned good day, not to mention today. We huffed and puffed up the hill to Starbucks and got some coffee. We went to a store called Big Lots, the kind of store I really like. It sels stuff from stores that had trouble selling the stuff. How great is that?

Also, our son is home from college, and one of his professors, who is from Ethiopia, required homework be turned in on Friday--on Thanksgiving vacation. How great is that? It was helpful that the homework was online. Why should a professor from Ethiopia know about the rhythms of Thanksgiving break? He or she shouldn't. The rhythms of Ethiopian holidays are different, one assumes.

I picked up my son from an appointment, and I had some pop-radio station on, and he said, "Wow, you're really rocking out." Ah, the dry humor of youth. Then the station played (I suppose "stations" don't really "play" anything now) a song in which the word "glamorous" was spelled out, and I tried to tailor the lyrics to my 1995 Volvo. My son found this to be humorous.

I was able to watch one of my all-time favorite movies, Mildred Pierce, with Joan Crawford, Ann Blythe, Jack Carson, and Zachary Scott. If anyone wants to understand what makes the U.S.A. tick, he or she should watch Mildred Pierce.

I was also privileged to greet a small white dog of the Westie (?) species, watch college football on television in a most fragmentary way, watch commercials featuring stuff I will never buy, and read the following words in books: "eupeptic," "trope," and "dudgeon."

Another member of our family claimed that my Volvo was so messy that it made her sick, so we stopped off at a place that had a vacuum cleaner which you could rent for four quarters. So we vacuumed the heck out of that Volvo. I wondered whose job it was to empty the repository of the big vacuum cleaner, and I wondered what strange items ended up in there.

Tonight, on th e way back from having dinner at a venerable Tacoma restaurant, we started talking about writing, and I said that one good way to improve one's writing is to read a lot. My son opined that no one reads anymore because "all they want are screens," and, only half seriously, he predicted that book-burning would occur soon. Doing my best to imitate Charlton Heston on the subject of guns, I said, "Well, if they come for my books, they'll have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands." And he said, "Yes, everyone should have the right to keep and bear memoirs." Most amusing.

I really do think there should be a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear books. The amendment should be written with greater care than the Second Amendment was. Someone was in a hurry with that one. It's basically a one-sentence amendment in which one kind of business is taken care of with an absolute phrase concerning militias, and another kind of business is taken care of in the clause stating that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged. Of course, the persons writing the sentence had no sense of the extent to which "arms" would evolve, and they didn't define "arms." If we go strictly by the Constitution, we should be able to keep nuclear arms in our basements.

So if we had an amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear books, we'd best define "books" carefully.

Carolina Chocolate Drops

Thanks to one of the blogs I follow, the Hyperborean, I was able to read another blog, the Lumpenprofessoriat:

http://lumpenprofessoriat.blogspot.com/

A post there mentioned the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a three-person African American string-band, which the blogger likes. Co-incidentally, I had just seen a recording of their performing on, of all places, the Grand Old Opry, which I almost never watch but which I channel-changed to for some reason the other day. I wrote "of all places" because I don't know whether any African American performer except Charlie Pride has been on the Grand Old Opry.

Of course, traditional rural American folk and "country" music and African American folk and blues music share some complicated roots, but once such music became commercialized in the early 20th century, it became segregated. This circumstance is well satirized in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, when the convicts and Robert Johnson go into the radio station operated by a blind person. At some point in the 1960s, I think corporate Nashville decided it needed at least one Black performer, so Charlie Pride's career was allowed to flourish. The control exerted by corporate Nashville on its product is notorious; hence the hostility that Johnny Cash often showed and the indifference Willie Nelson still shows toward the establishment there.

On the Opry, speaking for the group, the banjo player and singer, a woman, said the group had studied with an older Black folk musician in the Carolinas. The other two performers, both male, play fiddle and guitar, and the guitar-player also plays the big brown jug.

It was an interesting cultural moment to observe. The all-white Opry audience was polite and even joined in a sing-along, but they were restrained, somehow. Cool. Marty Stewart, who hosts the Opry now and is probably trying to bring it into the modern age, came out and joined the band for the last song. He also tried to get the crowd to stand up when it applauded, but no one would get up. I had to wonder how much the rise of Obama's political fortunes had to do with the appearance of the Carolina Chocolate Drops on the Opry. Maybe nothing.

At any rate, I love the music they make--at once fresh and authentic, definitely Old School, injected with three young persons' zest for refurbishing old music. So here's a shout out to the group, to Marty Stewart (for showing some class), to the Hyperborean, and to the Lumpenprofessoriat. The internet works in mysterious ways.

And here's a link to the group's site (from which I got the photo):

http://www.carolinachocolatedrops.com/

The group will be in Seattle, in May, for about a week, at the Seattle Children's festival.

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Now there's an enticing topic--the semicolon in modern thought.

There are two kinds of writers; one kind thinks there are two kinds of everything in the world; the other kind doesn't.

Actually, what I meant to say was that one kind likes semicolons and the other doesn't.

For example, poet Richard Hugo, In The Triggering Town, calls the semicolon "ugly." He refused to use it in his poetry. Maybe he used it in his technical writing at Boeing, but I doubt it. Whenever we get to that part of the book in class, at least one student says, "But I love the semicolon," and I always agree with the student. The semicolon possesses its own awkward beauty, as far as punctuation-marks goes; in fact, the semicolon refuses to punctuate; it semi-punctuate; it ends something but not really.

But there are so many problems with the semicolon. By U.S. rules, you are not supposed to use it unless there is an independent clause on both sides of it; moreover, the very fact that one has to start talking about clauses puts people to sleep--as does further discussion of coordinating conjunctions versus sentence-adverbs. One may also use the semicolon to separate items in a series that are so large they include commas. In England, as far as I know, the rules for using the semicolon are different, just as there is no "comma splice" in German. After all, these are printers' marks, these periods, commas, dashes, and semicolons--based on venerable handwriting marks. It's not like they existed in the deep grammar of our brains.

Of course, the main problem is that a semicolon is a period on top of a comma. The semiotics of this situation suggest indecision or error.

Anyway . . .: a poem concerning the semicolon:


The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

One By Poe

Some of my colleagues in the English Department are working hard to put together a conference about and celebration of Edgar Allen Poe and his writing. The event is called (wait for it) SymPOEsyium. Poe's 200th birthday is in January; the event is in February. A colleague and I are going to discuss Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition." There's going to be a parody-of-Poe contest, and maybe someone will open a cask of Amantillado sherry. Of course, the jokes about pendulums, live burials, and ravens abound.

I just re-read the following not-famous (also known as obscure, I suppose) poem by Poe, and I found it pleasing in some respects. The influence of Wordsworth--perhaps Coleridge, too--is evident, I think. The focus on the poem seems to be on how the river is in one sense an emblem of art but then on how it becomes a mirror that reflects a woman's face but, more importantly, reflects the adoration of someone who admires her. Of course, we've come to expect a reference, oblique or direct, to Narcissus in poems about water, but that's really not what Poe seems to be up to here. The woman isn't admiring herself.

I like the reference to "old Alberto's daughter," as if the reader is supposed to know who that is, and the line "the playful maziness of art" is most amusing, sounds modern, and doesn't quite sound like Poe. The expression freshly portrays the way a river--which seems quickly to become a brook or a creek--represents art; more typical ways would be to think of the river's flow as similar to the imagination's flow, or to conjure images of sources--headwaters, etc. "Playful maziness of art" I found to be a good surprise. Addressing the subject of the poem right away, followed by an exclamation point, was something of a conventional move, to say almost the least, in the 19th century, as was personifying nature. The poem is derivative, but it has its original moments, and for Poe, it's light, so it has that going for it, too.










To a River





by Edgar Allan Poe





Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow


Of crystal, wandering water,


Thou art an emblem of the glow


Of beauty- the unhidden heart-


The playful maziness of art


In old Alberto's daughter;


But when within thy wave she looks-


Which glistens then, and trembles-


Why, then, the prettiest of brooks


Her worshipper resembles;


For in his heart, as in thy stream,


Her image deeply lies-


His heart which trembles at the beam


Of her soul-searching eyes.