Some Favorite Poets in Translation

Over a year ago, I posted a list of some favorite poems of mine, almost all from the Anglo-American tradition, although I included one poem in translation by Neruda. The post is on the list of selected earlier posts, and a recent visitor to the blog liked my list but asserted that not including poems by Rilke, Lorca, and/or Cesaire was "criminal." I'm hoping it's just a literary misdemeanor. My self-imposed sentence is pretty light: I thought I'd list some poets whose work I know chiefly through translation, although in some cases I've also tried to read the work in the original language.

I would indeed include Rilke and Lorca (pictured) on the list, as well as Cesaire, a poet whom Langston Hughes liked a great deal and who's also linked with the Negritude movement in world literature.

I'd also include, in no particular order, Basho, Rumi, Goethe, Machado, and Vallejo. I like some of Bly's translations of poems by Machado and Vallejo as well as his discussion of Latin American and Spanish surrealism in contrast to French Surrealism.

Speaking of the French, I do like Baudelaire's and Rimbaud's work, and I like Victor Hugo's poetry, although I'm not partial to the Penguin translation because the translator decided not to replicate the rhyming and form Hugo used, but it's a bilingual edition, so you can look over and see what Hugo was up to.

I like a lot of Swedish poetry and have read some in the original Swedish, especially in the anthology Svensk Dikt. Some students I taught at the University of Uppsala gave me an anthology of Seven Poets From Uppsala (although I've translated the title, and the poems themselves are in Swedish). I also return often to Robert Bly's translation of contemporary Swedish poets, Friends, You Drank Some Darkness. Marie Silkeberg, Gunnar Ekelof, and Tomas Transtroemer are among my favorite Swedish poets.

To round out this international list, I'll include Eugenio Montale, Li Po, Boris Pasternak, and Marina Tsvetaeva, as well as Yevtushenko, whom I got to meet and chat with some 15 + years ago in T-Town.

Obviously this brief list excludes too many great poets, and I've no doubt committed more literary misdemeanors by omission. Sometime I need to mention who some of my favorite Canadian poets are, for instance. Atwood's edition (for Oxford) of Canadian poetry is no doubt viewed as old hat, but I still like dipping into it.

Movies With Snow

I've been watching the black-and-white, late 1930s film-version of A Christmas Carol today, off and on. I love the pace of such British movies. The scenes really move along. I'd forgotten about the scene in which Cratchett knocks Scrooge's hat off with a snowball and is fired. I don't think that's in the tale. The snow actually looks almost convincing in the film.

Probably my favorite snow-scene in cinema is in Dr. Zhivago, when Zhivago and his love hide out in the winter home, but the film also begins with some great exterior cinematography featuring a bleak wintry landscape. There's also the ill-fated protest, cut down by Cossacks on snowy streets.

For some reason, scenes from McCabe and Mrs. Miller also stick in my mind. Much of the film seem to have been shot on location, and the denouement takes place in the snow. Indeed, McCabe (Warren Beatty) is able to get the drop on a bad-guy by playing dead in the snow. That's before McCabe himself perishes in the snow. The film features some of the intentionally bad recording of sound and mumbling that Altman liked for some reason--his version of cinema verite, I guess. Otherwise, it's one of my favorites.

Beatty himself made a pretty good film involving a lot of snow, Reds.

I'm sure I'm not alone in being partial to some of the snow-scenes in Ingmar Bergman's films, including Fanny and Alexander.

Hollywood snow is usually pretty bad. It doesn't look like snow, so that's kind of a problem. Hollywood rain may be even worse, however, because there's almost always too much of it. All right, already, it's raining, we get it; now stop wasting water.

What's the film in which the character played by Richard Harris is attacked by a bear and then left for dead--and then left to try to survive in the snow? I think his antagonist is played by John Huston. Is it Man in the Wilderness? It's certainly a lot better than Mamet's strained, predictable move with Alec Baldwin, Anthony Hopkins, and a bear. Oy. That was a stinker, in my opinion.

Oddly enough, I think I first learned from a movie that people usually fall asleep before they freeze to death in snow. A young lad, I was watching a Western on TV. It was about buffalo hunters, and I think Robert Mitchum was in it, and I think he freezes to death--but nods off first. However, Mitchum may have just been nodding off in the middle of a scene. He didn't exactly take himself too seriously as an actor. He even turned down the lead in Patton, allegedly, because he said he'd just say the lines while somebody drove tanks back and forth in the background, whereas someone like George C. Scott would really tear into the role. And Patton includes a few interesting winter-battle scenes.

Mitchum strikes me as having been the type to like a good snow-ball fight, rather like one of my brothers. Sometimes we could get enough kids together in town to have a wee snowball battle between "teams." Forts of snow were built, and snowballs got stockpiled. My brother slipped some rocks in a few of the snowballs he made. That sort of thing tends to kick a snowball fight up to another level.

More Snow-Poems Piling Up

A valued reader of the blog and professional writer from Minnesota reminded me that Ms. Emily Dickinson wrote quite a few snow-poems. Living in Amherst in Winter had to have been rough at times, what with no insulation or central heating. I wonder what kind of cook-stove the Dickinsons had in that house. I also wonder what the hardwood of choice was for burning--maple? Oak?

I also forgot to mention Robert Bly's Silence in the Snowy Fields (speaking of Minnesota), arguably the book that made Bly a nationally known poet.

Then there's George Keithley's magnificent book-length narrative poem about the Donner Party. Snow certainly played a role in that awful drama. (The photo is of Donner Pass.)

Snow-Poems

It's been snowing in Tacoma today. Snow in Tacoma is big news because usually this part of Washingston gets snow only once or twice a Winter, and even then, not much. Of course, in a city that's not used to snow, people react and over-react to it in a variety of ways. They don't necessarily know how best to drive automobiles in the stuff. They tend to go too fast. At the same time, snow seems to make a lot of people happy. I was getting my hair cut today when someone, not the hair-cutter, asked me, "What do you think of the snow?" "Well," I said, "I grew up around snow, so I associate it with shoveling." She seemed disappointed in my reaction, so I tried to meet her part-way. "But it sure provides a change from our usual gray Winter," I said. "It's pretty." "Yes," she said, brightening, "it's pretty." I gathered that most of the hair-cutters weren't able to show up that day because of the snow, especially if they lived in those notorious "outlying areas" that weather-persons seem to like to discuss. There always seems to be more snow in the outlying areas, not just in the "higher elevations." If you live in an outlying area that is also at a higher elevation, then the weather-person takes a very grave attitude toward your situation.

Anyway, I got to thinking about well known snow poems.

The first one that came to mind was the one I had to memorize and recite in 4th grade: "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening." It's one of those Robert Frost poems that appeals to a broad range of readers. Those poets who like it probably like it first because of its technical brilliance. The combination of formal rhythm and speech rhythm works well, and the interlocking rhymes seem close to perfect. Repeating that line at the end really is a superb move, too. I've never sense anything forced in the poem. The scene and narrative are simple and accessible, so the poem works at almost every level of education, but they are also suggestive enough to tempt interpreters. When I studied the poem again in college, I discovered that some critics thought the poem to be about death. To me, this interpretation was not and is not persuasive.

Other snow-poems include Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," Basho's "First Snow," Billy Collins' "Snow Day," Richard Brautigan's "The First Winter Snow," and William Carlos Williams' "Hunter's in the Snow," which, if memory serves, is an ekphrastic poem insofar as it concerns (in part) Breughel's painting of the same name. In fact, I think the poem may be in the book Pictures from Breughel, which earned Williams a Pulitzer Prize--his only one, I think. Tobias Wolff has a short story by the same name. It's a well written story, but also a cold-blooded one that echoes Hemingway insofar as it seems to have disdain for the characters in it, as Hemingway's "Francis MacComber" story does, too, at least in my opinion.

My goodness, I wonder how many Russian and Swedish poems there are about snow. Canadian, too. On a site called "The Canadian Poetry Archive," I just found a snow-poem by a person named Archibald Lampman. The poem is pretty good, and the poet's name is to die for. "Hello. My name is Archibald Lampman, and as you might have already guessed, I'm a poet."

Louis MacNiece has a poem called simply "Snow," and so does Edward Thomas. Robert Graves wrote called "Like Snow." Another Billy Collins one is "Shoveling Snow with Buddha."

Those venerable American poets Longfellow and Whittier wrote snow-poems, as did Edna St. Vincent Millay: "The Snow Storm."

But I keep thinking I'm forgetting a very important snow-poem, one even more obvious and famous than some of the ones already mentioned. Some figurative snow is piling up in drifts near my memory, however, and my memory is preoccupied. It thinks it may have to go out and shovel some snow soon.

Human in an Airport

(photo: Naugahyde)

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Human in an Airport

To be human is to sit cross-legged

on a Naugahyde chair at an airport-gate,

which is no gate, to know what the word

Naugahyde means, to wear a dark woolen

coat, to wear cotton jeans which owe their etymology

to Genoa, to have had some of your head's

hair tinted yellow chemically, to wear metal

ear-rings, to wear a diamond-barnacled band

on one finger, to read with great rational,

passionate concentration a book entitled

World War IV, and to mark passages with

translucent, yellow, watery ink as if you

might be personally involved in this or that

denouement of history. And to sneeze.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

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