Stafford and Yevtushenko

An oddly matched pair--William Stafford and Yevgeny Yevtushenko: the former a conversational, modest American, in favor of low-key rhetoric; the latter in a tradition of more public, declamatory poetic rhetoric, and also in possession of a robust personality.

I've convinced myself I perceived an intersection in their work, however, specifically in a couple of stanzas. The first is from the opening of Stafford's poem, "Next Time":

Next time what I'd do is look at
the earth before saying anything. I'd stop
just before going into a house
and be an emperor for a minute
and listen better to the wind
or to the air being still.

The poem is from An Oregon Message, and the last line of the stanza is supposed to be indented 5 spaces, but the blog-machinery doesn't want to cooperate.

I like the matter-of-fact whimsicality of the lines but also the way they and the whole poem suggest a wish to do and to be better.

In "Requiem for Challenger," a poem from Almost At the End and, as the title states, a poem concerning a space-shuttle explosion, Yevtushenko begins with a great dramatic image: "This white tragic swan/of farewell explosion," and then, with his panoramic view, manages to take in Arlington Cemetery, the Kremlin, the Pyrenees, the Caucasus, Mt. Everest, and the Statue of Liberty. --Broad, bold strokes: what one has come to expect from this poet. But here is how the poem concludes (and again, the indentation of lines is off; my apologies):

Our life is a challenge.
Our planet is our common Challenger.
We humiliate her,
frightening each other with bombs.
But could we explode her?
Even by mistake?
Even by accident?
That would be the final error
never to be undone.

Like Stafford, Yevtushenko is interested in one's, in everyone's, doing and being better, and, in my opinion, he makes a nice choice when yoking one kind of technological disaster with another one--the nuclear one. Probably some will see "our common Challenger" as trite--a repetition of the "spaceship Earth" analogy, but Yevtushenko is never afraid to err in the direction of big plain statements, large-hearted emotion from which he probably knows some readers will recoil.

Perhaps the intersection between these poems and poets, if it exists, concerns something as simple (but difficult) as wisdom.

Oakland's Okay By Me, There, Gertrude

(image: vintage photo of Jack London Square, Oakland,
California [with vintage automobiles])


It seems as if I've had more students hailing from the East Bay Area of California in general and Oakland/Berkeley specifically in classes than I used to. I enjoy talkling with them about that region.
*
I went to college at U.C. Davis, not Berkeley, but I still spent a lot of time in the East Bay, and I have good memories of Oakland. There's a sense in which one is supposed to be more fond of San Francisco than of Oakland. --Nothing against San Francisco (except the baseball team perpetually breaks my heart), but I happen to be more fond of Oakland. I'm not entirely sure why.
*
As noted, memories of friends, events, and places play a role, of course. Also, I became a fan of the professional football team, the Raiders, by happenstance: the only television-signal we could receive in the Sierra Nevada canyon I grew up in was from an NBC affiliate in Sacramento, and NBC broadcast the American Football League games, whereas CBS broadcast the venerable NFL games. Essentially, the TV signals at the time had to carom off peaks; why one signal from Sacramento arrived at our aluminum antenna and the other didn't remains a mystery, but the mystery led to my "following" the Raiders.
*
Let's see: I accepted a prize in a statewide poetry-contest in Oakland. That was a good night. The first poem I ever read on the radio was for a recorded show on KPFA, whose home is technically Berkeley, I think, but that's close enough for poetry, radio, and horse-shoes. . . .I knew some people in Oakland-proper, in the Oakland hills, in Berkeley, and in nearby El Cerrito. . . . .As far as I know, I was probably the only white person in a movie theater in Oakland one afternoon, long ago; most of the rest of the audience was African American; it was an instructive, valuable, valued, pleasant experience. . . . . The Oakland Museum is splendid. . . . .Trees, birds, people, bookstores, water, places to eat, places to listen to music. . . . .All of these things count. . . .
*
*
As to Oakland itself, whatever that means, I just feel a certain connection to it that I don't feel to some other cities. Gertrude Stein, who lived in Oakland for a while, apparently felt little or no connection to it because she observed, famously, of Oakland, "There's no there there." Well, there you have it. Or maybe not.
*
*
Oakland Is There


Gertrude Stein famously said a lot of famous
things fashioned to be famously remembered
tenderly such as, of Oakland, California, U.S.A.,
"there's no there there," but after she left
and eventually went to Thereville, France,
the There of Oakland that had actually always
been There remained There in her absence.
*
See, Oakland had and has persons, places,
and things--the stuff that composes the There
of any place from Paris to Bangkok, Vladivostok
to Lesotho, Aberdeen to Montevideo. Gertrude
wanted more, or less (who knows?) from Oakland.
--Some irony to that since she possessed the
Oaklandish visage of a stevedore or boxing promoter,
a face with angles and planes in which Picasso
found a lot of There to paint in the portrait he painted.
*
Gertrude wrote some inlandish Oaklandese
sentences and hit some of them right on the
button, and then she died. Oakland's still there.
So is its There, which was there all along, and
will be, and is, and is there, and so there.
*

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Yo, Poe

Thanks to the incalcuable effort, energy, and imagination of some colleagues, the college at which I teach is about to host "SymPOEsyium," celebrating Edgar's 200th birthday, which actually occurred about a month ago, but after 200 years, well--close enough. The celebration will feature lectures, informal discussions, a parody-contest, performances, screenings of films, the serious, the campy, and the in-between. And Lord knows Edgar was in between--serious writer; writer for pay; "Southern Gentleman"; impoverished, feckless roustabout; considered by some to be an indelibly influential writer and critic; considered by others to be juvenile and excessive. Poe was most American, perhaps, in his desperate need for acceptance, in his attempt to try on different identities, in is manic drive, and in his raging inventiveness.
*




The poetry captivated me for a brief "moment" when I was in my early teens, and "The Raven" is still quite a performance, a grand entertainment. Poe also had a way with lyricism. Like Auden, he liked to play with words.
*

Many of the stories still work for me. They aren't especially subtle (ya think?), but that trait mostly springs from Poe's idea of what a story (and, indeed, a poem) should do: go for that one effect. In many instances, the stories achieve multiple effects, and the personae that narrate many of the tales fascinate, are more complex than one might first realize.
*


It's great to watch a writer essentially invent sub-genres that we now call "horror," "thriller," and "detective story." It's fun to watch a writer have fun. Poe's pleasure in entertaining comes through especially, I think, in "The Cask of Amontillado." (Unfortunately, my having worked as a stone-mason's assistant almost ruins the story for me because I know how long it takes to mix mortar, build a wall, etc. Poe glides over the details; more power to him.) "The Fall of the House of Usher" still holds great appeal, and Poe achieved so much in such a small space (so to speak) in "Murders in the Rue Morgue": genius-detective (half-amateur, half-pro); wacky crime; grisly crime-scene; the "locked-room" puzzle; the flummoxed police; the surprise ending.

Writers and readers should probably not underestimate how well Poe tended to start his stories. Some great openers.
*

In college I read and studied The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. A wild book, and not a bad novel, really.
*

For SymPOEsium, I'm going to get off my duff and, with a colleague, talk about "The Philosophy of Composition" and the famous review of Hawthorne's tales. I'll be giving Edgar an imaginary fist-bump. I hope his spirit takes it in the right spirit and doesn't try to brick me up in the catacombs. Yo, Poe: Happy Birthday.

A Way Out of the Financial Crisis

In these tough economic times, we must all brainstorm ideas to help improve the situation, even if we are poets and our financial brainstorms look like tiny dust-whirlwinds on the prairie.

Obviously, if we have just a wee bit of extra money, clothes, or food, we ought to give it/them to somebody who can get it/them to those in need. That's a small-scale idea.

My bigger idea is this: The U.S. should declare its dependence on Great Britain. I know this sounds terribly counterintuitive, especially since so much of our history and identity, not to mention our status as a nation, depends on certain colonists' having declared independence from Great Britain. Then the whole founding fathers thing--you know the story.

In terms of age, however, the U.S. is essentially a teenager, and Great Britain is . . . of advanced years. If we work with this analogy a bit, we might think of ourselves as teenagers or 20-somethings who need to move back in with their parents--just until we get our finances organized, get back on our feet. No doubt from Great Britain's point of view, this maneuver will seem cheeky, to say almost the least. Also, there may be some legal hurdles to jump. Is it possible for a nation to undeclare independence? We must get a team of lawyers, I mean solicitors, working on this, and we should encourage them to wear white wigs, just to send a subtextual message.

If Great Britain goes for the idea, we could ask it to pay some of our bills. One problem, of course, is that I can already imagine people from England shouting, "We already do! You got us into Iraq, Afghanistan, and the banking crisis! You ruined our language! You stole The Office. George Bush hypnotized Tony Blair! What more do you want from us?" It's hard to know how to respond to such points, although one tradition in Parliament (I gather, from watching it on BBC America) is that you can grumble and mumble. I really like how members of Parliament do that. It's impolite and civilized both at once.

"When, in the course of human events, a certain country goes broke and needs to move in with another country, declaring dependence seems like a good idea."

That doesn't quite have the same noble ring, I grant. But it's just a first draft, and I'm just brainstorming, as a poet and a patriot; in a weird sort of way, would undeclaring independence be patriotic? Jeez, I don't know. It's hard to follow the carom-shots. But it seems less complicated than these so-called bail-out packages.

Still Surprised

(image: Lucille Ball)











Still Surprised


I'm still surprised crickets can make
that noise. With their legs. Still surprised
by literature, by love, by eyes. Still
surprised when societies function.
Astonished still by cruelty. Mystified
yet by existence's existence. Always
shocked by violence. I'm still surprised

by the pull of words. Still puzzled that
a part of me imagines it can bring back
those who died: magical thinking. Still
flummoxed by what, exactly, the roles
of child and parent require. Remain

wounded, permanently altered, by
the murders of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK,
RFK, Allende, Palme, Till, and all
the so-called nameless ones. Still
stunned by numbers attached
to people killed. One. Ten. One
hundred thousand. Forty-five thousand.
Six million. Twenty-five million. I'm still
here, so it seems, surprisingly. I'm
still surprised I'm surprised by
cynicism and lies.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

For Cafeteria Workers

According to the OED online, "cafeteria" used to, more or less, refer simply to a coffee house:

1839 J. L. STEPHENS Trav. Russian & Turkish Emp. I. 157 Every third shop, almost, being a cafteria [sic] where a parcel of huge turbanded fellows were at their daily labours of smoking pipes and drinking coffee. 1894 Lakeside Directory Chicago 2188 Cafetiria Catering Co. 45 Lake. 1895 Ibid. 2231 ‘Cafetiria’, 46 Lake, 80 Adams, 108 Quincy and 93 Vanburen. 1896 Chicago Tribune 28 June 4/1 Gerbach used to be a waiter in a West Side restaurant subsequent to his employment by the cafeteria company.

I especially like the reportage concerning one "Gerbach." I mean, the quotation sounds matter-of-fact, but there also seems to be a menacing undertone.

At any rate, "cafeteria" now seems to refer to any large semi-self-serve place to get food, often connected to institutions like hospitals or universities. Of course, the "self-serve" aspect is mostly illusory. A lot of people put in a lot of work to get that food to where you serve it to yourself, but not really; mainly you just carry that tray or fill that glass. I worked in a cafeteria once, almost entirely behind the scenes as a dish-room worker, po-washer, and grill-cleaner, but also as a "runner" tasked with filling those odd milk-dispensers and replacing silverware, etc.


For Cafeteria Workers


The task of cafeterias is to feed large
numbers of people quickly. They are
not so different, then, from farms and
ranches, except the clientele is often
less polite than cattle, horses, and pigs.
*
Back there in the kitchen, they get it
done, the workers: Soup for thousands,
noodles for hundreds, protein and starch--
all timed to be there when the herd arrives
with bad moods and lots of opinions.
*
The dishroom is a symphony of clash,
a humidity of food-smell, steam, and sweat,
a silver cacaphony. The conveyor-belt's
the boss. Each tray brings a catastrophe.
*
The automatic dishwasher--a tunnel of water
and soap--disgorges disinfected implements
eaters will soon stuff in their mouths again.
The pot-washer is a lonely figure. Once I was
he. Heaps of stainless steel arise, food welded
to metal, grease smeared on every plane. Alone,
you work your way through the mountain 'til
nothing's left but you, your soaked shirt, and
clocking-out. Out front, the servers smile.
*
They remember names and endure whiners
and would-be gourmands. Runners fill machines
that distribute fizz and syrup. Cashiers stand on
weary feet and process armies packing trays,
hunger, haste, and attitude. Bless the cafeteria
workers, who are better than we deserve.
{
{
Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Civil Liberties in Bloom?

(image of interned American citizens)









Here is a poem from Mitsuye Yamada's book Camp Notes and Other Poems:


Evacuation

As we boarded the bus
bags on both sides
(I had never packed
two bags before
on a vacation
lasting forever)
the Seattle Times
photographer said
Smile!
so obediently I smiled
and the caption the next day
read:

Note smiling faces
a lesson to Tokyo.
*
Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1992, p. 13.
*
Yamada and family were removed from Seattle and interned in Idaho during WWII. The same thing happened to American families of Japanese background up and down the West Coast.

One of the best designed memorials I've seen regarding the internment happens to be on "my" campus. Alongside sidewalks are planted cherry trees that blossom twice a year. At the base of each cherry tree is a small plaque. On each plaque are the names of the college students on campus who were removed from said campus and sent to interment camps. Probably many of them were sent first to the Puyallup Fairgrounds and held in animal-stalls before being shipped elsewhere. Imagine having grown up in the U.S., being a an American college student, going to class, living your life, and then being removed and interned one day. Of course, property (farms, grocery stores) was stolen and never returned to the families as well. (A Japanese-American alum of the university was chiefly responsible for getting this modest but effective memorial established. A "well done" to him.


Yes, of course I've heard the alleged ways in which the issue was "complicated" and so forth, but the plain facts don't seem to want to budge. Persons of German background were not arrested and interned (nor should they have been). The persons interned were American citizens, not Japanese citizens, so this thing called the Constitution: where was it? Also, where was an inkling of evidence, not to mention due process? Legal representation? To stack irony upon irony, many interned Japanese American men were offered the chance to join the American military and fight--and they took that opportunity and comported themselves well.

Where were the newspapers: Apparently the Seattle Times behaved simply as a cheerleader, rather like Judith Miller, the New York Times, and Bush's crew recently. Newspapers and other journalistic media are supposed to have a contrarian attitude toward who's in power, no matter who's in power. It says so, right there in Contrarianism for Dummies. :-)

I have a colleague who teaches Civil Liberties. He is planning to save 15 minutes in class one day so that he can take the class to the trees and the plaques and suggest that this is one of many reasons why such concepts as civil liberties (and due process, and evidence, and so on) matter.

Counter-Memoir

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Counter-Memoir

*

*

Nobody wants to hear his stories:

what a relief. It's refreshing to him

not to be of interest, not to try to

entertain, not to inflate the value

of his experience. Obscurity is

a dear state to occupy. It is spacious

and undemanding, like a meadow

that wasn't on the map. Still, sometimes

people ask questions, maybe out of

politeness, hard to say. So then he talks

quickly about himself but changes

the subject as soon as possible. Silence

*

is his memoir. A blank page encompasses

that life nicely. He used to want people

to be interested in is stories. What,

he wonders, was he thinking? He

doesn't care about his life-story,

aside from the fact that it appears

to exist. His life-story is boring, partly

because he knows it too well. He wonders:

Is autobiography a kind of sin?

{

{

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Performance-Enhancing Drugs

(image: Roger Clemens, unamused)



The recent hubbub over performance-enhancing drugs has made many a sports-fan morose. If we take the long view, however, athletes have always probably been looking for an edge of some sort, and one wonders about the extent to which some of the drugs have a placebo effect. Also, think about all the bad and mediocre athletes who tried the drugs, only to find out they (the drug-takers) were still bad or mediocre athletes, except that they'd expended cash and ingested something awful.

I do remember with some amusement the Cold War Sports-Era, when some of the East Bloc athletes, especially some women, looked, well, unusual, but I reckon some athletes from the West were mischievous, too. Ya think?


As usual, I tend to focus on peripheral questions. For example, with regard to Barry Bonds, I always wondered why more players didn't imitate him by choking up on the bat, not by taking (allegedly!) performance-enhancing thingamabobs. Bat-speed seemed to be one key to Bonds's success. I don't know of another major league player who chokes up on the bat. In fact, most to the opposite. They get their hands on the knob of the bat itself.

At any rate, I decided to apply the contours of this sports-scandal to literature:


Performance-Enhancing Literary Scandal


Reports from Greece today allege Socrates
may have take the human growth-hormone,
HGH (not an inventive abbreviation). Owing
to an allergic reaction (the report continues),
Socrates may have had to employ Plato to
write the philosophy for which Socrates is
famous. Socrates, having also ingested hemlock
long ago, was not available for comment.


Meanwhile, communiques out of St. Petersburg
and Moscow suggest Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy
may have ingested steroids that helped them
double and triple the size of their novels. Elsewhere,
Faulkner and Joyce scholars are vehemently
denying that the impenetrable sentences of these
two Modern titans are the result of performance-
enhancing chemicals and not merely showing off.


Spokespersons for Thomas De Quincey and Charles
Bukowski said, "Read the books; then decide whether
the stuff we ingested enhanced or not. Also, shut up."
F. Scott Fitzgerald, speaking from West Egg in Heaven,
repeated his oft-quoted line: "First you take a drink, then
the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you."*
{
{


*Quotable Men of the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica Allen. New York: William Morrow, 1999, p. 13.

Foggy Couplets

Couplets in the Fog


Fog's a species of weather--
gray, like a pigeon's feather.
Auden once wrote, "Thank you, fog."
Sandburg thought of cat, not dog.
Fog's in Eliot's Unreal City--
yellow fog, what a pity.
Call it mist, call it fog:
Still you tripped over that log.
If you can, take off work.
No sense traveling in that murk.
Anything you try to say
will come out mumbled, foggy gray.
The fog is subtler than the snow.
And so it's the more dangerous foe.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Last People on Earth

I saw this film, I Am Legend, a while back. It was okay. Thrills, chills--that sort of thing. It reminded me a lot of The Omega Man, with Charlton Heston. These "last person(s) on Earth" movies are mildly entertaining. The material might actually be better suited to the small screen, as in the old Twilight Zone series, because the story doesn't need to be drawn out and padded so much.

*

The rest of the world must figuratively roll their eyes when they see cinematically that, yet again, the last person on Earth is an American guy living in a high-rise with lots of guns and groceries.

The Last People on Earth

If you and I were the last persons left

on Earth, someting in excess of terrible

shall have occurred. (Please note my

powers of deduction.) I assume we'd

be living like rats and have the cognitive

coherence of rabid skunks. That said,

I'd still be willing to celebrate your birthday

and nominate you for offices and awards of

your choosing. I might propose a moratorium

on strong opinions. As we tried to keep warm

(or cool), hide from predators, manage

hydration, sustenance, and hygeine, we might

eventually decide whether to revive the arts

in such forms as dancing, singing, and storytelling.

If you and I were the last persons left on Earth,

I'd be both the last and the first person to come to

for advice. Nothing personal, but I'd assume you'd

try to kill me eventually over something trivial.

*

*

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Zen Golf

I had the very good fortune of having dinner with Sherman Alexie and a few other people tonight. Mr. Alexie is an enormously talented, funny, humane, intelligent man, who also likes basketball and big laughter.

I was talking with a friend after the dinner, and he said, "You write--a lot"--referring to my blog, etc. I told him, "Yes, but unlike you, I'm unimpeded by being smart."(This fellow won a MacArthur "Genius" Grant, so I wasn't indulging in flattery.) I thought that was a pretty good line: If I were smarter, I probably wouldn't write as much. Reflection might get in the way.

Back to Alexie: what impresses me about his intelligence is its flexibility. He's interested in . . . everything. That's actually more a characteristic of a poet than a novelist, in my opinion. Novelists tend to ge most interested in things that follow a certain deep channel. Poets will go up and down any creek.

Back to the friend: He has a great idea for a Zen-related novel set in Seattle. I shall try to induce him to write it.

In the meantime, a wee Zen poem:


Zen Golf
*
*
Bow to the ball. Apologize
in advance for striking it.
Hit it with your favorite
club in any direction.
It's all a Hole out there--
the course, the world,
reality. Therefore, you
can't not hit a hole in one.
Going dualistic for a moment,
the bad news is that no one
keeps score. Even if someone
did count the strokes, there's
nothing to win. Good news
on the dualistic scale: You're
outside, the club in your hand
gleams, a bird craps on a
rich man's head, and . . . .



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

A Visit From a Sage

(image: W.C. Fields)

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

*

Say You're a Failure

*

*

Best just to blurt it out: "I'm a failure."

Other losing phrases will congregate

right away and get too close to you

as they announce themselves:

"I fell a bit short." "It just didn't

work out." "These things happen."

"It wasn't for want of trying." "If

that's what success is, I'd rather

fail." This last one engenders

many look-away glances and

urgent small-talk in the group.

*

*

Now the place is empty again.

You invite a sage over. He takes

his bourbon neat. You ask,

"Is continuing to try and to fail

any better than giving up,

surrendering to failure?" "No,"

says the sage. "True, one gives

the impression of dignity or

perseverence by continuing

to try, but whom is one attempting

to impress, and why?"

*

*

"I'm a failure. I failed," you say.

"Indeed," says the sage, now drunk.

He continues: "Saying so--the

proclamation, the confession--

that's what hurts. Otherwise,

failure is quite manageable.

You know, I really must bring

you a bottle sometime. I see

I've drunk up all your whiskey."

*

*

*

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom