I Dropped Keats's Grecian Urn

Dropping Keats's Grecian Urn


I dropped Keats's Grecian Urn
on a tile floor today. Luckily
the thing existed only on paper
in the weighty anthology that
slipped from my hands. Still
the imaginary sound of ancient
pottery hitting mass-produced
tile was terrible and beautiful.
It made me feel guilty and thrilled.
I picked up the book and made
sure Keats's poem was all right.
Not a scratch.

"Beauty is Truth, and Truth,
Beauty": great phrasing, the kind
that gets a poem anthologized.
I like the sound of it, but I never
knew what it meant because it
went in a circle like a toy-train,
and a lot of truth is damned
ugly, and some beauty is an
illusion, which some people
consider to be different from truth.

--Like my opinion matters to Keats
or anyone else, though. Anyway,
the timeless urn is timelessly encased
in Keats's oft-reprinted words, which
are always awake and ready to conjure
images and thoughts. One way to make
your pottery unbreakable is to put it
in poetry. Pottery/poetry. That's one thing
I got out of the poem a long time ago.

True, in words, the pottery's less
beautiful, and it won't hold much liquid, but
you can always pick it up with your
eyes or your ears and hold it in
your mind's hands, never pay to
insure it, and not worry about dropping it.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

How To Write An Essay (A Poem)

Amongst English teachers--middle school, high school, college--there is something of an eternal disagreement about whether to teach students to write papers in the venerable form known as the five-paragraph essay: introduction, three "body" paragraphs, conclusion, and Bob's-your-uncle. (There's no doubt a lesser debate about whether to write "amongst" or "among." I simply like the look and sound of "amongst." I have no doubt that copy-editors have changed it to "among" in pieces I've written that were headed to publication. And may I say that copy-editors are unsung heroes?)
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I won't rehearse all the arguments here, but even if you're far from the madding crowd of English teachers (and liking the distance), you may have already deduced that the basic disagreement is about whether to teach students an alleged formula (or "mold" in which to pour words) or to teach them how to write in a more process-oriented, organic way. By "organic" I don't mean pesticide-free, although I do like students to turn in essays that aren't sprayed with pesticides. I mean that the the shape of the essays springs from the writing and thinking itself, even as the student has absorbed many conventions of thinking, analysis, expression, and yes, even form (such as "the paragraph").
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A while back I decided to write a poem about the subject, not really to take sides (although my attitude, in a nutshell, has always been, "But what if the essay needs a sixth paragraph to be successful?"), but just to play with and perhaps release some of the pent-up professional frustration that attaches itself to this debate, which must seem to have extremely low stakes indeed.
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The poem was published in a journal called Writing on the Edge--right beside an essay that actually made a compelling case for a "product-oriented" approach to teaching composition if not for the five-paragraph essay, per se, although I believe the author did mention the venerable form. He emailed me later and said the poem made him laugh, and I emailed him back and said his essay made a lot of sense. So much for debate.
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The poem features examples of what's known as a mondegreen, which is a word (or phrase) that results from somehow mis-hearing or mis-understanding another word (or phrase). An example might be "[Ex]cuse me while I kiss this guy" in place of "[Ex]cuse me while I kiss the sky," from the Hendrix song. My poem features a speaker who has, and who can blame him or her, misheard or misunderstood the English teacher.



Notes in Five Paragraphs on How to Write an Essay


According to my notes, an essay
should have a niece’s statement,
which is different from a tropical
sentence. An essay should have a
beginning (how could it not?), a
middle (seems easy enough), and
an end (unlike time, which is infinite).

An essay needs evidence. Otherwise,
the perp walks. The essay’s exertions,
if my notes are right, need supporting
retail. Paragraphs require transmissions,
and the paragraph-brakes need to work.

An essay should have an interesting title,
such as “The Duke of Windsor” or
“Vampire Vixen.” The essay should not
include any logical phalluses. It should have
a good sense of its audience, even though
no one will ever actually pay to see the essay
perform in public. Oh—and it should be

grammatically erect, I am told, and it should
impose a sin-tax on its sentences. There
shouldn’t be any coma-splices or
spit-infinitives. Obviously, nobody wants
an essay to induce a coma or project saliva.

An essay must sight its sources on a
“Works Sighted” page. The essay should
be engaged to its reader, but that sounds
kind of creepy to me. In conclusion, these
are my notes on how to write an essay.


(published in Writing on the Edge, Spring 2008) Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Quotable Men

I've been browsing this book called Quotable Men of the Twentieth Century, edited by Jessica Allen (William Morrow, 1999). Oddly enough, Allen includes no preface or introduction that might have suggested the rationale for limiting the quotations to men.

Here are some quotations about government:

"Voters don't decide issues, they decide who will decide issues." --George F. Will. They may also decide when or when not to use a comma splice, apparently, too. Will's sentiment is the old hard-line Republican or republican (vs. small-d "democratic") one; institutions like the U.S. Senate are there to slow down the alleged will of the people. Wasn't James Madison a proponent of this idea? Given how the political spectacle operates and the money involved in politics, I wonder to what extent voters still decide who will decide, but perhaps I'm being too cynical. This was on page 115, by the way.

So was this, from Milton Friedman: "Governments never learn. Only people learn." Rhetorically, this is slippery, as governments are composed of people, so if people can learn, so can governments. However, some people don't learn, including Friedman, who helped get us in this financial mess, but perhaps I'm being too critical of Milt.

Also on p. 115: "Giving money and power to the government is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys." P.J. O'Rourke. That one brought a grin. Actually, however, I think giving money and power to government is like giving whiskey and car keys to U.S. Senators. Also, we must remember that O'Rourke is something of a Reaganite, and the Reaganites always railed aginst "big guv'ment," except that they made exceptions for military-spending (which looks an awful lot like money and power) and massive deficits (which look an awful lot like money). Reagan's deficits were bigger than Carter's.

And finally, from p. 116, this from Robin Williams: "It's a wonderful feeling when your father becomes not a god but a man to you--when he comes down from the mountain and you see he's this man with weaknesses. And you love him as this whole being, not as a figurehead." Most wise indeed. I think it's a wonderful feeling for the father, too, to shed some of that figure-head status.

Time to go check on what the deciders "we" allegedly decided should decide for us decided for us.

Wilde Thoughts

I've retreated to "the library," three walls of books, one of which (books) I pulled down: The Importance of Being A Wit: The Insults of Oscar Wilde, edited by Maria Leach and published in Oxford in 1997.

From p. 54 and, originally, The American Invasion:

"The cities of America are inexpressibly tedious. The Bostonians take their learning too sadly; culture with them is an accomplishment rather than an atmosphere, their 'Hub' as they call it, is the paradise of prigs. Chicago is a sort of monster-shop, full of bustle and bores. Political life at Washington is like political life in a suburban vestry."

Take that, America! Although Wilde claimed the cities of America are inexpressibly tedious, he seems to have expressed the tediousness well enough. I think there's still a sense in which Americans learn sadly, or think they should learn sadly, especially at colleges that position themselves as "traditional" in one sense or another. Of course, there are some colleges where learning seems to be taken not at all, so I guess things could be worse. . . . I do imagine that Wilde might have a better time in Chicago nowadays. It must have been a pretty rough "town" back then, certainly not up to his refined expectations. (Ironically, the great iconoclast comes across as a bit of a snob in this quotation.)

From p. 150 and, originally, The Critic As Artist: "Ah! It is so easy to convert others. It is so difficult to convert oneself." That's a wise one.

From p. 48 and, originally, A Woman of No Importance: "The youth of America is their oldest tradition. It has been going on now for three hundred years." Still true, yes? Americans, the eternal teenagers.

From p. 49 and, originally, An Ideal Husband: "If one could only teach the English how to talk, and the Irish how to listen, society here would be quite civilised." I think he meant the English need to be more interesting and the Irish less self-consumed, but I'm not sure. Of course, almost all Americans still equate "talking well" (whatever that may mean) with the English and "the gift of gab" (whatever tha may mean) with the Irish. So from this side of the Atlantic, it's call good, Oscar.

And from 106, originally The Decay of Lying: "Lying and poetry are arts--arts, as Plato saw, not unconnected with each other--and they require the most careful study, the most disinterested devotion." Indeed, poets and fiction-writers sometimes forget to "lie," to change "what really happened. " Poetry isn't journalism--or autobiography, although Wordsworth really tried to make it the latter, when he wasn't trying to make it philosophy. Both philosophers and poets like to play with words, however. I think that's why Plato was so suspicious of poetry and why the early Wittgenstein was so suspicious of philosophy, why he tried to reduce it to wordless math. Auden, a most philosophical poet (at times), liked "to play with words," his chief definition of poetry.

No-transition-alert!

Wasn't Stephen Fry superb in the "biopic" about Oscar Wilde? Great casting, but also a great performance. We've been watching him and Hugh Laurie (who is now "House") in the old Jeeves and Wooster BBC show. "Just as you say, sir."

[No-conclusion-alert]

Poem In The Air

Poem In The Air

Oh, Lord, no--not another moon-poem. Oh,
yes, poetry's tethered invisibly to the moon,
which is invisibly tethered to this terrain.
Technically, the moon's not permanent,
but compared to me, it is. I walked under it

tonight--my only option, really. The moon
wasn't quite full, so it looked pinched, and
while I stared, an impulse stole my pen
and notebook and sent another moon-poem
into bright, brief, bulbous orbit. I should

have known better than to look up and stare.
I should have had my eye on the poem in the air.

Names of the Obscure

Names of the Obscure


Mr. Jiggs ran the grocery store in town. He never used
his name as an excuse for not being famous. No one ever
asked, "Hey, Jiggs, did you want to be famous?" It was
out of the question. Not so with Johnny, local mischief-artist:
A thief by age 15, in the Marines by 18, back home at 24
starting fights. He wanted fame and settled for trouble.

Meanwhile, Claude Munkerz became ever more reclusive.
With a name like that, what else was he supposed to do?
Where were "his people" from? someone once asked, not
looking for an answer. Those who made it inside Claude's
shack came back with tales of smells, guns, and incongruously
exquisite furniture. Johnny robbed Clyde (guns and cash),

left town, never came back or found fame. Jiggs let Munkerz
run a tab at the grocery. Claude paid in cash at first, then
in barter (walnut table, mahogany chair), then not at all.
He died. So did Jiggs, in Florida, after retirement. On his
lap when he had the heart attack lay People magazine--
all about famous people.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Intrigue

(photo: author John Le Carre)










Intrigue

If anyone should inquire, I'll tell them
you were summoned to Paraguay to finalize
a business deal or pursue diplomacy, or
to pulverize a a business deal and decontaminate
diplomacy. The verbs are still en route.

This ploy should give you plenty of time
to carry out your plan. --No, it's better that
I know nothing about it. I trust you. I'm sure
the plan concerns peace, healing, romance,
or collectibles. Contact me through an
intermediary. The code-word will be "code."

We'll all be praying for you but in quite
a range of different religions. Here.
Take this. It will bring you luck.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Full-Figured Ancient Animals

(image: artist's rendering of Titanoboa cerrejonensia)






I've been preoccupied by the news story concerning the discovery of a skeleton in Colombia that appears to have belonged, perhaps to belong still (a difficult legal question), to an enormous snake--as big as a bus, according to Slate, and as heavy as a Volkswagen.


http://www.slate.com/id/2210631/?GT1=38001

The article is by Nina Shen Rastogi.

Apparently this species of snake lived even before those creatures we call dinosaurs did. It lived in the Paleocene Era, although you couldn't prove it by me. Of course, scientists have already named the snake even though no one formally introduced them it/him/her: Titanoboa cerrejonensis. Scientists are not only presumptuous but also enamored of syllables, apparently. Let's call the thing Bo, pretending we're on a one-syllable basis with the snake.

Anyway, the article asks, not rhetorically, why pre-historic animals were so large. (I also want to know why we use the term "pre-historic" and simultaneously speak of eras, which imply a scheme of history.) One answer, of course, is not all of them were enormous.

Another answer, apparently, is that they had more time to grow. I wasn't reading the article that carefully, so I'm not sure what this means. Maybe it means the animals started school really late. On the radio, in relation to the same story, I heard that another reason may have been the average temperatures, which were higher than those now, and an even greater abundance of "fuel" to eat.

For self-centered reasons, I prefer to call these animals "full-figured" rather than "enormous" or "gigantic." Also, I think other reasons may explain their size:

1. The heretofore unknown existence of prehistoric pasta.

2. Prehistoric couches and large-screen televisions, featuring, as television must, shows about dinosaurs, even though dinosaurs didn't exist yet.

3. Prehistoric body-building. Some of the animals may have belonged to gyms, were young and single, wanted to look buff, and after a good work-out (and a shower, one hopes), they hit the prehistoric clubs.

4. Absence of humans. Just think about how much space we take up. (All of it.) Without us, there was plently of room for full-figured prehistoric animals. Individual animals could think of a meadow as a twin-bed, for example.

5. This one springs from even more radical speculation and derives from B-movies: The individuals whose skeletons we have discovered were full-figured, but they were mutants, preferably from outer space. What I'm getting at is this: Is there any proof that there was more than one of these massive (sorry, full-figured) snakes in prehistoric Colombia? No. Pure extrapolation. Full-figured speculation, if you ask me, and you didn't.

Symbol-Rescue

Symbol-Rescue

She runs a small symbol-rescue operation

funded by donations. She takes in such words as

Africa, eagle, blood, sunset, heart, peak, sword,

and desert. Sometimes readers and writers

drop off wounded symbols secretly at night.

Her voluntary staff scrapes off encrusted layers

of meaning. The words are then allowed to rest.

In group-sessions, they talk about the abuse

they've suffered over centuries of literature,

politics, journalism, law, religion, and parenting.

They converse about simpler, denotative times.

Eventually, carefully screened users of language

are allowed to adopt the words, to speak and write

them only as needed, to avoid the old corrupt

symbolic forced-labor. The words seem glad

to have a second chance at meaning. They know

they'll get covered with connotative barnacles,

muck, and fungi again. They know they'll get

asked to signify awfully once more. In the

meantime, the symbols have been recovered.

Africa, for example, may mean in ways both

multititudinous and rare, like air.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Murray Edelman and President Obama

A colleague introduced me to Murray Edelman's book, Constructing the Political Spectacle, a while back. I wish I'd read it when it came out, in 1988, U. of Chicago Press. It is superbly written, well argued, terse, and just plain smart. As the title suggests, Edelman applies social-constructivist theory to the political spectacle, the highly complex social performance we call politics or government.

Here's one paragraph:

"Whatever its current connotation, talk about a leader is an ideological text. Like all terms that appear often in discussions of politics, 'leadership' introduces diverse language games that vary with the social context. References to leaders of one's own country, interest groups, friendly or hostile foreign countries, bureaucratic organizations, riots, or revolutions initiate disparate chains of associations that vary with the current situations of observers and are often multifaceted and contradictory. In each case the leader personifies a range of fears of hopes. As a sign, 'leadership' combines wide ambiguity and strong affect" (p. 37)

I thought of President Obama's first formal, official press conference when I re-read this paragraph. What did Obama do to that piece of the spectacle, "the presidential White House press conference"? Well, as Edelman suggests, that depends on whom you talk to. ("Wide ambiguity and strong affect"). I'm guessing that among the first responses from most of those who voted for Obama and some who didn't was one of curiosity ("how will he 'do'?"), and/or one of relief or celebration ("our guy won"; "he's more articulate than Bush"); and/or one of advocacy, inwardly cheering on the President.

My first response to the press conference was that it seemed staged pretty much like the old ones. The staging and lighting look the same as they did for Bush II and Clinton. The press sits well below the president, who stands in front of "the inner sanctum," as it were, of the White House. The effect is that the press is "let in," but not too far, and in an inferior (physically) position.

My second response was that Obama seemed so professorial. He answered only 13 questions in about an hour, and he often spoke in paragraphs, the way Clinton did, but mostly without Clinton's wide-ranging diction, which was sometimes quite folksy (at calculated moments), sometimes not. Obama didn't sound all that different from people I've learned from and worked with for a long time. --A bit long-winded, truth to tell--and it's an occupational hazard of professors to which almost none are immune. After all, in a basic sense, we're paid to profess, just as a plumber is paid to fix pipes.

In the front row, next to Helen Thomas, sat talk-show guy Ed Schultz, a former Division II football player who led the nation in passing yardage one year. Schultz occupies an upper-Midwest, centrist, good-old-boy, union-friendly niche on Air America, although his show is actually distributed by the Jones Network, if memory serves. But he still has "the jock" about him, and I caught him looking down an awful lot, as if he were thinking, "Wow, when is this answer going to be over?"

My third response was that I felt Obama did what all presidents do in such situations: not answer direct questions, pivot, and then launch into answers that are mostly general, predictable, safe, and only specific when specific unilaterally useful. One difference from Bush II, perhaps, is that the rhetoric is still essentially argumentative (as in making arguments, not bickering), while Bush II just seemed to toss out talking-points; he rarely constructed answers, as it were. Bush provided mostly morsels. Obama seems to build answers with well considered parts.

Obama is certainly different from Bush II, Clinton, and others, but this small part of the spectacle has hardly changed at all. Whereas Bush used blunt talking points and a kind of twitchy nervousness to avoid answering questions, Obama essentially filibustered as a way of controlling the situation. When Helen Thomas asked him whether he knew of any Middle East countries that possessed nuclear weapons, he, like presidents before him, didn't get within a hundred miles of answering the question, even though Israel's possession of nuclear weapons is common knowledge. She was playing by press rules; he was playing by old presidential rules. One simply doesn't answer that question. When she pressed him, he moved on to another questioner, just as presidents have done before him.

But as Edelman might have noted, others "constructed" this part of the spectacle each in their own ways, although of course there are large patterns of response. I've enjoyed hearing how others responded to the press conference, just sort of to observe the construction, to to speak. Like poems, political spectacles are built, in a way, but their scale is so much larger, and there's obviously more at stake, at least in worldly terms.

Combination of Factors

(image: Keystone Kops)

If a "mower" is something that mows, is a "factor" something that facts? For better or worse, language is never that logical, although there's an argument to be made that German is more predictable, if not "logical," than English. I'm not going to make that argument, partly because I'm unprepared to do so. Discretion is the better part of not getting trounced in a linguistic argument.

As one might imagine, the OED online is bursting with defintions of factor, used in a variety of parts of speech. Here is one especially interesting (to me), if obsolete, one:

b. One of the third class of the East India Company's servants. Obs. exc. Hist.
[1600 Min. Crt. Adventurers 23 Oct. in Cal. State Papers, E. Indies (1862) 109 Thos. Wasse to be employed as factor. Ibid. 18 Nov. ibid. 111 Three principal factors to have each 100l. for equipment..four of the second sort to be allowed 50l...four of the third sort 50l...and four of the fourth and last sort 20l. each.] 1675-6 in J. Bruce Ann. East-India Co. (1810) II. 375 We do order, that..when the Writers have served their times they be stiled Factors. 1781 LD. CORNWALLIS Corr. (1859) I. 378 We..have a council and senior and junior merchants, factors and writers, to load one ship in the year. 1800 WELLINGTON in Owen Desp. 719 Writers or factors filling the stations of registers.

In mathematics, a factor is a mode of simplification, isn't it? I am so distant from my days with algebra, alas, and algebra is the better for it.

It might be nice, however, if a "factor" were a machine that facted. "Bob, I'm telling you, if you want to make facts in a hurry, you're going to have to upgrade to the Black and Decker Factor-500."

For better or worse, the following small poem uses "factor" in the more customary and therefore vague sense.

A Combination of Factors

"A combination of factors"--such

a fine phrase, a wave of the hand

in the general direction of cause,

correlation, complexity, effect.

It's more droll than "I'm confused,"

less folksy than "Who knows?" It's

a nice place in phraseology to escape

to when the combination of factors

gets to be too much out there, or in here--

they appear to be ubiquitous, not to mention

multisyllabic, those factors, and

they do seem to prefer to combine.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Walk In the Sunshine

Walk in the Sunshine


How should I walk in the sunshine?
--Winter's been so long, the sun
so seemingly distracted.
My shadow will come back
and stick to my feet. Also,
I'll need to get used to moving
and being glad at the same time.

"It will come back to you," people
say. They say, "You'll remember how
to walk in the sunshine." They don't
know this. Nothing comes back. We
make up memories, ask questions,
and behave as if we're points of reference.
And did I tell you about the avalanche?

That's re-routed everything around here.
Anyway, the upcoming interval doesn't
know some people call it Spring and everybody
calls it something or other. Time reflects
not on its own situation. Time is completely
unselfconscious, unaware that it seems
to stalk us constantly. Time's always constant,
in spite of Relativity. No questions occur to
time. Nothing. It knows how to walk
in the light of every star.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

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.