You Don't Say?

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Really?

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Tell me a story.

Go ahead.

I will listen and

Nod my head.

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Talk a lot.

Make it plenty.

I'm one patient

Entity.

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Conversing's something

We can do.

We coincided:

Me and you--

*

(Or "you and I").

Is that so?

Tell me more!

I want to know.

*

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Snoring

According to the OED online, one of the earliest appearances of "snore" and/or "snoring" in print occurred in 1140, but an arguably more entertaining quotation comes from the 18th century and essayist Richard Steele:

1710 STEELE Tatler No. 208 6 We have a Member of our Club, that when Sir Jeffery falls asleep, wakens him with Snoring.

The etymological trail of "snore" also runs through such variations as "snork" and "snort." There's just too much to like about those two words.

Snoring

A motorcycle gaggle guns its snarlers

into Larynx Tunnel. Then a nearby sea

seems to sigh. The engines rumble once

again. The process repeats itself in a crude

rhythm as the one lying next to you or

the you who listens to you subconsciously

waits for a crescendo to seize the terrible

song. Whoever is listening waits for a gulp,

a swallow, a sigh--a break of some kind

that will invite soft silence to settle

like a dew on the slumbering cacaphonic

heap of prostrate weariness. How

can tired be so loud?

*

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Auden After the News

(image: W.H. Auden)











I listened to and watched some news tonight on television. Staunch Republican Frank Gaffney is still claiming that Saddam Hussein consorted with those responsible for attacking the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and that, therefore, the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do. Then I learned that respected (if controversial) reporter Sy Hersh, speaking at a forum in the Midwest, explained that the Bush administration included an assassination-squad that reported directly to the Vice President and operated independently--traveling to other countries, not even bothering to communicate with the CIA, and killing people named on a list. The book containing Hersh's reporting is not due out for 18 months or so; we'll have to wait on the evidence for a while, but perhaps others will dig into the story now to see if it will hold up. Fortunately (or, in this case, unfortunately) Hersh almost always gets things right.

Having had enoughof the news, I turned to W.H. Auden's Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage 1975) and read "A Walk After Dark," which ends this way:


For the present stalks abroad
Like the past, and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world.

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends
And these Unitd States.

(pp. 232-233)

Promptly Write Poetry

I was cleaning up my computer's "desktop," which is neither a desk nor a top (an uppermost surface), and I ran across a list of "prompts" or "ideas" for poems--each prompt designed to help students start writing a poem.

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Probably, the issue of whether to use prompts in creative-writing classes (or simply in one's own writing) is less contentious now than it was 10-20 years ago. In all the creative-writing courses I took in college, we were given almost no prompts. In one class, however, Karl Shapiro gave us a semester-long task of writing poems about a poet whose worked we liked. I chose Hopkins and wrote a series of poems about him.

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I guess one argument against "assigning" poems or providing prompts is that poetry is supposed to spring purely from inspiration. Of course, a nearby philosopher will immediately order, "Define 'inspiration.'"

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With regard to this issue, I'm terribly biased, so much so that I co-wrote a book, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively that discusses different aspects of writing poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction but that, in each piece, ends with some ideas for writing. In a way, it's a book full of prompts, topics, tasks, assignments, experiments, triggers, suggestions (choose your favorite term).

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I'm the sort of writer that often likes to be given tasks or challenges, and I actually think many poets fall into (or wander into) this category. To some degree, Shakespeare challenged himself (or maybe one of his friends challenged him) to write a sonnet that disrupted conventions of sonnets when he wrote "Sonnet 18." "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It's as if he's asking himself more than he's asking the imaginary listener. Much of the poem is taken up with his showing that the comparison isn't a good idea, so Shakespeare is writing a kind of counter-sonnet that refuses to make conventional comparisons. His implicit poetic answer to the question is, "Well, I shall and I shan't--watch this."

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Sometimes the challenge or prompt is as simple as. . . trying to write a villanelle, a sestina, a sonnet, or a pantoum, etc....or trying to write a poem in one long sentence...or trying to write a poem on a topic about which you've written a poem: refrigerator, feet, landfill (e.g.). Often, that is, "inspiration" may spring from a fairly plain task one gives oneself or from an idea or an experiment someone asks you to try. Once the writing is underway, we might find more inspiration, more reasons to keep wanting to write the thing.

*

Anyway, here are the prompts I found on my non-existent but nonetheless cluttered "desktop," in the unlikely event your're interested:

Write an homage-poem about a favorite writer. You need not be enthralled by the writer or her/his work, but you should like a lot of the writing, and you should feel a strong connection to it or to her/him (as you imagine her/him—after all, the writer may have died long ago). But it’s fine to have mixed, ambivalent feelings toward the writer and his/her work. (Auden wrote an homage to Yeats; Ginsberg wrote an homage to Whitman.)

Write a poem about a time when you were excluded from a group or, at the very least, when you believed yourself to have been excluded from a group.

Pick an age, more or less arbitrarily: 11, 9, 15, 13 years old. Then write a poem in which you completely make up an “autobiographical” event. But it should seem real, not farcical or over the top. And it might even capture an emotion you might have felt at that age, even if the “facts” of the poem are entirely fictional.

Write a poem that begins, “After you lied to me, . . . .”

Write a poem that begins, “After I lied to you, . . . .”

Write a poem about an animal you have observed closely—but not a pet. It has to be an animal you’ve watched—maybe smelled or heard, too. --You know, like that one horse that slobbered on you, or the spider that lives in your bathroom.

Quickly list ten verbs, in the past tense. Then start a poem that draws heavily on this list of verbs. Let the language pull the subject. Follow the verbs. See where they go.

Write a poem consisting of 10 images you associate with a given topic, thing, subject. You might start by making a list of topics, things, or subjects--or even by asking someone else help you make the list. When you write, make your language precise. Present the images. Then see where the poem takes you.

Think of a strong emotion—fear, love, disgust, outrage. Then write a poem about something neutral—tea, a boulder, being in the library, whatever. Let the emotion drive the poem—but not overtly. Leave the emotion under the poem, like molten but unseen lava.

Write a poem that is somehow concerned with the topic of shame, but be concrete—trust the images.

Library Catalogue As Inspiration

(image: old library-catalogue, the wooden kind)

So recently I searched (online) the Nevada County (California--confusing, I know) Library catalogue to see if the library held a book by me. I thought I had donated one, but I was wrong. At any rate, I typed my name in and hit search, and although I was searching by "author," the catalogue, having not found anything related to my name, presented me with suggested keywords related to each of my names.

Consequently, in relation to "Hans," the following list was provided:

strong, lost, most, cost, position, stop, strength, St [no period], stood, lot

The list, however, was verticle and had no commas, so it looked a bit like a poem.

In relation to "Ostrom," the following list was provided:

hands, has, then, hand, as, an, answer, things, means, ask

Of course, when presented with lists of words like this--lists that are both random and not--a poet thinks he or she has just received a most extraordinary gift indeed.

In poetry-writing classes, I often have students make lists of their favorite words (although I steer them away from proper names or pets' names) and then begin to generate a poem strictly from the words themselves, without a subject or topic in mind. Of course, additional words have to come into play to help begin to stitch something together. Temporarily, I fashion a false binary and say that sometimes we're inspired by something than happens or that we remember, and then we go find language to make a poem out of it, but that at other times, we start with language and go in search of a topic. The processes are much more entangled and reciprocal than that, certainly, but the idea is to consider language itself as a kind of "inspiration," a starting place, a trigger.

In any event, I gave myself the same assignment, except that I worked with the words from the library catalogue, not with my favorite words. The initial draft looks like this:

What Things May Mean

Even the strong
will have lost most.
That is the cost
of our position.
We must stop
thinking of strength
as sainthood.

Hands have. A
hand has an answer
sometimes. In
the conversation
you will have
this afternoon,
the word “things”
means “ask.”

I don't know that I've really found a subject yet, or maybe I've found too many, but it was most pleasurable to work with these words, which had arrived unexpectedly and seemed to ask to be made into some kind of poem. Putting them into sentences and aligning their sounds were satisfying tasks. I also like the fact that databases now politely correct us and offer to make up for our mistakes by providing "helpful" suggestions, including lists of words the computer thinks we thought we meant to write. Lovely.

Naps

(image: Kindergarten students taking a collective nap)

The OED online lists and defines a dozen different versions of "nap" as a noun, ranging from a type of wool fiber to a cup to "a baby's nap"--that is, a diaper (as it's called in the U.S.) or a "nappy," as the English call it. There's also "nap" as an adjective and five different versions of "nap" as a verb. Of course, some of these incarnations of nap are now obsolete, but nonetheless, who knew "nap" was such a various-and-sundry word? The OED did, it seems. One quotation is from Dickens:

DICKENS Dombey & Son (1848) xxiii. 240 He..refreshed his mind with a nap

Through 8th grade, I went to school in a town 12 miles away from where my family lived. We road the bus there, and on the bus were kids from age 6 to 18. Because the high-school "day" was longer than the first-grade one, the teacher had us first-graders take a nap on the floor of the classroom. I gather that still goes on in kindergartens, judging by the photo I found on the web (above). We had to sleep on these bizarre naugahyde mats, and I do wonder now about the hygeine-factor, but as to the comfort-factor: children can sleep anywhere.

Anyway, the main idea, I think, was for the teacher to take a break and restore some sanity to herself while she waited for 3:30 to roll around, whereupon we'd board the bus and travel 12 miles up the mountain--on a winding highway next to a canyon: kudos to the bus-driver (usually it was one Neil Foster), who never had an accident in the 8 years I rode the bus. I recall one flat-tire, which Mr. Foster promptly changed.

Napping may be a crucial key not just to a teacher of young children but to civilization itself. It might help Americans' sanity, for example, if the U.S. were to construct its culture more along the lines of Italy and Latin America, where the afternoon nap still seems to be central.

I was reading this book, Rules of Thumb, yesterday, and according to it, a one-hour nap is equivalent to three hours of sleep at night. The book didn't explain in what way the nap was equivalent, but I assume the authors meant that body and mind were provided as much restoration by a one-hour nap as three hours of night-sleep. I have no idea whether this information is accurate, and there is the famous REM-sleep-factor to consider, but I can say that naps seem to work just fine for me, when I can fit them in. The world just seems to be a little more manageable after one takes a nap. And then there's . . .the double-nap.

The Double-Nap

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He woke up from a nap,

stared at light left by

a gap in curtains, thought

of ambition as an acquaintance

who never repays personal

loans, enjoyed the pleasure

of second weariness, the lure

of lassitude, and lapsed once

more into napping, which

he considered to be a most

constant, reliable friend

indeed, one with an interest

in his restoration. Oh, Lord,

thought the napping man,

subluminously: a day off,

crowned by a double-nap.

*

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Anthology of African Poetry

Finally, I ordered an anthology of African poetry. I'm afraid I made a very conventional move and went with a Penguin anthology. I'm hoping it will serve as a good place to begin, and I have no doubt many delights await me, so even if you're unamused by this choice, don't disabuse me too much. Anyway, here is the basic information, in case you'd like to join me on this adventure--or, indeed, if you'd like to disabuse me (a bit); --or, better yet, suggest additional anthologies and other books.

Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, editors and translators, The Penguin Book of African Poetry (fifth edition), 2007.

I've read some African poetry and proverbs in translation here and there, I encountered some names of African poets when I was working on two Langston Hughes books, and I've been enjoying poems on Poefrika's blog, but this will be my first systematic foray.

A new anthology: wow--just the sort of thing to give a poet and reader of poetry an adrenalin-rush, and in a way, I wish I were kidding. Some people prefer bungee-jumping off bridges or race-car driving. Me, I go right for that table of contents, ice-water in my veins.

Mayor

(image: Mayor Richard J. Daley)











According to the OED online, "mayor" springs from the French, "mare," and used to be spelled "mair," among other ways. The governmental post seems to have been a feudal one originally, but it soon changed into the municipal-related one we think of now. Probably the most notorious mayor in my experience was Richard J. Daley of Chicago, famous for his dictatorial style, his "machine" ("vote early and often"), his bigotry, and his over-reaction to protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. His son is mayor now. Probably there are many reasons for his having been elected and re-elected, but one of them must be that some people were more or less nostalgic for "the old days."

I met a woman once who had grown up in Spain when Franco was still dictator but who then moved to the U.S.--in her late teens or early 20s, I think. She recognized that Spain's government, etc., was better now than then, but she also recalled feeling "safe" in the city she lived in--because Franco ruled militaristically: no street-crime, etc. I doubt if this woman ever would have voted for Franco, assuming he'd stood for election. Nonetheless, she experienced a degree of nostalgia when thinking of her childhood when he was dictator. The current Daley is no Franco, of course, but I do wonder if some people prefer "familiar authority" sometimes.

Anyway, I've been messing around with a mayoral poem.


A Brief Message from the Mayor

I'm the Mayor of No-town,
Population: One. However,
others live here seasonally.

I like to tell people I won
the election in a run-off.
I disagree with myself,

can't decide what to do,
and change my mind a lot,
so government suffers here.

True, I don't get many
complaints. I've threatened
to resign in protest. Still,

it's a good place to live.
I might create an ad-campaign
to boost tourism--something

like "No-town: home of
the Big Yes" or "No-town . . .
for a Tiny Vacation."

This democracy of one--
I have my doubts. I think
I'll change the charter.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Whom the Students Like: Poets

(image: ice cream fit for an emperor)

So I gave a test in the Introduction to Poetry Writing Class. I suppose it's unusual to give tests in creative-writing course, but there are other good reasons to do so besides the fact that it goes against the grain. We use a textbook [this time it's Kevin Clark's The Mind's Eye, which includes a lot of contemporary poetry] and the Norton Anthology of Poetry, and we do a fairly sustantial unit on prosody and traditional verse-forms, so although of course much of our time is spent on the students' poetry, we also read a fair amount.

On the test, I included a question about a favorite poem of theirs we've read so far--either in the Norton or in Clark's book. Shakespeare may be the earliest author I assign, although at some point, I usually discuss the English ballad tradition briefly as well as Anglo-Saxon poetry and how (for example) it influenced Hopkins.

Anway, here are the students' answers:

William Butler Yeats, "The Second Coming"

Ezra Pound, "In a Station of the Metro"

Robert Frost, "The Road Not Taken" [we spend some time discussing the ways in which the text of the poem doesn't "say" what people now assume it says] [2 votes]

Langston Hughes, "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" [2 votes]

Countee Cullen, "Yet Do I Marvel"

Norman Dubie, "Poem" (about a child burying a hairless doll)

Barbara Hamby, "Vex Me"

Wallace Stevens, "The Emperor of Ice Cream" [3 votes]

John Donne, "The Flea"

Theodore Roethke, "The Waking" [2 votes]

Wilfred Owen, "Dulce Et Decorum Est" [2 votes]

T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" [3 votes]

I was surprised by the fact that both Stevens and Eliot received multiple votes--Stevens, especially, because I had assumed the students had found "The Emperor of Ice Cream" to be too perplexing, although I try to show that it's really not as perplexing as all that (I assumed I'd come close to failing in this regard). We will have read more women poets by the time the second test comes around, but even so I was surprised poems by Hannah Stein and Ruth Stone (for instance) didn't get a vote. On the other hand, this is a vote only for one poem.

Exuberant Palomino

(image: a palomino, not the one in question, alas)









Study: Exuberance With Yellow Mane


One bright day a rack of years ago,
I stood next to an alpine pasture and saw
a palomino horse gallop across my gaze,
kick his rear legs up, fart as loud as gunshots,
and then run more. Jeter. That was his name.
A fat, friendly, pale yellow horse, was Jeter--
not dramatic. That day, though, his body
broke into a spirited sprint, went on a riff
of freedom, expressed an acrobatic comedy
of gas. He showed the bottom of his back-hooves
to the sky. He diveted that fenced turf.
Jeter had been called to the altar of joy,
and he came running in the sun, old
gassy Jeter, possessed exuberantly,
great to see.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Old-School Brits

(image: Gerard Manley Hopkins)






In my first or second year of graduate school, the university's daily newspaper interviewed an English professor, Elliot Gilbert, whom I ended up taking 2-3 seminars from. He was a Victorianist but also published on detective fiction and other topics. The reporter wanted to know either what Gilbert's favorite authors were or maybe favorite novels. I can't quite remember. Anyway, Gilbert refused to answer and called the inquiry "a TV question." He was right. On the other hand, it's a TV question that is sometimes amusing and pleasantly frustrating to answer.

On facebook, I made a list of my 100 most recommended novels. In a few instances, I bowed to pressure and included books just because they're so widely valued. Lolita is a good example. I don't like it as much as most people seem to, but it's hard to question its status. Otherwise, I listed books that I thought were great. I left off The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick (among others) and caught grief for it the next day, as I should have, I suppose. With listing comes responsibility.

Last night I decided to invent a much more difficult task for myself: to list my favorite 10 Old School British poets--in order of my preference. By Old School, I think I mean, oh, pre-1950, and I included Ireland in the mix, just because, poetically speaking, it is usually in the mix when people put anthologies together; otherwise, no offense intended.

How on Earth did I rank them--by what criteria? Good question. I think the answer is . . . some combination of achievement in the genre (poetry), influence on later poets, and my own personal appreciation. But the percentages change in each case. Anway, here goes:

1. W. H. Auden (the tops)
2. Gerard Manley Hopkins
3. William Shakespeare
4. William Blake
5. William Butler Yeats
6. Robert Browning
7. Samuel Taylor Coleridge
8. Stevie Smith
9. A.E. Housman
10. John Keats

Auden's achievement seems as various as any poet I can think of, and he was enormously influential. Also, it's just great to read his poetry, no matter what day or year it is. Hoplins is there because of his genuinely unique contribution, and also because when I first read him, the experience was something close to revolutionary. You can do that with poetry? I remember thinking.

Shakespeare's there because of the indelible achievement in sonnets, Blake because of the originality and daring, Yeats, I think, because he was just a fine poet. In some of those poems, his way with language is perfect. A lot of his views are just too weird to bear, and the thing with Maude Gonne and daughter got silly real fast. But as for some of the poems: hard to know what more he could have done. Browning is there, I think, because some of his poems are so precociously modern. Of the Victorians, he's the best psychological poet, in my opinion. Coleridge is on the list because, although his batting average wasn't that great, when he did "hit the ball," he hit it to the moon. Stevie Smith's vision and phrasing are just so independent, quirky, and fresh that I find her work irresistible. I can imagine lots of argument for keeping her off the list. Housman's there because of craft. Keats made it on there because of 5-10 fabulous poems.

Wordsworth almost made it on there because of the achievement in some of those lyrics--and parats of the Prelude. I've been re-reading a lot of Wordsworth lately, and the charm is definitely gone. I almost wrote a dissertation on him, and I've taught a whole course on him. He wrote a lot of bad poetry, however, and the self-absorption is unyielding. Nonetheless, some of those poems early on are superb.

If the list were a house, Wordsworth would be banging on the door wanting in. I can hear him out there. The same goes for Pope, Byron, Tennyson, E.B. Browning (Aurora Leigh is pretty great), and George Crabbe. Marvell and Donne are in the crowd, and so is Spenser--and so is Spender, although I can't imagine his banging on the door. Lots of other poets wanted in, but I had to keep the list to 10, just for the agony of it.

I also realized the extent to which I haven't kept up with post-1960/1970 British poetry in the way I have with American poetry from the same period. Part of this has to do with my getting interested in African Amerian poetry, but part of it is also a lack of discipline. I need to do some reading. The same applies to African poetry and Canadian poetry. Oy, so much poetry to read.

After you've railed in disgust at my list, please do make your own. I want to share the agony of choosing just 10--and ranking them. Good listing to you.

Use Form 9/25 For Poems, Please

(image: courtesy of postivesharing.com)

I've been playing around with an invented poetic form--a simple one in which the poem has 9 lines, and you simply count words per line in the following pattern: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. You end up with a poem that has a profile like that of a portly man, but there are other virtues to the form as well.

Unfortunately, I haven't produced very good poems using the form yet. I don't blame the form. Of course, I'm probably not the inventor of it. No doubt many have tried it. I simply haven't seen it around. Give it a try, if you like. I'm calling it Form 9/25, which sounds like a bureaucatric form, so there's that. (Nine lines, twenty-five words.)

Here are some examples, not that you need them, and not that the products are very good, as noted.

A 9/25 Poem

There

is a

kind of drama

in meeting each person

we meet, a space of

light or heavy tension

as one life

intersects with

another.

Starlings

Starlings,

dark grey

and speckled, gather

in a group--thirty

or so--on wires above

my abode. They whistle,

chatter, burble, and

flit. They're

garrulous.

[A bird-watching book I once read described starlings as "garrulous." I thought that to be a charming description.]

Literary Feud

One

drunken boaster

with a reputation

of some kind didn't

like another self-consumed writer,

and they squabbled over

the years, very

jealous: so

what?

(Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom)

Sunset Strip

(image: a section of the Sunset Strip in Hollywood)

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Sunset Boulevard

*

Sunset Boulevard is asphalt and concrete rolled

onto crushed rock. The rest is mirage. If you forget

this, then Hollywood's done one of its jobs. Above

the line of boulevard, wealth's fortifications protrude

from high ground. Below the line, a stew of stucco cooks.

Simmering, it releases gray vapors. Conduits of

sewage, electricity, gas, and such connect it all--

networks of basics, expelled and consumed.

Most buildings and signs on Sunset seem weary

in spite of designed protestations to the contrary.

People look hunted, haunted, or harried, in spite

of display, tattoos, feints, fashion, and façades.

Beneath the boulevard lie geological formations.

On top is us, the decoration. We're the close-up.

Time's the long shot in which all of this will be

out of frame.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom