International Rhododendrons

Rhododendrons were something of a revelation to me when I moved to the Pacific Northwest. Unassuming but noble most of the year, rhododendrons blossom extravagantly in Spring.

Soon we inhabited some homes with yards that included venerable "rhodies," and I became even more intrigued by them. Many gardeners give rhodies a great deal of attention, going so far as to pluck off the dried blossoms in late Spring/early Summer. I never did that, partly out of respect for the rhodies, which seemed quite self-sufficient to me. They do grow like mad, so sometimes pruning is called for. And they like some acidic fertilizer every now and then. --And water if the weather gets real hot. Otherwise, they just flourish: part of their charm, as far as I'm concerned. They provide some nice balance to roses, which require constant care, it seems.


Rhododendrons Without A Country


Rhododendrons in Canada and the U.S.
may be aware of a lot, but they don't know
they're Canadian or American. They're
even undecided about whether to be trees
or shrubs. Unsurprisingly, then, they bloom
cautiously. Vivid swatches of color peek
through grenade-size buds and give Spring
a good hard look to see if it's serious or
a double-agent working for Winter.

Rhododendrons never carry a passport
or negotiate treaties. They're model
citizens of forests, parks, and gardens.
Their leaves are leathery, seem wise.
Rhododendrons conduct business with
sun, soil, and rain. They exhibit a
cosmopolitan poise that rises
above petty nationalism.

Copyright 2009

Herrick's Poem, Reader's Face, Let's Party

(image: Likeness of Robert Herrick [1591-1674])

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To the Sour Reader

by Robert Herrick

If thou dislik'st the piece thou light'st on first,

Think that of all that I have writ the worst;

But if though read'st my book unto the end,

And still dost this and that verse reprehend,

O perverse man! If all disgustful be,

The extreme scab take thee and thine, for me.

Well, then! Here is poetry as a bit of a contact-sport. Instead of invoking the muses, Herrick invokes the reader, and, as I interpret the poem, he gives the reader two options: 1) If you don't like the first poem you read in my book, then simply assume that that poem is the worst poem in the book and move on from there (to what will, by definition, be better poetry). 2) If you don't like any of the poems, then you are perverse, and I curse you; specifically, may an extreme scab afflict you and those whom you know.

A poet and poem with attitude: not bad. Also a poet who probably wore a wig, judging by the image above. He looks like he could have played in a 1980s rock-band. Or maybe 1970s: He looks just a bit like Tony Orlando from "Tony Orlando and Dawn."

The use of "reprehend" is nice. We're used to "reprehensible." I don't hear or read "reprehend" much if at all anymore, though.

"Scab," I assume, in this case refers more to a disease than a single scab (crusted-over wound), per se. Here is an example from the OED online that may obtain (from anotheer poet, George Herbert, although not from a poem):

G. Herbert Jacula Prudentum 1137 The itch of disputing is the scab of the Church [transl. of the saying Disputandi prurigo est ecclesiæ scabies].

"Scab" also, of course, has come to refer to a worker who takes the job of a union-worker on strike. I haven't looked into the origins of that figurative use yet, but I probably will.

In the meantime, here's to Robert Herrick and his aggressive opening gambit toward is audience, even though the audience could have simply closed the book in outrage--and hoped the curse would not come to pass.

In a preface or foreword to one of his poetry-books, William Stafford was somewhat more subtle. If memory serves he wrote, "And to my critics: thanks, anyway." Lovely.

The Latest Spring

The Latest Spring

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Well, we were all out in the icy air,

behaving as if Spring weren't later

than we'd ever not seen it. I had seeds

to plant and seeds to feed birds. I

loaded up the bird-feeder, looked up,

and saw a fat robin squatting on

the roof, hunkered down. It seemed

too cold to move. It looked at me.

I looked at it. Chilled and in

no mood to plant, I gave up and went

inside. Birds and I have always

gotten along just fine. I'm not sure

why. Maybe we interpret weather

similarly, and we try to say busy.

They weren't moving around

much today. Me, neither.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Grocery Carts

I use the term "grocery-cart," I think, because I want to focus on the Old School metal baskets-on-wheels, as opposed to the plastic versions ("shopping carts") one is more likely to see at a place that sells clothing cheaply. For some reason, really simple, basic technology--like bicycles, grocery-carts, and hand-turned cake-mixers--continues to fascinate me.


Grocery Carts

Sometimes many grocery carts collectively embrace to create a long hive of silver caging in a parking lot. At night this is how new grocery-carts are born.

From a train, I saw a solitary grocery cart abandoned upside-down on a cresting wave of blackberry vines. I felt the tragedy of its never carrying groceries again. I almost wept, but luckily the train was moving quickly.

Sometimes people who live outside, using layers of clothing as housing, shuffle behind grocery carts filled with all their possessions. The carts look like they were intended precisely for such use. The carts belong to the people.

By accident, I've put an item I wished to buy in someone else's grocery cart. Apologizing, retrieving my quotidian item, I glance at the items the other person has chosen, and I'm envious. What excellent choices they have made! What a superb shopping-list they must have composed before coming to the store!

Sometimes a realtor's face appears on a plastic flap attached to a grocery cart. The face smiles at me no matter what I purchase. It is not judgmental. If I buy pickled herring, the face keeps smiling, as if it were the face of a Swedish realtor.

Sometimes a full grocery cart stands alone on the other side of the cashier's station: someone was unable to pay. One thinks, "There but for the grace of . . .".

Sometimes grocery carts linger at bus-stops. They wait for a bus shaped like a massive grocery cart. This bus will take them home.

Sometimes the grocery cart I select is wounded. It favors one of its wheels. The wheel wobbles like a nervous person. Loyal to a fault, I stick with the cart I chose. It squeaks with pain and wants to stop shopping, but I press on. "Hang in there," I whisper to the cart, "I just have to get some pickled herring and pay for the groceries, and then you may rest."

Sometimes I take an item out of the grocery cart and put it back on the shelf. I think of the person who will buy the item. Our lives will be obscurely connected by the thinnest thread of retail commerce.

Sometimes the eclectic items in the grocery cart seem to be getting acquainted before I arrive at the cashier's station. I can almost hear an orange say to a bar of soap, "What's it like to be processed? I ask only because my cousin became orange juice."

Sometimes too many empty grocery carts are lined up at the cashier's station, as if they're stuck in commuter-traffic, talking on their cell-phones, becoming angry, and tail-gating.

Sometimes pushing a grocery cart up and down aisles between shelves of stuff is a vaguely sad experience. One feels shabby, privileged, and absurd all at once. One feels as if one has pushed the cart into a short story by John Updike.

A grocery cart looks like a genial cage that's always amenable to escape.

Another theory is that grocery carts are baskets woven by artistic robots.

Yet another theory is that grocery carts come from Area 51.

Grocery carts mean too much and too little. That is the way it is with semiotics and with simple technology, so you had better get used to it.

Please return the grocery cart to the place where you are supposed to return the grocery cart. A grocery cart nearby is watching you.

Believing They Can Learn

For teachers of writing (composition) at almost every level but especially at the undergraduate level in college, the name "Mina Shaughnessy" is still one with which to conjure. Her book, Errors & Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing, which she published as Mina P. Shaughnessy in 1977 (Oxford University Press), remains a classic in the field, partly because it helped to change the way teachers look at students and at themselves and the way teachers look not just at mistakes students make in writing but at mistakes in general. (There's a Mina Shaughnessy Award now for the best book on the teaching of basic writing, as well as another Shaughnessy award for an article in the field.) In that decade, after all, people still referred to basic-writing courses in college as "Bonehead English." The name doesn't exactly denote respect for the students in the class--or, indeed, for the teacher.

Shaughnessy, who taught at the City University of New York, argued compellingly that teachers should see mistakes or errors as opportunities and that teachers need to place such errors in context. Here's an excerpt from the book. It's an excerpt that focuses on students who may be the first from their families to go to college, but the the advice is also broadly applicable:

"College both beckons and threatens them [first-generation college students], offering to teach them useful ways of thinking and talking about the world, promising even to improve the quality of their lives, but threatening at the same time to take from them their distinctive ways of interpreting the world, to assimilate them into the culture of academia without acknowledging their experience as outsiders.

At no pointis the task of representing both claims upon the student--the claims of his past and of his future--more nervously poised than at the point where he must be taught to write. Here the teacher, confronted by what at first appears to be a hopeless tangle of errors and inadequacies, must learn to see below the surface of these failures the intelligence and linguistic aptitudes of his students. And in doing so, he will himself become a critic of his profession and begin to search for wiser, more efficient ways of teaching young men and women to write.

For unless he can assume that his students are capable of learning what he has learned, and what he know teaches, the teacher is not likely to turn to himself as a possible source of his students' failures." (p. 292)

(Because Shaughnessy was writing in the late 1970s, she was accustomed to using the singular male pronoun to stand for everyone, whereas after the influence of non-sexist language, we're more used to seeing the plural [teachers; students; they] or "he or she").

In any event, I still value these passages and her book after all these years. And that last sentence in particular is a good one for teachers to remember. If teachers constantly blame students' failures only on the students, then something is probably haywire. Of course, it's just as counter-productive always to blame onself and one's teaching for things that go wrong, but it's always worth asking oneself what one might do better or differently to insure that some learning happens and to remind oneself that, yes, students are most capable of learning (in this case, to write) and that the errors are an opportunity to teach. Also, when students get the clear message that a teacher believes they can learn, they're in a better position to learn--in my opinion.

The Golden Age

(image: Poet and critic Randall Jarrell, with cat)










A colleague and I gave a paper on George Orwell at a conference recently, and I just noticed how odd the term "give a paper" is. In this case, it means that we collaborated on a 15-page single-spaced essay, submitted it, summarized it at the conference, and then responded to reactions.

As the discussion expanded, professors (mostly of political science, in this case) began to complain about students, especially students' not wanting to learn but instead merely to accumulate credits toward graduation. Passing over the issue of whether all students are the same, my colleague spoke up and said, well, when I was an undergraduate, that was pretty much what I was interested in--graduating.

The interchange reminded me of a quotation from Randall Jarrell, specifically from an essay called "The Taste of the Age":

Randall Jarrell
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.
The Taste of the Age

That is, we tend to glamorize our own days in college and believe that students now are radically different. I don't think they are radically different, except perhaps insofar as I think they have had to mature--or at least to absorb more information--than we were. Jarrell's quotation reminds us to be careful not to think too highly of the past and too lowly of the present.

As a poet, Jarrell was extraordinarily empathetic, seemingly able to inhabit the emotions and perspectives of others. (He is most famous for the six-line tour-de-force, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner"). As a critic, he was fierce and acerbic. Karl Shapiro once said that after being reviewed by Jarrell, he felt as if he'd been run over but not killed.

Some things were probably better in "the good old days," whatever era to which we'd like to attach that phrase. But probably relatively few things. The problem is that we really can't compate year X to year Y--to get the full sense of how things really were back there in year X, for us, for everyone--including those who were weary of those yellow Golden Age days.

The Stuff That Came His Way

The Stuff That Came His Way

Yes, this is about the stuff that came his way

and his way with the stuff. By barter, whim,

or accident, odd items came my father's way.

An huge green spotlight from a Navy

destroyer. He wired the light, placed it outside,

and shined it on the mountain. Why?

. . .An ornate barber's chair--porcelain, chrome,

and leather. It occupied our living-room for

a year. He called it a "conversation piece."

I did not know what that term meant. . . .

A hand-made cross-bow. A mahogany

nutcracker in the shape of a naked woman:

the legs did the cracking (very funny). An

upright porcelain urinal, which he left outside,

leaning against a cedar tree. Dynamite. Mercury.

A Chickering grand piano, made in Boston but first

sold in Portland, Oregon. A ukelele. Hand-made

skis. An antique mechanical apple-peeler. Square

nails. Antique barbed wire. Petrified wood. A

bona fide jalopy, which he rigged to drive

a big-bladed buzz-saw. Bamboo fishing rods,

wire and pipe of all kinds, and a Chinese nightstick.

The intrinsic value of all these things was immediately

clear to me. That they had arrived and were mysterious

was all the verification I required. My father used some

of this stuff, laughed at most of it, misplaced some, and gave

a lot away to anyone who made the mistake of showing

or feigning interest. "Hell, take it--it's yours," he'd say.

It wasn't theirs. It wasn't his. It wasn't anyone's:

that was the problem. Toward all the stuff, my mother

remained skeptical, cooly tolerant. She liked the piano.

She laughed, once, at the nutcracker shaped like a woman.

As for the rest: it was from her point of view part of a

domain mismanaged with great authority by her husband,

my father, who was a kind of intersection of the Dadaist

Movement, of which he wasn't aware, and Daniel Boone.

I have a piece of cinnabar someone gave him. It's very

heavy for its size. I'm hanging on to it. The piano's in

my livingroom. I'm restoring his Ford pickup. His stuff,

it came my way. Like him, I'm a magnet for stuff.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Caribbean Cruise (Not)

"Caribbean" is one of those words my mind always tempts me into misspelling. For some reason, I want an extra "r" in there. . . .

I've taken one cruise in my life--an over-nighter from Stockholm to a big island between Sweden and Finland. The Swedish travel-agent informed us that the colloquial name for the cruise was "the booze cruise." He was right. Swedes, especially Swedish men, got on the boat, drank and drank, and then passed out--usually without saying a word and never with causing trouble. Americans tend to get louder when they drink. Swedes seem to get quieter.

I did take a boat from southern Italy to Greece (and back) once, but it was hardly a cruise. It was a people-freighter.

Oh, and I've taken a small cruise-ship on a "dinner-tour" of Puget Sound. That was okay. I actually prefer sitting in a restaurant and looking at the water, however.

I took the ferry from Dover to Holland once, and the sea was rough. Not to get too graphic, but everyone was throwing up except the crew, an Irish woman, and me. I tend not to get sea-sick for some reason, although if I were on a ship in the Atlantic, I probably would. One person made the mistake of rushing to the wrong side of the boat and expressing himself, as it were, into the wind. A crew-member chided him. I thought that was mean. The Irish woman sat there on the deck smoking, and I sat next to her. I think we were each waiting for the other to get sick.

This has all been a rather unpleasant prelude to a poem.


The Home-Cruise

I'd like to take a cruise, Caribbean, let's say,
but I don't like "activities," crowded boats,
and troughs of food. I wonder if they'd bring
the cruise to me: A cup of sand, a bucket of
sea, a box of sunlight, a book about the history
of the Caribbean. --You know, just drop it all
off at the place here. Then I could put on

some swimming-trunks that don't fit,
play recorded Jamaican music ("Get Up,
Stand Up"), pretend to look through a
porthole, fall asleep drinking rum, wake up,
stand up, and feel as if I've taken that cruise,
come back, rested, with some small knowledge
of Jamaica and no sun-damage to my skin.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poetry As Impressionism

I'm continuing some of the most pleasurable reading I've done in some time--that of The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry (cited in earlier posts). If you like poetry and haven't read it, then by all means buy the book new or used or borrow it from a library or a friend or a friendly library.

One of the short poems in there I like is by Femi Fatoba, a multi-talented person--actor, dramatist, stage director, painter, and drummer. He is from West Nigeria. The poem is called "In America," and (unfortunately, the blog-machinery gets in the way) each line below is supposed to be indented four spaces more than the previous line--to create a stair-step effect:

In America
The highway runs too fast
For men to feel the ground underneath;
The mirage does not have time
To look like water:
And too many rainbows
Strangle the clouds.

(p. 270)

Of course, any time anyone, including a poet, makes an observation about one's nation, one is likely to want to correct the impression--not so much out of defensiveness as out of a sense in which one believes one knows "the whole story." But in the case of poetry, photography, painting, etc., one must fight the urge to correct--precisely because what's being offered is an impression--not a sociological or anthropological thesis.

Having visited the U.S., Fatoba no doubt felt the impression(s) represented in the poem, and they're not inaccurate. Obviously, folks from rural California, Montana, and West Virginia (for example) may protest, "Wait a minute--we feel the ground underneath all the time!" But just as obviously, Fatoba isn't intending to ask his short poem literally to make such sweeping claims. No, he's giving us a quick impression, a lively, inspired sketch.

"The mirage does not have time/to look like water": what a great line, an effective way to convey the rush and haste evident in much U.S. (and industrial, generaly) culture. Fabulous. "And too many rainbows/Strangle the clouds": again, wonderful: a superb image and phrase to capture a visitor's impression of American excess, Americans' sense of their alleged "exceptionalism," Americans' sense of entitlement, and Americans' sense of "no limits."

Fatoba achieves so much in so few lines. Great stuff.

Name In The Book

Name In The Book

So I called an uncle to tell him
his sister, my mother, had died,
and he said, "Well, all of our names
are written in the Book." I took this
to be a reference to preordination
if not predestination. After

the conversation, I thought
about the Book--an elegant
symbol of fate, omniscience,
or both. The when, where,
and how of our deaths are out
there, no doubt about that.

But are they fixed, as in a book
already printed? The uncle
I've never known well thinks
so. Since we don't get a good
look at the Book, the fixed
points aren't legible to us,
so my uncle's as much in
the dark as I; it's just that
he stands confidently there.

I wonder if the Book is also a
log and therefore included
the phone-call with my uncle
before the call occurred. Could
be. Who knows? I have to say,
that's how the phone-call seemed.

I wonder how people talked
about predestination before
books started getting made,
but from this uncle's point of
view, I should maybe stop
wondering so much.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Charity In Vancouver

Handouts in Vancouver, B.C.

A homeless alcoholic missing
half a smile asked me for money.
I gave him some. He said,
"Thank you. God bless you."
Moments later, we found
ourselves to be customers
in the same cafe. His use
of money to buy bread
and coffee surprised me.
I'd assumed he'd spend it
on booze to quiet tremors.

The one giving the handout
feels superior, perched to judge;
makes assumptions; and settles
into self-satisfaction. I wonder
what, if anything, he assumed
about me. I wonder if he gave me
the handout of a second thought.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

White Beard

Study: Man With White Beard

The old man's beard grew so big
it became a white cloud below
his face. Wee thunderstorms
occurred in there. Sometimes
a silver airplane from 1948
emerged, banked, and landed
on a nearby table. Behind

the beard lay the face
of a shy man whom no one
knew anymore. With the beard,
the man had grown garrulous
and querelous. He'd been
barking opinions for years.

Sometimes his family takes him
to lunch and tries to listen. They
look at the white cloud of whiskers,
which quiver when he talks. The
cloud hypnotizes them. They
don't hear the opinions coming
from the mouth behind the cloud.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Bach to Basics

Watching Bach Played


I saw a string-ensemble play
Bach's music. Each musician
leaned, turned, and swayed
in chairs differently as
they played. The women's
backs looked strong in gowns.
The men's feet in black shoes
stayed fixed to the floor.

Sometimes violin-bows poked
straight up as if probing unseen
clouds just above the players'
heads. Portly cellos had to be
held up like friendly drunks.
They mumbled low genial
gratitude. One man stood

above the players, waving
his arms and a stick as if
to try to get someone's
attention. The violinists
may have glanced at him,
I don't know, but mostly
they cuddled their polished
wooden instruments, and
let their bodies feel the music.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom