Out of the Ordinary Time

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Out of the Ordinary Time
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A turquoise cable-car, yes, something
like that and not like that is tonight's
craving. I've learned not to lose sight
of basic needs (water, money). But
there's more to life than survival,
or so it seems when you're surviving,
anyway. So yes, long-haired, brown,
unamused Jesus riding a Harley
out of clouds to pay a serious visit
to pious "wealth-gospel" punks: that
would be of interest. Or a wheel-on-fire
chasing Donald Trump down an alley
in Calcutta, Shiva waiting for him
to Come to Mama. Or a furry llama
standing in mist just outside my dreams.
A seagull's scream, a shark's devotion,
some old shaggy, long-lost emotion:
these are sorts of things tonight called
to say it needed. I stood in rain. I pleaded.
Lightning sawed off a chunk of sky,
dropped it in the bay. That's
what I'm talking about.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Long-Lived Authors: Harper Lee, Karl Shapiro, Philip Roth

I was talking with another writer the other day, and he was observing that, when he was a very young writer, he often heard other youthful scribblers romanticizing such concepts as "surrendering your life to art" and "living hard and dying young [in relation to writing]."

I understand the romantic appeal of these ideas; on the other hand, in order to write, one does have to remain alive. It's just kind of the way things work.

So I want to say word in favor of writers who live, survive, thrive, and persist--who keep on truckin' and keep on keepin' on. Among them is Harper Lee, author (as you well know) of To Kill A Mockingbird. She recently turned 83. She's kept on writing, but she's chosen not to publish much. Philip Roth is still going strong at . . . age 73, I believe. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., lived into his 80s, as did Karl Shapiro (1913-2000). In fact, a posthumous edition of Karl's last poems was recently published by Texas Review Press. It's called Coda, and it shows how splendidly Shapiro kept writing poetry well into his late 70s. He never lost his eye for detail, his love for the whole lexicon, his confident voice, and his iconoclasm. He stayed funny. Bless his heart.

Stanley Kunitz lived for 100 years and wrote for most of those.

Keep writing and keep living--it's a both/and kind of thing.

Happy Birthday (Birth-Month), Writers

Here comes June, always an ambiguous month in the Pacific Northwest. It can be as wet and cold as January, or as summery as anywhere else in the U.S. You just never know.

However, you may know what authors were born in June, at least if you care about such things and poke around the Internet. Here's a list of some of our writerly friends, some still with us, most not (except in their words, etc.) who were born in June, starting with a howl:

Allen Ginsberg
John Masefield
Ambrose Bierce (do high-schoolers still read "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"? I hope so.)
Anne Frank
Barbara Pym
Ben Jonson
Laurie Lee
Blaise Pascal (perhaps my favorite spiritual writer--and author of a book in a genre by itself, Pensees)
Lillian Hellman (if you haven't seen the film, Pentimento, I invite you to do so)
Louise Erdrich (that's what I like--someone who's at ease with both fiction and poetry)
Luigi Pirandello
Colin Wilson
Mark Van Doren
Mary McCarthy (attended school in Tacoma)
Elizabeth Bowen
Charles Kingsley
Octavia Butler (thanks for your final book, Ms. Butler, Fledgling, not to mention the other ones)
Jean Anoulih
Pierre Corneille (we bunched the difficult French-playwright names together)
Harrie Beecher Stowe
Saul Bellow
Thomas Hardy (a.k.a. Mr. Cheerful)
John Ciardi (I have fond memories of his radio-spot on NPR, called "Good Words to You," and I very much like his translation of Dante)

Small Garden

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Small Garden
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When carrots come up, they're green hairs
on Earth's loamy pate. Already, though, they're
pointing covert orange fingers toward Earth's
molten core. Carrots like cool weather. Tomato-
plants don't and therefore hunker. They hold
out for the blaze, in which they'll then sprawl
promiscuously and weigh themselves up
with serious loads of red. That said, lettuce
is the lovely one, presenting delicate textiles
of itself to sun. So goes growth in post-Edenic
gardens, fallen and common, full of manure
and worms, seedy, sketchy, weedy, kvetchy,
half-cultivated, half-rude, all vulgar. Water
and weed, heed the almanac, fill a sack or
two at harvest time: all to the good.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poets Who Would Have Blogged

(image: Emily Dickinson, the best poet ever)
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A simple speculative question, with no falsifiable answers: Which poets from the pre-blogging era would have blogged?

Homer? Yes. Although digitally print-related, blogging has much in keeping with an oral tradition out of which Homer sprang. Same goes for Virgil, who imitated Homer in every way.

Rumi? Yes. Rumi was an expansive, garrulous sort. What's not to like about blogging?

Martial? A tough call. He loved to gossip. But he may have made fun of new-fangled things.

Dante? No. However, he may have invented an additional circle of Hell for bloggers, if need be. (The might fit in existing circles.)

Chaucer? Yes. Geoff had the gift of gab. Same goes for Shakespeare, who would have found a way to revolutionize the genre. (In my poetry class this term, we decided that a good alternative name for Shakespeare was Master Shake, performance poet.)

Li Po? Yes.

Marvell and Donne? Probably, but within small circles. One would have had to subscribe to the blog.

Samuel Johnson? Why blog when you have the human blogging-software as your best friend (Boswell)? On the other hand, Johnson was such a social, verbally combative sort that he may not have been able to resist blogging. In one draft, he would have produced a sculpted, perfect essay.

Alexander Pope? No. Blogging wouldn't be traditional enough, and it would have been great satiric fodder for him.

Basho? Absolutely. Blogging on the road with a laptop. Collaborative blogging.

Wordsworth? Yes. Many posts about childhood memories and Dorothy, and childhood memories, and memories, and Wordsworth, and Dorothy, and childhood memories, and Wordsworth. Oy.

De Quincey? Maybe late at night, after the pharmaceuticals were brought on board?

Byron? Yes. Leigh Hunt? Absolutely. A journalist at heart.

Blake? Yes, if he could bring all the funky graphics on board. Oh, my: Imagine Blakean blog-posts!

Tennyson? Not so much. Arnold, no. But he would have written a poem complaining about blogs.

Emily Dickinson? Absolutely a perfect form for her. She could communicate with the world but maintain her privacy. Her posts would have been cryptic, brief, wry, and perfect.

Whitman. Are you kidding me? Blogging was made for Walt. "Blog of Myself."

Eliot? No. Pound? No. Blogging would have too much to do with the unwashed masses for their tastes. We are the hollow bloggers, we are the stuffed bloggers. Do I dare to blog?

Williams Carlos Williams? All over it. Langston Hughes? All over it. Imagine the sheer number of emails, not to mention blog-posts, Langston would have written.

C.P. Cavafy? A tough call, but no.

Auden? Yes. Spender? No. Larkin. Hmmmm.

Yeats? Absolutely not.

Marianne Moore? Oh, yes.

Frost? No.

Irving Layton? Yes. For a variety of motives.

Neruda. Hmmm. Uh, yes.

Sandburg? Yes.

Baudelaire, yes, Brautigan, yes, Victor Hugo no. Rimbaud, yes.

Goethe? Ah, come one. Germans and technology? Yes.

Something's Been Decided

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Something's Been Decided
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She told me sometimes she feels
like a short-wave radio that only
sends and doesn't receive. She
sends out good wishes, polite
inquiries, and expressions to try
to keep old friendships going.
Not much comes back, she said.
"I may have offended thoughtlessly,"
she added, "but more likely is
something's been decided. I mean,
I'm ignored because I'm ignorable."
She thanked me for stopping by.
I said, "Keep in touch." "I will,"
she said. "Will you?" We smiled.
"Send and receive," I told her.
"Let's do both."
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Mr. Cheney

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One of the latest headlines, from UPI, on the Internet is "Strategists Stymied by Cheney's Stature."
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Mr. Cheney selects interviewers who won't press him on the most basic, insoluble contradictions. He cheerfully admits that the U.S. used water-boarding, and just as cheerfully asserts that the U.S. doesn't torture. How is water-boarding not torture? According to Cheney and the "legal" memos, it isn't torture because they said so. I think I'll rely on my eyes and ears, which have witnessed the videotape of water-boarding, and on someone like Jesse Ventura, who has been water-boarded. Interviewers shouldn't let Mr. Cheney even get to the question of whether torture "works." They should just keep asking how water-boarding isn't torture. And keep asking. And keep asking. Until and unless he walks off the set--or resolves the basic contradiction.
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Mr. Cheney
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How do you unplug a former Vice President
of the U.S.A.? You don't. He is like a large
refrigerator with nothing good to offer from
inside. He turns lies into ice-cubes:
We used "enhanced interrogation techniques"
like water-boarding, which isn't torture because
we don't torture, unless you count near-drowning
as torture, along with sleep-deprivation, beatings,
and other "enhanced techniques," which is the
language of those who order torture, which saved
us from being attacked, after-torture-because-of-
torture being the logic--the logic, I tell you, so
shut up! The refrigerator opens its doors. Words
come out. The former Vice President is
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an American appliance. He runs on American power.
Hear the ice-cubes tumble from his brain to his mouth?
An ice-cube melts into a lie. The interviewer laps it up
like a dog. The refrigerator watches the dog. People
watch the refrigerator and the dog. It is a TV show.
It is a former Vice President of the U.S.A. "Children,
can you say 'above the law'?"
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

The Seventh Seal: Bergman's Light-Hearted Romp

(image: Death and a Knight play a friendly game of chess
in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal)
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As we move toward graduation-Sunday on campus, there are numerous luncheons and dinners at which members of the Board of Trustees and the faculty mingle.

At last night's dinner, I sat next to a colleague from the History department, and we discovered we both liked Ingmar Bergman's classic film, The Seventh Seal. We also discovered that we had attempted to screen the film for students--with disastrous results. Most students simply think the film is too weird. Go figure!

Many parts of it have always made me laugh, although I do recognize that the genre is not exactly MGM musical. Death and the Knight playing chess intermittently and Death's sawing a tree in which someone is perched (somehow such a Swedish thing to do) both make me laugh. Ah, that droll Scandinavian humor.

In any event, my colleague reported that when she got the film going (on DVD) for the class, a student in the back said, "Wait a second--you mean this film is both in black-and-white AND subtitles?!"

Ah, well, some class-sessions just get off to an imperfect start.

Nothing To Explain

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Nothing To Explain
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A stout frailty of birds noises things up well
in gray rain this evening. They empty their
throats before feathering down to sleep
in trees and brush. Meanwhile, I climb
into a hulking steel wheeled-thing and go
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to market to secure such items as oranges,
bread, and strawberries. I don't understand
birds, nor they, me. Thus shall it always be.
Yet we may share a burst of activity at dusk,
paying homage to nothing more than having
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made it through another day. The birds
and I ended up in the same place.
There's nothing to explain.
The have feathers. I have hair.
Both get wet in rain.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Sour Grapes

(image: sketch of fox and grapes, courtesy of Litscape.com)
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I've been working with another writer on a project that is not strictly about wine but related to it, so technically our project concerns sour grapes.

At the same time, I've been reading a translation of Jean de la Fontaine's fables in verse. Fontaine stole cheerfully, freely, openly, and well from Aesop and others and recast fables in verse. He was born in 1621 and died in 1695, by the way.

The edition I'm reading is from Penguin, translated by James Michie, with an introduction by Geoffrey Grigson.

Arguably the most famous fable from Fontaine (although not original to him) is the one about the tortoise and the hare. In fact, yesterday I asked a hard-working cashier if she were working too hard, and she said, "No, just steadily," and I said, "Slow and steady wins the race," and she said, "Yep, that's the way it worked with the turtle and the rabbit."

The second most famous fable (again, this is contestable) may be the one about the fox and the grapes. Because the fox can't get the grapes, he (or she) allows how he or she didn't really want them, and down the ages has come the phrase "sour grapes," except now it's applied to people who express disappointment after not getting what they want. Here's how Fontaine's fable ends, in translation:

Wasn't he wise to say they were unripe
Rather than whine and gripe?

So the point of the fable seems to be that instead of whining, the fox simply suggested that the grapes weren't ripe anyway yet and thereby kept his cool. I think our notion of "sour grapes" has drifted since then, and note that the grapes are not sour as in fermented (wine) but sour as in not yet full of enough sugar (unripe).

By the way, the illustrations for this edition are by J. J. Grandville, and they just slay me. I love sketches of animals that are fully costumed in human clothing. You get this sort of thing in Beatrix Potter books. The key is that the animals are not sentimentalized. Yes, they're personified, obviously, but they maintain their full animal-identity, and the effect is to make the costumes seem a bit much, not the animals. Perhaps my favorite animal-in-clothes sketch is in the Potter books; it is one of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a frog. A most dignified frog.

The River Moved

(image: Tower Rock, Perry County, Missouri)
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The River Moved
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I get used to watching rivers move from up
to down. Then someone will remind me,
"The river used to be here until it moved,"
and I picture rivers walking slowly across
plains, opening another canyon for themselves,
going underground for a spell, or running into
dams--nibbled by turbines and turned into
a lake that sits and waits but never loses
its desire to find a sea. The way rivers move's
a note slowly written in cursive to time, whose
mail historians and geologists open. For instance
the famous river-boat that sank's buried on
a dry plain now because the big river moved.
"It's just a grave now," someone said. "Bones
are down there, remember. No one wants to dig."
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Corresponding With Nostalgia

Nostalgia's a fact of life because it springs from routine, it provides an easy if illusory alternative to bothersome change, and it may be legitimately related to things that worked pretty well in our lives. Things in the past were not necessarily worse, even though our tendency is to over-estimate them (arguably).

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In my case, an example of the latter (things worked all right) would be . . . the post office. In a relatively remote mountain-town, the post-office provided one obvious link to the world at large. It provided one of the most stable routine's of the day--going to get the mail.

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I inherited my father's 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, which I am steadily refurbishing but not restoring; he purchased it new, and by 1997, when we left us, he had put fewer than 50,000 miles on it. Here's a rough guess: at least 25% of those miles were put on when he drove the truck to town to "get the mail." (We had no rural delivery, except of a newspaper or two.) The round-trip was probably around 3 miles.

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I also remember liking the musty smell of the old post office; oddly enough, my dad helped build the new post-office (which is now old), including a nice stone-facade in which he embedded venerable gold-mining implements. I also liked the highly ritualized transactions of buying stamps, getting mail-orders, opening the wee mailbox, and so on.

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One ritual that still obtains in the town is that, when someone dies--especially after a long illness and even if they have moved away--someone attaches a notice of the event to the glass doors of the post office. Email and voice-mail have yet to replace this mode of communication that precedes an official obituary.

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Post-offices still seem busy, but I suspect they're far less busy with personal correspondence, which is delivered via various incarnations of phones and computers (and phones are computers). At the same time, neuroscientists might argue (I guess) that nostalgia is a matter of electrons, too--located in the electrical wiring of our brains.

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A wee ballad, at any rate (and postal rates always go up; why, in my day, a stamp cost only . . .):

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Corresponding With Nostalgia

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The correspondence used to be

Composed of pulp and ink,

Now seems elaborate and slow,

Indeed antique, I think.

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The mail comes digitally now,

Encoded on the air.

Yes, personality persists.

And no, it itsn't fair

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To say we write robotically.

The wait and weight of post--

The palpability of what

I read, I miss the most.

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Yet now I'm totally plugged in,

Am tethered to my screens.

I send and post, receive and text.

("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)

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A letter to Nostalgia, yes:

I think that's what I'll write.

It will come back: "No such address."

Electrons are Nostalgia's site.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Edward Thomas, part two--or Ulex europæus

Since last I posted about Edward Thomas, I took a walk--or an "urban hike." A walk (or similar kind of basic exercise) has to be one of the least expensive, most effective elixirs. The body and mind say, "Hey, thanks for the walk."

Thomas liked to walk, too; more specifically, as Peter Sachs writes in the intro to the collection I'm reading, Thomas liked roads, walking them. My sense is his average distances were much longer than mine, and his roads were "country," whereas mine (at the moment) are urban/suburban. Here's part of a poem by Thomas that seems to have sprung from a walk:

[from] The Lofty Sky

by Edward Thomas

Today I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man's house,
His hedges, and his cows,
Where, if I will, I look
Down even on sheep and rook,
And of all things that move
See buzzards only above:--
Past all trees, past furze
And thorn, where naught deters
The desire of the the eye
For sky, nothing but sky.


Thomas seems to have wanted to get some height on this walk. The poem could be placed in tradition of "prospect" poems in which the speaker looks out over a "prospect" or a landscape. Lots of these got written in the late 18th/early 19th century, although it's hard to imagine any poetic era anywhere that didn't include such poems. You know, you take a walk, you reach a perch of some kind, you look, you see, and later you remember and write. Or maybe you write on the spot. That never worked for me.

By the way, according to the OED online, "furze" is a popular name for Ulex europæus, which is a thorny evergreen bush that has yellow flowers (according the OED) and is also called "gorse" by some. By gee, by gosh, by gorse, by golly, by gum.

Happy Mother's Day (which originated in an anti-war movement, incidentally--you knew that), and happy walking or otherwise basic-exercising, and no, you don't need find a big ol' hill. Huff, puff.