Winter's Dull Knife

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Winter's Dull Knife


The dull gray blade of Winter's fallen. It
cuts with cold, leaves bloodless wounds:
fatigue, despair, and ague. Winter doesn't
mean well. It doesn't mean anything, although
Lord knows we've tried to dress it in
significance. Some people like to ski.
There are holidays and sweaters.

There's the other hemisphere, which
Summer shacks up with now that it's
left us high and wet. Mostly we walk,
work, and ride in Winter, stay inside
in Winter, sniffling over bowls of soup,
napping with heavy Russian novels,
always hardback, on our chests, mentally
collecting many types of gray, hoping
Winter never finds a sharpening stone.

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Cubist Village

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Cubist Village


A blue horse pulls its fractured,
functional vegetable cart parallel
and perpendicular to our window,
which looks out on an alley and
our living room, where we scratch
noses at the back of our heads,
which host warped angles and excite
the sky beneath our feet. The silent
music of this vortex soothes. Wake up
to the lullaby of thunder's lightning.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Haitian Poetry

Ezra Pound famously asserted that poetry is "news that stays news," but in the face of a catastrophe like the one in Haiti, poetry seems inadequate, far removed from desperate, immediate needs and overwhelming loss. As we contribute what we can and wait for information about else we might do over the longer haul, however, we can take a moment to consider the poetry from the land afflicted. Here is a link to an anthology of Haitian poetry edited by Chris Waters:

Haitian Poetry

Some Writers Born In January

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Writers born in January include Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham, Patricia Highsmith, Isaac Asimov, and Zora Neale Hurston (in the photo). Langston Hughes missed January by that much (as Maxwell Smart used to say), having been born on February 1, 1902--in Joplin, Missouri.

Since 1804

An item I found in Quintard Taylor's nice reference work, Black Facts: The Timelines of African American History, 1601-2008 (p. 64):

"1804: On January 1, Haiti becomes an independent nation. It is the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere (after the United States)."

Fund for Haitian Relief

Below is a link to one of many funds to support relief in Haiti. This fund is well established and supported by musician Wyclef Jean:


Haiti Relief

Monosyllabic Life

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Monosyllabic Life

born, breathe, cry, eat, smile,
crap, want, hurt, pee, sleep,
dance, want, hurt, like, fear,
love, learn, heal, lose, "win,"
call, bleed, wish, sweat, write,
tire, sing, talk, read, drink,
sleep, play, work, sex, know,
find, grow, raise, hope, ache,
grieve, weep, groan, buy, lust,
wear, wash, rest, sell, wish,
lick, frown, cheat, help, find,
shame, ask, take, will, give.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Patrick McGoohan on THE PRISONER

Here is a video clip from an interview with the late Patrick McGoohan concerning his TV series, The Prisoner, which I believe was and remains perfectly suited to poets who like to watch TV:


McGoohan on The Prisoner

The Chore

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The Chore


Life never seemed simple. Once,
though, it appeared to have fewer
components. That was an ego ago.

Mirrors showed compassion. Amazement
was not yet rare. Programmers
had not yet inherited the Earth.

Nostalgia, I'm told, is a yearning,
a warm emotion. What I feel is cold.
It accompanies basic, necessary work:

contrasting yesterday's illusions with today's.


Copyright Hans Ostrom 2010

Against Yesterday

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Against Yesterday


Yesterday is not a good idea. It
just happened, so it's not really
history. It's more like a today
that's started to rot. Yesterday
can't make any promises, and even
if it could, it wouldn't keep them.

Yesterday annoys--the way it blurs
into a perfectly fine today, insulation
between the two disintegrating like
wet cotton candy. Listen, I'm
not saying we ought to abolish
yesterday. I'm suggesting we impose

severe regulations. I'm thinking
we should investigate what a yester
is, why in fact yesterday isn't
yestermorrow, and who made
midnight boss.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Rampant Significance

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(image: Sumerian tablet)
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It's been a while since I've seen wee advertisements on TV for videos of "girls gone wild." I gather from the ads that the "girls" in question are chiefly college students on break who are induced to lift their shirts and expose what, in Sweden (for example, would be unremarkable if nonetheless unobjectionable and certainly not without charm. Probably the videos should be called "girls gone bored" or "boys gone predictable."

I doubt if I can successfully market the idea of "significance gone rampant," so I wrote a poem.

Rampant Significance

There is too much meaning. Everywhere
you refuse to turn, something means.
Messages are getting across. Answers
proliferate like dust mites. Typhoons
of information saturate our land.

In my mind I found the image
of a solitary Sumerian slowly
etching text into stone. The notion
of a billion email messages per
[insert unit here] then swept

the Sumerian and his chisel away like
an ant in a flash flood. No one
has time to be absurd. People
are too busy making themselves understood.
To what end? Points are being stressed.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Brazilian Poetry

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(image: Brasilia's Metro system)
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Today I ran across a nice little overview of Brazlian poetry. The overview appeared (and still appears) on the U.S. Brazilian Consulate's web site. I wonder if the Brazil U.S. Consulate's site has an essay about American poetry. Probably not.

Anyway, the piece sent me in search of An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bishop (on whose poem, "The Fish," I once published a wee essay--pardon the self-serving but non-commercial interruption)and Emmanuel Brasil. It is, I assume in translation--for us dolts who don't read Portuguese. Anyway, I ordered the book. I was about to write that I can't wait to read it, but of course I can wait to read it--I just don't want to wait. While ordering the book, I also saw Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism, edited by Charles A. Perrone--also an anthology, I gather. What a nice title.

Anyway, here is a link to the Bishop/Brasil anthology:

Brazilian poetry

They'll Grow That Way

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They'll Grow That Way


They'll grow that way, the trees--
the way they negotiate themselves
and circumstances: weather, climate,
soil, and such. They they're there.
They are. We are. We look and name,
then file trees away in this or that
taxonomy, maybe mythology,
ecology. We may place trees into
a landscape design, a farm, or an idea
of wilderness. The trees, they don't
know about this. They'll grow
that way, each a tension rooting
in and branching from a code
of seed, a pattern of environment.



Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom