Poet's Musings

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

and so you stand or sit
and drop these packets
of words into the electronic
river. off they float--

and yet they stay,
retrievable, for the river
flows and freezes both at once,
visible to all, theoretically.

in practice the electronic river
is a vast obscuring mass,
an orderly crash
of infodataimage.

these word-packets
are lost and found,
gone and here,
disappeared and
recovered like the legendary
vowels missing from the ancient,
mysterious word, Html,

the pronunciation of which
the imaginary scholars
at Borges University
bicker about over
glasses of claret
in the Minotaur Library.

Copyright 2012 Hans Ostrom

Advertising: The Literary Genre of the Age

After, oh, 1920, let's say,
advertising became
the dominant literary genre.
It's stories, images, and ethos
hold culture's imagination.

Advertising's the myth,
the epic poem, the novel,
the drama of our age.

Other genres pretend
at the edges, play at their
old importance. It is assumed
that publishers advertise novels,
especially best-sellers, that studios
advertise films, especially
block-busters, and that other
studios advertise music, but
novels and films and music
and the rest
publicize advertising,
the master genre

that sells space, real
and virtual, and that turns
a profit, which is the god
of our creation myth.

Copyright 2012 Hans Ostrom