"Big Ol' Teeth," by Hans Ostrom

Several decades old, he finds it hard to believe
that a dentist proposes braces for his teeth,
to make money, of course, but technically
to close up those gaps, the ones that apparently
terrify strangers (but not children or animals)
when he smiles, laughs, or snarls. For fun,

he attributes his big, relaxed teeth
and the enormous smile (quite vulgar, actually)
to a Viking heritage. He wonders if it's
a berserker's grin. Important detail:

he hadn't asked the dentist about braces,
and the teeth are in good shape. Typical.
He has always received unbidden advice
about his teeth and everything else.
(The general heading for filing
such advice is, What the fuck
is wrong with people?)

One of his aunts had teeth
behind her wisdom teeth.
He suspects something atavistic
lurks in his DNA. Sabre-tooth
cat? Hyena? Shark?

War, famine, poverty, racism, etc.
go on, so he's not about to spend
excess thought on his teeth, which
work fine, fantastic omnivore-tools.

"Do you floss with rope?" a pretty girl
once asked him at a college party.
Not a bad joke. Apparently his big ol'
teeth transfixed her, for she stared.
Her teeth were suburban straight and white,
as all Americans are supposed to be, right?

He provided deep background. "My parents
asked the dentist when I was ten if I should
have braces. But the dentist said my tongue
is too big and would just push the teeth
out again, and the gaps would come back."

"Really?" she said, attempting to look
inside his mouth, as if he were about
to run in the Derby. She was thinking
about his tongue. He was, too,
in a roundabout way.


hans ostrom 2014

"The Constant Lover," Sir John Suckling

"The Treasure," by Rupert Brooke

"These Annual Bills," by Mark Twain

"Twilight," by D.H. Lawrence

"Recent Musical Scores," by Hans Ostrom

And from our sports and arts desk . . .,
the following recent musical scores:

Beethoven 5, Debussy 3; Buddy Guy, 18, over
Eric Clapton's 4, Bessie Smith outdistancing
Barbara Streisand, 283 to 146; Beyonce

tied with Clara Smith, 102-102; Bill Monroe 98,
Hank Williams, Sr., 83; and finally Charles Ives
edging Benjamin Britten, 31-30, in a very
close match.


hans ostrom 2014

"Piano Ready to Roll," by Hans Ostrom

A piano's lacquered
surface serrates light
from outside, turns it into
a gothic, cubist
rendering
of a keyboard
that looks
a bit like a bar-code.

As music, that image
might be from Monk
or Ives, James P. Johnson or maybe
Chopin
as phrased by Rubenstein. Anyway,
it's all invented and then
rearranged. By all I mean all.

And look, they bolted
this piano to a frame with three
big wheels. That's some serious
industrial-revolution nonsense.

So roll that lovely hunk of thumps,
shadows, and singing strings into
a misplaced bay where your
emotions go sometimes into exile.



hans ostrom 2014

Everyday Speech #3--The 'S' Word in the U.S.

The 'S' word--shit: virtually ubiquitous in U.S. talk. (The rest of the world observes, "We knew all along you were full of it!")

I was reminded of the ubiquity when Carter Monroe, poet, publisher, novelist, and sage, sent me the following list:

Good as shit
Bad as shit
tasty as shit [most amusing]
fast as shit
slow as shit
hard as shit
soft as shit
funny as shit
mad as shit
interesting as shit
boring as shit
smart as shit
stupid as shit

Then there's "I'm tired of this shit" or the working person's generalized complaint, often muttered with a sigh, "Well, . . . shit."

And the universal exclamation of praise: "Great shit!"

And the universal exclamation of dissatisfaction: "Shitty!"

If not an empty signifier, it is at least word that will wear any disguise.

True, other cultures like their shit-words, but most probably don't deploy it as variously as the U.S.

In the 1970s, one heard, "Man, that's some good shit," in re: some of the worst marijuana in the history of humankind. Stems and seeds, as we used to say, back when people apparently smoked stems and seeds. Or so I've heard.

Of course, Freud might have observed something about childhood development and literal shit when examining such a list, and Americans are known for their arrested development (eternal teen-agers, is the rap on us), but there's just no way to prove that kind of speculation. I think it has more to do with Americans' predilection for efficiency in *some* areas of speech, with American coarseness (which even "refined" people like to flaunt so as to project another dimension to their image, or so they think.

When I or anyone else made a hash of something on the construction-job, my father, boss, would occasionally say, "That looks like a mad woman shit." Fantastically colorful expression, so to speak. I don't know why it had to be gendered. That inclination to depict women as mad, perhaps: Sandra Gilbert and others have written about that.

Even when my brothers and I were young lads, the Old Man's parenting style was end mischief as quickly as possible, usually with a direct order: "Knock that shit off" = stop what you're doing. Or "Don't be such a shit-head" or "Don't act like a shit-head to your brother." I responded well to such directives because they were clear, uncluttered, and I didn't get the feeling I was being trained in a broader sense, although "Don't act like a shit-head to [in this case] your brother" does implicitly look forward to shit-head-less days.

Galway Kinnell

Sad to see that poet Galway Kinnell died.

I remember seeing/hearing him read at U.C. Davis in the late 1970s. It was in a relatively small classroom in Olson Hall, next to Sproul.

I recall he read a poem about not being with his mother when she died. A kind of Freudian poem, for lack of a better description, that was not rare in those days, as Freud's influence hadn't waned quite yet.

I also recall a poem in which the speaker tries to talk someone out of suicide, or at least thoughts of suicide. After he read the poem, Kinnell said, "I have to admit, it wouldn't convince me, either."

Self-deprecating, at least at that reading, and the broad, craggy face and what used to be called "an unruly shock of hair."

Fine free-verse poet.

"Conscience and Remorse," by Paul Laurence Dunbar

Revising Titles of Poems

Today I'll be working with the poets on the titles of the poems they've written this term. Here are some of the options I'll offer:


1. If the tile of your poem is long, try a title that is one word. Shapiro: "Nebraska." Langston Hughes: "Harlem."
2. Start with a participle or gerund--an "ing" word. James Wright: "Lying in a Hammock . . ."
3. Make the title a complete sentence: "Jack Eats Plastic"
4. Theme: so old-fashioned! "Of the Unfairness of Stomach Aches."
5. Allusion. "A Bird Eats my Liver"--allusion to Prometheus. "Something's Gaining On Me"--allusion to a statement by Satchel Paige.
6. Adjective plus noun: so simple! "Red Shoes." "White Folks."
7. A word or phrase from a language other than English: might sound pretentious, might not.
8. A title that springs from a word or phrase in the last 3 lines. This works uncannily well.



hans ostrom 2014

"Deader than hell . . ." Everyday Speech #2

"[It] killed him deader than hell." I heard my uncle say this when I was about 15 and changing tires on a dump trunk. He was talking about a fellow who had crawled under a dump truck to remove the jack when the jack failed, and the dump-truck crushed the man. "It killed him deader than hell," my uncle said, finishing the cautionary tale.

So: degrees of death, as if you could be just slightly dead or all the way up to deader than hell. Great vernacular touch there.

I heard it said by many men of my parents' generation. I never heard a woman say it.

I've corresponded with a poet- and publisher-friend in North Carolina who remembers hearing the same phrase, so it's apparently not regional. (My uncle was a native of Indiana, where he drove a car for a boot-legger, among other things, before moving to California to run heavy equipment, etc.)

Probably, it's not a phrase that will survive the Boomer generation, a few of whom might still say it.

A similar but more widespread phrase was, of course, "deader than door-nail," which I never liked because door nails are inanimate. I did, however, like the rhythm and alliteration.

"Wild Plum," by Orrick Johns