List-Poem by the Numbers

The "list-poem" is one of the oldest modes of writing. Homer made long lists in his epics, for example, and I guess poets, being human (I'll assert this for the sake of argument), simply have that list-function in their brains, a function that Evolution must have selected early on. To Do: stay alive; find water; run from large predator.

Even if one doesn't end up writing a list-poem, listing is a heck of a way to prepare to write a poem. Such a preparation-list can be composed of images, associations that spring from a topic, phrases--almost anything, really. The title-poem of the late Wendy Bishop's book of poems, My Last Door, is a list poem, a catalog-poem, in which "Let my last door . . ." is repeated throughout the poem. So a list-poem can also develop into a kind of chanting-poem, incantatory.

Here's a short list-poem paying homage to the number 2:

Fortuitous Twos

by Hans Ostrom

A pair of spats. Two herons,
early morning, bending

necks to water. Windows
on each side of a carved door.

Cells dividing in a newborn baby.
A mother and a daughter

singing two-part harmony.
Two lovers waking up near

the ocean. Two moons circling
one planet. A couple of old men

golfing in a thunderstorm
two minutes before midnight.

Horns on a moonlit skull,
two miles from the water hole.

This first appeared in Wendy Bishop's textbook, 13 Ways of Looking for a Poem, still in print from Longman.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Homeless

Television-news told me today that almost 200,000 of the homeless citizens in the U.S. are veterans of the military. I think that approximately 25% of the homeless were in the military, whereas only about 14% of the population is composed of former military-veterans.

Almost all cities seem confused by "the homeless problem." When homeless persons establish encampments--under bridges, for example--cities ultimately disband them. But if the homeless congregate near businesses or homes, the police move them from there. Neighborhoods trying to improve themselves are not happy to see meal-distributors show up to feed the homeless because the homeless might bring other problems, like crime. A group for whom my wife and I make sandwiches ran into that problem; the police told them to stop distributing the sandwiches in a certain area of the city. The same goes for shelters: where should cities put them? Should there be shelters on military bases for veterans who are homeless?

The following poem is several years old and goes back to a period when many homeless persons were congregating in our city's main library:

Homeless Citizens in a Library

People have retreated
from the outside
of not having homes
to the inside of not
having homes. This
week that’s the public
library. Amongst books
and terminals, people
sit and lie, squat and
sleep. In bathroom stalls,
a few sell sex or chemicals.
Something needs to be
done about this problem.
Let’s run a keyword
search. Let’s look
for authors of this failure,
Let’s identify the complete
title of our responsibility.
Let’s use our library-cards
and borrow the brains, will,
and humanity to get these
people the help they need,
to get us
people the help we need.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Poem About a Play

One great source of inspiration for writers is literature itself. Imitation of established works by newer writers was part of the writing-instruction created by the Roman, Quintilian, for example, some 2,000 years ago, and creative-writing teachers nowadays use the method, too. More often, perhaps, writers produce a work that expresses a response to reading they've done, or they use an existing work as a kind of rail on a pool-table, playing a "carom shot." The piece they write doesn't imitate the earlier work as it does play off it. In all of these practices, a productive tension exists between the old piece of literature and the new one, just as there is tension between a jazz-musician's rendering of a song and the song as it was strictly composed. The tension might also be regarded as a conversation. (Parody is a "conversation" in which one work mocks another.)

The following poem, by Meredith Ott, a writer in Oregon, was inspired by British writer Caryl Churchill's play about cloning, A Number:

A Number

by Meredith Ott

Me
well what do you mean by Me?
Am I myself because if there is another
I think I should know I think I should because because
I have a right to know because
if there are two three four or more
if there are eight me’s running around
shouldn’t I do I want to know
do I should I care and would they could they be like me
am I like me who am I like tell me, tell Me
I must be like someone
don’t we all come from somewhere some genetic make-up
some test tube of the mind of the body I don’t know
who I am is Me determined by someone else?

Could you tell me would you please
if you had the chance
or would you hide it from me?
if I commit a crime against myself do I commit it against others
who are me or are they me and do they feel it--
my suicide?
or are they satisfied
with life
life that has been chosen for them life that isn’t theirs for the choosing
or do they even notice
or know or care or stop to think or fear that maybe what they have isn’t theirs?
mine
could be
you made me. You made me…
they make me, made Me make them
can’t you stop it if you
don’t you want to have one
One perfect
what is it that you’re looking for?
have you found your one
have you found it in me in them
is it in me or from me
or is it
me
?
you
became the womb
you gave birth you gave me gave them gave you
you selfish
it was all for you I was
they were it was you
playing with god and science and where is my mother
the mother of all
I need to be nurtured to grow to develop
outside of a person sterile pure yet eternally contaminated
by the lack of self, family, being, purpose

raise me love me choose me
choose to choose me
aren’t I original only simple individual complicated complex
enough?
aren’t I enough Me?

Copyright 2007 by Meredith Ott

Invitation from a Poem

Often I enjoy reading poems that somehow invite the reader into them. Sometimes they do so merely by being accessible, but even difficult poems can signal, in a variety of ways, that the reader is still welcome. Many of Shakespeare's sonnets and Donne's poems belong, I'd argue, in the latter category. You know going in that there will be some knots to untie, but you also know you'll probably enjoy being inside the poem nonetheless. With some so-called L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poems, a few of Robert Creeley's poems, and a lot of Pound's poetry, I'm sometimes uncertain about how welcome I am in the poem.

Here's a poem that takes the idea of invitation both literally and figuratively:

Make Yourself, At Home

by Hans Ostrom

You are always welcome here
at the end of this sentence,
in a courtyard of expression.

Your presence shapes utterance,
organizes this garden of letters.
With your permission, afternoon

arrives. We could say “shadows
lengthen,” but that’s not very good,
and you prefer to think of Earth

always moving, pulling trees, people,
hills, and buildings toward and away
from sun. You are and change the subject.

You murmur a tale, which brings laughter
at its close. Will you tell that tale?
Please tell that tale again.

The invitation at the end is "spoken" by the one "uttering" the poem to an implied listener "within" the poem, but the invitation is also literal. The last stanza invites you to tell an engaging, perhaps humorous, tale or anecdote today to someone you know--or to a stranger, if the stranger will stand for it.

The poem is from Subjects Apprehended, by Hans Ostrom (Ohio: Pudding House Press, 2000).

Theme and Variations

I tried an experiment whereby I treated a poem the way a jazz musician might treat a melody, playing a melodic phrase or "theme" and then improvising upon the phrase. A couple circumstances suggested, even before I started, that the experiment might be less than 100% successful. I am a piano player, although piano hacker is more accurate. My mother (not a professional piano teacher) gave me a few lessons in middle-school, and then I taught myself, so I studied with the worst. I like to play ballads from the 30s and 40s, and I do a D+ version of "Satin Doll." Okay, maybe D (the grade, not the key). Second problem: words aren't musical notes. Third problem: it's the first time I've tried this. Fourth problem: nobody really likes experimental poems, even if they say they do. Looking on the bright side, I can observe that the poem really isn't very long. It stretches out a bit, but it doesn't have that many words. Here it is:

Theme And Variation

1. Theme

Be nice to her.
Nice words go far.
To go gracefully, gaze.
Her far gaze matters.

2. Variation

be
nice nice
to words to
her go go her
far gracefully far
gaze gaze
matters

3.Variation

her
to far
nice go gaze
be words gracefully matters
nice go gaze
to far
her

4. Variation

be
to
go

far
her

nice
gaze

words
matters

gracefully

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2007

Poem By Hiroshi Kashiwagi

Here is a spare, wry poem from a California writer named Hiroshi Kashiwagi:

A Librarian Looks at Snails

watching

snails

coupling

I wonder

if they read

books on

sexuality

Copyright 2007 Hiroshi Kashiwagi; used by permission.

Guest Poem by Sarah Borsten

Here is a second poem from Northwest writer Sarah Borsten:

Visiting

by Sarah Borsten

Your hands look smaller
every time I see you,
knitting needles sprout
like fingers that somehow
escaped the fire.
When I visit
you are always sitting
underneath the faded Monet poster.
I ask you if the blanket you are knitting
is for my baby cousin.
You glance at the waterlilies
above your head
and reply that
life has more holes
than you can ever patch up.

Copyright 2007 Sarah Borsten

More Recommendations: Books of Poetry

Students in a poetry-writing class had to choose an extra book of poems to read. Almost all of the students are seniors and thus have reached the ripe old age of 21 or 22 but still qualify as youths (pronounced "yutes," remember, a la Cousin Vinny). Here are the books they chose, in no particular order:



Mark Strand, Blizzard of One
Pablo Neruda, The Sea and the Bells
Frank O'Hara, Collected Poems
Langston Hughes, Selected Poems
Mona Lisa Saloy, Red Beans and Ricely Yours
William Butler Yeats, Selected Poems
e.e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems
Derek Walcott, The Gulf and Other Poems
Gary Snyder, Left Out in the Rain
Marge Piercy, The Moon Is Always Female
Norman Dubie, Alehouse Sonnets

Why Is Snow White?

I grew up around snow--at about 4,000 feet above sea-level in the Sierra Nevada. That was about 1,000 feet lower than the really serious snow, but each winter we still got storms that dumped a foot here, two feet there, sometimes four feet. Before I was born, the infamous storm of 1952 hit, and it dumped so much snow that drifts piled above the roofs in town and cut the town off. Highway-plows were completely useless against such a volume of snow. Lore has it that some pregnant women, among others, got nervous.

Some people who grow up around snow remember it fondly and become lifelong ski-enthusiasts, etc. I associate it with work: shoveling, walking in it, putting chains on tires, getting cold, driving in it with appropriate caution (why some people speed up, only God knows), stoking wood fires. Snow and I are acquaintances, not enemies but not friends.

According to a variety of sources on the internet, snow is white because when light enters it, light gets bounced around off all the crystals that make up snow, and the light basically gets bounced right out. I think this happens fairly rapidly, as light is known to be in a big hurry all the time. Anyway, when it comes out, our eyes "read" it as "white." I remember digging paths through snow to and from the house, however, and essentially a snow-corridor took shape. The sides of the corridor looked positively blue at times, I assume because the light came out and/or went in at a different angle. . . . There is nothing quite like the silence of a snowed-over field, if the wind isn't blowing.

A wee poem, piled only four lines high, about a snow-childhood, then:

Childhood, Sierra Nevada

Snow fell on me.
I fell on snow.
Why it was white
I didn’t know.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

By the way, the name "Snow White" has always puzzled me. I gather it's supposed to suggest virginity or purity. But imagine meeting her in the village. "Good morning, Snow. What's going on?"

This, That, and The Other Thing: Our Lives

I like that pat answer people sometimes give when you ask, "What have you been up to?" "Oh, this and that," they say. It can be a way of saying, "None of your business," or of saying, "It's too complicated to go into now," or "You are not the person I was hoping to speak with right now" or "Mere words cannot describe what I've been up to."

But it can also be an accurate response, for our lives are occupied by This and That. This is the thing occupying us most intensely right now, whereas That is what might be on our minds, a constant thing we have to deal with, a relationship, a political cause--whatever. Our days are concerned with the This of our lives and the That of our lives, hence this wee poem:

The Position I Hold

I work for the Office of This and That.
Currently I am Vice President for the
Development of This.

For many years, however, I worked
as District Manager of That.

In many respects This and
That have been my life.

When people ask me at a party,
“What do you do?” I say, “A little bit
of This, and a little bit of That.” I’m not lying.

-Hans Ostrom

Best of luck with this, that, and the other thing--life itself. Peace be with you, and also with you.

Poem As Very Short Essay; or Essay as Very Short Poem

'Tis the season on many college campuses for students to write many, many essays, a.k.a "papers." Here's a little poem that takes its shape from one shape the essay sometimes takes. The poem first appeared in Willow Springs, a magazine published at Eastern Washington University, which has a fine M.F.A. program in writing.

Bread and Bus: And Essay

by Hans Ostrom

Somebody is always,
always baking bread. It’s
been that way for thousands,
thousands of years.

Additionally, if life
is short, then there is
no such thing as
a long bus ride.

In conclusion, the bus
rolled onto a street
of shops, and we smelled
bread, baking; baking bread.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

May your day be filled with the smell of freshly baked bread. And if you're working on an essay, good luck.

Haiku; Basho; Sneeze

Although one of my favorite books of poetry is Matsuo Basho's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, as translated in English, I hardly ever try to write haiku. Many poets specialize in the form--poets writing in English, I mean. Basho's book is great because it's part travelogue, part autobiography, part meditation, and part poetry. The poetry's interwoven with the narrative, and occasionally he'll invite someone he meets to write a poem with him. In my hands, the haiku-form just seems artificial in a way that the sonnet-form, though difficult, does not. I feel as if I'm writing in a form I don't understand fully, and I assume that there are all sorts of cultural assumptions lying behind the haiku form. For example, the 17 syllables may mean a great deal in Japanese for reasons I don't fathom, but in English, what's the difference between 17 and 16 or 17 and 15? But I certainly enjoy haiku written by other poets, and the focus on clear, "hard" imagery has a lot in common with the Imagist movement.

Anyway, here's just one haiku:

Allergic Haiku

mold, pollen, weeds, dust--

sealed building full of bad air—

she wheezes; sneezes


A-choo.

Bricks

I'm living in a brick house for the first time in my life. I like it just fine. Brick houses always look appealing from the street because you don't see peeling paint, and bricks pretty much stay bricks: they hold their shape and color. I've heard that brick houses don't fare too well in earthquakes, but I don't know that for a fact.

My father, a stone mason, loathed bricks. Basically, he refused to lay them. I think the process was simply too boring for him, and although he would have been furious if someone had referred to him as an "artist," he liked the fact that no two rock walls or fireplaces looked the same. He liked composing the things.

We've always bought highly used homes--a couple were even Victorians houses, ancient by American standards. No matter how much the previous occupant cleans up outside, there always seem to be things of interest (but of no or little use) left behind, such as an oddly shaped piece of metal, a broken chair, or just one brick. The just one brick is the topic of this poem.

Brick

A brick never set
into wall or walkway

seems all rectangular

for nothing, red out
of embarrassment or alarm:

Brick emergency! I need

to be part of something,
mortared into solidarity!

The isolated brick gives

the impression of being aware
of its situation, although

that is impossible.

What will happen?

Weather will get to it.
Or it will break. Anyway

it’ll return to soil, finish
the trip from clay to mold

to kiln to being brick to dirt.