A Slice of Poetry

A Slice From a Poem's Center


...It's too late tonight
to start a poem, or to finish
one, so all that's possible
is to present the middle,
where these dry pine-needles
lie and the pastor's daughter
swims naked in a mill-pond,
and a meteor drags a line
of fire across black sky
above Siberia once only
in all of Time. In other
words, . . . .

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Fooling Around With Surrealism

There's not a lot of time left in the semester, so we had to race through the topic of surrealism today. A student made the apt point that a "manifesto of surrealism" seemed liked an instance of hypocrisy: we need a manual of rules for telling us how to break the rules?!

We also talked about the important role surrealism played in Modernist poetry; arguably the most famous Modernist poem, The Waste Land, is surrealistic.

Sometimes it's easier to start talking about surrealism in connection with painting, so I established a spectrum between Impressionism and Abstract Expressionism, with Dali and Pollock thrown in there somewhere for kicks. Almost everyone in the class loved paintings by Monet and Van Gogh, thought Dali was amusing and relatively accessible, but didn't quite know about Pollock. I described Warhol's film of the egg, and they didn't seem amused, although a couple of them noted that showing such a film would make people reconsider the practice and act of viewing films.

We then read a poem by Charles Simic, and one by Theodore Roethke. In the Simic poem, the key is that he begins by refusing to see the fork (in this case) in a routine way. The poem assumes we are seeing a fork for the first time, and that assumption is the trigger for surrealism. Roethke's poem takes a different approach. It is more like expressionism. It presents a kind of violent, confused emotional response to something ordinary--cuttings, as in cut flowers or cut willow branches. Surrealistic images spring from the emotional response, the inner turmoil. But again, the poem refuses to be merely descriptive.

We then talked about why anyone would want to write surrealistically. Answers: to represent reality more faithfully than realism (ironically); to break through the confines of conventions and predictable genres or modes (like the contemporary first-person, autobiographical narrative poem); to explore the unpredictable murk of the psyche.

I had also asked the class to bring relatively ordinary objects from home. These included a penny, a 2 dollar bill, a black candle, some kind of mysterious lamp shade, a stuffed animal that looked like a kitten and actually seemed to breath (this item freaked out everyone), a deer-skull, a watch, and dice.

We then began to write poems about the objects--our object own or someone else's. The poems needed to be "surrealistic" in some way--that is, not simply and conventionally descriptive. Robert Bly calls this kind of poetry "leaping poetry," and he argues that there's not enough of it in the American tradition. Of course, as I mentioned to the class, the trick is to make sure the reader has a prayer of making those leaps with you.

At any rate, I chose the dice (or die) someone had brought--red, with white dots. I couldn't resist. This is the draft I wrote:

Dice

Fold night several times until
it becomes a cube. The North Star
shines on one side, Orion's Belt
on another, and so on. Repeat the
process. You have two cubes.
Now let your fist swallow both
die. Hold your fist high, shake
it against the sky defiantly.
Make a wager with God.
Toss the cubes onto
a flat black velvet night. Look
at the way the constellated cubes
have come to rest, inert
and grave. Of course, you've lost.
The House always wins. God is
the House. The sky is God's casino.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Sexual Orientation

Sexual Orientation

First of all, what an unusual term. Second,
which parts of the body ought to face east
during sex? Third, if there were a formal
introduction, what society could agree
about who should lead and take
the workshops and what topics should be
covered and uncovered? Fourth, people
aren't ships or compasses. They're
people, and desire is a kind of tautology,
a self-evident definition, a personal
rendition of emotional music. Fifth, the
sun seems to rise, people have sex, the
sun seems to set, people have sex, and
thus has it been so since so long ago, it
seems like forever. Therefore and sixth,
is it past time to love and let love, to
realize adults young, old, and middling
will find their landscapes of desire
using maps that make the most
sense to them and sensing direction
from a most mysterious magnet indeed?


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

The Right to Keep and Bear Memoirs

Yesterday was a darned good day, not to mention today. We huffed and puffed up the hill to Starbucks and got some coffee. We went to a store called Big Lots, the kind of store I really like. It sels stuff from stores that had trouble selling the stuff. How great is that?

Also, our son is home from college, and one of his professors, who is from Ethiopia, required homework be turned in on Friday--on Thanksgiving vacation. How great is that? It was helpful that the homework was online. Why should a professor from Ethiopia know about the rhythms of Thanksgiving break? He or she shouldn't. The rhythms of Ethiopian holidays are different, one assumes.

I picked up my son from an appointment, and I had some pop-radio station on, and he said, "Wow, you're really rocking out." Ah, the dry humor of youth. Then the station played (I suppose "stations" don't really "play" anything now) a song in which the word "glamorous" was spelled out, and I tried to tailor the lyrics to my 1995 Volvo. My son found this to be humorous.

I was able to watch one of my all-time favorite movies, Mildred Pierce, with Joan Crawford, Ann Blythe, Jack Carson, and Zachary Scott. If anyone wants to understand what makes the U.S.A. tick, he or she should watch Mildred Pierce.

I was also privileged to greet a small white dog of the Westie (?) species, watch college football on television in a most fragmentary way, watch commercials featuring stuff I will never buy, and read the following words in books: "eupeptic," "trope," and "dudgeon."

Another member of our family claimed that my Volvo was so messy that it made her sick, so we stopped off at a place that had a vacuum cleaner which you could rent for four quarters. So we vacuumed the heck out of that Volvo. I wondered whose job it was to empty the repository of the big vacuum cleaner, and I wondered what strange items ended up in there.

Tonight, on th e way back from having dinner at a venerable Tacoma restaurant, we started talking about writing, and I said that one good way to improve one's writing is to read a lot. My son opined that no one reads anymore because "all they want are screens," and, only half seriously, he predicted that book-burning would occur soon. Doing my best to imitate Charlton Heston on the subject of guns, I said, "Well, if they come for my books, they'll have to pry them out of my cold, dead hands." And he said, "Yes, everyone should have the right to keep and bear memoirs." Most amusing.

I really do think there should be a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear books. The amendment should be written with greater care than the Second Amendment was. Someone was in a hurry with that one. It's basically a one-sentence amendment in which one kind of business is taken care of with an absolute phrase concerning militias, and another kind of business is taken care of in the clause stating that the right to keep and bear arms shall not be abridged. Of course, the persons writing the sentence had no sense of the extent to which "arms" would evolve, and they didn't define "arms." If we go strictly by the Constitution, we should be able to keep nuclear arms in our basements.

So if we had an amendment guaranteeing the right to keep and bear books, we'd best define "books" carefully.

Carolina Chocolate Drops

Thanks to one of the blogs I follow, the Hyperborean, I was able to read another blog, the Lumpenprofessoriat:

http://lumpenprofessoriat.blogspot.com/

A post there mentioned the Carolina Chocolate Drops, a three-person African American string-band, which the blogger likes. Co-incidentally, I had just seen a recording of their performing on, of all places, the Grand Old Opry, which I almost never watch but which I channel-changed to for some reason the other day. I wrote "of all places" because I don't know whether any African American performer except Charlie Pride has been on the Grand Old Opry.

Of course, traditional rural American folk and "country" music and African American folk and blues music share some complicated roots, but once such music became commercialized in the early 20th century, it became segregated. This circumstance is well satirized in Oh Brother, Where Art Thou, when the convicts and Robert Johnson go into the radio station operated by a blind person. At some point in the 1960s, I think corporate Nashville decided it needed at least one Black performer, so Charlie Pride's career was allowed to flourish. The control exerted by corporate Nashville on its product is notorious; hence the hostility that Johnny Cash often showed and the indifference Willie Nelson still shows toward the establishment there.

On the Opry, speaking for the group, the banjo player and singer, a woman, said the group had studied with an older Black folk musician in the Carolinas. The other two performers, both male, play fiddle and guitar, and the guitar-player also plays the big brown jug.

It was an interesting cultural moment to observe. The all-white Opry audience was polite and even joined in a sing-along, but they were restrained, somehow. Cool. Marty Stewart, who hosts the Opry now and is probably trying to bring it into the modern age, came out and joined the band for the last song. He also tried to get the crowd to stand up when it applauded, but no one would get up. I had to wonder how much the rise of Obama's political fortunes had to do with the appearance of the Carolina Chocolate Drops on the Opry. Maybe nothing.

At any rate, I love the music they make--at once fresh and authentic, definitely Old School, injected with three young persons' zest for refurbishing old music. So here's a shout out to the group, to Marty Stewart (for showing some class), to the Hyperborean, and to the Lumpenprofessoriat. The internet works in mysterious ways.

And here's a link to the group's site (from which I got the photo):

http://www.carolinachocolatedrops.com/

The group will be in Seattle, in May, for about a week, at the Seattle Children's festival.

The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Now there's an enticing topic--the semicolon in modern thought.

There are two kinds of writers; one kind thinks there are two kinds of everything in the world; the other kind doesn't.

Actually, what I meant to say was that one kind likes semicolons and the other doesn't.

For example, poet Richard Hugo, In The Triggering Town, calls the semicolon "ugly." He refused to use it in his poetry. Maybe he used it in his technical writing at Boeing, but I doubt it. Whenever we get to that part of the book in class, at least one student says, "But I love the semicolon," and I always agree with the student. The semicolon possesses its own awkward beauty, as far as punctuation-marks goes; in fact, the semicolon refuses to punctuate; it semi-punctuate; it ends something but not really.

But there are so many problems with the semicolon. By U.S. rules, you are not supposed to use it unless there is an independent clause on both sides of it; moreover, the very fact that one has to start talking about clauses puts people to sleep--as does further discussion of coordinating conjunctions versus sentence-adverbs. One may also use the semicolon to separate items in a series that are so large they include commas. In England, as far as I know, the rules for using the semicolon are different, just as there is no "comma splice" in German. After all, these are printers' marks, these periods, commas, dashes, and semicolons--based on venerable handwriting marks. It's not like they existed in the deep grammar of our brains.

Of course, the main problem is that a semicolon is a period on top of a comma. The semiotics of this situation suggest indecision or error.

Anyway . . .: a poem concerning the semicolon:


The Semicolon in Modern Thought

Scholars disagree; they are disagreeable.
According to Jeb Nolocimis, Distinguished
Three-Legged Chair in Social Podiatry at
Bandsaw University, a hallucinating German
printer presided over the marriage of Period
and Comma in his shop, located in
Mainz-am-Rhein, circa 1498. However,
Dr. Lola Doirep of the Toots Institute
rejects Nolocimis's account as "surreal
historicism." She argues periodically
that the semicolon should be interpreted
semiotically first as inhabiting a liminal
zone vexed by indecision (stop or continue?)
and second as the right and left eyes
of an iconic emoticon, which more deeply
represents "winking post-modernity"
and "the rise of Cyber-cute." Meanwhile,
Argentinian-American poet Rexi Vivaldo,
in his long poem, "Stubby's Quest,"
alludes to the semicolon as "a sad
period's single tear, frozen in time
and space--a lament
for the mortality of clauses . . . ;"


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

One By Poe

Some of my colleagues in the English Department are working hard to put together a conference about and celebration of Edgar Allen Poe and his writing. The event is called (wait for it) SymPOEsyium. Poe's 200th birthday is in January; the event is in February. A colleague and I are going to discuss Poe's essay "The Philosophy of Composition." There's going to be a parody-of-Poe contest, and maybe someone will open a cask of Amantillado sherry. Of course, the jokes about pendulums, live burials, and ravens abound.

I just re-read the following not-famous (also known as obscure, I suppose) poem by Poe, and I found it pleasing in some respects. The influence of Wordsworth--perhaps Coleridge, too--is evident, I think. The focus on the poem seems to be on how the river is in one sense an emblem of art but then on how it becomes a mirror that reflects a woman's face but, more importantly, reflects the adoration of someone who admires her. Of course, we've come to expect a reference, oblique or direct, to Narcissus in poems about water, but that's really not what Poe seems to be up to here. The woman isn't admiring herself.

I like the reference to "old Alberto's daughter," as if the reader is supposed to know who that is, and the line "the playful maziness of art" is most amusing, sounds modern, and doesn't quite sound like Poe. The expression freshly portrays the way a river--which seems quickly to become a brook or a creek--represents art; more typical ways would be to think of the river's flow as similar to the imagination's flow, or to conjure images of sources--headwaters, etc. "Playful maziness of art" I found to be a good surprise. Addressing the subject of the poem right away, followed by an exclamation point, was something of a conventional move, to say almost the least, in the 19th century, as was personifying nature. The poem is derivative, but it has its original moments, and for Poe, it's light, so it has that going for it, too.










To a River





by Edgar Allan Poe





Fair river! in thy bright, clear flow


Of crystal, wandering water,


Thou art an emblem of the glow


Of beauty- the unhidden heart-


The playful maziness of art


In old Alberto's daughter;


But when within thy wave she looks-


Which glistens then, and trembles-


Why, then, the prettiest of brooks


Her worshipper resembles;


For in his heart, as in thy stream,


Her image deeply lies-


His heart which trembles at the beam


Of her soul-searching eyes.

Doug Edwards

Doug Edwards, a Professor of Religion at the University of Puget Sound, died Saturday at the age of 58 after battling cancer for a long time. "Battling cancer" has become a familiar term, but in Doug's case, it is particularly apt. He simply would not give in to or back down from his illness, and even as he endured treatments, he remained of good cheer, completely dedicated to his teaching and scholarship, a family man, a contributor to the community (including as a singer with a bass voice in "Revels"), and an exemplar of the liberal arts.

Doug's scholarly specialty was archaeology; or I should say it is archaeology, for his contributions to the archaeology of the Middle East and especially of sites related to the Bible will endure. He was among the pioneers in the field who used global-positioning satellite imagery, combined with old-fashioned "digs," to produce extraordinary results. I shall never forget dropping by his office one day a couple years ago and having him show me just a bit of what was possible with the new technology. Doug combined the training and discipline of a scholar with the native curiosity of a child.

He was the kind of person who inspires people to try to be better persons. I'm thinking a lot about Doug and his family today, and about the all-too-brief but always warm conversations he and I had. Arguably, he and I shared a certain workaholism, so we often passed each other in corridors or campus parking lots, rushing to another task, but we usually stopped for a moment to chat. Peace be with Doug.

Sentencing

Sentencing

Your sentence is to write a sentence.
Your crime is having conspired
to kidnap a thought and confine it
to words. By writing a sentence,
you serve your sentence. Meanwhile,
you appeal the verdict, claiming
the thought did not pre-exist

the sentence. In your appeal,
you write, "Neurons were at play,
impulsive electricity coursed
through my cranium, but no
thought truly formed until
I was sentenced to write the
sentence, which is the form of
thought, which is no thought
without form." Your audience

appreciates the irony
of your situation, sentencing
having provided the evidence
for your conviction. Your
audience notes the conviction
with which you wrote your
appellate sentence, but
in a formal clause, it
dismisses your appeal,
and so you serve your sentence.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Entrance, Entranced

One benefit of working at a college is that sometimes you get to sit around and listen to smart, well read people talk about an interesting topic. Of course, usually these talks occur during an hour that's squeezed between several hours of teaching, office hours, and many hours of committee-work--not that I'm complaining; it's just that college is somewhat less leisurely than it's portrayed, say, in the cinema, even though college is, undeniably, a privileged place. Sitting around talking about ideas is a privilege. It is also a necessity.

Yesterday I listened to colleagues from departments as far-flung as Math, Religion, English, and Political Science discuss the topic of religion/spirituality--how spirituality plays a role (or not) in their lives, the extent to which it's become socially acceptable to mock religion of any sort on campuses, the extent to which religions are reduced to caricatures and then, like straw men, knocked over, and the extent to which a broad education requires some education in religion. One need only consider how little Bush II (a U.S. president, a graduate of Yale) apparently knows about different kinds of Islamic belief, and how this absence of knowledge may have affected his foreign policy (strategically and tactically), to take the point well.

The professor of religion mentioned that some yogis in northern India practice the following ritual: In Winter, clad only in a small piece of cotton and wearing no shoes or sandals, they walk slowly around a village. Then they sit in the snow and have a kind of friendly meditation-competition. Presumably, the temperature is at or below freezing. They measure the competition by how many blankets they can soak with their perspiration. They perspire because, through meditation, they can raise their body temperatures as much as 17 degrees. Apparently scientists have studied the practice, the phenomenon, the temperature-increase, etc., and although they have documented a factual basis, they have not yet arrived at an explanation of how the yogis can manipulate their physiology to such an extent. The point the professor wanted to stress, however, was not that this practice was somehow exotic or strange but that "there are things out there that we simply don't know" and that, to some degree, religion is one lens through which to examine such mystery.

So is science, of course. His assumption was that science and religion could and should coexist quite comfortably. He also opined, refreshingly, that of course students should leave college knowing something, knowing many things, but that, perhaps more or as importantly, they should leave college not knowing things--or knowing what they don't know, being comfortable with some areas of uncertainty, some mystery, and with that vast universe of things about which humans know nothing. He also quoted Nietzsche (by way of Freud, perhaps), who noted that when people don't undertand something, they often rush to "explain" it, take pleasure in feeling "safe" from confusion once more, and move on--having explained nothing, really, of course. This sort of thing may help to explain why citizens are so comfortable with political slogans, as opposed to more patient, subtle political analysis. Slogans "feel better" to the brain, perhaps.

Today, I was looking at a sign that said "Entrance," and then I associated it with the word "entranced," which made me think, again, about how fluid language is and about those yogis (one of whom is 80, by the way), essentially naked in the snow but sweating profusely, entranced, as it were. So I played around with a draft of a poem:

Entrance

*

*

The entrance entranced her.

A portal, it projected a practical

sign of passage. A designed object,

it also evaded intepretation,

asserted its mystery. To pass through,

she knew, would be to know the entrance

differently. Entrances don't really

lead anywhere, she believed. They

are their own expressions of somewhere.

Entranced, she chose not to pass through

the entrance. Just yet.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

What He Knows

What I Know

Squirrels scratch the roof tonight.
I didn't know they could be nocturnal.
My wife's asleep. I know she's weary.
I've survived life thus far. I know I'm
a remnant. Now the furnace, an old
smoker in the basement, wakes
and coughs, exhales through creaking
ducts. I know I need to change the filter.

I hear a car careening down the alley.
It crunches a trash-can, keeps going.
I know the driver gunning the engine is
drunk, will pull out onto an avenue. I don't
know if I'll hear a siren soon. I expect to.

Near me a gray cat groans in sleep.
I don't know what cats see when they
dream. God, if you're there, good for you.
Good for me, too. The rent is due in ten
days, and I can't afford to get sick.
That's what I know.


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Deluge

Ten years ago, the Pacific Northwest experienced something of a deluge. True, in almost every year we get a lot of rain in Fall, Winter, Spring, and even a chunk of summer, and even this year, there is some danger of flooding. But 1998-99 was extraordinary. Rain fell for three months straight, every day. Sure, the rain fell lightly on some of those days, but nonetheless: 90 days (give or take) of rain. And remember that "40 days and 40 nights" constitute the Biblical Deluge- standard.

I recently exhumed (from mud?) a poem about that chronic rainstorm:

Deluge

Pacific Northwest, Winter 1998-99

Rain for three straight months makes Noah
seem like the mayor of Palm Springs.
Our umbrellas look like sad mushrooms.
Our shoes have become buoys.

Sidewalks serve as creek-beds. Our
minds become mill-ponds. Occasionally
the sun smirks--yes, that's a personification,
but when everything is sodden, everything
gets personal. Worms float up, get stranded
on concrete, look like pink cursive from notes
we had planned to write in Spring.

Spring! What a far-off joke. From where
we sit, inside staring at three months of drizzle,
Spring is a tugboat-season captained by a lush,
adrift in rain-pocked Commencement Bay.
What if it never stopped raining? Someone
asked me that question. I didn't answer.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Civil Liberties Sonnet

(photo is of Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union)








Civil Liberties Sonnet


A civil liberty might be defined
As a chance to have a prayer to defend
Oneself against a power that's aligned
With secrecy and certitude, that's then
Brought out much of the worst in some
Of the cohort who enjoy power, which tends
To unhinge folks. What, however, has been done
Might be undone, with rights restored to mend
The rips in practices that hold a clear
And wary view of power. Checks and rein
And oversights on reign: basic but dear.
Unbounded power just tends to go insane.
Since that's the way it is, that which concerns
Our civil liberties is a priority that burns.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom