Night of the Open Mic

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When someone puts a microphone on a person, is the person "miked up"? I think so. But then if you participate in an event where anyone can come to the microphone and read, are you part of an "open-mic" night? Mike v. mic. The sound v. the spelling. Hmmmm.


Night of the Open Mic

I grew up in an era when voices
were wrapped in the rough velvet
of booze and cigarettes. Low purring
voices brought me news, commercial-
breaks, station-identifications,
travelogues, and live reports
through microphones, which were
large like the heads of sci-fi
insects. Now

everyone is miked-up. People speak
small ugly truths inadvertently during
commercial-break when a mic
is left open. Talk-show hosts are
their own guests and soak in their
logghorea. Men and women speak
into their lapels, their wrists, their
personal computers, their phones,
lamp-shades, and autos. The aural

symbols strummed out by
our vocal chords are broad-corded
and re-cast. Every phoneme is caught
like a metal filing on a magnet. Singers'
voices are bent into tune. Sound is synced
with virtual image effectually. Few listen
carefully--a dying, folksy art. But
every little sound is heard and horded.
The mic is always open in this age,
this long night. Whenever you speak,

you speak into a mic. Not just
wires but the air itself is tapped,
sounds distilled and bottled
into essence, evidence, and confession.
How close to the microphone should
I get? Such a quaint question. No
worries. The microphone is
always close to you; and open.
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Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Old Seagull

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Old Seagull

One old white seagull prowled wet grass
near brick buildings, looking for worms.
It walked arthritically and seemed chilled.

A lone, hunched seagull is a dignified
defeat, a sign of how hopeless hope is.
Was the bird's eyesight still good enough

to see worms? Did the bird ache? Do
seagulls fly back to the beach to die,
or do they get stranded on a street,

eaten by a crow or a raccoon? The
seagull was a general in exile,
a feathered Napoleon on Elba.

It was a heroic nun, a white flag
hanging from a wall of a blasted fort.
The gull seemed to know everything.

It kept its routine of life.
Walking past, I admired the bird,
which ignored me, which I admired.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Why To Study Creative Writing

An allegedly positive follow-up to my previous post is . . . why might one take a creative-writing course--in the community, informally (a writing-group), at a college, or at an M.F.A. program?

Let's try for ten reasons--no particular order:

1. Structure: sometimes it's good for artists to learn within a structure of some kind. It provides some discipline, some routine, etc. It brings tradition on board, in a good way. When someone takes a ballet class, he or she is doing something specific that day but also joining a long, long tradition. What's not to like? Same goes for creative writing.
2. It saves time. You can learn about all sorts of moves to make and mistakes to avoid in a hurry. I borrow this argument from Richard Hugo, The Triggering Town.
3.You get to "test" your work with a real audience. You will get varying responses. You will have to sort them out. No need, usually, automatically to dismiss people's reactions to your work--or to take them to heart. Consider them.
4. You get to meet other writers--at whatever level of expertise. Misery and creativity sometimes love company.
5. You get to look at, to study (if you will) literature from a different angle--the angle of the ones who produce it.
6. Imitation. An ancient idea, going back at least 2,000 years but really much further. To learn how to do X, you practice by imitating an example of X produced by someone else. Read a sonnet, write a sonnet. Look at Quintillian's program for the liberal arts, way back when. It involved reading and then imitating good writing.
7. Stretch. Often in a creative-writing class (of whatever kind), you'll be pushed, usually not rudely, to try something in your writing you might not otherwise try. It's kind of like going to a yoga class and stretching a tendon you thought would never stretch. It's a way to experiment.
8. "Give it a try." If you never "thought of" yourself as a writer but you think you'd like to try it, a class might be the place to do so. Often in my introductory poetry class (e.g.) I'll get a senior majoring in business, and she (for example) will find out she can write good poetry. What a nice discovery.
9. Make connections. Whatever one's interests are, it's often nice to share them with a community.
10. You get to represent--in writing (as opposed to in conversation, painting, or repression--something, anything, important to you: ideas, experiences, whatever. You get to share the representation with others to see how it goes. To see if it does what you wanted it to do.

For every one of the 10, there's also a good reason NOT to take a creative-writing class. Much depends at what stage you are in as a writer, and on where you are in your life. Maybe you don't need structure. Maybe you already have learned the basics and saved time, maybe you're at a point where you just need to put backside in chair and write. Maybe your experience in the class isn't productive. Whatever.

It's not an either/or situation. Studying creative writing in a group or a class can be just the ticket. It can also be not right for someone at a particular time. This avoidance of dumb binary-thinking is another reason to dismiss the lame, simple-minded thinking about "abolishing" creative writing classes. Why not keep all the options open?

Creative-Writing Under Almost-Attack

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Periodically, someone dusts off the old argument against teaching creative writing (especially in any kind of academic setting) and launches it like a rusted scud missile that lands harmlessly in a dry field. (Thanks to Fran for alerting me to this most recent harmless launch.)

This time it's Louis Menard in (gasp!) The New Yorker. I teach creative writing, so I think I'm supposed to be offended, but I can't quite muster offense. I'll make myself a candidate for the New Yorker's "block that metaphor" feature by saying that the "attack" isn't even rusted-scud material but more like that of a wet noodle, or a glob of wet noodles. Ouch, not the wet noodles again. Oh, stop. Oh, not the New Yorker.

How quickly can I summarize the argument (but fairly, too)? Let me try. Creative writing as a subject is bad because students can't teach students, writers can't teach students, teachers can't teach students, "genius" and "talent" can't be taught, some writers who have taught creative writing later disavowed it, some writers-in-residence are just louts pocketing cash, Somebody or Some Place Famous (Iowa) said it can't be taught (but will cash your tuition check), there are too many programs, if you write poems "for tenure," you've been compromised, the products of creative-writing classes are derivative, and I think that's about it.

I'll make this easy. Substitute the words "music," "reading," "painting," "dance," or "sculpting" for "creative writing" and then ask the same question. I don't believe I've ever heard an argument against teaching such things in an academic setting (or other settings).

Second, creative writing is, more than a little, another way to study literature and reading. It demystifies those parts of writing that can be demystified, and that makes for better readers. It is also a humbling process. Try to write a sonnet, for example. Or a successful five-page short story. Setting aside the question of how well you do, you will have deepened your appreciation for sonnets and short stories--and also, perhaps, cleared away a lot of rubbish about "artistes." Creative writing is--this will come as a huge surprise to dancers--a lot of damned hard work.

As to the "if you write poems 'for tenure', you've been compromised" argument: please. Not another wet noodle! When have writers not been compromised--by the State they live in (as in nation-state), by agents (if they're novelists), by publishers (who are now owned by multi-national corporations, which care deeply about literature), by their own tattered souls, etc.? Academia is no picnic, but it's no more corrupting to poets than fussy, misguided editors or having to work in a factory to make a living or growing up in poverty or growing up in wealth.

As to the "derivative" argument--all art is derivative, even when it sets out not to be. Creative-writing classes neither accelerate nor retard that process. Look at how derivative poetry was in any era--Renaissance, 18th century, Victorian (to settle on England). If you reach past the famous poets and the Norton anthologies to what was being written and published in general, you will say, "Gee, this all sounds the same." Well, of course it does. That's what happens with art. And then a breakthrough of sorts happens, or technology changes, or the tectonic plates of history shift, and "new" art arises.

Oh, and the article comes with the standard black-and-white photo of Robert Frost at Bread Loaf or wherever. Old photograph, old argument.

Social scientists would probably have a better shot than I or anyone who's closely involved with the topic at explaining what's going on, but what may be going on is that, as usual, Americans, including allegedly literate, "cultivated" (whatever) ones are habitually ambivalent toward academia in general, teaching in particular, art in general, and writing in particular. Get all four in the same room, and there's just too much to despise. The bile rises, and some clever fellow like Menard launches an almost-attack and suggests the teaching of creative writing be abolished. Enter Seinfeld. Yadda. (Yawn.) Yadda. Or in this case Yaddo. Yaddo.

Dang, and I was going to post a poem--by me or someone else. Much more interesting, even if it had been one of mine.

Writers Born in June

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(The photo is of John Edgar Wideman)
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Other writers who have or had birthdays in June: Carol Shields (The Stone Diaries), William Styron, Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), John Edgar Wideman, and Maurice Sendak.

Poets Born In June

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The photo is of Alfred Lord Tennyson. I wonder if anyone called him "Al." I'm thinking not.

Anyway, Tennyson was born in June, as were poets Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Judith Wright (Australian), and William Campbell (Canadian). I'm sure each was tempted at least one to rhyme "June" with "moon"; it's just an occupational hazard.

August Kleinzahler Wins Awards

Poet August Kleinzahler has won awards recently from the Lannan Foundation and the National Book Critics Circle for his poetry, which appears in such books as Sleeping It off in Rapid City and The Strange Hours Travelers Keep. Here is a link to a good article about Kleinzahler; the article appears on SF Gate, the online home of The San Francisco Chronicle:

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/06/02/DDKU17RF3B.DTL

Digital Technology

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(photo courtesy of the University of Massachusetts, Lowell--in connection with a lecture by Prof. Stine Grodal, Boston University, on “The Nanotechnology Label Across Communities: Categorizing a New Field.”)
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Digital Equipment

This digital equipment changes daily, rearranging
how technology's pointillism delivers the itsy-bits
which represent what's seen and heard. Our calls
are screened. Our screens are called something
different and become much bigger or much smaller,
as if designers were torn between an impulse
toward sky and one toward earthly atoms:
storm-large screens vs. nano-invisibility.

Among the demotic, consuming herd, I buy
what I must to keep within mooing-distance
of what's new. True, I could have been happy
with tubular black-and-white TV and stone-heavy
phones forever. It's all magic to me. I liked
the charcoal of Old TV, the clumsy heft of phones
bolted to walls. I sit beside a Heraclitan

river of research, development, manufacturing,
and marketing. Periodically, I reach and pick
something from the surface of mass-production.
I learn its basic applications without enthusiasm.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poetry-Dust-up at Oxford University

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Something of a scandal has erupted at Oxford University over the appointment--and subsequent rapid resignation--of Ruth Padel as an Oxford professor poetry. Apparently Padel had some involvement with eroding the candidacy of Derek Walcott for the same position. The story raises lots of persistent questions about "writer-in-residence" positions, tensions between "the artist" and higher education, writers who are in residence vs. writers who teach (or professors who write), gender, race, and sexual harassment--just to name a few topics left in the wake of the story. Here is a link (and thanks to Dr. Dolen for the heads-up on this story--see Dr. Dolen's Divinations" on the blog-roll):

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/31/weekinreview/31orr.html

Rhino

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Apparently the official (Latin) name for the "white" rhinoceros (which, as the photo suggests, isn't white, but it's a bit of a long story) is Ceratotherium simum, just in case someone should ask you about that today.
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Rhinoceros

Evolution left rhinoceros holding
a heavy load, freighted down with
muscle, bone, horns, and heft, all
held up by four short legs.

Rhino, you're an envoi from dinosaurs.
People are your predators, as ubiquitous
as sunlight, as shifty as shadow,
lethal and silly: grinding your horn
into powder? I like the way you stare

sadly straight down the tunnel of
history. I like that rough-hewn
stone spike you carry on your face
but would never want to own it.

Let hummingbirds be nuanced. Some
creatures must be as subtle
as an avalanche. Big leathery
rhino, you're one of them, and not
that your large ears will process
this word as meant, but Thanks.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Friends Old and New

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I'm a piano-hack, at best, but I do especially enjoy playing the rich chords in ballads from the 30s, 40s, and early 50s--and in some Simon & Garfunkel songs (well, they are actually Simon songs), including "Old Friends." I just thought I'd mention that as a more or less irrelevant introduction to a poem.



Friends Old, Friends New


It is difficult to discuss old friends
with new ones, new ones with old ones. You feel
as if they're characters from novels whose
pages cannot be inter-collated. You didn't
write these novels. You're of them, too, but
in them both, and you may travel from each
to each. You realize you're the only go-between,
the one who knows both stories, knows who
did why to what so whereily and how with whom
it may well have concerned. As always, you seem

to be the point at which your life converges--
well, duh. But yet you yearn legitimately for
variation, for someone else to unify the narratives
of you, of yours. Maybe a new friend could befriend
an old one and then collaborate to help explain
you to you and them to them.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

New Site For Scrapper Poet

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(The photo is courtesy of Jamestown Community College)

Note: The Scrapper Poet's site has moved to

www.thescrapperpoet.wordpress.com

Saunter on over to Wordpress and pay a visit.

Misbehaving Animals

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Animals Misbehave

Some frogs drive by at dusk in a green car.
One of them gets out, puts a continuous-loop
broadcasting device under a fern, hits "play,"
gets back in the car, and off the frogs go
to drink and laugh at a moist cocktail lounge.
Meanwhile, I listen to a "frog" croak all night.

The gray squirrel has become so large eating
seed put out for birds that he can barely
fit into his fur. "Are you sure you're not
drinking beer" I ask him one morning. He stares
at me, keeps chewing, and finally says,
"Yes, I'm sure."

The crows have contacted a realtor and are
going to offer to buy our house. We're going
to listen to the offer, out of respect, which
crows demand. Our neighbor is trying to trap
a raccoon that's eating decorative fish. The
raccoon is a known felon. It never checks in

with its parole officer. It's also an
escape-artist. I didn't have the heart
to tell my neighbor this. Under the earth,
worms live a lovely life. I assume they
don't writhe unless we dig them up.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

On Hobbema's Painting

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(the Hobbema painting is owned by the Getty Museum now)


About Hobbema's Landscape

(Meindert Hobbema, 1638-1709)


In Hobbema's "A Wooded Landscape with Travelers
on a Path through a Hamlet," clouds, trees,
and shadows overwhelm travelers and buildings.
Even a patch of sunlight, mid-painting, might
be ominous, a precursor to thunderstorm. Villages,
hamlets, and no-account small towns live on
the edge of being devoured, one way or another.
They are beside nature's point--are one tornado,
flood, avalanche, or economic downturn away from
obliteration. I'm sure Hobbema had something else
in mind with these pigments, the tracks left by
his brush-strokes, but I do like how he knew
foliage, clouds, and shadow lord over a mere
hamlet made of brick and milled wood.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Under Fluorescence

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Under Fluorescence

I'm sitting under fluorescent lights,
waiting for the others to arrive. This
light reminds me of snow-light, denatured,
gathered from peaks around the world
and stored in these humming, nervous tubes
above my head. Topics we'll quibble about
in the meeting around this illuminated
table shall be small but intricate like
snowflakes. We'll have to wait and see
if they'll add up, if they'll reflect.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Those Phrases

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So far, I haven't noticed too many similarities between Barack Obama and Richard Nixon--not that I've been looking for them very hard. I did think of the two in conjunction when I heard Obama say several times, "Let me be clear." Nixon used to say, "Let me be crystal clear" or "Let me make this crystal clear." Of course, Nixon was and Obama is ambitious, bright, and politically shrewd: how do you get to be president without being so? Even Gerald Ford had to be smarter than he seemed, and he became president only because Nixon resigned.

Nixon and Obama both chose tough, hardened, bare-knuckles men as chiefs of staff--Obama's is Rahm Emanuel, and Nixon's was H.R. Haldeman. Obama's the far better orator, and at least so far, Obama seems to have none of the Nixonian paranoia or tendency toward self-destruction. I do think Obama, like most if not all politicians, has some interesting contradictions to work out, including the issue of gay and lesbian citizens and civil rights. Most politicians choose simply not to work them out but to finesse them, so this will be interesting to watch. Constitutionally, there just seems to be no good reason to treat gay and lesbian citizens differently, but then again, I'm no Constitutional scholar. Morally and ethically, I can't think of a reason to treat such citizens differently either, in terms of civil rights, etc.--the purview of politicians.


Those Phrases

To be honest, I don't know why
I'd start a sentence with "to be
honest," unless I were implying honesty
might be a new technique I was about
to try out. In all candor, I don't
have to say I don't like "in all
candor," but I don't. "I must say"
nothing. When people say, "Just let
me say . . .," to me, they've already
started saying it, so it's not a
question of my letting them. Quite
frankly, I prefer the phrase
"Somewhat frankly" because it's
more entertaining and honest. To
tell you the truth, "to tell you
the truth" is just an expression,
neither truth nor lie but a dweller
on the idiomatic frontier. Let me
be clear, or let me be obscure:
your choice! Confidentially,
and just between you and me, there
seems to be no confidentiality.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Tables And Chairs In Trouble

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Cafe, Early Morning

Outside a cafe, tables and chairs
have been arrested and detained,
gathered and restrained by a cable.
Obviously, last night they'd disturbed
the peace. Chairs had shouted protest
about all the asses they must endure.
Tables had rocked and moaned, pounding
on themselves. This morning the furniture
is silent but not ashamed. Tentatively,
the manager releases and arranges first
the tables, then the chairs. One chair
squeaks. A hungover table wobbles.
Customers arrive, unaware of
last night's misdemeanors.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

"Words Crowded Together"

I was reading a book of poems by William Stafford this morning, An Oregon Message, and the opening stanzas of a poem titled "Scripture" reminded me of why I like to read poetry. Okay, I really didn't need reminding, but nonetheless, here are the lines (from p. 91 of the book):

[From "Scripture," by William Stafford]

In the dark book where words crowded together,
a land with spirits waited, and they rose and walked
every night when the book opened by candlelight--

A sacred land where the words touched the trees
and their leaves turned into fire. We carried in wherever
we went, our hidden scene; and in the sigh of snow coming down.

For Charles Epps

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For Charles Epps

(1953-1971)

What's left these 38 years after Charlie
died? The same as what was left a minute
after he died: an avalanche of absence.
I've visited the grave. I always go alone. I
let morbidity, a pettiness, arise, think
of what's under ground, including
the baseball uniform in which they put
his body. It's easy to move past small,
awful thoughts. What's left to resolve?

Everything. He ought to be alive. God
knows that as well as I. My knowledge
stops there. I don't know why he died,
only how, when, where, and with whom--
Sonny Ellis. Their death numbed,
scandalized, and scarred me, but so what?
I got to live at least 38 years more
than they. When I die, so will my grief,

and so it goes. Like an instinctive,
migratory mourner, I think of Charlie
at least four times a year and every May
and try to think of something more to say.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

What Would Bukowski Say?

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What Would Bukowski Say?


A fat man trying
to exercise in hot
sun walked past a
fat man sitting in
a fat American car
eating a hamburger
the size of a Pacific
atoll and sitting on
white cow-hide seats,
and one fat man nodded
at the other, knowing
each other's story
well, and about as
concerned with the word
"fat" as a rattlesnake
is with who will be
the new Secretary of
the Interior. And when
I saw this scene, I
thought of what Charles
Bukowski might say.The
last and only time
I saw Bukowski was
in Davis, California.
His face looked like
it had gone through
a cyclone full of rivets.
He drank a six-pack of
beer and read poetry,
pacing himself in each
task. Bukowski always
had interesting things
to say about almost
everything, including
a fat man in a car and
a fat man trying to exercise,
and anyway, I wish he
were still alive, writing.



Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Artistic Woman

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Artistic Woman

She did and was art. She might make and wear
a nurturing kerchief, let's say, or transform
with shears and thread an old dress into a new
shawl. Often she carried a purse full of verse.

Ears and fingers teased light with rings. Food
was not simply baked or boiled into submission.
She concocted it like magic, revealed it with
a flourish, delighted in delicious noises guests

might make while eating. She listened artistically,
wanting to seize well said words. Even with pain,
propped with a cane, she turned a walk into a
subtle scene. Envious dull ones liked to accuse

her of showing off. They were right and wrong.
Off? Not so much. Showing? Sure. For her notion
was that life, a surprise, came from darkness
like nothing, showed itself, revised itself:

a pageant, a play, a making, a day to dramatize night.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Top 50 Science Fiction Novels

The photo is of Arthur C. Clarke



I just posted on this topic over on my department's blog, but if by chance you like lists and/or are looking for a list of sci-fi novels to work through, here is one:

http://www.epic-fantasy.com/

I'd describe myself as a reader who's always dabbled in science fiction, but I'm about as far from being an expert on the subject as Pluto (which is still a planet, in my opinion) is from Mercury. However, I know quite a few people who do qualify as experts, and they tend to have strong opinions that don't mesh with the opinions of other experts. Also, the fact that list rather loosely mixes sci-fi, fantasy, and more-or-less realistic fiction that is merely speculative (like On the Beach) is no doubt a bone of contention, like the bone that goes up in the air in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Please pretend the titles are in Italics.

I don't know of any well known poets who also dabbled in sci-fi writing, but I'm sure there must be, or must have been, some. Richard Hugo wrote one genre-novel--a detective novel with a great title: Death and the Good Life. Karl Shapiro wrote a realistic novel, Edsel. As far as I know, neither writer tried more than one novel. Poet Stephen Dobyns became a bona fide writer of crime fiction.

I'll just add that a lot of sci-novels have terrific poetry-like title. I mean, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,--what a great title for a poem that would have been! In cinematic form, it became Blade Runner, but you knew that.

Anyway, the list:

1. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
2. The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov
3. Dune, Frank Herbert
4. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein
5. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin
6. Neuromancer, William Gibson
7. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke
8. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
9. The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley
10. Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury
11. The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe
12. A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.
13. The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov
14. Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras
15. Cities in Flight, James Blish
16. The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett
17. Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison
18. Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison
19. The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester
20. Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany
21. Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey
22. Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card
23. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson
24. The Forever War, Joe Haldeman
25. Gateway, Frederik Pohl
26. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, J.K. Rowling
27. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
28. I Am Legend, Richard Matheson
29. Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
30. The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin
31. Little, Big, John Crowley
32. Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny
33. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick
34. Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement
35. More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon
36. The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith
37. On the Beach, Nevil Shute
38. Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke
39. Ringworld, Larry Niven
40. Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys
41. The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien
42. Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut
43. Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
44. Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner
45. The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester
46. Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein
47. Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock
48. The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
49. Timescape, Gregory Benford
50. To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

Gaming Humans

In the photo, the soccer-players seem to be ruminating on the futility of it all.

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Humans and Their Games

In golf, humans attack a tiny white ball with long
metal clubs and then walk or ride in pastures, acting
as if the attack had not occurred. A bit later, they
attack again. The ball flees from them, but it rarely
escapes. No one knows what the ball did to offend
the humans. In chess, humans move figurines around
a small board and never talk. They look like pouting
children. In bowling, people roll a large sphere
toward milk-bottles, which have been beautifully
arranged. The aim is destruction, apparently. In

soccer, people run around an enormous field arguing
about who should possess a single leather ball.
Clearly, more soccer-balls and less field constitute
one obvious solution to this prolonged frustration.
In hockey as in golf: small object, large clubs,
inexplicable anger. Ice, however, is added, and
men embrace frequently, although their attire
turns them into clumsy clowns. Now, baseball

is a game in which too much activity is considered
gauche. Standing, scratching, staring, murmuring,
yelling, signaling, spitting, waiting, eating seeds,
hiding in caves, and using tobacco are crucial to this
game and constant. There is a sense in which the
game is opposed to activity. Football, though,

is nothing less than felonious assault observed
and encouraged by thousands. Make no mistake:
in this game, men attack men. Skiing and luge
are gravity-assisted suicide. Ski-jumping is
a bad idea someone in a Nordic country once had.
It is inadvisable. Racing cars around an oval

track is loud and repetitive like the screams
of a demented man. In tennis, the net always
remains empty, and the lake around it has
dried up. Somehow, in spite of all these
absurd spectacles, we can be induced to care
who wins, after which we forget who won,
and we go back to work. The rules of these
games become our era's sacred texts.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

May I Speak To the Past, Please?

I have no doubt that the mobile phone pictured at right will soon seem obsolete or even antique. Maybe it already is the former if not the latter. The velocity of technological obsolescence seems to increase every day. As I think I've noted before, I'm opposed to these wee phones because they discriminate against us thick-fingered ones. When I attempt to hit one button, I usually hit three. It takes me all day to send a two-line text message. I feel like a bear in a sewing-class.


Phoning the Past

I telephoned the past. The number
I reached was no longer in service,
and anyway I'd wanted to reach the past,
not a number. Just as well. What would
I have said? "Hello, I used to live there"?
"Please write me a letter of recommendation
for the future"? The past is a special effect.
When I think about it, it's right beside me.
I reach for it. Then it withdraws miles and
decades instantly, and I'm left in this
lumpy present, which is always beyond
its sell-by-date and curdling into the past.
I read history, but it's a sad substitute
for what happened. So, foolishly, I phoned.
Fine. I made a mistake. That's all in the past.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Concerning Games

(The image is of a "shocked" Monopoly man; maybe he invested with Madoff)

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Not Much For Games
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I was never much for games. In "Hide and Seek,"
I was content to let the others remain in hiding. I
enjoyed the solitude. In "Tag," there seemed to be
celebrity attached to being It, so why share it?
I liked collisions in football, but they gave me
headaches. I liked playing right field in baseball
but was often tempted to keep walking--into other
fields beyond. In Monopoly, I wanted to disperse
the property equally, end the game, and go drink
hot cocoa--unaware the world cocoa-
market was probably controlled by a monopoly. In
charades, I always want to to say the answer and stop
the nonsense. I liked badminton and table-tennis--something
about an obsessive concentration on one object and
the pleasure of returning what came over the net.
"Gambling" is misnamed; it is ritualized losing.
My father played poker well, had no "tell."
I'm competitive, but I've never trusted the trait.
Survival is the only game, and is no game,
and will be lost in due time. Let the games
begin, and continue, but often without me.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Top 100 Detective Novels?

(The image is of Denzel Washington in the film-based-on-the-novel, Devil in a Blue Dress, by Walter Mosley.)


I'm double-dipping on this post, as I have posted on a related topic--on

http://upsenglish.wordpress.com/

At any rate, the following site has a list from David Lehman of the top 100 detective novels, based partly on the value of the novels themselves but also on their historical importance in the genre:

http://www.topmystery.com/lehmans100.html



Like a lot of people who, one way or another, ended up making reading central to their lives, I started reading detective fiction early. There were always a lot of paperbacks in the genre around the house, for one thing, and I also got hooked on Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes early on.

I teach a class, now and then, on detective fiction, and I've published one detective novel, Three To Get Ready--very much a first try, if you get my drift. I was so inexperienced that I didn't know I'd written a book in the sub-genre known as "police procedural" until I read a review of the book, the "police" in which are represented by a rural sheriff and his deputy.

I've always thought the detective (or "crime" or "mystery") novel had a lot in common with the sonnet, insofar as there are some strict conventions set up, and some heavy expectations--but also the expectation that one will improvise, somehow, on what's come before. In both cases, working within the conventions but also testing them and in some cases disrupting them--all part of a satisfying process, from the writer's point of view at least.

Nobel Laureates in Literature

In the Spring of 1994, I taught at Uppsala University in Sweden--one of the highlights of the academic part of my career. I was what's known as a Fulbright Senior Lecturer. I taught a couple courses and had a fine time in Sweden. My grandfather came from Sweden, and his niece lived in Uppsala, so I often had dinner with her, spoke Swedish, and revisited old times. She lived--and still lives--and Murargatan--"Brick Street."

The year before, Toni Morrison had won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and the English Department at Uppsala had managed to have her visit while she was in Sweden to pick up the prize in Stockholm: what a great opportunity. I was sorry to have missed her visit but very glad she had visited.

If you're the sort of person who sometimes likes to base a schedule of reading on lists of one kind or another, then you may be interested in the last decade's worth (or so) of Nobel Laureates in Literature:

2008 Jean-Marie Gustave le Clezio
2007 Doris Lessing
2006 Orhan Pamuk
2005 Harold Pinter
2004 Elfried Jelinek
2003 J.M. Coetzee
2002 Imre Kertesz
2001 V.S. Naipaul
2000 Gao Xingjian
1999 Gunter Grass
1998 Jose Saramago
1997 Dario Fo
1996 Wislawa Szsborska
1995 Seamus Heaney
1994 Kenaburo Oe
1993 Toni Morrison
1992 Derek Walcott
1991 Nadine Gordimer
1990 Octavio Paz

For a complete list that goes back to 1901, please see . . .

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/

Tidal Sights and Sounds

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Towards Evening
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The muted roar of tidal surge
sounds like a convergence of one
million whispers.
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Reflection of the sun's unrolled
like a ragged carpet on the surface
of the sea.
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To touch the wind with your tongue
is to taste ancient salt and conjure
braids of kelp.
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Soon the sea will say its vespers
deep inside its tidal whispers.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

I Get Some of My News from Facebook

Ashamedly, I must confess I get some of my news from facebook, including some of the unlovely kind:

"Utah State Senator Chris Buttars recently called the LGBT community 'probably the greatest threat to America...I know of' He went on to spew a series of vile insults including:

* Lesbian and gay relationships are 'abominations.
* LGBT people are moving America toward a society that has no morals.
* LGBT people will 'destroy the foundation of American society.'

Comments like this spread ignorance and fear – promoting an atmosphere of violence against LGBT Americans. They have no place in the discourse of our elected officials."

The last two lines are commentary from someone on facebook, of course, not news, per se. The same goes for "spew vile insults": that phrase is a bit of commentary, granted.

--Not sure what do about Senator Buttars' opinions and remarks, aside from instinctively to recoil from them. Not only do I not think of "the" (sic) LGBT community (I don't think there's just the one monolithic community, but what do I know?) as a threat, I think of LGBT individuals, families, friends, and communities (etc.) as a net gain, to say almost the least.

As to the rest of Butterfingers' argument, well, I'd have to know what he thinks "the foundation of American society" is. Is it tectonic plates, or am I being too literal? Is it republican (small r) democracy, petite bourgeoisie capitalism, corporate capitalism, a theocracy, or what? I'd need to know that first. Define terms and all that boring English-major stuff.

All LGBT persons have "no morals"? This can't possibly be true. This is not borne out by my experience.

When I hear "abominaton," I always think of the abominable snowman, and I get distracted, so Butterfingrs has lost me there, too. I think of Bigfoot, with a white fur-coat on, walking in the snow.

Okay, strictly for the sake of argument, trying mightily to play along with Butterfingers, I will assume for 90 seconds that "the" LGBT community poses some kind of threat. We'll call it a "threat to be named later," for the simple reason that I don't know what the threat is. For instance, let us assume that a gay couple moves into a house next door to a married (or not) straight couple. Both couples go to work, take the garbage-cans out on garbage day, mow the lawn, walk the dog, yadda yadda. So far so good? Okay. Now, in what sense is couple A a threat to couple B, let alone a threat to all straight marriages or relationships? If couple B is running a meth-house, then couple B is a greater threat to couple A, I submit to you, your honor. I've never been able to follow this "threat" argument. But I digress. I was supposed to be playing along with Butterfingers. Playing along, I will cite the following as greater "threats," in no particular order:

1. Bunions.
2. Global warming.
3. Complete financial de-regulation.
4. Insomnia.
5. Really bad reality TV shows that are really awful. Really.
6. The designated-hitter rule in baseball.
7. Anti-biotic-resistant strains of the Staph infection
8. A mis-understanding of how the semicolon is supposed to be used.
9. The Swine Flu.
10. Chronic homelessness.
11. A widening gap between rich and poor worldwide.
12. Where to store nuclear waste.
13. Chronic illnesses such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
14. The use of the term "back order." When shops run out of something, a clerk says, "It's on back order." I'd prefer the clerk to say, "We don't have any of that stuff. Go away." The use of the term "back order" is a threat to morale.
15. Two wars.
16. Rumsfeld's religious covers to his briefing memos; they may serve to help recruit more Al Queada members than anything.
17. Dick Cheney's shotgun, espeically when he's liquored up. To be fair, anybody liquored up shoudn't wield a shotgun; this isn't personal. Johnny Walker Red and shotguns shouldn't marry. :-)
18. High cholesterol.
19. Too much salt in prepared foods.
20. A lack of appreciation for the films of Preston Sturgess.

There! I wasn't really even trying, and I came up with 20 threats that are greater than Butterfingers' (phantom, arguably) threat.! And I'm not even an expert on threats!

Senator Butterfingers, I urge you to sit down and to rearrange your priorities. Then please read Michel Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Part One and a nice readable popular history called Out of the Past. Take two aspirin, and call Stephen Fry (not Hugh Laurie!) in the morning. Also, I apologize for calling you Butterfingers. It was high-schoolish of me, Senator Buttars.

Out of the Ordinary Time

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Out of the Ordinary Time
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A turquoise cable-car, yes, something
like that and not like that is tonight's
craving. I've learned not to lose sight
of basic needs (water, money). But
there's more to life than survival,
or so it seems when you're surviving,
anyway. So yes, long-haired, brown,
unamused Jesus riding a Harley
out of clouds to pay a serious visit
to pious "wealth-gospel" punks: that
would be of interest. Or a wheel-on-fire
chasing Donald Trump down an alley
in Calcutta, Shiva waiting for him
to Come to Mama. Or a furry llama
standing in mist just outside my dreams.
A seagull's scream, a shark's devotion,
some old shaggy, long-lost emotion:
these are sorts of things tonight called
to say it needed. I stood in rain. I pleaded.
Lightning sawed off a chunk of sky,
dropped it in the bay. That's
what I'm talking about.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Long-Lived Authors: Harper Lee, Karl Shapiro, Philip Roth

I was talking with another writer the other day, and he was observing that, when he was a very young writer, he often heard other youthful scribblers romanticizing such concepts as "surrendering your life to art" and "living hard and dying young [in relation to writing]."

I understand the romantic appeal of these ideas; on the other hand, in order to write, one does have to remain alive. It's just kind of the way things work.

So I want to say word in favor of writers who live, survive, thrive, and persist--who keep on truckin' and keep on keepin' on. Among them is Harper Lee, author (as you well know) of To Kill A Mockingbird. She recently turned 83. She's kept on writing, but she's chosen not to publish much. Philip Roth is still going strong at . . . age 73, I believe. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., lived into his 80s, as did Karl Shapiro (1913-2000). In fact, a posthumous edition of Karl's last poems was recently published by Texas Review Press. It's called Coda, and it shows how splendidly Shapiro kept writing poetry well into his late 70s. He never lost his eye for detail, his love for the whole lexicon, his confident voice, and his iconoclasm. He stayed funny. Bless his heart.

Stanley Kunitz lived for 100 years and wrote for most of those.

Keep writing and keep living--it's a both/and kind of thing.

Happy Birthday (Birth-Month), Writers

Here comes June, always an ambiguous month in the Pacific Northwest. It can be as wet and cold as January, or as summery as anywhere else in the U.S. You just never know.

However, you may know what authors were born in June, at least if you care about such things and poke around the Internet. Here's a list of some of our writerly friends, some still with us, most not (except in their words, etc.) who were born in June, starting with a howl:

Allen Ginsberg
John Masefield
Ambrose Bierce (do high-schoolers still read "Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"? I hope so.)
Anne Frank
Barbara Pym
Ben Jonson
Laurie Lee
Blaise Pascal (perhaps my favorite spiritual writer--and author of a book in a genre by itself, Pensees)
Lillian Hellman (if you haven't seen the film, Pentimento, I invite you to do so)
Louise Erdrich (that's what I like--someone who's at ease with both fiction and poetry)
Luigi Pirandello
Colin Wilson
Mark Van Doren
Mary McCarthy (attended school in Tacoma)
Elizabeth Bowen
Charles Kingsley
Octavia Butler (thanks for your final book, Ms. Butler, Fledgling, not to mention the other ones)
Jean Anoulih
Pierre Corneille (we bunched the difficult French-playwright names together)
Harrie Beecher Stowe
Saul Bellow
Thomas Hardy (a.k.a. Mr. Cheerful)
John Ciardi (I have fond memories of his radio-spot on NPR, called "Good Words to You," and I very much like his translation of Dante)

Small Garden

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Small Garden
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When carrots come up, they're green hairs
on Earth's loamy pate. Already, though, they're
pointing covert orange fingers toward Earth's
molten core. Carrots like cool weather. Tomato-
plants don't and therefore hunker. They hold
out for the blaze, in which they'll then sprawl
promiscuously and weigh themselves up
with serious loads of red. That said, lettuce
is the lovely one, presenting delicate textiles
of itself to sun. So goes growth in post-Edenic
gardens, fallen and common, full of manure
and worms, seedy, sketchy, weedy, kvetchy,
half-cultivated, half-rude, all vulgar. Water
and weed, heed the almanac, fill a sack or
two at harvest time: all to the good.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Poets Who Would Have Blogged

(image: Emily Dickinson, the best poet ever)
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A simple speculative question, with no falsifiable answers: Which poets from the pre-blogging era would have blogged?

Homer? Yes. Although digitally print-related, blogging has much in keeping with an oral tradition out of which Homer sprang. Same goes for Virgil, who imitated Homer in every way.

Rumi? Yes. Rumi was an expansive, garrulous sort. What's not to like about blogging?

Martial? A tough call. He loved to gossip. But he may have made fun of new-fangled things.

Dante? No. However, he may have invented an additional circle of Hell for bloggers, if need be. (The might fit in existing circles.)

Chaucer? Yes. Geoff had the gift of gab. Same goes for Shakespeare, who would have found a way to revolutionize the genre. (In my poetry class this term, we decided that a good alternative name for Shakespeare was Master Shake, performance poet.)

Li Po? Yes.

Marvell and Donne? Probably, but within small circles. One would have had to subscribe to the blog.

Samuel Johnson? Why blog when you have the human blogging-software as your best friend (Boswell)? On the other hand, Johnson was such a social, verbally combative sort that he may not have been able to resist blogging. In one draft, he would have produced a sculpted, perfect essay.

Alexander Pope? No. Blogging wouldn't be traditional enough, and it would have been great satiric fodder for him.

Basho? Absolutely. Blogging on the road with a laptop. Collaborative blogging.

Wordsworth? Yes. Many posts about childhood memories and Dorothy, and childhood memories, and memories, and Wordsworth, and Dorothy, and childhood memories, and Wordsworth. Oy.

De Quincey? Maybe late at night, after the pharmaceuticals were brought on board?

Byron? Yes. Leigh Hunt? Absolutely. A journalist at heart.

Blake? Yes, if he could bring all the funky graphics on board. Oh, my: Imagine Blakean blog-posts!

Tennyson? Not so much. Arnold, no. But he would have written a poem complaining about blogs.

Emily Dickinson? Absolutely a perfect form for her. She could communicate with the world but maintain her privacy. Her posts would have been cryptic, brief, wry, and perfect.

Whitman. Are you kidding me? Blogging was made for Walt. "Blog of Myself."

Eliot? No. Pound? No. Blogging would have too much to do with the unwashed masses for their tastes. We are the hollow bloggers, we are the stuffed bloggers. Do I dare to blog?

Williams Carlos Williams? All over it. Langston Hughes? All over it. Imagine the sheer number of emails, not to mention blog-posts, Langston would have written.

C.P. Cavafy? A tough call, but no.

Auden? Yes. Spender? No. Larkin. Hmmmm.

Yeats? Absolutely not.

Marianne Moore? Oh, yes.

Frost? No.

Irving Layton? Yes. For a variety of motives.

Neruda. Hmmm. Uh, yes.

Sandburg? Yes.

Baudelaire, yes, Brautigan, yes, Victor Hugo no. Rimbaud, yes.

Goethe? Ah, come one. Germans and technology? Yes.

Something's Been Decided

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Something's Been Decided
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She told me sometimes she feels
like a short-wave radio that only
sends and doesn't receive. She
sends out good wishes, polite
inquiries, and expressions to try
to keep old friendships going.
Not much comes back, she said.
"I may have offended thoughtlessly,"
she added, "but more likely is
something's been decided. I mean,
I'm ignored because I'm ignorable."
She thanked me for stopping by.
I said, "Keep in touch." "I will,"
she said. "Will you?" We smiled.
"Send and receive," I told her.
"Let's do both."
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Mr. Cheney

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One of the latest headlines, from UPI, on the Internet is "Strategists Stymied by Cheney's Stature."
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Mr. Cheney selects interviewers who won't press him on the most basic, insoluble contradictions. He cheerfully admits that the U.S. used water-boarding, and just as cheerfully asserts that the U.S. doesn't torture. How is water-boarding not torture? According to Cheney and the "legal" memos, it isn't torture because they said so. I think I'll rely on my eyes and ears, which have witnessed the videotape of water-boarding, and on someone like Jesse Ventura, who has been water-boarded. Interviewers shouldn't let Mr. Cheney even get to the question of whether torture "works." They should just keep asking how water-boarding isn't torture. And keep asking. And keep asking. Until and unless he walks off the set--or resolves the basic contradiction.
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Mr. Cheney
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How do you unplug a former Vice President
of the U.S.A.? You don't. He is like a large
refrigerator with nothing good to offer from
inside. He turns lies into ice-cubes:
We used "enhanced interrogation techniques"
like water-boarding, which isn't torture because
we don't torture, unless you count near-drowning
as torture, along with sleep-deprivation, beatings,
and other "enhanced techniques," which is the
language of those who order torture, which saved
us from being attacked, after-torture-because-of-
torture being the logic--the logic, I tell you, so
shut up! The refrigerator opens its doors. Words
come out. The former Vice President is
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an American appliance. He runs on American power.
Hear the ice-cubes tumble from his brain to his mouth?
An ice-cube melts into a lie. The interviewer laps it up
like a dog. The refrigerator watches the dog. People
watch the refrigerator and the dog. It is a TV show.
It is a former Vice President of the U.S.A. "Children,
can you say 'above the law'?"
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

The Seventh Seal: Bergman's Light-Hearted Romp

(image: Death and a Knight play a friendly game of chess
in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal)
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As we move toward graduation-Sunday on campus, there are numerous luncheons and dinners at which members of the Board of Trustees and the faculty mingle.

At last night's dinner, I sat next to a colleague from the History department, and we discovered we both liked Ingmar Bergman's classic film, The Seventh Seal. We also discovered that we had attempted to screen the film for students--with disastrous results. Most students simply think the film is too weird. Go figure!

Many parts of it have always made me laugh, although I do recognize that the genre is not exactly MGM musical. Death and the Knight playing chess intermittently and Death's sawing a tree in which someone is perched (somehow such a Swedish thing to do) both make me laugh. Ah, that droll Scandinavian humor.

In any event, my colleague reported that when she got the film going (on DVD) for the class, a student in the back said, "Wait a second--you mean this film is both in black-and-white AND subtitles?!"

Ah, well, some class-sessions just get off to an imperfect start.

Nothing To Explain

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Nothing To Explain
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A stout frailty of birds noises things up well
in gray rain this evening. They empty their
throats before feathering down to sleep
in trees and brush. Meanwhile, I climb
into a hulking steel wheeled-thing and go
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to market to secure such items as oranges,
bread, and strawberries. I don't understand
birds, nor they, me. Thus shall it always be.
Yet we may share a burst of activity at dusk,
paying homage to nothing more than having
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made it through another day. The birds
and I ended up in the same place.
There's nothing to explain.
The have feathers. I have hair.
Both get wet in rain.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Sour Grapes

(image: sketch of fox and grapes, courtesy of Litscape.com)
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I've been working with another writer on a project that is not strictly about wine but related to it, so technically our project concerns sour grapes.

At the same time, I've been reading a translation of Jean de la Fontaine's fables in verse. Fontaine stole cheerfully, freely, openly, and well from Aesop and others and recast fables in verse. He was born in 1621 and died in 1695, by the way.

The edition I'm reading is from Penguin, translated by James Michie, with an introduction by Geoffrey Grigson.

Arguably the most famous fable from Fontaine (although not original to him) is the one about the tortoise and the hare. In fact, yesterday I asked a hard-working cashier if she were working too hard, and she said, "No, just steadily," and I said, "Slow and steady wins the race," and she said, "Yep, that's the way it worked with the turtle and the rabbit."

The second most famous fable (again, this is contestable) may be the one about the fox and the grapes. Because the fox can't get the grapes, he (or she) allows how he or she didn't really want them, and down the ages has come the phrase "sour grapes," except now it's applied to people who express disappointment after not getting what they want. Here's how Fontaine's fable ends, in translation:

Wasn't he wise to say they were unripe
Rather than whine and gripe?

So the point of the fable seems to be that instead of whining, the fox simply suggested that the grapes weren't ripe anyway yet and thereby kept his cool. I think our notion of "sour grapes" has drifted since then, and note that the grapes are not sour as in fermented (wine) but sour as in not yet full of enough sugar (unripe).

By the way, the illustrations for this edition are by J. J. Grandville, and they just slay me. I love sketches of animals that are fully costumed in human clothing. You get this sort of thing in Beatrix Potter books. The key is that the animals are not sentimentalized. Yes, they're personified, obviously, but they maintain their full animal-identity, and the effect is to make the costumes seem a bit much, not the animals. Perhaps my favorite animal-in-clothes sketch is in the Potter books; it is one of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, a frog. A most dignified frog.

The River Moved

(image: Tower Rock, Perry County, Missouri)
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The River Moved
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I get used to watching rivers move from up
to down. Then someone will remind me,
"The river used to be here until it moved,"
and I picture rivers walking slowly across
plains, opening another canyon for themselves,
going underground for a spell, or running into
dams--nibbled by turbines and turned into
a lake that sits and waits but never loses
its desire to find a sea. The way rivers move's
a note slowly written in cursive to time, whose
mail historians and geologists open. For instance
the famous river-boat that sank's buried on
a dry plain now because the big river moved.
"It's just a grave now," someone said. "Bones
are down there, remember. No one wants to dig."
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Corresponding With Nostalgia

Nostalgia's a fact of life because it springs from routine, it provides an easy if illusory alternative to bothersome change, and it may be legitimately related to things that worked pretty well in our lives. Things in the past were not necessarily worse, even though our tendency is to over-estimate them (arguably).

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In my case, an example of the latter (things worked all right) would be . . . the post office. In a relatively remote mountain-town, the post-office provided one obvious link to the world at large. It provided one of the most stable routine's of the day--going to get the mail.

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I inherited my father's 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, which I am steadily refurbishing but not restoring; he purchased it new, and by 1997, when we left us, he had put fewer than 50,000 miles on it. Here's a rough guess: at least 25% of those miles were put on when he drove the truck to town to "get the mail." (We had no rural delivery, except of a newspaper or two.) The round-trip was probably around 3 miles.

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I also remember liking the musty smell of the old post office; oddly enough, my dad helped build the new post-office (which is now old), including a nice stone-facade in which he embedded venerable gold-mining implements. I also liked the highly ritualized transactions of buying stamps, getting mail-orders, opening the wee mailbox, and so on.

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One ritual that still obtains in the town is that, when someone dies--especially after a long illness and even if they have moved away--someone attaches a notice of the event to the glass doors of the post office. Email and voice-mail have yet to replace this mode of communication that precedes an official obituary.

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Post-offices still seem busy, but I suspect they're far less busy with personal correspondence, which is delivered via various incarnations of phones and computers (and phones are computers). At the same time, neuroscientists might argue (I guess) that nostalgia is a matter of electrons, too--located in the electrical wiring of our brains.

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A wee ballad, at any rate (and postal rates always go up; why, in my day, a stamp cost only . . .):

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Corresponding With Nostalgia

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The correspondence used to be

Composed of pulp and ink,

Now seems elaborate and slow,

Indeed antique, I think.

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The mail comes digitally now,

Encoded on the air.

Yes, personality persists.

And no, it itsn't fair

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To say we write robotically.

The wait and weight of post--

The palpability of what

I read, I miss the most.

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Yet now I'm totally plugged in,

Am tethered to my screens.

I send and post, receive and text.

("Text" now's a verb, it seems.)

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A letter to Nostalgia, yes:

I think that's what I'll write.

It will come back: "No such address."

Electrons are Nostalgia's site.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Edward Thomas, part two--or Ulex europæus

Since last I posted about Edward Thomas, I took a walk--or an "urban hike." A walk (or similar kind of basic exercise) has to be one of the least expensive, most effective elixirs. The body and mind say, "Hey, thanks for the walk."

Thomas liked to walk, too; more specifically, as Peter Sachs writes in the intro to the collection I'm reading, Thomas liked roads, walking them. My sense is his average distances were much longer than mine, and his roads were "country," whereas mine (at the moment) are urban/suburban. Here's part of a poem by Thomas that seems to have sprung from a walk:

[from] The Lofty Sky

by Edward Thomas

Today I want the sky,
The tops of the high hills,
Above the last man's house,
His hedges, and his cows,
Where, if I will, I look
Down even on sheep and rook,
And of all things that move
See buzzards only above:--
Past all trees, past furze
And thorn, where naught deters
The desire of the the eye
For sky, nothing but sky.


Thomas seems to have wanted to get some height on this walk. The poem could be placed in tradition of "prospect" poems in which the speaker looks out over a "prospect" or a landscape. Lots of these got written in the late 18th/early 19th century, although it's hard to imagine any poetic era anywhere that didn't include such poems. You know, you take a walk, you reach a perch of some kind, you look, you see, and later you remember and write. Or maybe you write on the spot. That never worked for me.

By the way, according to the OED online, "furze" is a popular name for Ulex europæus, which is a thorny evergreen bush that has yellow flowers (according the OED) and is also called "gorse" by some. By gee, by gosh, by gorse, by golly, by gum.

Happy Mother's Day (which originated in an anti-war movement, incidentally--you knew that), and happy walking or otherwise basic-exercising, and no, you don't need find a big ol' hill. Huff, puff.

One from Edward Thomas

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*(image: Edward Thomas)
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The poetry of Edward Thomas (1878-1917) is often grouped with that of other World War I British poets like Wilfred Owen and Siegried Sassoon, chiefly because Thomas was killed in the war (he volunteered for the army, as he was too old to be drafted), but also because he did write a few poems when he was serving in France, before he was killed by artillery-fire.

But most of his poetry concerns rural Britain, is closely observed, and--although it deploys conventional rhyme and meter--is plainspoken. Thomas made his living chiefly as a "literary journalist"--writing reviews, editing anthologies, etc., and he was an early champion of Robert Frost's poetry. Thomas liked the way Frost had ignored a lot of conventional poetic diction and written precisely but plainly. Thomas himself first published his poetry under a pen-name. Then, after Thomas's death, Walter de la Mare put together a collection. I've been reading a relatively new paperback edition from Handsdel Books, with a nice introduction by Peter Sacks.

Here's a short poem related to May from the book:

The Cherry Trees

by Edward Thomas

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding
On the old road where all that passed are dead,
Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding
This early May morn when there is none to wed.

Did I mention that, like Frost, Thomas could be a bit glum, even before World War I came along?

Spuds

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After a three-year hiatus, I'm going to plant some potatoes. Yukon Gold is the choice, ordered (as "sets") a bit late from a Midwest nursery-company. For some reason, I like having spuds in the ground out there. Looks like we'll have lettuce, carrots, and (green) onions, too, as well as tomatoes, although the latter ripen rather late in our global niche.

I grew up hearing potatoes sometimes referred to as "spuds." According to the OED online, this slang-term for potato emerged rather late, preceded by "spud" (as noun) as referring to a variety of tools, mostly small ones used for digging but also kinds of knives. Here is an example of the potato-reference:

1860 Slang Dict. 225 In Scotland, a spud is a raw potato; and roasted spuds are those cooked in the cinders with their jackets on.


In spite of the syntax, the spuds are the ones with their jackets on, not the cinders. One whom I know well has always found the reference to "potatoes with their jackets on" most humorous; it's a reference that appears in many cook-books, and it is charming to think of spuds going to a tailor to get fitted for potato-blazers.

Spuds
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Potatoes grow out of potatoes like an
underground dynasty while the rest
of agriculture bustles above-ground
with blossoms, pods, and fruits.
Potatoes multiply themselves in sequestered
arithmetic. They send up gestures
of leaves to appease sunlight. Meanwhile,
they populate their tomb, glow inwardly,
will stand for harvest or sit tight--possess
a kind of divine patience, an honest secrecy.
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Spuds aren't glamorous, decorative,
geometric, or vibrant. They're lumpy,
plain, idiosyncratic, and common. They
get along with rocks, advise moles, ignore
frost, and huddle in carbohydrate caucuses.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom