Community Colleges and Poetry

. . . And here is a link to U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan's poetry project, which includes work with community colleges:

Kay Ryan/Community Colleges

I must now hail Sierra College, the community college I attended way back when. Thanks especially to several fine English teachers there and one fine philosophy teacher, from whom I took a two-semester history of philosophy course.

Library of Congress Site: Black History Month

Here is a link to a "page" on the U.S. Library of Congress site that describes a variety of projects, exhibits, and archives connected to Black History Month:

Library of Congress

Southeastern Kansas

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Southeastern Kansas


Grains of agrarian
patience sway, shimmer,

shall become bread
of memory. Clouds

have purchased sky.
Prairie is lightning-

lacerated. Grassy
hills take as long

to curve as they will.
Expanse fascinates.



Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

A Musical Evening With Langston Hughes

A Musical Evening With Langston Hughes, featuring Awilda Verdejo.

Great Site for International Poetry

Here's a link to a fine site for contemporary poetry around the world:


International Poetry Web

Once there, you may simply select a country from the drop-down menu, go to that page, and find dozens of poets.

Great stuff.

Say There's A Ship

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Say There's A Ship

Say there's a ship we can take out
on the sea of our lives. Say we can
cast nets and lines and thus retrieve
sources of regret, despair, haul them
on board, apologize, repair--make things
right. Tell it so we can find

unrecoverable people out there. They stand
or sit in boats, close enough to see,
to hail. Make it so that ocean's not just
time or loss, memory or change, failure or
death. We know that sort of ocean well.

Talk about the joy we'll feel. Describe
the laughter, redemptive weeping, songs
and delight. Now a harder part: tell us
how to get there. Please tell us how
to go down to that ship, get on.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Hughes and Hurston on Haiti

Haiti's being in the news, to understate things awfully much, has reminded me that two Harlem Renaissance authors, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, developed a great interest in that nation.

An anthropologist as well as a fiction-writer, Hurston wrote the study: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. It was reissued in 2008.

Hughes wrote a play, Troubled Island, which concerns the Haitian rebel leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who helped defeat the army Napoleon had sent to Haiti and who later became emperor of Haiti. His dates are 1758-1806. Later, the composer William Grant Still and Hughes (as librettist) collaborated on the opera, Troubled Island.

Evening Hatch

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Evening Hatch

An evening hatch of gnats rose from the river
in a cloud. One gnat flew to a blue bluff,
landed there, pushed against infinite,
immovable stone mass. The gnat

fell away and down toward a pool,
out of which erupted a rainbow trout,
which snatched and swallowed the gnat.

I will have had less effect on things than
this gnat. It's good to meditate on that.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Lucille Clifton Passes

It is sad that poet Lucille Clifton passed on a few days ago. She was a poet of great wit and insight.

Here are two links to more information about her, one a recent article following her death, the other from poets. org:

Clifton article

Clifton on Poets.org

This is a good day to re-read some of her poems.

Black History Quiz and Africlassical.com

Should you have a hankering to take a quiz on Black history, then here's a link you might like to follow:


Black History Quiz

The quiz appears on the site, Africlassical.com, which explores the African and African American presence in classical music.

The site has a companion blog, which (finally, the self-serving part) kindly mentioned an upcoming musical program I helped to put together. Actually, the site borrowed a notice from another blog (thanks, Professor O'Neil)--ah, the complications of the web.

Langston Hughes/Awilda Verdejo

President Clinton Reads "The Concord Hymn"

Here is a link to a video of President Clinton reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Concord Hymn," as part of the "Favorite Poem" project:

Clinton reads Concord Hymn

It was good to hear that the former President is doing well after a visit to the hospital.

As to his other poetic tastes, the CBS site includes The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats on his list of favorite books.

African American Crime Fiction

Probably like most of you, I've been reading detective fiction since I was in my early teens. I think I received the Doubleday collected Holmes stories as a gift from my parents when I was about 16.

Later, I wrote and published one mystery novel, featuring a rural sheriff as the detective.

And I've taught a class on detective fiction a few times. One interesting aspect of such a class is that you get some students who take simply because they have been reading in the genre independent of "school" work. In a sense they are connoisseurs.

Now I'm considering developing a course on African American detective fiction, or at least I'm taking steps toward the consideration. In the process, I discovered a few recent anthologies, including

African American Crime and Mystery Stories, edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland. I'm enjoying it a lot. Here's a link:

anthology

Sierra City Website

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(Sierra City, California, population 225)
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My hometown has a website now: Sierra City

Who knew?

Links To African American Poets

Here is site that provides a wealth of online links to information about African American poets:


Black poets

Black Past

I just ran across this great site:

http://www.blackpast.org/

Duke Takes The "A" Train

A nice video--for Black History Month or any month--of Duke Ellington playing "Take the A Train":

Duke Ellington

William Blake and Soccer

Below is a link to a great short film on youtube that combines football (of the soccer variety) and the poetry of William Blake. I think you'll like this:


Blake Press Conference

"Awful Library Books": A Most Amusing Blog

A link on the The Scrapper Poet's blog alerted me to the amusing blog, "Awful Library Books," which I hope you'll enjoy, too:

ALB

Eugene Lipscomb

As I was getting ready to have a couple friends over for the Super Bowl (more chat than Super Bowl, truth to tell), I thought, for some reason, of Randall Jarrell's elegy for the professional football player Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, who played professionally for Baltimore, L.A., and Pittsburgh teams but who died of a heroin overdose in 1963. I don't think that in '63 I was really much aware of professional football, but I distinctly remember the name "Big Daddy Lipscomb," which I found enchanting, partly for the sound of it.

Anyway, below is a link to Jarrell's poem, "Say Goodbye to Big Daddy." The page starts with a sports poems by William Carlos Williams, so you just have to scroll down a bit once you're there.

Big Daddy Lipscomb Poem

Errant

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Errant

A wayward knight came into our
time zone. He was diminutive,
in need of a bath, and not
that great a horseman. We recycled
his armor, found a good home
for his nag, got him some job-
training: financial sector. Last
we heard, he'd been hired by
an Internet start-up called
errant.netcomorg.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Sequioadendron Giganteum

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Sequoiadendron Giganteum

From a classroom in the building on a knoll,
I look across, see the Sequoiadendron giganteum,
a shaggy green profile foregrounding faint gray
distant Cascades and clouds rippled like a tide.

The tree's A-shape's improvised upon by growth--
something like shoulders protrude there thirty
feet from the top. And near the top, there's a gap
in boughs, where the trunk looks like a thread.

Then, askew, a few wee branches appear, a tiny
comic feathery cap, a frivolous dash, a perfect
flaw. Of course, Sequoiadendron giganteum has
nothing to tell us we haven't told ourselves.

It has nothing to do with us, but has this nothing
at such a grand and unrushed pace, we're tempted
to be quiet, simply to stare at this other thing,
this individuality of tree that encompasses its

species and thinks nothing, thinks nothing of ours.


Link to info

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen was one of the first literary stars of what's known now as the Harlem Renaissance (circa 1919-1934), and although his reputation dwindled after that, it recovered, and he is arguably one of the best lyric poets the U.S. has produced. His sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel," is perfect, blending a formal but contemporary idiom with the form and crafting a superb "argument" about race, color, theology, and existentialism--without ever getting heavy, and with a light ironic touch. It's just one of those poems you can admire forever.

There's a nice anthology of Cullen's poetry--and one novel--edited by Gerald Early: My Soul's High Song.

Eventually, Cullen pursued middle-school teaching as a career--in Harlem, where James Baldwin was one of his students.

Here is a link to more information about Cullen:

Countee

Recycling Message

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Recycling Message


Without reading it
carefully, I just
recycled in the black
tub a postcard sent
to me and others
reminding us to live
more greenly.



Copyright 2010

Fine Poem By Joe Salerno

At "Rinabeana's" site, I found a fine poem by Joe Salerno, "Poetry Is the Art of Not Succeeding":

Poem

Black History Month Begins

...And a happy Black History Month to you. What a good idea historian and professor Carter G. Woodson had way back when.

I thought I'd mention two worthy anthologies of African American poetry: African American Poetry: An Anthology 1773-1927, edited by Joan R. Sherman and James M. Bell--from Dover Books, for two dollars (new). And Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of African American Poetry Since 1945, edited by Michael Harper and Anthony Walton, from Back Bay Books. --Oops, this apparently leaves a gap between 1927 and 1945, so you might look at Oxford's anthology of African American poetry.

Follow Chekhov On Twitter

I suspected that, eventually, Anton Chekhov would get on Twitter. Lo and behold, he is:

Chekhov on Twitter

This particular twitterer tweets quotations from Chekhov's work and observations about Russia and Russians.

Chekhov would have appreciated the imposed frugality of word-choice Twitter imposes.

The River of January

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The River of January


How wonderful it must have been
to find a river in January, when
they were hot, and they
were experiencing explorer’s
despair at the start of the 16th
century, and people who
lived there and had
already found the river looked
at them as if they too, had
been discovered already.

Probably I won’t find a river.
Are there any left to find?
I could find one already found
and rename it, except I might
be tempted to name it the
River of January, and that
wouldn’t do. So I’ll put on
a carnival hat in the Northern
Hemisphere, turn a faucet
on and off, and think of Rio
De Janeiro, flowing there
below its continent’s leading
edge, which tips toward
ocean and Africa. Promises
to oneself are easy to make,

especially when one’s wearing
a carnival hat. I promise myself
that one day I’ll fly to the River
of January, and look at it. And just
look at it and say, Rio De Janeiro.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Kevin Clark's New Book

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(Kevin Clark)
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My old friend Kevin Clark's new book of poetry is out: Self Portrait With Expletives. What a great title. It was the winner of the 2009 Lena-Miles Todd Poetry Series contest and selected by Martha Collins. It is published by Pleiades Press at the University of Central Missouri but distributed by Louisiana State University Press. The ISBN is 978-0-8071-3645-4.

Kevin teaches at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and is also the author of the poetry-writing textbook, The Mind's Eye (Longman).

The Last System Standing

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The Last System Standing

The Chief Executive Oligarch of Paranational,
Inc., rides in a private jet over neighborhoods
he helped ruin, oops, accidentally—you know,
a bad good-decision here and there. Hey,
it happens—naturally, like a bonus
gliding down from the heavens. If you’re
not taking chances, you’re not trying. He falls
asleep listening to opera. Assuming capitalism
once had to pretend to be better than its
worst traits, well, no more. It behaves like the last
system standing. As with the old burlesque
stripper, its excesses are its virtues. Time
is money, people are things, profit is lord,
and not to worry: the system will solve
all problems. Poverty’s temporary, and pain’s
an illusion. The system has everybody’s
best interests in mind, so take some advice
and don’t get in the way of the system--
unless you want to be like a bug on a
railroad track, a vine in the path
of a bulldozer, or a bird flying in front
of a jet-engine’s scream. These are
vivid examples—you know, like
advertising: images that educate. The system
doesn’t want anyone to get hurt. You
understand. You know how it works.
How it works is you work, or not; either
way, the product will get made, get sold,
and this is the best system there is. So,
unless you have any questions,. . . .


Copyright 2010

Writers Born on January 29

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Oprah Winfrey
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At least according to sites I have perused, the writers listed below were born on January 29, although I haven't done my double-checking, due-diligence best.

H.L. Mencken
Emanuel Swedenborg
Thomas Paine
Anton Chekhov
Robert Frost
Edward Abbey
Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter)
Oprah Winfrey
W.B. Yeats
and
Edward Lear, from whom the following limerick is borrowed:

"There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, 'It is just as I feared! -
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!'"

Stadium Dream

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Her Stadium Dream

In her stadium dream, she
doesn't know where she's supposed
to go, what she's supposed to
watch on the field, where
she's supposed to sit, with
whom, and why. She wanders

around trying to decode obscure
or nonexistent numbers for
section, aisle, row, or seat.
No one pays her attention. Their
attention is focused on something
she can't see or on each other.

As she continues, the stadium
becomes a tangle of tunnels. It
has gone underground. People
become erratic. They're confused
like her and not like he. She
observes her own desolate, panicked
feeling as the dream refuses to cease.
She is begging it to cease as she wakes.

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

The Wise One

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The Wise One

"I'm the Wise One you've
been looking for," said the one
claiming to be the Wise One.

"I don't believe you," said
the one to whom the one claiming
to be the Wise One had spoken.

"See," said the Wise one, "already
you're acting wisely. That's
the effect I have on people."


Copyright 2010

Sterling Brown

In a class on the Harlem Renaissance today, we read and discussed "The Odyssey of Big Boy," one of the best known poems by Sterling Brown (1901-1989). The poem is spoken by "Big Boy" himself, a working-class African American who's had many adventures (of the heart and otherwise) as he's traveled around working different jobs, from mule-skinner to stevedore. The choice to write the poem in a Black vernacular idiom was a interesting one for Brown, who grew up in Washington D.C., went to the famous Dunbar high school, then earned a degree at Williams College as well as an M.A. at Harvard. He became a professor at Howard University and got interested in African American folklore.

Brown's books of poems include Southern Road (1932), The Collected Poems of Sterling Brown (1980), The Last Ride of Wild Bill and Eleven Narrative Poems (1975).

Here is a link to more information about Sterling Brown.

Nurses on Break

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Nurses on Break

They've come from an open heart
or a long birth, from drip of life
or failure of flesh. In green gowns
or blue, white gauzy caps, they enter
the park, stretch out like cats.

Sky is victorious, breezes querulous.
The park is arranged around
these reckoned women. Back
at the gray glum castle, pain
waits for them. It isn't going anywhere.


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Sonia Sanchez

Here is a link to information about Sonia Sanchez's new book of poems, Morning Haiku:

Link to Sanchez book

Sanchez has been doing highly original things with the haiku form for a long time. I think I first encountered her use of the form in her book homegirls and hand-grenades--great title for a book, too. She writes in a variety of other forms as well.

Claude McKay

Black History Month is just around the corner, and Tacoma is fortunate to be hosting the Fisk Jubilee Singers and, in a separate program, the Harlem Dance Studio.

One of my favorite Harlem Renaissance writers is Claude McKay, a native of Jamaica. He wrote poetry, fiction, and nonfiction (in the latter category, A Long Way From Home, his autobiography). He is perhaps still most famous for the protest-poem in sonnet-form, "If We Must Die," written in response to the terrible events of the Red Summer of 1919, when an epidemic of anti-Black violence occurred in the U.S.

Later, during World War II, Winston Churchill "adopted" the poem, not knowing its author was Black and not knowing the original context. As McKay notes in a recording I have, he (McKay) was just fine with, if bemused by, that. I also have a recording of Ice-T reading the poem. He does a nice job.

Here is a link to more information about McKay.

Poetry Slam in Mainz

Many moons ago I taught at Johannes Gutenberg University in the great city of Mainz, Germany--then West Germany. Yes, indeed, that's where Johannes started all this printing business, which is now virtual. Mainz is across the Rhine (or Rhein) from Weisbaden, in Germany's wine country, which is probably still less well known than it should be.

Back then I couldn't have imagined that there would be such a thing as a Poetry Slam in Mainz, chiefly because "poetry slam" wasn't part of the parlance then. I was not aware of a poetry-reading culture in Mainz then, but no doubt one existed. I was just too busy teaching too many classes, improving my German, and making cultural adjustments.

Indeed there is such a thing as . . .

Poetry Slam Mainz

. . .--as well there should be.

Winter's Dull Knife

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Winter's Dull Knife


The dull gray blade of Winter's fallen. It
cuts with cold, leaves bloodless wounds:
fatigue, despair, and ague. Winter doesn't
mean well. It doesn't mean anything, although
Lord knows we've tried to dress it in
significance. Some people like to ski.
There are holidays and sweaters.

There's the other hemisphere, which
Summer shacks up with now that it's
left us high and wet. Mostly we walk,
work, and ride in Winter, stay inside
in Winter, sniffling over bowls of soup,
napping with heavy Russian novels,
always hardback, on our chests, mentally
collecting many types of gray, hoping
Winter never finds a sharpening stone.

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Cubist Village

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Cubist Village


A blue horse pulls its fractured,
functional vegetable cart parallel
and perpendicular to our window,
which looks out on an alley and
our living room, where we scratch
noses at the back of our heads,
which host warped angles and excite
the sky beneath our feet. The silent
music of this vortex soothes. Wake up
to the lullaby of thunder's lightning.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Haitian Poetry

Ezra Pound famously asserted that poetry is "news that stays news," but in the face of a catastrophe like the one in Haiti, poetry seems inadequate, far removed from desperate, immediate needs and overwhelming loss. As we contribute what we can and wait for information about else we might do over the longer haul, however, we can take a moment to consider the poetry from the land afflicted. Here is a link to an anthology of Haitian poetry edited by Chris Waters:

Haitian Poetry

Some Writers Born In January

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Writers born in January include Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham, Patricia Highsmith, Isaac Asimov, and Zora Neale Hurston (in the photo). Langston Hughes missed January by that much (as Maxwell Smart used to say), having been born on February 1, 1902--in Joplin, Missouri.

Since 1804

An item I found in Quintard Taylor's nice reference work, Black Facts: The Timelines of African American History, 1601-2008 (p. 64):

"1804: On January 1, Haiti becomes an independent nation. It is the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere (after the United States)."

Fund for Haitian Relief

Below is a link to one of many funds to support relief in Haiti. This fund is well established and supported by musician Wyclef Jean:


Haiti Relief

Monosyllabic Life

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Monosyllabic Life

born, breathe, cry, eat, smile,
crap, want, hurt, pee, sleep,
dance, want, hurt, like, fear,
love, learn, heal, lose, "win,"
call, bleed, wish, sweat, write,
tire, sing, talk, read, drink,
sleep, play, work, sex, know,
find, grow, raise, hope, ache,
grieve, weep, groan, buy, lust,
wear, wash, rest, sell, wish,
lick, frown, cheat, help, find,
shame, ask, take, will, give.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Patrick McGoohan on THE PRISONER

Here is a video clip from an interview with the late Patrick McGoohan concerning his TV series, The Prisoner, which I believe was and remains perfectly suited to poets who like to watch TV:


McGoohan on The Prisoner

The Chore

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The Chore


Life never seemed simple. Once,
though, it appeared to have fewer
components. That was an ego ago.

Mirrors showed compassion. Amazement
was not yet rare. Programmers
had not yet inherited the Earth.

Nostalgia, I'm told, is a yearning,
a warm emotion. What I feel is cold.
It accompanies basic, necessary work:

contrasting yesterday's illusions with today's.


Copyright Hans Ostrom 2010

Against Yesterday

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Against Yesterday


Yesterday is not a good idea. It
just happened, so it's not really
history. It's more like a today
that's started to rot. Yesterday
can't make any promises, and even
if it could, it wouldn't keep them.

Yesterday annoys--the way it blurs
into a perfectly fine today, insulation
between the two disintegrating like
wet cotton candy. Listen, I'm
not saying we ought to abolish
yesterday. I'm suggesting we impose

severe regulations. I'm thinking
we should investigate what a yester
is, why in fact yesterday isn't
yestermorrow, and who made
midnight boss.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Rampant Significance

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It's been a while since I've seen wee advertisements on TV for videos of "girls gone wild." I gather from the ads that the "girls" in question are chiefly college students on break who are induced to lift their shirts and expose what, in Sweden (for example, would be unremarkable if nonetheless unobjectionable and certainly not without charm. Probably the videos should be called "girls gone bored" or "boys gone predictable."

I doubt if I can successfully market the idea of "significance gone rampant," so I wrote a poem.

Rampant Significance

There is too much meaning. Everywhere
you refuse to turn, something means.
Messages are getting across. Answers
proliferate like dust mites. Typhoons
of information saturate our land.

In my mind I found the image
of a solitary Sumerian slowly
etching text into stone. The notion
of a billion email messages per
[insert unit here] then swept

the Sumerian and his chisel away like
an ant in a flash flood. No one
has time to be absurd. People
are too busy making themselves understood.
To what end? Points are being stressed.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Brazilian Poetry

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(image: Brasilia's Metro system)
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Today I ran across a nice little overview of Brazlian poetry. The overview appeared (and still appears) on the U.S. Brazilian Consulate's web site. I wonder if the Brazil U.S. Consulate's site has an essay about American poetry. Probably not.

Anyway, the piece sent me in search of An Anthology of Twentieth Century Brazilian Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bishop (on whose poem, "The Fish," I once published a wee essay--pardon the self-serving but non-commercial interruption)and Emmanuel Brasil. It is, I assume in translation--for us dolts who don't read Portuguese. Anyway, I ordered the book. I was about to write that I can't wait to read it, but of course I can wait to read it--I just don't want to wait. While ordering the book, I also saw Seven Faces: Brazilian Poetry Since Modernism, edited by Charles A. Perrone--also an anthology, I gather. What a nice title.

Anyway, here is a link to the Bishop/Brasil anthology:

Brazilian poetry

They'll Grow That Way

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They'll Grow That Way


They'll grow that way, the trees--
the way they negotiate themselves
and circumstances: weather, climate,
soil, and such. They they're there.
They are. We are. We look and name,
then file trees away in this or that
taxonomy, maybe mythology,
ecology. We may place trees into
a landscape design, a farm, or an idea
of wilderness. The trees, they don't
know about this. They'll grow
that way, each a tension rooting
in and branching from a code
of seed, a pattern of environment.



Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom