Mary Ann Wishes For Rose-Rain

I was talking with a colleague who is teaching a course that includes the great Victorian novel, Middlemarch, by George Eliot, pen name of Mary Ann Evans. We were observing that many passages in the novel are poetic because the phrasing is so superb, heightened without going over the top. Here is a little poem by George Eliot:

ROSES

You love the roses - so do I. I wish
The sky would rain down roses, as they rain
From off the shaken bush. Why will it not?
Then all the valley would be pink and white
And soft to tread on. They would fall as light
As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be
Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!

George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans] 1819-1880

I find much to like in this little blank-verse poem. The speaker addresses "You" and even mentions that this "You" loves roses. But by the end of line one, the poem has turned permanently to what the speaker loves, wishes for, and imagines. What a great surprise. We think the poem is going to be "to" and "about" this "You," but it's not. The poem seems to be literally about rose-rain and figuratively about wishing for something you know won't happen but enjoying the wishing just the same. Comparing roses or rose-petals to sweet-smelling feather is good, too, even if "light as feathers" is and probably already was a cliche.

Interim Report

"Interim" is a good word. It sounds nice, for one thing, and it starts with a stressed syllable. It would be a good word with which to start a poem in that most difficult (for poets writing in English) meter, dactylic, in which each three-syllable unit must begin with a stressed syllable and end with two unstressed syllables. Unless I'm mistaken, Longfellow's poem Hiawatha is composed in dactylic meter.

I believe interim was lifted directly from Latin, and a few hundred years ago, one might say, "Interim, I'll get a new horse," meaning "In the meantime, I'll get new horse." So one was simply mixing two languages, Latin and English. I guess we do that sometimes now when we say something like, "See you manana,"and I'm sorry I don't know how to get that mark over the first n.

Later, interim became a noun:

1579-80 NORTH Plutarch (1676) 918 The Wars that fell out in the interim were a hindrance.

This is from the OED online. Here interim means what it means now--a period in between two other periods. And that's an interesting sentence translated from Plutarch, by the way: very understated and very British (even though it's not originally British): wars were "a hindrance." I'll say!

Nowadays you hear or read interim used as an adjective. "She was appointed interim director of the zoo."

Here is an "interim report" in the form of a poem:

Interim Report

Most of my memories—
good, bad, mixed—
concern instances and means
of trying to cope.

Nostalgia is largely lost
on me. Because the world
is none of my doing—nor
should it be—I’ve tried

to get by, discern terrain,
keep two eyes on those
in power, survive humanity
and nature. All this takes up

most of my time, thus most
of my memories.
How has it been so
far for you?

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

A November Poem by Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr.

Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr., was a pioneering African American poet whose life and work bridged the era of slavery (he was born in 1861) and the era in which modern African American literature flourished in the Harlem Renaissance and continued to grow in the decades ahead (he died in 1949, preceded in death by his son, Joseph Jr., also a poet). I enjoy Cotter Sr.'s poem about November very much and post it here as we find ourselves in that month again:

November

by Joseph Seamon Cotter, Sr.

Old November, sere and brown,
Clothes the country, haunts the town,
Sheds its cloak of withered leaves,
Brings its sighing, soughing breeze.
Prophet of the dying year,
Builder of its funeral bier,
Bring your message here to men;
Sound it forth that they may ken
What of Life and what of Death
Linger on your frosty breath.
Let men know to you are given
Days of thanks to God in heaven;
Thanks for things which we deem best,
Thanks, O God, for all the rest
That have taught us—(trouble, strife,
Bring through Death a larger life)—
Death of our base self and fear—
(Even as the dying year,
Though through cold and frost, shall bring
Forth a new and glorious spring)—
Shall shed over us the sway
Of a new and brighter day,
With Hope, Faith and Love alway.

The first four lines read so well that they are a poem within a poem.

Country and Western Song

My father's day-job was carpentry and stone-masonry, but for several years he took a second job as a bartender. My uncle owned the bar, The Buckhorn in Sierra City, California, and it had a juke box that played 78 rpm records. My father brought home some of the records that were removed to make way for new ones. So I grew up listening to "Folsom Prison Blues" and "Big River" by Johnny Cash, "North to Alaska" by Johnny Horton, and songs by Kitty Wells, Eddie Arnold, the Sons of the Pioneers, and many others.

I think FPB is still my favorite country song. I also like Hank Penny's "Bloodshot Eyes," Patsy Cline's "Crazy," Marty Robbins' "El Paso," and different renditions of "Ghost Riders in the Sky." "Honky Tonk Angel" is pretty good, too. I can't stand most contemporary C & W. It's just corporate pablum, awful stuff. That's why Johnny Cash loathed the Nashville establishment.

Country and western lyrics are extremely difficult to write, perhaps most especially for poets, because they require such simplicity, more simplicity than is in what poets think of as their simplest poems. Of course, they have to have a sense of the common folk, too. In this respect, they're like the blues.

Obviously, I'm claiming that they're difficult to write because I've written some, and they're not very good. Oh, well. I think I hear the train a-coming, so here are the lyrics (and I did manage to sneak in the word "cash"):

I Hate My Job

Verse 1:

My boss’s head is bigger than his backside.
His backside is bigger than his car.
What I need costs more than what I make.
My paycheck goes a mile less than far.

Chorus:

I hate my job.
I can’t stand it.
But I need the cash.
So I can’t quit.

I hate my job.
But I can’t quit.
Gotta feed my family.
And that’s just it.

Verse 2:

Where I work the higher-ups
Are dumber than the dirt.
They pay me only what they want,
But never what I’m worth.

Chorus.

Bridge:

Working men and working women:
They make this country go.
But the way that we get treated
Is dirty, mean, and low.

Verse 3:

I get up and go to work each day.
But I’ve forgotten why.
If I don’t get a day off soon,
I might fall down and die.

Chorus.

Copyright Hans Ostrom 2007

Faux Fall Rant

One of the great "rant" poems in American literature announces itself, with its title, as a rant-poem: Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which harnesses the power of counter-cultural, anti-Establishiment outrage to a kind of Old Testament prophetic oratory. Amiri Baraka's "A New Reality Is Better Than a New Movie" (1972) is a durable poem in this "genre," too. Langston Hughes, who is not customarily associated with "rant" poems, actually wrote many of them, especially in the 1930s. They were often connected to labor-issues and to opposing imperialism and racism.

Faux rants are an interesting form of expression, too. The ones politicians, shock-jocks, and talk-show hosts go on are frequently too predictable, fallacious, and grotesque to enjoy. I much prefer the ones delivered by the real professionals, stand-up comedians. Don Rickles had a good "rant" act, but the part where he insulted people in the audience or on the set made me uncomfortable. Lewis Black has perfected the faux rant or "angry act." He never attacks anybody in the audience, and he peforms a clever, cathartic outrage directed at things going wrong in the culture-at-large. When he's not doing the act and (for example) just being interviewed, he's quite reserved, generous, unpretentious, and smart.

Here's a faux-rant against Autumn. One problem Autumn poses for poets is that it's Autumn and not just Fall. Another problem is that at least 5 billion poems have been written about Autumn, most of them including images of leaves, of course.

Like everybody else, I rather like Fall, so the poem is obviously a schtick, and it masks the real frustration, which almost all poets feel when they sit down (or stand up) to write an Autumn poem. So to all those fans of Autumn out there: remember that this is a faux rant.

Against Autumn

I don't like Autumn or Fall, and nobody even knows
what "Autumn" means. Enough with the colorful leaves already!
They're dead. That's why they fell, not because they're colorful
or symbolize anything, okay? Scientists should turn deciduous
trees and shrubs into evergreens--or ever-oranges or ever-
browns. Even ever-pinks would be fine, as long as the leaves
stayed glued to branches. Fall is a tedious road
from Summer to Winter. It's loaded with work
and school, and there's almost no place to pull over
and rest. Its holidays--Halloween and Thanksgiving--
have become ludicrous, taken over by the sugar
industry, the Hollywood horror-sequel factory,
Pilgrim coloring-books, stupid TV decorating-shows,
turkeys on steroids, and dysfunctional airports.
People shoot lots of animals,
and sometimes each other, in Autumn, out there on
private hunting-ranches and in groomed forests.
How would you like to be a pheasant, a deer,
a duck, a quail, or the Vice President's friend
in Autumn, huh? Concussions occur in football
games on Autumn's Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays.
This is a fact. In fact, the n would fall like a dead leaf off
autumn if it weren't for the word autumnal, so
couldn't we get used to saying awtoomal or
awtoomistic or even fallish (but not fallic)?!
I'm sick of the silent n in Autumn, and I've
had it with Fall. Harvests don't happen
in Autumn anymore anyway. I see squash, spuds,
and apples in the store year-round. This
is called proof. So I say
Shut it down! Shut down autumn! Winter,
Spring, and Summer would each stretch more than
a week longer, and how could anybody
be opposed to that? I oppose Autumn.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Amy Lowell; Taxi; Metro

Along with H.D. (Hilda Doolittle), Richard Aldington, and Ezra Pound, Massachusetts native Amy Lowell was an important Imagist poet in the early decades of the 20th century. Here is a poem by her about a taxi-cab:

The Taxi

by Amy Lowell

When I go away from you
The world beats dead
Like a slackened drum.
I call out for you against the jutted stars
And shout into the ridges of the wind.
Streets coming fast,
One after the other,
Wedge you away from me,
And the lamps of the city prick my eyes
So that I can no longer see your face.
Why should I leave you,
To wound myself upon the sharp edges of the night?


As one might expect from a working Imagist, the images are sharp, and they hold one's interest, but to my mind the most compelling feature of the poem is the speaker's relationship to the taxi. In one sense the taxi is personified ("you"), but in another it remains just a taxi. A variety of urban elements constitute barriers between the speaker and the taxi, and although we often have negative associations with taxi-cabs, one can also see how a cab might become a symbol of security. And so, suddenly, the speaker seems to be in the taxi at the end of the poem, and what has come before seems to have been speculation about how difficult life would be if he or she to leave the taxi. I enjoy how the last two lines induce us to reinterpret the lines we just read; the speaker seems to have been in the cab all along. It's a deceptively complex poem.

Here's a wee transportation-poem that's not especially complex, deceptively or otherwise:

For Metro Riders

Behind the smudged
window of a ticket-booth,
an angel evaluated your
sincerity. Now rhythms
of a city owned by noise sooth your
innermost ears. You must have
nodded off. You’re in
the right place on the right
line but after all must
still discover where you
are as you are, going.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Josephine Miles; Family

Here's a splendid poem by Josephine Miles. It's always reminded me of Stevie Smith's poem, "Not Waving But Drowning," but it's a bit less bleak. Miles (1911-1985) taught for a long time at U.C. Berkeley. Rheumatoid arthritis physically disabled her considerably. I heard/saw her read at U.C. Davis in the late 1970s, and an assistant had to carry her into and out of rooms. She gave a great reading. Her poems are droll and intelligent. The poem (from the Poetry Foundation website, so I think it's okay to post it), which my friend, and former classmate at U.C. Davis, likes very much:

Family

by Josephine Miles

When you swim in the surf off Seal Rocks, and your family

Sits in the sand

Eating potato salad, and the undertow

Comes which takes you out away down

To loss of breath loss of play and the power of play

Holler, say

Help, help, help. Hello, they will say,

Come back here for some potato salad.

It is then that a seventeen-year-old cub

Cruising in a helicopter from Antigua,

A jackstraw expert speaking only Swedish

And remote from this area as a camel, says

Look down there, there is somebody drowning.

And it is you. You say, yes, yes,

And he throws you a line.

This is what is called the brotherhood of man.

* * * * * *

Here's a different kind of poem about family:

Family Legends, Small and True

by Hans Ostrom

Thomas, my father’s uncle, fist-fought
my father’s grandfather—yes, it was quite
a tangle of relations, a knuckle-riot.
This happened during the first course
of the family’s Christmas banquet in
the tall white clapboard house on a hill
in a gold-mining town, California.

They fought beside a long table. They
did not take the fight outside. Each knocked
the other down. Dining resumed. This
happened in the Ago all families, yours and
mine, occupy—that vast astral soup of time.

One day Thomas merely left and was not;
and was not heard; and was not heard from
again, ever. No news of him since: that
is a species of immortality—everlasting,
immutable Disappearance. Thomas will
never amount; he will never amount to
anything except a fistfight and a dis-
appearance and these words, which Thomas,
after a fashion writes, letting me

hear from him now that the others are all
gone, and dessert and coffee, brandy and
cigars are served, and a piece of raw, cold
steak is applied to his bruised face, and
filial hatred glows like a kerosene lamp.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

On Halloween, A Review of the "Holidays"

Since today is Halloween, I thought I'd briefly review some of the "holidays" (using the term loosely, in some cases). I'll start with my least favorite first and work toward the one I like the best; it happens to be the best one for poets, too, in my opinion. Here we go--and don't take offense; if you really like a holiday that I don't, more power to you, and may you write or read a great poem about it:

1. I don’t like the Fourth of July. I know: not liking the Fourth of July is un-American. This kind of thing could have gotten me hauled before a Congressional committee in the 1950s--maybe today, too--who knows? I have two main reasons. I don’t like the interminable noise of fireworks and how such noise terrorizes animals (and there's the problem with fires, too). And if I were inclined to celebrate “the birth” of the U.S., I would probably do it in a more cerebral (and, I admit, boring) way—by meditating on the Constitution and its origins, for example.

2. New Year’s Eve. I used to like this “holiday” a lot, but now I dislike forcing myself to stay awake until midnight, so this is strictly age- and life-style related. I also worry very much about all the drunk-drivers out there, although I do everything I can to stay off the roads. At the same time, there’s really not much pressure to celebrate, so it’s all good, I guess. The Times Square thing was always bizarre for West Coast people because it was tape-recorded.

3. Christmas. I’m ambivalent about this holiday. I rather like a light-oriented celebration in Winter, and the Swedes especially emphasize this part. I also appreciate the celebration of The Birth, just as I appreciate other religious holy days or periods of observance that occur during the same time of year. The shopping part is way out of control; it’s really turned into a kind of national madness. A relatively new Catholic, I tend to like the masses that occur throughout the year, and I like the meditative quiet that “surrounds,” so to speak, a mass. So I did not take immediately to the Christmas-masses, and I learned that many Catholics attend mass only at Christmas and Easter. At the same time, it is pretty cool to see all the children at the mass, and I’ve gotten used to the noise. One simply has to understand and accept that it’s a different kind of mass. I very much enjoy other people opening gifts, as long as they rather like the gift. I enjoy opening gifts, especially if they’re books, of course. Our family has a very eclectic, eccentric collection of tree-ornaments, so there is great quirky pleasure in hauling those out every year. I’m actually in favor of the plastic trees, not just for environmental reasons but because they’re so wonderfully tacky. I haven't been able to convince my family yet, though. My favorite songs are “Go Tell It On the Mountain” and “Mary’s Boy Child,” a Jamaican song. I think the best version is by none other than. . . Vanessa Williams.

4. Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving’s okay because family and friends get together. I don’t like the massive meal, and if one has to deal with air-travel at all, Thanksgiving is hopeless. I think it’s probably a good idea to give thanks. I don’t really get a sense that people think much about the alleged Puritan/Pilgrim origins of this holiday, but I could be wrong--and often am.

5. Halloween is good for kids, I think. They enjoy the costumes. I tend to think of “gothic” writers like Hawthorne and Poe. Trick-or-treating has become dicey because the parents and guardians essentially have to accompany the children like a security-team, and there’s a great deal of pressure to buy huge bags of candy. Many college students seem to like this "holiday."

6. Easter’s good for a Catholic, like me. When I was young, we had the infamous Easter-egg hunts, and my father, being competitive, hid many eggs that were never found. That’s kind of amusing, now that I think about it. Probably the eggs were eaten by raccoons that very night. A cautionary tip for cat "owners": lilies are poisonous to cats, many of whom (of which) like to chew on lilies.

7. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s, birthday. I like this holiday very much, not simply because of King but because interesting things happen on or near that day in schools and communities. It’s a holiday that’s handled well, in my opinion.

8. Arbor Day. Not really a holiday, I suppose, and I’ve never really celebrated it. I’ve planted lots of trees, but I’ve never planted one on Arbor Day. I need to do that. I think this Day should be turned into a bigger deal, but I don't want to see it commercialized with Arbor Day greeting cards (that would be environmentally ironic) or Arbor Day gifts.

Most trees are excellent, after all, so why not celebrate this Day? I think it’s an especially good holiday for poets, in spite of Joyce Kilmer’s infamous poem with its extraordinarily mixed metaphors. Joyce was a man, as you probably knew, and he died in World War I. Ezra Pound thought there were too many tree poems, and that was 60-70 years ago. I don’t think you can have too many tree-poems, although more of them should probably appear online as opposed to on paper, to “save” trees. My favorite tree is probably the oak. Cedars are very admirable, too, and sequoias are impressive. I planted a sequoia next to a Victorian house we once owned. If all the subsequent owners will leave it there, it will tower over the neighborhood one day, and no doubt many poems will be written about it, pax Ezra.

Tic Tacs

In the check-out line at a grocery-store the other day, I looked again at the items for sale near the cashier's post--magazines, gum, breath-mints, candy, batteries, and so on. I wondered what percentage of a grocery-store's or "super-market's" net income springs from sales of such items and how much money I've spent in my lifetime on such items.

I looked once more at the Tic Tacs in their transparent little box. I have purchased Tic Tacs a few times over the years, but I've decided I don't like them. They're candy, and they look kind of creepy, and I remembered that I'd written a little prose-poem about them:

Tic Tacs

by Hans Ostrom

This little glass box once held a tiny kingdom’s jewels but now imprisons maggots. Or are they petrified eggs of the world’s smallest dinosaur? A message glued to the box orders me to “collect points and get incredible stuff.” I will do so. I will remove the maggots and the eggs, and I will seal the points and incredible stuff in the demitasse casket, bury it in a little cemetery in Luxembourg or Rhode Island. On a headstone made of one small mosaic tile, I will etch the words, “Tic” and “Tac” and with bad breath mutter tiny prayers for the soul of incredible stuff.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

For the heck of it, I looked for "Tic Tac" on the internet, and of course there is a site: tictacusa.com. The tag-line of the site reads as follows:

"Tic Tac Breath Mints Are Fresh Entertainment For Your Mouth."

To some degree, this line is more surrealistic than my prose-poem. One imagines sending away the very tiny stand-up comedians, jugglers, singers, and actors that had been providing entertainment, like micro-Lilliputians, on the precarious stage of one's tongue. And one imagines going to a microphone and introducing a new entertainment-act to one's mouth: "Put your teeth together for Tic Tac Breath Mints!"

In what sense do breath-mints entertain our mouths? Should they be called breath-mints, in fact, or mouth-mints, or something else (besides Tic Tacs)? What were the other names in the running when the company named this little candy? An auto-company once had the bright idea of inviting poets to submit names for a new car, and the company approached noted American poet Marianne Moore. She came up with "Tyrolean Turtle-Top." Certainly poetic, but probably not good for sales--except to poets, perhaps.

Good luck resisting that final purchase before you pass through the cashier's gate at the "super-market."

Guest Poet: Jared Leising on Beer, Ted Kooser, and Other Matters

Here is a fine poem by Jared Leising, a writer and professor in the Pacific Northwest and author of the chapbook, The Widows and Orphans of Winesburg, Ohio:



The Drink Ted Kooser Owes Us All


Twenty-four hours in a day, 24 beers in a case. Coincidence? I think not.

- H.L. Mencken


I go to Safeway
to buy a six-pack.
Somebody’s taken
a bottle from the
last pack, so now it’s

a fiver, dammit.
Was it Kooser?—that
geezer (my mom finds
cute) who wrote about
the miracle of

a lone beer bottle
standing right side up
and empty along
the highway—each line
three syllables long,

each stanza three lines.
My students read this
without awe, as though
they’ve done this plenty
after polishing

off a bottle at
fifty, cruising down
Aurora, tossing
emptiness to wind.

by Jared Leising


Copyright 2007 Jared Leising

Guest-Poems by Jones and Borsten

Here are two poems, one each by Michelle Jones and Sarah Borsten, writers living in the Pacific Northwest:



And Are We Yet Alive



by Michelle Jones


Why does this dirge happen?
Because my body hurts.
Because our ghosts are made
of silk curtains in the
window by the elm.

Must we because of this haunting
and that dirty sheet go wandering
down the steps with a crucifix
and hymn stuttering our softy voices.
And if you get there before I do,
Swing low, Swing low.


And must I wake each morning
broke back to your fist that
warns me of the blinking shut-eye,
and hear the sun buzzing at me
and camouflage my cheek with white,
the same way spilled wine stains
red on your sleeve.


And I erect like a statue with my legs
missing and your sour breath hovering
as your prompt me in the kitchen.
I am without foot, heavy in the chair
and remain with buckets of ammonia
instead of barrels of apples or bed sheets
clean from the washing.


You left me asleep with the quilt I made
and one cheek turned up so that
I could hear the dogs barking
and the bells calling me like a symphony.


The last few days, I told you that nothing hurt.



Copyright 2007 by Michelle Jones
* * * * * * * *

Yelling Fire

by Sarah Borsten

They tell me to yell fire
during personal emergencies--
the kind that would need more
than water to save me.
They tell me to yell fire
because strangers will
call nine-one-one
if they think they smell smoke
and not just cum.
It would be just like
my dreams of slogging
through thick mud,
no one around,
only this time
my lungs stretched past breath
my knees jolting terribly on cement
my thighs sore from holding myself together.
There would be a fire
but no one to put it out.

Copyright 2007 by Sarah Borsten

New From Copper Canyon

I just received a new catalogue from Copper Canyon Press, one of the venerable publishers of poetry-books in the U.S. It is located in Port Townsend, Washington.

What looks good to me in the catalogue:

W.S. Merwin, New and Selected Poems--new in paperback.

Jim Harrison, Saving Daylight.

Maram al-Massri, A Red Cherry on a White-tiled Floor: Selected Poems.

June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan.

Alberto Rios, The Theater of Night.

Taha Muhammad Ali, So What: New & Selected Poems 1971-2005.

Ruth Stone, In the Dark. Stone's poetry is a favorite of a professor, poet, and scholar I knew at U.C. Davis, Sandra Gilbert.

Madline DeFrees, Spectral Waves. DeFrees writes poems of complex structure and startling imagery.

The catalogue also features a list of signed books from the press.

H.D. and the Mysteries

Hilda Doolittle (1886-1961), who preferred to publish as H.D., was a part of the Imagist movement in poetry in the early 20th century. Indeed, her poems are filled with arresting imagery, but I believe her poetry is also complex rhetorically. Her not-so-well-known war poem, "R.A.F.," is splendid. Here is another poem by her:

The Mysteries Remain

The mysteries remain,
I keep the same
cycle of seed-time
and of sun and rain;
Demeter in the grass,
I multiply,
renew and bless
Bacchus in the vine;
I hold the law,
I keep the mysteries true,
the first of these
to name the living, dead;
I am the wine and bread.
I keep the law,
I hold the mysteries true,
I am the vine,
the branches, you
and you.

by H.D. (Hilda Doolittle)

The images are plain but strong here. The voice captivates. It is clear and coherent, as if indeed one person were speaking to us, but it also represents a collective persona who can be Demeter (mother of Persephone and goddess of . . . agriculture, for lack of a better term), Bacchus, Adam (the naming), and any keeper of the law. The persona can also be us: "you and you." Is the persona The Life Force, God, Christ, the artistic impulse, or what or who? Yes--and no. H.D. wouldn't and didn't lie to us: "the mysteries remain."

It's hard not to like this poem.

GLBT Poets

October is the month in which gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered persons, past and present, are celebrated, remembered, and honored. In the spirit of the month, here's a list of some of my favorite poets who are or were G, L, B, or T. As with poets in general, some chose to write about sexuality, their own and others', and some didn't. Some were in the closet and some were out, and in some cases those categories hadn't been labeled that way. While I'm thinking about it, I'll also mention my favorite general modern-and contemporary-GLBT history: Out of the Past, the author of which I'll have to add later (and it's later, and the author is Neil Miller). I'm pretty sure it's in print in paperback. Highly readable. The poets:

W.H. Auden
Countee Cullen
Mark Doty
Allen Ginsberg
John Giorno
Thom Gunn
A.E. Housman
Audre Lorde
Frank O'Hara
Adrienne Rich
Walt Whitman
Oscar Wilde (better known for his plays; a novel; being incarcerated for being gay; and one-liners, but also a good poet)

Langston Hughes, one of my all-time favorite poets, was probably bisexual, but his main biographer, Arnold Rampersad, concludes that Hughes essentially became "asexual," and this topic was easily the most controversial one mentioned in the two-volume biography. One good way of starting an argument among Hughes-scholars is to raise the question of his sexuality. I have no doubt Langston is amused my this, from his perch up there with Duke Ellington, Carl Van Vechten, Arna Bontemps, other friends, and a great number of just plain folk, whom he liked the best.

Mood and Impression: Edith Sitwell

Earlier I wrote a blog-entry about British poet Edith Sitwell's unusual war-poem, "Still Falls The Rain." Here's a much different poem from her:

Gray Crystal Bells

BELLS of gray crystal

Break on each bough--

The swans' breath will mist all

The cold airs now.

Like tall pagodas

Two people go,

Trail their long codas

Of talk through the snow.

Lonely are these

And lonely and I . . . .

The clouds, gray Chinese geese

Sleek through the sky.

Edith Sitwell

It's almost as if Sitwell decided to infuse the poem with a gray chill. The poem strikes me as the lyric equivalent of an Impressionist painting. The opening image of icicles on boughs is terrific and makes me think of rare freezing rain, which devastates trees, in the Pacific Northwest.

Comparing people to pagodas may be a bit of a stretch, but I like the "codas" of talk: a nice way of describing what conversation sounds like outside in the cold. After "Lonely are these," we almost think there must be a typographical error in the next line: should it read "And lonely am I?" No--and this line seems better than that one would be: "And lonely and I . . ." Does the line refer, redundantly, to the two pagoda-people, or is the second "lonely" just floating freely in the speaker's head as he or she observes the two? The answer remains ambiguous, probably as Sitwell intended it to be, but the second "lonely" is followed nicely by "and I. . . ."--as if the speaker wants to turn from his or her own (painful?) thoughts and speak instead of the scene. Clouds are compared to gray Chinese geese: terrific. The image helps to book-end the poem, which early on gives us the image of swans' breath misting the cold air. The rhyme-scheme works well, even if pagodas seems to serve codas too obviously.

--A nice, mysterious, impressionistic, compact poem--as we look ahead to winter. Well done, Dame Edith!

A Poem By Abe Lincoln

Here's a poem by President Abraham Lincoln:

To Rosa—

You are young, and I am older;
You are hopeful, I am not—
Enjoy life, ere it grow colder—
Pluck the roses ere they rot.

Teach your beau to heed the lay—
That sunshine soon is lost in shade—
That now's as good as any day—
To take thee, Rose, ere she fade.

Apparently Lincoln wrote this poem in 1858, for the daughter of a hotel proprietor.

As a writer, Lincoln tended to cut to the chase. The Gettysburg Address is a model of concision. The thesis of this one is pretty clear: "Rosa, induce your boyfriend to marry you--soon." "Pluck the roses ere they rot" delivers a punch. We're accustomed to seeing roses fade in poetry, but "rot" is less familiarly poetic in a poems comparing roses to women. Lincoln's legendary gloominess is apparent, too: "You are hopeful, I am not--." --And this was before the death of children and the disastrous early years of his first term as president, when the Civil War looked hopeless for the North, the abolitionists believed him to be too soft on slavery, and his Cabinet was a pit of snakes. (Gore Vidal's Lincoln is one of my favorite historical novels.)

The poem appears in the Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, edited by Roy Brasly. It also appears online on U.S. government sites.

I wonder how soon (or even whether) Rosa got married after reading this poem. I wonder what kind of poetry George W. Bush writes--or reads.

Hardy on War

Here is a poem by Thomas Hardy about war. It is grim and ironic: precisely what one turns to Hardy's novels and poems expecting to find:

The Man He Killed

Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!

But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.

I shot him dead because--
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe of course he was;
That's clear enough; although

He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,
Off-hand like--just as I--
Was out of work--had sold his traps--
No other reason why.

Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You'd treat, if met where any bar is,
Or help to half a crown.

A "nipperkin," by the way, is (according to the OED online):

"A small vessel used as a measure for alcoholic liquor, containing a half-pint or less."

Because they would have gotten the nipperkin wet, one might have guessed that the nipperkin was something like a napkin. "Nipperkin" can also refer to the ale or liquor in the vessel. So if you said, "May I have a nipperkin of bourbon?" and the bartender were to understand what you said, s/he would give you a certain amount of bourbon, not the nipperkin itself to take home.

As with many men and women who serve in the U.S. military, these two men enlisted because they didn't know what else to do and/or were out of work. The speaker speculates that the other man may have, like him, "sold his traps"--probably referring to fishing-traps or crab-traps. Then suddenly the two men are opposing each other on a battlefield in a war not of their making. As in Wilfred Owen's famous "Dulce et Decorum Est," there is no note of patriotism or even passion in the killing. It is accidental in the sense that two soldiers more or less wander into their respective armies and by chance oppose each other one day. If fate had gone another way, they might have had some beers together in a bar. There is more than a little of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage in his poem. It also brings to mind a film with Toshiro Mifune and Lee Marvin, Hell in the Pacific, wherein an American and a Japanese soldier are stranded, by accident, on the same small island.

I wonder how many of those serving in Iraq now have a similar perspective on their circumstance.

"Wireless" Redux

I stumbled upon the following poem from the very early century just-past:

Wireless, by K.G. Martin [1904]

Wireless, meaningless, save that we know

that another man in a far away land

stands by the side of a gibbering spark,

punching his message into the dark.

Into the dark of a Summer's night,
and around the world and into the light
of our brilliant Winter day
speeds the vibrant, quivering ray.

And, caught in the web of sky-flung wires,
sinks to earth, chatters, expires;
but before it dies, skillful hands of man
have torn from its soul a Marconigram.


This poem fascinates in several ways. "Marconigram," a telegram named after the radio-inventor Marconi and apparently based on a telegraph-system he or those familiar with his work created, is a lovely portmanteau word. I think the last telegram I received was in about 1986. I had to drive down to a Greyhound bus-station (where there was a tiny Western Union office) to get it: cumbersome. I would much rather have driven down there for a Marconigram. (And now of course my mind drifts to the infamous "Candy-gram for Mongo" scene in Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles.)

Also, I like the nice mixture of being impressed by the new technology and being underwhelmed by it. The new (in 1904) technology may be whiz-bang, but in the end, it results in . . . chatter. Chatter in, chatter out, regardless of what gizmo you're using.

Now, obviously, "wireless" refers neither to radio nor to telegrams, per se, but to telephonic gizmos that are equipped to bounce signals--billions a day, one supposes--off satellites and towers. I have no idea how this technology works, and I've written before here about my discomfort with cell-phones (mobile phones), which are far too small for my paws. Companies should have "Big and Tall" stores where one can buy phones to fit one's physical . . . um . . . style.

Here is a poem I wrote perhaps seven years ago, well before I stumbled upon the "Wireless" poem by K.G. Martin, for whom now I feel a kind of kinship. It's a bit uncanny that, without knowledge of the other or the other's poem, K.G. and I both chose three four-line stanzas. Of course, back then, he felt more pressure to use rhyme than I do, so I went with free verse. Neither of us is one hundred per cent enthusiastic about this new "wireless" technology. K.G., if you read this, call me, using your wireless phone. (What is Heaven's area code?) The poem (which for some unknown wireless reason the blog-program insists on putting in Italics--not my idea, but I can't fix it, and I even took the extraordinary step of looking at the Html code):

Truly, Madly, Cellularly

By portable telephones they trysted.
Their words raptured--caromed off
corporate satellites, descended bundled
in spongy static. Some sluiced through

optic fibers. Why not speak face to face?
Unmanageable: The lovers worried words
might disappear into Society so harried, sloppy,
huge. Words cleansed in space and digitized

might be exchanged like polished stones.
Sighs and whispers might be chastened.
The two did broadcast their love, but only to
the other; and were charged by the minute.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Jets; A. R. Ammons

What happened to "sonic booms"--the noise made by airplanes that go faster than the speed of sound? I haven't heard one in ages. Growing up in the Sierra Nevada, I heard them all the time. That's an exaggeration. But at least 5 a year, usually in the summer. We assumed they were caused by high-flying jet fighter-planes coming out of an Air Force base in Nevada, but I don't remember exactly what kind of planes they were. I do remember an extraordinarily startling boom. Every so often, if lightning struck very close, the ensuing thunder might match a sonic boom, but otherwise the latter was the loudest boom I'd ever heard. It seemed like it was all the windows could do to keep from breaking, and the house rattled. Then, if you went outside and looked up (and the sky was clear), you could see the beginning of the white jet-trail, high up, and at the head of that trail, an object that looked not much bigger than a needle.

After opening with this jet-digression, I'll now present a jet-poem by A.R. Ammons, who died in 2001, after a long, distinguished career as a poet and professor. He published at least a dozen books of poems, which concerned wide-ranging, eclectic subjects, were often written in a casual, unpretentious voice, but also often featured unexpected phrasing and great attention to detail. As far as I know, it's appropriate to post this poem because it already appears online, on the Modern American Poetry site. In any case, the copyright information appears below the poem:

Elegy for a Jet Pilot

by A.R. Ammons

The blast skims
over the string
of takeoff lights
and
relinquishing
place and time
lofts to
separation:
the plume, rose
sliver, grows
across the
high-lit evening
sky: by this
Mays Landing creek
shot pinecones,
skinned huckleberry
bush, laurel
swaths define
an unbelievably
particular stop.

Copyright © 1998 A. R. Ammons. from Selected Poems, by A.R. Ammons (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1987).

My own jet-poem concerns gardening underneath (so to speak) a jet. I live much closer to an Air Force base (and an Army base with aircraft) now than when I lived in California; there are frequently U.S. airplanes overhead. The poem appeared previously in a magazine, but at the moment, I can't remember which one. I'll have to do some digging, not the gardening kind. The poem:

Skeins

Unroll a skein of shadows,
clip segments and arrange these
in a garden, where daffodil blossoms
bow. A supersonic warplane
practices overhead, unrolling
paired white skeins of ice.
Between a garden and a warplane
lies a little distance—measured
in mere feet. Told a certain way,
all of history fits into that
space, and this may be one reason
you feel small while wondering
where you stored green twine
used to tie up vines. A
short segment of daylight remains.
The warplane may still be heard.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Blank Verse; Mistakes

"Blank verse" is a term that throws even some students of literature for a loop, at least early in their studies. Basically, it's just iambic pentameter. Of course, if you don't study poetry much or had a bad experience with English in high school, you hear or read "iambic pentameter" and probably want to run away, or at least cover your ears. It sounds so technical and weird, that term.

To review, as much for myself as anyone else: verse in English works by combining syllables and stresses--a "stress" referring to a syllable that's pronounced with greater force than is the syllable before or after it (for example). When most people say "banana," they stress the first "na" more than the "ba" and the second "na." So the first "na" is the stressed syllable of the three.

One iamb (what a weird word) is made of two syllables, and the second of these syllables is stressed. "Alone" is a good example. Almost no one pronounces that word A-lone. Instead they put the stress on "lone."

String five such two-syllable units (iambs) together, and you have yourself blank verse. Easy! What's "blank" about it, aside from the fact that your mind may go blank with all this talk of iambic pentameter? It doesn't rhyme. That's all. So you could write a hundred lines of blank verse and not have to rhyme, although you probably would rhyme by accident at some point.

Iambic pentameter is in some ways the spine of Anglo-North American poetry. You find it in such forms as sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas, for example (the first two forms rhyme, of course, and the third form repeats six end words in a different pattern).

Unrhymed iambic pentameter (blank verse) has its own noble heritage. Shakespeare composed his plays--for the most part--in this verse. Milton used it in Paradise Lost. Wordsworth used it. So did any number of other well known poets. Free verse, which may pay attention to rhythm and sound, certainly, but which doesn't use a regular meter (or pattern), is now the fall-back form of poetry. Open up any literary magazine, and you expect to find free verse. In second position, I think, is blank verse, still.

Blank verse is kind of fun to write (unless you have a life). For poets, it can be like working out is for athletes. Also, the regular old English we speak every day almost "wants" to be iambic pentameter, so you don't have to work that hard to get those alternating syllables going--unstressed/stressed. And there's something conversational about blank verse--one of many reasons, probably, that Shakespeare used it in plays.

Here's a small bit of blank verse on the topic of mistakes:

Mistakes

If each mistake I’ve ever made in this,
My life, were to become a snowflake, drifts
Would rise above the eaves. I’d open wide
The door and look into a blue-tinged bank
Of snow. I’d close the door and say, “I should
Have left last week when I first heard the news
A storm was coming in." I’d light a fire.
The room would fill with smoke, however, for
I’m sure I would have left the damper closed.

One convention of blank verse is to capitalize the first word of every line, even though it may not start a sentence, so that takes some getting used to. Another convention is to pad a line with extra words from time to time to get the quota of five iambs. In this little exercise-poem, I didn't really need to write "wide," but I did because I needed a stress there, and at least "wide" is plausible. Also, I probably could have written simply "in life" instead of "in this/My life," but I padded a bit to keep the meter going.

Note, too, that "My" and "life" receive almost the same stress. All iambs are not created equally. In every line of blank verse there's also a pause that seems to occur "naturally"; the official name for it is a "caesura." Sometimes punctuation causes it; sometimes it doesn't. Milton was great at deliberately moving the caesura into different places in different lines, partly to avoid monotony.

And so I've made more mistakes to add to the pile of . . . snow: discussing "iambic pentameter" and "blank verse," calling up bad memories of high school English for some people, and writing some blank verse for God and Milton and everyone else to see should they stumble down this blind alley (see previous post) of the internet.

Try writing some blank verse, maybe while you're watching TV. When you're done, you will have joined a long line of scribblers stretching back to Shakespeare (and even further). It's a big club. Everybody's welcome.