Employment

Sometimes I forget how lucky I am to have a job. I don't think I'm alone in this lapse. A person can get wearied by work in general or pestered by something particular at work and feel beleaguered, but usually a little chronological or spatial distance puts things in perspective.

It's no fun looking for work when you're out of work, and even when you have a job, looking for another one puts you out there "on the market" again. Oy. On the market, like a slab of bacon or an apple.

I'm very lucky to have had the same job for a long time, although when most people learn just how long and strange the path can be to a steady academic job, they just shake their heads, and I can't blame them. Earning a Ph.D. takes anywhere from 5 to 10 years, and I'd say 7 is probably the average--and that's 7 years after you've earned a B.A. or a B.S. So even if you're fairly quick and don't take detours, you're likely to be in your late 20s or early 30s before you're in a position to find secure academic employment, and usually you have to apply for jobs all over the country--and maybe even abroad. And then most academic institutions want to have a look at you from 3-6 years before they want to hang on to you permanently.

It took me 8 years, so when I've applied for loans and have had to put down the number of years of education, I put down "24"--12 to get the high-school diploma, 4 to get the B.A., and 8 more to get the Ph.D. Freshly minted Ph.D. in hand, oh these many years ago, I sent out over 60 applications, which netted me four interviews--and one job. Luckily, I needed only one job, just as the home baseball team needs only one run if the game's tied in the bottom of the ninth.

A greater percentage of academic jobs are part-time now. Community colleges and state universities meet the infamous bottom-line by hiring part-time instructors, who in turn have to piece together work at several places to compose a full-time job; and of course the benefits are shaky: yet one more reason why "health care" is on the docket during the presidential campaign.

At the same time, no one is forced to choose the academic life; it's really more of a calling.

I applied for and held lots of other jobs along the way to the relatively settled life of an academic, however. I worked as a carpenter's assistant--digging foundation-footings, framing houses, carrying hod. I cut weeds, I worked at a gravel plant, and I stocked shelves. I flipped a few burgers and made some not very stylish "frosty cones." I worked the usual jobs in college--washing pots and dishes, serving as an "R.A." in a dorm. For a while I was a part-time sportswriter, and later I worked as a part-time editor for state-government.

I think I ended up as an academic for two main reasons: I love books and writing (#1), and I like a certain autonomy (#2). If you're a professor, you're certainly part of an institution and its components, such as a department. But you're also a kind of private contractor insofar as you have to take care of your own courses, designing and delivering them. There is a hierarchy, a chain of command, at a university, but there are some interesting spaces of autonomy as well.

When I worked in state government in particular, I discovered I was somewhat allergic to the veneer of "teamwork," the unusual culture of bureaucratic and corporate life. Colleges and universities actually share much of this culture with corporations, but as a professor, you can spend much of your day in a classroom teaching or in your office working on things you have defined: reading students' essays (the "parameters" of which you have set), for example, or doing your own research, or just (just!) reading books.

In other professional venues, there may be even more pressure to be part of the group, to buy into "the philosophy." And everybody seems to have a "philosophy" now--fast-food chains, car-dealerships, insurance companies, and so on. Of course, the "philosophy" is something that decorates the real philosophy, which is to make money. And if you want to stay in business, you have to make money, but to make money, you don't necessarily need to "gin up" a "philosophy."

I think I'd prefer insurance companies just to say, "We like to make money, and we have charts that say how high we can push our rates" rather than to imply that they are my neighbor. At the same time, there are probably a lot of high-school seniors and their parents out there now wishing that colleges and universities would simply say, "We need X number of students with SAT scores in the Y range in order to meet our budget," as opposed to selling their particular curriculum or locale. Of course, the insurance companies and the colleges and universities will protest that they really do pay a lot of attention to more than the bottom line. Fair enough.

Let's just say I saw a bit too much of myself for comfort in the film Office Space, especially when I look back on my days in state government.

On the other hand, if I needed to get a job tomorrow, I'd go out there and try to get one, and I might have to do my best to pretend to "buy into" a business's or a company's "philosophy." I actually have a fear of poverty, so I'd do the philosophy-thing if I needed the paycheck. Among the innumerable hurdles standing between me and becoming a priest, to pull an extraordinary example out of thin air, is that fear of poverty. (God is no doubt a somewhat larger hurdle, but that's another story.)

All of which is an even more circuitous way than usual of saying, "Here's a poem about looking for work"--and if you happen to be looking for work, may the road rise to meet you:

Looking For Work

They said to call back tomorrow,

which is today.

I did .

They said there were

qualifications to which

everyone agreed, certain

expectations. Values, too.

They said there were values

they, we all, hold dear and

so on. They said somewhere

between qualifications and

values my application got

"misplaced." They said if

I wanted to reapply, I

should come back tomorrow,

which was yesterday. Today

is where I am and they are not.

I am not they. I am not there.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Regarding "Off"

Children and occasionally adults sometimes say a word over and over again, rapidly, until the word becomes just a sound, representing nothing, meaningless, vaguely silly. Similarly, anyone who writes, including but certainly not exclusively poets, will sometimes look at a familiar word--and look at it and look it--until it becomes unfamiliar. The writer sees it differently, perhaps even examines it for what it really is, an object formed by ink on a page, or a digitized virtual object on a screen.

This happened to me with the word, "off," for some reason, perhaps partly because "of" is buried in "off"; perhaps partly because you hear people say things like, "Well, I'm off, then," or, "I guess it's time to shove off," or, "Are you off at 1:00?", or "Come off it, will you?!"

I believe variations on the infinitive "to get off" can also have sexual connotations, and I think I've heard "off" used in TV dialogue as a verb meaning "to kill," as in "He offed him."

In any event, a small poem grew from the loam of my temporary obsession with "off," an obsession undoubtedly harder to justify than Gertrude Stein's with "rose":

Of Off

Shove Off, and it shoves back--
or seems to do so with its
stalwart inertia of absence.

A hard west wind pushes
through the O, and two F’s
stand like trees on a ridge,
boughs blown easterly.

It is not the moon
that switches tides off,
on. Rather, just
off-hand, you might say it is
relation’s ships: sun, moon, earth.

Something is in the offing,
we sometimes say, off-
handedly. Offing is the season
of imminence. If you cannot wait
for what waits in the offing,
then be you with off.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

James Weldon Johnson and Bill Cosby

I watched Larry King interview Bill Cosby and his co-author, Professor Toussaint, about their book, Come On, People, which speaks to the ways in which African Americans can address problems in their communities and families. Cosby's gotten some grief for the book and for speaking out, partly, in seems, because his thesis has been mis-construed. Even Larry King asked him, "But aren't many of these problems the result of racism in America?" And Cosby answered, of course--he'd never suggested they weren't. Cosby seemed to be running into one of the primary logical fallacies of television interviews: the false dichotomy, which dictates that the root of a problem must be either X or Y but never both X and Y. Cosby's point: both. All Americans have a responsibility to address American problems, but he just happens to be focusing now on what African Americans might do in the meantime, for America-in-general doesn't seem to be in a great rush to solve the problems.

King and his guests reviewed some of the statistics: African Americans make up 12 per cent of the general population but 44% of the prison population. The average lifespan for African Americans is six years less than that of the general population. In some cities, the high-school drop-out rate of African Americans is 50 per cent.

James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938)--African American poet, novelist, songwriter (he wrote "Lift Every Voice" and other popular songs), editor, diplomat, and professor--has a nice little poem that pertains to the topic:

To America

by James Weldon Johnson


How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking ’neath the load we bear?
Our eyes fixed forward on a star?
Or gazing empty at despair?

Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings?
Or tightening chains about your feet?

I love this poem in part because it gets to the nub, or a nub, of the matter. Whatever problems plague African Americans are problems for the whole nation to confront and solve, not shifting blame, going for easy excuses, or making things worse along the way. In fact, the "us" in the poem could represent not just African Americans (about whom Johnson was writing) but any group experiencing widespread difficulty: the homeless; the working poor; single parents; physically and psychically wounded soldiers coming back from Iraq; all people without health care or with shaky health care. In Johnson's time, even more so than in ours, the "widespread difficulty" lay with how the U.S. viewed and mistreated its African American citizens; therefore, Johnson, in his poem, was asking the question of the source of the difficulty, America.

How would you have America, America? Implicitly, that's also Johnson's question. If a 50-year-old white woman is laid off, loses her health-care insurance, and can't go to the doctor, and if a 16-year old African American man drops out of high school, the woman and the young man have a problem, but so do their families, their community, and their nation: us. America should want the woman to have health-care, no matter what, and America should want to get the lad back into school. How would we have it? Much better--especially for those who have it bad.

A Little Bit of Housman

Here's a fine but lesser-known short poem by A.E. Housman:

XVII

The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:
My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.
But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,
The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.

Oh grant me the ease that is granted so free,
The birthright of multitudes, give it to me,
That relish their victuals and rest on their bed
With flint in the bosom and guts in the head.



There's much to like in just eight lines. A bouncy anapestic meter dominates and is appropriately inappropriate to the glum point of view, and Housman sets us up nicely to expect "my troubles are few" in line two, but he gives us "my troubles are two," and at that moment, the rest of the poem becomes irresistible. We have to find out what those two ("Only two?" we think) troubles are, and they are, merely (!), the head and the heart, which "reave" him. "Reave" means, according to the OED online:

"To commit spoliation or robbery; to plunder, pillage."

Thus is the speaker of the poem "bereaved."(Later spellings of the word included "reive" and "rieve," and I believe Faulkner has a short story called "The Rievers," which Hollywood filmed.)

The poem ends with the speaker's expressed wish to be more like what he imagines "ordinary" people to be: content with victuals and able to sleep easy. "Flint in the bosom" I take to mean a toughness in the face of passion or sentiment; the heart is hardened. "Guts in the head" can be taken to mean mental courage, or it could be taken to mean not-so-smart but the better for it. I think I'd go with the former interpretation, but "guts in the head" is a great surprising phrase with which to end the poem, even if, or especially because, it gives us quite an image with which to grapple: a head full of guts.

A gem, this poem.

Financial Advice

With the news that the housing-crisis (foreclosures; stalled sales; "credit-crunch") may affect the economy severely unless the government acts to get the flow of credit going again, I thought it might be time to break out a poem that expresses less than full confidence in such concepts as "investments" and "retirement." I once read the poem to a group from a Board of Trustees with significant fiduciary responsibilities. Before I read the poem, I assured those present that the poem was in no way a comment on their management of funds. Several in attendance were multi-millionaires, and they seemed genuinely amused by the poem. If I had millions of dollars--heck, even one million--I might find the poem more amusing. Anyway, here 'tis:

Animals And Investment

1. The Managed Fund

Crows guarded his retirement plan.
They marched around its perimeter.
Squirrels managed the fund.
They wore small green visors,
used their cheeks as briefcases,
embezzled by accident, forgetting
where they buried the dividends.

2. Fixed Income

One day so dispirited by his work
was he that he decided to retire.
He asked to begin to withdraw
his pension. The account-manager,
a raccoon, presented a box to him,
removed the lid, and waddled away.
The new pensioner peered in.
Feathers and leaves were all
the box held. His income was fixed.

from The Coast Starlight (2006), by Hans Ostrom

Some Favorite First Lines

In no particular order, here are some of my favorite first lines of others' poems:

O hideous little bat, the size of snot

(Karl Shapiro, "The Fly")

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

(William Shakespeare, Sonnet #30)

Because I could not stop for death

(Emily Dickinson)

We real cool. We

(Gwendolyn Brooks, "We Real Cool")

What happens to a dream deferred?

(Langston Hughes, "Harlem")

By the road to the contagious hospital

(William Carlos Williams, "Spring and All")

Glory be to God for dappled things

(Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur")

Is there any reason why a poem shouldn't

(Mark Halliday, "Functional Poem")

Body my house
my horse my hound

(two lines, I know; May Swenson, "Question")

i sing of Olaf glad and big

(e.e. cummings)

I hold my honey and I store my bread

(Gwendolyn Brooks, "my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell")

They fuck you up, your mum and dad

(Philip Larkin, "This Be the Verse")

When snow like sheep lay in the fold

(Geoffrey Hill, "In Memory of Jane Fraser")

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.

(Kenneth Koch, "Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams")

Nothing is plumb, level or square:

(Alan Dugan, "Love Song: I and Thou")

Lay your sleeping head, my love,

(W.H. Auden, "Lullaby")

If a Tree Falls On a Poem

Richard Brautigan wrote a humorous little poem called "Haiku Ambulance," which pokes genial fun at haiku-conventions--and himself. I won't spoil it for you.

From his poem, I borrowed the title of the following poem, "Zen Ambulance," which plays with the venerable philosophical question, "If a tree falls in the forest and no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" David Romm, on a site called www.spectacle.com, adds an interesting variable: What if you leave a tape recorder (on) in the forest and the tree falls? No one is there, but the sound is recorded. But then I guess you'd have to prove the sound on the recorder represents the sound of the tree falling, so then you'd have to call witnesses with expertise in sound-recording, air-displacement, and so on.

In any event, the zen-tree fell on the following poem:

Zen Ambulance

If a tree fell in the forest,
and you were in the way,
you might be killed. If you
fell in the forest, and
the tree were in the way,
the tree would probably be
fine. If no one is in the forest
to see a tree fall, termites,
fungi, and bacteria
still devour the fallen
wood. If no one
is in the forest to see you fall,
let’s hope you can get up.
If a Zen monk stops you
in the forest, say hello,
and if you have some trail-mix
and water, offer to share them
with him. If he falls, don’t just
stand there, and under no
circumstances clap. Help him up.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Ten: One of the Great Numbers

According to the computers comprising the machinery behind blogging, I just wrote my 110th blog-entry. In honor of the number ten, then, which "goes into" 110 eleven times and must be used in calculations--by us and our machines--billions of times per day, a poem:

Grief For The Number Ten

What would we say about
ten if it died? –The 1

and the 0 lying in a box
of cotton, a salacious minister

sliding into the crowd
to read the unimportant

Tenth Psalm. "Oh, Ten,
we would think, you were right

in the midst of everything
we thought about numbers.

You unified by dividing.
You got those zeros rolling

in a train roaring past that
pipsqueak town, Arithmetic,

into Infinityville." Or maybe
we’d just look at our fingers,

count like crazy, hymning
& humming desperately.

The data suggest we,
take away ten, are nothing.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom

The Whole Heaven-Thing

I have a friend who happens to be a fine poet, and he likes poetry to stick to imagery. In his view, the image is not just the heart but the skeleton and everything else of the poem. I like imagery, too, and I'm sure we were both influenced by our reading of Modernist poets (including Imagists) and of all the poets who came after. He's been especially influenced by "deep image" poets. Robert Bly talks a lot about "the deep image" (Bly is a Jungian), although I don't know that my friend necessarily thinks of imagery in Bly's specific terms.

Although I like imagery, sometimes I like poems just to talk, however, and lots of times I read poems for the old-fashioned reason of their "music," their work with words as units of sound, or as signs of units of sound, or just as the play of phrases and sentences. Sometimes I like poems that speculate, too--poems that offer quick little bursts of argumentation or philosophizing, even though both these words have their negative connotations. My friend, I suspect, just thinks of such poems as being sententious, so I hope he doesn't read this one, which is about the whole heaven thing, because if he reads it, he might give me hell.

Terribly Important

I wonder if I’ll be welcome,
and welcomed, in Heaven. I
wonder if Heaven exists, even
as I’ve risen from the font and
have acceded to Pascal’s reasoning
on behalf of faithful wagers. How
would I like to be welcomed there?
What a question! The answer is
I must not care--meaning I’d like
the welcome not to be anything
I might have predicted. Heaven
must be a wonderful surprise,
a way of being so different
that none of our machinations need
apply. Heaven must be where
all necessary love exists. What
a statement! More statements: Heaven is.
Heaven is necessary, but I am not.
To speculate: Perhaps Heaven exists
for the unnecessary; maybe it converts
even nothing into something terribly
important. Heaven must be as
terribly important as we erroneously
believe our activities to be.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Sonnet For an Actress

Here's a sonnet for an actress. Which actress? No one in particular, though Julie Christie or Jacqueline Bissett might work in my case. Readers may substitute their own actress or actor, for the poem seems to be about "beauty" and notions of beauty, as they're projected onto and by the culture, whatever that means. I think it means that in a culture of mass media, especially cinema and television, media-icons, however short their iconic lifespan (as opposed to their biological lifespan) may be, help define beauty--for better or worse or both.

Sonnet for an Actress

You should have seen her yesterday.
She was more beautiful than our
Idea of beauty; and the way
She carried beauty in her hour

Unveiled achievement by a body
Unmatched by art. You should have seen
Her. Yes, our gaze was always ready.
What, though, did her beauty mean?

Did she embody what we thought?
Or did she teach us to desire?
And were we seeing what we sought,
Or held in spell by beauty’s choir?

Confused, nostalgic—what to say?
If you’d just seen her yesterday . . . .

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Theatrics Again

At one point in War and Peace, Natasha goes to the theater, and for one reason or another (chiefly her own shifting affections), she can't concentrate on the play, so she looks at the rest of the theater-goers and otherwise focuses on the reality of the theater-itself as opposed to the pretend-reality on stage. It's a great fictional way to represent her inner turmoil, but as I suggested in an earlier post, it is similar to my own experience of theater. I often pull back from the suspension of disbelief and start looking at the ceiling or a fly on the curtain or whatever.

There is such a thing as theater of the absurd, which willfully disobeys longstanding conventions of theater, partly in order to dramatize the absurdity of existence, as perceived by the playwright. I suppose Waiting for Godot is a good example.

In another sense, all theater is absurd (and there's nothing wrong with that), or so I claim in this poem:

Theatrics

There’s no theater that’s not
theater of the absurd because
in every case humans sit

observing humans acting
like humans. Every human
in the whole theater-building

has a task, which both is
and is not what brought each
task’s corresponding human

to the building. The building
is a product of innumerable
tasks. So is the play. All tasks

are ultimately meaningless.
So is the play. The theater-
building is filled with pretending

humans watching other humans
pretend, and this is reality,
and this is play, and if God

doesn’t exist, then none of it
means anything ultimately,
and if God does exist, then

none of it means what it purports
to mean, and one additional absurd
thing is how ordered, dutiful,

polite, and amused we are as
we perform our tasks. We play
the game of As If as if it

weren’t a game, and that is
acting, and that’s absurd, and
that's quite a performance.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Pledge of Allegiance

I'm from a generation of Americans that had to say the "Pledge of Allegiance" every day, at least in grade-school. I can't remember if we kept saying it in high school. "Had to say" is a bit strong because it was just automatic, just as we "had to have" recess and "had to" ride the bus.

I recall that almost everyone (in third or fourth grade, say) had trouble with the word, "indivisible." Kids had trouble saying it, and some people said, "invisible," which in some ways is more accurate because "one nation under God," which "indivisible" modifies retroactively, is an abstract concept--the "nation under God" isn't visible to anyone; only little scenes from it are. Anyway, nobody ever handed out the text of the pledge and went through it to explain what a "republic" was or that the word was "indivisible" not "invisible." A little primer on the pledge would have been helpful.

I remember that at some point, being a literalist, I had trouble with the concept of pledging allegiance to a flag. I could understand pledging allegiance to a friend (say), or a pet, perhaps even a nation (although I don't think I pushed it that far--"nation" is a large concept for a grade-schooler). I couldn't visualize my having allegiance to a piece of cloth. I think I was the kind of learner who needed to visualize things. Of course, the sense of the pledge is that you are pledging allegiance to the nation by pledging allegiance to a symbol of the nation, but I couldn't wrap (so to speak) my literal mind around that concept back then. If they wanted me to pledge allegiance to the nation, they should have cut out "the middle-man" of the flag--that was my thinking back then.

Apparently, the pledge was written by one Francis Bellamy, who was--if I have the story straight--a Christian Socialist. --That's right: a Christian (a Baptist, I think) who believed in left-leaning politics. How ironic. --Because now right-leaning Christian Republicans seem to "own," so to speak, all issues related to the flag. That's another irony, in some ways, because Jesus Christ made that interesting (and logical) distinction between God and Caesar. "Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's"[such as taxes, or a pledge to be loyal to the Roman Empire], but keep all that separate from your spiritual life; don't confuse the nation or the empire in which you live with God's province. Isn't that the sense of what Jesus says? I think I have it right. But of course some people believe the U.S. is a Christian nation, even though a lot of U.S. citizens (born or naturalized) are Jewish, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Muslim, Hindu, Universalist Unitarian, agnostic, atheist, and so on. And more practically, there seems to be political hay to be made from issues related to the flag and to connecting the U.S. with one particular creed.

Anyway, Bellamy published the pledge in an adolescents' magazine (in 1892, I think) and later people started saying it in schools and at meetings. I think Congress still says it. Apparently, because of a federal-court ruling in 2006, you can't force kids in public school to say it anymore. I don't know that you ever could. Who's going to check to see if a kid is just mouthing the words or not? There's no way to insure quality-control.

And as a friend of mine once pointed out, one of the most likely persons to take an oath of loyalty would be a disloyal person--like a spy. I imagine some KGB agents said the pledge of allegiance at meetings they had infiltrated, back in the day.

The following poem plays off the pledge, not as a parody, for I actually remember the pledge fondly, partly because of the "indivisible/invisible" confusion, partly because I remember how we 8- ,9- , and 10-year-olds rushed through it, as if we were racing--as kids will (we might as well have been speaking Swedish or Czech, for heaven's sake), and partly because it reminds me of how literal-minded I was and am. The following poem may attempt to imply that almost everyone is so busy trying just to be themselves and get through the day that a pledge to an indivisible republic is a pretty tall order.

Pledge

I pledge allegiance to the flagging
spirit of hope in the united cells
of my cerebellum, and to
the republic of individuation
for which they stand, one
person, under the impression
he exists with liberty— just this, for now.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Theatrics

I've engaged literally in theatrics only a few times, although life requires some form of performance most of the time. Teaching, everyday politeness, and responding to unexpected questions, for example, are three kinds of interaction that require a level of performance.

I remember Larry King's having interviewed Marlon Brando toward the end of Brando's life. It was a terrible interview because King was intimidated by Brando, and Brando was being Brando. At one point, however, Brando tried to demystify acting. He asked King to imagine a real-life circumstance in which you're sitting at a bar having a drink when a stranger comes up and sits beside you and behaves somewhat oddly. Brando started to say, "So when you respond to that person, you're acting--you're presenting yourself so as to have some control over what seems a strange, possibly threatening, situation" [or something like that--I'm paraphrasing]--but then King cut him off and asked something uninteresting (to me).

I wanted Brando to finish the thought, the kernel of which seemed to be that everybody acts all the time. Of course, that's different from being a trained actor who actually gives a sustained performance, but Brando was trying to teach King about one simple basis of acting.

I tried out in high school for the lead role in The Crucible and so overwhelmed the director of the play, Mr. Murphy, that I was cast in a bit-part, as Ezekiel Cheever, the court-bailiff. I think Mr. Murphy just needed bodies; otherwise, I may not have been cast at all. Perhaps the apex of my acting-career occurred when the actor playing the judge blanked on his lines. He was supposed to order me to bring in the prisoner. I waited a beat, and then I ad-libbed, "Shall I bring in the prisoner, judge?!" The judge-actor said, "Thank you!"--a wonderful double-entendre. Decades later, I "acted" in a short film called Cliche and thereby, absurdly, landed my name on IMBD.

When I go to live theater, I often watch the edges of the performance--actors' shoes, the faces of other people in the audience, the ceiling. I don't do this in any obtrusive way, and I'm sure the actors would rather I suspend disbelieve completely and get immersed totally in the drama. I do re-focus on the drama, but I also like withdrawing from it for a moment. I especially like plays in which people come on the set to change the set right in front you. I pretend the people are actors pretending to be set-changers.

I don't know the theater-world well at all, but I assume that back-stage people get weary of actors and that actors, by the same token, feel as if they're the ones risking everything out there. With regard to plays or films about theater, I'm partial to The Dresser (1983), a film with Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay; Shakespeare in Love; Anton in Show Business (a play); and a recent film, Bigger Than the Sky (2005), which is about a regional theater (Portland, Oregon) that puts on Cyrano; the director casts in the lead-role a person with no training in acting, and we go from there. The film seems to capture "theater-people" well, at least as I see them from the outside of that world, and it's a very thoughtful presentation of the phenomenon of regional theater and the obstacles such theater faces with regard to what to produce, how, and why.

Here's link to a nice poem, by Clay Derryberry, about theater:

http://www.artvilla.com/wordplay/?p=602


And this little poem concerns theater-backstage, at least I think it does:



Properties


Reality doesn’t just come out of nowhere.
We sawed boards into shapes of clouds,
worked polymers into blue sky.


Adam and Eve enter left, spew their lines,
name a fashioned set. Backstage we hear
each board creak. The sky moans like a sick duck.


Somehow the better drama’s back here—
heat coming off the stage-manager’s neck, lust
unspoken between me and the set-dresser.


Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

The Evolution of Gossip

According to the OED online, here is the original meaning of gossip, the noun:

"One who has contracted spiritual affinity with another by acting as a sponsor at a baptism. a. In relation to the person baptized: A godfather or godmother; a sponsor. Now only arch. and dial."

From this meaning, the word evolved slowly, next referring to women in attendance at a baptism, then to "idle" women, then to the conversation in which "idle" women indulge, and so on, until now one meaning of gossip is something like "conversation full of rumor" or "idle, potentially negative conversation about people" (these are my definitions, not those of the OED, in case that wasn't obvious). And we now have the accompanying verb, "to gossip."

One can imagine women involved in a baptism conversing, and one can imagine men (for example) ultimately deciding that this was "idle" conversation. It is interesting that "gossip" was thusly "gendered" early on. "Women gossip; men don't." Right.

I think there are two basic kinds of gossip, one good and one not good. The not-good kind is the kind we usually regret after we indulge in it: talking negatively about someone, with a certain schaudenfreude. The good kind is a means by which information is spread informally, especially within well established social, professional, or political institutions. The more tightly such institutions try to control the flow of information, the healthier gossip is, even if one assumes (as one should) that a certain percentage of it will be inaccurate. Gossip as an underground river of information is, I think, a good thing, and it may well have functioned that way in groups of relatively powerless women. Moreover, small communities (a corporation, a town) need gossip in the sense of news-passed-along, not in the sense of mere rumors, negative talk, or false information. But information passed by word-of-mouth, even in, perhaps especially in the age of multiplied media, is still crucial to communities. For instance, I would argue that leakage of certain information from the branches of the federal government is good, and it is of course ironic that G.W. Bush would clamp down like Super-Nixon on leaks within his own administration but then pardon someone convicted of leaking information about a U.S. spy. I would argue that he was clamping down on a good kind of gossip and pardoning a bad kind.

However, it's the not-so-good gossip I had in mind, probably, when writing the following poem:

Of Gossip

Braised café buzz, whispered
faux intimacy, secrets that dearly
desire to fail—gossip,

which idles like the motor
in a cat’s throat.
It is flashy and frothy,

is fascinating, briefly, like a minnow.
Gossip struts,
the short-legged mayor

of Talk’s Township, proud to know
what it imagines it just found out,
eager to get busy and pass it along.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

The Things We Can't Quite Throw Away

Probably you've read Tim O'Brien's great long story, "The Things They Carried," they being American soldiers in Viet Nam, the things being. . . all manner of things.

In class we talked not so much about the things we carry but about the things we can't quite throw away--things that might accompany us from move to move but that don't fit easily into any justifiable category: functional things; heirlooms; collectibles; and so on. We were in the process of brainstorming possible sub-categories of "thing poems."

I remembered a pickled baby octopus my mother had purchased for me as a souvenir at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. The year was 1965, and the chief purpose of the trip was to take me and my two brothers to see Willie Mays and the San Francisco Giants play at Candlestick Park. In 1965, a baby octopus was considered an appropriate souvenir, and I was fascinated with the thing. Still am. Can't quite bring myself to throw it away, even though I realize how inappropriate it is in 2007. A poem that came from the prompt, "things we can't quite get rid of":

The Pickled Octopus

Why do I own a brown
baby octopus, pickled in a jar
of formaldehyde, purchased in 1965
at Fisherman’s Wharf,
specimen as souvenir?

The bulbous-bodied octopus
leans permanently in broth,
suction-cups revealed. Fascinated
for four decades, I’m
asking for advice.

Is the octopus in the jar
right or wrong? To be hidden
or displayed? If I dispose of it—
how? Would you like to see it?
Tell me the truth.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2007

Seriously Sick of the Muse

The 19th-century British poet Thomas Hood has a nice little poem in which he expresses weariness with the pressures of writing poetry, with the obligation to be a Serious Poet. The poem, by title, is dedicated to Minerva, Roman goddess/muse of poetry and other arts. The poem also mentions Thyrsis, a singing shepherd in Virgil's poetry, and it alludes to Pallas (Athena), the Greek predecessor of Minerva.

To Minerva

by Thomas Hood

My temples throb, my pulses boil,
I'm sick of Song and Ode and Ballad--
So Thyrsis, take the Midnight Oil,
And pour it on a lobster salad.

By rain is dull, my sight is foul,
I cannot write a verse, or read,--
Then Pallas, take away thine Owl,
And let us have a lark instead.

Thus Hood, on a lark, so to speak, produces an anti-serious-poetry poem.

In honor of Hood and poems written on a lark (to give Minerva a coffee break), a poem that larks about:

Just Between You and Me

I ponder you. You ponder me.
Thus we create a palpable
ponderability,
a kind of interstasis
or interpersonal oasis
that’s both and neither
Other and Self.
Shuck and jive and humming hive,
the twixt between us is alive.


from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom

Fourteen Lines: Sonnet-Addiction

The sonnet-form of poetry has been around for about 800 years. That's a long time, from where I'm sitting, but maybe not from where geology is sitting.

It's a form that should be worn out by now (indeed, most working poets today probably view it as a worn out form), but it's simply too addictive--to poets as well as readers of poetry--to be abandoned. From an American perspective, one might compare it to the blues form or the three-chord country-and-western song. In one sense we feel as if we've heard it all before when we think of these forms, but on closer inspection, the possibilities for variations and innovations within the tight form are endless, and indeed one source of fascination is what the next person will do with the form, given the form's tight guidelines. The tension between tight, conventional form and innovation becomes a source of inspiration and interest. Of course, it's always possible to disobey a form's guidleines significantly, something that happened when the sonnet-form lept, so to speak, from Italy to England.



"Sonnet," so the story goes, springs from a similar word in Italian that means "little song" or "little sound." Apparently it began life as a song-form within larger works, in Sicily, at the court of Frederick, in the 1200s. We associate the form now with the Renaissance Italian poet Petrarch, and his sonnets refined the octave [8 lines]/sestet [6 lines] form. It's easier to rhyme in Italian than in English, so Petrarch was able to use as few as four rhymes over the 14 lines. Thomas Wyatt tried to keep the Petrarchan form going in English but started to vary the rhyme-scheme, and his iambic pentameter was pretty rough. As we know, Shakespeare put the real English stamp on the form, solidifying the three-quatrain/couplet form, which, among other things, allows for more rhymes. Shakespeare's iambic pentameter tends to be more regular than Wyatt's; that's for sure. Shakespeare also deviated from and even made fun of conventions of the sonnet. For example, in Sonnet 18, he asks, "Shall I compare thee [his beloved] to a summer's day?" The rest of the sonnet implicitly answers, "Yes and no," because he does draw comparisons but points out their inadequacy, thereby disrupting the convention of describing someone's beauty in terms of nature (a.g., a woman's complexion = that of a rose). Not to get too cute, but Sonnet 18 is both a sonnet and a meta-sonnet, a sonnet that shows off the poet's awareness of the tradition in which he writes.

Like Dickinson's poetry, sonnets are often met with resistance because they can seem too formal, encoded, and remote--something that belongs to dusty volumes in libraries or only to English teachers. But once you crack the surface, so to speak, they're very satisfying little puzzles to work on, and they often make quick little arguments, often feinting in one direction, going in another direction, and ending with emphasis, surprise, or both. And by the time Countee Cullen writes his famous sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel" (in the Harlem Renaissance), almost any subject is open to the sonnet; it's no longer a song of love. "Yet Do I Marvel" may well be my most favorite sonnet of all time, with all due respect to the Shake-meister-general.

In one sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading can be described as a figurative addiction, not so different from that to crossword puzzles or soduku. In another sense, sonnet-writing and sonnet-reading are like a big ongoing party you can visit. It's a welcoming tradition. That one is welcome doesn't necessarily mean that the sonnet one tries to write will succeed or that every sonnet one reads will be satisfying. It just means a grand, flexible, evolving tradition continues--a moveable feast.

I usually have students (as poets or readers) write a "sound sonnet," in which individual lines or sentences make sense but in which the sonnet overall need not, and indeed should not, make sense. The idea is to liberate the students from having to mean so that they may focus on the meter and rhyming, the building of three quatrains and a couplet. Ironically, the hardest part of the exercise turns out to be not making sense. In most cases, the "sound sonnets" quickly begin to be about something.

I invite you to write a sound-sonnet, a 10 [syllables; every other syllable stressed] X 14 [lines] poem, as my late friend Wendy Bishop referred to it. Try not to mean!

I participate in the tradition chiefly by reading (and teaching) sonnets, but every so often I attend the party as a writer. In the following sonnet, I decided to have the poem try (at least) to meaning something, I decided to stick with the English or Shakespearian form (three quatrains and a couplet), I decided to adhere, with a few variations, to iambic pentameter, but I also decided to be flexible with the rhyming by using some slant- or half-rhymes.

Making the Soul’s Re-acquaintance

It seems you must give up your long-term lease
On being right and wronged, righteous and hurt.
No doubt there’s someone else who would be pleased
To lord over that haughty piece of Earth.

Move to a cottage of humility,
Cross-breezes, and a pantry full of jars
That hold your faults, preserved for scrutiny.
Live with the wretchedness of who you are.

Chop kindling from the stump of your assumptions,
And ask forgiveness from each simple wall.
It won’t be long before you sense resumption
Of simple gratitude for life and all.

Of course you’ll want to pray again, poor sod.
But keep it basic: pray there is a God.

from The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, Hans Ostrom.

Here's a wonderful site, by the way, for sonnet enthusiasts, addicts, or casual visitors:

http://www.sonnets.org/

Car-Pooling

I haven't had to carpool much in my life, thank goodness, but I do appreciate the way English so quickly absorbs such concepts and turns them into verbs. My sense is that languages like Swedish and German have more trouble doing that, and this is probably to their credit, at some level. English seems to be the great vacuum-cleaner of languages.

I have taken a fair number of public-buses in my work-life, and of course I have given and taken rides in cars to work-related destinations, but not really on a regular basis. For the better part of two decades, I've lived some 5 minutes from where I work, and we just moved again, in part to escape what had turned into a very difficult commute of 20-30 minutes (one way, for about five years). To many people, I realize, such a commute would be a piece of cake.

My uninformed sense of things is that Americans still don't take to carpooling. As bad as the traffic is in this area, one still sees many, many cars with one driver in them. There's something about the American temperament that wants to drive alone, traffic jams, global warming, petroleum prices, and going-to-war-for-oil be damned. I think I share the temperament, unfortunately; it's just that I've been lucky enough to live near my job. I think I'd rather take a bus (or a train) than car-pool, for some strange reason. I'm very glad to be able to walk to work now, leaving a lot of gasoline languishing in the tank.

In any event, here is the only carpooling poem I've written (and good luck with your commute, wherever you are--Tokyo, Berlin, Buenos Aires, Seattle, San Diego, Oklahoma City. . . . .):

Carpooling

I’ll meet you where horizon
catches a ride with the tollway
and There tells Here where to go.

The Commissioner of Asphalt
will snip a ribbon, a way will
open, and we’ll commute on

into Nowhere. We’ll sing of
carts and dirigibles, trucks and
tri-planes, trains and schooners

and other means of trans-
importance. We’ll best be getting
along into the shaking sky. Why,

we’ll be late and early
both at once, nearing and
disappearing. Together!

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Dreams, the Old-Fashioned Kind

If dreams, the kind that come with sleep, were a stock, we would say that they probably peaked in the early post-Freudian era and that then the bottom fell out of them. Nobody can say for sure what they're for, and Freud's & Jung's "interpretations" were simply interesting guesses that told us more about Freud and Jung than about dreams. There's simply no evidence that a book you or I "see" in our dreams means what Sigmund, Carl, you, I, or anybody else says it means. If anything, there has to be a statistically better chance that you know what the book means in your book-dream than anyone else, since you, at least, are the resident historian of your life.

As far as I can tell, almost everyone seems to agree that one's own dreams can be quite interesting (or not) but that the moment you tell your dream to someone else or someone tells his or her dream to you, the listener stops listening because other people's dreams are boring. Moreover, psychologists and psychiatrists don't seem to want to hear about dreams anymore. In fact, I suspect there's an inside joke in that profession whereby if you run out of things to ask the client, ask him or her about his/her dreams, right before minute 49 turns into minute 50. "Oh, I'd love to hear more about that dream, but we're out of time!"

The only "dreams" you hear about anymore are the aspiration kind--you know, all about "realizing your dreams," which is basically the same as achieving goals. Probably dreams (the sleep kind) fulfill some kind of biochemical, neurological function, flushing the wiring after a long day or helping the brain deal with stress physiologically. I assume the biochemists are working assiduously on that, especially if the pharmacological corporations think they can sell pills based on the research eventually. Dream-enhancers.

Dreams may also tell you what you may already know, namely that experience X had a powerful impact on you. For example, I still have anxiety-dreams about not passing some imaginary class in graduate school and not earning my Ph.D., which I earned in 1982, for heaven's sake, but I've just told you about a dream, and we know that no dreams but your dreams are interesting to you, so I'll stop. A poem, then:

Dream On

A small council
of evolutionary matter
in a county of the brain
knows the real purpose
of dreams, a purpose
wholly unrelated to what
we imagine dreams do
for, to, with us. So I
dutifully dream, as if
it were a chore that came
with sleeping (it is), as if
I were a member of that small,
secret provincial council,
which meets in a lodge
somewhere off of Highway Zero,
East of West, as if I had
a choice in the matter of
dreams, the dreams of
matter.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Consumocracy Coda

Regarding the "consumocracy" (blog October 13, 2007), I must add that while glancing at NFL football games on TV, I saw three commercial advertisements, one for Burger King, one for Toyota, and one for Visa. Each has a tag-line or slogan, of course:

Burger King's is "Have it your way," which is lovely because it says the exact opposite of what Fast Food is all about--namely, that if you eat at a franchise-outlet, you will, by definition, have it the franchise's way. It's also lovely because it can be taken ironically, as being similar to "Knock yourself out," which is usually a prelude to conflict. "Have it your way" [followed by faux-weary sigh]--and battle ensues. Nonetheless, I do love the fact that burgers have a king. The universe of ground-beef is, indeed, feudal, a civilization in which the warlords McDonald's, Wendy's, and Burger King wage permanent war around the globe. If one were to open a Burger Princess restaurant, one would hear immediately from the King's lawyers, I assume.

Toyota's slogan is "Moving forward," which I presume is the least anyone would want from a motorized vehicle, although a vehicle's capacity to back up has proven itself to be useful, too. Why not: "Moving forward, backward, at angles, and in broad curves"? I guess that wouldn't be catchy enough.

Maybe you've seen the Visa commercial ad, in which "everyone" is swiping plastic Visa cards to pay for things, when someone who is obviously "different" pays with cash and slows down the pace of the crowd, which is being herded through a variety of retail-chutes. Apparently the herd-mentality in the U.S. has indeed taken over to such an extent that a) to pay cash is to be "independent," a stray from the herd, a rogue and b) to be "independent" in such a painfully basic way is to be disruptive, downright subversive, requiring the herd to become impatient with you, to threaten to ostracize you--to cast you out permanently because of the shameful behavior of . . . giving a clerk currency. The accompanying slogan is "Life takes Visa." This is a metaphysical statement. Reality now depends upon one's having an account at a large credit-card firm. Eric Blair, a.k.a. George Orwell, could not have written better cautionary satire. Indeed, the reality and language--the poetry--of the Consumocracy has far outstripped Orwell, who now seems a bit naive. It has also outstripped William Golding and Lord of the
Flies. Pray you have your credit-card with you if you are stranded with a pack of retail-shoppers.

As you move forward and have it your way, know, then, that Life takes Visa. If Visa is absent, . . . . yikes. I think we may safely conclude that the Consumocracy is permanently established. It is Life. We'll be right back, after these messages.

Hotelingua

Here's a poem that's kind of a collage of language I've read or heard at various hotels. The last line is a direct borrowing from a printed note in an Italian hotel, wherein an "a" was replaced by a "u," thereby making the note truly charming. Mistranslations can break your heart.

Obviously, hotels are commercial enterprises, but they have to pretend, at least superficially, that you are a "guest," as opposed to a customer or a catch, as in a netted fish. So hotel-language seems to be forced to walk a fine polite line. Some hotels are better at it than others, and maybe the ones that aren't very good at it are preferable.

Hotel-Texts

Good Evening. We
are enjoying your stay. We
have refreshed your reservations
and prepared further assistance.
Please feel free. Call Housekeeping
fore and aft your convenience. Touch
Six for in-room whining. Our
turn-down service is renowned.
We have provided tomorrow’s weather.
Have a pleasant chance of showers.
(Probabilidad de Chaparrones.) High
forty, low thirty, middle class. Please
let us know of any further enjoyment we
may provide your billing options. We
control the settings from the central desk.
We ask on time that you check out.
We are suddened by your departure.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Wheels, Money, Women, Soul

I think most poets have a tough time writing song-lyrics because song-lyrics have to be so simple and spare, and they have to have broad appeal. Not all of the songs Johnny Cash wrote were good, but when he was good, he was very, very good--because of the simplicity and honesty of the phrasing, and because he had a way of speaking to a broad audience without being bland or simple-minded. In fact, lyrics like those in "Folsom Prison Blues" are rather the opposite of bland.

At any rate, I give song-lyric-writing a try from time to time, mainly to remind myself I'm no good at it. I decided to write some blues lyrics, and let me be the first to point out, derisively, that a middle-aged academic blogger may not be the figure who springs to mind when one thinks about the blues tradition. At the same time, I'm not pretending to "sing the blues," nor am I suggesting that nobody knows the trouble I've seen. To some degree, this is a technical experiment. I asked myself what men--traditionally defined, I admit--tend to have trouble with. Of course, the list created in response to that question might stretch from here to the Mississippi Delta, so I tried to stick to basics, and I came up with automobiles ["wheels"], money [employment; prudent spending]; women [matters of the heart]; and soul [the spiritual dimensions]. With the basics identified, I wrote the lyrics, with mixed results, presented here for inspection. Can these blues be saved?! I suspect not. Robert Johnson, please pray for me. But I enjoyed the exercise.

Wheels, Money, Women, and Soul

I got troubles with my transport.
My car is broke. The bus don’t run.
I got troubles with my transport.
My car is broke. The bus don’t run.
If I was rich and had a limo,
I’d ride from dusk to rising sun.

I got troubles with the money.
It goes out but don’t come in.
I got troubles with the money
Going out, not coming in.
I’d pray to God for riches,
But they tell me it’s a sin.

I got troubles with the women.
They play me bad and do me wrong.
Always falling for a woman
Who plays me bad and does me wrong.
I’m waiting for the woman
Who’ll do me right and love me long.

I got troubles with my soul, now.
It’s tired of war and aches for peace.
I’m troubled deep in my soul, son.
It’s tired of war and aches for peace.
I don’t like to admit it, but
Sometimes I pray for sweet release.

[Bridge:]

Wheels, money, women, and soul.
The ride, the green, the girls, my soul.
I’m oh-for-four in these essentials.
Can’t cross the bridge, can’t pay the toll.

Niche

"Niche" is a pretty cool word, denoting a recessed part of a wall where somebody might put an ornament or a little statue, but also connoting the following, according to the OED online:

4. fig. a. A place or position suited to or intended for the character, capabilities, status, etc., of a person or thing.

How many people feel as if they've found their niche in life? (How many people pronounce the word "nitch," how many pronounce it "neesh," and how many prefer not to use the word at all?) Maybe most people feel or think that they're in a niche but also that the niche doesn't fit them very well, so they settle for an awkward fit. Others may feel or think that they have found a niche, that the fit is good, but then the niche or the person changes, or both change. Because it's ultimately a figurative, indeed metaphysical, concept, "niche" is difficult to discuss with accuracy, unless it's the literal hole in the wall. Humans, like cats, seem to know immediately when the body is in a comfortable position, but the psychic, spiritual, vocational, or professional dimensions of a person's niche are, obviously, more complicated. And even cats--when you move them from one human abode to another, for example--take a long time to adjust themselves, psychically, to the new place. Much pacing, sniffing, and general investigation of the premises are required. In the following poem, a person, not a cat, works to find a niche:

Niche

He viewed himself
as a spectator. A parade
ensued. It invited him.
He marched in it. It
shunted him back, back
to vantage of onlooker, and
further back into an alley.
There he watched the backs
of those watching the parade.
This he found intriguing. The
parade he couldn’t see
no longer interested him. The
backs of heads, sad backs
of coats and trousers, the
necks and ears, scuffed heels—
these fascinated. He looked
behind him. Several persons
stood there, watching him
watch. They invited
him. He declined. He
did not want to join again.
He’d found a niche
between the watchers of
parades and the ones
watching him.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2007

The Consumocracy

A brief recap: the U.S. ceased to be a republic long ago, experts say. We became an empire by pursuing expansionism. Then the U.S. apparently shifted toward a service-economy from an industrial or manufacturing-based economy. This is still a work-in-progress, I gather, but we import many more goods than we export, and more and more jobs seem to be in the service-sector. So the food served, the toy sold, or the car leased may come from outside our borders, but we still need people to bring the food to the table, "ring up" the toy at the cash-register (which doesn't ring anymore), and haul the car from the port to the car-dealership.

Because we're more of an oligarchic empire than a democracy and more of a service-economy than an old-fashioned capitalist, industrial political economy (smoke-stacks a-blazing), then maybe the proper signifier for the U.S. is "consumocracy." Everybody has the right to buy stuff, and we hope everybody does buy stuff, because the economy depends on these retail service-jobs. United we buy. In goods we trust.

Do I have the economic and political analysis all wrong? I sure hope so, and I think the odds are very good that my hope is supported by reason. Actually, I just like the word, "consumocracy," because of the way it sounds and because of the way it describes how I see the U.S. Before I turn this space over to a poem, however, I will recommend a book about American legal history and how the concept of laissez-faire took over. It's called Lawyers and the Constitution, by Benjamin Twiss, who knew what he was talking about (unlike some we could mention), and it was published way back in the early 1940s. Its style is fresh and direct, and the research is terrific. It was reprinted in 1973, so it's probably in lots of libraries.

The Consumocracy

If you don’t have it, you
must need it, and if you need
it, we can feed it to you. You’re
free to buy what you want,
and we’re free to buy ways
to entrance you to want what
we sell. This is not, as is
alleged, democracy mocking
itself. It is the consumocracy,
which the founding dads
intended their investment
to become. For a limited time,
we can offer you books and
digital videos that prove this point.
We’ll think of something
you don’t have and buy a
way to let you have it. We
like to let you have it. This is
how the consumocracy works,
see. See our product, sense
your need, see and want. Buy,
buy, see. See it there, laissez
faire. Eat the feed, pay
the fee, seed the greed. This
incredible deal won’t last! Call
now and we'll throw in something
else incredible for free. Call
now, or else.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

The Phenomenon of the Business-Conference

As far as I know, I've never been to a business-conference, to which people who are in the same kind of business (a macro-example might be "sales"; micro-examples might be hand-tools, cosmetics, or sporting goods) fly or drive. They stay in a big hotel, and they put up exhibits and share information, or so I gather. Then there's the kind of conference that's focused on training: how to do your business better. People talk, and you listen, or you talk, and people listen to you. Everybody gets trained, and then they go home.

When I worked as an editor for auditors, I did go to a few training-seminars, so I got a feeling for what they are like. And I've been to numerous academic conferences, which in one sense have to be radically different from business-conferences because they're composed of academics, after all, but in another sense must be about the same. Hotels must see all conference-participants as the same, although academics probably talk more and tip less well, on average.

So anyway, I had to use my imagination when I wrote the following poem about a business-conference. Imagine that--having to use one's imagination in a poem! What next?! Whether you're an academic, a business-person, a tourist, a hotel-worker, or a spy, all hotels are pretty much the same now, so that part was easy.

Business-Conference

In this high steel hotel, gray regulated
air commutes through air-ducts ceaselessly.
Whole rivers course inside
labyrinths of plumbing. Lexicons
are digitized, then sluiced through
copper, into sky to satellites and back to
ground, riding bands of width or widths
of band. We, the most expensive people

in history, sit up and stare at screens,
lie down to sleep in low-conditioned
exhalations of manufactured wind. We
are talked to, and we talk to. After training,
we are unable or unwilling to sleep. We rise
again to stare at opposing steel and other glass.
From this angle, inhabitants of City
seem at least secondary to all
engines and motors, which constitute
City, its energy and purpose. We
act out dramas of math and tools. The

hotel is satisfactory. It is a promontory
overlooking advancements in technology.
We are engine-tenders and data-shepherds.
We have registered for the conference. We
are minding our business. We are keeping
track of our expenses. We are meaning business.

2007 Copyright Hans Ostrom

Bus and Subway, Sluggish Transit, Numb Commute

I rode buses quite a lot in Germany and Sweden, have taken trains in Europe and the U.S.A., have used the subway in San Francisco, London, Paris, Barcelona, Berlin, and elsewhere, have taken commuter buses in Sacramento and Seattle. I've taken the infamous Greyhound bus a few times. The collective fatigue created by such slow mass-transit seems similar everywhere, workers and professionals hauled like so much freight. The weariness of industrial society seems distilled on such conveyances, on the platforms, escalators, stairs, in the echoing passageways. Of course, there's always the possibility that something exciting might happen--but that would be bad news in almost every case.

Once I got off a lightly populated London-Underground train at a main station, and suddenly, coming toward me, were hundreds of football (soccer fans), almost all young, male, rowdy, loud, and drunk--even though they were going to, not coming from, a match. I felt like one fish swimming in the wrong direction, schools of fish swimming toward me. Except these were humans, not fish, and their bodies were preceded by their noise. Finding a wall right-quick seemed the thing to do, so I did, and the mass of amped-up humanity passed and filtered onto trains. I did get a whiff, though, of that mob-mentality that can go wrong so quickly. The more common collective affect, if not mentality, of the commuting masses is perhaps more telling about us as a species, however, than that dangerous potential quickening of mob-thought.

Frustration Station

At Frustration Station, crates
of bad karma get off-loaded,
vats of bile sit in storage, and
tickets turn to paste. Conductors
have called a halt. Engineers
weep, and tunnels belch hot wind
recirculated from the 1930s.
Departures and arrivals melt
into one immobile blob. Turnstiles
turn into chrome gun-barrels aimed
at one another. Vermin gnaw
the wires of ambition. Only the fiddler
playing for oily coins puts on
a cheery, sticky smile.
These faces, these faces, these
faces twist toward scream.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

Acquaintances Are Not Friends

A long time ago, I had a residency at a so-called "arts colony" named Ragdale, north of Chicago, in Lake Forest. The owner of the property, which featured a large house and a couple of smaller houses, as well as original prairie-pasture, had turned it into a non-profit "colony" that artists could apply to visit from one week to a month or more in order to write, paint, sculpt, and so on. Of course, it's heavenly to go to such a place, devote oneself to one's writing (in my case), and to talk with other artists. There was a kitchen where you took care of your own breakfast and lunch needs, and then in the evening, there was a casual, communal dinner cooked by an employee. Lake Forest itself is an extremely wealthy suburb of Chicago, so when you walked into town, you were immediately identified as Not From Around Here. I kept in touch for a while with some of the people I met there, but I became friends with none of them, nor did I expect to do so. It was pleasant to be around them, but it was just business (that is to say, art): the idea was to get some work done while you were there. Such places are, naturally, also renowned for their assignations, their artistic soap operas, especially the more famous writers' colonies in the East. Ragdale, at least at that time, tried to identify itself and its ethos a bit differently. It tended to encourage the work, not the extra-curricular activities. In any event, I hunkered down in my room--and I had a great one: one of the large spaces on the second floor of the larger house. I'm sure a few of the residents got to know each other very well, but I minded my own business.

Later I visited Chicago for a conference, and by chance I ran into a woman whom I'd met at Ragdale. We'd been mere acquaintances. We'd spoken a few times at the communal dinners. I think she was a painter, and I think she actually lived in Chicago. When we ran into each other at the Art Institute in Chicago, I had the sense she was a bit down on her luck. I'd seen the exhibit I'd wanted to see and was heading for the museum-cafe, so I asked her if she wanted to join me for a bite to eat. She actually looked hungry, as if maybe she hadn't eaten breakfast that day, as if maybe she were out of work. She accepted the invitation, but very warily, and I didn't and don't begrudge her wariness.

That sort of interaction between acquaintances is actually quite complicated, for myriad reasons, and the usual reasons were complicated by the fact that I was allegedly doing her a good turn by offering to buy her a meal. Of course, she was rightly wary of the possibility that I might be doing more than a good turn, and I was hoping not to appear to want to do anything more than a good turn. (Good grief, this is the sort of over-thinking you find in a Henry James novel.) On the surface, it was a coincidental meeting of acquaintances; but of course there were all sorts of calculations and concerns operating under the surface. This poem came from that experience.

Wanting Nothing Is Impossible

At the Art Institute, an acquaintance
encountered me. We talked easily
enough. I offered to buy us something
to eat, museum café. She accepted.

Younger than I, she had lived a lot
already. I sensed she was broke—
nothing obvious; intuition.
With coffee and food, we talked

more. I said I was
glad we had run into each other.
It was true. Happenstance
had pleased me. Her

face changed. Maybe apparitions
of men she’d known had suddenly appeared
around the table. Maybe she couldn’t
recall a single social interaction

in which someone but especially
men had not seemed
to want too much from her.
I sensed she was broke. I saw she

thought she saw me wanting something.
It’s true. I wanted her to finish her
coffee and say, “Nice to see you,”
and then leave. I wanted to say,

“Nice to see you,” and leave.
Soon we said phrases like that. Her
face kept its wariness. Her
experience had put her on alert.

We left the café and parted.
Can the pronoun “he” ever
want nothing from the pronoun “her”?
Certainly, in theory. My acquaintance

did not live in theory. Her life
was composed of constant practice.
Insistent apparitions had sat at table.
I sensed she was broke. Now I hope

she’s not broke, that she’s
better and well, that her art has come along.
Well, when I think of her that day,
I sense I’m briefly sad for

simple meetings troubled
in Chicago, not to mention
everywhere. I am a ghost at
a café table in the Art Institute

looking at her guarded face. I want
to say, “I don’t want anything. Just
enjoy the hot coffee, the warm food, the rest.”
Her face says, “If you say that,

then you do want something. You
want me to believe you, and believe the rest.
That isn't possible for me. I have had
to take care of myself. Thank you and goodbye."

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

What To Do With An Old To-Do List?

A "found poem," as we know, is one in which the poet takes existing language from its original context and arranges it into a poem. Words from labels on food jars; instructions posted in an elevator; a note someone dropped--these sorts of things. A poet can also be more aggressive and use the "found" text as a starting place, the way a jazz musician might take a well known musical-phrase and then improvise like crazy.

Another kind of found poem is a poem you forgot you wrote; you find it in an old notebook or in an old computer-file. The following poem is a found poem in all of these ways. It starts with found language and meditates on it. But it's also a poem I'd forgotten I wrote, maybe for good reason. (The poem notwithstanding, and it probably won't withstand much, the concept of "To-Do" lists fascinates, for one is writing orders to oneself. Now that electronics are allegedly replacing paper, do people leave To-Do lists to themselves on voice-mail, and do they then delete the voice-mail in a fit of self-rebellion? Do they write To-Do lists on Blackberries? [What is a Blackberry? I'm still not sure, and yes, I know I'm a Luddite.] Do they send themselves To-Do emails or instant To-DO messages? A massive compendium of To-Do lists, taken from around the globe on a given day, might be interesting to examine.)

The Author of a To-Do List Discovers It a Decade Later

Pack.
Get money.
Make sauce.
Got to school.
Organize greenhouse.
Move stuff into drawer.
Get fish.

He never liked to pack luggage--
a tedious, sad task. No doubt money
was gotten then released into a variety
of shops--into the world, the air.

(Sauce?) Noting, at age six, that School
was outfitted with drinking fountains
and free books, he has been going
there his whole life; nonetheless, reminders
to return are not unwelcome. (Sauce?)

Regarding the greenhouse, he remains
perplexed but seems to recall encouraging
plants to unionize. . . . Probably stuff
remains in a drawer, which, like certain
ancient cities, has been lost. Salmon

or halibut, which is nobler? That is not
the question. The question is: Sauce?
Was it connected to getting the fish, or
to getting the money, neither, or both?
Was the sauce, in fact, made, or does it
remain packed in a Platonic suitcase of unmixed

ingredients? Did the sauce by chance
or design end up in the drawer, at school,
on money, or in the greenhouse? The older
the To-Do List, the more
uselessly beautiful it becomes. He goes now
to get money so that he may continue
to list what to do. He goes now to list; and to do.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

"Spirit-Wine, A Way of Happening, A Mouth"

Paul Laurence Dunbar was arguably the first Modern African American poet, and it's generally agreed that he was the first African American poet to gain national prominence, partly through poems written in "dialect, " Lyrics of Lowly Life, but also through such excellent non-dialect poems as "We Wear The Mask," which tends to be the one most anthologized now, and deservedly so. It's a terrific poem. In the following poem (far less well known than "We Wear the Mask"), "The Choice," Dunbar (1872-1906) expresses a poet's (guilty?) pleasure over liking "songs"--or the play of words--better than solemn verses that have something to teach, something worth learning:



The Choice



by Paul Laurence Dunbar



THEY please me not--these solemn songs

That hint of sermons covered up.

'Tis true the world should heed its wrongs,

But in a poem let me sup,



Not simples brewed to cure or ease

Humanity's confessed disease,

But the spirit-wine of a singing line,

Or a dew-drop in a honey cup!



I really like the move of turning "simple" into a noun and making it plural--and inducing it to refer to sententious bits of wisdom, bromides. I also like the way he sticks with iambic tetrameter meter up until line six, when he shifts to the more "danceable," so to speak, anapestic (more or less) meter; at any rate, the poem breaks loose in a little dance there at the end.



W.H. Auden, who in poetry played with language in what seems like innumerable ways, came at the issue of what poetry is, does, or is able to do from a different angle in his elegy, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats." Auden writes,



[...]For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives

In the valley of its making where executives

Would never want to tamper, flows on south

From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,

Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,

A way of happening, a mouth.





Poetry for Auden is, momentarily at least, "a mouth," one that drinks what Dunbar calls "the spirit-wine of a singing line," and spirit-wine of a singing line is just such a line, the kind one likes to savor, say, and hear. Poetry makes poetry happen; that's about all we know for sure about poetry, even if we think we know other things about it, even if we expect more from it, and even if we imagine that it can make something (besides itself) happen.

Ignore Winter; Look Ahead to Spring

Although I may have given up gardening, or so I claim, I have retained the gardener's habit of thinking past Winter ahead to Spring. Of course there's work to do in a garden during Winter, but it's not glamorous, so we won't go into that. . . .All across the Northern Hemisphere, gardeners are beginning to receive seed- and plant-catalogs in the mail, and they are reading them greedily. What actually springs eternal is the idea that next year, you'll be able to grow that thing you've never been able to grow. For me, it was asparagus. I never got the hang of it. I wasn't very good at strawberries, either. Raspberries, yes. I often recommend potatoes and (green) onions to those beginning to garden. Potatoes are somehow friendly. They do fine in poor soil and just need some water and some light (and potassium if you have some around); when the tops go bad, it's time to harvest, but especially in moderate climates, you can just leave the spuds in the ground until you need. Digging them up is like a little treasure-hunt, too. Potatoes are also very secretive, of course, like spies. I prefer the variety (of spuds, not spies) known as Yukon gold. Green onions are great because all they do is grow. They never complain, and they never get sick. You plant them, and you water them. You can also start them in the greenhouse or inside, of course. Easy crops are good for the gardener's soul and also for the gardener's soups and stews.

With Emily Dickinson's help, let's look ahead to Spring and not reward Winter for its bad behavior by noticing its bad behavior. Her poem:

EW feet within my garden go,

New fingers stir the sod;

A troubadour upon the elm

Betrays the solitude.

New children play upon the green,

New weary sleep below;

And still the pensive spring returns,

And still the punctual snow!

--Emily Dickinson


I read this one as an early-spring poem, with all sorts of creatures visiting the garden and with the troubadour (just flew in from Canada, and gee, are his wings tired) in the elm. The children are just children, I think: sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. "New weary" is interesting. I reckon if you are dead, then there's a certain sense in which you are weary--completely out of energy. Is spring pensive? In a way. It broods. Is snow punctual? Hmmm. Mercurial Ms. Dickinson.

Here's a short poem about Spring; it doesn't quite hide a disdain for politicians.

April Primary

Winter’s filibuster fades to mumbles.
The delegates are nominating Spring,
signifying their favor by piercing
soil with green digits. Birds work
the precincts, natural politicians:

quick with impromptu speeches,
always groomed, crisply garbed,
well coiffed. I support Spring. I think
it has a lot of good ideas.

Copyright 2007 Hans Ostrom

"Green digits" came from watching gladiola and iris leaves break through the soil. They really are blade-like, and it does seem (to one former gardener) as if they're signifying "Aye," in favor of a motion for Spring to take over again, to preside over things.

On Not Missing Gardening

I first planted radishes when I was about 8, I think. Radishes always grow when you plant them, but often the tops rocket up (going "to seed") without forming a globe under the ground, and often some little worm eats the radish before you pick it. Truth to tell, radishes are more trouble than they're worth, from a gardener's perspective.



I've been (or I had been) a semi-serious gardener for the last 25 years, and at our most recent abode, we had the whole enchilada: raspberry patch, greenhouse, herb garden, herbs in containers, flower-garden, rose-garden, interesting hedges, peonies, rhododendrons, a camellia, a smoke-tree, and yadda-yadda-yadda. Actually, way back when, the landscaping was designed by a regionally famous garden-guy, who lived there. But we just sold the place, and I gave up gardening, quit the habit, cold. With no regrets, no jonesing to plant or tend anything. It was great while it lasted, and I was as into composting and fighting various fungi as much as the next mildly insane gardener is. But I'd had my fill. Now I associate gardening with what other non-gardeners associate it with: work.



One of those uncanny coincidences: In our last summer at that place and for the first time in my life, I saw rhubarb go to seed. The plant shot some stems up that flowered. It had never done that in all the years we were there, and I'd never seen anyone else's rhubarb go to seed.



So I've given up gardening. Except. Except when and if we move into a condominium, I will probably grow some herbs in containers, chiefly because one of the joys of growing herbs is that you can step outside (if your herb garden is outside) or go to the containers, inside, pick fresh herbs, wash them, and have them in the food you're cooking within minutes. Now that is fresh. And there's something Old School about it.



Rosemary is easy to grow, smells heavenly, is great with chicken and some fish, but is almost impossible to transplant. If a rosemary plant gets old enough, it will become a serious shrub, with real "rosemary wood," which is quite hard, densely fibrous. Basil has a good reputation, but I tended to use it in cooking much less than I thought I would, and it's a bit persnickety, from a gardener's perspective. Chives: easy to grow, full of flavor, versatile. Thyme: heavenly to smell, wonderful in soups and saauces. Oregano: a lot of fun to grow, especially outside, because the bees love that pale purple flowering. Oregano's great with fish, chicken, Italian stuff, soups. Mint: Once you get it started, it's basically impossible NOT to grow it. It's great to walk near it, bend, pick it, crush a leaf, and smell the aroma. Lots of uses, obviously. . . . .



But if I grow herbs, I'm not hurling myself back into the activity. It mustn't be work. But for the effort one puts in, herbs pay one back handsomely.



--A wee poem about gardening, then, one that plays off Stevens's famous "Idea of Order at Key West," but is not in the least as ambitious as that poem; and maybe there's the slightest echo of Richard Hugo's "The Art of Poetry." Here's the poem, a bit of a goodbye to gardening:



The Idea of Disorder In a Garden


Intricacies of fine soil abide.
Writhing worms advise and consent.
Rain stimulates an economy
of chemicals and bacteria. Ah,
Francesca, some people would rather
talk of gardening than garden; others
would rather garden than talk
of anything. You talk as you garden,
a few well chosen words presented
like a bouquet of Russian sage.

Gardens are always on the verge
of becoming something we had not
intended them, in our tending, to be:
This seems to have been your argument,
premised on soil today. My listening, Francesca,
was a kind of cultivation, too.



Copyright 2007

Questions For Presidential Aspirants

In spite of my better judgment, I've watched a few of the presidential-aspirant "debates," which of course aren't debates, any more than "reality TV" is less scripted that other kinds of TV. The "debates" are question-and-answer sessions, as well as strange montages of candidates' faces. Also, the answers are, naturally, unrelated to the questions, except in the case of Ron Paul, who answers questions directly and tells the truth, as he sees it. He appears to be appealing rhetorically to people who can handle bad news and/or who share his libertarian views. In other words, he appears doomed to failure with regard to presidential politics. But then all of the candidates are thusly doomed, except for Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mitt Romney. These candidates have all the money. McCain is comparatively low on money, but Giuliani and Romney are so bad that he still has a chance. Maybe Fred Thompson has a chance, too, but I doubt it. He doesn't look well, and he doesn't look as if his heart is in it. His lies are extremely half-hearted. One has to sell the untruth. He seems to believe his lines on Law and Order more than he believes his lines from his pre-debate briefings. As a politician, Reagan was much more professional at delivering lines than Thompson is.

The "race" on the democratic side is over, barring some kind of catastrophe. Obama and Edwards are done for. The others know for sure that they have already lost.

I think Giuliani will be the next president. I take no joy in making this prediction. He's a very disturbing, disturbed man.

At the same time, I don't believe who is president (from this "field" from both parties) matters much. "We" will get out of Iraq when the military and the large oil companies and the private contractors think we should. "We" will get "universal health-care" when large corporations think we should. The gap between rich and poor will continue to widen, no matter who wins the next election. The natural history of global warming, overpopulation, over-fishing, etc., will likely proceed apace. "Corporate person-hood," that disastrous concept, will continue to flourish. The Supreme Court will remain composed of insular, elite, idiosyncratic, self-important alchemists.

On the other hand, God works in mysterious ways. You just never know when something good might come out of something so obviously gone awry, structurally, as presidential politics. And the next president simply cannot be as much of a horrific parody-president as George W. Bush, who is a more awful president than Kurt Vonnegut or Mark Twain (consummate satirists) could have invented. GWB is a performance artist with virtually unlimited political and military power. He is a form of punishment inflicted on the U.S. (and the world) by the U.S. He is fascinatingly grotesque. The next president will be an improvement over George W. Bush. This is saying very little, but it is still good news. I think we need to accentuate the positive. Keep the faith, baby! Faith in what? Well, in whatever floats your boat. And think of all the people in American history who had it far, far worse than we have--but who nonetheless persisted, somehow, some way. As Langston Hughes says in one of his poems (speaking for many African Americans), "I'm still here." Have some laughs, and do somebody a good turn. Plant something--a tree, a tomato plant, whatever. Don't forget to water it. Keep on keeping on. Listen for the lies ALL politicians say, and don't believe them--the lies or the politicians.

In an alternate universe, the presidential aspirants would be asked interesting questions, and they would answer them. The following questions happen to be the ones I am most interested in having the aspirants answer, directly and truthfully--recognizing, of course, that no human can tell the complete truth. The questions are in no particular order. I encourage all poets (and citizens in general) to construct their own lists of questions, post them somewhere on the Internet, and send them to news outlets.

1. Who is one of your favorite poets and why?

2. Name one of your favorite poems and say briefly why you like it.

3. What is the most serious lie you have told in your life and to whom did you tell it?

4. Will you promise that, during the campaign, you will submit yourself to the most severe interrogation-techniques used by the CIA and other agencies and then report to us about your experience, suggesting whether you view these techniques to be a form of torture or not?

5. Will all of you please remove your shoes and socks and proceed to wash each other's feet? (Thank you.)

6. Please briefly outline your plan for re-distributing (with the assistance of the FCC and Congress) the ownership of media in the United States, all right?

7. Will you promise to make the annual budgets of the CIA and the NSA available to all taxpayers? If not, why not?

8. Who is the poorest person you know, where does she or he live, and how might we most effectively help him or her?

9. What do you dislike most about yourself?

10. Will you promise to dig the grave for or to help cremate the bodies of the next American soldier and next innocent Iraqi citizen killed in the war? If not, why not?