How to Read Dickinson's Poetry

I'm guest-teaching for a colleague tomorrow, discussing imagery and symbolism (in literature) with the class and analyzing, with them, Dickinson's poem 591 (which used to be 465), "I heard a fly buzz [...]. " Whenever I have doubts about my chosen main way of earning money (teaching literature and writing), I think of being able to analyze a Dickinson poem, and suddenly it all makes sense again. I have a friend who teaches Constitutional law, and he probably has at least one topic that similarly reaffirms his choice of professions.

--Not that Dickinson is easy to teach. In fact, she's unnecessarily hard to teach, chiefly because of the baggage the culture, the critics, the anthologies, and some other teachers have heaped on her poetry and our image of her. To use an old-fashioned phrase, people get "hung up" on all sorts of nonsense that simply isn't there, in the poetry. Often, when I go into a classroom, I'm facing all the things Dickinson isn't, the preconceived notions, so I try to get around those.

So my "rules" for reading Dickinson's work are as follows:

1. Her poems are to some degree like crossword puzzles or soduku. There is always a solution to the confusion. There is, in fact, never any (lasting) confusion.

2. To the extent her poetry is mystical, philosophical, or spiritual, it is so grudgingly; that is, her work is always firmly attached to the earth, sometimes directly to earthy imagery. One key, then, is to find what that more concrete thing is to which the spirituality (assuming the spirituality really is there) is tethered. Or: Always prefer the simpler explanation to the "confusion." And: Never leap to the spirituality or "mysticism." Because she's never in a hurry to get there, and she never stays there long.

3. Take out the dashes. Put in your own punctuation. Get comfortable with the poem. Take out your punctuation. Put the dashes back in. Or: don't make a big deal of the dashes. She didn't punctuate because she didn't publish. All the pauses, etc., were in her head. The dashes are a combination of universal place-holders and a writing-quirk. She wasn't trying to be difficult. She just didn't imagine the poems would go to print. Same thing goes for the capitalization. Just a quirky habit. Ignore it.

4. She never makes mistakes. She just makes quick moves. (See #1--there is no confusion.)

5. If she hadn't been a poet, she would have been a scientist. She observes everything very carefully. She's an empiricist. (See # 2.) (Just look at her descriptions of bees, snakes, and birds.)

When, for example, in 591, she writes, "And then the Windows failed," she means the windows of the house failed to work because she (the speaker of the poem) died. Or: dead people don't see through windows, even if, in literature, they're still allowed to speak poems. Emily will go only so far with poetic license. She won't go so far as to suggest dead people can see through windows. She's practical. When, at the end of the poem, she writes, "I could not see to see," she means that, owing to death, her brain has ceased to function, she is no longer processing sensory data, and therefore does not have the capacity ("could not see") to see.

Dickinson remains the smartest, drollest, most original, and yet still most earthy poet I know. It's hard to think of one important thing the Modernists did, for example, that she didn't anticipate. Things you find in Pound, Williams, Auden, Yeats, Lawrence, Cullen, Moore, cummings, Eliot, Woolf--they're there in her work. The outlook is Modern. It is feminist. It is anti-establishment. It is anxious (in the sense Auden meant the term). It is imagistic (Williams, Pound). It is new. "No ideas but in things" (Williams). The phrasing and especially the rhyming and improvisation with meter are Modern. She's still hip. Known as a recluse, she lived in the world--the tactile, stinky, pungent, messy world of the house, the garden, and the woods. When the "I" dies in 591, "the King" is witnessed (no confusion there--but plenty of room for debate), but note that he is preceded and followed by this: a common housefly, which is blue--meaning a "blue-bottle fly," meaning a fly the color of glass left in the sun for a long time (see number 2 above).

I like Housman almost as much as Dickinson, but his range is much more limited. There's more true joy in her work than his. I like her rich simplicity as much as I like that of Langston Hughes's, but she is even quicker, less predictable, and a little more tricky. L. and E. share a great sense of whimsy--but usually with an edge; they're not just playful. Williams's imagery is often as vivid, but her point of view is more original. You never know what Yeats or Pound might drag in (like a cat) to a poem, but she can be just as surprising. Eliot has gravitas, gotta give him that, but pound for pound (ezra for ezra), her poems can go 15 rounds with his. In her own way, she's as sexy and exuberant as Neruda (with adjustments made for lingering Puritanism), as defiant as Jeffers.

Eliot and Pound threw more allusions by volume into their poems, but she is as allusive--just more efficient, and less insecure. They seem to need to show off. She doesn't.

She's not "the Belle of Amherst." She was just one hell of a hardworking, focused, precise poet. --With the gift of, not so much talent (though she sure had that), but of believing, unwaveringly, in her talent. She justs didn't know (cf. "see to see"); she knew she knew--how to write.

Sonnet With A Low Battery

Having written a sonnet that rhymes on its left, as opposed to its right, side, and an extremely narrow sonnet, I will now continue my assault on the form by writing a diminishing sonnet, a fading lyric that starts out robustly in the usual iambic pentameter but withers to monosyllabic lines. At the same time, I attempt to adhere to the 14-line limit and to follow the Shakespearian or English rhyme-scheme, based on quatrains and a couplet.

Diminishing Sonnet

I have this sonnet, and its battery
Is running down. The sonnet's theme,
I think, is flattery.
--Not, it would seem,
The best
Thing.
Psst:
Sing!
Of
What?
Love,
nut.
Oh,
no.

There we have it, an entropic sonnet that goes from iambic pentameter to mono-meter in 14 lines, includes an internal dialogue, and rhymes best with Psst. I think of it as an old wind-up sonnet that came along before sonnets could run on long-lived batteries.

I'm considering the possibilities of a square sonnet, not "square" as in the way the Beatniks used the term (although maybe that, too), but geometrically square. This could be achieved simply by playing with spacing, of course, but maybe I'll go for a more figuratively square sonnet and write 14 lines with 14 words in each line. I could also throw in an acrostic or two--top to bottom and/or diagonal. This is starting to sound not simply like lyric madness but Shakespearian soduku. Somehow, I think John Donne would have approved.

I Think of Russell Baker

As I'm attempting to recuperate from the flu, which seems to bear no relation to the "flu vaccine" I was given earlier in the year (I do wonder if they injected me with sugar-water), I've been inflicting cable-news on myself. So I watched the Spitzer-debacle unfold yesterday. Of course, the cable-outlets covered almost nothing but the scandal; meanwhile, the U.S. president had just vetoed a bill that would have banned water-boarding because water-boarding is, irrefutably, torture. Nor did the president argue that water-boarding is not torture. Instead, he chose to make the one argument that is easily disproved. He implied that "it works," whereas everyone who seems to know anything about interrogation claims that torture "doesn't work" in the sense Bush understands (?) the terminology.

So the governor of what envisages itself to be our most important state pays several thousands of dollars for sex and drags his wife to the ensuing press-conference, and a president once supported by "the Christian right" takes the side of Pontius Pilate and vetoes an anti-torture bill. It all made me think of the title of a book by Russell Baker--a book of humor, meant to salve minds as they attempt to confront absurdity. It's called So This Is Depravity.

It could be--and has been--worse. In Mississippi, where there's a primary election today, it could be 1958 instead of 2008. Sometimes thinking about African American history (for example) provides some perspective.

Nonetheless: Why is Bush president? Why are Rove and Libby not serving time for outing spies? Why is Guantanamo not closed? Why is it legal for Bush to practice torture? Why was it legal for Bush to invade Iraq? By what laws, if any, are Bush, Cheney, and Blackwater bound?

The Milky Way

I almost never read scientific articles unless I'm in a waiting room. That's a pretty desultory way of keeping up on stuff scientists are up to, but probably even they can't keep up. Recently I read an article about the Milky Way and the fact that it, too, would go the way of the dinosaurs at some point and disintegrate. It's not like this is going to happen next week, but nonetheless, the news made me a little sad.

According to the OED online, one of the earliest references to the Milky Way was Chaucer's, and Milton & Pope also referred to it in their poetry:

a. The irregular, faintly luminous band that circles the night sky, now recognized as composed of billions of stars and corresponding to the main disc of our galaxy, in which are located most of its stars, including the sun; =

GALAXY n. 1a.

c1450 (c1380) CHAUCER House of Fame 937 Se yonder, loo, the Galaxie, Which men clepeth the Milky Wey. 1556 R. RECORD Castle of Knowl. 105 The Milkye way in heauen, whiche many men in England do call Watlyng streete. 1615 H. CROOKE 455 As we thinke the via lactea or Milky Way in heauen is occasioned by an infinite number of small starres. 1667 MILTON Paradise Lost VII. 579 The Galaxie, that Milkie way Which nightly as a circling Zone thou seest Pouderd with Starrs. 1733 POPE Ess. Man I. 104 Far as the Solar walk, or Milky way.

I guess I see how someone might regard that luminous band of stars as a "way," but I probably wouldn't have described it in that manner. I don't have any bright, so to speak, ideas about what to replace "way" with, but the word just doesn't seem quite grand enough for that stellar spectacle.

To some degree, the phrase "billions of stars" means something to me. I understand it. But to a large extent, it's meaningless because I can't picture the immensity of that immensity--multiple billions of things that are like the sun.

Anyway, I wrote a poem about the impending demise of the Milky Way:

The Matter of the Milky Way


In a magazine
on astronomy
I read today that
the Milky Way
will also disintegrate.

Juxtaposed against
such change,
my experiences,
memories, and ambitions
are telescopically
less than microscopic.

Yet my life feels important
to me. --Habit,
I suppose. A person
goes on even as
it’s clear a powerful
case can be made
for the idea that nothing,
not even matter, matters.

But I’m not going to make
that case because I
have to go to work tomorrow,
and you never know—
I might have a few laughs,
feel the spirit.

I’ll see people I like
and one gray cat. I'll
view this bankless river they call
the Internet, which
must be observed with interest
in some parts of the Milky Way.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

French Writing

Someone once told me I was too much of "a should-person." In her opinion, I tended too much to tell myself I should do things. Sometimes I'm multiply focused, a condition which often exhibits the symptoms of distraction, because I tell myself I should be doing x, y, z, and, oh yea, w, too--and why not a and m? Sometimes I'm ultra-focused on one task or project, a trait I learned and/or inherited from my father, who could be dogged, determined, and relentless when he wanted to be so. At other times, I simply take on too much. And at still other times, I invent almost-preposterous "shoulds." For example, I tell myself I really should publish the two novels I have, finally, completed, but to a large degree, that matter doesn't rest with me. That is, I really should try to get the two novels published; easier said than done. (A friend of mine just "sold" her novel to a big publisher. The news absolutely delighted me. It was lovely to learn of the breakthrough. I was vicariously ecstatic.)

For another example, I tell myself I really should read more French writing--in translation. My opportunity for learning to read French well passed long ago. I did take one year of French in college, and my teacher praised my accent in this way: "Your application of a Spanish accent to French is interesting, Monsieur Ostrom." Lo siento mucho, Mademoiselle.

I have read and do like Balzac's fiction. Balzac's writing is a bit like Dickens's in its panoramic, manic vision of society and its layers, but it has somewhat less melodrama and a lot more earthiness. I have read and do appreciate Descartes' philosophy. I think I have read almost everything by Camus, and I like both his fiction and his nonfiction more than a lot. A bit of Zola and some Stendahl. Colette: I love the Claudine novels; they're so smart, so quick and alive. I've taught them (in the one-volume, translated Penguin set) twice. Sartre, who leaves me cold, for some reason. Some of Jacques Prevert's poems. I tend to read about Simone Weil, as oppose to reading what she herself wrote. Quite a lot of Baudelaire and some of the French Symbolists. Vast heaps of Simenon novels. As terrific as they are in English, they must be heavenly in French. An anthology of translated surrealist poetry, which I loved. That's about it, I'm afraid. Awfully spot. I really should read more French writing. (I've seen a lot of French films. Does that count?)

So many shoulds, so little time.

Birds At Evening

Among the ways in which I've been inordinately fortunate is to have lived for large parts of my life in at least two places with superb populations of birds: the Sierra Nevada and the Pacific Northwest. I spent a fair amount of time in California's Central Valley, too, and that's a pretty darned good place for birds as well. Sweden is interesting bird-territory, too. I don't remember much about German birds. A friend of mine is living in Indiana temporarily, and the envy I feel for his being able to observe cardinals may be approaching the level of sin, according to John James Audobon, if not the Catholic Church.

Before we moved into the present abode, we had a place in the quasi-country, with lots of trees, shrubs, and flowers, nearby lakes, and a our own small pond. It was an okay neighborhood for humans, but for birds, it was truly upscale. They wanted for nothing, especially when I spent wads of cash on suet and seeds for them, maintained bird-houses, maintained not just the pond but a bird-bath, chased away stray cats, hung moth-balls to ward off raccoons from nests (it works), and let some shrubs grow into dense trees, which to birds are exclusive condominiums. For example, we had a holly "bush" that had grown into a 17-foot tree: Trump Towers. I almost hired a crow or a seagull to serve as the doorman.

The great choral cacophony of birds, especially at evening, from Spring through Fall is one thing I miss about that place. The sheer amount and variety of activity, sound, and bird busy-ness created such exuberance, such a comic display of life, that you couldn't help but smile, even as you toiled in an unmanageable garden or tried to unwind after a stressfully tedious or tediously stressful day. As a subject, birds are almost irresistible to poets--and therefore dangerous. One is likely to get trite or sentimental, or to go over old poetic ground. Also, after what Dickinson, Hopkins, and (William) Everson (among others) did with their bird-poems, the poetic bird-stask is daunting, to say almost the least. With trepidation, then, I post the following poem, which I exhumed, like a lost potato, from the loam of my hard-drive. I post it not just with a poet's trepidation, but also with an amateur's appreciation for some good bird-times.

Birds At Evening

Evenings, birds convene
in trees and shrubs, in sky
and fields, fill air
with sound, thesis of which is
we’re alive; repeat: we’re alive.

Bodily harmonies rise,
spill out of beaked mouths (alive).
Birds can wait,
know, react. They cannot
hope but do embody hope

by going on, by feeding
and feathering, by trickling
water down their throats, by
flitting, flying, hopping,
looking. --By shrugging

feathers into place. No look
is more alive than a bird’s glance:
old news--but still. . . . Night absorbs
last avian riffs, alive . . .live . . .
ive . .e . . Beaks close, and eyelids

shut from the bottom up.

No so much to comment on my own poem (a terrible faux pas), as to add a reinforcing coda: The way birds fluff their feathers out of and into shape has always cracked me up; it sometimes reminds me of Italian-American men "shooting the cuffs" of their tailored shirts. And, unfortunately, I do fancy the idea of birds' "songs" having a thesis. I like birds, and I'm an English teacher, so that nerdly fancy is explicable if not forgivable.

Good Old Negative Capability

John Keats invented the term "Negative Capability," in a letter. The capability is that which allows one to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at once--and let them stay there, each with equal weight. Keats described the capability as "negative," I infer, not because it was bad but because it required restraint, pulling back from that instinctual, rationalistic desire to declare one idea the winner. Life is either hopeless or it isn't, for example.

American writer James Baldwin echoed Keats without naming him as he concluded his famous essay, "Notes of a Native Son." The essay details one of the worst moments in Baldwin's life. His father has died. Baldwin is still in is teens but is essentially the head of the family, which is desperately poor in Harlem. He never understood his father, nor his father him. He doesn't have proper clothes to wear to the funeral, and Harlem has just exploded in a race riot because a white policeman has shot a Black man for suspicious reasons. He may be at the period in life when he most needs a father--and his father has died. Baldwin reports summoning the will from some unknown reservoir of determination to decide that, to survive and thrive, he must hold two opposing ideas in his had at once and forever. Idea one: Life is unjust--and especially unjust for African Americans, and demonstrably unjust for him--and will remain so. Idea two: One must never stop struggling against the injustice. That is, there is no resolution to the injustice, but you have to struggle--not just seem to struggle--as if there resolution might be possible. No crying in baseball (a tip of the cap to Tom Hanks), no seeming in the struggle.

I was reminded of Keats and Baldwin today after I attended what I'll call an activists' meeting on campus. For the immediate moment, the topic of the meeting isn't important (although it will be tomorrow morning), and this isn't the place to reveal particulars of processes under way. After about three hours, we broke for a late lunch, and I ended up dining with two impressive students: smart, informed, activist in their own ways, but by no means starry-eyed or naive.

One of them asked me how long I'd been at the college, and I told him 25 years. He then opined that it must be depressing or at least wearing to revisit the same old issues year after year with little progress. I agreed with him, but I added that, over a 25-year span, one at least has the chance to perceive some change, whereas over the usual 4-year span of an undergraduate's time on campus, nothing seems to change. I also pointed to one rather significant, concrete example of a fine academic program that had arisen from similar activism some 15 years earlier. The other student said something like "and while we're working on this problem, there's a war on." --His point being, I think, this: so many issues, so little time. One throws oneself at a local issue, only to look up and realize how many national and global issues persist.

That's where Keats and Baldwin come in. Nothing much is going to change, even over the course of a lifetime, or lifetimes (ouch), but one must live one's lifetime as if much change is possible. It's not pretending--because you don't make believe that injustice has suddenly disappeared, and you don't over-estimate your powers. It's not denial--because you are well aware of such lovely circumstances as futility and such phenomena as constituents who are natural allies becoming "enemies" strictly out of pride. It's Negative Capability. A mental, perhaps even spiritual, juggling act. Two ideas, two opposing conclusions, up in the air of the mind at the same time, each given equal weight. A more colloquial version of N.C. might be "keep on keeping on."

Keats was headed for death from tuberculosis when he wrote his letter, and Baldwin was, arguably, at the lowest point of his life with no evidence that there was an "up" from that lowest point. In their own ways, both prevailed. Yes, I know they were the exceptional of the exceptional, but it's not as if one has to compete with Keats and Baldwin. One merely has to keep on keeping on. Breaks, naps, and good night's sleeps are not only allowed but vital, so there's that.

New Cabinet-Positions Needed

Now that a certain percentage of the U.S. population is going to elect a new president, I believe it's time to think about some new cabinet-positions.

I'll get the most self-centered one out of the way first: I think the absence of a Secretary of Poetry has represented a glaring oversight from the beginning of the republic into our present imperial period. Let's take care of that after the next election. I want some press-conferences where reporters pepper the Sec. of Poetry with questions about trochaic meter, surrealistic imagery, and women coming and going into rooms speaking of Michaelangelo.

I'd also rename the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: The Secretary of Housing and Urban Humanity. We seem to do the development-part real well. For whom and how are different questions.

Arguably, we need a Secretary of Consequences, whose job it will be to predict what will flow from a president's decisions, precipitous and otherwise. She or he would soon probably be known as the Sec. of Uh-Oh or the Sec. of Oh, No. In this new department, perhaps there could be an Under-Secretary for History, her or his main job being to remind people that bad (and good) ideas have a history.

I'm not sure we still need a Secretary of the Treasury because there's nothing left in the treasury. Perhaps he or she could simply become the night-janitor. We need, instead, a Secretary of Debt. I believe I could get the support of Ron Paul and several recluses who live in the Mojave Desert in old Airstream trailers for this idea. Not a groundswell, per se, but, hey, you have to start small, and, in the case of Ron Paul, weird. How he manages to answer every debate questions with "The gold standard," I do not know, but I'm impressed.

I'd go back to the old name for the Secretary of Defense: the Secretary of War. It was refreshingly counter-Orwellian. I would then add a Secretary of Peace, for symmetry and out of blind hope.

A Department of Rhetoric is clearly needed. The Government Accounting Office now investigates how money is mis-spent. Although nothing is done with these investigations, it is good to know something close to the truth. The Sec. of Rhetoric would be responsible for analyzing the rhetoric of top-level politicians and explaining the traditions out of which the rhetoric sprang, the logical fallacies, the good and bad appeals, modus ponens, modus tolens, and so on. All politicians are slick. Congressperson Socrates is a politician. Therefore, . . . .

Apparently we have a Secretary of the Interior, which sounds vaguely contemplative but which actually operates the Forest Service, against whom my father held a life-long grudge involving their (its) alleged incompetence. If this department concerns itself with the outdoors, wouldn't it be better named the Department of the Exterior? Then the Department of the Interior could advise people either on decorating-choices, their inner lives, or digestion.

Do we need a Secretary of Philosophy? I would argue Yes. When Clinton quibbled with the meaning of "is," that was an obvious Wittgenstein-move, and the U.S. Dept. of Philosophy could have stepped in. Bush II is obviously an absurdist. The Secret Service's code-name for him is probably Gregor Mendel. Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, is obviously counter-Nihilist and a bracing attack on post-Modernism. As I've noted before, that McCain calls what is a "bus" the "Straight-Talk Express" is a sophisticated irony with which philosophers could help. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama chant "Yes, we can." This implies a belief in free will. What would be the U.S. Department of Philosophy's stance on this?

Good night, and good luck.

Badger

I saw a badger once and once only in the Sierra Nevada. I was riding around with my dad in his pickup, in the back-country. I can't remember what the specific quest was--firewood, perhaps, or merely flight from boredom. No doubt he said, "Look at that--that's a god-damned badger," and left it at that. The badger was pretty impressive in its own way--low to the ground, garbed in some good-looking fur, and awfully determined. The sighting was but a glimpse--off it went, bothered, on those big paws with long claws--really low to the ground.

It's a bit odd that "badger" was turned into a verb, meaning to tease or to harangue incessantly (or at least that's my definition), and we're used to hearing it in TV court-dramas: "Your honor, I object; counsel is badgering the witness." I guess the connection is that badgers dig incessantly, looking for food--including rodents, I have learned; so "counsel" digs into the witness. But badgers seem to want to be left alone; they do not seem to aspire to become attorneys. According to the OED online, "badger" became a verb very late in the 18th century.

Unfortunately, some people still trap badgers for the fur and hunt them for--I don't know what for: just to kill them, I guess. Steve Jackson's badger website suggests badgers usually live 2-8 years in the wild, more like 14 in captivity, and, in one case, up to 26 years. Various kinds of badgers include the honey badger, the hog badger, the Eurasian badger, and the ferret badger.

Badgers are related to ferrets and weasels. I think some people call lawyers "weasels," so I guess it's technically possible to hear someone in a court-room say, "Your honor, I object; the weasel is badgering the witness."

The American badger's Latin name is Taxidea taxus, and apparently the one I saw was from the Taxidea taxus jeffersoni sub-group; another sub-group is jacksoni. Why the scientists used Jefferson and Jackson, I do not know--and I'm sure those names arose well before Steve Jackson started his site in the U.K., so we mustn't jump to conclusions. From the website, I learned that those who study the badger have a heck of a time determining their population, but badgers are spread broadly from the upper mid-western states to the west and widely over western Canada, too.

Here's a link to the badger-site, which has some photos of handsome badgers, and of one badger who is yawning (after a tough day of digging, no doubt). Badgers seem just to throw themselves into any activity, and this badger is really yawning. I mean, he or she is going for the yawn in an inspiring way.

http://www.badgers.org.uk/badgerpages/american-badger.html

Here's a badger-poem I wrote quite a while ago. I think I may have included it in the Collected Poems I put together, but I just added an epigraph from Jackson's website. I don't know if philosophers, let alone linguists, would approve of the word or the concept, "badgerness," but it amuses me (that makes one of us).

Regarding Badger

"A loner, it is always digging."

--Steve Jackson

I have seen the badger,
and I approve. Its body
argues for badgerness. The
rhetoric is fierce, furry, low,
leveraged, and necessary.

I prefer not to point to tall
buildings and small computers
and say Look at what we’ve done!
I am, however, in favor
of sewer systems, electric light,
and medicine. Have we
done right by the badger?

That’s a measure of civilization,
too: a judgment to limit ourselves,
to leave badger and woods
alone enough and well.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

500,000 Iraqi Children

With three other professors and a member of the staff, I'm helping to facilitate an Iraq War Discussion Group where I teach. It's an official course, but it's worth only 1/4 of the academic credit usually earned in a course, it's graded on a pass/fail basis, and it meets only once a week. We try to talk about our various responses the war but also to present information about the history of the region (going back to antiquity), the British involvement during and after World War I, and the U.S. involvement in Iraq for decades. Of course we also talk about events, issues, and controversies related to the war as they arise, including those connected to the presidential primaries in the U.S.

Today we talked a bit about the first Gulf War. One of the professors, a political scientist, mentioned that he is reading a book in which a CBS "60 Minutes" interview with then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright is mentioned. The interviewer, Leslie Stahl, first notes that by most estimates, the international sactions against Iraq in the 1990s had directly or indirectly caused the death of an estimated 500,000 Iraqi children. She then asked Madeline Albright if this loss of life was worth what the sanctions were aiming to achieve. The Secretary of State answered, "Yes."

My colleague also mentioned that the U.S. had not only supported Iraq's regime during Iraq's war with Iran but that it had also, essentially, looked the other way while Saddam Hussein used chemical weapons against the Kurds. He suggested that the U.S.'s "looking the other way" (my term, not his) might have contributed to Saddam Hussein's sense that the U.S. would not react to his invading Kuwait--an invasion that led, of course, to the first Gulf War, and later to the sanctions--and ultimately, I suppose, to the current war, for it seems the second president Bush believed he had to finish the war begun by the first presdient Bush. Precisely why the U.S. invaded Iraq the second time, I still don't know. Plausible reasons range from oil to Bush II's need to prove something to trying to introduce American-style capitalistic democracy to the region. Implausible reasons now include the weapons of mass destruction, which did not exist. A reason invented after the fact is that Saddam Hussein was a terrible, murderous dictator. The facts suggest he was indeed that, but Bush, et al., did not at first use that as a reason to start the war. Only after the weapons of mass destruction proved illusory (or always were illusory, as Colin Powell's "testimony" to the U.N. suggested, from the first) did this reason form part of a retroactive argument. There was also an assertion about Iraq's connection to terrorists who attacked the U.S., but that connection proved to be flimsy, at best. A reason to perpetuate the war now advanced (by McCain and others) is that to leave would embolden terrorists who are now in Iraq, but a counter-argument is that the terrorists would not be there if the U.S. hadn't invaded in the first place.

There's no good way to create a transition from these topics to a poetic one, so I will simply and abruptly mention that the site and project, Poets Against the War, is in its 7th year and has accumulated roughly 22,000 poems from around the world, as well as publishing an anthology, supporting politically oppressed writers worldwide, and continuing to express a variety of views against the war in Iraq. The site's main page also points to selected poems it receives each month, and for November 2007, there is mention of a poem by an alum of our university and a former student of mine, Sarah Borsten.

The link to the main page of Poets Against the War is http://www.poetsagainstthewar.org/,
and Sarah's poem is mentioned on the left-hand column.

Villanelle: The Villain, L

The villain, L, disrupts this life of ours,
And is, as the imbuer of desire,
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.

Sometimes the villain, L, recedes and cowers,
And lurks as others rush to douse a fire.
The villain, L, disrupts this life of ours.

Is L for Love? For Longing, Lonely hours?
For Lust or Loss? Or maybe just for Liar,
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.

Could it be Language? Our Linguistic powers--
That signifying engine which won’t tire?
The villain, L, disrupts this life of ours.

(In many languages other than ours,
A different letter shall be used to hire
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.)

Or L for Light, fiated Big-Bang’s flowers?
By light, we know and, knowing, we desire.
The villain, L, disrupts this Life of ours,
A criminal who deftly drains our powers.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

One By Jeffers

I know two colleagues where I teach, neither of them professors of English, who enjoy the poetry of Robinson Jeffers (1887-1962), known for--well, for many things. He anticipated so-called "eco-poetry" by many decades; he often expressed a kind of anti-humanist ("inhumanist") philosophy, arguably close to Stoicism but also involving anti-imperialist ideas and a sense in which one might benefit ethically from living close by and observing raw nature.

Jeffers built his own stone house near Carmel, by the sea, in California; he built his poems with deliberate rhetoric, long lines, an austere tone, and clarity. His work is often thought to occupy a place between that of Whitman and that of writers loosely associated with the Beat Movement--Kenneth Rexroth, William Everson, and Gary Snyder, among others. In fact, Rexroth, Everson, and Snyder were pretty far removed from Beat poetry; mostly they were otherwise occupied, even though Snyder certainly knew the gang at City Lights Books and is allegedly the basis of a character in one of Kerouac's novels.

Jeffers, like Langston Hughes and William Blake, is one of those poets with great appeal outside colleges and universities. The Hughes conference I attended in 2002 (he was born in 1902) included both academics and "plain old citizens." The Blake Conference I attended in Santa Cruz in the 1980s drew academics, of course, but also ordinary folk interested in visual art and people who literally viewed Blake as a prophet. I'll never forget one fellow who casually suggested that everyone go out and do "some ecstatic dancing" in the forest after one of the sessions. I was tempted to join him and the group, but having grown up in the woods, I knew that the forest and ecstatic dancing didn't really mix. It's just too easy to fall over a log or off a rock.

Oddly enough, Jeffers and Hughes got to know each other in the 1930s, when Hughes was staying with a friend in Carmel, Noel Sullivan, and working on some stories that eventually showed up in The Ways of White Folks. Hughes attended at least one cocktail party hosted by Jeffers, whom one does not associate with such conviviality after having read his poems. Differences between the work of Hughes and Jeffers abound, and many are obvious; at the same time, both are plain-spoken poets who didn't much care whether English professors liked their work.

Here's one by Jeffers that's in the public domain. It's from his book Tamar, and unfortunately, the blog-machinery will make at least one of the long lines spill over:

To The Stone-Cutters

Stone-cutters fighting time with marble, you foredefeated
Challengers of oblivion
Eat cynical earnings, knowing rock splits, records fall down,
The square-limbed Roman letters
Scale in the thaws, wear in the rain. The poet as well
Builds his monument mockingly;
For man will be blotted out, the blithe earth die, the brave sun
Die blind and blacken to the heart:
Yet stones have stood for a thousand years, and pained thoughts found
The honey of peace in old poems.

Sometimes Jeffers is so morose that he makes me smile, and although his phrasing is almost always clear, it is also often surprising. "[Y]ou foredefeated/Challengers of oblivion/Eat cynical earnings . . .". Reading the poem again, I found myself settling in with the first two phrases here and then being surprised (again) by "Eat cynical earnings." It's startling, and it also begs to be interpreted several ways, but the rhetoric is that of direct address: "You . . . eat . . . earnings."

Many undergraduates understandably do not take immediately to Jeffers' poetry. After all, most of them are enjoying life and rightly expressing optimism and hope. Suddenly there's this guy "looking forward" to when the earth will die and the sun flame out. Robinson "Happy Go Lucky" Jeffers, at your service. Anyone up for an Ingmar Bergman film?

An obvious question to ask readers of the poem is this: Do you find the "honey of peace" in Jeffers' newish old poem? Speaking only for myself, I don't necessarily find "honey" in the poem, but I find the peace of familiarity in "watching" Jeffers meditate on stone-cutters, poets, and a geologic scale of time.

Gwendolyn Brooks and Displacement

I was reading some poems by Gwendolyn Brooks again, in preparation for teaching them. She was born in 1917 and died in 2000 and was the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, if memory serves. Her most famous poem is "We Real Cool," which is indeed a great poem in an invented form, and a poem that's efficient in the way Dickinson's poems are. A great deal of business is transacted, so to speak, in just a few lines.

But Brooks' range was amazing, both in terms of style and voice and of subjects that interested her. Many of her poems are rooted in her neighborhood of Chicago (like "kitchenette building" and "The Bean Eaters"); indeed, the prize-winning volume is entitled A Street in Bronzeville.
She wrote excellent short narrative poems--"Sadie and Maud" is a famous one--and longer, more meditative pieces like "The Sundays of Satin-Legs Smith." She moves easily between more formal verse and free verse, is a virtuoso deployer of rhythms and diction, and displays a clear, sharp intelligence in every poem.

Partly because of temperament and partly because she started writing in the 1940s, she arrived a bit late at the political-activist eruption of the 1960s--but arrive she did. She changed publishers for activist reasons--in part to make her books more affordable for working people. She wrote some superb socially conscious poetry, including "Riot." Her homage-poem, "Malcolm X," is pithy.

Of her "neighborhood" poems, "the vacant lot" (yes, she uses no capitalization in the title) is one of my favorites. The speaker remembers the last three people--Mrs. Coley and her two children--who lived in the house that was removed to create the vacant lot. The memory is sharp and humorous, but one subtext of the poem is that the poem, the memory, is the last anyone will hear of all the history that occurred in that vacant lot. Circuitously, it's a poem about urban displacement, or urban revision, which seems constant.

I saw/heard Brooks read at U.C. Davis. Her husband was with her, and at her insistence, he read some of his poems after she did. He was a modest, wry man, and before he read, he said, "Simple logic dictates that I should have read first." We laughed, for who among us would have liked to read our poems right after Ms. Brooks had read? Of course, she had intended to honor him and his own work, but she'd put him in a tough spot, so she laughed, too.

In honor of her and her husband, I'm replicating the folly by posting a poem after talking about hers. Simple logic dictates that I should have started with my desultory poem and then moved to the main act, Gwendolyn Brooks. But no. That would have been too easy. As far as I know, this poem concerns urban displacement, too; hence the title, I reckon:

Displacement

Well, I went downtown.
They’d moved it. Some dirty bricks
were left behind, some people.
A few old buildings stood—
rats in elevator cars, For Lease
signs in windows, stench of mayoral
promises in a dumpster.

I started screaming, couldn’t stop,
stacked echo on echo, splendid rage.
My outburst brought police. They
took me to a place to which
Downtown had been transferred.

For every question they asked,
I asked two. In the hasty move,
city ordinances had been
misplaced. No one
could specify with what I should be
charged. Upon my release, I asked
myself what’s right for me to do?—an
old-fashioned interrogative that
would have played well in Old Downtown
but not, alas, in the New Here District,
where bright, new office buildings
and slick, wee bistros will sit on
an immense investment of capital.

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom