What Would Jeffers Say?

Two of the most intellectually interesting and nimble people I know are an historian of science and a political scientist, the latter specializing in Constitutional law and how the media report on matters of law. In some ways the two are different intellectually, but they share at least three qualities that help account for the quality of their minds. They are empiricists. They are willing to follow the data wherever they (the data) lead, as opposed to taking a theoretical short-cut to a destination and forcing the data to come along on the vacation Second, they have a sense of irony--about the world and themselves. Third, they're widely read, far beyond their academic specialities. Their reading includes the poetry of Robinson Jeffers.

I see these two and talk with them frequently (one of the perks of this academic job of mine). This week especially I've had them in mind, however, because of the financial debacle and accompanying political circus related to the alleged collapse of Wall Street. Here I must break for a brief rant about conservatives who like to stress "personal responsibility." Arguably, excessive de-regulation (also known as chaos) led to this mess, so how about if some conservatives take personal responsibility for having pushed de-regulation too enthusiastically since, oh, about 1981? How about a simple, "I'm sorry. We were wrong"? It is, however, somewhat amusing to see Congressional Republicans saying No to Bush with regard to the bail-out. Typically, Bush seems to have seen the alleged crisis as an opportunity to try to give the Secretary of the Treasury the powers enjoyed by Henry VIII.

At this moment, when crisis meets farce, I am of course tempted to think of Jeffers and of my two colleagues who like his work. Jeffers thought the U.S. was crumbling by the mid-1940s, as demonstrated by his poem, "Shine, Perishing Republic," in which "this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity, heavily/thickening to empire,/And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out,/and the mass hardens." Later in the poem, he writes, "corruption/Never has been compulsory, when the cities lie at the monster's feet/there are left the mountains."

Well, I don't know if even the mountains are left, what with ski resorts, open-pit mining, the spread of suburbia, drought in the Rockies, and all those noisy snow-mobiles and three-wheelers out there. In any event, today I seem to hear Jeffers whispering "See, I told you so."

I suppose it's only fair to concede that Jeffers was a bit of a misanthrope and pessimist; a few friends and family excepted, he tended to prefer the sea, large rocks, and hawks to humans. There is a chance, however, that the current corruption, mismanagement, and inept political spectacle might shock even Jeffers. I'll have to check with my colleagues to see what they think.

Anyway, Robinson, the republic (or empire) seems to be living down to your expectations these days. Maybe this is a good day to read some of e.e. cummings more exuberant, life-affirming poetry and take a break from Jeffers' rocks and hawks

Concerning That Good Night

In class we briefly discussed the villanelle, that most difficult form, in which the poet has to repeat whole lines, use only two rhyming sounds, stick to iambic pentameter, and, incidentally, make sense. As I've noted in earlier posts, Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night," Theodore Roethke's "The Waking," and W.H. Auden's "If Could Tell You" are among the most venerable villanelles; however, we also studied one by Jay Parini about the event now known as "Nine-Eleven," and most of the students liked it.

We talked about some moves a poet can make to negotiate the form. We noted that many villanelles are light on imagery and rely on statements, on a kind of conversational discourse. We discussed the possibility of using half-rhymes and of altering the repeated lines slightly--turning a statement into a question, for example, or changing one word.

One student said she found the form difficult to read because of the repetition, which can indeed begin to sound like "nagging."

As great as Dylan Thomas's poem is--and it is, indisputably, a tour de force--I've always felt uneasy about the advice the poem offers, simply because I think people should be able to die with the attitude they choose--assuming, of course, that they are even able to choose the attitude with which they approach death. I had a very close older relative who died of heart failure but also, indirectly, of dementia, so she was not able to approach death--mentally or spiritually--in the way she might have chosen. So if I or anyone had advised her not to go gentle into that good night, it would have been pointless, at best. But this takes nothing away from Thomas's indelible villanelle.

Still, I finally decided to write a wee response-villanelle with D.T.'s poem in mind, although I confess the main task here is just to get a bit of a workout. Villanelles offer good aerobic poetic training, even if they don't turn out perfect or fall far short of perfect.


Go As You Wish Into That Good Night


Go as you wish into that good night.
It's not a night, of course. It's death.
To tell you how to die? I have no right.

Besides, death often hides nearby, plain sight--
Then someone's gone, as quickly as a breath.
Go as you wish into that good night,

Assuming you're allowed your wish. I might
Not even be around, to tell the truth.
To tell you how to die? I have no right.

I've not yet died, have not yet faced the fright
Of certain death, so here's my guess:
Go as you wish into that good night.

I sympathize with D.T.'s rage. That sight
Of one who's dear about to die: Damned death!
But still: go as you wish into death's night.
To tell you how to die--I have no right.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Should an Apple Pie Appear in a Poem?

I'm almost always afraid to put a rose in a poem because roses have been appearing in poems since about 5,000 B.C.E., or thereabouts. I make an exception when I'm writing explicitly about actually growing roses because then I have a chance of staying away from the usual symbolism, which can be religious, or romantic, or whatever.

I feel similarly about putting an apple pie in a poem. From a poetic perspective, apple pies are . . . what? Too domestic? Too "home-spun"? And then there's the unholy trinity of mom, applie pie, and the American flag. Oy.

So I guess if you write a poem that's based in some way in experience, and if the experience had something to do with baking or eating an apple pie, you're out of luck. You should probably just write a poem about something else or maybe use a different kind of dessert. That would be the smart thing to do.

I decided not to be prudent, however, and I decided to go ahead and write a poem with an apple pie in it. I don't think I entirely escaped the pitfalls of doing so, and I probably made things worse by including "love" along with the apple pie. Oh, well. So it goes with baking and with writing. Trial and error, with lots of error.

Not that you asked, but I prefer apple pies to be very light on the sugar (or the Splenda); indeed, I believe all fruit or berry pies should be tart. I believe this preference places me in a minority. I am also very much in favor of a tradition on the verge of disappearing: serving a piece of sharp cheddar cheese with a piece of pie. No, not vanilla ice cream; cheddar cheese.

Waking to Baking

My love for you
is but for you, just
like the only apple
pie of its kind, the one
I baked that day:
butter-brushed crust
just so, narrow streams
of sweet steam piping
out of vents in the top-
crust opened with a
nicked tip of a paring-
knife. Yes, my love
for you is precisely
combined like cinammon,
nutmeg, and lemon-peel--
a sparing use of sugar,
apples picked, peeled,
and cut by no other hands
but these, pieces of apple
floating in cold water
that day, that hour, the
oven pre-heating, which
is another name for heating.
You napped. You awoke
to a house inebriated with
aroma of baking apple pie,
an affection-imbued interior
weather of heat applied
to fruit, flour, and spices.


Hans Ostrom, Copyright 2008

Prophets' Return

Prophets' Return

No wonder prophets don't come back.
Their crests would fall if they returned.
See the prophets standing here, just
returned: "For this," they ask, "we spoke
the fiery truth, risked our lives, and cracked
history?" See them looking at chronic
starvation, effects of cluster- and car-bombs,
oceanic gaps between rich and poor,
advertising smeared like mucous across
humanity. See them seeing torturers,
enslavers, elected thieves and thugs.

Overhear them asking, "Why did we bother?
What we failed to eradicate with righteousness
persists, what we achieved has been forgotten
or repackaged and marketed for a profit." Ah,
but if they were to tarry, they need only read
a single suffering child's face, ingest a spore
of hope, feel courage electrifying wisdom,
and there they'd go again, trying (can you
believe it?), to change the way things are.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Any Storm in the Port

Any Storm in the Port


The coastline forms a question-mark,
which punctuates the sentence of this day.
From your apartment, you can't even see
buildings that have a view of the harbor.
No ship docking down there will bring
adventure to your life. Even the cargo,
quotidian as it is, will be shipped elsewhere.

Idly, you wish for strange weather--
hurricane, tsunami, dead-calm, lock-down
fog. This wish would be irresponsible if
related to a reality outside your head. You'd
never kill an albatross, interrupt a whale's
progress, organize or break a strike. You

are a cove that occasionally dreams
of being a bay. Viking--you might have
been a Viking. --Not a berserker hacking
villagers but a rower who would pull
the boat in a gray unmapped direction
for as long as it took or until you died.
You're that sort--a kind history never
notices from its panoramic view. You
pull your life through life.

Wall Street Metaphors

I don't know how appropriate it is to speak of having a retirement-account (in the making) as a blessing. Perhaps privilege is a better word. Having one, however, I was among those interested in the reported demise of such instiutions as Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch and the consequent effects on the stock market.

As a reader and poet, however, I soon became interested in the language used to describe the events: tsunami, collapse, plunge, tidal wave, earthquake, hurricane, even Armageddon. Yikes.

Of course, "Wall Street" itself is a kind of metaphor. I believe it's a metonym, in which a part of something is used to describe that something, so that the White House is sometimes used to describe the Executive Branch or the presidency. "The White House said today that . . . ." Certainly, a stock market exists on Wall Street, but all those stocks and bonds exist in vaults somewhere or, more likely, they exist only on computer-chips. I "own" stock only because some letters and numbers on a screen or a piece of paper say I do. Yikes, the Sequel.

I like this term "correction," too. I think it's meant to sound soothing. "The housing-market is undergoing a correction," it is said, or "Expect the stock market to correct." When I pause to consider the word, though, I realize that a mistake has been made--one that needs correction. "They" would probably prefer that I think of a ship making a slight "correction" (adjustment) in its course.

"Bubble" has been around a long time in connection with markets. As far back as the 18th century, I think, there was a speculative "bubble" concerning British colonial investments. It's a pretty interesting metaphor. Investments become as molecules of gas, which create a bubble, which pops, and the investments go . . . into the air. I still don't know what to make of the term "hedge," applied to investments. I think it means that you put a hedge around your investments, but hedges have never seemed that durable or protective to me. They're things birds can penetrate, after all. "Hedge-fund" just doesn't sound right. "I've decided to invest in hedges--chiefly laurel and boxwood. What do you think?"

In some ways, the financial world seems and is so technical, all mathematics and statistics. But when even the alleged experts discuss "the market," they seem quickly to slip into metaphor-speak. Nonetheless, I don't think I'd necessarily argue for putting a poet in charge of AIG, for example. By the way, who or what insures insurance companies? I guess "we" do--people who pay taxes.

We're There Yet

We're There Yet


Where shall we go? Hell is out--
much too expensive. Let's go where
the beach doesn't stink when the tide
hides. I wouldn't mind a town
that featured jobs for us but also
had people who have doubts about
strong opinions. Who am I, Kidding?
We're where we went.

This isn't home, but it will have to do.
Say, do you hear that dog barking?
That's where we are, my darling.
Why does the newspaper have
a "Travel" section every Sunday?
Is that supposed to be some kind of joke?
Why is there even a newspaper here?
The best news already happened.

Yesterday, a woman told me
she saw someone walking an
armadillo on a leash. She asked me,
"What kind of town is this?"
I said it's definitely a town
in which people might take
an armadillo for a walk. I
did not wish to mislead her.

We've arrived, regardless of
whether we planned to go here
or not. This is what our destination
looks like. Darling, do your best.

Sex

There is an online site called poemsabout.com, and as you might infer, it's a massive compendium of poems organized by topic. The lists of topics themselves intrigue. Here's just a piece of the alphabetical list:

africa
alone
america
angel
anger
animal
april
autumn
baby
ballad
beach
beautiful
beauty
believe
birth
brother
butterfly
candy

An arguably interesting writing-prompt would simply be to start with this list, begin making phrases, lines, and sentences (with additional words as needed), and see where the language led one. Richard Hugo advises this kind of approach (in The Triggering Town), when he advises poets to write "off the subject." His logic is that a poet's obsessions will out, one way or another, and that therefore one should concentrate on the medium (language), not the message. In fact, he advises that if you have a choice between conveying your "message" and writing language that is more pleasing than the language that contains the message, go with the pleasing language every time. Of course, much in writers resists such advice, which is counterintuitive because we are accustomed to thinking of language as transmission of message. Elsewhere Hugo humorously writes, "If you want to communicate, use a telephone."

At any rate, when I looked at the topics on poemsabout.com, I realized I'd never written a poem, strictly speaking, about sex. Of course I'd written some poems that referred to sex, one way or another, but I'd never written "sex" at the top of the page and started a poem. Certainly, "sex" seems like a very good topic for a poem; this claims seems indisputable. At the same time, poets who've been writing for a while know that the so-called sex-poem can be simply graphic, pornographic, and/or surprisingly not-sexy--that is to say, boring. Nevertheless, I decided to write a poem entitled "Sex," although the poem itself seems to be as much about language as it is about sex, no surprise there.


Sex


Sex is an excellent syllable, which
detonates meaning and is fillable
with much connotation. Of course
it conjures a deed done and conjugal
entanglements of bodies, when love
or lust gets down to earthy business,
when desire fires itself up and down
and on (and out of) the town. Sex
is also an implied question on a form

that may be answered M or F,
even if you’re in a mood to
answer Yes or No or Maybe So,
or "I'll get back to you later" or
"What about it?"Sex is not solely
one thing or two but more
than a few and human, too.

Sex at times is a semiotic nexus
(how sexual that sounds!) suggesting
bawdy, haughty, naughty, hottie
bodies, which touch and much more
in sex’s neck of the woulds and coulds,
the musts and lusts. Sometimes sex is
subtly intimated simply by the two-letter
syllable, it, as in getting it on, doing it,
making it, and even, alas, faking it. Oh

yes, there’s that other effing eff-word,
the one that rhymes with truck
and gets so often stuck in awkward syntactical
positions. Sex is life in frenzied love
with itself, all lips and hips, rounds
and flats, sultry strategies and tender
tactics, loads of lust and convoys
of cupidity, sensual consensual
congress. Sex can cause stupidity—
would you agree?—and vice versa.
Sex is a state of union, an exhilarating
expiration, a getting up, a getting with
it, a going down, a fear and fondness
of flying, a finding out and a knowing
about. It has been known to be
a bit of a chore, an occasional bore.
It’s mysterious and base, crude and holy,
much cause for consternation,
controversy, rules, and fools. Sex
is something else again. And again.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Concerning Vanity

[photo of Peter Sellers as Clouseau]



How vain of me to write and post a poem on vanity! Ah, the obscure, vainglorious trap of being a blogging poet.



Vanity Almost Rhymes Fully With Insanity


In those days of my alleged
importance, vanity
was my friend. She
maintained a list

of my accomplishments.
We sipped drinks
and traded admirations,
looking out over a bay.

We wore status
like our clothes.
We decided, vanity
and I, who was good

and worth our time. Once
vanity and I had realized
my importance, however,
I lost vanity as a friend. A

certain evaporation of
illusion left distance
between us. Obscurity
is my pal now. Oh,

obscurity makes me laugh,
and what a reliable friend.
We get together, evenings.
We warmly review

how vanity once charmed
us, the ways in which I was
ordinary at most and not
important back then. And now.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Ballad of the Micro-Town

[the photo is of Sierra City, California, population 225, elevation @ 4,250 feet above sea level]





Ballad of the Micro-Town


The mountains round that town are sheer
Massifs of stone. The town
Lies glinting like a coin below.
The river carves a frown.

I grew up there, so it was all.
It was the world to me.
That it and I were less than small
I'd learn eventually.

To have grown up in a small town
Is such a micro-fate,
A shrunken destiny, at best,
A morsel of time's bait.

If you are from a micro-town,
Bravo to you from me.
Our origins have blessed us with
Well known obscurity.



Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

Hair-Cutter's Hiccups

Hair-Cutter's Hiccups


In the hair-cutting place, no longer
known as either a barber shop or salon,
I heard a child report, "Horses
are my favorite thing in the whole
universe." The woman cutting
my hair suffered from hiccups.
Of a recent customer, she said,
"He's the rudest person I've met--
hup!--in my hair-life so far." She
asked, "Sideburns trimmed?" I
answered, "Sure." She asked,
"'Shorter' or 'sure'?" I said,
"Sure, shorter." She said, "Hiccups
affect my hearing." I laughed.

Finished with my sideburns, she said,
"Look down." At the guillotine-line, she
let the humming clippers nibble my neck.
Later, she removed the black silk cape
from me with a bullfighter's flourish
and said, "There you are--hup!" We
looked in the mirror, where I
wasn't but where we saw each
other absurdly looking in the mirror.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

Blogosonnet

Blogosonnet

There's nothing spherical about the space
In which innumerable web-logs all appear.
It's just Electronville, the selfsame place
That harbors radio, lightning, and fear.

A universe of language every day
Big-bangs itself into hyper-existence
On billions of screens--a cosmic spray
Of texts that is galactically immense.

The Web is actually a firmament
Of pixelated light. In fact, these blogs
Aren't blogs so much as wee lights meant
To light a billion mental strolls through bogs

Of collective and individual thought:
This is what Gutenberg and Gates hath wrought.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

Transactional Poem

Transactional Poem


Although we've never met
and odds are never will, we
virtually converge here on line 3.
I deliberately left imagery home
because I wanted to meet you
unspecifically as I write and you
read this. I figured you didn't
want to be imagined, for you
already exist. You are who

you are, not what anyone
says you're like. Similitude
is difference with a mask on.
What happens next is that
you think what you will
inside your life, mind, body,
moment. You are the only

you you'll ever be, a verifiable
rarity. It is good to meet you
here without having to know you,
and there's a good chance you may
feel the same. Your reading this
transactional poem is what the poem
means. You perfect it by being there
and here. Reading, you finish the poem
I'm about to finish, none too soon.

In poetry, this qualifies as business
transacted. It's been a pleasure doing
language with you.


Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Creeks

Creeks



Should you be granted the luxury
of listening to a creek, you'll hear
sounds inside sounds, trickles within
rushes, and a constant water-sigh,
an exhalation of sound. Memory
hears names of alpine creeks: Deer
Creek, Haypress Creek, Hackman
Ravine. There's the unnamed creek
that carries water from the abandoned tunnel
of the Monarch Mine. Each of these

creeks featured an improvised mix
of bedrock and gravel, bank and bar,
riffle, pool, fall, foam, and whirl. Each
had systems of life--bird, bug, moss,
brush, fern, trout, worm. Sometimes
a deer: touching the glassy top of water
with a glossy black nose. Sometimes

something demanded
your respect--for example, a bear
making a splash of things and broadcasting
its bear-body, bashing brush, looking
at the creek as if the creek might be
swallowed in a gulp. A few times there

was I, absolutely incidental to the watershed,
hiking through holy sunlit days, flicking a fly
out on a leader, watching for fish, breathing
in shadows of ancient cedars, listening
to creek-water as it dropped into this
pool, space and time.

Hans Ostrom Copyright 2008

Details Inside

Last night, we were pumping gasoline into an automobile, and I looked at an exterior wall of the the gas-station, and I saw a sign that "said," "Buy 5 car-washes and get the 6th one free. Details inside."

I wondered what additional details lay inside. Maybe if I were to go in there and to inquire about the information on the sign, an employee would say, "Well, I think you'll find the details ironic. You actually don't get the 6th car-wash free!" Or perhaps she or he would have said, "No one has asked about the details before, so I'm ashamed to say I don't know what they are." Or: "You may not believe this, but if you purchase 5 car-washes, you automatically become a Knight of Malta."

I assume the details are, in an actuality inside the gas station, mundanely legalistic. You probably have to purchase the car-washes with a form of American currency--not that American currency actually exists. No rubles, no semi-precious gems. Or you have to purchase the car-washes all within 12 months. Or perhaps if you've purchased a used Soviet tank from the Black Market, you are not allowed to try to drive it through the car-wash.

That's why I didn't inquire. I wanted to make up some mythical details. I also thought, however, that a great generic title for almost any poem would be "Poem: Details Inside."

Dancers at Last Call

Dancers at Last Call


Where Zeno's paradox, Jesus's orthodox, and science's
anti-dox intersect stands my belief--nervously, like
a solitary traveler waiting for a bus that's more
rumored than scheduled. Science transforms mystery
into temporary knowledge, but mystery's infinite
at least, so we'll always not know. Incarnate, God
transmitted some counterintuitive news:
word, light, love, and peace are the way,
not war, invention, industry, and empire.
Who knew? The human response to the bulletin
was to hang the incarnation out to dry. Sigh.

Nonetheless, the wisdom haunts us, hounds us
down the positively positivist ages. By means
of knowing, we can never cross Zeno's line
of mystery. By means of belief, we hope we can
cross over, but hope lives in later. Faith
and science each need the other like two
dancers in a bar when Last Call comes. They
clutch one another, shuffle, and try to think
of something to say. The bartender, Zeno,
will count the tips and lock the door
behind them when they leave and get
slapped with cold wind and dark early
hours of tomorrow outside.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Stick

I was walking across campus today when I overheard a conversation between students. The topic seemed to concern one person's wish to have another person drive his car somewhere. She did not seem entirely committed to the proposition of driving his car. He seemed to be marshaling arguments---until a logistical question popped into his mind. He asked, "Can you drive a stick?"

What a lovely question, especially if you are unfamiliar with American English. "Drive a stick? No, as a matter of fact, I've never driven a stick. Are you mad?" Stick-shift, obviously, was the term in play, but even that term attracts fascination. I believe it springs from a healthy desire to reduce technology to the basic. "Yeah, whatever, it's a lever, and it's connected to a transmission, but I say it's still a stick."

Shifting topics abruptly, I'll mention that, regardless of what toys we acquired for our son when he was quite young, sticks were his favorite implement of fun when he was 4 and 5 years old. We lived in Sweden for 6 months at that time, and he amassed quite a collection of Swedish sticks, which look remarkably like American sticks.

I suppose there's an argument to me made for sticks having been the first human tools, although Kubrick focused on the bone in his famous cinematic rendering of an evolutionary epiphany.

"Stick" is one of those words poets need to keep nearby. Verb and/or noun, with multiple meanings in both parts of speech. A single, brisk syllable. Open to rhyming. A doorway to numerous subjects.

"Stick a feather in your cap, and call it macaroni." Now, that is a folk-song line that continues to perplex me. "No, thank you, I don't have a cap, and if I did, I wouldn't want to stick a feather in it, and even if I stuck a feather in a cap, I wouldn't call the feather or the cap macaroni. What you're asking is excessive. Good day to you, sir."

And looping back to the semi-original topic, let me say that I am surprised (but shouldn't be) how many persons do NOT know "how to drive a stick." My son knows how to drive a car with a stick shift, and he also earned his Ph.D. in stick-driving by practicing on a 1969 Ford F-100 pickup, with none of this "syncro-mesh" nonsense, and no power steering--so while you're madly trying to get the thing in gear, you're also wrestling with the wheel.

Stick.

Stories the Mainstream Media Ought to Cover

Not that you or anyone or the mainstream media asked, but following are some stories/topics I wish the mainstream media would cover. How do I define the mainstream media? By example. Example one: Any city's large daily newspaper, and in most cases, it's just one large newspaper. Example two: large news networks, cable and otherwise. Example three: "national" dailies like the New York Times or the Christian Science Monitor.

1. Themselves. I want them to cover themselves. I know; this sounds silly. But I really would like the Tacoma News Tribune to report on how its being part of a huge chain of newspapers affects the way it reports news. I'd like the media to cover the unprecedented consolidation of the media, in other words. But of course this is a story they won't cover, and it's probably a story they can't cover because their interests and the story, arguably, conflict.

2. What is happening to soldiers and contractors who are returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. What are there lives like? What are the effects of so many tours of duty and so much trauma?

3. Protests. I think the media do a lousy job of covering anti-war protests, and in some cases, I think they're missing some significant stories about the police's abuse of people and rights. Of course, being a police-person in a protest isn't an easy job. Policing isn't an easy job. Neither is protesting. Both the police and the protesters have to do things right; each has a professional responsibility, as it were. I think in some instances the police have become unprofessional and abusive. Maybe I'm wrong. It's hard to tell, though, from watching and reading mainstream news because they don't seem to dig into the story.

4. Oil. How about getting some plain facts out there? The U.S. "own" about 4% of the oil that's left and it uses about 24% of the oil worldwide. This means drilling is a moot point. Also, most of the oil from Alaska (for example) does not go to the U.S. market. It goes to the world market.

5. The extraordinary, almost unchecked growth of the Executive Branch, in terms of power. Presidents from both parties are responsible for this growth, and I'd argue that Bush II + Cheney are just an extreme example of a trend that's been growing for a long time. The issues dovetails with a lot of other ones: Church and State; the role of Congress vis a vis military action; "signing statements"; civil rights; proper responses to global warming; the imperial tendencies of the U.S.

6. Poetry. I'm kidding. I really don't need the mainstream media to cover poetry. On the other hand, if they just read some great poems out loud on TV, that might fill time better than some of their stories. Who knows?

7. What is everyday life like for most people in Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places around the globe?

Unexpected Turns in Poems

Here is a short poem by Irene Rutherford Mcleod, a British poet born in 1891. The poem is from an anthology published in 1920 and edited by Louis Untermeyer. I like the poem, especially the first two stanzas. The last stanza presented me with something I hadn't expected and to which I didn't respond all that favorably.

Is Love, Then, So Simple

By Irene Rutherford Mcleod

Is love, then, so simple my dear?
The opening of a door,
And seeing things all clear?
I did not know before.

I had thought it unrest and desire
Soaring only to fall,
Annihilation and fire:
It is not so at all.

I feel no desperate will,
But I think I understand
Many things, as I sit quite still,
With Eternity in my hand.

Great title and great first line, in my opinion. We're used to reading poems and other things that complicate love. Mcleod decides to go against that grain and present love as simple. In the middle stanza, the poem seems to disrupt conventional poetic treatments of love, such as those found in traditional sonnets, famous for their intentionally over-blown rhetoric.

I found myself still very much in sync with the poem through the first half of line 3 in the last stanza, but "With Eternity in my hand" is surprisingly conventional and grandiose. I didn't see that turn in the poem coming, and when it arrived, I didn't like it. I think I may have preferred an image of the two people who are "in" the poem--the hint of a scene, a suggestion of intimacy, but nothing over the top. I still like the poem, and in some ways, I like the fact that Mcleod chose to end it in a way I wouldn't have ended. I don't mind differences of opinion and tactics between me (as a reader and poet) and another poet. It's pleasurable to see another poet making a different choice, and other readers may have good reasons for liking Mcleod's choice here. I still like the poem also because the deliberately plain rhetoric, combined with a lyric-form, works nicely. The form is traditional, but the rhetoric is modern, especially by 1920 standards.

About The Author, All Right, Already

A genre unto itself is the "about the author" page or paragraph that appears on the back of a book, on a dust-jacket, or at the end of a book, among other places. I've had to write such things, or edit ones editors have written about me, and they're awkward and artificial. It's a form of bragging, of course, so there's really no lovely way to write the thing; on the other hand, I suppose a reader or two might want some information about the author.

For a while, in the 1960s and 1970s, it became not just customary but obligatory for poets, in the "about the author" paragraph, to mention what sorts of things they'd done besides writing (or teaching), and the more gritty, the better. So male poets especially mentioned that they had picked fruit for a living, or shipped out on a freighter, or worked as a fry-cook. At some point in the late 1970s, maybe the early 1980s, I remember the poet Philip Levine, who had working-class roots, implicitly mocking such references in an "About the Author" paragraph; he wrote something like, "Philip Levine has held a variety of stupid jobs."

Anyway, a while back, I was playing around with a send-up of the about-the-author pieces, including the ones I've written and read about me.

About the Author, All Right, Already

Wagging the Marsupial is Shillbay Scrum's thirteenth
book of poetry. Scrum is a member of the National
Academy of Poets (NAP) and has been on the receiving end
of a Flugelhorn Grant, a Braunschnoz Prize, and the
Agewart Medal from the American Awardamantine
Foundation. Violet Redbeak, Monopoly Professor
of Literature at Varhard University, has written
of Scrum, "His work amorously massages our eyeballs
and testifies with aching penance to the beauty of
ugliness. His unique, piquant, uncompromising voice
scrapes our nasal passages and reminds us that
we are human, not amphibian." Scrum
is Extinguished Professor of Rarity at Central
Pomp State University, Brine-Wreck-on-Hudson,
where he has never taught. He divides his time
between New York and New York. Scrum's next
book of poems will be his fourteenth.

In A City

In A City


Anyway, you're in whatever city the city is,
the one next to a harbor or a river or both or
a lake, toxic water at any rate, and of course
a big percentage of the buildings are tall--
density is money--and prestige is squeezed
into selected leased spaces, and you stop,
take effects in via senses conditioned by
memory, reason, digital imaging, and
Pavlovian repetition, and in spite of it all,
you think, "Well, I'm glad no overt war appears
to be occurring here, and I can breathe, kind
of, and these people sure work hard, but this
isn't very good, this spectacle, this big-ass
urban production, this extraordinary
collection of hard surfaces, motors, pipelines,
wires, and compressed gases," and you yawn,
and a stranger is gratuitously but unoriginally
rude to you in a way that elicits pity for
yourself, the other person, and everyone,
including the bustlers bustling past.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

A September Poem by Auden

Here is one of W.H. Auden's more famous poems, "September 1, 1939." It's famous in part because it responds to Germany's invasion of Poland and what people knew would be the beginning of a European war. It's also known for being a poem that Auden himself came not to like. He went so far as to remove it from collections, alleging that he didn't like the line "we must love each other or die," asserting that whether we love each other or not, we die--but I think even he knew that that wasn't the original rhetorical point in the line. I especially appreciate how the poem replicates a complicated, multifaceted response to an event of terrible global impact, and how it demonstrates Auden's comfort with many different levels and sources of diction and vocabulary.



The poem appears on the Academy of American Poets site.




September 1, 1939


by W. H. Auden



I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.


Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.


Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.


Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.
Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.


The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.


From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
"I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,"
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the deaf,
Who can speak for the dumb?


All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.


Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Updates are Ready to Install

[image is of the Magna Carta]








Updates Are Ready to Install


USA needs to reboot
the republic, erase viruses
of repacity, racism, monopoly,
milidustry. USA needs to enlarge
its memory and improve its
applications. Also, the simpler
computations have yet to be
completed: feed the hungry,
house the homeless, love
the cast aside, lift the worker,
limit the powerful. Let people
mediate their own media,
decide what's news to them.
Let us click and drag unused
icons to the recycle-bin. Let
justice and old Magna-Carta
ways rise to the level of
the desktop. Let USA
interface with its ideals,
become user-friendly
to citizens of the commons.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

If

If


If the clock were to stop,
time wouldn't notice. If
the creek ran dry, it wouldn't
run at all. If "if" didn't exist,
I'm sure the other words
would miss it. If there
weren't any war, we'd
be much better off, and
that reasoning's too obvious,
and if one says such a simple
thing, then one might be
accused of using "if" as a happy
hallucinogen. Then again,

if we don't think of its and
the imaginary whats they inspire,
then we might as well proceed
to stop proceeding at all and act
as if all the possibilities
had already up and iffed
themselves away.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Novel: A Sonnet

When I was at Powell's Book Store in Portland recently, I saw a volume of "three-sentence novels" by a European writer. I should have purchased the book, but I'll track it down eventually.

The book reminded me of some "one-page novels" that a former professor of mine, the late Elliot Gilbert, used to write. Elliot was a marvelous professor of Victorian literature, wrote smartly on Kipling (of all people), and also knew a lot about such topics as detective fiction. He was married to the noted poet and feminist critic, Sandra Gilbert.

In any event, I decided to write a "novel" in fourteen lines--a novel stuffed into a sonnet.


Novel: A Sonnet

There was a place where people lived a long,
Long time. They soaked the place with their despair
And overloaded it with lore and song.
And then one day a stranger traveled there.
His presence was an irritant and salve,
Of course--that dual role which strangers play.
He saw someone and something he must have.
His getting them, however, would betray
A secret waiting for him all along.
A certain pressure grew under the weight
of character and fate combined. A wrong
Occurred and love turned into hate.
In more detail, the story stretches out
Three hundred fifty pages, or thereabouts.


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Veep

At moments like these, it's a pleasure to be a part of academia because one can wander the halls and ask political scientists (PS) what they think of McCain's choice for the candidate for Vice President.

1. PS #1: I cannot explain the choice, so I will not try to explain the choice.

2. PS #2: Whether the choice is good or not depends entirely on who wins the spin-game. The GOP will try to spit the choice as a) good for women [an appeal to women who voted for Senator Clinton] and b) good for conservatives. The Dems will spin it as . . . this person is not qualified to be president, should McCain be elected and then perish.

3. PS #3: The selection makes no sense. Strictly from a political standpoint, it is nutty.

A mere poet, I watch in fascination and wonder why McCain didn't select Kay Hutchinson if the tactic was to appeal to women and conservatives. or Mike Huckabee if the tactic was to appeal to conservatives and those interested in "executive experience."

My own opinion, which is at least worthless, is that McCain had some kind of appeal-to-women in mind but is insecure and did not want to select someone from the primary-race and is also impulsive to the point of recklessness.

I also treaded online turf and sought opinions about the worst vice presidents in history. Of course, one must be a vice president of the U.S. first before one is judged, so McCain's or Obama's choices must first be elected to be eligible to be judged.

Anyway, apparently Burr [dismissed as Veep-candidate, he eventually killed Alexander Hamilton]; Calhoun; Tyler; Agnew [even Nixon thought Agnew was not qualified to hold the post--ouch]; and Quayle. The newspaper The Guardian in the U.K. gave Teddy Roosevelt, Al Gore, Lyndon Johnson, and Dick Cheney high marks. That last one puzzled me; after all, Dick did get liquored up and then proceeded to shoot his friend in the face, he lost his composure badly in the Senate, and he probably egged Bush II to occupy Iraq, out a CIA agent, and conduct illegal wiretaps. On the other hand, Dick has made the most of the post, so I guess that's the logic.

I couldn't unearth any information about Vice Presidents and poetry, but I'm still looking.

I think that after several decades of observing politics, I have come to the point at which I regard presidential politics especially as a kind of surreal poem. Of course, I do wish our nation and the rest of the world the best, but I must confess I do not understand politics as much more than a spectacle which, nonetheless, does affect people's lives, eventually. On the other hand, Veep rhymes with Jeep, so there's that.

C'est le guerre.

Liberal Professors

It seems as if at least once a year, somebody publishes a book about how almost all college professors are liberal, and I notice that this Glenn Beck fellow devoted a show to advising conservative students how to survive and thrive at colleges, which Glenn seems to think are all liberal.

Of course, there are lots of problems with the assumption that most college professors are liberal. There's the definitional problem. Indeed, to political economists, "liberal" still refers to so-called free-market expansion connected to some kind of republican (small r) captitalism. Last year, for example, I heard an economist say that the occupation of Iraq was an experiment in bringing "liberal capitalism" to the Middle East, and he meant liberal as in Adam Smith not as in George McGovern.) Also, "liberal" and "conservative" have been pummeled, misused, and food-processed in the media so much that they'e become empty signifiers. Murray Edelman has observed that, to create a political spectacle, one has to create enemies, and one way to do that is to soil the category-name of your political opponents.

It used to be that environmentalists were automatically judged to be liberal, but with big chunks of glaciers melting daily, etc., environmentalism has become what I have long suspected it to be: practical. Neither Left nor Right but Necessary. People used to mock recycling as a Lefty idea, but now municipalities have well oiled (so to speak) recycling programs, ho -hum. Vaguely responsible fiscal policy used to be associated with conservatives, but the most fiscally conservative president since 1980 has been . . . Clinton, according to the data, and the most fiscally giddy has been Bush II, who cut taxes during a war, which is kind of like quitting your job and maxing out your credit cards at the same time. It's as conservative as a drunken first-time gambler playing craps in Las Vegas. Whoopee!

Maybe the real problem with the liberal-professors thesis, however, is that the people purveying it don't know what professors do most of the time. For example, today I was advising freshmen about what classes to take. What did we discuss? Where they're from, how well they do in math, what their short-term and long-term interests are, and (drum-roll please) what classes will actually have seats left in them when this group registers on Friday. The only political topic that came up was whether to try to take introduction to American politics or introduction to political theory, and once again, the choice hinged mainly on what was open. So even if I had wanted to advocate on behalf of my eccentric politics, I wouldn't have had the time or opportunity.

More to the point, I don't have the slightest interest in advocating on behalf of my politics. I'm tired of my political ideas because I hear them all the time in my own head. 'm much more interested in what students's political views are and even more interested in how they express and support the views. That is, I'm interested in their rhetoric (not in the sense of "empty rhetoric" or "political rhetoric," but in the sense of how they present arguments, go through a reasoning process, and make appeals to authority, history, logic, and so on.) Also, in my experience (mostly from observation), if you want to be sure to dissuade young adults of your views, political or otherwise, try to convince them of the views. Parents of teenagers and young adults will know whereof I speak.

Professors spend a lot of time preparing for class, reading essays or lab reports, going to committee meetings, trying to carve out time to do research, driving their kids to soccer-practice, going to the grocery store, attempting to do something helpful to the cardio-vascular system, blogging, checking email, and so on. If there is a professor out there who wants to distribute copies of the Communist Manifesto to his or her students, I 'd bet that he or she has lost the copies somewhere in the back of the station wagon or under heaps of students' essays on the desk.

So if you saw Glenn Beck's show or read one of these books, and if you're conservative, and if you're worried about liberal professors, I hereby give you permission to chill out. On the list of things to worry about, you probably want to place "liberal professors" at around the 50,243rd slot, or lower. Seriously.

On the other hand, if you're worried that certain professors will induce students to read poetry, then your concerns are well founded. Poetry strikes fear into liberals and conservatives alike. Iambic pentameter--the great equalizer.

Duke Ellington

Some words remembering Duke Ellington:









Duke Ellington


The headline from the Sacramento Bee
Announced that Ellington had died. I think
The article may have referred to him as one
Of those things he really was. They got
It right, if I recall: they said he was
"A treasure"--treasure lost to us, to me,
Who'd only just begun to understand
What I'd been blessed to witness when I spent
A few buck on a ticket for a concert in
A cafeteria--a break from writing essays for
My English 1-B class. I got to hear
Duke Ellington--in a junior-college cafeteria.
That night I was as privileged as a prince
Who'd seen and heard Mozart conduct.
Mere Rocklin was my Salzburg, Duke's jazz
Demotic classical. Duke Ellington had passed,
The headline said. I thought of him, spotlit
That night, a black tuxedo, and the hair
Brushed back. That's how he must have looked
As he strolled past Archangel Gabriel.
To Gabe he may have said, "We love you madly--
But try it in a minor key this time."
When I saw him, I was 18 and thought
I knew just what Duke Ellington deserved.
"He's royalty," I thought, "does not deserve
This gig on cold linoleum." Time is
No satin doll who puts her arms
Round you, and now I think I' may have learned
What Mr. Ellington believed that he deserved:
To write, to play, and to conduct, as long
As God would let him, and anywhere the bus
Or train or plane might go. The music does
Not know it's in the cafeteria, or in
A segregated Cotton Club. And Mr. Ellington,
The evidence suggests, could take care of himself.
Ah, heaven's black piano's always tuned.
The A-train glides like silk into the night.
In Davis, California, and in Harlem, you
Can see the sky, and hear "Mood Indigo."

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

How to Get Ideas For Poems

Occasionally, persons who are not, or who do not see themselves as, writers of poetry, fiction, drama, and the like ask persons who do write such stuff, "How do you get ideas for [poetry, fiction, drama, etc.]?" I can't speak for all or really any of such writers; nonetheless, I suspect some of them might agree with my sense that a lot of writers find it fairly easy to "get ideas." It's the writing itself that is sometimes, maybe even often, the difficulty. It's one thing to have a good or great idea for a short story. It's another to write that short story, and it's still another to make that story as good as you think it needs to be.

In any event, a while back I wrote a poem about how to get ideas for poems. Perhaps the title is too obvious. I'm not sure.





How to Get Ideas for Poems


It's surprisingly easy. Since you're already in
your mind, even if others claim you're not, just
look around in there and see what's on the shelves
and prairies, in the tunnels and trade-shows::
sharks, appliances, jeans, turnips, primal scenes.
Maybe foaming dog-mouths full of teeth.

Scan acres and acres of words--native, transplanted,
farmed, found, pilfered, grafted, milled, mulched. It's
a little known fact that poems are made of words.

Allergies and outrages are good. Grudges, too.
Love? Sure. Why not? Do what you have to do.
You and your mind are already in the world,
in spite of jokes philosophers tell, so you don't
have to make special trips to peaks, Paris,
bull-fighting rings, deserts, or dance-halls
to find what advertisers call inspiration.

If you want inspiration, just keep breathing.
(If you want anything, just keep breathing.)
The poems will follow. Some ideas will cling
the way stickers stab socks when you walk
through brush and grass. Others will settle--
shadow, soot, silt, and shock. Some will pound
on the mind's door like a drunken neighbor
who came back to the wrong house. Some

will whisper and mumble like spies, gossips,
gamblers, and prophets. Basically, just
let it slip that you're a poet. The news
will get around your mind, and there will be
no end to the ideas. You'll have to
fight them off with poems.


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

The Scorpion King II

We subscribe to cable television, and so we have access to something like 31,238 channels. However, we tend to be interested in only about 6 of them, two or three that run different iterations and re-runs of Law and Order, a couple of so-called "news channels," and channels that give us access to BBC news, programs, and movies. I also like to watch C-Span, the fundamentalist Christian "network," the Weather Channel, and other anomalies.

On one of these selected channels, I saw an advertisement for the DVD of a movie called Scorpion King II. I haven't seen Scorpion King [I], but I think it may have been produced by the unusual people who are in charge of professional-wrestling-entertainment.

I've seen only a couple scorpions in my life, so I'm no expert, but I don't think scorpions are ruled by a monarchy. The scorpions I met seemed like they would rebel against the very idea of a hereditary monarchy, in fact.

However, I gather the scorpion monarchy has not been in place for a long time, as it is now ruled only by its second King. Some monarchies consolidate power via marriage, so maybe the Scorpion King will marry the Princess of Spiders or Lady Bug, who will then become the Scorpion Queen.

Interestingly, I saw no scorpions in the advertisement for The Scorpion King II. Most of the images seemed to be of young body-builders with lubricated upper bodies. They seem to be running and carrying swords from the studio's collection of swords.

The language such advertisements borrow from alleged reviews of the product being offered is a bit like exhausted poetry. For example, the quotations mentioned in this advertisement included the following: "Non-stop action!" "Bone-crushing excitement!"

I like movies in which the action stops occasionally. I like it when people stop chasing each other or hacking off limbs, sit down, and have a conversation. Also, at some point, the action in all movies needs to stop after an hour or two, don't you think? At some point, the credits have to run. As for bone-crushing excitement, I am ambivalent, at best. I can't envisage liking excitement that would result in the crushing of bones.

I don't think I'm going to rent or purchase the DVD for The Scorpion King II. If there is a so-called "Nature" show--on a Public Broadcasting channel--that focuses on scorpions, I am likely to watch it for a while, however.

The Poem Is

The Poem Is


The poem is a woman who
would sing if she weren't so
weary. The poem is a man
who would get up and fight
if he weren't so old. The poem
is a child who would come out
of the room if the world
weren't so strange.

The poem is a mountain
that would be green if
water flowed there. The
poem is a city that would
treat people right if only it
weren't a city. The poem

wants to meet a poem
that understands what
it's like to be the kind of
poem the poem is.

The poem would be epic
if it were arrogant. It would be
lyric if it weren't so lonely.

The poem breaks like a dry
stick and heals itself
miraculously and leans
on itself as it takes a walk
through the woods. The
poem thinks magically.
That is the job of the poem.

The Waiting Room

The Waiting Room


The room waited. No,
that's not true. The room
was empty, so we said
it had been waiting for people
to enter it. They entered
it. We were already there,
waiting. We watched them.
They waited. All over the
planet, operators are
standing by. A man is being
recorded shouting, "But
wait--there's more!" "What
are you waiting for?: that
is a command poorly
disguised as a question.
"I can't wait": this is best
translated as "I am saying
something as I wait." Once
someone told me, "Wait
here." I did so. I am in
fact still waiting. Here.


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Democracy Today

Democracy Today

A politician's head swelled
and burst out of a televising screen,
crashing onto the floor of my room,
rolling to my feet, where it lay,
face up, a grin glued on like a photo
of a keyboard, eyes fixed wide open,
genderless features painted
with studio-makeup, hair
formed like fine-spun fiberglass,
forehead shining like porcelain.

I howled, jumped up, ran
out the door into the street,
where everyone wore masks
that looked like the face on
the floor of the room I'd fled.
"We're all going to vote!" the
masked crowd cried.
"You will join us!"


Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

For Rose-Gardeners

Is there a flower that humans have been more obsessed by than the rose? Maybe the cherry-blossom; and, indeed, the rose-obsession may be more Western--Greco-Roman/Euro-American--than Eastern. And it's a bit ironic that the rose itself is a bush, a shrub, and of course the cherry is a tree.

Lilies, orchids, daffodils, and poppies have all drawn their share of attention. But especially in Western religious and poetic traditions, the rose seems to have it all going on. Bill the Bard, Robert Burns, Bill Blake, Gertrude Stein, Jean Genet, and even George Eliot (in a wee poem) have famously weighed in on the rose. Rose-poems must number in the millions.

To those who grow roses--or, more accurately, assist roses in their growth--the rose tends to discard its several cultural symbols and starts to represent work, a battleground (chiefly person v. fungus and person v. aphid), a vegetative entity with diva-like whims but also astonishing resilience, and unrequited love. Yes, rose-gardeners fall in love with their roses, in many cases. It's not a pretty sight. That's when the whole thorn v. blossom mythology kicks in.

I had a 20-year fling with roses. Mulching, pruning, spraying (I stuck to organic sprays like neem oil, and a mild, non-detergent soapy spray does just fine with aphids), weeding, staring. A lot of staring. And sighing--in frustration. Fertilizing (I liked organic fertilizers). There is, of course, the illusion that it's all worth it--such as when you pick what really looks like the perfect rose--a blossom, say, from a Mister Lincoln--and the color & perfume really do almost make you swoon, and then you show it to someone else, and they almost swoon. From different objective distances, however, one may raise all sorts of objections to the time and energy spent on roses, to the Rose Industry (floral shops, rose "breeders," garden shops), and to the culture's rose-fetish.

Oddly enough, the most amazing roses I've seen are wild ones growing in a pasture in the Sierra Nevada. They basically turn into huts--an igloo of vines. Once one of our neighbors read about how much Vitamin C was in rose hips--those knots that grow after the petals have fallen--and she began to brew and drink rose-hip tea. Apparently the wild rose-hips had something else in them, however, because she got a little loopy and had to give up the tea. Jonesing for rose-hips. Wow.

Solid tips I picked up over the years: in the Pacific Northwest, prune roses on or near President's day; prune roses into a kind of bowl-shape, and attempt to eliminate the branches on the inside (roses seem to need some space "inside" to ventilate themselves; don't over-fertilize (I know: but what does that mean?) ; checking for aphids is actually more important than waging war on them (when you see them, spray a mild solution of Ivory soap on them; also, ladybugs really do like to dine on aphids).

In the imaginary court of gardening, roses and I reached an amicable rose-divorce. When I stroll past an impressive rose garden, I am most intrigued--and then fatigued, as I imagine all that work, the constant attention.

I did exceptionally well with two kinds of roses, both venerable--Queen Elizabeth and Mister Lincoln, one pink and the other red. I did okay with Peace roses, too, and I had pretty good luck with yellow roses--Sun Sprite was one I liked. A rose called Oklahoma did not do well in the Pacific Northwest, at least for me (and I'm a rank amateur), but that one had my favorite rose-aroma. Roses by other names didn't smell as sweet, nyuk, nyuk.

A poem, then, for rose-gardeners (I think it's in iambic tetrameter):

For Rose-Gardeners

To one who cares for roses, rose
Refers to the whole plant; the flow-
Ers are a kind of coda. To one
Who cares, the tale is in the soil,
Which should be dark and rich and loose.
It should be mulched, and it should breathe,
Perhaps give off a faint bouquet
Of chocolate. The tale proceeds
In pulpy roots of rose, and in
The branches which shoot up so fast
The green-and-purplish growth can seem
A little other-worldly. Leaves
Have much to say as well. They should
Be waxy and deep green but are
Impressionable, go black or brown
Or yellow from the merest wink
Of fungus. Thorns amaze--ornate
Medieval armor for a plant. If
The flowers come and keep coming,
Then one who cares for roses has
Assisted earth and plant to tell
The story well and now may stare,
May bend to sniff perfume or clip
In twilight of a long ritual--
The caring for the whole rose plant.

For Groundskeepers

On a rainy Monday in the Pacific Northwest, here's some blank verse for groundskeepers.





For Groundskeepers


At universities and schools, at parks
And hospitals, at bureaus and museums,
Banks and supermarkets, rows of shops,
Amidst steel and glass, beside the wood,
The brick, the concrete, walls, walks, facades,
In stadia at which rich athletes play,
There are the grounds, that space where those who plan
Our public spaces want to keep the Earth,
A.K.A. Nature, domesticated--kept
As in maintained. And after builders have
Departed and investors disappeared,
Now that the planners have moved on to plan
Their other things, responsibility for care
Resides exclusively with those who keep
The grounds; who dig and clip and weed and care,
Remove what's dead, restrain the growth that has
Become obese or weird. "Groundskeeper" is
One name by which they go. They are by all
Accounts almost invisible, paid not enough,
And tasked too much, no doubt, but genial
In most respects, it seems; the work with soil
And shrub, with grass and tree, must teach
A kind of patience; people who pass by,
Oblivious to the keeping grounds require,
Must also cultivate a sanguine view.
The litterer, the snob, the ones who've never
Held a shovel, wheeled a barrow: no sense
In getting angry at such folks, who are
Less sensitive than plants. Ah, well: Here's thanks
To those who keep our grounds, who care for our
Exteriority. Our cities and our towns,
The places where we work and where
We recreate would be oppresive or
Hard blighted spaces, were it not
For ones with barrows, clippers, spades.
Appreciation's due to those who keep
For us the grounds, who keep them up for us.

Hans Ostrom


Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Picking Blackberries

On one of my urban-hike routes, there are blackberry bushes, hence blackberries. It is August, and humid; therefore, the blackberries are ripening.

I happen to be a veteran blackberry-picker, having picked berries in my youth in the Sierra Nevada, where the blackberries ripen rather late, as late as September, just barely ahead of the frost and the snow.

Poets like to write poems about blackberries, for some reason. For some reason, I've never gotten a poem I like out of the blackberry subject. But that's okay. Blackberries are enough.

Picking blackberries is most satisfying to the single-minded, persons vaguely driven, determined, perhaps a wee bit compulsive. One must ignore how lonely the first berry looks in the container. One must be ready to experience minor thorn-damage on one hand. (one must never wear gloves.) The technique I prefer is to load up one hand with several berries, retrieve the hand, and dump the harvest in the container. But it's not good to get too greedy with one handful.

The more one picks, the more one sees additional ripe berries. It's some kind of Zen thing, I think.

One mustn't eat any berries until late in the game. It's not professional. Also: delayed gratification.

Not-quite-ripe berries don't want to come loose, but you can use them to pull the vine closer to you.

Soon the container is heavy and full, black and gleaming. The image of a pie, or simply berries in cream, materializes.

Blackberries are enough.

Exonerate the Snake?

Some blank verse for Friday, then:

Exonerate the Snake?

The Bible and John Milton blame the Fall

On Slim--the slender slitherer alleged

To have approached Ms. Eve and sold her on

The idea of the Fruit. With deference

And all respect that's due and duly orthodox,

I have my doubts. The snake? A pea-brained length

Of skinny tubing lying in the grass?

A narrow fellow, as Ms. Emily said?

Okay: I know a boa can enwrap

A human or a cow and swallow whole.

Sure, cobras, vipers, rattler, and mocassins

And such can strike and kill. But please. Hold on.

Be serious. If we insist on saying snakes

Must take the fall for loss of Paradise,

It seems we run the risk of looking low--

Yes, lower than the snake. We chose to cast

Off innocence for worldliness, and God

Said, "Fine. I call it sin, and I say it's wrong.

What's more, I think it's dumb. Your lease is up.

Get out of Eden." What happened then, it seems

Was something between God and human kind.

To blame a lowly flicker of the tongue,

A crawler with cold blood and clammy hide,

Seems more than just a bit convenient.

Let's take the rap. The fault was ours, not Snake's.

Hans Ostrom

Copyright 2008 Hans Ostrom

Ricked!

Thanks to someone vastly more attuned than I to the nuances of Internet culture, I have learned of the practice known as "Rickrolling." In the 1980s, a British singer named Rick Astley recorded what became a popular tune, one that I'd put in the disco category. Astley has a rather impressive baritone voice, which seems incongruous in relation to his physical appearance: He seems to be of relatively small physical stature, with red hair, not that red hair runs counter to baritone-status; anyway, it's one of those cases in which the person in possession of the voice is a bit of a surprise.

His big hit was "Never Gonna Give You Up," and, music-videos having been in their infancy back then, his video is nerdy and dorky, to use technical terms. Basically it's just Rick singing and doing some basic moves. Not quite explicably, he sometimes appears in a trench coat. Sometimes the alleged scene is a club--but the club is empty, and it's daytime. A female dancer or two materialize, and the bartender becomes a dancer at some point. There is not a "plot" to the video, and I say thank God to that. Who wants a plot in a music video? Indeed, who wants a music video? A few have been interesting, but basically, it's a moronic, corporate genre.

The video is so bad that it's good, and the song blends a great, trained voice with a fairly dumb disco song. All the elements are there, in other words, for camp, and I gather that things campy in this day and age can be turned into Internet pranks of the harmless variety. So people apparently trick their friends into viewing the Astley video on youtube, and allegedly hilarity ensues.

Nerdy and dorky, I am both amused by and sympathetic to Mr. Astley. Chiefly, he seems to have been working the job (my agent got me into this?) and in no way seems to take the video seriously. More nerdy than Rick, I find the lyrics interesting because they exemplify iambic tetrameter. In fact, one could substitute "Tyger, Tyger, burning bright/In the forest of the night," and have a splendidly surreal combination, a fearful symmetry, of Rick Astley and William Blake. "Tyger, tyger BURN-ing bright, in the forest OF THE NIGHT!" Blake is never gonna give up that tyger.

In the lyrics, there's also an interesting bit about the persona of the song offering "total commitment," which other fellows do not offer the beloved, it is argued. Perhaps he's threatening to have his lover committed to an insane asylum, OR he's offering to commit himself voluntarily to such a facility. "I'm never going to give you up, but at the same time, I'll be safely behind bars, getting treatment!" Of course, there's a chance that commitment refers to something else.


For a very good, frivolous time, check out the Astley video, rick-roll yourself, and have a grin or two in these dour times. Join the people who've been ricked!

A link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yu_moia-oVI

And thanks to Mr. Astley and his most impressive baritone.