Poems From Africa

The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry arrived, and of course I immediately dived in.

Certainly, the editors must have felt dispirited at times (as they imply) because their task was to represent poetry from writers in nations and homelands across a whole immense continent in a wide variety of languages--all in one volume.

Some well known writers are represented, as one might expect; these include Ben Okri, Tchicaya U Tam'si, and Wole Soyinka.

One of my favorite poems so far is "Sometimes When It Rains," by Gcina Mhlophe, a poet from South Africa. Unfortunately, no other biographical information about her appears in the back of the book. "Sometimes when it rains" is a first-line refrain in five-line, free-verse stanzas, of which there are ten. The images, experiences, memories, and/or scenes depicted in each stanza get increasingly more complex, weighty, and intense, and there's also a general movement from childhood to adulthood--and toward what might be called political awareness. A poem with this design can easily become a static list-poem, but Mhlophe escapes that outcome easily. The voice is authorative, and one never gets the feeling the poem or poet is trying to do too much, so (almost paradoxically) the poem's able to achieve a lot. I think I'm going to use this poem in classes. There's so much to admire in it.

It's hard to beat a new, interesting anthology of poetry on an unseasonably cold day in the Pacific Northwest. And I'm just getting started reading it.

Tell Us How We're Doing

We went to a restaurant the other evening, and with the check, also known as a bill, came a pre-printed card on which was printed a survey about the restaurant and the server.

I almost never fill out such surveys because I don't know what the management is going to do with them, if anything. I might have mentioned that some of the lettuce in the salad was frozen, but I'd already mentioned this fact to the server, not so much to complain or whine as to alert her to a possible refrigeration-problem. Of course, my social-scientist friends would probably critique the validity of the survey itself. Usually surveys like this are titled something along the lines of "Tell Us How We're Doing."


Tell Us How We're Doing

When our global corporation defrauded
everyone, did a representative greet you
with a smile? When we built another
nuclear missile, was it delivered in a
timely fashion? After we dumped
poison into a river without warning
anyone, did you receive a Christmas
card from us? When we took away
your rights, were we dressed properly?

We value the opinions not only of
our clients but also of our victims.
Please take a few moments and let
us know how we're doing. After
you fill out the survey, present it
to the uniformed guard who is
staring at you. Thanks!


Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

In The TV

I know it's eccentric of me, but I wish a lot of television-shows, even current ones, were in black-and-white. I also wish the "test-pattern" would appear now and then--the one that used to appear when they ran out of programming. Now when they run out of programming, they run program-length commercials, which aren't as fascinating as that test-pattern, which looked like an elaborate, cryptic target. I also miss all those glass tubes you could look at when someone took the back of the TV off. Televisions now are essentially computer-monitors, aren't they? Oh, well. They seem to work pretty well.

Inside the Television

Sometimes he kept the television off
so he might imagine what was in there:
a movie in which books are characters
who talk; a news-program that reports
on only one significant story per week
in unrelenting, exacting detail, commercial-
free; a series in which celebrities interview
ordinary working people and listen; the
Saw Channel; a nest of new-born birds;
a cake; shadows folded neatly like black
linen; a collection of some excellent TV-
moments from childhood; unimagined
wonders.

Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Those Who Can, Learned How To

(image: cover of book about Jaime Escalante, renowned teacher

of high-school math)

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I've been glancing at some quotations about teachers; my text is the Webster's New Explorer Dictionary of Quotations (Massachusetts: Merriam Webster, 2000), pp. 408-409.
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Probably the most famous quotation about teachers is from George Bernard Shaw's play, Man and Superman: "He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches." The quotation often appears in the plural nowadays: "Those who can . . . ." The quotation has endured because it's well phrased, reflect the great appeal that "making it" entirely on one's own has, and it gives voice to bad feelings toward and memories of schooling and teachers we might harbor.

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Apparently Shaw harbored quite a few of these about the schools he attended: Wesleyan Connexional School and the Dublin English Scientific and Commercial Day School. The trouble with these schools may have begun with their names, and it continued with such lovely practices as corporal punishment.

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Later Shaw married an heiress; they were both members of the socialist Fabian Society. I don't think the heiress gave up her inheritance. Those who have the capital tend to keep it. Ironically, Shaw helped found the London School of Economics, where at least a few of the teachers, apparently, can teach, do teach, and can practice economics. I think Mick Jagger went there. He certainly seems to have learned something about amassing capital--and about dancing in a very silly way.

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A few more quotations about teaching:

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"A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops." --Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams. I assume the quotation applies to women teachers, too, and I might add that teachers can never tell where the influence starts. It's a mystery.
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"Who dares to teach must never cease to learn." --John Cotton Dana, motto composed for Kean College, New Jersey. Amen, brother Dana. You have to keep current in the subject you teach, but as importantly, you have to maintain a certain delight in learning. And the next class-session is the none you have to do well in, regardless of how well or poorly the last session went. I don't know if Kean College still exists. I'm going to check.

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Of course, all of us learn from and teach each other all the time. That's pretty much how society and culture work. If you don't know, you ask; if you see someone struggling to figure something out, and you know something about it, you offer to show them how the thing works. If you can, and if you have the opportunity, teach someone who can't, provided they appear to be open to the idea of learning. Random acts of instruction, and all that.

Air Voltaire

(image: Voltaire)








Before Air Jordan (the U.S. basketball player, not the airline), there was Air Voltaire, although I'm not sure he actually went by that nickname.

However, in the image above, he certainly is styling, even if he doesn't seem to be leaping, sinking jump-shots, playing suffocating defense, or making lots of commercials. Voltaire was in favor of so-called "free trade," so if he were alive today, he might do American Express adverts or maybe ones for travel in France.

Actually, "Voltaire" itself is a nickname, or at least a pseudonym--for François Marie Arouet, born 1694, died 1778, and most famous, of course, for having written Candide. In his own lifetime, he was more famous for pamphlets and encyclopedia-articles (in an age when encyclopedia-articles were more sexy than they are now).

Voltaire was essentially a satirist in the tradition of Swift, whose writing he admired. He wasn't an atheist or a revolutionary but was rather a deist and a reformer. In the town he ultimately settled in, for example, he used his capital to create what we might call small business, and he built housing, which he offered to people on extremely reasonable terms.

At the same time, Candide is a hilarious, scalpel-like attack on optimism (especially that suggested by Leibniz), on religiosity, on fanaticism of any kind, and on humans' capacity for getting almost everything wrong. After Pangloss, the hopelessly optimistic philosopher, yet again expresses his view that "all was for the very best," a character named James replies, "Men," he said, "must have corrupted nature a little, because they weren't born wolves, yet they've become wolves: God didn't give them twenty-four-pounders [cannons; we might substitute "nuclear missiles"] or bayonets, but they've made themselves bayonets and cannons with which to destroy each other. I might also mention bankruptcies, and the law which takes over a bankrupt's property to defraud his creditors of it." (end of chapter three)

Imagined how amused and unsurprised Voltaire would be by the current global-captial implosion, which seems to spring directly from greed, corruption, and "de-regulation," also known as white-collar lawlessness.

Circuitously and incorrectly, Voltaire often gets blamed or credited, depending on your viewpoint, with the French Revolution, but, as Andre Maurois points out in a nice introduction to the Bantam Classic edition, Voltaire was a monarchist, a deist, and a scientist. He was Monsieur Mainstream Enlightenment, in other words, as well as being Air Voltaire. His view, as expressed in Candide, was that one needed to tend one's own garden--tend to business, that is; concentrate; practice moderation; be sensible; follow the data.

Maurois calls this a "bourgeois" worldview, as well as a scientific (in the sense of Englightenment) one, and he's probably right. Voltaire was no revolutionary. It's just that his views were so anti-establishment and anti-authoritarian at the time that people reacted as if he were a revolutionary. He often faced censorship. My own less-than-educated guess is that he managed to be a monarchist and a reformer/deist at the same time chiefly because he liked sensible order and seemed to be getting it from the system. He seems to have been a monarchist in the sense most Brits are monarchists now--liberal (in the 19th century sense, not as in U.S. Democrats), republican (small "r"), and tolerant of tradition, as long as it didn't go crazy.

Best of all, Candide is a very quick, funny book--still. Air Voltaire is in the house.

After Next

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Next

What happens next? Next happens
next. You go to a funeral, a hard
summing-up, and you feel as if
something's been sealed. Not long
thereafter you're standing in a
grocery store, buying celery,
or you're at home pawing through
mail distractedly.
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Tides of ordinary
life roll in, unchecked by what we
deem momentous, even cataclysmic.
In the midst of broadcast
disaster, when time seems like
it should be seized, people
need to go to the bathroom,
put clothes in a closet, feed
farm-animals or a pet. Our
own parts in the flow end, yes.
The flow, no, never ends.
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Announcer

(image: George Fenneman, Groucho Marx's announcer, with Groucho)










I suspect I was thinking first of the late Don LaFontaine when I wrote this poem. He was a professional announcer or voice-over specialist, famous for describing movies by starting, "In a world where . . .". He also did a very funny send-up of himself on a Geiko commercial, second only to the appearance of Little Richard (who transforms every form in which he works, even a commercial). But more broadly the poem is about all those radio and TV announcers with those resonating, cultivated voices. "Announcing" is one of those niche-careers that materialized because of the rise of electronic mass-media. Arguably, the announcer with the toughest job was George Fenneman, who had to work with the acerbic, unpredictable Groucho Marx on a game-show called You Bet Your Life. I saw it only a few times, but even when I was a kid, I sensed that Fenneman was managing Groucho, smoothing over the rough spots.

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Announcer
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For decades he told contestants
what they'd won, he introduced
the host, and he said other words
to help create The Show. He could
make his voice resonate the way
microphones like it and make it
dive down, rise up, purr in
between, but most
importantly sound optimistic
and happy for people came home
from work and watched TV or
watched TV while they cleaned
house. The Show was to make
people happy so they would
watch The Show and maybe buy
the products advertised.

Small man. Big voice. Calm
spirit. Talking through a
microphone was his work
and made as much sense
and money as anything else,
more or less. His voice won
the bread. A family, sure. He
got sick and died. People do.
Anyway the great age of
radio and TV announcers
had come and gone. Gone!
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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

You Don't Say?

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Really?

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Tell me a story.

Go ahead.

I will listen and

Nod my head.

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Talk a lot.

Make it plenty.

I'm one patient

Entity.

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Conversing's something

We can do.

We coincided:

Me and you--

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(Or "you and I").

Is that so?

Tell me more!

I want to know.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Snoring

According to the OED online, one of the earliest appearances of "snore" and/or "snoring" in print occurred in 1140, but an arguably more entertaining quotation comes from the 18th century and essayist Richard Steele:

1710 STEELE Tatler No. 208 6 We have a Member of our Club, that when Sir Jeffery falls asleep, wakens him with Snoring.

The etymological trail of "snore" also runs through such variations as "snork" and "snort." There's just too much to like about those two words.

Snoring

A motorcycle gaggle guns its snarlers

into Larynx Tunnel. Then a nearby sea

seems to sigh. The engines rumble once

again. The process repeats itself in a crude

rhythm as the one lying next to you or

the you who listens to you subconsciously

waits for a crescendo to seize the terrible

song. Whoever is listening waits for a gulp,

a swallow, a sigh--a break of some kind

that will invite soft silence to settle

like a dew on the slumbering cacaphonic

heap of prostrate weariness. How

can tired be so loud?

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom

Auden After the News

(image: W.H. Auden)











I listened to and watched some news tonight on television. Staunch Republican Frank Gaffney is still claiming that Saddam Hussein consorted with those responsible for attacking the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon and that, therefore, the invasion of Iraq was the right thing to do. Then I learned that respected (if controversial) reporter Sy Hersh, speaking at a forum in the Midwest, explained that the Bush administration included an assassination-squad that reported directly to the Vice President and operated independently--traveling to other countries, not even bothering to communicate with the CIA, and killing people named on a list. The book containing Hersh's reporting is not due out for 18 months or so; we'll have to wait on the evidence for a while, but perhaps others will dig into the story now to see if it will hold up. Fortunately (or, in this case, unfortunately) Hersh almost always gets things right.

Having had enoughof the news, I turned to W.H. Auden's Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957 (New York: Vintage 1975) and read "A Walk After Dark," which ends this way:


For the present stalks abroad
Like the past, and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occurring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world.

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends
And these Unitd States.

(pp. 232-233)

Promptly Write Poetry

I was cleaning up my computer's "desktop," which is neither a desk nor a top (an uppermost surface), and I ran across a list of "prompts" or "ideas" for poems--each prompt designed to help students start writing a poem.

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Probably, the issue of whether to use prompts in creative-writing classes (or simply in one's own writing) is less contentious now than it was 10-20 years ago. In all the creative-writing courses I took in college, we were given almost no prompts. In one class, however, Karl Shapiro gave us a semester-long task of writing poems about a poet whose worked we liked. I chose Hopkins and wrote a series of poems about him.

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I guess one argument against "assigning" poems or providing prompts is that poetry is supposed to spring purely from inspiration. Of course, a nearby philosopher will immediately order, "Define 'inspiration.'"

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With regard to this issue, I'm terribly biased, so much so that I co-wrote a book, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively that discusses different aspects of writing poetry, fiction, drama, and nonfiction but that, in each piece, ends with some ideas for writing. In a way, it's a book full of prompts, topics, tasks, assignments, experiments, triggers, suggestions (choose your favorite term).

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I'm the sort of writer that often likes to be given tasks or challenges, and I actually think many poets fall into (or wander into) this category. To some degree, Shakespeare challenged himself (or maybe one of his friends challenged him) to write a sonnet that disrupted conventions of sonnets when he wrote "Sonnet 18." "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" It's as if he's asking himself more than he's asking the imaginary listener. Much of the poem is taken up with his showing that the comparison isn't a good idea, so Shakespeare is writing a kind of counter-sonnet that refuses to make conventional comparisons. His implicit poetic answer to the question is, "Well, I shall and I shan't--watch this."

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Sometimes the challenge or prompt is as simple as. . . trying to write a villanelle, a sestina, a sonnet, or a pantoum, etc....or trying to write a poem in one long sentence...or trying to write a poem on a topic about which you've written a poem: refrigerator, feet, landfill (e.g.). Often, that is, "inspiration" may spring from a fairly plain task one gives oneself or from an idea or an experiment someone asks you to try. Once the writing is underway, we might find more inspiration, more reasons to keep wanting to write the thing.

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Anyway, here are the prompts I found on my non-existent but nonetheless cluttered "desktop," in the unlikely event your're interested:

Write an homage-poem about a favorite writer. You need not be enthralled by the writer or her/his work, but you should like a lot of the writing, and you should feel a strong connection to it or to her/him (as you imagine her/him—after all, the writer may have died long ago). But it’s fine to have mixed, ambivalent feelings toward the writer and his/her work. (Auden wrote an homage to Yeats; Ginsberg wrote an homage to Whitman.)

Write a poem about a time when you were excluded from a group or, at the very least, when you believed yourself to have been excluded from a group.

Pick an age, more or less arbitrarily: 11, 9, 15, 13 years old. Then write a poem in which you completely make up an “autobiographical” event. But it should seem real, not farcical or over the top. And it might even capture an emotion you might have felt at that age, even if the “facts” of the poem are entirely fictional.

Write a poem that begins, “After you lied to me, . . . .”

Write a poem that begins, “After I lied to you, . . . .”

Write a poem about an animal you have observed closely—but not a pet. It has to be an animal you’ve watched—maybe smelled or heard, too. --You know, like that one horse that slobbered on you, or the spider that lives in your bathroom.

Quickly list ten verbs, in the past tense. Then start a poem that draws heavily on this list of verbs. Let the language pull the subject. Follow the verbs. See where they go.

Write a poem consisting of 10 images you associate with a given topic, thing, subject. You might start by making a list of topics, things, or subjects--or even by asking someone else help you make the list. When you write, make your language precise. Present the images. Then see where the poem takes you.

Think of a strong emotion—fear, love, disgust, outrage. Then write a poem about something neutral—tea, a boulder, being in the library, whatever. Let the emotion drive the poem—but not overtly. Leave the emotion under the poem, like molten but unseen lava.

Write a poem that is somehow concerned with the topic of shame, but be concrete—trust the images.

Library Catalogue As Inspiration

(image: old library-catalogue, the wooden kind)

So recently I searched (online) the Nevada County (California--confusing, I know) Library catalogue to see if the library held a book by me. I thought I had donated one, but I was wrong. At any rate, I typed my name in and hit search, and although I was searching by "author," the catalogue, having not found anything related to my name, presented me with suggested keywords related to each of my names.

Consequently, in relation to "Hans," the following list was provided:

strong, lost, most, cost, position, stop, strength, St [no period], stood, lot

The list, however, was verticle and had no commas, so it looked a bit like a poem.

In relation to "Ostrom," the following list was provided:

hands, has, then, hand, as, an, answer, things, means, ask

Of course, when presented with lists of words like this--lists that are both random and not--a poet thinks he or she has just received a most extraordinary gift indeed.

In poetry-writing classes, I often have students make lists of their favorite words (although I steer them away from proper names or pets' names) and then begin to generate a poem strictly from the words themselves, without a subject or topic in mind. Of course, additional words have to come into play to help begin to stitch something together. Temporarily, I fashion a false binary and say that sometimes we're inspired by something than happens or that we remember, and then we go find language to make a poem out of it, but that at other times, we start with language and go in search of a topic. The processes are much more entangled and reciprocal than that, certainly, but the idea is to consider language itself as a kind of "inspiration," a starting place, a trigger.

In any event, I gave myself the same assignment, except that I worked with the words from the library catalogue, not with my favorite words. The initial draft looks like this:

What Things May Mean

Even the strong
will have lost most.
That is the cost
of our position.
We must stop
thinking of strength
as sainthood.

Hands have. A
hand has an answer
sometimes. In
the conversation
you will have
this afternoon,
the word “things”
means “ask.”

I don't know that I've really found a subject yet, or maybe I've found too many, but it was most pleasurable to work with these words, which had arrived unexpectedly and seemed to ask to be made into some kind of poem. Putting them into sentences and aligning their sounds were satisfying tasks. I also like the fact that databases now politely correct us and offer to make up for our mistakes by providing "helpful" suggestions, including lists of words the computer thinks we thought we meant to write. Lovely.

Naps

(image: Kindergarten students taking a collective nap)

The OED online lists and defines a dozen different versions of "nap" as a noun, ranging from a type of wool fiber to a cup to "a baby's nap"--that is, a diaper (as it's called in the U.S.) or a "nappy," as the English call it. There's also "nap" as an adjective and five different versions of "nap" as a verb. Of course, some of these incarnations of nap are now obsolete, but nonetheless, who knew "nap" was such a various-and-sundry word? The OED did, it seems. One quotation is from Dickens:

DICKENS Dombey & Son (1848) xxiii. 240 He..refreshed his mind with a nap

Through 8th grade, I went to school in a town 12 miles away from where my family lived. We road the bus there, and on the bus were kids from age 6 to 18. Because the high-school "day" was longer than the first-grade one, the teacher had us first-graders take a nap on the floor of the classroom. I gather that still goes on in kindergartens, judging by the photo I found on the web (above). We had to sleep on these bizarre naugahyde mats, and I do wonder now about the hygeine-factor, but as to the comfort-factor: children can sleep anywhere.

Anyway, the main idea, I think, was for the teacher to take a break and restore some sanity to herself while she waited for 3:30 to roll around, whereupon we'd board the bus and travel 12 miles up the mountain--on a winding highway next to a canyon: kudos to the bus-driver (usually it was one Neil Foster), who never had an accident in the 8 years I rode the bus. I recall one flat-tire, which Mr. Foster promptly changed.

Napping may be a crucial key not just to a teacher of young children but to civilization itself. It might help Americans' sanity, for example, if the U.S. were to construct its culture more along the lines of Italy and Latin America, where the afternoon nap still seems to be central.

I was reading this book, Rules of Thumb, yesterday, and according to it, a one-hour nap is equivalent to three hours of sleep at night. The book didn't explain in what way the nap was equivalent, but I assume the authors meant that body and mind were provided as much restoration by a one-hour nap as three hours of night-sleep. I have no idea whether this information is accurate, and there is the famous REM-sleep-factor to consider, but I can say that naps seem to work just fine for me, when I can fit them in. The world just seems to be a little more manageable after one takes a nap. And then there's . . .the double-nap.

The Double-Nap

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He woke up from a nap,

stared at light left by

a gap in curtains, thought

of ambition as an acquaintance

who never repays personal

loans, enjoyed the pleasure

of second weariness, the lure

of lassitude, and lapsed once

more into napping, which

he considered to be a most

constant, reliable friend

indeed, one with an interest

in his restoration. Oh, Lord,

thought the napping man,

subluminously: a day off,

crowned by a double-nap.

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Copyright 2009 Hans Ostrom