Say There's A Ship

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Say There's A Ship

Say there's a ship we can take out
on the sea of our lives. Say we can
cast nets and lines and thus retrieve
sources of regret, despair, haul them
on board, apologize, repair--make things
right. Tell it so we can find

unrecoverable people out there. They stand
or sit in boats, close enough to see,
to hail. Make it so that ocean's not just
time or loss, memory or change, failure or
death. We know that sort of ocean well.

Talk about the joy we'll feel. Describe
the laughter, redemptive weeping, songs
and delight. Now a harder part: tell us
how to get there. Please tell us how
to go down to that ship, get on.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Hughes and Hurston on Haiti

Haiti's being in the news, to understate things awfully much, has reminded me that two Harlem Renaissance authors, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, developed a great interest in that nation.

An anthropologist as well as a fiction-writer, Hurston wrote the study: Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica. It was reissued in 2008.

Hughes wrote a play, Troubled Island, which concerns the Haitian rebel leader, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who helped defeat the army Napoleon had sent to Haiti and who later became emperor of Haiti. His dates are 1758-1806. Later, the composer William Grant Still and Hughes (as librettist) collaborated on the opera, Troubled Island.

Evening Hatch

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Evening Hatch

An evening hatch of gnats rose from the river
in a cloud. One gnat flew to a blue bluff,
landed there, pushed against infinite,
immovable stone mass. The gnat

fell away and down toward a pool,
out of which erupted a rainbow trout,
which snatched and swallowed the gnat.

I will have had less effect on things than
this gnat. It's good to meditate on that.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Lucille Clifton Passes

It is sad that poet Lucille Clifton passed on a few days ago. She was a poet of great wit and insight.

Here are two links to more information about her, one a recent article following her death, the other from poets. org:

Clifton article

Clifton on Poets.org

This is a good day to re-read some of her poems.

Black History Quiz and Africlassical.com

Should you have a hankering to take a quiz on Black history, then here's a link you might like to follow:


Black History Quiz

The quiz appears on the site, Africlassical.com, which explores the African and African American presence in classical music.

The site has a companion blog, which (finally, the self-serving part) kindly mentioned an upcoming musical program I helped to put together. Actually, the site borrowed a notice from another blog (thanks, Professor O'Neil)--ah, the complications of the web.

Langston Hughes/Awilda Verdejo

President Clinton Reads "The Concord Hymn"

Here is a link to a video of President Clinton reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's "The Concord Hymn," as part of the "Favorite Poem" project:

Clinton reads Concord Hymn

It was good to hear that the former President is doing well after a visit to the hospital.

As to his other poetic tastes, the CBS site includes The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats on his list of favorite books.

African American Crime Fiction

Probably like most of you, I've been reading detective fiction since I was in my early teens. I think I received the Doubleday collected Holmes stories as a gift from my parents when I was about 16.

Later, I wrote and published one mystery novel, featuring a rural sheriff as the detective.

And I've taught a class on detective fiction a few times. One interesting aspect of such a class is that you get some students who take simply because they have been reading in the genre independent of "school" work. In a sense they are connoisseurs.

Now I'm considering developing a course on African American detective fiction, or at least I'm taking steps toward the consideration. In the process, I discovered a few recent anthologies, including

African American Crime and Mystery Stories, edited by Eleanor Taylor Bland. I'm enjoying it a lot. Here's a link:

anthology

Sierra City Website

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(Sierra City, California, population 225)
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My hometown has a website now: Sierra City

Who knew?

Links To African American Poets

Here is site that provides a wealth of online links to information about African American poets:


Black poets

Black Past

I just ran across this great site:

http://www.blackpast.org/

Duke Takes The "A" Train

A nice video--for Black History Month or any month--of Duke Ellington playing "Take the A Train":

Duke Ellington

William Blake and Soccer

Below is a link to a great short film on youtube that combines football (of the soccer variety) and the poetry of William Blake. I think you'll like this:


Blake Press Conference

"Awful Library Books": A Most Amusing Blog

A link on the The Scrapper Poet's blog alerted me to the amusing blog, "Awful Library Books," which I hope you'll enjoy, too:

ALB

Eugene Lipscomb

As I was getting ready to have a couple friends over for the Super Bowl (more chat than Super Bowl, truth to tell), I thought, for some reason, of Randall Jarrell's elegy for the professional football player Eugene "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, who played professionally for Baltimore, L.A., and Pittsburgh teams but who died of a heroin overdose in 1963. I don't think that in '63 I was really much aware of professional football, but I distinctly remember the name "Big Daddy Lipscomb," which I found enchanting, partly for the sound of it.

Anyway, below is a link to Jarrell's poem, "Say Goodbye to Big Daddy." The page starts with a sports poems by William Carlos Williams, so you just have to scroll down a bit once you're there.

Big Daddy Lipscomb Poem

Errant

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Errant

A wayward knight came into our
time zone. He was diminutive,
in need of a bath, and not
that great a horseman. We recycled
his armor, found a good home
for his nag, got him some job-
training: financial sector. Last
we heard, he'd been hired by
an Internet start-up called
errant.netcomorg.


Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Sequioadendron Giganteum

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Sequoiadendron Giganteum

From a classroom in the building on a knoll,
I look across, see the Sequoiadendron giganteum,
a shaggy green profile foregrounding faint gray
distant Cascades and clouds rippled like a tide.

The tree's A-shape's improvised upon by growth--
something like shoulders protrude there thirty
feet from the top. And near the top, there's a gap
in boughs, where the trunk looks like a thread.

Then, askew, a few wee branches appear, a tiny
comic feathery cap, a frivolous dash, a perfect
flaw. Of course, Sequoiadendron giganteum has
nothing to tell us we haven't told ourselves.

It has nothing to do with us, but has this nothing
at such a grand and unrushed pace, we're tempted
to be quiet, simply to stare at this other thing,
this individuality of tree that encompasses its

species and thinks nothing, thinks nothing of ours.


Link to info

Copyright 2010 Hans Ostrom

Countee Cullen

Countee Cullen was one of the first literary stars of what's known now as the Harlem Renaissance (circa 1919-1934), and although his reputation dwindled after that, it recovered, and he is arguably one of the best lyric poets the U.S. has produced. His sonnet, "Yet Do I Marvel," is perfect, blending a formal but contemporary idiom with the form and crafting a superb "argument" about race, color, theology, and existentialism--without ever getting heavy, and with a light ironic touch. It's just one of those poems you can admire forever.

There's a nice anthology of Cullen's poetry--and one novel--edited by Gerald Early: My Soul's High Song.

Eventually, Cullen pursued middle-school teaching as a career--in Harlem, where James Baldwin was one of his students.

Here is a link to more information about Cullen:

Countee

Recycling Message

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Recycling Message


Without reading it
carefully, I just
recycled in the black
tub a postcard sent
to me and others
reminding us to live
more greenly.



Copyright 2010

Fine Poem By Joe Salerno

At "Rinabeana's" site, I found a fine poem by Joe Salerno, "Poetry Is the Art of Not Succeeding":

Poem

Black History Month Begins

...And a happy Black History Month to you. What a good idea historian and professor Carter G. Woodson had way back when.

I thought I'd mention two worthy anthologies of African American poetry: African American Poetry: An Anthology 1773-1927, edited by Joan R. Sherman and James M. Bell--from Dover Books, for two dollars (new). And Every Shut Eye Ain't Asleep: An Anthology of African American Poetry Since 1945, edited by Michael Harper and Anthony Walton, from Back Bay Books. --Oops, this apparently leaves a gap between 1927 and 1945, so you might look at Oxford's anthology of African American poetry.