Saturday, April 9, 2011

The Difference Between Poetry and Prose

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The Difference Between Poetry and Prose

What is the difference between poetry and prose?
is a question poetry never even thinks to ask at a party.
Poetry is too distracted looking at the curve of someone's
buttock, or tasting the word "vellum," which somebody
uttered a half-hour ago, or letting a whiff of vanilla cast
it into a pool of memory. Prose is the responsible sibling,

doing its duty to make something happen. Poetry assumes
everything's always happening already. It is
stoned, stunned, seduced, and stung by reality,
which just happens to be, according to poetry.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Friday, April 8, 2011

"Tropics in New York," by Claude McKay

Watch Out for Us

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Watch Out for Us

We're all around you, you know. There are
a lot of us--the ones who over-think things,
the ponderers. (Perhaps you're one of us:
what do you think?) We think of thinking

as vocation. Oh, yes, we're usually boring
or invisible or impertinent, in the best sense
of the latter word: think about it. If you ask
us what we think, however, we may defer

or deflect. We don't necessarily like sharing
what we think. That trait belongs to a different
sort. We just like thinking. At social events,
we might flash a smile, answer an arcane

question, or amuse briefly, but then we
always withdraw. Why? To get away
from noise and to think. What good are we?
Where does all this thinking get us, get you?

Ah, we think about those questions, too.
Oh, yes, you bet we do.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Nothing Less

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Nothing Less

On the brink of exhausting the Earth, it's
past time to re-think, don't you think?
The scandals of nuclear weapons,
starvation, species eradication. Chasms
between rich and poor . . . . Nothing less
than a revolution of spirit shall suffice.
The age seems to beg for moral transformation,
by which we agree to think ahead by centuries,
not quarter-years.  Short-term profits
shall be anathema. A certain selflessness
must obtain. We have to mine it within
ourselves. It's there. Refine it--that ore
known by an old-fashioned name, virtue.
Nothing less than a revolution of the spirit
shall suffice, I think, when I think twice.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Better Than Television

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Better Than Television

This week I encountered several people who talk
constantly out loud to themselves in public. Out
very loud. It's interesting how they are at once
accepted and normatively abnormal: I experience
curiosity and wariness. Also of interest is that
I don't listen carefully to them. If I did, I'd have
to follow them because they're almost always
on the move, and it would be rude to follow them.
But it's a missed opportunity, not listening, I suspect.
Maybe it's gibberish, maybe it's not: I don't know.
But it has to be better than television. At least.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Monday, April 4, 2011

Final Engagement

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Final Engagement

The man told me twelve-hundred American
veterans of World War II die each month now.
The Macs and Johnnys, Jimmies and Franks,
farm-boys, city-boys; Black soldiers
once concentrated in separate divisions; men
who enlisted at Manzanar or Tule Lake; women
called WAVES whose names were Kay or
Gladys, Mildred, Lucille, Gloria, or Dolores;
conscientious objectors, veterans of another kind
of war; men with lifelong jitters, and worse, after
the war.  It's the final engagement, in which 1200
perish per month, maybe more, their photos
ghostlike on local obit websites. It's the final
assault on the jitterbug and cherry blossoms,
high-balls, unfiltered Camels, the sound of Murrow's voice,
the Lindy Hop, silk nylons, hair oil, propellers,
and a deep reticence to talk with anyone about what
happened over there, over here.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Friday, April 1, 2011

My White Body

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My White Body

My white body has brought me ease
in this USA society that's marked black
and brown bodies, that marks them still.

My body white and masculine has functioned
as a passport, yes it has. Has often let me
be as invisible or as noticed as I prefer.

Has allowed me to prefer. I hear the voices
of contrarians: Have my white body and I
been excluded, ignored, worked hard, and


maybe even hated?  Oh, sure. But not so
as to make my white body's experience
and me equivalent to that of those marked

by this USA society. I've been reading
The Slave Ship: A Human History by
Marcus Rediker, 2008. You know, you

think you know, but you don't know--
that is why history is written, read.
Admit it. Admit you have a white body

according to the culture's rules, I told
myself. And let's not whitewash the issue.
This isn't Tom Sawyer's fence.

What's an admission worth? Not much.
It's a move, a mental shift. What must ensue
after the admission must be more productive

than just the admission. Otherwise the move
becomes just more hoo-hah from a mind inside
a white body. My white body has brought me ease.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

My Father Does Disapprobation

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My Father Does Disapprobation


Jesus Christ Almighty! my father used to say,
not speaking to, of, or for Jesus but to one or more
of his three sons, who had done something maybe
not even wrong but just imperfectly. He could be
thunderous in his disapprobation, which is a word
I never heard him say.  He was the Jehovah

of our family--and an atheist: no competition.
Jesus Christ Almighty HIT the sonofabitch!!
he'd shout--concerning a sledge-hammer,
wielded by one of us, at a wooden stake.

A mere stake being driven into the mere ground!
Disproportionate furor! Magnificent, in its own
way, and in its own way Judeo-Christian: Old School.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom