Hidden Driveway

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Hidden Driveway

In Tacoma to-Friday-night, after
laughing as hard as we needed to
with friends, we walked down
a dark alley to our car,

and I saw a sign on a
greased wooden telephone pole
that read, "Hidden Driveway,"
and above it was a round

convex mirror, in which
pointless murky images lived.
I found the concept of
a hidden driveway to be

not quite beautiful but
nonetheless necessary.
How crucial, I thought,
to have hidden driveways

out of which unseen people
drive their hidden vehicles
into obscure traffic to
secret jobs to earn invisible

money for unacknowledged
families, and then come home
to park the ghost-car and go
inside a domestic cloud.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Epidemiology of Hate

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Epidemiology of Hate

If only we could vaccinate
against hate.
It's the constant plague. It leaves
each era a wreck,
and from each new wreck
more hate mutates.

Consider the hate you hear
every day in common discourse,
in how our "leaders" talk to each
other about people they imagine
to be us. Language
becomes black bile. Vile
strategems go viral.

No mass-cure for hate exists.
Individuals must treat themselves,
must get to know how to learn.
Must go inside themselves, scrub
the mind, and think. Must
choose to get better; or
at least not worse.

To witness the pleasure of hate
play on faces and turn person-herds
rabid is to glimpse evil's vectors
and hosts. People, witness what
hate does to you, to them. Change.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Creature in a Copse

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Creature in a Copse

Scuffed rough gray trunks of fir trees
in a copse stand ruler-straight, may
suggest modest ambition or nothing
but the image they help compose.
"Yes, trees are everywhere," wrote
Pound, dismissively, the rest of the
argument left unstated. True, almost

no one can really take a nature-break
from civilization because in retreat
even a recluse thinks of civilization.
A lot. Still, the still copse is. How
these particular (not just any) boughs
play riffs on breeze matters if you
notice. No performance is identical.

Of course there's machinery, there are
people, more or less nearby. And there's
you, as envoi from the not-wild. To come
here, to look at a stand of conifers, always
intricate, proves a worth, re-establishes
a modest, appropriate dignity not
discoverable by drilling through rocks

from civilizations' virtual rubble of myths
and texts. A precocious smart-ass in a copse
is just another creature amid trees that
keep on with the being thing and breathe.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Something My Wife Said To Me Today

"I know you would be comfortable living between a cemetery and a creek-ravine, but most people wouldn't, okay?"

Where He Works

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Where He Works

At the institution where he works,
people pass each other in corridors
or outside. They say hello for 10,
15, 20, 30 years. They recall each other's
names. Or not. They "work together"--
not really. Each is after only her or his
cup of compensation, acknowledgement.
Sometimes one person gets excised by the
institution.  Efficiently cut away. It
upsets a few people. For a while. Then,
more soon than late, there's no memory
of who left, who got removed. The
institution is like a moored ship full
of ghosts.  It's not going anywhere.
Hello, goodbye, request, deny.
The institution sometimes consults
the ghosts before it changes
things.  This is an especially empty
ritual.  A polite and airless drama.
After one ghost leaves, another
takes its place.  Or not. Hi. Nice
to see you.  See you later. Thanks! No.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

The Art of Obscurity

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The Art of Obscurity

Becoming a hermit
is the lazy person's path
to obscurity. The more
determined Obscurity Artist

becomes known but not
remembered, hides in plain
sight, is never exalted; it
goes without saying: hush.

Make connections that break.
Pretend to be interested in
rising and climbing, but see
to it you withdraw in time.

Stay and play at edges.
Always trouble categories.
Take advice but treat it
as material to rework

into whatever art it is
you make, not as assistance
out of the shadows.  Come and
go as you please, a kind of fame.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Late Orthodontia

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Late Orthodontia

A dentist wants to straighten the man's teeth,
close up those those gaps--the ones that help
to scare people when his smile, tied somehow
to a Viking heritage, fully deploys its ivory squad.
An aunt of his had teeth behind her wisdom teeth.
He wonders if his is a Berserker's grin.

He hadn't invited the dentist to suggest dental
rearrangement. He had been and is content
with his teeth.  The man gets much unbidden
advice, always has. War, famine, and economic
collapse continue, so he's not however about
to spend excess thought on piercers and grinders

that do their jobs. "Do you floss with rope?" a
pretty young woman once asked him way back
then at a college party. "If you take your clothes
off, I'll try it," he'd said. They'd shared a laugh,
teeth bared. She'd stared at his teeth. Again.
Hers were straight and white, direct from suburbia.

"When I was 10," he told her, "my parents asked
the dentist if I should get braces." Probably the
Eagles were playing in the party's background--
"Tequila Sunrise" or "Take It Easy."  He said,
"But the dentist told them that my tongue is
too big and would just push the teeth and open

the gaps again. "No," the woman had said. She
smelled good, had on a thin dress. "Yes," he said.
Now through the Invisoline of memory, he
recalls that she shifted hips as he sipped tequila.
"Really," she said, not quite a question, and sipped
her beer, looked at his closed mouth; and pondered.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Attitude Toward Light

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Attitude Toward Light


Light's entered once more. It's physics;
and a miracle. A sky of light, a scene
of green life drinking light--commonplace,
we might say; but shouldn't.

You're seeing the light or-and feeling
light's warmth on your skin--
light just arriving from the sun. Breathe
into the peace of it. Will civilization--
there's only one now, you know--
ever be marked mainly by its
capacity for peace? In this light,

it's important to ask such questions,
from which more light shines. Let your arms
hang down. Tilt your face up to the light.
For a moment hold this attitude, not
that other one. Your breath goes
out to the light.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Machine People

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Machine People

You've ground me down to dust,
machine-people, pious nihilists,
capitalized thugs. You silly
sonsofbitches, you wreck shit
and never have to pay. You
blood- and spirit-sucking demons
who fucking hate everything including
your own bodies, your own children,
anyone with wit, brains, sensuality,
magic, quickness, intuition. You

horrible people, offspring of
slaveowners, union-busters,
torturers, flesh-burners,  apocaplyptic
thieves, puritanical freaks,
earth-eaters. God damn you
to your Machine Hell, your
Bankers' Killing Floors,
your cabinets of body parts.

You've ground me down but
I aspire to summon energy
enough to rise up and eat
your throat and stick a spike
of history into the side of your
fucking head. You've ground me
down to dust, so God damn you.
"He's very abrupt and changeful.
What brand of man is he?" asks
Sweet Jane Eyre, ground down.

He's the brand of man who's
going to bury a pick-ax into
your head while you sleep on
silk sheets next to a trophy-wife.

You've ground me down to
the dust you'll choke on,
eyeballs bulging, your fourth
wife grabbing jewels and
pre-nupts as she laughs and runs.
As you descend from your
private jet, glance left.
Too late. Too late.

"All's To Do Again," by A.E. Housman

"i gather up," by Sonia Sanchez

"Dust of Snow," by Robert Frost

"Salamander Confession," by Hans Ostrom

"To Recite Every Day," by William Stafford

Proverbs, IV

"Oklahoma Is," by Hans Ostrom

"A TABLE," by Gertrude Stein

Proverbs III

Eyes on the Road

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Eyes on the Road

I don't like to keep my eyes on the road.
I like to keep them in my head.

I imagine a long highway covered with eyeballs,
hear the sound of car-tires striking them,

see what's left--miles of slime on asphalt.

Motorists  pull over. They and their passengers
run into woods, retch and moan near ponds,

where frogs lift their eyes out of water, stare.

Hey, now: something amphibian in human eyes,
which blinking keeps wet and dry land
keeps focused. 

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

Proverbs II

Ruby Chimerica on the Hopi Reservation, Arizona

Michelle Alexander on "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age o...

Proverbs, I

The Best Book On Racism in the U.S. in Decades

I've just read the best book on racism in the U.S. in decades. It is The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander. Alexander is a former attorney. She has a gift for amassing crucial detail, weaving into a brisk narrative, but not cutting corners.  She used to be a litigator. From her book, I've deduced that one of her techniques in court must have been to let the evidence speak for itself when it is overwhelming.


I hope I don't mangle her thesis too much as I paraphrase it.  It is foregrounded by a sketch of American history, which includes (of course) slavery, followed briefly by Reconstruction, followed immediately by the era of Redeemers, white folks who wanted to "redeem" society.  We all know about the KKK and white terrorism and Jim Crow, as well as de facto Jim Crow in the North, which affected housing and schools, etc. Two keys to Jim Crow were disenfranchisement and using the law to retain de facto slavery. That is, on a massive scale, white folks would have Black men, especially, arrested on any pretext, sent to prison, but then "hired" out as workers, with no pay.  Alexander documents this beautifully.

Fast-forward to 1980 and the Rise of Reagan. She documents how Reagan and his regime invented a war on drugs out of whole cloth.  They deployed a massive PR program, even, to scare (white) people and link the "war" to Nixon's "law and order" schtick.  In the PR program, drugs were linked almost exclusively to Black people. Enforcement was federalized and militarized.  Do you remember a time when most cities and towns didn't have a SWAT team? Me, too. Now everybody has a SWAT team, and through various means such teams and other local law-enforcement are linked to the FEDs. The same thing has happened with the "war on terror," of course.  Reagan's Feds leaned heavily on state and local officials to join "the war on drugs"--or else.


Results: About half of all Black men in the U.S. are either in prison or declared felons or both.  That's right. About half.  And guess what?  Black folks are no more likely to use or sell drugs than White folks. Alexander has the data. A vast percentage of the people in prison are in there for possessing drugs--and not for sale. And often just weed. Add the extreme sentencing-guidelines, including the 3-strikes law, and the picture gets worse.  Alexander also demonstrates, again with data, that the U.S. imprisons more ethnic minorities than either Russia or China. 

 Basically, Jim Crow went underground--or hid in plain sight: at least as White folks are concerned.  White folks have been conditioned to associate drug-use with Black and Brown folks, to be indifferent to Draconian drug-laws and drug-sentences, and to be indifferent to the erosion of the 4th and 8th amendments.  Alexander demonstrates that illegal search and seizure is a thing of the past--especially for Black and Brown folks. Police routinely stop people and ask if they may search them. Few people have the confidence or wherewithal to say, as they should, "No."  Of course, add in the Patriot Act, and the 4th amendment is moot.

Alexander further argues that the election of Barack Obama is more of an irony than a milestone, and that Black "exceptionalism" has always been a tool of White bigotry and indifference.  "See--he made something of himself, and we voted for him! How can you say racism persists?"

Of course, none of this is news to most Black folks. They live under these conditions. Of course, a majority of White folks will resist the arguments because they need the myth of a nation that has gotten better and better, that has made Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a hero with his own Washington monument (in white, ironically).

Interestingly, Alexander argues that indifference, not bigotry, is the main issue.  If the police harassed White folks and broke into their homes under the weakest of pretenses proportionally to the way they do with Black and Brown folks, all these issues would converge into an emergency.  I've never been stopped for driving while White.  I've never--never--met an adult Black man who hasn't been stopped for driving while Black.

If you react fiercely against these arguments, that's fine.  In fact, this means there is no argument, in the sense that Alexander or I or anyone else is unlikely to change your minds. So it goes.

If you respond skeptically, all the better.  That is, in fact, where Alexander began.  She was skeptical of the pattern that seemed to be emerging as she studied the problem.

If you're comfortable with the prison population jumping from 300,000 (1970) to over 2 million (today); if you're comfortable with prisons being filled mostly with Black and Brown folk; if you're comfortable with half of Black men being felons and thus disenfranchised, excluded from housing and employment programs, and essentially doomed; if you think the U.S. has made "a lot of progress" in race; if you think we live in a color-blind society--well, you're among a large majority.

If you think these conditions are scandalous, alarming, and wrong, please read the book. Or if you don't want to or can't afford to buy the book just yet, google Michelle Alexander on Youtube, and catch a summary of her argument.

Your Condition

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Your Condition

People will think something
to keep your condition from
affecting their view of life,
especially when their view
of life has contributed to
your condition. If indifference
doesn't work, they'll likely
blame you entirely for your
condition and suggest you
take full responsibility,
which will of course be
finely choreographed with
their taking no responsibility.
People hate to have their
indifference disrupted.
All of which is a funny
thing--funny-peculiar,
as Eudora Welty wrote,
not funny-ha-ha. Still
you'll laugh. Probably.
Maybe. At first.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

"The Wrath of Lester Lame Bull," by James Welch

With More Noise Comes More Silence

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With More Noise Comes More Silence

All right, don't get back to me, then. In
this age of proliferated communication,
silence too is on the rise. People ignore
or do not respond to messages, questions.
Silence is a response. It baits assumptions,
massages insecurities. It leaves you alone

with yourself, and there's that submerged
piece of you that's almost glad. There's
a pleasing ache in isolation sometimes--
like that of muscles after work or sport.

And you're asked, by yourself, "Just what
were you expecting, fool, in return for your
message, your question?"  You choose
not to respond to yourself.

Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

"Fall Wind," by William Stafford

"Flight-Attendant's Instructions Song," by Cosmo Monkhouse

"each," by Hans Ostrom

Thoreau on Scholars

From a friend in Boston:


Thoreau:  "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers. Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men."

Poem: "Professors of Literature"

--Intentionally painting with a broad brush here. There have been and still are splendid professors of literature. I studied with a couple of them.



Professors of Literature

They don't love books so much
as covet them, jealous of students
who want casual affairs with novels
or poems. They imagine themselves
to be dead authors' agents, lawyers,
conjurers, explainers, personal friends,
stunt-doubles: "indispensable." They
behave like security-officers prowling
canons and eras.

They tend to hate themselves, each
other, and simple questions. They
dislike students except for the ones
they collect like figurines. They
make stuff up about books and
poems but aren't imaginative.

They hate to teach rhetoric, which
is a real education, as those Greeks
and Romans knew. They excrete
things to quibble about and catch
arrogance like the flu. They love
to speak in codes of theory about
theories of codes, but they always
forget to bring evidence along.
They hate writers.

Too many are small, nasty packages
of wasted thought. A fair percentage
are bullies, also lunatics obsessed
by light-bulbs they mistake for the moon.

Their parties are no fun, are a kind of
humorless hell, though cackling can
be heard, as is the case with hazing.
They treat secretaries and
waitresses like shit. The
truth is, universities wouldn't miss
them much if they were to run off
like rabid dogs, the circuits of
their narcissism finally fried.


Creative Commons License Hans Ostrom

For the Number Four," by Hans Ostrom

How Novels Begin: THE VANISHING AMERICAN, by Zane Grey

"You And This War," by Hans Ostrom

ee cummings reads "Somewhere I have never travelled..."

Creative Quotations from Diane Wakoski for Aug 3

"Retro Love"

"A Delta Land of Used-to-Be," Cosmo Monkhouse

"No End To Love," by John Hartford

"Down Where I Am," by Langston Hughes

How Novels Begin: THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES, by Arthur Conan Doyle

"Knight," by Hans Ostrom

"pity this monster," by e.e. cummings

What Are Your Favorite Words?

When I teach poetry-writing, I sometimes invite students to make lists of their favorite words--favorite chiefly because how they sound or intuitively "feel" to the writer, and favorite (secondarily) because of some personal connection to or memory about the word. I advise the students not to include too many words that they like simply because of a concept the word represents, like "freedom," unless the sound appeals, too.  But of course I don't "prohibit" such words. 

Such a list is useful in itself, but then you can also begin to work toward a poem by stringing some of the words together--going from specific language (with no subject in mind yet) toward a subject--and there's no rush.

Here's a link to a poem I read for Youtube, one made up of some of my favorite words; it's just a list poem, with "of" thrown in a lot as a kind of binding agent, mortar:

"Genitive Case"

"Sasha's Hooka," performed by Joe B. Vaughan, Jr.

"i like my body," by e.e. cummings

"The Extravagance and Reticence of Love," by Hans Ostrom

"To War Again," by Hans Ostrom

"Sudden Light," by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"The Want of You," by Angelina Weld Grimké

"putrefaction," by Charles Bukowski

"First Love," by John Clare

"Freedom of Love," by Andre Breton

"Henry River Poem 13," by Tim Peeler

How Novels Begin: ANIMAL FARM, by George Orwell

"The Masquerade," by Olive Custance

How Novels Begin: THE SOUND AND THE FURY, by William Faulkner

"Theatre of the Absurd," by Hans Ostrom

British Poets--Youtube

It turns out I've read 88 poems by British poets on Youtube. The most viewed is "Cherry Ripe" by Robert Herrick--I don't think I read it very well because I tried to sound like a market-barker in the first few lines. The least viewed is "On Gut," by Ben Jonson.  Anyway, here is a link:

British poets

"Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman," by Max Beerbohm

"Inventory," by Dorothy Parker

"Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman," by Max Beerbohm

"Sestina: Ellis Island, Amelia Earhart," by Hans Ostrom

Novel Out a Year--Set in the Sierra Nevada

HONORING JUANITA, a novel I wrote, has been available for about a year. It hasn't appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, but I imagine that's just an oversight. It's a contemporary tale set in the Sierra Nevada and concerns a woman who decides to protest the building of a dam on a pristine alpine river. Her husband happens to be the county sheriff, so he has to arrest her. Complications ensue, as they often do in novels. A secondary plot is historical--the lynching of a Mexican woman during California's Gold Rush.  This part's based on an actual event that happened in a town near where I grew (a town by the name of Downieville). Anyway, these stories were something I'd wanted to write since I was in about the fourth grade--well, at least the historical plot was. 

The novel-publishing world is mad to categorize novels--just look at any literary agent site. Of course, "romance" is the big category. But then there's chick-lit, fantasy, multi-cultural, "literary," mystery, and so on.

 HONORING JUANITA seems to have a bit of the "women's novel" about it, as far as I understand that category. And multi-cultural: Juanita is/was Mexican, and Mary Bluestone & her husband Lloyd are of mixed ethic backgrounds.  And environmental?  Is that a fiction-category? Also relatively short. Don't you love relatively short novels? I do, even though the enormous WAR AND PEACE remains my all-time favorite piece of fiction. But just looking at one of Georges Simenon's thin Maigret novels makes me smile. I see I've digressed.



HONORING JUANITA is available in traditional form for $11.95, less than that used on amazon, and VERY cheap on Kindle: less than a dollar! Such a deal. This post constitutes my major advertising-push and has left me exhausted.  A link:

HONORING JUANITA

Poems (Translated) From the Sanskrit

Here's a link to poems from the Sanskrit I've read for Youtube--all very short, and all (or most) from John Brough's wonderful translation--Poems From the Sanskrit--from Penguin, a book that should be on poetry-readers' shelves, in my presumptuous opinion:


Sanskrit poems

Langston Hughes's Poems--Youtube

Here is a link to the poems by Langston Hughes that I've read for my Youtube channel (which is named langstonify, after all)--and grateful acknowledgement is hereby sent to Knopf and the Estate of Langston Hughes; if you don't own Hughes's Selected or Collected yet, you might want to get them.  --A highly under-rated poet, still.

Hughes poems

Amusing Poems

Here is a link to some amusing poems (well, I think they are) that I've read on my Youtube channel:

Humorous Poems

"Prophecy," by Elinor Wylie

"The Coast Starlight," by Hans Ostrom

Animal Poems

Here is a link to the "Animal Poems" playlist on my youtube channel, langstonify. By the way if you're a) a poet, b) stuck regarding what to write about and c) interested in getting un-stuck, writing a poem about a creature, any creature, usually gets things going, although a pet-creature is not always the best way to go.


Animal Poems

How Novels Begin: MIDDLEMARCH, by George Eliot

"The Poet," by Paul Laurence Dunbar

How Novels Begin: EMMA, by Jane Austen

Poems About Money and Work

Here's a link to poems (chiefly by others) I've read for Youtube that concern money and/or work:

Money/Work Poems Playlist

How Novels Begin: BARRABAS, by Pär Lagerkvist

Love Poems/Erotic Poems

...So I've recorded around 500 poems for Youtube now, chiefly poems by others, and I've begun to categorize them in the "Playlists" category, and one of the categories is "Love Poems/Erotic Poems," in case anyone asks.

How Novels Begin: WAR AND PEACE, by Leo Tolstoy

"Four Kinds of Trouble Blues (Wheels, Money, Women, and Soul)," by Cosm...

"Between Your Sheets," by Lady Wortley Montagu

"I Really Do," by Hans Ostrom (song)

"Bermuda Moon," instrumental song + printed lyrics, by Hans Ostrom

"Bermuda Moon," instrumental song + printed lyrics, by Hans Ostrom

"The Taxi," by Amy Lowell

"I'm Just A Guy" (song)

How Novels Begin: TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, by Richard Brautigan

How Novels Begin: TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, by Harper Lee

"the two hanks," by Carter Monroe

"Grief for the Number Ten," by Hans Ostrom

"Heaven," by Robert Creeley

How Novels Begin: OLIVER TWIST, by Charles Dickens

If They

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If They

If they aren't going to be near your death-bed,
If they never thought well of you,
If they never thought of you,
If they belittled everything you did even
If they thought of you,

If they never helped you dig
in the ground when you were
digging in the ground,
If they never helped you get
better when you were ill,
If they never gave you a break,
If they never helped to fix
your leaking roof,
If they never paid for a drink,
If they never had a kind word
for you or anybody else,
If they sucked up to power
and back-stabbed their associates,
If they never thought things through,
If they thought empathy was for suckers,
If they never listened,
If they never knew one goddamned
thing about you & never cared to,
Et Cetera, then

Why do you care what they think
about you, about people you care for,
and about matters dear to you?
If they are whom they have shown
themselves to be, then let them
drift on their own sea and disappear,
and disappear.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

"History," by Langston Hughes

"The Gift of Sight," by Robert Graves

"Lovers by Sea-Light," by Peter Davison

"The Fly," by William Blake

"Pious Celinda," by William Congreve

"Science Fiction," by Kingsley Amis

"Balloonist's Log, Final Entry," by Hans Ostrom

"City Life," by D.H. Lawrence