Sunday, August 18, 2019

Contrarian Poets

Not that you asked, but from my earliest days of reading poetry up to now, I've been drawn to the poetry of contrarians who chose not to fit into the popular or popular-literary conventions of the day. Emily Dickinson and Gerard Manley Hopkins are good examples, and I started reading their poetry when I was a teen. True, Dickinson worked in what fit loosely into ballad/hymn traditions, but disrupted most of the conventions with regard to subject matter, meter, rhyme, and world-view. Hopkins was a Jesuit priest who usually had his poems get around to praising God, but I had the sense that wasn't his main emphasis, which was on exploding the iambic line. Like Dickinson, he had an unusual worldview insofar as he was drawn to what was imperfect, improvised, messy. "Pied Beauty" expresses this view best, perhaps.

Then there's Karl Shapiro and Langston Hughes. Shapiro was in some ways part of the literary establishment insofar as he edited Poetry magazine, taught at big universities--as many poets did after World War II--co-wrote a book on English/Irish/Scottish/American prosody, and early on worked in rhyme and regular meter. But as with Dickinson and Hopkins, he disrupted the tradition as much as he worked within it. As to subject matter, he wrote about killing flies, auto wrecks, troop ships, and the like, though he could produce a good love poem here and there. He deliberately cultivated an eccentric image of himself, as a Jew who was far from orthodox, a Jew who thought Pound shouldn't get the Bolingen Award because of his fascism, an "atheist who says his prayers," a "bourgeois poet" in an era when the alleged anti-bourgeois Beats were all the rage, and so on. He belonged but thumbed his nose at belonging. He mocked at will.

Smack in the middle of the Modernist era, Hughes wrote accessible verse about a wide swath of Black experience. He did the latter way before it became a crucial part of African American literature. It was as much a political, existential stance as it was a literary one. Like William Carlos Williams, he occupied the accessible turf of Modernism, contrary to Joyce, Eliot, Pound, and all their deliberately "difficult" imitators. Hughes also went all in on socialist politics in the 1930s--until Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and Hitler started his race war and Stalin conducted his own genocide. Again, based on existential reality, Hughes supported the war against the fascists.

Luckily, I was able to take classes from Shapiro, and maybe that reinforced my contrarian nature. I chose not to pursue an MFA and preferred to earn a Ph.D. I was never part of any local, regional, national, or online movement, clique, or club. This wasn't out of a desire to make a point; really, it's just that I didn't enjoy or need that kind of thing, for whatever reasons. It is true that, having grown up in a town of 225 in the High Sierra, I was indeed a hick with a built-in eccentricity feature. I was West Coast, and in spite of all the powerful regional movements in American poetry, the East still rules. I grew up in an era when there were legions of male poets who fashioned themselves hard-drinking tough guys who, when they taught classes, liked to be cruel, or to not show up, and to cultivate some version of a renegade persona. It got so de rigeur that I recoiled from it.

Nowadays, I avoid all the online groups and cliques, although I say, "More power to them." Whatever gets and keeps poets writing is more or less all right with me. I'm still drawn to poetry that goes against the grain in some easily discernible way. I never got the hang of L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, although I got what they were aiming for. Too often, it just seemed like gibberish or, when not gibberish, excessively taxing on the reader's patience.

I think much African American and otherwise "ethnic" poetry--Latino/a/x, Asian American (many sub-groups), Native American--brings a huge amount of energy and innovation to poetry and is often the best of the Spoken Word stuff.


hans ostrom 2019

Saturday, August 17, 2019

Ins and Outs

A cat is walking in and
walking out as a tide is going
out and coming in as metro
trains are going out and
coming in as harmonica
buskers suck notes in
and blow notes out,

as workers enter and exit
buildings of their jobs
as your breath is going
out and coming in as
your sense of consciousness
is pulling back, now
pushing forth--in

this moment, as you
observe to yourself
you are alive.



hans ostrom 2019

Unicorn and Dragon

A unicorn asked a dragon,
"Would you like to exist
in material form?" "Hell

no," the dragon answerd.
"My breath would set
my head on fire."

"Prefer the myth,
my mono-spiked friend."
"Thank you," said the unicorn.



hans ostrom 2019

Seeds in My Bed

Dark brown seeds
in my bed. From bread.
(Bed is a place for sleep,
books, and sex. Beyond
these three, life does have
a few other highlights.)

The seeds look like tiniest
canoes. I'm going to sleep
beside them because I
am not moved to tidy up.

I won't have the recurring
dream of lying flat in a canoe
and floating down a river,
night, many others floating
in their canoes beside me.

The river rivers me
toward a sunny place where
people seem okay and help
me ashore. Because the

brown seeds made me want
to dream that dream,
the law of dreams will not
let me dream it. Goodnight.


hans ostrom 2019


Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Wood Carving

Is this wood
in the mood
for steel? The
shape you see
in there is real.
It's not a distant
form. Your body
warms as you
dig in, asking
grain if it's seen
the spoon you
want. Of course
it has. A basic

sensuality abides
in this old craft,
which predates sin.
Odd, and good,
how body and
attention mold
themselves around
the task. Shavings
and gougings fly
like fat snowflakes.
Wood remaining
repeats a mantra
to you as you carve:
carver, slow down. 



hans ostrom 2019

An Opening

Gamblers and philosophers--Pascal was both--
need a system. Poets with a system wake up
one morning or night and the system is lying
next to them like a suit of armor made entirely
of mollusks. Unsatisfactory. Poets need openings,
not systems. There is life and there is language
and there are openings between the two and poets
look for them. Here's an opening: go through.


hans ostrom 2019

Of Morpheus

Last night Morpheus, dream
distributor, sent a severed head
to my sleep. I couldn't decide
what to do with the head. I carried
it around, stored it, hid it, hid from it.
This took several seconds or a year.

People in the dream, extras,
noticed the head and discussed me
when I was absent, and I heard
everything they said, which is how
waking life should work. They
began to think less and less of me,
and I started to hate myself
more and more. I never asked
who the head belonged to. I

took it with me underground,
cool moist rooms of concrete
and steel. Strange chambers.
I could not just finish the dream
and bury the head. Chest full
of panic. Eyelids fluttering
outside the dream like butterflies

The head rotted on my lap.
I sat and rocked myself awake.
Awake, I told Morpheus to fuck off.


hans ostrom 2019

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

Poetry Consulates

Pushkin loved the idea of St. Petersburg
and the bronze horseman who saw
the city before it was built. Langston
Hughes loved the idea of Harlem,
also some people there. Did Baudelaire
love Paris? Splenetically, perhaps.
I don't think Dickinson loved
any cities. The village of her mind
sufficed. It pleases me to think
of all the poets writing now
in Istanbul and Mainz, Hong
Kong and Honolulu, Uppsala
and Houston, Brasilia and Berlin,
Tehran and Tangier and all
the other cities where poets
live, every city in other words,
in their words,  which
follow their cities around,
no matter how often the
cities change disguises. Poets'
words attach themselves to love
and food, despair and dreams. If
only these poets could meet
and read their poems and argue
but not fight, ask questions
about language and children,
mountains and rivers. Should we
build poetry consulates in all the cities
we can? Surely it couldn't hurt.


hans ostrom 2019

Monday, July 29, 2019

Dog in the Rain

Sometimes you feel like a dog in the rain.
Right at that point when the dog's
too tired to make its fur
shake off water. When the dog
aches to smell warmth
and what's hiding inside it.

The dog knows that if going
inside will happen,
it won't be soon because
dogs smell time and know
such things. So the dog
lowers its head and keeps
going to where clouds fall
apart and it can lift up its head again.


hans ostrom 2019

Friday, July 26, 2019

Respectfully Absurd

Rituals of remembrance,
so weary, so salty-sweet.
Beside an open grave,
someone says words 
about a dead man whose
corpse lies in a manufactured
box nearby. The memories
of him will never be riper
than they are now. No one
will think to recall him after
a few months, it not days, if
not . . . Even at the moment
how many listeners are 
thinking of other things, 
or wondering what the point
of funeral services is? "Funeral
services" has the ring 
of American assembly lines. 
That's all right. The frail,
exhausted nobility of mournful
practices preserves their worth.
They're respectfully absurd.


hans ostrom 2019

Wednesday, July 24, 2019

Memo to Religions

Pretty much all religions
need to take a break from being God,
from being chosen, elected, selected,
right and righteous. Religions
are human and assuming God sends
rules and info, religions must therefor garble
the message, if not twist it into a club
used to knock around the faithful.

Religions, please spend the next 100 years
doing practical good, making up
as best you can for your stupidities,
atrocities. Get the hell out of the way
and let people breathe. Dump
the vast stores of wealth, throw
water on the preening, the pompous,
the predatory. Put that goddamned
fire out.


hans ostrom 2019

All He Could Manage To Do

I'll tell you what. I'll tell you
a man cut grass and picked up trash
and sat down then. He thought
about America's most recent
consolidation of white-supremacist
power, became queasy. Thought
of vomiting on the cut grass but
did not. A hummingbird

visited a nearby rosemary bush,
pale blue blossoms fluffed out
modestly like women's
handkerchiefs in 1911. Hummingbird
throat-chirped when it backed off
a blossom, and again when it
air-wheeled itself back for another
nectar-strike. The man made
a powerless choice. He let

sight and sound of one bird
help him breathe out of his
disgust and go more lightly
through next tasks. It was pitiful.
It was all he could manage to do.


hans ostrom 2019


Sunday, July 14, 2019

Ultimate Shade

A gardener grabbed
dead day-lily stalks
and some soil with them.
And an earthworm. Earthworm.
Syllables of that word
burrow deep in the mouth. Said

gardener let the worm lie
in a gloved palm. Said
earthworm paused its wriggling
until the gloved hand had
repatriated it to a bed of soil
where vegetables meet
to gossip about each other.

Buried alive in soft dirt,
the worm resurrected its writhing
life in ultimate shade, as gardener
returned to a life in air and light
and work and worry.


hans ostrom 2019