From the boundary waters: Poems

Osing, Gordon

Memphis State University Press

The author spent three years in China and Asia. This volume of poetry is inspired by his time there and the journals that he wrote during his travels.

The Water Radical

Iris Press

Town Down River

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

St Lukes Pr

Accidents of Attention 
 What is in these accidents of attention More than a fate one might choose. (I cannot Ever trust a theologian without a beret,) Never mind the advertisements memorized in school. The gains however do not cancel the losses. There is demurrage, the old railroad auditor’s Term for rent owed on delayed rolling stock Left empty on a spur of the line. Where is That unchosen one with that other life? Say the gap widens or it comes together, Like obvious railroad tracks, always finally. Like the ones I walked home from school, In the backsides of warehouses, risking a trestle And the afternoon train down from Chicago. 
 Friend, reader at this very moment, think on Momentary revelations, when you knew almost Faces of your self, as if accidents of attention, Were good as decisive moments. Another life Hangs in the balance and which one is it to die for. Auden is right, “Injustice is the hell of childhood,” But Calvinist porn passes time till time to repent. And then no-face comes along, plus something else, Perhaps accidentally, but you know mercy cannot be summoned deliberately. It comes with abjectivity. between moments out of time and mortal longueurs, Insolent to what all tangles being in itself. Ergo, The only freedom is in mercy. We’d best believe Some accidents are good as sacred. Better.

Polyphemus: Masques of Desire

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

The author writes a series of poetic imaginations around the idea of family and identity. The enduring presence of both tends to adhere to fiction, pure and simple, so that the things, the events of our communal time and country are also thrown into this mode of a fictive certainty. The result is a series of lyrical encounters with the loneliness and seeming impossibility of the personal--a universal suffrage that informs everything that happened (history.)

Things That Never Happened: Fictions of Family Eros

United States

Spuyten Duyvil

Slaughtering the Buddha

Envoi Are you reading this to see, friend, if you want to ramble through what’s inside? Fair enough. It’s not a page turner I’m after, nor airport fiction. I’m after undoing words, so that contexts both make them transparent and invite colors and projections of heart. And more, smear the palette of mere being. Mayday, and all the alarms in the world going off at once are morning birds in Delta bluffs woods, taking me out to the bothy to watch waves on the lake, and a pontoon gliding into an easterly, on westering waters. The boat moves to the east all morning tied to the dock. Until I ask what science traffics in deliberate misunderstandings, incorporates illusions that the senses verify, purposes to undo “the real world,” as parents say. What is proved more than the worlds it takes to stay in place, and the worlds moved to life by the eye stayed in watching.

Meanwhile

Then and Now 
 Sixty-five plus years ago I began catching the early GM&amp;O train, #8, to Chicago, and walking around the Loop till noon, to Cubs’ games and a stage show late afternoons before the evening train, #5, back to Springfield. I had my own pass. Father was the chief division auditor. After the game, a stage show at the Chicago Theatre made a great day. Frankie Lane, Patti Page, Les Paul and Mary Ford, those were among the stars of those days. The morning train arrived in the Union Station in the hour after dawn. We slid backwards through the yard beneath a brightening sky, shifting sideways in the rails. In and out of light, I watched the loading docks and water tanks on the backs of buildings, and the morning workers waving. Then the sky went away and we eased into the shadows of the terminal shed and I saw myself in the window, seeing myself seeing. That’s how it is, I say, now.

Desperate Things

Traveler 
 We are all emigrants, immigrants in time, and here are the rules. When you find yourself in somebody else’s world, take everything for granted as ordinary. That will save you the tour guide’s patronizing exaggerations. Second, learn to shut up deeply enough that you begin to see. “So far” and “if” describe most meanings. Third, imagine that anything declared true must have plausible contradictions. Try to avoid believing your simplest needs mean anything to those charged with satisfying them. Don’t be effusive for his assistance. Finally, don’t be surprised at anything 
 somebody believes, even if he merely hopes it’s true, wishes, if he needs for it to be. Many have lost the only or ultimate world they believe ought to have endured, that the one before them is totally wrong, temporary, and the true one will return one day (soon?), like Arthur from Avalon. That, too, is ordinary. Try to find out what they take for funny. That will tell you what they want not to fear, I mean what they do. Think your own thoughts are just as old as theirs, and just as altered, made do with, impressed, being what one had. Do you know how lucky for you it is to have your own world overturned, made new.

The Late Show

Immigrations

Selected Poems of Gordon Osing 
 Gordon Osing’s Things That Never Happened is brilliant, soul-deep, questing, and fun. One thinks of Wordsworth’s Prelude done with a great jazz beat, and then one thinks of all the good books wrung from a writer’s experience, from a life. The book has the force of a train rumbling through a vibrant city. Its observations are startling and pleasurable even as they disturb. Richard Bausch, author of Wives and Lovers 
 In Things That Never Happened each of the little ones in the house must find his and her way out, must face the ordeals of trying to love, must find and enact a self who is not blindsided by the simplest blandishments of assimilation in town. Tom Russell, author of Travelling with the Magi 
 With a fluidity of intellect plumbing the heart of stone, Osing is one of the most gifted philosopher poets America has ever produced. A Mid-Western Southerner, his art never sedentates in the metaphoric game-board of the local, rather the concern for form as universal wings us to the four corners of the poem. No practitioner or radical experimenter has mined it with as much questioning honesty or risk. t thilleman, author of The Special Body 
 The Water Radical will come to rank with the best of the travel journals, verse or prose. It’s captivating, and its resolutions are marvelous. Miller Williams 
 The Jazzer &amp; The Loitering Lady is a most startling autobiography, really. A trip to the harsh, beautiful geography of ‘home,’ and the terrifying psychic territory of his own germination as a man and artist. At times painful, most often riotously funny, lines jump off each page like cut diamonds reflecting the clear light of accurate, cutting observation. Tom Collins, Albuquerque Journal 
 Gordon Osing observes, questions, celebrates, and gives voice to pathsweepers, dead poets, even the silence in a ruined temple. He is a guide you can trust. Nancy Willard

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