From the boundary waters: Poems

Osing, Gordon

Memphis State University Press

Town Down River

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

St Lukes Pr

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

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

Spuyten Duyvil Publishing

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

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

Literary

Before Afterwards “The world has to be dreamed before it is seen.” … “We grow mostly by dying.” Siddhartha Mukherjee, “Runs in the Family” Geezer me, I must be on the verge of knowing everything. Even what knowing is, me the nervous kid who smiled with his mouth open, the cowlick, the nightmares, the unusual gift for imitating what I thought were doctrines and the stories that proved them pertaining. My eye had to learn what I had to untangle or have no life truly my own and then to betray both to something like oblivion. Moreover, does not the Good Book adjure us “if thine ‘I’ offend thee, pluck it out.” I know it doesn’t name the first person pronoun as the likely villain in the adventure of learning, but I know it is, from a lifetime of giving it up in sacrifice, in return for what it tells me to write. What do I care if learning is part spite.

South of the South

Believe Me —wo, Chinese for the first person singular I am yet a pretender to this ancient art, not much more than the moth this morning at four, fluttering at my p/c screen, believing it a flame, which it is, to my eye anyway. You’d think this art was mine from the beginning. It wasn’t. A last resort? Not that either. The luck of a fate it is, other choices tried and abandoned, irresistible temptations in the momentary. Yes, I gave myself over to them time after time. And, if I am a generation behind in manners, why should I care. Some time ago I chose to let my “wo” be gone. Believe me, the rhythms of speech in cadences are more. I fell in with it from sheer admiration of practitioners. It’s my way of surrendering to time. I gave up palavering for this blank page lighted from within. Why not. What was that “wo” compared with being upstairs alone at four A.M., arranging on an empty screen what it can let me speak. Here’s a heart’s body of love and work believing and not in ordinary moments being there, in continents and their subs where nothing is believed to exist in words unless they are regarded as lost signs, inherited, squirreling lines, but spoken, the mouth echoing like the caves of Marabar.

Straying Home

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Osing, Gordon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Osing, Gordon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Osing, Gordon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

From the boundary waters: Poems

Town Down River

Things That Never Happened: Fictions of Family Eros

Slaughtering the Buddha

Desperate Things

The Late Show

Immigrations

Immigrations

South of the South

Straying Home