“I am the century’s decay”

The Poetry of Julia Ostrowski

It appears we have a proper poetry series going here at The Hinternet — and now my job grows difficult. JSR continues his pressure on me to hunt for interesting new voices, and I am forced to confront the fact that I don’t really know all that many poets. The two we’ve featured thus far —Maria Theresa of Dimes Square, and Maxim Morel of his father’s loins— are chance acquaintances of mine, whom I consider myself entirely too lucky ever to have met. So for our next poet, I ended up asking Maxim to introduce me to a friend of his, of whom he’d spoken very highly: Julia Ostrowski, originally of Milwaukee.

At the moment, Julia is somewhere on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey doing work for her Ph.D. in archeology, digging up and cataloguing the basalt orthostats of a neo-Hittite site near Tarsus. I managed to get through to her nonetheless, and to ask her whether she had any poetry she might share with us. She agreed to send me a few poems from the debut collection she’s been compiling, which she hopes to get out into the world in 2026 or 2027.

Introducing Ostrowski, I think, requires a brief discussion of the state of the poetic art. The Hinternet itself has no official position on any such thing as “contemporary poetry”, which, from our transhistorical point of view, sounds like nothing so much as an oxymoron — perhaps even an insult. What exactly is contemporary about poetry? The first human writing may indeed have been little more than the shopping lists and calendars of the priestly classes, but language itself arguably began in something like a state of poetry. We don’t have to go with the old line of the Renaissance humanists, that poets were themselves the creators of civilization, to recognize that all human societies have conceived of themselves as a “people” only insofar as they had a poetic story to tell about themselves — memorized, internalized, passed down through the generations.

Today we politely agree to call these “myths”. But as the largely forgotten scholar Owen Barfield once argued, in his peculiar masterpiece Poetic Diction (1928), “myth” is only a word for an ancient unity of thought-and-world (Geist-und-Welt? Geisteswelt?), which these days we can only piece back together by way of metaphor. According to Barfield, there was never a time in the past when “all men were poets”. What we’re doing when we create poetry, for him, is addressing the painful rupture of an ancient, embodied, and unified meaning: attempting to re-unite —to heal, however briefly— a fracture in the world, returning us to a time when the world, and the way we spoke about the world, were an experience entire. And that unified, imminent meaning, we came to call language.

Doubtless this all risks sounding a bit arcane. As promised, the point was to address the issue of “contemporary poetry” in the English language. But what that really is, as far as I can tell, is a kind of cross-institutional pyramid scheme for convincing the public that history doesn’t exist, and that poetry is about very sentimental and sensitive people feeling so exquisitely much on behalf of the rest of us, rather than dealing with language as a repository for eons of meaning. (“Language,” Emerson once wrote, “is fossil poetry”.)

The poems of Julia Ostrowski concern themselves, at least partially, with this situation. As she herself has asked me to say, these are decidedly “early” poems, composed as she was negotiating the breakdowns of two complex relationships (one with a man, one with a woman), while enduring the fallout of a very particular scandal which she happened to be caught up investigating, back in 2016. The details of that personal history are hazy. In our two conversations she only told me she “saw things” several years ago, alluding to an apparently extraordinary mental episode which took her to both Poland and Brazil, and to the aforementioned scandal.

But I think it’s worth attending to just what Ostrowski’s poems have to say about the difficult task of being a poet in the present century, since, besides love itself, this seems to be the main theme of her very rewarding work.

—Sam Jennings, London

Poets

In the minimal fall I’m carried up,
deposited on a cloud so cloudless,
it greets me with antagonisms
and agonists,
druids of faint Pagan girth,
small in the shadow of the sun.

Here’s an Ocean poet, sentimental
star-breeder,
rare as grass,
sharp like a bird;
an eye unblinking
and soon tearing up,
self-announcing
and grand as gray.

He fills the world
with masochistic lines
and thinks himself
an optimist, like God.

Now a flower poet, ironically
winter,
mechanical as the moon,
covered in tufts of styrofoam—
which she calls
her beautiful house;
but an old rot
suckles inside.

She writes her odes
to sex and petals
and calls it
religious testament.

And last: a blood poet, primping
gravedigger,
true as a constellation,
fat like a lion;
a frantic whisper;
a hiss at revolution’s whim,
fantastical
and swollen with rage.

She fills the sky
with the bodies of sailors
she tipped overboard
to help her fly.

And I’ve seen each of these
at great heights,
who traipse around the cloudless clouds
and nightless nights,
in witches’ robes,
uncomfortably worn—
in the minimal fall,
the minimal winter’s born:
and as my feet reach the ground again,
these poets play on
far above my head,
and if sometimes
I wish for their festival,
I thank God
for solid ground, instead.

Everyone

Everyone has written beautifully
of things that haunt the decade,
of reasons for absconding
with a history of pain,
of the dull shackled brain,
and everyone’s come up a glorious
idiot—still blind to the fire
that licks and laps our ankles.

Myself included: I’ve sunned my soul
in the flames, as they rose,
expecting any day
to hear the gospel of
a technologic fix, an end
to want, to death, to meaning;
hoisted up by my own amphetamines,
entrusted with the whole sick crew,
and the death of an author,
and the death of the new…

Some spirit raced across the plain
that stretches from Earth to Heaven,
that stretches back
a thousand years,
to deep engines of
our primordial guilt—
and it secreted through the centuries
a word or two, once written,
depositing its frank hieratic script
on the doorstep,
where we stare.

And I read the news
which promised it was true,
but in between the lines I caught
the clearest conversation,
which blew my mind out
like a childhood candle,
saying: “I am the century’s decay,
the engine of fertility,
and the end is so forever near,
why love—why linger
anywhere at all?”

And the answer all around
hummed, invisibly,
ensconced in sheer air:
“Illusions now,
and illusions then,
sad history of becoming;
you cannot make the void tremble,
but only speak one word,
and it will be
an unexplainable thing.”