Odd and Invented Forms

The Protean Poetry of Herbert Coursen

  

Last evening, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, very belatedly I learned of the death of Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., whom I met forty-four years ago in Maine, at a 1968 Bowdoin College conference on “stylistics.” It was the same year that the first edition of my volume titled The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics was published — Herb would become one of its first and biggest fans.

Herb grew up in New Jersey.  He was educated at Amherst College, Wesleyan University, and the University of Connecticut, where he earned his Ph. D. in English.  He lived since 1964 in Brunswick, Maine, where, until 1992, he taught at Bowdoin College. A well-known Shakespearean with many scholarly books to his credit, he also wrote poetry, mainline and sports fiction, and non-fiction.  He was prominently involved in anti-Vietnam war activities during the 1960's although he had himself been a military man, a fighter pilot during the Korean war.  Later he became involved with environmental and peace activities.

Coursen's first collection of poems was a 1973 chapbook, Storm in April (see the bibliography at the end of this essay).  These poems looked hard at the reality experienced by a truly sensitive personality, and the language in which those experiences were couched gave the reader the sense that he or she knew the speaker of the poems and recognized the experiences as valid. Coursen appeared to be one of the few writers who know that we can best know ourselves by seeing ourselves reflected in others.  Add to this understanding a deft sense of nature and an ability to convey ideas and images in forceful language, and one had in this booklet a promise toward the fulfillment of which one looked forward with pleasure.

His second collection the following year was also a chapbook, Survivor.  In it the interest was perhaps primarily technical, for he had begun to write in quantitative syllabic verse and to turn away, to some degree, from the lineated prose of the previous book.  Although the Vietnam war had been elegized in "Far from Vietnam: Maine, Summer, 1967," in the first collection, it was in the second that Coursen turned to his own Korean War experiences in "ex navy pilot."  In his third chapbook, Lookout Point, one could begin to see what was happening: the poet was ranging back and forth through his life; he was beginning to weave a tapestry of words and experience that had certain recurring threads: childhood in New Jersey, military service, love and its loss in Maine, among that state's great natural beauties.

These subjects were filled out in the next collection, Inside the Piano Bench, which included an uncharacteristic and overtly journalistic prose memoir of a love gone awry, "Fragments of a December in England."  Perhaps Coursen thought of it as a prose poem, but it didn't have enough language interest for that.  As though this prose piece were a glitch in a phonograph record, the next chapbook, Fears of the Night, largely abandoned the more formal approach the poet had been taking.  Here were many more "free verse" prose poems, and straight prose paragraphs, together with a poem written in what Amy Lowell called "polyphonic prose," the wonderful "American Pastime," one of the grand catalogs of the twentieth century:

 

I hereby establish my own Baseball Hall of Fame.

For alliteration, for example, I enshrine

Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash.

For future fame in other areas:

Albert Schweitzer (St. Louis, A. L., 1908-1911).

They called him 'Cheese', so with him,

I further honor Clarence Beers and Sweetbreads Bailey,

Hot Potato Hamlin and Noodles Hahn, Ginger Beaumount

and Sugar Cain, and Honey Walker....

 

One must stop oneself by an act of will at that point, or one shall quote the entire poem, for there is no place to rest, or even to pause.  No one has ever written a better baseball poem.

Cheek by jowl with these prose pieces, Coursen placed a sonnet, "'Soft you now...'."  To this point Coursen had not written much in accentual-syllabic prosody; he would develop this obvious ability in the future and give us other books which were as great a pleasure to read, but his next collection, Walking Away, cut against the grain of his development and returned to lineated prose for its mode.  It returned, also, to his flying days for much of its subject matter, though love, growing up in Jersey, and the Maine landscape were not abandoned.  The book opened with a glossary of flying terms which the poet hoped would be "A helpful guide to the diction of some of the poems that follow[ed]."

I was privileged to write the introduction to Hope Farm: New and Selected Poems, published in 1979 — the volume was overdue.  For a number of years Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., had been publishing his poems in a variety of little magazines and collecting his work in chapbooks.  As a result, the poetry reading public had not had a chance to see the poet in his full range.  That range turned out to be considerable.  The book began with autobiographical flashbacks to childhood, disarming in their simplicity.  These poems evoked the mood necessary for what were, later on, essentially contemplative, sometimes metaphysical reveries — the poet's strongest suit.

         "Jersey Shore: Early Forties" from Fears of the Night may stand as example of the earlier kind — a good story, objectively told;  autobiographical, yet the narrator's voice is held in check so that the story would not be overloaded with pathos.  The overtone, the implications, of the last sentence were therefore all the stronger and more dramatic.

 

The film would show a ship,

logging a last unsuspecting

second, as the waking metal

fish strove eagerly for the

prime section amidships.

The ship explodes

like a trick cigar.

But there is always

something wrong with the water,

too smooth, to simple,

failing the complicated maturity

of real oceans.

Our ocean, off Bay Head

and Mannasquan, was thick

with tar in 1943

and we had a pan of gasoline —

even on an A-Card —

outside the cottage,

to wash away

the burnt caking around our toes.

One day, some strange remains

bobbed into the surf.

Black cars with white stars

on their sides stopped

by the boardwalk, and a long

black car also stopped there,

and the ocean was closed

for a summer's afternoon.

 

The enigmatic scene evokes not merely the Second World War, but also the sense of a child trying to understand the mysteries of the adult world, the differences between fiction and reality, and the feeling that there are menaces lurking beneath the surfaces of things.

"Sister" was the first poem in the collection written from the dramatic viewpoint: the poet placed himself in the persona of a girl and, in a few lines, managed to say things about sexism that novelists have labored to say at great length, often with less effect:

 

Younger than they,

and not the same.

Girl growing amid

a grove of brothers.

They took my dolls

one day into their

forbidden circle

in the woods,

drove sticks

into the cleared dirt,

and burned them

at the stake.

 

Some of the poems were about flying.  Coursen had for years been writing about his experiences flying fighter aircraft during the Korean War era, as his preceding collection had chronicled, and he wrote pieces that fused technical information about aviation and evocations of emotions inherent in various, usually harrowing, situations.  But some of the finest of the poems in this volume, as they had been in his earlier volumes, were nature pieces; elegies and reveries in the countryside of Maine, Coursen's adopted state.  They were fusions of local color and love, like "The Leaves Again," which was effective in much the same way that the best haiku are.  Though this poem was not syllabic, Coursen sometimes wrote nature-love poems in quantitative syllabics, and these generally were among his most successful pieces, as for instance "Inscape," which was complex and metaphysical, ugly and beautiful, a current of thought flowing out of an epigraph from a 16th century Book of Common Prayer.

"Inside the Piano Bench," the title poem from his fourth collection, touched on another aspect of Coursen's range, this time a blending of the earlier nostalgia and the later metaphysics.  It is a nice conceit that interweaves vintage crooners and their songs with the evening of an adult listening backward in his mind through yellowing sheet music, as though the piano bench and its contents an aural crystal ball conjuring the past rather than the future:

 

Bing remains forever

blond and Bob for-

ever hopeful that

 

Dorothy's sarong will drop

south of the border.  Two

sleepy people,

never

to leave their blue room, yawn

away.  Fred and

Ginger, Ginger and

 

Fred, hold their pose always, day

and night, night and day, in

the still of the

room.

 

Coursen did something like the same thing in "National Pastime," quoted above, utilizing a catalog of baseball players' names, but in this poem the nostalgia was humorous.  Coursen could be clever, as in "Trick Sentence"; satrical, "Do I Dare to Bite a Pear?" which sent up T. S. Eliot's J. Alfred Prufrock; wry, "How to Start Your Foreign Car."  He could give insight into the superstitions of the 17th century, and therefore our own, as in "Fears of the Night," the title poem from an earlier collection.

         The most brilliant poem was the last, "The Emerald of Polycrates."  It is a verse-mode poem, too, not prose-mode like the earlier "free verse" pieces, or even like the syllabic works.  It glitters with imagery, reverberates with music, tenses with drama.  It is a fine poem, a very great shift away from biography and nostalgia, but readers may be baffled by its inclusion here, for there was nothing else like it in the book.  No doubt Coursen included it because it was too striking to leave out.  It left one with the impression that there was an even greater range being held in reserve by this poet.  In a letter to me dated "12 Jan '93" and datelined Prince's Point, Brunswick, Maine, Coursen said,

 

"I wrote 'The Emerald of Polycrates' in 1978.

"I had been reading Herodotus's The Persian Wars for no compelling reason and found the story of Polycrates.  I had been searching for an idea for a poem, but did not realize that until the idea was there, in the wonderful story.  One reason why someone says, "I am a poet," is that that attitude attracts and may recognize ideas for poems.  The mass of people move by the idea without comment.  The story, of course, suggests that if a person takes some external action things may change for the better.  The myth behind the story suggests that the person must make his or her own journey to the underworld, to the psyche.  The stone won't serve as an alter ego on the path of individuation.

"But that is psychology, not poetry.  To tell the story is to change it, but not into an analysis of the story.  To tell the story as poem is to find a form for it.  A poet studies forms so that they are available for the poem he wishes to write.  I teach Shakespeare and, at the time, was teaching Victorian poetry, which includes all those superb dramatic monologues by Browning and Tennyson.  So the form of the dramatic monologue — a poem told in the speaker's voice and in iambic pentameter (usually) — presented itself.  Iambic echoes the infinitive — 'to be' — and the article/noun form — 'the king' — so it does tend to sound like human speech.

"Notice Polycrates's complacency — the emerald represents no sacrifice.  And notice that he dies as he lived: his final vision is of precious jewels." 

 

Coursen cited an epigraph from William Collins' 1746 "The Passions: An Ode for Music" as either "a brief entrance to or exit from" the poem:

 

First fear his hand, its skill to try,

Amid the chords bewildered laid,

And back recoiled, he knew not why,

Even at the sound himself had made.

 

And here is the poem itself:

 

My friend Amasis, King of Egypt, warns

that fortune smiles too constantly on me,

and I agree.  In Samos, where I reign,

the grape swells in the sun, and wine cools deep

within the vats of cedar, and fires the heart

from golden bowls of the feast of roasted ox,

blending its scent with steaming capon, fish

basted in cream and doused in lemon sauce.

Contented slaves bring fruit on silver trays,

and my wife smiles at me from deep within

her eyes, for I have taken the emerald,

the pride of Samos' crown and thrown it far

upon the gray-haired sea, to show the gods

they need not envy me.  My steward speaks

of a man who brought a giant fish he'd caught,

as offering.  He carves the fish before

my eyes, and dim from entrils glows the green

of the terrible stone returned.  I see my queen

glance at the door.  The guards are gone.  I smell

the smoke of revolution, sweat of slaves

who raise their fisted hands and roar below —

the sea raising its tide against my walls.

I hear the pound of iron through oaken beams

and then, through flesh.  My heart splinters as the cross

heaves up.  My ribs crush down upon my lungs.

I see the final diamonds touch the dark.

 

This was an engaging book, very often — to use an image from one of the poems — "bare lace-work / against the ruined rose of sunset": humane and natural, thoughtful and evocative.

His next collection was Winter Dreams that led off with a poem titled "Rewinding the Reel."  This, like most of the other poems in the book, was written in quantitative syllabic verse.  The poem was an illustration — coincidental? deliberate? serendipitous? — of the Stephen Hawking theory, later abandoned, of what might happen if the universe, having continued in its expansion to the point of collapse began to run backward through reversed time to its origins:

 

Oranges sheathe themselves

in peel.  Horses flail backwards,

flanks heaving terror into the barn.

Suns lurch and pale

to the east to set,

seducing darkness from the west.

 

Flowers spring closed, draw

periscopes down into earth.  Birds peck

air into crackle-smooth shells.  Prime-rib

roasts resucculent

themselves as knives draw

slices whole.  Bottles bubble back

 

from hollow stems of

glass.

 

I think Coursen must have coined that word, "resucculent."  It does its job.

Many of the rest of the poems are in fact memoir or journal entries with titles like, "Sandlot: 1941"; "October Saturday: 1949"; "To the Beach: Labor Day, 1979," and the last, "15 December, 1981."

         The chief difference between the sorts of poems contained in the next chapbook, Rewriting the Book, lay not in their titles, for these were much the same, but in Coursen's formal approach.  This collection went so far as to include an example of one of the most popular post-Modernist borrowings from medieval Provencal bardistry, but one that he had resisted to this point: "Sestina: Winter, 1986."  The most prevalent tone of the poems was a rueful wistfulness, as in the blank verse sonnet, "A Professor's Monday Morning":

 

She sits there, shining blonde, shifts to cross her

legs.  Momentary glimpse of white beneath

the subtle weave of tartan.  She has heard

that, if she comes, empty but appealing,

 

to me, she will leave with a topic to

processed in next Tuesday, or to be

extended due to some breakdown that is not

of her smile, or of pearls that snuggle

 

into blue cashmere.  The space between us

as we chat of Hamlet cannot be phrased.

A life ahead, a life behind.  "What should

such fellows as I do, crawling between

 

earth and heaven?" I ask.  She jots a note

and goes, leaving me without a topic.

 

One of the themes that Coursen developed from some of his earlier work was continued in his War Stories, a chapbook full of quantitative syllabic poems whose subject, for the most part, was nostalgia, but not the kind that cloys, the kind that illuminates the present by casting a sharp glow over the past.  The poems began in the 1950's when Coursen was a fighter pilot, and they worked forward to the early 1980's.  In effect, then, this was an autobiography, but it was first of all the story of days spent in intense living, both physically and intellectually.  Coursen studied The Book of Forms intensely, and he died still a formalist — there is even another sestina here, but the forms do not hinder his telling any more than they hindered his Bowdoin colleague and fellow Maine poet, the late Louis O. Coxe, who also had his influence on the younger man.

The next collection was a second selected poems, Rewinding the Reel, taking its title from the first poem in Winter Dreams.  Coursen had originally intended to include many more of his war poems, but he cut back on these and included a larger portion of the nature poems and meditations.  The result was a book with an elegiac tone and a formal feeling.  It included many of the poems discussed in paragraphs above.

         Several chapbooks later, after Songs and Sonnets, Five Minute after 'Mayday!', and Lament for the Players, all issued in 1992,  Coursen published a collection, Love Poem (sort of), which won the 1993 Cooper House American Chapbook Award, of which Michael Hall, poetry editor of the sponsoring periodical, Poet, wrote, "Coursen is an accomplished poet and a master of the short lyric.  His poems combine beauty and precision in a way that allows him to recreate the experiences of a place, a time, or an emotion.  Reading the poems in this collection, we hear a voice that speaks directly of particular moments and experiences and captures them quite precisely in language that is often very close to painting or photography in its clarity."

This was his most formal collection to that point in his career, full of sonnets, like the title poem, "Love Poem (sort of): For Anne":

 

Here, on the other side of the mountain, the wind

rivers a few leaves along a yellow bank of light.

Winter waits elsewhere, and somewhere else the blind

migrations echo a line of coast, where night

and dawning empty of song.  Regiments

of cornstalks march and countermarch, this side

of the mountain, where the molten hill consents

to shadow, and afternoon fathoms an evening tide.

 

Spring will never learn how to come,

except in the memory of seed and branch again,

insisting on what we forget until the pain

lets us forget for good.  So, I come home

to letters that answer questions I never gave,

and smile between the lines at the ones I have.

 

In the same year H. R. Coursen proved himself to be a very brave man with an unusual idea.  His next book, which he partly edited, partly wrote, is at once a collection of photographs, an anthology of poems by famous British and American poets (and one Vietnamese poet, Ho Chi Minh), and a book of original elegies by Coursen.

"This book began many years ago," Coursen wrote in his introduction, "when I stood before the Donne memorial in Saint Paul's [Cathedral, London].  I was surprised that stone could move me."  Therefore, over a period of time, the author undertook a pilgrimage to the graves of many men and women writers which his partner, Pamela Mount, photographed.  When these had been gathered, Coursen selected representative poems by his subjects, added them to the manuscript, and wrote his elegies.  "Some of the poems I have written to accompany the photographs," Coursen said, "are 'to' the poets and a few are imitations of them."

         By themselves, the photographs would have been soporific.  The representative poems add a dimension of interest, but not an unusual one.  It is in his own contributions to the book that Coursen shows his courage, and his greatest success.  By and large, the few poems that are imitations fare badly in contrast with their models.  Coursen writes disingenuously that these "...are exercises but do show, by contrast, how good the originals are."  The elegies, however, are quite good, even moving, in and of themselves.  At this point an example is called for.  Here is all of the elegy for the 14th-century Geoffrey Chaucer, "Rhyme Royal for Autumn Storm":

 

Vacant spaces open to the bay,

layered in the leaves of years long lost

and yesterday.  Empty skies lose way

and drift, touching shadows to the coast,

marbled in rain, waiting the etching of frost.

A wind, descended from the north, cries, loud

with earth's friction.  Last light bleeds from cloud.

 

A storm-lash whips the bridge's back, as I

try the lights.  A birch releases a spill

of wind that pulls bewildered leaves to die

in the downward rift of rain, and the spell

that night begins to cast across the fill

 

of water, reflecting the rejecting face

of shore, erasing now without a trace.

 

But what has this to do with Chaucer? one may well ask.  Nothing on the surface except the form of the poem, rime royal, in which Chaucer wrote upon occasion.  Beneath the lines, however, there is a pensive meditation occasioned by the spirit of the poet.  If one protests that Coursen is writing about himself, about his mood occasioned as much, perhaps, by a New England landscape as by the grave of the first great English poet, we may shrug and reply, But what else is an elegy if not one's own meditation upon the death that has occurred to another, and many another, and must occur to us?

There are many fine elegies in this book.  Some of them have chimes and images as good as this one cited in which there are not only true end-rhymes and consonances, but head-tail rhymes as in the first two lines (bay / layered); alliterations, as in the second line (layered in the leaves of years long lost); assonances (leaves years); internal rhymes and cross rhymes (layered / yesterday...way.  But one need not belabor the point.

         Another talent that Coursen displays upon one occasion here is an ability to translate from Middle English into modern English, as he does in a fine rendition of a passage from Confessio Amantis by John Gower, Chaucer's contemporary.  If some of the imitations fall off from this level of competence, as for instance "Raleigh. Dawn: 29 October 1618," many of these are nevertheless very good poems by a very good writer who was not given his due by his contemporaries.

We have come to the end of the essay I published years ago, but Herb continued writing all kinds of things until he died at the age of 79 in bed, in his sleep apparently and enviably, on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011.  I hope that he had received and seen his contributor’s copy of the revised and expanded edition of The Book of Forms, Including Odd and Invented Forms, which contained four of his poems, “National Pastime,” discussed above, in my opinion the greatest poem about baseball ever written; “The King of Kolchis,” written in a form he invented called the “once” (pronounced “on-say”), “St. John of the Cross,” written in the Spanish form called the “lira,” invented by the title poet, and “Winter Dreams,” written in another form Coursen invented, the dagwood.

Herb was a dear old friend, as was Pamela Mount, his companion of two decades, who died last year. My wife Jean and I miss them both deeply.

Lewis Putnam Turco

 

BOOKS BY H. R. COURSEN, JR.

 

H. R. Coursen, Jr., Graves of the Poets, Manassas, VA: EM Press, 1993.

——, Hope Farm: New and Selected Poems, Stratford, CT: Cider Mill Press, 1979.

——, Inside the Piano Bench, Berkeley CA: Samisdat, Vol. VII, No. 2, 1975.

——, Fears of the Night, Berkeley CA: Samisdat, Vol. XI, No. 1, 1976.

——, Lookout Point, Berkeley CA: Samisdat, Vol. III, No. 1, 1974.

——, Love Poem (sort of), Oklahoma City OK: Cooper House Publishing, 1993.

——, Rewinding the Reel, Stratford CT: Cider Mill Press, 1989.

——, Rewriting the Book, Stratford CT: Cider Mill Press, 1987.

——, Survivor, Houghton NY: ktaadn poetry press, 1974.

——, Storm in April, n.p.:n.d. [1973].

——, War Stories, Stratford CT: Cider Mill Press, 1984.

——, Walking Away, Berkeley CA: Samisdat, Vol. XVI, No. 1, 1977.

——, Winter Dreams, Stratford CT: Cider Mill Press, 1982.

 

"The Protean Poetry of Herbert Coursen," by Lewis Turco, was originally published as the lead article in The Hollins Critic, xxxii:3, June 1995, pp. 1-11, copyright 1995 and 2012 by Lewis Turco; all rights reserved.

 

 

Looking for a Few Good Terzanelles

The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

          The American terzanelle is a villanelle written in terza rima.  Like the latter, it is nineteen lines in length: five interlocking triplets plus a concluding quatrain in which the first and third lines of triplet one reappear as refrains.  The center line of each triplet is a repeton reappearing as the last line of the succeeding triplet with the exception of the center line of the penultimate stanza which reappears in the quatrain.  This is the rhyme and refrain scheme for the triplets: A¹BA² bCB cDC dED eFE.  The poem may end in one of two ways: fA¹FA² or fFA¹A².  Every line is the same metrical length (except in the original one below which had a short third line, repeated as the last line):

         Recently I went looking on the Web for good examples of the terzanelle. I found dozens of poems written in the form, but very few good ones. I therefore began to collect the good ones I could find and to add them to the several I had written over the decades, then I began asking some of my poet friends to try their skill and luck with this pattern I had invented back in the ‘sixties. Below listed are the titles and authors of the best terzanelles that I was able to gather. If any of the readers of this blog would like to try their hands at the form, I’d be happy to see them. WARNING: I have no immediate plans for these poems, but they may be sent to me via e-mail at lewturco@roadrunner.com. 

“Terzanelle,” Lewis Turco, 1965

“Thunderweather,” Lewis Turco; (subsequently, “Terzanelle in Thunderweather,” Wesli Court, 1973; listen to the author read Thunderweather).

“Terzanelle of This Room of Hours,” Wesli Court, 1978

"A Mole Lived on a Mountain," Wesli Court, 1978

“Terzanelle of the Spider’s Web,” Wesli Court, 1990

 “The Burned Walls,” Christian Nguyen Langworthy, 1992

“Terzanelle in Blonde,” Chryss Yost, 2000

“The Swamp-Muskeg Complex,” Ruth F. Harrison, 2001

“Terzanelle,” Robert Schechter, 2002

“Terzanelle with Lines from Bhartihari,” Ned Balbo, 2005

“The Premonition,” Wesli Court, 2006

“Spring on Cape Cod,” Bobbie Ann Pimm, 2007

“The Black Death,” Wesli Court, 2007 (listen to the author read The Black Death).

“Passing the Time,” Wesli Court, 2008

"The History of the Republic of Ireland Football Team," Joey O'Brien, 2008

“The Shade,” Wesli Court, 2009

“Tempi” (using anagram rhyme), Wesli Court, 2011

“Hortatory Terzanelle,” Wesli Court, 2011

“Mr. Big,” R. S. Gwynn, 2011

“Terzanelle for the Pilgrimage to Rosedale,” Maryann Corbett, 2011

“It Tolls for Thee,” Rhina P. Espaillat, 2011

“Economics,” Rhina P. Espaillat, 2011

“After the Closing of the Mines at Leshine,” Thomas Kerrigan, 2011

“Days,” Jack Foley, 2011

"Spell," Miriam N. Kotzin, 2011

"On Goodbyes," Ned Balbo, 2011

"Through a Sea of Blackness," Martin Elster, 2011

"A Paraphrase of Light," Catherine Chandler, 2011

"Razor Stroke," Joseph S. Salemi, 2011

"Rhapsody on QA," Uche Ogbuji, 2011

 

Corrections for the The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition

 

Corrections for the The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition, Published January 2012:

 

p. 93: under “Two-Line Forms” add “Tailgater.”

p. 161: under “Classical pentameter,” line one, delete the word “hexameter.”

p. 218: the stanza at the top of the page is not correctly centered.

p. 231, under “hendecasyllabics,” move lines two, three and four over to the far left margin.

p. 275, under “paradelle,” line one, add an “s” to “it” to make “its inventor.”

p. 417, index, column one, under “Epitaph for a Postal Clerk,” change the page number from “312” to “329.”

p. 419, index, column one, under “X. J. Kennedy” change the page number “312” in two places to “329.”

p. 420, index, column one, under "Robert Mezey," change the page number from "222" to "226" and delete the page number "336."

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5. 

 

Contributors' Copies of The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition

Dear Contributors,

Alas, I received this today (9 December, 2011) from UPNE:

"The contributors will be receiving a copy, however it won't be arriving in time for the holiday. More likely it will be mid-January. This is just a factor of how contributors and permissions copies are processed and shipped, and the release date for the book. So I'm sorry the contributors won't have a copy in hand in time for the holiday, but one is certainly on the way to each of them." I'm very sorry for all the delays. I beat all the deadlines I was given, apparently to no avail.

 

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Revised and Expanded Edition, Including Odd and Invented Forms

It exists! I received this letter today, 22 November, 2011:

The book should be available to order from the publisher by December 13th, but it may be advance-ordered from Amazon.com or B&N.com now:

The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Fourth Edition, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5. Not yet published; expected: December 13, 2011.

PRE-ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM:

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco

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The Poet's Court

 Forenote: This review essay was published in Voices, 171, 1960. It was written in 1959 while I was still a non-traditional undergraduate at the University of Connecticut which I attended after spending four years after high school in the U. S. Navy from 1952-1956, during which time I began to publish, beginning in 1953, in the literary quarterlies and “little magazines” of the period, including the poetry periodical Voices edited by Harold Vinal. Mr. Vinal had asked me to review some books, which I did, and he thought well enough of my criticism to ask me to do more of the same.

I had not planned to write criticism, but I decided that, if I were going to do so, I needed a system based on something other than mere opinion. Therefore, I wrote this piece explaining my viewpoint and method, and I have adhered to these principles throughout my career as a writer. 

Visions and Revisions of American Poetry by Lewis Turco, Fayetteville AR: University of Arkansas Press,UArkansasPress 1986. ISBN 0-938626-50-7, trade paperback, $12.95. Recipient of the 1986 Melville Cane Award for criticism of the Poetry Society of America. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM. 

 

THE POET'S COURT

         When a poet, upon publication of his work, is submitted thereby to a jury of his peers (and by "his peers" I mean poets both better and worse than he is), he is not, as a rule, adjudged guilty or not guilty of literary excellence as he might be were he on trial in a court of law. His reviews are usually mixed, at least to some degree. One reviewer will like him or dislike him more than another, even if the jury is unanimously in favor of, or condemns, his work. There is no official academy in this country, even if there are several unofficial ones.

         Thus, in effect, his [or her] work is tried not once but many times in a system of multiple jeopardy. He is handed a set of dissimilar verdicts arrived at by any number of critical codes and told to go forth and either to live up to or live down the critical balance of reputation at which he has arrived in the public eye.

         This being so, and the poet's position under such conditions being extremely precarious, the fairest thing a critic can do is to explain the standards by which he is judging. Since I have only recently [1959] taken up the mechanism of reviewing and, perhaps owing to this fact have formulated opinions on some of the conscious things I attempt in my own writing, this seems a good time to explain them to you and to the authors whose work passes beneath this pen and eye.

         Poetry is a series of "images" [I later called them “levels”], if we can conceive of such things as music, philosophy, idea, as well as retinal impressions, as images. On the first and least important level [sic], there is the visual image: how does the poem look on paper before you even read it? If this seems absurd or irrelevant, I beg the reader to think of how a Whitman poem looks in print as opposed to a poem by W. C. Williams. At first glance one can tell the difference, perhaps even catch some impression of the unlike psychological effects these poets will produce on closer reading.

         Second, there is the "sound image" [“sonic level”]: what musical or sonoral pattern does the poet weave? This would include rhyme, rhythm, vocabulary, syntax, etc.

         Third, there is the "sense image" [“sensory level”]. What mood does the poet evoke? What feelings, scenes and so forth?

         Fourth, there is the "idea image" [“ideational level”]: meaning, philosophy, observation.

         Fifth, there is the "total image" [“fusional level”]. What does the combination of ingredients equal?

         There are poets, and there are others:

         Upon reading Prof. Elder Olson's essay, "The Nature of the Poet" in A Casebook on Dylan Thomas (1961), edited by John Malcolm Brinnin, it occurs to me that Mr. Olson is wrong. Since he is a high priest of the Neo-Aristotelian School of Criticism, it is therefore distinctly possible that the Neo-Aristotelians are also wrong.

         The essay does not particularly offend me until, On page 77 of the Casebook, Mr. Olson quotes a portion of, poem which he thinks "has gone unnoticed," and compares this with three lines which, it seems to him, are "pure trifling." It is plain to me that the trifling lines are very good writing indeed, and that the justly unnoticed ones could be considered good only by someone like Elder Olson, who writes just this kind of verse himself.

         It seems to me that Mr. Olson condemns and lauds [Dylan] Thomas just as Thomas ought to be condemned and lauded, but he does this and that to that and this: he loves the bad and loathes the good. I find very little to argue within the line of his reasoning. He seems very discerning and intelligent. But finally, all I can say is that logic will do no one any good unless he [or she] also has taste, and the flavor of Mr. Olson's pronouncements leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

         Unfortunately, while the foundations of logic are fairly stable, taste changes. There is no possibility that some metrician someday will invent a sliding rule which will predict in advance a change in the taste buds of readers. Which means, of course, that each of us must continue to pick out idols and worship them for our own reasons. Therefore, since I have always felt that Thomas is a good poet and Olson is a bad one, I resent the latter's invading my personal Tahiti like a boat full of Illinois missionaries to convert the noble instinct to the Neo-Aristotelian dogma. I resent, particularly, Prof. Olson's seizing the excuse to preach, in the last half of his essay, when he has the right only to say that, after all, these are his own reasons for liking what he likes. When he begins to lay down the Golden Rule for Literary Criticism, I begin looking at him with an eye as to how well his shrunken head would look on the wall of my thatched hut.

         But, to get down to specifics: when there is one undefined abstract word in a logical argument, like a frayed strand in a good net, the fish one is trying to catch may get away. In Mr. Olson's case' the word is value. He says, "We value the arts in terms of their effects on us." On the surface, all seems well. But later on he "Says, "We measure performance against what it seems impossible anyone should have done; against what only the fine artist could have done; against what most artists could do, what most people could do, what anyone could have done, what only a fool would have done." He forgot to add, however, that we as individuals value various things in varying degrees; he forgot to mention the most important standard: personal bias, which has nothing to do with logic, and a lot to do with the id. In other terms, ultimately we measure performance against what we ourselves cannot do, would love or loathe to accomplish.

         Now, maybe Mr. Olson means it when he says that he thinks,

 

— Tell his street on its back he stopped the sun

And the craters of his eyes grow springshoots and fire

When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang. —

 

is pure trifling, and that

 

— There must, be praised, some certainty,

If not of loving. well, then not,

And that is true after perpetual defeat. —

 

is "the shape and stamp of despair." Personally, I value the rhythms, sonority, images and visceral common sense of the first quotation, and care very little for the pallid philosophizing of the second.

         Mr. Olson and I may rationally evaluate a poem by the same reasoning, but the things, we value are not the same; they are a matter of taste. Perhaps his taste is good, and mine is bad. Perhaps it's the other way around. Perhaps, it doesn't make any difference to anyone else. Perhaps, if we wish, we should give our reasons for liking particular poems and then, instead of proselytizing, let others make up their own minds.

         Carol Hall in Portrait of Your Niece (1959) is a virtuoso performer in the American manner: a master of technique and control if not always of emotional honesty, as the first poem in her book quickly proves. "When I Was a Child, I Bought the Beach" is set up in four quintets turning on two rhymes, the first three rhyming abbaa and the fourth, babab. In the first three stanzas, she sets up her theme and the tone of her poem, a reminiscence of childhood, and carefully plants the truism, "Children are hard to understand." Then, in the last stanza, she wants to let us know that she is going to do something different from and with what has gone before, so she changes the rime pattern.

         But she is going to make her job as tough on herself as she can — she is going to use five lines that have been used in the first 3/4 of the poem, namely, lines 2, 4, 8, 9 and 12. How will she say anything different? Of course, she has to change something. Therefore, to set us up for the punch line, she changes an innocuous word, "was" in line 9 to "all" in line 19, thereby giving herself precedent for changing a more important word in line 12, "hard", which becomes, in the final line, "Children are slow to understand," (my italics).

         This is the kind of crossword-puzzle approach to writing that a poet ought to grow out of. In any event, in this case the game wasn't really worth the candle.

         Although her structures are always planned mathematically, she is also mathematically loose in her scansion, giving the impression of spontaneity without granting her verse the liberty one senses it would like to have. For example, "Country Without Rain," in blank verse: "This is a country without willing rain/ The shrunken seeds start from our ground like mice,/Soiling the foot that treads them."

         However, Ms. Hall can handle a theme, even a commonplace one like that in "Portrait of Your Niece," the title poem, almost brilliantly. She knows language and how to handle it. She has memorized all the rules, knows when and how to apply them; in this case they are slant rime, change-of of rhythm, calculated surprise (which thrills the would-be critic in each of us). Carol Hall writes "the well-made poem."

         It seems she can work with almost any set of premises she needs to create a given effect, provided the effect desired is not an unusual one. That is to say, she has a better ear than that of a mere imitator. She is able, for instance, to hear Dylan Thomas in her head, then write a poem like "The Funeral-Baked Meats," skirting Thomas so well that, while we know he is there, we hesitate to say so.

         There is little similarity between the latter poem and the one cross-page in her book, "Beach at Pasture." They might have been written by different poets. "Beach" is paler in texture, surprisingly so because of the large number of adjectives, which seem neither to harm nor help what little is said.

         Two pages farther on, another voice: "Sons and Fathers: the Homecoming," in my opinion the best poem in the book. It is heaped with marvelous imagery: "When the slamming of the door shatters your faceless calm/Dendrites like trees make porches of the eyes.... " Here, Hall is more than just a fine technician. She has found something to say which forces her to transcend her consciousness of craft. She is capable of making a real poem. The line, "You must set me up now with a shop of goodies," is a masterful unraveling of the texture of image and sound that precedes it and paves the way for more of the same, until we come to a great final line: "(Is your face rayed with light like angry windows?)"

         Miss [Ms.] Hall has a good range of wit and emotion, complexity and simplicity, but very seldom does she mix these elements, which is a failing. Many of her poems, such as "Office Memoranda," need ]leavening. Too often she begins a pattern and does not vary it. Even so short a thing as a poem may need dramatic relief, or at least an intensification or diminution of mood. The safest poets seldom attempt this, for it is too great a chance to take: the poem might fail; it's a prose device, let the novelist fool around with it if he wants to. He has the space. The possibility that a poem might attain stature through such means is too large a gamble.

         As a general rule, Carol Hall avoids the literary cliché, the "academic sound," the tight little aphorism of "modern poetry," but in such poems as "Before My Kept Hands" she, too, at last gives in and writes the set piece.

I wish she would let herself go.

         Jean Garrigue in A Water Walk by Villa D'Este (1959) is very facile. She knows everything there is to know about the construction of verse, has an eye, an ear and an active pen hand. She is, in other words, a good academic poet, but rather unexciting. I don't mean to slight her ability or her position in the contemporary scene, but to treat her work more fully would be to duplicate effort, for many of the comments I have made in the preceding treatment of Carol Hall's book may justly be applied to Miss Garrigue also.

         I take in hand next Robert Huff's Colonel Johnson's Ride and Other Poems by Robert Huff, (1959). Mr. Huff does not particularly believe in visual image. Except for "Porcupines," which is startling because it imitates prose paragraphs and comes in the middle of the book, he sticks with quatrains, couplets, stanzas all set down matter-of-factly and pushed over to the left hand margin. Robert Huff's sound, however, is full. He often mixes, I hesitate to use the word, sweetness with toughness of language, as in "King Salmon":

 

A gravel deathbed for the king of fish.

Nuncle, the mad Kingfisher had you hooked

From birthrise, hauled and schooled, and heaved

From saltsea silver up brown rapids run

To rest your milt-white crown upon these stones.

Hear how the windy guts of gulls

Rejoice above your ghost beginning now.

They grow for so much Godspent majesty.

 

         Similarly, Huff mixes the pastoral with the mechanical. Sometimes this works and sometimes it does not. We are not yet used to having machines and bombers described in lyrical fashion. His poems work best with mood and nature. This may be best illustrated by quoting the whole of "Although I Remember the Sound":

 

Although I remember the sound

The young snag made when I felled it,

It was not noise or music mattered then.

Briefly, the tree was silent on the ground.

Of what it was that mattered I recall

Simply, among the chips and dust

And keener near the center of the cut,

The sweet, new smell which rose after the fall.

 

This is his best subject, although he tries satire, moral objection to war and portraits with good success.

         The idea image Huff creates is, unfortunately, somewhat unclear. He will give us a scene and a mood, the characters, the plot, and then will not draw his conclusion. Rather, he will hint at it. We may or may not understand what he is talking about, depending on the degree of empathy between the reader and what went on early in the poem. I, for one, am uncertain how to react when, in "The Smoker," the poet describes a blind man blowing smoke rings with (perhaps) "his hearing aid turned off" so that he cannot hear the poet's conversation and later appears in his dreams, "A slow smile smoking, circled to the thighs / And screws both of his thumbs into my eyes / And will not stop to listen to my screams." In general, however, the total image of one of his poems is pleasing, if a bit too careful.

         Thomas Merton, of course, is a major minor poet. It may be that he will eventually be held in even greater esteem. For this reason, then, let it simply be said that his Selected Poems (1959), are a valuable addition to any library. His language is direct, simple and beautiful. His themes, though hampered by the fact that he must of necessity limit their scope to the boundaries prescribed by the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur of the Roman Catholic Church, owing to the fact that he is a Trappist monk, are far from trivial. He knows technique, but lets his ear and good taste guide him; his imagination is unfettered. His imagery is often classical in its appropriateness. One example should suffice:

 

TROPICS

At noon the sky goes off like a gun.

Guards, on the Penal Island,

Converging, madas murdered, in the swearing cane,

Arrest the four-footed wind.

 

But the chained and numbered men

Do not cease their labor:

Building a cage for the devouring sun.

 

At six o'clock exactly,

The sky explodes like a bomb,

And it is night.

 

Instantly, the guards

Hide in the jungle, build a boat

And escape.

 

But the prisoners of the state

Do not cease their labor,

Collecting the asphalt fragments of the night.

 

         William Everson, known also as Brother Antoninus, not only wrote the poems in The Crooked Lines of God (1959), but he also designed it, set the type and printed it. His long correspondence with Harry Duncan bore fruit in this collector's item. I personally do not care for the shape of the book, (it is wider than tall), but there's a reason for this: Brother Antoninus writes a very long line of verse.

         Brother Antoninus at his peak is a powerful poet. Beneath the long, jagged lines there lies a heavy rhythm which might well be likened to the advance and retreat of the Pacific against a rough coast. Though this reader cannot at all times agree with what Brother Antoninus says, there is no denying his ability to say it. It is a great temptation for me to venture that there may be one truly great poem in The Crooked Lines of God, namely, "A Canticle to the Christ in the Holy Eucharist": "And the many days and nights that I lay as one barren, / As the barren doe lies on the laurel under the slope of Mount Tamalpais. / The fallow doe in the deep madrone, in the tall grove of the redwoods...." Certainly, at least, this is some of the very finest religious poetry of the last twenty years.

         Mona Van Duyn in Valentines to the Wide World (1959) is first rate in those poems which utilize both the long line and a reflective voice, as in the title, poem, "Three Valentines to the Wide World." In this too-brief mention, I would like simply to say that the above poem, "Addendum to Any Day, Any Poem," "From Yellow Lake, An Interval", and particularly "Death by Aesthetics," are all very well written, moving in a cerebral way, and contain some masterful descriptive passages.

         In going through Peter Miller's book, Sonata for Frog and Man (1959) I jotted down a few notes such as: flat language, but good images; nice handling of the extended metaphor, though not really striking. Concerning the poem, "Every Time, You Came," my reaction was: this is a very bad lyric. Strange, perhaps, that he is not as good with a form to bolster him as he is with free verse — that is to say, prose. Unexciting, pompous sometimes.

         I won't fall into that trap in which many reviewers are caught when they are dealing with primarily "free-verse" poets, by saying that he lacks an ear. But he lacks something cohesive in his poems. It may be that he is a young man who published two books too quickly.

         In the case of Weather House by Alonzo Gibbs (1959), worth lies in the light touch of beautiful description, i.e. from "Water":

 

Water with its mirror ways is never itself:

it is always the sky, the green seawall or the rock shelf;

it is the girl upon the cliff the full

bush, the pier or out-of-drawing hull;

at times at noon water is the sun.

 

and "Tenement Tomb":

 

The steeple cock tailed by the day-paled moon,

Antenna, courthouse dome score tit-tat-toe.

And on the ridge the red brick school for boys

Is seen over several sunlit walls.

 

         Unfortunately, a book full of descriptive poetry, no matter how fine, does not wear well upon the reader who looks also for other things.

         The Gazebos by Edwin Honig (1959) takes description several steps further. Coupled with a sometimes brilliant technique, he unites what is seen with what is felt and thought, and passes judgment upon the total vision rather than simply accepting it as beautiful. Take the first poem in  the book, "Jawing of Genesis", as an example:

 

A shaggy sea-wet islet pauses tideless

Under two hawks hovering. A dim

Washed heaven blue surmounts the worldless

Morning, its weighty world-wide asking trimmed

Down to summer silence — Was paradise

Like this before the need arose for it,

Before God made the book that broke the silence?

 

Man-made, the book was God. At his arising

A thud of grim intelligence slammed shut

The summer silence. Up rose the wordy islet,

Awash with seas' first rocky stutterings.

One man, one hut: " an aleph-beth was started

With handy Adam to belie it, mouthing

How Eve most mothers summer's green abiding.

 

Folk Meters

 

During the academic year 1959-1960, while I was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Donald Justice, I overheard a conversation between my classmate Robert Mezey and his printer / publisher Harry Duncan. We were at adjacent tables in a coffee shop, perhaps the Student Union, and they were discussing a verse-writing system they called “dipodics,” of which I had never heard. I had, however, begun work on The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, and I was always on the alert for information, so I began to take notes while I eavesdropped.

Harry and Bob were talking about dipodics not as Greek “dipody,” but as an accentual prosody, basically Anglo-Saxon, but modified by the Norman invasion of England in 1066 which brought into English literature the French syllabic verse prosody. Over the subsequent centuries syllabics and accentuals merged until, in Chaucer and the “Scottish Chaucerians,” a new prosody, accentual-syllabics, emerged in which there were regular numbers of syllables, both stressed and unstressed, alternating regularly with one-another to form “verse feet.” Early Renaissance poets like Philip Sidney and George Puttenham (an ancient cousin of mine) attached classical terminology from the Greek system of “quantitative” verse to these English verse feet, which really was not accurate or descriptive, but we have lived with this situation for several centuries.

Between Geoffrey Chaucer’s death in 1400 and the early verse published at the beginning of the English Renaissance a century later, people forgot the metrical system invented by John Gower and Chaucer and fell back into a semi-accentual system of writing that kept French riming although it also kept alliteration and some of the other effects of Anglo-Saxon prosody.

Of course, all this information I researched later on, I didn’t hear it from Mezey and Duncan who were speaking on a level more technical than historical. When I went home I began to ponder “podics,” and of course I began writing poems in this “new” system. One of the first was this one, for the subject of which I chose my young wife’s pregnancy:

 NURSERY RIME

(Listen to Lewis Turco read Nursery Rime)

                  What shall I say of my son,

That he is firm, fair of skin?

         That he rides his backside and can't know

He has not yet let the outside in?

                  There squalls a storm just begun.

         I stand fast; he lies low.

 

                  What may I say of this bone

Wound in flesh partly mine —

         Warp of my woof, thread of my skein —

He has come so supple to sup and dine,

                  To tangle the nets we have thrown

         To veil the waters that won't drain.

 

                  He would swim where I recline.

Toss him a hook.  Fish his schools:

         He will lure us down, take us in.

He will build us a weir for fools —

                  He is no man's yet he is mine.

         He is a death sign and a bulletin.

 

         Below I have scanned the first stanza using these symbols: X=strong stress; (x)=secondary stress; •=caesura (a pause in the center of a line); x =an unstressed syllable. The rules-of-thumb regarding stressing are simple and few:

1.  In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress. Scansion marks are always placed over the vowel that appears in each syllable. If one cannot at first hear the stressing, then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.

2.  Important single-syllable words, particularly verbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.

3.  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses through promotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse.

4.  In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will be counted as a stressed syllable.

5.  In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will be counted as an unstressed syllable.

6. Any syllable may be rhetorically stressed by means of italics or some other typographical ploy.

Thus, in the scanned lines above, there is no normative pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, so neither the stanza nor the poem is written in standard accentual-syllabic verse; rather, it is written in STRONG STRESS VERSE, that is to say, “podic prosody.” Here are the first five lines scanned:

     X    (x) x  X   x     x  X

What shall I say of my son,

    x    Xx  X    •  X  x    X

That he is firm, fair of skin? 

    x    x  X      x    X    X    x     X         X

That he rides his backside and can't know

  x   x    X  (x)  X     x  X   x    (x)

He has not yet let the outside in?

    X        X    x    X     X     x  X

There squalls a storm just begun.

X  (x)   X   •   X (x)  X

I stand fast; he lies low.

 

Getting rid of the words, we are left with the scansion marks:

 

Xx xX xxX = 7 syllables

xX xX •X xX = 8 syllables [the compensatory caesura = (x)]

xxX xX (x)x XX = 9 syllables

xxX (x)X xX x(x) = 9 syllables

()X Xx XX xX = 7 syllables

()X (x)X •X (x)X = 6 syllables (not counting the compensatory caesura)

If we attempt to discuss these marks in terms of the metrical feet of accentual-syllabic prosody rather than podic prosody, line one consists of a trochee, Xx, in which the second syllable is demoted from strong stress to secondary stress, thus equaling an unstressed syllable; an iamb, xX, and an anapest, xxX. The second line is four iambs in a row, the third of which has its first syllable compensated for by a caesura, •X; the third line has an anapest, xxX, an iamb, xX, a trochee, Xx, and the last foot is a spondee, XX, two strong stresses in a row. The first foot of line four is an anapest, xxX, and the last three are iambs, the first of which has the first syllable demoted from strong stress and standing in place of that strong stress. The fifth line is particularly problematic and can perhaps best be scanned as a headless iamb ()X, followed by a trochee, Xx,  a spondee, XX, and an iamb, xX. Line six is another headless iamb, ()X, followed by three iambs,  the second of which has a compensatory caesura in the first syllable, (x)X /•X/ (x)X.

All of which is to say that the poem cannot be scanned in terms of accentual-syllablc verse because there is no running foot — no particular verse foot that predominates in all the lines of the poem; nor are the syllable counts of the line regular, so it is not a poem written in syllabic prosody. It is accentual or strong stress verse, called “folk meters” or podic prosody by many, but “stress hierarchy” by The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics in its discussion of “dipodism, dipodic verse” which is, “In the older sense of the term, used in Classical prosody. ‘Dipodism’ refers to the fact that metrical feet in Greek and Latin are double the length of what they later became in the European vernaculars…. But primarily the term is now used to refer to a distinctive feature of ballad meter, namely stress hierarchy.” It is sometimes called ballad meter because it is the prosody in which many Scottish border-ballads were written during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Likewise, now and again podic prosody is called “nursery rhyme verse” because many old children’s poems were written in it.

For much more information about the various prosodic systems mentioned in this essay, the reader may refer to The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco (Dec 13, 2011) at Amazon.com.

 

 

 

The Dialects of the Tribe:

Post Modern American Poets

and Poetry [Paperback]

Lewis Turco (Author)

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Plowing the "Free Verse" Field

 

People who maintain that there is such a thing as “free verse” deny that “verse” is measured language and to write it one has to count so many syllables to a line in some way. They cite the derivation of the word from plowing a field and “turning” when one comes to the end of a row. But such folks, I guess, have never watched a farmer plowing a field. The farmer plows to the end of his field, then turns and plows to the other end of the field before he turns again. That farmer’s field has limits, and he plows the WHOLE field, not half a row here, then a third of a row there, and three-quarters of a row next, and so forth. That’s what one does when one writes “free verse.”

Let’s say that the “field” is a paragraph. One begins to write a sentence of that paragraph, but before one gets to the end of the sentence the “plowman” decides to begin a second row after writing a phrase; he continues it to the end of that phrase, then he begins a third row until he finishes a clause. He begins another row and a new clause in row four, and so on until he has finished his poem, until he has finished “plowing his field.” Stand back and look at that field – what do the rows look like? They are uneven; there is unplowed earth at the ends of many of them. They look like a “free verse” poem. 

Listen, all you poets who cling to a ridiculous term because you feel as though you cheat when you write a lineated prose poem: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH PROSE POETRY! You don’t have to justify your practice by clinging to a metaphor that won’t hold up against scrutiny simply because you think that the English tradition requires you to write in “verse.” It does not! There have been prose poems written in the English language since the Roman occupation of Britain. Neither Edgar Allan Poe in “Eureka” nor Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” knew anything of “free verse” when they wrote their prose poems; neither did Christopher Smart or William Blake or the translators of the King James Bible. It was the satirical French who invented the term “vers libre,” and they weren’t writing it either.

 

The Blues Sonnet

        According to Ira Gershwin in his book Lyrics on Several Occasions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959, pp. 33-34), “As a term for depressed spirits, ‘the blues’ goes back to the first decade of the nineteenth century: ‘and I saw he was still under the influence of a whole legion of the blues’ (Washington Irving: Salmagundi, 1807). Irving’s phrase is his shortened version of the earlier British and Scottish ‘the blue devils,’ which figuratively meant a visitation by the spirits of Melancholia. A century went by before The Blues began to be used as a music term; this, thanks principally to the talent and output of W. C. Handy and his world-famous ‘St. Louis Blues,’ ‘The Memphis Blues,’ and many more.”

        Langston Hughes is given credit for making the "blues" as much a part of American literature as it was of American music, for as artistic expression, the blues is a phenomenon of Black American musical tradition rather than Black literature specifically.  A subgenre of jazz, blues is equally a form of lamentation or complaint with roots in the Bible, in particular the Old Testament which, more than the New Testament, has guided and solaced generations of American Blacks. 

        Blues first appeared as a consciously literary form in Langston Hughes' poem, "The Weary Blues," which won Opportunity magazine's poetry prize in 1925 and, in the following year, was the title poem of his first book, The Weary Blues (1926). Despite his overstatement of the fixity of the blues form, Langston Hughes was much looser in his practice. He never used the rhyming triplet form, preferring merely to express the sadness that is the tone and subject of “the blues,” which he defined in his poem titled “The Blues”:

 

When the shoe strings break

On both your shoes

And you're in a hurry —

That's the blues.

 

When you go to buy a candy bar

And you've lost the dime you had

Slipped through a hole in your pocket somewhere —

That's the blues, too, and bad!

 

         Hughes also tied “the blues” to music in a much less formal way in the title poem from his prize-winning first book in 1923,  “The Weary Blues”:

 

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

He did a lazy sway...

He did a lazy sway...

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues,

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man's soul.

O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan —

"Ain't got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

And put ma troubles on the shelf."

 

        My own first attempt at writing the blues took place at Yaddo where I spent part of the  summer of 1959 between graduation from the University of Connecticut and entering the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa in the fall. Unwittingly following in Hughes’ footsteps, and in the true tradition of improvisation, I was having lunch in my room one day with the artist Roger Crossgrove. We were discussing how quickly one could create an image or write a poem, and I said that I could write a decent poem in fifteen or twenty minutes. Roger scoffed at me. I got a pad of paper and a pencil and said, “Give me a subject.” “How about that waitress we were flirting with last night at the dive across from the racetrack?” he replied. I said, “Okay,” and the result was,

 

LORRIE

Lorrie looked good — man,

         she was a jazz band, straight

         as a clarinet, and the tunes she played

         with her hip action wowed my crowd.

Lorrie swung like a prime ensemble,

         smiled the cool blues as we sipped our

         brews in the racetrack dive while the

         bass thrummer, a basic type, swiped

         at the strings, making us think

         of beds and things.

There we were, dancing our eyes

         among the beers while Lorrie walked

         her pert way among us, mashers all,

         and we asked, "What's up tonight,

         Lorrie-love?"

"I've no time," she smiled, "no time —

         I'm a college girl, my major's law.

"By night I slide drinks down

         to your hands, and in the daylight

         I guard lives at Ryall's beach."

Then, when the jazz bunch quit and

         the horn stopped snorting

         and the drums bumped the last bum

         out the door, we went too, man,

         we went too

 

Who wants to see Lorrie meet her beau?

         Who wants to see his old eyes, older

         than she'll ever be, and his dark hands

         grab her wrist hard as they leave to park

         in the raceway woods?

My collaborator of many years, the printmaker George O’Connell, who is also an amateur jazz musician and plays the vibes in local bands, loves this poem. He made a beautiful Xmas card of it in 1984 and, later on, an entire Artist Book which he gave to me.

         it was not until the 1970s that the blues stanza came to be recognized as an identifiable literary form. At that time Stephen Henderson, in the introduction to his 1973 anthology Understanding the New Black Poetry (a title which was intended to be a reply of sorts to the New Critical Brooks and Warren "Bible" of the Caucasian academy, Understanding Poetry) wrote about the "'classic' twelve-bar, three line form" of the blues, as in Eddie 'Son' House's 'Dry Spell Blues'":

 

         The dry spell blues have fallen, drove me from door to door.

         Dry spell blues have fallen, drove me from door to door.

         The dry spell blues have put everybody on the killing floor.

 

         Now the people down south sure won't have no home.

         Now the people down south sure won't have no home.

         'Cause the dry spell have parched all this cotton and corn.

 

These rhythms are to be found in earlier English poetry as well, however, as one noted in Visions and Revisions (1986, pp. 125-6), specifically in Robert Browning's "A Toccata of Galuppi's."

         House's line is identifiable as loosely iambic hexameter and Browning's as a loose fourteener (i.e., a "fifteener," each line containing fifteen syllables; see The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, 1986, p. 202), but the blues line may vary in length from tetrameter to heptameter; thus, both examples are within the metrical boundaries of the tradition. The triplet stanza and its rhyme scheme are as important to the blues as its meters.  Browning's stanza rhymes aaa but in the strict form of blues stanza the rhyme scheme is AAa —The second line is an incremental refrain, a slightly changed repetition of the first line; the third line is a synthetic parallel which gives a consequence of the repeated lines. And so forth. Here is a portion of the Browning poem:

 

Here you come with your old music, and here’s all the good it brings.

What, they lived once thus at Venice where the merchants were the kings,

Where Saint Mark’s is, where the Doges used to wed the sea with rings.

 

The rhythms and rhymes are the same. The only thing missing from the Browning poem is the formal repetition. The main point is that, though the forms differ slightly, the techniques are the same. The styles are completely different, and it was style that Henderson was discussing, not “technique.”

        Beginning in 1986 the blues stanza is described in The New Book of Forms, (op. cit., pp. 101-2) as a triplet derived from the Afro-American tradition of lamentation or complaint in which line two is an incremental (meaning “slightly changed) repetition of line one and the third line is a synthetic parallel which gives a consequence of the first line and its repetition, AAa, BBb, etc., as in this diagram (the large X or other letter indicates a stressed syllable, the small x an unstressed one; letters other than x = rhyme, and a large letter other than X = a repeated line):

lines                  meters and rhymes

1.                  xX xX xX xX xA

2.                  xX xX xX xX xA

3.                  xX xX xX xX xa

 

4.                  xX xX xX xX xB

5.                  xX xX xX xX xB

6.                  xX xX xX xX xb and so forth:

 

Listen to the author read his poem Blues for George Gershwin

 

BLUES FOR GEORGE GERSHWIN

September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937

 

When I was three you stepped out of the light.

When I was three years old you spurned the light

And wandered off into the dark of night.

 

You left behind a melody or two,
A tune, a song, a melody or two,

And that was quite enough for you to do

 

To justify your stay among us here,

To pay your way while you were with us here

Upon this mortal coil, this spinning sphere.

 

When I grew up I heard the songs you made,

I listened, and I learned the songs you made

And wished¾oh! how I wished that you had stayed.

 

I do not understand why you were taken

So young. Some force of Nature was mistaken

When it decided to leave the world forsaken

 

Of all that possibility of song,

That minstrel’s bag of melody and song

That now we’ll never hear forever long.

 

Therefore we pick your bones and make up tunes

Out of the scraps you left, those scraps of tunes

Your brother Ira kept through nights and noons

 

Until he got too old and joined you there

Wherever you are, rose up and joined you there

To help you strike those strings in the ringing air. 

Wesli Court

 

          Henderson wrote, “In…the poem as ‘score’ or ‘chart,’ we move to the most challenging aspect of Black poetic structure [he kept saying “structure,” not “style” or “tradition” which is in fact really what he was talking about] — the question of limit, or performance of the text.” Later he wrote, "A poem may thus differ from performance to performance just as jazz performances of 'My Favorite Things' would. Moreover, it implies that there is a Black poetic mechanism, much like the musical ones, which can transform even a Shakespearian sonnet into a jazz poem, the basic conceptual model of contemporary Black poetry. The technique, the fundamental device, would be improvisation, lying as it does at the very heart of jazz music."

        In Visions and Revisions (p. 130) I wrote, "Neither in music nor in poetry is improvisation in any way linked merely to jazz or to a specific ethnic group [as Henderson claimed]. The Arabic qasida is a form dating from prehistoric times, and its essence is improvisation. As to turning Shakespearean sonnets into jazz poems, one can even blend the sonnet with the blues; this following sequence, written by Wesli Court [the anagram pen-name under which I write formally traditional verse], is a set of terza-rima blues sonnets, ending with [the first ever] pure blues sonnet as an envoi"; each poem adds a heroic couplet to four triplet stanzas of iambic pentameter terza rima in the first three poems (aba bcb cdc efe ff), or iambic pentameter blues stanza in the "Envoi" (AAa BBb CCc DDd ee):

 

THE BONEYARD BLUES

I.

I'm sitting in the boneyard singing songs,

Sitting singing songs as blue as blue —

Considering my days, their shorts and longs,

 

The days we spent together, me and you.

Yes, you and me and all those other folks

Who've come and gone.  Oh, please don't misconstrue

 

My meaning — yesterday is gone in strokes,

In strokes and chimes, and time cannot be turned,

I'm well aware; it plays its dirty jokes

 

And leaves us on our ashes, bare and burned.

We bare our hearts, and then we burn our spans,

But who's to say what lessons we have learned?

 

The ifs and maybes, shall-bes, will-bes, cans

Turn into bonedust, rusting pots and pans.

 

II.

Rusting pots and pans pile up and ring,

Pile up and ring us round with shards of loss,

With echoes of the songs we used to sing

 

In living rooms and bedrooms filled with moss,

With moss and lichen now of recollection.

The kitchen where we used to sit and toss

 

Together meals of love and of affection

Has grown a mold upon the oven grate,

And there is nothing left of our confection

 

Except a little sweeting on a plate,

The plate of dreams, its edges chipped and cracked.

In the beginning already it was too late —

 

The gun was loaded and the deck was stacked.

The tune could not provide what the lyrics lacked.

 

III.

And so I'm sitting in this boneyard, blue

As blue, and singing songs that leave me cold.

The words — they may be false, they may be true,

 

They may be new — more likely they are old,

As old as flesh and time.  I hear the knell

Of generations as the peals are rolled

 

Among the stones, within the stony well —

That stone-cold well of destiny gone dry.

Who is the sexton hauling on the bell?

 

Why is the deacon grinning at us?  Why?

Why are his cheekbones sunken, and his teeth

So moonlight-gleaming?  Wherefore is his eye

 

The hollow of a heartbeat underneath

The zero of a withered floral wreath?

 

Envoy

 

Just let me drop this note into the dark,

Yes, let me drop this note into the dark —

I'll light it with a match and watch it spark.

 

I'll sail it into night with fire and flare,

Fly it into darkness, see it flare

And wink out in those shadows circling there.

 

I'll watch it take its place among the stars,

Among the minor planets and the stars.

I'll hum the blues, not much — a couple bars —

 

Until the spark has died to inky ash,

And words have flickered into smoken ash.

Then I'll have me a sip of sour mash,

 

And lean against this marker made of stone

That will not last as long as ink or bone.

 

Wesli Court

 

This sequence of poems also ends The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, which also includes "Blues for George Gershwin," www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; BUY FROM AMAZON.COM .