In an interview he conducted for Poets & Writers Magazine
On-Line Only (www.pw.org/mag/dq_turco.htm.) in December 2005 Daniel Nester asked me how it feels to know poets
everywhere use The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics as a standard text on poetics and
prosody.
I replied, “It’s gratifying, of course, but writers seldom get a
real sense of what something like that is like because we get very little
direct feedback. Over the years, though, in the case of The Book of Forms, it’s become slowly obvious to me
that a lot of people use it, and a fair number write to me about it, asking
questions, as you did.”
For
instance, earlier that year, in late January of 2005, the poet-scholar Annie
Finch e-mailed me to relay a query she had received from Erin A. Thomas asking her if she knew whether I were the inventor
of the terzanelle, and if the only existing example was “Terzanelle in
Thunderweather” in The New Book of Forms (Univesity Press of New England, 1986) and The Book of Forms,
Third Edition (University Press of
New England, 2000). I replied that I hadn’t thought of the terzanelle as an
invention, but it’s true that in 1964 or 1965 I had experimented with the form
of the villanelle by applying terza rima to it, thus coming up with a hybrid
form that acted rather like a pantoum and that I called the “terzanelle,” so in
that sense, yes, I was its inventor. Prof. Finch put me in touch with Erin
Thomas who struck up a correspondence with me regarding the background of the
terzanelle.
During
the course of our contact I told him that the first example of the form in
print, titled "Terzanelle," appeared in The Michigan Quarterly Review, volume iv, number 3, in July of 1965. I included
a description of the form in the first edition of The Book of Forms (E. P. Dutton, 1968, page 125), but there were no
examples of poems in that volume, and I didn’t include my poem’s title in the
“Bibliography of Examples” (on page 133).
Subsequently I wrote other examples including “Thunderweather” (title
changed later to “Terzanelle in Thunderweather” as on p. 397 of The
Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Star Cloud Press, 2004), and various people had
been writing them as well, several eventually being posted on the web.
I
suggested to Annie Finch that she Google the term, though I’d never done so
myself. Subsequently, I took my own advice and discovered that there were
26,000 hits on the internet! I was astounded. Although the activity on the web
has since cooled way down, it must have been the most popular verse form in the
world right at that moment. I also Googled “blues sonnet,” the other form I had
“invented,” the first examples of which appeared as “The Boneyard Blues” in my
book of criticism Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (University of Arkansas Press, 1986, pages
130-132), but there were only 72 hits for that form on the web. I was bemused.
One would have thought that the American blues forms would have been more
popular than a medieval French form. How little one knows!
On September 25, 2006 4:48:14 PM EDT Gerald Greland wrote from Bronxville NY to me in Oswego NY:
"Dear Mr. Turco,
"I
am writing to ask for help in finding more information about the Bref Double,
the French form you describe in your Book of Forms. I use your book consistently as I write; it is
the most useful book in my collection.
"I
have consulted numerous other volumes on form and prosody in the hope of
finding more information about the history of this unique combination of rhymed
and unrhymed lines. Unfortunately, though, I have not found any information
that goes beyond your entry.
"I
turn to you now with the hope that you might be able to provide me with more
comprehensive information, or point me in a direction where I can investigate
further.
"I
would be extremely grateful for any help and information you might give.
"With
many thanks," etc.
On
September 25, 2006 9:50:42 PM EDT I wrote to Gerald Greland:
Mr. Greland,
I
always thought that I found that form in Clement Wood’s Poets’ Handbook, but someone else asked me about the bref double a
few years back, and when I checked up on it, I couldn't find it there. So I
regret to say that I have no idea at this late date where I found it, unless
it's from Helen Louise Cohen's Lyric Forms from France (Harcourt, 1922), which is the only other title in
my original bibliography for The Book of Forms (1968) that might apply. Did you try Googling it? I
just did, and got 3000 hits!
Yours,
etc.
On Sep 26, 2006, at 9:18 AM, Jere Greland wrote:
"Dear Mr. Turco,
"Thank
you so much for your prompt reply. I will use the sources you cited in order to
find more information on the bref double. I realize now that I was asking you
to recall original sources and materials that you used almost 40 years ago when
your first edition came out. Of course, when I use TBoF today it all seems so fresh and immediate. I have
the 1986 edition, The New Book of Forms, so I didn't even know that there was a bibliography until you mentioned
it, and then I found that the later edition (and perhaps the earlier?) included
your sources.
"I
did try Googling the bref double, but came up only with examples written in
some bastardized form that seems to have been copied mistakenly from your book
and then propagated endlessly online (the number of repetitions of the rhyme
and the rhyme scheme have been altered and then set, which takes away from the
ambiguous, fantastic essence of the form, in my opinion). Trying to find
anything scholarly or definitive about its origins has been daunting, but I
will keep trying.
"Regardless,
though, of that search, I want to express my humblest and deepest gratitude to
you for the incredible contribution you have made to the field and for the
enormous influence that your work has had on my writing.
"Yours," etc.
On
September 26, 2006 7:49:42 PM EDT I replied,
Mr. Greland,
Many
thanks. I am always happy when someone tells me he or she has profited from my
work.
Lewis
Turco
On
Sep 27, 2006, at 9:52 PM EDT Jere Greland wrote back:
"Dear Mr. Turco,
"I
followed up on the works that you cited, and indeed you were right about
finding the citation for the bref double in Clement Wood's Poets’ Handbook. I found it on page 355 in the 1946 reprint
edition. Perhaps the reason that you had difficulty finding it when you were
last asked is that it is listed in Wood's work as a "breu-doble."
Your description in TBoF is an
exact rendition of what Wood describes. Unfortunately, in the edition of Wood
that I have, there isn't a bibliography, so I'm back to searching for further
historical information. Perhaps I will have more luck researching the
"breu-doble."
"Again,
many thanks for your help.
"Yours," etc.
On
September 28, 2006 9:25:19 AM EDT I wrote:
Mr.
Greland,
You
must be a great researcher, and fast! Wow!
I
wonder how I missed it when I looked it up years ago. Perhaps I looked in Cohen
rather than Wood.
"Breu
doble" doesn't sound familiar, though, but it does sound Spanish rather than French, unless it's
medieval French, which it probably is. I notice in my original bibliography of
1968 and my most recent, of 2000, that the edition of Wood that I cite is the
1940 edition. I wonder if there's a difference in spelling between it and the
1946 edition you cite.
Thank
you for keeping me informed about all this. Much appreciated.
On
September 30, 2006 12:33 PM EDT I followed up:
Mr.
Greland,
I’ve
been thinking over some of the issues and memories you have revived for me.
Regarding the spelling of the bref double that you found in Wood as “breu
doble” -- I’m wondering if I didn’t think, when I found the form (sometime
between 1959 and 1968) that the u
in “breu” was probably the medieval equivalent of v and therefore the first word of the term was meant
to be “brev,” which meant “brief.” However, the “breve” in English prosody
means something else entirely, that is, a “short” or unaccented syllable, as
distinguished from a “macron,” a “long” or accented syllable. I therefore
probably thought that I ought to avoid confusion by changing the v in “brev” to an f, thus arriving at “bref”; then I just added a u to “doble” to modernize the word and wound up with
“bref double.”
In
my researches for The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics I ran into all sorts of similar situations for
which I tried to find simple solutions. As I wrote in the original Introduction
(page 11), “…while researching these forms, the author has discovered ambiguities
in many of the descriptions set forth by his sources. He has also found that in
several cases distinctly different forms have been lumped under one terminology
or another. In order to clarify the study of verse forms, in some cases the
author has invented the names of forms, but in every case these inventions are derived
from the original ambiguous terminology.” The bref double is an obvious example of one of these problems
encountered.
Yours,
etc.
On October 2, 2006 9:34:47 AM EDT Jere Greland wrote:
"Dear Mr. Turco,
"Thank
you for clarifying by outlining your process for arriving at your entry on the
form. I do think that your reasoning behind presenting it as a "bref
double" rather than a "breu-doble" makes complete sense and
probably avoided much confusion.
"I
cannot imagine the enormous job that you had in researching and classifying all
of these magnificent forms into such a practical, comprehensive, compact, and
easy-to-use volume. The decisions that you had to make in terms of naming and
presenting certain forms must have been many. But given the depth and breadth
of your command of the field, I am confident that your choices were more than
sound, as in the case of the 'bref double.'”
"My
best,
"Jere Greland."
On
Tuesday, November 17, 2009, R. S. Gwynn wrote me to say, “The poet who's coming in to read tomorrow [in
Beaumont, Texas] asked if I could think of a 14-liner in pentameter or
tetrameter that could make no claim whatsoever on being a sonnet. I couldn't come
up with one, even from Lowell's vast welter of them. Can you think of any?
She's working up a sonnet lecture for the conclusion of her Warren
Wilson MFA. I said that I always
told my classes that a sonnet has five main qualities:
1.
chiefly lyrical
2.
iambic pentameter
3.
rhyme scheme (other than couplets)
4.
turn/volta
5.
14ll.
"Then I tell them that
all of these 'rules; have been violated at one time or another in
poems that are called ‘sonnets.’
1. There are many short narratives and dramatic
monologues/dialogues;
2. Shakespeare and Sydney used shorter and longer
meters in sonnets;
3. Lowell's sonnets are unrhymed; Wilbur's "In
Trackless Woods" is in Baer's sonnet anthology;
4. Many sonnets lack a clear turn;
6. Both shorter (curtal) and longer (16ll. and
caudate sonnet) exist.
“Any
thoughts?”
I replied, I've
just posted on my new blog [see my previous entry here,
http://lewisturco.typepad.com/odd_and_invented_forms/ ]
"Revisions for a Sixth Printing of the Third Edition of The Book of Forms" that includes a complete definition of the differences between sonnets and other fourteen-line poems [which are called ‘quatorzains’].
Other quatorzains would include the blues “sonnet” which,
though it is fourteen lines long, rhymes, and may be written in iambic
pentameter verse, uses refrain lines in each triplet stanza, and no sonnet uses refrains. Neither the “curtal” nor the “caudate” sonnet is a sonnet
because they aren’t fourteen lines long, and no matter what one calls a poem, by definition, if it isn’t fourteen lines
of rhymed iambic pentameter (or decasyllabic or hendecasyllabic) verse, it is not a sonnet.
COMMENTS
I was
challenged to come up with something to be thankful for each day until Turkey
Day, so I made today Turco Day: "Today
I am thankful for Lew Turco, who taught me that the djinni is stronger for
having learned to live inside the lamp." Paul
Comments