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.

 

 

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. 

 

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.

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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.

 

The Dialects of the Tribe:

Post Modern American Poets

and Poetry [Paperback]

Lewis Turco (Author)

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Odd and Invented Forms in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics

Friday, June 10, 2011 2:07 PM

Hi Lew,

I'm here at the [2011] West Chester University Poetry Conference, where one of my digital poems is going to be presented tomorrow. I attended a panel discussion today and R. S. Gwynn said LOTS about YOU and your Book of Forms. Your ears must have been burning. You might not be here in person, but you had a BIG PRESENCE via Sam who spent his whole time on the panel talking about you!

Mary Ann Sullivan

Editor, The Tower Journal

 

Lew,

I want you to know that I returned last night from the West Chester Poetry conference, where I told my "Forms of Repetition" workshop that as poets they need to have a copy of The Book of Forms. Of course several of them already had it, and the others were easily persuaded by what the rest of us said. I also gave them "The Obsession" as an example of successful experimentation with an established form. They loved it, and marveled at it — as I still do each time I reread it.

I was there when Sam Gwynn held up your Book of Forms for the audience and described it aptly; I want you to know, my brother, that the rest of the panel concurred.

Rhina P. Espaillat

 

Dear Lew,

I just got back from the West Chester Poetry Conference, where Sam  Gwynn made laudatory mention of your Book of Forms, speaking on a  panel called something like "The Fitzgerald Award: A Twelve Year  Retrospective."

Best,

Alfred Nicol

 

Dear Lew,

I am sure you know that in our 12 year review of the Fitzgerald Award panel, Sam Gwynn spoke at length about you and The Book of Forms. Everyone in the audience raised their hands when Sam asked who had read your book. And you were much praised and cited by all.

Dana Gioia

 

Dana got it right, Lew,

I look forward to the new edition, which I plugged mightily. I went on so long about The Book of Forms that Dana shut me off before I could get to Paul Fussell, about whom I was also supposed to speak. By the way, I got a big laugh when I read how you had inscribed my present copy of TBOF:

"This copy is for Sam, my old friend; may he be less hot-headed in the future."

Sam Gwynn

 

Lew,

Pre-ordered from Amazon.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Fourth Edition - Paperback (Nov. 8, 2011) by Lewis Putnam Turco

Buy new: $27.95 $18.45

Available for Pre-order

Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.

Other Formats: Digital

Amazon said it'd be shipped between November 4 and November 11. I figure I can make-do with the olde one till then. LOL

Patricia A. Marsh

 

 

 

Search for a Publisher of Odd and Invented Forms

Dear Contributors,

         A publisher for The Book of Odd and Invented Forms has been identified, and the finished manuscript has been submitted for approval, so no more poems or forms can be considered. Actually, what's happening is that a fourth edition of The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, has been created that incorporates Odd and Invented Forms. I'll be getting in touch with contributors as things move forward. Thanks to all who helped, offered help, and contributed poems and new forms. 

Considering the Sestina

 

 

 

On Monday the 20^th of September 2010 I had an engagement at the school where I taught for thirty-one years before my retirement in 1996, the State University of New York College at Oswego, to talk to Leigh Allison Wilson’s “Living Writers” class about poetry and to read from the new collection by my pseudonymous alter-ego “Wesli Court,” some of the poems in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems,¹ that the students had already read. I began with a question I used to ask on the first day of the semester in my Nature of Poetry class: “How many of you studied poetry in high school? Please raise your hands.”

In those days, especially toward the end of my teaching career, if any hands went up they would be few. In Leigh’s class, which was quite large (there were visitors as well), a lot of hands went up. “Wow,” I said, “Things have changed.” That is so partly, I think, because of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, published originally in 1968.² It has become known since then as “the poet’s bible.” For a very long time it was the only text-reference like it in print, it was an easily-available paperback, and it was used by several generations of poets young and old, including Richard Wilbur and James Dickey who in an unsolicited cover blurb wrote, “Belongs in the hands of every poet, student, and teacher, for the greater good of the art.”

One member of Prof. Wilson’s class, a young woman, asked me about my sestina. I asked her which one, because there are several sestinas in the book. She said, “The one titled ‘Sestina.’” That surprised me because it wasn’t one of the assigned poems. A couple of days later, not knowing exactly how many sestinas there actually are in the collection, I counted them. There are seven! — “The Obsession,” which is a variant sestina; “The Dead Letter Office,” a rhymed sestina without an envoy; “The Day We Bombed the Moon (and Barack Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize)”; “Tsunami”; “Double Vision,” which is a double sestina made up of two originally titled (but not in the book) “The Vision” and “Second Sight”; and, of course, “Sestina.”

What I replied to the student’s question was, “That poem is at the opposite end of the spectrum” (I meant, “technically,”) from the first sestina in the book, ‘The Obsession.’” If I’d had the time, I would have liked to explain myself at greater length, because both sestinas are obsessive, but in quite different ways.

In both my own Book of Forms, Third Edition (2000)² and in An Exaltation of Forms by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes (2002) for which I edited the section on the sestina, I wrote that the form is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante from whom it received its Italian name. The popularity of the poem in English is primarily a 19th century phenomenon in the U. K., and a 20^th century phenomenon in the United States.

The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first sestet stanza are repeated in a specific order as teleutons in the five succeeding sestets. In English-language tradition the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters, though it may also be written in any specific line length. In the original edition of The Book of Forms I wrote, “lines may be of any length.” I meant any single length, not “of any lengths, but people do not read carefully; therefore, I had to be more specific in subsequent editions because I began to see sestinas written in varying line lengths, including once in The London Times Literary Supplement, which astonished me, but before my book came out Donald justice had written a sestina with varying line lengths, as noted below, so perhaps I wasn’t entirely to blame. And, of course, ultimately any poet may use poetic license to do any damn thing he or she pleases.

The thirty-nine lines of the sestina are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi). In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing, each line. The order in which the end-words are repeated appears to have its roots in numerology, but what the mathematical significance of the pattern originally was now is unknown. The sequence of numbers is 6-1-5-2-4-3. Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted sequentially ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3.

If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters in this case signify repeated words, not whole refrain lines) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The reader will usually be unable to miss the fact that the last teleuton in the sixth line of each sestet stanza is also the last teleuton of the first line of the succeeding stanza. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.

In his “Foreword” to my First Poems (1960)³ Donald Justice wrote, “…part of Lewis Turco's exuberance, which is everywhere in evidence, is a matter of technique.  No reader can avoid noticing the variety of forms here.  There are sapphics, several of the French forms, sonnets, syllabics, and a number of what this young poet, who originated the form, calls "triversens," or triple-verse-sentences; curiously, no villanelles, no sestinas, fashionable forms at the moment.”⁴ Eight years later, in a collection of quantitative syllabic poems titled Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968⁵ I sneaked into the book my first sestina, “The Forest of My Seasons,” which I disguised by indenting the lines, as the other poems in the book were indented in order to indicate corresponding syllabic line-lengths.² My sestina was written in decasyllabics, so there was no real reason to indent any of the lines except for purposes of deception, and there is no reason for me to indent here. Over the years a few people have noticed that the poem is a sestina, but not many.

The primary problem that poets encounter with the sestina is, generally, that the repeated end-words can be obtrusive. To draw the reader's attention away from the repetitions, poets may enjamb their lines so that sentences and phrases are not end-stopped on the teleutons; or they may use, on occasion, homographs of the end-words, like wind (as in "south wind") and wind (as in "wind your own clock"), or even such ploys as repeating one word, such as can, as part of another word, like toucan, as I did:

 

THE FOREST OF MY SEASONS

 

Desire today is a cavern of snow;

ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.

Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns

rampant on a field vert under the woods

quartered in a southern compass.  Toucan

tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,

 

threatening rupture.  Poet, draw your shade

today upon a mirror made of snow

shadowed.  Men may hibernate if bears can.

Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind

till it may be harried awake by wood-

pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —

 

Too many words, like girdles built of horn,

confined in an attic.  How to say “shade”

but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood

laid for light to walk on; and to have snow

imply more than God's linoleum.  Wind

is wind, but direction matters.  Who can

 

help me?  Where's my muse today?  Shake your can,

you errant Echo, and get home.  My horns

sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind

your own clock and make love with your own shade

someplace up a cavern or down the snow

where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

 

The forest of my seasons grows strange woods

sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,

not as it ought.  My pen is cold as snow:

its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns

of silence.  Lie you down, lie down in shade,

word-warbler.  Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

 

And while you sleep, dream.  Dream of the south wind

needling you awake with slivers of woods:

birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;

oak on the white hillside.  Dream, if you can,

of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns

blown to silence.  Dream no longer of snow,

 

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can

to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.

There will be tonics.  It's time for shades now.

 

Of course, one can go the other way and use the teleutons obsessively for particular effect, which is what Wesli Court did in that poem Wilson’s student asked about. In fact, I doubt that repetition in the sestina can be carried any further than in this metapoem — “metapoetry” is poetry about poetry — which obviously violates the rule that each of the six teleutons must be different from the others.

  

SESTINA

 

It drives you crazy to write a sestina.

First off, in order to write a sestina

you need six end-words that don’t shout, “Sestina!”

One should hide the fact that it’s a sestina

you’re writing. I mean, why holler “Sestina!”

if you don’t have to? Why give the sestina

 

game away right away? For a sestina

needs to be a subtle thing. A sestina

should lead readers away from the sestina,

make them think, “This is no kind of sestina,

it’s a sixteener, maybe, no sestina

sustaining itself on sestets. Sestina

 

indeed! I don’t believe it. A sestina

doesn’t announce itself, “I’m a sestina,

no less! I live on end-words, a sestina

to end sestinas! I’m a sustainer

of sounds, echoes of a choral Sistiner

bouncing off Michaelangelo sixteen or

 

so ways from Rome to Nome.” A fine sestina

that would be. Thirty-nine lines of sestina

mumbling into the reader’s ear, “Sestina,

sestina, sestina.” Who could sustain a

poem like that for so long? A sestina

ought perhaps to read more like a sonetto

 

rispetto than like what it is. Sestina

end-words are teleutons, and a sestina

should tell you tons about what a sestina

is all about. Certainly, a sestina

is about disguise, subtlety, sestina

reticence, reluctance to be sestina-

 

like. Rather, it ought to be a soul-stainer,

nuanced, a mind-mellower. A sestina

ought not to be the thing, just the sustainer

of thingness in the memory. Sestina

is teleutonals, not end-words. Sestina

is an earful of sense, not a sestina

 

ending in a coda that says sestina,

repeating end-words, sestina, sestina,

sestina, and a final time, sestina!

 

    In 1979 Wesli Court took advantage of the obsessive quality of the sestina's repetitions in "The Obsession," one of the poems in a sequence first collected in The Gathering titled “Letters to the Dead” which rings the changes on the rhymed iambic pentameter sestet. The first line of "The Obsession" contains all six of the end-words, and the same basic line is repeated incrementally as the first line of succeeding stanzas. Each time the line is repeated the syntax is transposed by hypallage, an exchange of words in phrases or clauses as in E. E. Cummings' poem, "anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so floating many bells down" instead of “anyone lived in how pretty a town / with so many bells floating up, down.” I would use hypallage later on in another sestina, “Tsunami,” where the dislocation of normal syntax is meant to show confusion, but the line repeated in “The Obsession” always makes sense despite the inverted syntax.

Because all six end-words do appear in this line, a particular problem arises at the envoy, for it cannot be of three lines.  Instead, the refrain line reappears a seventh time as a one-line envoy rather than as the normal triplet, but with the sense of the original first line reversed.

  

THE OBSESSION

 

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen.  He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

I greeted him.  I said, "How are you, father?"

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

We were together, older than when he'd died —

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror.  He looked his last

Into the glass and kissed it.  He saw he'd died.

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell.  I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

 

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so.  But what was it I dreamed

In fact?  An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream?  Who was it died

 

Again last night?  I dreamed my father died,

But it was not he — it was not my father,

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

Whose is it, his or mine?  Who dreams he dreamed?

 

My father died.  Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands.  And when at last

He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

Download The Obsession read by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court

When I replied to the question posed by Prof. Wilson’s student I meant that the poem titled simply “Sestina” is technically at the opposite end of the spectrum from “The Obsession” because the word “sestina” itself is used like a sledge-hammer in the former poem whereas in the latter poem the sestina verse form is used to show the nature of obsession as it is manifested in a recurring dream or “dream vision.”

 The oldest British example of the sestina — a double sestina, actually — is by Sir Philip Sidney, "You Goat-Herd Gods," from his 16th century Arcadia. It is not merely a double sestina (twelve sestet stanzas rather than six), but a pastoral dialogue or eclogue as well. Here is my own — I should say, “Wesli Court’s” — double sestina from The Gathering, a monologue rather than a dialogue:

  

DOUBLE VISION

A Double Sestina

 

                                    I.

 

It came upon me while I was on the crapper

of my father’s parsonage, my eyes

boring into the porcelain of the tiles

before me on the wall.  The tiles were white.

They spread across the vacancy of time

That seeped into my mind and filled that blank

 

jug of puberty with a vast Mont Blanc

of sorrow and ennui. On that crapper

I saw that I would have to fill up time

with something more than the nothing that met my eyes,

the emptiness that seeped out of those white

ranges of porcelain whose trackless tiles

 

led finally to death. I feared those tiles

worse than I feared my death, that ultimate blank-

ness waiting for me on the snowy white

crest of age. I saw life was a crapper

that had to be filled with something. If I closed my eyes

perhaps I could dream myself to a better time

 

than this one snowing before me. There was no time

to dream. What could I do? I could fill tiles

with words. I could write. I filled my eyes

with reading every day; I could fill blank

sheets with my own words. I rose off that crapper

thinking I might pave my way with white

 

sheaves laden with stories, poems — I could write

my way to death by filling my living tome

with endless lines of type till I came-a-cropper

at last and alas! perhaps, on the devil’s tines,

if I kept my gaze steady and didn’t blink,

and if I did not try to romanticize

 

my life with gods and demons, with the sighs

of wishful thinking, with the little white

lies of religion that covered up the blank

of existence with the stuff that fills a crapper.

I pulled myself out of the abyss of tiles

Ready to take on life and move in time.

 

I’d use my eyes to read. Perhaps in time

I’d use those words to write, to fill up tiles

With something more than blankness on that crapper.

 

 

                                    II.

 

So that is what I’ve done. I’ve been the croupier

in life’s casino to this point, with ice

in my arteries. My column of tales

and songs has risen to a decent height

and I am old at last, although not tame

as maybe I should be. But I won’t blink

 

at this point, for why should I wish to blink?

I’ve been raking in what a good croupier

rakes in — coin of the realm like leaves of thyme,

minutes and moments that one can use to spice

the pot of emptiness when it gains heat

enough to flavor these mortal tales

 

that I’ve been cooking up. There’s nothing stales

a blend of blandishments quick as a blink

faster than losing interest at its height

even as one’s flesh grows crepier

with every year and hour. So, throw some ice

into the mix, perhaps, but never tame

 

the cold gazpacho one swallows nigh the tomb.

Trade the rake for a ladle, but keep those tales

swirling about in that bucket of mordant ice

and, before your readers can even blink,

serve it like a waiter, not a croupier,

when the flavor has hit its tasteful height.

 

Some folk feel that life is just a hoot,

a game of chance played with a friendly team

and not alone with “God” as one’s croupier

dressed in cummerbund and a set of tails

spinning the wheel. Before you can even blink,

the game is done and you are soused with ice

 

dumped on you by the “team.” You make your choice,

and if you manage to gain a little height

you place your bet, the wheel whirrs — if you blink

(or even if you don’t) the suave croupier

pushes over your pile of songs and tales

and you find out there is no game or team,

 

there’s only ice that chills you till you’re tame

and lowered by that croupier from about man’s height —

he doesn’t blink and he will tell no tales.

  

In the 19th century Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote another double sestina titled "The Complaint of Lisa." Swinburne rhymed his poem titled “Sestina” ababab, turning its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increasing the difficulty of the form, but some of the earliest French and Italian sestinas also rhymed, so this was not really an experiment.

Here is a rhyming sestina without an envoi, also from “Letters to the Dead” in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems. The italics in “The Dead Letter Office” indicate narrative rather than epistolary monologue as in “The Obsession” which is part of the same series and is not italicized.  It begins with an envelope sestet which rhymes abccba rather than ababab, but of course unlike Swinburne’s Sicilian sestets this rhyme scheme changes as the stanzas proceed, although the rhyme words stay the same:

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

 

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

For a sure and certain doubt?  He sighs.  It seems

There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets.  Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards.  "Is this the doom

Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him.  Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads.  What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Swinburne, also wrote a "Sestina," and, as sometimes was the fashion, he italicized the teleutons. Not long after the turn of the 20th century Ezra Pound returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote the monologue "Sestina: Altaforte"; this, together with his "Sestina for Isolt," set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas in America.

In his "Age and Indifferent Clouds" Harry Mathews deliberately used such words as "hippopotamus" and "bronchitis," thus drawing the reader's attention to the teleutons rather than away from them, and the beginnings of the lines doubled the difficulty by making puns and ringing variations on six herbs and plants, which might go unnoticed because the end-words take so much of the reader's attention. Here is a Court sestina from Gathering that does similar things:

  

THE DAY WE BOMBED THE MOON (AND BARACK OBAMA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE), A SESTINA

 

October ninth, 2009, we sent

A rocket off to Luna. We meant to bomb her

Into submission? No, our good intent:

To blow up surface dust to test for ice.

On the same day the Nobel Prize Committee

Amazed the world by bestowing its amity

 

Award upon a tyro. A calamity,

It seemed to some — an evil precedent

Imposed upon America by committee.

They gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama!

Many Republicans needed to ask for ice-

Water and Schnapps, or even an oxygen tent.

 

No one had dreamed an explosion of this extent

Could blow moondust in the face of amity

Around the House and Senate. It wasn’t nice

That those Norse should cause old pols to resent

Explosive love. It was a suicide bomber

NASA sent to ruin comity —

 

If not around the world, the R. N. C.

At the very least. Gaddafi in his tent

Celebrated Luna’s death. “Embalm her!”

Was his battle cry, his enmity

For  global infidelity was sent

To Cocoa, Florida, well-packed in ice.

 

 But NASA said, “It isn’t very nice

To imply we had an impact on the Committee

Rather than the moon! Our bomb was sent

Out into space. We’re not incompetent!”

Meanwhile, a wave of pure tsunamity

Engulfed the Oval Office, and Obama,

 

Although surprised himself, felt like the balm or

Salve of sweet salvation in a trice

Had rehabilitated amity,

Restored a modicum of comity

To the world at large to some extent,

One could sense the very aloe’s scent.

 

Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee,

And malcontents hope NASA finds its ice,

But what price amity amid dissent?

 

Download The Day We Bombed the Moon read by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court

Donald Justice's "Sestina: Here in Katmandu" has no envoy and its line-lengths vary, generally between four stresses and one, and Alan Ansen's "A Fit of Something Against Something" is a “diminishing sestina" which starts out normally but then begins to lose words until in the envoy all that's left are the teleutons of each line. Here is a Court sestina, “Tsunami,” from Gathering that incorporates the rhetorical device called hypallage (defined above) to mimic the effect of the wave:

 

TSUNAMI

 

The world was washed away by a wall of water

That first became the horizon: a rising wall

That pulled the shallows outward and away

From the shores. The coastal sealife washed

Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was

Stillness everywhere, and then the world

 

Listened to a roar that became the world,

The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water

Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was

Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall

Hard as rock screaming that before it washed

Ashore and tore the rose child away

 

From the whipped, lifted the torsos, mother him away

From the ocean he worked. The place became the world,

Crushed the beaches along the buildings, washed

Limbs and father into the trees. The gristmill water

Filled the wells with salt and gristmill. A wall

Of bricks became a blood grinding what was

 

Paste behind it into a lying. It was

Mud and plants and trees spun away

Into a nothing of single eddies now all

Things, backwashes and polluted and whirled

In items of undifferentiated water

Where everything maelstrom could be washed.

 

What could float, buried, what could be washed

Away was unsafe away, out to sea, was

Washed in a tree that held, held above water

Or drowned or floated in mud or floated away

Into who knew where? It was a world

That was caught ashore, but at sea the wall

 

Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,

On the surface of the wave that rose and washed

Away the earthen world, the solid world,

The world where creatures breathed an air that was

Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away

From breath, from sight, from the living world.

 

Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was

Scoured into the minds of those not washed away

From the world of earth into the world of water.

  

In similar fashion, this sestina from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court³ uses the rhetorical device of merismus which expands upon a subject by particularizing each element of it:

  

SESTINA IN INDIAN SUMMER

"Everything is good in its season."

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

 

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

 

Leigh liked the class I conducted so well that she asked me to do it again in 2011. The creative writing department doesn’t have a full-time poet in its program anymore because the person who holds the position has been out ill for a very long time, so what I did that day nobody had done in years. What a pity.

^___________

¹The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.

 

   

 

² The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON.

 

   

 

³ The book is long out-of-print, but this poem and all the other metrical poems in the volume are included in 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.

 

 

 

⁴I did not originate this form, the triversen; William Carlos Williams did. I merely named it and used it frequently.

⁵ The book has been out-of-print for years, but it is reprinted in its entirety in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 

 

 

Great article, Lew!

 

I'm sending this link out to poet friends! And it was good to catch up with recent epitaphs I had not seen.

As for your Facebook page, though, I don't do Facebook, or any of those blogs at all. Just your blog, that's the only one I look at.

Love,

Rhina Espaillat

 

Lew,

SESTINA

“Considering the sestina” — Lewis Turco

 

“Considering the sestina”

Is something I find myself doing from time to time

Thinking that now might be the moment for me to produce one,

Yet my laziness always kicks in

And I think, Just because John Ashbery

Wrote one, therefore should I?

 

What good would it do for a poet such as I

To produce (it’s unlikely!) a decent sestina

Of the kind done by Pound or John Ashbery?

No doubt I have written some good poems in my time

(Some you lose, some you win!)

But I’m acutely aware that other people have done far better

        than I have done,

 

Especially in producing one

Of these complex puzzles I

Always feel so lost in.

Why does anyone write a sestina?

Was it a product of its time,

As interlinking as a poem by John Ashbery?

 

Never would anyone living in the Haight Ashbury

Ever have thought to write one.

But time is time.

I am no longer that long-haired, peace-loving, V-making I

Whose dreams resembled chaos, not a sestina,

And who found no pre-existing structures to put his faith in.

 

All those structures were God (replaced now by John Ashbery?)

Why are we always looking for the One?

Can’t we admit to the chaos of all Time

Using us as it will but then abandoning our I (and eye)

With none of the formal elegance of a sestina

(I wrote a paper arguing that “Time” in Paradise Lost is almost  

       the same as “Sin.”)

 

What monstrous thing should I put my little faith in?

Will I scramble for the nothingness of John Ashbery

(Who wrote, I believe, only one sestina)

Do I think I’m someone?

What is my miserable little I

That it believes that it will live through the fires of time?

 

Time

Is the fire we learn and burn in

(Wrote Delmore Schwartz, a greater poet than I

But perhaps no greater than John Ashbery).

Plotinus searched again and again for The One

But I prefer the random, elegant repetitions of the sestina.

 

They call to mind both time and John Ashbery,

The “god within,” and the many inhabiting the “one”:

And I see to my surprise that I have produced an imperfect

      sestina.

 

Jack Foley

 

Thanks, Lew.

My "sestina" should perhaps better be called a "septina" since I have seven stanzas instead of six.  The product of a septuagenarian recently released from being a sexagenarian!

Jack

 

Too little sex, Jack, and too much sepsis.

Lew

Lew,

    In light of your essay on the sestina, I thought you might be interested in the attached, a sestina (doubled) I wrote several years ago in response to an ad in Poets & Writers (used as an epigraph).  In addition to six given words as end words, it uses a second given list of words medially in the lines, all in the traditional pattern, and uses all twelve words in the envoi.

 

Challenge: Incorporate these words into a sestina: Poetry,Fiction, Exuberant, Divorced, Worldly, Woman. Or try these:Man, Writer, Northeast, Wise, Adventurous, Lively. Just kidding, of course, but I’d love to hear from divorced/widowed male, 55+ for possible long-term relationship. [Personal ad in Poets & Writers.]

Dear Exuberant Divorced Worldly Woman,

Perhaps poetry matters only to the man

at home in fiction, or to that rare writer

who, exuberant only north by northeast,

finds himself divorced from the world (nowise

wishing to be worldly) but adventurous

in his dreams of woman.  She will be lively

as only woman can be—with that liveli-

ness poetry was born for and which man,

if unworldly enough and adventurous,

can image.  Though fiction lie, a good writer

may lie, divorced from the world and wise-

ly so, exuberantly.  But why northeast?

Does exuberance belong but to the northeast?

Is woman languid if she’s but midwest lively,

or midwest man divorced from all things wise

and beautiful?  Is poetry from such a man

a lesser fiction?  Do you think such a writer,

though otherworldly, less adventurous?

And what is worldly?  what adventurous?

Exuberance can be hard if from the northeast

the wind brings a chill fiction to a writer

that his dream of woman—lovely and lively

enough to dance in poetry and bless a man—

is divorced from possibility, that it’s unwise

for him, supposedly divorced from the wise,

true, and worldly good, to feign adventurous-

ness or dare believe poetry.  Yet such a man

might rival in exubernace any northeast-

erner.  Dear woman, let me belie that lively

and hurtful fiction; find in me that writer

who can fiction such truth that no writer

could divorce it from the real, that the wise

would embrace it, and every woman of lively

wit find in it such worldly, adventurous

exuberance as would thaw the polar north. East

of Eden, poetry is still the best of man.

 

Might not a wise woman and such a man, a writer

of exuberant poetry, create a lively adventure — us —

divorced from the fiction of the worldly northeast?

 

Cheers,

Jan D. Hodge

 

Well, Lew,

The first one I tried, following your "lines may be of any length" formula, might be classed as experimental, since the line lengths do vary, and since I played a bit with the end words — you gave a term for them but I'll need to reread your article to get it into my vocabulary...I'll check some others from my sestina folder and see if I have a better offering:

 

SESTINA LENTE

 

Love should be in it, for counting life counts love;

add: one golden raintree, as twig leads to blossom,

as rivulet to river.

Knowing must be in it, that born is to be lost—

loss not of our making

but intertwined with reasons why a clock.

 

We have been true to rendezvous with clocks

since sages tell us time is scant for love

and less for making—

that what's in bud today tomorrow is past blossom

the fallen petal lost

yellow reflection floated down, down river.

 

In my green time the ways were all one river:

only long forever parents knew the clock ...

lost, lost ...

What fastens once-upon-a-Wednesday to today is love

and this day's blossom

is a good given, not of our making.

 

I've seen her mirrored and no: she is not what I was making—

I was making her juniper desert flint river

mossflower, indian paintbrush blossom

bluebell larkspur blackeyed-susan four o'clock...

Sagebrush.  Foxglove ...

but gathered once is all; and the pathways are lost.

 

Death drops abysses: each brink to the other is lost—

can you remember, last time, what that was you were making—?

Whom did you love?

Did her spirit lave you cool and forever a river?

Had you finished when the clock

stopped? when frost blacked and shriveled the blossom?

 

Say time is yet for a twig– one bud, one blossom–

an apple before the good season is lost ...?

Ah, the cold clock

decrees hand and soul have no further kinship with making ...

Soon, soon we will thrust on the river:

Then lost— clocktime and blossom and making and love.

 

Blossoms will no longer be in the world of our making—

lost, wide and wider, swept far and swift on the river:

clocks foraged yesterday, early, on white-blooming love.

 

Ruth L. Harrison 

Lew —

 

Great article, which I had not read — and I love the sledgehammer sestina.

The first sestina I ever wrote — at the Iowa Workshop, of course, I simply slipped one line in each stanza — ABCDEF, BCDEFA, CDEFAB, and so forth. My reason for this is that I didn't know any better. When they asked me why I'd deviated from the normal line inversion, I naturally said something about how this form just seemed to suit the subject matter better, and made a mental note — "read Lew Turco's Book of Forms." Actually, being new and green, I didn't know about it yet, but would discover it soon.

In that same sestina, I came up with an innovative form which Don Justice liked a lot — again, I came up with it because I had no idea it was an innovative form. That was the walking enjambment. In the first stanza, every line was endstopped except the first, which was enjambed (by one word) to the second line. In the second stanza, I repeated the pattern, except that the enjambment was now second-to-third line, and so on down the poem. Of course, by the time I got to the 6th stanza, that was no longer possible, so instead I put a hard caesura at the beginning of the first line. In commenting on the device, Don said, "What do you when you get to the 6th stanza? Tad very elegantly has done nothing — just let the enjambment slide off the bottom." My my, I thought to myself, that is elegant, isn't it? And I rewrote the 6th stanza to eliminate the caesura, which was a failure anyway.

Since then, I've used the “walking enjambment” or walking caesura device from time to time again — most effectively, I think, here:

 

THE MAP OF THE BEAR

from My Night With the Language Thieves

 

The only map is the map of the bear.

Your best hope is to follow it closely,

Closer than dogs. It's engraved with your spoor,

You wake in the night to find it partly

Charred by the dying fire. “The only

 

Map is the map of the bear. Follow

It closer than dogs. Your best hope is

To read the part engraved below

The surface of the fire. Sleepless,

You move by night.  The only map is

 

The map of the bear. Dogs know,

That's why they follow with no hope

The dying spoor.  You're passing through

Fire, you've passed through sleep,

Now the only map is the map

 

Of the bear. Now hope gives up

Its secrets, now you follow where

Dogs won't go, even in sleep.

Above, the route's engraved on fire.

The only map is the map of the bear.

  

 

Here's that long-ago sestina with the walking enjambment:

 

IF YOU'S WHITE

 

"They are developing some very strong feelings about this music  so much so that I have heard some white country blues singers say, `I want to be Negro.'"

 

John Cohen, Sing Out!

  

A young man with dark sweater and a white

Face, in the sidewalk shadows of New York,

Shading his eyes to dim his skin toward black,

A battered (by choice) guitar held in his hands

While in his mind he sees a soulful blues

Moaning along the highways of the South.

 

There is no earth  it's barren in New York. 

He tries to pluck a bass string with a black

Thumb, but the sterile whiteness of his hands

Is not for digging roots and picking blues

That grow along the highways of the South.

He pulls up milkweed, fluffy, dry and white.

 

The woman that he's living with is black,

He sees the race's character in her hands;

The suffering that goes to breathe the blues

Alive, in the fields and road gangs of the South

Whispers beyond the range of any white 

Although she's never been outside New York.

 

He'll tell you, "Man, just look at that spade's hands!

They look like they were born to play the blues!

(You know the way they breed 'em in the South.)

There's nothing wrong with him except that white

Soul, from the shallow spirit of New York

That robbed him of his birthright (which was black).

 

Sometimes a weary voice sings him a blues.

It may have drifted upward from the South,

He scarcely hears it: "Fella, be glad you're white!

You can buy better guitars up in New York

To sing about what happens to a black

Man, with cold iron shackles on his hands 

 

The kind of thing that happens in the South,

And hate the cops  that's safer if you're white,

Yes, fella, even up here in New York.

This is the time, you're thinking, to be black;

Well, if that's so, you have it on your hands."

"Was that an eight bar or a twelve bar blues?"

 

He sits in a White Castle in New York,

A cup of black coffee warming his cool hands

Too frigid for a blues bred in the South.

  

In this one, the enjambment walks from one line to the next, in succeeding stanzas. In "Map of the Bear," it walks from one metric foot to the next on the refrain line, or what would be the refrain line if it wasn't enjambed. It actually does a moonwalk, walking backwards until at the end the whole refrain line is on one line.

 

Tad Richards

 

Tad,

Your “walking enjambment” reminds me of my “progressive hendecasyllabics,” a device I used in a poem titled “A Row of Hedges Revisited” in an earlier posting on this blog called “Reinventing the Wheel: Modern Poems in Classical Meters” which, if you’re interested, you can find below.

Lew

 

 

THE 103^RD BIRTHDAY OF EMMA REGINA DEGRAFFENREID SMITH

 

Great-granddaughter Molly – Annie and Robert’s daughter

I was four years old when we came to the Inner Passage.

It’s heaven here. I don’t remember anything from before.

My favorite things are fishing and blueberry season.

I go alone! Mom says that Granny Em is my first love.

Then Granny Em says “And I’ll be your first broken heart.”

Hurray, Hurray, Hurray! You’re 103 years old today!

 

Great-grandson Tommy - Annie and Robert’s son

Big deal. So she’s 103 years old today.

She’s just wrinkled and old. It’s not like a rite of passage.

When we left Los Angeles it broke my heart.

I’d never even been out of the city before.

I have a girl friend there and we are mad in love.

Plus there’s no TV here. I miss baseball season.

 

Great-grandson Cadmus – Reggie’s son

There is no TV here and I miss LA and its one season.

I can’t believe Granny Em is 103 years old today.

I thought I would hate it here, but there’s things I love.

Last week we saw a bunch of whales out in the Passage!

And I heard there was a tidal wave here once before,

but if we moved back to LA it wouldn’t break my heart.

 

Great-granddaughter Phaedra – Reggie’s Daughter

If we move back to LA again it won’t break my heart.

The absolute worst thing here is the winter season.

I do like this house better than the apartment we were in before.

And it’s really nice that we could come over to town today.

Last time we came Tommy ran away, he’d booked his passage.

Oh, I told my Aunt and Granny Em about my new pen-pal love.

 

Granddaughter Reggie

I told Annie and Granny Em about Lewis, my new love.

I never thought that I’d be willing to risk my heart.

Although these days divorce is like a rite of passage.

I think we’ll be married by the end of fishing season.

It would make him happy if we could marry today.

I told him I won’t be rushed like I was before.

 

Grandson-in-law Robert – married to Annie

I told Tommy we are going to do things like before.

You can’t go rushing off, leave those you love.

We are going to have a good time here today.

There’s a birthday cake with a big blue heart.

Pretty soon we’ll start the long winter season

and he’ll have to stay. He can’t cross the Passage.

 

Granddaughter Annie

We thought we’d lose Granny Em in the passage over or before.

She is in her winter season, but she has all this love.

It’s her strong, strong heart that keeps her with us today.

 

Great-grandson Pericles Emmanuel – Reggie’s son

My dad was my mom’s second husband.

He’s the one she says is drinking himself to death.

He got mean and violent and we had to get out.

I’ve talked to him, but I haven’t seen him since.

I want to go visit. Mom says “we’ll see.”

I know if I go back he won’t be the same.

 

Great-grandson Paris – Reggie’s son

Nothing on the island ever changes. It’s always the same.

I’m glad my mom has found another man to be her husband.

For me there’s nowhere to meet people and nothing to see.

I hate it out there and I’m always bored to death.

You’d think we would take the boat over here more since

there’s no grocery stores and we’re always running out.

 

Great-granddaughter Ariadne – Reggie’s daughter

There’s no grocery stores, but I love running out

in the woods for mushrooms. They don’t all look the same!

We moved away from LA and it’s been great ever since.

I don’t miss Creepy Joe – that’s what I call mom’s last husband.

She says he is trying to drink himself to death.

Whether he does or not we’ll have to wait and see.

 

Great grandson Carleton – Annie and Roberts’ son

Whether we can stay here we don’t know, we’ll have to see.

Mom could lose her job, then we’d have to get out.

I think for Molly to move, it would take death.

It’s heaven here for me, too. I’m just the same.

I like the guy that’s going to be Reggie’s husband.

Maybe he’ll come live with us, I mean if and since…

 

Grandson-in-law-to-be Lewis

I’d be willing to live out there with them, I mean since…

I could probably get to my job from there, we’d have to see.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been a husband.

I guess if it doesn’t work then I’ll just get out.

Of course, I mean, she can do the same,

even though we each will promise unto death…

 

Grandaughter Annie

These kids are going to bug me to death!

I was the one who fought for this job, since

fifty other rangers wanted the same.

For a long time it was wait and see, wait and see,

but then I prevailed and I beat them out!

Got this lighthouse for my kids and husband.

 

Emma Regina DeGraffenreid Smith

I don’t know why I didn’t die when I lost my husband.

I almost did. I’m sure I could have pined to death.

Something on the boat ride out here shook me up and out,

got me moving. I haven’t stopped since!

There’s too much to do and too much to see.

Nothing on the island ever stays the same.

 

When I lost my husband, I thought it meant death,

but then, we came out here and ever since,

what I look at I see and my days are never the same.

 

Alice L. Teeter

from When It Happens to You, Star Cloud Press, 2009

 

 

The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems

 

 

The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems

By Wesli Court

(“Wesli Court” is the anagram pen-name under which Lewis Turco writes his traditionally formal poems.)

was published on September first, 2010!

from StarCloudPress.com

Product Details:

Soft cover ISBN: 978-1-932842-43-2

Publisher: Star Cloud Press

Date of Publication: September 2010

Page Count: 114

Price: $14.95

COMMENTS BY READERS:

“This major collection by the astonishing Wesli Court is an event calculated to shiver all literary seismographs.  Readers addicted to poetry, but weary of ill-made poems, can latch on to it with joy.  Aspiring poets can seize it as a handbook of models, learning how to write anything from an ode to a sonnenizio, from an epigram to a blues epilogue.  While often striking a wistful, wintry tone of hail-and-farewell, there are notes of infectious cheer and some genuine surprises — even a poem to fulfill an unused title that Wallace Stevens left lying idle.  With unique skill, Court shows us what a truly good metrical poem used to be, could be, and (in his able hands) still is.”

— X. J. Kennedy

  

“It’s an increasingly rare pleasure to read poems about the real world in language as clear as it is lyrical, with deep roots in the past and illuminated by careful rhyme.”

— Miller Williams

 

 “I've had time to read The Gathering of the Elders and admire both its poignancy and its savoir faire — what a pleasure to read poems that sound like poems and feel like poems! Especially after dipping into The New Yorker from time to time and thinking, What hath Ashbery (and Helen Vendler) wrought? After reading the Elders I had to have a second cup of strong coffee. Even the cover is distinguished!”

— Philip Appleman.

 

There are marvelous things everywhere in The Gathering of the Elders. Since I am at an age when the elegiac tone and note stir me more deeply than ever before, I was quite impressed by the poems in the second section, especially "Letter to a Hall-of-Famer," "Letter to an Editor," and “Letter to Mother," and by "Reflections in an Attic Room," particularly the second half. I think "The Obsession" is a masterpiece — speaking of fathers, the poem of that title and "A Paternal Curse" were also among my favorites, as were, in the last section, the three cautionary poems, "Currency" and "Stile." I was quite struck by the winter poems in the first section and by "After School" and "Columbian Ode" in the third. It's all but impossible to open the book amiss.

— Michael Palma

 

A new work by Lewis Turco — or his equally gifted and prolific avatar, “Wesli Court” — is always good news, whatever its form or genre. This one is no exception.

The formal aspect of these poems, as is usual in the work of this poet, is dazzling: there are sonnets and blues, riffs on the villanelle, a profoundly moving “Samsong,” and several sestinas, including “The Obsession,” one of the best examples of that form by anyone. “The Black Death,” a recent tsunami, a Civil War battlefield before the battle, all serve the poet as backgrounds, and his characters include George Gershwin and W. B. Yeats.

Court’s dark meditation on our shared fate ends with a group of poems particularly wrenching for their stoical, steady gaze at the inevitability of loss, coupled with a clear understanding of the value of what must be lost. A birthday poem for the poet’s wife, at once tender, playful and subdued, comes to mind, as well as “Boneyard Blues,” which includes these words, to incorporate the makings of poetry —  “tune” and “lyrics” — as stand-ins for aspects of reality:

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.

 

— Rhina P. Espaillat 

Listen to Wesli Court read his terzanelle The Black Death and his sestina The Obsession from The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems.

 

The Airs of Wales and Eire

 

THE AIRS OF WALES AND EIRE

 

 

Medieval Welsh and Irish Poems in Modern English

 

 

by Wesli Court

 

 

Copyright © Lewis Turco 1981, 2004, 2010.

 

 

 

 

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

 

The Airs of Wales was originally published as No. 53 of the Poetry Newsletter of Temple University, Fall, 1981, Richard O'Connell, editor. Copyrights reverted to the author on publication; all rights reserved.

 

 Most of the poems may be found in The New Book of Forms and The Book of Forms, Third Edition, both published by the University Press of New England © Lewis Turco 1986 & 2000 respectively. All the poems may be found in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, © Lewis Turco 2004. By permission of the author.

   

  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 Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON

 

THE AIRS OF WALES

FOREWORD

 

The order of these poems is roughly chronological. I have cast these modern versions into the verse forms of the Welsh bards. This does not mean that I have duplicated the bardic form in which each poem was originally written; rather, I have chosen that form which, it seemed to me, suited the sense and aura of the medieval period at the same time that English might best be served.

I have used only the first half of "The Battle of Llongborth," which rose to its own climax before the second half began to wander, it seemed to me, into a rather dull consideration of horses that ate grain. The form in which it appears here is englyn penfyr.

The form of "The Head of Urien" is englyn milwr; of "The Corpse of Urien," englyn penfyr; "Lament for Owain ab Urien," cywydd deuair hyrion. The longer stanzas of "Huntsong for a Small Son" are hyr a thoddaid, but the final couplet is cyhydedd fer. "Elegy for Urien Rheged" is englyn penfyr.

The form of "Ailment and Age, Grief, Catarrh" is an imitation of Welsh form, not a specific bardic meter. The lines are heptasyllabic, as in a number of Welsh patterns, but instead of rhyme and/or consonance, I used analyzed rhyme and repetition for the most part.

"Spring Song" is cast into awdyl gywydd; "A Riddle," rhupunt; "The Grave," englyn proest dalgron, and "Winter" is an imitation, as in "Ailment and Age, Grief, Catarrh."

The original of "Love in Exile" had each line beginning with the letter H. I kept the aitches and cast the poem into the form of a variant of cywydd deuair hyrion.

"My Choice" is written in the form known as cywydd deuair fyrion; "In Summer," clogyrnach; "In Praise of Owain Gwynedd, cyhydedd naw ban, and "To a Girl" in cyhydedd hir.

In The Airs of Eire "The Mystery" is attributed to Amergin (ca. 6th century), reputedly the eldest Irish poet, if one excludes St. Patrick, who has been credited with poems as well as other sorts of writing. In An Introduction to Irish Poetry Hoagland (see bibliography) says, "The earliest form [of Irish-Gaelic poetry] was rhymeless, based upon alliteration."  This modern version, therefore, has been cast in the form of Anglo-Saxon prosody. This form is actually a line or stich of accentual verse consisting of four overstressed or sprung syllables and any number of unstressed syllables.  Generally, the overstressing is accomplished by means of alliteration, but other sonic devices such as assonance, rhyme, and vocalic or consonantal echo are also used.  The stich is broken into hemistichs or half-lines by a caesura (pause) in the center of the line; in each hemistich there will be two of the four stressed syllables. "The Mystery" also exhibits parallel construction, for each line is an independent clause beginning with either "I am the" or "Who." Grammatic parallelism, whether used in verse or in prose composition, is the oldest prosody in the world, antedating accentual verse by many centuries, but used as often today as in ancient Chaldea.

Another feature of the earliest Irish verse is chain verse or linked rhyme: the last syllable or syllables of a line are rhymed with the first syllable or syllables of the following line as in  "The Charm of Eire" which is also attributed to Amergin.

Explanations and diagrams of all these forms may be found in Lewis Turco's The Book of Forms, Third Edition, University Press of New England, 2000.

W. C.

 

THE BATTLE OF LLONGBORTH

 

Before Gereint the foe-scourge, the axer,

Were white stallions with red legs —

After the war-cry, cromlechs.

 

Before Gereint, the foeman's bescyther,

Were mounts red-shinned from the fight;

After the war-cry, dark thought.

 

Before Gereint, the avenger, fighter,

Were stallions saddled in white;

After the war-cry, gall and blight.

 

At Longberth I saw the vultures

Circling over many a bier,

And men by Gereint's charge gored.

 

At Longberth I witnessed the great slaughter

Of men fearful for their blood

Before Gereint, his sire's pride.

 

At Longberth I witnessed spurs being won,

Men who did not flinch from spears,

Wine drunk from crystal ewers.

 

At Longberth I saw the armor gleaming;

From the helms I saw blood pour,

And I watched the burier.

 

At Longberth I saw a mailed King Arthur

Where men fell, struck down with steel:

It was he who led the toil.

 

At Longberth Gereint was slain in the field

By knights from lowland Devon:

They slew before they were slain.

 

                                    — Anonymous

 

 

THE HEAD OF URIEN

 

I carry a severed head.

Cynfarch's son, its owner, would

Charge two warbands without heed.

 

I bear a great warrior's skull.

Many did good Urien rule;

On his bright breast, a grey gull.

 

I bear a head at my heart,

Urien's head, who ruled a court;

On his bright breast the crows dart.

 

I bear a head in my hand.

A shepherd in Yrechwydd-land,

Spear-breaker, kingly and grand.

 

I bear a head at my thigh,

Shield of the land, battle-scythe,

Column of war, falcon-cry.

 

I bear a head sinister.

His life great, his grave bitter,

The old warrior's savior.

 

I bear a head from the hills.

His hosts are lost in the vales.

Lavish it with cries and hails.

 

I bear a head on my shield.

I stood my ground in the field,

Near at hand — he would not yield.

 

I bear a head on my greaves.

After battlecry he gives

Brennych's land its laden graves.

 

I bear a head in my hand,

Gripped hard.  Well he ruled the land

In peace or in war's command.

 

I cut and carried this head

That kept me fearless of dread —

Sever my quick hand instead!

 

I bear a head from the wood,

Upon its mouth frothing blood

And, hereafter, on Rheged!

 

My breast quaked and my arm shook;

My heart was stone, and it broke.

I bear the head that I took.

 

                           — Llywarch Hen

 

 

THE CORPSE OF URIEN

 

The handsome corpse is laid down today,

Laid under this earth and stone —

Curse my fist!  Owain's sire slain!

 

The handsome corpse is now broken

In the earth, under the oak —

Curse my fist!  My kinsman struck!

 

The handsome corpse is bereft at last,

Fast in the stone he is left —

Curse my fist!  My fate is cleft!

 

The handsome corpse is rewarded thus,

In the dust, under greensward —

Curse my fist!  Cynfarch's son gored!

 

The handsome corpse is abandoned here

Under this sod, this gravestone —

Curse my fist!  My liegelord gone!

 

The handsome corpse is here locked away,

Made to rest beneath the rock —

Curse my fist!  How the weirds knock!

 

The handsome corpse is settled in earth

Beneath vervain and nettle —

Curse my fist!  Hear fate rattle!

 

The handsome corpse is laid down today,

Laid under this earth and stone —

Curse my fist!  This fate was mine!

 

                           — Llywarch Hen

 

 

LAMENT FOR OWAIN AB URIEN

 

Owain ab Urien's soul

May the Lord keep immortal.

Lordly to praise Rheged's lord,

Greatly burdened by greensward,

Laid low, this far-bruited king,

His lances wings of dawning.

To none other was he thrall,

No other was his equal,

Reaper of foes, ravener,

Son, father, and grandfather.

When Owain scythed down Fflamddwyn

It was no more than nodding.

Sleeping are the Anglemen,

Light in their sockets open,

And those who but shortly fled

Were bolder than they needed —

Owain put them to the sack:

Sheep before the wolf-pack.

Grand in colored armament,

Well he horsed the suppliant:

For his soul's sake Owain shared

The treasure that he hoarded.

Owain ab Urien's soul

May the Lord keep immortal.

 

— Taliesin

 

 

HUNTSONG FOR A SMALL SON

 

Dinogad's coat is specked with spots —

I made it out of pelts of stoats.

Flingabout, fling!  Flingabout, flingabout!

Eight times the song we'll sing.

 

When your daddy went to the hunt,

Shouldered his spear, his staff in hand,

He called to the hounds that were hale and fleet,

"Fido, fetch!  Bowser, trail!"

 

He caught fish in his little boat

Like a dragon after a shoat.

When your daddy climbed up the craggy rock

He brought back boar, buck, stag,

 

A stippled game-hen from the hills

And a trout from Oak Fountain Falls.

At whatever your Daddy cocks his spear,

There he strikes bear, lynx, fox.

 

This is no boast, this is no lie —

If it escapes, then it can fly.

 

— Anonymous

 

 

 

ELEGY FOR URIEN RHEGED

 

This ingle has lost its voice — on its floor,

Once common, there were hearth-noise,

Mead, the talk of men and boys.

 

This ingle — will it not be benettled?

While its protector could breathe,

Familiar was the stranger.

 

This ingle — will not the sod cover it?

When Owain and Elphin prayed,

God put prey into the pot.

 

This ingle — will it not sprout hoar toadstools?

There used to gather about

Its food the dauntless, the stout.

 

This ingle — will it not spread with brambles?

Logs blazed on it, burning red;

Nearby, the gifts of Rheged.

 

This ingle — won't it be cumbered with thorns?

Customary were the theigns

And the henchmen of Owain.

 

This ingle — won't the ants crawl over it?

Customary was torch-pall

Over the gathering of all.

 

This ingle — will not the boars root in it?

Here once met the folk's clamors

And the banquet's circling horns.

 

This long-abandoned pillar — that one, too:

They once echoed those clamors

And the music of armors.

 

— Llywarch Hen

 

 

AILMENT AND AGE, GRIEF, CATARRH

 

Before I was a crook-back

I was honored for word-craft,

Feasted — till I was bereft.

 

Before I was a crook-back

I was hailed in the meadhalls

Of Wales, toasted in crystal.

 

Before I was a crook-back

The first to pierce was my spear;

I blazed! — now I creep hunchback.

 

Oaken crook, come harvest-time:

Ocher bracken, saffron grass —

Fond things are gone in a trice.

 

Oaken crook, come hoar-frost time:

Men bawling over liquor —

My bed cheerless by the fire.

 

Oaken crook, come cuckoo-time:

Women flirting at the feasts  —

Done are the days of my trysts.

 

Oaken crook, come heather-time:

Bright weather, green-tendril nights —

I loathe the sight of your knots.

 

Oaken crook, you good old stave,

Prop the elder and heartsick —

Llywarch the long-tongued, the stiff.

 

Oaken crook, unbending stick,

Lead me to God's waiting flock —

That's it, my steady fellow!

 

Oaken crook, do as you're bid:

be proper, make me proper,

I, Llywarch the long-winded.

 

Age has made me a scarecrow,

Hoar-haired and long in the tooth,

Lance forsworn for the crook's oath.

 

Age has whispered a poor jest

In my ear through my hoar-hair,

Withered the lance women joust.

 

White wind frets the foot-hill trees,

The stag stands on the bare hill,

My stick stutters on the trail.

 

The wind bears away the leaf

Over the hill — God knows where.

It was a new leaf this year.

 

The lad's love is my loathing:

Lass, stranger, unbroken roan —

These are no longer fitting.

 

This is the loathsome foursome

Come upon in a corpus:

Ailment and age, grief, catarrh.

 

Old, alone, misshapen, cold,

Once I had a famous bed;

Grief-bent, I go three-folded.

 

Old, thrice folded, witless, weak,

Given to the sudden rage —

Those I loved pay no love-wage.

 

No lasses love me, none come

Nigh me, I may not come near —

Not even death will appear!

 

Joy shuns me, sleep keeps away

Since kinsman and friend were slain —

My cross carcass and I wane.

 

Curse the night Llywarch was born

To work this row with his crook,

Walk the road no man may brook!

 

                           — Llywarch Hen

 

 

SPRING SONG

 

Earthspring, the sweetest season,

Loud the birdsong, sprouts ripple,

Plough in furrow, ox in yoke,

Sea like smoke, fields in stipple.

 

Yet when cuckoos call from trees

I drink the lees of sorrow;

Tongue bitter, I sleep with pain —

My kinsmen come not again.

 

On mountain, mead, seaborne land,

Wherever man wends his way,

What path he take boots not,

He shall not keep from Christ's eye.

 

                           — Anonymous

 

 

A RIDDLE

 

Riddle me this —

Knew the Flood's kiss,

Has a snake's hiss,

This great creature,

 

Fleshless, boneless,

Senseless, bloodless,

Headless, footless,

Older nor younger

 

Than he started,

Never daunted,

Not live nor dead,

Ever useful —

 

God in Heaven,

What origin?

Great wonders Thine

Who made this bull.

 

In woods, in leas,

Ageless, griefless,

Ever hurtless,

Of equal age

 

With the Eras,

Older than hours

From Time's ewers;

Broad as the gauge

 

Of all the Earth.

He had no birth,

Nor has he girth

On land or sea.

 

Trust him to hum —

He will lie dumb

And will not come

If it need be.

 

Bull of the air

Beyond compare,

None may ensnare

Him in his den

 

On the sea-cliff.

He'll roar, he'll cough,

Mannerless oaf —

Savage again

 

Crossing the land

Roaring and grand,

Then hushed and bland,

Fey as a boy,

 

then with a shout

Lashing about

Earth in a rout.

Wickedness, joy,

 

Hidden, yet seen

In his careen,

Heard in his whine

First here, then there,

 

Hurling, twirling,

Ever breaking,

Never paying

Bull of the air.

 

Blameless as sky,

He is wet, dry,

Often comes by.

Old Man-fashioned,

 

Like everything

From beginning

Unto ending —

He is the wind.

 

                  — Anonymous

 

 

MY CHOICE

 

I choose a fair

Maid so slender,

Tall and silver,

Her gown of heather

Hue — I choose her,

Nature's daughter,

For the kind word

Dropped, scarcely heard,

And for my part

Take her to heart

For gift, for grace,

For her embrace.

 

I choose the wave,

The water's shade;

Witch of the shire,

Your Welsh tongue pure,

 

 My choice you are,

And am I yours?

Why be silent

(Sweet your silence)?

 

I choose my course

Without remorse,

With a clear voice —

So clear a choice.

 

         — Hywel ab Owain Gwynedd

 

 

IN SUMMER

 

Summer I love, stallions abroad,

Knights courageous before their lord;

The comber booming,

Apple tree blooming,

Shield shining, war-shouldered.

 

Longing, I went craving, alack —

The bowing of the slim hemlock,

In bright noon, dawn's sleight;

Fair frail form smooth, white,

Her step light on the stalk.

 

Silent is the small deer's footfall,

Scarcely older than she is tall.

Comely, beautiful,

Bred bountiful,

Passion will heed her call,

 

But no vile word will pass her lips.

I pace, I plead — when shall we tryst?

When will you meet me?

Love drowns me deeply —

Christ keep me!  He knows best.

 

                  — Cynddelw Brydedd Mawr

 

 

IN PRAISE OF OWAIN GWYNEDD

 

I hail a boonsman hearty in war,

Battlewolf, boastful, first to the fore —

I sing of serving him with fervor,

Sing his mead-fed and worthy power,

Sing his ardor, this wind-winged falcon,

Sing his thoughts, lofty as the welkin,

Sing his dauntless deeds, lord of frayhounds,

Sing his praises — they may know no bounds,

Sing odes for my magnanimous thane;

I sing paeans of praise for Owain.

 

Armed for Angles in Tegeingl's realms,

Blood's spouting streams, our blades' spating storms,

We met dragons, the warriors of Rome,

A prince's son — costly their winestream.

Striving with the Dragon of the East

The western Dragon showed which was best.

Lusty our lord, his bright blade unsheathed —

The sword poured forth, the spear was strife-bathed,

Blade in hand and all hands hewing heads,

Hand on hilt and edge on Norman hordes —

 

At the sight of death, constant wailing

And swashbuckling and loud reveling,

Blood flowing from brave men's riven skulls —

I heard flesh pledged to the birds' bowels

In the fierce thrust of the sharp ash-haft,

In the raven-beckoning blood-path.

On corpses to feed a thousand shrikes

Brynnich's riders rode, Owain's war kites.

Carcasses, carrion by the bushels,

The taste of battle, killed men's entrails!

 

For his prize we fought, and for his praise,

Hosts and bards, for Owain's bounteous ways,

To Cadell Hiriell Hiriein's scion

For reward, guardian of Coel's line,

Battlefield's lance-thrust, praise-lavishing,

Shield-carrying, eagle onrushing

Court's stalwart, vigilant defender —

Beware his thrusting, three-colored spear!

They harvested Aberteifi's spears

With battlecries, as at Badon Fawr.

I saw war-stags, corpses stiff and red —

We let the fierce wolf put them to bed;

 

They ran without arms — some without hands,

Mighty warriors under talons;

I saw their rout — three hundred were slain;

I saw bowels on thorns, the war won.

I saw the strife, heard the battleshout,

Saw knights belaboring troops in flight.

 

I saw men falling from the chalk heights,

The foe slaughtered among their redoubts;

I saw pikes blooming about a wall

And lances rushing at Owain's call —

I saw the charge make Saxon carnage

And princes reaping the day's courage.

Prince of princes!  His battle is won,

Bought dearly — he is pursued by none.

I saw at Rhuddlan a ruddy tide,

A hero's host heroic in pride —

I saw in Penfro a prince peerless;

I saw in Penardd a lord fearless;

I saw their slaughter of the doughty

Borne by a brave land, the fern's bounty.

I saw men thronging and scurrying,

 

Heard alarums, saw troops hurrying,

Saw them taken, saw comrades in pain,

Saw strife near Caer and Coen Llywyfain.

Gwynedd's valor was proven again —

You were dauntless, shepherd of Britain!

 

                           — Cynddelw Brydedd Mawr

 

 

TO A GIRL

 

I saw on the face

Of a haughty lass

A look with no trace

Of love — cold, still:

The cresting spume-glow

Upon the billow

Of the sea's face, flow

And ebb of chill.

 

She sends her respects

To me, harshly, vexed —

The candle rejects,

Cuts shadow dead,

And now I must hoard

Disgrace's great hurt —

She's trod on my heart,

Sought Greeneye's bed!

 

         — Cynddelw Brydedd Mawr

 

 

THE GRAVE

 

Everyman comes to the dank earth.

Folk, forlorn and small, perish.

What wealth rears is wracked by death.

In an hour dirt devoureth.

 

Great maw, end of what I clutch,

What I loved you turn to filth.

Mine will be a chill stone hearth —

Life was not meant for a youth.

 

Each man's cold estate is death;

He walks alone on the heath

That will take him in its clinch,

Come at last to the cromlech.

 

                  — Dafydd Benfras

 

 

WINTER

 

The wind keens on the bare hill;

The ford is froar, and the lake

Is hoar-crusted.  A man's ilk

Might stand on a single stalk.

 

Comber after comber comes

To cover the shore.  The gale

Hovers over the hill: owls

Crying.  One cannot stand tall.

 

The bed of the fish is cold

In the ice where they shelter.

Reeds are bearded; the stag, starved.

Trees bow in the early dusk.

 

Snow falls, and the earth is pale.

Warriors sit near their fires.

The lake is a dim defile:

No warmth is in its color.

 

Snow falls; the hoarfrost is white;

The shield is idle upon

The old man's shoulder.  The wind

Freezes the grass with its whine.

 

Snow falls on top of the ice.

Wind sweeps the crest of the trees

Standing close.  On his shoulder

The brave fighter's fine shield shines.

 

                                    — Anonymous

 

 

LOVE IN EXILE

 

Her grace has charmed away my

Heart — Morfudd, godchild of May.

 

Hail her, give her good morrow:

Hapless I lie the night through.

Here the wild sower has sown

Her seed to break my breastbone.

Hurt will bloom and heartwail blame

Hours trystless, bleak as henbane.

Heavenly being of grace,

Haunting voice, face, enchantress —

How I plead, without avail,

Hunger inconsolable.

 

Haply, lore might find a way

Hope can win my fair lady;

However, into exile

Hurled, I shun her domicile

Heaped within my breast, yearning

Hurkles and writhes the night long:

Higher than waves on the shore

Hurtles the lust I bear her

Heart to beauty has been chained,

Haft to fettering fastened.

Hard and bright as gold is she —

Hushed love creeps slow toward me.

Hale, long life is my wandream:

How can water flow upstream?

Hearthchild of Ynr — life were

Harder than death without her!

 

                  — Dafydd ap Gwilym

 

 

 

THE AIRS OF EIRE

 

 

 

THE MYSTERY

 

I am the breeze breathed at sea,

I am the wave woven of ocean,

I am the soft sound of spume,

I am the bull of the seven battles,

I am the cormorant upon the cliff,

I am the spear of the sun striking,

I am the rose of the fairest rose.

I am the wild bull of war,

I am the salmon stroking the flood,

I am the mere upon the moor,

I am the rune of rare lore,

I am the tooth of the long lance,

I am He who fired the head.

 

Who emblazons the mountain-meeting?

Who heralds the moon's marches?

Who leads the sun to its lair?

I am the Word, I am the Eye.

 -- Amergin

 

THE CHARM OF EIRE

 

Charmed be this, the land of Eire,

Fair isle of the fruitful sea;

Trees be laden on the green hill,

Filled with fruit be the rainy wood;

Moody with rain be the cascade,

Made of falls be the lake of tarns,

Tarn-deep be the tor-top well.

Well-met be the moot of clans,

Plain-spoken be the chiefs of Tara.

Temair shall be a mount of folk,

Yolked among the scions of Mil,

Mil of the coracles, Mil of the barks.

Harken!  Let the lofty isle

Sail the ocean; let it be

Sea-born on the dark wave's song,

Tongue of craft, charm of cunning,

Canny and wise as the wives of Bres,

Brazen as Bres, the women of Buaigne.

A woman of might be the isle of Erin;

Eremon hath enthralled her,

Ir and Eber enchanted her.

Hear my charm for Erin the charmed!

 -- Amergin

 

 

EVIL IT IS

 

 

Evil

It is to shun

The King of Righteousness

And to make a compact with the

Devil.

 

-- Anonymous

 

 

A BLESSING ON MUNSTER

 

 

God's blessing be invoked upon Muster now,

Upon its men and boys, its womenfolk;

Blessings be upon the land, peak and down,

That boons the flock fruit, root, stem and stalk.

 

A blessing upon all kinds of fruitfulness

That shall be borne upon this meadowland,

No neighbor going in want of helpfulness.

God place over Munster his healing hand!

 

A blessing be upon the high ridge,

Upon their cottages' bare flagstones;

A blessing upon heather, sedge, the sheer cliff edge;

A blessing upon lea and ledge, their gloaming glens!

 

Like sands of ocean under vessels

Be the numbers of their dwellings' hearthstones

Upon their downlands and their sloping hills,

Upon their crags and fells, their misty mountains!

 -- Attr. St. Patrick

 

GAELIC STANZAS I

 

 

What, my Lord, shall I do with

Work enough to fill a cart?

How build from a thousand boards

A tight little house of art?

 

The wind is dark, howling hard,

Tossing Ocean's hoary hair.

Tonight the dragon-boats' horde

Will not char my white bones bare.

 

If the sere leaves were golden

In the forest in the fall,

And the sea's whitecaps silver,

Finn would have bestowed them all --

 

My patron gives no horses

For the poems I write now.

He grants beasts as best he can:

For an elegy, a cow.

 

The famished winter wind keens,

The lakes glitter, the brooks flash,

The hoarfrost chimbles the leaves,

The white combers froth and clash.

 

I can't tell with whom she'll sleep,

But I'm certain to the bone

That blonde, beauteous Etan

Will not go to bed alone.

 

Bell of chiming cold and clear

On a night of hurtling wind,

Much better to tryst with you

Than to tumble, hag-entwined.

       -- Various Anonymous Gaelic authors  

 

 

THE BARD'S LAMENT

 

 

Woodland's green wall is wilding,

Mild with the blackbird's preachment;

Cock and hen hover, a-wing,

Where I bring pen and parchment --

 

But the grey-hooded cuckoo

From his fastness mocks my mood.

Good grief!  May God save those who

Would write well in the wildwood!

 -- Anonymous

 

 

GAELIC STANZAS II

 

Blackbird, for you how simple --

Where you light you take your rest,

No hermit chained to matins,

But a morningsong confessed.

 

If poetry were buried,

"History" would be a sound

Empty as an open grave

Where no forefathers are found.

 

When I indite in English                [write]

I tear out the shamrock leaves,

But when I write in the Erse

The English get the heaves.

 

I aim this, my mocking song,

But at ladies nobly born.

Let your dame go rest in peace,

For she lies beyond my scorn.

 

Not spoken about in Eire

And among the Scots unmissed,

If I'd not here dropped his name

The O'Flynn would not exist.

 

I would never be amazed

If in Crundmail's tawdry hut

They used the salt for butter,

And the butter for biscuit.

 

Small fly upon the cottage eave,

Take air and sun ere you dance,

For you'll dine on little else

At this penurious manse.

 -- Various Authors

 

 

TWO EPIGRAMS

 

When I stand with the young bloods,

Then my fierce red blood is up;

When I sit with the greybeards,

I nod sagely in my cup.

 

Sad to see the sons of lore

Damned to the eternal fire

While these pigs, illiterate,

In God's glory corruscate.

 

--Anonymous

 

 

GAELIC STANZAS III

 

There's a man I can think of

For whom I'd give the gold earth

And welkin with its bright pearls,

Though the bargain have small worth.

 

And I would give my kingship,

The splendor of name and crown

To the last hour of Doomsday,

If I could keep you, Marvaun.

 

Eire grieves cold alone tonight

For all of her exiled ones.

Odd it is these shores be home

To everyone but her sons

 

Joyful in a long vessel

With their loves and a helping wind,

Voyaging to otherwhere,

Their bitter home left behind.

 

But there will be a blue eye

Look back that will never more

See Ireland's women or men,

Nor the green and fragrant shore.

 

My crane, my true feathered pet,

Takes its food from out my hand.

Among the men of Ireland

I've found no such faithful friend.

 

The night is cold in the bog --

Knife of lightning, hammer hail;

Windstorm whistling through the wood

Slivering in the darkling gale.

 

--Anonymous

 

 

THE DEATH OF CONAIN

 

The shining tides rise and swell,

Swing him in his coracle,                   [small boat]

Break across the sandy strand:

Conain looks out at the land,

 

Then she whose white hair he grips --

Hair of spindrift, frigid lips --

Fleers and turns her phlegm to foam

On the tomb that was his home.

 

--Anonymous

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 CARNEY, James, ed., Medieval Irish Lyrics, Berkeley: University of California, 1967.

GREENE, David H., ed., Anthology of Irish Literature, New York: New York University, 1971.

HOAGLAND, Kathleen, ed., 1000 Years of Irish Poetry, Old Greenwich: Devin-Adair, 1947.

HUMPHRIES, Rolfe, Green Armor on Green Ground, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1956

KNOTT, Eleanor, Irish Classical Poetry, Dublin: Colm O Lochlainn, 1960.

——, Irish Syllabic Poetry 1200-1600, Dublin and Cork: Cork University, 1935.

O'CONNELL, Richard, ed., Irish Monastic Poems, Philadelphia: Atlantis Editions, 1975.

——, More Irish Poems, Philadelphia: Atlantis Editions, 1976.

TURCO, Lewis, The Book of Forms, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968; The New Book of Forms, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986, and The Book of Forms, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

WELCH, Robert, A History of Verse Translation from the Irish 1789 1897, New York: Barnes & Noble, 1988.

WILLIAMS, Gwyn, An Introduction to Welsh Poetry, London: Faber and Faber, 1953.

WIMSATT, W. K., ed., Versification: Major Language Types, New York: Modern Language Association, 1972.

 REMARKS

Lewis,

What a remarkable work!   I am about to print it out so I can have it as a Real Book, though of course for classroom use the e-form is far more useful.   It is OK to use it in the classroom, yes?  Do let me know before I link it up to my online courses.

I miss my Scots/journalist/writer father all the time, but at moments like this most poignantly.   He named me for Robert Burn's girlfriend Agnes (Burns called her and several lesser girlfriends Clarinda for poetry purposes, but I'm sure you knew that), and he sang Scots/Appalachian versions of all the old ballads to me when I was a kid.  Of course I knew Barbara Allen's erring boyfriend as Sweet William, not Sir John Greene.  My father'd have known — or made up — tunes for all these airs. 

Thank you for this.  Thank you.

Clarinda Harriss

 

Sure, Clarinda, go ahead.

Lew

Thank you much for the compilation of The Airs of Wales and Eire.  It's just the ticket for looking at workings out of the techniques.  Many thanks-- it was the inclusion of these forms that first made the old Book of Forms my appendage as I went about my work.

Ruth Harrison

Lew,

Was just looking over your Facebook album listing your books, but I don't see The Book of Forms. Is it out of print? Hard to believe it's not a standard in all creative writing classes!

Best,

Frank Judge

 

No, Frank, it's not out of print. The publisher is still the University Press of New England. I don't know why you couldn't find it among my books. I'll check up on it. Thanks for asking.

Lew

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON