In The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics I say that the glosa, glose, or gloss is a poem that comments upon a texte…which is written in staves…. However, that is too particular, because this poem is also a glose, though the texte is not written out as the first stanza like the example given there which is titled “Western Wind,” — it cannot be, for the eight lines mentioned in the title are taken from various places in the original poem, “A Letter from Li Po” by Conrad Aiken — they never were a cohesive stanza, and they appear here instead as the last lines of the eight quatrains that make up the poem:
ELEGY ON EIGHT LINES BY CONRAD AIKEN
from A Letter from Li Po
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Elegy on Eight Lines
There is a silence lying on the air
And on the carpet of muted hue and weave
Beneath the desk. Upon the desk there lies
A letter long as time and deep as love.
Whom is the missive from, to whom addressed?
What are these words that one can scarcely say
In the dim room of dream, glimpsed in a flare,
That lightning-stroke which in your dream you saw?
Have I directed these syllables to you,
Or are they yours addressed to me? A glove
Has fallen on a page to contemplate
Dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve.
The moon pours through the window streaked and cracked,
Flows over a ragged dike of books to lave
The pen of shadow spinning its spider thread,
And with it all its local web of love.
Beyond the window, in the meadow there
Where entropy dissolves the evening chord
Against the sky, the letter comes to life:
The song is in the peach tree and the ear.
The room sinks farther into stillness where
It mulls the meaning of its monotone.
Night has written itself upon the leaves;
The singer holds his phrase, the rising moon
Which scratches its arc among the hieroglyphs
Scrawled upon the dark. What is the word
The world attempts to sing in letters, leaves?
Among the leaves we are the hidden bird;
We are the arching moon, the night descending
Among our limbs throughout long ages starred,
Destined to wither sere and still at last,
And with the falling leaf the falling bird.
From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, a.k.a. Lewis Turco, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; BUY FROM AMAZON.COM .
Something like the same thing occurs in this following poem — the lines have been extracted not from a single poem, however, but from four different poems in the works of Vern Rutsala. Those lines appear consecutively as the first, second, third, and fourth lines of the first four quatrains of the poem; furthermore, the four disparate lines come together as a single last stanza that reads coherently, though that stanza never occurs anywhere but here, so it is not a texte in and of itself:
DEJA-VU
On four lines by Vern Rutsala
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Deja-vu
The evening is carved of light.
One has watched here before, the view
of this bracken-edged meadow, the heather
lofting plumes into dusklight out of shadows.
One wonders what he has sought
in the meadows of deja-vu,
and on what occasions he has weathered
these asides of recall — and were there others?
For here an uncertain sleight
of sunlight settles itself like vows —
in the broken fields of sons and fathers —
taken, broken, retaken. Darkness stammers,
the linnet has gone to flight;
hours have fallen to clay review
and have sprung again. Out of ashen feathers
ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.
The evening is carved of light.
In the meadows of deja-vu,
in the broken fields of sons and fathers,
ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.
From 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 point of these examples of variations on the glose verse form, if it isn’t obvious, is this: Nothing in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics is written in concrete. It is basically a book that provides patterns and examples that may be used to experiment with or follow exactly or, better still, do both at various times.
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.
