Odd and Invented Forms

Conrad Aiken, Magus

 

 

 

R.I.P. CONRAD AIKEN

August 5, 1889-August 17, 1973

 

He found his parents’ murder-suicide

When he was but a child. Although he tried

His hand at death himself he was not taken

Till age took pity on old Conrad Aiken.

 

Conrad Aiken died of a heart attack on Friday, August 17th, 1973.  In his New York Times obituary notice of Sunday, the 19th following, Alden Whitman wrote, "As the years wore on Mr. Aiken came to have hardly a kind word for anybody or anything except comic strips, martinis, and John O'Hara's short stories.  In an interview with this reporter in 1969, he wrote off contemporary American poetry as having come to 'a temporary pause' and dismissed Archibald MacLeish, Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg, among others, as over-estimated." I am sorry the Times obituary is the last impression the public had of the end of a great poet's life.  On August 26th of the year of Aiken's death I wrote Mr. Whitman a letter — never acknowledged — in which I corrected his vision of the poet as a bitter old man who had lost his interest in poetry.

In the fall of 1970, nearly a year after the reporter interviewed Aiken, I found a first edition of the poet's The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones (1931).  Aiken is one of my favorite authors, and I had several other of his books, among them his 1961 Selected Poems which I had praised in a review I'd done for American Weave, the magazine of my friend Loring Williams when we had both been living in Cleveland in the early 1960s.  In October of 1970 I wrote Conrad Aiken a letter to ask if he would be willing to inscribe a book or two for me if I sent them along with return postage.  I hoped to get a favorable response by reminding him of my review.

On October 29th Aiken replied that he would be "glad to sign it.  And thanks," he continued, "for reviewing me.  Maybe now again?"  For it appeared that Oxford University Press had on 27th August 1970 published his Collected Poems 1916-1970 and committed the error of printing on the title page, "Second Edition."  Aiken was considerably upset that they had done so without consulting him and without mentioning that the new volume contained "FIVE more books than the 1953 edition," he wrote, adding, "They are going to correct it but too late.  It will get NO reviews.  Ars lunga etc."

As soon as I got his card on November 2nd I sent Aiken two of his books, Osiris Jones and the Selected Poems, and I included a letter.  I said that I was enclosing two of my own books "as a gift — one just out today, The Inhabitant."  The other was Awaken, Bells Falling (1968).

I also wrote Daryl Hine, editor of Poetry, to ask if he'd like me to review the new Collected Poems, as Aiken had requested.  Hine responded quickly in the affirmative, even before I had gotten the review copy.  I wrote to Aiken to tell him that I would do the review, but I was not prepared for the note I received from him — he didn't even mention the review.  The postcard was datelined "Brewster, Mass., Nov. 20 70":

Dear Mr. Turco: The Inhabitant(²) is the best new poem I've read in something like thirty years — profoundly satisfying to me, speaks my language, such a relief to have WHOLE meaning again, instead of this pitiable dot-and-dash splinter-poetry, or sawdust cornflakes which we usually get.  And you're all good.  You give me courage to read again, and even to believe again in myself.  So you see how handsomely I'm in debt.  Thank you!  You should be, and will be, better known.  The Coll Poems are being sent, but don't feel you must like me because I like YOU — gawd ferbid.

Before the mail had arrived at my family's apartment in Oswego, New York, on November third, I had written a note to tell Aiken that I had received the signed books; after the mail came and I had gotten over the first effects of Aiken's letter, I sat down and wrote him again on the same day to tell him how much I appreciated his remarks about my books.  I said that The Inhabitant "will have a very small circulation, but I'd rather have your single opinion than a thousand readers."  I told him his comments would have no effect on my review, as I had long been his admirer anyway, and had said so in the earlier review.

I added, "I'd like very much to meet you some day.  My home town is Meriden, Connecticut, and we spend our summers in Maine....  Perhaps, on a trip someday from here to there, I might visit with you for a few minutes?"

The review copy of Aiken's book finally came, and I sat down to write the review for Poetry, which had set fairly stringent space limitations for the piece.  When it was finished I sent it off to Hine, and by the end of January 1971 I had received a formal acceptance of it, together with a note of thanks from Hine, one sentence of which read, "Belated thanks for this review, which manages to say so much in such a short space."

The next communication I had from Aiken was datelined Savannah, Georgia, March 8, 1971, and it was also a surprise: "I'd like to nominate you for the Loines Award, of the National Institute of Arts and Letters," he wrote, "for an American or English poet whose work has not been too much recognized."  He said he didn't have my books with him, though, and wondered if I wouldn't send the Institute copies and tell them he'd told me to do so.  "Don't hope too much!" he wrote.  "You must know as well as I do what happens on these damned committees.  I served on one at the Institute which tried to give the Gold Medal for fiction to K A Porter instead of Faulkner!  But I proceeded to nominate F and of course when it came to a full vote of the Institute he walked away with it, thank you.  Disgraceful...[.]"  He suggested further that I look up a critical piece on his new book that had appeared in the Saturday Review for January 30, 1971.  He ended with, "We're here til May, then to the Cape end of that month.  Communicate, and try to come by at Brewster.  It would be nice to see you."

I knew that one couldn't apply for the Loines Award oneself, and I felt diffident about sending them my own books.  I wanted to avoid any appearance that I was responsible for initiating this nomination; therefore, on March 10th I wrote Aiken to say I appreciated his efforts in my behalf, but I suggested that I send him the books to forward.  I enclosed a copy of my review of his book, though I'd not yet received proofs from Poetry, I told him.  I said I'd look up the Saturday Review piece, and I ended with, "I'm looking forward to the summer.  I intend to take full advantage of your offer while we're on our way down to Maine."

On March 13th Aiken responded with "...thanks for books and the review."  He agreed that he himself had simultaneously decided that his sending in the books to the Institute "might be more tactful!  I'll send 'em on to Insti.  Your review is very good, AND kind — I only regret that you can't have been a LITTLE more specific about early, middle and late, etc etc.  But VERY useful.  And I'm glad you slapped O U Pee on the wrist...and yes, a martini next summer!"

I replied on the 9th of April with thanks for his last card.  I wrote that I would have liked to have more space in my review, "but the enclosed correspondence from Poetry will explain things, I said.  "I'm working on a book of criticism," I continued, "and I'll get a chance to expand on your work, I'm sure.

"I don't know when the book will be finished, but I'll let you know when it is — and when and if it's published." Unfortunately, my Visions and Revisions of American Poetry [see the note below], with its comparison of Aiken and Wallace Stevens in a chapter titled "A Modernist Coin," wasn't published until 1986.(¹)

On May 20th of 1971 I wrote Aiken again to give him the news and to say, "We'll be leaving for Maine in a few weeks."  I gave him my summer address and phone number.  I told Aiken I'd be on sabbatical in the fall, and might stay on in Maine for a while.  I enclosed a copy of the first review of The Inhabitant to be published.

Aiken was back in Brewster by June 1st, which is when he next wrote me.  He quibbled a bit with the review of The Inhabitant: "But does he quite see that it's ONE POEM**??  I wonder!  Don't know about seeing you this month — the trip up took a lot of whey out of me, I'm still weak and shaky — could you perhaps call me to see what's what a few days before you start—?"  He gave me his phone number and suggested that perhaps the fall would be better for my visit, "as June looks now as if it might be a little crowded.  Sorry — let's wait and see.  I'd very much like to meet you."

I replied over a month later, on the 8th of July.  I thanked him for his card and said that of course I'd come down whatever month he wished.  I also thanked him for having Oxford send me the new edition of his impressionist autobiography Ushant, which I was reading and enjoying.  I told him I'd have Jerry Patz, publisher of The Inhabitant, send him a copy of my new book, Pocoangelini: A Fantography and Other Poems, when it appeared in September.(³)  "I read proofs on your review in Poetry not long ago.  It should be out this month or next.," I wrote.  Aiken replied on July 30th that he looked forward to October and my visit.

I was apprehensive about Aiken's health, and I did not want to tax him during the month of August by writing him letters he might feel obliged to answer.  During this period, though, the review in Poetry appeared and I sent him a copy.  On August 13th Aiken dropped me a card from Brewster: "Thanks!" he said.  "The review is damned good, and Allen Tate said so in a note this morning.  He sent me a copy."  Aiken said he would see me in October.

Not long after, I sent him a copy of Pocoangelini, just out: Jerry Patz had asked Aiken for permission to use his letter of praise for The Inhabitant as a blurb on the new book, and it appeared on the back cover of the paperback edition.  Aiken replied with a card dated September 9th: "Many thanks for the little angels, which I haven't had time for yet.  We're a hospital at the moment, and I have no mind or energy."  He wasn't as intrigued with this book, though, and of course he was right, for all three of the series comprising the volume — "Pocoangelini, A Fantography," "Bordello,"(⁴) and "The Sketches"(⁵) — had been written earlier, some of them much earlier, than The Inhabitant:  However, the latter had originally been published as a chapbook in 1962, and it had received good reviews.  The middle series, a short one, had never appeared as a set before, and it was subsequently to be picked apart again as individual poems were picked up and anthologized frequently.  "But don't believe anything I say!  For I don't either," he wrote; "I'm a little out of my mind."  I took it that he meant that he was feverish.

David M. Ungerer of Reston Publishing Company had a bit earlier flown to Maine to ask that I turn my S.U.N.Y. correspondence course study-guide into a college textbook, and I had just signed a contract to write Poetry: An Introduction through Writing.(⁵)  I planned to go home to New York State, where my professional library was located, to work on it, so I wrote Aiken before I had received his card, on September 11th, "I'll be leaving here to return to Oswego about October 17th.  Would it be possible for me to drop in on you in October before then?"

When I finally got his card, I dashed off a note on September 13th to hide under nonsense how upset I felt about his health problems.  It was meanwhile becoming clear to Aiken that the National Institute of Arts and Letters wasn't nearly as enthusiastic about The Inhabitant as he was, for on September 22nd he wrote to say that he'd written a letter to the secretary of the Institute, Felicia Geffen, "for the committee, but don't know if it's now too late.  [Malcolm] Cowley was here a week ago, but was offhandedly noncommittal about it all, so I haven't too much hope."  He said further that "my wife is better, but as we're both shaky, I fear we must again postpone positive decision about seeing you next month — hope we'll be in the clear for lunch or a drink.  So let's reappraise round Oct 9th or 10th."

Obviously, Aiken was still expending energy in behalf of my book, and I wanted to spare him and reassure him that I wasn't very much concerned about the Loines Award.  Literary politics has never been of interest to me, any more than it was to Aiken who had always been something of a loner.  On the 24th of September I wrote, "I'm tremendously pleased to hear your wife is better and that you're feeling better than you sounded in your last card."  I told him not to worry about the award, for his praise was better than any award I could receive.

Of greatest concern to me was Aiken's health and the often-deferred visit I was to pay him.  It was put off for a final time when, on October 3rd, he wrote from Brewster, "Dear Lewis: This is sad, and I'm sorry, but I fear it can't be helped."  Besides Mrs. Aiken's ill health, the poet himself had "...gone and had another heart flurry."  The doctor told him he simply had to slow down and specifically not see people, as excitement sent his blood pressure soaring.  "So, forgive me," he wrote, "but we'll just have to put it off for another year."  He and Mrs. Aiken had "sorrowfully decided to leave for the south, and more clement weather, earlier than we'd planned.  Don't hold it against me.  And forgive me too," he continued, "if I don't correspond, for this too has become a burden, my desk is a snowdrift of unanswered letters.  Hell."

The next note I wrote, on October 7th, was brief for two reasons: I felt I had been bothering Aiken excessively, and I didn't want to add to his problems.  The other reason was that I was deeply disappointed, although I didn't want to show it.  "Dear Conrad," I said.  "You have my love.  We'll see each other next year.  Meanwhile, my very best to you and Mrs. Aiken."

After quite a long lapse I wrote Aiken again the next year, on March 10, 1972.  "Please don't feel you have to answer this letter," I said.  "I just feel like writing you.  I thought you might not mind hearing what I've been doing...."  I gave him the news and wrote, "I look forward to the summer, of course, which isn't far off now."  I added, "Perhaps we can see each other then.  I hope so."

I received no response, and I judged Aiken was still quite ill.  A couple of months later I sent him another letter, dated May 15th, telling him I'd been "scouring the bookstores for Aikeniana."  I asked if he'd be willing to sign some bookplates for me, and I sent him a copy of a poem I'd written.  On the first of June 1972 Aiken wrote me his last letter, from Savannah.

It was as I had surmised — he had been "ill since fall, prostate with complications, had to delay trip south, and now the doctor won't let me travel.  Nor can I walk, or read with intelligence...."  He enclosed the signed bookplates — "that sounds like fun," he said.  "Don't know when, if ever, we'll get back to the Cape.  Meanwhile our house has been brutally robbed of most of its objets d'arts, lifetime collection.  Sickening."

Conrad Aiken lived for a bit over another year.  That he was a harried, disillusioned man with overwhelming health problems is true, but that he ever lost his interest in literature and life is not.  If the current revival of the long narrative poem by the Neo-Formalists is successful, we will look to Aiken as one of the few modern masters of the form. Many of the poems in his Collected Poems 1916-1970, about which he was so exercised, were longer than short, more narrative than lyric; yet it is difficult to place Aiken definitively in any cage of conception or of genre, for he refused to sound like anyone but himself or to conform to mid-20^th-century literary etiquette. That is to say, he derived very little from Pound and Eliot except, now and then, a slightly recognizable weltschmertz — which Babylon translates as “sentimental pessimism” — but even that isn’t certain, for it has been argued that Eliot and Pound derived something of their tone from Aiken.

Conrad Aiken’s poetry can be explicit and allusive at the same time; it can contain philosophical insights without obtuseness of diction or abstraction of syntax; it can evoke a scene, create a sonic “image,” print a spatial pattern without risking thralldom to traditional form or surrealist metaphor. A long story may be told with great variety of locutions, as in “The Coming Forth by Day of Osiris Jones,” a name and a title that combines the mystical with the quotidian. Here Aiken employs a sequence of related shorter poems with increasingly sharper viewpoints. The life story of O. Jones is told and retold in fragments by clocks, faces, mirrors, and coin machines; in short, the matter of a life becomes its accuser and judge until there is nothing left but the medical report of a dying old man and a “landscape with figures” — birches, larches, pines, junipers; brooks and crickets; echoes and grass — extended over a hollow time.

Aiken lived through both the Modernist and post-Modernist periods, and he survived the New Critics as well as the old simply by writing his own idiosyncratic work and refusing to engage in the literary scene. He was never in the forefront of the era’s imagination, nor was he ever a fad. His Collected Poems, then, was a major book by a major neglected poet. It contained the lifework of a man who listened with his inner ear to the nuances of the spirit and of the marrow. Aiken was not satisfied merely to listen, however. He worked to find the craft and the strategies that would enable him to convey to others what he experienced, and he succeeded in his intention in larger degree than nearly any other poet of the twentieth century.

The poetry of Conrad Aiken is a poetry of wholeness: whole meaning, whole experience, whole saying. From first to last his oeuvre is some of the most sustained and exquisite writing the tongue can boast. Aiken was a musician of the language, and he heard things in humanity few others have been able to articulate.

It is not so much that he wrote poems as that all his work is a single poem ranging over personalities and ways of being that Aiken obviously lived in his mind and committed to paper so that his audience might live these strangers and familiars as well. He built, out of words, a cosmos in which an identifiable and evolving consciousness resides, and that cosmos is large enough to accommodate the reader as well as hosts of fictive personae.

One of the reasons why many critics and scholars have found it difficult to come to terms with Aiken is that he must be perceived in toto, not in shards and slices. Though the tenor of his creation has been apparent for decades, the vehicle was not complete at the time of his death, as no cosmos is ever completed. Nevertheless, it may be argued that in his oeuvre Aiken accomplished what Pound did not manage in his Cantos. We can finally perceive that Aiken was a Pythagoras of words — their depth, height, and breadth. He was a Magus who listened to a linguistic “music of the spheres,” but he lived in an existential age that seemed to deny a Pythagorean mathematical harmony of all things.

What Aiken did, then, was to create a paradox, a universe that cannot, but that despite all, does exist. The tension of his work derives from the mind’s symmetry opposed to the whirlpool of doubt, rationality struggling with instability, but it is Everyman’s struggle, not the ascetic’s, for we can all see ourselves standing in the circle of his horizon. The poetry of Aiken is an Ouroboros of consonance and dissonance, the hermetic worm that devours its own tail in order to exist, and in that metaphysical circle which contains all of Man — his mind and his heart, all men and women — all things are encouraged to be until they are extinguished in the total Being.  Conrad Aiken left as a legacy to us a trove of poetry, fiction and autobiography that few writers have equaled in quality, and fewer have surpassed.  He left, as well, the memory of great vitality to the end.

 

NOTES 

(¹)A portion of this essay appeared as "Ouroboros" in Poetry, cxviii:5, August 1971; as "Corresponding with Conrad Aiken" in Conrad Aiken: Priest of Consciousness, Georgia State Literary Studies 6 edited by Ted R. Spivey and Arthur Waterman for AMS Press, 1990, and in Visions and Revisions of American Poetryby Lewis Turco, Fayetteville AR: University of Arkansas Press, UArkansasPress 1986.

(²)The Inhabitant, poems, with prints by Thom. Seawell, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970. Paper. Out-of-print; all poems are collected 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.

(³)Pocoangelini: A Fantography & Other Poems, Northampton: Despa Press, 1971. Paper. Out-of-print; most poems collected 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. 

(⁴) Bordello, poems, with prints by George O'Connell, Oswego, NY: Grey Heron / Mathom, 1996. Cased portfolio, out-of-print, but the poems alone are available 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. .

(⁵) The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask, Cleveland: American Weave Press, 1962. American Weave Award Chapbook. Out-of-print, but the series of poems is collected 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.

(⁶) Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing, 1973. ISBN 0879096373, paper. Out-of-print, but available from ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education.

The epitaph at the head of this essay is from Epitaphs for the Poets, by “Wesli Court” (a.k.a. Lewis Turco), Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1, $15.00, forthcoming.

 

John Ashbery

 

 

         Born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, John Ashbery was never an academic. He took his B.  A. from Harvard in 1949 and two years later an M.  A.  from Columbia University where he studied French literature. He did postgraduate work briefly at New York University 1957-58, worked in publishing, then went to France from  1960-65 as an art critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune and Art News, of which he subsequently became an editor.  He returned to New York City in 1965.

         Ashbery's first collection, Turandot and Other Poems, was published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953; despite this previous publication, he won the first book award of the Yale Series of Younger Poets for his Some Trees in 1956. The judge was W. H. Auden who chose the collection over that of Ashbery's friend, Frank O'Hara. Subsequent books were The Poems (1960), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966),  Selected Poems, published in London in 1967,  The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three  Poems (1972), The Vermont  Journal (1975), As We Know (1979). "At North Farm," the first poem from his A Wave (1984), is a good example of the level of abstraction to be found in his poems:

 

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

 

At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents,

through narrow passes.

But will he know where to find you,

Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

 

Hardly anything grows here,

Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,

The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.

The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

Birds darken the sky.  Is it enough

That the dish of milk is set out at night,

That we think of him sometimes,

Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

 

         A great many critics have complained about the difficulty of Ashbery's work; indeed, of all abstract poetry. Jonathan Holder says that he admires Ashbery's work "even though Ashbery's 'use' of poetry often seems...too limited — an Olympian, noncommittal language-play that refuses engagement or to make value judgments, poetry that issues from a universe in which one never has to go outdoors or discipline a child or change a tire, from a universe consisting entirely of texts. Yet when I choose to amuse myself in the ludic, whimsical, lyric weathers of discourse, I read Ashbery" (1). Others have criticized Ashbery for being exactly what one would have expected he would not be and, in fact, never has been: an academic poet. Richard Nason wrote, "The Existential poetry of William Carlos Williams, sensible enough perhaps as a reaction to the heavy metaphysical burden of the poetry of Eliot, Pound and, to a lesser degree, Yeats, has in recent decades degenerated to the grudging gibberish of Ashbery and the vacuous, verbless maundering of [A.  R.] Ammons. The highly remote, almost indecipherable content of this verse has remained of interest only to those who study it so they may become initiates in the elite academia where it is taught" (Intro.). But it is not at all certain that, as Nason says, Ashbery's poetry is "almost indecipherable”; much more likely is the possibility that it is totally indecipherable, as music is "indecipherable" even as it is enjoyable to listen to.

         If Nason is categorical in his rejection of Ashbery, there is an ambivalence in Holden's attitude, almost as though he were abashed to like the poetry and unable to understand why he should do so against all reason. Raymond Carney wrote, "Ashbery has related a wry dialogue between himself and Kenneth Koch that is very much to the point: 'He asked me, "Does your poetry have any hidden meanings" And I said: "No."  "Why Not?" "Because somebody might find out what they were and then the poems would no longer be mysterious"'" (3). Ashbery does not want  to attach a "program" to his language music, as composers have done to their musical compositions from time to time. He wants to achieve in language, if he can, the mysterious pleasures of music by using abstract syntax.

         It is interesting to note the use of the musical term "minor key" at the end of this passage from Carney's essay: "There is no shortcut through an Ashbery text; no possibility of skimming it for key passages.  It is a wonderfully democratic verse. Just as in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, the result of Ashbery's almost absolute renunciation of architectonic structures and rhetorical heightening is a paradoxical heightening of everything, of even the most ordinary details, in the poem. The common and mean, at moments, can become almost transcendent in Ashbery as in Bishop, who achieve their grand Romantic moments, as William Carlos Williams did, in a minor key" (14).

         Echoing Archibald Macleish's poem "Ars Poetica," Marjorie Perloff wrote, "Not what one dreams but how — this is Ashbery's subject. His stories 'tell only of themselves,' presenting the reader with the challenge of what he calls 'an open field of narrative possibilities'.... For, like Rimbaud's, his are not dreams 'about' such and such characters or events;  the dream structure is itself the event that haunts the poet's imagination" (252).

         Ashbery's method of composition may also explain something about how his poems manage to gather "mystery" to themselves. In an interview with Sue Gangel, Ashbery said, "I write down phrases and ideas on pieces of paper which I then can't keep track of. I put them in a drawer, and sometimes I can't  find them, and sometimes I use ones I've already used before and then I have to do something about that. I don't keep any journal. I write down things that seem suggestive to me when they occur and I think might be usable later on. Then if I can't find them, that's all right too because meanwhile I will have already started to think about something else" (p. 19).

         If Ashbery's syntax is "abstract," and if his method of composition is at the farthest remove from the mechanical or even the rational, nevertheless one may point out that the poet's approach to versifying is neither "ludic and whimsical," as Holden suggests, nor "academic," as  Nason defines it in these post-deconstructionist days, nor is it entirely without "architectonic structure," as Carney would have it. If it were so, why do some of Ashbery's poems find themselves located in the anthologies of the so-called "New Formalist" movement that was underway in the United States during the 1990s? Formalism might once have been considered academic, back in the 1950s, but formal approaches to poetry had been banned from American poetry since then. Neoformalism was considered by the later academy to be either reactionary or revolutionary, depending on whether one was defending the "tradition of Whitman," as Diane Wakoski has termed it in her apologies for the status quo, or advancing the argument that form, whether traditional or experimental, is necessary to meaning, as Dana Gioia and the other New Formalists maintained.

         But this description of Ashbery's method of composition is perhaps rule of thumb rather than categorical, for he had something a bit different to say when he described "Variation  on  a Noel," with its epigraph from the Christmas carol, "when the snow lay round about, / deep and crisp and even...", in Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (3-4). This poem is written in the form of a pantoum. In his comment on the poem in Lehman's book Ashbery said, "I first  came across the word pantoum as the title of one of the movements of Ravel's 'Trio,' and then found the term in a manual of prosody. I wrote a poem called "Pantoum" in the early '50s; it is in my book Some Trees.   'Variation on a Noel' is the only other time I have ever used the form. The poem was written in December of 1979" (p. 5). This is the first stanza:

 

A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.

A thirsty unit by an upending stream,

Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication

If elixir were to be found in the world's dolor, where is none.

 

         A pantoum is an accentual-syllabic Malayan form. Its lines may be of any specific length, in any particular meter, and it consists of an indefinite number of quatrain stanzas with particular restrictions: lines two and four of each stanza, in their entirety, are refrains — they become lines one and three of the following stanza, and so on. The rhyme scheme is interlocking. Stanza two of Ashbery's poem reads,

 

A thirsty unit by an upending stream,

Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little

                                                               of her nakedness —

If elixir were to be found in the world's dolor, where is none,

Our emancipation should be great and steady.

 

         "I was attracted to the form in both cases," Ashbery continued,  "because of its stricture, even greater than in other hobbling forms such as the sestina or canzone. These restraints seem to have a paradoxically liberating effect, for me at least. The form has the additional advantage of providing you with twice as much poem for your effort, since every line has to be repeated twice" (5). The observation about the paradoxically "liberating" effect of writing in forms had been made by many poets over the years, but increasingly in recent years as young poets rediscovered formal poetry. Here is the penultimate stanza of "Variation on a Noel":

 

And I have known him cheaply.

Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus —

A form of ignorance, you might say. Let's leave that though.

The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.

 

The poem can be ended in one of two ways, either in a quatrain whose refrains are lines one and three of the first stanza in reversed order, or in a repeton couplet consisting  of lines one and three of the first stanza in reversed order. Ashbery decided to end the poem his own way: lines one and three  of the first stanza became lines two and four of the last stanza, in the same, rather than reversed, order:

 

Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus.

A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.

The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.

Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication.

 

         Besides Lehman's collection, Ashbery's poems also appeared in the New Formalist anthology Strong  Measures, edited by Philip Dacey and  David Jauss. One of these, the poet's original "Pantoum" from his book Some Trees, was included in the text as an example of that form. Also included are "Some Trees," the title poem of that collection, which serves as an example of what the editors call "nonce couplets" and "couplet quatrains";  and "Farm Implements  and  Rutabagas  in a Landscape," a sestina, from The Double Dream of Spring. The poet has always been supposed to make leaps of the imagination that surprise the reader, to make associations that others perhaps would not have made. It is evident that the difficulty readers have with Ashbery and others of the so-called “New York School” is that they jump from one association to another  without intervening transitions — it is a modernist technique, one that Ezra Pound discovered in the original draft of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" by editing out those transitions and leaving only the fragments and abstract syntax that mirror the fragmentation and technological leaps of the twentieth century. It is a technique from which Wallace Stevens forged a career of writing poetry for himself, not for readers, but that some readers loved anyway — some, not many, for modernist and contemporary poetry left the common reader behind, just as modern music has done.

         David Shapiro noted in the chapter titled "The Meaning of Meaninglessness" in his study, John Ashbery: An Introduction  to the Poetry, that "John Ashbery once took a course of lectures in music by Henry Cowell at the New School. Ashbery recalls Cowell remarking that the intervals in music become wider as music grows more sophisticated: 'for instance, if you compare "The  Volga Boatmen" and the "Love Duet" in Tristan und Isolde you see how vastly wide the intervals have become;  and the ear seemingly becomes accustomed to unaccustomed intervals, "as time goes by"'.... One cannot really anticipate the next note in many serial pieces, and this suspense is a fine quality of Ashbery's own work..."(16).  It is, that is, and it isn't, depending on one's point of view...on whether one is Jonathan Holden, Richard Nason, David Shapiro,  or someone else. One thing is certain, however: John Ashbery writes his poems in an abstract "musical syntax," and this syntax is sometimes to be found bottled in traditional lyric verse forms. This new kind of poetry began displacing Robert Bly's "deep imagism" as the "avant garde" movement of the 1980s. It made inroads on the West Coast where most of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets resided, but in 1986 signs of a  further spread became evident, through chapbook publications from the "alternative press" movement, to New England and the South in work by De Villo Sloan and the late George Butterick, two members of the second  generation  of Black Mountaineers from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Donald M. Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara,  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

——,  ed., The New American Poetry 1945-1960,  New York: Grove Press, (1960)

John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring, New York: E. P. Dutton Co., 1970.

——, The Poems, New York: Tiber Press, 1960.

——,  Rivers  and  Mountains, New York: Holt, Rinehart  & Winston, 1966.

——, Selected Poems, London: Cape, 1967.

——, Some Trees, New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1956.

——, The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems, Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

——, Three Poems, New York:  Viking Press, 1972.

——, Turandot  and  Other  Poems, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953.

——, The Vermont Journal,  Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.

——, A Wave, New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.

Raymond Carney, "John  Ashbery," in Donald J. Greiner, ed., American Poets Since World War II, Part 1: A-K,  Detroit MI: Gale Research, 1980.

Tracy Chevalier, ed., Contemporary Poets, Fifth Edition, Chicago: St. James Press, 1991.

Philip Dacey, and David Jauss, eds., Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms,  New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Donald Davie, Articulate Energy, New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Sue Gangel, "Interview with John Ashbery," in Joe David Bellamy, ed.,  American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work,  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Lyn Hejinian, The Guard, n.p.: Tuumba Press, 1983.

David Lehman, ed., Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Frank O'Hara, A City Winter, and Other Poems, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1952.

——, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

——, Jackson Pollock, New York: George Braziller, 1959.

——, Love Poems (Tentative Title),  New York: Tibor de  Nagy, 1965.

——, Lunch Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.

——, Meditations in an Emergency, New York: Grove Press, 1957.

——, Odes, New York: Tiber Press, 1960.

——, Oranges, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953.

——, Robert Motherwell, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965.

——, Second Avenue, New York: Totem/Corinth Press, 1960.

Ron Padgett, and David Shapiro, eds., An Anthology of New York Poets, New York: Random House, 1970.

——,  The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud  to  Cage,  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Marjorie Perloff,  Frank O'Hara, Poet Among Painters, New York: George Braziller, 1977.

David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry,  New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Radcliffe Squires, Cornar, Philadelphia, Pa.: Dorrance, 1940.

——,  Fingers  of  Hermes,  Ann  Arbor,  Mi.:  University  of Michigan Press, 1965.

——,  Where  the Compass Spins,  New York: Twayne Publishers, 1951.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, The Complete Poems,  ed.  N.  Scott Momaday, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968.

——, The  New Book of Forms,  Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.

——, Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing,  Reston:  Reston Publishing Co., 1973.

——, Visions  and Revisions of American Poetry,  Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986

Alberta Turner, ed., Poets Teaching: The Creative Process,  New York: Longman, 1980.

James Vinson, ed., Contemporary Poets, Second Edition, New York: St. Martin's, 1975.

 

This essay is scheduled to appear in the volume Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, Texas: Stephen F. Austin State University Press: date uncertain. All rights reserved by Lewis P. Turco, 2012.

 

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.

 

 

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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Plowing the "Free Verse" Field

 

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

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

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

 

The Blues Sonnet

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

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

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

When the shoe strings break

On both your shoes

And you're in a hurry —

That's the blues.

 

When you go to buy a candy bar

And you've lost the dime you had

Slipped through a hole in your pocket somewhere —

That's the blues, too, and bad!

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

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

He did a lazy sway...

He did a lazy sway...

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues,

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man's soul.

O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan —

"Ain't got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

And put ma troubles on the shelf."

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

 

LORRIE

Lorrie looked good — man,

         she was a jazz band, straight

         as a clarinet, and the tunes she played

         with her hip action wowed my crowd.

Lorrie swung like a prime ensemble,

         smiled the cool blues as we sipped our

         brews in the racetrack dive while the

         bass thrummer, a basic type, swiped

         at the strings, making us think

         of beds and things.

There we were, dancing our eyes

         among the beers while Lorrie walked

         her pert way among us, mashers all,

         and we asked, "What's up tonight,

         Lorrie-love?"

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

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

"By night I slide drinks down

         to your hands, and in the daylight

         I guard lives at Ryall's beach."

Then, when the jazz bunch quit and

         the horn stopped snorting

         and the drums bumped the last bum

         out the door, we went too, man,

         we went too

 

Who wants to see Lorrie meet her beau?

         Who wants to see his old eyes, older

         than she'll ever be, and his dark hands

         grab her wrist hard as they leave to park

         in the raceway woods?

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

lines                  meters and rhymes

1.                  xX xX xX xX xA

2.                  xX xX xX xX xA

3.                  xX xX xX xX xa

 

4.                  xX xX xX xX xB

5.                  xX xX xX xX xB

6.                  xX xX xX xX xb and so forth:

 

Listen to the author read his poem Blues for George Gershwin

 

BLUES FOR GEORGE GERSHWIN

September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937

 

When I was three you stepped out of the light.

When I was three years old you spurned the light

And wandered off into the dark of night.

 

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

And that was quite enough for you to do

 

To justify your stay among us here,

To pay your way while you were with us here

Upon this mortal coil, this spinning sphere.

 

When I grew up I heard the songs you made,

I listened, and I learned the songs you made

And wished¾oh! how I wished that you had stayed.

 

I do not understand why you were taken

So young. Some force of Nature was mistaken

When it decided to leave the world forsaken

 

Of all that possibility of song,

That minstrel’s bag of melody and song

That now we’ll never hear forever long.

 

Therefore we pick your bones and make up tunes

Out of the scraps you left, those scraps of tunes

Your brother Ira kept through nights and noons

 

Until he got too old and joined you there

Wherever you are, rose up and joined you there

To help you strike those strings in the ringing air. 

Wesli Court

 

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

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

 

THE BONEYARD BLUES

I.

I'm sitting in the boneyard singing songs,

Sitting singing songs as blue as blue —

Considering my days, their shorts and longs,

 

The days we spent together, me and you.

Yes, you and me and all those other folks

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

 

My meaning — yesterday is gone in strokes,

In strokes and chimes, and time cannot be turned,

I'm well aware; it plays its dirty jokes

 

And leaves us on our ashes, bare and burned.

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

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

 

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

Turn into bonedust, rusting pots and pans.

 

II.

Rusting pots and pans pile up and ring,

Pile up and ring us round with shards of loss,

With echoes of the songs we used to sing

 

In living rooms and bedrooms filled with moss,

With moss and lichen now of recollection.

The kitchen where we used to sit and toss

 

Together meals of love and of affection

Has grown a mold upon the oven grate,

And there is nothing left of our confection

 

Except a little sweeting on a plate,

The plate of dreams, its edges chipped and cracked.

In the beginning already it was too late —

 

The gun was loaded and the deck was stacked.

The tune could not provide what the lyrics lacked.

 

III.

And so I'm sitting in this boneyard, blue

As blue, and singing songs that leave me cold.

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

 

They may be new — more likely they are old,

As old as flesh and time.  I hear the knell

Of generations as the peals are rolled

 

Among the stones, within the stony well —

That stone-cold well of destiny gone dry.

Who is the sexton hauling on the bell?

 

Why is the deacon grinning at us?  Why?

Why are his cheekbones sunken, and his teeth

So moonlight-gleaming?  Wherefore is his eye

 

The hollow of a heartbeat underneath

The zero of a withered floral wreath?

 

Envoy

 

Just let me drop this note into the dark,

Yes, let me drop this note into the dark —

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

 

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

Fly it into darkness, see it flare

And wink out in those shadows circling there.

 

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

Among the minor planets and the stars.

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

 

Until the spark has died to inky ash,

And words have flickered into smoken ash.

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

 

And lean against this marker made of stone

That will not last as long as ink or bone.

 

Wesli Court

 

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

 

Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale

John Skelton (1460-1529) was the last English poet of any note before the 19th century priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (Skelton was also a priest) to use alliterative stress verse, but his podics were idiosyncratic: he made lines of the hemistichs of Anglo-Saxon prosody, as in many nursery rhymes, but rhymed them insistently until he suddenly shifted to another rhyme.  We have come to call this obsessive form Skeltonics, in his honor, or "tumbling verse."

Although Skelton was a priest, he was a highly unusual one who, among other things, evidently proclaimed himself the first Poet Laureate of England. He has been called the last of the English Medieval poets by some, and by others the first of the English Renaissance poets.  No doubt he was both, for he wrote not only in podic prosody, like the anonymous English poets and balladeers since Chaucer, but in accentual-syllabic prosody as well, like the Scottish Chaucerians, Chaucer himself, and almost all other English poets up through the 19th century.

Skelton’s intention in this satire was not to say something deep, nor really to characterize the girl of the title who remains an abstraction rather than a person, but to make fun of his fellow clergy ("clerks" means clergy) who, unlike Skelton, were womanizers, for Skelton had a common-law wife and at least one child, for which he was punished by the Church. In the last stanza, Skelton may be asking his fellow priests to marry him to his “wife,” thus making his marriage “legal,” which they certainly would not be permitted to do, which is why Skelton’s marriage was of the common-law variety. Priests took the vow of celibacy, but not necessarily of chastity: the two terms are not synonyms, and Roman Catholic clergymen have seldom practiced the latter.

In this poem Skelton’s primary method was to use the music of the language to mock, for a good deal of the satire lies in the sounds of the poem, particularly in the refrain:

 

Aye, beshrew you, by my oath,

These wanton clerks are never loath!

Be off! Be off, my popinjay,

What, will ye do nothing but play?

Tilly vally, straw, let be I say!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

By God, ye be a pretty toad,

And I love you a whole cart-load,

Straw, James Fodder, you play it shrewd,

I am no hackney for your rod:

Go watch a bull, your back is broad!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Surely you deal discourteously;

What, would ye frumple me? Now fie!

What, shall you be my piglet’s sty?

By Christ, ye shall not, not hardly:

You’ll not bejape me bodily!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Just walk away, you cost me naught;

Now I have found what I have sought:

The best cheap flesh that ever I bought.

Yet for His love that all hath wrought,

Wed me, or I’ll die at the thought.

Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!

Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!

Gup, Christian Clout, gup, Jack of the Vale!

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

— John Skelton

This version is copyrighted by Lewis Turco 1973, 2011 and may not be reproduced anywhere for any reason without the written permission of the author.

The Audience for Poetry

 

 

Long before the advent of the Age of the Internet, which has changed everything, it was John Ciardi, I believe, who put forward the theory of the “vertical” and “horizontal” audiences. The vertical audience for literature consists of the mass of readers of any stripe who exist at any particular moment, whereas the horizontal audience is those readers who exist from one particular moment forward into the indefinite future. Although the vertical audience appears to be massive in comparison with the horizontal audience of that same moment, in fact the horizontal audience will be much larger — good news for the writer of serious literature as distinguished from the writer of “popular” literature.

In practice, this is what used to happen, according to Ciardi’s theory: on a particular day two magazines are published; one is a popular mass-market magazine, and the other is a “little” magazine. The popular magazine has a vertical audience of a million people, but its horizontal audience diminishes rapidly — it extends primarily only so far as the publication date of the magazine’s next issue. Let’s say that length of time is one month, and during those thirty days two million more people read the magazine, for a total vertical-horizontal readership of three million readers. (Of course, this doesn’t include readers of magazines in the offices of such people as doctors and dentists where periodicals apparently have half-lives equivalent to radioactive substances.)

The “little” magazine has a vertical audience of only a thousand readers, but it does not become obsolete as fast as the popular periodical. In fact, over the years scholars, students, and researchers have recourse to the little magazine in academic libraries and collections in particular. Eventually, the theory goes, the little magazine’s horizontal audience outstrips the popular periodical’s total readership.

One can think of some limited-circulation magazines that would fit this pattern — I would judge that since the eighteenth century The Spectator has been read by more people than any particular issue, or even, perhaps, the whole run of Time magazine. But the theory is no doubt sounder if one applies it, not to a whole issue of a magazine, or a whole run, but some of the contents. No doubt more readers have read The Waste Land over the last century than have read any single article in any issue of Newsweek.

Although Ciardi’s theory, applied in such a way, can perhaps give some small comfort to the poet in the long run, it will probably not give the journalist many sleepless nights, for the reason that the latter is reaching the audience he or she has chosen. The poet, on the other hand, probably is not reaching his or her chosen audience — who consciously writes for the ages? Most poets would like to reach a sizable vertical audience too, although Emily Dickinson may be the exception; she apparently cared very little for any audience at all. Others, however, like to think they are addressing one’s contemporaries, a situation that poses a considerable dilemma to the serious writer. How serious can one be if one reaches out for a mass readership? Walt Whitman, for instance, addressed his poems to “the common man” but, though his horizontal audience is enormous, it is not made up of laborers, and his vertical audience was smaller than that for the work of many of his contemporaries — Whittier, Longellow, the “Schoolroom Poets” whose works were found on the shelves on anyone who had pretensions to culture in the 19th century. The poet, then, must consider the audience he or she wishes to reach, and settle for that readership which is as large as his or her seriousness of intent and talent will bear. The smallest audience possible is one: oneself, the audience Dickinson wrote for; the largest is everyone. Every audience in between these extremes, it goes without saying, is limited to a greater or lesser degree. If the poet addresses only himself or herself, he or she is a narcissist; if the poet addresses everyone, he or she must seek the lowest common denominator, and art is exhausted.

Visualize a circle that represents all possible readers at a particular moment. Within this circle imagine a triangle. At the apex of the triangle there is the poet. One of the other points of our figure represents those readers who are of like mind with the poet; the third point of the triangle stands for those readers who are unlike-minded. The poet has several choices of audience: he (or she) can address the people within both circle and triangle — everyone; the people outside the triangle but within the circle — readers who do not read poetry; the people within the triangle only — all the readers of poetry; himself only; himself and like-minded people; or unlike-minded people.

To address everyone is to write artlessly or journalistically, which will no doubt exclude those people within the triangle who consider poetry to be an art; to write for people outside the triangle only is probably hopeless. If he chooses like-minded people, the poet will very likely choose to speak to them in commonly held symbols and phrases — clichés, but not mass audience clichés; rather, cult clichés, such as those used by Charles Olson and his “Black Mountaineers.” Should the poet choose to address an unlike-minded audience, he will have to speak in terms of the clichés that group has accepted, if he or she wishes to be heard.

The poet may, however, choose to speak to a central audience, those people contained in the middle of the triangle — visualize a second circle within the triangle, an audience interested in the art of poetry, but not necessarily of the poet’s mind. In this case the poet must speak in symbols invented for the purpose, the specific purpose, but these symbols must be recognizable, in context, to the readership. In other words, the poet must be imaginative.

This poet, then, will speak in his or her own voice, but to an audience that is willing to abjure cliché in favor of art, an audience of the middle, not of the extremes, and not including everyone. One way the poet can involve this middle audience in the poem is through the use of the dramatic or narrative points of view, by writing about his audience and about oneself; about their world as well as the poet’s own — in other words, by invoking empathy, not merely sympathy or antipathy.

Empathy is the quality of seeing oneself in another’s art, though the world of that art be strange. The middle audience is willing to give itself to the poet, but the poet must be willing, in turn, to give himself or herself back to the audience — neither one nor the other, but both. The audience that gives itself to a poet is a cult; the poet who gives himself to the audience is a confesser, but if there is mutual giving, then the art of poetry flourishes, and the poet can choose to reach the largest possible number of readers consistent with quality of writing and seriousness of intent.

I don’t think this paradigm holds as well in the Age of the Internet as it used to, because everything that is published potentially can exist forever in cyberspace, or at least for as long as there is technology and a form of the current civilization. It hardly matters whether what is written is pure data, like statistics, or hard copy, or digitized material including music and art. It is all available, and every day millions of people enter terms into search engines to dig through materials that used to take great labor and enormous amounts of time to uncover. There is no longer a vertical audience; it’s all horizontal as far as electronics can see.

  

The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship , www.UPNE.com, ISBN 0874519551, quality paperback, $24.95, 224 pages. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms. ORDER FROM AMAZON.

COMMENTS

Oh, this is a jewel, Lew,

          Many thanks. I loved, in particular, "This poet, then, will speak in his or her own voice, but to an audience that is willing to abjure cliché in favor of art, an audience of the middle, not of the extremes, and not including everyone."

Jennifer Reeser

 

Lew,

Thanks for sharing this. I especially appreciate your observations on empathy and mutual giving. 

Geraldine Cannon Becker

Lew, 

Very heartening for editors of little magazines. It reminds me that the labour & effort of publishing them is not as futile as one sometimes feels.

Paul Stevens

 

Paul,

The world of the little magazines has long been nurturing to literature. Let's hope it always will be, but so many of our best periodicals are dying these days and it's a brave new world out there on the Web. 

Lew

Lew, 

That brave new world can seem scary "New Math of Poetry":

http://chronicle.com/article/The-New-Math-of-Poetry/64249/

Mike Snider

Mike,

During the middle ages all warriors were expected to be able to stand up at the mead table and extemporaneously relate their exploits in what we now call "Anglo-Saxon prosody." Of course, there was also a caste of professional poets called "bards," but everyone was supposed to be able at the very least to understand and appreciate "poetry." There's nothing wrong with trying to teach everybody the elements of poetry writing and appreciation, and there's nothing wrong with absolutely everybody trying to write it (which they have always done: John Ciardi discovered that decades ago when he talked to fellow commuters on the train). I think the person who wrote that essay must be a snob.

Lew

 

Lew, 

I think you're right abut the snobbery - but I also think the writer is correct that the likelihood of losing very good and even great poets in the crowd has bever been higher for a living language. The flip side, of course, is that there never were more opportunities for very good or great obscure poets to find somone who'll read them.

Mike

 

I have no idea how many poets have been "lost" over the ages. I'm not sure it makes a lot of difference -- we have plenty to read, and people will always be out looking for the Emily Dickinsons and the Manoah Bodmans.

Lew

 

Prose and Poetry vs. Prose and Verse

Today, February 4, 2010, I ran across this comment by Annie Finch at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/03/poetry-in-notion-what-does-that-word-mean-anyway/

“I actually came across the use of ‘prose’ to refer to poetry again in the last few days–I will try to remember where it was. The only critical precedent I know for this is Lewis Turco, who holds that only metered writing qualifies as poetry.”

I have no idea how Prof. Finch could so misinterpret what I have been at great pains to distinguish as the difference between “prose” and “verse,” which are MODES OF WRITING and between “poetry,” “fiction,” “drama,” and “nonfiction.” Which are GENRES OF WRITING.

To wit: PROSE is UNMETERED LANGUAGE as distinguished from VERSE which IS METERED LANGUAGE. Prof. Finch goes on to say,

“He refers to free verse as ‘lined lyric prose.’”


If Prof. Finch considers herself to be a scholar as well as a poet, as I consider myself to be, then she ought to be able to cite the work in which I say such a thing. I challenge Prof. Finch to point to a place in anything I’ve written WHERE I SAY ANYTHING LIKE THAT. What I HAVE said is this:

VERSE IS METERED LANGUAGE, AND PROSE IS UNMETERED LANGUAGE. ANY OF THE GENRES (POETRY, FICTION, DRAMA, AND NONFICTION) MAY BE WRITTEN IN EITHER OF THE MODES. Thus, there may be VERSE POETRY or PROSE POETRY; VERSE FICTION (epics) or PROSE FICTION (novels); VERSE DRAMA or PROSE DRAMA; VERSE NONFICTION or PROSE NONFICTION.

Prof. Finch continues, “Maybe Turco’s phrase would not now be felt to be the insult to free verse that it might have been considered to be in the 1960s. If, somewhere along the line, ‘poetry’ became a term of praise and ‘prosaic’ the opposite, so that it would have been considered a problem to refer to something written in free verse as prose, that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore; now, prose poems are the height of literary cool. If the term “prose” is indeed creeping in to describe particular kinds of beautifully-written poetry, that could be why.
Of course, if we introduce the term ‘verse’ to refer to metered writing, then we are left with verse and prose, and either of them could then be lined or unlined, lyrical or discursive. This would make some nice clear distinctions that might be refreshing. Where would that leave the word ‘poetry’?”

The distinction between PROSE AND POETRY is a distinction between two different classes of things because PROSE IS A MODE and POETRY IS A GENRE. All I have ever said about FREE VERSE is this: THERE ARE ONLY TWO MODES IN WHICH ONE MAY WRITE ANY GENRE: PROSE, WHICH IS UNMETERED LANGUAGE, OR VERSE, WHICH IS METERED LANGUAGE. THERE IS NO THIRD “MODE” CALLED “FREE VERSE” BECAUSE, IF VERSE IS METERED, HOW CAN IT BE FREE?

Obviously, “FREE VERSE” is merely LINEATED PROSE: that is, PROSE BROKEN INTO LINES ACCORDING TO PHRASES, CLAUSES, SENTENCES or some other grammatical system SO AS TO RESEMBLE VERSE ON THE PAGE. The term “free verse” is not a term that is definable in any rational way. “Free verse poems” are PROSE POEMS. If they are not seen on the page but only heard aloud, ONE WILL HEAR PROSE RHYTHMS NOT VERSE METERS.

This essay, also to be found on the web, seems to have a better grasp of what I am talking about than Annie Finch does:

http://www.helium.com/items/438942-comparing-shakespeares-use-of-prose-poetry-and-verse

   

  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 Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship , www.UPNE.com, ISBN 0874519551, quality paperback, $24.95, 224 pages. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms. ORDER FROM AMAZON

The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, www.UPNE.com, 2004. ISBN 1584653612, quality paperback, $14.95, 190 pages. A companion volume to The Book of Forms and The Book of Literary Terms. Order from AMAZON