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.