Odd and Invented Forms

Form of the Week 16: The Recombinant Poem

Over the weekend of September 22-23 2012 Robert Mezey wrote me as follows:

"Dear Lew,           "Here’s an invented form, and certainly odd, that I’ve never seen or heard of before. An old student of mine has taken my sonnet "Hardy" and written another poem using exactly the same words. I don’t know whether she has given it a name—I seem to recall her saying something about “recombinant” (as in DNA?) Anyway, her poem surprised me; it seemed much better than I thought it would be. You might be interested in it for your collection."           Mezey's original poem is as follows: Hardy

Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,

Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,

The crone implacable.  At last he shivered,

Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped

In a world from which there is but one escape

And that forestalled now almost ninety years.

In such a scene as he himself might shape,

The maker of a thousand songs appears.

 

From this it follows, all the ironies

Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow

The way of things, the suffering one sees,

The many cups of bitterness he must swallow

Before he is permitted to be gone

Where he was headed in that early dawn.

 

Robert Mezey, From Collected Poems: 1952-1999, University of Arkansas

Press, © 2000.  Reprinted by permission of the author.

And here is the second poem:

ANOTHER HARDY

 
 
Slapped from the dawn,

chafed and trapped in it,

he howled

at a thousand things

in that implacable world,

and lay there on the swaddling,

recovered from birth.

This one was permitted to be!

He, the one whose maker

plucked and drew away the early shroud.

The first breath was shivered

to where all life is headed,

but before that escape,

he must shape songs

of the ironies of fate,

swallow the bitterness,

such as it is, thrown

in many cups.

 
And at last he is gone.

The crone forestalled

almost ninety years

appears and plays a scene

of suffering from which

he sees a way one might follow.

Now he follows himself there.

by Callie Cardamon, © 2012, all rights reserved by the author.

Form of the Week 14: Bad Poems

          On November 16, 1972, while I was still teaching at the S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego, an interview I did for the student newspaper The Oswegonian was published. The interviewer was Peter Bernhardt, and at one point he asked me, “Last year you and one of your students, P. J. O'Brien, gave a reading of nothing but bad poems, mostly by nineteenth century authors. What brought that on?”

          I replied, “I don't know what brought it on. I've very often read bad poetry to my classes. It's a good thing to read, for instance, to an introduction to poetry class because many students feel they don't know what a bad poem is. Or a good poem, for that matter. How do you tell? Well, if you read a really bad poem, an obviously bad poem, that gives the students a water mark or, I should say, a low water mark, They can then judge other poems according to how much higher they rise above the low water mark.

         “With regard to creative writing classes, I find that young people despair that they're ever going to turn into competent writers. If I read them a bad poem I can say, ‘Look, you're already better than this.’"

          Without a doubt one of the bad poems I read to my classes in those days was by Walt Whitman. Before he discovered that prose could be a vehicle for poetry, as in the Bible, Walt Whitman wrote very bad metrical verse and published it in the pages of the Brooklyn Eagle; here is The Good Gray Poet’s very worst rhymed and metered poem (his best is “O Captain! My Captain!):

 

OLD GRIMES

 

He lived at peace with all mankind,

         In friendship he was true;

His coat had pocket-holes behind,

         His pantaloons were blue.

 

Unharmed, the sin which earth pollutes

         He passed securely o’er, —

And never wore a pair of boots

         For thirty years or more.

 

Walt Whitman

 

          Of course, any poet may write a bad poem, or at least a bad line now and again, and many do:

 

R.I.P. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

August 4, 1792-July 8, 1822

 

He said to the skylark, “bird thou never wert,”

A line for which no poet would give his shirt,

Nor even a pair of socks that were worn and smelly.

Nevertheless, we honor Percy Shelley.

 

Wesli Court

 

          My return to the topic of bad poetry today was occasioned by a review of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition that has just appeared in the library journal Choice:

 

          The reviewer, C. E. O’Neill, has written a review that winds up being favorable in its last sentence, but I wonder why because most observations appear to be critical, as for instance that “…the book is easy to use and exhaustive almost to a fault when it comes to verse forms used by poets writing in English.” How is it possible for a reference book to be “exhaustive almost to a fault”? Isn’t its mission to be exhaustive?

          Here is another of the reviewer’s “favorable” observations: “Although James Dickey’s oft-cited endorsement of Turco’s handbook as ‘the poet’s bible’ no longer strictly applies –,” but what Dickey actually said appears on the rear cover; I don’t understand how the reviewer can have missed it. Many people have called it “the poet’s bible” over more than four decades, but I don’t know that Dickey was one of them.

          The review continues to explain why the term “no longer applies,” because “– several high-quality competitors are available…,” but two of the books cited, the first edition of Preminger’s Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, and the first edition of Paul Fussell’s Poetic Meter and Poetic Form were published in 1965, thus preceding my book by three years, as the appendix, “A Chronology of Postmodern Books Concerning Verse Forms” on pages 397-398 clearly shows. The Book of Forms earned its reputation despite these earlier publications.

          The reviewer also says, “Beginners may be confused by Turco’s obvious bias against free verse (he asserts it cannot exist, and even presumes to edit Walt Whitman)….” I was myself confused by the latter statement because I did not recall editing anything written by Whitman. When I thought about it I decided that O’Neill must mean I had criticized Whitman, which I am allowed to do despite the Whitmaniacs’ opinion that The Good Gray Poet is sacrosanct, an object of veneration, not to be commented upon by mere mortal man. Here is what I wrote on pp. 15-16:

          Walt Whitman's "I Hear America Singing" is a prose poem that is one sentence long, comprised entirely of grammatically parallel lists. In it there are several lists or catalogs: of types of people — laborers of one kind or another, of jobs, of prepositional phrases and other modifiers.  One can see the parallel structures by running one's eye down the left-hand margin of the poem, where the article "the" appears in a column.  Besides these constructional schemes, one finds a repetitional scheme also: the repetition of the verb "singing" throughout the poem:

 

I HEAR AMERICA SINGING

 

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plank or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutter's song, the plowboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown,

The delicious singing of the mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else,

The day what belongs to the day — at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.

 

Walt Whitman

 

          One of the problems with writing prose poems has to do with editing. Would it be possible for these young men to sing with closed mouths? Is the word “open” at all necessary in the important climactic line? In fact, is the phrase “with open mouths” needed?”

          I said that Whitman had been guilty of a “pleonasm,” a definition of which, I pointed out, was on page 85:

“Pleonasm is the use of excessive words, as in the ending of Walt Whitman's ‘I Hear America Singing’ q.v., which ends, ‘Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs.’  It would be difficult for anyone to sing with closed mouths; therefore, 'with open mouths' is a pleonasm." 

           I would think that a teacher of English composition would recognize the use of excessive words in a poem as well as in a student essay and would feel free to comment on it wherever it was found, no matter who committed the error, whether demigod or man.

           To the reviewer’s assertion that I have a bias “against free verse” – and my insistence that such a thing cannot exist: I am biased against the term, not against poems written in prose, which is what “free verse” must be inasmuch as the definition of “verse” is “metered language,” wherein the writer counts syllables in a line, and the definition of “prose” is “unmetered language,” wherein the writer’s “prosody” or system of composition is by syntax, phrases and clauses, as I pointed out in my discussion of Whitman’s prose poem above. Prose and verse are “modes” of writing; there is no third mode in any language in the world; therefore, "free verse" does not exist. It matters not who insists that it does.

          People have been calling prose poems “free verse” only since the early twentieth century despite the fact that they have been written since the beginning of human history. Prose poems are older than verse poems. The term “free verse” is a “contradiction in terms” (NOT an "oxymoron") because if the poet is counting syllables in each line he or she is writing metered language, which Whitman was not doing except in poems such as “Old Grimes,” above. Whitman was an execrable versifier who wrote only one truly uncriticizable prose poem in my opinion, “A Noiseless, Patient Spider.”

          Although when he was writing Whitman desperately needed a good editor, I was not alive at the time and was thus unable to give him aid before the worshippers of bad poetry raised him to the status of Deity. Whitman himself never heard the term “free verse,” which was a coinage of the Modernist poets after 1912, nor had his British prose poem predecessors of the 18th century Christopher Smart and William Blake, both of whom, like Whitman, wrote in verse as well. Whitman did not invent the prose poem. He wasn't even the first American poet to write one, Edgar Allan Poe was.

          One last thing having to do with definitions – here is what I wrote in another of my “exhaustive almost to a fault” books, The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship:

"Each word is an aural — heard, or indited — written sign that stands for something else.  An agreement on the meaning of a word or other language unit is a definition."

          If “free verse” exists, it must have a “definition.” What is it? I have never heard one that everyone agrees with, though books have been written on the topic. Perhaps O’Neill can give me an acceptable definition and can show me a poem that is written in “free” (unrestricted) “verse” (metered language), or, to put it in terms I’m sure everyone will be able to understand, including confused beginners, “unrestricted metered language.” (Please note that this is a sarcastic remark, not a description per se.)

          I won’t reply to the reviewer’s remark regarding “the heavy use of his own poems and those of Wesli Court, actually a pseudonym for Turco himself” except to quote from an on-line source, http://blogcritics.org/culture/article/those-who-cant-do-teach/ “…people are quite familiar with the saying, ‘Those who can’t do, teach.’ This statement suggests that people who have failed or would be failures in the world outside of academia end up as teachers.” I retired from teaching in 1996; since then I have written and published scores of poems, essays, memoirs, short stories, and nineteen books, three this year including Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, The Dialects of the Tribe: Post Modern American Poets and Poetry, and the book reviewed by C. E. O’Neill,

          But back at last (I apologize for the digression) to bad poems. Sometimes a bad poem is famous, as for instance “Trees” by Joyce Kilmer (who, by the way, was a male); Kilmer’s poem is here illustrated by the late Socrates Samson:

 

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

 A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

 

Joyce Kilmer

          Is that a poem? Perhaps most people would say yes, but most poets would say no, it is not — it’s a series of versified aphorisms, clichés dressed up in rhymes and meters, and the imagery is ridiculous, if one thinks about it, for Kilmer says a tree is simultaneously an infant and an adult whose coiffeur is messed up by a bird's nest while she is making love to the weather; it is a huge head with a mouth at the bottom but with arms growing out of its scalp and hair for leaves...talk about mixed metaphors!

          Then what is poetry? A short answer is, poetry is the art of language, as distinguished from fiction, the art of written narrative; or drama, the art of theatrical narrative; or nonfiction, the art of written or rhetorical exposition. ANY OF THESE GENRES MAY BE WRITTEN EITHER IN PROSE OR IN VERSE. A simpler answer might be, “Something said well is something well-said, but something said superbly is a poem.”

Suggested writing assignment: 

Write a bad poem.

Form of the Week Thirteen: Spatial Poetry

     The four levels of poetry are the typographical, having to do with the appearance of the poem on the page; the sonic – having to do with the various elements of sound; the sensory – imagery, and the ideational – theme and meaning. A prosody or “system of composition of poetry” based on the typographical level is called “spatial prosody”; synonyms would be Carmen figuratum, typewriter poem, hieroglyphic verse, concrete poetry, calligramme, and shaped stanza.

     Spatial poems are relatively popular in our own age. An extreme form of spatials is the sub-genre called “concrete poetry” which takes the poem further toward graphic art than does shaped stanza. Concrete verse is ideographic spatials. For instance, in Japanese the character for “rain” (an ideograph looks like the thing it is meant to represent; the Japanese have characters rather than the letters of an alphabet, and the characters are ideographic) might be arranged on the page so that it will look like rain falling. At the bottom of the page there might be the character for “house”; thus, the characters for rain are falling pictorially on the character for house. Concrete poetry is really more picture than poem, as in “Leo’s Casino,” a print by D. A. Levy that uses the letters of the alphabet simply as elements in a picture:

 

      A “typewriter poem” can be a picture of something made with the letters of the alphabet or words, as in “Town Square “ below:

 

     Spatials can be quite elaborate. A “sampler” was originally an exercise primarily for schoolgirls who would design a piece of embroidery that illustrated their ability to sew various stitches. It would be comprised of the alphabet, mottoes and, often, illustrations of various kinds, but the colonial American poet Edward Taylor wrote a poem that was a sampler:

 

      The opening motto of this poem is,

 

This Dove and Olive Branch to you

is both a Post and Emblem too.

     These words appear written within a crude drawing of a dove holding an olive branch with which Taylor decorated or “illuminated” this page of his manuscript. Besides being a sampler and an acrostic (the alphabet is spelled out down the left-hand margin), this extremely complicated poem is also a concrete poem, and an epistle (a “post”) addressed to Taylor’s first wife, Elizabeth Fitch, whom he married on November 5, 1674:

 

These for my Dove

Tender and only Love

Mrs. Elizabeth Fitch

At her father’s house in Norwich.

 

The design of this sampler is of a circle within a triangle that reads,

 

The ring of love my pleasant heart must be

Truly confined within the Trinity.

 

The second line doubles as the base of the triangle and as the line illustrating the letter “T”; it is therefore a refrain.

 

The circle reads,

 

Love’s ring I send

That hath no end.

 

At the center of the circle is a drawn heart.

 

Here is a modern rendering of the acrostic portion of

 

ACROSTIC LOVE POEM TO ELIZABETH FITCH

 

Aspiring Love, that scorns to hatch a wish

Beneath itself, the fullest, chiefest Bliss

Contained within Heaven’s crystal pale and shine,

Doth wish its object always; so doth mine.

Elect no more presented in desire:

For Heaven’s roof, aye, lets not a wish soar higher.

Got though too dim, none can get to sign

Hear you, (my friend), is strengthened wish of mine.

In drossy silver should, I should by this,

[J is included in the representation of I, above]

Keep dull my post, and stain my serious wish,

Lest which polluted be, or the fearful Dove

My post-out foiled, I run a ring of Love

New polished, where my centered heart doth reek

Out highest streams of Love, which here do meet.

Presented thus your heart, Love’s Ring you’ll find

Quest I unless, always best befits the mind.

Reserve mine that. Yet let our secret breast

Set Love the tune which tunes this Ring the best.

The Ring of Love my pleasant heart must be

[Truly confined within the Trinity. — refrain]

Upon your heart (I pray you) put Love’s Ring

V[=U]nerringly; Love’s Swelt(ering) heart herein

Wearing a True-love’s-knot at center’s set.

Wherewith I send to you an alphabet

Xenodict¹ whence all syllables complete

[e]Xtracted are to spell what love can speak.

Yea, see, then, what I send. Yet I design

Zion my Ring shall license with her Trine.²

 

Edward Taylor

 

¹Xeno” means strange or foreign, and “dict” (spelled “dick” in the original) means spoken; perhaps what this neologism means is “strangely spoken,” which would be an accurate description of this poem.

²The last line of this metaphysical (extended metaphor) poem may mean something like, the license of marriage, or even of poetic license, is allowed within the strictures laid down by the Trinity.

     However, spatial poems need not be so elaborate. This one, “Nymphomania” by Richard Kostelanetz, is quite straightforward:

 

     Sometimes spatial verse requires just a bit of art besides the shape of the poem, as in this poem I wrote in college after a game. It has baskets at each end of the basketball court:

 

     According to the author of “The View from Khufu’s Tongue,” there are two kinds of spatial poem, “positive” and “negative.” “Positive shaping utilizes the words and negative shaping, the spaces.” His poem is an example of negative shaping.”

 

     These next two poems are products of the 1960s; the first was written for President John F. Kennedy, and the second emerged from the “ban the bomb” movement; both are examples of positive shaping:

 

All poems are copyrighted and rights are reserved. 

 Suggested writing assignment: 

Write a spatial poem of some type on an original theme.

 

 The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5.

 

Form of the Week Twelve: Haiku

Recently Ned Balbo asked me, "...do you know Bryan Dietrich's book-length haiku sequence Prime Directive, which connects Star Trek to his father's decline due to Alzheimer's? Great stuff."

I replied, "No, sorry, I don't. I do notice, however, that there seem to be many poems lately that use haiku as a stanza form. I'm afraid I don't understand why this is different from using any other quantitative syllabic stanza form. Aside from the syllable counts in each line, what is the object of using a five-seven-five syllable count in each stanza; how does the "haikuness" of each stanza impact the poem? What is the difference, even, between this stanza form and the triversen stanza of W. C. Williams (see "Form of the Week 2: Triversen)." I've been writing quantitative syllabics of various stanzaic syllable counts since 1959, and this haiku thing baffles me."

"Your bafflement makes sense! Frankly," Ned wrote back, "I think the 'haikuness' of such poems is lost: the stanzas become an organizing principle whose main function (from what I read) is to determine pacing. Its use in narrative is at odds with haiku's usual brevity. But I don't mind if the poem that results is strong in its own right, on very different terms."

At about the same time Leslie Monsour emailed me and asked the same question, except that it was about Richard Wilbur's use of the haiku as a stanza rather than Bryan Dietrich's. She wrote, "…here's an example of the haiku stanza I referred to in a previous message, which Richard Wilbur has used a great deal in his more recent poems":

 

A MEASURING WORM

 

     This yellow-striped green

Caterpillar, climbing up

     The steep window screen,

 

     Constantly (for lack

Of a full set of legs) keeps

     Humping up his back.

 

     It's as if he sent

By a sort of semaphore

     Dark omegas meant

 

     To warn of Last Things.

Although he doesn't know it,

     He will soon have wings,

 

     And I too don't know

Toward what undreamt condition

     Inch by Inch I go.

 

— Richard Wilbur

 

"So, you see," Ms. Monsour continued, "the stanzas are envelope-rhymed haiku.  Wilbur has written about a dozen poems in this form.  I just wonder if he thought it up, or if it was used earlier by, say, Marianne Moore, or someone else.   Tell me if you dig up anything about it." 

"These are NOT haikus," I replied, "they are rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets with lines that have the same syllable counts as haikus. A haiku is complete in itself, but these stanzas are enjambed."

Even if they were not enjambed, however, none of the stanzas are whole unto themselves. Disregarding the question of form, the definition of a haiku is, "an insight into the nature of the universe." A senryu, which has the same external form as the haiku, is "an insight into the nature of mankind." In "Form of the Week 2: Triversen" I discussed William Carlos Williams' adaptation of the haiku to his triversen stanza system. He understood the concept of "haikuness."

  Ms. Monsour wrote again, "I don't know if Wilbur calls these haiku stanza poems.  I've heard the poems referred to as that, and I've actually used the term myself in my articles about Wilbur —  something I should qualify from now on.  Of course the stanzas don't stand alone as individual or linked haiku.  I guess the term 'haiku stanza' has been bandied about simply because of the syllable count per line, per stanza.  Your definition, 'rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets,' is certainly correct. Aaron Poochigian uses the form in his poem, 'Kudzu: An Immigrant's Tale,' from his current book, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), and A.E. Stallings also uses it in her poem, 'Blackbird Étude,' from her newest book, Olives (Northwestern University Press).  As far as I can tell, Richard Wilbur established it. Calling the form a 'haiku stanza poem' seems handier than 'rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets.'  Can we find a better name for it?" But why does it need a better name if there is nothing about it to distinguish it from any quantitative syllabic stanza other than the syllable counts per line? All that's necessary is a description.

The basis for the haiku in Japanese prosody is the katauta. There are actually two Japanese forms that are called "katauta"; both are formal, but only one is a stanza form per se, and both are based upon spontaneous "utterances" which, in the Japanese tradition, are sudden, emotive words or epithets. The first form of the katauta is an emotive question or its answer:

Am I in love?  Birds are flying.

Do birds fly?  I am in love.

A pair of such katautas is a mondo. Each line of the preceding couplet is a mondo. The katauta answer is not derived logically; it is intuited, as in the Zen koan or "unanswerable question," for Zen Buddhism is at the root of the haiku. The second kind of katauta is a stanza or poem form.  It is made up of three parts arranged in lines of 5-7-7 syllables, these lengths being approximately breath-length, or the appropriate lengths in which to ask a sudden, emotive question and respond to it, also emotively.  Seventeen syllables, as in the haiku, or nineteen, as in the katauta, are as many as can normally be uttered in one short breath; five to seven syllables are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer:

 

     Why do these birds fly?

Where there is wind, there are wings.

Where there are wings, there is wind.

 

Here is a katauta written by Ezra Pound (the lines have been rearranged; nothing else has been chained from the original which was published in Poetry in 1913):

 

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

 

     The apparition 

of these faces in the crowd:

petals on a wet, black bough.

 

— Ezra Pound

 

The choka is a poem written in alternating 5-7-syllable lines:

 

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

 

     TAROT in the Wheel;

mercury, sulfur, water,

     salt.  Mix well and turn.

The jackal-headed god bears

     up under the spin,

rising.  The Garden's serpent

     slithers down the west.

The Sphinx in blue — a woman —

     squats atop it all,

holding a sword against her

     breast.  Everything is

the same, despite the odd turns —

     so say the Fixed Signs,

each reading somebody's book:

     To the upper left,

Man with Wings; an Eagle to

     the right, a Lion

under.  And a winged Bull there,

     lower left, scanning

his blank pages with the rest.

 

     His blank pages, which

he fills with hoofprints, hoping

     consciousness evolves

into Godhood somewhere, some

     when.  Caught at this point

on the Mandala, the small

     bull confuses him-

self with Taurus, his Sign.  It

     is expected, to

be forgiven.  He is not

     affixed (nor is he

broken — not yet).  He hopes that

     all is relative,

 

and complete; that there is choice,

     though all is finished;

that the smallest is the largest...;

     that some sure thing

is accomplished by means of

     these clumsy hooves, these

dull horns that turn to silence.

 

— Lewis Turco (from Seasons of the Blood: Poems on the Tarot)

 

  The conclusion of a choka would be, often (though not in the case just given above), an envoy that doubled the last 7-syllable line: 5-7-7, or that consisted of two choka couplets with a doubled last line: 5-7-5-7-7 — the tanka. 

Like the katauta, the tanka takes two forms, both of which are externally alike in that they are quintet poems with lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, but in the first tanka form, called the waka, one subject is treated in the first two lines, another in the next two, and the last line is a refrain or paraphrase or restatement: 5-7, 5-7, 5.  The first two lines are a dependent clause or a phrase, the last three an independent clause:

 

TURN

 

     If you should waken

at the first turn of moonlight,

 

     would you please follow

the silver road, not the dark

at the first turn of moonlight?

 

— Lewis Turco (from Seasons of the Blood: Poems on the Tarot)

 

The second type of tanka consists of two parts.  The first three lines are an independent unit ending in a noun or verb after which a turn takes place: 5-7-5, 7-7.  The triplet is an observation, the couplet is a comment on the observation:

 

CUPS

 

     Moon takes the tide where

a tide must go: Light pierces

     the hardest crystal.

 

Stone shall be filled with water,

and dust will be filled with blood.

 

— Lewis Turco (from Seasons of the Blood: Poems on the Tarot)

 

The word "hokku" is Chinese in origin, and in Japanese poetry it came to specify the first triplet of a renga chain which set the theme of the chain and was the most important part of the poem, the rest ringing the changes upon and elaborating the hokku. The hokku of a renga chain ended with a full stop — it was complete in and of itself.

The Japanese renga, according to Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner in Japanese Court Poetry, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), is "Linked verses. Historically two different forms, both involving more than one author.  The earlier form, called tanrenga, or 'short renga,' is a  [tanka] whose first three lines were composed by one poet, and last two lines by another;.. (509).”  This final couplet response is the hanka [italics added]. 

A renga chain or "long renga" is a poem made of a sequence of  rengas  and composed by two or more authors.  The first triplet sets the subject, the succeeding couplet and all ensuing triplets and couplets amplify, gloss, or comment upon the first triplet. The term haikai no renga applies to the humorous renga chain, and it means, specifically, "renga of humor," according to Yoel Hoffman, editor and translator of Japanese Death Poems, (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986). 

By various stages the term "haiku" — a corruption and blending of the dissimilar words "hokku" and "haikai" — came to denote an independent tercet of 5-7-5 syllables.  The haiku dropped all hankas, glosses, comments, and elaborations.  It became a poem which had as its basis emotive utterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element. A distinction has sometimes been made between the haiku and the senryu, though  both have exactly the same external form. The senryu is an inquiry into the nature of humankind, whereas the haiku is an inquiry into the nature of the universe. Here is a "found" senryu:

 

AN AMHERST HAIKU

 

     Will you bring me a

jacinth for every finger,

     and an onyx shoe?

 

— Emily Dickinson / Lewis Turco (from Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters)

 

The haiku is philosophically an outgrowth of Zen Buddhism. Haiku translated into English tend to appear, to Western eyes, overly sentimental and to fall victim to the pathetic fallacy — overstated personification. We do not understand that the Zen poet is trying to put himself or herself into the place of the thing perceived, empathizing with the inanimate object. Moreover, the Zen poet is trying to “become one” with the object and thus with all things.

The haiku has perhaps been best described as “a moment of intense perception.” William Carlos Williams enunciated the American-British Imagist doctrine as “No ideas but in things.” Both conceptions are, if not identical, at least quite similar, for both are based upon the sensory level. Williams’ dictum and T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” sever the observer from the perceived object, while at the same time preserving much of the effect of Zen empathy. An "objective correlative" is simply the vehicle of a metaphor. The theory is that, if the correct object that correlates with the idea to be expressed (symbolizes that idea) is chosen, then the idea will arise through connotation and overtone without being stated denotatively. It is through this objectivity, finally, that the poet in English achieves empathy — which is only a way of saying there is no such thing as pure objectivity.

Here are modern English versions of some haiku and senryu by the classical Japanese writer, Basho; please note that they are not a single poem but fourteen separate and discrete poems:

 

FOURTEEN HAIKU

after Basho

 

     Will it soon be spring?

They lay the ground-work for it,

     the plum tree and moon.

 

     One sees in the glass

mere glass, not quicksilver, not

     spring in the plum tree.

 

     On the mountain path

they arise at once — the scent

     of plums and the sun!

 

     The hollyhocks turn

to follow the sun’s footpath

     through the rains of May.

 

     The winds blow cherry 

petals from all four quarters

     to the lake’s currents.

 

     I would lie down drunk

on a bed of stone covered

     with soft pinks blooming.

 

     Bush-clover spills not

one drop of white dew, although

     its waves never still.

 

     The bell’s chiming fades;

scent blossoms from the echo

     of evening shadow.

 

     the lightning flickers;

still, darkness follows the voice

     of the night-heron.

 

     Please come to visit,

for I am lonely. One leaf

     falls from the kiri.

 

     The wind of autumn

is sharp in the chestnut tree,

     yet its burrs are green.

 

     Leaning on their canes

a snow-haired family comes

     to visit the graves.

 

     Grave, shake you as well

as my quaking voice in this

     chill wind of the fall.

 

     No one walks this road

on which I travel, on which

     autumn darkness falls.

 

— Basho / Lewis Turco

 

Here is a poem by William Carlos Williams which was originally arranged in four lines, but it was actually a senryu:

 

MARRIAGE

 

So different, this

man and this woman: a stream

flowing in a field.

 

— William Carlos Williams

 

This following poem illustrates a number of the Japanese forms in the order in which they were developed:

 

PARADIGM

 

Why does the brook run?

The banks of the stream are green.       — MONDO

 

     Why does the stream run?

The banks of the brook bloom

with roe and cup-moss, with rue.           — KATAUTA

 

     The trees are filled with

cups.  Grain in the fields, straw men

     talking with the wind.

Have you come far, water-borne,

     wind-born?  Then here are

hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak.          — CHOKA

 

     When the spears bend as

you walk through vervain or broom,

     call out to the brook —

it will swell in your veins as

you move through broom or vervain.      — WAKA (5-7-5, 7-7)

 

     Have you spoken aloud?  Here,

where the swallows' crewel-work

     sews the sky with mist?

You must cut the filament.

You must be the lone spider.                — TANKA (5-7-5, 7-7)

 

     The bole is simple:

Twig and root like twin webs in

     air and earth like fire.                    — HAIKU (5-7-5)

 

— Lewis Turco (from Seasons of the Blood: Poems on the Tarot)

 

Suggested Writing Assignment:

Write a set of haiku observing all the requirements of the form in each individual poem.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com), 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

NOTE: All of the poems, or versions of poems above by Lewis Turco, are available in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007.  

 

Form of the Week 4: Paren(t)hesis

During the early 1960s while I was teaching at what is now Cleveland State University, a student named Russell Salamon walked into my office to show me a poem titled “She” in a repeating form that he had invented. In this poem Salamon began by taking a set of parentheses as his center:

 

()

 

He then took a sentence, "my hands cup her cup," broke it after the subject, and inserted the set of parens into the break (the technical term for a break in a line of verse is “caesura”):

 

my hands () cup her cup.

 

This is a metaphor: “My hands are a set of parentheses.”  Next, a second clause: "all parentheses in which I am warm drizzle-rain inside her," thus:

 

All parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

 

And a third, "sizzling on snowscapes of her skin, her face, her arms, her thighs, forests full of soundless flowers waited once unseen, translucid [he probably meant “translucent”]; she carries rain constellations to fill flute basins where" with some changed punctuation and a bit of typographical dispersion, appears this way:

 

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.

Her face, her arms, her thighs,

all parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

Forests full of soundless flowers

waited once unseen, translucid.

She carries rain constellations

to fill flute basins where

 

And finally, "My finger touch dis[s]olves into a shiverlong echo of rains; we wash our morning faces off":

 

 

SHE¹

 

My finger touch dissolves

into a shiverlong echo of rains/

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.

(Her face, her arms, her thighs,

all parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

Forests full of soundless flowers

waited once unseen, translucid.

She carries rain constellations

to fill f lute basins where

/we wash our morning faces off

 

         — Russell Salamon

 

The split between f and lute in the penultimate line appears as it was originally printed in Salamon’s chapbook, Parent[hetical Pop]pies, published by d. a. levy’s Renegade Press in 1964; it may or may not be a typographical error.

After I had thought about it for a while, I recalled E. E. Cummings’ poem titled “l(a,” which was also built of parentheses, though all he did was to take the word “loneliness,” insert into it a single sentence, “a leaf falls,” and sprinkle it down the page. More to the point, though, I remembered a poem I had myself written when I was a G. I. Bill undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut only two or three years earlier, for the C. S. U. position was my first professional teaching experience. I had begun by taking the title sentence, “Time goes down in mirrors,” and writing a sentence that rhymed and metered (both halves had the same meters, x X x X x) to parenthesize the title: “Sophia chatters, for nothing matters” and create the first stanza (with a change or two in punctuation):

 

Sophia chatters.

         Time goes down in mirrors,

for nothing matters.

 

The second stanza would add two more rhyming lines with the opposite meter (a “mirror image” as it were, X x X x X):

 

Horace listens while

         Sophia chatters.

                  Time goes down in mirrors,

         for nothing matters;

Hence, his worldly smile.

 

In the third stanza I had decided that this time the meter would be normative iambic tetrameter xX xX

xX  xX xX for both lines,

 

The phonograph spins out its tune.

         Horace listens while

                  Sophia chatters.

                           Time goes down in mirrors,

                  for nothing matters.

         Hence, his worldly smile:

The pair will love each other soon.

 

The fourth stanza would repeat the plan:

 

Outdoors, the shadows listen as

         The phonograph spins out its tune.

                  Horace listens while

                           Sophia chatters.

                                    Time goes down in mirrors,

                           for nothing matters.

                  Hence, his worldly smile:

         The pair will love each other soon,

Their movements metronomed by jazz.

 

Then, in the fifth stanza, while the central line remained the same, the lines above and below it would be inverted:

 

TIME GOES DOWN IN MIRRORS²

 

Sophia chatters.

         Time goes down in mirrors,

for nothing matters.

 

Horace listens while

         Sophia chatters.

                  Time goes down in mirrors,

         for nothing matters;

Hence, his worldly smile.

 

The phonograph spins out its tune.

         Horace listens while

                  Sophia chatters.

                           Time goes down in mirrors,

                  for nothing matters.

         Hence, his worldly smile:

The pair will love each other soon.

 

Outdoors, the shadows listen as

         The phonograph spins out its tune.

                  Horace listens while

                           Sophia chatters.

                                    Time goes down in mirrors,

                           for nothing matters.

                  Hence, his worldly smile:

         The pair will love each other soon,

Their movements metronomed by jazz.

 

                                    Sophia chatters.

                           Horace listens while

                  The phonograph spins out its tune.

         Outdoors the shadows listen as

Time goes down in mirrors.

         Their movements metronomed by jazz,

                  The pair will love each other soon.

                           Hence! his worldly smile...,

                                    For nothing matters.

 

Both of these poems are rather complicated structures although both were written by undergraduates. As an exercise in repetition and in syntax rearrangement, though, parenthetics need not be so difficult, and I used it in class for decades. Here is a brief exercise poem laid out in different fonts so that one may see the sentence elements, none of which do anything fancy such as rhyming, metering, or using any sort of punctuation, including parentheses:

 

PINES³

 

They are the pines

I have seen them standing

in the hills where stone dwells

the wind shifts among their needles

roots touch toward silence in the earth

as though they have always been

strength drawn out of darkness.

 

Although it’s built of uncomplicated elements, notice that the poem can be read from top to bottom, from bottom to top, or from the middle out and it still makes sense.

 

NOTES:

 

This essay is from “Paren(t)hesis,” in Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, ed. Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, Austin: TX: Dos Gatos Press, 2011, pp. 194-99.

¹Russell Salamon’s poem titled “She” is from his chapbook Parent[hetical Pop]pies, Cleveland: Renegade Press, 1964; all rights reserved by the author.

²”Time Goes Down in Mirrors” is from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, © 2004, all rights reserved by the author.

³The poem titled “Pines” is from Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing by Lewis Turco, Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., © 1973 and subsequently renewed, ISBN 0879096373, paper. O-P but available through ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education.

Form of the Week 3: The Terzanelle

 

Edwin Arlington Robinson 

 

In late January of 2005, the poet-scholar Annie Finch e-mailed me to relay a query she had received from Erin A. Thomas asking her if she knew whether I were the inventor of the terzanelle, and if the only existing example was “Terzanelle in Thunderweather” in The New Book of Forms¹ and The Book of Forms, Third Edition.²  I replied that I hadn’t thought of the terzanelle as an invention, but it’s true that in 1964 or 1965 I had experimented with the form of the villanelle by applying terza rima to it, thus coming up with a hybrid form that acted rather like a pantoum and that I called the “terzanelle.” Therefore, in that sense, yes, I was its inventor. But the terzanelle begins, of course, with the villanelle.

The oldest, and in fact the only example of the form that existed prior to the nineteenth century was the French Renaissance poem titled "Villanelle" by Jean Passerat (1534–1602). All other so-called “villanelles” or farmers’ songs of the period were simple baladas, dance songs with insistent refrains, as outlined in The New Book of Forms. Théodore de Banville in the nineteenth century popularized the form in France, and Edmund Gosse did the same after he imported it into England. Other English poets who used the villanelle were Austin Dobson, Oscar Wilde, and James Joyce who included a poem written in that form in his autobiographical fiction A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

In September 1894 the American poet Edwin Arlington Robinson published in the Boston Globe a villanelle that soon became famous in the United States, “The House on the Hill,” which I read in my ‘teens and loved. Others from one or another edition of Louis Untermeyer’s Modern American Poetry and Modern British Poetry that I also read during the early ‘fifties and admired were the Welshman Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” and Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking.” All three, in my opinion, were truly memorable works of art. A bit later, in 1959-60, my University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop classmates and I were introduced by Donald Justice to Weldon Kees’ “Five Villanelles” — amazing poems many of us thought. Other villanelles by poets of the period were “Villanelle” by W. H. Auden, “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, “Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath, and “Villanelle of the Circus Villains” by Richard Frost. I included both “The House on the Hill” and “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” in the third edition of The Book of Forms where this was my description of the form:

The French villanelle, like the terzanelle, is a poem of five triplet stanzas and a concluding quatrain, but it turns on only two rhymes.  Lines one and three of triplet one are refrains, the first of which reappears as lines six, twelve, and eighteen; the second reappears as lines nine, fifteen, and nineteen: A¹bA² abA¹ abA² abA¹ abA² abA¹A² or, sometimes, in reverse order: abA²A¹.  Every line is the same metrical length.”

The capital letters indicate refrain lines, both of which rhyme A; therefore, the superscripts indicate that the lines differ from one another.

In his “Foreword” to my First Poems Justice wrote, “No reader can avoid noticing the variety of forms here.  There are sapphics, several of the French forms, sonnets…no villanelles, no sestinas, fashionable forms at the moment.” I am unable to explain why I wrote no villanelles in those days and, in fact, I didn’t write one until long after I had “invented” the terzanelle. This was my first effort:

 

VILLANELLE AT THE END OF TIME⁴

 

As we were winding up, the clock unwound.

       The spring was set — until we felt the fall,

The flailing hands of fall, the scyther's wound.

 

We put down roots upon the shiftless sand;

       We felt the glass turn, heard the nightwatch call

As we were winding up.  The clock unwound

 

And sprang us into chimes of the yearsend.

       We watched the pendulum against the wall,

The flailing hands of fall.  The scyther's wound

 

Appeared upon our flesh, and on the ground

       There lay in swathes the crop that could not fail.

As we were winding up, the clock unwound

 

And filled the autumn air with autumn's sound:

       We marked the hours, felt the moments coil,

The flailing hands of fall, the scyther's wound.

 

And in the stillness now our pulses pound

       Minutely, till we hear them not at all.

As we were winding up, the clock unwound

The flailing hands of all the scythers wound.

 

I didn’t publish another villanelle until ten years later. My epigraph was from a 17^th-century book of aphorisms because at the time I was working on a series of poems that was projected to be titled A Book of Proverbs, but it never appeared as a separate volume. Instead, it was included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court.⁵

 

VILLANELLE OF A WINTER'S DAY⁶

"The life of man is a winter's day and a winter's way." —

 

The life of man is a winter's day.

       As the wind blows, so wends each hour.

The life of man is a winter's way.

 

In the bright morning an overlay

       Of snow clothes earth in a gown of hoar.

The life of man is a winter's day.

 

The louring billows of noon are grey

       Upon the horizon, they begin to soar.

The life of man is a winter's way.

 

By afternoon the world's away

       In a whirl of rime gone bleak and dour.

The life of man is a winter's day.

 

At eventide the light gives way

       For good and all to a darker power —

The life of man is a winter's way.

 

No matter whether we curse or pray,

       Bonechill and night come falling sure.

The life of man is a winter's day.

The life of man is a winter's way.

 

This villanelle is a slight deviation from the standard because the two refrain lines are identical except for the rhyme words, so the second can be described as an incremental repetition of the first.

The last villanelle I published was written in in Dresden, Maine, on my in-laws’ family farm not long before my mother-in-law died in 1996. It was her favorite poem and something of an experiment because it is written not in verse, but in prose — I had been experimenting with various kinds of poems written in lyric prose ever since I had run across Ezra Pound’s experiments with it in some of his versions of Chinese poems:

 

VILLANELLE OF THE FIRST DAY⁷

 

It is the first day of autumn come in August,

       The sun lying upon the lush green of the morning

Chill and brilliant, shadows to the west longest

 

Over the gullies, under the vacant nest

       Hung in the pine, the heavy dews shining —

It is the first day of autumn come in August,

 

No hint of the south about it, no feel of the tempest

       Gone to sea beyond the headlands standing

Chill and brilliant, shadows to the west longest

 

Along the cascades of stone ranging the coast

       Where gulls ride the currents plunging and wheeling.

It is the first day of autumn come in August,

 

The tall occasional cloud driving east

       Across the sky of opal hovering

Chill and brilliant.  Shadows to the west, longest

 

Under the woodlot, run into the pasture, are cast

       Down the river moving beneath the spring

Chill and brilliant.  The shadows to the west are longest —

It is the first day of autumn come in August.

 

I had included a description of the terzanelle in the first edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics⁸ but there were no examples of poems in that volume, and I didn’t include my poem’s title in the “Bibliography of Examples” (on page 133). This is the description of the terzanelle as it appeared in the second edition of The Book of Forms which was titled The New Book of Forms in 1986:⁹

         The American terzanelle is a villanelle written in terza rima.  Like the latter, it is nineteen lines in length: five interlocking triplets plus a concluding quatrain in which the first and third lines of triplet one reappear as refrains.  The center line of each triplet is a repeton reappearing as the last line of the succeeding triplet with the exception of the center line of the penultimate stanza [the last triplet] which reappears in the quatrain.  This is the rhyme and refrain scheme for the triplets: A¹BA² bCB cDC dED eFE.  The poem may end in one of two ways: fA¹FA² or fFA¹A².  Every line is the same metrical length.

The original description was pretty much the same except for that last sentence, because the first terzanelle had one line, the third, that was not the same length as the rest of the lines, which were written in iambic tetrameter meters. The third line was a trimeter line.

At this point perhaps it would be a good idea to define the term “terza rima.” This was the entry for The Book of Forms, first edition:

Italian. Accentual-syllabic. Any number of interlocking enclosed triplet stanzas. The first and third lines of a stanza rhyme; the second line rhymes with the first and third lines of the following stanza. In other words, the ending of the second line of any stanza becomes the rhyme for the following stanza: aba bcb cdc, etc. The poem usually ends in a couplet rhymed from the second line of the last triplet: yzy zz. The meter is usually iambic pentameter.

Prof. Finch put me in touch with Erin Thomas who struck up a correspondence with me regarding the background of the terzanelle. During the course of our correspondence I told Thomas that the first example of the form in print, titled "Terzanelle," appeared in 1965:

 

TERZANELLE¹⁰

 

The wind's a huckster whose breath blows

Tongues and voices, voices and tongues

     Out of a sack of echoes.

 

He barters nothing.  From his lung

The spiel of time unwinds and knots

Tongues and voices, voices and tongues.

 

Skeins of rumor in cosmic lots

Ravel the air like the yarns they are.

The spiel of time unwinds and knots

 

A song of silence from star to star.

The spider's rope and the night's thread

Ravel the air.  Like the yarns they are,

 

Words turn to tangles as they are said.

Watch the mountebank at his trading

The spider's rope and the night's thread,

 

Darkness his stock and his bill of lading.

Watch the mountebank at his trading:

The wind's a huckster whose breath blows

     Out of a sack of echoes.

 

This poem was first collected in Courses in Lambents, a book that appeared in 1977 attributed to my avatar “Wesli Court,” an anagram pen-name I had been using for the traditionally formal poems I had been publishing in little magazines and literary periodicals. From that date on Wesli would supply me with examples of poems in the various forms I would need in the later editions of The Book of Forms, but the first “Terzanelle” itself would never appear as an example of the form.

When Prof. Finch wrote me in 2005 I knew that a number of young poets had been writing terzanelles some of which were being posted on the internet. It was there that I ran across someone who conjectured that I had invented the form merely because I wanted to see how many people would use it. That is very far from the fact. It was purely an experiment on my part to see how well terza rima and the villanelle form would blend. Apparently people felt they melded well.

I suggested to Annie Finch that she Google the term, though I’d never done so myself. I took my own advice and discovered that there were 26,000 hits on the internet! I was astounded. Although the activity on the web has since cooled way down (9,260 hits on Monday, September 27, 2010), it must have been the most popular verse form in the world right at that moment. I also Googled “blues sonnet,” the other form I had “invented,” the first examples of which appeared as “The Boneyard Blues” in my book of criticism Visions and Revisions of American Poetry,¹² but there were only 72 hits for that form on the web. I was bemused. One would have thought that the American blues forms would have been more popular than an old “French” form. How little one knows!

The next terzanelle I wrote was "Thunderweather"; the title was later changed to “Terzanelle in Thunderweather," and it has become a standard, especially on-line where it has often been pirated. I used it as an example of the form in The New Book of Forms in 1986, Miller Williams used it in his Patterns of Poetry in the same year,¹⁴ and others have used it since:

 

TERZANELLE IN THUNDERWEATHER

 

This is the moment when the shadows gather

Under the elms, the cornices and eaves.

This is the silent heart of thunderweather.

 

The birds are quiet now among the leaves

Where wind stutters, then moves steadily

Under the elms, the cornices and eaves —

 

These are our voices speaking guardedly

About the sky, about the sheets of lightning

Where wind stutters, then moves steadily

 

Into our lungs, across our lips, tightening

Our throats.  Our eyes speak in the dark

About the sky, about the sheets of lightning

 

Illuminating moments.  In the stark

Shades that we inhabit there are no words

For our throats.  Our eyes speak in the dark

 

Of things we cannot say, cannot ignore.

This is the moment when the shadows gather,

Shades that we inhabit.  There are no words —

This is the silent heart of thunderweather.

 

This poem began with a word. I had always wondered why one of the favorite expletives of the German language, “Donnerwetter,” had never gained a foothold in its sister language, English. I decided to give it a chance by using its English equivalent in a terzanelle. I have not so far been successful in popularizing it in our language, but apparently the Germans love it! They have translated it into German and run it through the on-line critical mill in Europe.

“Terzanelle of This Room of Hours” was originally titled simply “The Room” when it appeared in 1978:

 

TERZANELLE OF THIS ROOM OF HOURS¹⁵ 

 

There is a room, and in that room hourdust

       Lies smothering the chairs, the rugs and couches

Where no one sits, where the radiators rust,

 

Thinking of steam.  The chill of evening slouches

       In the corner shadows where wallpaper peels in waves,

Lies smothering the chairs, the rugs and couches.

 

Nothing is certain here.  The twilight saves

       The day in ripples that fall through windowpanes

On corner shadows where wallpaper peels in waves,

 

Sounding the silent combers.  Everything stains

       Everything, is nothing but what it is.

The day, in ripples that fall through windowpanes,

 

Washes the floor and fades.  Now, in this

       Heartbeat preceding night, the room is still

Everything, is nothing but what it is:

 

The raveling of mildew upon a sill;

       Heartbeat preceding night.  The room is still

Where no one sits, where the radiators rust.

There is a room, and in that room, our dust.

 

 

"Terzanelle of the Spider's Web" appeared in January 1990:

 

TERZANELLE OF THE SPIDER'S WEB¹⁶

 

The spider spins her web across the pane.

       Beneath her in the dusk the room is still.

Upon the glass the hours have left their stain,

 

       And darkness seeps down on the windowsill.

At last she finishes her silent weaving;

       Behind her in the dusk the room is still

 

Accumulating echoes of the evening —

       They fill the corners, spread across the floor.

She finishes at last her silent weaving

 

       And then awaits the trembling at her door.

The shadows wait as well — they swell and grow;

       They fill the corners, spread across the floor.

 

Time drifts.  The room is netted in its flow.

       The spider rides upon the darkening tide,

And the shadows wait as well — they swell and grow.

 

       The room and all things in it will abide.

Upon the glass the hours have left their stain.

       The spider rides upon the darkening tide,

For she has spun her web across the pane.

 

         There was a hiatus in my composition of poems in this form until I got the idea of writing a series of autobiographical terzanelles, the first being “The Premonition, ” which first appeared in a textbook in 2006.¹⁷ I disguised it by publishing it as a block of print, something I had done on occasion with “Thunderweather.” The poem described an incident that had taken place while I was serving as a member of the crew of an aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Hornet (CVA 12), in 1955:

 

THE PREMONITION

 

The first two planes had crashed. I’d known they would

as I watched AirOps from the Gunner’s Bridge,

and I’d seen everything from where I stood.

The wings folded along the fuselage

on this new day relieved me. I was glad,

as I watched AirOps from the Gunner’s Bridge,

that this third time there would be nothing bad

about to happen. My instincts had been wrong

on this new day. I was deeply glad

this pilot would be safe. I looked along

the deck as the plane was parked, then looked away

before it happened — my gut had not been wrong!

The jet had not cut out! I saw it sway,

then disappear over the Hornet’s side

near where it had been parked. I looked away —

At least the first two pilots hadn’t died!

Those first two planes had crashed. I’d known they would,

but this one fell along the Hornet’s side,

and I’d seen everything from where I stood.

 

The second poem in the series was “Passing the time”; it appeared on-line in an e-zine in 2008:

 

PASSING THE TIME¹⁸

 

Where am I going? How do I know where?

Why do I write as I saunter along,

passing the time on the road to nowhere?

 

I’m humming a tune, mumbling a song

to kill as much time as I sensibly can —

that’s why I write as I wander along

 

making the syllables skip and scan,

making the language dance and go deep

to kill as much time as I sensibly can —

 

to liven the senses before I sleep,

slipping into that ultimate slumber.

Making the language dance and go deep

 

by counting these syllables without number

and making them count is my chosen role.

Slipping into the final slumber

 

is, of course, my ultimate goal.

Where am I going? How can I know where?

Making time count is my chosen role

while passing time on this road to nowhere.

 

My last terzanelle to date, “The Black Death,” had a different inception from the three preceding, but one similar to that which gave rise to “Thunderweather.” It has always irked me that etymologists have long overlooked the obvious derivation of the word “boo-boo,” a sore or minor wound. The American Heritage Dictionary, for example, has this: “Perhaps alteration of boohoo, to weep noisily.” So I decided to write a poem that gives a more likely source, the bubo:

 

THE BLACK DEATH¹⁹

London, 1665

 

“I have a bubo, mum,” my daughter said

and raised her sleeve to show me. In the street

the bellman cried aloud, “Bring out your dead!”

 

The heart of me froze like a drop of sleet,

dropped into my bowel when my darling child

raised up her sleeve to show me. In the street

 

the crier’s bell rang out both dark and wild.

The end of time opened like a flower,

fell into my bowel as my darling child

 

showed me her fatal wound. Our final hour

blossomed before my eyes in Satan’s garden,

for the end of time had opened like a flower.

 

I felt the heart in me begin to harden

against a Deity who could ordain

such an evil blossoming of Satan’s garden.

 

What were the sins that could have earned such bane?

What sort of Deity could so ordain?

 “I have a bubo, mum,” my daughter said.

The bellman cried aloud, “Bring out your dead!”

 

The poem first appeared on-line in an essay by Brian Bridges titled “The Villanelle and Variants: An Overview.” It turned out to be a good deal darker than I had at first surmised, but a poet must walk where the word-path opens. I substituted it for "Terzanelle in Thunderweather" in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition.

_______

¹Lewis Turco, The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.

²——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000.

³——, First Poems, Francestown: Golden Quill Press, 1960.

⁴First published in Buckle, IV:1, Fall-Winter 1980-81, p. 19, and included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2004.

⁵Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

⁶Originally published in The Kentucky Poetry Review, V. 27, Fall 1991, p. 65. Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

⁷E.L.F., Eclectic Literary Forum, V:3, fall 1995, p. 26. Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

⁸The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, [first edition], New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968.

⁹Op. cit.

¹⁰The Michigan Quarterly Review, volume iv, number 3, in July of 1965. Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

¹¹"Wesli Court," (anagram pseudonym of Lewis Turco), Courses in Lambents: Poems, Oswego, NY: Mathom Publishing Company, 1977.

¹²Lewis Putnam Turco, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986, pp. 130-132.

¹³First published in Modern Poetry Studies, iii:5, 1973. Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

¹⁴Miller Williams, Patterns of Poetry, Fayetteville, AR: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.

¹⁵Poetry Miscellany, 8, 1978, p. 110. Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

¹⁶The Southern Review, xxvi:1, January 1990, pp. 223-5. Included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, op. cit.

¹⁷R. S. Gwynn, editor, Poetry: A Pocket Anthology, Fifth Edition, New York: Penguin Academics, 2006, p. 355. This poem is included in Wesli Court, The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2009

¹⁸Per Contra, Summer 2008. This poem is included in Wesli Court, The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems, op. cit.

¹⁹ Bryan Bridges, “The Villanelle and Variants:  An Overview,” Trellis Summer, 2007. The poem is included in Wesli Court, The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems, op. cit.

 

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 from Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.SFASU.edu/sfapress/, 2012, 336 pp., paperback. 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.