Odd and Invented Forms

Villanelles

          Edited by Annie Finch and Marie-Elizabeth Mali, this book is the first of its kind — a comprehensive collection of the best of the villanelle, a delightful poetic form whose popularity ranks only behind that of the sonnet and the haiku.

          With its intricate rhyme scheme and dance-like pattern of repeating lines, its marriage of recurrence and surprise, the villanelle is a form that has fascinated poets since its introduction almost two centuries ago. Many well-known poets in the past have tried their hands at the villanelle, and the form is enjoying a revival among poets writing today.

          The poems collected here range from the classic villanelles of the nineteenth century to such famous and memorable examples as Dylan Thomas's "Do not go gentle into that good night," Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," and Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song." Here too are the cutting-edge works of contemporary poets, including Sherman Alexie, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Rita Dove, Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and many others whose poems demonstrate the dazzling variety that can be found within the parameters of a single, strict form, such as Wesli Court’s widely-used variation on the form, the terzanelle, is included:

LISTEN TO WESLI COURT READ HIS POEM Thunderweather

AVAILABLE ON-LINE FROM AMAZON.COM: Villanelles-Annie-Finch.

For examples and samples of many other interesting verse forms, see

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5.

 

On Glose Variations: Aiken and Rutsala

 

         In The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics I say that the glosa, glose, or gloss is a poem that comments upon a texte…which is written in staves…. However, that is too particular, because this poem is also a glose, though the texte is not written out as the first stanza like the example given there which is titled “Western Wind,” — it cannot be, for the eight lines mentioned in the title are taken from various places in the original poem, “A Letter from Li Po” by Conrad Aiken — they never were a cohesive stanza, and they appear here instead as the last lines of the eight quatrains that make up the poem:

 

ELEGY ON EIGHT LINES BY CONRAD AIKEN

from A Letter from Li Po

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Elegy on Eight Lines

 

 

There is a silence lying on the air

And on the carpet of muted hue and weave

Beneath the desk.  Upon the desk there lies

A letter long as time and deep as love.

 

Whom is the missive from, to whom addressed?

What are these words that one can scarcely say

In the dim room of dream, glimpsed in a flare,

That lightning-stroke which in your dream you saw?

 

Have I directed these syllables to you,

Or are they yours addressed to me?  A glove

Has fallen on a page to contemplate

Dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve.

 

The moon pours through the window streaked and cracked,

Flows over a ragged dike of books to lave

The pen of shadow spinning its spider thread,

And with it all its local web of love.

 

Beyond the window, in the meadow there

Where entropy dissolves the evening chord

Against the sky, the letter comes to life:

The song is in the peach tree and the ear.

 

The room sinks farther into stillness where

It mulls the meaning of its monotone.

Night has written itself upon the leaves;

The singer holds his phrase, the rising moon

 

Which scratches its arc among the hieroglyphs

Scrawled upon the dark.  What is the word

The world attempts to sing in letters, leaves?

Among the leaves we are the hidden bird;

 

We are the arching moon, the night descending

Among our limbs throughout long ages starred,

Destined to wither sere and still at last,

And with the falling leaf the falling bird.

 

 From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, a.k.a. Lewis Turco, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; BUY FROM AMAZON.COM .

         Something like the same thing occurs in this following poem — the lines have been extracted not from a single poem, however, but from four different poems in the works of Vern Rutsala. Those lines appear consecutively as the first, second, third, and fourth lines of the first four quatrains of the poem; furthermore, the four disparate lines come together as a single last stanza that reads coherently, though that stanza never occurs anywhere but here, so it is not a texte in and of itself:

 

DEJA-VU

On four lines by Vern Rutsala

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem  Deja-vu

The evening is carved of light.

One has watched here before, the view

of this bracken-edged meadow, the heather

lofting plumes into dusklight out of shadows.

 

One wonders what he has sought

in the meadows of deja-vu,

and on what occasions he has weathered

these asides of recall — and were there others?

 

For here an uncertain sleight

of sunlight settles itself like vows —

in the broken fields of sons and fathers —

taken, broken, retaken.  Darkness stammers,

 

the linnet has gone to flight;

hours have fallen to clay review

and have sprung again.  Out of ashen feathers

ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.

 

The evening is carved of light.

In the meadows of deja-vu,

in the broken fields of sons and fathers,

ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.

 

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

         The point of these examples of variations on the glose verse form, if it isn’t obvious, is this: Nothing in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics is written in concrete. It is basically a book that provides patterns and examples that may be used to experiment with or follow exactly or, better still, do both at various times.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5.

 

 

Corrections for the The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition

 

Corrections for the The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition, Published January 2012:

 

p. 93: under “Two-Line Forms” add “Tailgater.”

p. 161: under “Classical pentameter,” line one, delete the word “hexameter.”

p. 218: the stanza at the top of the page is not correctly centered.

p. 231, under “hendecasyllabics,” move lines two, three and four over to the far left margin.

p. 275, under “paradelle,” line one, add an “s” to “it” to make “its inventor.”

p. 417, index, column one, under “Epitaph for a Postal Clerk,” change the page number from “312” to “329.”

p. 419, index, column one, under “X. J. Kennedy” change the page number “312” in two places to “329.”

p. 420, index, column one, under "Robert Mezey," change the page number from "222" to "226" and delete the page number "336."

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5. 

 

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Revised and Expanded Edition, Including Odd and Invented Forms

It exists! I received this letter today, 22 November, 2011:

The book should be available to order from the publisher by December 13th, but it may be advance-ordered from Amazon.com or B&N.com now:

The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Fourth Edition, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5. Not yet published; expected: December 13, 2011.

PRE-ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM:

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco

Paperback (December 13, 2011) 

Buy new: $27.95 $18.45

Available for Pre-order

Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.

Other Formats: Digital

Folk Meters

 

During the academic year 1959-1960, while I was a graduate student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under the tutelage of Paul Engle and Donald Justice, I overheard a conversation between my classmate Robert Mezey and his printer / publisher Harry Duncan. We were at adjacent tables in a coffee shop, perhaps the Student Union, and they were discussing a verse-writing system they called “dipodics,” of which I had never heard. I had, however, begun work on The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, and I was always on the alert for information, so I began to take notes while I eavesdropped.

Harry and Bob were talking about dipodics not as Greek “dipody,” but as an accentual prosody, basically Anglo-Saxon, but modified by the Norman invasion of England in 1066 which brought into English literature the French syllabic verse prosody. Over the subsequent centuries syllabics and accentuals merged until, in Chaucer and the “Scottish Chaucerians,” a new prosody, accentual-syllabics, emerged in which there were regular numbers of syllables, both stressed and unstressed, alternating regularly with one-another to form “verse feet.” Early Renaissance poets like Philip Sidney and George Puttenham (an ancient cousin of mine) attached classical terminology from the Greek system of “quantitative” verse to these English verse feet, which really was not accurate or descriptive, but we have lived with this situation for several centuries.

Between Geoffrey Chaucer’s death in 1400 and the early verse published at the beginning of the English Renaissance a century later, people forgot the metrical system invented by John Gower and Chaucer and fell back into a semi-accentual system of writing that kept French riming although it also kept alliteration and some of the other effects of Anglo-Saxon prosody.

Of course, all this information I researched later on, I didn’t hear it from Mezey and Duncan who were speaking on a level more technical than historical. When I went home I began to ponder “podics,” and of course I began writing poems in this “new” system. One of the first was this one, for the subject of which I chose my young wife’s pregnancy:

 NURSERY RIME

(Listen to Lewis Turco read Nursery Rime)

                  What shall I say of my son,

That he is firm, fair of skin?

         That he rides his backside and can't know

He has not yet let the outside in?

                  There squalls a storm just begun.

         I stand fast; he lies low.

 

                  What may I say of this bone

Wound in flesh partly mine —

         Warp of my woof, thread of my skein —

He has come so supple to sup and dine,

                  To tangle the nets we have thrown

         To veil the waters that won't drain.

 

                  He would swim where I recline.

Toss him a hook.  Fish his schools:

         He will lure us down, take us in.

He will build us a weir for fools —

                  He is no man's yet he is mine.

         He is a death sign and a bulletin.

 

         Below I have scanned the first stanza using these symbols: X=strong stress; (x)=secondary stress; •=caesura (a pause in the center of a line); x =an unstressed syllable. The rules-of-thumb regarding stressing are simple and few:

1.  In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress. Scansion marks are always placed over the vowel that appears in each syllable. If one cannot at first hear the stressing, then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.

2.  Important single-syllable words, particularly verbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.

3.  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses through promotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse.

4.  In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will be counted as a stressed syllable.

5.  In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will be counted as an unstressed syllable.

6. Any syllable may be rhetorically stressed by means of italics or some other typographical ploy.

Thus, in the scanned lines above, there is no normative pattern of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, so neither the stanza nor the poem is written in standard accentual-syllabic verse; rather, it is written in STRONG STRESS VERSE, that is to say, “podic prosody.” Here are the first five lines scanned:

     X    (x) x  X   x     x  X

What shall I say of my son,

    x    Xx  X    •  X  x    X

That he is firm, fair of skin? 

    x    x  X      x    X    X    x     X         X

That he rides his backside and can't know

  x   x    X  (x)  X     x  X   x    (x)

He has not yet let the outside in?

    X        X    x    X     X     x  X

There squalls a storm just begun.

X  (x)   X   •   X (x)  X

I stand fast; he lies low.

 

Getting rid of the words, we are left with the scansion marks:

 

Xx xX xxX = 7 syllables

xX xX •X xX = 8 syllables [the compensatory caesura = (x)]

xxX xX (x)x XX = 9 syllables

xxX (x)X xX x(x) = 9 syllables

()X Xx XX xX = 7 syllables

()X (x)X •X (x)X = 6 syllables (not counting the compensatory caesura)

If we attempt to discuss these marks in terms of the metrical feet of accentual-syllabic prosody rather than podic prosody, line one consists of a trochee, Xx, in which the second syllable is demoted from strong stress to secondary stress, thus equaling an unstressed syllable; an iamb, xX, and an anapest, xxX. The second line is four iambs in a row, the third of which has its first syllable compensated for by a caesura, •X; the third line has an anapest, xxX, an iamb, xX, a trochee, Xx, and the last foot is a spondee, XX, two strong stresses in a row. The first foot of line four is an anapest, xxX, and the last three are iambs, the first of which has the first syllable demoted from strong stress and standing in place of that strong stress. The fifth line is particularly problematic and can perhaps best be scanned as a headless iamb ()X, followed by a trochee, Xx,  a spondee, XX, and an iamb, xX. Line six is another headless iamb, ()X, followed by three iambs,  the second of which has a compensatory caesura in the first syllable, (x)X /•X/ (x)X.

All of which is to say that the poem cannot be scanned in terms of accentual-syllablc verse because there is no running foot — no particular verse foot that predominates in all the lines of the poem; nor are the syllable counts of the line regular, so it is not a poem written in syllabic prosody. It is accentual or strong stress verse, called “folk meters” or podic prosody by many, but “stress hierarchy” by The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics in its discussion of “dipodism, dipodic verse” which is, “In the older sense of the term, used in Classical prosody. ‘Dipodism’ refers to the fact that metrical feet in Greek and Latin are double the length of what they later became in the European vernaculars…. But primarily the term is now used to refer to a distinctive feature of ballad meter, namely stress hierarchy.” It is sometimes called ballad meter because it is the prosody in which many Scottish border-ballads were written during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Likewise, now and again podic prosody is called “nursery rhyme verse” because many old children’s poems were written in it.

For much more information about the various prosodic systems mentioned in this essay, the reader may refer to The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco (Dec 13, 2011) at Amazon.com.

 

 

 

Plowing the "Free Verse" Field

 

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

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

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

 

The Blues Sonnet

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

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

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

When the shoe strings break

On both your shoes

And you're in a hurry —

That's the blues.

 

When you go to buy a candy bar

And you've lost the dime you had

Slipped through a hole in your pocket somewhere —

That's the blues, too, and bad!

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

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

He did a lazy sway...

He did a lazy sway...

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues,

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man's soul.

O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan —

"Ain't got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

And put ma troubles on the shelf."

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

 

LORRIE

Lorrie looked good — man,

         she was a jazz band, straight

         as a clarinet, and the tunes she played

         with her hip action wowed my crowd.

Lorrie swung like a prime ensemble,

         smiled the cool blues as we sipped our

         brews in the racetrack dive while the

         bass thrummer, a basic type, swiped

         at the strings, making us think

         of beds and things.

There we were, dancing our eyes

         among the beers while Lorrie walked

         her pert way among us, mashers all,

         and we asked, "What's up tonight,

         Lorrie-love?"

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

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

"By night I slide drinks down

         to your hands, and in the daylight

         I guard lives at Ryall's beach."

Then, when the jazz bunch quit and

         the horn stopped snorting

         and the drums bumped the last bum

         out the door, we went too, man,

         we went too

 

Who wants to see Lorrie meet her beau?

         Who wants to see his old eyes, older

         than she'll ever be, and his dark hands

         grab her wrist hard as they leave to park

         in the raceway woods?

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

lines                  meters and rhymes

1.                  xX xX xX xX xA

2.                  xX xX xX xX xA

3.                  xX xX xX xX xa

 

4.                  xX xX xX xX xB

5.                  xX xX xX xX xB

6.                  xX xX xX xX xb and so forth:

 

Listen to the author read his poem Blues for George Gershwin

 

BLUES FOR GEORGE GERSHWIN

September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937

 

When I was three you stepped out of the light.

When I was three years old you spurned the light

And wandered off into the dark of night.

 

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

And that was quite enough for you to do

 

To justify your stay among us here,

To pay your way while you were with us here

Upon this mortal coil, this spinning sphere.

 

When I grew up I heard the songs you made,

I listened, and I learned the songs you made

And wished¾oh! how I wished that you had stayed.

 

I do not understand why you were taken

So young. Some force of Nature was mistaken

When it decided to leave the world forsaken

 

Of all that possibility of song,

That minstrel’s bag of melody and song

That now we’ll never hear forever long.

 

Therefore we pick your bones and make up tunes

Out of the scraps you left, those scraps of tunes

Your brother Ira kept through nights and noons

 

Until he got too old and joined you there

Wherever you are, rose up and joined you there

To help you strike those strings in the ringing air. 

Wesli Court

 

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

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

 

THE BONEYARD BLUES

I.

I'm sitting in the boneyard singing songs,

Sitting singing songs as blue as blue —

Considering my days, their shorts and longs,

 

The days we spent together, me and you.

Yes, you and me and all those other folks

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

 

My meaning — yesterday is gone in strokes,

In strokes and chimes, and time cannot be turned,

I'm well aware; it plays its dirty jokes

 

And leaves us on our ashes, bare and burned.

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

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

 

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

Turn into bonedust, rusting pots and pans.

 

II.

Rusting pots and pans pile up and ring,

Pile up and ring us round with shards of loss,

With echoes of the songs we used to sing

 

In living rooms and bedrooms filled with moss,

With moss and lichen now of recollection.

The kitchen where we used to sit and toss

 

Together meals of love and of affection

Has grown a mold upon the oven grate,

And there is nothing left of our confection

 

Except a little sweeting on a plate,

The plate of dreams, its edges chipped and cracked.

In the beginning already it was too late —

 

The gun was loaded and the deck was stacked.

The tune could not provide what the lyrics lacked.

 

III.

And so I'm sitting in this boneyard, blue

As blue, and singing songs that leave me cold.

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

 

They may be new — more likely they are old,

As old as flesh and time.  I hear the knell

Of generations as the peals are rolled

 

Among the stones, within the stony well —

That stone-cold well of destiny gone dry.

Who is the sexton hauling on the bell?

 

Why is the deacon grinning at us?  Why?

Why are his cheekbones sunken, and his teeth

So moonlight-gleaming?  Wherefore is his eye

 

The hollow of a heartbeat underneath

The zero of a withered floral wreath?

 

Envoy

 

Just let me drop this note into the dark,

Yes, let me drop this note into the dark —

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

 

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

Fly it into darkness, see it flare

And wink out in those shadows circling there.

 

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

Among the minor planets and the stars.

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

 

Until the spark has died to inky ash,

And words have flickered into smoken ash.

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

 

And lean against this marker made of stone

That will not last as long as ink or bone.

 

Wesli Court

 

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

 

Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale

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

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

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

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

 

Aye, beshrew you, by my oath,

These wanton clerks are never loath!

Be off! Be off, my popinjay,

What, will ye do nothing but play?

Tilly vally, straw, let be I say!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

By God, ye be a pretty toad,

And I love you a whole cart-load,

Straw, James Fodder, you play it shrewd,

I am no hackney for your rod:

Go watch a bull, your back is broad!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Surely you deal discourteously;

What, would ye frumple me? Now fie!

What, shall you be my piglet’s sty?

By Christ, ye shall not, not hardly:

You’ll not bejape me bodily!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Just walk away, you cost me naught;

Now I have found what I have sought:

The best cheap flesh that ever I bought.

Yet for His love that all hath wrought,

Wed me, or I’ll die at the thought.

Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!

Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

— John Skelton

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

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

Friday, June 10, 2011 2:07 PM

Hi Lew,

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

Mary Ann Sullivan

Editor, The Tower Journal

 

Lew,

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

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

Rhina P. Espaillat

 

Dear Lew,

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

Best,

Alfred Nicol

 

Dear Lew,

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

Dana Gioia

 

Dana got it right, Lew,

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

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

Sam Gwynn

 

Lew,

Pre-ordered from Amazon.

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

Buy new: $27.95 $18.45

Available for Pre-order

Eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping.

Other Formats: Digital

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

Patricia A. Marsh

 

 

 

The Mathematical Secrets of Verse

 

 Erasmus Darwin, 

29 December 1804 – 26 August 1881

Today, Thursday, October 7th, is National Poetry Day [in the United Kingdom], a fact that once would have been of much interest to scientists. In the 1700s several poems appeared that passed on a scientific message. The best known is The Loves of the Plants, by Erasmus Darwin, who in 1791 set out in verse an account of the sexual habits of the vegetable world. He used heroic couplets, in which the rhyme pattern is AA, BB, CC and so on (for the sensitive plant, for example, he wrote that "Weak with nice sense the chaste Mimosa stands,/ From each rude touch withdraws her timid hands;/ Oft as light clouds o'erpass the summer glade,/ Alarm'd she trembles at the moving shade"). Byron, a rather better poet, liked the form ABABABCC and in his epic Don Juan even manages to squeeze in a mention of Newton ("And this is the sole mortal who could grapple/ Since Adam, with a fall or with an apple.")

Overblown as Erasmus Darwin's verses might seem nowadays, the point of poetry was pattern; to use a strict structure of rhythm and rhyme as a framework for words of passion or pedantry that would become fixed in a reader's brain. Robert Frost put it neatly when he wrote that "Poetry without rules is like tennis without a net".

 Poetry, in other words, is mathematics. It is close to a particular branch of the subject known as combinatorics, the study of permutations – of how one can arrange particular groups of objects, numbers or letters according to stated laws. As early as 200 BC, writers on Sanskrit poetry asked how many ways it is possible to arrange various sets of long and short syllables, the building blocks of Sanskrit verse. A syllable is short, with one beat, or long, with two. In how many ways can a metre of four syllables be constructed? Four shorts or four longs have just one pattern for each, while for three shorts and a long, or three longs and a short, there are four (SSSL, SSLS, SLSS, and LSSS, for example). For two of each kind of syllable, there are six possibilities. Do the sum for metres of one, two, three, four and more and a mathematical pattern emerges. It is Pascal's Triangle, the pyramid of numbers in which the series in the next line is given by adding together adjacent pairs in the line above to generate 1, 1 1, 1 2 1, 1 3 3 1, 1 4 6 4 1, and so on.

As in a great poem, hidden within that elegant structure are deeper truths that touch on apparently unrelated things; on fractal patterns, on the theory of numbers, on primes, and of complexities too deep to be accessible to mere mortals untrained in the mathematical art. One useful property is that Pascal makes it possible to ask in how many ways it is possible to arrange a group of objects, be they footballers in a league, or lines in a poem.

The French writer and amateur mathematician Raymond Queneau took advantage of that in his 1961 book A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. It consisted of a series of 10 sonnets of 14 lines, each with exactly the same structure of rhythm and rhyme and with each line printed on separate strips of card that could be rearranged. They are eccentric but engaging: one begins, in translation, "The Parthenon horse looks nervous on the frieze,/ Since Elgin seems to think the nose de trop,/ Just as the Turk is deeply mired in sleaze,/ The 're' in all his songs came out as 'doh'".

Another starts: "When all that's left is sorrow and disease,/ When undertakers peer and say O-ho!/ The timid mutter into their goatees,/You hear your spouse pay off the medico". The lines are then reordered at random to generate new poems – to give, according to the Law of Pascal, 10 to the 14 possible combinations. At 12 hours a day, it would take around 300 million years to read them all (which is about the time it took us to evolve from reptile to human).

And, speaking of reptilian poets, it has just been announced that a cache of letters from Philip Larkin to his mistress Monica Jones has been found (The Daily Telegraph published a selection last week). I look forward to reading more of them, for who can afford to miss the writings of the man who produced the most genetical poem in the English language? I quote the second verse, for his views on Mum and Dad in the first are not suitable for the chaste Science page of this newspaper: "Man hands on misery to man/ It deepens like a coastal shelf/ Get off as quickly as you can/ And don't have any kids yourself". Happy Poetry Day!

By Steve Jones, professor of genetics at University College, London, U.K.