Odd and Invented Forms

Form of the Week 30 – The Monsourelle

Leslie Monsour

          On Saturday, February 23, 2013, Leslie Monsour wrote me, “I wonder what to call the form of the poem…below or if I even ‘invented’ it.  It's not really an invention, because, although I've published three poems in this ‘form,’ it hasn't caught on, and nobody else has used it.  Also, I don't know that other poets before me haven't already thought of it.  It's sort of a "terzamonorima" with the monorhyme coming at the end of each stanza.  The example below appeared in Poetry and in my first book [Earth’s Beauty, Desire, & Loss, R.L. Barth 1998], as do the other two I've written in the form.  It's awfully close to terza rima:  

 

NIMIS COMPOS MENTIS

 

The paper table cloth was tastefully bleak,

The misty morning light shone on his cheek,

And made him look alone and masculine.

 

He talked of Seneca and bad translations,

Of modern critics’ lightweight observations;

A bread crumb rested sweetly on his chin.

 

Behind him, through the glass, the ocean’s heave

Uncurled against the sand, beside his sleeve,

As Eros aimed his toxic javelin.

 

I ducked out of the way to no avail;

It glanced my flesh, injecting quite a cocktail

That blurred my sight and gave my head a spin --

 

Never mind the coffee we were drinking,

Whatever I said was not what I was thinking:

I wanted to become his mandolin,

 

And lie across his lap, a dainty lute,

And sing to him and feed him ripened fruit,

While light upon the sea turned opaline.

 

Instead, this conversation about art

And formal education -- God, he’s smart!

Such rationality should be a sin.

 

The hour was up, he had to run, of course;

A handshake and a peck of shy remorse --

Outside, the sea was gray and dull as tin;

It ruled the shore with tedious discipline.

 

-- Leslie Monsour

 

          I replied by sending Leslie this:

  

POETS: OUR SHELVES

A monsourelle, a form invented by Leslie Monsour

 

We put our minds to pen to pass the time,

And then, perhaps, we add a bit of rime

And meter here and there to complicate

 

Our effort and to add some ornament.

At first it was in no way our intent

For this sweet dallying to be our fate,

 

But pastimes do cause moments to elapse

Even if pursued between our naps

And daily duties of our normal state.

 

We come to find our eggs lie in one basket,

And it may look a lot like someone's casket

Where readers of the works that we create

 

Come to mourn them lying in their covers.

It may be true that we deserve these lovers,

But, alas! they all have come too late,

 

And they must see our efforts come a-caper

Upon these wads of tearful, smeary paper.

We wish them well, but we are out-of-date --

We have discovered time and rime won't wait.

 

-- Wesli Court

 

          Leslie responded, “Wow, Lew!  You just came up with this?  It's very good.   ‘We come to find our eggs lie in one basket, / And it may look a lot like someone's casket.’  What grim, fun sense you make. And how quick you are...but I already knew that.  Does this mean the terzamonorima is now an official form?  I'm speechless.  (Also tired.  We just got back from a night out with friends.  And what an excellent message to find waiting!)”

 

Dear Leslie [I wrote back],

 

          I think it should be called "the monsourelle" and kept to 19 lines [like the villanelle and the terzanelle]. Last night there was nothing on teevee, so my wife read while I wrote the first draft of "Poets: Our Shelves," on my iPad, and when I was finished I handed it to Jean who read it and she seemed to like it okay. When she handed it back I got ready to copy it and send it to you, but I pushed the wrong button and lost the whole thing! I cursed for a while, then decided to write it again. This time I saved it before I showed it to Jean. She said the new version isn't as funny as the first but it moves along okay. I think I liked the first better, but of course I can't be sure.

          Then I went to bed and woke up in the small hours because I had a horrific, murderous nightmare (someone was trying to murder me). So I lay in the dark trying not to go back to sleep and continue the dream. Instead, the first few lines of another monsourelle began to build, and finally I had to get up and write them down so I wouldn't forget them. When I finish it I'll send it to you. It's 6:38 a.m. now, and I didn't have a good night, so I may take a nap after breakfast before I go back to my monsourelle about the schwa.

 

This is the finished poem:

 

DISCHWASHING: A MONSOURELLE

 

Though indeterminate, I like the schwa

Much better than refrains like "tra-la-la";

Its sign's an "e" that's standing on its həd;

 

Its sound's the first "e" found in "diffərent,"

Which many may think sounds indiffərent --

And they'd be right: it has the feel of ləd,

 

But it dəs yeoman work -- it's everywhəre

Excepting in the alphabet. Not thəre

At all, although it is quite often səd

 

And hərd in people's ordinary speech,

And you will find that too few pundits teach

Its mere existənce: one might think it's dəd,

 

But you'd be wrong. The schwa's ubiquitəs,

For instənce in the word "existənce." Thəs,

Its English lifetime is unlimitəd.

 

In fact it's very likely to outlast əs,

And if it doesn't that might be disastrəs,

But that is something we need hardly drəd

As we enjoy our daily buttəred brəd.

 

-- Wesli Court

 

Suggested writing exercise:

          Write a monsourelle or two.

______

COMMENTS:

That there is a form called the "monsourelle" in the world makes my heart glad.

-- Kim Bridgford, Director, W. C. U. Poetry Conference

 

Dear Leslie and Lew,

 Hahahahaha!!! Delightful! Oh, that's going to be the best panel ever [at the West Chester University Poetry Conference this summer], and the monsourelle needs to be spread far and wide! I have a hunch its English lifetime is unlimited. I think this exchange between you two indicates that your West Chester panel is already bearing fruit, months before it even takes place! I heartily approve "monsourelle" as the name of the form, and absolutely love both examples! I knew yours, of course, Leslie, with that wicked lute image, and Lew's new one is a worthy response. 

 If this is what you get from sleepless nights, Lew, Jean should be in charge of keeping you awake, for the sake of American poetry! All I get from insomnia is grouchy.

Love,

-- Rhina Espaillat

 

Thanks, Lew,  

 I'll try it.  I'm ready for a new thing. Hey, your "Fog" play, at the "Poetics and Ruminations" site, is truly fine. It is kindred to my Job experiment in the Greek meters, but is more compact and therefore more effective.  Good Theatre of the Absurd work ... as are we all, I suppose ...

Ruth F. Harrison

 

Go, Leslie! (Oui, Monsour!)

-- Jack Foley

 

 Thanks, Lew.  Your insomnia remedy is more fun than the one my mother urged on me.  She said if I couldn't sleep I should get up and wash my kitchen floor whether or not it needed to be washed. (I wasn't living with my parents when she said that.)  

Miriam Kotzin, Editor, Per Contra

 

 Lew, I can't believe the fertility of the seed of Leslie's then-nameless form. I am struck dumb with admiration of both Leslie's and your monsourelles. I am going to drive up to West Chester the morning of June 5. Your gentle nagging did the trick.

Clarinda Harriss, Editor, BrickHouse Books 

 

Lew,

I started out to write a monsourelle and ended up nearly completing a ttrochaic pentameter sonnet with a rhyme scheme of ababcccc dedfff.  It pretty much sucks.   But it does illustrate--for anybody who wants to write a whole trochaic poem which isn't 'Hiawatha'-- that anybody who thinks a trochaic line is just an iambic line with the first unstressed syllable omitted is C R A Z Y.

Onward! 

Clarinda

 

 Lew,

The terzanelle you attached to your last mail wouldn't open on my computer -- I guess it only deals with WORD and Adobe, etc.

The Monsourelle will be trumped when I write my first Mademoiselle! And can my RheinMosel be far behind (a slowly flowing form)?

Chris Wiseman

 

Well, Lew –

I'm speechless again!  A tribute to the schwa...who woulda thunk it?  Who but you!  And to have the newly named "monsourelle" posted on your blog is like discovering a new species of butterfly or a new asteroid floating around in space and having it named after me.  Oh, but there's a slight correction: when I said my poem appears in my first book, I meant my first full-length book, The Alarming Beauty of the Sky, published in 2005 by Red Hen Press, and still in print, apparently.  (The title you quoted was that of my first chap-book, which Bob Barth published in 1998, as you noted).  

Rhina, it'll be such fun to see you at West C.  And, I must say, I agree with you about sleeplessness: it only makes me grouchy.  Would that I could dash off monsourelles in the wee hours the way Mssr. Turco has done!

Cheers to all,

Leslie

 

Lew,

I've very much enjoyed spending time with you as I read this marvelous depiction of your life and of the friends and family around you as you've lived it.  When I read my own name, I almost felt as if I were still there with you, and that was a good feeling.

Joys to all your worlds, my friend.

Miller Williams

 

Thank you, Lewis,

For this ... and for news of your participation in the West Chester University Poetry Conference. I wish we lived a bit nearer! I see we weren't too far from the area when we were in Philadelphia (January 2012). I conducted an interview there with Professor Don Riggs of Drexel for an international literary magazine from Romania.

I enjoyed your correspondence and commentary on the Monsourelle, and look forward to experimenting in due course.

With best wishes,

Caroline Gill U. K.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Form of the Week 29 – The Interlined Poem

          This week Jack Foley sent me a poem written in a form he has used before that he calls, “writing between the lines.” “The idea of the form,” he wrote, “is the interplay between the two poems--each going on separately but constantly being interrupted by the other. I like Dan's poem -- from a book of his I've always treasured, A Little Geste”:

CHARM

            for the return to health of Daniel G. Hoffman

 

Do I speak truth

            Goddess,

Then let this breath deny

            Lover of the hunt

As much of death

            And of animals,

As any man can. I

            Protect this man

My burnt tongue’s gift bequeath

            Whose mortal breath

To you in whom my speech

            Gives praise

Or song moves most:

            To all you love,

Act, enact the myth

            Rex Nemorensis:

Of man the maker: Reach

            Protect his tongue

In every syllable

            His eyes

Of your life, in each

            His nimble fingers

Motion of your soul

            Let his sword

As though these dreams my ghost

            Stay steady

Long since made were real;

            As dreams;

Such magnificence you touch

            Let his speech

Shall your self become

            Attain inevitability;

At the portal of your feast

            Let his words stay

I sing, though dust be dumb:

            In the shaken cranium

Praise the immortal host,

            Of all who hear.

Mortal encomium.

 

            —Daniel G. Hoffman (from A Little Geste, 1959) / Jack Foley

          I replied, “Jack, I wrote this back in the early 'seventies or late 'sixties; you can find it on page 345 of the current edition of The Book of Forms where the form is called "shadowbox":

 

A WELL AS DEEP AS THE WORLD

"For Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound,"

 

"It is not now as it was then,"

it is broken and far off,

"but it is like a sea on ebb,"

like the sound of someone being tortured

"and only pools here and there"

at the end of a long corridor

"left among the rocks."

 

Lewis Turco, from Innerspring Quarterly, I:2, Fall 1971.

This is the entry on the form from 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: 

Kelly Cherry writes of the SHADOWBOX, “It seems to me that Fred Chappell has invented an amazing new form: the embedded, or nested, or inlaid poem.  Sometimes a sestet is embedded within an octave; sometimes the last word of the first half of a line becomes the first word of the second half of the line.” Fred Chappell adds, “Kelly Cherry’s descriptions…are accurate, though she leaves out a couple: There are also dialogue poems, in which the speakers’ lines form separate whole poems that interlock with each other to produce the integral poem; poems in which the syllables of another language are disposed in order throughout an English-language poem that glosses the original. My examples are made from Medieval Latin hymns.”

SEARCHLIGHT

The hamlet sleeps under November stars.

Only the page of numerate thought toils through

The darkness, shines on the table where, askew

And calm, the scholar’s lamp burns bright and sears

The silence, sending through the slot, the bars

And angles of his window square, a true

Clean ray, a shaft of patient light, its purview

Lonely and remote as the glow of Mars.

 

Fred Chappell

And there is another interlined form laid out in The Book of Forms:

The DAGWOOD, invented by Herb Coursen, is two separate poems that when interleaved (first line of first, first line of second, second line of first, second line of second, and so on) become a third poem. “Winter Dreams” is an example. The form can, of course, be extended to incorporate several separate poems:

WINTER DREAMS

The day holds itself still at noon,

under the motionless circle of gulls.

The sky is simply there, background for

ice capping the granite that

tumbles chunks down the long bay.

The bottom row of the wood pile

freezes to the field, crunches in frost.

Down the full sky toward February,

Gemini will baffle the night,

from which light cannot escape.

The day is balanced, not quite ready.

 

The waters of the bay flatten out,

gray, holding ice floes, silent.

The unmoving spine of the trees

will tremble again before spring,

melting down the ocean’s mouth,

wants the thawing tide of May winds.

Canis Major chases Lepus the Hare.

The Northern Cross will rise again,

over the black opening

into a new universe. The day is poised

for its tugging into spring.

 

The day holds itself still at noon.

The waters of the bay flatten out,

under the motionless circle of gulls,

gray, holding ice floes, silent.

The sky is simply there, background

for the unmoving spine of the trees,

ice capping granite that

will tremble again before spring

tumbles chunks down the long bay,

melting down the ocean’s mouth.

The bottom row of the wood pile

wants the thawing ride of May winds,

freezes to the field, crunches in frost.

Canis Major chases Lepus the Hare

down the full sky toward February.

The northern cross will rise again.

Gemini will baffle the night,

above the black opening

from which light cannot escape

into a new universe. The day is poised.

The day is balanced, not quite ready

for its tugging into spring.

 

Herb Coursen

 

This example is a three-layer Dagwood:

 

THE FOX HUNT

Winslow Homer 1893

 

Wind-driven waves crash on rocks, and

spray rises over each cascade.

On the snow-covered shore

in the wind

in storm-wasted light

a few red berries tremble on twigs

over snowdrifts like stilled waves.

 

The fox looks out to sea.

The fox, he high steps. Slow.

What does he hear,

his black ears pricked up,

the russet fox,

his white-tipped brush

of no use now?

 

Crows fly up from the sea to

the hungry shore,

wings like feathered night.

They hover over,

making ready,

a gather,

a murder of crows.

 

The fox looks out to sea.

Wind-driven waves crash on rocks, and

crows fly up from the sea to

the fox. He high steps.  Slow

spray rises over each cascade,

the hungry shore.

What does he hear

on the snow-covered shore—

wings like feathered night?

(His black ears pricked up

in the wind.)

They hover over

the russet fox

in storm-wasted light

making ready

his white-tipped brush.

A few red berries tremble on twigs,

a gather

of no use now,

over snowdrifts like stilled waves:

a murder of crows.

 

Miriam Kotzin

Yet another interlined form from The Book of Forms is the hypallogo, which was used here back on November 12, 2012 as “Form of the Week 22 – The Hypallogo,” q.v.

Suggested writing exercise:

 

Write an interlined poem of some sort.

 

 

 

 

Form of the Week 26 – Anglo-Saxon Prosody

 

          The major form of English strong stress verse is Anglo-Saxon prosody in which the oldest European epic written in a vernacular tongue (as distinguished from the classical tongues of Greek and Latin), Beowulf, was written, not to mention such later poems as The Vision of Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  Anglo-Saxon prosody has continued to be written fitfully over the centuries, even in contemporary times, as for instance “Junk” and “The Lilacs” by Richard Wilbur, and there are other, more modern strong stress forms, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins' variable accentual "sprung rhythm" system and William Carlos Williams' triversen stanza. The basis for accentual verse is the counting of stressed (accented) syllables in a line of verse, paying no attention to the number of unstressed syllables. Scansion is the process of isolating the accented or unaccented syllables in language. These are The Rules of Scansion in English:

         1.  In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress.  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.

         The features of Anglo-Saxon prosody are these: each line (called a stich) of verse) contains four stresses; two or three of these syllables are overstressed by means of alliteration.  This term means that the first syllable of a word is accented, first, by means of pronunciation (that is, the way in which we ordinarily pronounce the word — with the accent on the first syllable, like cowboy), and, second, by means of the repetition of consonant sounds (that is, in two or more words the stressed first syllable begins with a sound of the alphabet other than the vowels a, e, i, o, or u).

          Besides the four strong stresses in the stich and the alliterations, each stich is broken in half by a pause called a caesura.  This pause is built into the poem in one way or another. In this excerpt from Beowulf, which is too long to include here in its entirety, the champion of the Geats learns of the monster Grendel who terrorizes Denmark, and he sails to help King Hrothgar:

From THE EPIC OF BEOWULF

In Geatland Beowulf, Higlac’s hallmate,

Greatest of the Geats, greater and stronger

Than any other anywhere else,

Heard that Grendel turned the halls

Of distant Heorot to scenes of horror.

He ordered a ship be readied to sail

Over the ocean, for he would help

Hrothgar the Dane in his hour of need.

The wise elders of the gathered Geats

Did not object, for the portents promised

Success for their hero in far Heorot,

They said farewell as he fared forth

With a chosen band of brave brothers.

Fourteen of the finest that could be found

Among the Geats who boarded their boat

And set sail on the wild waves,

Pointing their prow to distant Denmark

Far from their fjords, their familiar fields,

Coursing the currents beneath the cliffs,

Eager to find what would befall them

And their longboat laden with armor,

Lined with shields along the gunwales,

Their oaken hearts in their oaken vessel

Beating strongly as the wild wind

Hurled them beyond the foaming breakers

Until at last they saw in the sea,

Rising out of the furling froth,

Hills lifting their green heads

On the horizon, and soon they stood

Under those cliffs where their cruise ended.

                  — Anonymous Anglo-Saxon author (version by Wesli Court}

          In English lines of four beats or longer, a natural caesura — only a brief hesitation — occurs very often after the second or third stressed syllable:

   /               /       ·           /        /

Alone I am driven · each day by dawn

          Qualitative caesura is caused by the manipulation of measures; that is, by changing up the rhythm of the stich (. = an unstressed syllable):

 

  /   .     /     .   ·  .       /      / 

Fasten darkness · in deep moods

          If we analyze this stich, we see that the first half has two "falling rhythms" — ¢È ¢È (we would call them trochees if we were doing accentual-syllabic prosody), and we can see that the second half of the stich reverses this rhythm È¢ (we would call this an iamb).  There is a pause at the point of rhythmic change in the stich.

          Punctuational caesura is caused by punctuation occurring somewhere in the center of the line because of phrasing:

To wake and wander,  [·]  to cry my cares.

          Compensatory caesura occurs when the caesura compensates for a missing unstressed syllable in the line:

   /   .      /   [.]   /  .     .    / 

Winter-drear[y], over the wave.

           In this stich falling rhythms are set up in the beginning of each hemistich; the mind's ear wants to hear /. /. /. /, but the fourth syllable is missing, so we hear a pause at that point to compensate for that unstressed syllable,

 

/.     / [.]  · / .   /.

xx    x[x]  · xx   xx

          A word about this following anonymous poem which is probably a fragment — information is missing internally.  For instance, in the third strophe the translation by Michael Alexander in his book, The Earliest English Poems, (Hammondsworth: Penguin, 1966) reads, "Then his kinsmen ganged, began to think / thoughts they did not speak, of splitting the wedlock," but in the antepenultimate (third-to-last; the penultimate is the second-to-last) strophe the wife speaks of "that young man" as the cause of her woes.  For consistency's sake, line three of strophe three is rendered here, "Then a kinsman began to scheme," and so forth.

          Also in strophe three the order of the two couplets of which it is made is reversed so that the chronological sequence of events in the wife's life makes more sense: in the original the kinsmen first began to scheme, and then the wife complained about being marooned. The rest of the poem makes it clear she was first marooned, and then the relative(s) schemed.

          The most interesting thing about this poem, perhaps, is that it is probably the first in English literature that is identifiably written from the woman's viewpoint; we may assume, then, that the poet was a female.  The stichs of the first stanza show the stressing and the accentuation; the boldface letters show the alliterations; note that the accent mark (ictus) is always placed over the vowel; a secondary accent is shown by a dot, also always placed over the vowel  (but secondary stresses do not count in the scheme of Anglo-Saxon prosody or other strong-stress verse, only the overstressed syllables); a space shows the caesurae (caesuras, pauses).

          Note in the first line that "wrought" and "awry" are not alliterations, nor are "fresh" and "befretting" in line six: they are examples of consonantal echo: the repetition of stressed or unstressed consonant sounds anywhere in two or more words.  Assonance can sometimes be used instead of alliteration: the repetition in two or more words of stressed vowel sounds — these may be anywhere in the words; they need not appear in the first syllable, as alliteration does.  Vocalic echo is the repetition of vowel sounds anywhere in the words, whether the syllables are stressed or unstressed.

THE WIFE'S COMPLAINT

 

               /                  /                     /         / 

I have wrought these words    from a life awry,

My heart's tally,    telling the beads

 Of griefs suffered    since my girlhood —

Old griefs and new,    the worst now:

Never have I not    known sorrow,

 Some fresh befretting    in the endless fray.

First my lord left his folk

For the wave's weird, whither I wondered,           [fate]

Knew not where, and wakened saddened.

I fared afield, outcast and friendless,

Served as I might to stanch loneness.

 

Enisled and estranged, he and I

Lived apart — heavy my longing!

Then a kinsman began to scheme,

In cold silence, to cleave the wedlock.

 

His return was harsh, his heart torn,

His eyes bitter, his mind bound.

My match-mate was moody-browed,                   [husband]

Louring and mourning.  He brooded murder.

He sent me here to this stern place

Where few are friendly, few trustful.

 

Our lips once took oath hourly

That naught should twine us save the knell —       [sever]

Nothing less.  Now all is lost,

As though our past had never passed

In fond friendship.  I feel in the wind

That my darling has come at last to loathe me.

Now in this knotted knoll of the wood

I dwell in a den under the oaks:

The chill of this earth eats at my heart.

 

Thorns thrive in the thick copse

On the banks that darken these black dales:

A joyless home.  Husbandless grief

Preys upon me.  Some earthly pairs

Live in love, lie in warmth

When day dawns; I tread, forlorn,

Among these caverns under the oak.

Here I must sit as summer wanes,

Here bewail the outcast's woes,

The hardships heaped upon a heart

That shall not sail into still waters

And find the tarn that drowns yearning.    [mountain lake]

 

My bitter grief grythe the brow                  [tremble]

Of my youthful foe!  May fever fret

His grinning face!  May a flock of sorrows

Choke his chest!  His leer would change

Should he be loned in the land of the banished,

Far from his folk.

Where my man broods

Hoar encrusts the crumbling cliff,                  [frost]

The grim tide grinds the shingle.                  [stones]

Wit cannot bear, in such barrenness,

A deal of bane.                                    [poison]

One dwells too often

On gentler surroundings.  Sorrow engulfs

This bleak abiding of the banished.

 

                  — Anonymous, ( v. Wesli Court)

          "Match-mate" above is a kenning, an epithetic compound made of two terms that equal a brief metaphorical synonym for another word.  In this case, the "match" means the marriage match that was worked out by the families of the bride and groom, and of course, "mate" means what it still means.

          Following is another anonymous Old English poem in Anglo-Saxon prosody written from the distaff angle, and it is also a fragment.  A few liberties have been taken here to give it the appearance of completeness; that is, Eadwacer's name has been inserted into strophe three, where it did not appear in the original, and the refrain — the repeated hemistich or half-line — has been repeated at the end of the poem where, it seems likely, it ought to have reappeared with greatly increased dramatic irony.  The refrain is an unusual feature of early British verse:

 

WULF AND EADWACER

 

The carls of my clan would catch him like prey;       [men]

Should he come to camp, they will slay him quickly.

 

We are undone!

 

Wulf is enisled, as I am elsewhere.

My isle is a fastness girdled by fens,

Defended by the fiercest of folk.

Should he come to camp they will kill him surely.

 

We are undone!

 

It was wet weather; I wept at the hearth,

Wondering of Wulf and his wandering afar;

Eadwacer, a chief, chafed and embraced me —

He made me glad, but I grieved as well.

Wulf, my Wulf, my wanting you

Made me heartsick, your seldom coming,

The cave of my breast, not thigh-hunger!             [lust]

 

Do you hearken, Eadwacer?  — our whelp Wulf

Shall take to the forest!  What was never fettered

Is soon untwined, our loins together!

 

We are undone!

 

                  — Anonymous, (v. Wesli Court)

 

          The Old English "Hymn to the Creator" is attributed to Caedmon (d. 690?), the first Anglo-Saxon poet whose name is known.  The form, as in the original, is Anglo-Saxon prosody.  The stichs are broken here into hemistichs at the caesurae and stepped.

 

HYMN TO THE CREATOR

 

Now must we glorify

                           The guardian of Heaven,

The mood of our Maker,

                           The might of His marvels,

Warder of all;

                           How He, of all wonders

Ever Eldlord,

                           Formed the origin.

First he made

                           For the children of men

Heaven's hall —

                           Our holy Author!

Then Midgard,

                           This guardian of mortals —

Eldlord ever,

                           Framed afterward:

This Earth for man,

                           our almighty Maker!

 

                           — Caedmon

          Although the term "pod" in Latin means "foot," and there are no verse feet involved in strong stress prosody, nevertheless "pod" traditionally means "strong accent."  The standard metrical prefixes (mono, 1; di, 2; tri, 3; tetra, 4; penta, 5; hexa, 6; hepta, 7; octa, 8; nona, 9; deca, 10; hendeca, 11) attached to podic will indicate the number of stresses in the stich.  For instance, in the refrain above there are two stresses, on “we” and the second syllable of “undone,” so the meter of the refrain is dipodic.

          One would assume that, because there are four stresses this meter would be “tetrapodic,” but not so: Because of the medial caesura that splits the stich, the meter is dipodic.  If there were no caesura in the stich, then it would be tetrapodic. For further examples of Anglo-Saxon prosody, 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 (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

   

          "The Blacksmiths," a curse from the anonymous Middle English, is, like Piers Plowman and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a late example of Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse.  X. J. Kennedy, in his Tygers of Wrath, says of this version that the translator "has preserved much of the rhythm and alliterative music of his original, from the fifteenth-century Arundel manuscript (3227 in the Index of Middle English Verse)."  The caesurae here are indicated by line breaks rather than by spatial stepping.

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read "The Blacksmiths."

THE BLACKSMITHS

Sooty, swart smiths,   Smattered with smoke,

Drive me to death   With the din of their dents.

Such noise at night   No men heard, never!

What knavish cries   And clattering of knocks!

The crooked cretins   Call out, "Coal, coal!"

And blow their bellows   Till their brains burst:

"Huff, puff!" says that one;   "Haff, paff!" that other.

They spit and sprawl   And spill many spells;

They gnaw and gnash,  They groan together

And hold their heat   With their hard hammers.

Of bullhide are made   Their broad aprons;

Their shanks be shackled   For the fiery flinders;

They've heavy hammers   That are hard-hafted,

Stark strokes   On a steely stump:

LUS, BUS!  LAS, DAS!   Rants the row —

So doleful a dream,   The devil destroy it!

The master lengthens little   And labors less,

Twines a two   And touches a trey:

Tick, tack! hick, hack!   Ticket, tacket! tyke, take!

LUS, BUS!  LAS, DAS! Such lives they lead,

These cobblemares:   Christ give them grief!

May none of these waterburners   By night have his rest!

 

         — Anonymous Middle English author (v. Wesli Court)

 

In this following contemporary poem the lines are stepped at the caesura:

 

FOR A WORDY LADY

 

Grow lax in your larynx,

                                    limp in the tongue,

Madam! Move your mad lips

                                    much less, lose noise!

the volume of your voicebox

                                    is vibrating eardrums

which hitherto hung

                                    in their whorls, happily

contemplating the conundrums

                                    of cornflowers and bees

busy with bushes,

                                    not bitchy with words.

 

Words are a riddle

                                    wrung from the mind

at best; at worst,

                                    they are crusts for the buzzards

of gossip and guilt.

                                    Gusts such as yours

are a riot and roil

                                    of ruthless looseness

signifying nil,

                                    nipping backs

and buttocks with boldness,

                                    banality and tooth.

 

Terseness is wit, lady,

                                    tension is thought.

Vent your venom

                                    on ventilators whose wind

is as constant as yours

                                    and as steady as sin,

or on clocks that course

                                    in constant cycles:

my time is a treasure.

                                    Trifle with hours

of your own, woman!

                                    Word your own woe.

 

                           — Lewis Turco

 

Here are two contemporary poem in Anglo-Saxon prosody, the second in “sonnet” form:

 

     DRAWING IN: AUTUMN

 

     Lone leaf      a stone turned

     lone leaf      a brief burning

     crisp shine      and fine curl

     before the edge     of hoar frost.

 

     Wild lilt      of silt wind,

     darkened sky      mark the change.

     Cat at the door      a fur flurry,

     mad elf, becomes      a homebody.

 

     Ah, old cat      with cold paws,

     fog cool in your coat      eyes remote gold,

     lap seeker      bleak comforter:

     unsing this rain     and bring back

     bright arrogance     expanse of spring

     sun, bold in      the golden window.

     Heavy you lie       and leave me

     weighted with winter      with late thought.

 

                     − Ruth F. Harrison

 

 

THREE VISITORS ON CHRISTMAS EVE

 

Mist on moonspill   as midnight nears.

Adrift but not dreaming,   our drowsy son

is covered and kissed.   At the kitchen door

our basset is barking;    out back coyotes

are standing like statues   down by the dogwoods.

Across the crystal   of crusted snow,

they search for stragglers   who startle and run;

their vigil reveals   no victims this night.

 

Trash would be trouble;   they trot away

unbothered by blood-throated   baying and growling.

No star distracts   their stealthy march;

the highway hums.   They howl through the calm,

then savor new scents   that spice their path

in this world awash   in wonder and wrath.

 

− A. M. Juster

          The English “bob and wheel” is an accentual-syllabic quintet appended as a tail or coda to a stanza of Anglo-Saxon prosody in one Medieval romance in particular, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  The “bob” is a one-or-two-foot line running on (enjambed) from the alliterative accentual stanza, and it is continued by the “wheel,” a quatrain of short lines, generally of three feet, rhyming baba.  The whole quintet “bob and wheel” rhymes ababa, but rhyme does not necessarily appear anywhere in the part of the stanza that is made of Anglo-Saxon prosody. The bob rhymes with lines two and four of the wheel; lines one and three of the wheel rhyme with each other. Gawain is thus a clear example of the old alliterative verse system being deliberately linked to the new accentual-syllabic prosody invented by Chaucer and Gower. It is thus about as clear a transformational poem as anyone might hope to see coming out of the Middle Ages and linking with modernity.

          Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is too long to quote here in its entirety, of course, but this is stanza 25 from the poem in a modern version (the line, “…and of delight” is the “bob”; the rest of that stanza is the “wheel”):

 

From SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT

 

From the deeps of dream   Gawain mumbled,

Suffering stounds of sorrow and worry                        [moments]

That Weird [fate] that day    would wield him death

At the Chapel Green    where the green man

Would deal him death    with a great dunt                   [knock, blow].

Anon our knight    recalled his wits,

Fought his way    from the fens [marshes] of slumber,

Rose fleetly    to attend his fate.

The sweet carline [young woman]   came laughing,

Kissed his face    and fondled him;

Gawain gladly    welcomed her kindness,

Admired her garb,    her glorious hair,

Faultless features    and radiant hue.

Gladness arose    out of his heart.

He took her there    in rapture rare,

In ecstasies   of blissful song

                                          and of delight.

                  They shared this happy state

                           In loving talk and light!

                  What might have been his fate

                           Had Mary not kept her knight?

 

                           — The Gawain Poet, (v. Wesli Court)

 

         Here is a modern poem with a bob and wheel:

 

THE MAGI CAROL

 

Sheep of the fold,   fowls of the storm,

In chill the child,   chaste in His manger —

The kings are coming   to crown a King

And here are we   waiting to welcome

                                                               them together:

                                                                      We wish you joy again,

                                                               Gale, oak and heather,

                                                                      Mistletoe and pine,

                                                               In any winter weather.

 

Bearing gold,   gifts of myrrh,

Of frankincense —   seed of thyme,

Vervaine and thorn,   horn at the Gate —

The Magi move   among the snows

                                                               together:

                                                                      We wish you joy again,

                                                               Gale, oak and heather,

                                                                      Mistletoe and pine,

                                                               In any winter weather.

 

 

Reap the heart   of the hoar oak

With a scythe of ore,  open the Gate

Of the golden Bough,   bend to dream

Before the stable,   the stall of fortune

                                                               all together:

                                                                      We wish you joy again,

                                                               Gale, oak and heather,

                                                                      Mistletoe and pine,

                                                               In any winter weather.

                           — Lewis Turco

 

Suggested writing exercise:

 

Write a stanza or poem in Anglo-Saxon prosody, with or without a bob and wheel.

 

Credits:

 

“The Blacksmiths” by an anonymous Middle English poet, originally appeared in Song, 5, 1978, and was reprinted in Tygers of Wrath, edited by X. J. Kennedy, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1981, and in World Poetry, An Anthology of Verse from Antiquity to Our time, edited by Katharine Washburn and John S. Major, New York: W. W. Norton, 1998; it was gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004.

“For a Wordy Lady” by Lewis Turco first appeared in The Midwest Quarterly, ii:2, 1961.

“Hymn to the Creator” by Caedmon, from the Anglo-Saxon, first appeared in The Davidson Miscellany, xiv:2, Fall 1978, and was collected in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op. cit..

"The Magi Carol” by Lewis Turco appeared in Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., 1973, and was gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op. cit.

“Three Visitors on Christmas Eve” by A. M. Juster is from Filled with Breath: 30 Sonnets by Thirty Poets edited by Mary Meriam, Exot Books 2010.

“The Wife's Complaint,” by an anonymous Anglo-Saxon author, v. Wesli Court, appeared in Poetry Newsletter, No. 46, Spring 1978, and was gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op. cit.

“Wulf and Eadwacer,” from the anonymous Anglo-Saxon, appeared in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000, and was gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, op. cit.

 

All rights reserved by the author(s).

 

 

 

Form of the Week 24 – Genethliacums

         OCCASIONAL POETRY is written to celebrate a particular occasion, such as a marriage (epithalamion, epithalamium, prothalamion), death (elegy, obsequy, ode, threnody), public event (triumphal ode, coronation ode) or person (encomium, pæan, panegyric), or to deliver an apology (palinode). The genethliacum is an occasional poem written in honor of a birth. It may be written in any prosody or in any form, traditional or nonce.  This genethliacum is written in the strong-stress prosody called “podics”; many ballads and nursery rhymes are written in podics -- for more information about this system, see any edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition.

NURSERY RIME[1]

 

                  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.

 

         These next two genethliacums are written in the traditional roundelay form invented by John Dryden in the 18^th century:

 

 

FOR CHRISTOPHER CAMERON TURCO

A Roundelay after Dryden, January 23, 1997

 

Christopher is twenty-four

Upon this January morn.

It makes his father pretty sore,

It leaves his mother looking worn

That they don't see him anymore

Because he's left where he was born:

 

It makes his father pretty sore,

It leaves his mother looking worn.

His sister's settled their old score —

Their sibling feud has been forsworn,

But they don't see him anymore

Because he's left where he was born.

 

His sister's settled their old score;

Their sibling feud has been forsworn.

It makes his father pretty sore,

It leaves his mother looking worn

That they don't see him anymore

Now Chris has left where he was born.

 

His family can but deplore

The way its fabric has been torn.

Christopher is twenty-four

Upon this January morn,

But they don't see him anymore

Since he forsook where he was born.

 

FOR JESSIMA SITI RANNEY

A Roundelay after Dryden, January 23, 1997

 

Jessima is one year old

On this January day.

Yes, the weather's pretty cold,

But we feel as warm as May;

Her father loves her big and bold,

Her mother loves her all the way —

 

Yes, the weather's pretty cold,

But we feel as warm as May:

Grandma will not break her hold,

Granddad's on the floor to play;

Her father loves her big and bold,

Her mother loves her all the way.

 

Grandma will not break her hold,

Granddad's on the floor to play —

Yes, the weather's pretty cold,

But we feel as warm as May:

Her father loves her big and bold,

Her mother loves her all the way —

 

Oh, the stories to be told!

Oh, the songs to sing and say!

Jessima’s a whole year old

On this cold and blowy day.

Her father loves her big and bold,

And mother loves her all the way.

 

These three genethliacums are written in the verse form called the rubliw which was invented by Richard Wilbur in the 20^th century:

 

RUBLIW FOR HAMLET ON HIS 400TH BIRTHDAY

 

            Dear Ham,

         I guess I am

      just about as damn

  full of you as any clam

is full of stuffing. I simply cannot cram

   you down past my diaphragm —

      not another gram.

         I wish you’d scram,

            you ham!

 

RUBLIW FOR MARGARET GROUT

On Her 100^th Birthday.

 

            Dear Mar-

         garet, you are

      without doubt, by far

   a century’s most shining star.

independent of the calendar,

   here is a ringing reservoir

      of lovesong poured afar

         from an Alcazar

            guitar.

 

RUBLIW FOR GEORGE O’CONNELL

On His Birthday, 16 October 2000

 

            Dear George,

         It would be gorg-

      eous to do as the Borg-

   ias did and take a meal to gorge

us all on your birthday. It will forge

   a closer bond among us four

      “jest folks.” Who could want more,

         George? Be food’s scourge —

            engorge!

 

         Here is another birthday poem for George O'Connell, but this is a limerick:

 

GEORGE O’CONNELL

October 16, 2009

 

The printmaking artist named George

O’Connell was apt to disgorge

          Jazz pictures of ladies

          Erupting from Hades

And Satan’s most blistering forge.

 

This birthday poem is written in the traditional form called common octave, which is the quatrain stanza called common measure doubled:

 

GENETHLIACUM FOR GEORGE O’CONNELL

October 16, 2012

 

George’s birthday is this week,

He’s turning eighty-six.

I doubt I could administer

Half that many licks,

Or light that many candles on

A largish birthday cake

Before we’d all be standing in

A waxen burning lake.

 

So I am simply going to

Write these simple rhymes

And wish him well and many more --

Okay, A few more times

Like this one where we four have come

Together for a sharing

Of a meal, a drink, a laugh,

And a ritual of caring.

 

         This poem is written in iambic tetrameter lines, most of which are couplets, called “short couplets,” but not all of them:

 

A GENETHLIACUM FOR GARY GETCHELL

November 20, 1995

 

Gary Getchell’s turning seventy –

It seems more like a thousand-leventy.

His father, Ray, was a restless itch,

Which makes Gary a son-of-an-itch.

Jean, my wife, held her cousin in awe,

And I, his ancient cousin-in-law

Have had to swallow an incredible crawful

Over the years, so I do what’s in-lawful

And hold that he’s just somebody awful

Nice when he’s not feeling above it,

Which isn’t often, so I tell him to shove it

Into a corner and then forget it,

But does he do it? Never. He won’t quit

Being a fellow who’s forever noisome:

Smelly, you know, not to mention annoysome.

 

I don’t know how Judy, his long-suffering wife,

Has managed somehow to get on with her life

As well as she has, what with Gary’s gout,

His penchant for “projects” that seldom work out:

The studio gear, the outdoor umbrella

With table that he said could make a poor fella

Richer than Midas, or even than Croesus,

But did it? Ask Judy and she’ll holler “Jesus!

He’s driving me bonkers, he’s driving me wacky

With all these ideas that sound so damn tacky

That I could just scream.” She pauses, then does so,

Using her lung-power with a good deal of gusto.

 

Now he’s retired, so he’s asked for a hand up

From Judy the Sturdy so he can do stand-up

Saturday evenings, serve on the school board

And listen to speeches so he can be bored,

Call on his relatives to come break an arm

While erecting his opulent barn

And so on and so on. Well I could continue,

But as we can see, here’s a retinue

Who’d like to get up and give Gary a roasting.

I’ll build a pyre outdoors for his toasting.

 

         Finally, here is a poem written in a nonce (invented for the occasion) form:

 

RICHARD WILBUR ON HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY[2]

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem on Richard Wilbur

 

Oh, if your name were only “Wilver,”

         With a v instead of b,

There would be a lot less silver

         On this head of mine. You’d see

                  Brown again — some gray, at least.

                  For sure, perhaps, I’d be well fleeced

 

The way I was when we were younger...,

         But you seem not to have grown old.

What’s going on, you ballad-monger?

         Who is this fellow I behold

                  Now and again and here and there,

                  This tall, good-looking guy with hair?

 

If my old cat saw Richard Wilbur

         I know exactly what she’d do

If she were young, too, and could still purr:

         She’d climb up in your lap and mew,

                  And then she’d settle down and choose

         To await the arrival of your Muse

         (Although she’d probably spell it "Mews").

 _____

[1]"Nursery Rime" was first published in Prairie Schooner, xxxviii:3, Fall 1964 and gathered in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004.

[2]“Richard Wilbur on His 80^th Birthday” first appeared in print in Mea’sure, Winter issue 2012, forthcoming.

All poems copyright © Lewis Turco 2012, all rights reserved,.

 

Suggested writing exercise:

 

Write a birthday poem for someone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Form of the Week 22 – The Hypallogo

           Last week, while we were working on “Form of the Week 21 – The Octo,” Jack Foley wrote, “I call what I did to Clara's poem ‘writing between the lines.’ Here's the way they should look -- and here is the title for each:”

 

ELEGY TO A LOST NECKLACE

 

Small aqua star gleamed on my throat

Held by a string of naked beads

Stunning in its simplicity

Now the bell tolls for it is lost

The one necklace I treasured most

Memory of its simplicity

Held by a string of naked beads

Small star, gleaming, in dark unknown

 

 -- Clara Hsu

 

ELEGY TO A LOST NECKLACE

/ A NECKLACE OF WORDS 

 

Small aqua star gleamed on my throat

            Here, take this, a necklace of words

Held by a string of naked beads

            Sorrow for the lost aqua star

Stunning in its simplicity

            I saw you wear it more than once

Now the bell tolls for it is lost

            But beyond the fact of seeing

The one necklace I treasured most

            “Things” take on our deeper being

Memory of its simplicity

            I saw you wear it more than once

Held by a string of naked beads

            Sorrow for the sweet aqua star

Small star, gleaming, in dark unknown

            Here, take this, a necklace of words

 

-- Clara Hsu / Jack Foley

 

          The technical term for what Jack calls “writing between the lines” is “interlineation.” If one were to write a poem, transform each line through hypallage, and then interline the two versions, one would have written what I call, in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition, a “hypallogo.”  

          “Hypallage” is an exchange of words in phrases or clauses, and it is sometimes used humorously: “I smell a smile; will she rat on me?” instead of I smell a rat; will she smile on me?  The disjuncture caused by the interlined lines of a hypallogo allows them to work ambiguously on more than one associative level,

          The following poem became a hypallogo accidentally, for it was meant simply to illustrate the use of hypallage in an old textbook I wrote years ago that was titled Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, but some poets decided it was a form in its own right.

 

          The hypallogo is a more or less “normal” poem (there are no specified stanzaic or metrical requirements). The lines in roman print below are the original version, the italicized lines are those that are revised by hypallage, and the lines in italics can themselves be extracted and put together to form a third poem:

 

WHITE FOR WEATHER WORDS

For d. a. levy

 

On a gross day, in a green month

On a green month, in a gross day,

 

once, a child was Summer’s lover.

A child was once Summer’s lover.

 

She, heavy with worlds, sent

She with worlds sent, heavy

 

the child bouquets of amber light. Giver

giver, the child light: bouquets of amber

 

and taker, she tossed him petals;

and she tossed him petals. Taker,

 

in good barter he gave his leman

he gave his good leman in barter

 

words shaped like flesh

flesh like shaped words

 

of fruits: sweet peach, tart lemon,

sweet of fruits: peach, lemon, tart

 

berryheart whose vine goes

vine whose berryheart goes

 

twining with grass. She gave

with grass. She gave twining

 

him this too: a grassblade made

too a grassblade, made him this

 

the frost’s sickle, luch love

frost’s love, the lush sickle

 

turned root rape, the maggot’s

root turned the maggot’s rape,

 

carnal slither. No matter. Her

no carnal matter. Her slither

 

kiss was decay. Still, his songs

was his still kiss. Songs decay

 

weather the winter.

the winter weather.

 

== Lewis Turco

 

Suggested Writing Exercise: 

          Write a hypollogo by interlining one of your own poems with lines transformed by hypallage, or write a poem of your own in answer to someone else’s poem, as Jack Foley did, and interline the two. Or do both, maybe.

Form of the Week 21: The Octo

 

Jack Foley

Recently Jack Foley wrote to tell me about a verse form called the “octo” which he thought might have been invented by Nina Serrano. He included a poem by Ms. Serrano:

 

MOON

 

The moon the smallest silver slice

the last sliver on the night’s plate

laid on a star studded table-cloth [syllable count: 9]

a late night snack set for dreaming

The day’s reordered scheming [syllable count: 7]

laid on a star studded table cloth [syllable count 9]

The last sliver on the night’s plate

The moon the smallest silver slice.

 

© Nina Serrano, 2010

 

This normative syllabic verse form consists of eight lines (an octave), each line being octosyllabic (eight syllables in length). Lines 4 and 5 rhyme, lines 1, 2, and 3 are repeated in reverse order as lines six, seven and eight.

The Serrano poem was a bit inconsistent with the description in that lines three and six (which is line three repeated) were one syllable too long, and line five was one syllable short. Here is a diagram of the scheme as it is described:

Lines     Syllables    Rhymes and repeated lines (caps):

1. x x x x x x x A
2. x x x x x x x B
3. x x x x x x x C
4. x x x x x x x d
5. x x x x x x x d
6. x x x x x x x C
7. x x x x x x x B
8. x x x x x x x A 

When I contacted Nina Serrano she replied to my query, “I don't think i invented the form, though I might have been using a variant unwittingly and been spreading it around to friends and poetry reading participants. Before I dare take any credit for this [form] I am going to check my possible source. I remember going to Dena Taylor's retirement party where she and friends read poems and I may have asked them about the form and this is where it may have entered my life. I will call Dena today and check this out as it is a hazy memory.”

Nina has not yet gotten back to me, but Jack sent some octos of his own:

 

NINA SERRANO

God bless her, Nina Serrano,

She writes octos lickety split!

I wrote to Nina Serrano

Asking her what octos might be

She explained the form patiently

I wrote to Nina Serrano,

I wrote octos lickety split.

God bless her, Nina Serrano!

 

Jack Foley

 

 

POEM

 

In the gray sky some little light               

Strikes my heart as I sit moping.

Is it the thought of poetry?

A deep heaviness descended

Then the feeling sweetly ended.

Is it the thought of poetry

Strikes my heart as I sit moping?

In the gray sky some little light.

 

Jack Foley

 

This one uses incremental repetition:

 

OCTO FOR AN OCTOGENARIAN

For Michael McClure 

 

How does one celebrate genius?

Turn round: go West or else go East

Dōgen and Meister Eckhart meet

Don’t strive: what is there to attain?

This universe is right as rain

Dōgen and Meister Eckhart meet

Poetry goes both West and East

Celebrate deep mammal genius.

 

Jack Foley

 

And here is an octo that has more rhymes than are called for:

 

GOING SOUTH

 

There’s nothing to hold onto yet.

The quiet sounds louder at night.

A bouquet of expectations

Weeps for a bird’s recitation

This season speaks of migrations.

A bouquet of expectations.

The quiet sounds louder at night.

There’s nothing to hold onto yet.

 

Mary-Marcia Casoly

 

AN OCTO FOR THE TURK     Lewis Turco writes formal poems He writes with great wit and brio And Lewis has a pseudonym: If at times you wonder who is Wesli Court, you’ll find it’s Lewis: This anagram, this pseudonym, Court, writes with great wit and brio. Wesli Court, too, writes formal poems. Jack Foley SANDY: An Octo October 29, 2012   The storm is rolling up the coast Pushing the sea ahead of it, Lifting the ocean into clouds, Dropping lakes on field and dwelling Alike and immensely swelling, Lifting the ocean into clouds, Pushing the sea ahead of it -- The storm is rolling up the coast.   Wesli Court   Lew, two more--stop me before I write another!    ALL SAINTS DAY   She walks to the cemetery To see what "action" may be there What kind of "action" does she wish? They "rise," the dead do, sometimes there And shamble to the city square What kind of "action" would she wish To see--what "action" may be there?  Dead walk in the cemetery.   -- Jack Foley     BREAST MAN   I am thinking of your breasts, dear (Both the right one and the left one), Oh, how beautiful your breasts are! How thrilling they are to the touch! Ah, do I think of them too much? No: how beautiful your breasts are (Both the right one and the left one) I am thinking of your breasts, dear.   -- Jack Foley   Wow, Jack! Now I’m receiving them two abreast!   Lew   OCTO FOR THE OLD DAME Catrina, lady of the skull lady of uneasy laughter how your teeth gleam in the sunlight Posada knew you, drew you well knew you could not be held by Hell see, your teeth gleam in the sunlight lady of uneasy laughter Catrina, darling, heh heh, skull.

Suggested Writing Exercise:

Write an octo or two [everybody except Jack Foley].

 

All poems are coyright © 2012 by their authors; all rights reserved.

 

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.

 

Form of the Week 17 – The Descort

THE DESCORT

 By Tad Richards

At the encouragement of Lewis Turco, for the fourth edition of his Book of Forms, I tried my hand at writing a descort — a form characterized by its infidelity to any one form. Each stanza is written in a recognizable form, but a different one. Lew said that he had never actually seen one, so my entry didn't have much competition.

A little research into the form: there is actually a Wikipedia entry on it, in which the invention of the descort is credited to Garin d'Apchier, whose exact dates are lost to history, but he did write the first descort, and I would share it with you, but it, too, is lost.

Gautier de Dargies, for whom we do have approximate dates, ca. 1170 — ca. 1240 (he lived to be approximately 70, a ripe old age in those days), is said to have written three descorts.

Dargies has his own Facebook page, which I am the only person, as of this writing, to like.

Here's one by Raimbaut de Vaqueiras (1180-1207). It's written in a variant of the form — each stanza is in the same verse form, but in a different language. And it's quite beautiful. English translations are interspersed between the verses.

 

Eras quan vey verdeyar

Pratz e vergiers e boscatges,

Vuelh un descort comensar

D'amor, per qu'ieu vauc aratges;

Q'una dona.m sol amar,

Mas camjatz l'es sos coratges,

Per qu'ieu fauc dezacordar

Los motz e.ls sos e.ls lenguatges.

 

[Now that I see becoming verdant

lawns and bowers and woods,

I want to begin a contrast

about love, on whose account I am distraught;

for a lady used to love me,

but her mind has changed

and therefore I sow enmity

among the words, the sounds and the languages.]

 

Io son quel que ben non aio

Ni jamai non l'averò,

Ni per april ni per maio,

Si per ma donna non l'o;

Certo que en so lengaio

Sa gran beutà dir non sò,

çhu fresca qe flor de glaio,

Per qe no m'en partirò.

 

[I am the one who have no good

nor ever shall I have it,

either in April or in May,

unless I have it through my lady.

True, in her own language

I cannot describe her great beauty,

fresher than gladiolus' flower,

the reason of my persistence.]

 

Belle douce dame chiere,

A vos mi doin e m'otroi;

Je n'avrai mes joi' entiere

Si je n'ai vos e vos moi.

Mot estes male guerriere

Si je muer per bone foi;

Mes ja per nulle maniere

No.m partrai de vostre loi.

 

[Fair, sweet dear lady,

to you I give and give up myself;

I shan't have my whole joy

unless I have you and you me.

You are a most treacherous enemy,

if I die through my good faith;

but still, there is no way

I shall part from your dominion.]

 

Dauna, io mi rent a bos,

Coar sotz la mes bon' e bera

Q'anc fos, e gaillard' e pros,

Ab que no.m hossetz tan hera.

Mout abetz beras haisos

E color hresc' e noera.

Boste son, e si.bs agos

No.m destrengora hiera.

 

[Lady, I surrender to you

as you're the best and truest

that ever was, and sprightly and valiant,

if only you weren't so cruel to me.

Most fair are your features

and fresh and lively your hue.

I am yours, and if I had you,

nothing would be lacking to me.]

 

Mas tan temo vostro preito,

Todo.n son escarmentado.

Por vos ei pen' e maltreito

E meo corpo lazerado:

La noit, can jatz en meu leito,

So mochas vetz resperado;

E car nonca m'aprofeito

Falid' ei en mon cuidado.

 

[But so much I fear your anger

that I am in complete despair;

for you I have toil and torture

and my body is racked:

at night, when I lay in bed,

I am awoken many a time;

and since I gain no good for myself,

I have failed in my intent.]

 

Belhs Cavaliers, tant es car

Lo vostr' onratz senhoratges

Que cada jorno m'esglaio.

Oi me lasso que farò

Si sele que j'ai plus chiere

Me tue, ne sai por quoi?

Ma dauna, he que dey bos

Ni peu cap santa Quitera,

Mon corasso m'avetz treito

E mot gen favlan furtado.

 

[Fair Knight, so precious is

your honoured thrall

that every day I despair.

Alas, what shall I do

if she whom I call my dearest

kills me, I know not why?

My lady, by my faith in you

and by the head of Saint Quiteria,

you have taken away my heart,

and stolen it by most sweet talk.]

English translation follows each stanza.  The original is in Provençal, Italian, French, Gascon and Galician respectively. In the envoi, the five languages are mixed together.

I did find one contemporary descort, in Drunken Boat. it's pretty good, and for some reason is unsigned.

—     Tad Richards

 

NOTE: I tried to access Drunken Boat but was unable to do so. Therefore, Tad Richards’ poem, “Descort: Dupree Variations,” is the only published English language example of the form, to the best of my knowledge. It may be found on pp. 185-187 of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition, 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.

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.