Odd and Invented Forms

Villanelles

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

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

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

LISTEN TO WESLI COURT READ HIS POEM Thunderweather

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

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

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

 

On Glose Variations: Aiken and Rutsala

 

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

 

ELEGY ON EIGHT LINES BY CONRAD AIKEN

from A Letter from Li Po

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Elegy on Eight Lines

 

 

There is a silence lying on the air

And on the carpet of muted hue and weave

Beneath the desk.  Upon the desk there lies

A letter long as time and deep as love.

 

Whom is the missive from, to whom addressed?

What are these words that one can scarcely say

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

That lightning-stroke which in your dream you saw?

 

Have I directed these syllables to you,

Or are they yours addressed to me?  A glove

Has fallen on a page to contemplate

Dust on the doorsill or an ink-stained sleeve.

 

The moon pours through the window streaked and cracked,

Flows over a ragged dike of books to lave

The pen of shadow spinning its spider thread,

And with it all its local web of love.

 

Beyond the window, in the meadow there

Where entropy dissolves the evening chord

Against the sky, the letter comes to life:

The song is in the peach tree and the ear.

 

The room sinks farther into stillness where

It mulls the meaning of its monotone.

Night has written itself upon the leaves;

The singer holds his phrase, the rising moon

 

Which scratches its arc among the hieroglyphs

Scrawled upon the dark.  What is the word

The world attempts to sing in letters, leaves?

Among the leaves we are the hidden bird;

 

We are the arching moon, the night descending

Among our limbs throughout long ages starred,

Destined to wither sere and still at last,

And with the falling leaf the falling bird.

 

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

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

 

DEJA-VU

On four lines by Vern Rutsala

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem  Deja-vu

The evening is carved of light.

One has watched here before, the view

of this bracken-edged meadow, the heather

lofting plumes into dusklight out of shadows.

 

One wonders what he has sought

in the meadows of deja-vu,

and on what occasions he has weathered

these asides of recall — and were there others?

 

For here an uncertain sleight

of sunlight settles itself like vows —

in the broken fields of sons and fathers —

taken, broken, retaken.  Darkness stammers,

 

the linnet has gone to flight;

hours have fallen to clay review

and have sprung again.  Out of ashen feathers

ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.

 

The evening is carved of light.

In the meadows of deja-vu,

in the broken fields of sons and fathers,

ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.

 

 

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

 

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

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

 

 

Plowing the "Free Verse" Field

 

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

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

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

 

Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale

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

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

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

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

 

Aye, beshrew you, by my oath,

These wanton clerks are never loath!

Be off! Be off, my popinjay,

What, will ye do nothing but play?

Tilly vally, straw, let be I say!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

By God, ye be a pretty toad,

And I love you a whole cart-load,

Straw, James Fodder, you play it shrewd,

I am no hackney for your rod:

Go watch a bull, your back is broad!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Surely you deal discourteously;

What, would ye frumple me? Now fie!

What, shall you be my piglet’s sty?

By Christ, ye shall not, not hardly:

You’ll not bejape me bodily!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

Just walk away, you cost me naught;

Now I have found what I have sought:

The best cheap flesh that ever I bought.

Yet for His love that all hath wrought,

Wed me, or I’ll die at the thought.

Gup, Christian Clout, your breath is stale!

Go, Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale!

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

With Mannerly Margery Milk and Ale.

 

— John Skelton

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

Considering the Sestina

 

 

 

On Monday the 20^th of September 2010 I had an engagement at the school where I taught for thirty-one years before my retirement in 1996, the State University of New York College at Oswego, to talk to Leigh Allison Wilson’s “Living Writers” class about poetry and to read from the new collection by my pseudonymous alter-ego “Wesli Court,” some of the poems in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems,¹ that the students had already read. I began with a question I used to ask on the first day of the semester in my Nature of Poetry class: “How many of you studied poetry in high school? Please raise your hands.”

In those days, especially toward the end of my teaching career, if any hands went up they would be few. In Leigh’s class, which was quite large (there were visitors as well), a lot of hands went up. “Wow,” I said, “Things have changed.” That is so partly, I think, because of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, published originally in 1968.² It has become known since then as “the poet’s bible.” For a very long time it was the only text-reference like it in print, it was an easily-available paperback, and it was used by several generations of poets young and old, including Richard Wilbur and James Dickey who in an unsolicited cover blurb wrote, “Belongs in the hands of every poet, student, and teacher, for the greater good of the art.”

One member of Prof. Wilson’s class, a young woman, asked me about my sestina. I asked her which one, because there are several sestinas in the book. She said, “The one titled ‘Sestina.’” That surprised me because it wasn’t one of the assigned poems. A couple of days later, not knowing exactly how many sestinas there actually are in the collection, I counted them. There are seven! — “The Obsession,” which is a variant sestina; “The Dead Letter Office,” a rhymed sestina without an envoy; “The Day We Bombed the Moon (and Barack Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize)”; “Tsunami”; “Double Vision,” which is a double sestina made up of two originally titled (but not in the book) “The Vision” and “Second Sight”; and, of course, “Sestina.”

What I replied to the student’s question was, “That poem is at the opposite end of the spectrum” (I meant, “technically,”) from the first sestina in the book, ‘The Obsession.’” If I’d had the time, I would have liked to explain myself at greater length, because both sestinas are obsessive, but in quite different ways.

In both my own Book of Forms, Third Edition (2000)² and in An Exaltation of Forms by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes (2002) for which I edited the section on the sestina, I wrote that the form is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante from whom it received its Italian name. The popularity of the poem in English is primarily a 19th century phenomenon in the U. K., and a 20^th century phenomenon in the United States.

The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first sestet stanza are repeated in a specific order as teleutons in the five succeeding sestets. In English-language tradition the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters, though it may also be written in any specific line length. In the original edition of The Book of Forms I wrote, “lines may be of any length.” I meant any single length, not “of any lengths, but people do not read carefully; therefore, I had to be more specific in subsequent editions because I began to see sestinas written in varying line lengths, including once in The London Times Literary Supplement, which astonished me, but before my book came out Donald justice had written a sestina with varying line lengths, as noted below, so perhaps I wasn’t entirely to blame. And, of course, ultimately any poet may use poetic license to do any damn thing he or she pleases.

The thirty-nine lines of the sestina are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi). In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing, each line. The order in which the end-words are repeated appears to have its roots in numerology, but what the mathematical significance of the pattern originally was now is unknown. The sequence of numbers is 6-1-5-2-4-3. Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted sequentially ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3.

If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters in this case signify repeated words, not whole refrain lines) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The reader will usually be unable to miss the fact that the last teleuton in the sixth line of each sestet stanza is also the last teleuton of the first line of the succeeding stanza. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.

In his “Foreword” to my First Poems (1960)³ Donald Justice wrote, “…part of Lewis Turco's exuberance, which is everywhere in evidence, is a matter of technique.  No reader can avoid noticing the variety of forms here.  There are sapphics, several of the French forms, sonnets, syllabics, and a number of what this young poet, who originated the form, calls "triversens," or triple-verse-sentences; curiously, no villanelles, no sestinas, fashionable forms at the moment.”⁴ Eight years later, in a collection of quantitative syllabic poems titled Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968⁵ I sneaked into the book my first sestina, “The Forest of My Seasons,” which I disguised by indenting the lines, as the other poems in the book were indented in order to indicate corresponding syllabic line-lengths.² My sestina was written in decasyllabics, so there was no real reason to indent any of the lines except for purposes of deception, and there is no reason for me to indent here. Over the years a few people have noticed that the poem is a sestina, but not many.

The primary problem that poets encounter with the sestina is, generally, that the repeated end-words can be obtrusive. To draw the reader's attention away from the repetitions, poets may enjamb their lines so that sentences and phrases are not end-stopped on the teleutons; or they may use, on occasion, homographs of the end-words, like wind (as in "south wind") and wind (as in "wind your own clock"), or even such ploys as repeating one word, such as can, as part of another word, like toucan, as I did:

 

THE FOREST OF MY SEASONS

 

Desire today is a cavern of snow;

ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.

Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns

rampant on a field vert under the woods

quartered in a southern compass.  Toucan

tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,

 

threatening rupture.  Poet, draw your shade

today upon a mirror made of snow

shadowed.  Men may hibernate if bears can.

Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind

till it may be harried awake by wood-

pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —

 

Too many words, like girdles built of horn,

confined in an attic.  How to say “shade”

but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood

laid for light to walk on; and to have snow

imply more than God's linoleum.  Wind

is wind, but direction matters.  Who can

 

help me?  Where's my muse today?  Shake your can,

you errant Echo, and get home.  My horns

sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind

your own clock and make love with your own shade

someplace up a cavern or down the snow

where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

 

The forest of my seasons grows strange woods

sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,

not as it ought.  My pen is cold as snow:

its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns

of silence.  Lie you down, lie down in shade,

word-warbler.  Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

 

And while you sleep, dream.  Dream of the south wind

needling you awake with slivers of woods:

birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;

oak on the white hillside.  Dream, if you can,

of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns

blown to silence.  Dream no longer of snow,

 

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can

to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.

There will be tonics.  It's time for shades now.

 

Of course, one can go the other way and use the teleutons obsessively for particular effect, which is what Wesli Court did in that poem Wilson’s student asked about. In fact, I doubt that repetition in the sestina can be carried any further than in this metapoem — “metapoetry” is poetry about poetry — which obviously violates the rule that each of the six teleutons must be different from the others.

  

SESTINA

 

It drives you crazy to write a sestina.

First off, in order to write a sestina

you need six end-words that don’t shout, “Sestina!”

One should hide the fact that it’s a sestina

you’re writing. I mean, why holler “Sestina!”

if you don’t have to? Why give the sestina

 

game away right away? For a sestina

needs to be a subtle thing. A sestina

should lead readers away from the sestina,

make them think, “This is no kind of sestina,

it’s a sixteener, maybe, no sestina

sustaining itself on sestets. Sestina

 

indeed! I don’t believe it. A sestina

doesn’t announce itself, “I’m a sestina,

no less! I live on end-words, a sestina

to end sestinas! I’m a sustainer

of sounds, echoes of a choral Sistiner

bouncing off Michaelangelo sixteen or

 

so ways from Rome to Nome.” A fine sestina

that would be. Thirty-nine lines of sestina

mumbling into the reader’s ear, “Sestina,

sestina, sestina.” Who could sustain a

poem like that for so long? A sestina

ought perhaps to read more like a sonetto

 

rispetto than like what it is. Sestina

end-words are teleutons, and a sestina

should tell you tons about what a sestina

is all about. Certainly, a sestina

is about disguise, subtlety, sestina

reticence, reluctance to be sestina-

 

like. Rather, it ought to be a soul-stainer,

nuanced, a mind-mellower. A sestina

ought not to be the thing, just the sustainer

of thingness in the memory. Sestina

is teleutonals, not end-words. Sestina

is an earful of sense, not a sestina

 

ending in a coda that says sestina,

repeating end-words, sestina, sestina,

sestina, and a final time, sestina!

 

    In 1979 Wesli Court took advantage of the obsessive quality of the sestina's repetitions in "The Obsession," one of the poems in a sequence first collected in The Gathering titled “Letters to the Dead” which rings the changes on the rhymed iambic pentameter sestet. The first line of "The Obsession" contains all six of the end-words, and the same basic line is repeated incrementally as the first line of succeeding stanzas. Each time the line is repeated the syntax is transposed by hypallage, an exchange of words in phrases or clauses as in E. E. Cummings' poem, "anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so floating many bells down" instead of “anyone lived in how pretty a town / with so many bells floating up, down.” I would use hypallage later on in another sestina, “Tsunami,” where the dislocation of normal syntax is meant to show confusion, but the line repeated in “The Obsession” always makes sense despite the inverted syntax.

Because all six end-words do appear in this line, a particular problem arises at the envoy, for it cannot be of three lines.  Instead, the refrain line reappears a seventh time as a one-line envoy rather than as the normal triplet, but with the sense of the original first line reversed.

  

THE OBSESSION

 

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen.  He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

I greeted him.  I said, "How are you, father?"

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

We were together, older than when he'd died —

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror.  He looked his last

Into the glass and kissed it.  He saw he'd died.

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell.  I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

 

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so.  But what was it I dreamed

In fact?  An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream?  Who was it died

 

Again last night?  I dreamed my father died,

But it was not he — it was not my father,

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

Whose is it, his or mine?  Who dreams he dreamed?

 

My father died.  Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands.  And when at last

He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

Download The Obsession read by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court

When I replied to the question posed by Prof. Wilson’s student I meant that the poem titled simply “Sestina” is technically at the opposite end of the spectrum from “The Obsession” because the word “sestina” itself is used like a sledge-hammer in the former poem whereas in the latter poem the sestina verse form is used to show the nature of obsession as it is manifested in a recurring dream or “dream vision.”

 The oldest British example of the sestina — a double sestina, actually — is by Sir Philip Sidney, "You Goat-Herd Gods," from his 16th century Arcadia. It is not merely a double sestina (twelve sestet stanzas rather than six), but a pastoral dialogue or eclogue as well. Here is my own — I should say, “Wesli Court’s” — double sestina from The Gathering, a monologue rather than a dialogue:

  

DOUBLE VISION

A Double Sestina

 

                                    I.

 

It came upon me while I was on the crapper

of my father’s parsonage, my eyes

boring into the porcelain of the tiles

before me on the wall.  The tiles were white.

They spread across the vacancy of time

That seeped into my mind and filled that blank

 

jug of puberty with a vast Mont Blanc

of sorrow and ennui. On that crapper

I saw that I would have to fill up time

with something more than the nothing that met my eyes,

the emptiness that seeped out of those white

ranges of porcelain whose trackless tiles

 

led finally to death. I feared those tiles

worse than I feared my death, that ultimate blank-

ness waiting for me on the snowy white

crest of age. I saw life was a crapper

that had to be filled with something. If I closed my eyes

perhaps I could dream myself to a better time

 

than this one snowing before me. There was no time

to dream. What could I do? I could fill tiles

with words. I could write. I filled my eyes

with reading every day; I could fill blank

sheets with my own words. I rose off that crapper

thinking I might pave my way with white

 

sheaves laden with stories, poems — I could write

my way to death by filling my living tome

with endless lines of type till I came-a-cropper

at last and alas! perhaps, on the devil’s tines,

if I kept my gaze steady and didn’t blink,

and if I did not try to romanticize

 

my life with gods and demons, with the sighs

of wishful thinking, with the little white

lies of religion that covered up the blank

of existence with the stuff that fills a crapper.

I pulled myself out of the abyss of tiles

Ready to take on life and move in time.

 

I’d use my eyes to read. Perhaps in time

I’d use those words to write, to fill up tiles

With something more than blankness on that crapper.

 

 

                                    II.

 

So that is what I’ve done. I’ve been the croupier

in life’s casino to this point, with ice

in my arteries. My column of tales

and songs has risen to a decent height

and I am old at last, although not tame

as maybe I should be. But I won’t blink

 

at this point, for why should I wish to blink?

I’ve been raking in what a good croupier

rakes in — coin of the realm like leaves of thyme,

minutes and moments that one can use to spice

the pot of emptiness when it gains heat

enough to flavor these mortal tales

 

that I’ve been cooking up. There’s nothing stales

a blend of blandishments quick as a blink

faster than losing interest at its height

even as one’s flesh grows crepier

with every year and hour. So, throw some ice

into the mix, perhaps, but never tame

 

the cold gazpacho one swallows nigh the tomb.

Trade the rake for a ladle, but keep those tales

swirling about in that bucket of mordant ice

and, before your readers can even blink,

serve it like a waiter, not a croupier,

when the flavor has hit its tasteful height.

 

Some folk feel that life is just a hoot,

a game of chance played with a friendly team

and not alone with “God” as one’s croupier

dressed in cummerbund and a set of tails

spinning the wheel. Before you can even blink,

the game is done and you are soused with ice

 

dumped on you by the “team.” You make your choice,

and if you manage to gain a little height

you place your bet, the wheel whirrs — if you blink

(or even if you don’t) the suave croupier

pushes over your pile of songs and tales

and you find out there is no game or team,

 

there’s only ice that chills you till you’re tame

and lowered by that croupier from about man’s height —

he doesn’t blink and he will tell no tales.

  

In the 19th century Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote another double sestina titled "The Complaint of Lisa." Swinburne rhymed his poem titled “Sestina” ababab, turning its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increasing the difficulty of the form, but some of the earliest French and Italian sestinas also rhymed, so this was not really an experiment.

Here is a rhyming sestina without an envoi, also from “Letters to the Dead” in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems. The italics in “The Dead Letter Office” indicate narrative rather than epistolary monologue as in “The Obsession” which is part of the same series and is not italicized.  It begins with an envelope sestet which rhymes abccba rather than ababab, but of course unlike Swinburne’s Sicilian sestets this rhyme scheme changes as the stanzas proceed, although the rhyme words stay the same:

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

 

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

For a sure and certain doubt?  He sighs.  It seems

There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets.  Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards.  "Is this the doom

Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him.  Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads.  What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Swinburne, also wrote a "Sestina," and, as sometimes was the fashion, he italicized the teleutons. Not long after the turn of the 20th century Ezra Pound returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote the monologue "Sestina: Altaforte"; this, together with his "Sestina for Isolt," set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas in America.

In his "Age and Indifferent Clouds" Harry Mathews deliberately used such words as "hippopotamus" and "bronchitis," thus drawing the reader's attention to the teleutons rather than away from them, and the beginnings of the lines doubled the difficulty by making puns and ringing variations on six herbs and plants, which might go unnoticed because the end-words take so much of the reader's attention. Here is a Court sestina from Gathering that does similar things:

  

THE DAY WE BOMBED THE MOON (AND BARACK OBAMA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE), A SESTINA

 

October ninth, 2009, we sent

A rocket off to Luna. We meant to bomb her

Into submission? No, our good intent:

To blow up surface dust to test for ice.

On the same day the Nobel Prize Committee

Amazed the world by bestowing its amity

 

Award upon a tyro. A calamity,

It seemed to some — an evil precedent

Imposed upon America by committee.

They gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama!

Many Republicans needed to ask for ice-

Water and Schnapps, or even an oxygen tent.

 

No one had dreamed an explosion of this extent

Could blow moondust in the face of amity

Around the House and Senate. It wasn’t nice

That those Norse should cause old pols to resent

Explosive love. It was a suicide bomber

NASA sent to ruin comity —

 

If not around the world, the R. N. C.

At the very least. Gaddafi in his tent

Celebrated Luna’s death. “Embalm her!”

Was his battle cry, his enmity

For  global infidelity was sent

To Cocoa, Florida, well-packed in ice.

 

 But NASA said, “It isn’t very nice

To imply we had an impact on the Committee

Rather than the moon! Our bomb was sent

Out into space. We’re not incompetent!”

Meanwhile, a wave of pure tsunamity

Engulfed the Oval Office, and Obama,

 

Although surprised himself, felt like the balm or

Salve of sweet salvation in a trice

Had rehabilitated amity,

Restored a modicum of comity

To the world at large to some extent,

One could sense the very aloe’s scent.

 

Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee,

And malcontents hope NASA finds its ice,

But what price amity amid dissent?

 

Download The Day We Bombed the Moon read by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court

Donald Justice's "Sestina: Here in Katmandu" has no envoy and its line-lengths vary, generally between four stresses and one, and Alan Ansen's "A Fit of Something Against Something" is a “diminishing sestina" which starts out normally but then begins to lose words until in the envoy all that's left are the teleutons of each line. Here is a Court sestina, “Tsunami,” from Gathering that incorporates the rhetorical device called hypallage (defined above) to mimic the effect of the wave:

 

TSUNAMI

 

The world was washed away by a wall of water

That first became the horizon: a rising wall

That pulled the shallows outward and away

From the shores. The coastal sealife washed

Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was

Stillness everywhere, and then the world

 

Listened to a roar that became the world,

The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water

Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was

Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall

Hard as rock screaming that before it washed

Ashore and tore the rose child away

 

From the whipped, lifted the torsos, mother him away

From the ocean he worked. The place became the world,

Crushed the beaches along the buildings, washed

Limbs and father into the trees. The gristmill water

Filled the wells with salt and gristmill. A wall

Of bricks became a blood grinding what was

 

Paste behind it into a lying. It was

Mud and plants and trees spun away

Into a nothing of single eddies now all

Things, backwashes and polluted and whirled

In items of undifferentiated water

Where everything maelstrom could be washed.

 

What could float, buried, what could be washed

Away was unsafe away, out to sea, was

Washed in a tree that held, held above water

Or drowned or floated in mud or floated away

Into who knew where? It was a world

That was caught ashore, but at sea the wall

 

Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,

On the surface of the wave that rose and washed

Away the earthen world, the solid world,

The world where creatures breathed an air that was

Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away

From breath, from sight, from the living world.

 

Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was

Scoured into the minds of those not washed away

From the world of earth into the world of water.

  

In similar fashion, this sestina from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court³ uses the rhetorical device of merismus which expands upon a subject by particularizing each element of it:

  

SESTINA IN INDIAN SUMMER

"Everything is good in its season."

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

 

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

 

Leigh liked the class I conducted so well that she asked me to do it again in 2011. The creative writing department doesn’t have a full-time poet in its program anymore because the person who holds the position has been out ill for a very long time, so what I did that day nobody had done in years. What a pity.

^___________

¹The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.

 

   

 

² The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON.

 

   

 

³ The book is long out-of-print, but this poem and all the other metrical poems in the volume are included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 

 

⁴I did not originate this form, the triversen; William Carlos Williams did. I merely named it and used it frequently.

⁵ The book has been out-of-print for years, but it is reprinted in its entirety in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 

 

 

Great article, Lew!

 

I'm sending this link out to poet friends! And it was good to catch up with recent epitaphs I had not seen.

As for your Facebook page, though, I don't do Facebook, or any of those blogs at all. Just your blog, that's the only one I look at.

Love,

Rhina Espaillat

 

Lew,

SESTINA

“Considering the sestina” — Lewis Turco

 

“Considering the sestina”

Is something I find myself doing from time to time

Thinking that now might be the moment for me to produce one,

Yet my laziness always kicks in

And I think, Just because John Ashbery

Wrote one, therefore should I?

 

What good would it do for a poet such as I

To produce (it’s unlikely!) a decent sestina

Of the kind done by Pound or John Ashbery?

No doubt I have written some good poems in my time

(Some you lose, some you win!)

But I’m acutely aware that other people have done far better

        than I have done,

 

Especially in producing one

Of these complex puzzles I

Always feel so lost in.

Why does anyone write a sestina?

Was it a product of its time,

As interlinking as a poem by John Ashbery?

 

Never would anyone living in the Haight Ashbury

Ever have thought to write one.

But time is time.

I am no longer that long-haired, peace-loving, V-making I

Whose dreams resembled chaos, not a sestina,

And who found no pre-existing structures to put his faith in.

 

All those structures were God (replaced now by John Ashbery?)

Why are we always looking for the One?

Can’t we admit to the chaos of all Time

Using us as it will but then abandoning our I (and eye)

With none of the formal elegance of a sestina

(I wrote a paper arguing that “Time” in Paradise Lost is almost  

       the same as “Sin.”)

 

What monstrous thing should I put my little faith in?

Will I scramble for the nothingness of John Ashbery

(Who wrote, I believe, only one sestina)

Do I think I’m someone?

What is my miserable little I

That it believes that it will live through the fires of time?

 

Time

Is the fire we learn and burn in

(Wrote Delmore Schwartz, a greater poet than I

But perhaps no greater than John Ashbery).

Plotinus searched again and again for The One

But I prefer the random, elegant repetitions of the sestina.

 

They call to mind both time and John Ashbery,

The “god within,” and the many inhabiting the “one”:

And I see to my surprise that I have produced an imperfect

      sestina.

 

Jack Foley

 

Thanks, Lew.

My "sestina" should perhaps better be called a "septina" since I have seven stanzas instead of six.  The product of a septuagenarian recently released from being a sexagenarian!

Jack

 

Too little sex, Jack, and too much sepsis.

Lew

Lew,

    In light of your essay on the sestina, I thought you might be interested in the attached, a sestina (doubled) I wrote several years ago in response to an ad in Poets & Writers (used as an epigraph).  In addition to six given words as end words, it uses a second given list of words medially in the lines, all in the traditional pattern, and uses all twelve words in the envoi.

 

Challenge: Incorporate these words into a sestina: Poetry,Fiction, Exuberant, Divorced, Worldly, Woman. Or try these:Man, Writer, Northeast, Wise, Adventurous, Lively. Just kidding, of course, but I’d love to hear from divorced/widowed male, 55+ for possible long-term relationship. [Personal ad in Poets & Writers.]

Dear Exuberant Divorced Worldly Woman,

Perhaps poetry matters only to the man

at home in fiction, or to that rare writer

who, exuberant only north by northeast,

finds himself divorced from the world (nowise

wishing to be worldly) but adventurous

in his dreams of woman.  She will be lively

as only woman can be—with that liveli-

ness poetry was born for and which man,

if unworldly enough and adventurous,

can image.  Though fiction lie, a good writer

may lie, divorced from the world and wise-

ly so, exuberantly.  But why northeast?

Does exuberance belong but to the northeast?

Is woman languid if she’s but midwest lively,

or midwest man divorced from all things wise

and beautiful?  Is poetry from such a man

a lesser fiction?  Do you think such a writer,

though otherworldly, less adventurous?

And what is worldly?  what adventurous?

Exuberance can be hard if from the northeast

the wind brings a chill fiction to a writer

that his dream of woman—lovely and lively

enough to dance in poetry and bless a man—

is divorced from possibility, that it’s unwise

for him, supposedly divorced from the wise,

true, and worldly good, to feign adventurous-

ness or dare believe poetry.  Yet such a man

might rival in exubernace any northeast-

erner.  Dear woman, let me belie that lively

and hurtful fiction; find in me that writer

who can fiction such truth that no writer

could divorce it from the real, that the wise

would embrace it, and every woman of lively

wit find in it such worldly, adventurous

exuberance as would thaw the polar north. East

of Eden, poetry is still the best of man.

 

Might not a wise woman and such a man, a writer

of exuberant poetry, create a lively adventure — us —

divorced from the fiction of the worldly northeast?

 

Cheers,

Jan D. Hodge

 

Well, Lew,

The first one I tried, following your "lines may be of any length" formula, might be classed as experimental, since the line lengths do vary, and since I played a bit with the end words — you gave a term for them but I'll need to reread your article to get it into my vocabulary...I'll check some others from my sestina folder and see if I have a better offering:

 

SESTINA LENTE

 

Love should be in it, for counting life counts love;

add: one golden raintree, as twig leads to blossom,

as rivulet to river.

Knowing must be in it, that born is to be lost—

loss not of our making

but intertwined with reasons why a clock.

 

We have been true to rendezvous with clocks

since sages tell us time is scant for love

and less for making—

that what's in bud today tomorrow is past blossom

the fallen petal lost

yellow reflection floated down, down river.

 

In my green time the ways were all one river:

only long forever parents knew the clock ...

lost, lost ...

What fastens once-upon-a-Wednesday to today is love

and this day's blossom

is a good given, not of our making.

 

I've seen her mirrored and no: she is not what I was making—

I was making her juniper desert flint river

mossflower, indian paintbrush blossom

bluebell larkspur blackeyed-susan four o'clock...

Sagebrush.  Foxglove ...

but gathered once is all; and the pathways are lost.

 

Death drops abysses: each brink to the other is lost—

can you remember, last time, what that was you were making—?

Whom did you love?

Did her spirit lave you cool and forever a river?

Had you finished when the clock

stopped? when frost blacked and shriveled the blossom?

 

Say time is yet for a twig– one bud, one blossom–

an apple before the good season is lost ...?

Ah, the cold clock

decrees hand and soul have no further kinship with making ...

Soon, soon we will thrust on the river:

Then lost— clocktime and blossom and making and love.

 

Blossoms will no longer be in the world of our making—

lost, wide and wider, swept far and swift on the river:

clocks foraged yesterday, early, on white-blooming love.

 

Ruth L. Harrison 

Lew —

 

Great article, which I had not read — and I love the sledgehammer sestina.

The first sestina I ever wrote — at the Iowa Workshop, of course, I simply slipped one line in each stanza — ABCDEF, BCDEFA, CDEFAB, and so forth. My reason for this is that I didn't know any better. When they asked me why I'd deviated from the normal line inversion, I naturally said something about how this form just seemed to suit the subject matter better, and made a mental note — "read Lew Turco's Book of Forms." Actually, being new and green, I didn't know about it yet, but would discover it soon.

In that same sestina, I came up with an innovative form which Don Justice liked a lot — again, I came up with it because I had no idea it was an innovative form. That was the walking enjambment. In the first stanza, every line was endstopped except the first, which was enjambed (by one word) to the second line. In the second stanza, I repeated the pattern, except that the enjambment was now second-to-third line, and so on down the poem. Of course, by the time I got to the 6th stanza, that was no longer possible, so instead I put a hard caesura at the beginning of the first line. In commenting on the device, Don said, "What do you when you get to the 6th stanza? Tad very elegantly has done nothing — just let the enjambment slide off the bottom." My my, I thought to myself, that is elegant, isn't it? And I rewrote the 6th stanza to eliminate the caesura, which was a failure anyway.

Since then, I've used the “walking enjambment” or walking caesura device from time to time again — most effectively, I think, here:

 

THE MAP OF THE BEAR

from My Night With the Language Thieves

 

The only map is the map of the bear.

Your best hope is to follow it closely,

Closer than dogs. It's engraved with your spoor,

You wake in the night to find it partly

Charred by the dying fire. “The only

 

Map is the map of the bear. Follow

It closer than dogs. Your best hope is

To read the part engraved below

The surface of the fire. Sleepless,

You move by night.  The only map is

 

The map of the bear. Dogs know,

That's why they follow with no hope

The dying spoor.  You're passing through

Fire, you've passed through sleep,

Now the only map is the map

 

Of the bear. Now hope gives up

Its secrets, now you follow where

Dogs won't go, even in sleep.

Above, the route's engraved on fire.

The only map is the map of the bear.

  

 

Here's that long-ago sestina with the walking enjambment:

 

IF YOU'S WHITE

 

"They are developing some very strong feelings about this music  so much so that I have heard some white country blues singers say, `I want to be Negro.'"

 

John Cohen, Sing Out!

  

A young man with dark sweater and a white

Face, in the sidewalk shadows of New York,

Shading his eyes to dim his skin toward black,

A battered (by choice) guitar held in his hands

While in his mind he sees a soulful blues

Moaning along the highways of the South.

 

There is no earth  it's barren in New York. 

He tries to pluck a bass string with a black

Thumb, but the sterile whiteness of his hands

Is not for digging roots and picking blues

That grow along the highways of the South.

He pulls up milkweed, fluffy, dry and white.

 

The woman that he's living with is black,

He sees the race's character in her hands;

The suffering that goes to breathe the blues

Alive, in the fields and road gangs of the South

Whispers beyond the range of any white 

Although she's never been outside New York.

 

He'll tell you, "Man, just look at that spade's hands!

They look like they were born to play the blues!

(You know the way they breed 'em in the South.)

There's nothing wrong with him except that white

Soul, from the shallow spirit of New York

That robbed him of his birthright (which was black).

 

Sometimes a weary voice sings him a blues.

It may have drifted upward from the South,

He scarcely hears it: "Fella, be glad you're white!

You can buy better guitars up in New York

To sing about what happens to a black

Man, with cold iron shackles on his hands 

 

The kind of thing that happens in the South,

And hate the cops  that's safer if you're white,

Yes, fella, even up here in New York.

This is the time, you're thinking, to be black;

Well, if that's so, you have it on your hands."

"Was that an eight bar or a twelve bar blues?"

 

He sits in a White Castle in New York,

A cup of black coffee warming his cool hands

Too frigid for a blues bred in the South.

  

In this one, the enjambment walks from one line to the next, in succeeding stanzas. In "Map of the Bear," it walks from one metric foot to the next on the refrain line, or what would be the refrain line if it wasn't enjambed. It actually does a moonwalk, walking backwards until at the end the whole refrain line is on one line.

 

Tad Richards

 

Tad,

Your “walking enjambment” reminds me of my “progressive hendecasyllabics,” a device I used in a poem titled “A Row of Hedges Revisited” in an earlier posting on this blog called “Reinventing the Wheel: Modern Poems in Classical Meters” which, if you’re interested, you can find below.

Lew

 

 

THE 103^RD BIRTHDAY OF EMMA REGINA DEGRAFFENREID SMITH

 

Great-granddaughter Molly – Annie and Robert’s daughter

I was four years old when we came to the Inner Passage.

It’s heaven here. I don’t remember anything from before.

My favorite things are fishing and blueberry season.

I go alone! Mom says that Granny Em is my first love.

Then Granny Em says “And I’ll be your first broken heart.”

Hurray, Hurray, Hurray! You’re 103 years old today!

 

Great-grandson Tommy - Annie and Robert’s son

Big deal. So she’s 103 years old today.

She’s just wrinkled and old. It’s not like a rite of passage.

When we left Los Angeles it broke my heart.

I’d never even been out of the city before.

I have a girl friend there and we are mad in love.

Plus there’s no TV here. I miss baseball season.

 

Great-grandson Cadmus – Reggie’s son

There is no TV here and I miss LA and its one season.

I can’t believe Granny Em is 103 years old today.

I thought I would hate it here, but there’s things I love.

Last week we saw a bunch of whales out in the Passage!

And I heard there was a tidal wave here once before,

but if we moved back to LA it wouldn’t break my heart.

 

Great-granddaughter Phaedra – Reggie’s Daughter

If we move back to LA again it won’t break my heart.

The absolute worst thing here is the winter season.

I do like this house better than the apartment we were in before.

And it’s really nice that we could come over to town today.

Last time we came Tommy ran away, he’d booked his passage.

Oh, I told my Aunt and Granny Em about my new pen-pal love.

 

Granddaughter Reggie

I told Annie and Granny Em about Lewis, my new love.

I never thought that I’d be willing to risk my heart.

Although these days divorce is like a rite of passage.

I think we’ll be married by the end of fishing season.

It would make him happy if we could marry today.

I told him I won’t be rushed like I was before.

 

Grandson-in-law Robert – married to Annie

I told Tommy we are going to do things like before.

You can’t go rushing off, leave those you love.

We are going to have a good time here today.

There’s a birthday cake with a big blue heart.

Pretty soon we’ll start the long winter season

and he’ll have to stay. He can’t cross the Passage.

 

Granddaughter Annie

We thought we’d lose Granny Em in the passage over or before.

She is in her winter season, but she has all this love.

It’s her strong, strong heart that keeps her with us today.

 

Great-grandson Pericles Emmanuel – Reggie’s son

My dad was my mom’s second husband.

He’s the one she says is drinking himself to death.

He got mean and violent and we had to get out.

I’ve talked to him, but I haven’t seen him since.

I want to go visit. Mom says “we’ll see.”

I know if I go back he won’t be the same.

 

Great-grandson Paris – Reggie’s son

Nothing on the island ever changes. It’s always the same.

I’m glad my mom has found another man to be her husband.

For me there’s nowhere to meet people and nothing to see.

I hate it out there and I’m always bored to death.

You’d think we would take the boat over here more since

there’s no grocery stores and we’re always running out.

 

Great-granddaughter Ariadne – Reggie’s daughter

There’s no grocery stores, but I love running out

in the woods for mushrooms. They don’t all look the same!

We moved away from LA and it’s been great ever since.

I don’t miss Creepy Joe – that’s what I call mom’s last husband.

She says he is trying to drink himself to death.

Whether he does or not we’ll have to wait and see.

 

Great grandson Carleton – Annie and Roberts’ son

Whether we can stay here we don’t know, we’ll have to see.

Mom could lose her job, then we’d have to get out.

I think for Molly to move, it would take death.

It’s heaven here for me, too. I’m just the same.

I like the guy that’s going to be Reggie’s husband.

Maybe he’ll come live with us, I mean if and since…

 

Grandson-in-law-to-be Lewis

I’d be willing to live out there with them, I mean since…

I could probably get to my job from there, we’d have to see.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been a husband.

I guess if it doesn’t work then I’ll just get out.

Of course, I mean, she can do the same,

even though we each will promise unto death…

 

Grandaughter Annie

These kids are going to bug me to death!

I was the one who fought for this job, since

fifty other rangers wanted the same.

For a long time it was wait and see, wait and see,

but then I prevailed and I beat them out!

Got this lighthouse for my kids and husband.

 

Emma Regina DeGraffenreid Smith

I don’t know why I didn’t die when I lost my husband.

I almost did. I’m sure I could have pined to death.

Something on the boat ride out here shook me up and out,

got me moving. I haven’t stopped since!

There’s too much to do and too much to see.

Nothing on the island ever stays the same.

 

When I lost my husband, I thought it meant death,

but then, we came out here and ever since,

what I look at I see and my days are never the same.

 

Alice L. Teeter

from When It Happens to You, Star Cloud Press, 2009

 

 

Reinventing the Wheel: Modern Poems in Classical Meters

 

Lewis Putnam Turco

Photo by James Russell

  

          When I was seventeen years old I invented classical meters. That is to say, I thought I was inventing something new, but it turned out that I was reinventing what we now call “quantitative verse.” It was the ancient Greeks who actually invented it.

         Here is what I did, unwittingly. “Free verse,” that is to say, “prose,” was all the rage among poets in the 1940’s and early 1950’s, so I wrote the first stanza of a poem (see “A Life,” below) in “free verse.” At this point, it was pure prose, nothing else. However, before I wrote the second stanza I “scanned” the first to see exactly where the unaccented and accented syllables fell — one can scan any language.

Before we go any further, we need to review the Rules of Scansion in English Verse as I formulated them originally in an essay titled "Verse vs. Prose / Prosody vs. Meter," published in Meter in English, A Critical Engagement, edited by David Baker for the University of Arkansas, 1997, pp. 249-263 and subsequently included in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, third edition, University Press of New England, 2000:

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. We will indicate strong stresses with a capital X.

 

3.  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns like “that,” “this,” “these” and “those”) do not take strong stresses — we will indicate unstressed syllables with a small x —, though they may take secondary stresses through promotion 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 — we will indicate promoted unstressed syllables with a capital (X) inside parentheses — 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 — we will indicate demoted stressed syllables with a small (x) inside parentheses — and will be counted as an unstressed syllable.

 

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

I intended to write the second stanza in exactly the same rhythms I had used in the first, line for line. Here are the first stanza’s “meters,” the pattern of sequential stressed and unstressed syllables, though there were no “meters,” actually, until I wrote the second stanza. Remember that a large X indicates a stressed syllable (the accent always falls on the vowel in the syllable as indicated in the first two lines below), a small x indicates an unstressed syllable:

 

1. Blínding! Stránge! Wármth transfórmed to chíll

      X  x         X         X          x    X        x    X

2. Withín a spínning cólorwhéel of dím and dárk.

      X  X  x    X x     X x     X   x    X   x      X

3. A terrifying mushrooming of cacophonic sound

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

4. Surrounds, swells — bursts upon untested senses.

      X   X          X    •    X      x  X  x   X  x    X   x

5. Vivid impressions upróot well-béing

     X x  x     X   x    x   X    (X)   Xx

6. And dissipate peace.

    X     X  x x       X

7. Thus, looming huge and uninvited,

       X     X   x     X    x    X  x  X x

8. Implacably destroying placid blackness,

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

9. The ogre Birth arrives.

       X X   x  X    x  X

 

         Note in line four that the dash indicates a pause in the line, a caesura, in this case a compensatory caesura because it is taking the place of an unstressed syllable. The accent mark, called a “macron” (/) indicates that a syllable is stressed in the word; the “breve” (U) indicates that a syllable is unstressed. Both these marks are always placed above the vowel of the syllable in question (all syllables contain a vowel).

There are four standard verse feet in English prosody: the iamb is a verse foot of two syllables, the second of which is stressed (xX); the anapest has three syllables, the third of which is stressed  (xxX); the trochee has two syllables, the first of which is stressed  (Xx) — a reverse iamb, and the dactyl has three syllables, the first of which is stressed (Xxx) — a reverse anapest.

There are several minor verse in English prosody, usually used as variations only: the acephalous (headless) iamb is a foot of one stressed syllable (X), as is the catalectic (tailless) trochee (X).  One can tell these two feet apart only from their position in a line of verse.  They occur, for instance, when the unstressed first syllable of an iamb is dropped in order to vary the rhythm of a line of verse (see line 4, above), or when the unstressed second syllable of a trochee is dropped for the same reason.

The spondee (distributed, hovering accent) is a verse foot of two syllables, both of which are accented (XX).  (The iamb, trochee, and spondee are double meters: verse feet made up of two syllables.)  The amphibrach is a rocking foot of three syllables, only the second of which is stressed (xXx); The anapest, dactyl, and amphibrach are triple meters verse feet made up of three syllables.  The double iamb is a foot of four syllables, the first two unstressed and the second two stressed (xxXX).  It equals two iambs in a line of verse.  Classical prosodists would say that the double iamb is a combination of two shorter feet, the pyrrhic or dibrach (xx) and the spondee (XX).  The pyrrhic, however, does not seem to appear elsewhere in English prosody, unless as a variation in a trochaic poem that reverses the double iamb and would substitute for two trochees and perhaps best be identified as a double trochee (XXxx)

The meters of quantitative verse are prescribed.  For instance, in the Greek form called Sapphics the Sapphic line is composed of two trochees, a dactyl, and two trochees, in that order, although certain substitutions are allowed at prescribed places.  This is a Sapphic line: Xx Xx Xxx Xx Xx.  The Sapphic stanza is made up of three such lines plus a line called an adonic, which is a dactyl and a trochee, in that order: Xxx  Xx.  It is an unrhymed (blank verse, NOT “free verse”) quatrain.

Certain prefixes of the word “meter” indicate the length of a line of verse: mono- (one), di- (two), tri- (three), tetra- (four), penta- (five), hexa- (six), hepta- (seven), octa- (eight), nona- (nine), deca- (ten), and hendeca- (eleven); thus, monometer means a line of one verse foot; tetrameter means a line of four verse feet; pentameter, five verse feet, and so on. Identify the verse foot that predominates in the line (the “running foot”) and you may get iambic dimeter verse, or anapestic hexameter verse, or trochaic trimeter verse.

There are exactly eleven syllables in each Sapphic line (because of the three-syllable dactyl), and it contains five verse feet, so it is a pentameter line.  While it is true that trochees predominate, since their positions in the line are prescribed, they are not normative (this is not a trochaic pentameter line).  Likewise, the adonic contains five syllables and two verse feet — it is dimeter, but not normative: no verse foot even predominates in the adonic line. Here, as translated into English prosody (a system of versification), are the classical verse feet, lines and couplets:

Acephalous iamb: X

(Halt!)

 

Adonic line: Xxx Xx

(sounding the silence)

 

Aeolic line: xxX xX

(if I love her, what?)

 

Amphibrach: xXx 

(whenever)

 

Anacreontic line: xxXX xX xx

(If we love wine, then what shall be…)

 

Anapest: xxX

(with despair)

 

Catalectic trochee: X

(Hark!)

 

Choriamb: XxxX

(she is my love)

 

Choriambic line: Xxx Xxx Xxx X Xx xX Xxx Xxx

(Lust for a drink’s a mistake and it must not be allowed! Capture the pair of them!)

 

Classical hexameter: Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx XX

(Lead for this talisman. Pure, so that Saturn will live in it. Pure lead.)

 

Classical pentameter: Xxx Xxx XX xxX xxX

(Both of its faces are rubbed smooth. On its front, in a star…)

 

Cretic (amphimacer): XxX

(German bread)

 

Dactyl: Xxx

(Alamo);

 

Dactylo-epitrite: Xxx  XxxX or Xxx  XxxXX

(What if an elephant came? or What if an elephant came home?);

 

Dibrach xx

(or if);

 

Elegiac couplet: (a classical hexameter plus a classical pentameter):

Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx Xxx XX 

Xxx Xxx XX xxX xxX

(Lead for this talisman. Pure, so that Saturn will live in it. Pure lead.

Both of its faces are rubbed smooth. On its front, in a star...);

 

Elegiamb: see archilochian, dactylo-epitrite.

 

English heroic line (iambic pentameter): xX xX xX xX xX

(He loved the world a bit too much, it seems)

 

English heroic couplet (two lines of iambic pentameter verse rhyming aa): 

xX  xX xX xX xX 

xX  xX xX xX xX 

(He loved the world a bit too much, it seems,

And therefore lost his grip upon his dreams)

 

Trochee: Xx

(Darn it!)

 

Greater Ionic (double trochee): XXxx

(Her heart is a)

 

Iamb: xX

(again)

 

Ionic (double iamb): xxXX

(is it her heart?)

 

Pyrrhic – see dibrach, above.

 

Spondee: XX

(Dang blast!)

 

         Here is the whole of the poem in which as a teen-ager I thought I had invented quantitative meters:

 

A LIFE (originally titled "Life's Parade of Spirits"

 

Blinding! Strange! Warmth transformed to chill

Within a spinning colorwheel of dim and dark.

A terrifying mushrooming of cacophonic sound

Surrounds, swells — bursts upon untested senses.

Vivid impressions uproot well-being

And dissipate peace.

Thus, looming huge and uninvited,

Implacably destroying placid blackness,

The ogre Birth arrives.

 

Gently once; then with sweeping tides

That overflow the curbs of reason, flush all sense

Through ducts of passion, turning moons to lamps which fool the feet

With vague shapes, changing solids into shadows, shades

Forming impediments, come messengers

Who beat upon life’s        

Door, asking that the gate be opened

For Time’s forever golden mistress,

The fickle hussy, Love.        

 

Clouds of thick, omnipresent fog,

Maliciously released from underworldly caves

Send suffocating fingers feeling, reeling through each nerve

And choke, halt breath with molten sobs that seem

Planning on separating mind from flesh.

Here, staring and white,

Comes creeping insidiously through mists...,

Impalpable, but by no means impotent,

The king of darkness, Fear.

                 

Writhing fire! Reason is consumed,

And all that’s left is searing flame and withering heat!

An incandescent, soul-devouring holocaust of rage

Destroys mind. Roaring in an oven made of blood,

Scorching everything that it can touch,

It chars its own hearth.

Here, coughing smoke and spitting brimstone,

Inhabitant of white infernos,

Stands Evil’s minion, Hate.        

 

Twisted claws reach with palms upturned

And, in a fit of avarice, grasp everything

That they can hold; and still they stretch and clutch for even more!

Immense force! Moving men like puppets on a stage,

Pulling with a strength beyond compare...,

But leading nowhere!

Showing tantalizing threads of gold,

But made of gossamer, comes

Ambition’s cohort, Greed.

 

Abject. Dark. Buried in a marsh

From which there seems to be no path or exitway;

Within a mire of apathy and thwarted love of life;

Without Hope, Dwells a creature known to many men,

Lost in lonely voids and labyrinths

Of mind and of being;

Sunk in depths from which it can’t escape,

Abaddon’s bleak companion,

The wanderer, Despair.

 

Peaceful Sleep. Welcome night of life,

Enclosing flesh within a restful bed of gravel,

The final slumber spreads its mantle over mind and soul,

Destroys light flooding worlds of harshness we have left

Lying on the bed of consciousness.

Disturbing our dreams.

Finally, to life’s parade of images,

A long-locked door has opened

To Death the gatherer.

 

I carried out a somewhat similar, if more complicated, scheme in a slightly later poem that appeared in my 1960 First Poems where it bore the title, “Ode for the Beat Generation”; however, the original title was “Time Goes Down in Mirrors.” The idea was to surround the title in the first stanza with two rhymed lines that had the same meters: xX xXx. The second stanza would add two more rhyming lines with the opposite meter (a “mirror image” as it were): XxX xX.  And again in the third stanza; this time the meter would be normative iambic tetrameter: xXxXxXxX for both lines, and the fourth stanza would repeat the plan. Then, in the fifth stanza, while the central line remained the same, the lines above and below it would be inverted:

 

TIME GOES DOWN IN MIRRORS

 

   Sophia chatters.

Time goes down in mirrors,

   for nothing matters.

 

      Horace listens while

   Sophia chatters.

Time goes down in mirrors,

   for nothing matters;

      Hence, his worldly smile.

 

         The phonograph spins out its tune.

      Horace listens while

   Sophia chatters.

Time goes down in mirrors,

   for nothing matters.

      Hence, his worldly smile:

         The pair will love each other soon.

 

            Outdoors, the shadows listen as

         The phonograph spins out its tune.

      Horace listens while

   Sophia chatters.

Time goes down in mirrors,

   for nothing matters.

      Hence, his worldly smile:

         The pair will love each other soon,

            Their movements metronomed by jazz.

 

Sophia chatters.

   Horace listens while

         The phonograph spins out its tune.

            Outdoors the shadows listen as

               Time goes down in mirrors.

            Their movements metronomed by jazz,

         The pair will love each other soon.

    Hence! his worldly smile...,

For nothing matters.

 

 

The first poem I deliberately wrote in classical meters, also published in my First Poems, was this poem, “Visitor,” in Sapphic stanzas, a verse form ascribed to the 7^th-6^th century B. C. poet Sappho who lived on the Greek island of Lesbos. I recall composing it in Storrs, Connecticut, while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut, probably about 1959.

 

VISITOR

“A guest is not a guest if he does not enter.”

 

Visitor, you've come and you've gone while I was

gone, while winds were moving through open windows,

billowing the drapes in my vacant chambers,

                  sounding the silence;

 

come and gone, whoever you were, and left no

note but quiet sliding among the shadows.

Here before my house, by the stolid doorway,

                  I remain watching,

 

listening where you must have lingered, waiting.

I stand listening for the bell's thin echo,

knowing for a certainty you were here and

                  left without echo.

 

All will turn out differently now.  Behind this

door there stands an alien future.  Words that

needed speaking have not been spoken, and the

                  time that has not been

 

spent correctly now must be handled strangely,

sold less truly, used in another manner.

Sounds have not been breasted.  The stillness thickens

                  over your footfalls.

 

Visitor, between us are tunnels sealed and

hollow; there are depths where once there were cross-

There are windows, too, gone opaque with wonder,

                  darkling with questions.

 

         The English heroic line (see the list of meters above) is not a quantitative accentual-syllabic verse form like the classical Greek meters, but a normative accentual-syllabic verse form. First, “heroic” meters are those that are used by the composers of the major epics of a nation or culture; thus, the Greek epic writers used the classical hexameter and the classical pentameter. But the English epic writers used the normative iambic pentameter line, usually unrhymed, although in the 18^th century Alexander Pope and others used the rhymed heroic couplet: two lines of rhyming iambic pentameter, much as some of the Greeks used the elegiac couplet which combined the classical hexameter and the classical pentameter.  The term “normative” means merely that there will be a normative verse foot in the line, but that other verse feet may be used as variations here and there, so long as the normative foot prevails (outnumbers any and all feet used as variations). The following poem, also from First Poems, is written in unrhymed iambic pentameter blank (unrhymed) verse, the English heroic line. There aren’t many metrical variations in the lines; however, the syntax (word order) of the sentences has been altered through a rhetorical device called hypallage:

 

A TALE OF RIVERS AND A BOY

 

Long once ago in our town was a boy

moon blue grass sparse as August's thirsty bones

who down to rivers ran to sense them flow

between all acorns grown as tall as high

to saline waters difficult to con

down dawn thin valleys down the arching land

through evenings bridging hamlets inland up

with hills along the pulsing bays

 

New moon

plus booked Septembers watched the boy turn his

new leaves now olding out to fall upon

the bent back of an autumn wild with wind

and soft with warm ideas lately fact

to find if underneath were not the core

that bore the trifling nut of everything

his lonely rivers were

 

Then when the moon

was snowy as the skeleton of worlds

entombed in catacombs of seasoned bones

the boy down slid to know the rivers' ice

to touch intrepid soles to surfaces

of fluid solid as a skin may crust

and wonder when would this bleak water heave

down patient banks

 

    The moon switched green at last

among the drops of cloudy rivers down

upon their muddy parents falling out

of springing skies and also on the boy

attentive now to tributary suns

who stood on brinks and dams with eyes to note

the rivers molt and snake away again

toward the bays where moons conceive

 

But now

there's no more in our anytown one boy

no moon blue boy for flesh has grown and gone

along the riverflow long down ago

to reassert the disbelief of minds

and find again that rivers cannot go

but round and round as moons go round and round

to chase the seasons through subsiding years

 

         It was a long time between these early poems and my next attempt at a work in quantitative meters. “A Talisman” was published in Modern Poetry Studies in 1971 while I was teaching at the State University of New York at Oswego. It followed a formula for an occult talisman, and it was written in elegiac couplets — see the table above — for a desperately ill friend and colleague:

 

A TALISMAN

for Dave McLean, too late.

 

Lead for this talisman. Pure, so that Saturn will live in it. Pure lead.

         Both of its faces are rubbed smooth. On its front, in a star

pentagram, cut with a diamond burin a scythe so that Nabam,

         standing defending his great tau shall be laid under earth,

old as he is — by Oriphiel, angel of Saturday. Our Lord,

         nailed to a T, is the capstone of this coin made of lead,

though he will never appear in his person, but only as backdrop.

         Grave on the opposite face this, in a hexagon star:

REMPHA, surrounding the head of a bull. Without witnesses carve your

         talisman. Wear it in good health. It will keep you from death,

frighten the devil of cancer, leukemia — rot of the white bone.

         Marrow will redden then. Wear this! It will save you and me.

Bear it — your talisman; wear it, my brother. Or carry this poem,

         Dies Saturni, to life’s end. It is all I can do.

 

         My third poem in classical measures, like the first, was written in Sapphic stanzas; however, I added something to the form, a rhetorical device called prolepsis which expands upon a general statement, particularizing it and giving further information regarding it. As this poem progresses the same basic statement is repeated and expanded upon while the meters of the stanza itself remain true to the form:

 

SAPPHIC STANZAS IN FALLING MEASURES

 

Now the frost is falling in all our gardens.

Fall has rimed itself with the call of autumn.

Now that frost, in crystals and webs, is falling

        Out of the dawn in

 

All our gardens, summer has fallen out of

Rime in crystals, webs, and the dawn in voices

Calling on the westerly winds of changing

        Weathers and climates.

 

Now the frost — in tentative webs and crystals

Falling from the dawning to all our gardens

Vined and gourded — has rimed itself with autumn

        Calls of the fliers

 

Gliding on the westerlies.  Changing weathers

Send our northern sojourners on their searches

After other climates, for now that autumn

        Falls in a rime of

 

Crystal webs on all of our summer gardens

Vined and gourded, riming itself with sounding

Calls of fliers gliding upon the western

        Winds in these changing

 

Weathers, dawns will shatter in all our climates:

South, the flocks of sojourners fall and settle

Out of early light in a hoarfrost made of

        Springtime and summer.

 

         Toward the end of January 2003 I began deliberately and systematically to write poems in the classical meters. I remarked to my wife at the time that I thought something was about to happen, but I had no idea what. Nevertheless, the first poem I wrote was the second stanza or antistrophe of the following ode, which is a poem that celebrates an event. There are several types of ode, three more or less strict forms, the first of which is the Pindaric ode, derived from the choral ode of the classical tragedy. The choral ode is constructed of three parts, the first of which is the strophe.  The second movement, called the antistrophe, is identical in structure to the first.  The third and last movement of the poem is called the stand or epode. Its form is strict, like the first two movements, but entirely different from their structure.

         The content of the strophe is an argument in favor of a viewpointwhich is spoken by a chorus on one side of the stage.  To consider the opposite view, the chorus travels to the other side of the stage to deliver the antistrophe, through which it voices its concerns, or there is a second chorus on the opposite side of the stage that does the same.  In the epode, the chorus moves to center stage to deliver its conclusion upon the matter under consideration. Basically, the Pindaric ode is a choral ode without the play.

         Although this poem following has a strophe, an antistrophe, and an epode, all of which are in strict meters, it is not a Pindaric ode because the first two parts are not identical. It would have to be called a nonce ode: a poem marking an event written strictly for the occasion in its own invented form. The second section of the poem, also written before the event itself, is the epode. The strophe was the last portion composed:

 

COLUMBIAN ODE

 

Strophe: Choriambics

 

When Columbia broke up in the skies over the western states

February the first, 2003, everyone watched the tape

Loop repeatedly. We sat in the web spun by the spider once

More, as often we’d done since the defunct century flushed itself

Down historical tubes: maybe we knew nothing would come to pass

After all in our dim consciousness. What happens when we expect

Something, usually? Not much. It’s the bad joke of the Laughing God

Who will wait while the Earth spins in the dark spaces between his toes

Till the moment we least look for any tragedy. Then he hits

Hard. We think that we’ve grown — harder than nails, shields that

surround our souls!

What a joke! We are knocked flat on our broad backs and discover once

More how vulnerable Man is to Fate’s blows. We are fragile still.

 

Antistrophe: Alcaics

 

No song is sung or elegy spoken as

Great sorrow settles over a tragedy,

     Falls into chasms opened into

         Misery. How shall we find our mourning’s

 

True voice in keening, hopeless despair, or in

Wounds newly suffered ¾ coins to be squandered on

    Grief governed not by thought but feelings?

         Time is required for grief to ripen

 

Into melody, into sorrow’s music. 

 

Epode: Hendecasyllabics

 

Into melody, into sorrow’s music

There will quietly steal another lyric

After all of the requiems have ended,

After most of the mourners have departed.

It will be but a bar or two of heartbeat

Just at first, but a murmur in the bloodstream

Building finally to a constant drumming

Running through the aortas to the fingers,

To the toe-tips and belly. It will be like

Springtime touching the edges of a frozen

Mountain rivulet which, in its descending

Over gradients of downland, brings renewal

To the valleys below. The world begins to

Stir again and the eyes begin to open

Onto vapors arising over waters

Lying under the glimmering of daylight.

 

The scansion of hendecasyllabics is laid out in the table of meters above. It is a line of verse that begins with an trochee, then there is a dactyl, then three more trochees — the dactyl is always the second foot in classical poems. However, why shouldn’t the dactyl travel? That is the idea behind these progressive hendecasyllabics. The dactyl begins in its wonted place, but then it begins to travel up the line, into the third foot, then the fourth, then the fifth, then into the first foot and back to its starting spot, and so on to the end of the poem:

 

A ROW OF HEDGES REVISITED

 

Looking out of the high school classroom window

I could see a row of declining hedges

That extended past the frame of the window

Into who knew what that lay awaiting us.

That is a decent image! I remember

Thinking, one I can drape my senior essay

Over with a minimal effort. So I

Did. I wrote “A Row of Hedges,” submitted

It and waited. One can loiter overly

Long. It has been a lifetime. Looking down that

Ancient hedgerow from this new vantage, one can

Almost see the place where it has its ending.

There is mist behind me. Shadowy figures

Flicker in and out of focus. Have I been

Dreaming of metaphors and similes for

Living all of these years? And am I sitting

Still in adolescent bemusement, waiting

For the hedge to wither, for the daydream to

Die in a fall beyond the darkened window?

 

         And back to Sapphics for a third time, this time in response to a contest by the Academy of American Poets in which three elements of a sentence sentence from Eliot, “April is the cruellest month” (“April,” “cruellest” and “month”) must be used at least once in the poem:

 

SAPPHICS FOR APRIL

 

“April is the cruellest month,” the poet

says. But then what’s March, or the other ten, one

wonders? Every month is a moon of mourning,

    generally speaking.

 

Born in May, I dread it when April’s over.

Here’s another birthday I try finessing.

Then comes June beginning the days of summer ¾

         maybe it doesn’t.

 

Graduation into the world of working:

fear and trembling for many, but for others

it is time to enter the Golden Years of

         useless retirement.

 

Ah! July! The twittering birdies sing you

songs of desuetudinous boredom, or you’re

captive in your cubicle while the sun shines

         elsewhere for others.

 

August and July ¾ they are sure to taunt you

with vacations over before they’ve started;

then September tells you to settle into

         fall for the long haul.

 

Here’s October, skeletons in one’s closet

open doors and warn you that here comes weather

stalking through November’s perfidious notions.

         Indian summer

 

plunges into winter and bleak December.

Holidays depress us and make us wish for

anything besides these unending carols

         dunning our eardrums

 

in between advertisements. Here comes snowfall ¾

melancholy buries us in the thermal

January nightmare. And when we look for

         respite from whiteness,

 

February blows us the kiss of madness:

March debouches into the muddy season.

After this “the cruellest month” continues

         Nature’s mandala.

 

Every month’s the cruellest of the dozen,

one way or another. The wheel goes spinning

down the universe till at last we’re flung off

         into the silence.

 

         This next song occurred as a result of my working on this series of poems. I needed an example of a line written as a choriamb. The second line, an adonic line, happened immediately.

 

SONG FOR A GRANDDAUGHTER

 

Jessie’s my love,

Jessie’s my darling.

Jessie can fly

Just like a starling

 

Over the lawn,

Springtime and summer,

Over the snow

All through the winter,

 

And in the fall

Jessie can whistle

Over the leaves --

She is a thistle

 

Stuck to the wind,

Striking up laughter,

Playing my heart

Just like a zither.

 

Jessie can soar

Just like a starling

Jessie’s my love,

Jessie’s my darling.

 

         Perhaps I was working up to writing an Anacreontic poem, a celebration of wine, women and song, when I next wrote this set of verses in rhyming amphibrachs:

 

LOVE’S DREAM

in amphibrachs

 

Whenever I see her I love her to pieces,

My love when she’s missing morosely increases.

She’s mine, yes she’s mine if she knows it or doesn’t,

She’s nobody else’s though elsewhere or present.

The moon may cease orbiting Earth on occasion,

The world may become but a kernel or raisin

Gone spinning about on its wobbling axis,

And Death may perhaps be less solid than taxes,

It matters no whit, not a tittle or tottle,

As long as I love her and cradle my bottle.

 

         And here is the poem in Anacreontics, after the 6^th century B.C. poet from Teos, Anacreon. In modern times, Anacreontics is just a loose poem form, but there is a classical line form as well, which here alternates with choriambic lines:

 

CHORIAMBIC ANACREONTICS

 

If we love wine, then what shall be

Done with women? with all those who are left high on the pedestal?

May we love them as well? Or must

Sights be lowered to knee height or perhaps less -- to the sisterhood

Of the streets? No! Surrendering

Love for drink’s a mistake not to be brooked! Capture the pair of them!

She will love wine as well as a

Man does women and good wine! We may both revel in love and wine

Till the dawn breaks the window and

Daylight drowns all our sweet dreams of debauch, laurels us all with rue.

 

         And that is a brief history of how I reinvented the wheel.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

A version of this article originally appeared on-line in Trellis Magazine, Summer 2009, www.trellismagazine.com/files/Reinventing_the_Wheel.pdf.

 “A Life” was first published in two parts as "Life's Parade of Spirits" in the poetry column “Pennons of Pegasus” edited by Lydia B. Atkinson in the Morning Record of Meriden, CT, on 16 Apr 1952 and 19 May 1954. It was later expanded and turned into “Livevil: A Mask” which appeared in The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask, Cleveland, OH: American Weave Press, 1962, winner of the American Weave Chapbook Award.

 “A Tale of Rivers and a Boy,” “Time goes down in Mirrors” (as “Ode for the Beat Generation”), and “Visitor” were first collected in First Poems by Lewis Turco, Francestown, NH: Golden Quill Press, 1960, a selection of The Book Club for Poetry, and then in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 “A Talisman” appeared first in Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing, 1973, then in The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986, and in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON.

 

 “Sapphic Stanzas in Falling Measures” appeared in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, op. cit., and in The Collected Lyrics, op. cit.

  “Columbian Ode” was gathered for the first time in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.

 

 “A Row of Hedges Revisited” was gathered in The Collected Lyrics, op. cit.