The Fortieth Anniversary of The Book of Forms

A reading given at the Newburyport Literary Festival on 26 April 2008

While I was still an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut in 1959 the late Harold Vinal, editor of Voices: A Magazine of Verse —which was published from his ancestral home island, Vinalhaven, Maine — wrote to ask me if I would be willing to review some books of poetry. I agreed and wrote “A Trio of First Books,” my first review, which Mr. Vinal published the same year. This may seem precocious of me, even uppity, perhaps, but I had spent the four years after high school, 1952-1956, in the U. S. Navy teaching myself how to write, and I had published my first poems in a national literary periodical, The American Poetry Magazine, in 1953, so that by the time I got to college I was, if not a seasoned veteran of the literary wars of the period, at least an experienced recruit, well-published for my years, to the irritation of some of my teachers at UConn and the admiration of others. Mr. Vinal, for one, was familiar with my work, which is why he wrote me. Unlike the work of E. E. Cummings, who in apparent retaliation for a rejection wrote the poem titled “Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal,” that editor had been publishing my poems for four years, since 1956.

Harold Vinal liked the review well enough to ask me to do another, but I felt a bit diffident about writing a second one because I had never consciously thought about being a critic — in fact, I disliked the idea; therefore, I had no system for criticism. All I had done in my first review was to state my opinions as cogently as I could. Before I accepted my second assignment I felt I had to sit down and think about what it was I was doing, both in my own writing and in my comments on the poetry of others. I soon arrived at the idea of the “levels” of poetry, the “typographical,” the “sonic,” the “sensory,” the “ideational,” and the “fusional” which, in my second review for Voices, “The Poet’s Court,” I at first called the “images” of poetry: “Poetry is a series of ‘images,’ if we can conceive of such things as music, philosophy, idea, as well as retinal impressions, as images.” I had no notion of doing anything more with this critical system until, during that same summer 0f 1960, I paid a visit to the University of New Hampshire Writers’ Conference and heard my friend and publisher, Loring Williams, using it to teach a workshop in poetry writing. I asked him where he had gotten it, and he replied, “From your review in Voices.”

While I was a graduate student in the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa during the previous academic year 1959-60, I had conceived the plan of writing what would eventually become The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, on which I worked for the next seven years. Taking my cue from Loring, I organized the book around “the levels of poetry,” and since its publication in 1968 that system has become familiar to poets and teachers throughout the U. S. as has, I am afraid, my criticism, probably to the detriment of my reputation as a poet which, according to R. S. Gwynn, has tended to be eclipsed by such of my books as The Book of Forms (1968, 1986 and 2000 in different incarnations), Poetry: An Introduction through Writing (1973), Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (1986), The Public Poet (1991), The Book of Literary Terms (1998), The Book of Dialogue (in various incarnations from 1989 through 2004), and the articles I’ve written for various periodicals, collections and reference works.

I have therefore decided to celebrate the birthday of The Book of Forms by reading some of the poems I wrote with my partner in rhyme Wesli Court (an anagram pseudonym of my real name), to illustrate some of these levels and patterns. The first one I’d like to read, then, is the first poem of mine that Harold Vinal published in Voices, about his home state, Maine, where I have spent most of the summers of my life, and all of my retirement years so far. It is an example of the triversen, the invention of William Carlos Williams, which I analyzed and named while I was still in the Navy, floating around the world on an aircraft carrier, the USS Hornet:

PEMAQUID

...here are the clouds
rigged yesterday,
foursquare upon blue canvas.
Slate-gray configurations writhe
beneath, propounding summer
sophistries to rockbound shores.
"Pemaquid," the seabirds call,
counterpointing breakers as
they beat a rhythm to the name.
Yet, sitting on my stone above
the shore, I hear
the background silence: the Indian silence.
Thus do we all sit,
now and then, listening
for the middle distances.
Listening for the ancient calms
to remind us today
of yesterday.

The next piece I’d like to read is an example of a poem written in Sapphic stanzas. In this poem the technique of “prolepsis” has also been used. You can find a discussion of prolepsis in The Book of Literary Terms, in Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, or in The New Book of Forms:

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
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.

The third poem I’d like to read is titled “The Old Professor and the Sphinx,” which is an example of an extended metaphor or, to use an older term, the “conceit.” It is also, I’m afraid, somewhat autobiographical, though I wrote it while I was only in my first few years as a teacher. There is a discussion of this poem in The Book of Forms:

THE OLD PROFESSOR AND THE SPHINX

It is a dry word in a dry book
drying out my ear. I squat and swallow
my tongue here in this chair,
the desert of my desk, summer bare, spreading
like a brown horizon into regions grown arid
with erudition. A caravan of books treks

stolidly across my eyes while I,
the Sphinx, a phoenix nesting in my skull,
pry into inkwells and
gluepots seeking the universal solvent.
There is none. The pages as I turn them sound like sand
rattling in the sec temples of a beast gone to

earth with the sun. I lie caught in my
creaking dune, shifting with the wind of the
pharaohs, wondering if,
somewhere, I have not missed my valley. Upon
the walls of my office there are Oriental prints
hanging stiff as papyrus, whispering their brown

images into the silent air.
I know the poems on my shelves speak with
one another in an
ancient language I have somehow forgotten.
If there is rainfall, I recall, the desert blossoms,
but I have somewhere lost the natural prayer

and instinctual rites of the blood
which can conjure clouds in seasons of drought.
There is but ritual
remaining; no honey is in the lion's
hide; my temples have mumbled to ruin: they endure
disuse and despair. An archaeologist of

cabinets and drawers, I exhume
paperclip skeletons, the artifacts
of millennia: red
ball-point pens with nothing in their veins, pencils
like broken lances, and notebook citadels empty
of citizens — the crusader has squandered his

talents on bawds, grown hoary in their
service. The town is sacked: the bawds are gone
to tame younger legions.
Look into my sarcophagus: the tapes are
sunken over my hollow sockets. Slowly the waste
swallows my oasis like a froth of spittle.

This next poem is a modern version by Wesli Court of an ancient anonymous Welsh poem written as an example of what Edward Davison called “analyzed rhyme”:

WINTER

The wind keens on the bare hill;
The ford is froar, and the lake
Is hoar-crusted. A man's ilk
Might stand on a single stalk.

Comber after comber comes
To cover the shore. The gale
Hovers over the hill: owls
Crying. One cannot stand tall.

The bed of the fish is cold
In the ice where they shelter.
Reeds are bearded; the stag, starved.
Trees bow in the early dusk.

Snow falls, and the earth is pale.
Warriors sit near their fires.
The lake is a dim defile:
No warmth is in its color.

Snow falls; the hoarfrost is white;
The shield is idle upon
The old man's shoulder. The wind
Freezes the grass with its whine.

Snow falls on top of the ice.
Wind sweeps the crest of the trees
Standing close. On his shoulder
The brave fighter's fine shield shines.

This next poem is an example of an “alba” or “aubade,” a song sung at dawn. The singer in this case is intended to be the first fully human being who understands what it means to be alive and cognizant:

DAWN SONG
"...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song." — Margaret Mead

I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —
it breaks across my mind as across the eyes
of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,
and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun
in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,
breaking across my terror and my surprise;
to know that I am the beast who knows his name:
Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun
of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see stone for a stone,
to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight
and know what it may do to the brittle bone
of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,
in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone
held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.
The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.
He is the child of dust. I am stone's son,
born of the first rose and the first lark's song.

Here is an example of “blues stanza”:

THE SHADOWMAN

This is the year when everybody died —
This is the year when friends and neighbors died,
Took that short trip or ended the long slide.

Jim shot himself on Cemetery Road,
Left an ironic note beside the road.
No one heard his desperate heart explode.

Our frightened former next-door neighbor went —
Rita, the fearful widow from next-door went
To join her husband John in the firmament.

Paul's heart quit because his cough would not.
His life went up in smoke, for he could not
Stop smoking soon enough — so he would trot

Along our streets slower than folks could walk,
Jog the streets slower than we could walk
And slower than the shadowman can stalk.

Cooper's blood sluggishly turned to whey
In his pale veins — slowly turned to whey
Beneath the translucent skin now turned to clay.

Kermit and Dorothy lost this chilly spring
To the sickle and the crab — lost the spring
To the dim weather and the scorpion's sting.

And Mag, our neighbor on the other side,
Next door toward the lake on our north side,
Father of my son's best friend, has died

Because he loved his beer more than his life,
Loved his suds more than his very life,
Let alone his daughter, his son, his wife.

The shadowman comes tapping down the street,
His feet come stuttering along the street.
Nobodaddy's patrolling, walking his beat.

Hear him, townsmen, between the curbs of night,
Among our yards, towing the craft of night
Whether the hour is dusky or dark or light.

Listen to him breathing in the walls
Of all our houses, breathing in the walls,
In our kitchens and in the empty halls.

Stop when you listen and whisper to the dust,
"These are the names of neighbors scrawled in dust,
Whistled to shadow, scattered in a gust."

This next is a “canzone,” an Italian form. Dana Gioia published this poem, which he fostered, while he was poetry editor of Italian Americana:

CANZONE

"Whatever you set your mind to, your personal total obsession, this is what kills you. Poetry kills you if you're a poet, and so on. People choose their death whether they know it or not." — Don DeLillo in Libra, p. 46.

Canto Uno. Obsessive Ottavi

It's said we choose the thing that will destroy us:
The plumber picks the scalding pipe that bursts.
We seize upon the obsession to employ us
All our days — the butcher among his wursts
Will gasp his last on the sausage he embraces,
The cobbler strangle in his own shoelaces.
The tease will die in a way that will annoy us,
The sweetie-pie in a manner sure to cloy us.

The fiddler will pass away in some vile inn
Between gigs on the road. The hypnotist
Will suffer stroke and spend a little while in
Staring into nothingness; the dentist
Will feel the drill slicing through his sinus,
The banker's columns add at last to minus.
The model shall come to end her days in style, in
Styli the engraver; the clerk shall file in.

Who makes these rules? One wishes it were so,
But only poets smother in their words
That spill like cottage cheese out of their vents
In swollen streams throughout their lives. Although
The words are for the world, the world says, "Hence!
Take back this whey, take back these pallid curds."
And so we eat our words all our lives long,
Stifling finally in a mound of song.

Canto Due. Terminal Capitolo

Why is it when we've worked our will and won,
Some goomba comes along and trips us up?
Just when we're on our toes he knocks us down.
The ewe's in place, and now here comes the tup —
The ram is blind! He misses by a mile!
Basta! It does no good to mope and gripe —

We ought to groan and berate with a snile;
We ought simply to turn the other cheek,
But when we do we're met with another snarl
And batted from today into next...month.
That's to the good! for there we'll find the sun
Filling the halcyon sky with light and warmth.

Basta! again — smoke rises between our toes!
Just when the eyes have it, so does the nose.

Canto Tre. Aria Gone Awry
Everything is gall and bile at last,
A dagger in the liver or the spleen,
A splash of acid from the acrid past,
A dash of bitters in life's chipped tureen.
No matter what we do it comes out wrong,
Our voices crack in the middle of the...aria.

The world is a martini mixed, not stirred,
Its twist of lemon sere as August's rind.
Search as one may to find the proper word,
A synonym will have to do: "behind"
Becomes arrears and smells a little strong,
And that's the short of it, the short and...interminable.

So, what to do? Drink up the curdled broth;
Quaff the quotidian cocktail at the sink;
Choke down the peel that tastes like pickled moth;
You'll never swallow finer food or drink —
For future food becomes what you have passed,
And everything is gall and bile...in the final analysis.

Commiato. Elegiac Barzeletta

No one can tell which way the wind is blowing
Unless it's snowing; then the eyes can wrinkle
And an inkling — just a hint — of the future
Lash its way beneath your eyelid. Your cornea
Will be abraded. You will be all but blinded.
You'll long for California, or perhaps you'll
Wish that you'd been born dead. You take my meaning?

The weather of the world's demeaning, non e
Vero? The temperature is zero even
On a summer evening: Here comes the sunset;
The azure of the heavens slowly deepens
To violet. The sun on the horizon
Cloaks itself in velvet mists. It is lovely...,

Until the hailstones fall upon our foreheads
As we look up. The wind comes whistling meanly
Among the fuschias, knocking down the bluebirds'
Happy house. Outstanding among the headstones
We find our fortune: "He who lies here sleeping
Cares not for hail or gallstones, earth or ether,
Nor for songs of the plaining poet's making,
But for dreams that rise from a gravel pillow."

“Pirate Song,” by Wesli Court, is an example both of a children’s poem and a chantey. I sang it to my children, so I’ll sing it to you:

PIRATE SONG

By jingo, by Joe, by gee,
I think I'll go to sea.
I'll set my sail
Abaft of the rail,
A binnacle on my knee, by gee,
A binnacle on my knee.

By jingo, my gee, by Joe,
I think I'll go below.
I'll stow my gold
Down deep in the hold
Because of the winds that blow, by Joe,
Because of the winds that blow.

“Lafe Grat” is a poem written in the form called the “split couplet.” It’s from a series of poems titled “Bordello,” which was published as a limited edition portfolio of poems with prints by the graphic artist George O’Connell; it may be found also in my The Book of Dialogue:

LAFE GRAT
from Bordello.

In this house I am not ugly — nowhere
else. Nor is there
a mirror in the room we use, my bought
bride and I. What
images are reflected in her eyes
I recognize
as in a dream only, my face redrawn
by night. Reborn
each evening of this woman, spared my name,
the cruel fame
of the publicly disfigured, I roar
with my old whore
like a whole man, transfigured for a time.
Sordid? I am
Lafe Grat. I work hard to make a living.
There's no giving
to a man who makes you think of darkness,
for my likeness
is found buried in everyone, hidden
till, unbidden,
it rises to gorge the beast in the blood.
So, out of mud
I am formed and rise each morning to stalk
where others walk
in a world of surfaces — till night when,
like other men,
I may purchase with coin my manhood, life —
a moment's wife.

The last two poems of mine from The Book of Forms have become pretty well known, “Terzanelle in Thunderweather” and “The Obsession.” The terzanelle is a form I developed back in the middle 1960s by applying terza rima to the villanelle. It’s since become a popular form:

TERZANELLE IN THUNDERWEATHER
"A winter's thunder's a summer's wonder."

This is the moment when the shadows gather
Under the elms, the cornices and eaves.
This is the silent heart of thunderweather.
The birds are quiet now among the leaves
Where wind stutters, then moves steadily
Under the elms, the cornices and eaves —
These are our voices speaking guardedly
About the sky, about the sheets of lightning
Where wind stutters, then moves steadily
Into our lungs, across our lips, tightening
Our throats. Our eyes speak in the dark
About the sky, about the sheets of lightning
Illuminating moments. In the stark
Shades that we inhabit there are no words
For our throats. Our eyes speak in the dark
Of things we cannot say, cannot ignore.
This is the moment when the shadows gather,
Shades that we inhabit. There are no words —
This is the silent heart of thunderweather.

The first line of "The Obsession," which is a variant sestina, contains all six of the required end-words or “teleutons,” 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; nonetheless, the line always makes sense. 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.

Thank you all for giving me this opportunity to share some of my work with you and for helping me celebrate the fortieth anniversary of The Book of Forms.

Copyright © 2000 and 2008 by Lewis Turco; all rights reserved.

NOTA BENE:Most of the poems included in this reading are available in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, http://www/star/CloudPress.com.

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COMMENTS

Lewis,

Have re-read your posting — the speech from the literary festival. I like every poem, but most especially “Dawn Song." It is other world/this world, two planes of existence, full of beauty and promise of violence — "of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song." "I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone.... He is the child of dust. I am stone's son,…" What a magnificent poem from Wesli Court. Felt the sense of being new, looking with new eyes and also knowing the future with new eyes at the same time — it is a poem alive inside me.

A. T.