Poetics and Ruminations

La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs and Poems

Barnes & Noble 

OCTOBER 2009

This book of memoirs and poems is available from all booksellers:

Bordighera Press

John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute

Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean

Queens College/CUNY

25 West 43^rd Street, 17^th Floor

New York NY 10036

 

VIA Folios 57

ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1

LOC Control No. 2009905032

Trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00

 

 

From the cover:

Lewis Putnam Turco is the author of some fifty volumes in the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including books, chapbooks and monographs. The most recent of these include The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, published in 2008, and in 2009 Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, a history of the period when science began to displace religion in the western world and of the settlement of Colonial America where his mother’s family, the Putnams, were deeply involved, on both sides of the issue, in the great Salem witchcraft craze of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.

It is as a poet, however, that Lewis Turco has primarily been known. His First Poems appeared in 1960 as a selection of the Book Club for Poetry. The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004 — the latter sobriquet being an anagram pseudonym under which Lewis Turco has published most of his traditionally formal poems — appeared in 2004. Three years later, in 2007, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, a gathering of his non-traditionally written poems, was published. 

Founder of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1962 and of the creative writing program at the State University of New York College at Oswego in 1968, Turco’s first book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize in 1998.  In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation.

Author of “the poet’s bible,” The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, a seminal work — currently in its third edition — in the development of the Neo-Formalist movement in the U. S., in 2008 Lewis Turco received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award given by the West Chester University Poetry Conference. In 2000 he received an honorary degree from Ashland University in Ohio, and this year he received a second honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON

Blues for George Gershwin

September 26, 1898 – July 11, 1937

 

On Saturday, June 27^th, 1998, my wife Jean and I arrived at Chautauqua in western New York State, where I was booked to do several programs the following week. My first program was the following day, on Sunday afternoon, when I gave a reading. That evening we went to hear Wynton Marsalis and the Lincoln Center Jazz Band in the Amphitheater. On Monday morning at 0830 I bagan my workshop, “American Verse Forms,” which went daily through Friday till 1030. On Tuesday evening I gave a lecture, “Upstairs,” for the Women’s Club. During the week we went to a Gershwin program presented by Richard Glazier, a ballet evening, a comedy cowboy trio, “Riders in the Sky,” a chamber music program, and on Friday night there was a pop singer, Mary Chapin Carpenter.

After the Gershwin program we went back to our rooms and went to bed, but I couldn’t sleep because Gershwin kept going through my head. He had long been my favorite American composer, and I regretted that he had died so young. As I lay there, I found myself composing a poem. I finally got up, wrote down what I had floating around in my skull, and finished the piece:

 Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Blues for George Gershwin

When I was three you stepped out of the light.

When I was three years old you spurned the light

And wandered off into the dark of night.

 

You left behind a melody or two,

A tune, a song, a melody or two,

And that was quite enough for you to do

 

To justify your stay among us here,

To pay your way while you were with us here

Upon this mortal coil, this spinning sphere.

 

When I grew up I heard the songs you made,

I listened, and I learned the songs you made

And wished -- oh! how I wished that you had stayed.

 

I do not understand why you were taken

So young. Some force of Nature was mistaken

When it decided to leave the world forsaken

 

Of all that possibility of song,

That minstrel’s bag of melody and song

That now we’ll never hear forever long.

 

Therefore we pick your bones and make up tunes

Out of the scraps you left, those scraps of tunes

Your brother Ira kept through nights and noons

 

Until he got too old and joined you there

Wherever you are, rose up and joined you there

To help you strike those strings in the ringing air.

 

       This poem appears in a collection 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, about which the poet X. J. Kennedy wrote, “This major collection by the astonishing Wesli Court is an event calculated to shiver all literary seismographs.” 

 

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Saturday, September 26th, 2009

R.I.P. T. S. ELIOT

September 26, 1888-January 4, 1965

 

“The Waste Land” and the “Four Quartets”

Were among his surest bets

For lasting fame, but Eliot’s

Standing lies nowadays with “Cats.”

The Background of Hip-Hop

 

Podics is a "folk meter," and it is often found in anonymously written nursery rhymes, ballads, madsongs and, more recently in “rap” or hip-hop. Stephen Henderson in his book Understanding the New Black Poetry (1973 — for a discussion of all Henderson’s terms, see the chapter titled “Black Poetry” in Lewis Turco’s Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Arkansas, 1986), discussing what he calls “virtuoso free-rhyming,” says in effect that these lines typify a Black tradition:

 

I don’t want nothin’ old but some gold;

I don’t want nothin’ black but a Cadillac!

 

I can’t eat a bite, I can’t sleep at night,

‘Cause the woman I love don’t treat me right.

 

They call me Rap the dicker the ass kicker

The cherry picker and city slicker the titty licker.

 

However, The Arabic qasida  is a form dating from prehistoric times, and its essence is improvisation. The technique as it is described in Preminger’s Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965) is a model for the composition of poetry in many ancient societies, including that of the English:

Only by considering how poetry is composed in Arabic can the evolution of the qasidah be reconstructed. In its simplest form, verse is composed extempore, sung to some traditional tune, in one bait at a time; it is then taken up by the company, sung to rhythmical movement and hand clapping. Until the poet warms to his work he casts about among the many traditional themes in his conscious and subconscious memory — which doubtless explains the qasidah sequence and the recurrent clichés of both classical and colloquial versification, for in Arabia mere originality for its own sake is not sought. When visited by Inspiration — which the Arabs conceive as supernatural, a species of demon — the poet now turns to the theme he wishes to treat.

Furthermore, many English language poets such as John Skelton in the early Renaissance, the 19th-century Scots poet Robert Burns, and such twentieth-century poets as John Crowe Ransom, Vachel Lindsay, Ralph Hodgson and Theodore Roethke have used the accentual prosody called “podics” successfully. Podics uses rhyme, but it does not regularly alternate stressed and unstressed syllables.  Podics is a holdover, in folk poetry, of Anglo-Saxon prosody. 

After Geoffrey Chaucer, his contemporary John Gower, and other fourteenth-century poets combined the Norman French syllabic system with the native English strong stress prosody, thus inventing accentual-syllabic prosody, the common folk, including the balladeers of the Scottish-English border, continued to hear the ancient alliterative stich (line) and echoic devices, so they continued to write using the old prosody, but they added true rhyme and stanza forms, which they adopted from the Norman French after year 1066.  Many nursery rhymes and lullabies are nothing more than two rhyming stichs (a distich) of Anglo-Saxon prosody:

The cock's on the midden · a-blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn · a-threshing of corn;

The maids in the meadow · are making of hay;

The ducks in the river · are swimming away.

Dipodic verse merely breaks the full four-beat stichs into half-lines (hemistichs), but they don’t have to be printed that way because the central caesura already does that:

The cock's on the midden

a-blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn

a-threshing of corn;

The maids in the meadow

are making of hay;

The ducks in the river

are swimming away.

Here is an excerpt from the hip-hop performer Tupac Shakur’s “Panther Power” from his album titled The Lost Tapes — in the first four lines the caesurae (mid-line pauses) and stressed syllables have been inserted as above:

 

As real as it seems · the American Dream

Ain't nothing but another · calculated scheme

To get us locked up · shot up back in chains

To deny us of the future · rob our names.

Kept my history of mystery but now I see

The American Dream wasn't meant for me

Cause lady liberty is a hypocrite she lied to me

Promised me freedom, education, equality

Never gave me nothing but slavery

And now look at how dangerous you made me

Calling me a mad man cause I'm strong and bold

With this dump full of knowledge of the lies you told

Promise me emancipation indispute nation

All you gave my people was our patience

Fathers of our country never cared for me

They kept my answer shackled up in slavery

And Uncle Sam never did a dam thing for me

Except lie about the facts in my history

So now I'm sitting hear mad cause I'm unemployed

But the government's glad cause they enjoyed

When my people are down so they can screw us around

Time to change the government now panther power

“Tumbling verse,” which is insistently rhymed dipodic couplets, was the creation of the sixteenth-century poet John Skelton who made lines of the hemistichs and rhymed them insistently.  We have come to call this system Skeltonics in his honor.  As in hip-hop, there is no set point at which the rhymes may change, and every now and again a tripod (three-beat line) may be thrown in to thicken the brew.

         The "head" of the title of the following poem is a skull, a "Memento Mori" or remembrance of the shortness of life that was kept on the table of a monk or a priest like Skelton. The title continues into an epigraph. The last line of this poem was originally in French: "mirrez vous y," which is rendered here in English:

UPON A DEAD MAN'S HEAD

that was sent to him from an honorable gentlewoman for a token, Skelton, Laureate, devised this ghostly meditation in English, covenable, in sentence, commendable, lamentable, lacrimable, profitable for the soul.

Your ugly token

My mind hath broken

From worldly lust,

For I have discussed

We are but dust,

And die we must.

It is general

To be mortal.

I have well espied

No man may him hide

From Death hollow-eyed,

With sinews withered,

With bones shivered,

With his worm-eaten maw

And his ghastly jaw

Gaping aside —

Neither flesh nor fell.

Then, by my counsel,

Look that ye spell

Well this gospel:

For whereso we dwell

Death will us quell

And with us mell.

For all our pampered paunches

There may be no franchise

Nor worldly bliss

Redeem us from this.

Our days be dated

To be checkmated

With draughts of death

Stopping our breath —

Our eyes sinking,

Our bodies stinking,

Our gums grinning,

Our souls burning.

To whom, then, shall we sue

For to have rescue,

But to sweet Jesu

On us then for to rue?

O goodly Child

Of Mary mild,

Then be our shield

That we be not exiled

To the dread dale

Of bootless bale,

Nor to the lake

Of fiends black.                                             

But grant us grace

To see thy Face,

And to purchase

Thine heavenly place,

And thy palace

Full of solace

Above the sky

That is so high,

Eternally

To behold and see

The Trinity!

Amen.

Mirror you thus.

John Skelton (modern vversion by Wesli Court) from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, © 2000.

PROLOGUE

(from Odds Bodkin’s Strange Thrusts and Ravels)

         Sirs, my name is Odds,

of hods a worshiper, of clods

descended, an eater of pods —

my surname Bodkin,

of bad stock and odd kin

offsprung; can nod, can

grin, do odd jobs, japes,

queer faces, apes,

may jingle and rime

when the mood moves and the time

is promiscuous.  Sirs, I'm

harmless, a happy man,

rimer, chimer — none sublimer

in my fashion, no climber

I, I suit my station, pan

my branch for glitter and,

sirs, though there be not much

gold forthcoming, such

is my lot — I am content,

I bend as I am bent.

 

         But I have eyes, damme,

sires and Mesdames, eyes

to see what shall pass, arise,

what grubs, grovels, flies,

becomes, is, shall be, dies —

I have a nose

for good verse, bad prose,

a breast that sighs,

fingers to scratch,

two ears that nigh match, a tongue

to tell and a good lung

with a loud breath

to back the telling.  Death

shall still me, it may

be, but I shall stay

till I've said all I have to say,

and then it will not matter

how the sickle may tatter

my rags, rum, and marrow.  Flatter

I shall lie, but not lie to flatter.

 

         For I purpose to tell,

if it takes an ell

of foolscap, a fathomless well

of ink and one hell

of a heap of gall,

of my fellow rimers: all

their foibles and fables, small

honors and tall tales

told in school and out,

of the fleshless and the stout —

poor fish all: sucker, trout,

flounder, eel, grouper; bales

of pickled herring — of these

and many another: anchovies

in tins, oiled and boiled,

soiled, moiled, foiled, roiled,

salted and spoiled,

anemones, clams

served up in stuffings, chopped,

garnishing hams, Spams....  Stopped

be thy jaw, Odds!

Ye gods, how you do yaw!  Cods

and codpieces!  Get on with it —

swallow or spit!

 

Wesli Court

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Star Cloud Press.

Seventeen Haiku

After Matsuo Basho

 

Arise! Arise! I

want you with me on my road,

sleeping butterfly!

 

Spring calls beginnings,

yet in solitary thought

lies the fall gloaming.

 

Is it for spring’s sake

that this small, nameless mountain

hides in morning haze?

 

From what tree’s blossoms

does it waft? I wish I knew —

this phantom perfume!

 

Moon of the pond’s sky,

I meander about you,

and night is over.

 

Sometimes the clouds come

to arrest our eyes, give rest

from this moon-gazing.

 

Where the starling flies

till sight loses its wings,

there lies one island.

 

The island adrift

in a wild sea; overhead

flows heaven’s river.

 

The day is so still

their voices drill into stone —

the locusts calling.

 

Did it shrill until

it became only echo?

— this cicada shell.

 

In the deep prairie

sunken in its solitude

the lark sings and sings.

 

Waving summer grass:

the dead weave dreams of it,

the warriors sleeping.

 

In the same house slept

the women of the evening,

bush-clover, the moon.

 

The blossoms have gone,

and the moon; he drinks the wine

of his solitude.

 

Butterfly and bird,

there is your hidden flower —

the sky of autumn.

 

The snow that we watched

falling then — has it fallen

again with the year?

 

Upon an ill road,

old among withered fields; dreams

will go wandering still.

 

Lewis Turco

from The Cream City Review, ix:1-2, 1984, and The Cream City Review 20th Anniversary Anthology, xx:1-2, 1995-96.

Poetics: The Conspiracy of Silence

 

 

         In the teaching of poetry at all levels there is a tacit conspiracy of silence regarding the most basic elements of the genre. This silence about the structure of poetry, which is the fundamental concern of the poet, proceeds from pure ignorance of the subject.

         In secondary school students are confounded by teachers who have been trained to believe there are only two ways to write poetry; namely, in accentual-syllabic, usually rhymed, verse, or in "free verse," which none seem to be able to define.  Although poets have been writing poems in a thousand different ways for centuries, no teacher seems capable   of explaining simply what is to be seen on the page.  As a result, teachers try to jam everything into metrics, and when it can't be done, both teachers and students know something is wrong, but they don't know what.  So the teachers pretend everything is all right and call the exceptions "free verse" or "sprung rhythm" or something equally undescriptive.  At this point students turn off their minds on the subject and go to college.

         In college they meet professors who also do not know the different prosodies of poetry, for no one has ever taught them, either. Item: While conversing with Dr. Wesley Sweetser about the British poet Ralph Hodgson, I discovered that this "expert" on Hodgson knew nothing about the prosody called podics.  He had never even heard of the term.  It happens that podics is the prosody in which Hodgson wrote; it is also the prosody of nursery rhymes and folk ballads.

         Item: while conversing with two other colleagues, Dr. Barbara Hardy, a Shakespeare scholar, and Dr. Rand Bishop, an African literature specialist, I was reluctantly informed by both that neither had been taught how to scan a poem and could not handle scansion, even of blank verse, which was the metric of Shakespeare.  The reason for this situation seemed to be that no one had ever told them that the purpose of scansion is to discern the running rhythm of the poem, with the variations all good poets use in the line, not to try to force each line into a regular beat — few poets are interested in monotonous regularity.

         In college students meet professors such as these — professors who are scholars or critics, generally speaking.  For them how the poem was built by the poet is of little value — they are interested in more esoteric things. It's as though a group of freshmen were taken out into the desert on a guided tour.  They come to a beautiful palace called "Poetry," which is built high in the air on four marble pillars. When they arrive, the guide calls out, and someone lets down a golden ladder.  The students climb up to the palace and are met by a professor who immediately ushers them into a chaotic hall called "The Deconstructionist Throne Room" where everything shifts and wavers before them, where sounds do not settle into meaningful syntax and everything is relative to everything else. When they have finished there, the students visit the Feminist Wing for a time, with its loveseats and ornate couches spotted among the iron maidens containing the impaled males of the human race.  Then they enter the Marxist Parlor to look at the working class murals on the walls, and when they are tired they rest in the Reader Response Suite, full of intuitive starlight and the Muzak of Personal Opinion played through loudspeakers. When they are rested, they exit through the Post-Structuralist Funhouse where everything again loses its sense in a welter of meaningless word games. When at last the students leave, it is night.  They climb down the golden ladder and are led blindly away — no one has shone a torch upon the marble pillars that support this marvel in the air.

         If someone had struck a light at the right time, the pupils would have seen signs on the four pillars: "The Typographical Pilaster," "The Sonic Pilaster," "The Sensory Pilaster," "The Ideational Pilaster."  If one had examined these pillars closely, he would have discovered how the magnificent Palace of Poetry was supported in the heavens by simple stone — the work of the craftsman. Instead, the students clamber back into the bus, traverse the desert, and, when they reach the first oasis, they are given transfer tickets in the form of diplomas.  They scatter on various conveyances to the four corners of the world, become teachers themselves, some of them, and teach what they have been taught to others who may eventually make the same journey which is in a circle intellectually, if not in any other way.  The cycle of ignorance is self-perpetuating.  In this case, however, ignorance is not bliss — it is uneasy, and this is the reason for the agreement to be silent, for only if no one admits he or she is confused will anyone be found, like the king in the fable, to be standing before his class and his profession stark naked.

         I admire my three colleagues for having the courage, finally, to admit they knew nothing about poetics and for submitting themselves to a crash course I delivered on a desktop that cursorily covered a few basic elements of scansion and prosodics. These are the essentials: 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, particularlyverbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.  3)  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses throughpromotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse. 4)  In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will stand in place of a stressed syllable.  5)  In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will stand in place of an unstressed syllable. 6)  An accent may be forced upon a syllable through rhetorical stress, by underlining, italicizing, boldfacing, or otherwise artificially heightening it, as has just now been done.

         But such first-aid is not enough by any means.  Someone, somewhere, must break the treadmill and strike off on the highway the poets themselves walk.

From The Andover Review, i:2, Fall 1974.

 

Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, UArkansasPress  1986. Paperback, $12.95. 1986 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America. ORDER FROM AMAZON

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Sunday, September 20th, 2009

R.I.P. DONALD HALL

September 20, 1928 -

 

His parents wept, for they both hated

The jobs for which they seemed ill-fated;

He learned to let his teardrops fall

And drown the verse of Donald Hall.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Saturday, September 19th, 2009

PRIEST OF PASSAGE

for William Golding, 19 September 1911 – 19 June 1993

 

A Mouse:

 

I lie here in the root of this weed, gray

as the rest of the night. I hear the sharp

points of the stars spearing the undergrowth.

The nails of my hands grasp thistle and moss

as I listen, my cold eyes glistening.

 

An Owl:

 

He is down there, waiting. He will not hear

my wings until they are beating his sides,

until my talons have wound his life in

spools of flight and the earth diminishes

as his world grows smaller, washes at last

into the wells of his sight. Let him wait

as I circle in a white storm of stars.

 

The Mouse:

 

I think I hear him, but I do not hear

Him. I only think. What I do hear is

the hoofsong of the nightwind rearing like

a stallion among the boles and cones. Branches

beat against branches — a flock of beaks sharp

as this blade of sawgrass against my ear.

 

The Owl:

 

It will be soon now. All I need do is

circle, draw the spiral sign once more on

the slate of silence. I am priest of his

passage, a monk who dwells in his bowels.

I finish the motion thus: the tip of

my wing lances the moon with this gesture.

 

The Mouse:

 

Stars and a tide of wind.

 

The Owl.:

 

                                                               Up. We are one.

 

Lewis Turco

First published in Arts in Society, iii:2, 1965; all rights reserved.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, September 18th, 2009

R.I.P.  SAMUEL JOHNSON

September 18, 1709-December 23, 1784

 

Many an essay, poem, and play

Fell from his quill in his heyday,

But now we must look in a lexicon,

For the words of Doctor Johnson.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Thursday, September 17th, 2009

R.I.P. WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS

September 17, 1883-March 4, 1963

 

So much depends upon that red

  wheel barrow, glazed with rain

      water beside the white chickens,

no doubt – but what? We feel

   someone should tell us but, alas!

      only Doctor Williams could.