Poetics and Ruminations

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

  

R.I.P. JOHN GAY

June 30, 1685 – December 4, 1732

 

Although he had financial trouble

And lost his wealth in the South Sea bubble,

He wrote the famous beggar’s play

That made a rich man of John Gay.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Tuesday, June 29th, 2010

 

R.I.P. FRANK LOESSER

June 29, 1910 – July 26, 1969

 

Many lyricists were lesser

Men of talents than Frank Loesser.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Sunday, June 27th, 2010

 

R.I.P. PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR

June 27, 1872 – February 9, 1906

 

A wunderkind chock-full of gumption,

He died much too soon of consumption.

Checkers or Chess

 
 

An Interview by Terry Stanion

         This interview took place at St. Michael's College in Winooski, Vermont, on October 20, 1971, where Lewis Turco gave a reading before a room full of college students, a few professors, some middle-aged people and some not so middle-aged, and a nun. It appears here as it was edited from its original publication in The Vermont Freeman, issue of "Early November, 1971," page nine.

         Mr. Turco was a dark-haired, neatly groomed, mustached man dressed in a green shirt, multi-colored vest, and red jeans. On a tour of several colleges in the Northeast, the poet had read the day before at the University of Vermont in Burlington.

Stanion. Mr. Turco, what did you think of your audience this evening?

Turco. I thought they were responsive. I got the impression they enjoyed the reading.

Stanion. The audience chuckled after you read your first poem. It was titled "Old News," wasn't it? You wrote it when you found out your wife was pregnant with your first child, I believe. Would you read it again?

Turco. Yes. It appeared in my book Awaken, Bells Falling three years ago:

 

OLD NEWS¹

 

         "Six weeks gone," the doctor said,

that odd good luck look walking his lips along

 

         the trail blazed by the tip of

his tongue.  "Six weeks gone, son.  She'll be fine.  Lousy

 

         in bed, though," shaking his head.

"You'll be used to the idea come daylight,"

 

         and off he went, his eyes propped

wide with a good call's work — blasé, not quite bored

 

         by the old wonder with which

I was left: the old bride whose acquiescence,

 

         I now find, can swallow down

this house with its carpet silences; stillness

 

         of pillows; the couch couching.

Outdoors, the dark lies in the hollows of trees.

 

         Night descends like a muffled

lamp.  These eyes seize on ancient things: the roadway

 

         sleeping between its curbs, the

lurking swell of a still flat belly, and the

 

lidded moon risen, unwinking, on the world.

 

Stanion. That is a crowd-pleaser, it seems. Do you deliberately write for a particular audience?

Turco. That depends on what you mean by audience, and on when you mean I think about it. While one is writing, I doubt very much that one thinks about the audience who will be reading the finished poem. But eventually, it seems to me, one has to consider the audience one wants to reach. I think most poets are concerned more with the horizontal than the vertical audience.

Stanion. What are those?

Turco. The "vertical" audience for literature consists of the mass of readers of any stripe who exist at any particular moment, whereas the “horizontal” audience is made of those readers who exist from one particular moment forward into the indefinite future. Although the vertical audience appears to be massive in comparison with the horizontal audience of that same moment, in fact the horizontal audience will be much larger — good news for the writer of "serious" as distinguished from "popular" literature.

Stanion. It's the difference between the cult and the mob?

Turco. More or less. The smallest possible audience is one — oneself; the largest is everyone. Every audience in between these extremes is limited to a greater or lesser degree. If the poet addresses only himself or herself, he or she is a narcissist; if the poet addresses everyone, he or she must seek the lowest common denominator, and art is exhausted. The poet, then, must consider the audience he or she wishes to reach and settle for that readership which is as large as his or her seriousness of intent and talent will bear.

Stanion. How long have you been writing poetry?

Turco. For about as long as I can remember. I published my first poems when I was nineteen and doing a stint in the Navy.

Stanion. In the Navy? That sounds like a TV sit-com. What is your background?

Turco My father was an Italian Baptist minister who served congregations in Buffalo, New York, and Meriden, Connecticut, where I grew up. My mother is a Methodist missionary from Wisconsin who traces her ancestry back to the Putnams of the Salem Village witchcraft trials of 1692.

Stanion. Are you an only child? Are you married? Do you have children? Do you write about people who are close to you?

Turco I've written poems about my brother, Gene, my wife, my parents, my daughter — in fact, I wrote a whole series, about my family, friends, and acquaintances, titled The Sketches. It was originally published as a chapbook in 1962 and was reprinted in my Pocoanqelini: A Fantography & Other Poems this year.

Stanion. You've also written on occasion about public figures and events, haven't you? One of your best-known poems, I recall, is titled "November 22, 1963," about the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It's been translated into other languages, hasn't it? Would you read it?

Turco. I'd be happy to.

 

NOVEMBER 22, 1963⁽¹⁾

for J. F. K.

 

Weeping, I write this:  You are dead.  The dark

animal of the heart, the beast that bides

stilly in its web of flesh, has stolen

flight again out of the air.  What is there

to say?  That I wish we were gods?  That the

mind of man were equal to his lusts?  It

is not — not yet.  You were a man, but more:

you were an idea dreamt in a sweet

hour while the spider slept.  We make our

web; its habitant makes greatness of its

prey.  We are ourselves victim and victor.

You were and are ourselves.  In killing you

we murder an emblem of what we strive

to be: not men, but Man.  In mourning you,

good Man, we grieve for what we are, not what

we may become.

                                  Sleep, John.  We will try

once more.  Sleep, sleep now.  We will try again.

 

Stanion. Robert Frost read at the inauguration of President Kennedy, and you spent some time here in Vermont at Middlebury College's Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. Did you ever meet him?

Turco. Yes, in 1961, when I was a Bread Loaf Poetry Fellow, I spent an evening swapping stories with him in Treman Hall on the Bread Loaf campus. He had died by 1968 when I was a member of the teaching faculty there.

Stanion. Some people have commented on the similarity of some of your poems to those of Frost. Did he have an influence on you?

Turco. In a way, perhaps. Not stylistically, but Frost's feeling for people perhaps influenced me in my writing about people

Stanion. Why do you write poetry?

Turco Perhaps for the same reason that others read poetry: they are driven to it in their quest for a richer understanding of life.

Stanion. Is that why you wrote a sequence of poems, "Bordello,"² in your book Pocoangelini, about men who frequent a bawdy house?

Turco Yes. I tried to empathize with such people because everyone seems to have written fiction and poetry about so-called "fallen women," but I've never seen the other side of the coin. If there are reasons why women become prostitutes, there must be reasons why men use them, so I tried to put myself into those men's minds and attempt to understand the psychology that motivates them. Each has a different reason — one has been emasculated by his wife, another has had to work too hard and too long to find a wife, and a minister deludes himself into believing that by knowing sin firsthand he can serve his flock better.

Stanion. Probably the saddest of these men is Lafe Grat who is too ugly to have a wife.

Turco Yes. For him the bordello is his only refuge:

 

LAFE GRAT⁽²⁾

 

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.

 

Stanion. That sounds like an experiment in psychology.

Turco Writers were the first psychologists. A poet experiments with words in much the same way that a scientist experiments with physical data. Whereas the scientist explores the mysteries of the physical universe, the poet tries to explore and understand the mysteries of the human condition.

Stanion. You are a teacher as well as a writer — can insight be taught?

Turco. A teacher can certainly teach technique, and he or she can foster sensitivity, but no one can teach aptitude. I think it's possible to teach almost anyone to write poetry — not great poetry, but poetry. If I didn't think I could do so, I wouldn't be a teacher.

Stanion. And you've written a book on the subject, The Book of Forms,⁽³⁾ which many other teachers use also, In a world that has become so depersonalized by automation and overpopulation, perhaps we can use a few more poets.

 

NOTES

¹Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 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

²The 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

³The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, 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

 

E-REMARKS

 

Lew,

I very much enjoyed the Interview by Terry Stanion. The paragraph on one's audience was apt and I was touched by “Lafe Grat”

Alice Teeter

 

Thanks, Alice,

         I'm working on a manuscript of my collected interviews over the years titled Craft or Sullen Art. This is one of the earliest. You wanted to know about qn even earlier one, "Interview with a Split Personality" which was videotaped in 1968. I checked with SUNY Oswego, and unfortunately it appears that it was destroyed when the "Learning Resources Center" was eliminated.

Lew

 

Awfully short sighted of SUNY Oswego, if you ask me.

 

Alice

Uncle Wesli’s New Mother Goose No. 11

 

Listen to Wesli Court read Piggery Dog

PIGGERY DOG

On the 10^th of July, 2001 I sent a letter to Dana Gioia in Santa Rosa, California, that said in part, “I write very little these days. My last poem you probably saw in The Formalist, ‘The Gathering of the Elders.’ My last except for this, which I wrote for my [then five-year-old] granddaughter, Jessima, when we passed a sign in Augusta [Maine] that read, “Piggery Road” --

Piggery Diggery Dog,

We’re supping high off the hog,

On fatback and bacon

With all else forsaken,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

         Today [yesterday], Thursday, 24 June 2010, I ran across that letter and the stanza that I’d never done anything with. Because Jessima, now a teen-ager, and her little sister Phoebe, six, are staying with my wife Jean and me while their folks are attending a conference in Washington, DC, I wrote the rest of this nursery rhyme for the two of them (but mostly for Phoebe, of course — Jessie is ‘way too sophisticated now):

 

Piggery Diggery Dog,

We’re supping high off the hog,

On fatback and bacon

With all else forsaken,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog,

My brain is all in a fog,

         My thoughts are as misty

         As Agatha Christie,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog,

My sister fell off of a log,

         She landed akimbo

         Then slipped into Limbo,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog,

My engine is slipping a cog,

         It’s all out of whack

         And jumping the track,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog,

The camel is out for a jog,

         The silly giraffe

         Is aching to laugh,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog,

Look out for that fat pollywog

         Who thinks it’s a toad

         While crossing the road,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog.

Your eyeballs are all of agog,

         They’re crossed and they’re walleyed

         And trying to backslide,

Piggery Diggery Dog.

 

Piggery Diggery Dog.

I’m done with this droll catalogue

         And if you want more

         Then try not to snore

And furnish your own epilogue.

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Ciardi, Robert Frost, and the Morrisons at Bread Loaf 

R.I.P. JOHN CIARDI

June 24, 1916 - March 30, 1986

 

The lately great limerist Ciardi,

Whose muse was nigh onto untardy,

         Whenever he sang

         In his New England twang,

Made rum sounds like, "Paw me a toddy."

John

Listen to Lewis Turco read John, Parts One and Two

I, JOHN’S TELESCOPE

 

The fireflies that limpid summer night

   called to one another silently,

moving beneath the sky as though they were

stars set free among their frozen siblings.

 

Our nephew John set up his telescope

   on the lawn among the fireflies

and aimed it at a planet — probably

Saturn, perhaps, or Mars — one of those gods

 

the Greeks invented not so long ago

   to replace the Titans and prepare

the way for Jaweh. Johnny let me peer

through the lens into the brilliant dark

 

that I recalled from childhood when I lay

   on my back beneath the summer sky

and let the weight of all that mystery

settle upon me till I was absorbed

 

into the nothingness that I could see

   and the rest of nothing I could not.

Terror absorbed me. I could feel the grass

dewy beneath me, hear the piping frogs

 

down by the brook ratcheting on of love,

   or sex at least, calling to their kind

to come and carry on for who knows why?

I could have been a star myself, shooting

 

into the void we now know can’t exist,

   filled with quarks and quasars, sheets of gas

the Hubbell has turned into veils of light

swaling through space like the sails of cosmic

 

ships, dark matter filling the abyss, black

   holes swallowing worlds and suns, novae

flaring and creating worlds and light. Who

can compass it? The paltry gods of Earth

 

were never meant to handle such immense

   phantasmagoria as these, were

never meant to represent these Powers,

Thrones, Dominions, eidolons of the mind

 

   of man, these firefly mysteries.

 

 

II. JOHN’S MICROSCOPE

 

         John shuttled between the sublime

         and the infinitesimal,

       novas to microbes, and he wound up

   with the smallest of the small – he became

a microentomologist.

                                  But there are smaller still,

 

         uncertain in principle, like

         muons, baryons, leptons, mesons;

      the unobserved antiparticle

   or the graviton; the photon, which is

its own antiparticle. Each has its own spin, its own

 

         spin doctor studying bosons

         and fermions interacting:

      creating and annihilating

   with force, adding electrons or dropping

protons, keeping nuclei intact

 

         perhaps, while particles enter

         or leave twice at the same time, while

      neither matter nor energy may

   be destroyed, only transformed, one into

the other, the sum of their parts forever a constant

 

         whole resting, it may be, upon

         a bed of vibrating super

      strings, all of them playing the music

   composed by Pythagoras long ago,

the constant music of the ineffable cosmic spheres.

 

From Attic, Shed and Barn, Ahadada books, www.ahadadabooks.com, free downloadable on-line chapbook.

 
 

The red pen event is hardly worthy of the name, considering the excellence and pedigree of its headliner.  I was thrilled to present to the world "John," a new poem by Lewis Turco, and an interview of Mr. Turco by his altar ego (read the piece to ravel that pun) Wesli Court.  In "John" Mr. Turco contemplates through the glasses (telescope and microscope) of a nephew the utterly grand and the utterly small. It includes a brilliant, poetic take on the standard model of physics.  It also includes a meditation of the universe, rising to the following:

 

The paltry gods of Earth

 

were never meant to handle such immense

   phantasmagoria as these, were

never meant to represent these Powers,

Thrones, Dominions, eidolons of the mind

 

   of man, these firefly mysteries.

The self-interview is a splendid mini-memoir tracing through the history of a too-often neglected branch of modern poetry, and it includes so much that inspires me as a poet and a student of poetry.  In one telling passage he describes how, sending poems out to periodicals in the middle-to-late 1970’s, he was amazed that magazines began accepting rhyming and metered poems more readily than syllabic poems.

"What was going on? I thought I knew. The worm was beginning to turn again, and there was a big pile of younger poets who had been using The Book of Forms for almost a decade, writing in the old forms, experimenting with the Bardic forms, publishing in the little magazines, and even beginning new periodicals that published what they were interested in."

I've read Mr. Turco's poetry and criticism since I've been a teenager, and it has been an honor to work with such a creative, perceptive and hard-working gentleman.  I should also mention his Weblog, which is one of the best maintained and most interesting you'll find by a major contemporary poet.

Uche Ogbuji, Poetry Editor

www.TheNervousBreakdown.com 

The Passing of Allen Hoey

 

         I am extremely sorry to hear of the passing of the poet Allen Hoey. I'd known him for years, since he was a young man publishing beautifully printed and designed poetry chapbooks from his Banjo Press in Potsdam, New York. One of those little books was my A Cage of Creatures which Allen issued in 1978:

 
 

         It's particularly sad when someone dies too soon, but obviously he accomplished much and put his time to good use while he was with us:

 

Popular county poet dies of heart attack

By: JOAN HELLYER

Bucks County Courier Times

BUCKS COUNTY COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Allen Hoey earned a Pulitzer Prize nomination for his collection of poems entitled "Country Music."

Friends and colleagues are remembering Bucks County Community College Professor Allen Hoey as a man with "a big soul and a generous spirit."

Hoey, 57, died Wednesday night of a heart attack, said his wife, Deborah.

The language and literature professor was an accomplished writer and poet who in recent years ran the Bucks County Poet Laureate Program and the Bucks County's High School Poet of the Year contest.

Hoey, a Solebury resident, was recognized as the county's poet master in 2001. The New York native also was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for "Country Music," a 2008 collection of poems, many of which concerned life in northern New York.

He recently released "Stricter Means," a selection of poems from previous collections. Hoey's other recent works include "Chasing the Dragon: A Novel about Jazz" and "Once Upon a Time at Blanche's" about the people he knew at a bar he frequented while an undergraduate college student in upstate New York in the 1970s.

"A lot of the stories these patrons tell are funny, but there's also a depth of sadness in many of them," Hoey told the newspaper about "Once Upon a Time" in a 2009 interview.

"That same conversational mix of tragedy, mishap and humorous half-acceptance continues through the book, including poems about birthing cows, an over-flowed septic tank, an act of vengeance, and an elderly lesbian farmer," Hoey said during the interview.

Deborah said her husband, whom she married in 2006, was "an absolutely brilliant man with a very peculiar sense of humor."

They first met years ago when she returned to college as an older student. Then 10 years later, in 2000, after staying in touch via the phone every once in a while they ran into each other in a local bookstore. Both were separated at the time, Deborah said Friday. They decided to "get a drink" together and have been a couple ever since.

Their blended family includes his sons Owen and Stephen, her daughters Jessica and Lauren, son-in-law Bill and grandchildren Tristan and Reece.

"He was a loving, caring wonderful man who I did not have nearly enough time with," Deborah said.

Hoey's friends and colleagues also found much to celebrate about the literary master.

"He could be very structured and could be very humorous and down home," said John Strauss, Hoey's friend and fellow language and literature professor at BCCC.

The poem, "What To Do When the Minute Hand Won't Move," is an example of those abilities, friends said.

"Shake the clock. Depress the switch that lights the face. Shake it again. Watch the ceiling till the slight glow seeping through the slats lets you see every item arrayed across the dresser," Hoey wrote in the poem.

His attention to detail and passionate commitment to the craft extended to the classroom, colleagues said.

"Alan was incredible. He was one of the most reliable, productive members of the department. He was the curriculum coordinator. I don't know what we are going to do without him," Susan Darrah, the assistant academic dean of the language and literature department at BCCC, said Friday afternoon.

Here is a link that will provide further information about Allen and a few of his recent poems:

http://www.foxchasereview.org/10SU/AllenHoey.html

Having a Nervous Breakdown

 

 

This weekend Lewis Turco is the featured poet at

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/

where he is interviewed by his alter-ego “Wesli Court”

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/lturco/2010/06/lewis-turco-the-tnb-self-interview/

and you can see his double poem titled “John”

http://www.thenervousbreakdown.com/lturco/2010/06/john/ 

taken from his most recent collection of poems, a free, downloadable e-chapbook titled Attic, Shed and Barn, published by Ahadada books, www.ahadadabooks.com.

Later on in the summer, after Wesli Court’s new book of rhymed and metered poems titled The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems is published by

http://www.StarCloudPress.com 

on September first (his first solo book since 1981), Turco will turn the table on himself and interview Court. These are some comments about Court’s forthcoming collection:

 

This major collection by the astonishing Wesli Court is an event calculated to shiver all literary seismographs.  Readers addicted to poetry, but weary of ill-made poems, can latch on to it with joy.  Aspiring poets can seize it as a handbook of models, learning how to write anything from an ode to a sonnenizio, from an epigram to a blues epilogue.  While often striking a wistful, wintery tone of hail-and-farewell, there are notes of infectious cheer and some genuine surprises — even a poem to fulfill an unused title that Wallace Stevens left lying idle.  With unique skill, Court shows us what a truly good metrical poem used to be, could be, and (in his able hands) still is. — X. J. Kennedy

 

It’s an increasingly rare pleasure to read poems about the real world in language as clear as it is lyrical, with deep roots in the past and illuminated by carefree rhyme. — Miller Williams

 

The miraculous thing about all these poems is the way they avoid sentimentality and the temptation to reinvent the past, preferring, instead, a difficult blend of affection and detachment, honesty and regret. — Rhina P. Espaillat in The Hollins Critic.

 

COMMENTS

Hi Lew,

     This week, since I have the proof copy of The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems on my desk, I have treated myself to intervals of quiet so that I could read your poems again . . . and again, and have done so with great pleasure.

      It is a superb collection, masterfully rendered by a true Master of Craft.

      I hope that it will find the very wide readership that it deserves.

 

Dr. Steven E. Swerdfeger, Ph. D.

Publisher

www.StarCloudPress.com

 

Dear Mr. Turco,

I am an MFA student in poetry at Spalding University and have just completed a semester of study with Molly Peacock. Molly has pretty much turned me into a formalist, and I will be writing my extended critical essay about the creation of narrative in sonnet crowns, and the pressure that narrative exerts on sonnet form.

I've read that you've published a sonnet crown under your pseudonym. Would you mind sending me the name of the book that contains the crown. 

Thanks so much for your help, and for all your wonderful poetry!

Sincerely,

Barbara Payne Freimuth

 

Hi, Barbara,

Sorry to disappoint, but I've written a sonnet redoublé, not a crown of sonnets, under my pseudonym Wesli Court. It's in the current edition of The Book of Forms, titled "Reflections in an Attic Room," and it will appear for the first time in a collection of my poems, The Gathering of the Elders (by Wesli), from StarCloudPress.com on September first. It was originally published in Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry.

Yours,

Lew Turco

  

Thanks very much!  I look forward to purchasing these books, and to hearing you read someday!

Best,

B. Freimuth

p.s. Great website!

 

Lew —

Congratulations on your Breakdown! I liked "John" very much — both scopes. The interview was great. Wish the videotape for classroom television was online. 

Alice Teeter

 

Thank you, Alice,

Maybe I can get Oswego to put the interview on a cd. If so, I'll post it on my blog; meanwhile, it's in my blog archive as a document titled "Interview with a Split Personality."

Lew

 

OMG Lew, you are amazing and awesome. Thank you for sharing your exciting news with me!

Peggy Cooper

CooperHouse Publishing

  

Thanks, Peggy,

Whatever became of your forms chart?

Lew

I don’t know where to even start with this splendid history. So much that inspires me as a poet and a student of poetry. But I will say that this is the moment that gave me a frisson:

After a while you and I had all these poems lying around doing nothing, so we decided to start sending them out to periodicals in the middle-to-late 1970’s, sometimes under my name, but most of the time under your name. To my amazement, magazines began to accept them. In fact, you began to have more luck with your rhyming and metered poems than I was having with my syllabic poems! What was going on? I thought I knew. The worm was beginning to turn again, and there was a big pile of younger poets who had been using The Book of Forms for almost a decade, writing in the old forms, experimenting with the Bardic forms, publishing in the little magazines, and even beginning new periodicals that published what they were interested in.

Hooray for the turned worm. I personally share your opinion of the Beat Generation (and I throw in the Confessionals as well), as I’ve argued before here on TNB. I’ll admit that I was given occasion to examine a few of the writers more closely, and found some good bits here and there, but overall, I agree with the characterization of when the loudest camp in poetry was “consolidating its anti-intellectual stranglehold on a generation, and the self-righteous, self-indulgent decade of the 1960s loomed ahead.” In fact, you inspire me to publish my poem “Babel”, which I’ve long avoided doing because I thought that all the reflex reverence for the beats meant maybe I was just missing something.

I’m delighted to think you had some effect on the turning of the worm. I’m not dogmatic about form, but I do really wonder how a poet can develop the marvelous mimetic and compact power over language bards have perfected for eons, while ignoring all the hard work and miraculous achievements of those eons of bards. In my opinion, the fear of Erato is the beginning of poetic wisdom, even if sometimes that wisdom ultimately manifests itself in free verse.

 

Thank you, Uche,

And thank you for asking me to be the featured poet this issue of thenervousbreakdown.com. You've been very kind.

Lew Turco

 

This three-headed interview has left me dizzy, exhilarated, and schizoid. The professorial third of me is energized to tackle the long-needed revision and updating of my own “book of forms,” FORMS OF VERSE, BRITISH AND AMERICAN, first brought out in the early 70s by now-defunct Appleton-Century-Crofts. It was (and is–I still use it in teaching, as do a few others) more a learn-by-doing book than a handbook. The diffident and realistic third of me feels puny in the face of the erudition of all the Turcos. The poet third cries out, “Sit down, shut up, grab your copy of Turco’s BOOKOF FORMS and try some new experiments!” The poet third is the loudest. Thanks, Mssrs. Turco, and Wesli Court too.

Clarinda Harriss

 

Thanks, Clarinda,

And certainly you ought to update your book. The more, the merrier!

Lew

[“John” is] Beautiful. A wonderful homage to both John and Pythagoras.

I particularly like this… “into the nothingness that I could see
and the rest of nothing I could not.”

Jude

Thank you, Jude. Delighted you enjoyed the poem.

Lew

 

My favorite bit is the ending of I, from “Who can compass it?” But as an amateur of physics I also love the standard model rendered into verse of the middle stanzas of II. Overall, the poem is a sheer pleasure.

Uche Ogbuji

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Saturday, June 19th, 2010

 

R.I.P. JOHN DONNE

June 19, 1572 - March 31, 1631

 

He took a playwright’s child as bride

And wrote defending suicide,

Used Anne, his wife’s name, as a pun

To indicate he was un-Donne,

But he lived longer than did she,

And lingers still in poesy.

 

Published originally in Per Contra Spring 2009 Light Verse Supplement at www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm