Poetics and Ruminations

The Donald says he’s gonna pump
Moola from his moola dump
Into a run
Till Obama’s undone –
We hope we achieve the last Trump.

Memoir of a Cleveland Renegade

          The Fenn College Poetry Center of Cleveland was officially established on April 14, 1962. Dr. Randolph Randall, the Chair of the English Department, was ill and in hospital, so I was named founding director by Dr. Donald Tuttle, the acting chair. My only collaborator in the venture at the college was the late David French, the audio-visual technician of the College and an amateur poet who would complete a Ph.D. in history at Western Reserve and later become Dean of Erie College, not far up the road toward Buffalo. He and another Poetry Center habitué, Al Cahen, would inherit the Cleveland poetry magazine American Weave from its founder, Loring Williams, who presided over the Poetry Center Forums which began that fall. A local Afro-American writer, Louis Albion Williams, was the focus of the Center’s first Poetry Forum on October 19^th.  Julie Suk has written a memoir about it:

          “My first introduction to Lew [Turco],” she wrote, “was at the Poetry Forum at Fenn College, now Cleveland State. I had just moved to Ohio from Birmingham, Alabama. Newcomer to poetry after a half-hearted painting career, I decided to venture down to the Forum and try out a few poems. I dropped my name in a basket by the door and walked in expecting a small group of readers and friends. Wrong! No smattering of people. Instead, a large and lively crowd celebrating guest speakers topped off by an AME Zion Church choir singing spirituals. ‘This Little Light of Mine,’ ‘I Wish I Knew How I’d Feel to Be Free,’ ‘There Is No Hiding Place Down Here’ — exuberant rhythms I grew up longing to listen to over and over,[…]”¹

          Another charter member of the Poetry Forums was Darryl Allan Levy, or “d. a. levy” (sic, å la e. e. cummings, as he liked to sign himself sans capital letters), born in Cleveland on October 29, 1942, to Joseph J. and Carolyn Levy. The unusual spelling of his middle name is the same as that of Edgar Allan Poe, and I have speculated whether his parents deliberately named him after America’s first “Decadent” poet; if so, it was an ominous portent.

          Soon after the Poetry Center opened, Levy came to see me in my office on the eighth floor of Fenn Tower on the corner of Superior and West 24^th Street. He told me that he had never graduated from high school — that was apparently a lie; I have no idea why he told it — and asked if it would be possible for him to get into the College without the diploma. I said I'd try to work it out, and I arranged an interview for him with the admissions office. I asked him, though, please not to shoot himself in the foot, as I knew he was wont to do, but of course, that's what he did. He deliberately botched the interview and was not allowed to enroll. After that, all he could do was come to the Poetry Center programs and, of course, make a life for himself in the city.

          This is what I believed happened at the time, but since then I have had reason to doubt my interpretation of those events because, according to other sources including Wikipedia, Levy had, in fact, graduated from high school, gotten his diploma, and enlisted in the Navy. I was only eight years older than Levy, and I, too, had spent time in the U. S. Navy, four years of active duty from my own high school graduation in 1952 to 1956 when I entered college on the G. I. Bill, graduating in 1959 and attending graduate school from 1959-1960. The instructorship I held at Fenn College was my first full-time academic appointment, and I would, in fact, not complete and receive my M. A. until 1962, the same year that the Poetry Center was founded.

          If Levy was at that time twenty years old, he must have graduated from high school in 1960, the year I came to Cleveland and Fenn College, and he appears to have spent a very short time in the Navy. He must either have been a Naval Reservist while he was still in high school, which is doubtful, or he was discharged early for some reason. In an e-mail message of Wednesday, December 16, 2009, my former Fenn student Russell Salamon wrote me, “d. a. levy told me about that. He was trying to get discharged, first for physical reasons[,] then he started to behave in an erratic manner, argued about the validity of the military. I think he also meditated, spent [s]ome time in the brig. He was not on the ship more than a few weeks.”

          If my calculations are close to being accurate, then Levy could have made a regular application for admission to Fenn College. Was his request some sort of test he was applying to me? Did he deliberately ruin the interview with the admissions office because he knew that his true history would be discovered if he were admitted?

          If it was a test of some sort, apparently I passed, for Levy continued to attend the Poetry Forums and the other Center programs, and he even asked me to submit work for some of his publications, for he had somehow gotten hold of a table-top hand press and founded the Renegade and the Seven Flowers imprints. Levy began publishing the work of his local friends and acquaintances, including young writers around the country and Russell Salamon who was his roommate for a time. Salamon’s chapbook of poems from Levy’s Renegade Press, which he dedicated to me, was titled Parent[hetical Pop]pies.² It appeared in 1964, the year of his graduation from Fenn. Russell was eventually the author of an epic of sorts about Levy titled Descent Into Cleveland.³  It described the underground scene in the city during the ‘sixties, Levy’s involvement in it, and it led up to Levy’s suicide.

          Salamon spent much of his time in Cleveland trying to keep Levy interested in life, for apparently his ambition was to kill himself, and he talked about it often. Levy did not have a great deal of talent as a writer, but I think he desperately wanted to be remembered when he was gone, and the best way to do that, perhaps, was to be notorious. The local poet Russell Atkins, founder and editor of the Cleveland poetry magazine Free Lance, wrote me in Oswego, New York, in 1967, “Well, I suppose you might have heard that d. a. levy and some of the group here have become objects of the police, FBI and narcotics agents. Much cause célèbre in the making here.”⁴

          As a poet Levy — as one can tell, perhaps, by the lower-case name — was influenced by E. E. Cummings, not by the rhyming and metering poems of Poe, as in this following item titled “bop for kiddies”:

 

i watermeloned down the lawn

and summersalts in season

a red balloon

a blue—a green

an orange one all

floating skyward

with childrens dreams tied⁵

 

          Though I'm sure he wouldn't have known the term, Levy here used the schema called anthimeria, substitution of one part of speech for another, as in "watermeloned down the lawn," where a noun is substituted for the verb.  A similar thing happens in line two, where somersaults is perhaps, though not necessarily, deliberately misspelled. And the other errors, such as lack of punctuation, were probably also deliberate, and easier to set by hand, especially if one didn’t have many pieces of some fonts. In the e-mail message cited above Salamon wrote, “In the ‘i watermeloned’ poem all of those things are deliberate. I asked him about ‘summersalts’. He wanted it that way”

          I left Cleveland in 1964, and the Fenn alumnus Russell Salamon helped me to move to Hillsdale, Michigan, where I taught for a year before I made my final academic move to the State University of New York College at Oswego. My successor as Director of the Poetry Center was Alberta Turner who wrote me on November 24, 1964, "Something will have to be done about those forums, by the way. Russ Salamon and Co. made the last forum so disagreeable that four members walked out before it was over. I've never seen so much naked vanity on display. The whole atmosphere was hostile, condescending, and confused. No hints nor jokes on my part served to shut him up, so I guess I'll just have to call him into the office for a private talk."⁶ But this incident was minor compared with other things that were going on with Levy and his friends.

          Loring Williams, editor and publisher of the local American Weave Press and of the poetry magazine American Weave during these years, was the incumbent leader of the Poetry Forums of the Poetry Center until I departed. He himself left the city in 1966 to return to his native Maine after the death of his wife, Alice Crane Williams, a composer and an aunt of Cleveland’s most famous poet, Hart Crane.  In a letter of January 30, 1967, datelined South Berwick, Loring wrote me in Oswego to say,  "Well, I've been in Maine a full year, and am still quite content[....]I suppose your Cleveland correspondents are keeping you up-to-date on the Jim Lowell - d.a. levy scandal. Perhaps 'scandal' isn't the right word...but it has to do with d.a.'s publishing and Lowell's selling of 'pornographic'” literature [from his Asphodel Bookshop]. I never thought his (and his satellite's) ravings were 'pornographic'...but merely the scribblings of little boys on shit-house walls."⁷

          An elegy I wrote for Levy, “Words for White Weather,” was written on request for a memorial publication three years after Levy shot himself the following year, 1968:

 

WORDS FOR WHITE WEATHER

for d. a. levy

 

On a gross day, in a green month

once, a child was Summer’s lover.

She, heavy with worlds, sent

the child bouquets of amber light. Giver

 

and taker, she tossed him petals;

in good barter he gave his leman

words shaped like flesh

of fruits: sweet peach, tart lemon,

 

berryheart whose vine goes

twining with grass. She gave

him this too: a grassblade made

the frost’s sickle, lush love

 

turned root rape, the maggot’s

carnal slither. No matter. Her

kiss was decay. Still, his songs

weather the winter. ⁸

 

          I was thankful not to have been in Cleveland when Levy took his own life, nor in 1984 when another Poetry Forum member, Jau Billera, followed Levy’s example.  I've known self-destructive people, but d. a. levy was world-class in that regard. I suppose his death was inevitable, but it was very sad. He was a harmless little guy, really, and not the wild Beat renegade he liked to act; however, some people do remember him as the most famous native Cleveland poet after Hart Crane, also a suicide, which is an accomplishment of sorts.

NOTES

¹Swerdfeger, Steven E., Editor, Lewis Turco and His Work: A Celebration, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004, p. 196.

² Salamon, Russell, Parent[hetical Pop]pies, Cleveland: Renegade Press, 1964.

³ ——, Descent into Cleveland, Tustin: Words & Pictures, 1994.

⁴ The Russell Atkins file In the Lewis Turco Collection of the Special Collections of the Cleveland State University Library at http://www.clevelandmemory.org/turco/.

⁵ Published in Turco, Lewis, Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing Co., 1973, p. 185.

⁶ The Alberta Turner file in the Lewis Turco Collection, op. cit.

⁷ The Loring Williams file in the Lewis Turco Collection, op. cit.

⁸ Turner, Alberta, Poetry: Cleveland, ed. Alberta Turner, Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1971.

 

Earth Day Poem 2011

THOUGHTS FROM THE BOSTON POST ROAD

 

Today ten thousand vehicles have passed

                  In cursing columns down the nearby Post

Road, left that sparrow on the billboard gassed

                  Whose muddled instincts panic to the west

                  Beyond the screws and monkey—wrenches tossed

         From mobile windows.  But the west is east,

         And east is south, and south is north at least.

 

The land is shot for sparrows, shot for men.

                  But for machines it's Paradise on Wheels!

The lubricated sky remembers when

                  Its clouds were H2O, not high grade oils;

                  And everywhere the graded turf recalls

         When it grew grasses rather than these goddam

         Vines of white concrete and black macadam.

 

If that poor sparrow ever manages

                  To climb above our gamma—powered smogs,

Let him look down upon these acreages

                  And see if apple trees are bearing cogs,

                  Of if some tractor isn't laying eggs,

         Its mate a diesel truck that proudly roars

         To herald a new age of dinosaurs.

 

We've done a grand job building road and rail.

                  There's nowhere some good engine cannot roll

(With some good man behind the driver's wheel),

                  And I would not be worrying at all

         Except, this afternoon, out in the hall,

         I overheard my vacuum cleaner say,

"They built Der Furor just the other day."

 

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 Ballad of Lake Wobegon

“I think he's losing it: his monologues recently often center about fart jokes or adolescent moonings over girls in grade school.” — A native Minnesotan.

 

A fellow named Garrison Keillor

Decided to be the big dealer

     Of free public verse

     More prolix than terse

And full of quotidian flea-lore.

 

He delved in review books to find

Material that might be mined

     And put out to flog

     On his PBS blog

Where “excellence” was undefined.

 

The peots he chose were doggone

Happy to be Wobegon —

     They fawned willy-nilly

     And, though they were silly,

They always had peoms to pawn.

 

The songs that he loved were so bad

They smelled like a midden of shad

     But sounded much worse

     Than even his verse

And drove musicologists mad:

 

One, “Jesus Put a Yodel in My Soul,” fell

As flat as a pancake in Hell.

     Folks wanted to scoff,

     But it so turned them off

That they spewed and began to expel, 

 

But he played it again the next day!

The hairs of his hearers turned gray,

         Except for some mules

         Who giggled like fools

And asses that started to bray.

 

And, speaking of smells, he told jokes

That painted a picture in strokes

     So windy and gassy

     They didn’t sound classy

To even some Wobegon folks.

 

The stories he told of the maids

He’d known in his earlier grades

     Were terribly sad —

     No longer a lad,

He still can’t get over their braids.

 

Beware of the man who is hairy, son,

He might be an ogre or fairy, son.

     If he proffers a feeler

     He might be a Keillor

Of quality — you must be wary, son.

 

Wesli Court 

The Santa Cruz Good Times Poetry Corner

The Poems of Lewis Turco at http://www.goodtimessantacruz.com/santa-cruz-arts-entertainment-lifestyles/literature-poetry-book-reviews/2395-lewis-turco.html on 4/20/11. 

A Memoir of Robert Huff

Archie Amons, Bob Huff, Lew Turco & Dick Frost at Bread Loaf in 1961

In 1959, while I was still an undergraduate at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Harold Vinal began to ask me to review books for his magazine Voices.  He had been publishing my poems for about five years — ever since I was a post-high school sailor in the Navy —  so he knew my work. I was flattered, though it had never occurred to me to be a critic, but I accepted, and in the second review that I wrote for him, titled “The Poet’s Court,” published in 1960, I first ran into the work of Robert Huff. I said that in Huff’s first book, Colonel Johnson's Ride and Other Poems (1959), the poet did not particularly believe in visual image. Except for "Porcupines," which was startling because it imitated prose paragraphs and came in the middle of the book, he stuck with quatrains, couplets, and other common stanzas all set down matter-of-factly and pushed over to the left hand margin. Robert Huff's sound however, was full. He often mixed sweet words with tough language, as in "King Salmon":

 

A gravel deathbed for the king of fish.

Nuncle, the mad Kingfisher had you hooked

From birthrise, hauled and schooled, and heaved

From saltsea silver up brown rapids run

To rest your milt-white crown upon these stones.

Hear how the windy guts of gulls

Rejoice above your ghost beginning now.

They grow for so much Godspent majesty.

 

Huff occasionally mixed the pastoral with the mechanical. Sometimes this worked and sometimes it didn’t, for readers were not yet used to having machines and bombers described in lyrical fashion. His best poems had to do with mood and nature, an assertion that might best be illustrated by quoting the whole of "Although I Remember the Sound," which I admired:

 

Although I remember the sound

The young snag made when I felled it,

It was not noise or music mattered then.

Briefly, the tree was silent on the ground.

Of what it was that mattered I recall

Simply, among the chips and dust

And keener near the center of the cut,

The sweet, new smell which rose after the fall.

 

The natural world was far and away Huff’s best subject, although he tried satire, moral objection to war and portraits with good success.

The ideas that Huff was attempting to embody, however, were somewhat unclear in my opinion. He might give us a scene and a mood, the characters, the plot, and then he would not draw his conclusion, though he might hint at it. Depending on the degree of empathy between the reader and what went on early in the poem, we might or might not understand what he was talking about. I, for one, was uncertain how to react when, in "The Smoker," the poet described a blind man blowing smoke rings with (perhaps) "his hearing aid turned off" so that not only could he not see the poet, he wouldn’t be able to hear the poet's conversation either, but he might later appear in the bard’s dreams, "A slow smile smoking, circled to the thighs / And screws both of his thumbs into my eyes / And will not stop to listen to my screams." In general, however, the total image of one of his poems was pleasing, if a bit too careful. All in all, though, I liked Huff’s work well enough to remember him as standing out from many of the books I was considering for Mr. Vinal.

This turned out to be a good thing because at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, during the last two weeks of August the next year, 1961, Robert Huff, Miller Williams, Richard Emil Braun and I were poetry Fellows, A. R. Ammons, was a Scholar, and Richard Frost was attending on a Danforth grant. Frost, Huff and I shared one of the little cottages near Treman Hall.

One night we were sitting around in the cottage reciting limericks to one another and, of course, laughing and carrying on after each recitation. We made enough noise to arouse the ire of some women who lived in another cottage close by, and they complained to John Ciardi, director of the conference, that we were making too much noise. John came by — it must have been after ten p.m. — to do his duty and tell us to quiet down. He asked us what we were doing, and after he had fulfilled his function as policeman he sat down with us and began to recite limericks himself from his prodigious memory, most if not all of them original. All those present became, over the course of the next several hours, hysterical to the point that our sides ached. We were making much more noise with John present than we had been making before he arrived. I have no idea what the women did, or how they managed to get any sleep at all that night.

The recently deceased Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was one of the fabled people of our generation, and Bob Huff and I used to have Dylan Thomas sound-alike contests — of course, we had listened to his recordings. Huff was good, but I had the advantage of reading original material, for the year before, in my First Poems, I had published my

 

DIRGE A LA DYLAN

 

When I was a curled boy, short and long-

shadowed beneath an apple moon,

I peeled my dreams out of cider skies

and toasted them crisp each fiery noon.

 

When I was a birch young man I pruned

my dreams until they grew green and tall.

I plunged brown seed upon mossy days,

urged them to lunge and be done with the fall.

 

Then, when I was a hairy man,

I grasped my past by both its ears

to feed it on cabbages and grass

until it turned pink-eyed with the years.

 

Ah! curled small lad; O birch young man,

hairy elder: apple hours

are lying, prune-dry, upon cellar shelves,

choking black seed within vinegar cores.

 

I had been teaching by that time for a year at Fenn College in Cleveland, what is now Cleveland State University, and the following year, 1962, I founded the Poetry Center of Cleveland there. Of course, among the first to be invited to give programs there were some of my Bread Loaf confreres. Dick Frost read his work on August 24^th, and Bob Huff come to read on October fifth: as I recall we had all of twenty people in the audience. Both Dick and Bob stayed with my wife, Jean, our daughter, Melora, and me in the four-room apartment that we had recently moved into in Euclid, a Cleveland suburb. Jean was shocked to discover what a hard drinker Bob was. The first thing he did when he woke up in the morning was light a cigarette and take a pull out of a bottle he took from his briefcase. “He did it right in front of me,” Jean said, “and made a wry comment about it!” (I trust there was no pun intended on my wife’s part.)

Bob had come to Cleveland from the University of Delaware where he was a member of the faculty. On May 1, 1964, Elizabeth Bishop wrote to her correspondent Robert Lowell, “I don’t know why I am giving advice. I have a hard time finding words, remembering faces, wiping the glaze from memory. The stay at Delaware was an empty time, except for the company of Peter Taylor: a stiff English department, a drunken poet, Robert Huff, an amiable cowed messy weak [Theodore] Roethke, boisterously carrying a dull weight of defeat, pen women, nice and not very nice, with their little poems and stories written for themselves, a dearth of students, many handed in work but never appeared.”¹

In 1963. Bob was a MacDowell Colony Fellow in Peterborough, N.H. The following year I was given my walking papers from Fenn, and I began searching for jobs. Two that I was offered were at the University of Hawaii at Hilo, and at Bellingham State College in Washington. I had spent five years in the Midwest, and both Jean and I were yearning to return to points farther east. I was also offered two other positions, one at the State University of New York College at Oswego, and the other at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan. I preferred the Oswego job, but they were taking too much time to decide, and I was becoming fretful waiting for them, so I opted for Hillsdale — a vast mistake — and turned down the other three.

Hilo was hit by a tsunami in 1965, but Hillsdale was also a disaster, a John Birch Society undertaking cloned from Parsons College. I wrote Oswego to ask if that job were still available; it was, and I took it the following year, in 1965 — this time I waited until the middle of the summer when it was confirmed. I stayed there thirty-one years.

At the same time that I was firing myself from Hillsdale Bob Huff, it turned out, was looking to get out of Delaware, so he took the Bellingham position I’d been offered. Bob stayed at Bellingham for many years as well, and he wrote three other collections along the way, The Course in 1966, The Ventriloquist in 1977, and a bird chapbook, Shore Guide to Flocking Names, published in a limited edition in 1985. I reviewed the last of these sometimes rueful, usually descriptive, always light-verse pieces. They were enjoyable to read, but perhaps the audience for which they seemed to be intended — older children — had little chance to see them in this package.

In April of 2011 Phillip Bannowskiy wrote, “I remember Bob Huff from the early sixties at the University of Delaware. He had succeeded Robert Hilliard as Poet-in-Residence. He did like to drink, and with his students, too. He did his imitation of Dylan Thomas for us and I think he had a son named Dylan. Once he brought Edward Field, author of Stand up Friend with Me, who read terrific poems about Frankenstein and gay sex fantasies that totally outraged the English Department. He also brought Randall Jarrell in and Robert Lowell, who judged the Academy of American Poets prize in 1963, which I won. I took “Modern Poetry” and a poetry writing class with him where I met some life-long friends. Today I attended a celebration of the life of W.D. Snodgrass, who was also a Poet-in-Residence, today. The office was eliminated this year.” I was sorry to hear that the University of Delaware. is no longer interested enough in poetry to support a poet in residency. There was a long tradition of it there.

Bob Huff retired from Bellingham in 1989. He died in a fire at his home there  in 1993 at the age of sixty-nine the victim, apparently, of his last cigarette and the final toast he drank to his Muse.

Kelly Cherry remarked, “I taught at Western Washington U. in, I think, 1981. Bob Huff was there, and he was a good companion in general, although when he drank he could be verbally brutal. Nevertheless, I learned from him, not only about poetry but about the poet's obligation to remain free of jealousy and favor. About, in other words, the extent to which the poet must remember she is one of many (the long line of people, and not just literarily inclined people) and not somehow special or apart from them. I was deeply saddened and also shocked when I learned he'd died in a fire he'd started and yet not so, because I was aware that drinkers will do that. In my mind he remains a dear friend.”

His passing was sad, but he was a great boon companion,  Richard Frost has a tale to tell of just how boon he could be:

 

Some Memories of Robert Huff

Bread Loaf 1961 was my introduction to the social mysteries of the poetry world, and Bob Huff seemed the perfect poet hero. I had published in Poetry and in Harper’s Magazine and some other good places, which gave me some authenticity as a poet, but really I had been nowhere to witness how poets behaved. Bread Loaf was my baptism. Hard-drinking big-voiced Huff looked to be my best chance to hang out with a figure resembling Dylan Thomas, but the infatuation proved hard to sustain.

Bob Huff was a sweet, generous, gregarious guy with a big resonant voice. He read aloud beautifully, his own poems and all the others he liked. He and Lew Turco and sometimes Miller Williams and I would sit on the front porch of Bridgeman and read and recite and criticize and praise and drink vodka-&-tomato juice for hours. I’ll never forget Bob’s big affirmative infectious smile when he liked something. We all consumed bushels and gallons of poetry. This was, for my money, the way it was supposed to work.

In the year after Bread Loaf, Bob and I exchanged a few letters and once or twice talked on the phone. During the summer of 1964, when I was visiting my parents in California, with my first wife and our young son and daughter I drove to Bellingham, Washington, to see Bob, there in that big old house, the one he later set afire. It was a pleasant enough visit but sort of flat — with our two wives there, we didn’t talk freely, and Bob was drinking heavily. We stayed up most of the night. Bob had promised my son that he would take him fishing in the morning, and I doubted that it would happen. But early the next day, long before I was out of bed, Huff arose and took my son fishing. He was hung over, but he wasn’t going to disappoint the kid. 

The next, and last, time I saw Bob was in the fall of 1972. I invited Bob to read at my college, SUNY Oneonta, and it was altogether a mistake. He was drunk the whole time. Carol and I drove to meet him at the Binghamton airport but had to wait there several hours because he had missed his flight — had been removed from the plane, he told us, because he fit the profile for a terrorist. He had been to see James Dickey, who had sent him away with a bottle of Kentucky bourbon, which he still was carrying, half-full. He frightened us both, twice threatening to leave the car as we drove up Interstate 88.

The next day Bob was scheduled to visit my poetry workshop. He had gotten up on time, and Carol made him breakfast, which he supplemented with the rest of the bourbon. I drove him to the College for the class, which we met on time. I introduced Huff to the class, reminded them that I had told them about him, and turned the class over. Huff addressed himself to the blackboard. He drew a horizontal line with chalk, turned to the class, and spoke to a young woman at a front desk: “Do you love your father?” he said. Not waiting for an answer, he turned and wrote “Robert Lowell” on the board. He then asked for questions. I don’t remember the rest.

That afternoon we visited a bar, and that evening there was dinner at the home of one of my English department colleagues. We were not terribly late for Bob’s reading; the small auditorium was almost full. My poet friend and colleague Don Petersen introduced Huff, who then set his briefcase on the table and began looking for his manuscript. He searched for ten minutes, pulled out the papers he had previously rejected, and read. Not in his mellifluous Dylan Thomas manner I remembered, but with a hoarse tipsy mumble.

That was the last time. The next day my colleague Paul Lilly drove Bob to the airport. Then—how many years later? — I learned that he had fallen asleep in his chair with a lighted cigarette and had set his house on fire and had died, and his wife had died in the fire too.  I have a Kodachrome print — Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, 1961: Archie Ammons, Bob Huff, Lew Turco, myself, shoulder-to-shoulder in brilliant August sunshine on the front lawn of Bridgeman. We’re all young, brighteyed, and all set for the future.

— Richard Frost

 

Considering everything, it’s amazing that Bob lived to be sixty-nine years of age. Archie Ammons managed to make seventy-five, I’m seventy-seven, Miller Williams is eighty-one, and Dick Frost is eighty-two.  Most of us are still hanging in there.

______

¹Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Thomas Travisano, Editor, New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2010,

 

 

 

 

 

Uncle Wesli's New Mother Goose #16

AUNTY BETTE

 

Aunty Bette

Tried hard to get

As much as she could gross and net.

She got some lots and land and such,

But moneywise she got not much.

 

"The Raven" and All That Jazz

 R.I.P. EDGAR ALLAN POE

January 19, 1809 - March 24, 1882

 

The darkest poet of his time,

He threw a shadow over rime

And now, beneath this dome of woe,

Erato sleeps with Edgar Poe.

 

          Besides Emerson, Whitman, and Dickinson, there was a fourth nineteenth-century American poet who had a great effect on Modernist and post-Modernist American, and even British poetry, though that effect was indirect and more difficult to trace. Edgar Allan Poe influenced poetry and all of fiction as well, both Continental and New World, for it was he who invented the genre of the detective story. His first important influence, however, was on the French Symbolists of the nineteenth century, Paul Verlaine (i844-96), Arthur Rimbaud (1854-91), and Stephane Mallarmé (1842-98), leader of the group. These were the people who invented the term "vers libre" or "free verse" which, even in French versification which was syllabic, was incomprehensible, for if it wasn’t verse it had to be prose.  It was through T. S. Eliot, the American-born British Symbolist poet, that Poe worked his influence upon twentieth-century American poetry, and upon the American and British New Criticism as well.

          Poe began to publish his books of poetry in 1827, when he was eighteen years of age, thus equaling the feat of William Cullen Bryant who published his most famous poem, "Thanatopsis," when he too was eighteen. On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe published his poem “The Raven” in a newspaper, The New York Evening Mirror, Newspapers in those days were a standard venue for the publication of poetry because everyone read newspapers, and sometimes newspapers needed fillers to take up unused space between stories. Not only that, but people actually read poetry for pleasure in the nineteenth century, as they did in the case of “The Raven.”

          In very short order the poem was being reprinted everywhere, as is still the case. Ordinary folks just loved it, and so did people who were not so ordinary, like Abraham Lincoln who committed it to memory. Lovers of lyric verse have been memorizing it ever since. It is one of the most popular poems ever written in the English language. Mallarmé published a French translation of it, Le Corbeau, in 1875, with illustrations by the Impressionist painter, Edouard Manet.

          In 1848 Poe published Eureka, a Prose Poem, thus anticipating by seven years Whitman's issuance of Leaves of Grass, a fact that is generally overlooked by those who are determined to believe that Whitman was the first American prose poet. A great deal about Poe is overlooked by literary scholars, some of whom have said that Poe's idea of poetry appears to be a sort of monstrous distortion of Emersonian Transcendentalism. Poe believed, as he wrote in "The Poetic Principle" in 1850, that the poet's function was to achieve a moment, a glimpse of "Supernal Beauty," but that term is Poe's closest approach to Emerson, for supernal beauty could only be achieved by considering melancholy subjects, in particular the death of a beautiful woman. Poe was the first American decadent, which is no doubt why the nineteenth century held him at arm's length, even though he was ubiquitous in the literature of his period.

         In his theories of writing, too, Poe was at the opposite pole from Emerson, after whom Poe was perhaps the second most important American literary critic of the 19th century; certainly, Poe's literary opinions and views of writing have outlasted those of most of his contemporaries. Edgar Allan Poe discussed how he wrote “The Raven” in a treatise, “The Philosophy of Composition,” which appeared in Graham’s Magazine in April of 1846, a bit over a year after the poem was published. In it he set out an Aristotelian — indeed, an extremely craftsmanly and technical — view of how poets ought to go about writing their poems. It is, in fact, a rationale for the kind of literary approach to writing that Emerson specifically identified in his essay “The Poet,” as being un-American. Ever since then critics have been casting doubt on the rational system Poe said he used to pen “The Raven.” I have never understood why, because it is certainly very similar to the system I used as an adolescent in high school to analyze Poe’s most famous poem and to write a poem like it that I titled  “The Veil of Yearning.”

         Poe's poetry — all except Eureka — is written in verse mode, and it has been criticized for being too "jingly," too hypnotically metrical (though it is certainly not too metrically regular). His subjects are thought to be too abstract, too decadent, too overtly symbolic. It was all of these things that the French Symbolists admired. Likewise, it was all of these things that made Poe seem a sort of Old World weed in the Transcendentalist herb garden of America. His life-style, too, caused people to lift their noses (in this he was like Whitman), and when he died early of what appeared to be alcoholism or drug addiction, no one was surprised.

          One might mention that Poe’s “The Bells” has been discussed in the twentieth century as a “jazz poem” written before jazz had been invented. I would very much like to know how this poem can be called “tinkly,” apart from Poe’s use of the word in the first stanza:

I.

          Hear the sledges with the bells-

                   Silver bells!

   What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

          How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

              In the icy air of night!

          While the stars that oversprinkle

          All the heavens, seem to twinkle

             With a crystalline delight;

                Keeping time, time, time,

             In a sort of Runic rhyme,

   To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

             From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

                   Bells, bells, bells-

   From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

 

II.

          Hear the mellow wedding bells,

                   Golden bells!

   What a world of happiness their harmony foretells!

          Through the balmy air of night

          How they ring out their delight!

            From the molten-golden notes,

                   And an in tune,

            What a liquid ditty floats

   To the turtle-dove that listens, while she gloats

                   On the moon!

          Oh, from out the sounding cells,

   What a gush of euphony voluminously wells!

                   How it swells!

                   How it dwells

            On the Future! how it tells

            Of the rapture that impels

          To the swinging and the ringing

            Of the bells, bells, bells,

          Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,

                   Bells, bells, bells-

   To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells!

 

III.

          Hear the loud alarum bells-

                   Brazen bells!

   What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!

          In the startled ear of night

        How they scream out their affright!

          Too much horrified to speak,

          They can only shriek, shriek,

                   Out of tune,

   In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,

   In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,

          Leaping higher, higher, higher,

            With a desperate desire,

          And a resolute endeavor,

          Now- now to sit or never,

        By the side of the pale-faced moon.

           Oh, the bells, bells, bells!

           What a tale their terror tells

                   Of Despair!

         How they clang, and clash, and roar!

         What a horror they outpour

       On the bosom of the palpitating air!

           Yet the ear it fully knows,

                   By the twanging,

                   And the clanging,

           How the danger ebbs and flows:

           Yet the ear distinctly tells,

                   In the jangling,

                   And the wrangling,

           How the danger sinks and swells,

   By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells-

                   Of the bells-

           Of the bells, bells, bells,bells,

                 Bells, bells, bells-

      In the clamor and the clangor of the bells!

 

IV.

          Hear the tolling of the bells-

                   Iron Bells!

   What a world of solemn thought their monody compels!

          In the silence of the night,

          How we shiver with affright

     At the melancholy menace of their tone!

          For every sound that floats

          From the rust within their throats

                    Is a groan.

          And the people- ah, the people-

          They that dwell up in the steeple,

                   All Alone

          And who, tolling, tolling, tolling,

            In that muffled monotone,

          Feel a glory in so rolling

            On the human heart a stone-

          They are neither man nor woman-

          They are neither brute nor human-

                   They are Ghouls:

            And their king it is who tolls;

            And he rolls, rolls, rolls,

                   Rolls

              A paean from the bells!

          And his merry bosom swells

            With the paean of the bells!

          And he dances, and he yells;

          Keeping time, time, time,

          In a sort of Runic rhyme,

            To the paean of the bells-

                   Of the bells:

          Keeping time, time, time,

          In a sort of Runic rhyme,

            To the throbbing of the bells-

          Of the bells, bells, bells-

            To the sobbing of the bells;

          Keeping time, time, time,

            As he knells, knells, knells,

          In a happy Runic rhyme,

            To the rolling of the bells-

          Of the bells, bells, bells:

            To the tolling of the bells,

          Of the bells, bells, bells, bells-

            Bells, bells, bells-

    To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

 

Any competent metrical analysis of “The Bells” will dispel the theory that Poe’s rhythms were too regular.

          One of the best ways for young people to learn how to write verse is to imitate poems written in verse. That is certainly one of the ways I learned to write it. In an interview published in January 2010 on his blog “Poetry and Popular Culture,” Michael Chasar wanted to know how it happened that one of my early poems, “Excerpts from the Latter-Day Chronicle,” was published in what he considered to be a strange place, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, in 1962 “while studying under Paul Engle and Donald Justice at Iowa. This struck the P&PC office interns as kind of odd, for when they think of poets trained at the Writers’ Workshop, they don’t at all imagine them wanting to publish in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So we caught up with Turco and asked him to explain himself.

          “Can you explain yourself?”

          “Sure,” I replied, “I wasn’t ‘trained’ at the Workshop. I was almost entirely self-taught. I was publishing poems in my home-town paper’s poetry column all through high school….” That poetry column, edited by Lydia B. Atkinson and titled “Pennons of Pegasus,” appeared every Wednesday in the Meriden, Connecticut, Morning Record.

          In 1961 while I was a Poetry Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, the classical scholar and poet Dudley Fitts was assigned to me as the critic of my poetry. At one of our sessions he mentioned that when he was teaching at Cheshire Academy in Connecticut, not far from Meriden, he used to read The Morning Record.

          I told him that was my home town paper and I’d first published my poems in Lydia’s column while I was a high school student. He guffawed and said, “My wife and I used to read that column aloud to each other every Wednesday morning and begin the day with a hearty laugh.”

          I told him I had no idea I’d had such a distinguished audience so young, and I was pleased that he’d been familiar with my work for so long.  One of those pieces of my juvenilia that Dudley Fitts must have read was my imitation of Poe’s “The Raven,”

 

The Vale of Yearning

 

On a clifftop overlooking

The abyssal Vale of Yearning

         Stands a shape in silhouette

                 Against the starswept winter sky:

Effigy of imp or mortal,

Clothed in midnight’s sacerdotal

         Vestments, listening abstractly

                 To the wind’s lamenting cry.

 

Frosted gusts shake leafless branches

As they rear on rooted haunches

         In defiance of the serpent

                 Venting its nocturnal bane.

Sullenly the wind caresses

Trees whose withered autumn tresses,

         Long-since torn from senseless digits,

                 Rustle in each sylvan lane.

 

“Birth is but an infant madness,”

         Coughs the wind.

“Consciousness itself is sadness,”

         Weeps the gale.

“Should a being seek to borrow

Joy he finds, upon the morrow,

He owes fealty to Sorrow

         Which is blind.

Though he search for his release

Through a lifetime, no surcease

May be granted save the peace

         Death avails.”

 

But the shadow, unresponsive,

Stands upon the clifftop, pensive,

         Pondering its thoughts, unmindful

                 Of the nightwind’s monody.

Then at last the figure listens,

Lays aside its dim reflections

         As the unrelenting wind

                 Continues its soliloquy:

 

“Faith is folly through deceiving,”

         Soughs the wind.

“Love is flotsam past retrieving,”

         Shrieks the gale.

“Man’s good will is but a rumor

Contradicting his behavior;

Mankind owns no Saint nor Savior —

         All have sinned!

Human heritage is hate:

With this tool man carves his fate.

Faithlessness, his strongest trait,

         Cannot fail!”

 

Still the shadow gives no token

It has heard what words were spoken,

         And the wind continues seething

                 Through the valley’s crag-lined core.

Sounds rebound from cliff to boulder;

Then, within some stony cloister,

         Lie ensnared till they drift into

                 Quietude forevermore.

 

“Do you hear me, dreary shadow?”

         Asks the gale.

No sound breaks the prating nightwind’s

         Mad travail.

Suddenly, it quits its rancor

As the shadow gives an answer…,

Sets reverberations churning

Through the sterile Vale of Yearning.

And the shadow’s deft reply,

Puncturing the nightwind’s sigh,

         Is but enigmatic laughter

                 Echoing within the vale.

 

A Basketball Apology

Once, long ago, in a pretty town named Storrs where I was young and a student, I attended a basketball game and watched my team do this:

 

           But now, tonight, many weeks after I had given up on another team fielded by my Alma Mater when they emerged from Big East Conference play with a 9-9 record, I am forced to my knees to beg their forgiveness, for I watched these young men and their ancient coach (though he is not as ancient as I) perform an absolutely incredible run of wins to become, first, Maui Invitational Tournament Champions, then Big East Tournament Champions, and at last National Champions, not having lost a single game, all season long, to any team outside the Big East! I’m glad I lived long enough to witness this feat and to deliver to the Huskies

A BELATED APOLOGY

Upon the Occasion of UConn’s Winning its Third National NCAA Basketball Men’s Championship

on April 5^th, 2011.

There once was a coach named Calhoun

Who pricked an enormous balloon

          When he turned poor old Butler

          Back into a scuttler

And returned the team to its cocoon.

 

In fact, now that I think about it, I dedicate my original poem to the Butler basketball team who tonight managed to shoot the lowest percentage of baskets since 1950 when I was still a high school student in Meriden, Connecticut.