Poetics and Ruminations

Eulogy for Etan Patz and his Uncle Jerrold

 

Etan Patz and his uncle Jerrold Patz

         Jerrold L. Patz, who died on February 17^th of this year, 2012, was the brother of Stanley K. Patz and brother-in-law of Julie Patz, parents of Etan Patz who was kidnapped (apparently, though that has still to be proven despite a confession) by Pedro Hernandez on the Friday before the Memorial Day weekend in May, 1979. Jerry Patz went on to a successful career in and for his home state, Massachusetts, where he was involved in data storage and internet development. However, nine years earlier, in 1970, Jerry was the co-founder with Richard Littlefield of the Despa Press which was located in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Jerry and Dick were living at the time as students at the University of Massachusetts.

         Not long before the Press issued its first book the co-publishers visited the campus of the State University of New York College at Oswego in order to meet the printmaker Thom Seawell and yours truly, Lewis Turco, who, they had been informed, were working on a book and print project. Thom was completing a huge print titled “The House,”  and I was simultaneously writing my own “house,” The Inhabitant, a long series of prose poems.

         Thom and I had earlier produced three prints titled “School Drawing,” “My Country Wife,” and “Image Tinged with No Color”; subsequently we had applied for, and been granted, joint Faculty Fellowships by the SUNY Foundation to work on our joint project. Jerry Patz and Dick Littlefield had come to campus to consider our effort which Despa published as their first book in 1970. All four of us were happy with the book of poems and prints which was titled The Inhabitant.

         Dick and Jerry wanted to publish another of my books the following year, Pocoangelini: A Fantography and Other Poems, which consisted of three sets of poems including the title series, The Sketches of Lewis Turco, which had won the American Weave Chapbook Award in 1962 and been published in that year by American Weave Press of Cleveland, and a short series titled Bordello which Thom Seawell’s fellow printmaker at Oswego, George O’Connell, would turn into a portfolio of poem-prints many years later, in 1996, the year I retired (George had already retired by that time).

         The Despa publishers needed a cover design for Pocoangelini, however, and Thom didn’t have anything suitable. Instead, Jerry Patz turned to his brother, Stanley, a professional photographer, for an idea, and he had one.  Stanley Patz took a nude shadowed photograph of himself with his head thrown back and his arms and legs spread wide. The back cover was the “negative” image of the front cover. I always thought it was a spectacularly successful cover. Let this be my eulogy for both Etan and his uncle Jerrold:

Stanley K. Patz, photographer, self-portrait, 1971

Dresden, Maine: You Can't Get Here from Where You Are

        Today, April first, 2012, is April Fool's Day, of course, and this article appears in today's Maine Sunday Telegram on page B3 -- however, it is NOT an April Fool prank:

        This is a poem from one of several books of poetry that I've written about Dresden, specifically about Dresden Mills, where my wife Jean and I live, one of the three sections of Dresden including West Dresden and Cedar Grove:

 

THE SCYTHE

          It was a warm summer day and the milkweed had taken over the backyard of the old Cate Farm house in Dresden Mills, Maine, where my family spent every summer from the mid-‘fifties until my wife Jean and I retired there in 1996. Each year I reclaimed a bit more of the yard, and eventually so much of it would be cleared of brush, weeds and the remains of the chicken farm it had been for years that I had to invest in a riding mower and other sorts of equipment to keep it clear. And, of course, we would leave when school began until the teaching year was over in the spring, so the weeds would try to come back while we were gone and the house stood empty over the winter.

          This particular year the milkweed had moved in between the apple tree that stood in the center of the backyard and the house, filling the space from the screen porch attached to the back side of the house and the ell. The plants were in full bloom; they had attracted an immense number of bees of various types, and something had to be done if we were to use the yard.  I went to the barn and took one of the old scythes off the wall, honed the blade, and carried it out to the scene of action:

           Listen to Lew Turco read his poem, The Scythe --

THE SCYTHE

 

The crescent blade with its snake

   snath hangs on the cellar

      wall waiting for another

         day like last

            summer's milkweed

               day

 

when the bees in the great patch

   of blossoms out back made

      an electric sound as

         the Inhabitant came

            out to

               whittle

 

the congregation of stalks into

   a large circle then slowly

      a smaller one scything

         in spirals the

            bees moving

               always

 

toward the center as the ring

   of petal and stamen contracted

      the stalks falling bleeding

         milk as the

            crescent edge

               stroked

 

in passing and the buzzing thickened

   at heart until only a

      last fist of milkweed

         stood crowned with

            bees drinking

               one

 

nightcap of nectar before dusk cut

   into the still green air

      and the Inhabitant leaned

         on the snath

            against his

               blade.

 

          I remember that day so very clearly. At first I was merely careful when I swung the blade, but as the circle of weed contracted I began to step back after each pass and wait to see if I were going to be attacked. The bees, though, were so intent on what they were doing that as each arc of plants fell the bees merely moved in to the center of the patch. As my raid proceeded I was falling farther and farther back before I made another pass, then again I would plunge forward, whip the scythe across my body from right to left, and step back to a safe distance.

          The last column of milkweed that stood at dead center was alive with flying insects when I took my final swipe and the bees took off for home, wherever that might be. One of those places was very likely a hole in the ground somewhere in the host of raspberry and blackberry bushes that inhabited most of the rest of the two sides of the yard. There was some very fertile soil on the property, and we were careful to preserve the berry bushes that reseeded themselves every year.

          All of the inhabitants during berry season would go into the patches to harvest the juicy little fruits, and I for one when I closed my eyes at bedtime, before I drifted off to sleep in the cool Maine night, would see visions of the berries blooming on my eyelids, big, red, and as delicious as dreams.

          But there could be retribution: one never knew whether or where there would be a nest of ground bees in the berry patch, and sometimes someone would step into it during the harvest. On those occasions the bees would have their vengeance and we would run into the house with a cloud of fury circling and stinging.

          "The Scythe" was originally published in Poetry, Vol. CVIV, No. 5, Aug., 1969; under the title "Cuasa" it was translated into Rumanian by Areta Voroniuc and published in Rumania SSR in the periodical Conviribi Literare, ii:12, 1971, pp. 57-8. It was gathered as part of The Inhabitant, poems, with prints by Thom. Seawell, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970, which is out-of-print, but all poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, 640 pages. Available from AMAZON.COM.

          Also included in Fearful Pleasures is this book on the cover of which is the old farmhouse behind which grew the stand of milkweed depicted in "The Scythe":

          And a third collection of poems about Dresden and Dresden Mills is this FREE, DOWNLOADABLE on-line e-chapbook of poems, Attic, Shed, and Barn by Lewis Turco,  Tokyo: Ahadada Books, 2009.

 

 

New Hungers for Old: 100 Years of Italian-American Poetry

New Hungers for Old:

One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry [Paperback]

Dennis Barone (Editor)

 

$19.95 & eligible for

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Star Cloud Press 

New Hungers For Old: One-Hundred Years of Italian-American Poetry edited by Dennis Barone

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Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem

  

                                                             An Immigrant Ballad

From this anthology.

 

BOOKS OF RELATED INTEREST

 

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

 

Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

Sandburg Gnomes

 

Informality

 

Salute your forms on the new nickel;

I don’t use forms myself, I’m too fickle.

 

Art

 

The buffaloes are gone

Except for that statue out on the lawn.

 

Surtax

 

Tell him too much money has killed men,

But not very often, just now and then.

 

The Masses

 

A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads

Trying to get high on the funny mushrooms and the juice on the toads.

 

Ex

 

There will be a rusty gun on the wall, sweetheart,

But I can still use it, so stay away from my house if you’re smart.

 

Fencing

 

As a fence, it is a masterpiece, and will shut off the rabble

And even, quite possibly, the local constable.

Copyright © 2011 Wesli Court, all rights reserved.

 

A Great Grey Fantasy

On Monday, January 4, 2010, I received this e-mail message from Michael Chasar, a member of the English Department faculty at Willamette College in Oregon:

Dear Lewis,

You may or may not be pleased to know that "Poetry & Popular Culture" (a blog at http://mikechasar.blogspot.com) will soon be remembering the publication of your poem "Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle" from the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

On December 2^nd, 1959, while I was a grad student in the Workshop, I had submitted two poems to Fantasy & Science Fiction, which I had been reading since issue one: “A Great Grey Fantasy” and “Excerpts from the Latter Day Chronicle”; both were accepted, and the first poem mentioned was published almost immediately, in January of 1960. The poem has never been reprinted anywhere since then, but it’s clearly a Halloween celebration, so I’ve posted it here in time for this year’s spook night, fifty-two years later:

 

 No need to wound

the pride of witches

with dental pumpkins and

cardboard toots one autumnal

eve each year. Why raise the wrath

of wraiths; why rile

the local spook

 

or banshee? Let them lie there

sucking the blood of dreams.

You stay indoors. If

your id needs its lid lifted, flick

a knob in your parlor. You’ll

hear electronic chains scrape

 

and rattle, see

shadows larrup

the Laramie trail and Mike

Hammer’s image pound dickens

out of rubber jaws. The

Great Gray Phantom rides

again. Or, I

 

should say, still: Hallowe’en has

been perpetual now

for several years.

I have been here

in my easy chair

a month myself, bewitched

(i.e., made stone) by the runes

 

incanted by fakirs

of Commerce,

greatest of nether lords.

Come, I’m bloodless and it’s what!

Halloween? October

already? Out, then,

out of coffins;

 

out on the porch for air,

zombies! The moon’s full. Sniff.

What’s that wail, werewolves?

No, that window,

and that one, look there,

everywhere one notes tubes

flickering, faces pasted

 

to squares of grey

glass and gas. The sound!

it’s weird: hooves (cloven?), shots,

songs, shrieks (this Is Your Life) — what

a devilish din. What

are those black masses

against the moon?

 

Whither bound? Gad, brooms! Goblins,

ghosts, wizards, ogres! What’s

that banner say? “MARS

OR BUST!” In I

go for a good view.

a Mobile Camera

Rocket’s up ahead of them.

 

All rights reserved, Lewis Turco, 2011.

 

 

 

A Suite for Emily

         During the winter of 1980 I read an essay about Emily Dickinson by Van Wyck Brooks which quoted four lines from Emily Dickinson's letters: "The Moon rides like a girl through a topaz town"; "Tonight the Crimson Children are playing in the west"; "The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the trees," and "Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do is what detains the sky."

         I was struck by the modernity of these prose expressions; their sounds and images seemed to me to have more of the feeling and flavor of modernity than even Dickinson's poems, or even the lines of many and many a poem of the 20th century.  Immediately, I wrote four poems that included, and tried to live up to, the Dickinson lines I have quoted.

         No doubt this was a foolhardy thing to do, but I had attempted the same sort of thing with Robert Burton's 17th-century tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and I produced a book of poems the whole title of which reads, The Compleat Melancholick, "A Sequence of Found, Composite, and Composed Poems, based largely upon Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy," a collection which was published in 1985 by the Bieler Press.  I felt then, and I still feel, that my poems did little damage to Burton and, indeed, that Burton inspired me to accomplish some of my better work.  These are the first four poems, titled “A Suite for Emily,” that I wrote in a similar series, “A Sampler of Hours, Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters” contained in my book titled Emily Dickinson: Woman of Letters:

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read A Suite for Emily

 

                THE HARPER OF STILLNESS

 

                  The lawn is full of south

                  and the odours tangle,

                and I hear today for the first

                  the river in the tree.

 

                  The cricket in the root

                  has found a note to cast

                upon the pool of eventide,

                  of shadow welling from

 

                  a coast of pines.  Swiftly

                  now he comes, the harper

                of stillness, lifting up his strings

                  to net the western fire

 

                  shoaling the upper limbs,

                  the rooves of our houses

                swept by a wave of daylight lost

                  in the depths of summer.

 

 

                CRIMSON CHILDREN

 

                Tonight the crimson children

                  are playing in the west.

                They do not hear the stars call

 

                  down the burning sky

                that time has passed, is passing

                  under clouds afire,

                tumultuous with ash.

 

 

                THE EAR OF SILENCE

 

                Not what the stars have done,

                but what they are to do

                is what detains the sky.,

 

                keeps it from failing us

                now when the children sleep

                in rooms of dream's keeping.

 

                What does darkness confide

                in the ear of silence,

                vessel of the hollows? —

 

                echo of a sunken

                bell ranging the far fields

                of light, the well of chimes

 

                that takes us awake now

                in our waiting for night

                and the starlight falling.

 

 

                EPITHALAMION

 

                The moon rides like a girl

                  through a topaz town,

 

                her steed the beast of air,

                  the mound of the wind.

 

                We see her riding there

                  where the desert knocks

 

                against the horizon,

                  cactus burning like

 

                silver on seas of ore.

                  But our doors are shut —

 

                they are studded and barred,

                  and if we are still

 

                she will pass in our streets

                  blind to our whispers,

 

                deaf to our lingering.

                  The sand will take her,

 

                this girl who comes riding,

                  this bride of the night.

 

         When I had finished these first four pieces I sent them to a magazine at SUNY Buffalo titled Escarpments whose editor, Carol Sineni, accepted them immediately, but I was by no means satisfied with them myself, for I felt I had not assimilated Dickinson's tone and style and made my additions indistinguishable from her quotations.  I went to the library and checked out Dickinson's Collected Letters, hoping to find other lines I might quarry.  Much later I was fortunate enough to find a copy I could purchase for my own library.

         By 1984 I had written sixty poems in a series I have titled A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos on Lines from Emily Dickinson's Letters, Selected, Arranged and Augmented by myself.  Some readers of these pieces wish to know which lines are Dickinson's and which are mine.  At first I had tried italicizing her words, as I had done with Burton, but that practice seemed to break up the poems badly whereas in the Burton poems it had actually seemed to help.  As a result, some people have fallen into a guessing game almost automatically, which I deplore, but it can be amusing, to me at least, because the conjectures are generally wrong.

         If they were not, I would have been unsuccessful in assimilating Dickinson's style, and the poems would be failures.  Perhaps they are — readers will have to judge that for themselves.  The subtitle of the sequence indicates that I have "selected, arranged, and augmented" Dickinson's lines.  In the first four poems I had simply used each of her quotations as the first stanza of a poem, breaking the passage at the ends of phrases — what William Carlos Williams called "the breath pause" — and writing subsequent stanzas in the syllabic line-lengths into which Dickinson's phrases had happened to fall.  For instance, the first stanza of the first poem fell into the form of a quatrain the lines of which happen to be 6-6-8 and -6 syllables long; thus, the succeeding stanzas are quatrains with the same syllable counts line for line.

         At times I have done little more than select a complete passage from a particular letter and cast it into syllabic prosody; more often, I have taken lines from various letters and arranged them in some sort of order.  Reasonably often I have "augmented" Dickinson's lines with my own.  Some poems are almost entirely hers, others are more mine then hers, but the shortest poem in the series may serve as an example of the method of composition I used most often:

 

                THE GIFT

 

                A one-armed man conveyed the flowers.

                I gave him half a smile.

 

The first line is Dickinson's, the second is mine.

         On one occasion, when I was giving a reading from these poems in Portland, Oregon, I was accused by a woman of "tampering with an American classic," but this is not so.  I have touched none of the canon of that classic, the poems themselves; I have worked only with her letters, which few people read.  If any of these poems work, then all I have done is bring to the attention of a modern audience a number of Emily Dickinson's beautiful and startling observations that would otherwise have stayed buried in the bulk of her prose.

         This, it seems to me, would be a shame.  I have never met a person who had such a brilliantly wide-ranging mind, or such an ability to toss off, seemingly at random and on any occasion, images as arresting and colorful as any in American poetry, or to match in depth of perception and succinctness of expression the flowers of anyone's intellectual garden, as in this cento titled

 

               THE WINTER GARDEN

 

                It is November.  The noons are more

                laconic and the sundowns sterner.

                  November always seemed to me

                the Norway of the year.  A neighbor

 

                put her child into an ice nest last

                Monday forenoon.  Sharper than dying

                  is the death for the dying's sake.

                I cannot stoop to strut in a world

 

                where bells toll — frost is no respecter

                of persons, and yet the wind blows gay

                  today; jays bark like blue terriers.

                My heart is red as February

 

                and purple as March, for I taste life —

                it is a vast morsel.  If we knew

                  how deep the crocus lay, we should

                never let her go.  The gentian is

 

                a greedy flower, and overtakes

                us all.  Although death grasps the proudest

                  zinnia from my purple garden,

                blossoms belong to the bee.  I would —

 

                eat evanescence slowly — my winter

                flowers are near and foreign.  I have

                  only to cross the floor to stand

                among the Isles of Spice and Summer.

 

And here is an epitaph for Emily which appears in the forthcoming Wesli Court's Epitaphs for the Poets from BrickHouse Books:

 

R.I.P. EMILY DICKINSON

December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886

 

The Maid of Amherst, Emily

Dickinson, sang quietly

Far from the roar of the madding throng,

But now she holds her breath too long.

 

         “A Suite for Emily” first appeared in the periodical Escarpments, ii:1, Spring 1981; These poems and all the other poems in the series titled “A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters” are available in two books that are in print (in 2011): Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters by Lewis Turco, Albany: SUNY PRESS , 1993; hardbound, $39.95, wrappers, $14.95. ORDER FROM AMAZON, which contains essays by various scholars, and Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM which contains the entire sequence titled “A Sampler of Hours.”

For information regarding the forthcoming Wesli Court's Epitaphs for the Poets from BrickHouse Books please query:

Clarinda Harriss, Director

Brick House Books

306 Suffolk Road

Baltimore, MD 21218

charriss@towson.edu

For a sample, go here: www.percontra.net/14lightverseentry.htm

or http://www.the-flea.com/Issue19/Epitaphs.html

 

Lorrie

 

Yaddo is the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs that abuts the Saratoga Raceway. I spent the month of July 1959 there between my stint at the University of Connecticut as both undergraduate and, during the spring semester, grad student-part-time-instructor of English, and my transfer to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop the following fall. One of my new Yaddo friends was the artist Roger Crossgrove who, coincidentally, would become a member of the UConn faculty.

Roger and I were having lunch in my room one day, and the conversation turned to how quickly or slowly one might compose a poem or work of art. The evening before he and I, and several others, had gone to a bar located across from the race track to drink and listen to live jazz. We were attended by a young waitress named Lorrie with whom we flirted and exchanged banter.

One of the features of jazz, of course, is improvisation which is no less a feature of poetry composition worldwide, as for instance in contemporary hip-hop and in the qasida or, particularly, the ghazal of Arabic poetry. Poe’s “The Bells” was discussed in the twentieth century as a “jazz poem” written before jazz had been invented.

While we ate our lunch I told Roger how fast I could write. I boasted that I could compose a decent poem in twenty minutes or less. He didn’t believe it, so I said, “Okay, I’ll prove it.” I took a pad of paper and a pencil off the table and said, “Give me a subject.”

“How about our waitress, Lorrie, at the bar last night?” Roger suggested. This is what I wrote (listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Lorrie):

   

The poem was published in The Carolina Quarterly in 1961; I included it in my master’s thesis at Iowa, Summer’s Raceway, in 1962 and in my chapbook, The Sketches of Lewis Turco, the same year. I read it as part of a poetry reading at George Washington University somewhere around the same time, or perhaps a bit later. Afterward a young black man, a student, came up to me and said, “A white man isn’t supposed to be able to write like that.” I guess it was a good thing I didn’t know that.

Many years later, in 1984 during my tenure as a professor at the State University of New York College at Oswego, my friend and colleague George O’Connell, a printmaker and amateur jazz musician who played the vibes in local combos and orchestras, decided he was in love with “Lorrie,” and he made an Xmas card of it that year, which we sent around.

In 1989 George made an entire artist-book of the poem* and gave it to me as a birthday present in 1996, the year I retired from teaching. I have posted the images on my blog, Poetics and Ruminations. It’s a beautiful production.

________

*Lorrie, Poem by Lewis Turco, Drawings by George O'Connell, Oswego, NY: Grey Heron Press, copyright 1989, all rights reserved.

 

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 

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.