Poetics and Ruminations

Unity College Reception

          On Saturday, April 7^th, 2012 at 2:00 p.m., Unity College Center for the Performing Arts at 42 Depot Street (off Route 202) in Unity, Maine, (http://www.unity.edu/NewsEvents/News/Turco212A.aspx) celebrated National Poetry Month and the publication of two books by Lewis Turco: The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition and Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets (Epitaphs for the Poets) with a reception, a book-signing, and readings by the honoree and by attendees.  For further information email MLeavitt@unity.edu. 

          If you would like to hear the readings, go here: Reading0412.zip. If you would like to listen to the subsequent interview of Lewis Turco by Michele Leavitt, go here: TurcoInterview0412.zip.

Epitaphs for the Poets

JUST PUBLISHED!

Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012, 85 pp., trade paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1, $15.00. Order from Amazon.com: Epitaphs for the Poets 

As reverent as it is irreverent, this charming cycle of poems brings dead poets to life and life to dead poets.  Here is a guild of the centuries, by no means a “tradition,” but a bond, rather — unbroken and ongoing — among brother and sister practitioners of an art that has always spoken life to death. — Albert J. von Frank, co-editor, the Harvard Variorum Edition of The Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

R.I.P. LEWIS TURCO
May 2, 1934 –

 
Here lies at last and out of work,
The syllabubble wordsmith Turk
Who finds he cannot now resort
For rime to his sidekick Wesli Court. 

 

Remembering Dugan Gilman

          On February 3, 2012, I received an email message from Paul Rickert saying that the poet Dugan Gilman had died in Syracuse at the age of sixty-six. His younger brother, Kevin, had been one of my poetry writing students in the early 1970s while I was teaching at the State University of New York College at Oswego, about forty-five miles north of Syracuse, on Lake Ontario. When he was my student Kevin told me that his older brother was a poet, and that he had decided to take my classes because Dugan had suggested he do so.

          After his graduation Kevin Gilman became a Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company executive, not a poet, but he stayed in town. I had, and still have, a Northwestern account, and I saw him often until he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 58 on December 17, 2009. For twenty-two years at Midsummer Kevin had hosted a “Longest Day of the Year Party” where family and friends gathered from across the country and the globe; it was there that I first met his sister Teresa who is also a poet.

          Paul Rickert in his email elaborated a bit. He wrote that Dugan “was quite eccentric, lived outdoors and homeless many years, then settled into a house purchased by his siblings [for Dugan to live in] in the Westcott Street area where he lived as a hermit.” 

          Kevin told me that Dugan lived in a tent in the woods while he was homeless, and that he “lived off road kill,” which astonished and appalled me. Eventually Dugan moved into his sister Niki's home to live a solitary life in the basement, but when Wesleyan University Press in 1971 published his first and only book, Upstate, in its prestigious series, Dugan had not yet, so far as I know, shown symptoms of his impending eccentricity. However, the crop of young poets, of whom Dugan was one back in those early ‘seventies, had learned from Robert Bly how to distort reality; they were known as “deep image surrealists.”

          In 1958 Robert Bly had founded an extremely influential literary magazine that inaugurated the capitulation of the teaching Academic Poets to political correctness and anti-formalism. Bly’s periodical was originally titled The Fifties, then The Sixties, and, briefly, The Seventies, together with his press of the same names. In his periodical and in the books that he issued from his press, no less than in his own work, Bly began to press two ideas. The first was that, in order to write quintessentially "American" poetry one had, quixotically and paradoxically, to study the work of the Chilean Marxist poet Pablo Neruda and the Scandinavians, including Gunnar Ekelof and Thomas Tranströmer, all of whom Bly was translating.

          Bly's second idea was that poets needed to get in touch with their basic natures somehow, needed to reach down into their ids to pull up and bring to light the primal urges of the brute and somehow reconcile them with their conscious existence. The way to do this was to utilize what has come to be called the "underground" or "deep” image, a term coined by Amiri Baraka, but an idea Bly derived from Theodore Roethke whose method it was to walk the edge of madness deliberately, not falling over into insanity nor, on the other hand, giving in to the logical mind. It was the poet's job to bring from the side of the unconscious those images that would enable humankind to face and understand itself. These images would, of course, be distortions of "reality" as the conscious mind perceived it; therefore, "deep imagism" was a type of literary surrealism.

          Bly pressed ahead with his theories, and soon he had a great many converts.  One of the most beautifully lyric academic poets of the period, James Wright, joined the ranks of the Deep Imagists. Wright went on to gather an excellent reputation as a poet for, though much lyricism was lost in his switch to the ranks of Blymagism, his talent was large enough to bridge the gap. However, Bly's major convert, perhaps, was James Dickey, although their association was short-lived.

          It was Dugan Gilman who, when he came to visit me once in Oswego, coined a term to describe the Deep Imagism which had enveloped the college graduate writing workshops, of which there began to be a great many throughout America during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Gilman, who had been one of those young poets enveloped by the movement, called it the "Pink Fog."

          During this period many formal poets were persuaded to the view that formalism was no longer relevant to the times, which were becoming oriented to social activism, reform and to “self-expression”; i.e., egopoetry and “confession.” Unlike every other art taught in the academy, poetry became the stepchild of "intuition."  If young people wanted to find out consciously what they were actually doing with pen, muse, and paper, they were no longer going to discover it in the classroom; no, it had to be learned privately, on one's own in the silent hours, an activity I was able to foster in 1968 by publishing The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, a book that Kevin was using in class around that time, and with which Dugan clearly was familiar because many years later another Syracusan, Paul Harvey, wrote to tell me about his experience using The Book of Forms:

           “The Book of Forms has brought immeasurable pleasure to me (and my children who also use it) over the years,” Harvey wrote. “Introduced to it by a local poet and an old friend here in Syracuse, Dugan Gilman, it has given me the structure over the years to write much more pleasing and, I think, effective poetry. Once [I was] a proponent of free verse…until Dugan convinced me that I needed discipline and structure and gifted me with a tattered copy of [the] book.

          “Now on my third copy, and having bought several more as gifts, I still find regular pleasure in using it. In fact, I am currently writing a book of poems for my daughter who turns forty in February. It will contain many different poems in many varied forms (hell, I may even include a free verse here and there).

          “An attendant pleasure was the respect the book gave me for the poets of the ages. I found myself appreciating and even memorizing many of my favorites.”

          Dugan Gilman had come to visit me at home in Oswego after his first book of poems had been published and gotten good reviews. Arriving with a new manuscript, he told me that he had written his first collection by osmosis, picking up out of the air the neo-surrealism that hung like a "pink fog" over the campuses. Now, he said, he wanted to learn how to write well.

          I read his ms., which was full of formal verses, and I had to tell him I felt he had a long way to go before he could handle meters and rhymes and such bugbears with seeming ease — with artfulness. He had, I said, gone about the whole thing backwards: He had written a successful book of poetry before he had learned how to write. He had imitated a popular period style and gotten away with it, but if he wished to grow he would have to put his mind to it. I'm afraid he was considerably disillusioned, but it was the truth.  He had two choices: He could go on imitating the poems he had written and their models, or he could learn how to write anything he wanted to write. I don’t know how successful he was, for he never published another volume.

          A memorial service for Dugan Gilman will be held from 5:00-7:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 9^th, at Burns-Garfield Funeral Home, 3175 East Genesee Street, Syracuse, New York, 13224, (315) 446-2466.

 

The Passing of Herb Coursen

HERBERT R. COURSEN, JR., March 28, 1932 – December 3, 2011 

 

Harry Osgood, Herb Coursen, and Lew Turco at the New England Poets Conference at Harvard University, 1985.

          Last evening, Wednesday, January 18, 2012, very belatedly I learned of the death of Herbert R. Coursen, Jr., whom I met forty-four years ago here in Maine, at a 1968 Bowdoin College conference on “stylistics.” It was the same year that the first edition of my volume titled The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics was published — Herb would become one of its first and biggest fans.

          Herb died at the age of 79 in bed, in his sleep apparently and enviably, on Saturday, December 3rd, 2011.  I hope that he had received and seen his contributor’s copy of the revised and expanded edition of The Book of Forms, Including Odd and Invented Forms, which included four of his poems, “National Pastime,” in my opinion the greatest poem about baseball ever written; “The King of Kolchis,” written in a form he invented called the “once” (pronounced “on-say”), “St. John of the Cross,” written in the Spanish form called the “lira,” invented by the title poet, and “Winter Dreams,” written in another form Coursen invented, the dagwood.

          On more than one occasion I have written about Herb: I penned the "Introduction" to his book of poems titled Hope Farm (Stratford CT: Cider Mill Press, 1979), and I wrote a lead essay, "The Protean Poetry of Herbert Coursen," published in The Hollins Critic, xxxii:3, June 1995, pp. 1-11.

          Herb was a dear old friend, as was Pamela Mount, his companion of two decades, who died last year. My wife Jean and I miss them deeply. I will post “The Protean Poetry of Herbert Coursen” on my blog titled “Odd and Invented Forms” today.

 

The First Review of The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition

Martha Eshleman Smith e-mailed me today, December 29, 2011, to tell me that she had received her copy of the fourth edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition from Amazon.com, and that she had posted a review on the Amazon web site.  It’s a five-star review, and I thank her profusely for it, but there are a few things I’d like to correct in it, or comment upon.

A few typos, first: “typological” level should read “typographical,” and Martha means “Berryman” when she says “Berrymore.” She says that “The format of the description of each form is unchanged from the prior editions,” but that isn’t always the case. For instance, the description of the ghazal is quite different, much expanded.

Also, Martha says that “gnome or gnomic don’t appear in the general index of this edition…,” and that’s true, but that’s because a “gnome” is defined in The Book of Literary Terms, the companion volume of The Book of Forms as “an apothegm or truism, q.v.,  sometimes in rhyming form. Some ‘Gnomic Verses’ may be found in … The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, … under the heading of englyn cyrch.” The “gnome” is not a verse form, so the term doesn’t appear in the new Fourth Edition; however, each “gnome” I’ve been publishing in my blog “Poetics and Ruminations” at www.lewisturco.net, consists of a group of six “tailgaters,” and the tailgater is a verse form which appears on page 360 of the Fourth Edition – it was a late addition.

Martha also says, “I would like to see the book have a perpetual supplement available on the web. And hope that Lewis Turco has the health and interest to produce a 5th edition that expands into the world forms entering English poetry, e.g. the Burmese climbing rhyme.” The idea behind The Book of Forms has always been to include those forms that have been used in English in the past. I’m afraid I haven’t run into any English examples of Burmese forms so far.

My publisher isn’t going to be interested in doing another edition for at least ten years. I have worked on The Book of Forms now for more than a half-century, since I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa in 1959. If I’m still around in ten years I doubt I’ll be interested in, or able to produce, a fifth edition.  However, as I did for the third edition, I will very likely post a few corrections to this one on my blog titled, “Odd and Invented Forms.” My editors and I labored intensively over our proofreading, but there are bound to be errors cropping up anyway; I’ll appreciate anyone sending me at lewturco@roadrunner.com notice of those they find.

Thank you again, Martha.

 

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

Here’s to Your Health!

 

  

When I was a senior at Meriden High School, Meriden, Connecticut, back in the early ‘fifties, it was my belief that every citizen of the United States had the right to decent health care. When I graduated from high school in 1952 and joined the Navy in order to qualify for the G. I. Bill, I discovered that only members of the military, and other government agencies, had access to comprehensive and affordable health care.

Fifty-eight years later, during which most of the rest of the Western world has instituted national health care systems, including our neighbor to the North, Canada, America has at last been decent enough to enact health care for all its citizens. Now that we have joined the civilized world at last, I wish to offer this toast to us all:

 

HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH AMERICA, AT LAST!

Lewis Putnam Turco

Damming The River Of Time

By Robert Chute

 

In this issue of The New York Review

a picture of the Ku Klux Klan parading,

September, Nineteen  Twenty-six, filling

the avenue, capital dome for background,

lots of American flags were fluttering.

I was seven months old so don’t blame me.

 

Yesterday, March 22, Two Thousand-ten,

at the capital protesting the health reform bill,

men shouted “nigger” at a black congressman

and spat on another. Someone it seems

has dammed up the river of time again.

 

It’s harder to recognize the Klan in jeans

or leisure suits. The heart of their protest may

still be the color of their president’s skin.

 

 

R. I. P. Morton Marcus

         I heard today from my friend and former student Dennis Morton in Santa Cruz that his fellow townsman, and my former Iowa Workshop classmate, the poet Morton Marcus, died today. Dennis and I had been corresponding over the past few days about Mort, so this was in the air between us.

         We’d last seen each other in April 2006 when Dennis put together a reunion of Mort, Vern Rutsala, and me in Santa Cruz: the three of us older people had not been together since we’d been schoolmates in Iowa City in 1959-60, the best of friends, as we remained ever after, until now. This picture, below, is of Joan Rutsala, Mort Marcus, and the docent of Robinson Jeffers’ home, Tor House, in Monterey, California, during that reunion (click on the picture to see it entire):

R.I.P. MORTON MARCUS

1936 – October 28, 2009

 

Here lies the offbeat Dreamer

Whose beard wound round his nose.

His rage, created by the world,

Was vented on a rose.

 

Our deepest sympathies to Donna, and to Mort himself, goodbye, old friend.

HEALTH ALERT!

 

 Marcel Proust

Dresden, Maine, October 21, 2009. Exclusive to the Dresden Mills Gazette. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, today released an urgent appeal to the medical community and to the nation at large regarding an impending health emergency.

According to Dr. Horace S. Asce, M. D., seminal assistant director of reproductive assets at the Centers, bird flu has crossed with swine flu to coalesce into a major epidemic threat indigenous to the United States and potentially a danger to everyone world-wide.

“This could cause a pandemic,” said Dr. Asce when asked why he and not someone from the department of infectious diseases was spokesman for the Centers on this issue.

“Because,” Dr. Asce replied, “this disease is spread by unfertilized eggs. Anyone who has eggs for breakfast is in danger of infection.”

“Why breakfast?” he was asked by reporters present, in particular Wesli Court, chief influenza correspondent of the Dresden Mills Gazette.

“Sorry,” the doctor said, “I did not mean to imply one could catch this new strain of flu only at breakfast. One is at risk at any meal where eggs are served, in any form.”

“Is eating eggs the only way somebody can become infected?” Court asked in a follow-up question.

“No,” said the doctor. “One can also catch this disease by reading a particlar novel written by the French author Marcel Proust.”

“What novel is that?” Court asked.

“Swann’s Way,” he was told.

“How so?”

“Because,” Dr. Asce explained, “This cross between swine flu and bird flu is called Swann flue,” said the Doctor.

“You can get sick from a novel?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Asce. “I speak from experience. Many novels have made me sick.”

“Is this novel flu a single strain?” Court rejoined.

“No,” Dr. Asce said. “There are two strains. The more lethal has a capital S and a double n, as in ‘Swann.’ The other strain is simple swan flu, and you can avoid it if you duck or are goosed in time.”

“That would be a good thing,” opined the reporter, which the doctor confirmed. “Not only good, but eggcellent,” he agreed.

“Has anyone died of swan flu?” Court asked.

“Only readers of Proust so far,” was the reply. “The best defense against this deadly disease is to refrain from reading French novels. In fact, to be perfectly certain that one will not be infected at any stage, in my opinion one should reman at a distance from French literature entirely for an extended period,” said Dr. Asce.