Poetics and Ruminations

Tiger Claws at Xmas

Tiger, Tiger, quite contrite

By the hydrant late at night,

What infernal hand or fist

Would do this to an amorist?

William Flake

 

HEALTHCARE PLAN BLUES: An Interview

  

 

Sunday, November 29, 2009. Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. By Wesli Court, Blues Reporter.

DMG. At the moment I am standing in front of the candy counter of the Dresden Texaco and Take-Out in Dresden, Maine, having a conversation with Republican Senator Gloria Monday. Good morning, Senator Monday.

GM. Good morning.

DMG. The Democrat-controlled Senate recently voted to send to the floor of the United States Senate for debate a health care bill that was crafted by the Democrats. As a Republican senator from Bluestate, how do you feel about that?

GM. As you know, I voted with all the other members of my Republican Party against sending that bill to the floor.

DMG. Why was that?

GM. Although I feel that the health care system desperately needs to be reformed, I was against the bill’s containing a Public Option provision.

DMG. What is wrong with the Public Option?

GM. It will lead inevitably to Socialism in our Republic.

DMG. How so?

GM. It will create a system in which the government will weigh in with a heavy hand on our citizens’ rights to choose their own health care, and it will tell our doctors and medical practitioners how much they can charge for their services.

DMG. Aren’t you ignoring the word “option” in the bill? Citizens will keep their right to have the health insurance program of their own choosing, if they already have one.

GM. I don’t feel it is ever a good idea to have the Government involved in health care. People will eventually drop their private insurance coverage in favor of the Public Option.

DMG. Doesn’t that imply the private companies would be providing worse care, like deciding if a person covered by their policies has a “pre-existing medical condition” that they don’t want to pay for, or like choosing to drop a person’s coverage arbitrarily?

GM. Oh, I don’t think so. Government health plans are likely to be much worse than private ones, tied up in red tape, run by committees that decide who should live or die.

DMG. Excuse me, Senator, but Senior Citizens are all covered by a “Public Option,” Medicare. Doesn’t Medicare do a decent job?

GM. Medicare is beset by problems, like fraud and waste.

DMG. “Fraud” is a crime. That’s really not a part of the plan, is it? That requires investigation by law enforcement agencies. Are you suggesting that the Government is being remiss in not enforcing laws against medical fraud?

GM. That may very well be the case.

DMG. Perhaps the Congress should appropriate more money for law enforcement?

GM. That is a different subject than the one we were discussing.

DMG. That’s true. To get back to the idea of the “Public Option,” aren’t all members of the Armed Forces — the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, Coast Guard — all covered by a Government health care system? Not to mention veterans of all the services, who are covered by the U. S. Veterans Administraton.

GM. Yes, they are, but there’s a very good reason for that system.

DMG. Although it’s run by the Government, the USVA hospitals are both efficient and effective, aren’t they?

GM. In general, yes, but again, they had better be. Our service men and women deserve the best care available. But that’s not the kind of “Public Option” I was talking about.

DMG. Well, how about the “Public Option” that the U. S. Congress is covered by? Do you find that you personally receive decent health care?

GM. Er, ah…, uh, well, yes, of course.

DMG. And how about the health care option that covers ALL government workers? All Civil Service employees, employees of the Postal Service, and the various “public options” that cover State, County, and Local government employees?

GM. I am against specialty options for American citizens.

DMG. You mean like Medicaid that helps the very poor?

GM. No, no….

DMG. Isn’t it true, Senator Monday, that the “Public Option” included in the current Senate bill would apply only to those people who are covered by no health care plan at all? In other words, a relatively small segment of the population who are falling through the cracks of the current “system” of health care?

GM. Um. Well. Perhaps….

DMG. And isn’t it true that the bill also contains provisions for those states — primarily Republican Red States, one would assume — that would have another kind of option: the option to “opt out” of the coverage outlined in the bill if they wished?

GM. Well, yes, but….

DMG. Thank you, Senator Gloria Monday, Republican of Bluestate. You have been most helpful. I’m sure the readers of the Dresden Mills Gazette will find your remarks enlightening.

REMARKS

Well, Wesli,

You certainly nailed that interview! How can that dodo ever show her face in public again?

But wasn't Senator Monday implicated in the recent, notorious Seven-Day Escort Ring scandal involving the Washington call-girl known as Ruby Tuesday? Their boss was the sinister and secretive Mr. Friday, who ran the operation from a fortified island in the South Pacific.

Rhina Espaillat

 

You're making me Thursday. Good thing I have a cup of coffee in my hand.

Wesli

 

Love It, Lew.

Hope you had a good Thanksgiving & post-tryptophan days.

Moira Egan

 

Lew,

Thanks for sending the hilariously pathetic interview.  The responses, I mean, not the interview questions, which are terrific.

Clarinda Harriss 

  

Lew,

Didn’t you just interview this woman? (click on link:)

Understanding Our Hollow "Centrists"

Dennis Morton

  

Thanks, Lew. 

It's about time Someone gave Anyone the straight dope on the option. It's 

possible no one can persuade a Monday, though — the week's most recalcitrant day-- 

 
Ruth Harrison

It infuriates me that so many people are so purblind. EVERYBODY knows about the Public Options we already have. They're just determined to be stupid, apparently. I could hardly believe it when I saw all those old people who are clearly on Medicare waving signs AGAINST the "public option." And how politicians can actually get up in front of a camera and act like THEY are not on the Public Option themselves boggles the imagination. They must have gonads of brass if male and ???? if female. It requires tremendous amounts of cynicism on everyone's part. Lew

Yes.  The pretense at not grasping a truth which is straightforward and plain — it's shoddy indeed.  But that has been the nature of the Reps the past three decades or so, and by now it's an accepted technique — pretend something else is true if you do not like the truth before you.  You've got it — it's determined stupidity.

Am I wrong, or has it become more pronounced of late? 

Maybe I'm just old and crotchety ...

Ruth

 

No, you're correct, but probably we're both as old and crotchety as those morons waving those stupid placards.

Lew

 

Thanks, Lew. Enjoyed reading the Wesli Court interview!

Don Kimball

The Day We Bombed the Moon

(AND BARACK OBAMA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE),

A SESTINA

 

October ninth, 2009, we sent

A rocket off to Luna. We meant to bomb her

Into submission? No, our good intent:

To blow up surface dust to test for ice.

On the same day the Nobel Prize Committee

Amazed the world by bestowing its amity

 

Award upon a tyro. A calamity,

It seemed to some — an evil precedent

Imposed upon America by committee.

They gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama!

Many Republicans needed to ask for ice

Water and Schnapps, or even an oxygen tent.

 

No one had dreamed an explosion of this extent

Could blow moondust in the face of amity

Around the House and Senate. It wasn’t nice

That those Norse should cause old pols to resent

Explosive love. It was a suicide bomber

NASA sent to ruin comity —

 

If not around the world, the R. N. C.

At the very least. Gaddafi in his tent

Celebrated Luna’s death. “Embalm her!”

Was his battle cry, his enmity

For  global infidelity was sent

To Cocoa, Florida, well packed in ice.

 

But NASA said, “It isn’t very nice

To imply we had an impact on the Committee

Rather than the moon! Our bomb was sent

Out into space. We’re not incompetent!”

Meanwhile, a wave of pure tsunamity

Engulfed the Oval Office, and Obama,

 

Although surprised himself, felt like the balm or

Salve of sweet salvation in a trice

Had rehabilitated amity,

Restored a modicum of comity

To the world at large to some extent.

One could sense the very aloe’s scent.

 

Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee,

And malcontents hope NASA finds its ice,

But what price amity amid dissent?

COMMENTS

 

I'm pretty sure his first thought was "Oh shit!"  I expect that his acceptance speech will be very good.

Sam

 

Really challenging set of 6 words you set yourself, Lew! And you've done it, complete with outrageous rhymes and variants: 3 cheers for you, for the sestina — and for Obama.

Rhina

 

Balm a, Obama, wonderful. Reminds me a lot of Byron's "annuities" and "an old Jew it is."

Clarinda

 

Hey, Lew, liked your sestina.  Will you be America's closest thing to a French chansonnier, and keep producing timely comment on current events? We could use you!

Joe

 

I love "chansonnier"! Sure, I'll be one of those. Though it's kind of close to "chandelier" and I don't like just hanging around.

Lew

Poetics: The Conspiracy of Silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

         I admire my three colleagues for having the courage, finally, to admit they knew nothing about poetics and for submitting themselves to a crash course I delivered on a desktop that cursorily covered a few basic elements of scansion and prosodics. These are the essentials: 1)  In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress.  If one cannot at first hear the stressing, then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.  2)  Important single-syllable words, particularlyverbs and nouns, generally take strong stresses.  3)  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses throughpromotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse. 4)  In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion and will stand in place of a stressed syllable.  5)  In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion and will stand in place of an unstressed syllable. 6)  An accent may be forced upon a syllable through rhetorical stress, by underlining, italicizing, boldfacing, or otherwise artificially heightening it, as has just now been done.

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

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

Uncle Wesli's Daily Epitaph for today, Tuesday, August 4, 2009

“The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor” for Tuesday, August 4^th, 2009, says these things on-line:

“The deans got a hold of the pamphlet,” and, “the 19-year-old Shelley eloped to Scotland with a 16-year-old girl, the daughter of a English pub owner.”

    Herewith, an epitaph for Shelley by his admirer Wesli Court, (all epitaphs copyrighted 2009, all rights reserved):

R.I.P. PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

August 4, 1792-July 8, 1822

 

He said to the skylark, “bird thou never wert,”

A line for which no poet would give his shirt,

Nor even a pair of socks that were worn and smelly.

Nevertheless, we honor Percy Shelley. 

    An epitaph for August 5th:

R.I.P. CONRAD AIKEN

August 5, 1889-August 17, 1973

 

He found his parents’ murder-suicide

When he was but a child. Although he tried

His hand at death himself he was not taken

Till age took pity on old Conrad Aiken.

 On Thursday, August 6^th, in his piece on Tennyson’s birthday, Mr. Keillor wrote,

“They had traveled together through out Europe, and some scholars speculate that their relationship was more than platonic. Eventually, Hallam had become engaged to his Tennyson's sister.”

Keillor provides such fine examples of composition in the English language for the writers of America to emulate.

Here is an epitaph for Tennyson :

R.I.P. ALFRED TENNYSON

August 6, 1809-October 6, 1892

 

The purest poet of his time,

He did nothing else but rhyme,

So Fate bestowed the benison

Of fame and wealth on Tennyson.

On Friday, August 7, 2009, in his “Writer’s Almanac” Garrison Keillor quoted Leonard Nathan’s poem “Not to Trouble You” to this effect:

“Not to trouble you with love, I mean
/ those adolescent dreams of great, of greater,
/ or of greatest loving, let alone / the crumbly personal kind—“

One wonders in what way the personal kind of love is “crumbly”? Is it the same sort of thing as finding while putting on one’s shoes in the morning that “half a loafer is better than none”? Or that down south things aren’t what they’re crackered up to be? No, it’s probably more like working in a bleu cheese factory and finding that it’s a crumbly job after all.

         Keillor also reported that, “On this day in 1934, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled in favor of the novel Ulysses, by James Joyce.”

One had no idea that an inanimate object like a novel could bring suit in a U. S. Court of Appeals! Gosh, one can learn so many things by reading “The Writer’s Almanac” on-line every morning.

On Sunday, August the 8, 2009, Garrison Keillor’s once again taught’s us something we didn’t know’s about English; he’s wrote,  “Izaak Walton's wrote mostly biographies,” and I’s wrote this in emulation of him’s wonderful way’s with word’s.

     Keillor also reminded us that today is Dryden's birthday and that “Nearly all of his writing he composed in heroic couplets,” so here’s another epitaph by Wesli Court:

 

R.I.P. JOHN DRYDEN

August 9, 1631-13 May 1700

 

When once he learned to write in pairs

Of lines he gave himself no airs

And never after tried to widen

The field of vision of John Dryden.

And here's one for Jack Foley:

R.I.P. JACK FOLEY

August 9, 1940

 

Here lies Jack Foley

Decomposing slowly.

When he composed faster

It was a disaster.

REPLY

Here lies the Turk

Who wrote with a smirk,

Decried by all men

When he wrote with a pen.

 

Jack Foley

 

 

But on a computer

None were acuter.

 

Happy 69 to you, though, Jack,

 

Wesli

 

From Neeli Cherkovski:

JACK FOLEY AT 69

 

holding one end of time

at the end of the day

holding one end of the sun

here in the beginning

holding time, hovering

thinking, making a dream

remain so that the land

inside of it might be revealed

as the passage widens

 

holding a dream inside

of time, telling the moon

I love you everywhere

I am 69, the world is

nearly as old as I am

there in the beginning

of days as the light

of the sun and moon spar

against the distant

longing to be for

ever who I am

From Jake Berry:

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!



 

69 sure looks fine on you


and I don't mean to imply


any sexual act


Besides, using the Clinton definition,


the 69 position


is not actually sex in fact



 

What is it then?



 

It's pleasure, it's poetry,


it's a tap dance or foxtrot


depending on the music you've got


And what could be more amusing


than a life with the muses


whether you abuse it or not?



 

Take the extremes


the path of excess


wisdom rolls in like the tide.


69 is joy
f

or every girl and boy


willing to take the ride.



 

And the ride has just begun


there's so much left to be done,


so many songs to write and sing.


So pick up your lyre


and Dionysian fire


and mount the horse with wings!



 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY


to one hell of a poet


My hat, and most of my hair,


is off to you.

From Ivan Arguelles:

 

holy jumping bejeezus


if this monument hasn't


put on its quid of years!


silently heaped up time


has joined its holy 69
t

o the one you left over


last but leaping higher


still one hand in heaven


and t'other groping


for the Light!

 

From Mary-Marcia Casoly:

For Jack Foley 9669/MM

 

(Happy Birthday) Selamat Ulang Tahu*

don’t be afraid of the big barong

dance with the monkey

6 &9 ying/yang 

realize how much you are loved by so many

numerical acrobats 6 & 9 tumble

continue to bloom protectors

wise child throughout life

appear as twins standing for each other

which is which, give your reasons...

 the brightest star of Leo 

morning and night 6 & 9 sun moon

a myriad of subtle ways will tell 

being 69 light years from the earth... 

starbeam of Leo

 

*Indonesian for according to Google translator

 

From Katherine Hastings:

TWELVE LINES STOLEN ALMOST RANDOMLY BEFORE MIDNIGHT 

for Jack on his 69th Birthday

 

Ecstatic heights in thought and rhyme

The song of waiting and the shock of time

You must look up at the sky and act as if

 

The dream now beats more quickly than blood

This is the secret lamp burning under our gestures

In the air that consumes and strengthens

 

Burning red, jumbled and quivering

Each summer time to life.  Lo!  This is he,

And there could I marvel (his) birthday,

 

Pools and pasture shade

With bannerets and censors, with wimples and magic veils

The Birth of a Nation*

 

*How Jack signed his email tonight.

Jack's commentary:

Selamat Ulang Tahu

To me on my 6 plus 9

John Dryden should also rate a wahoo

His birth date’s the same as mine

As I scribble on scraps which I write between naps

In this mighty disorder called my den

’Twould be fine were I known as only the clone

Of that wonderful poet John Dryden

         Now here’s an epitaph for Monday, August 10^th 2009, and a homage (yes, a homage, unless you’re Cockney) to the Spectrist poets:

 

R.I.P. WITTER BYNNER

August 10, 1881-June 1, 1968

 

He helped to pull the Spectrist Hoax

With friends — their literary jokes

Were served like Knishes in a diner

By Arthur Ficke and Witter Bynner.

 

 

A SPECTRAL LAMENT

With Spectrist apologies to Emanuel Morgan.

 

I wish that I were crazy,

I wish that I were mad —

Alas!  I am but, Maizie,

A normal, noxious lad.

I would that I were otherwise

So I might make your tender eyes

Light up like thunder in the skies!

     If I were only dafter

     I might be making hymns

     To the liquor of your laughter

     And the lacquer of your limbs.

 

I'd take an artist's palette

And paint you, if I could,

The colors of a salad

All green and red and good.

I'd turn those cheeks so pale and saddish

The blushred of a summer radish;

I'd stop for aye my aubade-kaddish

     If I were only dafter

     I might be making hymns

     To the liquor of your laughter

     And the lacquer of your limbs.

 

I love the way you simper

When you've had one or two:

It makes me want to whimper

And drink a toast of dew

Or coat you overall with varnish

To keep away Time's bitter tarnish —

Lord knows I don't want you to vanish!

     If I were only dafter

     I might be making hymns

     To the liquor of your laughter

     And the lacquer of your limbs.

 

I'm just a small town slacker;

I'm not much, that I know.

Some greasy city slicker

No doubt will be your beau,

But I would run a country mile,

My Maizie dear, to see you smile

As you come slewing down the aisle

Grinning at me all the while,

Your yellow teeth all neat in file,

Your boring eyes as bright as oil;

     If I were only dafter

     I might be making hymns

     To the liquor of your laughter

     And the lacquer of your limbs.

 

“A Spectral Lament” is from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press, © 2004 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved. 

 

    

Here is an epitaph for Tuesday, August 11th, 2009:

R.I.P. LOUISE BOGAN

August 11, 1897-February 4, 1970

 

Her mother flaunted each affair

Which taught the young Louise to fear

Uncertainty, and thus began

The formal structures of Bogan.

    Here is an epitaph for Wedesday, August, 12, 2009:

BLUES FOR DONALD JUSTICE

12 August 1925-6 August 2004

 

Well, Don, I guess we knew you’d have to leave;

We hoped not, but we saw you had to leave,

And now we see it’s time for us to grieve.

 

We knew you young, we knew you when we all

Were young — you included, when we all

Were wrapped in language, held in hypnotic thrall

 

By sound and metre, couplet, quatrain, thrime,

By rhythm in the line, caesura, rhyme,

And it was you who showed us how to chime.

 

You read our work with care, closely, with care.

You read us with intelligence and care.

You let your annoyance show, but you were fair

 

When we were lax or earless, when we were mules.

Thank you for giving us the poet’s tools. 

Copyright 2009 by Lewis Turco. All rights reserved.

Garrison Keillor wrote of William Maxwell in “The Writer’s Almanac” for Sunday, August 16, “His last book, a collection of stories and fables called All the Days and Nights, he first started to work on, he said, ‘because my wife like to have me tell her stories when we were in bed in the dark before falling asleep.’ “

Me like that she like that, like, what not to like?

Here is a Wesli Court epitaph for today:

 

 

R.I.P. ANDREW MARVELL

31 March 1621 – 16 August 1678)

 

He had not world enough, nor time,

For coyness, but enough for rime

To spin its web and develop larval

Verse forms to make Andrew Marvell.

Here is an epitaph for Monday, August 17, 2009:

 

 

R.I.P. TED HUGHES

August 17, 1930 – October 28, 1998

 

“He often put himself into a trance before he writing,

and he tried to take the point of view of animals.”

— Garrison Keillor.

“He often put himself into a trance

Before he writing,” and before he dance.

He always asking animals for views,

And now he make believe he dead Ted Hughes.

         Today, Tuesday, August 18, 2009, Garrison Keillor published a poem titled “This Longing” by Martin Steingesser. I don’t know whether the errors to be found in the poem are by Steingesser or Keillor, but at one point the poem says, “…this / is what I wanted, to lie with you in the dark / listening how rain sounds….” One assumes one of the two knew that there ought to be a “to” between “listening: and “how”: “…listening [to] how rain sounds….”

         Later on Steingesser says, “and maybe
/ it will be still, as now, the longing / that carries us
/ into each other's arms

/ asleep, neither speaking
/ least it all too soon turn to morning….”

         Good grief. The word underlined should be lest, not “least.” This “poem” is from an actually published book, from “Deerbrook Edition, 2002.” Even that is a typographical error because, according to their web page, the publisher is “Deerbrook Editions," plural, not singular. Apparently nobody, not Steingesser, not the editors of Deerbrook, and not Garrison Keillor, either, cares enough about the presentation of the English language to catch these things before they are set up in print or put up for viewing on the Web.

         Later on in the posting, quoting sci-fi writer Brian Aldiss, Keillor writes, “’Science fiction is no more written for scientists that ghost stories are written for ghosts.’” That is obviously Keillor’s typo. “The Writer’s Almanac” continues to be our foremost purveyor of typographical and grammatical errors on the Internet.

         Here is a Wesli Court epitaph for today, August 19, 2009, the birthday of Ogden Nash, one of the greatest epigrammatists of all time, and the inventor of rhymed prose poems:

 

R.I.P. OGDEN NASH

August 19, 1902 – May 19, 1971)

 

The poet lives ‘twixt prose and verse

Than which no fix can be much worse,

But then along came Ogden Nash

Who turned the whole thing into cash.

REMARKS

Loved it!

Thanks for sharing,

-S.

Ogden was a Nashional treasure.

Rhina

  

Let me tell you, THAT made me Nash my teeth. Nashurally, that's what you intended.

Lew

Hi, Lew,

I was just mentioning Ogden Nash to someone a couple of days ago and lamenting the fact that he seems mostly forgotten. I still enjoy his artful humor on occasion. I think your "Epitaph" is a fitting tribute: it captures his "essence" perfectly.

Best to Jean and you,

Jack

Dear 'Wesli," thanks for the Nashigram — can you offer a sample or two of his rhymed prose poems?

 Best to you,

 Dan[iel]Ger[ard Hoff]man

 

 Dear DanGerMan,

 I don’t suppose that in good conscience I can

provide you with an honest-to-god sample of an

Ogden Nash poem made of prose

Without violating copyright, but maybe I can give you a little bit of an imitative example — who knows?

I can certainly give it a try,

but I’m a bit puzzled as to the reason you’d want me to, and wondering why

you’d want an example of a Nasher anyway when you’ve been reading his work all your life long

and all you need to do is Google his name to find some silly song

he’s written or a paragraph or two of prose gone wrong or maybe even correctly

in some weird way or other and not only alonely but interconnectly.

 Will this do? If so, see you,

 

Lew

 P. S. In the course of this conversation I discovered that I'd already written an epitaph for Ogden Nash:

 

R.I.P. OGDEN NASH

August 19, 1902-May 19, 1971

 

A son of Rye but nephew of the word,

He courted everything that was absurd

And caught it sometimes with élan, panache,

And often with the bite of Ogden Nash.

 

Maybe we could run a contest to see who likes which one better.

My favorite Nash-ism:

"Great Caesar's ghost is on the shelf...and I don't feel so good myself!"

John Kares Smith

 

 

Thanks! 

I like the "son of Rye" one best, I think. Though both are deft and a pleasure to read, the lines "nephew of the word" and the absurd rhyme are satisfying.  So there's my vote.

Best,

Ruth E. Harrison

 

And thank you, Ruth. Your vote is the first.

Lew

 

Nice!

Pres. Stephen L. Weber

SDSU

 

You have my vote for all three. . .

Dan Hoffman

Lew,

Now...stop playing with your words. You'll go blind.

George

 

I haven't gone blind yet. What do you play with these days?

Lew

 

What do I play with these daya? Whatever I can get my hands on. My guitar. The remote control. But mostly an old wrinkly friend with one eye who needs help getting up.

Yours,

George

 

Pretty good, George. Glad to see you’re still doing stand-up comedy.

Lew

Here is an epitaph for today, August 20, 2009:

R.I.P. EDGAR GUEST

August 20, 1881-August 5, 1959

 

He wrote, “It takes a heap o’ livin’ to make a house a home,”

And found it took a lot less work to make a rhyming tome,

So rather than become a sort of versifying pest,

He thought he’d move right in and stay an Edgar-present Guest.

Lew,

Thanks for sharing and always making my day more interesting.

I have a young friend who just received a master's in chemistry but who only wants to write! I hope you don't mind if I share your work with him. We are, of course, trying to think of "jobs" where he could use his writing abilities inasmuch as he just graduated and is now looking for a job. I feel so fortunate that I was able to publish Poet magazine for those years because that fed my

creativity. When the angel of death comes to me and says, "What was the best time of your life?" I will reply, "Poet magazine." hahaha

Hope all is well with you,

Peggy Cooper

 

Peggy,

Why would I mind? Miller Williams was a high school math teacher when he decided to be a full-time poet. He taught at the University of Arkansas for decades and was the director of their Press. I wrote one of his first job recommendations when I was a parvenu teacher myself at Fenn College, which is now Cleveland State University.

I’m okay this week, thanks.

Lew

The Difference Between Poetry and Poultry

Dear Contemporary Poetry Review,  

Jack Foley has very kindly suggested that I write a comment on X. J. Kennedy’s review of 77 Love Sonnets titled “My Dear Sonneteer: Garrison Keillor” in Contemporary Poetry Review because “Lewis Turco HATES Keillor and would gladly write a blistering response,” but that’s not accurate. I don’t “hate” Keillor, nor do I dislike his poetry, for I have never read any of it.  

However, I do think that nine out of ten poems that he publishes in his Writer’s Almanac are poor examples of language art, and that’s what I believe poetry ought to be, language art. I have discussed some of the worst examples of Keillor’s tasteless choice of poultry over the past couple of years on my blog, “Poetics and Ruminations.” 

Keillor also frustrates me because he manages to cripple even some of the good poems he now and again prints on-line with many egregious typographical errors in them—he also leaves typos all over the rest of the items in his Almanac. I have been cataloguing them on my blog as well.  

Because I have never read Keillor’s verse, I have formed no previous opinion of it. I don’t remember ever having run into it in any of the periodicals I have been reading for over half a century. (One would think I might have if it were publishable.) I have, however, read Dana Gioia’s excessively kind review of Keillor’s anthology Good Poems, and I have discussed that on my blog. I have also read Joe Kennedy’s review in the Contemporary Poetry Review. It does seem rather apologetic and tip-toesy, just as Dana’s essay did. Poets have asked me to take them off my email lists because I knock Keillor often. All of this leads me to believe that a lot of writers fear Keillor’s “power” and are willing to compromise their views in the hope that he will put their work now and again into his Almanac. 

I doubt that’s true of Joe and Dana, however, for they have their own reputations. I have admired Joe Kennedy’s work for half a century, and Dana has done excellent work about which I have written affirmatively on more than one occasion. I think Dana wants to encourage the appreciation of poetry by a larger public—that was his aim as Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts; perhaps that’s true of Kennedy, too. 

However, encouraging the public to believe that what Keillor believes to be “good” poetry is, in fact good, in my opinion is not doing literature any favors and is likely to mislead people and perhaps turn intelligent readers off rather than on. As a teacher for nearly forty years, and in my books about writing poetry, I’ve tried to show individuals how to write well, and to encourage the appreciation of well-written poetry of all types, not merely rhymed and metered verse as many people seem to believe despite the range of material I write. Criticism ought to be honest, even if it angers readers and writers who are “chicken” to say anything adverse about Keillor or anybody else who might do them favors someday. 

Although I have not, to the best of my recollection, read any of Keillor’s verse, I have now encountered the smidgens and scraps that Kennedy included in his review, and I am both confused and troubled by the fact that Kennedy is willing to go along with Keillor’s characterization of the contents of his new book as “sonnets.” If we are talking about the traditional fourteen-line verse form written in iambic pentameter lines, then some, perhaps many of the poems in the book, are not sonnets at all. 

Here is the definition of the “sonnet” from the third edition (2000) of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics:

The word sonnet originally meant simply “little song,” but it has come to denote a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter measures and rhymed in various ways. The Petrarchan or Italian sonnet has an Italian octave which is made up of two Italian quatrains (abbaabba) after which a volta or turn takes place, a shift in direction or thought which is pursued in the succeeding sestet, which is either an Italian sestet (cdecde) or a Sicilian sestet (cdcdcd).—The English or Shakespearean sonnet has three Sicilian quatrains (abab cdcd efef) followed by a volta and a heroic couplet (gg). There are various other forms, but all of them are fourteen lines of rhymed iambic pentameter verse.  

X. J. Kennedy quotes three lines from Keillor’s “So Much”: 

But I will sure be pissed

If I should have been an atheist.

Dear God: please exist.  

The first line is an iambic trimeter (three-foot) line, not iambic pentameter (five-foot) as required by the form; the second is iambic tetrameter (four-foot) though the first foot is an anapest not an iamb, and the third sounds more like a stich of accentual Anglo-Saxon prosody than a line of accentual-syllabic verse because each word takes a stress and in the center of the stich there is a caesura (a “pause,” here indicated by a colon). All three of the lines are too short, and they do not rhyme like any traditional sonnet form except the “blues sonnet” the stanzas of which, however, incrementally repeat the first line as the second line; stanza one, therefore, would rhyme AAa not aaa. A line quoted from another “poem” is, “My eyes get misty when I think of Julie Christie” which is sing-songy internally rhyming iambic hexameter (ending with a falling rhythm, an amphibrach, rather than an iamb). It’s also a stupid line, as Kennedy almost remarks. Joe gives other lines from something titled “Listeners”: 

O radio listeners, I think of you with gratitude,

Tuned in, simmering tomato sauce, trying not to boil it,

Or biking with headphones, or reclining nude

In the bathtub, the radio perched on the toilet.  

Line one is six feet long, iambic hexameter (apparently Keillor wants both io in “radio” and eners in “listeners” to be elisions), not pentameter. Line two is seven feet long, heptameter, and the first four verse feet are trochees, so it is a trochaic heptameter line. Line three is actually iambic pentameter, but the fourth line is at best anapestic tetrameter; however, it scans more like something Kennedy calls “free verse,” a mode of writing that doesn’t actually exist because there are only two modes in which any literary genre in any language in the world may be written, prose, which is “unmetered language” and verse which is “metered language.” There is no such thing as metered-unmetered language. Kennedy, who is a master versifier, is cutting Keillor far too much slack. Kennedy also quotes these lines from “October”: 

My novel has sold well (thank you, Lord)

And made the big best-seller lists

So let’s go home and lock the door

And practice being hedonists. 

This quatrain is iambic tetrameter all the way. The first line reminds me of those inane athletes who, if they score a touchdown or hit a home run, point at the clouds in gratitude to a beneficent deity who is looking down upon the field of endeavor and helping to defeat the hated enemy. And to think that, earlier, Keillor asked God to “please exist.” Would this be ambivalence or hypocrisy? Or perhaps merely inanity? One is certain that Keillor got something more than chicken feed for his novel and as a result is able to indulge his taste for hedonism, unlike the common man of Lake Wobegon who will surely enjoy spending good money to hear Keillor crowing about being cock of the walk. 

Kennedy writes, “Unsympathetic readers will charge Keillor with sentimentality, and at times that charge will be hard to deny [as in the Julie Christie line above] . . . . But what about those pain-filled entries . . . like ‘Sacrifice’?—‘Your therapist said we should break up so we did.’ Presumptuous to speculate, hard not to. One advantage of a tight form is that in it the poet can lay intimate feelings bare without looking naked as a skinned mackerel.” 

Aside from the fact that the line Kennedy quoted reads as though it had been written by a skinned mackerel or perhaps merely a dumb cluck, is Kennedy saying that these various and ragged verses of Keillor’s are written in the “tight form” of the sonnet? Yes, he is: “At the very least, the book proves that in this year of Our Lord [apparently, at least Kennedy believes in God] the sonnet is alive and kicking. Keillor enlarges our sense of what the old fourteen-liner can do.” No, Joe, no he doesn’t, and you know it. Keillor has very little ability to write in any kind of verse, let alone iambic pentameter verse, if he’s even trying to do so. 

Then why is Keillor calling this book 77 Sonnets (Kennedy says, “despite the title, there are 81”)? Here’s my guess: he’s using the number 77 to capitalize on the title used by the late John Berryman, a real poet, 77 Dream Songs, and he’s calling these ragged verses “sonnets” because he knows it’s a cue—a noun, as I say in TBoF, meant to elicit an automatic stock response in the reader or the listener. Society conditions its members to respond in knee-jerk fashion to certain words, much as the Russian scientist Pavlov conditioned his dogs to salivate at the sound of a bell by ringing one every time he fed them. After a while he didn’t need to feed them at all to make them drool, simply ring the bell. Just so, we are meant to respond without thinking to terms such as “motherhood,” “Old Glory,” “evil,” “love,” “soul,” “God,” and so forth. Keillor knows that the word “sonnet” will make the great American radio and television audience to which he panders begin to slaver all over itself as it rushes to purchase the latest book of Great American Poems written by the Great American Popularizer of bad music, giggly literature, and seedy verse. 

- Lewis Putnam Turco aka “Wesli Court”

 

REMARKS

 

Very good — nails hit on heads fairly and squarely. I even felt a little tap on my own.

Alice

Well, you've guessed it, Lew:

I'm not crazy about your essay on Joe Kennedy's responses to Keillor's sonnets. But I'm not going to scold you: you're a grown man — one that I'm very fond of and admire greatly — and we're entitled to separate and very different opinions on all sorts of things, including Keillor the anthologist, Keillor the poet, Kennedy the critic, so on and so on.

What I will say is that it's possible to like Keillor — and even enjoy his light verse sonnets, which you're taking too seriously and reading too literally — even if you're not afraid to offend him and thereby lose his "support" or "patronage," whatever it is. I can tell you that I don't care whether he cites poems of mine or not in his Almanac; nevertheless, I found the lines of his that you quoted delightful fluff, modest in their ambition, deliberately tongue-in-cheek, and not meant for the ages. There's room for work like that; also, I don't mind experimental sonnets at all: skinny, short-line sonnets, or even heterometric ones, so long as reading them gives me pleasure and refers back somehow to what we associate with the sonnet. I had never read anything of his before either.

I think in Kennedy's case, you're right: he certainly doesn't need Keillor's help, or anybody's. But Joe, like Dana, is a temperamentally calm, gentle individual not given to passionate reactions; he'd much rather soften a harsh comment, if he can do so without outright falsification of his opinion. I think he's done that here. There's room for that kind of criticism, and for your kind too. I wouldn't trade either one of you for anything.

Yes, it's true that Keillor should have better proof-readers. Most editors should! I keep finding typos in everything — including my own stuff, alas. I seldom see his Almanac, so I can't really say anything as to the general quality of the poems he publishes, but on the rare occasion when I've read it, I've found it no worse or better than most web anthologies. I don't get to very much.

Rhina

"Delightful fluff"? I didn't quote those lines, Rhina, Joe Kennedy did. I still haven't read any of Keillor's poultry except what Joe talked about.

"Heterometric"? I guess you didn't read the conversation I had with Bob Mezey on this blog some time back.

Keillor has excessively bad taste in poultry and music. I simply can't listen to "Prairie Home Companion" because of that inane noise he calls music — (see “Garrison Keillor’s Sarah Palin Poetry” elsewhere on this blog). And he likes anything in language that he can identify as jest plain folksiness. And then he brags about being 'way "above average" himself, what with being a best-selling novelist and all that. Sorry, Rhina, Keillor is in the same category as “The Hoosier Poet,” James Whitcomb Riley. I didn't spend my life trying to teach people the difference between literature and wordcrap just to get to where I'm going to cut Keillor some slack he doesn’t deserve. 

But thanks for not scolding me.

Love,

Lew

Dear Lew,

I gotta tell you that Ernie Hilbert sent me your response to my review of Keillor's sonnets and invited a riposte, which I supplied. Guess I like Keillor better than you do. His sonnets are better than you could tell from my snippets out of them. They ain't "Batter my heart, three-person'd God,” but they're all right.

Joe Kennedy

 

Joe.


You do know, don't you, that Ernie Hilbert wrote me to ask that I write a reply to your Keillor review? It wasn't my idea. I didn't even know you'd written one. Since he wrote you to write one for my reply, it's perfectly clear that he's having a good time and trying to get something started (or finished). I'll look forward to reading your riposte. When is it going to be published?

As ever,



Lew


Dear Lew,

Sounds as if Ernie Hilbert figures he has to stir up a little controversy. I've no idea when he'll publish my riposte to you — next CPR, maybe.

Joe

 

Joe,

Your riposte has already been published pn CPR:

 

X. J. Kennedy responds to his critics:

My friends Lew Turco and Jack Foley don’t like Garrison Keillor’s sonnets, and for reasons set forth in my review, I do. All right, I’m grateful to have triggered a bit of controversy.  

Lew’s attack on Keillor’s sonnets gets off to an irrelevant start, complaining about the man as an anthologist and picker of poems for his daily Writer’s Almanac. I could try to defend him here, but that’s something else, like the price of tea in China.

When it zeroes in, Lew’s attack seems to center on Keillor’s failure to stick to the stringent definition of a sonnet that Lew lays down in his classic Book of Forms. But if we’re to deny the name of sonnet to a fourteen-line octave/sestet type poem that plays around with traditional rhyme schemes, or that throws in three-foot or six-foot lines instead of always sticking to a five-footer, then we’re going to have to dismiss hundreds of admirable poems that have long worn the label of sonnet. David Bromwich’s anthology American Sonnets (Library of America, 2007), has plenty of good things the editor considers sonnets that don’t fit the Turconian-Procrustean definition, some by Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, E.E. Cummings, John Wheelwright, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Donald Justice, James Merrill, and others. Lew won’t agree, but maybe in poetry forms exist not only to be observed, but to be violated, and sometimes violated for the fun of it.  

Lew’s technical, prosodic criticisms deal with a mighty small amount of material: eleven likeable lines I quoted from the book. Before attacking the book as a whole he might have read it. But no doubt if he goes and reads it now, he’ll still want to give it a blast.  

Anyhow, I’m grateful to Lew for not accusing me of kowtowing to Keillor because I’m afraid of his “power,” nor accusing me of trying to suck up to him to use my stuff. In the interests of full disclosure, I should note that, indeed, in the past Keillor has put several of my things on his Almanac and in his anthologies. But if I had thought his sonnets were lousy, yes, I’d have said so. I have said so in the case of quite a few other poets I’ve reviewed over the past forty-five or so years, even though, ingrate that I am, some of them have been mighty kind to me.

X. J, Kennedy

Joe,

You write, “Lew won’t agree, but maybe in poetry forms exist not only to be observed, but to be violated, and sometimes violated for the fun of it.” But, indeed, I do agree with you. The form is not the important thing, the poem is. If Robert Frost hadn’t broken the form of the interlocking rubaiyat when he wrote “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” it wouldn’t be the great poem that it is. If Wesli Court hadn’t refrained from writing the traditional envoi for his sestina “The Obsession,” the poem would have been a ruin.

However, recently I received this message through Ernie:

 

“Mr. Turco,

“I enjoyed your epistle (missive? sermon? rant?) about Garrison Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets, but did find myself with a question. Since most of your complaints centered on the lack of traditional sonnet form in Keillor's book, I wonder how you feel about Robert Pinsky's 14-line, non-pentameter poem "Sonnet."  This isn't a snarky rhetorical question just curiosity.

“James Dickson”

I replied, 

People have asked me for years to comment on poems that are fourteen lines long that rhyme but are not written in iambic pentameter measures. However, this question was settled long ago, by Dante and Spenser and Shakespeare and Wordsworth and Mrs. Browning (not to mention Longfellow and Robinson and Frost and Millay). If the poem is not written in decasyllabic lines (if Italian or one of the other non-accentual languages), or iambic pentameter lines (if in English), then it is not a sonnet. [I’m not talking about “a fourteen-line octave/sestet type poem that plays around with traditional rhyme schemes, or that throws in three-foot or six-foot lines instead of always sticking to a five-footer.”]

There are many sonnet forms; all of the standard ones are listed and discussed in my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Rhyme schemes, traditionally, have been allowed to vary, as has the number of stanzas; and the volta or "turn" roams around a bit, but a "sonnet" in our tradition must be fourteen lines of rhymed accentual-syllabic iambic pentameter verse with a volta preceding the final stanza. That's it. Anything else is a nonce form, meaning a form invented by the writer of the poem for a purpose of the moment. Period.

Of course, there’s no law that says anyone cannot title or call anything a “sonnet” or a “piece of cheese,” or anything else, and I’m as interested in experimental poetry as I am with honoring the tradition of poetry in English (as anyone would know wo reads my books attentively). But naming is the basis of knowledge, and if you’re going to experiment it’s always a good idea to know where you’re starting so that you’ll know whether you’ve discovered anything.

Lewis Turco

Dear Lew,

I'm happy to know we agree that poems, not forms, are what matter most, and sorry if I misinterpreted you. Loads of contemporary sonnets won't fit your strict definition, of course, and incidentally, we've both no doubt seen many that don't fit any working definition of poetry! There are guys who've won $100,000 poetry prizes who haven't written a poem yet.

Cheers always,

Joe

 

Well, Joe,

I was in a Borders this afternoon and I looked to see whether they had a copy of The Book of Forms in the poetry section. They did, and they had one copy of Keillor's 77 Love Sonnets as well, so I thought I'd read some of them for the first time. You said in one of your emails, above, that "His sonnets are better than you could tell from my snippets out of them. They ain't 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God,' but they're all right." I guess your definition of "all right" and mine are different. I didn't buy the book. 

Lew

Our "Finest Critic"!

Today, July 11th, 2009, Garrison Keillor published on his "Writers' Almanac" this item:

"It's the birthday of the literary critic Harold Bloom, (books by this author) born in New York City (1930). His parents were Jewish immigrants, and his first language was Yiddish, but he fell in love with English poetry and read it before he had ever heard English spoken aloud. He started reading Walt Whitman and Hart Crane when he was eight years old. Like Walt Whitman, he has written reviews of his own books. And he went on to become one of the most influential literary critics in the country. He is one of the last critics who argues that great literature is a product of genius, and that we shouldn't read to understand history or politics or culture, but to understand the human condition. He said, "In the finest critics one hears

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®""

Actually, Keillor probably deserves the title, "Our poorest proofreader." Otherwise, like Bloom apparently, Keillor sings his own praises. I wrote him this earlier this month:

In this poem, which you published today (July 3^rd) in your Writers’ Almanac:

 At the Airport Baggage Claim

by Charles Darling

 

We contemplate a parade of skis,

boxes, bags, and attach&eaccent;s.

Some of them, unclaimed

the first time by, meander

all the way around and out,

dumb and colorful as cows.

A deaf woman watches

her husband talk in sign.

I cannot read his tongue

of wrist and fingertip

although there seems a sadness

and his hands fold finally

into themselves.

On his shoulders sits a little boy

whose hands, above the father's head,

are making up a second story—

something, I think, about a plane.

 

...I would greatly appreciate it if you would tell me what line two means.

He didn't reply, even though he finishes each of his almanac entries with that same famous quote by one of our finest critics. I think everybody should keep in touch with him, but perhaps he doesn't really mean it. 

Words for White Weather / White for Weather Words

The Cleveland poet Russell Atkins wrote me 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.” An elegy I wrote for levy, “Words for White Weather,” was written on request for a memorial publication when d. a. committed suicide 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.

 

Five years later I rewrote the poem and used it as an example of hypallage which is an exchange of words in phrases or clauses, a technique e. e. cummings used often, and cummings was one of levy’s influences. The disjuncture of hypallage allows lines to work ambiguously on more than one associative level, and it is sometimes used humorously: “I smell a smile; will she rat on me?” instead of I smell a rat; will she smile on me? Here is the poem I wrote for levy revised through hypallage; it is interlined: The lines in normal print are the original version; the italicized lines are the revised version:

 

WHITE FOR WEATHER WORDS

for d. a. levy

 

On a gross day, in a green month

On a green month, in a gross day,

 

once, a child was Summer’s lover.

A child was once Summer’s lover.

 

She, heavy with worlds, sent

She with worlds sent, heavy

 

the child bouquets of amber light. Giver

giver, the child light: bouquets of amber

 

and taker, she tossed him petals;

and she tossed him petals. Taker,

 

in good barter he gave his leman

he gave3 his good leman in barter

 

words shaped like flesh

flesh like shaped words

 

of fruits: sweet peach, tart lemon,

swet of fruits: peach, lemon, tart

 

berryheart whose vine goes

vine whose berryheart goes

 

twining with grass. She gave

with grass. She gave twining

 

him this too: a grassblade made

too a grassblade, made him this

 

the frost’s sickle, lush love

frost’s love, the lush sickle

 

turned root rape, the maggot’s

root turned the maggot’s rape,

 

carnal slither. No matter. Her

no carnal matter. Her slither

 

kiss was decay. Still, his songs

was his still kiss. Songs decay

 

weather the winter.

the winter weather.

"Words for White Weather" appeared in Poetry: Cleveland, edited by Alberta Turner, Cleveland: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1971. The hypallage version, "White for Weather Words," was published in Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, © 1973 by Reston Publishing Co., copyright reversion to Lewis Turco, all rights reserved 2009.

Click on an image to make it larger:

 

Weird Sonnet Invitational

Following Jack Foley's example, other poets are invited to get it off their vests...er, chests, with odd, weird, or outrageous sonnets to be posted below by submission to turco@oswego.edu.

OH, WOE! BEGONE! A REVIEW BY JACK FOLEY

77 Love Sonnets by Garrison Keillor, New York: Penguin USA, 2009.

If only we didn’t want to read

These crummy “sonnets” he writes so badly

If only we didn’t have to read

These “sonnets,” which are, sadly, sadly,

Neither well nor cleverly written —

And were published for one reason only: they

Were made by someone whose “voice”* had smitten

Millions of listeners with cash to pay.

Abominations of an art

Practiced with grace “in sondry londes”

But not in Lake Wobegon! Faint of heart,

Faint of mind — not faint of fans —

This book will sell, though my heart break;

He did better with that fucking lake.

* N.B. “Voice” is the Brooklynese pronunciation of “verse”; Keillor’s “voice” is different from his “verse.”

Jack Foley

Hi, Lew,

I look forward to seeing your "collection" as it grows. The following is from my brand new book, Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie (Quantuck Lane Press/WW Norton, 2009).

THAT TIME OF YEAR

So April's here, with all these soggy showers,

Making us almost long for March again,

As every twiglet makes a play for flowers

And every hack for miles picks up a pen,

Girls all playing hankypank, not soccer,

The smell of oozing sap all over town,

Teen-age boys completely off their rocker,

And rutting rabbits diddling farmer Brown.

 

We're in for it now, nothing to be done:

Loving's what we wanted, what we got.

At least we're going to have a little fun –

With any luck, we're going to have a lot.

Thirty days hath April: seize the day!

Don't trust to luck for darling buds in May.

Philip Appleman

 

THE PARASOL

On a word by Katherine Mansfield

Along the beach the lady wearing white

Made her shell-like way, the spray kissing

Her knees.  You almost heard the fish whispering

About her in the waves.  She walked, but might

 

Have ridden seahorses promenading

Had she wished.  She was a lady of fashion,

High-waisted, well made.  The sun was crystalline

Upon her parasol.  Her gown flouncing,

 

All her appointments minutely kept, she glanced

Among the emerald waves, and as she strolled,

The susurruses of the fawning ocean rolled

After her.  She flirted, she blushed, she danced

 

And giggled for her lovers.  "I'm nearly dead!

It's hot beneath this perishall," she said.

Della Diabolo

Not sure if this qualifies for your odd sonnet series, Lew, but here it is. I've been sending this notice around:

David Bromige died this morning.

There's a website accepting tributes:

http://bromige.wordpress.com/

I wrote this, using two poems by David:

 

R.I.P.

 

If your child is holding you

I can’t say that I ever satisfied him

in an intensity of feeling that you find’s

He was insatiable

too difficult to bear

Sometimes, I felt I had really disappointed,

you can abstract yourself by naming this

in the sense I had failed him.

experience: Biological identity.

At other times, I felt I had satisfied him

There is a use of category

It’s a lot like sex, though I don’t mean it to be

that brings hopeless reassurance.

 

You think of big B Being,

I wouldn’t have liked to make love to Robert Duncan

with all that term can bear to you.

It didn’t go further for me.

You needn’t think it rimes with big B Boeing

We were friends. Friends.

in that rare realm where you are big G Going.

And now Duncan is Gone

And call the boy your son.

And David is

This is a sonnet.

gone, — who said “sonnet” like “sun—”

 

Jack Foley

EPISTLE IN DEPRESSION

 

I’m not to blame that you are “bent and broke”

(Not to mention bankruptured and broken)

Because you spent your savings — every token,

Apparently, in your retirement poke —

 

Upon self-publication and ego trips

Foreign and domestic. Nor did I worsen

Your situation purposely, or coarsen

Your talents by applying contest judgeships

 

To work which you submitted that failed to win.

Those contests were anonymous, please note;

So, too, was the epistle that you wrote

Implying that your losses were my sin.

 

I doubt it, dear old friend, but I do worry

That you are in distress, and I am sorry.

Anne Ominous

WOODBANE

 

Hour on hour I've wandered Venus' arbor

Looking for the sun.  All I encounter

Is dappled leaves and lichen.  In her bower

She stands disarmed.  Each time I try to mount her

 

I fall unmembered to the harlot moss,

The victim of her concrete passion, dazzled

And confused.  I try to fit my loss

Into her cross words, but my mind is puzzled —

 

Incomplete and wretched intellect

Is no help at all.  Before the tomb

Of love I stand and pray to be elect,

To be at one with her in her blue womb,

 

For there at least and last I could not fault her,

And I'd have no more reason to assault her.

 

Hank O’Hare

Among Well-Thumbed Magazines

 

A life, however fierce we may intend,

is but a slight sublunary event—

it happens, here it comes and there it went.

Its major turns and roadblocks all depend

 

on cultural fixed variables.  We bend

our wills to doing.  All the while a silent

thief awaits, to rob us of intent.

Or here's a gap where we'd supposed a friend.

 

Let's pack our rumpled laundry up and go

off to the laundromat's bright lights.  That's where

we'll find no guilt, surcease, surcease ...  I know

seeking a mindless pause, we'll find it there

 

on plastic chairs.  We'll sit and weigh our grief

and for a time suspend our disbelief.

 

Ruth F. Harrison

Lew,

My reason for writing is to inquire if you are still soliciting sonnets, under your "Weird Sonnet Invitational" a month ago. If so, perhaps the following is appropriate. (Composed in response to someone's criticism of an earlier sonnet by me using capital letters, as here, to begin each line.)

Capital Punishment

A poet said to me the other day

Initial ‘caps’ on lines are now, he fears,

Best avoided. Oh, yes––and by the way,

That he himself has not used them for years.

 

Captious fellow! Full-blown ‘prof,’ indeed.

Eschewing tradition’s become a raison d’etre.

New rules from upper ranks have been decreed:

No caps, no vague allusions, no––et cetera.

 

(Surely it’s not by chance the works I love

Start in higher realms; conversely, those

Begun all leveled-down, I think less of.)

 

He handles Shakespeare’s sonnets, I suppose,

Re-typed, with lowered letters––what a bore.

Or does he just not read them anymore?

 

Marta Finch

 

Always appropriate, Marta.

Lew

The Sound and the Fury

 

Date: Saturday, May 16, 2009 9:30 AM ---- "Poets.org" <poetnews@poets.org> wrote:

 

Blue or Green
by James Galvin
We don't belong to each other.                             We belong together.                                                                            Some poems belong together to prove the intentionality of subatomic particles.                                       Some poems eat with scissors.                                                      Some poems are like kissing a porcupine.                    God, by the way, is disappointed in some of your recent choices.                Some poems swoop.                                                    When she said my eyes were definitely blue, I said, How can you see that in the dark?                                           How can you not? she said, and that was like some poems.                                                                                   Some poems are blinded three times.                                    Some poems go like death before dishonor.                                                                               Some poems go like the time she brought cherries to the movies; later a heedless picnic in her bed.                                    Never revered I crumbs so highly.             Some poems have perfect posture, as if hanging by filaments from the sky.                                         Those poems walk like dancers, noiselessly.                       All poems are love poems.                                                                     Some poems are better off dead.            Right now I want something I don't believe in.

 

From As Is by James Galvin. Copyright © 2009 by James Galvin. Used by permission of Copper Canyon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

 

Reply to the Academy of American Poets:

 

This "poem" is sheer gibberish. It is “full of the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.” Apparently you people have no idea what poetry is.

 

Lewis Turco

___________________________________________________________

REMARKS

Lew

I couldn't agree with you more. Like a second-rate abstract expressionist painter, Galvin simply hurled words onto a page and dubbed it a poem.

Don Kimball

 

What’s the difference between a first-rate and a second-rate abstract expressionist painter, Don? Although I must admit I like Miro.

Lew

 

Try to be a little tolerant, Lew. 

Who cares how other people write? What they call their work?  This business of renaming a particular non-poetry form has been rejected by the poetry establishment. That would have solved some things.  Hell, you don't write what I do, you promote what I value as poetry but do not write myself, and I have not scored you for it.  You have a right to.  Come down off it, man. Your reputation isn't threatened.  I just saw that Annie Finch included your book as a reference for Stonecoast.  Good!

And don't throw a punch at me because I won't answer you.

Tom Fallon

 

Why would I throw a punch at you, Tom?

Lew

 

Unless you are the court jester, you don't get to tell the truth, Turco, and you should know that!  

You and I share so much angst after all these years. I recall how disappointed you were when you passed the age that would make you eligible for prizes for "Young Poets," and still had not gotten what you were due!

Did you ever read an essay I posted at this link?

http://www.thebestpoetry.com/talentordumbluck.htm

The website where it appears has never been launched. I thought, after all these years of books and strivings, I ought to try something different. The Academy will not be giving me any awards in this lifetime. For however many dollars, I can become an "associate member" while those who run it go on setting a tone for poetry (as in the poem you denounce) and awarding each other prizes...

So I would place ads in little places saying, "Take the poetry challenge" with just the link to my website. My intention would be to draw as many hits as possible from the curious. Perhaps I could stir controversy. But most of all, at least my poems would have new legs and get some new readers.

It's an interesting thought. Maybe when I retire I will complete, proof, spruce up the website and give it a try.

Meanwhile, I'm always pleased to hear from you and admire your just anger!

Cheers,

David Axelrod

 

Very interesting essay on your relationship with the Iowa Workshop, David. I remember Ben Santos and love his remark! I recall when I decided to go back to Iowa for its 50^th Anniversary celebration in 1986 I think it was. I tried to talk Vern Rutsala into going, too. He said that none of his friends were on the program, so the hell with it. But I went anyway (his friends were my friends) and had a good time.

Oh, by the way, Paul Engle was not the founder of the Workshop, though he was of the International Workshop.

Lew

 

Agreed, Lew.

Watch Language poetry become Languish poetry...No longer a questioning but a style

Jack Foley

 

Yeah, Jack,

But I have a certain fondness for silly games.

Lew

 

Not silly enough in this case.

Jack

 

Lew, why waste your breath?

Roger Dickinson-Brown

 

No breath, Roger, Just a little finger action.

Lew

 

Ugh. They've lost their marbles.

Dave Mason

 

Dear All,

I'm happy that Lew's list has become active again and am pleased to be part of it.

Not to change the subject, but I'd like to invite any interested poets on this list to submit a poem, a translation, an appreciation, or an article for possible inclusion in a festschrift for the great translator from the Chinese and Japanese, Burton Watson.  If you don't know who he is, then do look him up.  His Chunag Tzu is a classic.  If you know and admire his work and would like to participate,  or know someone who might, then please contact me back channel. The deadline is October 2nd and the publisher will be Ahadada books, though Columbia University Press has expressed an interest.  Check out Burton's great reading at www.poetryvlog.com  Thanks for for your kind attention. 

Jesse Glass ahadada-jr@jcom.home.ne.jp

 

Since when, Jesse, has my "list" not been active? I guess you must mean my e-mail list, not my blog.

Lew

Lew,

Had a few moments to revise this "poem." With rearranging just a few lines, I think, tweaking here and there we might better understand this "work of art." 

:)

I hope you enjoy.

Boo-hoo, I mean

Don't we belong? To each other, 

                            together? This be a long

                                                                           poem. Some 

belong together. The intentionality of subatomic particles proves that

scissors eat some poems. With

                                                    some, poems are like kissing a 

porcupine. 

                   Dogs, by the way, are disappointed in some of your recent 

choices.

               Some poems poop.

                                                   When she said my eyes were 

definitely blue, I said, How dark? Can you see that in 

                                          the can?

Ewww. Not! she said, and that was like some poems.

                                                                                  Some poems are 

blind to our times.

                        Some poems read like death dissing honor.

Some poems blow like the time I popped her cherry at the movies; 

later a heedless picnic in her bed.

                                   Never revered, this poem’s dumb

(highly).

            Some poems posture, have perfect hang time online, like 

pollen through the sky. 

                                        Those poems dance like walkers, 

lie. Less noise.

                      All are love. Poems are poems.  

                                                                   Some better poems are off, 

dead

           right now. I want something more. I don't believe this.

Scot Slaby

Lew,

I'm enjoying your "Musing," and about a third through with the sample poems by several of your remarkable students. This series of poems based on an ancestor's diary is fascinating!

As for the Poem-a-Day exchange, I avoid those clashes that persuade nobody and teach nobody anything. What's the point of dealing with such things on a personal basis? I just put things down and stop reading when I can't stand them: I do a lot of that, in fact. I'm sure there are people who feel that way about what I write, and I'd just as soon not hear from them. It wouldn't do any good if I did: this is how I write, and being told that somebody else hates it is not going to make any difference!

What you've done with your "Musings," on the other hand, is entirely different: you're pointing out work you like, giving examples, and letting the reader learn from the experience. Positive is better.

Cheers —

Rhina

 

Dear Mother Rhina,

Thank you for the scolding. Just what I needed. However, my own mother was far from being a member of the Turn the Other Cheek school of thought, and as a teacher I pulled no punches, as any of my former students can tell you. Some of them appreciated my telling it like it is, as perhaps you can tell from "Musing about Students."

I did not ask the Academy of American Poets to put me on their e-mail list. But since they did, I feel no compunction about commenting on the spam I find nestling in my little bowl of poetical turds each morning. I especially don't understand why I am on the Academy's spam list at all because I had thought I was a non-person to them. They do not have me on their list of "American Poets," even though they are the "Academy of" that. This despite the fact that I had been a member of their organization for decades, had won their Prize at the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa in 1959-60, edited the "Manoah Bodman" issue of their Poetry Pilot for November 1973, and established and funded in perpetuity the Academy of American Poets Prize in the writing program of SUNY Oswego many years ago and so forth and so on. (The main thing that happened is that one of their "Chancellors," John Hollander, stole one of the Bodman poems I had reconstructed and published in Poetry Pilot and used it in his anthology of American poetry without acknowledgment.)

When I retired from teaching in 1996 I also officially retired from the Academy, which apparently they resented, hence struck me off their roster of living American poets. On the other hand, my old friend and teacher Don Justice was never a member, yet they honored him all over the place anyhow. Nothing like being even-handed and fair-minded. "And this is nothing like it," as Bill Burns, one of my old Fantaseer buddies, would have put it.

Lew

Son, I wouldn't dream of scolding a super-smart kid who's taught me as much as you've taught me over the years with one book after another! No, I just want to save you the unnecessary misery of getting into useless squabbles with people who are not going to learn anything from it anyway. It's not really a matter of turning the other cheek, but of walking out altogether for lack of interest.

I used to belong to the Academy, and sometimes liked the books to which they gave prizes, but very often didn't. At any rate, I never got to their events, even when I still lived in NYC, and am involved with too many other groups anyway, so I let my membership lapse. What are "Bodman Poems," and what do you mean by "reconstructed"? This sounds like quite a story about Hollander, whom I never met; I'd love to hear it!

They don't list you as an American poet? Really? Well, that's sort of like The Planetary Association of Mammalian Species not listing Homo Sapiens. I think it's funny. Maybe they think you're a bird. Where did you find the list? I'm wondering if I'm on it, or any of the Powows, for that matter, but I doubt it.

Cheers —

Mama

Dear Mama,

No, you're not listed either, so you don't exist in the opinion of the Academy of American Poets. I just checked. Go here to find out who is and is not a nonperson (!) http://www.poets.org/search.php/ — Isn't that a double negative, and don't two negatives make a positive, or at least a snapshot?

Lewson

P.S. Manoah Bodman is the early American poet I discovered many years ago and whom I researched and wrote a book about:

The Life and Poetry of Manoah Bodman, Bard of the Berkshires, Edited, with an introduction, by Lewis Turco, Lanham: University Press of America, 1999. ISBN 0761813241, cloth. 

Before I published the book I wrote quite a lot about him:

Commentary on Manoah Bodman, Poetry Pilot, November 1973.

"Manoah Bodman: Poet of the Second Awakening," Costerus: Essays in English and American Language and Literature (Amsterdam), viii, 1973.

"Manoah Bodman 1765-1850" (bibliography), First Printings of American Authors, Vol. 4, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli et alia, Detroit: Gale Research, 1979, pp. 35-36.

Bodman, Manoah, Encyclopedia of American Literature, ed. Steven R. Serafin, New York: Continuum, 1999.

There is more about him on my blog, in the archives. I reconstructed many of his poems from stanzas scattered in his maniacally religious books, in particular An Oration on Death, & the Happiness of the Separate State, Or the Pleasures of Paradise, Etc Ephraim Whitman, Williamsburgh, 1817. Hollander stole one of the poems I reconstructed and published in Poetry Pilot for his American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, edited by John Hollander, New York: Library of America, Volume 2, where it appears without acknowledgment as though he were the one who had done the reconstruction. I complained to the publisher who simply shoveled some bullshit in my direction.

Lew