Poetics and Ruminations

Errata in "The Hallway"

 

My old friend, the poet X. J. Kennedy, and I have been discussing typographical errors lately — these are our stories:

Dear Lew,

As you and I well know by now, no matter how careful the proofreading, some godam snafus will always slip through.  Last year Johns Hopkins brought out a translation I'd done (Apollinaire's Bestiary), containing the original French, and although I'd gone over it six times, Catharine Brosman to my chagrin detected five errors in the French!  But the worst fuckup I ever made was scrambling eight lines of Milton's "Lycidas" in a textbook — scrambled, they still seemed to make good sense.  The scramble lasted in the textbook through three editions till some UChicago prof called me on the carpet for it.  Which shows, maybe, how many people ever taught "Lycidas"!

Love,

Joe

 

Dear Joe,

Your story is bad and sad, but I committed a horrendous typo that I didn't get a chance to correct for thirty-seven years! —

In 1970 my book of prose poems titled The Inhabitant was published, and I was giving my first reading from it at Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks.  As I recall, I was sitting on a table at the front of the room reading the penultimate stanza of the poem which was titled,

 

THE HALLWAY

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, The Hallway

 

The Inhabitant stands in his hallway.  A long way from the door, still the gentleman has a distance to go               before he can leave, or enter, or simply resume.

Here there is small illumination.  The only window is of squares of stained glass, in the door behind him               which is closed.

Things wait in the narrow aisle.  Objects beguile him — each has its significance, in and beyond itself;                 each is an obstacle in a way to be touched and passed:

Touched and repassed, and with each touching to become more than the original substance.  The                       Inhabitant stands in his hallway, curiosities looming ahead and behind.

It is as though, almost, this furniture had become organs, extensions of his body.  If he listens, the                     gentleman may find his pulse booming in the hallseat, under the lid, gently, among artifacts and                 mathoms.

Let him proceed; let his footfall say clum, silence, clum.  Let the stained light lie amber on a black                       umbrella in its stand, fall scarlet on the carpet, make a blue haze of a gray hatbrim rising in shadow           to the level of his eye to rest on an iron antler in the hall.

The Inhabitant is home. Let him go down the hallway, choosing to pass the stair and banister this time,               pass these things of his, levelly, moving from light to light, shadow to shadow.

 

Before I’d written the poem I had run across the obsolete English word “clum” in one of my favorite books, Lost Beauties of the English Language by Charles MacKay. According to MacKay, “clum” was once a synonym for “silence,” which I thought was fascinating, because the word itself didn’t sound silent. However, I thought that “clum, silence, clum” was a great way to conjure the sonic image of a person walking down the hallway of an old house.

So I sat on that table at Saranac Lake reading the poem aloud to a small audience when my performance came to a jolting halt. I gasped, indicating my distress in various other ways as well: turning red in the face, going rigid…because I had discovered a typographical error that neither I nor my editors had caught — instead of “footfall,” the first line of the next-to-last stanza read, “Let him proceed; let his football say clum, silence, clum.” It was a humbling, and humiliating, experience.

 

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

 

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.

 

Whom were you with?

Hello Professor Turco

          Attached is an op-ed column from Sunday's, 2/7/11, Plain Dealer. The columnist the PD's readers' representative (quasi-ombudsman, apologist). He gets to respond to all the conservatives who accuse the paper of being too liberal and vice versa for the liberals. He strayed a bit from the usual issues this week. After reading your blog I am curious as to whether you would agree. 

William Becker

   

 

          Whatever works, Bill.

          But almost anything will work if you know how to do it.

          If you're a good pilot there's no airplane you can't deal with. Even a Sopwith. And if you're a good driver there's no steed you can't deal with. Even a camel. Not to mention a Sopwith camel.

Lew

 

Always wondered what you sop a camel with?  My son used to fly tourists round the Mt. St. Helen's area in a Jenny, but I think the plane has been retired.  Maybe with good rubber it can at least clear the runway ....

Ruth

 

Market Up

If you are a writer and you can’t get to your galleys because you must go into the hospital for an appendix operation and the surgeon’s knife slips, is that a table of contents? Is it an index of his incompetence if he halves your colon and you’re left with a semi-colon? What if you slip into a comma for a period? After close analysis, can the problem be rectified?

When you wake up and realize what has happened, will you attempt to dash from the recovery room, or do you deliver an apostrophe to the chief of surgery, especially after he quotes or even double-quotes you the price you’ll have to pay? Should you have taken Fen-Phen before surgery, or perhaps even High-Phen? Will his bill put you into a lower tax bracket? Asterisk you have to take, so try not to have a stroke or go all dotty.

You can pass this wisdom on to your children, make it your parent thesis to them; make an exclamation point of it. Use the caret, not the stick! And when eventually you do get to those galleys, remember that the proof is in the pudding.

 

 The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship , www.UPNE.com, ISBN 0874519551, quality paperback, $24.95, 224 pages. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM

 

Sonnet and Quatorzain, An Updated Entry for The Book of Forms

 

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms.

People often ask whether a poem that is fourteen lines long and rhymes but is not written in iambic pentameter measures is a sonnet. It is true that the term originally meant simply “little song,” but 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. 

The word “sonnet” has come to denote a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter measures and rhymed in various ways. Rhyme schemes of the sonnet have traditionally 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. Anything else is either a quatorzain or a nonce form, meaning a form invented by the writer of the poem for a purpose of the moment.

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 of thought which is pursued in the succeeding sestet, which is either an Italian sestet (cdecde) or a Sicilian sestet (cdcdcd).

         The envelope sonnet rhymes abbacddc efgefg or efefef. The Sicilian sonnet combines a Sicilian octave and a Sicilian or Italian sestet; the rhymes change at the volta: abababab cdecde or cdcdce.

         The Italian and Sicilian octaves and ottava rima (abababcc) are heroic octaves. The sonetto rispetto combines one stanza of ottava rima or one iambic pentameter rispetto (ababccdd) with either an Italian or a Sicilian sestet (abababcc defdef or dedede or ababccdd efgefg or efefef). The English or Shakespearean sonnet has three Sicilian quatrains (abab cdcd efef) followed by a volta and a heroic couplet (gg).

         The Spenserian sonnet has three interlocking Sicilian quatrains (abab bcbc cdcd) plus a volta and a heroic couplet (ee); the terza rima sonnet has interlocking Sicilian triplet (aba) stanzas: aba bcb cdc ded, a volta and a heroic couplet.  All these couplet, triplet, quatrain, sestet, and octave forms are heroic stanza forms because they are written in iambic pentameter measures (iambic pentameter is the “heroic line” in which most English-language epics are written), as are quintet and septet forms written in the same measures, such as the Sicilian quintet (ababa) and the Sicilian septet (abababa).

         Other quatorzain forms (see The Book of Forms, Third Edition) are the blues sonnet (see blues stanza), the envelope sonnet which combines one heroic octave rhyming abbacddc with either an Italian (efgefg) or Sicilian (efefef) sestet; the Courtwright sonnet which has an octave made of one envelope sestet and a heroic couplet (abccbadd) plus another envelope sestet after the volta (efggfe), and the sonetto rispetto, discussed above.

         In the thirteenth century, according to Kim Addonizio, "Vanni Fucci" invented the Florentine (Italian) sonnenizio to treat the subject of undying love satirically, but in fact she invented the form herself; Vanni Fucci is a minor player in Dante's Inferno. A variation of the sonnet, it is fourteen lines in length, written in hendecasyllabics (eleven-syllable lines), and it begins with a line taken from another poet’s poem. The lines need not be rhymed except for the last two which are a rhymed couplet. One word is selected from the quoted first line and repeated in each succeeding line.

 

CURRENCY

 

“The marvelous current of forgotten things,” William Wordsworth, Artegal and Elidure.

 

The marvelous current of forgotten things

Drains down Styx till it is no longer current.

We remember a currant or a raisin,

Currently, of our former youthful love life:

Half-baked, doughy, a largely fruitless courante

Danced upon the car seat of a jalopy.

Yes, of course, we wished it to last forever –

Or a thousand years at least of intercourse.

Our first lass, alas! is precursor only,

Never a courtesan for eternities.

Therefore currently we try to remember

What once the world was like riding that current

Now that we’ve wasted all of youth’s currencies

And such occasions are non-occurrences.

 

                  — Wesli Court

 

Copyright © 2009 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form, in any venue, without the express permission of the author.

REMARKS

 

Lew,

Kim invented the sonnenizio herself. Vanni Fucci is a minor player in The Inferno.

Sam Gwynn

 

I suspected something like that because of the "-izio" ending. Many thanks. I'll make the change.

Lew

 

Dear Lew,

        Thanks for the lucid updates to The Book of Forms  My previous understanding of the ghazal has been murky, so you make me feel clearer about it.  Your revised entry on the sonnet sure does lay down the law.  I'd have been for liberalizing that definition a little, myself, but it's nice to see someone uphold traditional verities.

         Happy Eve of September Morn,

Joe Kennedy

 

How would you liberalize it, Joe?

         The sonnet can rhyme any old way, have any number of stanzas so long as the poem has a total of 14 lines, and the volta slides around. Besides the length of the poem the only hard requirement is the meter, and that's pure tradition. Anybody can call anything a sonnet (the "blues sonnet" isn't one because it has refrains), but unless you have a definition you don't have a form. What's wrong with the term "quatorzain"? I didn't make that up, and it means any 14-line poem that isn't a sonnet. People have written "sonnets" in hendecasyllabics: within the past few days I've been corresponding with a man in Italy who writes those and calls them "atonal sonnets." Of course, hendecasyllabics in Italian literature are something different from ours, so he and I figured out one can't really write atonal sonnets in English.

Lew

OK, Lew,

I guess "quatorzain" is as good a term for an almost-sonnet as any.

Maybe that legendary band of monkeys who might accidentally write a book by pecking on typewriters could produce QUATORZAIN OF THE APES.

Cheers ever,

Joe

 

Or, if they were monks rather than monkeys, perhaps they could write a movie called The Quatorzain of the Apse.

  Lew

Lew--- 
Egad.  My awful pun topped. 
    Joe

Paradigm

Ruth F. Harrison of Waldport, Oregon, wrote me on May 26th, 2007, to say, among much else, “One other thing I went into mental discussion with you on, was the matter of the haiku ending “Paradigm” in The Book of Forms [Third Edition], but not in its predecessor The New Book of Forms [the second edition of The Book of Forms]. I visited the poem recently in writing yet another paradigm, and found the haiku, and thought I’d overlooked it and repeated the mistake to other poets, all that while since I had tried to emulate your poem and make a form of it. I’d like to correct what I’ve done and add the haiku, though some poems finish well on the tanka and don’t need it. I liked your poem very well as it stood in the earlier edition.

“My sister, in a recent visit here, asked me, ‘What would you do in judging a contest if someone tried the form and left the haiku off? Would that disqualify it?’ Having seen some paradigms in judging a contest’s traditional forms section, I had to answer, ‘The poem would have to stand on its own merits, unless the contest originators stated specific forms requirements’…but I will need to send something to Poets’ Forum for its next issue to open the matter for discussion, since its readers are the people most likely to love the poem and hope to emulate your beautiful work.”

On May 31st I replied, “As to ‘Paradigm’: It was not meant to be a form on its own, but only an example of the various Japanese forms in chronological order; however, you’re not the first to decide to make it a form. (This has happened to several of my ‘example’ poems.) Until you mentioned it, I was unaware there was a difference between the examples in The New Book and TBoF3. I just looked them up, and the former is a printing error that dropped the final stanza (though you’re right, it ends just fine either way). Because the haiku was the final development in the string of Japanese forms, it properly ought to end the poem. I have no idea how I happened to miss it until now. Thank you greatly for pointing it out to me.”

Since there are many people who are still using The New Book of Forms, perhaps they would like to see the poem as it ought to have appeared in that book, so this is the version as it appears in TBoF3 (2000). Poetry: An Intro-duction Through Writing (1973), and in Fearful Plea-sures: The Com-plete Poems 1959-2007, p. 247
(q.v.):

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem

Download Paradigm

Why does the brook run?
The banks of the stream are green.

Why does the stream run?
The banks of the brook bloom
with roe and cup-moss, with rue.

The trees are filled with
cups. Grain in the fields, straw men
talking with the wind.
Have you come far, water-
borne, wind-born? Here are
hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak.

When the spears bend as
you walk through vervain or broom,
call out to the brook —
it will swell in your veins as
you move through broom or vervain.

Have you spoken aloud? Here,
where the swallows' crewel-work
sews the sky with mist?
You must cut the filament.
You must be the lone spider.

The bole is simple:
Twig and root like twin webs in
air and earth like fire.

Actually, since each of the “stanzas” of this example illustrates a whole Japanese form, each is a “poem” on its own, and one might stop the poem after any of the forms and still have the series end satisfactorily, which explains why stopping it after the tanka seemed to do “Paradigm” no harm.

Corrections to The Book of Forms

For several years now I have been trying to get some corrections into The Book of Forms with little luck. Now the fifth printing of the Third Edition has been published and, though a few of those corrections have been implemented, unfortunately, not all of them appear in the book. Therefore, I am taking the opportunity to post the remaining uncorrected information on my blog so that owners of the book can make the corrections by hand:

pp. 73-89, add to chapter glossary:

COMPUTER POETRY. See interactive poetry.

INTERACTIVE POETRY. Poems produced on and for computers having alternative elements which in effect allow “readers” to invent their own “virtual” poetry within the boundaries of the computer program in use. Also called computer poetry and virtual poetry.

POETICULE. An insignificant or exceedingly minor poet, such as Scotland’s “most famous nobody,” William Topaz McGonagall (1830-1902). For a related term, see poetaster.

VIRTUAL POETRY. See interactive poetry.

p. 127. Line 8. should end in an e, not a c.

p. 137. Under BREF DOUBLE, fourth from last line, delete the last two words, "each of."

p. 164, in the diagram of the “Cyhydedd Hir” entry, change the rhymes of the second stanza to conform to the description:

9. xxxxd
10. xxxxd
11. xxxxd
12. xxxB
13. xxxxe
14. xxxxe
15. xxxxe
16. xxxB

p. 179, Substitute this version of lines 4 & 5 of “A Talisman” for those in the book:

standing defending his great tau shall be laid under earth,
old as he is — by Oriphiel, angel of Saturday. Our Lord,

and substitute this version of line 8:

Grave on the opposite face this, in a hexagon star:

This is the correct version of the poem which now scans correctly:

A TALISMAN
Elegiacs for Dave McLean, too late.

Lead for this talisman. Pure, so that Saturn will live in it. Pure lead.
Both of its faces are rubbed smooth. On its front, in a star
pentagram, cut with a diamond burin a scythe so that Nabam,
standing defending his great tau shall be laid under earth,
old as he is — by Oriphiel, angel of Saturday. Our Lord,
nailed to a T, is the capstone of this coin made of lead,
though he will never appear in his person, but only as backdrop.
Grave on the opposite face this, in a hexagon star:
REMPHA, surrounding the head of a bull. Without witnesses carve your
talisman. Wear it in good health. It will keep you from death,
frighten the devil of cancer, leukemia — rot of the white bone.
Marrow will redden then. Wear this! It will save you and me.
Bear it — your talisman; wear it, my brother. Or carry this poem,
Dies Saturni, to life’s end. It is all I can do.

p. 183, after “epilog,” add, EPILENY, a drinking song.

p
. 247, after “…with a cutting edge,” change the comma to a colon and insert,

WEDDING CERTIFICATE

Under an oak, in stormy weather,
I joined this rogue and whore together;
And none but Him who rules the thunder
May put this rogue and whore asunder.

— Jonathan Swift

[Also add the author and title to the index.]

p. 248, in order to compensate for the above, drop “Karl Jung”; after “This Morning Tom Child, the Painter, Died,” add:

Generally the literary epitaph begins with the name of the “deceased” as above, but a set form ⎯ an iambic tetrameter quatrain rhyming aabb ⎯ saves the name until the end of the last line.

p. 251, Delete “The order of the repetition of the end words is…” through “(line 39).” Not only is this erroneous, it covers what follows on the next page.

Index, p. 316, add p. 197 to the entry for “choka.”

Index, p. 324, add entry on “Incremental refrain, p. 127.”

Index, p. 327, add entry on “Modes of Writing, p. 4.”