Poetics and Ruminations

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

Neoformalism Is Alive and Well

Saturday, July 18, 2009 3:04 PM

Dear Mr. Turco,

I have, for some time now, been exploring the internet-based world of modern metrical poets, and it has not been easy.  I came across your work, though, and was very impressed.  It is hard enough to find modern metred and rhymed poetry, much less truly good examples of it.  Not that I have anything against more experimental work - Eliot is one of my true treasures - but it is a great loss to cast something so enjoyable aside with little or no consideration.

I was hoping, in that vein, that you might take a look at a bit of my own work.  I'm sure you get dozens of letters like this, but I have put a great deal of effort into developing my ability to write formal poetry, and I can promise you that it is at least beyond the level of what you might find in 'A Child's Garden of Verses.'  I hope that you can find the time to take a look, and perhaps even offer me your thoughts.  To be honest, the world of a metrical poet feels very lonely, right now, and most of all, I'm simply looking for other serious poets, or even communities of poets, who are attempting, like myself, to write something worthwhile in the structures of metre and rhyme, and who don't mind allowing another into the fold.  I'll include one or two poems, so you can see I'm not all hot air, but I also have a blog at (http://quietcartesian.blogspot.com/) which I update once a week with a new poem.

Thank you very much for your time, and I look forward to hearing back from you, should you find the time.

Sincerely,

Matt Newhall

Eos and Apollo

Young dawn, with fingertips of rose,

now makes a soft approach from Helios' house

to lay the dim stars in repose

and usher out her ancient Phoeban spouse.

 

He waits, his chariot prepared,

all girt about in godly fire and light,

and holds his steeds, so fresh and flared,

from leaping forward in untimely flight.

 

She calls him forth, her waking chant

of spousal love sounds on the morning air

with warbling birds that raise a cant

of glory for the god, their humble prayer.

 

The two embrace in endless dance

that she begins and he concludes in turn,

her blush in bloom at his advance,

her chambers ready for his fit return.

 

Just so he bursts upon the earth,

as she recedes again into her hold,

and yet, in each they find their worth:

her beauty is his merry mirth;

his majesty, her happiness untold.

 

Hope

 

If love, in longing, found a holy hand,

as palm and palm, profaner than the eye,

enfold and follow, like the two demand,

and make communion in a mute reply,

 

or if it sought a cheek of softer flesh

than falls upon this settling embrace,

prepared to offer up, and so enmesh,

as ought to marry hearts in happy grace,

 

or if it heard, again, a hushing breath,

unfinished until breathed afresh in turn

by other lips that long for sober death,

when told to love will only be to yearn,

 

then there is hope that heaven will arise,

although it be obscured in mortal guise.

 

Dear Mr. Newhall,

There has been a New Formalism movement afoot in this country since the early 1980s abetted largely by The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics which I’m sure you know about. There is even a neoformalist conference every year, the West Chester Universtity Poetry Conference, www.wcupa.edu/_ACADEMICS/SCH_CAS/POETRY/Poetry_Conference/ where you can meet scores of poets, students of poetry, editors of magazines, and so forth. And there are formalist societies around the country, the best of which is probably the Powow River Poets in Newburyport MA; they published a wonderful anthology not long ago: www.ocean-publishing.com/Powow.html. But lots of state poetry societies welcome formal verse, too; check out the National Federation of State Poetry Societies: http://www.nfsps.com/. There are print magazines that publish formal poetry, the most prominent of which is probably: measure.evansville.edu/Staff.htm which is an annual, but there are on-line journals also, including: Poetry Porch: www.poetryporch.com/poetry109.html, Per Contra: http://www.percontra.net/14poetry.htm , and Trellis Magazine: http://www.trellismagazine.com/index.html. You can find on-line addresses here:http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/pbonline.html. An on-line periodical that specializes in reviewing books of formal poetry is  the Contemporary Poetry Review: http://www.cprw.com.

I don’t criticize poems for people, but I will say that you can write formal verse well enough, though your diction is rather archaic and your subject matter is too classical for my taste, and probably for most people’s. Gods and goddesses? Not much call for them these days I shouldn’t think, and few people would have any idea what most of them stand for symbolically. The only specific criticism I’ll give you of your poems, though, is just that in the line, “enfold and follow, like the two demand,” “like” should be “as.” In your formal syntax and diction “like” is far too colloquial as you use it here. Kind of interesting to see this, though. Do you mind my asking how old you are?

Lew Turco

 

Well, thank you very much for all the information, and for such a speedy response. That's quite more than I was hoping for, given that my email was so out of the blue. I've heard of one or two of the journals you mentioned, but most are new to me. As for myself, I live in Portland, Oregon, am 27 years old, and have been writing poetry steadily for 4 or 5 years now, but have only recently made any attempt to move my poetry beyond my own small circle of friends and writers.

Thanks, too, for your comments. You're quite right, and I do see, that my writing is a bit too archaic and romantic for most tastes. On the other hand, it's what I enjoy, and I write like that because that is how I hear the poetry in my mind. I grew up on the likes of Dickinson and Yeats, and I fear that if I attempted anything too modern, it would take me quite a bit of time to write anything that didn't seem artificial and contrived. After all, it's not about writing what others want to read, but creating something from within, and that's all I've ever hoped to do.

Have a wonderful weekend.

Matt

 

Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 7:18 AM

I knew you had to be relatively young, Matt, because of the way you substituted "like" for "as" — the former has become ubiquitous as a synonym for the latter during the past forty years, starting in the 'sixties, and it's become totally ubiquitous as a sentence opener.

I guess you live a bit too far away to be able to join the Powow River Poets group, but you could always begin your own. I'm sure there are plenty of young poets in your area who would be interested in getting together to discuss and read each-other's formal verse. Find a place to meet, and write a story for your local paper about it. You could even start it at your home or that of a friend, or in a church basement, or almost anywhere. Would you like me to post your letter and this reply on my blog?

Best,

Lew Turco

 

Yes, I suppose that does give it away. Thanks for pointing that out. I try to avoid that sort of thing, but it can be hard when it's such an ingrained habit.

I would certainly appreciate it if you'd post that on your blog. It'd be nice to discover an established group, but if not, then it helps to be able to reach out to local poets in any way possible. You've been far too helpful, honestly. Thank you, again.

Take care,

Matt

 

Usurious Interest Rates and Other Stuff

28 Feb. 2005

GE Money Bank

P.O. Box 981403

El Paso TX 79998-1403

Dear Moneygrubbers:

         According to the “Important Notice Regarding JC Penney Credit Card Account GE Money Bank” that I received today I can reject the usurious raise in your interest rates if I notify you in writing before the Effective Date that you posit “As [I] may have previously been notified, on or about February 7, 2005.”

         To the best of my knowledge I did not receive such a notification, but it doesn’t matter, because there is no outstanding balance in my "JC Penney account ending in XXXX."

         I herewith do, indeed, reject your new terms. I have destroyed my JC Penney credit card.

 This is the second such outrageous increase in  credit card interest rates that I have rejected in the past couple of weeks. The current period is an extremely stupid time in the history of the U.S.A. for you greedy money people to raise your rates. I hope you go belly up shortly, and to help that event along, I am going to post this letter on my blog.

Sincerely,

Lewis Turco

_______________________________________________________________________________________

REMARKS

Lew,

I agree.

We just earlier this week got a "pre-approved" (of course, it is not really pre-approved at all) Discover Card letter, with (in exceedingly fine print) cash advances at 29.99 percent and overdue amounts at something approaching 33 or 34%. I don't remember. Both Mary & I got letters which I gleefully burned in our fireplace and consequently got some heat (and thus use) out of. Small comfort.

The bankers certainly need to be better reined in, but to my mind they are better controlled than these out-of-touch-with-reality & we-make-all-the-rules-and-can-change-them-at-will credit card sharks.

Best wishes in these hard times.

Your friend, Tom

P. S. I am still remembering every so often and chuckling about 'hairy fishballs.'

Tom,

My memoir, "A Nest of In-Laws," was published on-line today at

http://www.nightsandweekends.com/red/

It will be included in my forthcoming book titled La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs late this year or early next, most likely.

Lew

 

Nicely put together, Lew.

I've, of course, heard many of these before, but somehow you make a narrative of it – and it's not just the chronology. I remember quite clearly the resolves never to go to Dresden again.

Best,

Tom

 

And look where we wound up.

Lew

 

Lew –

What a delightful memoir...it brought back a flood of memories for me.  My dad's sister Daisy had what we called a "farm" in Tallman New York. We called it a farm because we came from Jersey City, as urban a place you could ever find. She and her husband Sal (they had no children) used it as a weekend retreat from their grocery/butcher business in Jersey City and, predictably, every weekend the family (all the Buttigheris and their spouses and kids) would go up on a Sunday. 

My Aunt Daisy, who was the worst hostess ever, would bristle at the fact that we were all coming up and creating a mess. She made it appear as though we were all on the dole. She was, shall we say, in order to be kind, a cheap d.o.b. She was the only one who had bucks in those days (40's), so the thought of providing for a gang of kinfolk sent her into a tailspin.

But it never happened. My father and his brother and other sister all brought more than ample food for everybody. So, in order to discourage us, my devious Aunt Daisy said, “If you want to come up here you have to work.” But that plan didn't work either because all the menfolk did just as she ordered. They picked peaches, mowed the lawn, weeded and weeded some more, and she had a big apple tree, so the women picked up those that had fallen and baked many an apple pie.  

Italians are great for putting up a false front...ever smiling but later on complaining and muttering under their breaths. On the way home, in the car my mother (your cousin) and her sisters-in-law would complain about Daisy's cheapness and Daisy would complain the day after to my father about the "bacano," Sicilian for the disruption and intrusion.  But amazingly, nobody ever said anything openly and just carried on as though everything was  honky-dory.  Daisy would greet us at the farm with open arms smiling and laughing as though she were delirious  to see us!  And we would unload the car with all the prepared food and tell her how happy we were to be there.

Why did we do it? We did it to keep the family as a unit, cohesive despite the cracks and falling mortar in its foundation. My father and uncle would say we went there to let the kids get a breath of fresh air and enjoy running around on the lawn, despite Aunt Daisy's admonitions to "stay off the lawn....” It was a battle of wills.

On reflection, it reminded me of the Bates Motel because there were times when we stayed overnight and the kids were relegated to an upstairs bedroom (with a red lightbulb) and we had to sleep on a mattress on the floor. I had a terrible allergy to dust and would spend the entire night sneezing and not being able to breathe. It was horrible.  But there was something very comforting to hear the sonorous sounds of the grownups playing cards downstairs, and ultimately, it lulled me to sleep. Snot and all.

So you see, my dear cousin, everyone has a story to tell about the screwballs and dotties in our families. But let me tell you, there is nothing like the charades performed by an Italian family....

Ann Badach

Thanks, Ann,

Great response, as always!

Lew

Lew:

If these are what I suspect they are, knowing how you feel about us I don't see any reason to read them. They will die on my computer, alas, unseen.

Betty

 

Betty,

Ah, that's what I like! A person who jumps to conclusions. Actually, I love your family and always have, with a couple of exceptions. But please, do me a favor and DON'T read my memoir.

Lew

 

Mea culpa-mea culpa! As you knew it would, you prodded me into reading it. Don't know if the rest of your "nest of in-laws" have read this; if so, they are probably not nuts about it, but You’re right. It's funny, and while it pokes fun at us, it is good.

Betty

 

Thanks, Lew!  Looks lively, and – like a family.  You seem to have Ruths coming and going in your family.  Can't help noticing that... 

it probably means you'll never be ruthless....

Cheers!

Ruth Harrison

 

Ruth,

Your review of my book of memoirs A Sheaf of Leaves has been published in The Hollins Critic, Vol. XLVI, No. 1, February, 2009, on pp. 18-20.  Congratulations! I just got my subscription copy; if you haven't gotten your contributor's copy yet, you ought to have it soon. Thank you so very much. I am quite Ruthful.

Lew

 

Oh, wow!  Very very cool!  I am so pleased. I had about given up getting it into somewhere ...so this is fine news!  I look forward to a copy when it comes – Cheers!

Ruth

 

It's truly a GREAT review, Ruth. I'm going to run off some photo-copies and I'll send you one. It's actually one of the best reviews I've ever gotten.

Lew

P.S. I got this yesterday:

Dear Mr. Turco,
I am writing you to let you know that my review of your book Fearful Pleasures from Star Cloud Press is now available online at the Meridian magazine website. You can access the magazine by going to 
http://www.readmeridian.org .
The review is available on page 95 of
http://www.readmeridian.org/issues/22/reviews.pdf
I enjoyed reading your collection of poetry very much. I hope you find the review interesting and useful.
Sincerely,
Suzanne Morgen, editor
http://www.TrellisMagazine.com

Dear Suzanne Morgen,
Many thanks for letting me know about the publication of your review of Fearful Pleasures and for the review itself, which I found to  be thoughtful and interesting. You ask the same question several times, though: How can someone who has spent his life writing about formal verse write such a collection of poems? The answer is simple: All language is formal; or, as I say on page one of the "introduction to the Discipline of Literature, Form" of my The Book of Literary Terms, a companion volume to The Book of Forms, "Every element of language is a form of some kind. The letters of the alphabet are forms, conventions upon which the members of a culture have agreed in order to communicate; so are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences, whether spoken or written."
This being so, all the poems in the various collections to be found in Fearful Pleasures are formal; they're just not traditionally formal verse poems. For instance, "The Sketches" are prose poems in parallel constructions, which is easy to see if you hold the book at arm's length and look at them. Each "stanza" is actually one sentence, and each poem ends in a "coda" sentence that is set off from the body of the poem. The constructions of these poems are to be found described on the pages identified on page 227 of TBoF3; also under "parallel," "parallelism," and "parallel structure" in the index of TBoLT.
The poems of "Awaken, Bells Falling," are all written in either quantitative or normative syllabic prosody (check p. 20 & the index of TBoF3 for all these terms), except for "The Moment Before" which is a calligramme;
Every other poem of "The Inhabitant" beginning with "The Door" is written in quantitative isoverbal (word count) prosody (pp. 15-16, TBoF3), all the rest are prose poems written in various parallel constructions (pp. 9-15, TBoF3);
"The Weed Garden" is syllabics again, as are "The Book of Beasts" and "Seasons of the Blood," except that the latter are all in Japanese forms (check index of TBoF3);
"Twelve Moons" is written in accentual prosody, specifically William Carlos Williams' triversen stanza (index); the rest of "American Still Lifes" is prose poems in a Williamsian Imagist style;
"Compleat Melancholick" is back to syllabics; ditto "New Poems," also "A Sampler of Hours";
"Phobiamania," though, is quite different: prose poems built on a system of repetitions and semi-repetitions which are, of course, a type of parallel structure (refrains & demi-refrains). Interestingly enough, the old magazine The Formalist published quite a few of these as the editor, Bill Baer, recognized their formality even though they weren't metrical. And the book ends with "The Green Maces of Autumn" that returns to my customary system of quantitative syllabics, in the main. This last set actually was written over the entire time span of my writing life, and it's where I ended up living after I retired in 1996.
Yours,
Lewis

Dear Mr. Turco,


Thank you for
taking the time to respond to the question posed within my book review. I did
not notice all of those poetic elements but I had seen and enjoyed many of
them. The audience and contributors to Meridian are probably not as familiar
with your work and poetic form; therefore, I felt that my review should be
broader and aimed at an audience reading and writing free verse. I hope that my
review has exposed your book to a broader public and that many more people will
benefit from your poetry as I have.

Sincerely,

Suzanne Morgen,
editor

editor@trellismagazine.com

 

Dear Suzanne,

I greatly appreciate
your review; I've read it several times and I've shown it to members of my
family and some of my friends. I'm delighted that you let people know that I
write something besides traditionally formal verse. In fact, that's one of the
reasons why I use a pseudonym for my formal verse; nevertheless, people seem to
think that that's all I write because of The Book of Forms.

Another review was
published at the same time as yours, by Ruth Harrison in The Hollins Critic, of my A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs, so I'm feeling quite coddled and appreciated these
days.

Thanks again,

Sincerely,

Lewis

Sad News: W. D. Snodgrass

Lew,

Some very sad news,

Sam:

 

“De [Snodgrass] died this morning at 7:25. His rapid decline began early Saturday and from then on he had the expert pain management he needed to be content and comfortable. In fact, in these past four months the only pain he experienced was from an ingrown toenail (I kid you not) and the irritation of the oxygen tubing's cannula on his ears and nose. This morning his daughter Cynthia and I were with him for the 10 minutes it took him to take his last breath. If there was ever a beautiful death, it was his.

“I would appreciate not receiving flowers. If you would like to give something to Hospice, that would be much appreciated. They gave De four months of personalized, loving care, four months without pain or indignities; they were there for me as well and will be for the next 13 months. They're funded by Medicare, but the funding is pathetically meager and they struggle to survive. Their address is 4277 Middle Settlement Rd., New Hartford, NY 13413.

“Thanks to you all for your tenderness and cheer. De knew he was loved and that was a great gift.

“Kathy [Snodgrass]”

 

Very sorry to hear that De Snodgrass has passed away, Sam,

 

I didn't even know he was ill. I knew him for fifty years, since I was an undergraduate at UConn and wrote this review for him in 1959 when Heart's Needle was published. Here is a past-tense version of the originally present-tense review titled “The Poet's Court” that appeared in Voices, No. 171, 1960:

         While he was a student in the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa W. D. Snodgrass began to write a very personal, very lyrical kind of poetry. Snodgrass' subjects were those which were closest to him and to most readers — family, environment, the everyday happenings behind which there often exists something so meaningful that the average person is unable or unwilling to confront it, let alone write about it. Snodgrass felt that it is the poet's job to write about these things. His poetry was a continual stripping away of the surfaces of our world, and a simultaneous exposure of the mental and emotional reasons behind our actions and reactions. Most of the poems in Heart's Needle struck a balance between feeling and sense, as in the first stanza of "Song":

 

Observe the cautious toadstools

still on the lawn today

though they grow over-evening;

sun shrinks them away.

Pale and proper and rootless,

they righteously extort

their living from the living.

The poet said what he had to say boldly and lyrically. His verse was polished without seeming slick, like stone tiles worn by the passage of the living. For the most part Snodgrass worked within strict metrical nonce-forms, but he found considerable freedom within their limits; the current of his thought ran swiftly and strongly beneath the surface of his lines, no matter what subject motivated him: divorce, marriage, loss, love, return. His work had personality and craftsmanship; often he touched a responsive chord in the reader. As in "A Cardinal," one could hardly gainsay him when he ended,

 

We whistle in the dark

of a region in doubt

where unknown powers work,

as watchmen in the night

ring bells to say, Watch out,

I am here; I have the right.

 

         In various of his early poems the narrative first-person "I" was not merely the poet speaking of himself, but the persona of the poet speaking for everyman in the real and terrifying world, out of despair and into human joy. Here, in this first book of poems, was a man's life shown to the bone, and one knew it was not made of whole cloth. Many readers were deeply moved by Heart's Needle.

         Not the least of Snodgrass' qualities was his sense of humor, almost unique among the members of the Confessional School, if one does not count John Berryman's bitter clowning. In the poem titled "These Trees Stand..." Snodgrass acknowledged the humor of his last name in the refrain, "Snodgrass is walking through the universe." Readers will not appreciate the full import of this line unless they know the etymology of the poet's name, but will respond merely to its sound. It is, in fact, two words compounded: grass and the past participle of the archaic English verb,  "to snid" or mow;  thus, "Snodgrass" means "mown  lawn" or "cut grass." The third and final stanza of this poem beings, "Your name's absurd, miraculous as sperm / And as decisive."

Thanks for letting me know, Sam,

Lew

I didn't know! Sorry to hear it; and my condolences to you, Lew, since apparently you were friends, and from way back.

Rhina Espaillat

 

Lew:

I did not even hear this news today, except from you. I vaguely remember his winning the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960 (?). He was, what 82/3? It's all getting a bit scary as we see ourselves advance in age while other contemporaries fall by the wayside. I guess that I did not want to ever confront my own mortality either.

Wasn't he in some way a geographic neighbor of yours in upstate NY?

Well, the world is a lesser place without him.

 Jerry Patz

 

Hello, Professor Turco

Is this the same  W.D. Snodgrass that Archives has on tape from the 1963 Maryland Writers’ Festival as part of the Fenn Series of Contemporary Writers [at Cleveland State University]?

Bill Becker

 

There's only one, Bill.

Lew

 

At “Peony Moon” (January 14, 2009 at 10:24 am):

A lovely post at Lewis Turco’s "Poetics and Ruminations."

Michelle

Lew,

Before I got to Iowa, but when De was still there, I wrote to him and asked for something for Chrysalis, the lit mag I edited in SF and, later, with Gordon Lish. He wrote back — I'll never forget — "Dear Mr. Herrmann — If this is the John Herman [sic] I knew from Iowa, change the salutation to, JOHN BABY!" I believe I got a poem but I don't remember and don't have all the issues. We tried to hire him later to come to Missoula, but he was on a grant or something.

De had left by the time I entered the program. When I was there, some of the others were Mark Strand and Marv Bell, Andre Dubus, Ray Carver...it was a good time then. Engle of course was still director. Cassill, Bourjaily were there, and I just missed Roth who was there the year before. So many gone now — Don Justice was a shocker. George Elliott, Verlin Cassill....

I'm reading the biog of Richard Yates. I didn't know him, he was director at Iowa for a time. But it's a book you'd enjoy. Probably 250 of the 400 people mentioned I knew, some of them very well. Shows the literary population of the 50s-90s is a small group. Now it's many thousands with the explosion of MFA programs. The biog is A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey, and it's available on www.abebooks.com for $1 + postage.

Imagine trying to sell a novel in today's economy. And that is exactly where I am. I spent over 8 years on this thing, and I doubt it will find a publisher. My agent even retired from fiction and so I have to find a replacement for her. From now on I'm sticking to short fiction. There are literally thousands of magazines now. Most of them obscure and many publishing their little groups. But that has always been so and probably should be that way. If I put up the money for a magazine, I'd probably only publish my friends and some big names to help with distribution.

Damn — I should have kept my notes, my papers, all the letters. I just tossed everything all the time. But kept a few — letters from Kissinger (who gives a fuck?), Jack Hawkes, Walter VT Clark, Bill Saroyan. A maybe important one I kept from W. Somerset Maugham, and two or three from Bellow and Bernard Malamud. You and I were in a time with some giants. But we didn't know it.

I wonder if there will really be a literature of our time that endures like the times of Twain, Faulkner and Hemingway, Bellow and Roth? Well, Roth is at least of our time, as is Updike. Hardly any of my students here talk of Salinger or Vonnegut now. Maybe that's because it is a little branch of a two year school. I guess you didn't know I still teach one course in fiction writing here. It's depressing what little reading my students have done. And poetry? They remember only one poem — "By the shores of Gitchigoomi," or whatever. Yeats? Carlos Williams? I yearn for those students who used to sign their papers with lower case letters like e.e. cummings.

John Herrmann

A Discussion of "Heterometric" Verse

Of late I have been running across a prosodic term with which I am not familiar and that doesn’t appear in The Book of Forms: “heterometric.” I ran across it most recently in Stephen Murabito’s review of my book Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems in the current issue of Italian Americana (Vol. xxvii, No. 1, Winter 2009, p. 124) where he writes, “The restrained poise of love closes ‘My Country Wife,’ from Awaken, Bells Falling (1968), in balanced heterometric syllabics.”

Earlier this year I asked a correspondent what he meant by the term, and he wrote, “I have encountered numerous scannings of [his poem titled “Caravel”] and have made several differing ones myself. The way I read it aloud every line is hexametric. R[ichard]. Wilbur reads it with lines varying between 5 and 7 feet. I understand the term ‘heterometric’ to denote just what it's [sic] two parts suggest[,] ‘differing meters.’ Sometimes it's shortened to ‘het-met.’"

I replied that the reason I don't know what "heterometric" means is that the usual term for what he appeared to be talking about is "variable accentual-syllabics"; that is, a verse poem written in one prosody but containing a varying number of (in this particular case) verse feet in its lines: A classic example, used in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, on pages 42 & 43, is William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality."

Other prosodic possibilities are "variable accentuals" and "variable syllabics." What Mr. Murabito meant to say was not, however, “variable syllabics,” but rather “quantitative syllabics,” because the lines, although syllabic, are not variable but “fixed” from stanza to stanza: all first lines are the same length; all second lines, though they may be a different length from the first or later lines, are the same length, and so on. "Heterometric" would mean something like "a jumble of all sorts and kinds of meters,” not a mixture of line lengths. Here is the poem that Murabito was discussing:

MY COUNTRY WIFE

My country wife bends to rinse.  Her skirt is

            unwrinkled.  Its print of flowers rounds

out her womb like the rug of violets

                        that mounds or dimples the chapel

burying ground.  She would be grotesque where

                                    hydrants irrigate gutters.

 

Here, she is a sleight of the moon; the sound

            a mole makes.  She bends and carries.  She

cooks and smiles her meals down my throat.  I need

                        no teeth.  She has done what the bee

does to clover.  The sun moves around.  She

                                    stays and stays.  She sweeps 

and cooks.

The term "heterometric" might make sense if one meant "a commingling of (say) accentual prosody and syllabic prosody," on the model of  "heterosexual," but there is already a term for a commingling of accentuals and syllabics; it's called "accentual-syllabic prosody," and it may be written in lines each of which contains the same number of “verse feet” (normative accentual-syllabics), or quantitative accentual-syllabics, or variable accentual-syllabics, which is what “Caravel” is written in.

If there were only two verse prosodies available, in order to write a “heterometrical” poem one would have to mingle syllabics, accentuals, accentual-syllabics, and isoverbal (word-count) prosody, a four-way heterometical "system." But it wouldn't be much of a system, would it? Though it might be what one might call, appropriately, "perverse."

 

Here is the Murabito review in its entirety (to view it properly, click on it):

____________________________________________________________________________________________

COMMENTS

Lew,

In your e-mail, did you mean the term "heterometric," which is discussed?  The irregular or "false Pindaric" ode, out of Cowley, through Wordsworth, and thence to Frost.

Sam Gwynn

 

Sam,

Of COURSE I mean "heterometric," NOT "hypermetric." I'm getting senile already. The term "heterometric" is not listed in the O.E.D., let alone The Book of Forms.

Lew

Lew,

I'm still not sure what a heterometric is, it's not in my American Heritage or OED — I think I'm a homometric, which I guess means I can't marry another homometric.

Bob Mezey

 

Bob,

It means nothing, far as I can make out. I think somebody just wanted to invent a term and see if it would fly. That person should have invented a tern instead.

Lew

Lew,

Molly-the-Wonder-Cat has
been occupying the keyboard and making your incisive article rather
furry. Fur is welcome this chill day, less so the pawses on the
keyboard of each little hoof ... but thanks much for the link, and
the insights it leads to. I have your essay printed out for purrusal
in an easier spot. It will likely end up as one further addendum to
my copy of TBoF, which is already well inset with appropriate items
and bookmarks.

Ruth  

Hot Head

CLICK ON THE IMAGE BELOW TO VIEW IT PROPERLY.

Yes, the idiot in this newspaper story is yours truly. All is on the mend.

Sam.

I have a chair like that. It can put you to sleep. That must be what happened to you. For a moment there you had red hair. Glad you're all right. I had a similar experience while I was teaching in Potsdam '68-'69> I went to a doctor to have a couple of growths removed from my scalp. He decided to burn them out, but before he did he disinfected the area with alcohol. I suddenly felt him and his nurse whacking me on the head with the palms of their hands: he'd set me afire. He cut the second one out with a pair of surgical scissors while I sat ensconced in his chair.

Great name for a fire chief! Or any man, I'd say. Now all you have to do is find a woman named Vaginasdaughter to put out the flame in your pubes.

Reminds me of three file cards I found at BuPers my last year in the Navy - Lunger, Crapper, and Glasscock. I thought they'd make a fine law firm.

Lew

Actually I was out of the chair and seated on a quite different kind--white porcelain.  When I returned, the flames were a'risin'.  Lost a lot of poetry books.  Send me a new Book of Forms one of these days.

Sam

I will send you one on Monday, my xmas gift with commiserations for your adversities.

Lew

It must have been a helluva massage!

Roy Howe

 

In a chaise pour massage, our friend Sam

made himself just as snug as a clam

till the gizmo defied him

and just about fried him

and served him with pancakes and ham.

Rhina

 

It takes a special person to own up. Or a person who knew his cover was already blown.

Tim Summerlin

Good God Sam!!!! What were you thinking???? I hope Captain Penis-son.....took good care of you and that you are NOT permanently damaged....

Love, Co

 

Oh, Dear!

FOR OUR FRIEND SAM

The chair he sat on like a burning throne

Flared in his office for a failed massage,

While all around him poems went up in flames

As their creators hoped they would some day.

It was a conflagration of the art

Much to be desired by mincing Logans

And others of that ilk. O mighty pyre,

That saves the critic from a chore to read,

Why should a garden hose rescue a poem?

If only it had spewed forth Maker’s Mark

We should have seen the Burning Man of art.

Yet still our friend lives on to blaze and write

Another book review, another rite

Of sanity disposed of in his prose.

Shine forth, O Burning Man, and in the night

May thy new-dappled nose dispel the gloom

Like reindeer guiding Santa’s laden sleigh.

Composed with love between courses of a reasonably good dinner,

Dave Mason

 

Sam,

I truly had no idea how prescient I was when I wrote your epitaph long ago:

 R.I.P.  R. S. GWYNN

May 13 1948

He made us laugh, he made us giggle,

But now he makes the earthworms wiggle,

He smoked until they let him in:

Here lie the ashes of R. S. Gwynn.

Lew

 Sam, this gives a whole new meaning to being in the hot-seat!   But I'm very glad you're okay; those heating-pad things are dangerous, and it could have been a whole lot worse.

Marilyn

 

 TEXAS POET SURVIVES ELECTRIC CHAIR!(and I just wonder who wrote up that marvelous article with a title just made for poetry?... in fact,  the entire ordeal seems poetry-ready!) Now HEAL, SAM!

T.P.

Please, T. P.,

Stop treating Sam like a dog.

Lew

Proofreading and The Writer's Almanac

Mr. Keillor:

 In today's poem in The Writer’s Almanac, "The League of Minor Characters" by Kathleen Flenniken, in line six, "When his doctor calls with test results, most of usv decide to remain," what is "usv"? Don't you employ proof readers? It's otherwise a good poem. Too bad you keep messing up the good ones.

Lew Turco

P. S. Just keeping in touch, as you requested again today.

 

Mr. Turco:

Thank you for the proofreading. I will have someone look into  it. It's a great thing that a man as busy as yourself has the time to attend to these details.

Garrison Keillor

 

Mr. Keillor,

You're a writer, too. Don't you hate proofing errors? I loathe them, and a writer should never be too busy to shirk proofreading details, especially when those details have to do with other people's work, such as poems that you have requested to reprint. It's not only insulting to the person who is doing you a favor, it is humiliating to him or her when friends see the way an editor has abused the work in question.

Lew Turco

 

Mr. Turco



You're absolutely right as always, is all I can say, and we're thrilled to hear from you from time to time and get the benefit of your thinking. We will fire our proofreader and find another. As for the poems on the Almanac, we can never hope  to reach your standard so there's no point in discussing it. Some people have taste and others just plod along as best they can.

Keillor

 

Mr. Keillor,

Please don't fire your proofreader. Times are hard. Perhaps just send him to camp at Guantanamo for a week or so. That’s what I’d do if I were you.

Lew Turco

P. S. Don't wait too long. President Obama is going to shut it down.

Mr Turco

You are the soul of kindness. I will tell Brett that his life has been spared. But I trust that your vigilance to typos at poetry websites will not relax for one minute. We are counting on you.

Garrison Keillor

 

I read your page every day, so it's not a problem to spot typos (if you really want me to keep calling your attention to them). One of the reasons I do is because I am writing Epitaphs for the Poets for a new on-line magazine, and I use your Almanac to check for poets I may have missed. I've done several score by now. I'll attach what I have so far, for you to glance at if you choose.

Lew Turco

 

Mr. Turco ----- Of COURSE we want you to spot typos and point out each and every one. It takes a keen eye to spot something like "usv" instead of "us" and write to the website and chastise them for ruining the poem, and though I'm astonished that you find the time to do this, what with your own work and all, nonetheless we can only profit from your attention.  Keillor

__________________________________________________________

Comments

This arrived just in time to make me clean 
my reading glasses as the river rises. It's
November. Winter issue ahead! 
 
Best,
Mir

Very funny, Lew,

And of course you are right about 
proofreading.

We are back in Os now & have 
about two inches of snow this a.m. 
Time to put away my shorts & find 
my long pants.
Our best to Jean (& you),

Tom

Uncle Al

Photo, “Albert Goldbarth’s Bad Hair Decade” from Poetry Snark on-line, Monday, July 4, 2005, at poetrysnark.blogspot.com/2005/07/ 

Recently I was appointed a contributing editor to the on-line quarterly periodical Per Contra which, beginning in October 2008, will also publish a monthly humor e-zine titled Per Contra Currents. The first time I had published anything in Per Contra had been the summer issue which appeared the day before the opening of the 2008 version of the West Chester University New Formalist Poetry Conference where I was to receive the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award on Friday, June 6^th. I met one of the founding editors of Per Contra at West Chester, Miriam N. Kotzin, who had published a poem of mine, one poem by my anagrammatic twin “Wesli Court,” and done an interview with me in which she asked questions about, among other things, my fiction writing, which I found refreshing because I’m not particularly known as a fiction writer and that was the first time I’d ever been interviewed on the subject.

The announcement of my appointment was in the fall 2008 issue which published my short story titled “Moving Day.” When it appeared in September, I noticed that there was a list of Per Contra staff members, so I accessed the page and saw that one of my fellow contributing editors was a prolific poet named Albert Goldbarth, a name I had been seeing alongside my own in many a publication. In fact, back in 1983 when I had begun doing an annual roundup of poetry volumes titled “The Year in Poetry,” for The Dictionary of Literary Biography yearbooks, I had written a brief review of one of his books:

“…reading Albert Goldbarth's Original Light: New & Selected Poems 1973-1983 (1983) is like sitting around listening to a garrulous and humorous uncle rattling cleverly away about everything in the world. Maxine Kumin says in her blurb, ‘Goldbarth's prodigious output is matched only by his erudition. He seems to have read everything and ingested centuries of history, biology, religion.’ True, very true. Although we would be delighted to sit and listen to such an uncle while he visits, we wouldn't want to live with him. This book was edited by Raymond Smith, who made all the selections — what a task! Perhaps editing his own work is a foreign idea to Uncle Al who ‘writes like a one-man gang,’ according to David Wagoner.”

Goldbarth and I had both taken graduate degrees from the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa, I in 1962, he nine years later in 1971 (I am fourteen years older than he). The Workshop publishes a semi-annual newsletter for its alumni, and in 1994 I sent in a notice that I had been made a member of the Meriden, Connecticut, Hall of Fame. In the next issue affable Uncle Al wrote an item mocking my paltry award; he pointed out that, apparently, I couldn’t tell the difference between a real honor and one that amounted to next to nothing.

Yesterday I was going through my computer letters file rearranging things I wanted to keep and getting rid of stuff I didn’t. I ran across this letter I wrote, datelined Oswego, New York, 27 January 1995, the year before I retired from teaching:

Dear Prof. Goldbarth:

         I saw your remarks in the Iowa Workshop Newsletter and feel constrained to write.  Meriden, Connecticut, a city of about 50,000 souls, is the place where I grew up.  When one's home town chooses to confer upon one of its sons or daughters its highest honor it is, indeed, an honor, because those people know you; they watched you walk the streets and play in their back yards; they noticed you in your best and worst moments over a period of years.  The standard by which they judge you is stringent and personal.

         The man who nominated me was my high school choral director, Tony Parisi, now nearly blind.  The person who seconded the nomination was [Warren Gardner,] the ancient editor of the Morning Record, for whom I had worked as a cub reporter, morgue clerk, and high school correspondent forty years earlier. The people who attended were citizens for whom as a child I had delivered newspapers, my classmates and schoolmates and playmates, the parishioners of my father's church including my Sunday school teacher, the organist with whom I had sung in the choir, the man with whom as a student I had collaborated to write the Meriden High School Class of 1952's graduation song.

         The day I was installed in the Meriden Hall of Fame alongside the diva Rosa Ponselle and my classmate Tomie DePaola, winner of the Caldecott Award, was without a doubt the most gratifying day of my life.  When someone attending asked me whether I had truly enjoyed the day, I told him my only regret was that it could never come again.

         It was chastening to take note of all your publications and accomplishments, Mr. Goldbarth, and you deserve congratulations for them, but it's a good thing to remember, I think, that arrogance is not a yardstick of accomplishment, nor is quantity necessarily a substitute for quality.  And to attack your fellow alumni for a lack of humility because they respond to a request for information by their alma mater  is not an excuse for displaying one's own deficiencies of character.

Sincerely,

Lewis Turco

Copy to: the Iowa Newsletter.

         My highly accomplished and exceedingly well-published fellow contributing editor to Per Contra never replied, and I guess now, after all, I have to live with the otherwise garrulous Uncle Al.

Printed Rejection Slips: A Correspondence

Lewis Turco <jturco@adelphia.net> wrote: 3 July 2008

 

C. Dale Young

Poetry Editor

The New England Review

Middlebury College

Middlebury VT 95753

 

Dr. Young:

Having Googled your name, I can see how busy you are, but that doesn’t excuse you from the discourtesy you showed when you sent me the printed rejection slip that I opened this morning. Your busy-ness as a doctor and as a writer, and as an editor and as a teacher is no reason for treating so shabbily someone who has done as much as I have, in almost twice as long as you’ve been alive, for the art you like to dabble in.

I assume that being a physician is your primary interest, as it was for W. C. Williams, but my primary interest in life is poetry, and it always has been. I resent being insulted by someone who is apparently a dilettante. I’d be willing to bet, from what I know of him, that Williams never sent anybody a printed rejection slip in his life, though he showed that it is possible to blend medicine with poetry.

 Please understand that I’m not complaining about the rejection, only about the form of that rejection. If you can’t do any better than this, I recommend that you quit some of your dabbling and pay attention to what it is you do best (I trust, but from what I’ve seen of it — which isn’t much, I admit — that isn’t writing poetry).

 Sincerely.

 Lewis Turco

 

"C. Dale Young" <cdaleyoung@cdaleyoung.com> wrote:

 Dear Mr. Turco,

 I have assistant editors who reject work, so I may not even be the one who rejected your poems. Our assistants do not typically write things on rejection slips, but I do stand by their judgements and take full responsibility. I do not read all 44,000 poems we receive at NER in a year. I read what is passed on by our assistant editors. We have readers in VT, CA, MA. We opt to use standard rejection slips in order to help speed up our response time, which we have now brought under 12 weeks for the most part.

 I am sorry receiving the rejection slip made you feel shabby; that is not our intent. But with the volume of poems we receive, I don't foresee us changing that policy any time in the near future. Even if I were to quit medicine, quit teaching once a year and quit writing my own poems, I could not read every submission and pen a personal note. I wish I could, but that would mean earning less than 5 cents an hour. The stipend I receive for editing poetry at NER is less than many poets receive for doing a reading.

 I am sorry you feel we have treated you poorly. I wish I had better news about the future. But with MFA programs now graduating well over a thousand writers per year, I suspect the volume of submissions will only continue going up. NER exists now purely as a charity of Middlebury College, considering subscriptions do not even cover the cost of printing and distributing the magazine.

 Sincerely,

 C. Dale Young

 

 Lewis Turco <jturco@adelphia.net> wrote: 3 July 2008

 Dr. Young,

 Since the postmark of the envelope was California, I suspect it was, indeed, you who sent me the printed rejection. Be that as it may, your reply is cautionary. I said you appeared to me to be a dilettante, now let me prove that to be the case: You write, "I do not read all 44,000 poems we receive at NER in a year. I read what is passed on by our assistant editors." Let me substitute a few words: "I do not read all 44,000 x-rays I receive at my hospital in a year. I read what is passed on by my medical assistants."

 You need to stop being an "editor" and spend your time being a doctor. If I operated the way you do, I'd deserve to receive nasty letters from the people who ask me for my help. I don't know how many individual poems I read in a year, probably not 44,000, but people are always asking me for help. Yesterday I read and criticized a poem that Dean Stephen J. Herman wrote to celebrate his marriage to his partner of many years (in San Francisco; he is a former student at Oswego from the late '60's); today I received an email from a man in Iraq asking me to send him a free copy of my BOOK OF FORMS; I replied at once; last week I read, and wrote a blurb for, a manuscript of poems by Rhina Espaillat, and I took the time to give Bryan Bridges information about the terzanelle verse form for an essay he's doing for the ezine TRELLIS; the week before, I read and criticized a manuscript of poems for Miriam N. Kotzin, the editor of another ezine, PER CONTRA; I am often asked to judge poetry contests, but I don't let the organizers sift the entries, I read them all myself...and here I've been "retired" for twelve years.

 In other words, Dr. Young, I spend ALL my professional time these days (as I always have) working in the field of poetry, to which I've dedicated my life. It really pisses me off when an editor tells me he's "too busy" to read the poems I submit to his magazine. If you're too busy to do what an editor is supposed to do, you should stop being an editor, because you're not doing your job.

 Lewis Turco

 

 "C. Dale Young" <cdaleyoung@cdaleyoung.com> wrote:

 Dear Mr. Turco,

 Thank you for your letter.  I obviously have not helped the situation by responding to your previous email in the first place.  It appears that nothing I can say will satisfy you, and I have no intention of resigning my post at NER.  There are hundreds of literary magazines in the country, so I wish you the best with your work and placing it with them. 

 Sincerely,

 C. Dale Young

 

 Dr. Young:

 Thanks for your advice, but I’ve already published in most of them over the past fifty-five years. As I said before, it’s not the rejection I object to (lord knows I’ve received a few of those in my day), but the printed rejection letter. And I guess you’re right; there’s no profit in our continuing this correspondence, is there? You’re way too busy anyway.

 Lewis Turco

________________________________________________________________________________________

 Wow.  But how do you really feel?????   Great response.

 But did you have to remind me that I was a student of yours in the 60's???   Only kidding.

 Stephen J. Herman

Oh Dear Lew:

My face is purple.  Do your scathing thoughts on rejections apply to email and ezines? Ah what to do...?

PAX,

Carolina

Hi Lew,

That's telling him... Won't do much good, but feels good anyhow.

Wiley

 

Lew,

Pretty hilarious — in a sad way — to read that email exchange with the NER guy. He's actually a nice guy, but the management structure of literary magazines — of many non-profits, for that matter — is more top-down than Halliburton.

Dan

Obama Accused of Atomic Terrorism

Dear Friends,

It is very distressing to discover that Barack Obama is a big supporter of nuclear energy as a solution to Global Warming. This was discussed last evening on Charlie Rose, Channel 13, with the Governor of PA. His campaign is backed by nuclear industrialists.

Nuclear Leaks and Response Tested Obama in Senate — New York Times Feb 3, 2008 ... Another Obama donor, John W. Rowe, chairman of Exelon, is also chairman of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear power industry’s ... [? Is this a quote without quotation marks, or plagiarism?]

This is a terrible danger, as we are in big trouble with aging plants with nuclear waste that is highly toxic and deadly lying around at these sites and no place to dispose of it. Yucca Mountain disposal site is still under construction and way behind schedule and a disaster to begin with as it is built on an earthquake fault. I was shocked to hear that Obama is for the abomination of nuclear energy, a disaster according the Dr. Helen Caldicott and Dr. Rosalie Bertell--and a major cause of the various cancers we see in one out of two Americans who contract some form of cancer in their lifetime.

The plants have always leaked more radiation than they admit, and this is a fact testified to by Dr. Lionel B. Luttinger, doctor of chemistry from Yale who used to be brought in to measure leakage at various facilities. Nuclear plants have witnessed major disasters in our lifetime and are major targets for terrorists.

Research for yourself, Obama's connection to the nuclear industrialists at the New York TImes and other sites. Very few of his young supporters are aware of his connection to the nuclear industrialists.

Daniela Gioseffi, New Jersey

NOW who's sending whom cheap shots, Daniela?

I live in a city that has THREE operating nuclear plants. Lived here since 1965. I'm still alive. Jean is still alive. My kids show no signs of radiation poisoning. Lots of people are still alive in Oswego. My next door neighbor is a security guard at one of the plants, and he keeps an eye on my house for us when we're in Maine.

The fact is -- and it IS a fact -- that Hillary HAS LOST the nomination of the Democratic party for the Presidency, and she will stoop to absolutely ANYTHNG in her desperation. DO YOU KNOW THAT OBAMA IS IN FAVOR OF MORE NUCLEAR PLANTS? WHO HAS DONATED TO HILLARY’S CAMPAIGN? PLEASE STOP SENDING ME CHEAP SHOTS AT OBAMA, Daniela.

Lew Turco, Oswego NY

Good for you Lew!

France for one, Japan for another, and much of Europe have relied on a careful and safe use of nuclear energy (not sloppy and cheap like the Russians). After solar and wind, it is probably the most benign source of power.

That is of course, excluding Hillary's bloviation.

Jerry P., Massachusetts

Jerry,

Would that last term apply to Monica as well as Hillary?

Lew

Hi Lew –

I'm not going to get involved in your presidential malarkey, but do get very tired of these people who go into hysterics whenever nuclear power is mentioned! OK, there are risks - but there are risks or snags in all energy sources. Hopefully, the nuclear industry has learned from the accidents that have occurred. Think of the harm that has been done to generations of coal miners - and to people living down-wind of coal burning industries of all types. Nuclear waste has to be treated and eventually disposed of somewhere but the actual quantity is minuscule compared to the mountains of waste produced by coal mining and coal burning - let alone the effects on the atmosphere. Not just greenhouse gases but also acid rain and other pollutants! What about oil-spills? If all industries worked to the standards (rightly) imposed on the nuclear industry commerce would be crippled. Good to read your spirited response to 'Daniela', whoever she may be! Cheers,

John C., The Lake District, U.K. (a retired science teacher).

John,

When we first moved to Oswego the city could “boast” the largest fossil fuel burning plant in the state. It shifted from coal — which was bad — to oil, which was worse, and more expensive. Our houses (including mine) were covered with black tar smoke deposit. Niagara Mohawk had to pay to have most of them (but not mine, for some reason, though my neighbors’ on both sides) repainted. I covered the house with unpainted shakes so they’d just darken and look more or less natural. But we all, including my children, breathed that noxious stuff until the plant was closed because the atomic plants produced cheaper and cleaner power.

And up in Maine, the State keeps suing fossil-burning plants in the Midwest because they produce all this pollution which lands in Maine’s forests and kills them (and many things in them) with acid rain.

Lew

But, Lew,

Why take such a tone? It was not a cheap shot, but factual evidence of Obama's big corp. interests, no better than Rodham's or McCain's. Obama and Rodham are very close on all the issues, but I fear that Obama cannot win against McCain, and I fear the militarist McCain greatly.

Why be uncivil. I was just sending facts, and sorry that you were on my list serve. I will take you off of it. I've been more kind towards and respectful of you than you've ever been to me in tone and deed, but you don't seem to understand that with your unfriendly tone.

I am greatly educated by a scientific family of physicists of Columbia U and Princeton U. and doctors of chemistry from Yale and world renowned physicians who totally disagree with you on the tremendous dangers and incredibly huge, counter productive costs of nuclear facilities. They are all aging and full of leaking spent fuel that has no place to go and plutonium with a half life of 24,0000 years of deadly radiation. Talk with the ill survivors of Three Mile Island and Chernoble, and my friend, Dr. Rosalie Bertel of Canada, world respected epidimologist [sic; correct spelling: "epidemiologist"] etc. No need to answer. I'll be away in MA. giving readings.

Best wishes,

Daniela

Ah, Daniela,

You have a short memory. My remark about “cheap shots” was quoting YOU when you accused me of taking “cheap shots” at the Clintons a while back with my “A Cyberspace Interview with Bill Clinton” on this blog. You accused me of sending those “cheap shots” via email, BUT IN FACT I ONLY SENT YOU A LINK TO MY BLOG, which you voluntarily opened yourself. And then you sent your “private” comments to everyone on my “Friends” list serve! You’re big on facts, and THOSE ARE FACTS, which I will prove by reprinting your original message and my reply:

“Dear Lew, With all due respect, the best friend is an honest one,

“Please don't send me anymore cheap shots at The Clintons. They are off-the-wall and inaccurate, SHALLOW, glib satire based on TV sound bites. [Etc., etc., at great length.]

“Daniela (New Jersey)”

“Sorry, Daniela,

“But I didn't send you shots of any kind — I sent you a link. You opened the link. The only cheap shots I've seen in this war of words are coming from the Clinton camp.

“Lew”

Allow me to reiterate my last sentence. Would you consider your response to my “Cyberspace Interview” to be “civil”?

And please forgive me for not acknowledging your incredibly superior education to which you have often drawn my attention. However, all your assertions do not offset the fact that MY FAMILY AND I LIVED IN OSWEGO, NY, A CITY WITH THREE ATOMIC POWER PLANTS IN IT, FOR MORE THAN THIRTY YEARS without ill effect on us or upon anyone we know. That accidents can happen is true, but see John’s email above for a rebuttal.

Congratulations on all your recent successes and appearances. I have always admired your literary work, though your polemics in support of Hillary leave much to be desired.

Lew

Lew,

I lived near the very first nuclear research/reactor in the UK in the 50's. The people I went to school with socialised and rock climbed and worked there. I know of no birth defects or mental disorders, apart from rock climbing, amongst any of my friends. Later in Life I fathered four children, all of whom bred normal (what’s normal?) healthy kids. Now I hear the same idiots blithering the same lies about nuclear power. No one rabbets on about coal, why? Because they own the media, and it's vested interests that are selling the story.

Please,

Sogni come se viviate per sempre e viviate come se moriate oggi.

Terry C., Australia