Poetics and Ruminations

Unity College Commencement 2012

         Many things fascinate me, but the idea of evolution fascinates me to the point of awe. One of the things I enjoy is reading scientific material, including anthropological works: I consider that Loren Eiseley’s book The Firmament of Time is one of the great works of literature of the twentieth century, and another great writer of anthropology was Margaret Mead. Sometimes in my reading I come up against a passage that arrests my eyes and causes my mind to begin to spin a fable. Such a passage was this portion of a sentence by Mead: "...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song."

         What must it have been like for the first truly human being at dawn one day to awaken from its sleep, to look out on the savannah, and to realize that she, or possibly he, was conscious of herself and of her plight and glory? To know, beyond all doubt, that she knew?

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Dawn Song:

 

I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —

it breaks across my mind as across the eyes

of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,

and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

 

I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,

breaking across my terror and my surprise;

to know that I am the beast who knows his name:

Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun

of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

 

I am the first to see stone for a stone,

to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight

and know what it may do to the brittle bone

of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

 

I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone

held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.

The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.

He is the child of dust.  I am stone's son,

born of the first rose and the first lark's song.

 

         If scientists can be clear-thinkers, like Margaret Mead and Loren Eiseley, who also knew how to write, how to communicate their thoughts to readers and strike awe into their minds, they can also, unfortunately, be romantics who, if one thinks about what they say, convey to readers ideas that fall apart under scrutiny.

         As a reader of science fiction when I was young — what is called “speculative fiction” these days, I guess, and of fantasy — “magical realism” now, I soon understood the difference between the two, between, let’s say, the science fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and the beautiful, impossible worlds of Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed the one for its projections of a possible reality, and the other for its imaginary evocations of primal hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows. Therefore, when I run across a scientist who confuses the two, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey did in the passage I quote next, I feel constrained to comment on that confusion. How close have we come to populating the stars? So as I had done before in poems, I once again put words into the mouth of a an ancient skull:

 

THE MAN HUNTER

"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.  And so what shall we wonder at?...The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.  We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." — Robert Ardrey

(And the skull replies,)

When I saw, spinning webs of sense and dust,

the heart-shaped spider of the womb's demands,

I raised myself upright upon the crust

of earth and issued it my first commands:

"Give me what I may take before the glass

of time is empty as a brain's white bowl

where slugs drink, where the mosses gorge and green."

I walked out of the forest, across the grass —

it withered underneath my callous sole,

for I could not forget what I had seen.

 

I saw the scarab in the turning earth

spinning murders from its golden shell;

I saw the rooting beast probing death,

but death must root if it would hope to dwell.

Therefore, I walked the trench of lambs and ewes

with winter's humour snowing in my bones,

and in my web of veins the scratching, dumb

dry tongue of the beast feeding on my dews.

Then, when at last I lay down in these stones,

I knew that more of us would one day come.

 

And you have come to find yourself in me

here where I lie, a skull transformed to stone.

My sightless eyes look out at you and see

that under the eons we are still alone —

but we are billions now who were a few

to forsake the forest and face time with a rock,

a naked rock held in a naked hand.

We face the ages still, and we bestrew

this cairn of stars with the remnants of our stock:

a jawbone here and there wearing to sand.

 

Perhaps one day, many centuries from today, mankind will indeed get off the planet, a bit farther off it than Luna or Mars, and take with him and her the myths born of Earth. When I was young I thought that might begin to happen in my own lifetime:

 

FATHERS

 

I. First Father 

I see him standing on the empty plain

As dawn begins to break across his eyes.

He is alone, this first of all my fathers,

But he can sense his scions and his daughters

Following down the looming centuries,

For time has started weaving through his brain,

And he can think. He understands at last

What must become, and what’s become his past.

 

And here I stand upon this farthest link

Staring down the line of molecules

Twisted in a spiral arc. I gaze

The other way to where the whirling haze

Rises over dark and depthless pools

And wonder what the final man must think.

 

2. Fathers of the Tribe

 

His sons and grandsons travel with the tribe

As it drifts out of the immense savannah

Following the herds, but searching for

Something else as well. They must explore,

Apparently. For Eden? For Nirvana?

Their leaders are unable to describe

What they are seeking past these eastern sands,

Moving always northward to colder lands.

 

What have we found beyond those roaming droves

That led us into canyons made of glass?

Where do we go from here? How shall we feed

The starving myriads whose simplest need

No longer can be met on Earth? En masse

We need again a miracle of loaves.

 

 

3. The Final Father 

And as they stop, wherever they may move,

Each scion takes his mate who bears his seed,

The generations of First Father’s loins.

Time spends these children like so many coins

Minted from the soil. The Earth has need

Of purses full of these. The parents rove

Into the mystery to make it known,

To turn the strangest climes into their own.

 

Now we are everywhere. The human race

Has filled the niches that the world provided.

What’s left is Easter Island duplicated

On a massive scale. We are checkmated

By ourselves; we are the tribe divided

Staring hopelessly to outer space.

 

         Mankind is apparently doing to this beautiful blue and green globe, the Earth, what earlier men did to Easter Island: They made it uninhabitable, by destroying the trees from which they had been able to manufacture canoes that would take them off the island to fish and travel; they overpopulated the soil that eventually could not sustain their numbers. Before we do that here, on the rest of our home planet, we need to understand our plight, we need to take charge of our future before there is no future remaining.

         Unity College in Maine, “America’s Green College,” is one of the forward-looking institutions that is trying to save us all. Last evening my wife Jean and I returned from a day spent at Unity College where, in the morning, we attended the inauguration of Stephen Mulkey as the school’s tenth president, and the afternoon at the commencement exercises where I received an honorary doctorate of arts and humanities. Our daughter Melora Norman, director of the school’s Dorothy W. Quimby Library, and the Powow River poet Michele Leavitt, spouse of President Mulkey, introduced me and I read my poem “Flower Moon,” the New England Indians’ May moon, from my series titled “Twelve Moons” in American Still Lifes.* I presented the book to Stephen and Michele:

 

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Flower Moon:

The sun blossoms in the sky,

         and the woodsflowers blossom.

                  Herbs bloom in the gardens.

 

All day light falls

         until shadows fall

                  with the failing west.

 

Then a yellow flare

         fires the clouds over the lake,

                  sets the waves afire.

 

Upon the shore the boats lie

         among the voices of children

                  skipping stones over the water;

 

the moon skims

         into the east

                  washing silver into the wood,

 

shadow into the stone —

         and, beyond, the pike flash

                  under the lip of shadow.

 

         Another honorary degree, described by President Mulkey as “The first and only Doctorate of Sustainability Science ever bestowed anywhere in the world,” was given to the commencement speaker Cynthia Barnett, environmental journalist and author of Blue Revolution, Unmaking America’s Water Crisis (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2011), a copy of which was presented as their senior gift to each of Unity College’s 2012 graduates. Ms. Barnett’s talk was riveting; I agreed with every word, and I hope everyone who cares about the planet we live on will read it and act upon it. 

 

Notes: "Dawn Song" and "The Man Hunter" may be found in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback.

"Fathers" is in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 

and all of the series titled "Twelve Moons," including "Flower Moon," may be found in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper.

 

 

Satan's Scourge Kindle Edition

Lewis Putnam Turco’s book titled Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, winner of the Wild Card category of the 2009 New England Book Festival, has just been issued in a 2012 e-book Kindle edition, SatansScourge-ebook/1 by its publisher, www.StarCloudPress.com, of Scottsdale, Arizona. The price is $8.79 which includes free wireless delivery.

Here is information about other editions: ISBN 978-1-932827, jacketed cloth, $54.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5; trade paperback, $39.95, 808 pages. ORDER FROM BARNES & NOBLE / ORDER FROM AMAZON; SatansScourge-ebook/1. 

 

 

The Tenth Anniversary of Nine / Eleven / 2001

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem,

Herb Plays with the Blues

 

 

Wednesday, 12 September 2001

 

Alas, my buddy Herb has got the blues,

My poor old buddy Herb's deep in the blues.

But it's an exercise, it's not the news

 

That's got him in the dumps. It's not the dust

That's covered New York City deep in dust

And rubble -- no, it's not the boom and bust

 

Of terror from the skies on a summer day,

A brilliant, clear and sunny summer day

Buried in suffocating clouds of gray

 

Smoke and soot and scattered body parts

Of once whole people merely body parts

That now must be removed in trucks and carts

 

From the streets of Old New York. Our world is changed

Forever now by monsters, forever changed,

And we who live in it have been estranged

 

From what was real. The solid earth we knew,

That solid sod that once we walked and knew

Is now surreal -- planes dropping from the blue

 

Into towers falling onto streets

That are no longer avenues and streets

But silent canyons. Herb, this form repeats,

 

This form called blues, but so too does despair,

These images of death and of despair

That sunder us beyond hope of repair.

 

From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; AMAZON.COM .

 

 

Emerson's Dream

When he and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first anonymous Bristol imprint in 1798 of their collaboration Lyrical Ballads, the “Advertisement” at the beginning of the book read, “The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure. Readers accustomed to the gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers, if they persist in reading this book to its conclusion, will perhaps frequently have to struggle with feelings of strangeness and awkwardness: they will look round for poetry, and will be induced to enquire by what species of courtesy these attempts can be permitted to assume that title.”

William Wordsworth wrote in his Preface that “The principal object, then, proposed in these Poems was to choose incidents and situations from common life, and to relate or describe them, throughout, as far as was possible in a selection of language really used by men….” This has ever since been the goal of many poets: to write verse that sounds like, but is not, everyday spoken prose.

Ralph Waldo Emerson in America also dreamed of finding a more “natural” language in which to write poetry in the nineteenth century. Even though he found it rather easy to write metrical lines, apparently he was bothered to a frazzle by the exigencies of the verse mode which seemed too “British” for him. He wanted some method of writing, or type of poetry that was more New Worldly, and he complained that there was something too artificial about rhyming and metering.

Should one happen to read Emerson’s early poetry (which nobody ever does), one would discover that he was a capable metrist, a fact one would never stumble upon if all that one read was his “mature,” very rough verse. It was a revelation to this reader to realize that Emerson was capable as a young man of writing perfectly acceptable, standard verse lines in any meter he chose. For some reason, his mature writing style is seemingly more "amateur" than his youthful work. Clearly, he chose to do what he did in his later work, perhaps in the hope that he could find some compromise with prose, or even discover a third mode of writing that was a combination of verse and prose. As Hyatt H. Waggoner wrote in the chapter titled “The Apprentice Years” in his book Emerson as Poet, “…some of the notebook drafts of poems in these years seem less like experiments in free verse than like symptoms of Emerson’s tendency to weaken the conventional boundaries between prose and verse. This is the way the first draft of ‘The Snow Storm’ appears in an 1834 notebook. The images are here, the guiding idea, and even whole lines just as they would be used in the poem, but the passage as a whole seems to exist somewhere in a no man’s land between poetic prose and blank verse.

“Announced by all the trumpets of the winds Arrived the snow & driving o’er the field, seems nowhere to alight The whited air hides hills & woods, the river & the heaven & veils the farmhouse at the garden’s end,”

and so forth. (Note the places in these lines where capitals appear to show where verse lines should start. These were Emerson’s own capitals.)

It’s impossible, of course, to inhabit “a no man’s land between poetic prose and verse,” for one must perforce write any of the genres of literature (fiction, drama, nonfiction, poetry) in one of the two modes of composition, either prose or verse; there is no third way, no such thing as “free” verse although Waggoner thought that Emerson’s struggles toward what he called “organic form” was “more a suggestive metaphor than a precise definition — and a metaphor of which Emerson himself was sometimes a victim, as Whitman would be later” and as modern poets continue to be when they break prose up into lines which somehow magically turns it into “verse.” As a result, just as Wordsworth and Coleridge called for a more “natural” poetry that could be understood and appreciated by the common folk, Emerson called for the same thing except that he wanted it to look and sound more “American” than British. Unfortunately, he had to settle for Walt Whitman, a prose poet who couldn’t stop writing in Romantic period style anyhow.

Wordsworth’s belief that poets ought to write poetry — that is, verse poetry — which was like ordinary prose speech, was not proven possible until the twentieth century in the work of such poets as A. D. Hope, Robert Frost, Howard Nemerov, Richard Wilbur and others whose verse often reads as easily as good prose.

People who maintain that there is such a thing as “free verse” deny that “verse” is measured language and to write it one has to count so many syllables to a line in some way. They cite the derivation of the word from plowing a field and “turning” when one comes to the end of a row. But such folks, I guess, have never watched a farmer plowing a field. The farmer plows to the end of his field, then turns and plows to the other end of the field before he turns again. That farmer’s field has limits, and he plows the WHOLE field, not half a row here, then a third of a row there, and three-quarters of a row next, and so forth. That’s what one does when one writes “free verse.”

Let’s say that the “field” is a paragraph. One begins to write a sentence of that paragraph, but before one gets to the end of the sentence the “plowman” decides to begin a second row after writing a phrase; he continues it to the end of that phrase, then he begins a third row until he finishes a clause. He begins another row and a new clause in row four, and so on until he has finished his poem, until he has finished “plowing his field.” Stand back and look at that field – what do the rows look like? They are uneven; there is unplowed earth at the ends of many of them. They look like a “free verse” poem.

Listen, all you poets who cling to a ridiculous term because you feel as though you cheat when you write a lineated prose poem: THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH PROSE POETRY! You don’t have to justify your practice by clinging to a metaphor that won’t hold up against scrutiny simply because you think that the English tradition requires you to write in “verse.” It does not! There have been prose poems written in the English language since the Roman occupation of Britain. Neither Edgar Allan Poe in “Eureka” nor Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself” knew anything of “free verse” when they wrote their prose poems; neither did Christopher Smart or William Blake or the translators of the King James Bible. It was the satirical French who invented the term “vers libre,” and they weren’t writing it either.

 

 

Dirge and Paean

                Mayday 2011    

                

Osama bin Laden was shot in the head --

Osama bin Laden is laden with lead!

Scatter the atoms of evil Osama!

Hosanna! Hosanna! Hosanna, Obama!

A Suggestion by a Korean War Veteran on Veteran's Day 2010

The USS Hornet (CVA12)

President Obama has announced that South Korea has decided not to cooperate with the U. S. in opening its markets to U. S. businesses. I have a suggestion: President Obama ought to inform South Korea that we will begin immediately to withdraw American troops stationed in South Korea in order to reduce our national debt.

In fact, the U. S. ought to begin to withdraw its troops and close our overseas bases world-wide. Now that there is a European Economic Community of governments, these bases, especially in Europe, are useless. All they are is a subsidy of Europe. President George W. Bush said that he was going to close U. S. overseas bases, and it was the only good idea he ever had, but nothing ever happened in this regard. No doubt the U. S. War Machine objected strenuously. President Obama needs to do something positive. America does not need to be the world’s police force any longer.

 

You're right, Lew.

Miller

 

I second the motion!

Phil A.

(U.S. army air corps, 1944-45)

 

EXCELLENT PLAN--

Ruth

 

Great idea, Lew!  How do we get this plan passed in our dysfunctional congress?

Pierre

 

There's a lot to what you say, Lew. Of course, we have to be sure first that

such a step doesn't leave our nationals at risk in any of those countries.

Happy Veterans' Day.

Rhina

 

Good idea, Lew,

I remember Bush saying this. Obama followed through on the bailout; he should be able to see his way on following through on this one, too.

Tom

 

Lew,

What a great suggestion! With such wisdom from a poet, let's put him in charge and should we have a 4-star general direct the NEA?

Best to you & to Wesli Court too —

Dan

[WWII veteran]

 

 

The Color of the Moment

An Interview by Gregory Fitzgerald and William Heyen

Lewis Turco by Clarence E. Premo, 1968

 

         This interview occurred on February 22, 1968, at the State University of New York College at Brockport as part of Brockport's ETV Writers' Forum series. It was published in Costerus (Amsterdam, The Netherlands), Vol. 9, 1973.

 

Fitzgerald. Mr. Turco, would you please be so kind as to read for us the poem "Burning the News" from your book Awaken, Bells Falling?¹

 

Turco. I'd be pleased to.

 

BURNING THE NEWS

 

                  The fire is eating

         the paper.  The child who drowned

         is burned.  Asia is in flames.

                           As he signs his great

bill, a minister of state chars

 

                  at the edges and curls

         into smoke.  The page rises,

         glowing, over our neighbor's

                           roof.  In the kitchens

clocks turn, pages turn like gray wings,

 

                  slowly, over armchairs.

         Another child drowns, a bill

         is signed, and the pen blackens.

                           The smoke of Asia

drifts among the neighbors like mist.

 

It is a good day for burning.

The fire is eating the news.

 

Fitzgerald. Do you regard that as a political poem in any way?

 

Turco. Perhaps political in the sense that it is relevant to current events — but in the larger sense, not really, because I think it would be relevant to almost any period in recent history.

 

Heyen. Is there a danger in bringing politics specifically into a poem?

 

Turco. When anyone writes on a subject that's specifically of contemporary import, I think he runs the risk of seeing his poem become obsolete. However, one can simply use the contemporary event as a takeoff for a larger statement.

 

Fitzgerald. You mean something like Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"?

 

Turco. That was about an event of import not only for that moment but for all of American history. I'm talking about something like an ode on the sinking of the battleship Maine, for instance; something that has a lot of import for a moment, but not so much for later on.

 

Fitzgerald. You mention the Maine. There is, of course, a poem by Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland," which is a pretty fine poem, although I think it does, as you say, just take off from the event.

 

Turco. Yes, it's not merely something like, "O Deutschland, thou art gone!" you know. It makes a bigger statement. And I do think poems that try to make larger statements have more chance of surviving than poems that are specifically of the moment.

 

Heyen. In regard to "Burning the News" again, these lines "The smoke of Asia / drifts among the neighbors like mist" are very intriguing lines. You've said elsewhere that the mass media really hide or remove us from current events rather than bring us closer to them. But in this poem the neighbors seem to be inhaling the mist of Asia's burning rather better than they absorb it from the newspapers.

 

Turco. I wrote the poem after I'd come in from the back yard where I'd been burning the newspapers one day. The inciting incident for the poem was a game I used to play to keep myself amused while I burned the papers. I used to put the newspapers in the trash burner, and then I'd take two matches; I'd light them, lay one on one side of the incinerator and the other on the other side, Then I'd pretend that these fires were two opposing armies, and I'd watch to see which army gained the most newsprint territory in the least time.

         One day, when I was playing the game, I thought, "That's real. That's the way it is, and it's happening now." So the metaphor took on the color of the moment, of the neighborhood scene. The smoke of the burning newspapers both literally and figuratively permeated the neighborhood just as the news about the war in Vietnam floated through the air, and we watched it on television, and nobody did anything about it — it was there all the time, suffocating us.

 

Heyen. Our perception is dulled rather than increased.

 

Turco. That's right. And if the poem works, it works because both levels of the poem are real — both the actual, everyday situation, including the game I was playing, and the allegorical level: the news of war stifles us and makes us impotent as human beings. We become mummies removed from the real world where people are being killed — not by bullets, but by a willed, safe anesthesia of the imagination, of the rational mind. We are spectators in the death of ethics and morality, of consciousness and action — our own death, as well as the death of armies.

 

Fitzgerald. You know, of course, that there have been a lot of changes in your poetry since the days when I reviewed your book First Poems.² I wonder if you would care to comment on the ways in which your poetry has changed. I remember, for instance, an enormous concern with rhythms, with things like alliterative verse. I wonder about your later book Awaken, Bells Falling — I wonder whether or not you feel there are great differences between the early mode and your current mode of writing.

 

Turco. Most of the pieces in First Poems were written in traditional styles while I was experimenting in various ways — trying to learn how to write, really. Donald Justice called them exercises [in his "Foreword" to the book], but I think that perhaps a few are better than that.³ Those poems that I felt never rose above the level of exercise were thrown away. At the time, I felt that the pieces in the book were relatively successful, in terms of the forms with which I was experimenting. In the summer of 1959, which I spent partly at Yaddo,⁴ I began to experiment with syllabics, and since that time a good many of my poems have been written in syllabics rather than in accentual-syllabics.

 

Heyen. Would you read us two or three poems from Awaken? We're starting to talk too much, and we'd like to hear some of your poems.

 

Turco. I tried to give Awaken some kind of consistency as well as relevance; I tried not only to pick out the best syllabic poems I'd written between 1959 and 1967, but to arrange them in such a way as to give the book some sort of overall structure. It was my intention to do this in two ways: by following the seasons, and by following people. The first poem in the book, which was meant to set these two overall themes, is called

 

THE TOWNSFOLK

 

                           There is, first, the road,

                  which goes nowhere out of

nowhere endlessly.  And beside

                  it, beside the road, grass

         and flowers growing, some trees,

 

                           leaves covered with dust.

                  A barn stands caught in a

twist of the road, paint peeling in

                  the insensible sun.

         Somewhere a dove mourns under

 

                           eaves.  A phoebe calls

                  out the season crisply,

and the townsfolk move out of no-

                  where, walking, going no-

         where with birdcalls and flowers.

 

Fitzgerald. How about going right into another one? For instance, "Lines for Mr. Stevenson"?

 

Turco. This is an elegy. I got the idea from listening to the television commentator Eric Sevareid just after Adlai Stevenson had died. Sevareid quoted a sentence Stevenson had spoken a few days before he was stricken. These words caught my ear and my attention, and I didn't want them to die with their speaker. So I took them and invented some more lines to be put into Mr. Stevenson's mouth, to try to sum up his life and his point-of-view at the end of his life, So this is called "Lines for Mr. Stevenson" — they are lines for him, in his memory, and they are also lines for him to speak, at the end of his career. The last lines of the poem are actually Stevenson's as quoted by Eric Sevareid:

 

LINES FOR MR. STEVENSON

 

                  Here, music

         is martial.  Wars and their rumors

echo among these cold walls.  I recall

                  one who kept

 

                  the beat with

         his shoe — the cadence of its heel

used a desk in a way I could not have

                  dreamed.  A world

 

                  speaks in so

         many tongues, it is difficult

to hear truth whispering out of Babel.

                  Even so,

 

                  one must try.

         At least, I believe so, and one

will be chastised for daring to believe:

                  the single

 

                  conviction

         must stand against the myrmidons

of truism and rumor — must prevail

                  at last, or

 

                  there is no

         hope.  But flesh tires; the mind will

wear it out if the drums don't wear it down.

                  Even the

 

                  warrior

         need not fight forever.  Where are

the young men?  There is music I should like

                  to hear; for

 

                  a while, I

         would just like to sit in the shade

with a glass of wine in my hands, and watch

                  people dance.

 

         I suspect, by the way, that that's one of those poems we were discussing earlier that has a built-in self-destruct mechanism, an unplanned obsolescence, Because Stevenson never achieved the presidency, he will be a minor figure of the post-World War II period. I'm sure there is a whole generation now living who have never heard of him, who know nothing of the fact that he was the United States Ambassador to the United Nations. The incident alluded to in the poem of Russia's Nikita Khruschev taking off his shoe and beating the top of the desk in the U. N. Assembly was notorious at the time, but I can't imagine many people born after the war knowing anything about it, unless they are history students in college.

 

Heyen. Nevertheless, that's a very fine poem. And it's a short leap, I was thinking as you were reading to another poem from Awaken, Bells Falling — "The Burning Bush." The speaker of "The Burning Bush" also wants to hear another kind of music. We have the humanist Adlai Stevenson trying to improve his life; now, in "The Burning Bush" — which is a Christmas tree — the speaker wants to find some kind of music out there. This poem ends very ironically, and I think this is another one of your voices.

 

Turco. I think we do want to understand ourselves, at the same time that we're afraid to find out what we are. We'll make a half-hearted gesture, perhaps, toward attempting to find our essential selves, but finally, perhaps, The man in "The Burning Bush" is like that:

 

THE BURNING BUSH

 

                  He touched the switch

         and lit his burning bush,

         then waited for a voice

                  to come chiming,

green as ever, from among

 

                  its needles.  He

         listened hard, but the spheres

         made no music of their

                  colors, and the

angel sitting on top of

 

                  everything just

         sat there holding a bulb.

         Maybe it was the wires:

he checked them, but

                  could find no short anywhere —

 

                  all the lights were

         tight in their sockets; no

         cane's cellophane was caught

                  in anything

electrical.  The angel

 

                  was shedding spun

         glass hair everywhere, but

         glass is no conductor.

                  He sat and he

waited.  The dark windows flashed

 

                  back the light of

         his burning bush.  The house

         hummed with sleep, with couches

                  stolid as cows

chewing carpet cuds.  Comfort

 

                  bleated in dim

         corners void of any

         echo.  Once, the furnace

                  rumbled under

him like a tame inferno:

 

                  for a moment

         he thought that the bush had

         started to speak.  At last

                  he gave up, turned

off the angel and its lights.

 

                  In the darkness

         his bush loomed against the

         window through which cold stars

                  came stabbing out

of a wind he had not heard,

 

                  nor wished to hear.

         Snow lay trackless in his

         yard, but at his panes some

                  sound, like fingers

touching for purchase or for

 

                  entry, moved and

         scratched, scratched on the frost-etched

         glass.  Open! said the wind;

                  wings battered his

door.  Trembling, he tried the lock

 

                  and went to bed.

 

Fitzgerald. A wonderful climax! I want to change the pace a bit here and ask you about another of your books, The Book of Forms, which is a book about the techniques of poetry.⁵ I think most of us know your immense interest in these techniques, and I wonder if you would tell us in what ways your own poetry mirrors these interests that you have.

 

Turco I suppose one of the reasons I did The Book of Forms is that I got interested, when I was just starting to write seriously, in how to write. I was in the Navy from 1952 to 1956 — I'd gone right in after high school. I had no teachers, and I had no one around me of whom I could ask questions...boatswain's mates don't know much about poetry. So I managed to get hold of some books that had been recommended to me by a little magazine editor, and I simply went through them; from that I got interested in the various and sundry ways one could write. There isn't any one right way of writing, I figured that the more I could learn, the more possibilities there might be for me to be able to do what I wanted to do.

 

Fitzgerald. What kinds of books did you read, then?

 

Turco. They were books such as introductions to poetry, anthologies, handbooks, collections of poems by single poets, and so forth, I started to work in the forms and began to teach myself something about all kinds of metrics and "free verse" [prose prosodies]. Then I discovered that no one had really tried to go through all of the forms that had been used traditionally in American and British history — including poetry written in prose forms. In 1959 I began to work on getting up a complete rehearsal of all the forms in English-language poetry. The book kept expanding over the years, and eventually it became a complete handbook. I wasn't interested in telling anybody how to write. I just wanted to have a reference book available that was as simple and concise as I could make it.

 

Heyen. Are you more comfortable in one particular form than in another?

 

Turco. No. I continue to write in various ways. I think that if you have at your command a range of technique, you can choose those elements you need to use for any particular poem you are driven, or — an old-fashioned word — "inspired" to write. If you have nothing to work with, you will produce nothing.

 

Fitzgerald. One of my chief interests is satire. What kinds of forms do you think are right for satire?

 

Turco. Well, one of them is Skeltonics.

 

Fitzgerald. I'm very fond of Skeltonics. I wish you'd give us an example of that. Tell us a little about what Skeltonics are.

 

Turco. Rather than tell you, I'll read you the first part of my...that is, Wesli Court's "Odds Bodkin's Strange Thrusts and Ravels." Skeltonics is an insistently rhymed two- and three-stress accentual line.

 

Fitzgerald. May I interject something here? I think one of the interesting things about this poem is that, as in the Stevenson poem, and as in so many of your others, you've created a fictional persona to carry the burden of the poem, and this takes care of the story line very nicely.

 

Turco. "Odds Bodkin's Strange Thrusts and Ravels" is a contemporary poem written in the form invented, of course, by John Skelton, a fifteenth-century English poet. The form has been called "tumbling verse" too — it really tears along. The persona of Odds Bodkin is that of a clodhopper doggerelist who aspires to be a poet himself — and, speaking from his point of view, he takes off in several "fits" to attack various schools of current poetry and sundry poets.

 

Fitzgerald. What do you mean by "fit"?

 

Turco. A "fit" is another word for canto, or section of a longer poem. But in this particular case Wesli and I thought the word "fit" was more appropriate than "canto."

 

Fitzgerald. I agree — it "fits" nicely.

 

Turco, This is from the "Prologue" of

 

ODDS BODKIN’S STRANGE THRUSTS AND RAVELS

 

         Sirs, my name is Odds,

of hods a worshiper, of clods

descended, an eater of pods —

my surname Bodkin,

of bad stock and odd kin

offsprung; can nod, can

grin, do odd jobs, japes,

queer faces, apes,

may jingle and rime

when the mood moves and the time

is promiscuous.  Sirs, I'm

harmless, a happy man,

rimer, chimer — none sublimer

in my fashion, no climber

I, I suit my station, pan

my branch for glitter and,

sirs, though there be not much

gold forthcoming, such

is my lot — I am content,

I bend as I am bent.

 

         But I have eyes, damme,

sires and Mesdames, eyes

to see what shall pass, arise,

what grubs, grovels, flies,

becomes, is, shall be, dies —

I have a nose

for good verse, bad prose,

a breast that sighs,

fingers to scratch,

two ears that nigh match, a tongue

to tell and a good lung

with a loud breath

to back the telling.  Death

shall still me, it may

be, but I shall stay

till I've said all I have to say,

and then it will not matter

how the sickle may tatter

my rags, rump, and marrow.  Flatter

I shall lie, but not lie to flatter.

 

         For I purpose to tell,

if it takes an ell

of foolscap, a fathomless well

of ink and one hell

of a heap of gall,

of my fellow rimers: all

their foibles and fables, small

honors and tall tales

told in school and out,

of the fleshless and the stout —

poor fish all: sucker, trout,

flounder, eel, grouper; bales

of pickled herring — of these

and many another: anchovies

in tins, oiled and boiled,

soiled, moiled, foiled, roiled,

salted and spoiled,

anemones, clams

served up in stuffings, chopped,

garnishing hams, Spams....  Stopped

be thy jaw, Odds!

Ye gods, how you do yaw!  Cods

and codpieces!  Get on with it —

swallow or spit!

 

And so on, for about 1300 more lines.⁶

 

Fitzgerald. What a delightful characterization that is!

 

Heyen. I wonder if you'd say something about the metric of the title poem of Awaken, Bells Falling, and then read it for us in conclusion.

 

Turco. There's not much to say about the metric other than that it's unrhymed quantitative syllabics. Dr. Fitzgerald mentioned that I seemed to be more interested in metrics and rhythm in First Poems. I think I'm still interested in rhythm, but perhaps in more various ways than formerly. This poem is about that day when a man wakes to the first cold of winter, He has a glimpse of his mortality, and he must confront it and see it clearly:

 

AWAKEN, BELLS FALLING

 

         It is a dawn quick as swallows

                  peeling to shear through peals belled

         from the one town steeple.  Autumn

         falls from green heat like a chestnut felled

out of its prickly jacket.  A single

 

         jay walks in the pines.  A cone of

                  cold sweeps chill's needles soughing

         through the day's screen doors.  There can be

         no cushioning today: to wake

shall be a sharp thing.  The person on his

 

         private ticking will be palsied

                  from his sheets, his numeral

         be rung, the coils of consciousness

         spring him into good woolen light,

without armament, to meet himself in

 

         mirrors and still halls.  Meet himself —

                  find his blood walking a thin

         line, alarums unsleeping him.

         Brazen as flame leaving ash for

the elm's sere leaf, autumn will have settled

 

         into summer's pallet — patchwork

                  and quilting: that poor thread of

         dreams curling at the doorsill.  It

         is done, the keen tone spoken, wrung

out of the bronze tongue of silence.  Winter;

 

         allcolor; whiteness.  Who will braid

                  our years now into what skein

         of circles?  Bells fail in the streets;

         the hall empties us into ice,

sheeted, sheer as mirrors, unreflecting.

____

¹Awaken, Bells Falling: Poems 1959-1967, by Lewis Turco, Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1968. Paper. Out-of-print; all poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures, The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper.

²"A Perceptive Romantic" by Gregory Fitzgerald, Iowa City, The Iowa Defender, iii:3l Monday, October 10, 1960, pp. 1-33.

³ First Poems by Lewis Turco, Francestown, NH: Golden Quill Press, 1960, A selection of the Book Club for Poetry. Cloth. Out-of-print; most poems collected in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, cloth; ISBN 1932842012, paper.

⁴An artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York.

⁵ The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paper. Out-of-print, but all material available in The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper.

⁶The poem first appeared in its entirety in Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing, 1973, pp. 332-363; ISBN 0879096373, paper. Out-of-print, but available from ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education. The poem may be found reprinted in The Collected Lyrics, op. cit.

 

 

 

The First Fourth of July Celebration in America

   

 
  Listen to Lewis Turco narrate The First Fourth of July

The first Fourth of July celebration in America took place in Massachusetts Bay Colony more than a century before there was a United States. On the 27^th of June 1636 the Selectmen of Salem ordered that on July 4^th all canoes in Salem were to be brought to the waterfront for a safety inspection. The day of the inspection brought the population together for a great social gathering. While the inspectors examined each boat and marked those that passed muster with a special seal, the young men of the community raced through the sunny day and the chill Atlantic waters while the folk stood on the beach and docks watching and applauding. The women were dressed in their finest clothes — bright colors were everywhere — and the younger ladies encouraged their swains circumspectly but unmistakably as they vied with one another.

Other boats of all descriptions joined the show, parading past the waterfront under full sail. When a canoe capsized, its occupants were immediately pulled from the swell by the closest boat and the canoe righted. The young men, dripping wet, would re-embark and set out for another tilt. The salt air whetted the appetites both of onlookers and participants; picnic lunches were spread along the beaches; neighbors dropped by to chat and share food. It was a grand day. Dr. George Emery, the new physician in town, found himself called upon to examine wrenched knees and cut fingers, but nothing serious. He enjoyed the outing as much as anyone else, for he soon understood that he was asked to look at a child not so much because anything was wrong, but because his new neighbors wanted the opportunity to look him over.

People talked for the rest of the summer about that Fourth of July celebration, and most remarked they hoped it would become an annual feature.

 

From Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1694, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2009, ISBN 978-1-932827, jacketed cloth, $54.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5; trade paperback, $39.95, 808 pages. ORDER FROM BARNES & NOBLE / ORDER FROM AMAZON 

 

Neanderthal and Modern Man

 

 

Image by sculptor Stephen Brois

 

Was there a historical Garden of Eden?  Were there two people named Adam and Eve?  Did Genesis take place?  Was there an actual Exodus?  Whether or not mankind is able to answer these questions with any degree of certainty or faith, we know logically that there had to be a first human being somewhere in the dim past; there had to be the First Mother (now called “genetic Eve”) and the First Father (“genetic Adam) of the race, and they existed in an environment that was conducive to their survival…or two environments, rather, because they lived at different times and in different places, but it was their DNA (YDNA in the case of the male, and mitochondrial DNA in the case of the female) that survived and spread throughout the living species of Homo Sapiens.

Who were the Cro-Magnon men and women?  What happened to their contemporaries, the brutish-looking, yet intelligent race called Neanderthal man who in fact had brains that were slightly larger than ours?  On Sunday, the fourth of July, 1993, in The New York Times Book Review there was an essay that discussed three new books on the subject: Did Cro-Magnon destroy Neanderthal, or did he die out naturally, cataclysmically, because of some inherent flaw in his constitution?

Back in the mid-'forties when I was a fifth or sixth-grader living on North Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut, I was crazy about prehistory.  One day I walked down to Ciotti's sundries store a couple of blocks away, on West Main Street, and I purchased a pamphlet about cavemen.  As usual, I walked back home with my nose buried in the book, and soon I was standing in front of my house showing it to Bob Strauss, my best friend from across the street, who looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages.  Shortly we came across the picture of a Neanderthal, a reconstruction of what he must have looked like, with his strong-featured face displaying its heavily-ridged brow (a bit like the brow-ridge I have myself).

As we stood before my two-storied house reading we happened to glance at my upstairs neighbor, old Mr. Longo, who was leaning over the railing.  To say we were startled is to understate, for the picture in my book could have been a photograph of our neighbor.  Bob and I stood comparing the man with his likeness for several minutes. There was no doubt about it, the man and the reconstruction were practically identical.

From that moment I felt certain I knew what had happened to Neanderthal man: he had been absorbed into the general Cro-Magnon population.  I have remained interested in the subject of mankind's origins all my life since.  We know that the race of Mankind spread across the globe from some point of origin in Africa.  Therefore, we can invent stories, like the book of Genesis, to explain our beginnings, and in those stories, though they be "lies," there will be a core of fact, and they will be lies in the service of truth.  This is a lie I invented to explain our origins to myself, from my chapbook of poems having to do with the legendary prehistory and history of the race, Legends of the Mists (1993):

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Dawn Song

DAWN SONG

 

"...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song." —

Margaret Mead

 

I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —

it breaks across my mind as across the eyes

of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,

and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

 

I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,

breaking across my terror and my surprise;

to know that I am the beast who knows his name:

Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun

of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

 

I am the first to see stone for a stone,

to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight

and know what it may do to the brittle bone

of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

 

I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone

held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.

The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.                  

He is the child of dust.  I am stone's son,

born of the first rose and the first lark's song.

 

Unfortunately, for decades paleoanthropologists and other sorts of scientists have been denying that Cro-Magnon and Neandertal ever interbred, and I have been growing more and more persuaded that these nay-sayers were correct. However, today, for me, is a red-letter day because as it turns out Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon did, after all, interbreed, and  “in the 7 May 2010 issue of Science, Green et al report a draft sequence of the Neandertal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals, and compare it with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. describes a method for sequencing target regions of Neandertal DNA. A News Focus , podcast segment, and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neandertal-related discoveries provide additional context for their findings.” Neanderthal man did not entirely die out, for two to four percent of his genome continues to exist in European and Asian human beings (though not in Africans).

Hence, it turns out that a sixth-grader living in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1946, judging from the picture projected from partial skeletons of a Neanderthal in a popular pamphlet and from the heavy ridge that boy himself had on his brow, turned out to be correct and the academic homo-sapiens living and pontificating in the interim between then and now, turned out to be wrong. 

This interbreeding did not, however, take place as I and others assumed, for the two races did not meet in Europe and simply combine. Rather, Neanderthal, who had left Africa first and spread into Europe, apparently was driven back into the Middle East by an ice age, and it was there that the two species interacted, living in the same caves at different times, perhaps, but in the same geographical locations simultaneously. This must have been the case because Neanderthal's genes in Homo Sapiens are found not only throughout Europe, but throughout Asia as well, where the Middle Eastern modern humans spread, but it is not found in African strains of our race, in peoples who never left the African continent in ancient times and thus never lived in the Middle East. 

People who are interested in this topic may be interested in the chapter titled "Deep Ancestry" in La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON

 

Here’s to Your Health!

 

  

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

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

 

HERE’S TO YOUR HEALTH AMERICA, AT LAST!

Lewis Putnam Turco

Damming The River Of Time

By Robert Chute

 

In this issue of The New York Review

a picture of the Ku Klux Klan parading,

September, Nineteen  Twenty-six, filling

the avenue, capital dome for background,

lots of American flags were fluttering.

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

 

Yesterday, March 22, Two Thousand-ten,

at the capital protesting the health reform bill,

men shouted “nigger” at a black congressman

and spat on another. Someone it seems

has dammed up the river of time again.

 

It’s harder to recognize the Klan in jeans

or leisure suits. The heart of their protest may

still be the color of their president’s skin.