Poetics and Ruminations

HEALTHCARE PLAN BLUES: An Interview

  

 

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

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

GM. Good morning.

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

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

DMG. Why was that?

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

DMG. What is wrong with the Public Option?

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

DMG. How so?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GM. That may very well be the case.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GM. I am against specialty options for American citizens.

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

GM. No, no….

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

GM. Um. Well. Perhaps….

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

GM. Well, yes, but….

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

REMARKS

Well, Wesli,

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

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

Rhina Espaillat

 

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

Wesli

 

Love It, Lew.

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

Moira Egan

 

Lew,

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

Clarinda Harriss 

  

Lew,

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

Understanding Our Hollow "Centrists"

Dennis Morton

  

Thanks, Lew. 

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

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

 
Ruth Harrison

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

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

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

Maybe I'm just old and crotchety ...

Ruth

 

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

Lew

 

Thanks, Lew. Enjoyed reading the Wesli Court interview!

Don Kimball

The Sullen Art of Lewis Turco

 

A Radio Interview by David Ossman

         David Ossman, a California poet and radio literature critic, recorded and produced several radio programs having to do with poetry in the early 1960s. This interview is one of a number Ossman conducted in 1960 and 1961 with contemporary, “new” poets, for a program entitled, “The Sullen Art,” broadcast on WBAI-FM Pacifica Radio in New York City. It is archived in the Canaday Center of the University of Toledo Library, in Collection #32, Box #39, which contains cassette tapes of the WBAI interviews.

         This collection, narrow in its time frame, yet comprehensive in the selection of its speakers, has two main components: a series of interviews conducted for the radio program “The Sullen Art,” and the proceedings of the Berkeley Poetry Conference held in July 1965. From the interviews, Ossman edited another program, “American Poetry, 1961.”

         While at WBAI-Pacifica Radio in New York City, Ossman developed three types of programs devoted to poetry: readings by poets of note; a series of readings by David Allen of poetry both old and new; and a series of interviews with younger poets, illustrated with readings of their works. It was early in 1960 that the idea of “The Sullen Art” was born. Ossman envisioned it as a continuing series of radio programs “inquiring into the sources and future of contemporary poetry.” He took the title for the program from Dylan Thomas’s poem, “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” since Ossman felt that poets, no matter how involved with the affairs of the world, ultimately created their work alone. He also deliberately chose to interview those younger, non-academic poets categorized as “new” or “beat,” sometimes quite erroneously. Ossman set out to show that the new poets were “not a bunch of illiterate, barbaric, slightly-criminal types,” as they had often been characterized in the popular press. In doing so, he interviewed over forty poets — some of whom have since achieved considerable fame. Ossman later published fourteen of the interviews in The Sullen Art: Interviews by David Ossman with Modern American Poets, [New York: Corinth, 1965].

         This interview with Lewis Turco was conducted by David Ossman at the New York City facilities of WBAI-FM Paciifica Foundation on September 26^th, 1961, and broadcast the following October 6^th at 9:30 p.m., but it has not previously been published. Turco was entering his second year as an Instructor at Fenn College (Cleveland State University since 1965). In the following spring of 1962 he would found the Cleveland Poetry Center at the College, an institution that continues to exist in the twenty-first century.

 

Ossman. Lewis Turco was born in Buffalo, New York, graduated from the University of Connecticut, did graduate work at the University of Iowa, the Writers’ Workshop there, and his first book of poetry, titled, perhaps appropriately, First Poems, was published last year by the Golden Quill Press. This book contains poetry written in his early twenties, at least that’s the description given in the Introduction by Donald Justice; also, poems by Lewis Turco have been published in “zillions” of magazines — that’s the only word I can come up with — at least a vast number of magazines that range from The Kenyon Review to Neon.

I’d like to discuss, first of all, the University of Iowa experience, the Writers’ Workshop there which has in recent years become quite a celebrated workshop, perhaps the most celebrated workshop in the country, as distinguished from, let’s say, a summer series like Bread Loaf. It’s certainly the best-known. A book recently has been released of work published there.¹ What was your experience at the Iowa Workshop?

Turco. Well, I didn’t go out to Iowa for the Workshop itself. I’d written to some people before I went out — W. D. Snodgrass being one, Stephen Berg being another — and they said the Workshop wasn’t really what one went out for, it was the contacts, and I must say my experience there proved that statement. The Workshop itself isn’t much; the young poets, young writers there in Iowa City are everything.

Ossman. What is the teaching technique at the Workshop? Is there a teaching technique?

Turco. No, not really. No “technique,” as such. You go into the Workshop; they have mimeographed manuscripts that they pass out to everybody, poems by the students there; you sit around and criticize these poems. When Paul Engle is there, which is not very often (perhaps that’s a good thing), he does most of the talking. When Don Justice has the workshop we have fairly good discussions — we had, I should say, they still have, of course. The discussions sometimes tend to be a bit vicious — there are a number of little schools, and cliques, and coteries in the Workshop. The atmosphere is not, I think, conducive to good writing; it’s the after-hours gatherings that really do the work.

Ossman. Do you think that any workshop atmosphere is conducive to good writing?

Turco. I think, yes. I’ve been teaching creative writing at Fenn College in Cleveland for a year now, and I think I learned a lot about how not to run a workshop by attending the University of Iowa. You don’t want to have the feeling in the workshop that you are God if you’re in charge of it, you don’t want to allow people to get vicious, you want the atmosphere to be one of constructive criticism. I think under these circumstances the workshop can do good work.

Ossman. During the time you were at the Workshop, who were your fellow poets? Can you name a group of people who might be known to the audience?

Turco. I’m sure I can. Of course Paul Engle is in charge of the workshop, Donald Justice is second man, and then among the students there were Vern Rutsala whose poems I’m sure you’ve seen — he writes mainly social criticism, he’s published in quite a number of magazines. There was a chap named Edmund Skellings who had a book out in 1960; Morton Marcus, a young poet; Robert Mezey, who went out to Stanford [University] and who won the Lamont selection this year; Raeburn Miller; a number of others: James Crenner who recently had a poem in the First Appearance Issue of Poetry — there were quite a few people out there.

Ossman. Do you think there’s a common style of writing that evolves from the experience at the Iowa Worksop?

Turco. Surprisingly, no. There are common styles. For instance, Robert Mezey, with Peter Everwine, another young poet, was sort of the mentor of the Neoclassical school out there. They wrote poems that at least had overtones that were similar. And Donald Justice of course wrote poems that were Romantic, and Jim Crenner was captured by Justice’s poetry which I regard very highly myself. And there are little groups that get together, like Vern Rutsala and Morton Marcus who both write poetry of social criticism. I didn’t belong to a group myself; I sort of played the field.

Ossman. People who are on this program almost inevitably say, “I never belonged to a “group.” (laughter). And I suppose if somebody else were there he’d probably say, well, Lew Turco belonged to….

Turco. Very likely, very likely.

Ossman. But that’s just keeping one’s own personality and individuality, which is a fine thing. The book which you published last year from Golden Quill — which is, I believe, a New Hampshire concern — was a selection of the Book Club for Poetry. It’s a fairly good-sized small volume of poetry, and I wonder: how do you feel about it now, one year after its publication and, what, five or six years after writing the poems in it?

Turco. When my First Poems was published all of my friends out in Iowa City pounced on me and said, “You should never have published this book. It’s not anything like your writing now.” I’ve talked to editors who won’t review my book because, they say, “We don’t want to type you according to these early poems” which are, as you said earlier, I believe, formal. I’m a formal poet anyway; I’m not writing this kind of formal poetry anymore, but I feel that the book does stand for several years of my life that were formulative, you know? I’m not ashamed of the book. I think that I’m going to have a better book out very soon, but it’s not the kind of poetry I’m writing now. I suppose you’d say it’s precocious student verse. Or something like that.

Ossman. Do you think it’s advisable for a poet under thirty to assemble poems which were written, let’s say in round numbers, from the age of twenty to twenty-five, who is now writing differently, to publish a book of, as you say, “formulative poetry” —do you think it’s advisable for him to publish, literally, his “first poems”?

Turco. Of course, you can’t really make a general statement about it. It depends on the poet. Robert Mezey is I think two years younger than I am, and his first book won the Lamont Award. He was writing poetry, real poetry, before I was even writing verse. He was — I don’t know — when he was eighteen he was a professional writer. Certainly his first book should have come out. In my case I think that the poems will stand perhaps not on the first or even the second level of poetry being written today, but as I said, I’m not ashamed of my book. Don Justice, of course, with his book two years ago was thirty-five when it came out — I don’t think you can make a general statement. It depends on the poet, how far along he’s gone, when he started writing, how serious he was about it for the first years.

Ossman. That reminds me of Ginsburg whose second book has appeared following — let’s see — five years from Howl, then Kaddish, and now his first poems are going to be published, written between ’45 and ’55, which will be a retrospective volume in that sense.

Turco. Well, I’m afraid I’d have to disagree with that. I can see putting out a first book of first poems, but I think it’s a little bit Narcissistic to go backwards in time and pull out old poems.

Ossman. It seems to me…well, I go back to the word “retrospective” — just as an exhibition might cover a showing of the work of a painter over a particular period, say 1900 to 1910, but I don’t know; for a poet it’s a sort of a very academic question….

Turco. Of course, in the world of publishing it’s a little bit strange sometimes. You’ve heard of Sam Bradley, the Quaker poet?

Ossman. Yes.

Turco. Well, he had two books out, and his second book was accepted first, so his first book is going to come out second. That was accidental. I wonder if I would agree that the second book should live on the reputation of the first book. I don’t know — maybe it’s better than the first book.

Ossman. Let’s talk about the formalism of these poems. I think there are two ways that a real poet starts out. One way is to begin with, let us say, formal training, feeling at home with, or at least reasonably comfortable with the writing of established verse forms: sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, and so on, or metrical forms and / or rhyme. And the other side of the coin is the poet who is unable, even at the beginning, to function within the constrictions of the form. Now eventually they all get up to a point where they’re writing their own poetry, but I wonder — now you obviously come from the side that writes formally.

Turco. Umm, I’m thinking that over — I’m not sure that I agree with you about my starting out formally. I think you’re right when you say people start writing in one of the two ways, either writing freely, which tends to be emotional kinds of verse, or in the forms, experimenting with meters, with rhyme, and so forth. In my creative writing classes I never object to a person who starts in either way. It just seems to me that a person who starts out expressing himself in “free verse” lines is going to take longer to achieve the degree of technical proficiency that the second type will — the man who sets himself specific problems to solve; who, by solving those problems learns something. I have nothing against, as I’ve said, the “non-formal” way of writing, but — I think, and this is only a theory — it’s going to take a longer time for him to achieve this degree of mastery over the language, over the things that go into making up verse. Not necessarily “poetry,” just “verse.” After all, what is poetry? I don’t know, you don’t know. Nobody knows.

Ossman. But, Lewis, I’m wondering what your distinction is between poetry and verse because I make a distinction too.

Turco. Well, I would say that a good man who knows his craft can write competent verse — unfortunately, that’s the kind of thing that’s being written all over the country. Competent verse is not necessarily poetry.

Ossman. Let me stop you there. Now, it seems to me that this competent verse that is being written and widely published all over the country is having something of an ill effect on those poets who are starting formally. I find that the vast number of young poets that I read in magazine after magazine who have talent can’t see, can’t open up, are under the influence, whether directly or indirectly, of the poets who are content with a kind of easy verse. I think this is very bad, and does not bode well for the development of a really rich American verse, let’s say, in the 1960s.

Turco. Well, let me say first of all that there’s damn little “easy” verse being published in this country. “Easy verse” — Edgar Guest: now that’s easy verse.

Ossman. Phyllis McGinley won the Pulitzer Prize, let’s not forget that.

Turco. You have to give Pyllis McGinley a little more credit than that, though, because just to be able to say something as easily as she seems to be saying it takes a tremendous amount of craft, a tremendous amount of skill. No, if you have something beyond the craft it is bound to creep through the façade of form. If you do not, you’re going to stay where you are. Certainly you need something to jar you, everybody does, but just being jarred isn’t enough. The people who keep trying to write real poetry are very few, I will admit, but then they never would have written it anyway. Whether or not there were any influences in the country that you say are keeping them down. You’ve got to be honest with yourself, you’ve got to say, “Look, I’ve written this thing, is it really what I want to say, or is it just saying something very cleverly or very badly, or very “freely,” or whatever. Poetry is actually self-examination put into solid substance, into ways of saying what you really mean, and if you don’t really mean anything, you’re not going to write poetry, whether you’re a Beatnik or a vesifier, or a syllabicist, or a whatever.

Ossman. Well, of course the meaning has to be there and the craft has to be there, I think we all accept that, but I’d like to make mention of another thing, and that’s an article you wrote called, “The House of Mirrors” that was published in the Spring 1961 issue of The Midwest Review in Nebraska. You make several points about new writing today, and go into the barriers against the writing of verse poetry. You say, for example, “One of the unwritten laws of contemporary verse is, “Thou shalt show no sentiment.” Another is, “There is sex, perhaps even gentle descriptions of the love act from which a moral is drawn, but often the lack of emotional involvement leaves the reader with the feeling that this is a scene with which he has no connection. If one is sentimental one runs the risk of being corny.” Another commandment is, “Thou shalt not be funny.” Another, “Thou shalt not stray from iambic pentameter.” These seem to me to be rules that are characteristic of this group of poets that I was talking about and the younger poets who are under their influence. It is not true of the group that you call the “Beatniks” but that I choose to call, for lack of a better term, “The New American Poets” as defined by the anthology of that title. I prefer not to call them all “Beatniks,” there are only three or four “Beat” poets anyway.

Turco. When I said “Beatniks” I wasn’t talking about people like Robert Duncan or Robert Creeley….

Ossman. But these rules do apply to the so-called “academic” poets, but they don’t seem to apply to Creeley, Duncan, [Charles] Olson, and….

Turco. Nor do they apply to James Wright, or Theodore Roethke, nor do they really apply to Richard Wilbur although he’s been accused of it very often. What I said in that article was that, I suppose essentially, that you can, A., either want to be a poet or B. want to be accepted as a poet. There is a grave and great difference between those two statements. If you really want to be a poet you’re not going to remain “influenced” for very long. You’re going to say, “I’ve learned as much as I can from these people, and now I’m going to do what I want to do.

         Or, if you want to be accepted as a poet, you can say, “I’m going to write the kind of verse that everybody who counts is writing,” and simply stay there. Now I say, further, beyond that article, that the people who stay under this influence would probably never have been able to write great poetry, real poetry anyway.

Ossman. But they are published anyway.

Turco. Certainly.

Ossman. Most of the magazines, most of the literary magazines in America, most of the quarterlies anyway, take these poems, and they’re taken immediately.

Turco. They’re not taken immediately — the magazines try to get the best that they can — but you know, that’s another aspect of our poetic culture, the tremendous number of magazines that are being published in this country. You can, I think, get a poem published if you just keep sending it out long enough; you’ll eventually find the right magazine for it. If you run down the list of magazines in the International Guide that Trace magazine puts out, eventually you’re going to find a publisher for your poem — maybe not easily, but you don’t want to get into the kind of magazines that will take that kind of verse anyway, do you, if you’re a real poet? You’ll try to make the big magazines, the good magazines, the ones that you think are good, let’s put it that way.

Ossman. Yes, but I think you have to really pick and choose those magazines. Many poets who are not formal poets cannot get into “big” magazines, like Kenyon Review, let us say, or any number of other quarterlies and reviews. I personally would not send a poem to Kenyon Review because what would be the use? I would get it back.

Turco. You’d be wrong. You’re talking about John Crowe Ransom’s Kenyon.

Ossman. Yes.

Turco. Well, he’s not there anymore. Kenyon has a new editor — Robie Macauley is open to a much wider range of poetry than Ransom was.

Ossman. Maybe I’ll have to revise my practices regarding the Kenyon Review, but there certainly are twenty or thirty others in this category that….

Turco. Let’s talk about The Hudson Review. Do you know Archie [A. R.] Ammons’ verse? I was recently at Bread Loaf [Writers’ Conference] and met Archie Ammons for the first time. He writes a long, loose free verse kind of poetry. Now The Hudson Review likes his work well enough to have published ten or fifteen pages of his poems in last fall’s issue. He’s writing poetry that’s not like any other poetry in the country, I think. It doesn’t approximate Creeley’s work, it doesn’t approximate Ginsberg’s, it doesn’t even approximate Carl Sandburg’s. These magazines are always interested in getting what they consider to be the best poetry available. Unfortunately, there’s damn little really good poetry available.

Ossman. Do you think things are breaking down into a kind of median ground now? It used to be that there were the “little” little magazines that things were published in, then there were the big ones that you didn’t even care about. Do you think things are going toward a center ground? I’ve talked with a number of editors who are trying to put out a magazine which will publish not only Allen Ginsberg or not only Donald Justice but both Donald Justice and Allen Ginsberg. And then I said that this is a thing to be desired, a magazine which will publish all the good work that’s being [written], not just one kind or another. But it seems to me majority of the magazines are devoted to just one kind of poetry or another.

Turco. Unfortunately, the reason for that is that maybe one editor runs the magazine. He has his point of view. I haven’t met an honestly catholic magazine editor, though I’ve met a number of men who say they are, but whose catholicity, rather than small letter catholic is large letter Catholic. And if a magazine isn’t run by one editor, it’s run by a board of editors, and so a poem is run through this board and a truly outstanding poem may be liked by one of the editors, but the other four will vote against it.

         I don’t know what the answer is; I don’t see any reason why there should be any number of magazines that are truly catholic because, if you don’t like The Kenyon Review, if you don’t like the Hudson Review, if you don’t like Neon, if you don’t like some of the other magazines, don’t publish in them. Publish in the ones you do like, that you’re able to get into. Some people publish in The New Yorker — I’m not one of them; some people publish in The Saturday Evening Post — I’m not one of them; some people publish in The Atlantic and in Harper’s and The Ladies’ Home Journal — I’m not one of any of those, nor are a number of excellent poets that I know personally.

Ossman. Well, just to conclude this so that we’ll have some time to hear some of your poetry, perhaps this is advice, but the thing not to do is run down the list of magazines in The International Guide, but to read the magazines…

Turco. Absolutely.

Ossman. …and to say, “This is a magazine that I want to be in because I feel comfortable in this company,” regardless whether it’s Hudson or Neon or Yugen or The Evergreen Review or Partisan.

Turco. That is the attitude that I think more people ought to cultivate.

Ossman. Let’s hear a selection of some recent poetry of yours.

Turco. I’d like to start by reading two brand new poems. The first one was written just the other day. It’s called, “Carnival Evening, on a Painting by Rousseau”² in the Metropolitan Museum.

         A painting: tall trees.  The dark tips rise

out of black lace, like clear sight out of fancy,

         and stand at the verge of the night sky.

 

         The moon is a coin lying deep within

the reversed reflection of a well.

         Nothing moves.  The stars are shavings of the moon's

 

         metal.  Two small clouds wait for the wood

to impale them on darkness: they have impaled

         themselves: the duplicititous forest

 

         looks downward at the brown cabin becalmed in

a meadow.  Lights in the window tell

         their falsehoods too; no one is within.  Lanterns

 

         and lamps shine on urgent imptiness.

There is a promise of motion, of voids soon

         to be filled, but for now (and perhaps

 

         now shall be forever) Pierrette stands hand

in hand with Pierrot, staring, out

         of solitude near the margin of the wood,

 

         across the summerless meadow, her

carnival eyes, and his, transfixed by

         the poor dreams of their beholder.

 

         The next one is called, “The Old Dog Acts Young, A Semi-ballad.” It was written a couple of weeks ago at Bread Loaf.

 

Rumple her skirts, stick out my tongue,

She’s young as the moon, and the moon is young,

         And the world is no kennel for Old Dog Tray,

I’m up on my haunches smelling the bung

         Of the sweet, sweet bitch out getting gay

 

In her first dry heat with an old-bones pup —

Waggle your tail, Bo, sniff it up!

         Your hair is grizzled, your tail is limp,

Your eye rolls bloody in its cup.

         Come on, Bo, admit it, you’re the sparest gimp

 

That ever came down with a case of hots —

She knows it too, but she likes it lots.

         I can teach her whatever she needs to know

While she ties me a bellygripe full of knots,

         But I won’t settle down, not even though

 

When the night comes down and the moon’s a-prowl

There’ll be nothing at all to do but howl

         And lick my scratches and bare my fangs

And sit on that hillside there to scowl

         At the young dogs scouting the woods in gangs.

 

Well, Bo, well, Tray, then live it wild,

You were never a jackass, you’re not a child,

         For a while yet there’s marrow in those bones.

You’re not ready yet to be stacked and piled

         In a lily bed with a bunch of stones,

 

So this is the thing: At any old age

A hound can learn what it’s like to rage

         At the bitchy moon, but she won’t care.

She’s up there alone, and you’re in your cage

         While her musk goes snarling in your hair.

 

The next poem is called, “Letter to W. D. S.,” W. D. Snodgrass. It was written after I read his book, Heart’s Needle.

 

                           Christ, you made me sad

                  with your love tunes gone awry,

         the bitter root twining mossily

among the pages of a songsheet tossed to

 

                           wind down the wind and

                  moulder in a lost cranny

         of some meadow.  I'm not used to loss,

though aware of it, as one is aware of

 

                           cancer.  A woman

                  I knew, wrinkled like blown snow,

         died of a wild part of herself which

ravened its own life.  Her children, grown to seed

 

                           themselves, kept locks on

                  their tongues, but their hearts' faceless

         prisoner snarled at the world behind

portcullises of eyes.  Like those striped lines of

 

                           yours, that scourge of ink

                  and pillory of paper.

         Why did you flay yourself there, in the

marketplace?  Was it because sorrow shown is

 

                           simpler than covert

                  loneliness?  All of us are

         alone.  The world we blow through is cold.

Snow fetters our sorrow.  Still we flute and fife.

 

The next one is called “Clambake.”

 

                           Nor was it the moon,

appointed, pure in outline,

         huge among stars, painted;

                  nor was it the wind.

 

                           Chinese firecrackers,

Chinese lanterns; O the flare

         and the pop!  Acres of

                  summer went well with

 

                           the fields of light made

by the moon tugging at tides.

         And the gale mewled offshore.

                  You could hear the hiss

 

                           of rockets.  The hiss of

the flames on the beach.  The

         surf's hiss too, the kiss of

                  sand.  It was not the

 

                           moon.  Nor was it the

old wind offshore, moaning.

         It was partly thjese, partly

                  their white permanence

 

                           and cold  But it was

the pop too, the flare, the

         flash of flame.  Short.  Slight.  Red and

                  unappointed.  The

 

                           scrim of those quick, quaint

with life.  The scream of bright

         rockets; night's backdrop; summer's

                  curtain.  Clams in a

 

                           bucket.  Fire them, shell

them in the summer dark.

         A heap of shells on the shore

                              looks like the moon's shards.

 

This next one is called, “My Country Wife.” Just for the note, it won the Academy of American Poets Prize at the University of Iowa last year, which goes to prove, I think, that any kind will go.

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 next one is called, “Raceway.”

 

I.

                  My raceway of sheets last night became

a cool trotter, unwinding with grace.  Today,

         autumn peeps imponderably out of

                  the soggy drought July had posted

                           on the foothills.  It is August

 

                  here in Saratoga; the races

open tomorrow.  Yesterday a filly

         worked out her own odds, snapping two of her

                  ankles while we watched.  She was done in

                           by a green syringe.  She lounged on

 

                  the turf, staring from one farthest eye,

both her forehooves angled like ballerina

         slippers.  With her, summer has stagggered: it,

                  too, soon will drop and the jockey sun

                           grow gray above the world's brown hide.

 

II.

                           When a thoroughbred loses its

                  pins, there's no more running.  Snort if you

         will, but reason, too, exhausts itself when

cause falters.  Men have run down when barred from the

                  race.  Summer is a fragile courser

 

                           here in the North; our racers are

                  all imports from the southland.  Summer

         will not slow for falling leaves, nor haul our

sleighs: it will linger, pawing its reluctance

                  to leave, but its strength is of only

 

                           short will, meant for one swift effort.

                  Watch the summer run its oval, it's

         a winner now — nothing can stop it!  The

stands urge their encouragement upon open

                  air; shouts fall and rise like the fall wind

 

                  that moves out of the foothills now, sure,

                  pervasive, wild.

                                        Blooded summer shies.

 

Ossman. The final poem, “Raceway,” lends its title to to Lewis Turco’s anticipated book titled Summer’s Raceway,³ which we expect to come out soon. His previous book was published by Golden Quill press; needless to say, Turco can be found in a good many magazines and publications, and will continue to be found there for some time. Thank you very much.

 

Turco. Thank you.

¹Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry, Selected from the Writing Workshops of the State University of Iowa, New York: Random House, 1961, on which Lewis Turco worked as Editorial Assistant to the editor, Paul Engle, Director of the Workshop.

²Published as “Pocoangelini 17” in Pocoangelini: A Fantography and Other Poems, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970.

³Summer’s Raceway and Other Poems was the title of Lewis Turco’s M. A. thesis at Iowa in 1962. It was never published. His next collection was The Sketches, published by American Weave Press of Cleveland as the American Weave Award Chapbook for 1962. The other poems included in the interview were collected in Awaken, Bells Falling: Poems 1959-1968, Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1968.

Wicked!

This review / interview by Deirdre Fleming appeared in the Portland, Maine, Sunday Telegram on Sunday, March 15th, 2009, in the Audience Section C on pages 6-5 (in that order). For a larger version, please click on the images below:

www.starcloudpress.com/SatansScourge.html,  6137 East Mescal Street, Scottsdale, AZ; 85254-5418, ISBN 978-1-932827, jacketed cloth, $54.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5; trade paperback, $39.95, 808 pages.

 

The Biden-Palin Debate

A Cyberspace Interview.

Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. October 3, 2008. My name is Wesli Court, a reporter for the Dresden Mills Gazette, and I’m back at my post beside the counter of the Dresden Take-out and Texaco, waiting for another local resident to come in so that I can interview him or her. Ah! Here comes one now — I see it’s my previous interviewee again, Dick Everyman. How are you this morning, Mr. Everyman?

E. Fine. You?

W. Very well, thank you. Can you answer a few more questions today?

E. Why not?

W. Did you watch the vice-presidential nominees debate last night?

E. I did.

W. What did you think of it?

E. Sarah Palin reminded me of my childhood.

W. Oh? How’s that?

E. I kept thinking about the nursery rhymes my mother read to me.

W. Really? Which ones?

E. Well, “Wynken, Blinken and Nod,” for one.

W. Any others?

E. “An Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe,” except in this case you’d have to substitute “Young” for “Old.”

W. But Sarah Palin doesn’t have so many children.

E. She will have. If she’s Veep we can watch her waddle around the White House.

W. Isn’t that a bit unkind?

E. Maybe, but that doesn’t make it a lie.

W. Did you see her Katie Kouric interviews?

E. Some.

W. Did they remind you of your childhood too?

E. Yes. I thought of “Little Bo-Peep” who lost her sheep and couldn’t tell where to find them.

W. Did you see a difference between her and John McCain?

E. “Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee,” except he’s living on borrowed time, has more tracks, and has more wrinkles.

W. What do you think of the Republican nominees’ plans for the economy?

E. “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, If turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side, And if ‘ifs’ and ‘ands’ Were pots and pans, There’d be no work for tinkers,” or anybody else, for that matter.

W. What about Palin’s lipstick remarks?

E. Pigs won't fly, even wearing lipstick.

W. Does John McCain bring to mind any nursery rhymes?

E. Just one.

W. What’s that?

E. “Humpty Dumpty.”

W. Then you believe that Barack Obama will win the election?

E. In a landslide.

W. Really?

E. I’ve been saying that since McCain was nominated.

____________________________________________________________________

COMMENTS

Aside from the fact that his arms are too short, and in spite of his history as a war hero (though my father - also a Vietnam Vet - says I should ignore all that), I don't like McCain because he just wants to be president too badly. He wants it so badly that he is taking what little reputation he has left and banking it on whatever patchwork coalition he can thread together. In addition to being an obvious move to get the female vote, his choice of Sara Palin sold his soul to a greater devil. That drew the obnoxious crowd into his recent rallies (in which, unfortunately, even his wife got nasty) where he got booed for saying something nice about his opponent. 

What the hell kind of people boo at their own candidate? 

I see his ambition as his downfall, a tragedy in the classical sense, just as I see Sarah Palin bowling herself over in a comic sense as Tina Fey defines her image more than all McCain's team can. There's a new tragedy/comedy mask for you. 

Paul A. Austin

Lew,

Consider this (from someone who is voting Independent this time}:

Obama/Biden vs McCain/Palin, what if things were switched around? Would the country's collective point of view be different?

What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three-month-old Down syndrome infant and an unwed, pregnant, teenage daughter?

What if Joe Biden had been given a $150,000 wardrobe by the Democratic National Committee?

What if John McCain were a former president of The Harvard Law Review? 

What if Barack Obama had finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class? 

What if McCain had only married once, and Obama were divorced? 

What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she had suffered a severe, disfiguring car accident? 

What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and later had a long affair while he was still married? 

What if Michelle Obama were the wife who not only became addicted to painkillers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization? 

What if Cindy McCain had graduated from Harvard?

What if Obama were seventy-one years old?

What if he owned several homes?

What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? ("The Keating Five" were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s)? 

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker? 

What if Obama couldn't read from a teleprompter? 

What if Obama were the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing planes? 

What if Obama were the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem? 

What if Michelle Obama's family had made their money from beer distribution? 

You could easily add to this list. 

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are? Might racism have been a factor in this political race? 

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference. 

Here are the educational Backgrounds of the candidates: 

Barack Obama: Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations. Harvard - Juris Doctoris (Doctor of Laws) Magna Cum Laude. 

Joseph Biden: University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science. Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctoris (Doctor of Laws). 

John McCain: United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899. 

Sarah Palin: Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester; North Idaho College - 1 semester,  general study; University of Idaho - 2 semesters, journalism; Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester; University of Idaho - 3 semesters, B.A. in Journalism. 

Education isn't everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world. You make the call.

Tony A.

Actually, Tony, 

I received your e-mail message on October 24th, and the poll numbers aren't that close anymore, though your comments are well-taken.

Lew

Everyman in the Street

A CYBERSPACE INTERVIEW

Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. September 28, 2008. My name is Wesli Court, a reporter for the Dresden Mills Gazette, and I am standing beside the counter of the Dresden Take-Out and Texaco. With me is my sketchist, Art Penman, and we are about to speak with a gentleman who has just entered the store to pay for his gasoline. Good morning, sir. What is your name, please?

D.E. My name is Dick Everyman.

W. C. Mr. Everyman, would you mind answering a few questions for the Dresden Mills Gazette?

D. E. Okay.

W. C. Are you a registered voter?

D. E. Yes, I am.

W. C. What is your opinion of the people who are running for the Presidency of the United States?

D. E. Depends. Which one?

W. C. How about the Republican nominee?

D. E. I think in his dotage he’s raising McCain.

W. C. And the Democrat?

D. E. Lots of racists are afraid we’re turning into an Obama nation.

W. C. How about his running mate?

D. E. He should start Biden time before he blurts again.

W. C. How about the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee?

D. E. She started out pale, and she’s still Palin. The depth of her ignorance is appalling.

W. C. How do you feel about the bailout of the country’s financial institutions taking place right now?

D. E. I thought the Bush League had finished looting the national treasury, but I was wrong. And they’re going to get away with it again.

W. C. What’s your opinion of the Secretary of the Treasury?

D. E. He, too, apPauls, son.

W. C. Which party do you think you’ll vote for in this election?

D. E. Well, in the recent past I’ve voted Green, but they’ve reached their Nader once too often.

W. C. Then you’re undecided?

D. E. Hell, no! If you think I want a third term sitting in the Bushes with McCain and his sugar, you’re crazy.

W. C. Thank you for your time, Mr. Everyman.

D. E. Welcome. How much do I owe you for gas?

 

Making the Language Dance and Go Deep

Edited by Jack Welch

This interview was conducted by Donald Masterson in the fall of 1980. At the time, the State University of New York College at Oswego, where Lewis Turco was Professor of English and Director of the Program in Writing Arts, was hosting the third S.U.N.Y. state-wide writers' festival. Turco's chapbook, Seasons of the Blood, had just appeared, and he was putting the finishing touches on his American Still Lifes, which would be published in September, 1981. Masterson and Turco met in the poet's campus office and discussed at great length (easily two and a half times the length seen here) the history, the teaching, and the craft of poetry, along with the requisite attitude of the professional poet. The interview originally appeared in The Cream City Review of the University of Wisconsin - Milwaukee, vol. 8, nos. 1-2, 1983.

Masterson. would you define the difference, if there is one, between one who writes poems occasionally, and publishes them, and someone who can be certifiably listed as a poet?

Turco. I imagine that what you're talking about is the difference between the professional and the amateur poet. Some people will no doubt feel that the phrase "professional poet" is a pejorative expression, but it seems to me that one is a professional poet when one dedicates one's life to writing poetry. I think that's the sole criterion one can apply. If poetry is an avocation, or if it's merely a means to an end — that is, let's say, a means to getting a job teaching, or of putting forward a political point of view — then I don't feel one can call oneself a professional poet. But that would be my criterion for almost anything; anyone who dedicates his or her life to a particular vocation is, in my estimation, a professional.

Masterson. What are the manifestations of a dedication to writing poetry?

Turco. I don't suppose that's a question that can be answered by anyone except oneself. Other people are going to have to examine one's academic and publishing record when someone who calls himself a "poet" applies for a teaching position or something similar, but I doubt that anyone but the writer himself can judge the depth of his own commitment.

Masterson. You wouldn't necessarily say that a person be considered a professional poet because he or she has two or three books or work in a number of periodicals? That would not meet the criterion?

Turco. Absolutely not. But if the dedication is to language, to its specific gravity, its meanings and associations, to its dance — its sounds, imagery, even to the way it looks on the page — then the person in question might call himself or herself a poet. There are many fine writers who were unpublished in their lifetimes who were obviously professional poets — Emily Dickinson, for instance, and Gerard Manley Hopkins; and there are some who have published a great deal who were obviously amateurs, as for instance Walt Whitman, who was much more interested in his "message" than in the language that carried the message. Emily Dickinson was the professional writer, for her life was totally dedicated to writing poetry, and Whitman was the amateur because his life was dedicated, not to writing poetry, but to propagandizing for a "new, American" kind of poetry and for various liberal causes and attitudes. Whitman was sometimes what I call an "agonist" — one who agonizes over and about what poetry is or ought to be, or who writes poems about poetry.

Masterson. But wouldn't some say that this is in a way very appropriate for Whitman because he stands at the beginning of modern poetry, and the agonizing would all have been very necessary at that particular moment in American literary history?

Turco. That's all perfectly true, but "agonist" is merely one of three categories we've been discussing — "professional, amateur, and agonist." The agonist is neither a professional nor an amateur, when you come right down to it; he or she is a public relations person for poetry, or a theorizer for poetry. But actually, Whitman was not so much the main theorist of what would after him be called "modernist" poetry; rather, Emerson was. Emerson was almost a pure agonist. Whitman merely put into practice the agonies of Emerson. In his poems, I think, Whitman was not so much interested in the dance of language as in, for one thing, the propagation of his own ego, and for another, in propagandizing for a liberal America.

Masterson. If that's the case for Whitman, then in some ways his inheritor in the 20th century was William Carlos Williams who was also in his own way a propagandist and one who made great claims for a liberal America in his poetry, but I gather that you would not claim that he was an agonist, but a true professional.

Turco. Whether I'm being clear or not, you seem to e getting what I mean by these terms. Yes, Williams was a professional. It wasn't in his poetry that he did all the agonizing you point to; it was in his letters to young poets and in what little prose he wrote, sometimes in his long poem Paterson and in In the American Grain. He was, in most of his poems, very much interested in the dance of language. He maintained that he wasn't interested so much in sound, but in image — he was one of the prime members of the school of poets called "Imagists" — but in fact he was also interested in the sonic dance of language. He invented a prosody which would do rhythmically for him what he wanted the language to do. He talked about the "breath pause," by which he meant grammatics: each line was to be a breath-length phrase. This as the same sort of idea as the five- or seven-syllable line of Japanese poetry, these lengths being just right to give vent to an "utterance," an emotive, short phrase, often a question or an answer, which is at the prosodic base of all the Japanese forms from the katauta to the haiku.

Masterson. You have worked with the Williams line, I believe, and with the eighteen-line form he invented, which you call the "triversen" in The Book of Forms.

Turco. Yes. In fact the first dozen poems, called "Twelve Moons," forthcoming in my American Still Lifes [and collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems 1959-2007], are all written in the Williams triversen form or in the triversen stanza. One is called

SEED MOON

In the night there was a crescent
thin as a breath
floating in the sky.

Now the sun has quickened;
it sprays the green meadows
with drops of light.

Birds pierce the trees
along the lake where grass
thrusts through the bluff.

In the houses of the village
there is the scent of savors --
the women move and the men rise.

Soon the earth will fill with voices,
the sounds of loam turning;
the sun will stretch to fill the sky,

and in the woodland the deer
will sample the air,
lift their heads to listen.

Masterson. Likewise, you've worked with the Japanese forms, I assume?

Turco. All the poems in my Seasons of the Blood [also collected in Fearful Pleasures] are in the Japanese forms. This one is a sedoka:

DIALOGUE

I am wearing blue
in honor of the sky. Shall
you wear green to honor earth?

I will don rainbows:
I will wear snow on my back —
white, allcolor forever.

Masterson. I hear the similarity in phrasing, but the tone is quite different.

Turco. Of course. The two books attempt different things. American Still Lifes has an American feel, and Seasons of the Blood has an Oriental one...I hope.

Masterson. The point you make, therefore, is that, even though Williams was a proselytizer for a certain kind of poetry, in a way a kind of American prophet following Whitman, his proselytizing was done outside of the realm of his poetry for the most part?

Turco. Now you've really put your finger on what a certain kind of American "poetry" is all about. It isn't about language, it isn't about art, it's about.., patriotism, I suppose I'd have to say. There are two main traditions in poetry. There's what I call "priest poetry," which is derived specifically from the liturgies and practices of various religions — prayers, incantations, sermons, and so forth; the tradition is millennia old. Others would call it Platonic poetry, I suppose, or Dionysian poetry. It is the romantic tradition. Then there's the so-called "art" poetry which is derived from work songs — rhythmic songs that women have always sung to their children while they were churning butter or whatever — which has nothing to do with religion. This is social poetry, Apollonian or Aristotelian, the classical tradition. American poetry, when it was defined by Emerson and Whitman, was defined specifically as priest poetry, but a particular kind, in order to distinguish it from European priest poetry. American poetry was to be anti-formal poetry, intuitive, "organic."

Whitman, as the prime priest poet of America, was concerned with mythologizing American experience in this "new" way. But Dickinson, who was interested not at all in vision or prophecy or anything like that (though she was most certainly interested in religious questions), was contemporaneously writing excellent art poetry which was also quintessentially and unmistakably American. It seems to me that priest poetry tends to be amateur and that art poetry tends to be professional.

Masterson. You see Whitman, then, as a kind of chauvinist?

Turco. Certainly. As a matter of fact, it seems to me that Whitman did something that was very clever indeed along that line. When he first began to write in the pages of The Brooklyn Eagle he was writing rhyming, metering verse, and anyone who wants to look up this stuff will find that it's terrible. Completely incompetent. The best surviving example of this sort of Whitman doggerel is "O, Captain, My Captain!" In verse Whitman had a tin ear. He could not handle traditional techniques. But then he discovered the Biblical systems of parallel prose writing, and he equated himself with America. Ever since, we have been idolizing him — I mean that literally. We have idolized a bad writer but a great chauvinist.

Masterson. How do you explain, then, William Carlos Williams' dedication to Whitman's work?

Turco. That is a myth. Some people claim that Williams is in "the Whitman tradition," but Hyatt H. Waggoner, in his book American Poets from the Puritans to the Present [1968; revised edition, 1984] claims that Williams knew very little about Whitman, and Waggoner is a pro-Whitman scholar. Williams was interested in only part of what Whitman was interested in. Waggoner talks about the mainstream of American poetry deriving from Whitman and Emerson, but then he makes distinctions among those poets who derive directly from Emerson's Transcendentalist credo, those who derive directly from Whitman's prose-poetry ["free verse"] practice, and those who derive from a combination of the two. William Carlos Williams derives, I would think, primarily from Whitman's practice, not from Emerson's agonism. That is to say, Williams was interested in Whitman's attempt to write in prose, thus getting away from traditional British practice. But rather than write prose poems, Williams invented a verse prosody — variable accentuals — that looks, acts, and sounds like prose most of the time. In this way he was like Whitman superficially.

Williams was also interested in the "common man," as Whitman professed to be, but in Williams' poetry the reader will find real people. In Whitman's poetry we find laborers mentioned and over-mentioned in catalogs of people, but the only person one will find is Whitman himself, or at least an image of himself that he projected. Williams was interested in Everyman; Whitman was interested in himself as the symbol of Everyman.

Those poets who derive primarily from Emerson might be people like Denise Levertov, people who are not so much interested in the way language works as they are in various kinds of propaganda. Levertov, of course, became the prototypical poet of the Vietnam War protest. Her major reputation rests on her anti-war poetry.

Masterson. What direction or directions has your poetry taken in the past few years? Judging from Seasons of the Blood [1980] and American Still Lifes [1981], you still write eclectically. I'd also be interested in a long-term picture of where it's been and where it's going.

Turco. When I began to write I was still a child, and I had a simple objective in mind. I enjoyed reading, and I felt that if I could, when I became an adult I would like to be able to do for other people what writers had done for me. I wanted to create worlds that were more interesting, perhaps, than the world I inhabited at the moment; to create characters who were interesting, and who would give insight into lives I could not lead myself, into human nature as it embodied itself in people put into situations and places no one person could possibly experience physically. In short, I wanted to embody life in the dance of language. I actually got started as a short story writer, but as I began to get into poetry I decided that what I wanted to do was write obviously good poems.

Masterson. What do you mean by that?

Turco. I mean poems that people could pick up and read and understand and enjoy, and that were obviously well-written.

Masterson. I'm still not quite sure what "obviously well-written" means. It's a very difficult thing to define, I'm sure.

Turco. It shouldn't be for anyone involved in teaching freshman composition. The writing should be well-structured and vivid, not private, not dense — that is, not opaque, though I wanted a textured poetry, certainly; textured thought and language.

A Cyberspace Interview with Bill Clinton

Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. Sunday, January 27, 2008. This interview was held in cyberspace on this date, the day after Senator Barack Obama won a decisive victory over Senator Hillary Clinton in the South Carolina Democratic primary, beating her by more than two to one. The interviewer for the Gazette was Wesli Court, political editor for our news sheet.

Gazette. Mr. President, it would appear that Senator Obama’s campaign is far from dead, as you have sometimes intimated it ought to be. He has, in fact, taken a major step toward becoming the first Black President in U. S. history. How do you respond to such an event?

Clinton. I don’t respond. It’s a joke. You people of the media just love to jump to conclusions that don’t exist. There’s no way Senator Obama can ever be the first Black President.

Gazette. That’s an astonishing remark. How can you make it?

Clinton. Because I was the “first Black President.” Ask anybody. Ask anyone who’s black, in fact. They’ll all say that I was the first Black President.

Gazette. I know that’s a claim that has been made, but you’re not ethnically or racially Black, so the claim is moot.

Clinton. No, it is not.

Gazette. Then why did practically all of the registered Black Democrats in South Carolina vote for Senator Obama rather than your wife? The state is 60% black, and 55% of its Democratic voters, including many whites, voted for him. That includes both black and white women.

Clinton. We’re thinking of asking for a recount. There’s something wrong with those figures.

Gazette. That would very likely be a futile gesture. Do you think that your being your wife’s attack dog might have had something to do with her defeat? She has now lost two big preliminary primary fights to Senator Obama, Iowa and South Carolina. The New York Times said today that, “Her advisers’ steady attacks On Mr. Obama appeared to prove fruitless, if not counterproductive, and the attack-dog role of former President Bill Clinton seemed to have backfired.”

Clinton. We may have to do some tweaking of our tactics in upcoming primary states. We will not be denied the White House a third time.

Gazette. “We?” That sounds as though you believe you’re going to share Hillary’s Presidency if she makes it.

Clinton. Well, she shared mine, didn’t she? And she parleyed that into a senatorship from New York State. She has over a decade of experience in American politics at the highest level, unlike Obama who has only a couple of years’ experience from a second-level state, Illinois.

Gazette. But your wife is a carpetbag senator, unlike Obama who has had a lot of experience in the local politics of his home state, most of it in elective positions. Hillary had never been elected to anything before she invaded New York and used her name recognition to win her office. You sound as though you look forward to sharing the power of your wife if she wins the Democratic nomination and the White House.

Clinton. I have fond mammaries of the White House, especially of the Oval Office.

Gazette. Did you say, "mammaries"?

Clinton. No, I said, "memories."

Gazette. My mistake. Sorry. Some people have implied that you look at moving back into the White House as a restoration of your Presidency; in fact, as your third term in office.

Clinton. Okay, you’ve got me. You know, people say I’m the most astute politician of my generation, and, yes, I plan to be the first President to hold a third term in office in fact, if not in name, since F. D. R. Boy, that’ll be some coup, won’t it?

Gazette. If you keep thinking and acting that way, Mr. Clinton, Democrats will catch on to what you’re really up to. In fact, the Times today also said, “Indeed, surveys of voters leaving the polls” in South Carolina yesterday, “showed that many Democrats who believed Mr. Clinton’s role was important ended up voting for Mr. Obama.” Your tactics may have the effect of electing the person who will really be the first Black President in American history.

A Cyberspace Interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. January 4, 2008. This interview was held in cyberspace on this date, the day after Senator Clinton’s third-place finish in the Iowa Caucuses behind winner Senator Barack Obama and runner-up John Edwards. It ought to be remembered that Mrs. Clinton was washed-out as well as washed-up, though she had, in fact, managed to wash up before the interview took place, like a flounder on the shore of the Dead Sea. The interviewer for the Gazette was Wesli Court, political editor for our news sheet.

Gazette. Senator Clinton, how do you feel after your debacle in Iowa. Have you begun to recover from your unexpected loss?

Clinton. I don’t feel much of anything. No, I haven’t. I’ve answered two of your ten questions.

Gazette. Ten questions?

Clinton. Yes, ten is your allowance. And that was your third.

Gazette. May I ask…? Let me rephrase that.

Clinton. Probably a good idea.

Gazette. You’re a very controlling person.

Clinton. Was that a question?

Gazette. No.

Clinton. Too bad. (She glances at her wristwatch.)

Gazette. But this is: How do you explain your third-place finish in Iowa?

Clinton. I can’t. We had just oodles of money to spend.

Gazette. “We”?

Clinton. Four and five. My husband and I.

Gazette. But your husband isn’t running for President. You are.

Clinton. Oh, that’s right. Six.

Gazette. That wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact.

Clinton. Sorry. Oh, I’m so very sorry. But I’m clearly the most qualified candidate in the field of Democrats.

Gazette. The most qualified candidate still in the race after yesterday is probably Bill Richardson. What, besides your few years as a U. S. Senator, are your qualifications?

Clinton. Now, that’s six, isn’t it?

Gazette. Yes.

Clinton. Well, as soon as we got into office, I started to push for universal health care.

Gazette. No doubt you mean by “we” you and your husband Bill Clinton.

Clinton. Yes I do. Was that question seven?

Gazette. No, that was an assumption based on empirical evidence. As I recall, that health care “push” was also a debacle, and the person you pushed was your husband.

Clinton. I’m so tired I can hardly focus. Perhaps I need a focus group.

Gazette. Then what you are claiming as your “experience” is actually your husband’s experience, isn’t that right?

Clinton. Seven. I suppose technically that’s right, but I was there in the White House for eight years learning and watching.

Gazette. Learning and watching is not exactly experience. This is question eight: Your duties during those eight years was acting as First Lady, setting up dinners, approving guest lists and menus, being a hostess, and so forth, wasn’t it?

Clinton. Well, yes, of course, but….

Gazette. But Barack Obama was elected to the Illinois legislature several times, and he’s been a senator like you for two years, and he has an exceedingly cosmopolitan background, world experience while he was growing up “learning and watching,” besides which he is a magnificent orator of the sort we haven’t seen in America probably since Abraham Lincoln, clearly a leader, and not nearly as tired as you…isn’t he?

Clinton. Well, but….

Gazette. Here’s my final question: If you were elected President of the United States in 2008, what would your husband’s role be in your administration? No need to reply, I think we all know the answer. Thank you for your time, Senator Clinton, and good luck with your campaign.

A Cyberspace Interview with Congressman Ron Paul, M.D.

3 January 2008, Special to the Dresden Mills Gazette. On this date, while the Iowa caucuses were being held, Dr. Ron Paul, a Congressman from Texas who is vying for the Republican nomination for the Presidency of the United States, was kind enough to grant the Dresden Mills Gazette an interview in cyperspace, not in outer space as some sources have suggested. The interview was conducted by Wesli Court, a staff member of the Gazette.

Gazette. Dr. Paul, thank you for allowing us to interview you on this important day. You have said that you are in favor of unregistered gun ownership for all Americans. Why is that?

Paul. Because citizens need to be armed so that they can defend themselves against the government if necessary.

Gazette. What government would that be?

Paul. The American government, of course. I’m against taxation without representation.

Gazette. But it was against the British government that the American colonists used that slogan in 1776. This is your own government you’re talking about.

Paul. The British government was their own government then, so the American colonists rebelled against their own government.

Gazette. Yes, but their “own” government was across the Atlantic ocean, not in Washington, D. C., and the American government is a representative government and you are one of those elected representatives. Don’t those representatives have the responsibility to enact laws?

Paul. No government should have the right to control firearms.

Gazette. But on 22 March of 1631 the colonial government of Massachusetts Bay enacted the first military legislation in North America requiring that all adult males (except ministers and magistrates) had to own arms and therefore constituted the militia which could be called upon in any emergency to defend the towns and villages of the colony. The requirement that all able-bodied males needed to own a gun was a form of taxation, wasn’t it?

Paul. The government of Massachusetts required people to own guns? Now that’s an enlightened government.

Gazette. Yes, adult male citizens of Massachusetts Bay were required by the government to purchase their own firearms if they could afford them; those arms had to be registered with the government so that, for one thing, the government during emergency situations could confiscate the arms of infirm or elderly owners of guns who could not serve in the militia, and those arms would then be furnished to able-bodied but non-gun-owning members of the militia. Otherwise, towns were required to furnish arms to adult males who couldn’t afford them and later collect the costs of those arms through taxation, which was called “raising a rate.”

Paul. Where in the world did you come up with such nonsense?

Gazette. It’s history. You can Google it.

Paul. Whose history? The Commies’?

Gazette. Let’s talk about the brick wall you want to build across the southern border of the United States in order to keep illegal immigrants out.

Paul. Right. It ought to be tall and strong, but it doesn’t have to be brick.

Gazette. Like the Great Wall of China?

Paul. Exactly.

Gazette. Why was that wall built?

Paul. To keep out the Mongolian barbarians.

Gazette. Did it work?

Paul. Certainly it did.

Gazette. Didn’t the Mongols breach the wall and rule China for hundreds of years?

Paul. What’s that, some more of your Commie history?

Gazette. Are there any other reasons for building this wall?

Paul. To keep out Muslim terrorists. Our southern border is not secure and therefore terrorists may simply walk into the U. S.

Gazette. But the people who attacked us on 9/11 came over our Northern border. And they were not illegal immigrants, they were visitors. If we're going to secure our southern border, shouldn't we also secure the northern one? Shouldn't we keep out foreign visitors as well as illegal immigrants?

Paul. Uh, I mean, er…the Canadians are our friends.

Gazette. So are the Mexicans. Why do most illegal aliens want to come to the United States in the first place?

Paul. To get free health care and Social Security.

Gazette. Don’t they have to pay into Social Security like other workers, own a Social Security card, provide proofs of paying taxes? Don’t they have to work to get those things?

Paul. Yes, and that’s another thing they come for, to take American jobs away from American citizens.

Gazette. Do many legal American citizens want to work as migrant laborers, field hands, housekeepers, sweat shop workers, and so forth for illegally substandard wages?

Paul. Well, of course they do.

Gazette. What would happen, then, if your wall kept out illegal immigrants? Would citizens flock to get the jobs that the aliens had vacated? Or would the fruits and vegetables rot in the fields, our homes go uncleaned, goods they produced rise in price?

Paul. Look, they aren’t citizens, so I’m not going to worry about them.

Gazette. Those of their children who were born here are citizens.

Paul. They shouldn’t be! I’m a pediatrician, and I say we should do away with birthright citizenship. Illegal aliens should be deported and their illegal children with them.

Gazette. Illegal children? How does being born in the U.S. make them illegal?

Paul. By virtue of the fact that they crossed into this country with their pregnant mothers.

Gazette. But how can you assume that their mothers got pregnant elsewhere? Don’t most of them become pregnant here? And even if they were pregnant before they crossed the border, what makes their children illegal?

Paul. We should have caught them and sent them back. They knew they were illegal.

Gazette. Who did? The unborn children?

Paul. Maybe not, but their parents knew. They had a choice.

Gazette. Are you Pro-Choice? Should the pregnant women have chosen to abort their fetuses?

Paul. No, no. I speak as a Pro-Life pediatrician congressman. They had the choice NOT to come to this country. We have the DUTY to send them back with their illegally-born babies.

Gazette. By getting rid of “birthright citizenship.”

Paul. Exaclty.

Gazette. But if a “birthright” isn’t a “birthright,” couldn’t the government you dislike so much and are a part of also do away with the birthrights of ALL American citizens?

Paul. Absolutely not. The militias would rise.

Gazette. And then what?

Paul. We’d create a governmental system we like.

Gazette. Thank you, Dr. Paul. You have given us all something to think about.

Paul. Thank you. Logical thinking is important.

The Poet Next Door

An Interview by David W. Hill

The following interview took place in the English Department Library in Swetman Hall on the campus of the State University of New York College at Oswego on the afternoon of May 9, 1990, after Lewis Turco's book manuscript, Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), which included the poem sequence “A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” had been completed and accepted for publication by the State University of New York Press (1). Present were David W. Hill, Prof. of English in the College, a well-known Emerson scholar and the contributor of an essay to Turco's book; Amanda Smith, a senior in Biology but arguably the best student fiction writer on campus, having won the undergraduate Mathom Fiction Award for 1989-90; and Mary Bagalonis, a non-traditional student double-majoring in English and Mathematics. Both Ms. Smith and Mrs. Bagalonis were students in Dr. Hill's American Romanticism class during the Spring semester; Ms. Smith had earlier taken two fiction writing classes with Mr. Turco.

David W. Hill. Professor Turco, where did the idea for “A Sampler of Hours” come from?

Lewis Turco. During the winter of 1980 I was reading an anthology (2) that contained an essay about Emily Dickinson titled "Hawthorne in Salem, 2: Emily Dickinson" by Van Wyk Brooks who quoted four lines from Emily Dickinson's letters: "The Moon rides like a girl through a topaz town"; "Tonight the Crimson Children are playing in the west"; "The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the trees," and "Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do is what detains the sky."

I was struck by the modernity of these prose expressions; their sounds and images seemed to me to have more of the feeling and flavor of modernity than even Dickinson's poems, or even the lines of many and many a poem of the 20th century. Immediately, I wrote four poems that included, and tried to live up to, the Dickinson lines I have quoted.

No doubt this was a foolhardy thing to do, but I had attempted the same sort of thing with Robert Burton's 17th-century tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and I produced a book of poems the whole title of which reads, The Compleat Melancholick, A Sequence of Found, Composite, and Composed Poems, based largely upon Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy" (3). I felt then, and I still feel, that my poems did little damage to Burton and, indeed, that Burton inspired me to accomplish some of my better work. These are the first four poems I wrote in a similar series based on Dickinson: