"Honkytonk Revisited" by Lewis Turco was originally published in Salmagundi, i:3, 1966; and gathered in
Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., 1973. ISBN 0879096373, paper. O-P but available from ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education.
OMEN
The Golden Shovel Anthology
New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooka edited by Peter Kahn, Ravi Shankar, and Patricia Smith with a Foreword by Terrance Hayes, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2017.
OMEN
By Lewis Turco
They were not fools: our parents always knew
The mores, ways and words of all the white
Folk that surrounded us. Even their speech
Was not beyond us – it was not the how
That we found useless, but we were never to
Become our “betters,” we could never make
Our skin turn white. We would always sing a
Song that’s black and blue; we’d always look
The way we look. We had to learn an an-
Them of our own and follow our own omen.
MISS PUSSY'S PARLOR SONGS
PART THREE
Monday's President was white,
So was Tuesday's, nice and light.
Wednesday's Pres. was white as snow,
Thursday's, though, was sort of slow.
Friday's President seemed numb,
Saturday's was pale and dumb.
Sunday's, though, was sort of dark,
Intelligent, right on the mark --
But Funday's Chieftain loved to lie,
He made us snarkle fit to die.
I saw a plane a-flying,
A-flying in the air;
And oh, it was all laden
With people from Qatar.
Arabs were in the cabin,
Muslims in the seats
Planning to become illegal
Voters and election cheats.
The four and twenty marshals
That stood between the decks
Wore badges on their bosoms
And chains about their necks.
The captain was a moron
With a monkey on his back;
And when the plane began to land,
The captain cried, "Quack, Quack!"
Crock-o'doodle-doo,
What's a Trump to do
When he has a parrot
But wants a cockatoo?
Crock-o'doodle-doo,
What's a Trump to do
When he has some pussy
But wants a cockatoo?
Crock-o'doodle-doo,
What's a Trump to do
When he's eaten chicken
But wants some cockatoo?
Diddle, diddle, dumpling, Donald Trump
Went to the bathroom to take a dump,
Managed to make much more than a paw full,
Stunk up the White House something awful.
Tell me, hooded wise old man,
As the Magus of the Klan,
Did you vote for Donald Trump?
I did vote for Donald Trump --
He's a lot like Forrest Gump.
UPON SEEING THE PREZ HUG LOUISE GORSUCH
Star Trump, star chump,
No star I'd like to hump,
I wish you may, I wish you might
Grab a pussy that's quite uptight.
Another Scalia? There is nonesuch,
No court would hope to see one,
But there's a fellow called Gorsuch
Who's going to try to be one.
Old King Trump was a grumpy old lump,
And a grumpy old lump was he.
He sat on his rump and made Forrest Gump
Some sort of Secretary.
If all the seas were one sea,
What a great sea that would be!
If all the trees were one tree,
What a great tree that would be!
If all the axes were one axe,
What a great axe that would be!
If all the men were Donald Trump,
What a great ass he would be!
And if the great ass took the great axe,
And cut down the great tree,
And let it fall into the great sea,
What a great splash that would be!
TRUMPING THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST
Pray, oh! Pray for The Apprentice
And Arnold Schwarzenegger
Whose ratings have fallen through the floor
And he's become a beggar.
He took my job, and look at him,
He governed California,
But he cannot be President
For he was not born heah.
This double darkling of the screen
Needs to have our prayers,
So on your knees, good gentlefolk,
And kiss my orange hairs.
Hickory, dickory, dock,
Donald exposed his cock,
But pussy was closed
And Donald got hosed,
Hickory, dickory dock.
I had a little pussy,
Her name was Lady Gay,
I rented her to Donald
To pet her and to play.
He poked her, he pumped her,
He rode her through the mire.
I would not rent her out again
For all of Donald's hire.
PETER THE UNLUCKY. A MEMOIR
Since we graduated from high school in Meriden, Connecticut, Peter and I have kept in touch or, rather, he has. We never exchange letters — although I've written him, he's never written back. Instead, about once a year the phone will ring, and it will be Peter calling from California or wherever else he happens to be. In our high school yearbook The Annual for 1952 he is pictured with Carolyn Kamens among the class notables as "Most Likely to Succeed." Among the ads at the back of the book there's a snapshot of Peter standing in front of a blackboard. On the board there's a diagram and the caption reads, "The Peter Theorem," for the man has an I. Q. of 165.
Sometime during the fall of 1986 he phoned. "Luigi!" he said, "do you ever watch 'The Wheel of Fortune' on TV?"
I laughed. "Never. What's up?"
"Don't miss it tonight," he said, "tonight or tomorrow night — check your local listings. I'm on."
"Not again!" For Peter had been on a game show several years earlier, and he'd won quite a number of cash and prizes — but I'd missed that one. We chatted awhile.
"Do you have my new address?" he asked.
"I think so," I said, assuming he meant his second California address, though it wasn't that new. He asked if we'd be going back to Meriden for the Christmas holidays, but I said no, I had no family living there any more, and my wife Jean's sister Ann was the only member of her family still in town. "I'll be going to the Modern Language Association convention in New York City just after Christmas, though, to help publicize The New Book of Forms which will just have been published."
"I'll be in the east then, too," he said. "Where will you be staying?"
"At the Grand Hyatt."
He said he'd probably catch me there. "Don't forget 'The Wheel of Fortune,'" he said.
I answered something like, "Okay, Peter, I'll make an effort to watch you tonight." But I did better than that. Even though I couldn't be home to see the program, I asked a colleague to tape the show for me, and not long afterward I bought a VCR myself. The tape became one of my fourteen-year-old son Christopher's favorite playbacks for a while. He kept bringing in friends to watch it.
The first contestant was Lee Stewart, a sailor; a secretary, Becky Edsel, was the second. Pat Sajak, the host, introduced "Peter" as "George." In fact, his first two names, like those of his late father, are George Peter, but when he was young everyone knew his father as George and no one called the son "junior," so he was called Peter instead. After the death of his father Peter began using his real first name, but I could never get used to it.
Sajak said that he saw my friend was a writer, and this seemed to take Peter aback. What I surmise is that he had said he was a "grants writer," someone who puts together proposals for foundation and government funding — Peter had been free-lancing along those lines for several years on the West Coast — and Sajak had misunderstood. In fact, Peter had wanted to be a writer, but he had never done anything with it. I'd been responsible for publishing a science-fiction poem of his in a little magazine called Starlanes back in the early 1950s, but I am unaware that he'd ever followed up with efforts of his own to appear in print. Whatever the case Peter, typically, blustered through Sajak's error and said he'd written some short stories and was working on a novel.
Peter was a good deal balder than when I'd seen him ten years or so earlier when he'd visited us in Oswego, New York, and brought us all a virulent, alien strain of flu. There was no mistaking him, however: the prominent aquiline nose set among the matching Greek features; the slightly stooped posture, which he righted now and again with a hitch of his shoulders thrown back; the satyr's grin, and the lively eyes darting shrewdly about. He looked newly showered and he was immaculately groomed.
My wife says her clearest recollection of Peter was at a party during high school at the home of our high school classmate and her childhood playmate, Tomie DePaola, now the famous children's writer and illustrator. She walked into a nearly-empty livingroom to see Peter standing before the mirror over the mantel, preening in the glass and admiring himself. "I remember thinking to myself, 'That's pure Peter,'" she told me.
When the preliminaries are over the sailor begins the game. He is looking to fill in a phrase, and on his first spin of the big wheel he asks for a "T." Vanna White turns over the appropriate square, and he gets his letter, but when he spins again the arrow lands on "Bankrupt," and it is the secretary's turn. She asks for an "H" on her first spin and gets two of them. The first word on the board is obviously "The." On her second spin she asks for an "R," but there is none in the phrase, and Peter gets to spin for the first time.
The arrow lands on $250.00 and Peter says with a big grimace, "I'd like an 'N'!" There are three of them in the phrase. He says, "I'll buy a vowel" — there are two E's in the phrase, including one in the first word, "The." On the next spin the arrow lands on $400.00 and Peter asks for an "S" — there are two of them; then "F": one word is obviously "of." Peter cannot lose — he spins again while the other two contestants look on with envy and boredom.
Next Peter wants an "M" and he gets two of them; "K" next — Peter has it. He says, "The milk of human kindness" in the carefully enunciating voice of an intelligent robot. Applause, applause — Peter, who has $2750.00, applauds himself and the audience does likewise. He shakes hands with Sajak.
When he came to visit us in Oswego where I had been teaching college for many years, we reminisced about our high school days and our crowd. I showed him that I still had a copy of our "Fantaseers" calling card: white lettering on black plastic, and a photo of the Fantaseers' Salem Witch Trials skit that I'd written and we'd performed in our junior year. There was Ben Barnes on the bench as judge Hathorne, holding up a string of paper dolls and cutting their heads off with a pair of scissors. I am dressed in my father's old swallow-tail coat, and Paul Wiese is the other prosecutor in an insane getup no Puritan ever wore. Peter is a member of the jury with the rest of the boys — Lindsey Churchill, Bill Burns, George Hangen, Art Von Au and the rest of them. Paul had wanted to gouge the eyes out of one of the witches, palm a hard-boiled egg, and throw it out into the audience, but the faculty censors — one was Mark Bollman, as I recall, and another, the Latin teacher, Ruth Coleman — wouldn't let us do it. Nevertheless, the production was a great success.
Some of the girls in our crowd had played the witches. Peter selects gold cufflinks as part of his prize, and "I've got to have that oak tray set for munchies," he says. Jean and I are groaning with chagrin as we sit in our living room before the television set. This is her first viewing, but I've returned to the tape time and again, fascinated as a cobra in a wicker basket listening to his fakir's piping. This is vintage Peter, the Attic pixy.
In high school Peter and Lindsey were known as the brains of the school. They were both members of the National Honor Society, both straight A students. Lindsey and I had been occasional playmates when I'd lived on Curtis Street during the third and fourth grades at Israel Putnam School. The Churchills had lived on Elm Street, not far from the high school were Mr. Churchill taught English, and it was a considerable hike for me to Lindsey's house — I had no bicycle until the fifth grade. But we had gotten along well, though he was a year younger than I.
A year or two later Lindsey had skipped a grade, and in Meriden High during our sophomore and junior years, he was a member of our Class of 1952. Both he and Peter were charter members of the Fantaseers, our "Science Fiction Reading Club," the distaff side of which was the "Reesatnafs," of which my future wife was a peripheral member — peripheral in her own eyes, not in anyone else's. The combined bunch was "The Fantatnafs" — it was the girls who had coined that phrase.
Although Peter's I. Q. was well into genius range, Lindsey outstripped everyone at the end of our junior year by winning a full tuition scholarship to Yale University and skipping his senior year in high school. Peter was himself scheduled to attend Yale when he graduated. Although his classmates were well aware of Peter's brainpower, we also knew he was not as highly motivated as Lindsey, and we could hardly miss the fact that he tended to get through his courses with a minimum of effort and a maximum of glitter. Peter was nothing if not flashy in a sardonic sort of way.
Lee, the secretary, bends over to spin the Wheel of Fortune for her second try. She asks for a "T" — she is trying to figure out an event. She spins again and asks for an "H": there are two of them; spins again...and lands on "Bankrupt!" She loses her turn.
Back to Peter who spins, smiling. The arrow lands on $200.00 and he asks for an "R" — there are three in the event he's trying to guess. He elects to spin again; he calls out, "Pin! Pin! Pin!" and it does...the arrow lands on "Pin." He bends over the railing to pull the cover of the "Pin" space and discovers he has won only $150.00.
While we sat and talked during his visit to Oswego I was startled to hear Peter say, "I felt threatened by the Fantaseers."
"Threatened?" I asked.
"Yes. The Fantaseers seemed to be your milieu, but it was destabilizing for me. It wasn't the image I wanted. I wanted to be accepted by the athletes as well as the intellectuals, and the Fantaseers had the reputation of being oddballs."
"Then why did you belong?" I asked.
"Because all my non-jock friends belonged," he said.
He asks for an "N" — it begins to look as though his victory is assured. Vanna White turns over three N's on the board and Peter spins again. The arrow lands on $250.00 and Peter wants a "D" — the fourth word of the event is obviously "and." Peter wants an "A" and gets six of them!
Peter always wanted A's but, unfortunately, when he went to Yale he didn't get them. The glitter evidently wouldn't sustain him on the college level. While I was beginning my floating hegira about the world courtesy of the U. S. Navy, I heard that he'd had to leave Yale and, further, that he'd enrolled at New Britain State Teachers' College, now Central Connecticut State. I was amazed to learn eventually that he'd had no better luck there than at Yale.
Peter spins again, asks for an "L," gets two and elects to solve the puzzle for $1950.00: the event is, "Arriving an hour and a half late." Peter chooses a pocket watch for about $300.00, a chest for $435.00, an entertainment center for $1190.00 — after two rounds Peter has won $9275.00.
I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events that followed in Peter's early career. I know that he had to leave New Britain College a second time after being readmitted, and that he joined the Army and spent some time in Germany with the M.P.'s, but which came first I'm not sure. I do know that eventually, when he'd served his enlistment and returned to civilian life, he attended Fairfield University and acquired his B. A. at last. He was married.
Jean and I, and a friend, Marie, had dinner with the newlyweds one evening. Peter's bride served a dish I'd never had before but that I loved — hamburger Stroganoff. A year or two later their marriage was annulled — there were no children — and we were into the 1960's.
Jean and I had been married four years when, in 1960, our daughter Melora was born in Meriden during the summer between my leaving the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and beginning my first teaching job at Fenn College, which is now Cleveland State University. My First Poems was published the same summer. I'm not sure in what year Peter founded an "alternative school" for children in or around New Haven, but he stayed there awhile. Next we heard he'd gone to Cape Cod to be the founder of a similar public school program there. And then we pretty much lost track of what he was up to, though he'd fill in a few details when he put through his annual phone call.
Peter gets to spin first in the third round of "The Wheel of Fortune." The arrow lands on $400.00 and he asks for an "S" — there are two of them; he spins — $500.00 — asks for an "N" and gets it. He spins again: $250.00, asks for an "R" and gets two. Another spin, Peter asks for a "T" and gets one of those as well. He buys an "E" — there are three of them in the three words.
When my daughter Melora was about seventeen and my son, Christopher, four or five, Peter got married again. His bride was the daughter of a well-to-do New Jersey couple. Jean and I went down to Meriden to visit our families, and we drove with Marie down to Jersey to the wedding. Unfortunately, we ran into a huge traffic jam on the Newburgh bridge along the route, and we arrived too late for the ceremony, but in time for the reception.
There we ran into several of our old high school classmates. One was Phil Riley who had lived nearly across the street from my family on North Third Street when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Phil had a brother who was afflicted with Downs syndrome, and most of the neighborhood kids had been at least leery of him, if not downright afraid. Fortunately, these are more enlightened times. Jim Pagnam, also from the West Side unlike Peter, who was from the East Side of Meriden, was present as well, and one or two others including Jim Masterson. In high school Peter, like Lindsey, had been something of a jock as well as an intellectual, and these were more-or-less his jock friends rather than Fantaseers or Reesatnafs.
Peter wants another vowel, so he buys an "A" and Vanna White turns over the squares. He spins, the arrow lands on $900.00 this time! Peter wants a "P" — it's obvious now that the "thing" he is trying to guess is "Peppermint Life Savers," and Peter solves the problem. He applauds himself while Sajak celebrates his accomplishment. Peter selects his-and-her wedding bands and he says, "Okay, for $1800.00, let's go for the brass bed!" He says, "I'll take the books," and, with vast understatement, "I'm kind of a reader." He gets a stack of Simon and Schuster books, including the novel by John Erlichmann of Watergate infamy. Peter licks his lips as he listens to the list of all the things he's getting. He now has a total of $13,475.00 in money and prizes. We glimpse the sailor and the secretary out of the corner of the camera from time to time.
Peter worked for a New York publisher for a while as some sort of technical person having to do with the printing operation — or so I seem to remember, but that may have been earlier. He and Ceil moved out to California after a while and he began doing his grants writing for various colleges and institutions out there. I think, however, that eventually the Reagan administration cutbacks in support for science, health, and education seriously undermined Peter's ability to make a living by free-lancing, though Ceil always had a steady job.
This game-show program is practically a duplicate of the other that Peter had won not long after he began living on the west coast — it was, if I recall correctly, "Jeopardy" on that occasion. I hadn't seen it, but I heard that he'd won something like $40,000.00. Sajak wishes the sailor "Better luck next time" and thanks him and the silent secretary for being on the show. "It's a clean sweep for this guy," he says patting Peter on the shoulder.
Mugging away, Peter says, "Well, that's the way it goes." He says he's going to go for "The ca-a-ar!" — a Mazda RX7 sports car worth over $13,000.00. Peter has to guess a "Thing" in this portion of the show, which is a hurry-up version. He is given five consonants and a vowel, and he chooses "T, N, R, S, L," and "E." He gets the "L," the "N," two E's" — "Lead pencil" is the object. There is no way Peter can lose now. He solves the puzzle, and the audience goes bananas. Peter applauds too.
Pat Sajak takes the microphone off Peter, escorts him, with Vanna, to the car, and he gets in. Sajak says, "Look out, look like a winner, and wave to America." Peter hangs his head out the window, waves at the camera, and grimaces — it's supposed to be a smile, one surmises. He mugs away like crazy. Sajak says, "You know, back in the early days of television, there were a lot of kind of cerebral game shows with people like Bergen Evans and so forth...you look like a panelist on one of those shows."
Peter replies, "I would have been a panelist, but I ran out of wood." Sajak does a slow double take, mutters something half under his breath, says goodbye to the audience, and the game is over. Peter has won everything, over $32,000.00 in all.
That was in 1986. Four or five years later Peter put through his annual call, but he acted a bit oddly on the phone. When I tried to call him back at home I got Ceil who seemed startled. She said he wasn't there, and she gave me another number to call. When I got Peter back on the line he admitted that he'd phoned to ask for a loan but had chickened out. He and his wife had split up and he'd been living in an apartment with several other men. He was afraid he was going to be out on the street if he didn't get up his half of the rent.
"But what happened to the money you won on 'Wheel of Fortune'? I asked. Ah, he said, that had gone to pay the back taxes on the things he'd won on "Jeopardy" — the IRS had hounded him for years. I told him I'd send him a fair amount to help him out. He said he'd pay me back one day, but I told him not to worry about it.
A year or so later he phoned again. The touch was easier this time, it seemed. "I can't afford to adopt you," Peter, I said. He argued with me, but I refused. "I already have a family," I told him. "You have one too, don't you?"
"Yeah, if you can call them that," he said.
"I've already sent you a rather large sum of money on one occasion," I told him.
"Oh, yeah. That came in handy," he said.
Some time later he called once more. This time all he wanted was a small loan — he said he was living out of his car. I told him that what he wanted from me wouldn't solve his problem, nor even stave it off for long. There were social agencies in San Francisco that could do him some permanent good, so I refused again and he rang off in anger. Since then I have received one or two collect calls from San Francisco, but the caller on each occasion has hung up before I could accept. "You will not be charged for this call," the operator informed me.
In July of 1994, at a reunion of the old high school crowd that was held on Cape Cod in the home of Carolyn, one of the Reesatnafs, I discovered that Peter at one time or another had also phoned several of those who were present to request money, which some of them had sent. "You know, we saw him several times when he was working with his alternative school in Barnstable," Carolyn said. She told us that when Peter had called her from the West Coast to ask for a loan, it had coincidentally been on the evening that some friends of hers and her husband's had been visiting from San Francisco. When Peter had hung up Carolyn explained the situation to her guests, one of whom was herself a worker in the San Francisco social services system. She promised that when they got home she would try to locate Peter and give him a hand. "She did try," Carolyn said, "but she could never locate him anywhere."
On another visit to Meriden some time later I was discussing Peter with Jim Masterson. “You know what his problem is, don’t you?” he asked me.
“Not really.”
“He’s an addict.”
I was astonished. “I never saw Peter take drugs, though I’ve seen him drink some.”
Jim shook his head. “Not drugs or alcohol,” he said.
“What, then?”
“Gambling.”
I cast my mind back to the early years, and I recollected that Peter had always been involved in poker games, at Fantaseer meetings, at parties, after school, even during study halls sometimes.
“That’s why he never went to class in college,” Jim said. “All he did was play cards. That’s what happened to the money he won on those game shows, all the money his friends sent him. Sometimes he was lucky, most times he was not.”
And that’s what luck can do to a guy with an I. Q. of 165.
There is a belated epilogue for this story. Just before Christmas, 2016, Peter called me once more from San Francisco. He had been trying to phone me in Maine. He didn't know Jean and I were spending the winter at our home in Oswego, New York. He tried to get me twelve times and finally called the Lincoln County sheriff to ask him to check out our Dresden residence to make sure we weren't lying around dead inside. Our neighbor Nancy Call saw the sheriff's car in our drive and went over to see what was going on. It all got straightened out eventually, and I phoned George to reassure him that all was well.
It appears that all these years later he had decided to repay some of the “loans” he had received from his friends, including Jim Masterson and me, but when he tried to phone Jim, Peter discovered that Jim had recently died. Panic seems to have set in and he made the first of the calls to me to try to make sure he wasn’t too late in my case as well – I assured him I was not yet quite dead, and he said he was sending me a check for the $500.00 he owed me.
He did that. I received it, was amazed, and immediately deposited it in my bank account. Peter called once more to request that I deposit the check as soon as possible. I assured him I had done just that. He thanked me, and I told him I’d be in touch. By way of my gratitude for something I had never expected to happen, I sent him a few of my books. I hope he’s enjoying them.
Except for the epilogue of this memoir, it was collected in Fantaseers: A Book of Memories, by Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: StarCloudPress.com, 2005, 196 pp., ISBN 1-932842-15-2, paper. Available from Amazon.
RELIGIONS OF THE WORLD
An Antapostolic Survey by Wesli Court
The Pantheists think there’s a faun
Or a nymph for each blade on the lawn.
The rocks are alive!
And each one must strive
To be home and in bed before dawn.
The Hindus have multiple deities
Plus multiple castes and impieties.
They never eat meat,
For their cows are so sweet
That they leave them out of their dieties.
The Path to Nirvana now has to be
Simpler for Buddhists than it should be,
For those who believe
Can simply achieve
Oneness with a lobotomy.
The Jainists reject the Creator,
Avow the Enjoyed and Enjoyer.
Although there’s a void,
One won’t be destroyed
If only one’s not a Destroyer.
The Jews are devotees of El,
The One God who puts them through Hell,
So they said to the Arabs,
“You can round up your scarabs
And evacuate Israel.”
The Christians believe in a Ghost
That’s holy, a Father engrossed
With a woman who’s wed
But still Virgin in bed,
And a dead Son Whose flesh is their Host.
A Muslim who’s martyred will spasm
A millennium in an orgasm
That he shares among virgins
Who enjoy such perversions
With clitorisless enthusiasm.
The Mormons don’t find it ironic
That the figure they view as iconic,
The angel Moroni,
Must be simply baloney
Or they’d call their religion “Moronic.”
Ron Hubbard was aware that theology
Is stories; so, minus apology,
He created religion
From his science fiction
And labeled his church “Scientology.”
The Quakers are always quite quiet;
They never speak loudly, but sigh it,
Then when one tunes his ears
To something he hears,
He bears witness and hopes others buy it.
The Christian Scientists monitor
Their illnesses with a manna—tour
Of fasting and prayer,
And then they get gayer
When they think they’ve defeated the Minotaur.
The Shakers came up with a plan:
They’d be chaste to a woman and man,
For while they were waiting
There’d be no generating —
They became God’s diminishing clan.
From The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback. Available from all booksellers.
Claudette McFang
MISS PUSSY'S PARLOR SONGS
Trumpty Dumpty sat on his wall.
Trumpty Dumpty had a great fall.
He climbed up his wall and fell down again
And again, and again, and again, and again.
Wee Donald Trumpkin runs through the town,
Peeing on the hookers in his nightgown,
Peering through the windows, crying through the locks,
"Are the johns all in their beds and turning on their cocks?"
I had a little nut tree --
Nothing would it bear
But a Donald Trumpkin
And some pubic hair.
The President of Russia
Hacked Hillary and me,
And all for the sake
Of my little nut tree.
Bumpity, bumpity, bump,
My name is Twittery Trump,
I eat out of pans and old tin cans
Because my mind is a dump, a dump,
Because my mind is a dump.
Bah! Bah! Donald,
Have you any hair?
"Yes sir, yes sir --
You had best beware,
For I have no master:
I will maul any dame,
Because the mighty lion
Has an orange mane."
An owl flew onto Donald's hair.
It bent and pecked his pate's scalp bare
So it would have space for a turd --
I wish I were that wise old bird.
Donald had a little ram,
It's fleece was black as ink,
And everywhere that Donald went
The ram was sure to slink.
It followed him to work one day
And caught Monica's scent.
From that point on that is the room
Where all their time was spent
WUTCHUGONNADO
A fable of the noble savage
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Wutchugonnado"
Wutchugonnado by the brookside,
Squaw at his side,
Crow caw overhead,
Speckled fish on the speckled riverbed,
Sat in the painted sun,
Thoughts on Wutsicumminto,
Wutsicumminto, his son.
Dappled ripples lap-lapped
At the mottled clay bank,
Shadows sank floating logs;
Thoughts were driftwood,
Little good;
Thoughts were braveness muscled in
Bronze skin;
Thoughts were stone-tipped,
Ice-nipped,
Birch-bark wilderness;
Thoughts were crushed dreams,
Dead schemes, sere themes
In the painted sun.
Wutchugonnado dreamt of
Savage hunt love,
Land of moccasin's pad-pad
On the forest trail;
Dreamt of clear eye,
Night cry,
Glowing-coal smoke, starlit night cloak,
Solemn peace pipe, flame on cheek bones —
Dreamt of these and many more things:
Of his offspring Wutsicumminto,
Of his son, his warrior son,
Bronzed and free
In the white man's factory.
From 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; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback. Also available from Amazon.com in a Kindle edition.
Gwendolyn Brooks
From Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-936205-30-1, paperback. Available from all booksellers.
For many years, despite her early involvement with the NAACP, Brooks wrote a formal poetry; during the 1960s, however, influenced by the militancy of her old friend Langston Hughes and by the aggressive posture of the young Blacks, such as Amiri Baraka, she found she could no longer afford to appear as though she remained on the sidelines. She therefore began to write a more militant kind of poem. In the lead essay of A Life Distilled edited by Gary Smith and herself, Maria K. Mootry, in her essay titled "'Down the Whirlwind of Good Rage': An Introduction to Gwendolyn Brooks," said that "at the nexus of Brooks's art lies a fundamental commitment to both the modernist aesthetics of art and the common ideal of social justice." (1)
Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, and educated at Wilson Junior College in Chicago, from which she was graduated in 1936. She married three years later and became the mother of two. During the Depression she worked as publicist for the NAACP Youth Council in Chicago, and subsequently she taught at various institutions of higher education in and around that city including Northeastern Illinois State College, Columbia College, and Elmhurst College.
"Nowhere is this dual commitment more apparent," Mootry continued, "than in the multiplicity of voices in her works. If the reader finds echoes of T.S. Eliot and Countee Cullen in her poetry, there are also equally strong folk vernacular voices punctuating her forty-year literary career. Her three early works, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), and The Bean Eaters (1960), present a wide range of poetic forms, including blues poems, ballads, experimental free verse, quatrains, Petrarchan sonnets and Chaucerian stanzas. Her subsequent publications, In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1971), Beckonings (1975), and To Disembark (1981), are written primarily in free verse and show her increasing concern with social issues, yet the variety of speakers continues."
Brooks' Selected Poems was published in 1963. In the "Foreword" to New Negro Poets U.S.A., edited by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, "At the present time, poets who happen also to be Negroes are twice-tried. They have to write poetry, and they have to remember that they are Negroes. Often they wish that they could solve the Negro question once and for all, and go on from such success to the composition of textured sonnets or buoyant villanelles without the transience of a raindrop, or the gold-stuff of the sun. They are likely to find significances in those subjects not instantly obvious to their fairer fellows.
“The raindrop may seem to them to represent racial tears — and those might seem, indeed, other than transient. The golden sun might remind them that they are burning." (13)
One of Brooks' simplest and most-anthologized poems exemplifies both her innovative approach to traditional verse forms and her social commitment:
WE REAL COOL
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel
"We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon."
First, on the typographical level, it is clear that this is a poem written in couplet stanzas. The second immediately noticeable point is that it is a parallel series, for each line except the last ends with the word "we." Next, the eye is caught by the fact that immediately preceding the last word of each line, except the final one, there is a period — the series is made up of short independent clauses, a set of assertions.
When we read the poem, though, we wonder at first, perhaps, why we ends the lines; it ought to appear at the head of each line, for it is the subject of the parallel clauses: "We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon." But when we read it in its "correct" parallel arrangement we realize why Brooks wrote it otherwise: it is not syncopated. Read normally," another thing happens to its rhythms: Some of the strong stresses are demoted. Written as Brooks has written them, each line except the first and last consists of three strong stresses. The prosody is accentual verse. Line one has four beats, the last has two.
The rhymes of the poem from lines two through seven thus appear medially — they run right down the center of the poem. All the verbs — the strongest words — from line two on, are pushed to first place; they are drum beats. The rhyming words are also drum beats sprung by their sounds, and each is followed by a full stop, a rest. Then another drum stroke, we: ¢ ¢ [] ¢, and the line is enjambed into the next stress. The poem is jazz; it is a dirge played in the streets, like those of the black bands that march in slow time through New Orleans alleys to the graveyard. The dirge begins slowly with four beats, and it ends abruptly with two. The entire little poem is an exercise in linguistic counterpoint.
The level of diction of the poem is idiomatic, the tropes mainly rhetorical — it is heavy with macho braggadocio. And it ends with the assertion of a truth that brings the reader up short with a jolt. The major genre of the poem is, plainly, the lyric, but it is also almost equally a didactic poem with a clear social message.
Brooks' second book, Annie Allen, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. "Then, as now," Bernard W. Bell wrote in the introduction to his anthology Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry, "Miss Brooks' race consciousness was low-keyed, yet keenly felt in every line. And her lyrics pulsate with the joys and sorrows of life. (9-10)
"Stylistically, Annie Allen is a masterpiece. Tracing the path of a black child's movement from innocence to experience, Miss Brooks skillfully employs adaptations of many of the major metrical patterns and stanzaic forms in the English tradition, from couplets and blank verse to sonnet sequences and free verse. In this and subsequent volumes, she maintains a remarkable balance between being a poet's poet and a poet of the people."
Writing in Women Poets of the World, edited by Joanna Bankier and Deirdre Lashgari, Barbara Christian, in her essay titled "Cultural Influences: African American" said, "Gwendolyn Brooks wrote much of her poetry during the 1940s and 1950s when Blacks were striving to achieve integration into the American social structure. By the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement gave way to the Black Power movement. Brooks' later work, published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflects that shift. The dominant literary movement of that period, Cultural Nationalism, focused on the development of Black selfhood and nationhood. There was a renewed interest in African and Afro-American history and culture. Poets saw themselves as revolutionaries in the service of their people” (337-8). Gwendolyn Brooks died in 2007 as one of America’s most highly respected literary figures.
R.I.P. GWENDOLYN BROOKS
June 7, 1917 – December 3, 2000
When she was young Miss Gwendolyn Brooks
Lost and found herself in books.
Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1.
February 11, 2017 in Books, Commentary, Criticism, Essays, Nonfiction, Poems, Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)
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