Poetics and Ruminations

Sestinamania Part One

   

           The verse form that we call the “sestina” is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante from whom it received its Italian name. The introduction of the form into English literature dates from the 16^th century. George Puttenham (a member of my mother’s ancient family, the Putnams of Salem Village) was the putative author of the first book of prosody written in English, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1588) in which the form is described thus:

          "There is another sort of proportion used by Petrarch called the setzino, not rhyming as other songs do, but by choosing six words out of which all the whole ditty is made, every [one] of those six commencing and ending his verse by course, which restraint, to make the ditty sensible, will try the maker’s cunning."

          This is how I describe the sestina in the current Fourth Edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, (Hanover, NH, and London, 2012):

          The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a specific order as end-words in the five succeeding sestet stanzas. In English the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters. Its thirty-nine lines are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi)…. In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing each line.

          Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3. If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters signifying repetitions) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.

          An “envoy” is a cauda, a partial stanza used as a tail or coda at the end of a poem that originally sent the poem on its way to the person to whom the poem was addressed: “Go, little poem, speed on your way to my beloved.” This ancient function has slipped into disuse over the centuries, but the coda has remained as a climactic shorter stanza that ends a poem or song. Because it was originally merely an addition of this sort, any poem might have had an envoy, but most poems did not, and envoys are optional even in the sestina.

          Edmund Spenser was apparently the first English poet to use a form of the sestina in his Shepherd’s Calendar which appeared in 1579. Here is my modernized version of the first two stanzas of lines 151-189 of the Eclogue for the month of August:

 

YOU WASTEFUL WOODS

You wasteful woods bear witness of my woe

Where my complaints did oftentimes resound;

You careless birds are privy to my cries,

Which in your songs were wont to make a part;

You, pleasant spring, have lulled me oft to sleep,

Whose streams my trickling tears did oft augment.

Resort of people does my grief augment,

The walled-round towns do work my greater woe;

The forest wide is fitter to resound

The hollow echo of my care-filled cries:

I hate the house from whence my love did part --

Her wailful absence bars my eyes from sleep.

          Note that the teleutons of stanza one are not used in standard order in the second stanza; rather, the last word of the last line of the first stanza reappears as the first line of the second stanza, and the following teleutons remain in their original order. This is the pattern that is followed in the next four stanzas:

Let streams of tears supply the place of sleep,

Let all that’s sweet be void; that may augment

My dole, draw near! What’s best to wail my woe

Are the wild woods, my sorrows to resound, Than bed or bower, both which I fill with cries When I see them so waste, and find no part   Of pleasure past. Here will I dwell apart In ghastly grove therefore, till my last sleep Does close mine eyes: so shall I not augment, With sight of such a change, my restless woe. Help me, ye baneful birds, whose shrieking sound Is sign of dreary death, my deadly cries

 

Most ruthfully to tune. And as my cries

(Which of my woe cannot reveal least part)

You hear all night, when nature must crave sleep,

Increase, so let your irksome howls augment.

Thus all the night in plaints, the day in woe

I have vowed to waste, till safe and sound

 

She come back home, whose voice’s silver sound

To cheerful songs can change my cheerless cries.

Hence, with the nightingale will I take part,

That blessed bird that spends her time of sleep

In songs and plaintive pleas, to more augment

The memory of misdeed, that bred her woe.

 

And you that feel no woe, when as the sound

Of these my nightly cries you hear apart,

Let break your sounder sleep, pity augment.

 

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Mother's Day 2014

Lewis, Luigi, Mom May Turco, 1936

 

REQUIEM FOR A NAME

Listen to Lewis Putnam Turco read his poem, "Requiem for a Name." 

          For as long as I have known the meaning and origin of my surname, I have known about the Putnams of Salem, Massachusetts, and their involvement in the Witch Hunt of 1692. Luigi Turco met May Laura Putnam — “Mom May” as she liked to call herself, because of the pun, I suppose — at a Methodist camp in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where she was working as a missionary among Italian immigrants. At the time she was an old maid in her thirties who had pulled herself out of rural poverty in Superior, Wisconsin, by sheer wit and strength of will. Despite the desperate penury of her second generation Danish mother, born Laura Christine Larsen; the shiftlessness of her father, William Herbert Putnam, descendant of an old New England family, and the competition of her six brothers and two sisters, Mom May had made something of herself, becoming the only one of the Putnam siblings to attend and graduate from college — Boston University’s School of Religious Education.

Believe it or believe it not,

           My mother was a Putnam once.

     On her ancestral tree she swears

The Lowells and the Deweys too

     Hang pendulous as lovely pears.

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce

Who rather let things go to pot —

 

Himself, his offspring, farm and wife.

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

     His homestead I remember well:

The floors were warped, the doors askew,

     And now and then the rafters fell.

           My mother was a Putnam once —

She led a less than social life,

 

So she went East from grampaw's West.

           My mother was a Putnam once

     Till she was married, woe O! woe.

No longer was she maiden free —

     She cursed her pa from pate to toe.

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce

To cheat the eaglet in its nest

 

By willing her a woman's form.

     My grampaw was a sort of dunce,

           But what a hefty name he wore!

He gave my middle name to me;

           It fits me like a saddlesore.

     My mother was a Putnam once,

I'd be one too, come sun or storm.

 

The Deweys and the Lowell hosts

     Are pendant from a hollow tree.

Now with this rime let them be felled,

     Let me be nothing more to me

Than windfalls blasted by the frosts.

 

           My mother was a Putnam once;

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

 

Mom May was wrong about the Lowells, but right about the Deweys.

          So my parents married and I was born into their middle age. We lived a while in Buffalo near my father's sister, Vita Sardella, and her family.  I was christened Lewis (my mother was having no other "Luigi" in the family) Putnam (hyphenated last names were not yet current in the U.S.) Turco, and then we moved to Meriden, where I was brought up unaware of how poor we were.  Thinking back on my early life, I consider it remarkable that my parents, given their own histories, brought up their children as members of the middle class who had no doubt at all we were as privileged as anyone else.  Though we had no money, the house was full of books of all sorts.  My parents read to me practically from the moment I was born, and soon I was reading for myself.

          The poem is 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 in a Kindle edition.

          And a history of the early Putnam family in America may be found here: Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and America 1580-1697 e-book edition, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, Kindle edition, 2012, 808 pp. Winner of the Wild Card category of the 2009 New England Book Festival.

 

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Remembering Vern Rutsala

 

 This morning, April 25, 2014, Bob Berner wrote his friends from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop of long ago that Vern Rutsala had died. I replied,

“This IS hard news, Bob,

“When I was at Iowa he, Mort Marcus and I were a little clan within the larger bunch. I'm the only one left, now. I'll put something up on my blog today.”

I have written often about Vern, most recently in a chapter of my book titled Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, (Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012), and I dedicated the first edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics in 1968, "To Vern and Mort and, in some ways, better days." He and I exchanged books over the course of our lives after Iowa, and I reviewed most of them in various periodicals and volumes. Back in the 'nineties for a while I was putting into a notebook particular lines from Vern's books that I ran across and particularly liked, and one day I sat down and wrote this poem: 

DEJA-VU

On four lines by Vern Rutsala

 

The evening is carved of light.

One has watched here before, the view

of this bracken-edged meadow, the heather

lofting plumes into dusklight out of shadows.

 

One wonders what he has sought

in the meadows of deja-vu,

and on what occasions he has weathered

these asides of recall — and were there others?

 

For here an uncertain sleight

of sunlight settles itself like vows —

in the broken fields of sons and fathers —

taken, broken, retaken.  Darkness stammers,

 

the linnet has gone to flight;

hours have fallen to clay review

and have sprung again.  Out of ashen feathers

ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.

 

The evening is carved of light.

In the meadows of deja-vu,

in the broken fields of sons and fathers,

ancient summer uncovers ancient summers.

 

The lines I chose are the first, second, third and fourth lines of stanzas 1, 2, 3, and 4; they come together to create the fifth and last stanza of this five-stanza poem. Of course, I sent the poem to Vern and he liked it a lot. He went through his poems and found the poems that I had mined for the first three stanzas, but he couldn't find the fourth. He begged me to let him know which of his poems had been the source of the fourth line, but I hadn't jotted that information down as I was collecting the lines, and I couldn't tell him. I'm afraid he must have died before this little mystery was cleared up, and perhaps I will do the same.

In April of 2006 one of my former students at SUNY Oswego, Dennis Morton, who lived then and lives still in Santa Cruz, CA, together with his neighbor in town Morton Marcus, put together a reunion of the three Iowa Workshop friends in the Santa Cruz area. Vern and I were interviewed on KUSP-FM radio by Dennis and Mort, and we visited Robinson Jeffers' Tor House as well -- in this photo Mort Marcus is in the center, I am on his right, and Vern on the left:

 

Bob Berner’s email message included this memoir-obituary by Jeff Baker in The Oregonian:

 

Vern Rutsala, the gentle giant of Oregon poetry, died Wednesday. He was 80.

Rutsala was a National Book Award finalist and the author of more than a dozen books who taught at Lewis & Clark College for more than 40 years. He died two weeks after receiving the C.E.S. Wood Distinguished Writer Award from the Oregon Book Awards, its highest honor, "for an enduring, substantial literary career."

Rutsala's many books include "The Moment's Equation," his National Book Award finalist; "How We Spend Our Time," "Little-known Sports," "Ruined Cities," "A Handbook for Writers," and "Selected Poems," an Oregon Book Award winner. His many awards included a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Carolyn Kizer Poetry Prize, and two NEA fellowships.

"His special achievement," Norman Friedman wrote in "Contemporary Poets," is to have made the furniture of everyday bourgeois life in America available to the uses of serious poetry. He is thus somewhat like the better pop artists, . . . who [make] assemblages out of found objects. . . . With a few skillfully constructed figures, Rutsala can confront us with ourselves."

Rutsala was born in McCall, Idaho, in 1934. His father lost his farm during the Depression and the family came to Portland in 1942. They lived in Vanport and moved to California before returning to a home near Mount Scott. Rutsala graduated from Milwaukie High School and played quarterback and was student body president while beginning to write poetry and fiction.
He went on to Portland State for a year, then transferred to Reed and studied with Kenneth O. Hanson. Drafted into the Army, he spent time in Germany as an M.P. and an editor of an Army newspaper.

He went to the Iowa Writers' Workshop but returned after a year and got a reference from poet Donald Justice that eventually found its way to William Stafford, already ensconced at Lewis & Clark. A three-quarter time job became full time after a year, "and I was there forever," Rutsala said in 2006. Rutsala helped start the creative-writing program at Lewis & Clark and was colleague with Stafford for more than 20 years. Rutsala said Stafford was a friend and an inspiration, and Rutsala was able to establish his own reputation despite Stafford's prominence.

Rutsala's first book, "The Window," was published in 1964. He was persistent, always working on five or six poems at once and keeping dozens in circulation until they landed at a magazine or journal. He lived in a book-stuffed house in Northeast Portland with his wife Joan, where they raised three children. He often wrote after midnight when his family was asleep  and he had "a long stretch in front of me with nothing to do but write," he told Reed Magazine in 2006.

In that article David Biespiel wrote that "looking at him, immersed in poetry talk, a life-long student of the art, a believer in poetry's importance in human experience, I could see and admire that what has really mattered to him has been the writing, not the public scene.

"'I like to throw the blob of words on the page, then come back, maybe days later, to see what is still possible in the poem,' Rutsala said. "Then I'm able to shape it. Most language is trying to sell us something or deceive us. Poetry doesn't try to deceive."

Rutsala did not slow his writing pace after he stopped teaching at Lewis & Clark. He would send notes with recent publications and enjoyed the recognition from younger poets that came his way -- a special edition of a literary magazine devoted to his work, a tribute at a national writers' conference. He had a quiet manner that disguised a wry sense of humor. When I saw him at a literary function, sporting a huge white poet beard, I teased him about it and he said that he needed a new hobby in retirement.

-- Jeff Baker

 

For the Unknown Poets

 

FOR THE UNKNOWN POETS

By Lewis Turco

 

Here they lie, all the unknowns,

Reduced to ashes, dust and bones.

The songs they sang with lip and tongue

Have fallen still and lie among

The tattered leaves in a fold of time

Covered now with moss and rime.

 

Originally published in Trinacria, Fall, 2011 and collected in 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, copyright © 2011, 2012 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

The Familiar Stranger

 

The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco,  Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press (www.StarCloudPress.com), 2014, ISBN 978-1-932842-78-4, paperback.

 

 

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Afterward

AFTERWARD

A Short Story by Lewis Turco

           As soon as he woke up he remembered the last thing that had happened before he lost consciousness. He had been sitting in his favorite chair in front of the television set watching the evening news. His wife had been sitting on the sofa watching as well in the parlor of their second-floor flat in the house that they had bought late in their lives and marriage. The news wasn’t good — was it ever? — but he and his wife were comfortable for the first time in their lives, and had been for several years of his retirement as pastor of the First Italian Baptist Church. They had lived in this small Connecticut city since 1939; their children had grown up and gone, gotten married themselves, one lived nearby — a toolmaker for Pratt & Whitney, the other in upstate New York — a college professor. The professor, the older boy, was the one he’d wanted to be a minister too, but that was not to be.

          He remembered the sudden sharp pain in his chest, falling forward out of his chair, hitting the floor and then nothing until he had awakened.

          No, that wasn’t right. He awoke, and still there was nothing.

          There was no light, if he had eyes, only darkness. He saw nothing, he felt nothing, if he had fingers to feel with; he heard nothing — there was nothing to hear or, apparently, with which to hear. He could not breathe, nor did he need to even had there been something to breathe. He did not understand how he was able to think, if he were, indeed, thinking.

          He lay awhile (was he “lying”?) attempting to do the things he remembered he used to do. He tried to shout, but he could make no sound, couldn’t have heard it if he had made one, had no mouth with which to utter anything. All he could do was recollect, feel as though he were going mad, experience despair and frustration for — how long?

          The conclusion he reached was inevitable and inescapable: he had died in his parlor while watching the evening news on NBC. Until that moment he had been certain that when he died something would happen. He would awaken to the Life Beyond. He would be ushered into the Presence of his Maker. Glory would abound. Something certainly would happen, not nothing. It was impossible for Nothing to happen! Or, if it did, it would be impossible for him to experience it. He would simply be nothing.

          Or had the ancient Greeks gotten it right? Was this Erebus? Was this the pure darkness of Tartarus, of the Underworld where the lost souls go to “live” in emptiness, without hope? When he was a boy living in Sicily, which the Greeks had colonized centuries before his own people, the Turks, had conquered that island, he had from time to time heard snippets and shards of Greek mythology. He had heard about Erebus and wondered about it.

          And as a member of an unobserving Roman Catholic family, long before his conversion to Waldensian Protestantism, he had wondered about Purgatory. Had the Church adopted the Greeks’ Erebus, as they had adopted so many other things from paganism, like holidays and saints? Was this, then, Purgatory, which would prove that his concept of the afterlife had been erroneous, and his life, consequently, had been useless? What there was left of him, here, in this all-consuming darkness, despaired.

          Would there be no end to this nothingness? Would there be no union with the Godhead, no reunions with those he had left behind, those who had preceded him? He tried to put out feelers, tentacles from his mind to test the blankness engulfing him. He felt that he would go mad, that he would like to go mad because he could not bear this soulless emptiness any longer. And how long had it been? It felt as though it had been eternal.

          He could not believe it when he woke up again. But had he awakened? What was all this light?

 

Originally published in Per Contra, Summer 2012, atwww.percontra.net/issues/24/fiction/afterward/, copyright © by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

Hortatory Terzanelle

 

The American TERZANELLE is a villanelle written in terza rima.  Like the latter, it is nineteen lines in length: five interlocking triplets plus a concluding quatrain in which the first and third lines of triplet one reappear as refrains.  The center line of each triplet is a repeton reappearing as the last line of the succeeding triplet with the exception of the center line of the penultimate stanza which reappears in the quatrain. This is the rhyme and refrain scheme for the triplets: A¹BA² bCB cDC dED eFE.  The poem may end in one of two ways: fA¹FA² or fFA¹A².  Every line is the same metrical length.

 

HORTATORY TERZANELLE

By Lewis Turco

 

We do not have the time to waste,

And yet we waste it all the time.

Time wasted leaves a bitter taste

 

Like orangeade turned tart as lime

Or sweet remembrance gone to seed,

But still we waste it all the time.

 

We take one sip more than we need

And soon our glasses are half full,

Like sweet remembrance gone to seed.

 

Time’s seepage is implacable:

Swallow or it evaporates

And soon our glass is but half full,

 

The freshest morning dissipates,

Becomes the driest afternoon.

Swallow or life evaporates —

 

The sun will soon become the moon —

We do not have this time to waste!

Here in the driest afternoon

Time wasted leaves a bitter taste.

 

Copyright © 2011 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

Friday, December 14, 2012

A Triolet for the Children

of Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut

 

There is little we can do −

Twenty children have been shot dead.

The killer shot his mother, too.

There is little we can do.

There are words, but far too few

And little more that may be said −

There is nothing we can do:

Twenty children have been shot dead.

Auden: Form and Style in Poetry (11 January 1956)

An Auden assignment via Sam Gwynn

 

AUDENESQUE

By Lewis Turco

 

Spring is not arriving

This year – winter is still

Alive -- it thrives, driving

April against her will

 

Beyond frosted windows,

Back to southern climes

Lying in warm windrows

That bask in fairer times.

 

Copyright © Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.