Poetics and Ruminations

Form of the Week 29 – The Interlined Poem

 Jack Foley

          This week Jack Foley sent me a poem written in a form he has used before that he calls, “writing between the lines.” “The idea of the form,” he wrote, “is the interplay between the two poems--each going on separately but constantly being interrupted by the other. I like Dan's poem -- from a book of his I've always treasured, A Little Geste”:

 

CHARM

            for the return to health of Daniel G. Hoffman

 

Do I speak truth

            Goddess,

Then let this breath deny

            Lover of the hunt

As much of death

            And of animals,

As any man can. I

            Protect this man

My burnt tongue’s gift bequeath

            Whose mortal breath

To you in whom my speech

            Gives praise

Or song moves most:

            To all you love,

Act, enact the myth

            Rex Nemorensis:

Of man the maker: Reach

            Protect his tongue

In every syllable

            His eyes

Of your life, in each

            His nimble fingers

Motion of your soul

            Let his sword

As though these dreams my ghost

            Stay steady

Long since made were real;

            As dreams;

Such magnificence you touch

            Let his speech

Shall your self become

            Attain inevitability;

At the portal of your feast

            Let his words stay

I sing, though dust be dumb:

            In the shaken cranium

Praise the immortal host,

            Of all who hear.

Mortal encomium.

 

            —Daniel G. Hoffman (from A Little Geste, 1959) / Jack Foley

 

          I replied, “Jack, I wrote this back in the early 'seventies or late 'sixties; you can find it on page 345 of the current edition of The Book of Forms where the form is called "shadowbox":

 

A WELL AS DEEP AS THE WORLD

"For Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound,"

 

"It is not now as it was then,"

it is broken and far off,

"but it is like a sea on ebb,"

like the sound of someone being tortured

"and only pools here and there"

at the end of a long corridor

"left among the rocks."

 

Lewis Turco, from Innerspring Quarterly, I:2, Fall 1971.

 

This is the entry on the form 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:

 

Kelly Cherry writes of the SHADOWBOX, “It seems to me that Fred Chappell has invented an amazing new form: the embedded, or nested, or inlaid poem.  Sometimes a sestet is embedded within an octave; sometimes the last word of the first half of a line becomes the first word of the second half of the line.” Fred Chappell adds, “Kelly Cherry’s descriptions…are accurate, though she leaves out a couple: There are also dialogue poems, in which the speakers’ lines form separate whole poems that interlock with each other to produce the integral poem; poems in which the syllables of another language are disposed in order throughout an English-language poem that glosses the original. My examples are made from Medieval Latin hymns.”

 

SEARCHLIGHT

 

The hamlet sleeps under November stars.

Only the page of numerate thought toils through

The darkness, shines on the table where, askew

And calm, the scholar’s lamp burns bright and sears

The silence, sending through the slot, the bars

And angles of his window square, a true

Clean ray, a shaft of patient light, its purview

Lonely and remote as the glow of Mars.

 

Fred Chappell

 

And there is another interleaved form laid out in The Book of Forms:

 

The DAGWOOD, invented by Herb Coursen, is two separate poems that when interleaved (first line of first, first line of second, second line of first, second line of second, and so on) become a third poem. “Winter Dreams” is an example. The form can, of course, be extended to incorporate several separate poems:

 

WINTER DREAMS

 

The day holds itself still at noon,

under the motionless circle of gulls.

The sky is simply there, background for

ice capping the granite that

tumbles chunks down the long bay.

The bottom row of the wood pile

freezes to the field, crunches in frost.

Down the full sky toward February,

Gemini will baffle the night,

from which light cannot escape.

The day is balanced, not quite ready.

 

The waters of the bay flatten out,

gray, holding ice floes, silent.

The unmoving spine of the trees

will tremble again before spring,

melting down the ocean’s mouth,

wants the thawing tide of May winds.

Canis Major chases Lepus the Hare.

The Northern Cross will rise again,

over the black opening

into a new universe. The day is poised

for its tugging into spring.

 

The day holds itself still at noon.

The waters of the bay flatten out,

under the motionless circle of gulls,

gray, holding ice floes, silent.

The sky is simply there, background

for the unmoving spine of the trees,

ice capping granite that

will tremble again before spring

tumbles chunks down the long bay,

melting down the ocean’s mouth.

The bottom row of the wood pile

wants the thawing ride of May winds,

freezes to the field, crunches in frost.

Canis Major chases Lepus the Hare

down the full sky toward February.

The northern cross will rise again.

Gemini will baffle the night,

above the black opening

from which light cannot escape

into a new universe. The day is poised.

The day is balanced, not quite ready

for its tugging into spring.

 

Herb Coursen

 

This example is a three-layer Dagwood:

 

THE FOX HUNT

Winslow Homer 1893

 

Wind-driven waves crash on rocks, and

spray rises over each cascade.

On the snow-covered shore

in the wind

in storm-wasted light

a few red berries tremble on twigs

over snowdrifts like stilled waves.

 

The fox looks out to sea.

The fox, he high steps. Slow.

What does he hear,

his black ears pricked up,

the russet fox,

his white-tipped brush

of no use now?

 

Crows fly up from the sea to

the hungry shore,

wings like feathered night.

They hover over,

making ready,

a gather,

a murder of crows.

 

The fox looks out to sea.

Wind-driven waves crash on rocks, and

crows fly up from the sea to

the fox. He high steps.  Slow

spray rises over each cascade,

the hungry shore.

What does he hear

on the snow-covered shore—

wings like feathered night?

(His black ears pricked up

in the wind.)

They hover over

the russet fox

in storm-wasted light

making ready

his white-tipped brush.

A few red berries tremble on twigs,

a gather

of no use now,

over snowdrifts like stilled waves:

a murder of crows.

 

Miriam Kotzin

Yet another interlined form from The Book of Forms is the hypallogo, which was used here as “Form of the Week 22 – The Hypallogo,” q.v. 

Suggested writing exercise:

          Write an interleaved poem of some sort.

 

 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. 

 

The Late, Late Show

        It's too late for our planet. Earth is already polluted past repair: Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, spent atomic fuel rods stored everywhere and unable to be destroyed; three gigantic eddies of trash in the oceans; India and others pouring rivers of raw sewage into the waters we drink; factories everywhere filling the skies with poison that we breathe. If we had any sense, we would find another planet to inhabit and destroy right now. Those who say "global warming" doesn't exist should be left behind to cope for themselves.

 

THE LATE, LATE SHOW

By Lewis Turco

 

                       It is now ten minutes after midnight,

                December 5th, 1965.  In honor

                             of the attack by the Japanese

                                    on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, on

December 7th, 1941, all channels

 

                       are running movies about war.  On one

                channel, the come-on is newsreel footage of the

                             bombing inserted into a film

                                    made by the Japanese.  Channel

9 has topped that: also Japanese, the movie is

 

                       science-fiction: the Third World War is just

                beginning.  I'll take a gangster film — Channel 3:

                             it sounds incredible, but the third

                                    world war is already over

over here.  This one is American.  Let me check

 

                       the T. V. Guide: "'Five.' (1951).

                The only five survivors of atomic war

                             revive man's ancient hostilities

                                    and prejudices."  The whole thing

is starting again.  So I have turned to writing this

 

                       poem as I watch.  I have survived one

                Armageddon; I shall build a microcosm.

                             I am writing very carefully:

                                    the woman is pregnant, and the

Negro is building a house.  I want my facts to be

 

                       accurate, in case this is the last thing

                to be left.  The sounds do not matter, only the

                             sense.  If you are reading this, I hope

                                    that it will not upset you, sir,

whoever you are.  It may be that my typewriter

 

                       was hocked, passed peacefully from dark shelf to

                dark shelf in ancient shops until it was sold for

                             scrap.  Grant us this: that was possible.

                                    But if you should find this lying

rolled in my machine, the letters of our alphabet

 

                       scrambled in the dust, grant us this much more:

we foresaw the end too clearly for it to matter.

 

From Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper. Also available in a Kindle edition from Amazon.

 

Sestinamania Part Thirteen

 

          In his "Age and Indifferent Clouds" the poet Harry Mathews deliberately used such end-words as "hippopotamus" and "bronchitis," thus drawing the reader's attention to the teleutons rather than away from them, and the beginnings of the lines doubled the difficulty by making puns and ringing variations on six herbs and plants, which might go unnoticed because the end-words take so much of the reader's attention. As “Wesli Court” I did similar things in my sestina “The Day We Bombed the Moon (and Barack Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize)” which was published on-line in The Nervous Breakdown in 2011 and collected in The Gathering of the Elders: and Other Poems:

 

THE DAY WE BOMBED THE MOON

(AND BARACK OBAMA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE),

A SESTINA

 

October ninth, 2009, we sent

A rocket off to Luna. We meant to bomb her…,

Into submission? No, a test intent

On blowing up surface dust to test for ice.

On the same day the Nobel Prize Committee

Amazed the world by bestowing its amity

 

Award upon a tyro. A calamity,

It seemed to some — an evil precedent

To settle on Washington, D. C.,

By giving the Peace Prize to Barack Obama!

Many Republicans needed to ask for ice

Water and Schnapps, or even an oxygen tent.

 

No one had dreamed an explosion of this extent

Could blow moondust in the face of amity

Around the House and Senate. It wasn’t nice

That these Norse should cause old pols to resent

Explosive love. It was a suicide bomber

NASA sent to ruin comity —

 

If not around the world, the R. N. C.

At the very least. Gaddafi in his tent

Celebrated Luna’s death. “Embalm her!”

Was his battle cry, his enmity

For  global infidelity was sent

To Cocoa, Florida, well packed in ice.

 

But NASA said, “It isn’t very nice

To imply we had an impact on the Committee

Rather than the moon! Our bomb was sent

Out into space. We’re not incompetent!”

Meanwhile, a wave of pure tsunamity

Elfed the Oval Office, and Obama,

 

Although surprised himself, felt like the balm or

Salve of sweet salvation in a trice

Had rehabilitated amity,

Restored a modicum of comity

To the world at large to some extent,

One could nearly sense the aloe’s scent.

 

Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee,

And malcontents hope NASA finds its ice,

But what price amity amid dissent?

The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 115 pp.

Related articles

Sestinamania Part Five

Sestinamania Part Twelve

Sestinamania Part One

Sestinamania Part Seven

What Is a Stanza?

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco

On Nov 23, 2013, at 9:19 PM, Pal wrote:

Lew:

I am writing a headnote for Emerson’s “Rhodora” and was wondering whether you could help me out with the poem’s form.  The Book of Forms seems to be quiet on the subject of a quatrain stanza rhyming aabb (i.e., two heroic couplets).  The poem consists of four quatrains, of which the second and fourth are apparently Sicilian quatrains, while the first and third are of the sort just described.  The poem divides right down the middle between the speaker’s discovery of the rhodora and his address to it, so two octaves (aabbcdcd) may be involved.  Again, as to form, is there a proper term for quatrains 1 & 3, and/or a properly descriptive term for the octaves or the poem as a whole?

Pal

 

THE RHODORA

On being asked, Whence is the flower?

 

In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,

I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,

Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,

To please the desert and the sluggish brook.

The purple petals, fallen in the pool,

Made the black water with their beauty gay;

Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool,

And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why

This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,

Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing,

Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:

Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!

I never thought to ask, I never knew:

But, in my simple ignorance, suppose

The self-same Power that brought me there brought you.

 

By Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

On Sunday, November 24, 2013 7:12 AM Lew wrote,

Dear Pal,

There is no particular term for a quatrain consisting of two heroic couplets, that's all you can say about it. The primary form is the couplet, no matter how many there are in a grouping. In this case, there really are no stanzas. I'd describe the poem as sixteen lines of iambic pentameter verse rhyming aabbcdcdeeffghgh. You may say some of the other things about it as well, of course.

Have good holidays, my friend.

Lew

  

On Nov 24, 2013, at 1:09 PM, Pal wrote:

Lew:

What I ended up saying (subject to further revision) is that “The poem’s architecture, its division into octaves, quatrains, and heroic couplets, combines formal symmetry with innovation, while remaining unobtrusive.”  The sentence, I think, is sufficiently indeterminate as not to commit me to very much, while serving, at the same time, to draw the reader’s attention to the interesting questions of form.

Ordinarily my impulse would be to defer to your judgment in these matters, but I am puzzled by your statement that there “really are no stanzas” in “The Rhodora.”  Certainly Emerson put in no line spaces, but to my way of thinking the presence of stanzas is signaled by the fact that rhyme patterns coincide with syntactical units.  Lines 1-4 and 5-8 are constituted by single sentences; the last two quatrains (as I want to call them) consist of independent clauses separated (or joined) by a colon.  One would call these distinct units of meaning even if the rhyme scheme did not coincidingly reinforce that impression.  The fact that there is no enjambment between quatrains (as there is between lines 9-10, for instance, within a quatrain) suggests that Emerson respected the closed independence of his four- and eight-line units.  The rhyme scheme in the first octave (the speaker’s discovery of the flower) precisely mirrors the rhyme scheme of the ensuing address.  What else do we need for a “stanza”?  The business of each of the poem’s subdivisions is accomplished within its borders.

So, does this way of looking at the matter convince you that there are indeed stanzas here, or is there some flaw in my approach to the question?  I trust your statement that there is no name for a two-heroic-couplet quatrain, but vacuums in the nomenclature would be no bar to Emerson’s inventiveness, right?

Pal

  

On Sunday, November 24, 2013 10:16 AM I wrote,

 

Pal,

Stanzas require spatial breaks. Look up the term in The Book of Forms.

Lew

  

On Nov 24, 2013, at 2:57 PM, Pal wrote:

I keep thinking I might get a reply from you that is not either stupid or insulting or both.  You keep disappointing me.

Pal

  

On Sunday, November 24, 2013 1:23 PM I wrote,

 

Pal,

I don't understand why you would say something nasty like that to me. The answer I gave you is neither stupid nor nasty, it is accurate. If you look at a poem and see that it is arranged in, say, three sections on the page, with separations between them, those are either stanzas or strophes. If the sections are regular, they are stanzas; if irregular, they are strophes. Each stanza may be made up of combinations of lines, couplets, triplets, quatrains, etc., as you described -- that does not make them stanzas in their own right.

I've spent my lifetime studying prosody, my friend, and I have never answered anyone who asked me a technical question in anything but an accurate way unless, of course, out of their ignorance they wish to pick a fight. You have offended and astonished me.

Lew

  

On Sunday, November 24, 2013 5:01 PM, Pal wrote,

You need to go back and look at what you said and compare it to what you might have said if you had wanted to be helpful (if you can imagine such a thing).  Then you could look up the definition of “brusque” in the dictionary.  You allow that there are “quatrains” in an English sonnet or octave and sestet in an Italian sonnet even though there are no line spaces, which you seem now to regard as essential to constituting subdivisions in a poem.  You were abusive to me when I sent that Henry James poem, and in fact it has been years since you said anything to me that exhibited a semblance of good manners.  You can’t treat people that way and then claim to be surprised when you get called on it.  I was prepared to forgive and forget on that last matter, but your dismissive “look it up in my book” response to my carefully reasoned enquiry was one bit of unmannerly petulance too many. 

Pal

 

On Monday, November 25^th, at 09:32 a.m. I replied,

 

Dear Pal,

You need to look at my first reply above. It was courteous and complete. I answered your query fully.

The first edition of The Book of Forms was published in 1968. It has now been through four editions, I have no idea how many printings, and it has been in print for 45 years. The whole idea behind the book is to consider poem and stanza forms, and there is a form-finder index beginning, in the current edition, on page 92, that lists stanza and poem forms beginning with single-line forms (monostichs) through 210-line forms. Many of these forms may be further broken down into their components, which may include couplets, triplets, quatrains, octaves, and so on, but these components themselves are not the stanzas of a poem unless they stand alone with spatial breaks between them.

The definition of a stanza, to be found on page 7 of the current edition, reads,  “Proportion in figure has to do with the shape of the stanza (stave)or strophe of poems that are not written in spatial prosody.  Essentially, “stanza” and “strophe” mean the same thing: shorter divisions of a poem; however, a distinction may be made if one thinks of strophes as short divisions of a poem having no specific length, and stanzas as having specific lengths.  A poem of one strophe or stanza is monostrophic; of two, distrophic (if it rhymes, a twime); or three, tristrophic (thrime), and so on through the standard prefixes, q.v.”

This is an Italian sonnet; it conists of two stanzas, an octave and a sestet rhyming abbaabba cdecde:

 

THE UNIVERSAL LEAF

 

The universe requires that we be born.

As soon as that's been done, it's out to get us.

We become Peter Rabbit in the lettuce

Trying to hide away from Farmer Brown.

Hopelessly we hope we won't be torn

Away, apart.  We pray he will forget us,

That he will have some pity once he's met us,

But all such self-delusion is forlorn.

 

Our hopes and dreams must come at last to grief

If they're not wrecked already, partway through

This span of years.  We're well aware that worse

Must come to worst.  We cower beneath this leaf

Which we turn over to find what we always knew:

No one cares.  Not even the universe.

 

This is the same sonnet, although now it is arranged in four stanzas – two quatrains and two triplets rhyming abba abba cde cde.

 

THE UNIVERSAL LEAF

 

The universe requires that we be born.

As soon as that's been done, it's out to get us.

We become Peter Rabbit in the lettuce

Trying to hide away from Farmer Brown.

 

Hopelessly we hope we won't be torn

Away, apart.  We pray he will forget us,

That he will have some pity once he's met us,

But all such self-delusion is forlorn.

 

Our hopes and dreams must come at last to grief

If they're not wrecked already, partway through

This span of years.  We're well aware that worse

 

Must come to worst.  We cower beneath this leaf

Which we turn over to find what we always knew:

No one cares.  Not even the universe.

 

This is the same sonnet, except that now it is monostrophic  -- fourteen lines rhyming abbaabbacdecde.

 

THE UNIVERSAL LEAF

 

The universe requires that we be born.

As soon as that's been done, it's out to get us.

We become Peter Rabbit in the lettuce

Trying to hide away from Farmer Brown.

Hopelessly we hope we won't be torn

Away, apart.  We pray he will forget us,

That he will have some pity once he's met us,

But all such self-delusion is forlorn.

Our hopes and dreams must come at last to grief

If they're not wrecked already, partway through

This span of years.  We're well aware that worse

Must come to worst.  We cower beneath this leaf

Which we turn over to find what we always knew:

No one cares.  Not even the universe.

 

You have vented your “scholarly” spleen on me, Pal, so let me make a few remarks of my own:

I hold no brief for the academic American literary establishment’s ability to teach poetics to its students, for it has never had any interest in prosody and technique; indeed, it disdains such things because its great hero, Ralph Waldo Emerson, disdained them, and its ikon, Walt Whitman, was unable to deal with them. Your question to me amounts to, “what is a stanza?” You have been through the academic mill and have an “earned “ Ph.D., whereas all I have is three “honorary” doctorates, given to me because I taught myself almost everything I know about poetics and made that knowledge available to several generations of poets. You do not understand what a “stanza” is although you are an eminent Emerson scholar. I knew what a stanza is before I got to high school because I was interested in such things, even as a child.

Your query to me is the very first time in my life that anyone has asked me to explain the “stanza,” one of the most basic elements of poetics. When I replied, I did so politely and fully. You chose to be unkind to me by way of thanks because of your deep ignorance and antipathy to technique, learned from the subject of your studies. You accused me of being “brusque,” when I was merely terse, a quality I needed to develop as the author of The Book of Forms in order to sort out and deliver simple definitions.

I am very sorry, Pal, that our friendship has turned into this sad relationship.

 

Lew:

Thank you for that crystal clear explanation of where your hostility is coming from.  As an ignorant academic I thought I had done sufficient obeisance to your marvelous expertise simply by asking for your help, but your contempt for me and

all my kind fully explains why, over the whole period of our acquaintance, I have never succeeded in extracting from you the first particle of useful information.

I don't expect I'll bother you in the future.  I wouldn't have done so this time except that I faced a very specific kind of problem, which was how most accurately to register what was interesting in the prosody of "The Rhodora"--for a reader's edition of the poems that I am currently compiling.  A smarter answer than you gave would have addressed itself to that problem as the subject at hand instead of flitting off, as you have a way of doing, into clouds of brag.  Your suggestion that nothing more need (or perhaps could) be said than to represent the poem's rhyme scheme alphabetically I found frustratingly reductionist if not simply brain-dead--a way of obscuring rather than of asserting the interest attaching to the poem's unique form--and a good explanation as well of why

academics long ago lost interest in the silly, thoughtless abab of the prosodists.  However chastened I may be by your view that I know nothing whatever about poetry, I find I have an equal contempt for those who practically deny the relationship between form and meaning, as also for writers who don't

accept it as a duty that they at least be interesting.

Pal

______

COMMENTS   Dear Mr. Turco, I looked up one of your terzanelles this morning and found your blog. The conversation between you and Pal was a sad one -- to my mind, you were doing your best to be helpful, and Pal had a hard time responding in a civil manner. I just wanted to say that I'm sorry it turned out that way.  Back to the topic at hand... would it be possible for me to post one of your terzanelles on my blog, The Opposite of Indifference(http://tabathayeatts.blogspot.com/)? I would be happy to link to your blog or to your books at a bookstore, whichever you would prefer.  Best, Tabatha Yeatts

 

 

 

Related articles

Edna St. Vincent Millay’s Use Of Sonnet Style In “

Blog 5. My thoughts.

Trinh - Post 20

Types of Poems

Quatrain Poems ~ Sharing our Poetry

Basic klmpk 5

Chain Ghazal

From THE HERO ENKIDU, "Canto III: Erech"

 

 

           I have just finished correcting what I hope is the final draft of my epic titled The Hero Enkidu which is written in Anglo-Saxon prosody with bobs and wheels (like Gawain and the Green Knight). The "Foreword," "Prologue," and "Canto One: Nimrod and Lilitu," are scheduled to be published in the Winter 2013 issue of Per Contra on-line. This is the first section of "Canto II: Erech" --

CANTO II: ERECH 

 

On their trek to Erech   Lilitu told

Enkidu the tale   of the city’s founding:

“In the second age   Isildur carried

Out of the ruins   of golden Númenor  

A great globe    made of stone.

Upon the stone    he etched an oath

And caused the great   King of the Mountains

To place his hand   upon the rock

And swear that he   would bear fealty,

To Isildur’s lineage   and to Erech when

Its temple and walls   were raised upon

The crown  of the hill.  Isildur built  

A ziggurat then,   the White Temple,   

And worshipped there   Anu and Inanna,   

Sky sovereigns.    But when the time

Came at last   to honor their oath,

The Men of the Mountains    would not fight

The wizard Sargon,    for they had worshipped

Him erewhile   in the Dark Years.

Isildur cursed them,    swore that they

Would never rest    till they had fulfilled

Their ancient oath.   Erech was desolate

When the Third Age   came to an end

Because the Terror   of the Sleepless Dead

Lay on the hill   and the White Temple.

Then Aragorn came,    arrived in Erech

To hold the army    of the undead

To their sworn word.   They obeyed this time

And helped Aragorn   defeat the Corsairs

Of Umbar at Pelargir.   After the battle

Aragorn released   the ghostly host

From their curse   and they went to rest.

                                             At last the mountain men

                                    were given their surcease.

                                             They could not remember when

                                    they last had lived in peace.

                                             They would not rise again.”

 

Obamacare or Obama? A Quiz.

John Boehner

Speaker of the U. S. House of Representatives

1. Who invented the Affordable Care Act, erroneously called "Obamacare" primarily by Republicans? ANSWER: The Heritage Society, a conservative Republican organization. 2. Who instituted the prototype of the "Affordable Care Act"? ANSWER: George Romney, Republican Governor of Massachusetts, in that state where it was successful and is still in effect. 3. After Massachusetts, what legislature approved and passed into law The Affordable Care Act? ANSWER: The Congress of the United States of America. 4. During the last Presidential election, which candidate opposed The Affordable Care Act? ANSWER: The Republican candidate, George Romney. 5. Which candidate lost the election decisively? ANSWER: The Republican candidate, George Romney. 6. Who questioned the Constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act after the election? ANSWER: The Republican Party. 7. What branch of the Government declared the Affordable Care Act Constitutional? ANSWER: The conservative Republican Supreme Court of the United States of America. 8. What is the real objective of the Republican Party? ANSWER: To destroy by any means the administration and reputation of the current President because he is of mixed white and black race. 9. How far are they willing to go? ANSWER: We are about to find out.

The City: A Poemoir

          In 1952 the gold medalists for the Meriden High School Hicks Prize Essay Contest were my classmates Phineas Gay, Carol Iodice, George Lallos, Doris Ravasio, Joyce Tambourine, and I. A three-person committee of teachers chaired by Mark Bollman, head of the English Department and my English Honors teacher, comprised the panel of judges. At the time I was told by other teachers that two of the three faculty judges thought my essay was the best one submitted that year, but that one judge, my instructor and the head of the English Department, Mark Bollman, refused to support it for the prize. The essay, “A Row of Hedges,” was about my gazing out the window of Bollman's class, a typical pose, and seeing a line of hedges, which I used as a metaphor for our time in high school. I assume Bollman took umbrage at my writing about daydreaming in his class, but my music teacher Tony Parisi told me years later, “You didn’t stand a chance. Bollman hated Italians.”

          Although Bollman kiboshed my Hicks Prize, I won a number of prizes that year in the Scholastic Writing Awards sponsored locally by the Hartford Courant and nationally by Scholastic Magazines. I received Honorable Mentions for my sets of poems titled, “Group I” and “Group 2,” and for my short stories, "The Battle of the Primaries," and "Mrs. Brown."  My long poem, “Observations of a Resurrected Corpse,” composed in Bollman's class as my English Honors project was an answer to Walt Whitman's effusive “Manahatta”; it was built around three poems I had written in my junior year preceding after my first trip to Manhattan -- this was the main one:

 

THE CITY

 

This is the city, the grime and the dust,

a rushing, roaring, rampant stream of life

passing, pressing, pushing along the narrow streets;

the clash and clamor of peering people

leaning from towering tenements, tainting the air

with curses and calls, the cries of Cain;

the acrid aroma, the air leaden;

the rich growing richer, the poor staying poor,

rich or poor, greedy alike

with the avarice of vermin, vicious, despairing.

This is the city, citadel of Man –

decadent, desperate, dollar-driven,

its veneer of glass a transparent mockery,

a mural of mirror masking a core

of misery and madness: humanity’s castle,

the fabulous fortress of a futile race,

the pinnacle of pride, see it clearly –

this is the city.

           “Observations of a Resurrected Corpse” (later titled “The City[s Mask”) won a Key Award from the Courant, and it received an Honorable Mention in the Nationals, the only student work in Meriden to do so. Nor did any student in Meriden receive nearly as many "Certificates of Merit" as I did in the Scholastic Awards.

          When we members of Mr. Bollman’s English Honors all had finished our projects, we spent several days discussing them and deciding which examples were to appear in the class anthology, The Leaky Pen. I was unprepared for Mr. Bollman’s reaction to my poem, a response more violent than mine had been to Whitman's poem -- he suddenly blew up, smashed the top of his desk with his fist, and furiously declared, “It is from works such as this that the seeds of Communism sprout and grow to bear bitter fruit!” If I had been more politically aware at the time, I might have realized that his response to a student poem had something to with the Communist witch hunts of the period. I was apparently a junior warlock allied ethnically with Sacco and Vanzetti, Italian=Amercan anarchists of an earlier period.

          Mr. Bollman also refused to allow me to be the solo editor of The Annual yearbook for the Class of 1952. He appointed Arthur von Au co-editor with me, and I received a B in English Honors.Twelve years later “Observations” appeared, in a somewhat revised version titled "The City's Mask," in Quartet, No. 8, 1964.

 

 

Regarding the Trayvon Martin – George Zimmerman affair

 

 

 

 

 

 

From the 2012 Florida Statutes

 

Title XLVI CRIMES

Chapter 776 JUSTIFIABLE USE OF FORCE

 

76.013 Home protection; use of deadly force; presumption of fear of death or great bodily harm.—

(1) A person is presumed to have held a reasonable fear of imminent peril of death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another when using defensive force that is intended or likely to cause death or great bodily harm to another if:

(a) The person against whom the defensive force was used was in the process of unlawfully and forcefully entering, or had unlawfully and forcibly entered, a dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle, or if that person had removed or was attempting to remove another against that person’s will from the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle; and

(b) The person who uses defensive force knew or had reason to believe that an unlawful and forcible entry or unlawful and forcible act was occurring or had occurred.

 

Q: Was Trayvon Martin illegally entering a home? A: No.

 

(2) The presumption set forth in subsection (1) does not apply if:

(a) The person against whom the defensive force is used has the right to be in or is a lawful resident of the dwelling, residence, or vehicle, such as an owner, lessee, or titleholder, and there is not an injunction for protection from domestic violence or a written pretrial supervision order of no contact against that person; or

(b) The person or persons sought to be removed is a child or grandchild, or is otherwise in the lawful custody or under the lawful guardianship of, the person against whom the defensive force is used; or

(c) The person who uses defensive force is engaged in an unlawful activity or is using the dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle to further an unlawful activity; or

(d) The person against whom the defensive force is used is a law enforcement officer, as defined in s. 943.10(14), who enters or attempts to enter a dwelling, residence, or vehicle in the performance of his or her official duties and the officer identified himself or herself in accordance with any applicable law or the person using force knew or reasonably should have known that the person entering or attempting to enter was a law enforcement officer.

 

Q: Does any of the above apply to Trayvon Martin? A: No.

 

(3) A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any other place where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the commission of a forcible felony.

(4) A person who unlawfully and by force enters or attempts to enter a person’s dwelling, residence, or occupied vehicle is presumed to be doing so with the intent to commit an unlawful act involving force or violence.

 

Q: Did Trayvon Martin have the right to be where he was, and does this law apply to him as well as to George Zimmerman? A: Yes.

 

(5) As used in this section, the term:

(a) “Dwelling” means a building or conveyance of any kind, including any attached porch, whether the building or conveyance is temporary or permanent, mobile or immobile, which has a roof over it, including a tent, and is designed to be occupied by people lodging therein at night.

(b) “Residence” means a dwelling in which a person resides either temporarily or permanently or is visiting as an invited guest.

(c) “Vehicle” means a conveyance of any kind, whether or not motorized, which is designed to transport people or property.

History.—s. 1, ch. 2005-27.

 

Q: Does any of section five apply to Trayvon Martin? A: No.

 

The Neighborhood Watch Rules of Sanford, Florida, have  been removed from the City's web site; however, according to Florida and National Neighborhood Watch rules,

 

1. Members of a Watch do not have the right to carry firearms.

 

Q. Was George Zimmerman in violation of this rule? A. Yes.

 

2. Members of a watch are not to approach a suspect in person but to report such suspect.

 

Q. Did George Zimmerman report Trayvon Martin as a suspect to the 911 headquarters? A. Yes.

 

Q. Was he told not to follow Trayvon Martin? A. Yes; he was told, “We do not need you to do that [to follow Trayvon Martin].

 

Q. Did he follow Trayvon Martin in violation of his instructions? A. Yes.

 

Q. Did he approach Trayvon Martin? A. Yes.

 

Q. Did he initiate the confrontation with Trayvon Martin? A. Yes.

 

Q. Did Trayvon Martin know who George Zimmerman was? A. No.

 

Q. Did Trayvon Martin have the right to defend himself against George Zimmerman according to Florida law? A. Yes.

 

Q. Was Trayvon Martin armed? A. No.

 

Q. Was George Zimmerman, given the situation, the law, and the rules, justified in shooting Trayvon Martin?  A. No.

 

 

 

Death of a Form

          The word form is a turnoff for some people. They think “sonnet.” “The sonnet is dead,” is a frequent claim by such folk, but what they usually mean is that, in their opinion, nobody can write a sonnet anymore because the form has been done to death; it has become trite.

          But “the sonnet” is not dead. It cannot die. It is merely a specific, often-used pattern. It is totally neutral in the abstract. It isn’t the form that’s dead, it is the burden of tradition that lies upon the sonnet. When one thinks “sonnet,” one doesn’t think merely of the form, one thinks of all the sonnets he or she has read, and when one goes to write a sonnet, one still thinks of all those sonnets lying in all those books of poetry sitting on our shelves.

          As a result, one often winds up writing a sonnet that sounds like Wordsworth, or Millay, or somebody, and one thinks, “I want to write like me, not like somebody else,” and we grunt n disgust as we crumple the paper and tosses it into the circular file. But if one can unburden oneself of the burden of tradition, the form remains waiting to be used in a new way. It is nothing more than a pattern that offers potential.

          Take the triolet, for example, that form which Edgar Lee Master derogates in his poem

 

PETIT THE POET

 

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

Tick, tick, tick, like mites in a quarrel —

Faint iambics that the full breeze wakens —

But the pine tree makes a symphony thereof.

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

Ballades by the score with the same old thought:

The snows and the roses of yesterday are vanished;

And what is love but a rose that fades?

Life all around me here in the village:

Tragedy, comedy, valor and truth,

Courage constancy, heroism, failure —

All in the loom, and oh what patterns!

Woodlands, meadows, streams and rivers —

Blind to all of it all my life long.

Triolets, villanelles, rondels, rondeaus,

Seeds in a dry pod, tick, tick, tick,

Tick, tick, tick, what little iambics,

While Homer and Whitman roared in the pines?

 

Edgar Lee Masters

 

          Every garden club poet from Dubuque to Oshkosh has written a triolet. Its burden of tradition is that the form is a pretty little thing, fit only for writing about fluffy cloudlets on a spring day, and daffodils on a lawn. Even the poet Dylan Thomas, when he was a child, wrote a triolet, and fell under the weight of the burden of tradition:

 

TRIOLET

 

The bees are glad the livelong day,

For lilacs in the beauty blow

And make my garden glad and gay.

The bees are blad the livelong day,

They to my blossoms wing their way,

And honey steal from flowers aglow.

The bees are glad the livelong day,

For lilacs in their beauty blow.

 

Dylan Thomas

 

 A truly awful piece of work, unless one looks at it simply as an exdercise in metrics. But even then one need not have written a triolet about flowers and bees. This is a triolet too:

 

JASPER OLSON

From “Bordello”

 

I take my women any way they come —

I'm Jasper Olson, brother.  Hard and fast

I play this game.  Though some folks think I'm dumb,

I take my women any way they come,

and come they do.  There's no time to be numb

in this life — grab it now and ram the past.

I take my women any way they come. 

I'm Jasper Olson, brother, hard and fast.

 

Lewis Turco

 

         And here is a description of the form taken from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition:

          The French triolet is an octave poem turning on only two rhymes and including two refrains: ABaAabAB.  Every line is the same metrical length.

          I suppose one of the reasons I wrote “Jasper Olson” was just to see if, for once, someone couldn’t dump the burden of tradition that encumbers the triolet. I found that the form wasn’t dead. Imagination is smothered by tradition, and all the poet needs to do in order to use an old form is to push the pillow off his face so that he can breathe again. Here is another triolet, a send-up of the form:

 

FOND POEM

A triolet

 

Believe me, I am very fond of you;

I think of you with affection in my heart.

My feelings are as strong as they are true,

believe me. I am very fond of you, 

but, sad to say, I’m afraid I do not love you;

therefore, my dear, I feel that we must part. 

Believe me, I am very fond of you,

I think of you with affection in my heart.

 

Wesli Court

 

A Message from Carl Stevenson

A MESSAGE FROM CARL STEVENSON

I started my own campaign on CREDO's new site that allows activists to start their own petitions. My petition, which is to members of Congress, asks the following:

Support the Student Loan Fairness Act (H.R. 1330), which is common-sense legislation offering a 10-10 repayment plan that would require borrowers to make 10 years of payments on their federal student loans at 10% of their discretionary income, after which the remaining student loan debt would be forgiven. The legislation would also limit interest capitalization to 10% of the original principal.

I graduated from the University of New Hampshire in 2008. Although I am fortunate to have a job doing what I love, I can never pay all my bills in any given month because of the amount of student debt I am in.

I grew up with a single mom, and worked hard to get myself into and through college. I did everything I could to help myself--I went to a state university, applied for scholarships, and worked full time for most of my college career. It took me six years instead of four to graduate because I was working so much. And yet I still graduated with almost $50,000 worth of student debt.

But my story is not unique. There are millions of Americans in the same position as I am. That's why I am asking you to sign this petition to support the Student Loan Fairness Act.

There are many good things in the Student Loan Fairness Act (H.R. 1330) that will help people like me, including capping interest rates on federal student loans at 3.4%, capping monthly payments at 10% of borrowers' discretionary income, and putting limits on interest capitalization. These provisions will help me and millions of other Americans get out from underneath our crushing debt loads. This is good for us and good for the economy. Click here to learn more and add your name to my petition to members of Congress urging them to support the Student Loan Fairness Act (H.R. 1330).

Carl Stevenson

A REPLY TO CARL STEVENSON

Dear Carl,

I was born in 1934, the heart of the depression, the son of an impoverished Sicilian immigrant who served in two armies, the Italian and the American. He put himself through grammar school, high school and seminary by working many jobs, to become an Italian Baptist minister. My mother was a Methodist missionary who grew up in rural poverty in Superior, Wisconsin, but managed to work her way through secretarial school in Chicago and subsequently, working as a stenographer, through Boston University.

Neither of my parents could afford to give me a nickel to attend college, yet now I am a retired professor of English who put himself through college and graduate school in the 1950s by graduating from high school and giving eight years of my life to the U. S. Navy in exchange for the Korean War G. I. Bill. I put my daughter through college with her help: she worked.

I have little sympathy for young people who put themselves deeply into debt in order to go to college. You could have managed in other ways, for instance by working and saving for a few years before entering, or by working full time and going to college part-time, or by working part time while you attended college, as my wife and many of my friends and acquaintances did. You chose your path. Live with it.

Lewis Turco