Poetics and Ruminations

Last Hanukkah Candle

Image by Tomie De Paola, © 2013, all rights reserved.

May you wax and never wane.

december Magazine: The Revival Issue

The “Revival Issue” of december ( http://decembermag.org/ ), a famous Chicago periodical having many connections with the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop during its classical heyday, has just been published by Gianna Jacobson, Editor, in December 2013 with new works by many of its original contributors and works by totally new ones.

One of the poems it contains is “The Cathedral” by Lewis Turco, a sestina written with repeated headwords rather than line-ending teleutons:

  

THE CATHEDRAL

 

Carven images bedeck its eaves;

Cloven hooves of fauns must scrabble where

Craven blackbirds arch their wings and call

Coven members to their burning duties.

Corvine discourses are hushed within the

Cavern of the nave. Do knaves fill this

 

Cavern once again? Are these figures

Carven at, or on the altar? Are they

Corvine in their nature? How long have they

Cloven faith from service to formulate a

Coven of figures clothed in cerements?

Craven from the beginning, have they preyed

 

Cravenly on the choir serving this

Cavern of piety? Was their warlocks'

Coven formed expressly for this purpose?

Carven in the doctrine of three males

Cloven from Adam's rib: Father, Son, and

Corvine Holy Spirit, never from the

 

Curving  womb? Was doctrine ever so

Craven, so fearful of the feminine? Can

Cloven hooves be heard scuttling among this

Cavern's aisles, before these seven stations 

Carven with the symbols of the rood?

Covens have been purported to exist from

 

Coventry to  Navarre, all of them

Corvine in their kind...wings hover over

Carven gargoyles in the umber eaves.

Craven shadows linger in this empty

Cavern, in the apse and in the choir.

Cloven vows lie riven at the altar,

 

Cloven vows that echo in this final

Coven of the Holy Ghost, in this

Cavern of the lost where in the vault

Corvine hosts prey upon the children,

Craven blackbirds raven far beneath

Carven gargoyles sitting in the eaves.

 

Cloven vows fall beneath this corvine

Coven dedicated to the craven

Cavern-dwellers, caryatids carven.

 

By Lewis Turco. All rights reserved 2013.

_____

COMMENTS

"The Cathedral" is quite marvelous. I loved the adjustment to the sestina, which enlivens a form I was never a damn fool about, and all the other wordplay in the poem. I'm quite envious of the quantity and especially the quality of what you're writing these days. As Pound said in a not entirely dissimilar context, "Complimenti, you bitch."   Michael Palma

Love the poem, dazzled by the assonance/consonance of the head words. You are the 3-dimensional chess player of poetry!

Clarinda Harriss

 

I can't think of anyone else Capable of such Curious, Clever Cobbling of Calculated Convergences! Your Capacity to Contrive Complex, Canny Compositions is beyond Comprehension!

Rhina Espaillat

 

That’s quite a sestina, Lew. I like the way the headwords caw. It’s a tour de force – again!

Ruth F. Harrison

 

...my own copy of December arrived yesterday & I was able to read "The Cathedral" -- A very impressive piece of work! Gail White

 

“The Cathedral” sestina is indeed intriguing and extremely well-worked. I just smiled at the word play and it cheered me greatly at a time when I've just learned I've lost an old friend from throat cancer. Life of quiet desperation when you get old, innit?

Christopher Wiseman

 

Related articles

Behind the Sestina: Tara Betts on "Sestina for the Sin"

Behind the Sestina: Kent Johnson on "Sestina: Avantforte"

Behind the Sestina: Scott Edward Anderson on "Second Skin"

All Saints Day

 

Image by Tomie dePaola

 

THE CHILDREN OF ROME

By Lewis Turco

 

The children suckle at the wolf.

All paths lead to these seven hills

where the lambs and goats graze among old

stone.  The saints, the orators

have quarried flesh here from the centuries.

 

The flocks have been known to rise,

their soft lips furling from the white edge

of their hunger, crazed by the wine

let from their veins, to butcher

the butcher in his charnel house.

 

The ages age in this abbatoire

of catacombs and naves.  Hours,

sins, toils of the ambitious: flags,

fish, and crucifixions.  You shepherds!

 

Consider these roads, these ewes and rams,

the lambs shorn to clothe holy Tiber

in ragwear, Romulus tearing

at the wolf's dugs, ayes afire — consider

Remus, his hands crooked in the foul hair

of the Mother of us all.

 

Image  copyright © and all rights reserved 2013, Tomie dePaola.

Poem orignally published in and copyright © by Poetry, cxviii:5, Aug. 1971; all rights reserved 2013 by Lewis Turco.

Related articles

In the beginning

Who Founded Rome?

In the beginning

The Beginning of Rome

Rough Draft: Charnel Houses V.S. Catacombs

Historic Rome: A UNESCO Site in Italy

How When And

Romulus and Remus, Founders of Rome

Emersong

EMERSONG

A tailgater bluesanelle

 

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting --

Waldo Emerson’s wisdom-fruiting

Transcendental instituting!

 

Rainbows love to come to flower,

Arch above his orchard bower,

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting

 

While he tries to meditate

On his Concord apple-crate,

Transcendental instituting!

 

Something good will happen soon,

Probably before high noon,

Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting,

 

The rain will stop and he’ll dry off --

The sun make rainbows of his cough,

Transcendental instituting!

 

He needs a literary hit-man…,

Perhaps he’ll hire Walter Whitman!

Waldo Emerson’s wisdom-fruiting,

Transcendental instituting! 

 

Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry

 

JUST PUBLISHED

 

Please check out the Maine Art Scene   

Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, 2012, 336 pp., paperback.

ERRATA SHEET

 for

The Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and

Poetry, First Printing

By Lewis Putnam Turco

 

This material is missing from the bottom of page 18:

…Berryman (1914-1972), Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966), Richard Eberhart (1904-2005), Richard Wilbur (1921—), Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), Howard Nemerov (1920-1991), Randall Jarrell (1914-1965), and Karl Shapiro (1913-2000). A subdivision of these poets whose vanguard consisted of W. D. Snodgrass (1926-2009), Robert Lowell (1917-1977), and John Berryman, became known, beginning in 1959, as "The Confessional School." Women were prominent among these writers, particularly Anne Sexton (1928-1974), Sylvia Plath (1932-1963), and Maxine Kumin (1925—). Their hallmark was the extremely personal poem. Snodgrass' lyrics regarding marital breakup and divorce, Heart's Needle, led the way back up the aisle.

"Dropping, Dropping,

 

     dropping, dropping, / Hear the pennies fall, / Every one for Jesus, / He will get them all.” We used to sing this song in the Sunday school of the church in Meriden, Connecticut, where my father was minister for seventeen years in the ‘forties and early ‘fifties of the twentieth century. I got to thinking of it when, in late July of 2010 I received a book in the mail that I hadn’t ordered. I opened the package while I was at the post office in Dresden, Maine, where I have a mailbox. I stared at the cover, opened it to see if it were inscribed because I do often receive books from friends and other writers as gifts, but I didn’t know the author of this one, Dave Hunt, and the book wasn’t signed, nor was there a review slip enclosed. I couldn’t imagine why Mr. Hunt had sent it to me because it was a religious book and I haven’t had anything to do with religion in decades, nor had I written on the subject, except that in 2009 I had published a book of history — written almost forty years before it appeared in print — titled Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697. Perhaps, I thought, that was it, but I hadn’t really dealt with the subject of religion per se in that book. 

    I thought that must be it, though. I recalled that when my book came out I had been interviewed by Deirdre Fleming in the Portland Sunday Telegram and I had made a few remarks there — one passage in particular — that might have caused someone to send me this book. I had said, “That was the age when the system in America and in the world, really, was shifting from what we consider sympathetic magic to science, as for instance the shift from astrology to astronomy. It's a fascinating period. This changeover from magic to science is what the Salem witch-hunt was all about. It was the last big clash between science and sympathetic magic.” 

    Ms. Fleming had asked me then, “What can we learn from that period?” I had replied, “There are lots of things we can learn — for instance, the way that witches could be saved in New England in the 17th century was if they confessed to being witches. If you read the whole book, all the accused witches who weren’t hanged in Salem confessed to being witches, and of course, they weren't witches. But some refused to confess, and they weren't witches either. They were hanged. That should tell us something about the ethics of torture. You also learn something about belief and the difference between belief and reality.” 

    “Are those things relevant today?” Ms. Fleming had asked. I replied, “We had a big witch hunt while I was in the Navy in the 1950s — it was called McCarthyism. That was a witch hunt. It is the same thing, exactly. You can learn a lot about human nature. We do repeat history. We're doomed to repeat. We never seem to learn. And there are so many mysterious things that no human being is ever probably going to get to the bottom of, such as “black holes” and “the big bang.” Well, if people have open minds, perhaps they can get their minds around such things, and then believe them. 

    “But believing them is just taking them on faith,” I continued. “Some people take it on faith that there was an initial explosion that created the universe. Other people say God created it, but how do they know that? They take it on faith. The big question is, if God created the universe, who created God? And if there was an initial “big bang,” what came before the big bang? One of these two things is based on science, and the other is based on religion, but both of them are totally mysterious, and people believe in both.” 

    When I got home from the post office I opened the book and read the preface, which was as much of the book as I intended to read. Then I sat down and wrote the author this letter. “Dear Mr. Hunt,” I said,

     “Thank you for sending me a copy of your book titled Cosmos, Creator, and Human Destiny. In your ‘Preface’ you say, ‘Anyone who sets out with an honest heart, an inquiring mind, and a sincere desire to find answers to the most important questions one can face in life will recognize a significant few that must be given priority. Does God exist? What is the origin of the universe and of the life found in such abundance on our tiny planet? What is life and what is its purpose?’ 

    “As the son of a Baptist minister I could hardly have failed to run full tilt into these questions as soon as I was taught to speak. But by the time I was twelve years of age I realized that there are some questions that are incapable of being answered by other human beings, no matter how smart they may be. Today I read this in the newspaper, which is the only reasonable response to such books as yours,” and I pasted into the letter a “Peanuts” cartoon I had recently run across. In the first panel Snoopy is sitting beside his full dish and looking at its contents. He says, “Suppertime…is this all there is to my life?” In the second panel he looks away and says, “Is this the sum-total of my existence? Do I really just live to eat? Is that all I’m really good for?” In the third panel he looks back at his dish and says nothing. In the fourth panel he gets up, bends his head to eat and says, “I must think about that some day.” 

    And then I began to think about the remark I had made in my letter about having lost my father’s faith by the time I was twelve years old and I asked myself, “ Is that true? And when did that process begin?” That’s when I remembered the Sunday school song. 

    In Meriden in those days there was a big department store down on Colony Street called Upham’s. (Parenthetically, now that I think of it, Charles W. Upham wrote a famous book titled Salem Witchcraft.) I loved to go to Upham’s with my mother because when she paid the clerk her money for a purchased item the clerk took a little iron box and stuck the money in it. Then she put the box into a compartment on a sort of trolley and pushed a button. The trolley took off on a railway of sorts — not a vacuum system of the type to be found at drive-in windows of banks these days. It clattered up and away, along the track that led from the counter up to an office that overlooked the store where a cashier sat behind a glass window where she could see everything that went on below her. She took out the money and the invoice, made change, and sent the trolley on its way back to the clerk and my mother. 

    That little railway system made a big impression on me. When we sang about the pennies dropping into the collection basket I imagined, when I was five or six years old, that some such system must be in play so that my Sunday school teacher could get the money to Jesus where he sat up in Heaven carefully watching what we did down here, for the song assured us that Jesus would get all the pennies. I took it on faith that it must be true. 

    But of course it wasn’t, which I finally figured out, doubtless by the time the Tooth Fairy, and the Easter Bunny, and Santa Claus had also gone by the boards. It was disillusioning to realize that my beloved father and my missionary mother could continue to believe such stories into adulthood and even into old age. I devoutly wished that such stories could be true. Perhaps that’s why I became a writer, for I understood, finally, that although those fantasies might not be true in the real world, they could be possible, if but briefly, in the magic world of the imagination, although ultimately that world must not be confused with the real world where sane people live.

 

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

Sad to think of the infinite self-deception religion involves. Freud:

"[Religion] is so patently infantile, so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it is painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life."

Jack

 

As Wesli wrote in "The Universal Leaf,”

 

"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."

 

Cheers, anyway!

Mir

An Immigrant Ballad

 

1890-1968

This poem was written while I was attending the University of Connecticut from 1956-59, after I had graduated from Meriden High School in Connecticut in 1952 and subsequently spent a four-year enlistment in the U. S. Navy. I talk about it a little in the memoir / short story “Father and Son,” which may be found in several of my books (see the footnote below), but others have written about it as well, in particular Jerre Mangione and Ben Morreale who reprinted it in La Storia: Five Centuries of the Italian American Experience:

Listen to Lew Turco read his poem An Immigrant Ballad

 

My father came from Sicily

         (O sing a roundelay with me)

With cheeses in his pocket and

A crust of black bread in his hand.

He jumped ashore without a coat,

         Without a friend or enemy,

Till Jesus nailed him by the throat.

 

My father came to Boston town

         (O tongue a catch and toss one down).

By day he plied a cobbler's awl,

By night he loitered on the mall.

He swigged his wine, he struck his note,

         He wound the town up good and brown,

Till Jesus caught him by the throat.

 

He'd heard of Hell, he knew of sin

         (O pluck that wicked mandolin),

But they were for the gentle folk,

The cattle broken to the yoke.

He didn't need a Cross to tote:

         His eyes were flame, his ears were tin,

Till Jesus nabbed him by the throat.

 

He met a Yankee girl one day

         (O cry a merry roundelay)

Who wouldn't do as she was bid,

But only what the good folk did.

She showed him how the church bells peal

         Upon the narrow straitaway,

And Jesus nipped him by the heel.

 

My father heard a sermon said

         (O bite the bottle till it's dead).

He quit his job and went to school

And memorized the Golden Rule.

He drained his crock and sold his keg,

         He swept the cobwebs from his head,

And Jesus hugged him by the leg.

 

The girl was pleased: she'd saved a soul

         (O light a stogie with a coal).

No longer need she be so wary:

Daddy went to seminary

To find how warm a Yankee grows

         When she achieves her fondest goal.

And Jesus bit him on the nose.

 

At last he had a frock to wear

         (O hum a hymn and lip a prayer).

He hoisted Bible, sailed to search

For sheep to shear and for a church.

He asked the girl to share his life,

         His choir-stall and shirt of hair,

For Jesus bade him take a wife.

 

My father holds a pulpit still

         (O I have had enough to swill).

His eye is tame, his hair is gray,

He can't recall a roundelay.

But he can preach, and he can quote

         A verse or scripture, as you will,

Since Jesus took him by the throat.

 

         Mangione and Morreale wrote, “The humor here is strikingly reminiscent of Robert Canzoneri’s novel A Highly Ramified Tree (1976). Canzoneri’s father was also a Sicilian immigrant who married, in his case, not a Yankee but a southern woman, and he too became a minister in the Baptist Church.

         “By 1990, after publishing his twelfth collection of poems, there is little or no evidence of the Italian experience in Turco other than the spelling of his surname. His recent collection of poetry, The Shifting Web (1990), is a far cry from the earlier poems about Italian Americans. One critic wrote of it: ‘Dominated by images of snow, shadow, dust and decay, Web ignores urban life and human traffic…Yet it is deeply philosophical.’”

         Although I may not have written a great amount of poetry of late years specifically about “Italian Americans,” I have, indeed, written a lot of prose about my Italian heritage.

After it appeared in First Poems (Golden Quill Press, 1960), “An Immigrant Ballad” was anthologized by George Abbe in his Folkways Records album Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, 1961 (available today in MP3 download from www.amazon.com/Anthology-of-Contemporary-American-Poetry/dp/B000S5ADN6); in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM, or from www.starcloudpress.com/CollectedLyrics.html. 

 

My cousin Ann Buttigheri sent me this today from New Jersey, Wednesday, February 18, 2015”

“Hi Lew,

“Yes I watched it, and while I knew there was prejudice, bias and inequity towards the Italians early on, I didn't realize the extent. But then I should have known.  Quick story:

“My dad and his family came here @ 1904. My grandfather (Giuseppe) was a barber by trade, but there was no work to be found, so he got a job building the high school I attended which celebrated it's centennial in 2006.  But for him the work was too messy and ‘hard,’ so he borrowed some money and opened his own barber shop in downtown Jersey City (sort of a Little Italy).  When my dad was in the 4th

grade his father pulled him out of school and told the teacher he’d had enough "education" and dad had to go to work in the barbershop standing on a box lathering faces for shaves and shining shoes too.  In those days it was not mandatory for children to stay in school 'til they were 16.  (That was evident in the PBS program where kids were working in factories). This is why my father didn't think it was necessary for me to go to college because graduating from high school was the equivalent of graduating from Harvard Law.

“My grandmother died very young (her early 40's) in 1926, so my grandfather went to Holy Name cemetery in Jersey City to buy a gravesite.  Now here's the rub: the cemetery's Board of Trustees was comprised wholly and solely of Irish Jesuit priests and so they refused to let him and his ‘ilk’ be buried there.  Italians were simply not allowed in ‘their’ cemetery. But, as uneducated as Giuseppe was, he was smart enough not to be intimidated by them.  So he went to an old family lawyer (Joe Lori) and won his case.  The ‘Board’ was furious, but the worst part of it was that Giuseppe bought a plot for SIXTEEN - oh no! 16 Italians in just one gravesite!

“Your cousin Fina, my step-mom, was the last of the 16 to be buried there.  If you walk through that cemetery you will find a vast number of Callaghans, Kellys, O'Briens, Gallaghers in the early years; but then, starting in the 1930's, you will see names like Buttigheri, Martini, Russo, Vicari and Bartolomeo.  In those days, plots were bought to accommodate the whole family because everyone lived near each other up the block, down the block, across the street and around the corner.  So when they died, they could all be ‘together’ again.

“As a footnote: My high school's teaching staff were ALL Irish, so my Italian teacher had a very, very hard time of it.  They made her life miserable.  Discrimination is a pretty ugly thing, but I'm proud to say that we Italians picked up our ‘big boy pants’ and got on with our lives and succeeded. 

“Sorry for this lengthy e.m. BTW, what a wonderful picture of Zio Luigi! He was quite the gad-about. eh?  I love, love, love "An Immigrant Ballad!" I am forwarding it on to my kids and my Italian friends. Beautiful.  Later, Dude.  Ann - and thanks.”

 

I replied, Dear Ann,

I have no idea what you think you have to apologize for. I just read your email to Jean and asked her what she thinks of the writing. She replied that she thinks it’s “wonderful.”

So do I, Ann! I’ve told you before how good I think you are. You’re a natural, born writer. Sincerely! That’s the opinion of someone who has taught a lot of writing to a lot of people. Please, do me a huge favor: write down all these family stories and send them to me, one by one. I will edit them and gather in a book, which I will then have published. I know at least two publishers who would love to have a book of them.

I am adding this story to my blog right now. Love always, and admiration too,

Lew

 

Another of Ann Badach's stories appears in this book:

 

  

La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON, all rights reserved. May not be reprinted without the express permission of the author. 

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.

New England Book Festival Wild-Card Winner, 2009

Lewis Putnam Turco. Satan’s Scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft, a book review by Joe Danciger

Satan’s Scourge by Lewis Turco refers in its title to smallpox and also to the punishments applied to those believed to be involved with witchcraft or allied practices, such as alchemy or divination.  This book develops a story spanning the years from 1580-1697, chronicling the sweep from a more superstitious age to the age of science and reason. This book is a must read for anyone interested in early American history or witchcraft and magic.

Satan’s Scourge is rich in detail, and many scenes have a sense of immediacy that makes history exciting. The brilliant and graphic account of the Salem witch trials may be the best and most detailed ever written. By the time the trials begin, we have walked the cow paths of New England with these people and have seen the terrible hardships of colonial existence. These details make the trials all the more poignant. Turco is a descendant of the Putnam family, who were very involved in the Salem witch trials, and on whom the book is centered. One might say without exaggeration that this story is in Lewis Turco's blood.

At the time of "Satan’s Scourge,” in Europe Galileo was publishing and considered to be heretical, while in Salem, Massachusetts, farmers were planting and harvesting crops of corn and wheat. Turco describes the historical and philosophical beliefs of the times so thoroughly that the narration can be wholly readable without resorting to further references. In addition the bibliography and index contain favorites of those who are fond of books on demonology and magic, such as Sir Reginald Scot’s “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” This anchors the story and lends its own pleasures. On both continents, riches could be gained by feigning or attempting diverse magical practices—and by hunting those who did so.  

The narrative of Satan's Scourge is not without humor: an occasional fool blows up a boat by accident, and some players are reliably unreliable. The legendary Mother Goose appears in her actual person and uses her herbal knowledge on some very bee-stung boys. The people portrayed in the book are documented by Turco’s scholarship.

The detailed and well-researched writing makes reading this book a pleasure: e.g., in a typical passage, “Early in the spring of 1679 John Stebbins of Northampton was working in a sawmill when he began to have trouble with the logs and boards with which he was working. They began to act up in strange ways- falling down by themselves, writhing out of his hands.” Stebbins later dies, covered with spots, and a neighbor is charged with witchcraft.

Written in such an engaging way that it is hard to stop reading, the narrative of Satan’s Scourge tells about a family and a time of superstition that was replaced by science. This book has depth, and goes far beyond retelling witchy stunts and acts of cruelty by stern patriarchs.

From Per Contra, Spring 2010, at http://www.percontra.net/18danciger.htm  

 
Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697 by Lewis Putnam Turco was the winner of the Wild Card category of the New England Book Festival 2009. The award ceremony was held at the Omni Parker House in Boston, Massachusetts, on Saturday, January 16, 2010, from 7:00-9:30 p.m. with the author and the publisher, Dr. Steven E. Swerdfeger of Star Cloud Press, Scottsdale, Arizona, both present.

 

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

WICKED

An interview by Deirdre Fleming, Staff Writer, The Maine Sunday Telegram, Sunday, March 15, 2009,

 

Dresden Mills writer Lewis Putnam Turco is out with a book, Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, on the deadly and scurrilous witch hunts that plagued Britain and America in the 16th and 17th centuries. After 35 years Dr. Turco has finally had his 800-page historical work on the Salem witch trials published. The 74-year-old award-winning poet was determined not to cut it.

Fleming. Why not?

Turco. I was quite happy with what I had done  — I had researched all that stuff, found out so much information about my mother's family, the Putnams of Salem Village, Massachusetts, which is now Danvers. I really didn't care whether it was published or not.

Fleming. But published it was, and you will discuss this newest book on March 29 at the Augusta City Hall learning gallery at 16 Cony St. What will be the focus of your talk?

Turco. The talk will be on the only trial of a Maine witch that occurred during that period — the trial of Casco minister George Burroughs in 1692. Burroughs was convicted and hanged.

Fleming. When did you actually write this book?

Turco. In 1974 I researched and wrote about the history of the Putnams, as well as all of the witch trails that occurred in New England at the height of the age of "sympathetic magic." The book is told not only chronologically, but also from the point of view of the crystal gazers, alchemists and alleged witches as well as their accusers, other witnesses and clerics. Read in its entirety, the book fully explains the period of time when science was coming into being and those who believed in magic were sometimes hunted down and killed.

Fleming. How did you become interested in this subject?

Turco. I have known about my mother’s ancestors and been interested in the subject since high school, or even before — I had been reading about it for years.

Fleming. Yet for more than three decades, your work and writing were focused on poetry. You taught poetry at the college level since 1960, first at what is now Cleveland State University and then at the State University of New York at Oswego, from which you retired in 1996. Your book on literary criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Poetry Society of America's Melville Cane Award in 1986, one of many awards your work on poetry has received. Why did this book sit around and not get published?

Turco. I tried to publish it. I wrote around, and publishers said it was too long. I wasn't willing to cut it, so I let it sit for 35 years. I didn't even try to peddle it for most of that time. Then, in 2006, I bought a new computer and decided to type it in. I had actually written the typescript in a spring and a summer, so I took another summer and rewrote it as I went along. — It didn't change much. I tightened it up a bit, but it is largely unchanged. When I mentioned it to my current publisher he asked to see it, so I sent it along.

Fleming. Why make it so long?

Turco. It is the only book that I know of that covers that entire history of witchcraft in England and New England during the period I specify, the year 1580, which is the birthday of my mother’s Putnam ancestor who founded the Putnam dynasty in America, to 1697 when the witch-hunts finally died out for good. That was the age when the system in America and in the world, really, was shifting from what we consider sympathetic magic to science, as for instance the shift from astrology to astronomy. It's a fascinating period. This changeover from magic to science is what the Salem witch-hunt was all about. It was the last big clash between science and sympathetic magic.

Fleming. What can we learn from that period?

Turco. There are lots of things we can learn — for instance, the way that witches could be saved in New England in the 17th century was if they confessed to being witches. If you read the whole book, all the accused witches who weren’t hanged in Salem confessed to being witches, and of course, they weren't witches. But some refused to confess, and they weren't witches either. They were hanged. That should tell us something about the ethics of torture. You also learn something about belief and the difference between belief and reality.

Fleming. Are those things relevant today?

Turco. We had a big witch hunt while I was in the Navy in the 1950s — it was called McCarthyism. That was a witch hunt. It is the same thing, exactly. You can learn a lot about human nature. We do repeat history. We're doomed to repeat. We never seem to learn. And there are so many mysterious things that no human being is ever probably going to get to the bottom of, such as “black holes” and “the big bang.” Well, if people have open minds, perhaps they can get their minds around such things, and then believe them.

But believing them is just taking them on faith. Some people take it on faith that there was an initial explosion that created the universe. Other people say God created it, but how do they know that? They take it on faith. The big question is, if God created the universe, who created God? And if there was an initial “big bang,” what came before the big bang? One of these two things is based on science, and the other is based on religion, but both of them are totally mysterious, and people believe in both.

Fleming. Do the same sorts of wrestling matches over ideas continue throughout history?

Turco. Right now there is a witch-hunt going on. We are looking for terrorists. And to a lot of people, anybody with a Muslim background is one. That is not a lot different.

Fleming. Are there others?

Turco. There is a small witch hunt getting started — it is the witch-hunt over the woman who had octuplets. The grandmother is getting threats, and the young “octomom” is getting threats. What is the most rational thing to do? To say, “forget all that, and take care of the babies.” The babies are there. Stop trying to blame the mother. So she's crazy — that's past. That's a good example of a modern witch-hunt.

Fleming. Do you think you'll write more on witchcraft?

Turco.  I doubt it. I'll be seventy-five years old in May. I'm not young, and can't really take on a huge project at my age. So I doubt I will. I will keep writing, though, and I'm giving that talk at Augusta City Hall that you mentioned. I went through my book and got all the information on the minister there in Casco who was hanged in Salem, and put it together as a lecture for this event. And in the summer I’ll be giving another such lecture in Connecticut on the Wallingford witch-hunt that took place about the same time as the Salem event. So I’m still fiddling with the subject to a degree. 

 

La Famiglia / The Family: Memoirs and Poems

Barnes & Noble 

OCTOBER 2009

This book of memoirs and poems is available from all booksellers:

Bordighera Press

John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute

Dr. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Dean

Queens College/CUNY

25 West 43^rd Street, 17^th Floor

New York NY 10036

 

VIA Folios 57

ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1

LOC Control No. 2009905032

Trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00

 

 

From the cover:

Lewis Putnam Turco is the author of some fifty volumes in the genres of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction including books, chapbooks and monographs. The most recent of these include The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories, published in 2008, and in 2009 Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697, a history of the period when science began to displace religion in the western world and of the settlement of Colonial America where his mother’s family, the Putnams, were deeply involved, on both sides of the issue, in the great Salem witchcraft craze of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692.

It is as a poet, however, that Lewis Turco has primarily been known. His First Poems appeared in 1960 as a selection of the Book Club for Poetry. The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004 — the latter sobriquet being an anagram pseudonym under which Lewis Turco has published most of his traditionally formal poems — appeared in 2004. Three years later, in 2007, Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, a gathering of his non-traditionally written poems, was published. 

Founder of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 1962 and of the creative writing program at the State University of New York College at Oswego in 1968, Turco’s first book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America in 1986, and his A Book of Fears: Poems, with Italian translations by Joseph Alessia, won the first annual Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize in 1998.  In 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the periodical Italian Americana and the National Italian American Foundation.

Author of “the poet’s bible,” The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, a seminal work — currently in its third edition — in the development of the Neo-Formalist movement in the U. S., in 2008 Lewis Turco received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award given by the West Chester University Poetry Conference. In 2000 he received an honorary degree from Ashland University in Ohio, and this year he received a second honorary doctorate of humane letters from the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

La Famiglia / The Family, Memoirs, New York: Bordighera Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback, 196 pp., $12.00. ORDER FROM AMAZON

Satan's Scourge published!

          The mammoth manuscript that I began thirty-five years ago, in 1974, 

Satan’s Scourge,

A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft

in England and New England 1580-1697

  

by Lewis Putnam Turco

 

was finally published today, May 2nd, 2009.  A number of people have ordered copies, which have been mailed, and many others have asked for details; here they are, together with the Foreword and Acknowledgments: 

 

Product Details:

ISBN: 978-1-932842-26-5 (soft cover) $39.95

Publisher: Star Cloud Press

6137 East Mescal Street

Scottsdale AZ 85254-5418

Web site: http://www.StarCloudPress.com

e-mail: StarCloudPress@aol.com

Date of Publication: May 2009

Page Count: 800+ including index

Format:

soft cover, ISBN 978-1-932842-26-5, $39.95

jacketed cloth, ISBN 978-1-932842-27-2, $54.95

 order on-line or by mail from

www.starcloudpress.com/SatansScourge.html

Phone: 480.609.0065 | Email Us | Fax: 480.951.5930

no extra charge for copies inscribed by the author

* with purchases over $25.00

Barnes and Noble   

Amazon.com  

This is the first review of the book:

Press Herald  

 

FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,

Satan’s scourge, A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697 is a book of history, a chronicle of the period when the Age of Sympathetic Magic, which had been the system by which mankind operated from time immemorial, was beginning to shift over to the Age of Science, “The New Philosophy,” by which the world would be increasingly governed from then forward. The main focus of the book is upon the Putnam family of Buckinghamshire, in England, from the birth of John Putnam, born in 1580, some of whose descendants would be deeply involved in the last gasp of sympathetic magic, the great witchcraft explosion of Salem Village, Massachusetts, in 1692, which is the climax of the book.

The volume not only looks at all the witchcraft cases in England and New England during the period covered, but it also tells the stories of the major scientists and Adepts of sympathetic magic (often the two were the same) in Europe and America. The effect is twofold: First, the method is strictly chronological, unfolding like a tapestry year by year. As one thread of the tapestry swells and tapers off, others appear and interweave with one another. Second, the history is told from the point of view of common people, the Puritans of England and New England primarily, but also the crystal gazers, alchemists, alleged witches and their accusers, and those ordinary citizens caught up in the webs woven by plotters, liars, “possessed” children and their parents, and, of course, the clerics.

Furthermore, this is the period when America was settled, when Oliver Cromwell and the Roundheads carried out their Puritan revolution, and all the politics and machinations of the relevant sovereigns and courtiers of the period are also a part of the tapestry here woven.

One is probably saying to oneself at this point, “It’s too complicated and confusing.” But when one begins to read the book one discovers that things start out clear, and they stay clear throughout. Everything in it is true. All the incidents took place in the real world, according to my historical sources (which are exhaustive — A bibliography is appended), and this depiction of the Salem witchcraft trials is the most complete and accurate that has ever been written, many errors and misprisions having been corrected.

I wish to acknowledge those who have helped and inspired me in this project. The first person to encourage my writing on the subject was Dr. Eleanor Michel of Meriden, Connecticut, High School for whose 11^th grade English class in 1950-51 I wrote an addendum — an extra concluding chapter, a postscript — to The House of the Seven Gables, in the style of Nathaniel Hawthorne [http://www.nightsandweekends.com/articles/09/NW0900132.php].

At about the same time four of us at Meriden High founded the Fantaseers Science-Fiction Reading Club which grew to include (Rev.) Ben Barnes, Pierre Bennerup, Bill Burns, (Prof.) Lindsey Churchill, the late Phineas Gay, (Rev.) George Hangen, George Lallos, the late Jack Rule, (Rev.) Ray Staszewski, George Veillette, (Rev.) Arthur von Au, and Paul Wiese — the Black Thirteen who provided me with Faustian fellowship, evil escapades, vile volumes, and the opprobrious opportunity to do my second (very imaginative) writing on the subject of the Salem Village witchcrafts: A Senior Day skit, a photograph of which appears on page 139 of my book Fantaseers, A Book of Memories, published in 2005 [also by Star Cloud Press].

Next, I beg the indulgence of the Research Foundation of State University of New York for providing me with a Faculty Fellowship during the summer of 1974, under which I was to write a volume of poetry but, inasmuch as I had begun this book in the spring, I finished the first draft instead. I did nothing with it thereafter beyond query a few publishers who seemed not much interested in it because of its length, so I put it away until the spring of 2006 when I rewrote it as I typed it into my new MacBook Pro computer.

I wish to express my deep gratitude to several librarians for their help in my research: Eleanor S. Adams of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts, for her early and kind assistance; Dorothy Mozley, Genealogy and Local History Librarian of the Springfield City Library, Springfield, Massachusetts, for her help with the Springfield witchcraft cases of 1646 and 1651, and Cecilia Caneschi, Reference Librarian of the Meriden, Connecticut, Public Library for her great help with the Benham Wallingford witchcraft cases of 1691, 1692, and 1697.

The description of the Vale of Aylesbury at the beginning of this book is in fact very largely that of Eben Putnam, not myself, taken from his Putnam genealogies (see Bibliography). Inasmuch as he explored the area, and I have not, I thought it as well to leave his descriptions largely as he wrote them. I thought it fitting, too, that this scholar of the Putnam family, who spent such enormous amounts of time and work researching his people, thus making the Putnams one of the most thoroughly documented families in America, ought to leave his imprint on these pages in some way other than statistically, for his two genealogies were published in limited editions (though I have made them available from University Microfilms International of Ann Arbor, Michigan).

Over the years I have met or known many people who are descended from the folk depicted here including my dear friend, the late poet Constance Carrier of New Britain, Connecticut; Curtis Disbrow, the husband of my sister-in-law Anne Disbrow of Meriden; my cousin-in-law Gary Getchell of Cedar Grove, Maine; Lindsey Churchill and the late Jack Rule, both Fantaseers; the Maine artist Margaret Macy, a descendant of Rebecca Nurse; the Cleveland poet Mary Oliver; the late novelist John Cheever, who angrily informed me in my living room in Oswego, New York, that the character Ezekiel Cheever of Salem Village was fictional, having been invented by Arthur Miller for his play The Crucible — John did not stop fuming until I showed him his forebear’s testimony in the Salem Witchraft trial records; my correspondent of almost forty years, the great fantasist Ray Bradbury, and there were two Drs. Mather, father and son (but doctors of medicine, not divinity — both Roman catholics!) in Oswego where I lived and taught for thirty-one years at the State University of New York College at Oswego, and where I wrote the first draft of this volume.

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to my wife, Jean, who helped me with the chore of working on the index of this book, the most grueling task she has suffered since the school year 1968-1969 when she carried most of the physical labor of typing and editing two manuscripts, The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco, my father, and The Literature of New York: A Selective Bibliography of Colonial and Native New York State Authors.

Lewis Putnam Turco

Dresden Mills, Maine

Tuesday, December 2^nd, 2008

 

REMARKS

Camden, Maine

March 31, 2009

To: Lewis Turco

Dear Sir:

I have to admit enjoying your lecture of Sunday, March 29, in double time (military term) because of its double concentration on witchcraft and Reverend George Burroughs. Then seeing your volume, Satan's Scourge, on the front table I realized you may have written the most comprehensive modern treatment of the epic yet. And I suppose you have.

But prime purpose of this letter is to say I have begun to read your tome and greatly thank you for the labors you invested in it.

Sincerely,

Robert Manns

Playwright

 

Libby, Montana

Putnam Turco —  

I just received Satan's Scourge, and what an enormous work it is. I've only had time to flip through it but already love an incident with two guys, a clay pipe and a horse's ass. 725 pages and over 80 pages of index! It is extremely rare that a piece of scholarship is also so readable. You are the right kind of writer to do scholarship; to show them that the material can be assembled and even analysed…and yet be a page turner.

If I can conquer this thing in a decent time range, I'd love to try a review. Is there some place you'd like me to try to get it in — a literary journal, maybe, and the name of an editor who would think the was a good idea? I'd like to help you sell it.

So congratulations on getting yet another major book out of your thickening brain.

John Herrmann

Novelist

 

John,

Thanks for your great letter! Yours is the first response to the book that I’ve received from a writer, and it means a lot to me to hear what you have to say about its readability.

Lew

Lew,

Your history makes me breathless. It doesn't stop for even a coffee break. I don't know what I could say about it other than it is a complete — over-complete — readable tracking of a great evil by well meaning people — your relatives, mostly. I can do a paragraph for Amazon.com, but I am not the reviewer for this. If you've read any of Blake Bailey's biographies (most recent, Cheever, but the Yates book is relentlessly complete) I would say that they are fine, but what's to review? I guess I'm just not able to review anything other than fiction, and then not all fiction, as I did the first review of Solzhenitsyn's August 1914 and could only review the awful language of the translation. I guess because S's work has always been mostly history. But I will say that your Satan book does not dramatize, and that's the stuff that I would pick up for reviewing. In the end, the whole thing moves too fast for me to find a place to begin talking about it. I will say that I was stunned at many of those really nutty women.

At times your narration seems to be slightly 17th century. Maybe not "your" prose but your sources' choices of expressions?

John Herrmann

 

John,

The dialogue in Satan’s Scourge is the actual recorded words of the original characters in it. What I did is go through the depositions of the witnesses and the trial records, and if someone said that something happened at a particular time, in a particular place and year, I simply moved the incident being described back in the chronology to the point where the witnesses said it happened. Therefore, nearly all characterizations of people and descriptions of events are taken from the actual dialogues and monologues of the people involved. That’s why the language in the mouths of the people speaking it is archaic, because it is, indeed, archaic language.

The only characterizations of people in the book that I invented are derived from the horoscopes I cast of the main characters on their birthdays (knowing beforehand, of course, how things developed in their stories). I hope that does two things: Gives the reader an opening sense of the adults those characters would become and portents of the events in which they were eventually involved.

I’m glad you like the book.

Lew

Beacon, New York

Congratulations, Lew.

I hope it fares well. I've talked it up to a few folks and passed on the link to your site for orders. I never wrote a review but I might get to that yet. Trying to keep a day job gets tough enough some days.

For me, it rekindled a fascination I had with the competition between magic, science, and religion. I had always thought that science won, and that was it — reason would reign for good. But our need or desire for religion and magic are like an addiction, and we must ever be watchful of that, just as a real addict knows that the bottle is not the solution, and causes more harm than the immediate pleasure or feeling of safety it brings.

For what it's worth, it reminds me of a song written by one of my favorite musicians, Neil Peart, of the Canadian band called Rush:

Witch Hunt

The night is black

Without a moon

The air is thick and still

The vigilantes gather on

The lonely torch lit hill

 

Features distorted in the flickering light

The faces are twisted and grotesque

Silent and stern in the sweltering night

The mob moves like demons possessed

Quiet in conscience, calm in their right

Confident their ways are best

 

The righteous rise

With burning eyes

Of hatred and ill-will

Madmen fed on fear and lies

To beat and burn and kill

 

They say there are strangers who threaten us

In our immigrants and infidels

They say there is strangeness too dangerous

In our theaters and bookstore shelves

That those who know what's best for us

Must rise and save us from ourselves

 

Quick to judge

Quick to anger

Slow to understand

Ignorance and prejudice

And fear walk hand in hand...

Paul Austin

Software Tester