Poetics and Ruminations

The Hustle

 

Gene and Lewis Turco at a family wedding.

          When I was five years of age my brother, Gene, was born in Meriden, Connecticut.  His middle name is "Laurent" — the male version of "Laura," my mother’s middle name, just as my first name is “Lewis,” the English version of “Luigi,” and my middle name is “Putnam,” my mother’s maiden name. It was many years before I realized the derivation of "Gene": it is the American version of "Gino," which is short for "Luigi" — my father had named both his sons after himself!  In my second collection of poems, a chapbook titled The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask (1962), I wrote about our childhood:

 

GENE

 

"Ragtail Gene, don't tag along here;

        scram on home or I'll bop your nose."

Brother, come the first of April,

        that was the word the second of May

        and all you heard when our lead pipe cannon

        swallowed a cherry bomb and belched a stone

        that boomed across the Fourth of July,

        nearly crocking you where you hid

        to spy on all the older kids.

 

If the world grew huger in your eyes,

        that was because they went wide

        to hear the clubhouse secrets told

        in the dark garage where gasoline

        smelled about good enough to swill.

 

For, the first you knew of going,

        you knew because we swore our raft

        was not a raft, but a ship to float

        a boy's body out of sight

        and a man's voice too deep for sounding.

 

That's the way that I am going;

        ragtail Gene, don't tag along here.

 

          When I was in the eighth grade my father sent me off to Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut.  He told me that he was doing it to give me the best education he could, but he evidently told my brother that he sent me away to save Gene's life.  I don't recollect that I was all that homicidal toward my sibling.  The worst thing I remember doing was tying him to the porch of the parsonage on Windsor Avenue when I was supposed to be baby-sitting him.  I wanted to play with my neighborhood buddies instead, and I knew he was safe because I could hear him yelling.

          One weekend while I was in the Navy and Gene was in high school I came back on liberty to Meriden and discovered that he had gotten himself into some sort of trouble. Papa and Mom May talked to me about it in distress, and I think I must have become angry, because I wrote “The Hustle”:

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "The Hustle."

 

O your eyes are slightly wondered,

           Brother Gene.

They allow the world's been sundered,

           Brother Gene.

So you travel with your brothers:

Not the flesh-and-blood kind — others

Who deplore the ways of fathers,

           Man! you're mean.

 

There are rods and there are women,

           Brother Gene.

You're a rebel, you're a demon,

           Brother Gene.

You were spawned beneath the atom

On a lower social stratum.

People stink, and so you hate 'em,

           Bile and spleen.

 

What's a lifetime's secret essence,

           Brother Gene?

Is it kooky adolescence,

           Brother Gene?

Is it ninety miles per hour,

Is it acting beat and dour,

Or professionally sour?

           Cool the scene.

 

We will halve the world and share it,

           Brother Gene.

Call half minah, call half parrot,

           Brother Gene.

In our monstrous aviaries

We will ostracize canaries...,

Any bird that sings or varies

           In between.

 

Then we'll blow the whole bit higher,

           Brother Gene,

Than the sun shoots tongues of fire,

           Brother Gene.

For commitment's too much trouble;

Prick the big dream like a bubble.

You can be the final rebel,

           Brother Gene.

           It was very strange, it seemed to me, that Gene had gotten into a scrape because he was, and still is, a very nice guy. He had never been a minute’s trouble all his childhood, to my recollection, except that he was accident-prone. Strange things happened to him: once he walked through the smoke of a bonfire — in those days one could burn leaves in the fall — and came down with a case of poison-ivy all over his body. Another time he and some of his friends were playing with a BB gun and he was shot in the eye which split his cornea. For most of our lives we have gotten along pretty well, our wives like each other, and our kids all get along on those few occasions when they get together. The poem is an over-reach, over-the-top. Reading it now, it seems to me that I was writing about the 1950s, not my brother.

          Jean and I had graduated from Meriden High in 1952. Two or three years later rock-n-roll had arrived, the new teen-agers were acting quite strangely, wearing d. a. hairdos (that’s “duck’s ass” in case anyone wonders) and developing the culture that would eventually lead to American Graffiti, Hair, James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause and the Beatniks. My wife and I had grown up in the post-World War II culture, where the last days of swing and bebop and bobbysox were fading into the unsettling and ominous future.

          The poem ttled "Gene" is 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; an e-book edition was published in 2013.

          "The Hustle" may be found in 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, $49.95; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback.

Class Reunions: A Poemoir

Sixty years ago this month, June 2012, my wife Jean; Tomie De Paola, Jean’s playmate as she grew up at 210 Highland Avenue in Meriden, Connecticut, and I graduated from Meriden High School which, alas, has not existed for decades. Tomie lived around the corner from Jean, at 26 Fairmount Avenue, the title of one of his “chapter books,” for of course he matured to become the famous children’s writer and illustrator, winner of the Caldecott, Newbery, and Laura Ingalls Wilder Awards.

At the end of October 2007 Jean and I drove in pouring rain from our retirement home in Dresden Mills, Maine, to Newport, New Hampshire, to see Tomie receive the Sarah Josepha Hale Award at the Newport Opera House. Jean was reluctant to go because she said she wouldn’t know anyone, but I told her she’d be a celebrity, and everyone there did know her, as “Jeannie” from Tomie’s chapter books about Meriden. Here is a photo of Jean and Tomie at that celebration:

 

And here are all three of us, plus John Berry (second from the left):

 

I was the other writer in our class and, in fact, the person who first published Tomie’s work because I was co-editor of the Meriden High School Annual for 1952 for which Tomie was Art Editor. He and I are both members of the Meriden Hall of Fame, as are three more of our classmates including Bill Greiner, our late Class President and for many years President of the State University of New York at Buffalo. Here are two of Tomie’s images from The Annual 1952:

 

Our classmate Ray Staszewski, with whom I joined the U. S. Navy a month later, was co-author of the Class of ’52 poem, which also appeared in The Annual, and I wrote three others for subsequent reunions:

 

TETRALOGY 

For the Meriden High School Class of 1952

 

GRADUATION

With Ray Staszewski, 1952

 

The morning years of life, for us, are through.

We leave a training ground of mind — this school.

Our thoughts, diversified ahead, behind,

Find us more than a bit perplexed with life.

In retrospect, our memories are sweet,

Like morning sunbeams spread on dampened earth

Or sparkle of a dew-dropped, dawning day.

Our free, young past we’ll cherish close to us:

A bulky mass of mixed-up incidents

to be relived in later dreams of youth.

 

But ah, how swiftly change the tunes of life!

Our present soon becomes the passive past;

The future, perfect....

                                   Yet, in all our hopes

There runs a thread of fear, for through the haze

Of college, working, fighting on the road

That lies before us all, a question mark

Rears up its hoary head and asks, “But what

Of Age, of Death’s cold, bony hand, whose slave

Is Time, with sickle cutting ever widening swaths

Through youth, which cannot mend itself again?

 

But still we look with firm, convincing thought

Into the foggy future that is ours

Which holds some love, yet hate; some joy, but pain.

We therefore look to Fate and humbly say,

“Our lives are yours, harsh world. Please use them well.”

 

 

A SONG OF TIME'S PASSAGE

1977

 

A world of cold water's flowed over the dam,

And the dam looks mossy, damn mossy, my friend.

Chill winters have weathered her, and warm springs

Have leaked through the sluice where the bullfrog sings

The peeper's green song that never shall end

Down by the dam, friend.  Dam your eyes —

Never say "was," say "will be" and "am."

That person's a fool who blubbers and sighs.

 

The millwheel races to beat the clock;

The chime strikes out — it takes its toll

As time consumes the current hour

Like a pickerel striking to devour

The minnows of minutes, to take them whole

Down by the dam, friend.  Dam your eyes —

Don't fish on a sandbank; cast from a rock!

No mossback takes good anglers by surprise.

 

Our summers have bobbed on the crests of our falls;

The millrace runs, the pond grows shallow.

Reeds bristle like beards where otters go deep,

Where old newts burrow and turtles sleep.

The willow withers, the lilly, the mallow

Down by the dam, friend; dam your eyes —

It's only a puddle.  If ageing palls,

Go spout in the ocean.  That never dries.

 

 

SILVER CITY

1997

 

Remember the streets of Meriden

When we were young and running free?

The blinking, whistling traffic tower

At West Main Street and Colony?

The railroad trains that rattled through

And tied up traffic for an hour?

Where are the sights and scenes we knew?

 

Remember the sounds of Meriden —

The old rag man with his horse and wagon?

On alternate days did the same man vend

Home-grown produce, his nag’s back sagging?

 “Water me-loan” was the cry he threw

Among the houses come sun or shower.

Where are the ice men that we knew?

 

The High School was on Pleasant then,

Just up from Curtis Library.

On East Peak was the old stone tower

We climbed to survey every tree

That grew in Hubbard Park below

Where we saw fountain, duck and flower —

Where are the greengrass days we knew?

 

We called it “The Silver City” when

It nestled among “The Hanging Hills.”

Now all the silver’s in our hair,

If we still have some, and the thrills

Of being young must be felt through

Our grandchildren who still are there

In the far fair land that once we knew.

 

 

A SEMI-CENTENNIAL TOAST

For the 50^th Anniversary Reunion

of the Meriden High School Class of 1952. 

 

Well, here we are together once again;

Yes, here we all are gathered once again

After two-score years, plus another ten.

 

A half a century has slid on by --

A full half-century has skidded by,

And we’re all standing here considering why

 

And how five decades have managed to disappear...,

Just how five decades have managed to disappear

Year by year by year by year by year.

 

The school we once attended also has gone.

Old Meriden High for a long time has been gone,

Sunken beneath many a night and dawn,

 

And many a friend and classmate will be missed

As we tell one another how we’ve missed

Each other and those missing from our list.

 

But look, each one of us is a survivor;

Each person here we know is a survivor

Who’s somehow managed the feat of staying alive, or

 

Mostly alive at any rate. A toast,

Then, to our class! A brave survivor’s toast

To the Class of Fifty-two -- we’re still a host!

 

Here is a photo of Tomie and me at our fiftieth class reunion in 2002:

 

Jean and I are planning to attend the sixtieth reunion on Saturday, August 25, 2012, a couple of months hence. We’re hoping to see Tomie again and many of our classmates. We’re not exactly a host anymore, but quite a fair number of us have survived into our 78^th year. I'm not planning to write another poem for the class this year, but perhaps this one, from my collection titled The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” will do:

 

YEAR BY YEAR

 Listen to Lewis Turco (a.k.a. Wesli Court) read his poem Year by Year

When we are born we have no clue

Why we are here, what we should do,

Therefore we flail about and yell

Till we are changed or held and fed,

And then at last, when all is well,

We take the world into our head,

Into our hands, until our fear

Begins to wane and disappear.

 

We enter school and learn to read

And how to cope with every need

That rises out of books and play.

We learn to cope with those around us

With whom we interact each day,

With all the people who surround us.

As we grow older year by year

Our playmates start to disappear.

 

Then we enter adolescence

To discover that the essence

Of existence seems hormonal:

We must learn to deal with excess

Of enticements pheremonal,

With the battle of the sexes.

As we grow older year by year

Our girl and boy friends disappear.

 

When finally we come of age

We take our place upon the stage

Of life and do what adults do:

Choose a career and graduate,

Settle on a friend or two,

Begin to think about a mate.

So we mature a bit each year,

And see our lovers disappear.

 

We settle down and get a house

Or an apartment with a spouse

Or live-in. Then the kids arrive

To take our energy and time —

No matter what, they seem to thrive.

We do as well, we’re in our prime

Until there comes that primal year

When all our children disappear.

 

The two of us are left alone

And then, perhaps, there’s only one

Because what else is there to do

Except look back and try to find

The future that we barely knew

Before it started to unwind

And we grew older, year by year,

Watching our elders disappear?

 

Now here we are. The moon turns blue

No longer and the days are few

When we have anything of note

To celebrate or fill our minds.

We have no projects to promote

Or interests of different kinds,

For we’ve grown older year by year

And seen our lifetime disappear.

 

 

Ray Bradbury, A Memoir

Yesterday, June 6, 2012, my boyhood idol and correspondent for more than forty years, Ray Bradbury, died in Los Angeles at the age of 91. One of my (advisedly) old friends in Connecticut — Pierre Bennerup who had been a member of the Fantaseers, our high school science-fiction reading club back in the early ‘50s — emailed me in late morning to tell me about Ray’s demise and provide me with a link, but I had already seen the article in the New York Times on my iPad not long after Claudette McFang, my cat, woke me up at abut 4:30 a.m. and asked me to let her out.

This morning I read Ray’s remembrance, “Take Me Home,” in The New Yorker’s science-fiction double issue for June 4 and 11, 2012, — how serendipitous can you get? His life has always been touched by magic, just as he wrote on his weblog “In His Words,” 

 

It was an encounter with [a magician other than Blackstone] that changed my life forever.

During the Labor Day week of 1932 a favorite uncle of mine died; his funeral was held on the Labor Day Saturday. If he hadn't died that week, my life might not have changed because, returning from his funeral at noon on that Saturday, I saw [a] carnival tent down by Lake Michigan. I knew that down there, by the lake, in his special tent, was a magician named Mr. Electrico.

Mr. Electrico was a fantastic creator of marvels. He sat in his electric chair every night and was electrocuted in front of all the people, young and old, of Waukegan, Illinois. When the electricity surged through his body he raised a sword and knighted all the kids sitting in the front row below his platform. I had been to see Mr. Electrico the night before. When he reached me, he pointed his sword at my head and touched my brow. The electricity rushed down the sword, inside my skull, made my hair stand up and sparks fly out of my ears. He then shouted at me, "Live forever!"

 

Well, he tried, and he came about as close as a mere mortal can come these days.

As a reader of science fiction when I was very young — what is called “speculative fiction” these days, I guess, and of fantasy — “magical realism” now, I soon understood the difference between the two, between, let’s say, the outer space and futuristic fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov or the beautiful, impossible worlds of Ray Bradbury and the terrifying eldritch horror stories of H. P. Lovecraft. (I couldn’t stay away from the Lovecraft book I owned, so when I was in the fifth grade I burned it in the gutter outside our rented home on West Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut…and then I spent years looking for a replacement. It is the only book I ever burned, and it shames me to this day, but one part of me was trying to save the other part of me that was afraid of the dark.) I enjoyed the one genre for its projections of a possible reality, and the other for its imaginary evocations of primal hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows.

Ray Bradbury was far and away my favorite living writer in any of these genres. My ambition, almost from the first moments I could read, was to write fantasy, and I did so, pecking away at them on my father’s old standard manual typewriter just as he pecked away at the same machine in his study, writing his own fantasies, the sermons he delivered from the pulpit every Sunday.

The summer of 1949, before I entered Meriden High School, I won third prize in a short story contest for high school students sponsored by the local paper in which it was published and for which I received actual money! In high school that fall my sophomore English teacher, Mary Flynn, took an interest in my stories and poems, and she was encouraging in every way. She suggested, however, that I put most of my effort into becoming a fiction writer rather than a poet because there was more chance I could make a living at it — those were the days when the slick magazines were publishing stories in every issue.

A bunch of us who were juniors and seniors and SF fans as well decided to establish an extra-curricular “science-fiction reading club” with a library of books that would be kept at my house. We called ourselves “Fantaseers,” and there is a photo of our one-bookcase library in my Fantaseers: A Book of Memories. One of the inciting reasons for starting the club was the founding in 1949 of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction which all of us read and that I subscribed to from Issue No. 1. Ray Bradbury was a regular contributor.

Ray’s first book, Dark Carnival, was published in 1947, but I didn’t get a copy of it until I was out of high school and serving an enlistment in the U. S. Navy. The Bradbury books we had in the Fantaseers library were The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, and The Illustrated Man, 1951. When we graduated from Meriden High in 1952 my friend Ray Staszewski, another Fantaseer, and I enlisted; the following year I was assigned to the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier that was still being built in Brooklyn Naval Shipyard. It subsequently embarked on a World Cruise and I had a lot of time at sea to read, write, take USAFI courses and begin to publish work in the “little magazines” and literary quarterlies.

I practically stopped writing fiction, though, because every time I tried to put together a story it turned out to be a fantasy. I was still in the thrall of Ray Bradbury. I desperately wanted to write “main line” fiction, but I didn’t seem to be able to pull off that trick, so I ignored Mary Flynn’s advice and concentrated on learning as much as I could about writing verse, though I also took a correspondence course in fiction writing from the Palmer Institute of Authorship. I didn’t know it at the time, of course, but a fellow Palmer student was Ray Carver who would subsequently, like me, attend the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. After many years and a number of other books, I finally published one fiction collection - most of the items are magical realism, of course, The Museum of Ordinary People and Other Stories. 

Although all of them appeared originally in periodicals or anthologies prior to my collecting them, none of them, sadly, were ever published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

I was almost immediately successful in my verse writing efforts, however, and the first poems I published in media other than the local newspapers and school magazines appeared in The American Poetry Magazine in 1953 when I was nineteen years old and still ashore in Brooklyn Naval Shipyard. I was beginning to meet people in the literary world. Lilith Lorraine (!), the editor of a little magazine called Epos that had used some of my early work, lived out on Long Island, so one day I hopped on the Long Island Railroad and went out to visit her and her husband. When I arrived I felt as though I had stepped into a Ray Bradbury story, for I found that Lilith had two thumbs on one hand and a parrot that could lie down and roll across the floor.

By the time I had finished my four years of active duty in the Navy I was well published in the literary magazines, to the degree in fact that I had to keep my ear to the ground at UConn in order to hear whether a particular teacher admired me for my early success or resented me for the same reason. I steered clear of the latter when it came to choosing classes.

I continued to write and publish while I went to school, and I continued to meet folks in the trade both in my correspondence and as the director of the UConn Student Union’s visiting writers series. One of the people I knew by the time I graduated, in January 1959, was August Derleth, publisher of Arkham House which had issued Ray Bradbury’s Dark Carnival in 1947. August used a batch of my poems in an anthology titled Fire and Sleet and Candlelight in 1961: its binding and format looked exactly like Bradbury’s book.

Time passes. In 1968 I was scheduled to be a member of the faculty of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, and so was Ray Bradbury! I looked forward to meeting him, but when I arrived I discovered that he had for some reason canceled. It was then that I decided to strike up a correspondence with him. We continued as pen-pals for the next forty-plus years, although I was never to meet him. On my computer I still have a few of the letters I wrote him over those years, but the bulk of our correspondence is in my archive at Iowa. However, when one of my books of poetry was published in 1970 Ray wrote a blurb for it:

 

“Lewis Turco and I share similar worlds. Everything he writes about in The Inhabitant is part of my real or remembered world. There are many riches here. Reading the book is like going up in the attic on an autumn or summer night, to open trunks and fetch out strange images and treasures.”

 

The book is long out of print, but the poems are available in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007.

 

On 8 August 2005 I wrote,

Dear Ray,

When I saw [Sam] Weller’s The Bradbury Chronicles reviewed in the NYTBR I ordered it right away, and I’m reading it now. Whenever Weller mentions one of your stories, I stop reading, look it up, re-read that first (I’ve read them all if they’ve been published, often more than once), then go back to reading the biography. I haven’t enjoyed anything more than this since, when I was in college in the mid-‘fifties, I sat out on the lawn and read, first, The Alhambra and then Don Quixote de la Mancha.

Coincidentally, my book titled Fantaseers: A Book of Memories will be published shortly (I enclose a proof copy for you). It tells of the adventures of our Meriden (CT) High-school science-fiction reading club of the early ‘fifties. We had a library in my house (there’s a picture of it in the book, page 97), and your work was a big part of our lives back then, especially mine. As I read your biography I think about how our lives often parallel each-other. For instance, when I was nineteen and in the Navy floating around the world on a carrier, the Hornet, I began to publish my poems in the national little magazines (the first one appeared in The American Poetry Magazine in 1953). One of the people I ran across early was August Derleth who was as kind to me as he was to you, though we never met. We corresponded (I bought a copy of Dark Carnival from Arkham House), and he asked me to contribute some poems to his 1961 anthology Fire and Sleet and Candlelight — he took seven! (Not bad for someone whose First Poems had come out only the year before: August reviewed my book on Thursday, April 21^st, 1961 in the Madison WI Capital Times. One of the poems he took, “The Seer,” had been first drafted while I was in high school and published in the UConn Fine Arts Magazine while I was in college after the Navy. I collected it last year in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004 (“Wesli Court” is an anagram pen-name under which I published most of my rhyming and metering poems over the years.)

While I was in high school it was touch-and-go whether I was going to be a fiction writer or a poet, but going into the Navy brought me down on the side of poetry because, though I was a Navy clerk — a “Yeoman”! — I didn’t have all that much time to spend typing up stories, but I could do poems handily. Also, I wanted to write mainstream fiction, but every time I tried a story, it wound up a fantasy. Which perhaps wasn’t all that bad, because I very much wanted to be published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, my favorite of the pulps. At last in grad school at Iowa I managed it — with two poems! One was titled “A Great Gray Fantasy,” which came out in 1960 while I was still at Iowa; the other, "Excerpts from the Latter-Day Chronicle," came out a couple of years later, in 1962.

You were born in 1920, and I in 1934, the middle of the depression. The story of your family’s poverty was similar to mine, of course, as were the stories of millions of other families. As I read, though, I couldn’t wait to get to the year of my birth so that I could see what I was doing and where I was when you were beginning your career in writing. Really, I can’t tell you how much, and in how many ways, I’m enjoying this book.

I have only one regret. You may recall that we were both supposed to be at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference — was it in 1968? When you didn’t show I was devastated, and I am still filled with frustration and rue whenever I think about it.

Well, I still have lots more of your life to read, so I’ll stop here and get back to it.

         With all the best, always, from your old fan….

Ray was delighted with my letter, and he sent a copy to Weller who, apparently, was equally delighted. Ray and I had always exchanged Xmas cards, and this is the one he sent me that year:

 

 A month later I wrote,

                                                                                                                          18 September 2006

Dear Ray,

In 1974 I wrote a book titled Satan’s Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and America 1580-1697 e-book edition, 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 my mother’s family, the Putnams 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 there woven.

         Now, 32 years later, I have resurrected the book and rewritten it as I typed it into my computer. The reason I am writing you is to ask whether this person is related to you:

 

Capt. Samuel Smith of Boston was preparing to voyage to Barbados, and Mary Bradbury of Salisbury went to Boston to sell him two firkins of butter that were put aboard. The vessel sailed, and after they had been at sea for three weeks the crew discovered that one of the firkins had not been completely churned — it had spoiled and was full of maggots. The seamen were considerably irritated, and they mumbled among themselves that they had often heard Goody Bradbury was a witch. It must be true, they inferred — exercising their infallible mariners’ logic — or she would not have dared to sell their captain such goods.

 

That’s an excerpt from my book, and of course Goody Bradbury gets into trouble later on. Is she one of your progenitors?

Bradbury replied,

 

“September 25, 2006

“Dear Lewis:

“Thank you for your September 18^th letter.

“You asked if Mary Bradbury is related to me and the answer is yes, she’s a direct blood ancestor. She was tried as a witch around 1692 but fortunately escaped. The family Bradbury originated outside of London around 1400 and they sailed to America around 1650. I’m so glad that you asked about Mary; I’m very proud of the fact that I’m related to her.

“Good luck with your work and best wishes,

“Ray Bradbury”

 

I replied,

                                                                                 2 October 2006

Dear Ray,

 

Thanks for your letter about Mary Bradbury. I was sure you’d be related to her.

I’m enclosing the front matter of my typescript, the material I have on Mary, and my mother’s genealogy.

Do you use a computer at all? If you do, I can send you a CD with the entire book on it, if you think you might like to read it before it’s published (if it ever is. Oxford is looking at it at the moment).

         My best,

                        As ever….

In the spring of 2007 I sent Ray a copy of Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, and he responded,

 

When Satan’s Scourge came out in 2009 and won a prize in The New England Book Festival I sent Ray a copy of that as well. One last item of my old friend that I have kept is a copy of a pamphlet published by the National Endowment for the Arts on the cover of which he scribbled a note:

 

 

 

Lorrie

 

Yaddo is the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs that abuts the Saratoga Raceway. I spent the month of July 1959 there between my stint at the University of Connecticut as both undergraduate and, during the spring semester, grad student-part-time-instructor of English, and my transfer to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop the following fall. One of my new Yaddo friends was the artist Roger Crossgrove who, coincidentally, would become a member of the UConn faculty.

Roger and I were having lunch in my room one day, and the conversation turned to how quickly or slowly one might compose a poem or work of art. The evening before he and I, and several others, had gone to a bar located across from the race track to drink and listen to live jazz. We were attended by a young waitress named Lorrie with whom we flirted and exchanged banter.

One of the features of jazz, of course, is improvisation which is no less a feature of poetry composition worldwide, as for instance in contemporary hip-hop and in the qasida or, particularly, the ghazal of Arabic poetry. Poe’s “The Bells” was discussed in the twentieth century as a “jazz poem” written before jazz had been invented.

While we ate our lunch I told Roger how fast I could write. I boasted that I could compose a decent poem in twenty minutes or less. He didn’t believe it, so I said, “Okay, I’ll prove it.” I took a pad of paper and a pencil off the table and said, “Give me a subject.”

“How about our waitress, Lorrie, at the bar last night?” Roger suggested. This is what I wrote (listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Lorrie):

   

The poem was published in The Carolina Quarterly in 1961; I included it in my master’s thesis at Iowa, Summer’s Raceway, in 1962 and in my chapbook, The Sketches of Lewis Turco, the same year. I read it as part of a poetry reading at George Washington University somewhere around the same time, or perhaps a bit later. Afterward a young black man, a student, came up to me and said, “A white man isn’t supposed to be able to write like that.” I guess it was a good thing I didn’t know that.

Many years later, in 1984 during my tenure as a professor at the State University of New York College at Oswego, my friend and colleague George O’Connell, a printmaker and amateur jazz musician who played the vibes in local combos and orchestras, decided he was in love with “Lorrie,” and he made an Xmas card of it that year, which we sent around.

In 1989 George made an entire artist-book of the poem* and gave it to me as a birthday present in 1996, the year I retired from teaching. I have posted the images on my blog, Poetics and Ruminations. It’s a beautiful production.

________

*Lorrie, Poem by Lewis Turco, Drawings by George O'Connell, Oswego, NY: Grey Heron Press, copyright 1989, all rights reserved.

 

Robert Mezey: The Curve of His Return

My essay on the career and work of Robert Mezey  has just been published in The Hollins Critic, xlviii:2, April 2011, pp. 1-14, For a glimpse of it, go to http://www.hollins.edu/grad/eng_writing/critic/critic.htm (if this link doesn't work, just cut and paste it into your Web browser). A version of the essay may also be found in my book Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.SFASU.edu/sfapress/, 2012, 336 pp., paperback.

Lew,

I want to congratulate you on the splendid article in Hollins Critic on Bob Mezey. Unfortunately I can't finish it until one of the Powows returns it, who took it home by mistake after our last workshop on Saturday, where I showed the issue and mentioned the article.

Rhina Espaillat

 

Rhina,

I'm happy your copy arrived, deeply mortified that somebody has already stolen it.

Lew

 

Dear Lew,

The issue of The Hollins Critic with your article on Mezey arrived in today's mail. Many thanks, not least of all for mentioning me at one point.

Historically, I should add that in spring semester, 1960, I was a student in Mezey's Understanding Poetry class, and I was also working at Renaissance II. I was rooming at a place over the Gamble's hardware store, over on Market St., on the second floor, and Lawson Inada had a room on the third floor. This was across from Pearson's Drug Store, where you could get a good tuna salad sandwich and a Green River at the soda fountain, and Hamburg Inn was just up Linn St. about a half a block. Mezey at this point lived over John's Grocery, a block up Market St., and across the street from Bernie's Foxhead Tavern. When Mezey left for Stanford, Vern and Joan Rutsala moved into that apartment. All three of these places were owned by three brothers, John, Bernie, and Don Alberhasky. (Somewhere along the line in the 70s, after Irene Kenney retired and closed her tavern, Bernie's Foxhead became the hangout place for Writer's Workshop people.) I think both Bernie's Foxhead and John's Grocery are still going.

Your article obviously involved a ton of analytical work, so huzzahs to you for that and for the historical filling-in. I didn't know about Don Justice’s first book, The Old Bachelor and Other Poems in 1951, or the death of Mezey's grandson — such a thing can never be easy. And the poem of his on that subject reminded me right away of a poem Mezey had us scan as an exercise in that class of his in 1960, Ben Jonson's "On my first son." The similarities are inescapable.

As to "A Coffee House Lecture," I'm fairly sure I was there when Mezey read it in public, but I didn't yet know Chris Wiseman at that point. In some ways now it almost seems unfair to lump Wiseman in with the illiterates of later poetizing. God knows, Chris is no chump when it comes to background, and he can turn a regular, rhymed, strictly metered poem with the best of them.

In any case, we're all old farts now, and we're probably all doomed because we don't have three names and we don't hang around the lower end of Manhattan and we don't have PhDs from Utah. (Utah? Whodofeverthunkit?)

Bob Berner

 

Dear Lew,

Thanks for sending me the copy of your essay on Bob Mezey. He is a poet who deserves such critical attention. I used to see him regularly, but I have completely lost touch with him since the death of his grandson. I have, in fact, been very worried about him. I was glad to glean from your essay that he is doing well, despite the reversals.

Dana Gioia

 

Dear Lew,

Thanks for posting those Iowa City memories of mine on your blog. The Iowa City we knew is history. It's been cutesy-poo'd and boutiqued and Californicated. Too bad.

Pax Tecum,

Bob Berner

 

You're welcome, Bob --

As long as I live I will remember wandering around Iowa City with you while you popped the questions on those flashcards at me so that I could memorize my answers to the M. A. exam I was to take. I bunked on the couch in Don Justice's clammy basement until the exam was over and I got back to Cleveland and my family. I still owe you a lot. I'm waiting for you to come up to Maine and collect.

Lew

 

Hi Lewis,

A pleasure to read "The Poems of Lewis Turco" in The Santa Cruz Good Times.html newspaper. Will you be at the Iowa Reunion in June? Planning on attending and be good to connect.

Best,

Robt. Sward

 

Went to the last one, Robert (the fiftieth),

And, with Bob Mezey, Vern Rutsala, and Chris Wiseman, I say they keep inviting the same crowd back and apparently our crowd isn't their crowd, so no, won’t be there this time.

Lew

 

Lew,

I didn't even know there was an Iowa Reunion!

I will, however, be in Iowa City this summer for much of June and part of July (my wife telecommutes to her job at the U but needs to be on site for 6 weeks in the summer).  So if there's a reunion I should crash out of principle, please by all means let me know!

Michael Chasar

 

Michael,

Just go to the Iowa Workshop web page for information.

Lew

 

Well lookee there!

I wonder if they'll let me attend, since even though I got my PhD from Iowa, I didn't get my creative writing degree from there.  I think I'll drop a note and ask if I can watch the panels; maybe they'll deign to give me a press pass, and if they don't, maybe I'll write about how Iran and Libya let in reporters but not the Workshop....

Thanks for the heads up.  Since I'll be in Iowa City already, this might be fun to see.  And, more important perhaps, it will certainly make for a livelier bar scene that week!

Best,

Mike

 

Hola, Y'All,

This morning I took a look at the Iowa Writes’ Workshop 75^th  website and it's amazing how few people from our 60s bunch are among the panelists for various events. No Turco, no Everwine, no Wiseman, no Rutsala, no Slesinger, no Keithley, not even a Marvin Bell. Wassupwiddat? The only 50s-60s person is Phil Levine, and from the mid-60s there's only James Tate. You'd think the workshop only had "successful" graduates starting in the mid-70s. Ridiculous.

Pax et Poesis,

Bob B.

 

Doesn't seem right.

Tad Richards

 

Hey,

I never got a Workshop degree either, only an English M. A., and they invited me, but not (for the second time) to be on the program. I guess I'm too old for the younger crowd.

Lew

 

Well, I'll keep your M.A. in mind as a counter-argument for when they reject my request.

I think Phil Levine is the only person on the reunion program who was at Iowa when Engle was Workshop Director, no?  I guess this will add up to a festschrift of sorts for Frank Conroy.

So maybe it's not that you're too old (in this case); maybe you just had the good fortune of studying with a guy the Workshop doesn't particularly want to remember.

That's my 2 cents at least.

Best,

Mike

 

Lew,

I received & read yr essay. Beautifully written. I plan to reread it. I learned about Mezey's perambulations. I had no idea.... I always liked some of his early poems. You both are so adept. Thank you for sending it. I keep it near me so when I relax at home, I can read it at my leisure.

Marlene Rosen Fine

 

Lew -

The Mezey essay just arrived in the mail. I thank you for it, and shall comment when I've had time to look at it properly. God knows Mezey deserves serious treatment and, from me, even after that workshop "thing," which I took less seriously than he did, much personal gratitude which I can't discuss. More later.

Chris Wiseman

 

Lewis,

Thrilled to see the Mezey essay, he deserves so much more recognition (compared to other poets of his generation)  than he has gotten. Congratulations and many thanks!

Best,

Nicholas Birns

P. S. And "Vetus Flamma" sure packs a punch!

 

Dear Friends,

As you know I just married into Iowa City, so speak, and Barbara's relatives have recently sent me clippings about the 75th Aniiversary stuff for the Workshop. I was pretty ticked off before but now I'm angry, on behalf of Don/Jean and Paul Engle. The way they are being relegated is absolutely appalling. Talk about revisionist history.

The Iowa City Press-Citizen takes much of its space up with 3 photos of  unknown young poets reading to about 12 people at Prairie Lights. Names I've never heard of. It lists the Pulitzer Prize winners from Iowa and DOES NOT MENTION Don Justice though it lists 7 others. Don is not mentioned ONCE in the article about the history of the workshop, and Paul in small print among a list of Directors only. They quote a 23 yr. old student, brag about the 3,500 books in the groaning library of Dey House, and then quote, at length, from James McPherson, a current faculty member, about "the pursuit of Numen" he helps his students achieve. Don and Paul and all of our generation of their students might as well not exist.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette is not much better though it gives more space. It mentions Don only in a small Who's Who of the Iowa Workshop, and actually, at the very end, has a tiny photo of him, with 6 others, as, get this, "Notable Graduates" of the Workshop. Not a word about his teaching there - that list of teachers includes, of course, such long-term stalwarts of the programme as Kurt Vonnegut and Philip Roth, Cheever and Lan Samantha Chang. Hah. Nary a word about Don's teaching there. Flannery O'Connor, Jane Smiley, John Irving, of course, are prominent.

Anyway, I could go on. But nobody from our generation of  writers gets one solitary friggin' mention, and Don and Paul are just being written out of the history of the place. Sorry to go on, but this upsets me greatly. Rita Dove but no Justice. Marvin gets a 2 line mention in a list. Dora Malech, D.A.Powell Haki R. Madhubuti, Mary Swander - but no Donald Justice.

I'm sorry to bend your ears but I can't believe it really. And I just wonder what Jean feels when her husband, one of the very very finest teachers and poets of his generation (IMHO the finest), is ignored in this crass, insensitive and ignorant way. Not to mention him in a list of Pulitzer winners is just disgusting. I feel insulted, and also upset on behalf of all of the 50s and 60s people who were there. People went to Iowa to work with Don. I was there 3 years and the last two were completely because I wanted to work with Don, and Paul got me scholarships. Oh I could go on. As could you all, and many many others who've done, shall we say, not too badly.... What is up with the Iowa people? Is Chang just incompetent or is there a "forget the old farts" movement going on there? It's a real disgrace.

Best to you  from a hot Wyoming and a hot-under-the-collar ex-workshop member.

Chris Wiseman

 

[Marvin Bell has asked that his e-mail to Bob Berner. reprinted in this spot, be removed because his remarks were "personal" and not for publication. I take it that the following interview, which he gave for publication, is not included in the proscribed material. L. T.]

Katie,

Here below are your questions with my responses to each, on or off the track. 

• What was your time at the Workshop like? Which building were you in, what was the class structure and the creative process like?

--I was a graduate student bum in the Writers’ Workshop mid-year 1961 to mid-year 1964. We met in a wooden building that was part of a complex of temporary buildings north of the student union. There was but one section of poetry and one of fiction. The only employee was one secretary. The office was one small room with a bathroom in which the toilet flushed hot water. Between the office and the front room, where the workshops met, there was a small windowless room. The front room had a bay window in which sat a sculpture of the entwined torsos of a man and woman. The worksheets were dittoed. Everything cost less, our needs were fewer, and it was easy to be a poor student.

• Has the process changed from when you were a student to a teacher to now?

--The process has stayed the same, but the program has changed. Then, there were perhaps two other programs in the country anything like Iowa’s. It was, as they used to say, a “bohemian” lifestyle and vaguely disreputable. It existed here because of one man, Paul Engle, who founded it and raised money for it.  Students found their way to the Workshop by circuitous means and were generally older than those of later years. We had an intense and playful community in which the teachers took an active role. Because the Workshop had been founded by a poet, the notion of “poetry” defined the entire workshop, even fiction, so that Leonard Michaels could tell his fiction students, “There’s no such thing as prose. It’s all poetry.”

• Could you give me a "then and now" description about the changes from the time you were a student to the time you left in 2005?

--Basically, it grew. One or two sections in each genre turned into four in poetry and four or five in fiction. Two hour workshops turned into three. The number of applications grew to a thousand. Public readings, which had been uncommon, became common. Tuition climbed and we found ways to offer student aid. More recently, the Workshop has had to hire part-timers and commuters. The sense of community possible then would be impossible now. Another change is the presence of literary theory and its attendant jargon. The biggest thing is that writing workshops have become professional. We were amateurs.

• What is it about Iowa City and the University of Iowa that allowed and allows this program to thrive?

--It’s certain individuals of extraordinary vision and energy. Paul Engle, who developed the program. Hualing Engle, who, with Paul, created the International Writing Program. Christopher Merrill, the current IWP Director, who has redefined it. Of course, it was good to start the program in Iowa City rather than in a large city where distractions are more numerous.

• What are some of the defining characteristics of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, and why do you think they’ve become a model for so many other programs?

--For one thing, many of the Workshop’s graduates took teaching jobs and began equivalent programs at their colleges. For another, students hunger for programs that say yes, and art is the big yes. The model is simplicity itself: student and teacher are all in this together.  We talk about writing in seminars and discuss our own writing in workshops, but all of it is just an excuse for a community of active writers. Once-a-week workshops, once-a-week reading seminars, individual conferences if and when a student wants one—that’s all there is to it. It depends completely on self-motivation.

• Why are creative writing programs an important aspect to our lives?

--Art and philosophy are survival skills. Poetry and fiction are about what life feels like, and that is a matter of one’s inner life. Prose seeks an audience, too, but in poetry, and perhaps in fiction as well, the person who gets the most out of a story or poem is the one who tells or writes it. Moreover, poetry at its best can be another way of thinking. In any case, every person needs something to do in his or her life that they would do even if no one paid them.

• Tell me about the power of story-telling.

--That one’s for a fiction writer. I’m not a fiction writer, but I will venture that art, including fiction, does its most significant work as metaphor. If it’s good enough.

Best,

Marvin

 

Hey Lew,

Thanks for sending this.  I passed it along to my friend Jeff Charis-Carlson, who is Op-Ed editor at the Iowa City Press-Citizen.  I've encouraged him to do a "Why I Did Not Attend the Reunion" feature, and he may or may not contact you about some or all or none of the above or below.

How's that for specific?

Jeff is a great guy (I'm godfather to his daughter).  He's a journalist who is not in any way held in thrall by the Workshop or its rhetoric.

I've been in I.C. for a week.  The pomposity is reaching a fever pitch as

Marilyn Robinson talks tonight and as Mr. I-Donated-all-the-money-for-the-Workshop-to-Build-a-New-Library hosts a soiree.  Me?  I'll be at the Foxhead, where the locals have already been making plans to vacate for the weekend.

I think there is a "forget the old farts" movement.  Silent, perhaps.  But

deadly....

Yours,

Mike Chasar

 

Dear Lew—

Below is an e-mail I sent to Marvin yesterday. I suspect he's sick of the whole business of the snubbing of 60s people and sending Engle and Justice down the memory hole. He's sick, Chris Wiseman is furious, and I'm downright flabbergasted.

Bob Berner

 

Dear Marvin,

Funny your letter and attached comments about the workshop should come in on a day when there was a piece posted on the "News" section of the Poetry Daily website, an article from a very recent edition of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, an article about IWW75 with some glaring historical errors: it said Raymond Carver was a student at Iowa in the 60s, which I don't remember, and that writers hung out in and one even wrote parts of his novel in a bar called The Deadwood. Du-uuh? In the 60s? I don't think so. As far as I know, in the 60s writers hung out at Kenney's, and sometimes some would gather at The Hawk's Nest over on N. Linn St., at Kessler's on S. Dubuque, and sometimes some of us would drink at George's Buffet, on Market St. just up from Pearson's Drug Store. And you may remember that Pete Everwine played 5-string at the 2 Way Inn, down on the corner of S. Dubuque and Burlington Sts., "owned and operated" by Iowa City's very own mayor, Da Peepl's Cherce, Max "Bullwhip" Yokum. (And after I got back from the Army and married Cecilia Riedel of Pompton Lakes, New Jersey, we lived down on S. Gilbert and we used to go have a beer occasionally just up the street at Speed's Tavern, the only bar I've ever been in that had Falstaff on draught!!! 

Now I also know that after Irene lost her lease thanks to the machinations of Old Lady Mars (who also owned the Mars Cafe, up the street), and Kenney's Tavern was history -- this is now the 70s -- workshop people started to hang out at Bernie's Foxhead, corner of Gilbert and Market, directly across from Bernie's brother John's Grocery. Back in the late 50s and early 60s Bernie's was strictly a townie bar and Lawson Inada and I almost got into a fight there one time in the spring of 1960 because one of the patrons "still hated Japs." We finished our beers and beat it before it got truly nasty.

Anyway, all of this is by way of leading up to thanking you, first of all, for your assessment of the differences between the old and more recent workshops. We were indeed lucky to have been students when Don Justice was there -- no one did a better or more thorough job of analyzing and criticizing your stuff and suggesting improvements. And you have no idea how many times I've told myself and others how lucky I was to be a classmate of yours, of Chris Wiseman, Tad Richards, Mike Harper, Vern Rutsala, Warren Slesinger, Lew Turco, and the others of that early 60s bunch.

And I tried to write a letter to the P-I in response to the article, but they would not let me "register"--for some reason they wouldn't accept any password I tried to put up, and without being registered you can't send them a letter via e-mail.

Anyway, check out the posting, via the News at Poetry Daily and you'll see why I keep asking myself, "How come they never talk to someone who was there back then?"

Well, in a way I'm a bit sorry a bunch of us from that 60s group aren't gathering, say, around The Black Angel. We could have a few beers and a Pizza Sub from The Mill, and sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of poets.

Well, tush, man, this cup too shall pass.

Pax et Poesis, 

Bob

 

Dear Lew —

And here's an exchange I had with Marvin yesterday. The Seattle paper's article is exemplary of what happens when reporters neglect original sources.

Bell. [DELETED]

Berner. You called it — self-promotion. Chris Wiseman is right to be angry about their ignoring Paul Engle and Don Justice; Paul made the Workshop famous, Don made it work.

Bell. [DELETED]

Berner. I knew you were being reticent when I first e-mailed you about the absence of 60s people from the IWW75 panels and you simply said you'd be in Port Townsend.  I place that statement right up there with another classic of understatement, from Curt Zimanksy.  I met him on the campus one day and said, "I think I'd better warn you, Skellings is coming to town," and he said, "I'll be at the Huntington Library studying minor poets."

Bell. [DELETED]

Berner. Yeah, why is it that someone who's been there for as little as  5 years can tell a reporter all about people and places and events of forty years ago. Why don't they ask you? Or, say, Sven Armens, or Bob Sayre, or Bob Kremenak from the dental school, or maybe even John or Bernie Alberhasky if they're still alive?

Those who are ignorant of history are certain to falsify it.

Pax et Veritas,

Bob

 

Dear Friends,

I think perhaps I've been a nuisance, getting angry about this Workshop reunion. And I suspect that you all know more than I - only recently back in the Iowa "swim" - about the background to the whole thing. For this I apologise, but I don't for a second apologise for my feelings, which I think are legitimate and justified. As someone who was never on any contact list from the IWW - it was Lew who got them to send me an invite in the mail as well as online - I'm not incredibly surprised that I had lost touch, but when I saw the program for the 75th. festivities, I was gobsmacked. One or two big names leading discussions, but the large number of very important writers who were not there and relegated to "any alumni may read...." at 10pm. after a day of readings and talks, in a "room TBA, really got to me. No need for me to list all the people, you all included, who were there during my 1959-62 stay, who have gone on to become extremely distinguished, award-winning, Laureates, and to see NONE of those names, even Strand or Harper or Keithley or Rutsala or Perry, etc. etc. or all of you - well I could simply not believe it.

Worse, however, was the relegation of Paul Engle and Don Justice - two people without whose tireless work and superb teaching and example I'm sure the Workshop would have found it difficult to continue  in any credible fashion, and I must include you, Marvin, in this too - to some sort of minor figures, was intolerable to me. When I was sent to IC and Cedar Rapids papers and read the stuff about IWW75, I was even more exercised. Don Justice not even mentioned in the list of Pulitzer winners or IWW teachers, but just as an "alumnus" who had two named books published. And Paul merely mentioned in a list in passing. Just outrageous. I wrote to Jean Justice and she sent a very gracious reply, saying that she is trying to ignore all the ignoring, but she sounded hurt all the same. I feel very strongly for her in this re-writing of history worthy of the old Soviet Union. And when Bob Berner wrote to the Chang person about the ignoring of 50s and 60s writers in the 75th. celebrations, she did not even have the courtesy or professionalism to reply. That's made me angry too. And Lew - your comment that "poetry is dead in Iowa City" is profoundly sad. Marvin, your calm resigned mail and your very placid and restrained answers to the newspaper questions is a model of resigned knowledge that we are all dinosaurs and that the relegation of yourself and all of our generation is inevitable.

I am trying to let myself do what Marvin so wisely suggests. That is to be grateful for what we had at the IWW and let this new lot promote themselves to their heart's content as protest isn't going to do any good. I'm finding this hard, largely because I feel that Paul, Don, Jean, Marvin especially, but also all of our generation are being insulted by being so blatantly ignored. But I'm finding my anger still burbling inside.

I had 3 great years in Iowa City. I had intended to go for one, but then realised that Don was the person I needed to learn from, and he remained a mentor until he died, though laregely by mail. He kept me writing at a very difficult time in the years after I left Iowa and  went to Scotland. He shared a lot with me, gave me invaluable advice when I was fighting to start the Creative Writing Program at the U. of Calgary and he, Jean and I met in London for lunch in the 1990s which pleased me greatly. And all of you - thanks Bob Berner for helping us stay in touch - have been encouraging and warm friends, even though we haven't seen much of each other during the post-Iowa years. Several of you, in particular, helped me through a very difficult time 5-6 years ago, and, yes, I guess that is the legacy of the IWW I should value and remember - the friendships, the good times, the new poems, Paul's getting me Fellowships to stay there, Don's mentorship and learning about poetry, writing, music, life from you and others there. Believe me, I value those things more than I can say. Don's comments on my books. And the swapping of books with several of you. These things keep that time alive, and I should celebrate that and not feel so angry.

But I still say that a huge insult is evident to me on behalf of Paul and Don especially, and I find that petty, unprofessional, and difficult to forget. But I still remember with great fondness those blue worksheets and some of the poems on them, and even the appalling Skellings seems a tad more tolerable with 50 years of hindsight, though not too much so. "I like the sonnet form very much" - Bob Mezey, when asked if he liked Skellings' sonnet remains a priceless memory.

So, I do apologise for opening a can of worms, if that's what I did, but I know that you all feel much the same about things and I shall try to swallow my bile. "Gentle breath of yours my sails must fill" - and it does, though I am far from Prospero. I shall allow my affection for so many people, a fantastic workshop, and a great little college town, to prevent bitterness, though I think those arranging this reunion should be utterly ashamed of themselves.

All best,

Chris

 

Reminiscences 3

        On a trip through upstate New York in October 2010 my wife, Jean, and I happened to run into a wind farm. Never having seen one before, and being aware that some people object to this form of green power coming to their states, we decided to explore a bit. When we saw the first windmills rising before us, we wondered why anyone would object to their appearance, for it was as though the countryside had developed wings and was rising into the air. It was simply a beautiful sight to see; thrilling, actually.

        Being in the car, we could hear nothing, and we knew that another objection to the machines was the noise they were supposed to generate, so we parked in the middle of the farm, opened the windows, and turned off the engine. We sat there a long time, listening, but we heard nothing. We heard absolutely nothing! We thought that was remarkable, because we knew that one of the biggest tourist attractions in Holland was the old-fashioned windmills, and we knew those were noisy if picturesque. These mills in New York were much more ethereal, noiseless so far as we could tell, and very far from being polluters of either the landscape or the ear. And how a bird could let itself be hit by one of the big, slowly rotating blades was beyond our ability to imagine.

Lewis Turco, from the Portland, Maine, Press-Herald, November 23, 2010.

Reminiscences 2

 

Jean and I drove the 500 miles back to Dresden, Maine, from Oswego, New York, on Sunday, October 24, 2010, with the newest member of our family, a long, rangy, young gray tiger tom whose name, apparently, is Buddy, according to Jean, who is intuitive about such things.  I was apprehensive about the trip because our late puss Sweetie-Pie was such a bad traveler, but Buddy is one of the most laid-back gentleman cats I’ve ever known personally, a true lover, a lapcat of the clearest water (who made none at all for eight hours!).

Our daughter Melora and her family, who were waiting to greet us and, with great anticipation, meet Buddy, asked us how we came to adopt such a magnificent animal. The answer is, we didn’t, he adopted us, which is how we usually acquire our felines. Buddy was a neighborhood cat who asked us (actually, Jean) to begin feeding him on our front porch while he was also being fed by the Beshures next door and the Bateses next door to the Beshures.

Buddy was obviously either a stray or an abandoned animal — hard to imagine how that could be — who had been housebroken, was used to people — whom he quite likes, and by whom he enjoys being petted and handled. He is extremely talkative, albeit in a quiet, in fact rather squeaky counter-tenor that doesn’t sort well with his size, but he has excellent communications skills and I can easily understand everything he says.  When he wants to go out he goes to the door, stands on his hind legs, and reaches for the knob.

Buddy is rather long and tall; he has short hair with white sox on all four feet, and he has an extra toe on each of his front paws. He is quite athletic, but someone trained him to stay off of tables indoors where he wanted to be as soon as we met, but I said not until we tried to find out who his former owners were and, failing that, had him checked out by a vet. Which we did and, sure enough, he had been neutered already (which no doubt explains the counter-tenor voice), but was free of everything except mites in one ear.

I worried about how well he would adapt to the Maine countryside after living in town, but as soon as I let him out of his travel cage he explored a bit, no doubt relieved himself, and as soon as we were done hauling things in, came in himself and made himself at home. He said hello to the granddaughters — who effused all over him, had supper, and lay down for a nap.

Buddy has one peculiarity: It seems that no one ever introduced him to a litter box, which he ignores; therefore, he must go outdoors and he will never be an indoor cat exclusively, but, hey, that endears him to me even more, because I’ll never have to mess around with litter. And today he did something that made me admire him even more: I was working at my desk when Buddy came along, jumped up into my lap, and asked me why I was ignoring him. Only one of our other cats ever did that to me: Pookah the Great would jump up on my desk, walk over to my pad of yellow paper (I use a computer now, of course), sit down in the middle of it, and stare at me. I knew what that meant. Buddy was smart enough not to sit down on my keyboard. In fact, Buddy is one helluva smart and admirable cat. We are well-pleased with him.

 

Lew,

Give me an update on the new cat, please — very much enjoyed your earlier note 

Tom

 

Buddy loves it here in Maine, Tom,

He settled right in, learned to use a box, which we keep on the porch (much preferable to indoors), and has caught several specimens of vermin for us, some of which he has eaten (when he doesn't like his canned food, which is often), and some of which he leaves on our doormat for us to eat at our leisure. Very thoughtful cat. But he's not very adventurous: hangs right around the house, as he did in Oswego, which is also good, as there are cat-eating critters in the woods nearby. When he comes in he insists we open closed doors so he can examine all parts of the premises. Otherwise, he's either Jean's lap-cat or my roommate down belowstairs.

Lew

 

 

 

Reminiscences 1

Dear Jamie Brown,

    You wrote on your Facebook page, “Fran Liebowitz once said, ‘Being a writer is in essence having chosen a lifetime of homework. The only difference is, it's impossible to write a book the night before it's due. I know. I've tried it.’”

    Maybe so, but back in pre-computer, manual typewriter days, I once signed and sent in a contract with the SUNY Office of Continuing Education to write a correspondence-course study guide of over 100 pages (Creative Writing in Poetry, Albany: State University of New York, 1970) on a Friday, and on the following Monday I mailed in the completed typescript. It so confused them that I wasn’t paid for a year. I had to ask what the problem was before they sent me a check.

    In 1971 David M. Ungerer, vice-president of the newly organized Prentice-Hall spin-off Reston Publishing Company, saw a copy of the study guide lying on a table in the office of the Dean of Continuing Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He wrote to ask me to develop a college text-anthology based upon the S.U.N.Y. guide, and in 1973 Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing was published by Reston. It’s out-of-print but still available from ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education.

    My point? Maybe one cannot write a whole book overnight, but if you try, maybe something good will happen.