An Interview by Loring Williams
This interview originally took place in Cleveland during a session of the Ohio Poetry Society on November 26, 1960. A version of it was subsequently published in a study guide, Freshman Composition and Literature, issued by the State University of New York in 1974 and reprinted in The Public Poet by the Ashland Poetry Press in 1991. At the time of the interview Loring Williams was one of a three-person panel which sat to choose those books of poetry which were to be published as selections of the Book Club for Poetry. The Book Club had chosen as a 1960 selection Lewis Turco's First Poems, which had appeared during the previous summer. Williams was also the editor of his own American Weave Press which subsequently, in 1962, would bring out Turco's The Sketches as an American Weave Award chapbook. Turco had come to Cleveland, coincidentally, to teach at Fenn College [later to become Cleveland State University] only two months before, in September, from the University of Iowa.
Williams. Mr. Turco, on behalf of the Ohio Poetry Society, let me welcome you to Cleveland. We are happy to have you with us.
Turco. Thank you, Mr. Williams. I'm very happy to be here.
Williams. You are beginning a new job here at Fenn College as a teacher, but what is the poet's job?
Turco. The poet's job is to "fix" this world.
Williams. Fix it? You mean, to repair it?
Turco. By the word "fix" I would like to suggest two things. First, the poet must fix, or transfix, the world in which he or she lives, for that is the world the poet knows, the world in which readers, present and future, will be interested. The poet's second job is to criticize his and the reader's world with a view to fixing, or correcting it so that it will function more smoothly, or more humanely, or so that it will exist more comprehensibly.
Of course, when I say "world" I mean that world or portion of reality which we all share in common. There are other worlds too, private worlds or portions of worlds, such as the individual's unconscious mind, which most of us know only briefly and at intervals, as in dreams. These personal worlds are also, certainly, areas valid for poetic exploration, but they are valid for a reader or an audience only at those points where there is correspondence with the common world. These "underground worlds," if I may coin a phrase, are as numerous and diverse as the number and diversity of individuals inhabiting this planet.
Williams. That's an interesting idea, but can a poet write about such things as rockets and automobiles and television - or bridges? Hart Crane, a local poet here in Cleveland, as you know, wrote about the Brooklyn Bridge. But is that proper subject matter for poetry?
Turco. Crane was your nephew, wasn't he?
Williams. By marriage. He was my wife's nephew.
Turco. In my opinion, there is no such thing as a subject that's unfit for expression in poetry. If Keats was right when he said, defining an abstraction in terms of another abstraction, without anchoring it in the specific, without defining it, "Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty," then even ugliness, which may be truth, can be beautiful. Only the poet can make the initial judgment concerning his ability to handle a particular subject well. The decision may well be wrong, but it is his or hers to make. Only after the poem is written may the jury of readers pass upon the merits of a subject objectified in poetry.
Williams. Have you written a poem on a subject that might not be considered "poetic" in a traditional way?
Turco. I'm sure I must have. Let me think - how about a dead end street?
Williams. Oh, yes, I know the poem you mean, from First Poems. Would you read it, please?
Turco. Very happy to:
DEAD END
Dead End shouted black-on-yellow.
Yet I, unbelieving, drove
On until I reached a fallow
Field beside a gutted grove.
There the road derived its dying
From a fang that tore the lip
Of the earth. The grove, unseeing
How its fate had changed in shape
Owing to a bulldog boulder,
Stood and meditated death;
Passively denied the builder
And the light that loves the moth.
Where the civilized macadam
Halted at the brooding rock,
There I stood and cursed my Sodom,
Knowing that I, too, must look
And, in seeing, rub the pillared
Salt that was my mind in wounds
That had turned the meadow pallid,
Wiped the woodland clear of sounds.
Finally I turned my back and
Went the way that I had come;
Left the sign still shouting Dead End -
Grove and field and boulder, dumb.
Williams. That seems a very traditional sort of poem.
Turco. I'm afraid it is, at least in treatment if not in subject matter.
Williams. Is Cleveland the first large city in which you've lived?
Turco. No. While I was in the Navy after high school my ship the USS Hornet, an aircraft carrier, was in Brooklyn Naval Shipyard until it was commissioned, and I spent the last year of my enlistement in Washington, D. C. -- actually, Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac. Why do you ask?
Williams. I was wondering how Cleveland strikes you, and whether you've written anything about the city yet.
Turco (laughing). Loring, you're leading me on. Do you really want me to read the poem you're referring to before these good people?
Williams. I wish you would.
Turco. All right. It's called
AN ORDINARY EVENING IN CLEVELAND
I.
Just so it goes: the day, the night -
what have you. There is no one on TV;
shadows in the tube, in the street.
In the telephone there are echoes and mumblings,
the buzz of hours falling thru wires.
And hollow socks stumbling across
the ceiling send plaster dust sifting down
hourglass walls. Felix the cat has
been drawn on retinas with a pencil of light.
I wait gray, small in my cranny,
for the cardboard tiger on the
kitchen table to snap me, shredded, from
the bowl.
II.
Over the trestle go
the steel beetles grappled tooth-and-tail - over and
over and over there smokestacks
lung tall hawkers into the sky's
spittoon. The street has a black tongue: do you
hear him, Mistress Alley, wooing
you with stones? There are phantoms in that roof's trousers;
they kick the wind. The moon, on a
ladder, is directing traffic
now. You can hardly hear his whistle. The
oculist's jeep wears horn rim wind
shields; the motor wears wires on its overhead valves -
grow weary, weary, sad siren,
you old whore. It's time to retire.
III.
The wail of the child in the next room quails
like a silverfish caught in a
thread. It is quiet now. The child's sigh rises to
flap with a cormorant's grace through
the limbo of one lamp and a
slide-viewer in your fingers: I cannot
get thin enough for light to shine
my color in your eyes; there is no frame but this for
the gathering of the clan. Words
will stale the air. Come, gather up
our voices in the silent butler and
pour them into the ashcan of
love. Look, my nostrils are dual flues; my ears are
the city dump; my eyes are the
very soul of trash; my bitter
tongue tastes like gasoline in a ragged
alley.
IV.
The child cries again. Sounds
rise by the riverflats like smoke or mist in time's
bayou. We are sewn within seines
of our own being, thrown into
menaces floating in shadows, taken
without volition like silver
fish in an undertow down the river, down time
and smog of evenings.
V.
The child cries.
VI.
Do you hear the voice of wire?
Do you hear the child swallowed by carpets,
the alley eating the city,
rustling newsprint in the street begging moonlight with
a tin cup and a blindman's cane?
VII.
The lamps are rheumy in these tar
avenues. Can you sense the droppings of
flesh falling between walls falling,
the burrowings of nerves in a cupboard of cans?
Can you hear the roar of the mouse?
VIII.
There is nothing but the doorway
sighing; here there is nothing but the wind
swinging on its hinges, a fly
dusty with silence and the house on its back buzzing
with chimneys, walking on the sky
like a blind man eating fish in an empty room.
Williams. I would say that is about as modern as anyone could ask, in subject matter and treatment.
Voice from the audience. Yes, but is it poetry?
Turco. You'll have to make your own judgment about that.
Williams. But it surely is effective, whatever you call it. When you say, "Felix the cat has / been drawn on retinas with a pencil of light...." What do you mean by that?
Turco. I mean television. Felix the cat is a cartoon show. The light is coming off the TV tube and hypnotizing us by drawing its picture on our eyes. Sometimes gadgets such as television can extend reality, help us see beneath the surface of events, but I'm afraid more often the effect is diametrically the opposite. Though the mass media can at times give us the feeling that we are participants in events of great magnitude, the effect of their constantly bombarding us with words and images is usually to remove us from the reality of events. We tend to slide into boredom and despair, rather than being aroused to useful action.
Williams. And is it the poet's job to arouse us?
Turco. It has long seemed to me that one of mankind's goals is, and always has been, to protect itself from experience, to build a wall between the self and reality. Americans have been particularly successful in this pursuit, which may be why the violence of the dark side of our natures is able to erupt through the surface of our society so often, for when darkness is suppressed, when it is not recognized by our conscious minds, it is likely to break out. The poet ought to try to wake us up, it seems to me.
Williams. But we can't be worrying about things all the time, can we? We don't want to lead "lives of quite desperation" all the time. Don't we need to sit back now and then to contemplate and renew the wells of our tranquility?
Turco. Of course. And now we're back to traditional subject matter. Would you like me to read a poem about renewing those wells?
Williams. Indeed we would.
Turco. This poem was written a year ago last summer at Yaddo, the artists' colony at Saratoga Springs, New York. On the property there is a
MILLPOND
This is the place where peace grows
like a green frond set among waters aerial
with dragonflies. Where, at noon,
the trees section the broad falling
leaf of light, and space color upon the millpond,
yet do not move because motion
might be lost upon silence.
This is the place where a stone,
given its occasional career, could disturb
little with an arc and fall,
for the pond would swallow all voice
and shrug circling ripples into its banks until
moss had absorbed this small wet gift,
showing a fancy darker.
This is the place where one may
abet his heart's romance, deceiving his eyes by
unconsciously confusing
slow change with no change. But even
here, dream makes way for declensions of wind and sun.
The alders will grow, moss will dry.
Wings will pulsate, then plummet.
This is the place where peace rests
like ferns beyond lilies. The trick is to wear it
as a mantle, but to know
cloaks for cloaks, shelters for shelters.
Beneath this revery of surfaces, fish wait
for the dragonfly's mistake. The
trick is to lose, but to own.
Williams. That sounds like a good place to stop now, while we are at peace with ourselves. This visit will be fixed in our minds for a long time. We thank you for coming to be with us today, and we hope you will be with us for years to come.
________
A version of "Fixing This World" was published in Freshman Composition and Literature, copyright 1974 by the State University of New York, and reprinted in The Public Poet, published by Ashland Poetry Press, copyright 1991 by Lewis Turco. "Dead End" appeared originally in Riverside Poetry 3, edited by Marianne Moore, Howard Nemerov, and Alan Swallow, copyright 1958 by Twayne publishers, and collected in First Poems, copyright 1960 by Golden Quill Press, copyright renewed by Lewis Turco and included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, published by Star Cloud Press, copyright 2004 by Lewis Turco. "An Ordinary Evening in Cleveland" appeared originally in The New Yorker, and "Millpond" appeared first in The Minnesota Review; both were collected in The Complete Poems, published by StarCloudPress.com, copyright © 2007 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved by the author.
