Poetics and Ruminations

Fixing This World

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?

Cheese

At the clinic the other day this guy came in with a terrible infection on his arm. The doctor looked at it and said, “Good grief! How did you do that? It looks like cheese.”

The guy said, “I gashed my arm on the weekend and I didn't have any disinfectant, so I used a bottle of French liqueur I had on the shelf.”

The doctor took another look at it and called his nurse over. “Take a look at that and tell me what you think.”

The nurse took a peek and said, “That's ugly. It looks like cheese.”

“Taste it,” the doctor told her.

“No way!” she said.

“Trust me,” he said. “Go ahead, taste it.”

Very reluctantly, after much persuasion, she took a bit on her finger and gasped, “It tastes like cheese!”

“It's just as I thought,” the doctor said. “Absinthe makes the hurt grow fondue.”

The Student

This student is lost in his books.
I have seen many students lost many ways.
They have been lost in the halls
looking for some door to enter,
afraid to find it because of Minotaur.
They have been lost in words
that fog up their lenses so badly they can't see.
They have been lost in the backstretch.
They have been lost in the woods with some girl
who told her daddy.
They have been lost in my office waiting
for me to come, but I never do.
I have seen many students lost many ways -
even lost in thought, though very few.
This student is lost in his books.
If he looks up, he will find that he is here:
the present is upon him; all books
lead to the present at last, and that is
the key to the maze of words.

Originally published in The Saturday Review, xlix:27, July 2, 1966; reprinted in "Poetry, an Introduction through Writing" by Lewis Turco, Reston VA: Reston Publishing Co., copyright 1973 by Reston Publishing Co. and copyright 2007 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

Ode to Gioia

On the Occasion of the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, Breaking His Left Foot While Hiking on His Family's Property in California.

Muses, make ye mournful sound!
Gioia's piède-sinistra broken
On his native stony ground
Ere a pathway could be found
Or a gasp of pain be spoken.
Dryads! Nymphs! Yea, Nereids!
Come and mourn in myriads!

Artists, take thy paints, thy palettes,
And compose ye endless posies;
Jongleurs, pen ye cheerless ballads;
Chefs! Attention to thy salads,
For our Gioia discomposes
While the sorry Nereids
Mourn in doleful myriads.

This is, alas! catastrophe
For Athabaskans as for Nome -
Shall those Alaskans atrophy
Who practice craft at work or home?
Shall those Oneidas nigh to Rome
Join the weeping Nereids
Mourning in their myriads?

L'envoi

Alas! Alas! Catastrophe!
Minstrels sing their sorry ballads!
Athabaskans atrophy!
Chefs weep buckets in their salads!
Lachesis, Clotho have their trophy
And the seeping Nereids
Sniffle for long periods.

Wesli Court

The Friggindork Chronicles

The Origin and Characteristics of the Friggindork Family in Britain and the United States

by Wesli Court

The Friggendork family (or “Friggindork,” as it is usually spelled in North America) is of ancient lineage. It may be the only tribe that is associated with a particular day of the week, Friday or “Frigedaeg,” “day of the Goddess Frig” which is, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, “A common West German translation of the late Latin "dies Veneris," day of (the planet) Venus. The Old English name Frig corresponds to Old Norse Frigg, wife of [the god] Odin (not to Freyja) and is the feminine of the Old Teutonic adjective frijo- 'beloved, loving'....”

The establishment of the duchy of Dork dates probably from the reign of King Alfred, though its exact founding is lost in the shadows of ancient history. The fiefdom lasted until 1179 (Julian calendar) when the Normans abolished it upon the death of Bertrand, thirteenth Duke of Dork, who is known to history as Dork-O'Mundy, the Great Dork (or “Dork of the World” in Middle English). The disestablishment of the Duchy of Dork took place at Dorking Castle (Dorcaster) on Friday - of all days! - the thirteenth day of July of that year, a date fraught with ominous portent, ever since which all Friggendorks have feared and abominated the number thirteen.

Fond Poem

A Triolet

Believe me, I am very fond of you;
I think of you with affection in my heart.
My feelings are as strong as they are true,
believe me. I am very fond of you,
but, sad to say, I'm afraid I do not love you;
therefore, my dear, I feel that we must part.
Believe me, I am very fond of you,
I think of you with affection in my heart.

Wesli Court

Writer's Block

Trying to write is like trying to dive
through ice. All you can do
is slide on the slick surface of the paper
until you hit something…a snowbank,
a stump, a patch of open water. Lucky you

if you don't drown in two feet of clear self-
pity. It won't do you
any good to take a drink, kick a chair, tell
your wife you're going to take a nap
and then kill yourself. She'll just say, “Yes, dear,” and keep

on reading. What is it she's reading? One
of those mysteries she
swallows whole, a bag at a time. She trades them
with her friends, dozens, scores of them. They
lie everywhere. You eat them for breakfast, lunch, and

suffer accordingly. Perhaps you should
kill her instead. Or her
friends. Or you could burn the books out in the back
yard and watch the smoke curling among
the bird feeders. The atmosphere is foul any

how. And who the hell are all these people
writing all this drivel
these days? Making themselves millionaires off my
wife, writing all this inane drivel
and driving potato chips off supermarket

shelves? Bring back the potato chips, I say!
Restore the forests! Re-
stock the shelves! Restore American literature!
With something meaningful. With something
that will make a difference! With something like this.

Government Bribery

On the Kennebec Journal Opinion Page for August 6, 2004, Christopher Coughlin of Randolph, Maine, in an essay titled “Rogue Libraries Fail to Install Porn Filters,” sounds off about certain Maine libraries not abiding by the “Children's Internet Protection Act” which “essentially requires libraries that receive federal funds as part of the federal E-rate program to install filtering software to protect children from the vile and pervasive problem of Internet smut.” He asks, “Can everybody say 'Constitutional right to equal protection?'”

Can Mr. Coughlan say, “Censorship”? Can Mr. Coughlan understand the difference between “requires libraries that receive federal funds…to install” porn filters, and “bribes libraries that receive federal funds…to install” porn filters? Does Mr. Coughlan understand that in this case there is no “requirement,” but only “bribery”? That no librarian is breaking any law if he or she says, “Thanks, but keep your federal (read 'taxpayer') bribe, we prefer to abide by the Constitution of the United States which guarantees free speech”?

Of course, it is likely if not probable that Mr. Coughlan (evidently a Republican -- he takes a passing swipe at the Maine “Democrat-controlled Legislature”) prefers to dump onto the heads of librarians the job of playing morals police, a job that properly belongs to parents, not librarians who are supposed to serve ALL the public, not just children who come in to use the library's computers. I would have thought that a true Republican would prefer that public servants stay out of people's hair as much as possible. Or is that too old-fashioned in this era of Patriot Acts, jailing American citizens without recourse to the law on charges President Bush, his Attorney General and Secretary of Defense deem well-grounded without specifying what those grounds are? On phony color-codes for levels of terror based on information three and four years old? On public give-aways to the wealthiest one percent of the population, many of whom have large libraries of pornography in their homes?

Rather than talk about the “80 percent of Maine libraries” that “did the right thing” by sinking to their knees and accepting a bribe, Coughlan ought to talk about the 53 others that acted like Citizens of the Republic by ignoring a government that wants to interfere with what a free people wishes to do as long it does no harm.

Diversity and the Melting Pot

People call the world that academics inhabit “the ivory tower,” but one wonders what especially rarefied atmosphere must pervade the chambers of the Modern Language Association and the administrative halls of Academe. More than a decade ago the Oswego State University's then-president, Stephen L. Weber, in an essay titled “The Accelerating Pace of Change” in that school's Emeriti Newsletter (5:1, Fall 1993, p. 2), felt that the reason colleges and universities were under-funded over the previous several years had to do with the “fact” that higher education wasn't changing fast enough to keep up with society, which Dr. Weber said was changing faster than the colleges.

But elsewhere in his essay, president Weber wrote the real reason for the abysmal lack of support for higher education: “...society has had less money to devote to higher education.” As in the cases of General Motors, IBM, and most of the other corporations of the United States, downsizing was - and still is - the order of the day. And, he continued, “At the same time that society has had less money to devote to higher education, it has put increasingly stringent demands upon us.” The same was true of Ford and Chrysler: productivity had to increase, expenses had to be cut because of the recession that prevailed at that time.