Although I have never met Kathrine Varnes in person, our professional relationship goes back a long way, to a time before I had any notion that she existed. Let me quote her at some length from a source I found on the Internet:
“A crucial moment in my writing life came when Robyn Bell gave me the first edition, then out-of-print, of Lewis Turco's slim, red [The] Book of Forms, [A Handbook of Poetics, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968]. So I was surprised recently when someone described my poetry as "first and foremost" concerned with women's issues. That some of what matters to me comes through is wonderful, but I felt immediately boxed in by the statement, as if my turf had been roped off with a little sign: No Varnes Beyond This Line. Sure, I identify myself as a feminist, but I've no large-scale plan to justify the ways of woman to man. It brought me up short to think that writing about my mother's death, for instance, was so charged, culturally speaking, that it must be interpreted exclusively as a women's issue instead of a concern with elegy. Why not both?
“Writing is for me about remembering things forgotten, understanding things confusing, asserting for just a split second a little order or pleasure. A good poem needs to feel right on the tongue, to make reasonable sense on the surface, and also to reward any reader generous enough to return to the poem a second or third time — the usual. Desiring those qualities in poetry and actually managing them are, of course, not the same. Maybe that's partially what draws me to experimenting with meters and forms — the repetition itself promises a kind of pleasure recognized by Freud and even both Dylans. When Bishop closes "The Fish" with that rainbow now famously repeated three times, it's dazzling, ecstatic, fundamental. Oh, and so corny. A person could do a lot worse than hope to pull off something like that.”
In the spring of 1994 I attended the Associated Writing Programs convention in Tempe, Arizona, where I met Annie Finch, who was moderator of a panel on formal women’s poetry, "A Formal Feeling Comes: Formalism in Contemporary Women's Poetry," and the editor of an anthology with the same title. She asked me if I would be willing to edit a section on the sestina for a handbook-in-progress that she was co-editing with Kathrine Varnes. Two years later (on my birthday the year of my retirement from teaching) I received a letter from Kathrine who wrote to remind me that I had promised Annie that I'd edit a section titled “Sestina: The End Game” for their reader, An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), which I did, and was happy to do. I wrote this poem for Annie and Kathrine when I received my copy:
EXALTATION
For Kathrine Varnes and Annie Finch,
editors of An Exaltation of Forms
There’s lots of Exaltation in this tome
Of plain and esoteric bardic lore.
Since it arrived I’ve let my fingers roam
Among its pages ⎯ much I knew before,
But here and there I’ve met a scop or gnome
I didn’t recognize, and so I pore
Over these leaves ⎯ I let my fingers roam
Among the pages. What I knew before
I let my eyes elide until I come
To something I don’t know and then I pore,
For here and there I meet a scop or gnome
I do not recognize. Let the rains pour
Today ⎯ my eyes glide on until I come
To pages holding things unknown before.
This is a garden filled with fertile loam
Lying along the musing river’s shore.
Here and there I accost a scop or gnome
I do not recognize; therefore I pore
Over this garden filled with fertile loam
Lying beside the musing river’s shore.
There’s lots of exaltation in this tome
Of plain and esoteric bardic lore.
Now and again I meet a scop or gnome
I’d like to recognize, so let me pore!
Then Steven E. Swerdfeger, editor and publisher of Star Cloud Press, wrote me to say that he was putting together a festschrift volume to honor me on my 70th birthday in 2004. He had collected quite a number of items for it, but he wanted an essay on my book Emily Dickinson: Woman of Letters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993) which contained a sequence of poems titled “A Sampler of Hours, Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters.” He asked if there were someone I would particularly recommend. Expertise in Women’s literature? America’s greatest woman poet? Formal aspects of poetry? Interest in my work? Of course, I recommended Kathrine Varnes who wrote a wonderful essay, “’Paint Mixed by Another’: Poems by Lewis Turco and Emily Dickinson” for Lewis Turco and His Work: A Celebration, edited by Swerdfeger (Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2004).
That was then. The next year, Kathrine’s overdue first book of poetry, The Paragon, was published in the Yellowglen Series (Cincinnati: WordTech Editions). She was kind enough to send me a copy which I read immediately. The volume is full of poems that are at once examples of important themes expressed in language that is both charged and suitable to its subject, and formal paradigms, including a form Varnes invented called the “villina.” The glory of the book, however, is a crown of sonnets titled “His Next Ex-Wife,” which treats wonderfully well of a relationship that is all too common today. Katherine Varnes’ poetry isn’t going to be “boxed in” by anything anytime soon.
Copyright 2007 by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court. All rights reserved.
