My habit of using pen-names for some of my published work is of long-standing. I have a dim recollection, if it’s a memory at all, of using an alias on some of my earliest publications in The Bell, the school newspaper of Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut, which I attended in the eighth and ninth grades (1947-49). Certainly I was using aliases in Meriden High School, also in Connecticut, where I wrote poems for Lydia Atkinson’s Wednesday morning “Pennons of Pegasus” poetry column in The Morning Record. One of them was “El Turco,” a play on my first initial, and another was “Della Diabolo.” There may have been others.
Of course, there were reasons for my hiding behind literary masks. For one thing, I was already deeply involved in poetry, and I wanted to be a controversialist. I understood even at that early moment that there were at least two American camps, the “free verse” writers, such as Walt Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, both of whom I had read even at that age, and the traditionalists, like Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant and Robert Frost whom I had read also, and I saw that minor members of both camps published in Lydia’s column.
The trouble is that I was (and I still am) an eclectic writer of what I hoped were poems. I had no single criterion to tout, no axe to grind in particular; all that I required is that a poem be well-written, however it was written. So I wrote both, or perhaps I should say all, ways. How, then, to be a controversialist? How to get the great American debate between the “experimentalists” and the “formalists” into “Pennons of Pegasus”? The only way to do so, it became clear to me, was to take both sides. Therefore, I wrote free verse diatribes against the rhymesters, and metrical attacks against the prosepoemists, and I published them all in Lydia’s column under various names, hoping to get an argument going, or at least a dialogue started. Needless to say, it didn’t work, but I had fun fighting among my selves.
The fight was going on in high school, also. I was outraged with Walt Whitman who was, to say the least, prolix. Worse, he was, so far as I could tell, a pollyanna. I was aware enough of the world — we had just traversed the Second World War and were heading into the Korean War, which was going to affect me personally — to know that there was damn little to be upbeat about. I was working on a major anti-Whitman opus for and outside my classes, “Observations of a Resurrected Corpse,” about which I have written elsewhere. This brought me down on the traditionalists’ side because at least one could easily tell whether their poems were good or not, whereas with Whitman anybody could say anything except something bad because he had wrapped himself in the American flag and it would be unpatriotic to attack him dressed that way.
By the time I got out of high school the Korean War was under weigh and I was broke, though I had been working evenings and summers since I’d built up my own paper route in the fifth grade; nor did my family have any money whatsoever — preachers’ families seldom do. So if I wanted to go to college, and I did, I’d have to get the G. I. Bill somehow. Of course, I could be drafted and spend possibly as little as two years of my life, if not my life itself, slogging around and falling into trenches, or I could donate an extra two years and pick my service, which I thought ought to be the nice safe Coast Guard but turned out to be, through sheer laziness, the Navy.
A fortunate choice, indeed. Of those four years of active duty, I spent one going back and forth between Bainbridge, Maryland, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; two years aboard an aircraft carrier, the U. S. S. Hornet (CVA 12) cruising quite literally around the world, and my last year in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D. C., working at the Bureau of Naval Personnel.
The two years aboard the Hornet were useful and productive. I spent much of the first year in Brookyn Naval Shipyard while the ship got ready for commissioning, and I attended many Broadway and off-Broadway productions via the U. S. O., toured many museums and book stores, and began to teach myself how to write better. By 1953 I began to publish, I racked up a lot of travel experience, I read many of the books in the ship’s decent library, and I earned about a year’s worth of college credits via U. S. A. F. I. and the college-level G. E. D. test, thus saving myself a year on the G. I. Bill, which would enable me eventually to take both my B. A. and an M. A. The year in Washington was educational and instructive in many ways, not the least of which was having access to the Library of Congress, so many museums, galleries, record stores and musical experiences ranging from be-bop dives to chamber orchestras. I doubt that all my high school pals were learning as much in college as I was in the Navy.
For instance, by the time the Hornet got to San Francisco I was well aware of how the times were changing. I knew about the Beats as early as 1954, I had actually published work in some of their magazines: City Lights, The San Francisco Review — under my own name, as I recall, though that would change by the time I got to the University of Connecticut where I submitted work and published (in Hearse: A Vehicle to Convey the Dead, among others) under the name “John Joen” (pronounced John John but who knew that except for me?). But by this time I was pretty cynical about “experimental” poetry, it was so easy to imitate, and most of my so-called “Beat poems” were private jokes.
Then, after the Navy, there was marriage and college, in that order, and most of the things I wrote other than the Beat stuff were rhymed and metered, just like the old-fogies whose art and craft I admired so much in the generation just ahead of mine: Richard Wilbur, Donald Hall, Howard Nemerov, John Ciardi, Dylan Thomas, &c. &c. They knew how to write poems that had good balance among layout (the typographical level), the sonic level, the sensory level, and the ideational level, as I worked it out in a review I did in 1959 for Harold Vinal’s Voices, “The Poet’s Court.” But I had also admired the great Modernists: Pound, Eliot, Yeats, Williams, Moore, so I continued to write like Williams sometimes, and like Pound at other times, and even like Moore, who wrote in rhymed syllabics.
I wrote a few poems in unrhymed syllabics during the school year 1958-59, and a whole lot of them while I was at Yaddo the summer of 1959. They were pretty good, I thought. Why was I writing non-rhyming, non-metering poems? Probably because I saw the handwriting on the wall: the other stuff was out of fashion. Not that I stopped entirely, but very few were being accepted for publication and it was time to try something different. And that’s where my split personality has its true roots.
My First Poems was published in June of 1960 when I left the University of Iowa without an advanced degree to take my first job in Cleveland. In 1961 I was a Fellow at Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference; in 1962 I finished my M. A. and founded the Poetry Center of Clevland at Fenn College, now Cleveland State University, and Wesli Court was published for the first time as a reviewer in the “Accent on Fenn College” issue of American Weave, the autumn-winter issue. Why a reviewer? My thinking was that I might publish under a pen-name and tell the truth with impunity, without making a lot of enemies. No one, of course, or almost no one, told the truth when they reviewed a book, because one never knew when one would need a favor from someone whose poetry one despised. That practice stopped almost immediately, for I found that the person I despised most was myself for hiding behind a mask just to avoid someone’s animus.
Nevertheless, I went on leading a double life. I was writing quantitative syllabic verse regularly, but I was also working on the manuscript of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, built on the skeleton of the “four levels of poetry” that I had invented in 1959, and projected as an anthology of examples of poems in the forms as well as descriptions and diagrams of those forms. I needed decently written specimens, and often I couldn’t find them, especially in contemporary language, which meant that I might have to write them myself in many cases. For instance, when I was in college, before I had conceived of The Book of Forms, I had discovered that there was absolutely no example of a good chant royal in English literature. I set myself the challenge to fill the gap, and I wrote a short series titled “Poems for an Old Professor” (Marcel Kessel, my Milton professor at UConn) consisting of a chant royal and three sonnets. I remember that, up to then, the lead poem, “The Old Professor,” a chant royal, was the hardest project of my literary life, but when I was through with it, I was sure it was well-written.
In 1970 Wesli Court reappeared in print, this time as the moderator for a television interview which, during the summer, was videotaped for a classroom television course, "The Nature of Poetry," at the State University of New York College at Oswego, and it appeared simultaneously in the April-May issue of The New England Review. Using three cameras, Court interviewed the Lewis Turco of 1960, and the Lewis Turco of 1968. Court began the interview this way:
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By literary sleight-of-hand, the two dates on which this interview took place have been telescoped. At the moment I am sitting in a room with Lewis Turco, aged twenty-six, on my left hand, and Lewis Turco, aged thirty-four, on my right. In the interview the younger Turco will be referred to as Lew, and the more dignified elder we will call Lewis.
It should be noted by the reader that my own name, Wesli Court, is a pseudonym which disguises the fact that, spiritually, I wear a beard and long hair, take "tea," and am the possessor of Knowledge which is not gained in classrooms, but only by means of an eternal youth that sees through the veil of false reality to Truth.
What I will be attempting to do here is to confront the elder Turco, who has passed beyond the pale of his thirtieth year and is no longer to be trusted, with the Young Turk, an infinitely more likely candidate for the laurels of verity.
The rules for this interview are simple. I will limit the younger man to remarks he made, upon the publication of his First Poems (1960), in an interview conducted by Lydia Atkinson and published in the pages of the Morning Record of Meriden, Connecticut, on July 13th, 1960, and on the dust jacket of his first book. I will then confront the older poet — who is the author of a chapbook, The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask (1962), a second book, Awaken, Bells Falling: Poems 1959-1967 (1968), and of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (1968) — and ask him to respond. It will be my intention to trap him with the wisdom of his youth. We will watch him squirm in the toils of compromises he has made while he grew older and sold out.
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Clearly, Wesli had not yet settled down into a recognizable personality unless, of course, he was being ironic.
I had worked on The Book of Forms for eight years, and every publisher I sent it to thought it was a good book, but that there was no audience for it, and indeed, they may have been right, for faculty poets were so bully-ragged by the Beats that they had stopped teaching such things as metrics. In desperation, I took all the examples out of the book to avoid having to pay royalties on them, thus making it a cheaper book to produce, and sent it to E. P. Dutton, which accepted and published it in 1968. My goal, however, was one day to bring out an edition with examples in it. I worked on those examples for the next decade and a half. Or perhaps I should say that Wesli Court did.
Wesli began to provide me with, first, many of his own poems in the traditional forms, especially the ones I needed. I also set him to work on the Welsh and Irish forms, as well, which had never appeared in any other book. What Wesli did was to look up English translations of Medieval poems, and then write contemporary versions of those poems cast into the forms I needed; they were not necessarily the forms in which the poems were in fact originally written. After a while Wesli and I had all these poems lying around doing nothing, so we decided to start sending them out to periodicals in the middle to late 1970’s, sometimes under my name, most of the time under his name. To my amazement, magazines began to accept them. In fact, Wesli was beginning to have a better track record than I was with my syllabic poems! What was going on? I thought I knew.
The Book of Forms when it was published had received exactly one review, from my colleague Frank Hulme at S. U. N. Y. Oswego, in the pages of the local Palladium Times. Nevertheless, it did well by word-of-mouth and was reprinted often. It was apparently having an effect on the world of poetry. It must be so, because there were no other books emphasizing craft published during the years between 1968 and 1986. Indeed, the last major poetry anthology to be published that contained formal poems was The New Yorker Book of Poems in 1969.
In 1977 some things began to happen that required Wesli Court to step forward. I sent a chapbook manuscript of some of our poems, under my name, to Song magazine, and it was accepted. Titled Curses and Laments, that’s just what it was, a series of alternating curses and laments. Two of the curses were directed at the president of my college, and others took aim at two or several of my S. U. N. Y. colleagues. At about the same time, my friend and former student, Charlie Davis, decided to start a publishing company. He drafted me as his editor and asked me to name the firm. I suggested The Mathom Publishing Company. When he asked me what the word “Mathom” meant, I told him it was old English via Tolkien for “useless treasure.” I assumed that’s what we’d be publishing. Charlie agreed.
Unfortunately, the first useless treasure that Charlie wanted to publish was a collection of my poems. Not wishing to tell my elderly friend that it wasn’t meet for a company to publish its own editor’s work, I hemmed a bit and then said, “Well, how about publishing a book of poems by Wesli Court?” “Who’s he?” “Me.” “Okay.” So I gathered another bunch of our rhyming and metering poems and put them together in a manuscript that I decided to call Courses in Lambents. And I wrote Richard Behm at Song and asked him to change the author’s name of his book to “Wesli Court” also.
This was my reasoning: If someone told my president about the curses I had written for her and she called me into her office to confront me with, “Did you write a book titled Curses and Laments? I could reply, “Why, yes, I did write a book titled Courses in Lambents, and here’s a copy, my gift to you.” When she examined it she would find no curses against her, and she would be forced to the conclusion that her informant was either misinformed or a trouble-maker. Meanwhile, I would be out the door scart free. (A scart is a small scratch; a Scot is a big Celt.) This scenario never took place.
As it happened, Courses appeared before Curses, in 1977, and the latter appeared the following year — I took very good care to make sure no copies appeared on campus for seven years, at which point I figured the statute of limitation on curses ran out. I then donated a copy to the College library. Meanwhile, Charlie wanted a children’s book for his list, so he attempted to negotiate with a member of our Writing Arts staff, Helen Buckley Simkiewicz, a well-known juveniles writer, but she was under contract, so he turned to Wesli again.
I had been making up stories and poems and telling or singing them to my children for years. One of them was about a pair of caterpillars who spun cocoons, but only one of whom, Mabel, emerged with wings. Murgatroyd instead grew a propeller. I had not written the story down at first, but eventually I’d done so, and it had been turned down by major houses on the grounds that children didn’t like, or at least shouldn’t read, stories about physical distortions (like a flying elephant with ears that were wings, or a little girl who falls down a rabbit hole where her neck grows longer and shorter, or dancing hippos wearing tutus, etc., etc.). Charlie didn’t see anything wrong with such distortions, so, in 1977 he brought out Wesli Court’s Murgatroyd and Mabel.
Over these few years Wesli had also been publishing his modern versions of Medieval poems in the traditional forms here and there, and in 1981 the Poetry Newsletter of Temple University brought out a chapbook special issue devoted to "The Airs of Wales," poems in some of the twenty-four official meters of the Welsh bards.
Until now, that was it for Wesli Court books, but from 1983-1986 I was furnishing an essay, “The Year in Poetry,” for The Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook annually. In these I began to discuss the fact that there was beginning to be a renewed interest in formal poetry, and I documented the movement, which I called “Neoformalism,” with the books I was reviewing. Ironically, it was during this period that Dutton, for no known reason since it was selling as well as ever, decided to drop The Book of Forms from its list.
Dutton’s move gave me the opportunity to revise, expand, and update the book, and because of its reputation I had no trouble in placing the manuscript (in fact more than one publisher wanted to bring it out), with many of my and Wesli’s examples included. In 1986 it was republished from the University Press of New England as The New Book of Forms, and it was an immediate success despite the fact that during the same year, for the first time in almost two decades, other formalist books were published including Miller Williams’ Patterns of Poetry, which included many Wesli Court poems also, and Strong Measures, edited by Phillip Dacey and David Jauss, which contained some of my own poems. The following year, when I passed my annual chore on to R. S. Gwynn, another book devoted to formal poetics, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, edited by David Lehman appeared. The drought was over and young people were learning craft again.
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This memoir was published as an afterword in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press (www.starcloudpress.com), 2004.
