Poetics and Ruminations

Border Security

Date: Thursday, June 28, 2007, 5:15 PM

To: The Cafferty File, CNN

Mr. Cafferty:

You warn us that our southern border is not secure and therefore terrorists may simply walk into the U. S. But the people who attacked us on 9/11 came over our NORTHERN border. And they were not illegal immigrants, they were VISITORS. If we're going to secure our southern border, shouldn't we also secure the northern one? Shouldn't we keep out foreign visitors as well as illegal immigrants?

Lewis Turco
Dresden ME

Currency

CURRENCY

“The marvelous current of forgotten things,” William Wordsworth, Artegal and Elidure.

The marvelous current of forgotten things
Drains down Styx till it is no longer current.
We remember a currant or a raisin,
Currently, of our former youthful love life:
Half-baked, doughy, a largely fruitless courante
Danced upon the car seat of a jalopy.
Yes, of course, we wished it to last forever –
Or a thousand years at least of intercourse.
Our first lass, alas! is precursor only,
Never a courtesan for eternities.
Therefore currently we try to remember
What once the world was like riding that current
Now that we’ve wasted all of youth’s currencies
And such occasions are non-occurrences.

Copyright © 2007 Wesli Court.

Outboard

Here lies the motor that broke its owner’s back,
purring at the stairhead of the barn,
recalling in its dreams, perhaps, how we scrambled
down the steep bank to where the Eastern River
rose and receded as its tides were washed

upstream and to sea twice every day. It did
no good to chain it to the freeboard —
the neighbor vandals loved to split the links apart
on rowboats tethered to the guardian pines.
I swore and struggled until I could haul

this little Merc over the roots no longer,
over the beds of needles, among
the underbrush; until the brilliant summers dimmed
a little bit, the children grew, the elders
left for good and all and the rest of us

found that our motors were slowing down a mite.

From Attic, Shed and Barn, a work in progress, © 2007 by Lewis Turco.

Paradigm

Ruth F. Harrison of Waldport, Oregon, wrote me on May 26th, 2007, to say, among much else, “One other thing I went into mental discussion with you on, was the matter of the haiku ending “Paradigm” in The Book of Forms [Third Edition], but not in its predecessor The New Book of Forms [the second edition of The Book of Forms]. I visited the poem recently in writing yet another paradigm, and found the haiku, and thought I’d overlooked it and repeated the mistake to other poets, all that while since I had tried to emulate your poem and make a form of it. I’d like to correct what I’ve done and add the haiku, though some poems finish well on the tanka and don’t need it. I liked your poem very well as it stood in the earlier edition.

“My sister, in a recent visit here, asked me, ‘What would you do in judging a contest if someone tried the form and left the haiku off? Would that disqualify it?’ Having seen some paradigms in judging a contest’s traditional forms section, I had to answer, ‘The poem would have to stand on its own merits, unless the contest originators stated specific forms requirements’…but I will need to send something to Poets’ Forum for its next issue to open the matter for discussion, since its readers are the people most likely to love the poem and hope to emulate your beautiful work.”

On May 31st I replied, “As to ‘Paradigm’: It was not meant to be a form on its own, but only an example of the various Japanese forms in chronological order; however, you’re not the first to decide to make it a form. (This has happened to several of my ‘example’ poems.) Until you mentioned it, I was unaware there was a difference between the examples in The New Book and TBoF3. I just looked them up, and the former is a printing error that dropped the final stanza (though you’re right, it ends just fine either way). Because the haiku was the final development in the string of Japanese forms, it properly ought to end the poem. I have no idea how I happened to miss it until now. Thank you greatly for pointing it out to me.”

Since there are many people who are still using The New Book of Forms, perhaps they would like to see the poem as it ought to have appeared in that book, so this is the version as it appears in TBoF3 (2000). Poetry: An Intro-duction Through Writing (1973), and in Fearful Plea-sures: The Com-plete Poems 1959-2007, p. 247
(q.v.):

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem

Download Paradigm

Why does the brook run?
The banks of the stream are green.

Why does the stream run?
The banks of the brook bloom
with roe and cup-moss, with rue.

The trees are filled with
cups. Grain in the fields, straw men
talking with the wind.
Have you come far, water-
borne, wind-born? Here are
hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak.

When the spears bend as
you walk through vervain or broom,
call out to the brook —
it will swell in your veins as
you move through broom or vervain.

Have you spoken aloud? Here,
where the swallows' crewel-work
sews the sky with mist?
You must cut the filament.
You must be the lone spider.

The bole is simple:
Twig and root like twin webs in
air and earth like fire.

Actually, since each of the “stanzas” of this example illustrates a whole Japanese form, each is a “poem” on its own, and one might stop the poem after any of the forms and still have the series end satisfactorily, which explains why stopping it after the tanka seemed to do “Paradigm” no harm.

The Eunuch Cat, A Pantoum

She went to work until she grew too old,
Came home at night to feed the eunuch cat
That kept the mat warm and its eyeballs cold.
She walked, but ran to wrinkles, then to fat,

Came home at night to feed the eunuch cat,
Then went to bed, slept dreamlessly till eight,
And waked. She ran to wrinkles, then to fat.
She fixed her supper, snacked till it was late,

Then went to bed, slept noisily till eight —
Must I go on? She'll feed the cat no more.
She fixed her supper, snacked till it was late,
Then died at dawn, just halfway through a snore.

Must I go on? — she'll feed the cat no more
To keep the mat warm and its eyeballs cold.
She died at dawn, just halfway through a snore;
She went to work until she grew too old.

"The Eunuch Cat" is from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Lebanon NH: University Press of New England, copyright © 2000 by Lewis Turco. All rights reserved.

A Letter to My Son

FORENOTE:

The current issue of Italian Americana Cultural and Historical Review (Vol. XXV, No. 2, Summer 2007) carries my memoir titled, “The Story of an Italian Protestant,” about my father, the Rev. Luigi Turco, for many years pastor of the First Italian Baptist Church of Meriden, Connecticut. The memoir is an edited version of a section of his manuscript titled The Spiritual Autobiography of Rev. Luigi Turco which has been housed in the archives of the Center for Immigration Studies at the University of Minnesota since 1969. This slightly edited letter is another part of that same manuscript.

A Birthday Resolution for My Wife

On (almost) 29 May 2007

I have a sweet helpmeet named Jean
On whom I have always been keen.
Her birthday’s today,
So I promise to say
Nothing at all that’s obscene.

(And there’s a stone owl involved.)