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
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.”
(q.v.):
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem
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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.
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June 19, 2007 in Commentary, Corrections, Correspondence, Poems | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: "Paradigm", haiku, Japanese verse forms