Poetics and Ruminations

The Poet Next Door

An Interview by David W. Hill

The following interview took place in the English Department Library in Swetman Hall on the campus of the State University of New York College at Oswego on the afternoon of May 9, 1990, after Lewis Turco's book manuscript, Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), which included the poem sequence “A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters,” had been completed and accepted for publication by the State University of New York Press (1). Present were David W. Hill, Prof. of English in the College, a well-known Emerson scholar and the contributor of an essay to Turco's book; Amanda Smith, a senior in Biology but arguably the best student fiction writer on campus, having won the undergraduate Mathom Fiction Award for 1989-90; and Mary Bagalonis, a non-traditional student double-majoring in English and Mathematics. Both Ms. Smith and Mrs. Bagalonis were students in Dr. Hill's American Romanticism class during the Spring semester; Ms. Smith had earlier taken two fiction writing classes with Mr. Turco.

David W. Hill. Professor Turco, where did the idea for “A Sampler of Hours” come from?

Lewis Turco. During the winter of 1980 I was reading an anthology (2) that contained an essay about Emily Dickinson titled "Hawthorne in Salem, 2: Emily Dickinson" by Van Wyk Brooks who quoted four lines from Emily Dickinson's letters: "The Moon rides like a girl through a topaz town"; "Tonight the Crimson Children are playing in the west"; "The lawn is full of south and the odors tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the trees," and "Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do is what detains the sky."

I was struck by the modernity of these prose expressions; their sounds and images seemed to me to have more of the feeling and flavor of modernity than even Dickinson's poems, or even the lines of many and many a poem of the 20th century. Immediately, I wrote four poems that included, and tried to live up to, the Dickinson lines I have quoted.

No doubt this was a foolhardy thing to do, but I had attempted the same sort of thing with Robert Burton's 17th-century tome, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and I produced a book of poems the whole title of which reads, The Compleat Melancholick, A Sequence of Found, Composite, and Composed Poems, based largely upon Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy" (3). I felt then, and I still feel, that my poems did little damage to Burton and, indeed, that Burton inspired me to accomplish some of my better work. These are the first four poems I wrote in a similar series based on Dickinson:

Top Ten Recommended Books 3

1) The Auto Salesman’s Pitchbook by Carlotta Junkers.
2) Gossip by Aaron Gripes.
3) Impotence by Dick Funk.
4) Seamanship by Abel Bodeed.
5) Why Marriage? by Amos B. Nutts.
6) Companionship by Armand Arme.
7) Dead Baby Jokes by Avery Sickman.
8) Surprise! by Ben Dover.
9) Circus Advance Man by Bill Poster.
10) How to Pay Off Your Mortgage by Bernadette Holmes.

Review of Sunbathing on the Bottom of the Atlantic

by Anthony Taylor Dunn, St. Cloud: MK Publishing, 2005. Quality paperback, ISBN 0-9760534-7-0. 77 pp. $14.95

On the acknowledgments page of this book of poetry there appears exactly one entry! The question is, How does a poet who is so good a writer have only one periodical publication? It’s amazing to me. I don’t recall ever having seen such a thing before. Can it have become, over these past several decades since the 1960s, so hard for a poet to publish in the little magazines? I don’t believe it. Certainly, in recent periodicals I have read many poems that don’t come close to being as interesting or accomplished as most of the poems in Anthony Taylor Dunn’s new volume.

Interview with a Split Personality, by Wesli Court

This interview took place in July of 1960 and in November of 1968. It appeared in the New England Review, Vol. I, No. 5, April-May 1970, and during that same summer it was videotaped for a classroom television course, "The Nature of Poetry," at the State University of New York College at Oswego.

Court. 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 Hand-book 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.

Lewis, you are now thirty-four years of age. How do you feel?

Catachresis

on an image by Mayakovsky quoted by K. Silem Mohammed

At times I feel that "I am a cloud in trousers,"
A pair of Dutchman’s breeches casting shadows
Across the sun as I scuff through the meadows
Of afternoon over the heads of dowsers

Seeking fountains while they wait for showers
To fall from heaven and renew the credos
They’ve forsworn. They go on scribing dados
On the altars where once they were espousers

But now are merely alterers. We ignorers
Of such turnabouts seek out rodeos
Peopled by stars who tune their celestial radios
To the clown baiting the bull that glowers

At the spangled and bravely dressed toreros
Who stand, swords drawn, awaiting a storm of sorrows.
--

October Song

The frog in the bog, the bog gone foggy,
The owl gone wide-eyed in the hollow log,
The swart smell of fall soughing in the wood:
Night among the ferns is a wild, wild dog —
The cold wind O! the cold, cold wind!
Don't let the cold wind catch you.

The spring is a mummer miming in green;
Summer comes jesting in a bellflower hat,
But the two-faced fall, smiling by day,
Grins at night with the teeth of a cat —
The cold wind O! the cold, cold wind!
Don't let the cold wind catch you.

Winter comes winding the rag doll trees,
Wandering down the fret-edged brook.
The lone moon, lingering, shreds and falls,
For the lake can freeze you with a look —
The cold wind O! the cold, cold wind!
Don't let the cold wind catch you.

Bed with the willow, the root of the willow,
Burrow for sleep in the furze and fern.
The black dog bays in the mint in the hollow
Gone sere with the stars that chill and burn —
The cold wind O! the cold, cold wind!
Don't let the cold wind catch you.

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, StarCloudPress.com, © 2004.