Poetics and Ruminations

Birthday of “The Poet’s Bible”

The year 2008 marked the fortieth anniversary of the publication of the volume on which the movement called "The New Formalism" (originally "Neoformalism") has been based: The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics which appeared in 1968 as an E. P. Dutton paperback. 

In 1973 the first college textbook to offer a formalist system for teaching verse technique, Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, was written by Lewis Turco and published by the Reston Publishing Company. The poet Felix Stefanile wrote (in Lewis Turco and His Work: A Celebration, edited by Dr. Steven E. Swerdfeger in 2004), "Lewis Turco has earned his reputation not only as a poet, but as a scholar and a biographer. His books on poetry, its forms, and its prosody, are used in the schools.... His Poetry: An Introduction through Writing was one of the more original poetry texts on the market...." In 2008 this book, long out-of-print, was made available on-line in ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education, and its author received the Robert Fitzgerald Prosody Award given by the New Formalist West Chester University Poetry Conference and presented by Dana Gioia, co-Director of the Conference and Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts:

 s.

The first hardbound and second paperback edition of The Book of Forms, containing all the material originally appearing in the first edition and in Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, was titled The New Book of Forms. Published iin 1986 by the University Press of New England, it marked the beginning of the second generation of writers to use what was becoming known to Neoformalists as “The Poet’s Bible.” “It opens with chapters on the typographical, sonic, sensory and ideational levels of language,” R. T. Smith wrote on-line, “and this Turco follows up with an encyclopedia of forms, complete with examples so masterful as to encourage any reader to believe that great things can be accomplished by working in forms that have a history and a sense of ceremony about them.”*

“Belongs in the hands of every poet, student, and teacher, for the greater good of the art.”

James Dickey, 1986

 

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON

The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, www.UPNE.com, 2004. ISBN 1584653612, quality paperback, $14.95, 190 pages. A companion volume to The Book of Forms and The Book of Literary Terms. Order from AMAZON  

The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship , www.UPNE.com, ISBN 0874519551, quality paperback, $24.95, 224 pages. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms. ORDER FROM AMAZON

The third edition of The Book of Forms, which was published in both cloth and paperback editions by New England in 2000, appeared on the New York City Schools’ list of “Recommended Books for Teachers.” A companion volume, The Book of Literary Terms, The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, organized on the model of The Book of Forms, was published in cloth and paperback editions by New England in 1999 and received a Choice citation as an “Outstanding Academic Title” for the year 2000. A third volume in this series, The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, appeared in a paperback edition by New England in February 2004 and was chosen in 2005 by the Association of American University Presses as a “University Press Book Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries.” It is a revised and expanded edition of Dialogue, originally published in hardcover by Writer’s Digest Books in 1989; in paperback in 1991; in a U. K. paperback edition by Robinson Publishing in 1989; in an Italian translation, Il Dialogo, by Casa Editrice Nord of Milan in 1992, and as part of a 1995 Robinson book titled How to Write a Mi££ion. Taken as a set, this series of three books covers the spectrum of writing in all genres.

  

A Review by Daniela Gioseffi

Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 6137 East Mescal Street, Scottdale, Arizona 85254-5418, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth $44.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paperback $32.95, 639 pp.

Is there anyone in American poetry quite like Lewis Turco — a prolific and highly versatile writer in all genres, a renowned teacher, translator, and a consummately skilled craftsman who also brought us The Book of Forms, that instruction in poetics that sits on the shelf of almost every poet in the country? It is a manual he has reissued and revised, adding more and more accuracy over the years.

The plaudits were well overdue when Star Cloud Press published Lewis Turco and His Work: A Celebration, in 2004. Now, Star Cloud has brought us Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007, and what a stupendous work it is!

Turco for many years has written and published formalist poems under the name of his alter ego, Wesli Court, though Lewis Turco is often found writing in free verse, prose, and other genres, including memoir, literary criticism, and polemic, as well as plays and stories. Having published more than forty books, he is one of America’s most prolific and versatile poets. A thick volume, The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, also came out from Star Cloud in 2004.

Donald Justice wrote in celebrating Turco: “Whenever I see in a magazine now a certain kind of poem—one witty and formally inventive and perhaps light-hearted, with verve and fizz and a few surprises—and if this poem is signed by a name unfamiliar to me, I tend to suspect that I may be reading the work of still another Turco spin-off. How many Turcos there really are I shall probably never know, but a whole townful would be all right with me.”

Felix Stefanile has observed, “Turco seems to have the whole of the English lyric tradition at his fingertips.” Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems certainly proves that statement correct. Turco has an ear for every sort of poem, meter, rhyme, or form, and no poet writing today can outdo him in skill. He can be exquisitely lyrical and marvelously witty and inventive. Obviously a wide reader, worldly and learned, he draws on many cultural traditions from Rabelais to Swift to Gypsy balladeer. He writes poems with Asian forms and Zen concepts, asks existential questions, and composes with Lorca-like musicality, as the preface to his Complete Poems, written by Rhina P. Espaillat, explains: “How fortunate the reading public is to have this wealth of writing by one of the country’s most interesting poets now in one volume…. It belongs on the bookshelf of every reader willing to risk the joy and anguish of hearing the world, having it speak to him as vividly, ambiguously and honestly as it speaks to Lewis Turco.”

At the end of “Millpond,” a poem written at Yaddo in 1959, Turco wrote,

This is the place where peace rests
like ferns beyond lilies. The trick is to wear it
as a mantle, but to know
cloaks for cloaks, shelters for shelters.
Beneath this revery of surfaces, fish wait
for the dragonfly's mistake. The
trick is to lose, but to own.

As a poet, Turco wears his mantle of peace, and while losing himself in poetry, he has come to own it completely. His Fearful Pleasures is arranged chronologically from The Sketches (1962) through The Green Maces of Autumn (2002) and takes us through A Book of Beasts, A Book of Fears, Seasons of The Blood: Poems on the Tarot, American Still Lifes and The Compleat Melancholick, among other sections. There are poems and centos based on lines from Emily Dickinson’s letters, because Turco can do and has done anything and everything, from mournful poems of lost love and youth to verses that roundly face death without sentimentality, to observations of the natural world and all its strange creatures bestial and human, to wisdom that runs deeper than many poets ever reach. Why he has not achieved a Pulitzer Prize or a National Book Award has more to do with the politics of poetry, and perhaps with his Italian name, than with his talent and knowledge of poetics. Like John Ciardi and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Turco has also worked in translation, and like Ciardi and Ferlinghetti, he is an artist who deserves more recognition than he has received. He is the granddaddy of the New Formalism while being consummately capable of the craftiest free verse. There is nothing this writer cannot write, it seems. Lewis Turco is a poet for all seasons, and we have all grown up under his tutelage, with his books on forms and genres on our shelves. In fact, he is an institution of American poetry.

As Dana Gioia has written, “Lewis Turco is one of the most diversely talented Italian American poets. [But why not just say ‘American poets?’] What a pleasure to read him….” And what a pleasure to read Fearful Pleasures!

This review by Daniela Gioseffi was originally published in VIA, xviii:1, 2007, pp. 95-104. All rights reserved.

The Story of an Italian Protestant

This is the story of my father told almost in his own words, with just a little elaboration and interpolation from me, but quite a fair amount of paraphrasing. It is a story that needs to be told because, as Charles J. Scalise wrote in his essay, “Retrieving ‘WIPS’: Exploring the Assimilation of White Italian Protestants in America,” “This study explores the assimilation of the WIPS [an acronym taken by Prof. Scalise from his title phrase] into American culture and seeks to offer some possible explanations for their general invisibility in historical studies of Italian Americans.” (1}

This is not the first time I have tampered with my father’s work which I edited after his death in 1968 as The Spiritual Autobiography of Luigi Turco and donated in 1969 to the Center for Immigration Studies of the University of Minnesota at the request of its Director, Rudolph J. Vecoli. (2) The manuscript consists of three parts, “A Brief Story of My Life,” “The Wisdom of the Bible,” and “A Letter to My Son” [which may be found elsewhere on this blog] — that is to say, yours truly. After he had done his “Autobiography” and his “Letter,” at the very end of his time, my father worked largely on translating some of my poems into Italian — not out of any literary consideration, but out of a desire to understand his older son. This is clear from some of his letters. He thought in Italian, and in order to communicate, he had first to translate his thoughts into English. The reverse was true as well — in order to understand English, he had to translate into Italian.

On several occasions, particularly in an earlier letter he had written me on September 16, 1957, he had asked me to help him out: “I am sending this copy to you of the story of my life for correction of my English. My greatest trouble is my English language. I am determined to master it as best as [sic] I can. So, please teach me as much English as you can. Correct this paper for me and … show me all my mistakes of grammar, punctuation, construction, ect. [sic].” (3)

Luigi Turco was born in Riesi, a rural community in south central Sicily, on the 28th of May 1890. His surname means “Arab,” and it dates from the period when, during the ninth and tenth centuries, Sicily was ruled by people who had derived from the Middle East (confirmed by a haplogroup G [M321] DNA analysis made by the National Geographic Society’s Human Genome Project in 2006) and who entered Sicily from North Africa. No doubt that means his ancestors were Muslims [see "Deep Ancestry" elsewhere on this blog]. (4) However, “It goes without saying,” he wrote, “that, being an Italian, my faith was that of the Roman Catholic Church.” (5)

Sympathetic Magic

I.

Several years back I was asked to write a comment on my work for a biographical dictionary. I said, “I regard myself as a formalist in the broadest sense of the word, not in the traditional sense, meaning perhaps an accentual-syllable metrist; rather, in the experimental sense, meaning that the poem is the product of the whole poet, including his mind, bent on giving coherent language form to the human experience. I can only quote and echo the composer Benjamin Britten who said, ‘I try to write as Stravinsky has written and Picasso has painted. They were the men who freed music and painting from the tyranny of the purely personal.’”

I am a rather orderly-minded person. I keep and file everything; my books are arranged alphabetically, grouped according to subject, and catalogued. However, my working surfaces are always cluttered and stacked with debris, except for brief periods when I attack the mounds and clear them away. During one of these frenzies recently I disinterred from my desk this note I had written to myself, or to the shadows of the cavern: “I see the poet as a writer. If he’s got a philosophy, that’s fine. But he ain’t no priest, and he ain’t no prophet, and he ain’t no wild old man of the woods.”

When I was eighteen and serving in the Navy, I made the conscious decision to attempt to become a poet. I sent a poem to the old American Poetry Magazine. I received a rejection from the editor, Starr Powers (!), that taught me my first great lessons. The poem, of course, was an egopoem, and Starr said, “I would eliminate the ‘I do not know.’ Readers do not care whether you know or not — they like to decide the answer for themselves, and arrive at their own conclusions.”

She said, further, “All beginners write like this at first, and poetry, like all enterprises in life, goes through stages — this is one of them. Read more modern, emulate the eccentrics for a while, and finally you will emerge with a fresh, original style of your own.” She recommended some books to me — a theoretical treatise, a practical book of exercises, some anthologies, all of which I bought and worked with in my spare time at the barracks. Shortly thereafter, she accepted for publication the first two poems I saw in print in a little magazine.

This all sounds so very rational, and one might begin to assume that I believe learning to write poetry is some sort of computer programming system. But I am the son of a minister who attempted to find God by seeking to understand himself. I am, further, an occasional anthropological kibitzer who was, and I am still, fascinated by Chapter XVI, “The Three Brains,” in Arthur Koestler’s book, The Ghost in the Machine (1968). Koestler quotes Dr. Paul D. MacLean’s article, New Findings…of the Brain,” published in October 1962 in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease:

“’Man finds himself in the predicament that nature has endowed him essentially with three brains which, despite great differences in structure, must function together and communicate with one another. The oldest of these three brains is basically reptilian. The second has been inherited from the lower mammals, and the third is a late mammalian development [the neocortex], which has made man peculiarly man. Speaking allegorically of these three brains within a brain, we might imagine that when the psychiatrist bids the patient to lie on the couch, he is asking him to stretch out alongside a horse and a crocodile.’”

That is, to me, an amazing and an illuminating passage. The science, I take it, is accurate — but so is the allegory, and it is this metaphorical language structure that provides the means for the flash of understanding. It is one of the essential methods of poetry. One may be granted insight, but one can learn to communicate it to others.

One of the prevalent post-Freudian tenets of certain kinds of latter-day Platonist poets is that the act of writing poetry ought to be an act of getting in touch with one’s unconscious mind. Evidently these theorists believe that it is the lower brain — the crocodilian and horsey hypothalamus — that writes poetry, bypassing the specifically human “thinking cap” or neocortex. I have never trusted this theory. I consider that stories circulated about poetry-composing lizards and ponies are apocryphal. Koestler gave me some hope to believe that man is the only poet on earth:

“To put it crudely, evolution has left a few screws loose between the neocortex and the hypothalamus.” [In other words, there is poor communication between the “human” and the “animal-reptilian” brains. Furthermore, since the lower brain is incapable of conscious symbology, most of the “communication” seems to be upward rather than downward: It is unlikely that the thinking cap can directly get in touch with the brute.] “The hypothesis that this form of schizo-physiology is built into our species could go a long way toward explaining the delusional streak in our history, the prevalence of passionately held irrational beliefs….”

Koestler’s chapter is ostensibly about the physiology of the human brain, but it is in fact about poetry:

Samhain Time, Samhain Station!

On Hallowe’en, Oct 31, 2007, at 8:09 PM, Lewis Turco wrote (to poets and colleagues):

“An Interview by David W. Hill at lewisturco.net or lewisturco.typepad.com.”

Annie, one of the poets, responded:

“Dear Lew,

“Thanks! By the way, when you send out such alerts, it would be very helpful if you typed the entire, complete URL (ie, http://www.lewisturco.net or http://www.lewisturco.typepad.com). That way, it becomes a live link and one click goes to the site. Otherwise you are asking those who receive your email to do a significantly more laborious cut and paste.

“Funny how our lives have come to the point where a few extra clicks feel laborious, but so it is as we try to keep our noses above the waters of the information flood.

“Hope all is well, and happy Samhain (my birthday!)

“Annie”

Turco wrote back,

“Sorry, Annie.

“Didn’t mean to wear you all out. But anyway, as San Franciscans like to say on the day the Beatniks bathe; as the Indians of the Southwest say when they drink firewater; as ornithologists say when they spot a rare species, and as the Marx brothers said when they ate steak:

“Hippy bath day to you,
Hopi booze day to you,
Hoopoe bird day, dear Annie,
Harpo beef day to you!

“Lew”

Annie answered:

“And, as the lambs tend to say on their own first birthdays: ‘Think ewe!’

“Annie”

Turco again:

“And as Jack and Jill say, ‘Ewer well-come.’

“Lew”

And a couple of other poets commented:

Savants

Oh, hi, hon! Come on in! When did you and Harry get back? Come in and sit down — the coffee's all ready, see? A fresh pot on the stove. Funny I didn't hear your car come in next door last night. I must've been busy with Timmy — honestly, he's been driving me crazy lately. I wish he could hear, at least, so I could get through to him.

So tell me all about it — where'd you go on vacation? How long's it been, now? Only two weeks? Seems it's at least a month. I didn't have anybody to talk to. Jim's no company at all — he's either watching TV or at a bar, or out bowling with the guys or fishing — but I don't have to tell you. Lucky you! You had Harry all to yourself for two whole weeks! Oh, well, sure, to yourself and the kids. I bet they were out in the woods all the time while you stayed with the camper, right? Oh, sure, you and the girls. Still, I bet it was nice.

What'd I do? Not much, let me tell you. But you know, I saw something on TV the other night that just made my eyes open up like a can of cat food. Oh, ignore him, that's just Timmy again. I give up trying to figure out what ails him. Let him cry. It's all he does all the time anyway. I'm about at the end of my rope. Maybe Jim's right — it's probably time to put him in a home or something. I can't cope any more.

What was I saying? Oh, yeah, the TV. I was watching a rerun of "Sixty Minutes" the other night. We never watch that show, but we saw everything else that was on last fall, all reruns, so I watched it. Jim wasn't home, just me and Timmy. Honestly, hon, let me tell you, it was the most amazing thing I ever saw in my life — no, really, the most amazing. It was all about these retarded people, so of course, on account of Timmy, I was interested. But you never saw such retards in your life!