Poetics and Ruminations

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Saturday, October 31st, 2009

R.I.P. JOHN KEATS

 October 31, 1795-February 23, 1821

 

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water"

Is all he asked to be scribed upon his marker,

Yet his best friends — friends but not aesthetes —

Ascribed his death-wish to critics, not John Keats.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, October 30th, 2009

R.I.P. EZRA POUND

October 30, 1885-November 1, 1972

 

He was a young expatriate,

A poet and ex-patriot

Who, like some old disloyal hound,

Was put in the cage of Ezra Pound.

A Well As Deep As the World

For Conrad Aiken and Ezra Pound

 

"It is not now as it was then,"

it is broken and far off,

"but it is like a sea on ebb,"

like the sound of someone being tortured

"and only pools here and there"

at the end of a long corridor

"left among the rocks."

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, 2004; originally published in Innerspring Quarterly, I:2, Fall 1971. 

R. I. P. Morton Marcus

         I heard today from my friend and former student Dennis Morton in Santa Cruz that his fellow townsman, and my former Iowa Workshop classmate, the poet Morton Marcus, died today. Dennis and I had been corresponding over the past few days about Mort, so this was in the air between us.

         We’d last seen each other in April 2006 when Dennis put together a reunion of Mort, Vern Rutsala, and me in Santa Cruz: the three of us older people had not been together since we’d been schoolmates in Iowa City in 1959-60, the best of friends, as we remained ever after, until now. This picture, below, is of Joan Rutsala, Mort Marcus, and the docent of Robinson Jeffers’ home, Tor House, in Monterey, California, during that reunion (click on the picture to see it entire):

R.I.P. MORTON MARCUS

1936 – October 28, 2009

 

Here lies the offbeat Dreamer

Whose beard wound round his nose.

His rage, created by the world,

Was vented on a rose.

 

Our deepest sympathies to Donna, and to Mort himself, goodbye, old friend.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

R.I.P. SYLVIA PLATH

October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

 

Her father died, and then her spouse

Turned out to be an English louse,

She thought, therefore, she’d show her wrath

By turning off the beaten Plath.

R.I.P. DYLAN THOMAS

October 27, 1914-November 9, 1953

 

Some poets don’t know how to live;

Their lives seep out as through a sieve,

Leaving behind mostly promise —

Here lies the Welshman Dylan Thomas.

Attic, Shed, and Barn

 

Cate Farm, Dresden Mills, Maine, July 31, 2014 
         

          The photo above is of the Cate Farm in Dresden Mills, Maine, where our family spent summers and sabbatical leaves from 1956-1995, and where my wife Jean and I have been retired since 1996. It is the location for the poems to be found in the free, downloadable on-line chapbook titled: Attic, Shed, and Barn by Lewis Turco,  Tokyo: Ahadada Books, 2009, 28 pp.

 

ATTIC, SHED AND BARN

 

 

 

      There are always the attic, the shed

 

   and the barn when you’ve nothing else to do

 

except gaze out the glass door at the turkeys

 

feeding in the snow. You’ve given them cracked corn,

 

 

 

      and you’ve fed the bluejays their peanuts

 

   in the box hanging from the underside

 

of the deck. So it’s down to the barn where

 

the seasons lie ruminating among boards

 

 

 

      and boxes, and up the shallow steps

 

   made to be used by the dying grandma

 

who left before she could use them. Now you’re

 

nearly old enough to appreciate them

 

 

 

      yourself. Upstairs, over your bookshop,

 

   the new part of the building, you begin

 

to see more recent yesterdays gathering:

 

the overflow of books, posters still scrolling

 

 

 

      among themselves on the floor, and this:

 

   your first computer! An Osborne One left

 

over from 1982, looking like

 

a sewing machine in its carrying case.

 

 

 

      You know today your watch has more K

 

   than that Osborne had. They called it the first

 

portable computer — its six-inch monitor,

 

built in, could show only a quarter-page at

 

 

 

      a time. People got dizzy if they

 

   watched as you worked, scrolling back and forth, up

 

and down, whipping out the words faster than you

 

used to be able to type, and that was fast.

 

 

      As far as you know, the machine still

 

   works…and there’s the file of floppies! All that

 

deathless verse you had to retype on later

 

hard drives. You wonder how long it will lie there

 

 

 

   snoring against the timbers of the barn.

 

 

 

 

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Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, October 23rd, 2009

R.I.P. ROBERT BRIDGES

October 23, 1844 – April 21, 1930

 

He thought that poets ought to reach

For levels of ordinary speech,

Not overflow the averages

That run beneath the span of Bridges.

HEALTH ALERT!

 

 Marcel Proust

Dresden, Maine, October 21, 2009. Exclusive to the Dresden Mills Gazette. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia, today released an urgent appeal to the medical community and to the nation at large regarding an impending health emergency.

According to Dr. Horace S. Asce, M. D., seminal assistant director of reproductive assets at the Centers, bird flu has crossed with swine flu to coalesce into a major epidemic threat indigenous to the United States and potentially a danger to everyone world-wide.

“This could cause a pandemic,” said Dr. Asce when asked why he and not someone from the department of infectious diseases was spokesman for the Centers on this issue.

“Because,” Dr. Asce replied, “this disease is spread by unfertilized eggs. Anyone who has eggs for breakfast is in danger of infection.”

“Why breakfast?” he was asked by reporters present, in particular Wesli Court, chief influenza correspondent of the Dresden Mills Gazette.

“Sorry,” the doctor said, “I did not mean to imply one could catch this new strain of flu only at breakfast. One is at risk at any meal where eggs are served, in any form.”

“Is eating eggs the only way somebody can become infected?” Court asked in a follow-up question.

“No,” said the doctor. “One can also catch this disease by reading a particlar novel written by the French author Marcel Proust.”

“What novel is that?” Court asked.

“Swann’s Way,” he was told.

“How so?”

“Because,” Dr. Asce explained, “This cross between swine flu and bird flu is called Swann flue,” said the Doctor.

“You can get sick from a novel?”

“Oh, yes,” said Dr. Asce. “I speak from experience. Many novels have made me sick.”

“Is this novel flu a single strain?” Court rejoined.

“No,” Dr. Asce said. “There are two strains. The more lethal has a capital S and a double n, as in ‘Swann.’ The other strain is simple swan flu, and you can avoid it if you duck or are goosed in time.”

“That would be a good thing,” opined the reporter, which the doctor confirmed. “Not only good, but eggcellent,” he agreed.

“Has anyone died of swan flu?” Court asked.

“Only readers of Proust so far,” was the reply. “The best defense against this deadly disease is to refrain from reading French novels. In fact, to be perfectly certain that one will not be infected at any stage, in my opinion one should reman at a distance from French literature entirely for an extended period,” said Dr. Asce. 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, October 21st, 2009

R.I.P. SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

October 21, 1772-July 25, 1834

 

In Nether Stowey Coleridge

An “Ancient Mariner” decreed

Which there was some need to abridge

Before at last he went to seed.

Sestina in Indian Summer

"Everything is good in its season."

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

 

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

  

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages. Originally published in The Southern Review, xxvi:1, January 1990; reprinted in Heartbeat of New England, An Anthology of Contemporary Nature Poetry, edited by James Fowler, Charlestown: Tiger Moon Productions, 2000 and in The Book of Forms, Third Edition, Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2000.