Poetics and Ruminations

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Monday, October 19th, 2009

R.I.P. LEIGH HUNT

October 19, 1784 – August 28, 1859

 

His lifelong strife with penury

Lasted half a century

But nothing that he tried could blunt

The scythe of the stalker of Leigh Hunt.

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, October 16th, 2009

R.I.P. GEORGE O’CONNELL

October 16, 1926 -

 

The printmaking artist named George

O’Connell was apt to disgorge

Jazz pictures of ladies

Arisen from Hades

And Satan’s most blistering forge.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, GEORGE!

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, October 14th, 2009

R.I.P. E. E. CUMMINGS

October 14, 1890-September 3, 1962

 

He wrote no oratorios,

Operas, or vainglorios,

Only the slightly wacky hummings

Of an Edward Estlin Cummings. 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Monday, October 12th, 2009 / Engle's Workshop

 

 

R.I.P. PAUL ENGLE

October 12, 1908-March 22, 1991

 

He was the famous Angler,

Forever politic.

He wheedled sheckels for his boys…,

That always did the trick.

 

 

ENGLE'S WORKSHOP

 

I.

         On Friday the 23rd of May, 1986, my wife Jean and I drove from Oswego, New York, to Hancock Airport in Syracuse, forty miles away, in time for me to catch my flight to Chicago at about a quarter past eleven in the morning. I was on my way back to Iowa City for the first time in twenty-six years to attend the Golden Jubilee celebration of the Writers' Workshop, the world's oldest and most famous graduate program in writing arts. I pondered the unsettling thought that when I'd left Iowa in 1960 the Workshop had been about to celebrate its silver anniversary with publication of a volume edited by its early director, Paul Engle. Now, returning, I was more than half as old as the program I had attended! As I flew west it seemed to me that I was in some true sense returning in time as well.

         In 1959 I had transferred to the Iowa Workshop from the University of Connecticut Graduate School. During the fall of 1958, while I was an undergraduate at UConn, I had applied to the Workshop, and on  January 21st of the following year Paul Engle had written to ask me to see that the letters about me from my teachers John Malcolm Brinnin and Kenneth Spaulding, and from Tom Ahern, Manager of the Student Union, for whom I had run the Fine Arts Festival magazine and the literary reading series, be sent to him "as soon as possible."  He'd also wanted copies of my published poems and my best work for his own records. At the end of March W. F. Loehwing, Dean of the Graduate College at Iowa, had written to tell me that I had been awarded a Graduate Fellowship for the academic year 1959-60 in the amount of $530.00. On the 4th of April Paul wrote to offer me a teaching assistantship of $1,300 instead of the fellowship, which was worth only half as much.  He also wanted me to submit poems to be considered for publication in the Workshop's silver anniversary anthology which was to be titled Midland: Twenty-five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop.

         I'd written back to say I'd rather not teach as I wanted to get my degree as quickly as possible.  Paul replied, telling me about the differences between the English M. A. and the M. F. A., which took longer.  I decided to go for the M. A., as I still had a year left on the Korean G. I. Bill and could transfer my six UConn graduate credits to Iowa, thus in effect finishing my class work at Iowa in a year.

         I'd spent the spring semester at UConn as a graduate assistant and part-time instructor of English taking two graduate courses and teaching an introduction to the short story / composition course to sophomores, then several weeks during the summer as the youngest resident of Yaddo, the artists' colony at Saratoga Springs, experimenting with writing unrhymed quantitative syllabic poems.

         In the fall I'd transferred to the Workshop.  The graduate fellowship was an honor, but the stipend was quite small. Jean and I were pretty strapped, so Paul, even though it was against the rules to give me both a fellowship and an assistantship, arranged for me to become Editorial Assistant to the Workshop in order to bring me back up to the financial level of the teaching assistantship I had foregone.  I was to help Paul with correspondence and with the permissions work for both the Random House Midland and the Hallmark Poetry for Pleasure, to be published by Doubleday.  Jean found a full-time job in the Bureau of Labor and Management.

         I'd wanted to attend Iowa's Writers' Workshop, not so much because it would be beneficial to sit in a classroom to learn about writing -- I'd been publishing for six years, after all -- but to associate with other young writers. My teachers would eventually have their effects on me and my work, particularly Donald Justice, but mainly I wanted to rub elbows and ideas with my contemporaries.

         By the 24th of August, 1959, Jean and I were settling into our new apartment on the second floor of Mrs. Keith's farmhouse outside of town.  I was to dump the garbage into a ravine, blow snow out of the driveway, and so forth, as part of our rent.  Our landlady kept a few sheep, one of which was a ram who inhabited the field I had to cross to the ravine.  I was always careful to keep an eye on him and one of the garbage cans between us in case he decided to attack, but he never did.  By October Jean was  pregnant; her morning sickness was lasting all day, every day, and she was pretty unhappy.  This was the first time she had been away from her family for any extended period of time.

         Curtis Harnack was on campus with his wife, my fiction professor Hortense Calisher, and Verlin Cassill labored away in the quonset hut where the Poetry Workshop was held.  Hortense liked to take baths in the tub there because there were only showers available in the apartments where she and Curt lived.  Paul Engle and Donald Justice shared the duties of the Workshop.  At that time Don, a Floridian who had recently taken his Ph.D from Iowa, had not published his first book.

         Paul, a native Iowan, had been born in Cedar Rapids in 1908.  He had studied for the Methodist ministry and preached at Stumptown church at the edge of town, but he'd heard no call and had instead taken an M.A. from Iowa in 1932.  In that same year he'd published what may have been the first creative thesis ever submitted anywhere for a graduate degree, Worn Earth, which had appeared as a volume in the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets.  Subsequently, he had studied at Columbia and then travelled to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship, taking another set of degrees there.

         In 1937 Engle had returned to the University of Iowa as a faculty member and had eventually become director of the Workshop. Under his leadership the Workshop, by the time I'd joined it, had become world-famous as a training ground for young writers.  On that first day of class in 1959 Paul asked us how many were from the state of Iowa.  Not a single person raised a hand.  Paul said, "I'm embarrassed.  This is the first time such a thing has happened." I looked around and saw what seemed to me to be a familiar face, and indeed it was -- it turned out to be Ed Skellings, with whom I had gone to prep school at Suffield Academy in Connecticut from 1947-1949. Some of my other fellow workshop students were George Keithley, Robert Mezey, Vern Rutsala, Morton Marcus, Raeburn Miller, and Kim Merker.  Walter Tevis, John Gardner, and Jerry Bumpus were members of the Fiction Workshop.

         Paul's and Don's styles were completely different.  Paul was the feisty, funny, slippery-tongued pepperpot, and Don the practical critic who knew just how to approach each particular poem.  Paul never got angry, but Don could sometimes be peevish, especially when he thought he was wasting his time on a poem that had not been carefully worked over before it was submitted for the worksheets.

         When I had arrived in Iowa City, I'd been surprised to learn how literally the poets rubbed elbows in all kinds of competitions, including most particularly physical competitions. From this distance in time, it seems as though nearly every day of the semester some of us spent a couple of hours at least in the ping-pong room at the Iowa Memorial Union viciously pasting a bouncing ball over a net. It was almost as though some kind of literary superiority depended upon our whipping Don Justice. Many of us tried, but most of us failed. In fact, I can't recall Don's ever losing a game, though I suppose he must have. I'm sure I never beat him.

         His technique was maddening. No matter how hard you hit the ball, Don would stand way back and let the ball drop over the edge of the table, out of sight. There, underneath, he would give the ball some kind of gentle, satanic slice, and back it would come, floating over the net.  It would kiss the table, but where it would go from there was anybody's guess.

         Ed Skellings had the same kind of style, and he was pretty good too, but not in the same league with Don. I recall those Justice-Skellings tournaments vividly: they were evil. Somehow, when Don played Ed, he got really mean, and inevitably Skellings would go down to ignominious defeat, calling for a rematch on the last point. Since I left Iowa before he did, I wonder sometimes whether Ed ever managed to put together a genius game and win one.

         Seeing Don's prowess on the ping-pong table, I never dared sit in on the weekly poker games some of the poets -- Bob Mezey, Kim Merker and others -- engaged in, but I hear they were marathon. In the spring ping-pong would give way to softball, but poker went on forever.

         I was the only member of the workshop turning in syllabic poems, some of them those I'd written at Yaddo the previous summer. At one point Don said to me, "Lew, you're cheating.  Your poems don't rhyme."  Dylan Thomas and Marianne Moore had been writing rhymed syllabics, but no one other than haikuists had been writing just plain syllabics. I considered that Don's remark in this case was ignorable, and I went on writing my rhymeless syllabics, as I've done ever since. A few years later I couldn't help noticing that Don's second full poetry collection, Night Light, consisted of unrhymed syllabic poems.

         Bob Mezey was one of the students I had looked forward to meeting ever since I had learned I would be going to Iowa.  He and I had published in many of the same magazines and anthologies, including Riverside Poetry 3 and New Campus Writing 3, which appeared that fall. Mezey was anticipating the coming year when he was to attend Stanford as a Fellow under the latter-day Messiah of the neoclassical poets, Yvor Winters, of whom Mezey was a professed admirer.  As things were to occur, however, they would have a falling-out even before Mezey arrived on campus, and the younger man would become one of the fringe Beats rather than the formalist poet he had been during his years at Iowa and, earlier, at Kenyon College under the Fugitive poet John Crowe Ransom.

         Like Mezey, I had always been interested in the traditional forms of poetry -- I was born a formalist, and I wanted a reference book that contained the whole range of them, but I'd never been able to find such a book other than those that contained merely the standard sorts of things: the sonnet, the villanelle, the haiku and tanka, the sestina -- mainly the medieval Italian and Provençal forms plus a few others.

         But what else was there?  Perhaps there weren't enough forms to fill a short book.  Then, one day while I was browsing through the bargain bin of Iowa Book and Supply on Clinton Street, I ran across a book of poems by Rolfe Humphries titled Green Armor on Green Ground.  Humphries had laid out "the twenty-four official meters" of the Welsh bards, and he had written a poem in each of these complicated syllabic forms.  I bought the volume, of course -- I think I paid a quarter for it, or maybe a dollar -- and I took it home.  After I'd looked it over a while I got to wondering whether, with such forms as these, I might not be able to gather enough material for a book, particularly if I filled it out with examples of poems written in the forms and with schematic diagrams of the forms, which I had never seen in any other book.  I discovered, incredibly, that no one in the history of English literature had ever put together a compendium of all the traditional forms, and I asked Don Justice whether he thought such a volume would be useful.  He encouraged me, and I began working on the project.

         That period of time when I began putting together what would eventually become, first, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, E. P. Dutton in 1968, two intermediary texts, Creative Writing in Poetry, a correspondence-course study guide for the State University of New York in 1970, which was turned into a college text for Reston, Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, 1973, then The New Book of Forms, 1986, and finally The Book of Forms, Third Edition in 2004, both published by the University Press of New England, was not auspicious for such projects.  The so-called "Beat Generation" was in the process of consolidating its anti-intellectual stranglehold on a generation, and the self-righteous, self-indulgent decade of the 1960s loomed ahead. Christopher Wiseman, a Workshop poet from England, one day submitted to the worksheets a parody of the work of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg.  Mezey, however, did not see the humor in it, only the threat, and he reacted by writing, and the next week submitting to the Workshop, his response, "A Coffee-House Lecture."

         Interesting things were happening off campus as well as on.  The Paper Place, one of the first paperback bookstores in the country and certainly the first in Iowa, was being tacked together by graduate students.  Upstairs the Renaissance II Coffee House was also taking form, and it was over coffee that Steve Tudor and his friends were starting the anti-establishment student newspaper, The Iowa Defender, which was to stand against the philistinism of The Daily Iowan.  Across the street Kenney's Fine Beers was another hangout for the writers. In all three places we got together for talk and socializing, but at Kenney's, things were generally more boisterous.

         Before The Paper Place could open, of course, it had to be built. One day when Mike and Marlene Fine and the rest of the group of grad students who founded it were putting up shelves, I dropped in to watch.  They had the frames for the shelves up.  One person would lift a shelf up to the frame, and someone else would scribe it about a half-foot in at each end. After a while I said, "Can I ask you a question, Mike?"

         "Sure," he replied.

         "Instead of cutting six inches off each end of the board, why don't you just cut twelve off one end?"  There was a tableau and silence for a while, and then everyone began to blush.  But the shelves stood until The Paper Place burned down a decade or so later, long after the Fines had left to return to Manhattan and Mike got involved in publishing with Simon and Schuster.

         One evening, after a group of us had left Kenney's, we walked across the street to see in the window of the bookshop a display of the manuscript drafts of his novel The Hustler and the contract that Walter Tevis had signed, for which he had recieved a $10,000 advance.  One of us asked him, "What the hell are you doing at Iowa?"  "Learning how to write," he replied.

         It was at the Renaissance II upstairs that the first student readings ever organized at Iowa took place.  John Gilgun was the entrepreneur.  Vern Rutsala and I and one or two others had the honor of inaugurating the series.  Others who read that year were, as I recall, Kim Merker, Peter Everwine, Jim Crenner, Morton Marcus, and Bob Mezey who read his reply to Wiseman, "A Coffee House Lecture."  He later included the piece in his first book, The Lovemaker, which won the Lamont Award of the Academy of American Poets in 1960 -- Paul was one of the three judges.  That same year two other books would come out of the Workshop, Don Justice's The Summer Anniversaries, which had won the Lamont Award for the previous year, and my own First Poems, which was published as a selection of The Book Club for Poetry during the summer.

         At the coffee house, too, Steve Tudor approached me about serving as poetry editor for his Iowa Defender, which I agreed to do; however, my service was short because Tudor chose to put poems into his pages -- very bad poems, embarrassing to me -- without asking for my opinion.  I resigned and wrote a furious letter to The Daily Iowan about it.  The fight raged back and forth for a few weeks in the two papers, getting personal at times.  Other people entered the fray, Mort Marcus for one, who got wrought up about a slur that Tudor attempted -- he'd wanted to write that I was "weak-chinned," but it got set in type as "weak-chained," which was true enough, it seemed to me, so I just thought it was funny.  Despite our disagreements, however, the I.D. was a lively and interesting underground venture while it lasted. It would be replicated often nationwide during the impending 1960s.

         I met Jerry Bumpus at Kenney's early in the autumn. Whether it was on that occasion or another soon after, for some reason we got into a discussion about words that described places where particular kinds of creatures were kept.  I said that a herpetarium held snakes, an aquarium held fish, and an aviary was for the birds.  Jerry nodded his head amiably and drank his 3.2 beer.  "And an apiary is a place where apes are kept."

         "Right," Jerry said.

         "Wrong," I said.  "An apiary is a place for bees."

         "Bull," he said, or words to that effect.

         "How much do you want to bet?"

         He checked his pockets and found that he had three dollars.  So did I, so that was the wager.  I went to the bar and asked for Irene Kenney's tattered dictionary, brought it back to the table, showed Jerry the entry, and asked him to pay up.  "You set me up," he said, and wouldn't come through with the three bucks.

         What happened next is apocryphal because I don't recollect it. In 1976 Steve Wilbers, who was researching his history of the Workshop, wrote me a letter and asked in a postscript, "By the way, is it true that when you met Jerry Bumpus you poured a glass of beer over his head while talking backwards?  He claims you're the only person he ever knew who could do that."

         Whether Wilbers meant pour a glass of beer on Bumpus, talk backwards, or do both simultaneously, I'm not sure. In any case, I wrote back to say I had no specific remembrance of the beer-pouring, but not only can I talk backwards (for some reason), but I can write backwards as well -- when I was at sea aboard the Hornet in the early 1950s, my battle station was behind a Plexiglas plotting board on which I had to write so that the officers on the other side could read it, thus the incident may have occurred as Jerry remembers it.  If so, I was getting even for his welshing on our bet, and what I said to him amphisbaenically was without doubt insulting.

         The Esquire symposium was held at Iowa that year, and a lot of famous writers and editors were present, including, as I recall, Dwight Macdonald and Norman Mailer. I remember a cocktail party -- was it at the Engles' or the Justices'? -- where I saw Mailer pinned in a corner by Ed Skellings who was gesticulating earnestly and jabbering at him at a great rate.  It was there, too, where I exercised another of my abstruse and exotic talents, the ability to clap with one hand by making the fingers flap against the palm of my hand -- not snap, a true clap.

         I'd been wandering across the room and happened to be passing a circle of people who were listening to a philosopher explaining the zen "koan," or unanswerable question.  "The best known koan," he was saying, "is probably, 'What is the sound of one hand clapping?'"  I stuck my arm into the center of the circle and did my bit, then withdrew and kept on walking.  I looked back over my shoulder to see the group staring in silence at the spot where my hand had been.  I don't know what happened to them after that.

         There was an active social life among the writers. Jean and I were invited to have Thanksgiving dinner with Paul and Mary Engle, and we were very glad to accept, for it would be the first celebration of the feast that my wife had spent unclasped in the bosom of her family.  It was there where, among many others, we first met Ben Santos, the Philippino novelist, and his wife.  She and Jean got on as though they were old friends, and Ben and I struck up the same sort of conversation.  Paul had been involved for years in bringing foreign writers to the Workshop.

         There were parties at the homes of Don and Jean Justice and Mort and Wilma Marcus, and on New Year's Eve we went to a gathering at the apartment of the Gregory FitzGeralds; Greg would review my First Poems for The Iowa Defender the following year and later become a colleague at Brockport, one of the S.U.N.Y. branches.  Toward the end of January Jean and I  went out for dinner with Vern & Joan Rutsala to The Carousel, a "sophisticated" Iowa eatery.  For dessert Joan ordered a "Flower Pot" and I ordered a "Vesuvius Fountain."  She got a clay flowerpot filled with ice cream, and I got a tall soda glass with some fruit cocktail in the bottom and a mound of sugar soaked in brandy flaming on top.  It was rather bizarre.  Joan and I cracked up, and the maitre-de threatened to kick us all out.  The other patrons were scandalized by our behavior.

         One day I received a letter from the editor, Henry Rago, accepting a poem titled "Like a Fleet Thief."  I was stunned -- I recalled having written no such poem.  I fell to my knees before the couch in our living room with the letter on the cushion before me, held my head in my hands, stared at the acceptance, and thought, "Oh, no!  I've been trying for years to get into Poetry, and now they've taken a poem by someone else that they think is by me!"

         I don't know how long I knelt there, my mind whirling frantically.  But then some dim shadow of recall began to encroach upon my memory, and I got up and went into the bedroom where there was a large stack of my manuscripts sitting on the floor beside the door.  I began sifting through the pile, despair growing ever stronger until, at last, at the very bottom, I found an onionskin carbon copy of the forgotten poem titled "Like a Fleet Thief."  I had thought so little of it, I had not recalled having written it, let alone submitting it to Poetry.

         My despair was not alleviated, for I didn't want such a poem to appear on my permanent literary record.  I pondered and mulled.  At last I came up with what seemed like a fair solution: I rewrote the poem, turning it into what I felt to be a good effort, a companion-piece for my Yaddo poem titled "Raceway," which was to be reprinted in Midland, and I titled the draft "House and Shutter."  However, I didn't dare to send the new version to Poetry for fear that Rago would turn it down, so I wrote him and asked if he wouldn't be so kind as to change the title of the poem he had to "House and Shutter." He did so.  Paul had asked me to choose one of my poems to put into Poetry for Pleasure, and I'd not yet gotten around to it, so I inserted the new poem into the manuscript, wrote Rago for permission to reprint, and I had both my initial publication in the June issue of Poetry and a decent version of the poem on the record.

         It was time, I felt, to do some weeding of that pile of poems on the floor.  Mort Marcus volunteered to help me.  He came out to the farmhouse one day and we sat in the livingroom of the apartment while I read the first few lines of poem after poem.  If he liked the sound of the beginning of a poem, Mort would give me the thumbs up; if not, the thumbs down, and I would crumple the sheets up and toss them on the floor.  By the time we were through, the floor was completely covered with wadded balls of paper.

         The first week in February  Mrs. Daniel B. Green, Awards Chairman of the YM/YWHA of Philadelphia Arts Council, wrote to tell me that my play, "An Onyx Dream," later to be retitled "The Dark Man," had won honorable mention in the 1959 Waldo Bellow Memorial Award Contest.  This same play at UConn had been performed in the Little Theatre and won the Undergraduate Play Contest.

         Bob Mezey had won the Academy of American Poets Prize at Iowa the two previous years, so Paul and Don had barred him from entering, and possibly winning, a third year in a row.  I was unaware of this fact and, with everyone else in the Workshop, submitted poems to the contest. The judges were to be E. L. Mayo and Ralph Salisbury, whom I had not previously met.  They selected my work for the prize that year, which made Bob sneer.

         The third thing that happened in which I took some pride was an acceptance by W. H. Auden of "Raceway" for publication in what I took to be a new magazine, The Mid-Century.  However, one of the Workshoppers approached me one day and asked how I had managed to have a poem published in an issue of the monthly bulletin of The Mid-Century Book Club, a new venture whose books were selected by Jacques Barzun, W. H. Auden, and Lionel Trilling.  My classmate was a member, and he had just received the newest bulletin; my piece was, I believe, the only poem ever published in one of them.

         When spring arrived in Iowa City, the softball games began. I recall a contest between Philosophy, I think it was, or Poli-Sci, and the Poetry Workshop. Don Justice was playing first base. A huge philosopher, weighing easily three hundred pounds, came to the plate and took a couple of swings, one of which hit the pitched ball into the infield.  It was an easy throw to Don at the bag: the philosopher was trudging up the baseline in slow motion.

         Tall, thin, stretchy Don -- built like the perfect first baseman -- caught the throw and held out his mitt to touch the runner as he came pondering up. At last the meeting took place.  The runner -- give him the benefit of the doubt -- could not readily slow down. He hit Don's extended arm, and the ball went flying. Don began saying things, and the philosopher turned the error into a double before anybody retrieved the ball.

         Don bided his time. A couple of innings later the heavy thinker came to bat again and hit the ball so far and hard, it was an obvious homer. Don jumped up and down screaming, "Throw the ball!  Throw the ball!"  But there was no ball to be thrown.  Don could take it no longer.  As the philosopher rounded first the poet launched himself at the ponderous ponderer who paid no attention whatsoever, continuing on his way home -- it was 1ike a gibbon attacking a hippopotomas. The image left in my mind is of an enormous marshmallow with a walking stick insect stuck all over it. I mentioned this event to Don some years later, but he disclaimed all memory of the event. I couldn't have imagined anything so funny.

         I discovered, rather too late, that there was a good deal of ill-feeling on the part of the English Department's scholars toward those Workshop students, such as myself, who were trying to get a straight M.A. in English without taking the "proper" courses in 20th-century literature.  The hostility manifested itself on the M. A. exams through unfair questions.  On my exam, for instance, one of the questions was, "Name the ten greatest prose works of the 20th century."  If one hadn't taken the course from the teacher who wrote the question, one had little hope of answering correctly, since what was meant was, the ten greatest works in the teacher's opinion, not the student's.  I recall that two of the answers were supposed to be Shadows on the Rock, by Willa Cather and The Seven Pillars of Wisdom by T. E. Lawrence.

         Running out of money, and with a wife who could no longer work because she was about to give birth, I left without taking my degree, but my publication record was strong enough to land me a job at what was then Fenn College in Cleveland, later to be Cleveland State University.  In 1961 I founded the Cleveland Poetry Center at Fenn, after spending two weeks in Middlebury, Vermont, as a Bread Loaf Fellow with John Ciardi and Dudley Fitts, and in 1962 I returned to Iowa briefly to finish my master's degree in company with Mark Strand, whom I had met at The Festival on the Green in New Haven where he and I had read our poems to a sparsely populated meadow during the summer of 1959.

         If these on-campus events are vivid, so are scenes like the one that took place at an M.L.A. convention in Chicago a few years later when, after the annual Iowa get-together, a bunch of the poets from various eras adjourned to my room for an all-night one-upmanship word-game marathon. -- Don was there, and Bob Dana, Steve Parker I think, and several others. Toward morning, Justice, who was lying on the bed -- or, rather, dripping half off it -- whenever a particularly good bon mot was passed, grunted feebly in a gesture of humor appreciated. I believe we kept it up so long largely to see if we could elicit just one more grunt of approval from Don Justice.

         For me, at least, the Iowa experience in terms of the Poetry workshop was largely Don. One of my books, Awaken, Bells Falling: Poems 1958-1967, is dedicated to two great teachers: John Brinnin at Connecticut, and Don Justice at Iowa. In many ways, he is a diffident and self-effacing man. I don't think he realizes what effect he had on the minds of many af his students. One of his phrases could set you off. I've already mentioned how The Book of Forms: was conceived. Again, when my sequence of "free verse" poem-portraits, The Sketches, came out as a chapbook in 1962, Don said, "You ought to try writing prose poems." I did, and eventually my sequence The Inhabitant appeared. "The Study," one of the poems included in the series, in fact, was written in Don's living room in Syracuse where he was teaching at the time. I'd penned it on the spot to illustrate the system of grammatical prose parallels in which the poetry of the Bible is written.

         I could give more examples of the kind in which a word from Justice went a long way toward getting one of his students into a project, or simply to raising our self-esteem.  But Paul Engle had his effect, too, and it was at least as large.  It was Paul, too, who stood in the line of fire to take the hits, for the Iowa Workshop has always elicited a fair amount of criticism, a good deal of it of the sour grapes variety.  In his essay titled "A Poet of the Ordinary," Frank H. Thompson, Jr., wrote in the fall 1964 issue of Prairie Schooner, "The early work of [W. D. Snodgrass and Philip Legler], as represented in Heart's Needle and  A Change of View, shows how easily they could have remained the technically adept, empty poets that Paul Engle so complacently turns out."  I felt constrained to reply in an essay titled "The Iowa Workshop: An Assenting View," in the spring 1965 issue of the same periodical:

 

         Readers of the country's literary periodicals are used to this sort of remark concerning the Writers' Workshop at the State University of Iowa.  In my view, the hostility displayed by various writers who have never been to Iowa, and by some few, such as Robert Lowell, who have resided there, is remarkable and largely unwarranted.

         First, in defense of Iowa, I would like to point out the simple truth that Paul Engle does not "turn out" poets.  Rather, what he does is encourage them to go to Iowa.  In this encouragement he is successful, because Iowa has earned a reputation as a gathering place for young writers, and for would-be writers who may never make it -- but how can one tell until they are given their chance?

         It seems to me that very few young people go to Iowa expecting to be "turned out" as accomplished writers.  Rather, they go there in order to be with other young people who are also interested in writing -- to talk with them, to fight with them, to be excited by the atmosphere generated in one of the very few communities of the United States where the art of writing is treated as a serious subject.

         That any number of mediocre talents seem to come out of Iowa can be explained simply: any number of mediocre talents are attracted to Iowa.  In any given year it would be remarkable if the law of averages permitted more than two or three potentially excellent writers to be enrolled in the Workshop.  The rest, as in any other kind of specialized gathering, must range from good through average to poor.  Thus, the appearance every now and then of a Snodgrass, or a Legler, or a Justice, or a Mezey, or a Sward, is to be expected and applauded, as Mr. Thompson rightly applauded the first two in this list.

         But why must all the rest, by the same token, be deplored -- worse, vilified?  The purpose of a school is to develop the excellent, certainly.  But it is also to develop, to the limits of their capabilities, the rest as well.  If all our schools were to restrict their enrollments only to the potentially supreme, we would have no society, or an unworkable society at best.

         On this basis, I would like to suggest that Iowa's Workshop does its work quite well.  It encourages an interest in writing; it provides an atmosphere in which various levels of talent may develop; it provides competition for the ambitious and talented, and it provides a certain level of excellence which the less talented writer can try to attain.  Even in the case of the totally untalented writer, Iowa's efforts are not wasted: hopefully at least, the writer who fails will at least be a more responsive and aware reader of poetry -- Mr. Snodgrass and Mr. Legler, I feel sure, will not scorn an intelligent reader of their work, a reader as informed, perhaps, as Mr. Thompson himself seems to be.

         Last, but not least by any means, Iowa is an exciting place for the young writer; at times, indeed, it may be a bit too exciting and hothouse, but these are conditions which any intense place must hazard from time to time if it is to proceed towards accomplishing its goals.  Regardless of stereotypes to the contrary, Iowa is an essentially unacademic place.  Most of the learning process takes place, not in the classroom, but in the private bull session at the Union or at Kenney's bar perhaps; in the library and book stores where students introduce themselves and each other to all kinds of writing, from the avant garde to the conservative.

         The measure of Iowa should not, I would argue, be taken by the unreasonable yardstick that it does not "produce" uniformly excellent writers, but by the rule that it encourages the young person to write seriously, to develop to one's best capacity, to learn something about the art and the craft of writing.  And to fight like hell for one's own point of view and kind of expression, if one has them.

         If one has no point of view, and if one wants to run with a herd, so be it.  Pay no attention.  But do applaud the real artist who manages to rise above the ordinary, and do give Iowa the credit it deserves for providing a serious first forum for the person with a true voice.

 

         On November 22nd, 1964, Paul wrote, "Dear Lew, Thanks for attacking the Philistine Thompson, whom I don't know.  The only thing I wish you had also said is that I couldn't possibly be 'complacent' about mediocre poets.  They pain me as much as anyone, and often more, because I have put time in on bringing them, on criticizing them, and it is sad to see little come of it.  This is an annual assault and I'm hardened!  As for Lowell, I feel he is not quite fair.  We saved him, in a sense, by being the first place in the USA to give him a job, to help him develop confidence after the shattering sequence of psychopathic hospital and federal prison.  Only Iowa would take a chance on him; others did, after we made the initial risk.  It gave Cal security and a hope; both the Dept. Head and the President took a hard look at the risks involved, and decided to hire him because I said he was the best poet."

 

II.

         Many of these recollections passed through my mind as the plane passed between Syracuse and Chicago where I changed planes to arrive in Cedar Rapids at 2:31 p.m. I caught the chartered bus to Iowa City, and it was in that vehicle where I met the first of my fellow Golden Jubileers -- Eugene Cantalupe, of an older generation, and David Lunde from the College at Fredonia whom I'd first met at the S.U.N.Y. Festival held at Brockport seven or eight years earlier. Also on the bus was Scott Heller, a young journalist who had attended Iowa, but not the Workshop -- he was back to cover the story.

         I was the only one on the bus who had signed up to stay at a dorm rather than at the Iowa House or the Holiday Inn, so the driver let me out at Burge Hall where I picked up my keys and walked across the street to Daum Hall. I had room 5404, on the fourth floor. It was air conditioned, but it didn't need to be, as the weather, unlike the soggy mess in the East, was a bit cloudy but very fine, the temperature perfect, around 70 degrees fahrenheit.

         As soon as I got unpacked I went to the Iowa Memorial Union at the foot of the hill to attend registration, which was at 4:00. I noticed that my old friend and classmate John Gilgun was among the first to have put his name on the sign-up sheet for the marathon reading that was to take place that night. While I stood there I met Joe Nigg, now a Coloradan and editor of company publications of Re/Max in Englewood. He and I, it turned out, were across the hall from one another in Daum, and Gilgun was next door to him. We also met Sam Hamod, who swore he had met me somewhere, but we couldn't figure out where.

         Sam gave Joe and me a ride to the Prairie Lights Bookstore where, Sharon Arnone of the University of Arkansas Press had written me on May 7th, my just-published book of literary criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, was to be found. She was as good as her word, and I was delighted to find my collection of poems, The Compleat Melancholick, published the year before by the Bieler Press, sitting next to it. Another Bieler book, cheek-by-jowl with mine, was Everything That Has Been Shall Be Aqain: The Reincarnation Fables of John Gilgun. I was finding John's tracks everywhere, but he himself was nowhere in sight.

         After we left Prairie Lights our next stop was across the Iowa River that flows through the center of campus -- the cocktail party and buffet held at the Iowa Museum of Art at 6:00 p.m. It was here that we began to meet the people we'd come to see. One of the first new faces was that of Nick Crome, like Joe a Coloradan. It was Nick who had made overtures in 1965 for me to go to Colorado State University at Fort Collins as visiting poet-in-residence, though we had never met. I'd not been able to swing it, however, and now we were face to face for the first time.

         Scott Heller took me aside for an interview, and while we stood on the terrace by the wall of the museum I spotted Paul Engle and went to talk with him. Seeing him under these circumstances filled me with delight. Paul introduced me to his second wife, Hualing, whom I'd not previously met and told me he'd received the announcement of Visions and Revisions, ordered a copy of the book from Prairie Lights, and then gotten the copy I'd sent him by first class mail, together with my 1981 American Still Lifes.

         "Now that's what I call class, Lew," he said. "Knowing you were going to see me in a day or two anyway, you sent me a copy by priority mail. I told Hualing, 'That's a class act!'" Then he said that the first chapter he'd read was the one on Eliot. "That's first rate work, first rate!" He had an ulcerated foot which was going to prevent him the following week from accompanying his wife to China. "I've been reading a chapter a day and three poems while I soak my foot," he said. "There's just enough time for me to do that." On the last day he added, "The poison flows out of my foot and the balm flows into my eyes."

         I laughed and asked him, "Can I get a blurb from you that says my book is a pedicure as well as a book of literary criticism?"

         "Sure," he replied, "and you can say it's an eyewash too."

         Donald Petersen was there, another colleague from Oneonta, a branch of the S.U.N.Y. system. Don Justice arrived and I hugged him, a sort of demonstration of affection he's not used to. I saw Mark Strand and Kim Merker, by then poet and fine editions printer for the University. I tracked down John Leggett, director of the Workshop for the past sixteen years, and met him for the first time. I told him of the progress of Leigh Allison Wilson, a recent Iowa M.F.A. and my colleague at Oswego. He asked me to find James McPherson and tell him about Leigh too, which I did, but it turned out that he had talked with her just a day or two before on the phone.

         At last I ran across John Cilgun, and another classmate, Greg Fitzgerald, was on hand as well, but I'd seen him on and off over the years at various S.U.N.Y. events. He said he'd just retired from the faculty at Brockport. I met Henri Coulette for the first time, Phil Levine likewise. Mike and Marlene Fine were present, and we exchanged reminiscenses of The Paper Place with John Gilgun. However, as one searched among the faces for old friends, it became evident that there were quite a few people missing.  Of these, a considerable percentage had evidently boycotted the Jubilee on principle.  As Vern Rutsala put it when he was asked whether he would attend, "I didn't see my name or the names of any of my friends on the program, so I guess I'll pass."  John Gilgun later wrote in a letter, "...this is the same point I made in 1959 -- that the clique system, the star system is nonsense." Many didn't attend owing to circumstances of various sorts. Hortense Calisher and Curt Harnack, the outgoing director of Yaddo, were among these.  So was John Irving, who was back in Vienna, scene of episodes in several of his novels.  David Duer, a young man who edits a little magazine called Luna Tack in West Branch, a town fifteen miles distant, was perhaps over-familiar with the Iowa City scene, and he had family responsibilities that prevented his attendance as well.  John Gilgun said of Duer, "He's the kind of person this Jubilee is all about," the unsung laborer in the literary vineyards.  Leigh had said Iowa was too recent an experience for her.

         After we'd socialized awhile and had a couple of free drinks we ate at the buffet, and then Don, Mark and I toured the museum. Paul was doing the same, so I talked with him some more. He told me that over the years my books had been arriving with "alarming frequency." It was at the cocktail party that a division among the participants became noticeable: there was an older "Engle crowd," and a younger "post-Engle group." Although the two intermingled physically, there was remarkably little interaction between them. The two groups remained spiritually and conversationally discrete. This situation was formalized later on at the "Decade Parties" that took place beginning at 9:00 p,m. in a tent in the field across from the entrance to the Iowa House, the hotel and conference center that had been built as a wing of the Memorial Union.

         In the Union at the same time the Marathon Reading was taking place. It was mostly the young people who were participating, but John Gilgun had signed up and he talked me into doing likewise; Harold Bond, whom I'd first met the previous fall at the New England Poets' Conference at Harvard, also enlisted and we three, being last, closed the show. Harold and I are formal poets, and even Gilgun's prose poems are chant-like. There had been one or two earlier readers who had read rhymed and metered pieces as well. Afterward John and I went back to the decade party where a young woman who had heard us read said to me, "The poets of your generation do that formal sort of thing so well, but we never learned how."

         While I was talking to her I mentioned Strong Measures, the newly published anthology of "Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms," edited by Phil Dacey and David Jauss. As I turned away, Dacey walked up and introduced himself -- he said he'd heard somebody mentioning his book and came over to see who it was. We got into an argument about the relative merits of Walt Whitman, whom he likes. I told him I kicked old Walt around a fair amount in Visions and Revisions. He said, "You've got a lot to answer for," but he thought he'd use the book as a text anyway, just to stir up his students, not that they'd believe me. I told him not to bet on it.

         At the continental breakfast next morning in the Terrace Lounge I managed to say hello to Mike Curtis of The Atlantic, whom I'd met in the spring of 1965 while I was teaching at Hillsdale College in Michigan. Dan Menaker of The New Yorker, who had for years been rejecting my stories with friendly notes, came over and sat with me while he ate. We talked for a long while before he had to participate in the 9:30 panel on the "Care & Nurture of New Writers" in the Main Lounge of the Iowa Memorial Union.  Curtis and Theodore Solotaroff, whom I'd met at Brockport, were the other panelists. I took the microphone during the question period to say that I felt the Iowa Workshop had spawned too many replications of itself in the form of graduate programs over the years, and that undergraduate programs that trained young people for jobs other than college-level teaching positions would have been of greater service and would have provided many more teaching positions for graduates of M.F.A. programs than currently exist, for there are innumerably more undergraduate colleges than graduate schools.  Oswego, where I taught, was an example of a large undergraduate program that employs seven writers.

         Looking among all these people and discovering who they were gave one the sense that Iowa had done a bit better than all right. I was meeting and remeeting many old friends, correspondents, and people with whom I've been sharing publishing space for years: Kent Baker had graduated from UConn a year after I did; he lives in Canada now. Scott Weeden, my former student at Oswego, was sitting almost directly in front of me a couple of rows down during the panel -- he and I got together briefly after it was over. James Baker Hall said hello and chatted awhile. He introduced me to Dan Marder. Bob Dana didn't remember the marathon word-game session we'd held in Chicago many years earlier, but Don Justice did and mentioned it first. Joe David Bellamy said hello and we recalled the joint reading we'd done at Canton Ag & Tech several years earlier. Edwin C. Cohen, Frank Conroy, Gerald Freund, and Kenneth Hope gave a panel on "Grants & Arts Colonies" at 10:35, and at 11:40 there was one on the "University as Patron" with the President of Iowa, James Freedman; the novelist Doris Grumbach; my old acquaintance, the poet Michael Harper; John Leggett, and Paul Engle. But it wasn't much of a "panel," for the opening statements of each participant took up all the time allotted.

         When he took the stand at last Engle was reborn.  No longer a seventy-eight-year-old retiree, he suddenly was transformed into the person one recollected from the Poetry Workshop sessions of the past.  He was absolutely at the top of his form. Most of the people present were transported, amazed, and delighted.  It was certainly the high spot of the Jubilee to that point for me, and later on I told him so.

         The noon-day barbecue was another fine meal. Everyone talked about how cheaply and yet elegantly the Iowa Foundation had managed the program. I sat with Don Justice, Henri Coulette, Phil Levine, and several others at lunch -- I taught them some new word-games: the con-game, puns on prisoners beginning with the prefix con: (What did the warden ask Lawrence the turnkey when Lawrence had been knifed by a prisoner? ans., "Con stab you, Larry?" This was Don's favorite); the humanoid little furry creature game (puns beginning with ob -- what do you call a segment of a film made by a little furry creature? ans., "An ob scene."), the divorcee game (prefix ex), and the golfer game (prefix pro). Paul came over to talk, pursued by the omnipresent photographers and a television crew. One cameraman wanted to get him in a "candid" shot walking down the street with a bunch of his friends. He tried to recruit several of us, including the poet Jane Cooper, the Dons Peterson and Justice, Mike Harper and the word-game gang, but the session turned into a free-for-all snapshot-fest, and it was many minutes before we were walking down the street, talking and laughing self-consciously while the lenses blinked and the sound crew dangled the mike boom over our heads.

         At 2:00 p.m. there was a panel on "The Writing of the 80's" with Russell Banks, Tess Gallagher, Levine, Strand, Charles Simic, and Hilma Wolitzer, but I found time to carry some of the books I'd brought along up to The Prairie Lights Bookstore and add them to the pile on the Iowa Workshop table. I also dropped in on Iowa Book and Supply and the Iowa Memorial Union Bookstore; both places said they'd order The New Book of Forms when it came out in August.

         The 3:05 panel was "Renaissance in the Short Story" with T. Coraghessan Boyle, Ray Carver, James McPherson, Bob Schacochis, and Stephanie Vaughn.  It appeared that Syracuse University, where Carver and Tobias Wolff taught, was the trendsetter, or at least that was the impression left by some of the panel. Boyle would publish a novel in 1990, East is East, in which he named a character "Lewis Turco."  Before he attended Iowa Boyle had been an undergraduate at S.U.N.Y. Potsdam, graduating in the spring of 1968 where, the following fall, the real Lewis Turco was Visiting Professor for the year.  When I wrote to him to ask why he had so named one of his personae, Boyle claimed to have made the name up!

         No one was going to every session because we were beginning to show signs of fatigue. For my part, I was exhausted and went back to my room for a nap. I got up in time to attend the 4:10 panel, "Trends in Poetry: New Directions for the 90's." James Tate, the moderator, wasn't serious and did a fair amount of clowning around, but Jorie Graham was interesting. The rest of them -- Marvin Bell, Daniel Halpern, Michael Palmer, and Charles Wright -- seemed not to agree on where the literary scene was going.

         The Presidential Reception took place at Dr. Freedman's house at 102 Church Street at 6:00 p.m. If I had remembered how close the mansion was to the campus I'd have walked, but I took the shuttle bus and sat with Doris Grumbach on the way over and back. It turned out that she runs Wayward Books in Washington. I told her about my summer Mathom Bookshop in Dresden, Maine, and we had a fine chat about that and about how sorry we were over the death of John Ciardi, her National Public Radio colleague that spring.

         I had been searching for George Keithley, my classmate in 1959-60, since the first day, and I finally ran into him at the reception. I said hello to Tess Gallagher, who taught at Syracuse University where my daughter, Melora, had been a teaching assistant in the English department during the past year, and I chatted with Tess' husband Ray Carver a while -- he hadn't heard that John O'Brien, a colleague  of mine who had brought Ray to Oswego to read three years back, had been institutionalized in West Virginia.

         At the 7:30 Jubilee Dinner -- chicken cordon bleu, asparagus, chocolate cake -- the tables were reserved by decades. I sat in the 60s with the Fines, Gilgun, Joe Nigg, Kent Baker, and George Keithley. Waiting at our places were copies of Seems Like Old Times, an anthology of reminiscences of the Workshop edited evidently at breakneck speed by Ed Dinger. Masters-of-ceremony were John Leggett, Doris Grumbach, and Galway Kinnell. Pres. Freedman gave the welcome.

         The members of John Berryman's class read poems: Jane Cooper, Coulette, Bob Dana, Bill Dickey, Ronald DiLorenzo, Shirley Eliason, Don Justice, Melvin Walker LaFollette, Phil Levine, Don Petersen, Paul Petrie. Henri read a poem sent by De Snodgrass who, when he tried to come from his Mexico vacation, was stopped at the border because of an irregularity in his visa. By the time the State Department had straightened things out he had driven 600 miles back to the spot where he had been vacationing, but he'd managed to get the poem into the mail, and it had arrived in time.

         There were also "A Half-Century of Reminiscences" given aloud: Deborah Digges for the 80s, Allan Gurganus for the 70s, John Irving's for the 60's read by Ray Carver, for Irving was back in Vienna. Jim Hall and Oakley Hall covered the 50s, and Kay Burford read Ray West's for the 40s. Paul was presented with a chair with a plaque on it by John Leggett, who also announced that there would be Fellowships and a faculty chair established by the Iowa Foundation in Paul's name.

         Then Paul got up to speak. Unfortunately, he got carried away and went on at great length. The younger people at the tables in the far end of the IMU Ballroom began to get rather noisy, and Paul's partisans were by turn annoyed with them and embarrassed for Paul. The event had to be anticlimactic for Paul at any rate, for it would have been unreasonable for anyone to expect him to transcend, or even reach again, the peak of performance he'd attained at the morning panel.

         At last it was over, however, and everyone drifted off, many to the Jubilee Ball across the river again at the new Theatre Building where two bands, the Max Lyon Quartet and The Rhythm Rockers, were playing. John Gilgun and I sat at a table listening and watching for a while, but then we left and went to walk the streets of Iowa City into the dark hours. We managed to find Iowa Book and Supply, which was still on its corner of Clinton Street, though it was a totally new shop. Nearby was a familiar bar, The Airliner, exactly as we had left it, even to the old neon sign. The next corner, where Whetstone's Drugstore had been, was a hair styling salon. There was a new brick mall next to the spot where The Paper Place had stood and later burned, and across the street where Kenney's Fine Beers had stood, there was a shoestore named, only too ironically, Kinney's. At last Gilgun and I got tired of walking the midnight malls of the city that had been made much prettier than we remembered. We'd come down and calmed down enough to go back to Daum and go to sleep.

         On Sunday morning John and I went out walking again to try to find somewhere to eat because brunch wasn't scheduled until 10:30 a.m. We got to the Holiday Inn where we discovered the restaurant open. We had breakfast and afterwards went back past the Prairie Lights Bookstore where we'd noticed stacks of the Sunday edition of The New York Times -- in the old days the Times used to arrive on Tuesday. I took one, slipped money under the door of the closed store, and we went back to the dorm where I began to do the crossword puzzle in the Magazine section, never noticing the big article on the Jubilee we were at that moment attending.

         John and I went over to the Union before things got going and discovered that we could have eaten in the cafeteria there if we had only realized it. We sat down and had coffee with Don Justice, Jim Tate, and several others. At 10:30 a fair number of people went to the final panel, "Regional and Fine Press Publishing" with Edwina Evers, David Hamilton, Kim Merker, and Robley Wilson. Paul Zimmer, director of the University of Iowa Press, was also listed -- I'd written him I was looking forward to meeting him, but for some reason he wasn't present.

         The last meal was the Brunch Buffet in the tent -- blintzes and sausage. I ate it with Sven and Kathleen Armens. Sven had been one of the English professors who, twenty-six years earlier, had played softball with the Workshop poets. I had known him rather well in those soft spring days, and it was a delight to have a chance to visit with him again. Everyone was saying their last farewells, taking their last pictures. Paul invited me to a gathering of "the old crowd" at his house at 4:00 p.m., and I had regretfully to tell him my limousine left Daum at that time to take me back to Cedar Rapids to catch my plane. He said he bet it was my private limousine, but I had to disillusion him yet again.

         Gilgun, who had been regaling me in the interstices of action, carousing, and conversation for a day and parts of two others with what I began calling his "tatterdemalion tragedies," invited me to go with him to West Branch, a town fifteen miles distant, to visit briefly with David Duer. He thought it would be a particularly appropriate way to end the weekend. And, of course we got lost in the cornfields. We drove back and forth, asking farmers and neighbors the way for the better part of an hour. We were about to give up when finally we found the house. David's wife was in the bath, and his arms were full of children. The wind was picking up and blowing over the greening fields -- it came on cold enough for John to put on a sweater, and I redonned my jacket. Before we left he gave us copies of his periodical, Luna Tack.

         Joe Nigg, Dan Marder and I shared the limousine to the Cedar Rapids airport. When we got there Joe and I went into the tiny bar for drinks. We were talking when Ted Solotaroff, Galway Kinnell, and two others came past grinning and looking at me in an odd way. I didn't understand why, when they sat down at a table nearby, they kept smiling and looking at me. It wasn't till later that I realized they must have overheard me say to Joe, who was talking about my books, that "I'm the most widely published unknown writer in America." It's not a smiling matter.

         Joe and I eventually took off in different directions. On my plane I found myself sitting next to a very attractive young woman named Marsha Shultz, a personnel representative of Rockwell International's Avionics Group. We got into a conversation and, of course, it turned out that she writes poetry on the sly. I gave her the last copy of the books I'd brought with me, my 1973 chapbook, The Weed Garden. She had two children who were spread out in age almost as much as my two are -- a thirteen-year old daughter and a three-year-old son. I promised to send her a copy of the children's picture-storybook, Murqatroyd and Mabel, that I'd written a few years back under my anagram pseudonym, "Wesli Court," to read to the little one.

         Jean and my son Chris were waiting for me back in Syracuse when my plane landed on time at 11:00 p.m. On our trip home we stopped at Pizza Hut for a pepperoni pizza. The Golden Jubilee was over. I had not spoken with one single person who had attended who hadn't thought it was an utter marvel of enjoyment. That is remarkable. No, it's a miracle, a bona fide miracle. I doubt I will ever again see the day when one-hundred percent of the writers at a literary gathering maintain against all likelihood and all hope that they had, one and all, the time of their life in celebrating the best and the worst times of their lives when they were students in that Camelot Erewhon, the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa.

From A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs by Lewis Turco, Scottsdale AZ: StarCloudPress.com, copyright 2004, all rights reserved.

 

COMMENTS

Lew - I was one of the others at that marathon wordplay night in Chicago -- in fact, that was the night we first met. You had left the Workshop before I got there, and I had inherited your title of World's Most Egregious Punster. So when word came that you were on your way up to the suite, there was a hush of expectation, reminiscent of an old Western saloon before the meeting of two legendary gunfighters. As I recall, we did not disappoint.

Don Justice ended up back at the suite, as you recall, but much much earlier in the evening, some of us had been sitting around -- Marvin Bell, Steve Parker, Nick Crome, Tod Perry, among others -- and the conversation came around to Justice. A little sozzled and sentimental, we began talking about how sad it was that poets were not more honored -- here was Donald Justice, one of the great 20th Century poets, in Chicago, and was there any ceremony to honor him? No! He was unsung and un-honored. So we would do something about it. We would arrange a testimonial.
At that moment, the door opened, and there stood Don, resplendent in tuxedo. "Sorry I can't spend the evening with you, gentlemen -- the French Ambassador is taking me to dinner at Maxim's."

Tad Richards

 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, October 7th, 2009

R.I.P. JAMES WHITCOMB RILEY

October 7, 1849 - July 22, 1916

 

He was an Indiana bumpkin

Who wrote about the lowly pumpkin

On which at last the hoarfrost fell —

James Whitcomb Riley did as well.

The Menu of Melancholy

out of Burton.

 

These do generally ingender gross humours

                  and windy bile, fill "all those inward parts

         with obstructions:  Beef, goat's flesh (a filthy beast,

and rammish); hart & red deer hath an evil name,

                           it yields gross nutriment, next unto horse";

 

all venison is melancholy, and begets

                  bad blood; hare breeds incubus; conies are

         of the like nature; pork "may breed a quartan

ague."  All fish are discommended, for they breed

                           "viscosities, slimy nutriment, lit-

 

"tle and humourous nutriment; eel, tench, lamprey,

                  crawfish; all fish, that standing pools and lakes

         frequent, yield bad juice and nourishment, dried, soused,

indurate fish, as ling, fumadoes, red herrings,

                           sprats, stockfish, haberdine, poor-John; all shell

 

"fish, conger, sturgeon, turbot, mackerel, skate.  Amongst

                  fowl, peacocks and pigeons, all fenny fowl

         are forbidden, as ducks, geese, swans, herns, cranes, coots,

waterhens, with all those teals, shel-

                           drakes and peckled fowls."  Among herbs: "Gourds, cow-

 

"cumbers, coleworts, melons, cabbage; all raw herbs and

                  sallets breed melancholy blood; roots &

         sole food are windy and bad, or troublesome

to the head; as onions, garlick, scallions, turnips,

         carrots, radishes, parsnips.  All manner

 

"of fruits" are forbidden, "as pears, apples, cherries,

                  plums, strawberries, nuts, medlers, 'serves, sweetings,

         pearmains, pippins, grapes & figs.  All pulse are naught:

beans, pease, fitches, &c." — they fill the brain with gross

                        "fumes, breed black thick blood," cause troublous dreams. Of

 

"spices:  Pepper, ginger, cinnamon, cloves, mace, dates,

                  honey and sugar; all aromatics,

         all sharp & sour things, luscious & oversweet,

or fat, as oil, vinegar, verjuice, mustard, salt;

                           bread of baser grain, as pease, beans, oats, rye,

 

"or overhard baked, crusty & black, oats and corn.

                  All black wines; overhot, compound, strong drinks,

         as Muscadine, Malmsey, Alicant, Rumney,

Brown Bastard, Metheglin, Cyder & Perry.  Beer

                           overnew or over stale, over strong

 

"or not sod, that smells of the cask, sharp or sour —

                  it frets and galls because of the hop."  And

         compound strong dishes beyond these simples: "Puddings

stuffed with blood, baked meats, soused, indurate meats fried &

                           broiled; condite; milk, and all that comes of milk,

 

"—cheese, curds; all cakes, simnels, buns, cracknels, made with

                  butter, &c.; fritters, pancakes.

         pies, sausages, & those several sauces, sharp

or oversweet."  And waters last: "Standing waters,

                           thick & ill-colored, such as come forth of

 

"pools and moats, where hemp hath been steeped or fishes live,

                  are most unwholesome, putrefied, full of

         mites, creepers, slimy, muddy,  unclean, corrupt,

impure."  All are windy, full of melancholy.

                           Shun them by dawn and dusk, by dark and light.

Order Fearful Pleasures, which includes The Compleat Melancholick, from Barnes and Noble: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Fearful-Pleasures/Lewis-Turco/e/9781932842197/?itm=16&usri=lewis+Turco 

The Agonism and the Existentity of Wallace Stevens

 

         In his earliest poems Stevens appeared to be one of the fallenangels.  Unable to believe in God and religion, he would substitute for them a language system — poetry — and a corresponding system of aesthetics.  As the poet wrote in the first line of his poem "The Snow Man," from Harmonium, his first book, "One must have a mind of winter," of existential objectivity, so that one might enjoy whatever there was in life to enjoy — primarily the life of the mind itself without falling victim to wish or romantic despair.

         However, the life of the mind is an abstract life.  In order to write about these abstractions, Stevens had not only to invent a set of "objective correlatives," to use T. S. Eliot's term, but to construct many of his sentences in "abstract," or, to use Donald Davie's term, "musical" syntax.  Each abstraction must be made concrete by means of metaphor: the abstract subject or "tenor" of the metaphor would be equated with an object in the physical world, and this object would become the "vehicle" that carried the burden of the symbolic equation.  Meaning would rise out of an understanding of this symbology, out of an understanding of what each object stood for and how it operated in the context of its environment of other objective correlatives.

         By these means Stevens could build what seemed to be a solid world, but behind this world would stand the "real" world of the mind which the poet inhabited.  In the early poems the objects Stevens chose to represent his ideas were often tropical or subtropical, as in "Sunday Morning" from Harmonium or "The Idea of Order at Key West" from his second collection, Ideas of Order.  As a result, Stevens appeared to be some sort of romantic, Polynesian Prince of Delights, but his intention was to be the exact opposite of "romantic" — existential.

         It was Stevens' contention that there is no meaning in existence beyond whatever meaning the artificer — the individual "creator" with a small c — imposed upon the chaos of the physical universe. In the beginning was the Word, but the Word was not with God, whom Man had created; rather, it was with man who is the creator of all words, including the name of God.  The order of reality is the order of words as they are arranged by the mind of the artificer.  Stevens' "system" posited art as the substitute for religion, which had been discredited as a plausible alternative in the objective, scientific 20th century: The name of God had lost its meaning; therefore, God no longer existed.  Other names must be invented if one were going to survive chaos, for nothing exists for human beings unless it can benamed.

         Generally speaking, as Stevens grew older, in his poems he traveled farther north, both psychically and metaphorically, till at last the landscapes of his poetry became relatively austere.  He was simplifying his objective correlatives, developing that "mind of winter" that was stoic rather than romantic.  He was reducing to essentials the dogmas of his substitute for religion.  An examination of Stevens' later poem "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," from The Auroras of Autumn, may serve to illustrate.

         In "Section I" of the poem Stevens begins on the level of the commonplace, the factual, where objects are of paramount importance. "The eye's plain version is a thing apart, / The vulgate of experience."  "Of what is this house composed if not of the sun, /... / Words, lines, not meanings, not communications."  The world of facts is gigantic and nothing more than itself; it has nothing to communicate beyond its solidity.  A second giant is needed to kill the giant of physical reality:

 

Dark things without a double, after all,

Unless a second giant kill the first —

A recent imagining of reality,

                  * * *

A larger poem for a larger audience.

 

         Stevens has stated his theme: Reality and imagination must meet to produce a greater insight.  In the last stanza of this section the poet maintains that by means of this insight or "larger poem," each datum loses its individuality and achieves unity; becomes, as it were, "A mythological form... / A great bosom, beard, and being, alive with age."

         In "Section II" the author picks up the topic of "houses" from stanza two of "Section I" where "house" equaled the earth, and from stanza three of that same section where "houses" equaled mundane objects.  Here, in this second section, "houses" amounts to a town or, by extension, the world composed of little worlds.  Stevens asks himself — or perhaps the reader — to think about the idea of humanity existing in these houses.  Soon, "we cannot tell apart / The idea and the bearer-being of the idea."  No longer individuals thinking individual thoughts, people are merely particles of data in the greater mass of humanity, with which the speaker of the poem can identify only in the abstract.

         "Section III" is a sort of invocation.  The poet asks that the will to holiness be considered next to holiness; that the desire for love be next to love.  This is more secure than love itself, for love, when possessed, becomes the possessor, thus blinding the lover to the fact that he or she is in reality alone, living merely with an illusion rather than in the totality of the mind.  The poet would rather be immersed in reality than bound emotionally to illusion. In "Section IV" "The plainness of things is savagery."  Stevens continues the argument of III.  The metaphor of seasonal change is introduced to stand symbolically for naked fact (winter), new beginnings in imagination (summer), and new descriptions that will be pursued later in the poem.  This section ends with the statement that "this cold... / seems like a sheen of heat romanticized."

         "Section V" grows out of the preceding section:

 

                  Inescapable romance, inescapable choice

                  Of dreams, disillusion as the last illusion,

                  Reality as a thing seen by the mind,

 

                  Not that which is but that which is apprehended...."

 

Romance is inescapable.  Imagination makes "Everything as unreal as real can be, / In the exquisite eye."  It is inevitable that this should happen, for "The Self, the chrysalis of all men, / Became divided....  One part / Held fast tenaciously in common earth / And one... / Searched out such majesty as it could find."  We are separated from the One, and from Others, by the lock of ego.

         In "Section VI" Stevens wrote,

 

                  Reality is the beginning not the end,

                  Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,

 

it is only the unglossed day of the world in which we live.  It needs shaping and broidering.  There are other elements: Reality "is the infant A standing on infant legs, / Not twisted, stooping, polymathic Z."

         For some, A is enough; for others, perhaps the absolute dreamers who deny reality, there is Z.  The disciples of A and Z will interpret life according to their various persuasions; they will be "The immaculate interpreters of life. / But that's the difference: in the end and the way / To the end.  Alpha continues to begin. / Omega is refreshed at every end."

         Thus, "Section VII" continues the argument, though the basic facts remain the same, they are eternally re-embellished — never twice the same way — and made new by the imagination.  The possessors of imagination are not poor:

 

                  In the presence of such chapels and such school,

                  The impoverished architects appear to be

                  Much richer, more fecund, sportive and alive.

 

         The central argument in "Section VIII" is that the lover, or the poet, before creating his "larger poem for a larger audience" must cool his love for simple reality before he can hope to create something new and alive, containing the essence of ultimate reality, which is the fusion of fact and fiction.

 

                  Our breath is like a desperate element

                  That we must calm, the origin of a mother tongue,...

                                      * * *

                  The cry that contains its converse in itself.

 

         In "Section IX"

 

                  We keep coming back and coming back

                  To the real: to the hotel instead of the hymns

                  That fall upon it out of the wind.

 

What we seek is the poem "of pure reality, untouched / By trope or deviation, straight to the word, / ... / Transfixing by being purely what it is, / ...We seek nothing beyond reality."  Rather, everything that reality encompasses, including its "spirit," "not merely the visible, / The solid, but the movable, the moment."

         "Section X" is a return to and restatement of "Section I," but "Section IX" is particularly obscure.  Although its literal meaning may not be capable of being glossed, it seems to be a play on Stevens' idea that imagination must begin with reality; however, the reality of which he speaks here is "The brilliancy at the central of the earth," or an essential, not a factual, reality.  The poet's terminology and thought patterns are confusing, probably because he is once again using abstract (or, as Donald Davie calls it, "musical") syntax, the order of words in Stevens' sentences following the form of the thought in his mind, but "without defining that thought." (Davie, )  This passage may be the first obvious place where Stevens' system's breakdown becomes reflected in the language he uses — one cannot write "A larger poem for a larger audience" if the audience is excluded from participation in the pet's argument, if the reader is not given landmarks in the landscape of the poet's mind.

         For some time in this poem Stevens has been digressing, talking around the issue he raised in the first section, which had to do with the creation of this "larger poem."  Now, in "Section XII," he returns to his original subject abruptly, unless there is something in the preceding passage that he intended to lead into the idea that

 

                  The poem is the cry of its occasion,

                  Part of the res itself and not about it.

 

         A poem, then, is not the mirror of reality, it is reality itself, or its essence.  The poet speaks the poem as it is,

 

                  Not as it was: part of the reverberation

                  Of a windy night as it is, when the marble statues

                  Are like newspapers blown by the wind.  He speaks

 

                  By sight and insight as they are.  There is no

                  Tomorrow for him.  The wind will have passed by,

                  The statues will have gone back to being things about.

 

        In other words, the purpose of the poet is to capture the reality of the moment, without romance, "said words of the world [being] the life of the world."

         The clue to "Section XIII" lies probably in Stevens' meaning of "ephebe."  An ephebos or ephebus was, in ancient Greece, a youth who had recently become a citizen.  Assuming that this is what Stevens meant, and taking a hint from "Section XII," we might draw the conclusion that the poet, who may be said to be always young and fresh in his viewpoint, newly born with each day, is eternally just becoming a citizen of the world; thus,

 

                  He skips the journalism of subjects, seeks out

                  The perquisites of sanctity, enjoys

 

                  A strong mind in a weak neighborhood and is

                  A serious man without the serious,

                  Inactive in his singular respect.

 

"He is neither priest nor proctor," he is an observer and recorder.  "It is a fresh spiritual that he defines."  He is after the "essential integrity of reality," not photographic journalism, which is mere description and representation of externals, like statues in daylight.  When merged with night and the wind of romance, statues become something other than themselves.

         "Sections "XIV" and "XV" go together.  Satire is unusual in Stevens' work; as a form its intent is to convince by means of derision.  Whom is Stevens trying to convince, himself or an audience?  In either case, somebody seems to need convincing, and if that is so, the viewpoint to be demolished must be unusually strong.

         To this point Stevens has been pointing an admonishing finger at the dry Professor Eucalyptus of New Haven who sits listening to the rain and seeking "God in the object itself, without much choice," just as the eucalyptus worships simple water.

         It is possible to assume, from line 8, "Section XIV," that Professor Eucalyptus is an academic poet whose verse derives from nothing more than

 

                  ...a choice of the commodious adjective

                  for what he sees, it comes in the end to that:

 

                  The description that makes [the rain] divinity, still speech

                  As it touches the point of reverberation — not grim

                  Reality but reality grimly seen

 

                  And spoken in paradisal parlance new

                  And in any case never grim, the human grim

                  That is part of the indifference of the eye

 

                  Indifferent to what it sees.  The tink-tonk

                  Of the rain in the spout is not a substitute.

 

         The rest of the section is variations on this same theme. "Section XVI" begins with the statement that time never duplicates; the present is unique.  In the second stanza Stevens reiterates and embellishes this idea, noting that, though the present  composed of ancient elements, they are new in their total effect.

         The third and fourth stanzas are descriptive.  Stevens picks up several aspects of nature — the sea, the horizon, the wind, the night — all of them undeniably "ancient," and he illustrates his point by weaving them into a new and melodious series of verbal juxtapositions, contrasting terms like "Oklahoman" and "Italian," "horizon" and "masculine."  In the last two stanzas he continues his

         description in this manner and injects the conception that death is poverty; conversely, life is wealth — "this should be tragedy's most moving face."

         In "Section XVII" Stevens notes that life almost attains comedy, but not quite.  The essence of life is seriousness.  The way in which nature manifests itself "is the mirror of the high serious."  Then, more fanciful description is inserted.  The section ends with an explicit statement, returning to the theme introduced in the preceding section:

 

                  These fitful sayings are, also, of tragedy:

                  The serious reflection is composed

                  Neither of comic nor tragic but of commonplace.

 

        Which brings the poem back to its original fulcrum.

 

         "Section XVIII" is another opaque portion of the poem.  What the poet seems to be saying is that experience and perception are necessary, but virtually worthless as a representation of reality if the imaginative element is lacking.

         Stevens returns, in "Section XIX," to the consideration of the historical past.  His thesis is that, at any given period, "there was always one," likely a poet, "who was the axis of his time"; that is, one who captured the essence of the epoch in which he lived, who "chants in the dark / A text that is an answer, although obscure." It may be assumed, I believe, that if Stevens were to nominate someone of the Modernist period to that office, it would be himself, not T. S. Eliot or Ezra Pound.

         The maker of "reality" sits in "Section XX" and in his room in Hartford (rather than New Haven, London, or Philadelphia).  He sits thinking, becoming a part of the entity of reality itself.

 

                                                He may evade

                  Even his own will and in his nakedness

                  Inhabit the hypnosis of that sphere.

 

        Stevens thinks twice in "Section XXI":

 

                  But he may not.  He may not evade his will,

                  Nor the wills of other men; and he cannot evade

                  The will of necessity, the will of wills —

 

         The first stanza of this section evolves from the last stanza of "Section XX."  It is fairly explicit.  The rest of "XXI" is obscure, however.  It is perhaps an attempt to define by analogy the essence of reality which is, of course, indefinable, though it may perhaps be glossed.  But the effort fails.  Stevens returns to Professor Eucalyptus who, in "Section XXII," sounds like the embodiment of wish-fulfillment: "'The search / For reality is as momentous as / The search for God.'"  Perhaps Emerson, or Pound, or Eliot is being made to see the light at last.  "It is the philosopher's search / For an interior made exterior / And the poet's search for the same exterior made / Interior."  This search consists of a recreation of truth using elemental things, such as "original cold" and "original earliness," which refer obliquely back to "Section XVI."

         "Section XXIII" continues to explore the theme of the preceding section.  The sun and daylight are illumination, bodiless, yet making apparent the individuality of objects.  This is half of reality. Night, then, is the submerging of separate things in a single thing; "everything come together as one."  It is the other, tenuous, half of reality.

         The poet in "Section XXIV" specifically identifies and describes the rainstorm throughout which, we must remember, Professor Eucalyptus, potential poet, has been sitting in his room.  It is sometime during the summer.  "It took all day to quieten the sky / And then to fill its emptiness again, / So that all the edge of afternoon, not over, / Before the thought of evening had occurred /.../ There was a clearing."  The scene is set for Professor Eucalyptus' transmogrification.

         In "Section XXV" the dry poet is on his balcony.  At this point,

 

                  Life fixed him, wandering on the stair of glass,

                  With its attentive eyes.  And, as he stood,

                  On his balcony, outsensing distances,

 

                  There were looks that caught him out of empty air.

 

         Then the poet speaks, in French for some Symbolist reason, "C'est toujours la vie qui me regarde" — it is always life who looks at me.  "Nothing about [life] every stayed the same, / Except this hidalgo and his eye and tune, / The shawl across one shoulder and the hat."  Stevens thus reiterates that, though life is to outward appearances the same as ever; is wearing the same old garb and playing the same old tune to remind the poet that it is, indeed, life that sits regarding him in a New Haven room; nevertheless, life translates the common idiom, simply by its presence, into "a rumpling of blazons."  "What was real [is] turned into something most unreal."

         "In isolated moments — isolations / Were false.  The hidalgo was permanent, abstract, / A hatching that stared and demanded an answering look."  Life is a continuous force that transcends and unifies the isolated ingredients observable in the commonplace.

         "Section XXVI" is a description of the scene after the storm,  and of the emotions felt by Eucalyptus as he contemplates new vistas. It is a specific scene, not an invented one, though Stevens' description is couched in imaginative terms.  He mentions the Sound, meaning Long Island Sound, which New Haven overlooks.

         "Section XXVII" puts words into the mouth of a scholar.  It is not clear if the scholar is the poet himself with a new awareness of reality, or if the poet is simply remembering the scholar's statements.  At any rate, the theme of the duality, but essential unity, of the real is stated in positive terms at last.  Stevens lists the ingredients and techniques to be used in the poet's "larger poem for a larger audience."

         Stevens in "Section XXVIII" makes statements similar to those in the preceding section.  If he had been relying on logical argument,  the preceding section or, at most, this one ought to have been the end of the poem.  But Stevens does not rely on logic.  He would rather rely upon seasonal change to point up symbolically his thesis that a continual renewal of the world is created by the synthesis of fact and imagination.

         Thus winter, in "Section XXIX," stands for the bare beginning again; unadorned fact.  Spring and summer are a continual redefinition through redescription of fact: They are the seasons of the imagination.  Although Stevens uses the same basic foundation time and again, the adjectives of his description are never the same:

 

                  The countrymen were changed and each constant thing.

                  Their dark-colored words had redescribed the citrons.

 

Autumn in "Section XXX" is a return to nakedness, nondescription.  Winter is the fact itself stripped clean, ready for another beginning.

         Stevens wraps up his argument in "Section XXXI," as if it can be considered an argument rather than an impressive massing of sounds and images, syntactical sleights of mind and ideational fens that tend to overwhelm the reader.  Even so, we are forced to agreement in the final stanza:

 

                  It is not in the premise that reality

                  Is a solid.  It may be a shade that traverses

                  A dust, a force that traverses a shade.

 

Stevens needs to be no more explicit than this, for what he finishes with refers to other details in the poem whose meanings are somewhat clearer, though such an ending might seem meiotic rather than climactic.

         Stevens would have a large impact upon both the poetry and the critical theory of the post-Modernist world.  Mark C. Taylor opened his article, "Descartes, Nietzsche, and the Search for the Unsayable," with a Stevens quotation.  "Few lines have more effectively caught the chill of modernity," Taylor said, than the conclusion of Wallace Stevens' poem "The Snow Man": "For the listener, who listens in the snow, / And, nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is."

         Later in his essay Taylor introduced the subject of "deconstructionism," a critical theory that engulfed academe in the 1980s and which "calls into question the possibility of securely establishing the meaning or range of meanings of any human construction, including any text."  But this system of the French philosopher and critic Jacques Derrida merely caused academics to fall into the same trap in which Stevens found himself, for if no text means anything, then neither do the critical texts written to discuss the literary texts.  It is the dead end of the "mind of winter": Nothing means anything except to the solo soul caught in his or her existential abyss.  But Stevens also had a positive effect on literature, for his practice did not necessarily follow his theories, and the "abstract syntax" of Stevens poems influenced, first, the poetry of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and the New York School of poetry and then, more recently, the so-called "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E" poets of the 1980s, though most of them do not acknowledge the debt.

 

WORKS CITED

 

Norman Friedman, E. E. Cummings: The Art of His Poetry, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1960.

Donald Davie, Articulate Energy, New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Lyn Hejinian, The Guard, n.p., 1983.

Archibald MacLeish, Collected Poems, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952.

Wallace Stevens The Auroras of Autumn, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950.

——, Collected Poems, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1954.

——, Harmonium, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1923.

——, Ideas of Order, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1935.

——, Opus Posthumous, New York: Alfrad A. Knopf, 1957.

Mark C. Taylor, "Descartes, Nietzsche, and the Search for the Unsayable," New York Times Book Review, February 1, 1987.

Lewis Turco, The New Book Of Forms, Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1986.

——, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986.

 

From Concerning Poetry, vi:1, Spring 1973, © all rights reserved 2009 by Lewis Turco

 

Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, UArkansasPress  1986. Paperback, $12.95. 1986 Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America. ORDER FROM AMAZON 

Uncle Wesli’s Daily Epitaph for Friday, October 2nd, 2009

R.I.P. WALLACE STEVENS

October 2, 1879-August 2, 1955

 

“God’s a blind that blocks the sun,

Wool pulled over everyone

Who thinks that he can roll elevens

And win death’s craps,” said Wallace Stevens.

 

FARMERS AND SAILORS

On an Aphorism by Wallace Stevens

 

If farmers had summers ten years long

What tomatoes they could grow!

If all the string in the world were tied

To a dragon kite ten cubits wide,

And a wind as wild as the sky is blue

Were to blow from the west from me to you

Through a farmer’s summer ten years long,

What tomatoes would we grow?

And if sailors had universal seas

What voyages they could take!

Their anchors would wind from the deep forever

On windlasses that turned and never

Stopped in the wind that never failed

To fill their sails though they never sailed

Across our universal seas

On voyages none ever take.

 

Wesli Court

 

 

 

http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Visiting-Wallace/Dennis-Barone/e/9781587298110

Tsunami (1)

The world was washed away by a wall of water

That first became the horizon: a rising wall

That pulled the shallows outward and away

From the shores. The coastal sealife washed

Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was

Stillness everywhere, and then the world

 

Listened to a roar that became the world,

The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water

Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was

Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall

Hard as rock that rose before it washed

Ashore and tore the screaming child away

 

From the mother, lifted the father, whipped him away

From the place he worked. The ocean became the world,

Crushed the buildings along the beaches, washed

Limbs and torsos into the trees. The water

Filled the wells with salt and blood. A wall

Of bricks became a gristmill grinding what was

 

Lying behind it into a paste. It was

Mud and plants and trees spun away

Into a maelstrom of single items now all

Things undifferentiated, whirled

In eddies and backwashes of polluted water

Where everything and nothing could be washed.

 

What could float, floated, what could be washed

Away was washed away, out to sea, was

Caught in a tree that held, held above water

Or drowned or buried in mud or floated away

Into who knew where? It was a world

That was unsafe ashore, but at sea the wall

 

Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,

On the surface of the wave that rose and washed

Away the earthen world, the solid world,

The world where creatures breathed an air that was

Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away

From breath, from sight, from the living world.

 

Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was

Scoured into the minds of those not washed away

From the world of earth into the world of water.

Lewis Turco

Copyright 2009. All rights reserved.