Passing the Time

  Roger Dickinson-Brown

          Roger Dickinson-Brown, who lives in France and was once a colleague, has apparently fostered a web page called “Verse.Fr” at http://www.verse.fr/index.php which is an on-line anthology of poetry in English, French, and Latin. In his comments on my work he wrote, “Like many virtuosos, Turco suffers from the overflow of his own talent: his poems lack the simplicity of great art. And he publishes so much that his best poems may be overlooked. Nonetheless, Lewis Turco at his best is one of the master craftsmen of his generation.”

          I wasn’t aware that I was a “virtuoso” (which is a very nice compliment), or that “great art” required “simplicity” (what’s simple about The Inferno or Paradise Lost, or even merely a Donne poem?). I do publish a lot, though, and the reason is that I write to pass the time away on my journey towards dissolution. If I didn’t write, I’d be bored, and I write a lot of other things besides poetry.

          I never consciously intended to write “great” poems, just one or two anthology pieces, maybe, and I think I may have done that. The rest of my work was written just to keep myself amused and, incidentally perhaps, to entertain a few other people along the way. Some of my work, of course, was written to provide examples of poems utilizing the verse forms discussed in the various editions of The Book of Forms, including modern examples of Medieval bardic forms. Others were written as experiments of various kinds, but most were written simply to keep melancholy at bay.

 

PASSING THE TIME

 

Where am I going? How do I know where?

Why do I write as I saunter along,

passing the time on the road to nowhere?

 

I’m humming a tune, mumbling a song

to kill as much time as I sensibly can —

that’s why I write as I wander along

 

making the syllables skip and scan,

making the language dance and go deep

to kill as much time as I sensibly can —

 

to liven the senses before I sleep,

slipping into that ultimate slumber.

Making the language dance and go deep

 

by counting these syllables without number

and making them count is my chosen role.

Slipping into the final slumber

 

is, of course, my ultimate goal.

Where am I going? How can I know where?

Making time count is my chosen role

while passing time on this road to nowhere.

 

 

Listen to Lewis Turco Read his poem, Passing the Time 

From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages; BUY FROM AMAZON.COM .