Poetics and Ruminations

Home Thoughts

         

          People are always asking artists and writers, “Where do your ideas come from?” You get your ideas wherever you get them. I have no idea where my next idea might come from, if I ever have another one. That's another thing you don't know — when is it all over? I don't worry about that too much, however, because under normal circumstances I think it's all over when you decide it's over.

          An idea can happen any time, anywhere. According to David Eagleman in his 2011 book Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain we have any number of secret “selves” or systems working beneath our “consciousness mind,” which is actually a very small portion of our brain. “Ideas” bubble up from some sort of subliminal brain committee that is forever working to keep us alive. A poem may begin with a single word — for instance, I heard a word on television one morning. I was watching the weather forecast and the forecaster said, "When will the snow do what it's supposed to do?" But instead of "snow do" I heard "snow-dew." That word fascinated me. I don't know where that idea is going to lead, but perhaps eventually something will click, one of my subconscious committees will put that word into some kind of context for me, and I'll be able to write a poem.

          On another occasion I'd been collecting such words and making a list of them, hoping I'd eventually find a place to use them, but I never did. It was a short list — "twilleter" is a neologism, meaning a kind of insect, from Alistair Reed's children’s book Ounce, Dice, Trice; "common goatsucker,” is another name for the nighthawk, one of my favorite words, but I tend to overuse it; "clum," which I ran across in the Oxford English Dictionary, is an ancient synonym for “silence.”

          Finally I got tired of waiting for "inspiration' to strike, and my conscious mind decided to write a poem and use all of the words, just to get rid of them. So I did, and as I was typing up the final draft (yes, “typing” — this was back in the ‘seventies, as I recall), I meant to write the word "slicing," but it accidentally came out "sliving." I looked at that typo and decided it was more descriptive than the word I'd intended to use, so I kept it. Years later, long after I’d written the poem, I serendipitously ran across the verb "to slive" in a book of archaic words, Charles MacKay’s Lost Beauties of the English Language published in 1874. It meant, "to do anything furtively or slyly; to sneak, to skulk." It turned out to be another ancient word and not a coining after all! I wonder which of my subconscious systems understood that. Anyway, this is the poem I or several of my selves wrote from my word list:

 

HOME THOUGHTS

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Home Thoughts

 

         Time buzzes in the ear.  Somewhere

nearby, beyond my peripheral

vision, an insect throbs its heartsong

to the couch.  A twilleter fuzzes

         against a burning lamp.  Outdoors,

 

         a common goatsucker strings twelve

yellow streetlamps on its bill.  Between

its hoarse shrieks, the town sky drops pieces

of clum among my snoring neighbors.

         If I close my eyes, a crack along

 

         the wall comes sliving my lids to

split the mind's dry sight.  Look inward: a

plaster skull sifts dust down upon old

webs that hang, buzzing, as darkness moves

         ruthlessly to feast on something

 

small and hollow with blind, jeweled eyes.

 

          So ideas come from everywhere; I guess all one need do is be receptive, keep one's ears open for sounds and one's eyes open for images. A poet, above all other writers, is interested in language. That's his or her material, You keep your ears open for language and your mind open to impressions.

          "Home Thoughts" was originally published in Poetry, cxiii:4, Jan. 1969, and gathered in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 

More Shakespearean Gnomes

THE CLASSICS

Six Shakespearean Tailgaters

  

Nobility 

 

This was the noblest Roman of them all:

He had a stony heart and a lot of Gaul!

 

 

Respite

 

After life’s fitful fever one sleeps well

Unless, of course, there’s such a place as Hell.

 

 

Haruspex

 

But this denoted a foregone conclusion:

Fall into a cellar hole…floorgone contusion!

 

 

Fame

 

When beggars die there are no comets seen,

Just meteorites, satellites and stuff in between.

 

 

The Big Bang

 

Nothing can come of nothing

Excepting everything.

 

Copyright © 2012 Wesli Court; all rights reserved.

 

Epitaphs for the Poets

JUST PUBLISHED!

Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012, 85 pp., trade paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1, $15.00. Order from Amazon.com: Epitaphs for the Poets 

As reverent as it is irreverent, this charming cycle of poems brings dead poets to life and life to dead poets.  Here is a guild of the centuries, by no means a “tradition,” but a bond, rather — unbroken and ongoing — among brother and sister practitioners of an art that has always spoken life to death. — Albert J. von Frank, co-editor, the Harvard Variorum Edition of The Poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

 

R.I.P. LEWIS TURCO
May 2, 1934 –

 
Here lies at last and out of work,
The syllabubble wordsmith Turk
Who finds he cannot now resort
For rime to his sidekick Wesli Court. 

 

Whittier Gnomes

Six Tailgaters

 

Wise Choice 

 

Give fools their gold, and knaves their power—

Give me a hooker for an hour!

 

 The Lie

 

They tell me, Lucy, thou art dead,

Now get your ass out of that bed!

 

 Observation

 

Shoot, if you must, this old gray head,

But if you do then I’ll be dead.

 

Threat 

 

Then she took up her burden of life again

And muttered, “Wait a while — I’ll get you then!”

 

Typo 

 

I'm sorry that I spelt the word

Without the u — “tird” is absurd!

 

Assault

Hushed the bird-voices and the hum of bees

Flap about my ears and beset my knees.

 

 

Copyright © 2012 Wesli Court, all rights reserved.

 

Found on the Internet

Found on the Internet at http://nicholastozier.com/blog/?p=957:

 

 

"Fun with Accentual-Syllabic Prosodies

"The new edition of Lewis Turco’s The Book of Forms: a Handbook of Poetics is out, so I’ve been waist deep in that every night this week.

"Dear University Press of New England,

"Please publish The Book of Forms as an eBook and a hardback. I’m sick of having to spread its pages open with one hand while I’m taking notes.

"This paperback edition won’t live more than 90 days—I’ll crush it with my love and leave bite marks all over its tender soft cover.

"Hardback and eBook, please."

posted: February 2, 2012
under: Book Reviews by Nicholas W. Tozier.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry $27.95 Paper, 978-1-61168-035-5.

Keats Gnomes

Six tailgaters.

 

Tippling Season

 

My wine overbrims a whole summer,

But liquorless winter’s a bummer.

 

 

After the Panty Raid

 

Pale were the lips I kissed, and fair the form

That she showed off for me there in her dorm.

 

 

The Comic Garden

 

Here are sweet peas, on tip-toe for a flight,

And here are popeyes itching for a fight.

 

 

The Empty Garret

 

Souls of Poets dead and gone

Have nothing left that they can pawn.

 

 

Western Manners

 

Shall I gulp wine? No, that is vulgarism

Practiced on that trail they call the Chisholm.

 

 

Waken and Blossom

 

Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose;

Try not to get a nettle up your nose.

 

Copyright © 2012 Wesli Court, all rights reserved.

 

Remembering Dugan Gilman

          On February 3, 2012, I received an email message from Paul Rickert saying that the poet Dugan Gilman had died in Syracuse at the age of sixty-six. His younger brother, Kevin, had been one of my poetry writing students in the early 1970s while I was teaching at the State University of New York College at Oswego, about forty-five miles north of Syracuse, on Lake Ontario. When he was my student Kevin told me that his older brother was a poet, and that he had decided to take my classes because Dugan had suggested he do so.

          After his graduation Kevin Gilman became a Northwestern Mutual Insurance Company executive, not a poet, but he stayed in town. I had, and still have, a Northwestern account, and I saw him often until he died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of 58 on December 17, 2009. For twenty-two years at Midsummer Kevin had hosted a “Longest Day of the Year Party” where family and friends gathered from across the country and the globe; it was there that I first met his sister Teresa who is also a poet.

          Paul Rickert in his email elaborated a bit. He wrote that Dugan “was quite eccentric, lived outdoors and homeless many years, then settled into a house purchased by his siblings [for Dugan to live in] in the Westcott Street area where he lived as a hermit.” 

          Kevin told me that Dugan lived in a tent in the woods while he was homeless, and that he “lived off road kill,” which astonished and appalled me. Eventually Dugan moved into his sister Niki's home to live a solitary life in the basement, but when Wesleyan University Press in 1971 published his first and only book, Upstate, in its prestigious series, Dugan had not yet, so far as I know, shown symptoms of his impending eccentricity. However, the crop of young poets, of whom Dugan was one back in those early ‘seventies, had learned from Robert Bly how to distort reality; they were known as “deep image surrealists.”

          In 1958 Robert Bly had founded an extremely influential literary magazine that inaugurated the capitulation of the teaching Academic Poets to political correctness and anti-formalism. Bly’s periodical was originally titled The Fifties, then The Sixties, and, briefly, The Seventies, together with his press of the same names. In his periodical and in the books that he issued from his press, no less than in his own work, Bly began to press two ideas. The first was that, in order to write quintessentially "American" poetry one had, quixotically and paradoxically, to study the work of the Chilean Marxist poet Pablo Neruda and the Scandinavians, including Gunnar Ekelof and Thomas Tranströmer, all of whom Bly was translating.

          Bly's second idea was that poets needed to get in touch with their basic natures somehow, needed to reach down into their ids to pull up and bring to light the primal urges of the brute and somehow reconcile them with their conscious existence. The way to do this was to utilize what has come to be called the "underground" or "deep” image, a term coined by Amiri Baraka, but an idea Bly derived from Theodore Roethke whose method it was to walk the edge of madness deliberately, not falling over into insanity nor, on the other hand, giving in to the logical mind. It was the poet's job to bring from the side of the unconscious those images that would enable humankind to face and understand itself. These images would, of course, be distortions of "reality" as the conscious mind perceived it; therefore, "deep imagism" was a type of literary surrealism.

          Bly pressed ahead with his theories, and soon he had a great many converts.  One of the most beautifully lyric academic poets of the period, James Wright, joined the ranks of the Deep Imagists. Wright went on to gather an excellent reputation as a poet for, though much lyricism was lost in his switch to the ranks of Blymagism, his talent was large enough to bridge the gap. However, Bly's major convert, perhaps, was James Dickey, although their association was short-lived.

          It was Dugan Gilman who, when he came to visit me once in Oswego, coined a term to describe the Deep Imagism which had enveloped the college graduate writing workshops, of which there began to be a great many throughout America during the late 1960s and the 1970s. Gilman, who had been one of those young poets enveloped by the movement, called it the "Pink Fog."

          During this period many formal poets were persuaded to the view that formalism was no longer relevant to the times, which were becoming oriented to social activism, reform and to “self-expression”; i.e., egopoetry and “confession.” Unlike every other art taught in the academy, poetry became the stepchild of "intuition."  If young people wanted to find out consciously what they were actually doing with pen, muse, and paper, they were no longer going to discover it in the classroom; no, it had to be learned privately, on one's own in the silent hours, an activity I was able to foster in 1968 by publishing The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, a book that Kevin was using in class around that time, and with which Dugan clearly was familiar because many years later another Syracusan, Paul Harvey, wrote to tell me about his experience using The Book of Forms:

           “The Book of Forms has brought immeasurable pleasure to me (and my children who also use it) over the years,” Harvey wrote. “Introduced to it by a local poet and an old friend here in Syracuse, Dugan Gilman, it has given me the structure over the years to write much more pleasing and, I think, effective poetry. Once [I was] a proponent of free verse…until Dugan convinced me that I needed discipline and structure and gifted me with a tattered copy of [the] book.

          “Now on my third copy, and having bought several more as gifts, I still find regular pleasure in using it. In fact, I am currently writing a book of poems for my daughter who turns forty in February. It will contain many different poems in many varied forms (hell, I may even include a free verse here and there).

          “An attendant pleasure was the respect the book gave me for the poets of the ages. I found myself appreciating and even memorizing many of my favorites.”

          Dugan Gilman had come to visit me at home in Oswego after his first book of poems had been published and gotten good reviews. Arriving with a new manuscript, he told me that he had written his first collection by osmosis, picking up out of the air the neo-surrealism that hung like a "pink fog" over the campuses. Now, he said, he wanted to learn how to write well.

          I read his ms., which was full of formal verses, and I had to tell him I felt he had a long way to go before he could handle meters and rhymes and such bugbears with seeming ease — with artfulness. He had, I said, gone about the whole thing backwards: He had written a successful book of poetry before he had learned how to write. He had imitated a popular period style and gotten away with it, but if he wished to grow he would have to put his mind to it. I'm afraid he was considerably disillusioned, but it was the truth.  He had two choices: He could go on imitating the poems he had written and their models, or he could learn how to write anything he wanted to write. I don’t know how successful he was, for he never published another volume.

          A memorial service for Dugan Gilman will be held from 5:00-7:00 p.m. on Thursday, February 9^th, at Burns-Garfield Funeral Home, 3175 East Genesee Street, Syracuse, New York, 13224, (315) 446-2466.

 

Campaign Donations

          During his run for the Presidency I made the mistake (though I couldn’t have known at the time that it was an error) of donating a small sum to Barack Obama’s campaign. Ever since then I have been dunned by all sorts of campaigns all over the country for governors, senators, congressmen from everywhere and anywhere — even for recall drives in places where I have never lived, and I am weary of it all. Today I received another one; I replied to it thus, as I have done several times recently:

Dear Juliana Smoot,

          Please stop asking me for money. If President Obama needs even more for his campaign than the enormous amount he has already raised, let him get it from the banks he bailed out that are now sitting on the excessive capital they have earned since he saved them — they don't plan to lend it to anyone until he is out of office. He won't be getting anything from me, although I will vote for his re-election because I am a Democrat. I wish he were one as well rather than the closet conservative he turned out to be.

Lewis Putnam Turco

 

 

Uncle Wesli's Daily Epitaph for Wednesday, February 1st, 2012

 

 

R.I.P. JOSEPH S. SALEMI

February 1, 1948 -

 

The poet Joseph S. Salemi

Confronted readers with dilemmi:

How to read with solemn laughter

And forget his work thereafter.