Poetics and Ruminations

Basso Profundo

Poem by Lewis Turco, image by George O'Connell

The Fog

 

          In the summer of 2012 the Dutch composer Walter Hekster and his wife Alice van Leuvan Hekster who had been a fellow classmate of my wife, Jean, and me at Meriden (CT) High School, class of 1952, came to visit us in Dresden Mills, Maine, from their summer home in Higganum, Connecticut. The four of us had a fine time, but Walter began to feel under the weather.

          After their visit we were all supposed to attend our M.H.S. 60th class reunion, but when Jean and I arrived we discovered that Walter had returned to The Netherlands to see his doctors because he felt so ill.

         I was in touch with Alice all fall, keeping tabs on Walter -- for whom I had on several occasions been librettist, so we had been expecting the sorry news of his passing. When I sent our condolences to Alice she replied, “Oh Lew, thanks. You know how sick Walt was, and it just got worse. I was with him and his Light just went out on New Years Eve.”

          On Feb 8, 2013, Alice wrote, “We are going to put Walt's ashes into the harbor here on Sunday the 17th (his wish)…. My Auntie Margy is coming and I hope Marie [Delemarre Ho, also a classmate]. One of my friends wrote a poem for the occasion, in Dutch. Could you?

          Love to Jeannie too,

          Alice

          On the same day I sent this to Alice:

 

R.I.P. WALTER HEKSTER

March 29, 1937 – December 31, 2012

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hekster

 

Here we scatter all these motes

Of his ashes like the notes

He composed, like the sands

Of time that passed through his good hands,

Both the sinister and dexter,

Of our dear friend Walter Hekster.

 

          Alice wrote afterward,

          Aunt Margy and Marie came [from the U. S.] yesterday! I can't believe it. Marie and Margy and I loved it [the epitaph]! It was a beautiful day and a swan came by with signets and got covered with Walt's ash.

          Alice

         This is the playlet I wrote that was first published in Polemic of Western Reserve University (now Case-Western Reserve of Cleveland, OH) Vol. XI, No. 1, Winter, 1966; it was used as the libretto for The Fog: Chamber Opera in One Act commissioned by the Twents Conservatorium, Enschede, Holland; music by Walter Hekster, libretto by Lewis Turco, Amsterdam: Donemus, 1987. Folio, paper. 

 

THE FOG: A CHAMBER OPERA IN ONE ACT

Dramatis personae: Character A, Character B, and a Voice.

ACT ONE

House lights down, curtain up.

Scene. A bare stage. Two figures are seen standing center stage. It is difficult to make out whether the figures are male or female, for a thick mist rolls in from both stage right and stage left. One of the figures speaks.

A. Aren’t we supposed to get somewhere sometime? When are we going to get there?

B. It’s too soon to tell. Not enough time has passed.

Voice (it is big and resonant). You’re almost there now. Don’t give up. You’ve almost made it.

A. Who was that? What was that voice?

B. That was some Being who watches over us. I think it was God.

A. What kind of Being? It’s hard to make out any shape in this fog. I can heardly see you, let alone a Voice. You look as though your body is made of shadow.

B. It’s possible I’m not even here. You could be talking to yourself. On the other hand, perhaps I’m here and you’re not. Maybe the mist is a mirror.

A. I’ve thought of that. I’ve given that very thing a good deal of reflection as we’ve been going along. But I can hear you breathing. Are you making this mist with your breath? If so, I wish you’d cut it out so I can see God. I’d like to find out who it is that’s talking to us.

B. We’re talking to each other. There’s no one else on this road.

A. But I think I heard a third voice. It came from somewhere overhead, I think.

B. Pay no attention. Just keep going.

A. The voice gave me courage. I’d like to hear it again.

B. What’s wrong with my voice? Isn’t the sound I make enough for you?

A. Yes.... No. That is, maybe. But what if it’s not your voice? What if it’s just an echo?

B. Then it’s an echo. It’s you giving yourself courage. So what? Isn’t that enough?

A. I don’t think so. I don’t want to be alone with myself in all this fog. It’s a frightening thing to think that I have to make it on my own. I don’t think I could do it.

B. Where is it you think you’re going? Do you have a map?

A. No, and that’s why it’s frightening. I don’t trust my sense of direction.

B. There doesn’t seem to be any direction out here. Every way looks like every other.

A. That’s the other thing that’s bothering me. Even if I could trust my sense of direction, I couldn’t trust the directions themselves.

B. Then why bother worrying? Just keep going. Follow me and don’t look back.

A. That’s the third thing. If I follow you, who am I following? And why should I trust you any more than I trust myself? You might even be myself — we’ve been all over that. I’d rather follow God. Maybe He can see better from up there — I wish He’d speak again.

Voice. Keep going. You’re almost there.

A. There! There He is again. Let’s go.

B. Lead the way. I’m right behind you.

A. I thought I was following you! I thought you knew the way.

B. You’re leading now. I didn’t hear Him.

A. That’s very strange. His voice was clear as a bell.

B. He must have been talking to you alone. You’re in charge now. Which way?

A. The way we’re going must be right. He said we were almost there.

B. We’ve been standing still. We haven’t moved an inch.

A. That’s the fourth thing. The fog seems to be getting thicker. We’d better hold hands so we don’t get lost. It would be death to be separated.

B. Now I’m beginning to be frightened. Here’s my hand.

A. Something solid at last! You’re not just my reflection after all.

B. Perhaps not. Anything is possible.

A. We still haven’t moved. Do you suppose we should try?

A bell begins to ring offstage, and it continues to ring throughout the next speech.

Voice. I was wondering when you’d get here. How do you do? I’m very happy to meet you both. This is it.            This is the end in view. (The bell stops ringing.)

A. Did you hear something just then? I thought I heard a bell ringing in the fog.

B. It was the wind, I think. Perhaps the mist is lifting a little.

A. Maybe so. Let’s wait here a little while and see if it clears up.

B. All right. I can wait.

The figures stand together in the fog. A bell-buoy begins ringing somewhere offstage and continues to ring for a while after all stage lights fade out and all house lights down and out. Curtain. 

The Hustle: A Poemoir

 

Gene and Lewis Turco at a family wedding.

          When I was five years of age my brother, Gene, was born in Meriden, Connecticut.  His middle name is "Laurent" — the male version of "Laura," my mother’s middle name, just as my first name is “Lewis,” the English version of “Luigi,” and my middle name is “Putnam,” my mother’s maiden name. It was many years before I realized the derivation of "Gene": it is the American version of "Gino," which is short for "Luigi" — my father had named both his sons after himself!  In my second collection of poems, a chapbook titled The Sketches of Lewis Turco and Livevil: A Mask (1962), I wrote about our childhood:

 

GENE

 

"Ragtail Gene, don't tag along here;

        scram on home or I'll bop your nose."

Brother, come the first of April,

        that was the word the second of May

        and all you heard when our lead pipe cannon

        swallowed a cherry bomb and belched a stone

        that boomed across the Fourth of July,

        nearly crocking you where you hid

        to spy on all the older kids.

 

If the world grew huger in your eyes,

        that was because they went wide

        to hear the clubhouse secrets told

        in the dark garage where gasoline

        smelled about good enough to swill.

 

For, the first you knew of going,

        you knew because we swore our raft

        was not a raft, but a ship to float

        a boy's body out of sight

        and a man's voice too deep for sounding.

 

That's the way that I am going;

        ragtail Gene, don't tag along here.

 

          When I was in the eighth grade my father sent me off to Suffield Academy in Suffield, Connecticut.  He told me that he was doing it to give me the best education he could, but he evidently told my brother that he sent me away to save Gene's life.  I don't recollect that I was all that homicidal toward my sibling.  The worst thing I remember doing was tying him to the porch of the parsonage on Windsor Avenue when I was supposed to be baby-sitting him.  I wanted to play with my neighborhood buddies instead, and I knew he was safe because I could hear him yelling.

          One weekend while I was in the Navy and Gene was in high school I came back on liberty to Meriden and discovered that he had gotten himself into some sort of trouble. Papa and Mom May talked to me about it in distress, and I think I must have become angry, because I wrote “The Hustle”:

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "The Hustle."

 

O your eyes are slightly wondered,

           Brother Gene.

They allow the world's been sundered,

           Brother Gene.

So you travel with your brothers:

Not the flesh-and-blood kind — others

Who deplore the ways of fathers,

           Man! you're mean.

 

There are rods and there are women,

           Brother Gene.

You're a rebel, you're a demon,

           Brother Gene.

You were spawned beneath the atom

On a lower social stratum.

People stink, and so you hate 'em,

           Bile and spleen.

 

What's a lifetime's secret essence,

           Brother Gene?

Is it kooky adolescence,

           Brother Gene?

Is it ninety miles per hour,

Is it acting beat and dour,

Or professionally sour?

           Cool the scene.

 

We will halve the world and share it,

           Brother Gene.

Call half minah, call half parrot,

           Brother Gene.

In our monstrous aviaries

We will ostracize canaries...,

Any bird that sings or varies

           In between.

 

Then we'll blow the whole bit higher,

           Brother Gene,

Than the sun shoots tongues of fire,

           Brother Gene.

For commitment's too much trouble;

Prick the big dream like a bubble.

You can be the final rebel,

           Brother Gene.

           It was very strange, it seemed to me, that Gene had gotten into a scrape because he was, and still is, a very nice guy. He had never been a minute’s trouble all his childhood, to my recollection, except that he was accident-prone. Strange things happened to him: once he walked through the smoke of a bonfire — in those days one could burn leaves in the fall — and came down with a case of poison-ivy all over his body. Another time he and some of his friends were playing with a BB gun and he was shot in the eye which split his cornea. For most of our lives we have gotten along pretty well, our wives like each other, and our kids all get along on those few occasions when they get together. The poem is an over-reach, over-the-top. Reading it now, it seems to me that I was writing about the 1950s, not my brother.

          Jean and I had graduated from Meriden High in 1952. Two or three years later rock-n-roll had arrived, the new teen-agers were acting quite strangely, wearing d. a. hairdos (that’s “duck’s ass” in case anyone wonders) and developing the culture that would eventually lead to American Graffiti, Hair, James Dean’s Rebel without a Cause and the Beatniks. My wife and I had grown up in the post-World War II culture, where the last days of swing and bebop and bobbysox were fading into the unsettling and ominous future.

          The poem ttled "Gene" is from Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper; an e-book edition was published in 2013.

          "The Hustle" may be found in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback.

The Weed Garden: A Poemoir

          One of the most common, and most unanswerable questions a poet is asked is, “Where do you get your ideas from?” It’s as though people expect one to say someplace specific, as though every idea were born in the same place and, if they knew where that was, maybe they could become writers too. My standard answer is, “I have a guy in Chicago who sends me new material every month.”

          That’s a lie, of course, but then poets are prevaricators by profession. In the early 1960s the poet Miller Williams participated in a writers' conference held at the Cleveland Poetry Center of Fenn College, now Cleveland State University, where he made a number of cogent comments, but in the course of a panel discussion on "The Poet's Masks" he said one thing in particular that I have remembered ever since: "The poet lies to tell the truth."  As an illustration of this thesis Miller used an incident that involved his son:  One day the boy ran into the house and said, "A lion's chasing me!"  Of course, there was no lion in the yard, but out of courtesy to childhood Williams looked, and there was a lion in the yard...in the form of a fair sized dog. 

          The point Miller made was that to an adult the animal was a dog, but the quality of the boy's experience was that he had been threatened by something as large and menacing to him as a lion would be to an adult, so the child had "lied" in order to convey the magnitude of the experience to an older person.

          Usually one doesn’t recall where a motivating idea comes from, but in the case of the poem following I recall reading in a periodical long ago an essay by or about R.  D. Laing, author of Knots, who, though himself a poet, made his living as a psychiatrist. Laing quoted one of his patients who said, “I am the ghost of the weed garden.”

          I don’t remember whether I finished reading the article because that line stopped me in my tracks. I knew I had to do something with it, for it was burrowing into my brain evoking…I knew not what, nor would I know until I wrote about it. In order to do that, though, I needed the other inhabitants of that weed garden, the herbs and plants among whom Laing’s patient lived.

          Fortunately, I was a book collector (what writer isn’t?) and I owned an old copy of John Quincy’s Pharmacopoeia Officinalis & Extemporanea. Or, A Complete English Dispensatory, in Four Parts, published in London by Thomas Longman in 1742, “Twelfth edition, enlarged and corrected.” It was bound in full contemporary calf with raised bands, blind-stamped borders and designs, but a modern leather label that I had made to replace the missing one. Its covers had been reattached with leather strapping at the top and bottom edges. The rear cover had been damaged, perhaps by acid, but I had refilled the holes with pieced leather. It was the perfect volume to tell me what I needed to know:

THE WEED GARDEN

On a line by a mental patient, with reference to Quincy's An English Dispensatory.

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "The Weed Garden"

 

     "I am the ghost of the weed garden."

           Stalk among stones — you will find me

remembering husks and pods, how crisp burdock

     couches in the moon for every passer.

           I am the dry seed of your mind.

 

     The hour will strike when you dream me, your

           hand at the sheet like five thin hooks.

I will wait for you in the old vines rattling on

     the wind, in the ground-pine.  I will show you

           where rue has blossomed and eyebright,

 

     mother-thyme.  You must name me Yarrow.

           Bitter vetch shall catch your step as

you follow, hearing the stars turning to crystal,

     sweet lovage turning sere, adder's tongue and

           Jew's-ear at their whisper.  Nightshade

 

     will consume the beautiful lady.

           Dwarf elder, dodder-of-thyme, I

am the thing you fear in the simple of your blood:

     toothwort in the dust, feverfew, mouse-ear,

           sundew and cup-moss, tormentils.

           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 neologism 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.

          "The Weed Garden" and "Home Thoughts" were published in my chapbook, The Weed Garden, Orangeburg, SC: Peaceweed Press, 1973, and they were eventually collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2007. Copyright © 1973 and 2007 by Lewis Turco; all rights reserved.