Poetics and Ruminations

Form of the Week 7: The Clerihew

Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1. 

          The epitaph is lapidary verse; that is, a gravestone inscription (not to be confused with the epigraph).  It is one of the two major short forms of satirics, the other being the epigram which has been defined as terse verse with a cutting edge. The clerihew, a particular type of epigram, was invented by E[dmund] Clerihew Bentley  (1875-1956).  It is a quatrain in dipodic [two-beat] meters rhyming aabb, the first line of which is both the title and the name of a person:

SIGMUND FREUD AND KARL JUNG

 

Sigmund Freud

Became annoyed

When his ego

Sailed to Montego.

 

Sigmund Freud

Became more annoyed

When his id

Fled to Madrid.

 

Sigmund Freud

Grew most annoyed

When his superego

Tried to Montenegro.

 

Sigmund Freud

Was nearly destroyed

When his alter-ego

Showed up in Oswego.

 

Karl Jung

Found himself among

Archetypes

Of various stripes.

 

-- Lewis Turco

 

          In 2014, the history of the Clerihew took a curious twist. According to its publisher, the collection of The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram, with illustrations by Julia Anderson Miller, [North Liberty, IA: Ice Cube Press, 2014, 146 pp., incl. 128 illus., trade paper, ISBN 97818888160772], by the “Legendary bookseller at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, Paul Ingram,” came to light after having been “long lost,” apparently in the author’s basement. In his Introduction Ingram says, “I started writing Clerihews about twenty years ago. The process seemed involuntary, rather quick Tourette’s-like explosions bound by rhyme and form. I would speak a name and the rest of the poem would spill from me without careful thought.” Oddly enough, Ingram’s collection begins with this clerihew:

 

Carl Gustav Jung

Was impressively hung,

Which sorely annoyed

The good Dr. Freud.

 

Wikipedia says, “E. C. Bentley (10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren

Said, ‘I am going to dine with some men.

If anyone calls

Say I am designing St. Paul's.’”

 

         Perhaps in my definition above I ought to have said simply “podic” rather than “dipodic,” because Clerihew’s practice was to allow his lines three, or as many as four beats if an author such as Ingram wishes; even I allowed myself three stresses in some of the lines of my examples above. But the inventor of this form was even less strict than the Wikipedia definition, for sometimes Clerihew didn’t write about people:

 

The art of Biography

Is different from Geography.

Geography is about maps,

But Biography is about chaps.

 

And sometimes personal opinion is more important than biography:

 

What I like about Clive

Is that he is no longer alive.

There is a great deal to be said

For being dead.

 

On occasion fiction overcomes even personal opinion in Clerihew’s epigrams:

 

Edward the Confessor

Slept under the dresser.

When that began to pall,

He slept in the hall.

 

Clerihew even allowed himself at times to be judgmental:

 

It was a weakness of Voltaire's

To forget to say his prayers,

And one which to his shame

He never overcame.

 

But this is a lesson, not an encyclopedia entry, and the book under consideration is certainly a worthy descendent of the work of the English journalist who invented the form, which Ingram stretches to the breaking point on occasion:

 

Margaret Mead

Used to fart when she peed,

A fact well known

To every Samoan.

 

Of course, the object of derision in a clerihew must be famous, or at least well-known, if the verselet is going to be effective:

 

Charles Baudelaire

Picked at his scrotal hair,

And found a weevil

In his Flowers of Evil.

 

Baudelaire’s reputation has stood the test of time, but others of Ingram’s targets may not be quite so lucky:

 

Forrest Gump

Told Donald Trump

“You know I like you

We have the same IQ.

 

Although Clerihew was a journalist, it was not his practice to be historically accurate, as Ingram is well aware:

 

Rebecca West

Became obsessed,

With the nether smells

Of H. G. Wells.

 

And 

 

Vivian Vance

Put cheese in her pants,

Both Swiss and Havarti,

When she used to party.

 

In Jul of 2012 Jack Foley wrote me,

 

Lew,

Here are some probably objectionable [Clerihews] by Jonathan Williams:

 

Alma Mahler

could really holler!

On those odd, ur-Freudian occasions when she took it up the butt,

she often hit fortissimo high-C and commenced doing the "Danube Strut."

 

Leos Janacek

in photographs looks a bloody blank Czech.

His music, as it unfurls,

appeals mostly to squirrels.

 

Franz Liszt

even played the piano when he pissed.

It was odd to see his piano stool dripping

during performances of Annes de Pelerinage that were

           absolutely gripping.

 

Puccini

is arguably better than zucchini.

But a pound of spinach

could write a better symphony than Zdenek Fibich.

 

Thus Jonathan Williams from his "Clerihews." Williams comments,

 “The clerihew was invented in 1890 by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who was a schoolboy of sixteen at St. Paul's in London when the divine numen of Orpheus struck him. His best one seems to me:

 

The digestion of Milton

Was unequal to Stilton.

He was only feeling so-so

When he wrote Il Penseroso.

 

“He never got any better than that, and few people have ever managed to equal him, though such as Auden, John Sparrow, Constant Lambert, James Elroy Flecker, Maurice Hare, and Gavin Ewart have tried. I can recall one sublime effort:

 

How odd

of God

to choose

the Jews.

 

“This was written by the now-obscured World War One poet William Norman Ewer (1885-1976). It makes me quote the equally sublime rebuttal by Leo Rosten, (as someone says,) the Yiddishist:

 

Not odd

of God.

Goyim

Annoy 'im!

 

“E.C. Bentley went on to Oxford, was a lifelong friend of G.K. Chesterton, wrote editorials for The Daily Telegraph for more than twenty years, and is remembered as the author of the detective novel Trent's Last Case.”

So:

 

Turco, that crazy fellow Lewis

will sometimes curse and even beshrew us

but mind your manners, you old schoolmarms,

this man wrote The Book of Forms.

 

— Jack Foley

 

I replied,

Wouldn't it have worked out better if I'd written The Book of Farms?

Jack said, “I have some sort of precedent. From an old song:

 

“Just a Love Nest

Cozy and warm

Like a dove nest

Down on a farm

 

“Here's one for old Jonathan:

 

Jonathan Williams, lamented, gone,

Had pages he put his pen upon

 Now he's in his grave, out he canna step —

He depends on people like me for his rep.”

 

          Of all these examples, the only one that looks like a Clerihew is the “old song” Jack quotes above, but even that is not a precise Clerihew if the current definition of the term is that the first line is only the subject’s name. Very few of the examples above, including those by Bentley, inventor of the form (which has clearly evolved since he wrote his first), are true Clerihews. Here is a Clerihew for Jack:

 

Jack Foley

Thought he was holy,

But found he was not

When it got too hot.

 

-- Lewis Turco

And here is his epitaph from Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets²:

 

R.I.P. JACK FOLEY

August 9, 1940

 

Here lies Jack Foley

Decomposing slowly.

When he composed faster

It was a disaster.

 

-- Wesli Court

 

Jack himself clearly knows how to write a true Clerihew; here are a few by him:

 

Nina Serrano

doesn’t play the piahno[,]

but she sings with her verses

even when they are curses

 

Mary Ann Sullivan

is better for you than Serutan[;]

She makes verses and videos that tick-

even though you’re a rather lapsed Cat’lic.

  

Dana Gioa

will never annoy ya[;]

He’s clever and smart and dutiful

and careful to show why we pity the beautiful

 

(The second couplet turns into prose like those of Johathan Williams; they are not dipodic.)

 

Al Young

has a song he’s sung

on pages and stages:

he writes for the ages[.]     

 

Writing Exercise:

Write four or five (or more) Clerihews on your friends’ names, or on any names you choose.

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 (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

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Form of the Week 6: The Prose Poem

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 (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

 

CONUNDRUM

 

Define prose: “Unmetered language.

Define verse: “Metered language.”

Define free verse: “Unmetered metered language.”

 

The Modes of Writing

What are the “modes” of writing? There are only two: prose and verse. The Oxford English Dictionary defines prose as "The ordinary form of written or spoken language, without metrical structure"  [emphasis added], and it defines verse as "a succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical [emphasis added] line.  To put it even more simply, prose is unmetered language and verse is metered language.

These are the only two ways in which anything in any genre can be written. Some of the literary genres or "kinds of writing" are fiction, drama, nonfiction, and poetry.  Fiction may be written in prose or verse; the same is true of drama, nonfiction, and poetry.

Prosody

In order to create, in order to mold the language, the poet must have some kind of system, or prosody — a theory of poetic composition or organizing principle — within the bounds of which he or she can build the structure of the poem.  Form, then, whether it be "internal" and "organic," or "external" and "formal," is of major importance. 

Unfortunately, when one says "form" many people think only of some structure that is traditional, such as the sonnet.  But every element of language is a form of some kind.  The letters of the alphabet are forms, conventions upon which we have agreed in order to communicate.  So are words, phrases, clauses, and sentences.  The poet is interested in all of these things, since his or her medium is language.  

The poet may also be interested in sonnets, which are metrical forms, but at the very least he or she is interested in words and in how to put them together in language structures.  This is not to say that poetry depends upon a particular organizing principle, a particular prosody, such as rhymed metrical verse.  Meter is only one element of verse-mode poetry, and a prosody can be based upon any aspect of language, be it rhythm, or grammar, or figures of speech, or syllables, or words, or letters, or what-have-you.  All that is necessary is that the system be unified and coherent, and that the products of the system be successful in terms of the system and in terms of the reader's perception of and response to the system.

Metered Language

"Meter" means "measure," and when one measures a line by counting something in that line, one is writing verse, not prose.  In English one generally counts syllables of some sort.  If one is counting merely syllables, measuring out a certain number to a line, then one is using syllabic prosody, and one is writing syllabic verse, as the ancient Irish and Welsh poets did. 

If one is counting only those syllables which, for some reason, are more heavily emphasized than others, then one is using accentual prosody, and one is writing accentual verse, as the Medieval Anglo-Saxon poets did.

If one is counting not only all the syllables in the line, but all the stressed syllables as well, and arranging them in an alternating pattern of some kind, then one is using accentual-syllabic prosody, and one is writing accentual-syllabic verse, as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare did.

 

The Rules of Scansion in English Verse

 

These are the rules governing stress in modern English:

1.  In every word of the English language of two or more syllables, at least one syllable will take a stress.  If one cannot at first hear the stressing, then one may consult a pronouncing dictionary.

2.  Important single-syllable words, particularly verbs and nouns, but also demonstrative pronouns (this, these, that), generally take strong stresses.

3.  Unimportant single-syllable words in the sentence, such as articles, prepositions, and pronouns (except demonstrative pronouns) do not take strong stresses, though they may take secondary stresses through promotion or demotion, depending on their position in the sentence or the line of verse.

4.  In any series of three unstressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through promotion, and the promoted syllable will stand in place of a stressed syllable.

5.  In any series of three stressed syllables in a line of verse, one of them, generally the middle syllable, will take a secondary stress through demotion, and the demoted syllable will stand in place of an unstressed syllable.

 

CAN POEMS BE WRITTEN IN PROSE?

Constructional Schemas

Some non-metrical systems for writing poetry are based upon schemas: sets of correlated things such as grammatically parallel sentence structures, and these systems ought properly to be considered as prose prosodies when verse systems are not in use for structuring poems.  Parallel sentence structures are constructional schemas, and the prosody that uses them is called grammatical parallelism.  One such prosody was practiced by the ancient Hebraic poets who derived their system from the even more ancient Chaldeans.

Grammatical prosodies, then, are really the oldest and simplest systems traditional in the western world, if not in the whole world.  The work of the Hebraic poets may be found in English in the Bible; specifically, in the King James version, published in 1611, though other English versions had appeared earlier, and versions in Latin, Greek, French, and other languages circulated in Britain since the middle ages.

Grammatical Parallelism

Parallel structure is the structure of symmetrical lists within the sentence.  These lists may be parts of speech, such as infinitives (I like to run, to jump, and to swim); proper nouns, (Alice, Bill, and James like to exercise); prepositions (This is a government of, by, and for the people); phrases (This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people); gerunds (I like running, jumping, and swimming); independent clauses (I came, I saw, I conquered), or any other sentence elements, even compound elements such as subjects and predicates (Alice, Bill, and James like to run, jump, and swim).  The controlling word is "symmetrical lists," for one does not write, "I like to run, jumping, and to swim," even though the sentence makes sense.  The elements of the list, of the catalogue, must be in the same form.

Probably few readers noticed that there was one paragraph above that was, nevertheless, constructed quite obviously of grammatical parallels.  If it is reprinted here and each parallel is isolated, the parallelism will be apparent:

If one is counting merely syllables, measuring out a certain number to a line, then one is using syllabic prosody, and one is writing syllabic verse, as the ancient Irish and Welsh poets did.

If one is counting only those syllables that, for some reason, are more heavily emphasized than others, then one is using accentual prosody, and one is writing accentual verse, as the Medieval Anglo-Saxon poets did.

If one is counting not only all the syllables in the line, but all the stressed syllables as well, and arranging them in an alternating pattern of some kind, then one is using accentual-syllabic prosody, and one is writing accentual-syllabic verse, as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare did.

Poem Analysis 11:

Here is a prose poem; the prose is kept unlineated, but each clause ends with the same prepositional phrase separated from the rest of the sentence by three hiatal dots:

COOL TOMBS

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin...in the dust, in the cool tombs.

And Ulysses Grant lost all thought of con men and Wall Street, cash and collateral turned ashes...in the dust, in the cool tombs.

[In the next clause Sandburg added still other techniques from the sonic level of the traditional lyric: internal rhyme, (haw, pawpaw), alliteration (Pocahontas, poplar, pawpaw), assonance, and vocalic and consonantal echo]:

Pocahontas' body, lovely as a poplar, sweet as a red haw in November or a pawpaw in May, did she wonder? does she remember?...in the dust…in the cool tombs.

Take any streetful of people buying clothes and groceries, cheering a hero or throwing confetti and blowing tin horns...tell me if the lovers are losers...tell me if any get more than the lovers...in the dust...in the cool tombs.

                  — Carl Sandburg

There are other parallel structures in this poem besides the refrain: the repetition of phrases, for instance, "tell me if," and the catalogue of actions, "buying," "cheering," "throwing," all borrowed from the practice of the Bible in which there are four major types of parallel grammatical structures that may be isolated: synonymous parallelism, synthetic parallelism, antithetical parallelism, and climactic parallelism:

The synonymous parallel is a line form in a poem written in a symmetrical list of grammatical parallels in which the second half of a clause paraphrases the first half:

The sun is setting; / heaven’s fire flickers in the west.

The synthetic parallel is a line form in a poem written in a symmetrical list of grammatical parallels in which the second half of a colause gives a consequence of the first half:

In the sky there is darkness; / birds settle out of the air.

The antithetical parallel is a line form in a poem written in a symmetrical list of grammatical parallels in which the second half of a clause rebuts the first half:

All things are silent; / the stillness is a tumult.

The climactic parallel is a line form that is the apex of a poem written in a symmetrical list of grammatical parallels in which each succeeding clause in the series builds to a climax:

Night walks out of the mountains to lie upon the land.

In his poem "Chicago," Carl Sandburg combined one technique from the craft of short fiction, the circle-back ending, with a repetitional schema, the refrain, and the parallel structure of the catalogue.  The first strophe (section) of the poem reads,

CHICAGO

 

Hog Butcher for the World,

Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,

Player with railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;

Stormy, husky, brawling,

City of the Big Shoulders:

 

and the last reads,

 

Laughing the stormy, husky, brawling laughter of Youth,

half-naked, sweating, proud to be Hog Butcher, Tool Maker,

Stacker of Wheat, Player with Railroads and Freight Handler

to the Nation.

 

— Carl Sandburg

Clearly, the first strophe is little more than the prose of the last strophe line-phrased or, to use a current term, "lineated"; that is, the dependent clause is lineated according to the phrases of which the clause is comprised.  To put it another way, the last strophe is the first strophe unlineated. 

We can illustrate by taking an example we used earlier and breaking it up into line phrases so that it will more closely resemble verse — what many people erroneously call "free verse."  That phrase is clearly a contradiction in terms, for "verse," in which some sort of syllables are being counted, cannot be free.  Lineating a prose passage does not convert it to verse, nor does it convert one genre — fiction,  drama, or nonfiction (as in this case) — to the genre of poetry:

 

If one is counting merely syllables,

measuring out a certain number to a line,

then one is using syllabic prosody,

and one is writing syllabic verse,

as the ancient Irish and Welsh poets did.

 

If one is counting only those syllables which,

for some reason,

are more heavily emphasized than others,

then one is using accentual prosody,

and one is writing accentual verse,

as the Medieval Anglo-Saxon poets did.

 

If one is counting not only all the syllables in the line,

but all the stressed syllables as well,

and arranging them

in an alternating pattern of some kind,

then one is using accentual-syllabic prosody,

and one is writing accentual-syllabic verse,

as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare did.

 

Here is a short poem made of the lines used above to illustrate the four major prose parallels of the Bible:

 

SERENADE

 

The sun is setting; heaven's fire flickers in the west.

In the sky there is darkness; birds settle out of the air.

All things are silent; the stillness is a tumult.

Night walks out of the mountains to lie upon the land.

 

If we were to line-phrase this quatrain, we might fool someone into

believing it is written in some sort of verse mode called "free

verse":

 

The sun is setting;

heaven's fire flickers in the west.

In the sky there is darkness;

birds settle out of the air.

All things are silent;

the stillness is a tumult.

Night walks out of the mountains

to lie upon the land.

 

Here is one of the greatest of all sports poems, a catalogue:

 

NATIONAL PASTIME

Dedicated to Cookie Lavagetto

 

I hereby establish my own Baseball Hall of Fame.

For alliteration, for example, I enshrine

Frankie Frisch, the Fordham Flash.

For future fame in other areas:

Albert Schweitzer (St. Louis AL — 1909-1911).

They called him "Cheese," so with him

I further honor Clarence Beers and Sweetbreads Bailey,

Hot Potato Hamlin and Noodles Hahn, Ginger Beaumont,

Sugar Cain and Honey Walker (from Beeville, Texas),

as well as Bob Sturgeon, Oyster Burns, Catfish Hunter,

Sea Lion Hall, and George Haddock, whose locker

was next to Davy Jones's. I add sure fingered

Tom Butters, Peanuts Lowery, Pretzels Puzzullo,

Luke Appling, Eddie Bacon, and Puddin' Head Jones,

George Bone and Stew Bolen, Rabbit Maranville

and Bunny Brief, Dave Brain, and Dodo Bird,

Turkeyfoot Brower, Deerfoot Bay, and Raindeer Killifer.

Since one must be mad or built like a

Bench to play catcher, immortalized also

are Earl Battey and Matt Batts.

A special velvet lined niche for the man

who led the senior circuit in hits in 1926 (with 201):

Glass Arm Eddie Brown.

I add another Brown: Mordecai Peter Centennial

(born, of course, in 1876), also known as

"Three Finger" Brown, because that's how many

he used to throw the ball (229 and 131: lifetime).

But M.P.C. "T.F." Brown must yield his share

of one great gallery in my special Hall to

Christian Frederick Albert John Henry David

Betzel, whom they called "Bruno" for some reason.

My Hall of Fame will house an armory, as some

museums do, for the display of weapons, like

Shotgun Shuba, Gunboat Gumbert,

Boom Boom Beck, Roxy Snipes, Ray Blades, and

Poison Ivy Andrews, who will be endowed with

a glass case all his own. And, of course, a chapel for

Preacher Roe, Deacons Scott, MacFayden,

and Law, Howie Nunn, Johnny Priest,

Maurice Archdeacon, Max Bishop, and Dave Pope.

 

— H. R. Coursen, Jr.

 

Suggested Writing Exercise:

Write a sixteen-sentence prose poem, each sentence to consist of independent clauses in pairs utilizing the four parallel Hebraic systems: synonymous parallel; synthetic parallel, antithetical parallel, and climactic parallel (which may contain more than just two clauses in a catalogue).

 

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The West Chester University Poetry Conference

VOLUNTEERISM AT THE WEST CHESTER UNIVERSITY POETRY CONFERENCE

 

By Lewis Turco

 

PREFATORY REMARK

I had decided not to publish this essay, but yesterday morning, Monday, September 15^th, 2014, I discovered in a posting on Facebook by Allison Joseph, that Kim Bridgford, the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center and Conference, has been removed from her position, and the conference for 2015 has been canceled. I am not quite sure of the reasons yet, but part of it seems to be that attendance has been falling, also that the administration and/or others are unhappy because the conference has lost focus. Its original purpose was to plug formal poetry, which it did very well at first. And then a political agenda took over and formalism receded into the academic background.

_________________

At the 20^th anniversary in 2014 of the West Chester University Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania, Dana Gioia, co-founder with Michael Peich, praised the tradition of volunteerism that has been associated with the Conference. I am acquainted with this tradition, as I volunteered as a “scholar” rather than as a poet on the first occasion of the conference. The schedule was so badly managed that year that we “scholars,” including the late poet Alfred Dorn, a fellow formalist, discovered that there were no attendees when we got up to give our presentations. Readings and workshops had been so thickly scheduled that it was impossible for people to come hear us “volunteers.” When Dana Gioia phoned to invite me to the next conference, I asked him what his terms were. He replied that there were none. I declined to attend.

When I had been an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, as a member of the Student Union Board of Governors I was placed in charge of the Student Union’s guest writers series from 1956 to 1959. Over that period we invited many writers to campus including E. E. Cummings, Richard Wilbur, James T. Farrell, Richard Eberhart, Donald Hall, John Hollander, Philip Booth, and others. We gave them each an honorarium, provided them all with meals, accommodations and travel allowances. The only people we asked to read on a voluntary basis were faculty and students.

During the summer of 1959, after my graduation, I was invited to spend some time at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo gave all its guests meals, travel, and accommodations. No one was asked to “volunteer” anything except readings for the attendees and staff.

The following year, while I was a Graduate Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop from 1959-60, I was able to attend programs very similar to those I had supervised at UConn. All those writers were given the same considerations that were provided at Storrs.

The summer I left Iowa my First Poems was published and I went to the State of Maine Writers’ Conference to meet with the co-founder, Loring Williams, who had also been one of the editors who had chosen my volume as a selection of The Book Club for Poetry, and with its publisher, Clarence Farrar. I gave a program of some sort and came back a number of times over the years, always with an emolument and accommodations.

In the fall I took my first job teaching at Fenn College, now the Cleveland State University. At the time C.S.U. was a downtown engineering school primarily, and in order to survive in such an atmosphere I began asking any poets and writers I knew who were local or visiting town, to come sit in on some of my classes as a favor, voluntarily, which some of them (actually, I recall no refusals) were happy to do. These were the origins of the C. S. U. Poetry Center.

The following summer of 1961 I attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, as a Poetry Fellow; Miller Williams was another Fellow that the Director, John Ciardi, invited to come, and there were others in fiction and nonfiction. We all received the considerations that I was familiar with.

While at Bread Loaf I learned that the British novelist, William Golding, was going to make an American tour the following year, 1962. As soon as I got back to Cleveland I arranged to have Golding come to Fenn as the first guest of the newly instituted Cleveland Poetry Center which was scheduled to begin the year he was touring. I spent the entire first-year budget for the Center, $100.00, on Golding and arranged accommodations at the College for him. Although I had no money left for the rest of 1962-63, I managed to schedule events at Fenn for local and state organizations with visiting writers including John Crowe Ransom, and for volunteer area and local poets.

In 1964 I left Fenn for Hillsdale College in Michigan whose administration asked me to set up a Conference of Midwestern Poets for the summer of 1965. I did so, and of course I followed the procedures I had been using since UConn. Then I left for the State University of New York at Oswego where I remained for 31 years, until I retired in 1996.

It was no surprise that Erwin Palmer, the Chair of the English Department, wanted me to set up yet another program, which I did: a major in creative writing complete with visiting writers every semester. There have been many, many of those, some very famous, such as John Cheever, John Ciardi, William Everson (Brother Antoninus at the time), Donald Justice, Dana Gioia, and on and on – all of whom were given honoriaria, accommodations, meals, and travel expenses.

Thus, I never understood where Mike Peich and Dana Gioia, a poet-businessman who became Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts during the George W. Bush Administration, got the idea that it is all right to ask professionals to donate their time, money, work, and materials to a writers’ conference. Certainly Gioia was not unfamiliar with the system I employed to invite writers to campus during my entire academic career. He himself has been the beneficiary of that system many times and at many places, including Oswego.

I still don’t understand it. Personally, I would have felt embarrassed and miserly to ask people to travel sometimes great distances at significant expense to provide me and my school professional services gratis. (Although Peich was a faculty member at West Chester, to the best of my knowledge Gioia never taught there.)

Yet I myself provided such service to the West Chester Poetry Conference the first year it was held, and in 2013 as well. Over the past decade I have provided the Conference with a $100.00 Student Scholarship annually (for which I don’t recall ever being thanked except by one recipient of that emolument one year).

In 2013 I agreed to serve as a member of two panels. The Conference scheduled one panel on the first day, and the second on the last day, which meant that I had to be (as the director said), the “Formalist in Residence” at my own expense, except for one or two nights’ hotel accommodation and meals. When I was invited to come back again in 2014 I felt constrained again to decline except, perhaps, as a keynote speaker whom the Conference treats as a professional ought to be treated. That has not happened over the decades, and is unlikely to happen at this stage of my life, especially since the Conference now appears to be gone.

 

 

 

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Form of the Week 5: The Mirror Sonnet

 

FORM OF THE WEEK 5: THE MIRROR SONNET

          On the seventh of July, 2012, I received this message from the poet Ned Balbo, one of whose students was working on a review of Annabelle Moseley’s first book The Clock of the Long Now (David Roberts Books, 2011). Ned wanted to document whether the “mirror sonnet” form had a preexisting history or was the author’s innovation. He provided a link: Verse Wisconsin 108 | Annabelle Moseley versewisconsin.org.

 

NOAH

[audiolink]

 

My ancestors are mute and all I know


of them are ancient spear tips — and the shards


of painted cups that, while faded, still glow


as though they hold wine.  Handed down, these guard


over my past, wordlessly talk of death


and what has been consumed. Now as I build


a ship to hold the world, I hold each breath


before exhaling — for all who'll be killed —


even as a few fragments cling to life.


I'll keep those broken few, and artifacts


of all who came before. What of their strife?


What of their burial? Borne on our backs


we'll carry memories of tombs and graves


to salvage and replant after the waves.



 

To salvage and replant after the waves,

we carried memories of tombs and graves.

What of their burial? Borne on our backs

were all who came before. What of their strife?

I kept the broken few and artifacts


even as a few fragments clung to life.


Before exhaling — for all who were killed —


a ship to hold the world, I held each breath


within my body's boat. Consumed, I built


over my past, wordlessly talked of death


as though wine.  What was left, I tried to guard


like painted cups, faded — the rainbow's glow.


I kept the ancient spear tips — and the shards.


My ancestors are mute.  That's all I know.

 

— Annabelle Moseley, Huntington, NY

 

          “Could you confirm whether, to the best of your knowledge, it's ‘hers’? I haven't seen other examples of it, but my knowledge isn't as exhaustive as yours.

“Thanks!”

Ned Balbo

          At first glance I thought that what Ms. Moseley had done was to write two sonnets using the rhyme scheme of the first sonnet backwards in the second sonnet, which was an idea that didn’t impress me much because the idea would simply double all forms, and people could then write "mirror terzanelles," "mirror sestinas" and so forth and claim they had "invented" the form(s). But a second glance showed me that the poem is much more clever than I had surmised on first reading. Ms. Moseley actually had written the second sonnet backward line by line, using the same lines as in the first sonnet, so that it made sense! The system got her into a few awkward spots, but it worked. It reminded me a bit of one of the poems I used in last week’s “Form of the Week 4: Paren(t)hesis” titled "Time Goes Down in Mirrors." Those who are interested might take a look at "Paren(t)hesis" again.

          Ned wrote back, “Thanks very much for your help, Lew…I'll recommend that the reviewer give Annabelle credit. I like the poem and think the form would be fun to try.”

          I replied, “All poems are nonce forms the first time they're written, and they remain nonce forms until other people use them. Has anyone else ever written a ‘mirror sonnet’?”

          Ned said, “If they have, I don't know about it. Annabelle may be the first.”

          “Then it's still just a nonce poem,” I said, and all Annabelle had done was to invent a form for her personal use, just as John Berryman wrote poems in the form he invented, the “dreamsong,” a description of which will be found on page 193 of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Fourth Edition. However, the “mirror sonnet” is quite a clever idea, and perhaps others would like to try the form. The rhyme scheme is simply that of the English sonnet, ababcdcdefefgg —ggfefedcdcbaba and, of course, the meter is iambic pentameter. More on the sonnet form is on pp. 353-357 of The Book of Forms cited above.

 

Suggested writing exercise:

 

Write a mirror sonnet.

 

          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 (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

 

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Cartoon by Leslie Ward

SPOONER RHYME

Spoonerism A Spoonerism transposes the initial sounds of two words in a clause, as in one of the most famous slips of the tongue of  the Rev. William Archibald Spooner (1844-1930), “Young man, you’ve tasted the whole worm!” (instead of, “You’ve wasted the whole term!).*

 

NO CLASS AT ALL! NO LASS AT CALL!

Built with Spooner’s Own Isms.

 

Young man, you missed my history lecture.

Further, you’ve hissed my mystery lecture!

You’ve tasted the entire worm,

Just wasted the entire term!

Don’t tell me you were lighting a fire –

I hate having to fight a liar!

It’s like seeing a blushing crow

Or receiving a crushing blow!

It’s like insulting our dear old Queen

Or running into our queer old Dean!

I wonder if the bean is dizzy?

I’ll bet you hope the Dean is busy --

No doubt with you it’s a half-formed wish!

Now go and eat a half-wormed fish!

Go home! Leave our cozy nook

Go fry your fish, you nosy cook.

 

By Lewis Turco

 

Assignment: Write a poem in Spooner rhyme. If necessary, make up your own Spoonerisms.

*From The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Hanover: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com), 1999. ISBN 0874519543, cloth; ISBN 0-874519-55-1, paper. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms.

 

 

 

 

 

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Year by Year

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "Year by Year":

 

YEAR BY YEAR

 

When we are born we have no clue

Why we are here, what we should do,

Therefore we flail about and yell

Till we are changed or held and fed,

And then at last, when all is well,

We take the world into our head,

Into our hands, until our fear

Begins to wane and disappear.

 

We enter school and learn to read

And how to cope with every need

That rises out of books and play.

We learn to cope with those around us

With whom we interact each day,

With all the people who surround us.

As we grow older year by year

Our playmates start to disappear.

 

Then we enter adolescence

To discover that the essence

Of existence seems hormonal:

We must learn to deal with excess

Of enticements pheremonal,

With the battle of the sexes.

As we grow older year by year

Our girl and boy friends disappear.

 

 

When finally we come of age

We take our place upon the stage

Of life and do what adults do:

Choose a career and graduate,

Settle on a friend or two,

Begin to think about a mate.

So we mature a bit each year,

And see our lovers disappear.

 

We settle down and get a house

Or an apartment with a spouse

Or live-in. Then the kids arrive

To take our energy and time —

No matter what, they seem to thrive.

We do as well, we’re in our prime

Until there comes that primal year

When all our children disappear.

 

The two of us are left alone

And then, perhaps, there’s only one

Because what else is there to do

Except look back and try to find

The future that we barely knew

Before it started to unwind

And we grew older, year by year,

Watching our elders disappear?

 

Now here we are. The moon turns blue

No longer and the days are few

When we have anything of note

To celebrate or fill our minds.

We have no projects to promote

Or interests of different kinds,

For we’ve grown older year by year

And seen our lifetime disappear.

 

-- Lewis Turco

“Year by Year” originally appeared in The Tower Journal, No. 10, Winter, 2010-2011, www.towerjournal.com/winter_10/ and was collected in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 115 pp.

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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 (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

          During the early 1960s while I was teaching at what is now Cleveland State University, a student named Russell Salamon walked into my office to show me a poem titled “She” in a repeating form that he had invented. In this poem Salamon began by taking a set of parentheses as his center:

()

          He then took a sentence, "my hands cup her cup," broke it after the subject, and inserted the set of parens into the break (the technical term for a break in a line of verse is “caesura”):

 

my hands () cup her cup.

 

          This is a metaphor: “My hands are a set of parentheses.”  Next, a second clause: "all parentheses in which I am warm drizzle-rain inside her," thus:

 

All parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

 

          And a third, "sizzling on snowscapes of her skin, her face, her arms, her thighs, forests full of soundless flowers waited once unseen, translucid [he probably meant “translucent”]; she carries rain constellations to fill flute basins where" with some changed punctuation and a bit of typographical dispersion, appears this way:

 

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.

Her face, her arms, her thighs,

all parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

Forests full of soundless flowers

waited once unseen, translucid.

She carries rain constellations

to fill flute basins where

 

          And finally, "My finger touch dis[s]olves into a shiverlong echo of rains; we wash our morning faces off":

 

 

SHE¹

 

My finger touch dissolves

into a shiverlong echo of rains/

sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.

(Her face, her arms, her thighs,

all parentheses in which I am

[my hands () cup her cup]

warm drizzle-rain inside her.

Forests full of soundless flowers

waited once unseen, translucid.

She carries rain constellations

to fill f lute basins where

/we wash our morning faces off

 

         — Russell Salamon

 

          The split between f and lute in the penultimate line appears as it was originally printed in Salamon’s chapbook, Parent[hetical Pop]pies, published by d. a. levy’s Renegade Press in 1964; it may or may not be a typographical error.

          After I had thought about it for a while, I recalled E. E. Cummings’ poem titled “l(a,” which was also built of parentheses, though all he did was to take the word “loneliness,” insert into it a single sentence, “a leaf falls,” and sprinkle it down the page. More to the point, though, I remembered a poem I had myself written when I was a G. I. Bill undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut only two or three years earlier, for the C. S. U. position was my first professional teaching experience. I had begun by taking the title sentence, “Time goes down in mirrors,” and writing a sentence that rhymed and metered (both halves had the same meters,) to parenthesize the title: “Sophia chatters, for nothing matters” and create the first stanza (with a change or two in punctuation):

 

Sophia chatters.

     Time goes down in mirrors,

for nothing matters.

 

The second stanza would add two more rhyming lines with the opposite meter (a “mirror image” as it were,):

 

Horace listens while

     Sophia chatters.

           Time goes down in mirrors,

     for nothing matters;

Hence, his worldly smile.

 

In the third stanza I had decided that this time the meter would be normative iambic tetrameter for both lines,

 

The phonograph spins out its tune.

     Horace listens while

           Sophia chatters.

                  Time goes down in mirrors,

           for nothing matters.

     Hence, his worldly smile:

The pair will love each other soon.

 

The fourth stanza would repeat the plan:

 

Outdoors, the shadows listen as

     The phonograph spins out its tune.

           Horace listens while

                  Sophia chatters.

                           Time goes down in mirrors,

                  for nothing matters.

           Hence, his worldly smile:

     The pair will love each other soon,

Their movements metronomed by jazz.

 

Then, in the fifth stanza, while the central line remained the same, the lines above and below it would be inverted:

 

TIME GOES DOWN IN MIRRORS²

 

Sophia chatters.

     Time goes down in mirrors,

for nothing matters.

 

Horace listens while

     Sophia chatters.

           Time goes down in mirrors,

     for nothing matters;

Hence, his worldly smile.

 

The phonograph spins out its tune.

     Horace listens while

           Sophia chatters.

                  Time goes down in mirrors,

           for nothing matters.

     Hence, his worldly smile:

The pair will love each other soon.

 

Outdoors, the shadows listen as

     The phonograph spins out its tune.

           Horace listens while

                  Sophia chatters.

                           Time goes down in mirrors,

                  for nothing matters.

           Hence, his worldly smile:

     The pair will love each other soon,

Their movements metronomed by jazz.

 

                           Sophia chatters.

                  Horace listens while

           The phonograph spins out its tune.

     Outdoors the shadows listen as

Time goes down in mirrors.

     Their movements metronomed by jazz,

           The pair will love each other soon.

                  Hence! his worldly smile...,

                           For nothing matters.

 

          Both of these poems are rather complicated structures although both were written by undergraduates. As an exercise in repetition and in syntax rearrangement, though, parenthetics need not be so difficult, and I used it in class for decades. Here is a brief exercise poem laid out in different fonts so that one may see the sentence elements, none of which do anything fancy such as rhyming, metering, or using any sort of punctuation, including parentheses:

 

PINES³

 

They are the pines

I have seen them standing

in the hills where stone dwells

the wind shifts among their needles

roots touch toward silence in the earth

as though they have always been

strength drawn out of darkness.

 

          Although it’s built of uncomplicated elements, notice that the poem can be read from top to bottom, from bottom to top, or from the middle out and it still makes sense.

 

NOTES:

This essay is from “Paren(t)hesis,” in Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, ed. Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, Austin: TX: Dos Gatos Press, 2011, pp. 194-99.

¹Russell Salamon’s poem titled “She” is from his chapbook Parent[hetical Pop]pies, Cleveland: Renegade Press, 1964; all rights reserved by the author.

²”Time Goes Down in Mirrors” is from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, © 2004, all rights reserved by the author.

³The poem titled “Pines” is from Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing by Lewis Turco, Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., © 1973 and subsequently renewed, ISBN 0879096373, paper. O-P but available through ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education. 

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