Poetics and Ruminations

Form of the Week 12: In the Footsteps of Basho

 

BASHO

       Ned Balbo once asked me, "...do you know Bryan Dietrich's book-length haiku sequence Prime Directive, which connects Star Trek to his father's decline due to Alzheimer's? Great stuff."

       I replied, "No, sorry, I don't. I do notice, however, that there seem to be many poems lately that use haiku as a stanza form. I'm afraid I don't understand why this is different from using any other quantitative syllabic stanza form. Aside from the syllable counts in each line, what is the object of using a five-seven-five syllable count in each stanza; how does the "haikuness" of each stanza impact the poem? What is the difference, even, between this stanza form and the triversen stanza of W. C. Williams (see "Form of the Week 2: Triversen)." I've been writing quantitative syllabics of various stanzaic syllable counts since 1959, and this haiku thing baffles me."

       "Your bafflement makes sense! Frankly," Ned wrote back, "I think the 'haikuness' of such poems is lost: the stanzas become an organizing principle whose main function (from what I read) is to determine pacing. Its use in narrative is at odds with haiku's usual brevity. But I don't mind if the poem that results is strong in its own right, on very different terms."

       At about the same time Leslie Monsour emailed me and asked the same question, except that it was about Richard Wilbur's use of the haiku as a stanza rather than Bryan Dietrich's. She wrote, "…here's an example of the haiku stanza I referred to in a previous message, which Richard Wilbur has used a great deal in his more recent poems":

 

A MEASURING WORM

 

This yellow-striped green

Caterpillar, climbing up

The steep window screen,

 

Constantly (for lack

Of a full set of legs) keeps

Humping up his back.

 

It's as if he sent

By a sort of semaphore

Dark omegas meant

 

To warn of Last Things.

Although he doesn't know it,

He will soon have wings,

 

And I too don't know

Toward what undreamt condition

Inch by Inch I go.

       "So, you see," Ms. Monsour continued, "the stanzas are envelope-rhymed haiku.  Wilbur has written dozens of poems in this form.  I just wonder if he thought it up, or if it was used earlier by, say, Marianne Moore, or someone else.   Tell me if you dig up anything about it." 

       "These are NOT haikus," I replied, "they are rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets with lines that have the same syllable counts as haikus. A haiku is complete in itself, but these stanzas are enjambed."

       Even if they were not enjambed, however, none of the stanzas are whole unto themselves. Disregarding the question of form, the definition of a haiku is, "an insight into the nature of the universe." A senryu, which has the same external form as the haiku, is "an insight into the nature of mankind." In "Form of the Week 2: Triversen" I discussed William Carlos Williams' adaptation of the haiku to his triversen stanza system. He understood the concept of "haikuness."

       Ms. Monsour wrote again, "I don't know if Wilbur calls these haiku stanza poems.  I've heard the poems referred to as that, and I've actually used the term myself in my articles about Wilbur —  something I should qualify from now on.  Of course the stanzas don't stand alone as individual or linked haiku.  I guess the term 'haiku stanza' has been bandied about simply because of the syllable count per line, per stanza.  Your definition, 'rhyming quantitative syllabic triplets,' is certainly correct. Aaron Poochigian uses the form in his poem, "Kudzu: An Immigrant's Tale," from his current book, The Cosmic Purr (Able Muse Press), and A.E. Stallings also uses it in her poem, "Blackbird Étude," from her newest book, Olives (Northwestern University Press).  As far as I can tell, Richard Wilbur established it."

       The basis for the haiku in Japanese prosody is the katauta. There are actually two Japanese forms that are called "katauta"; both are formal, but only one is a stanza form per se, and both are based upon spontaneous "utterances" which, in the Japanese tradition, are sudden, emotive words or epithets. The first form of the katauta is an emotive question or its answer:

 

Am I in love?  Birds are flying.

Do birds fly?  I am in love.

 

       A pair of such katautas is a mondo. Each line of the preceding couplet is a mondo. The katauta answer is not derived logically; it is intuited, as in the Zen koan or "unanswerable question," for Zen Buddhism is at the root of the haiku. The second kind of katauta is a stanza or poem form.  It is made up of three parts arranged in lines of 5-7-7 syllables, these lengths being approximately breath-length, or the appropriate lengths in which to ask a sudden, emotive question and respond to it, also emotively.  Seventeen syllables, as in the haiku, or nineteen, as in the katauta, are as many as can normally be uttered in one short breath; five to seven syllables are approximately equal to the utterance of an emotive question or its answer:

 

       Why do these birds fly?

Where there is wind, there are wings.

Where there are wings, there is wind.

 

       Here is a katauta written by Ezra Pound (the lines have been rearranged; nothing else has been chained from the original which was published in Poetry in 1913):

 

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

 

       The apparition

of these faces in the crowd:

petals on a wet, black bough.

 

— Ezra Pound

 

       The choka is a poem written in alternating 5-7-syllable lines:

 

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

 

       TAROT in the Wheel;

mercury, sulfur, water,

       salt.  Mix well and turn.

The jackal-headed god bears

       up under the spin,

rising.  The Garden's serpent

       slithers down the west.

The Sphinx in blue — a woman —

       squats atop it all,

holding a sword against her

       breast.  Everything is

the same, despite the odd turns —

       so say the Fixed Signs,

each reading somebody's book:

       To the upper left,

Man with Wings; an Eagle to

       the right, a Lion

under.  And a winged Bull there,

       lower left, scanning

his blank pages with the rest.

 

       His blank pages, which

he fills with hoofprints, hoping

       consciousness evolves

into Godhood somewhere, some

       when.  Caught at this point

on the Mandala, the small

       bull confuses him-

self with Taurus, his Sign.  It

       is expected, to

be forgiven.  He is not

       affixed (nor is he

broken — not yet).  He hopes that

       all is relative,

 

and complete; that there is choice,

       though all is finished;

that the smallest is the largest...;

       that some sure thing

is accomplished by means of

       these clumsy hooves, these

dull horns that turn to silence.

 

— Lewis Turco

 

       The conclusion of a choka would be, often (though not in the case just given above), an envoy that doubled the last 7-syllable line: 5-7-7, or that consisted of two choka couplets with a doubled last line: 5-7-5-7-7 — the tanka.

       Like the katauta, the tanka takes two forms, both of which are externally alike in that they are quintet poems with lines of 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, but in the first tanka form, called the waka, one subject is treated in the first two lines, another in the next two, and the last line is a refrain or paraphrase or restatement: 5-7, 5-7, 5.  The first two lines are a dependent clause or a phrase, the last three an independent clause:

 

TURN

 

       If you should waken

at the first turn of moonlight,

       would you please follow

the silver road, not the dark

at the first turn of moonlight?

 

— Lewis Turco 

       The second type of tanka consists of two parts.  The first three lines are an independent unit ending in a noun or verb after which a turn takes place: 5-7-5, 7-7.  The triplet is an observation, the couplet is a comment on the observation:

 

CUPS

 

       Moon takes the tide where

a tide must go: Light pierces

       the hardest crystal.

 

Stone shall be filled with water,

and dust will be filled with blood.

 

— Lewis Turco

       The word "hokku" is Chinese in origin, and in Japanese poetry it came to specify the first triplet of a renga chain which set the theme of the chain and was the most important part of the poem, the rest ringing the changes upon and elaborating the hock. The hokku of a renga chain ended with a full stop — it was complete in and of itself.

       The Japanese renga, according to Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner in Japanese Court Poetry, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961), is "Linked verses. Historically two different forms, both involving more than one author.  The earlier form, called tanrenga, or 'short renga,' is a  [tanka] whose first three lines were composed by one poet, and last two lines by another;...”  This final couplet response is the hanka.

       A renga chain or "long renga" is a poem made of a sequence of  rengas  and composed by two or more authors.  The first triplet sets the subject, the succeeding couplet and all ensuing triplets and couplets amplify, gloss, or comment upon the first triplet. The term haikai no renga applies to the humorous renga chain, and it means, specifically, "renga of humor," according to Yoel Hoffman, editor and translator of, Japanese Death Poems, (Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986).

       By various stages the term "haiku" — a corruption and blending of the dissimilar words "hokku" and "haikai" — came to denote an independent tercet of 5-7-5 syllables.  The haiku dropped all hankas, glosses, comments, and elaborations.  It became a poem which had as its basis emotive utterance, an image, and certain other characteristics as well, including spareness, condensation, spontaneity, ellipsis, and a seasonal element. A distinction has sometimes been made between the haiku and the senryu, though  both have exactly the same external form. The senryu is an inquiry into the nature of humankind, whereas the haiku is an inquiry into the nature of the universe. Here is a "found" senryu:

 

AN AMHERST HAIKU

 

     Will you bring me a

jacinth for every finger,

     and an onyx shoe?

 

— Emily Dickinson / Lewis Turco

 

       The haiku is philosophically an outgrowth of Zen Buddhism. Haiku translated into English tend to appear, to Western eyes, overly sentimental and to fall victim to the pathetic fallacy — overstated personification. We do not understand that the Zen poet is trying to put himself or herself into the place of the thing perceived, empathizing with the inanimate object. Moreover, the Zen poet is trying to “become one” with the object and thus with all things.

       The haiku has perhaps been best described as “a moment of intense perception.” William Carlos Williams enunciated the American-British Imagist doctrine as “No ideas but in things.” Both conceptions are, if not identical, at least quite similar, for both are based upon the sensory level. Williams’ dictum and T. S. Eliot’s “objective correlative” sever the observer from the perceived object, while at the same time preserving much of the effect of Zen empathy. An objective correlative is simply the vehicle of a metaphor. The theory is that, if the correct object that correlates with the idea to be expressed (symbolizes that idea) is chosen, then the idea will arise through connotation and overtone without being stated denotatively. It is through this objectivity, finally, that the poet in English achieves empathy — which is only a way of saying there is no such thing as pure objectivity.

       Here is a poem by William Carlos Williams which was originally arranged in four lines, but it was actually a senryu:

 

MARRIAGE

 

       So different, this

man and this woman: a stream

       flowing in a field.

 

-- William Carlos Williams

 

       This following poem illustrates a number of the Japanese forms in the order in which they were developed:

 

PARADIGM

 

       Why does the brook run?

The banks of the stream are green.         — MONDO

 

       Why does the stream run?

The banks of the brook bloom

with roe and cup-moss, with rue.             — KATAUTA

 

       The trees are filled with

cups.  Grain in the fields, straw men

       talking with the wind.

Have you come far, water-

       borne, wind-born?  Here are

hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak.          — CHOKA

 

       When the spears bend as

you walk through vervain or broom,

       call out to the brook —

it will swell in your veins as

you move through broom or vervain. — WAKA (5-7-5, 7-7)

 

       Have you spoken aloud?  Here,

where the swallows' crewel-work

       sews the sky with mist?

You must cut the filament.

You must be the lone spider.                     — TANKA (5-7-5, 7-7)

 

       The bole is simple:

Twig and root like twin webs in

       air and earth like fire.                         — HAIKU (5-7-5)

 

-- Lewis Turco

 

       Here is a short collection of some modern English poems and versions of haiku and senryu titled In the Footsteps of Basho:

  

ELEGY FOR A JAPANESE GARDEN

 

Sundissension:

  each slain ray

    lies splintered

      prismatically

        in rows between

      tall faountains,

    arranged

  in rainbow bouquets.

 

Descending

  into unity,

    a tune

      — plaintively

        rendered —

          blossoms in an

        inimitable

      Oriental mode

    throughout

  sequestered pathways.

 

Far from irradiation

 

  ...in semidarkness

    where jade

      holds ivory

        in abeyance,

      and jasminian

    luxury contends

  with cedar's

aromatics...

 

  a melodic

    condolence

      is conveyed

        to lamenting

      shadows.

 

    In twilight, then,

  the garden slumbers

as its unseen virtuoso

  creates

    his intangible,

      dragonscale

        mosaic.

SONG FOR HONSHU

 

Little Japanese girl,

Why do you sit

sailing your eyes out to sea?

Are they pushing you off

your green silk island?

They're pushing me, too.

 

Little ragamuffin,

sunskin ragamuffin,

Have you no place to go?

Neither have I.

 

Then come with me, come with me —

the moon is an almond, and the stars

are cherries waiting to be picked.

 

 

         NEW SONG FOR NIPPON

 

              When, sun dragon, when

Will you lift your broken wings?

              Tengu-san asks this.

 

              Why, bright lizard, why

Do city lights hurt your eyes?

              Where is your cold cave?

Tsuki-sama says you sleep

Beneath the snows of Fuji.

 

              When, wise spirit, when

Will your wings at last be healed?

New rains have washed the soils

That knew your brilliant shadow.

The rice has a strange flavor.

 

              Will you come to lend

Old wisdom to new knowledge?

              Tengu-san asks this,

Your people and Tengu-san.

 

 GROUND-WORK

 

            Will it soon be spring?

  They lay the ground-work for it,

            the plum tree and moon.

 

 

GLASS

 

One sees in the glass

mere glass, not quicksilver, not

spring in the plum tree.

 

 

PATH

 

On the mountain path

they arise at once — the scent

of plums and the sun!

 

 

HOLLYHOCKS

 

The hollyhocks turn

to follow the sun’s footpath

through the rains of May.

 

 

WINDS

 

The winds blow cherry

petals from all four quarters

to the lake’s currents.

 

 BED OF STONE

 

I would lie down drunk

on a bed of stone covered

with soft pinks blooming.

 

 

BUSH CLOVER

 

Bush-clover spills not

one drop of white dew, although

its waves never still.

 

 

CHIMING

 

The bell’s chiming fades;

scent blossoms from the echo

of evening shadow.

 

 

LIGHTNING

 

the lightning flickers;

still, darkness follows the voice

of the night-heron.

 

 

LEAF

 

Please come to visit,

for I am lonely. One leaf

falls from the kiri.

 

 

AUTUMN

 

The wind of autumn

is sharp in the chestnut tree,

yet its burrs are green.

 

 

CANES

 

Leaning on their canes

a snow-haired family comes

to visit the graves.

 

 

VOICE

 

Grave, shake you as well

as my quaking voice in this

chill wind of the fall.

 

 

AUTUMN DARKNESS

 

No one walks this road

on which I travel, on which

autumn darkness falls.

 

 

BUTTERFLY

 

Arise! Arise! I

want you with me on my road,

sleeping butterfly!

 

 

SPRING

 

Spring calls beginnings,

yet in solitary thought

lies the fall glaoming.

 

 

HAZE

 

Is it for spring’s sake

that this small, nameless mountain

hides in morning haze?

 

 

PERFUME

 

From what tree’s blossoms

does it waft? I wish I knew —

this phantom perfume!

 

 

MOON

  

Moon of the pond’s sky,

I meander about you,

and night is over.

 

 

CLOUDS

 

Sometimes the clouds come

to arrest our eyes, give rest

from this moongazingg.

 

 

ISLAND

 

Where the starling flies

till sight loses its wings,

there lies one island.

 

 

ADRIFT

 

The island adrift

in a wild sea; ovedrrhead

flows heaven’s river.

 

 

LOCUSTS

 

The day is so still

their voices drill into stone —

the locusts calling.

 

 

CICADA

 

Did it shrill until

it became only echo,

this cicada shell?

 

 

LARK

 

In the deep prairie

sunken in its solitude

the lark sings and sings.

 

 

DREAMS

 

Waving summer grass:

the dead weave dreams of it,

the warriors sleeping.

 

 

BUSH CLOVER

 

In the same house slept

the women of the evening,

bush-clover, the moon.

 

 

WINE

 

The blossoms have gone,

and the moon; he drinks the wine

of his solitude.

 

 

HIDDEN FLOWER

 

Butterfly and bird,

there is your hidden flower —

the sky of autumn.

 

 

SNOW

 

The snow that we watched

falling then — has it falllen

again with the year? 

 

 

WANDERING

 

Upon an ill road,

old among withered fields; dreams

will go wandering still.

 

 

WALL

 

         Mist builds a gray wall

where the lake begins among

         the stones of the shore.

 

 

CONTINUUM

 

     If space and time are

a continuum, then we

     have not yet arrived.

 

-- Lewis Turco

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

Robert H. Brower and Earl Miner, Japanese Court Poetry, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1961.

Yoel Hoffman, ed. & tr., Japanese Death Poems, Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1986.

Lewis Putnam Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Fourth Edition, Hanover and London, 2012.

Charlse E. Tuttle, ed., Japan: Theme and Variations: A Collection of Poems by Americans, Rutland and Tokyo: Charles E. Tuttle, 1959.

Kenneth Yasuda, The Japanese Haiku, Rutland: Charles E. Tuttle, 1957.

 

Suggested Writing Assignment:

 

Write a haiku observing all its requirements, then try another Japanese form.

 

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.

R.I.P. Galway Kinnell

R. I. P. GALWAY KINNELL

February 1, 1927 - October 28, 2014

 

He wished his verse to be as plain

As city smog or rural rain.

With this in mind, we like quite well

The oeuvre of Galway Kinnell.

 

-- Lewis Turco

 

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.

Form of the Week 11: Ballads

 

Geoffrey Chaucer

 

UNDER A LOT OF STRESS

          Podics is a "folk meter," and it is often found in anonymously written nursery rhymes, ballads, and madsongs. Many English language poets such as John Skelton in the early Renaissance, the 19th-century Scots poet Robert Burns, and such twentieth-century poets as John Crowe Ransom, Vachel Lindsay, Ralph Hodgson and Theodore Roethke have used the accentual prosody called “podics” successfully. Podics uses rhyme, but it does not regularly alternate stressed and unstressed syllables.  Podics is a holdover, in folk poetry, of Anglo-Saxon prosody. 

          After Geoffrey Chaucer, his contemporary John Gower, and other fourteenth-century poets combined the Norman French syllabic system with the native English strong stress prosody, thus inventing accentual-syllabic prosody, the common folk, including the balladeers of the Scottish-English border, continued to hear the ancient alliterative stich (line) and echoic devices, so they continued to write using the old prosody, but they added true rhyme and stanza forms, which they adopted from the Norman French after year 1066.  Many a nursery rhyme and lullabye is nothing more than two rhyming stichs (a distich) of Anglo-Saxon prosody: 

          Notice the alliterations in some of the stichs, and the added rhymes  (the rhyme scheme is aa, bb): these distichs look like ordinary couplets of accentual-syllabic prosody, and they even sound something like them, but add a breve (È) over each unstressed syllable, and no regular pattern of verse feet appears:

 

The cock's on the midden · blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn · threshing the corn;

The maids in the meadow . are making of hay;

The ducks in the river . are swimming away.

 

            If this were accentual-syllabic verse, we would be looking for a running foot  (common rhythm) — that is, a regularly recurring pattern of a single kind of verse foot.  The first foot in the first line is an iamb  ; the second is an anapest ; the third is another iamb, and the fourth another anapest.  In line two there is an iamb, an anapest, a trochee and an iamb.  Line four shows an iamb and three anapests in a row — this is the only line in which a particular verse foot predominates,  But what stays absolutely steady is the strong stressing: there are four strong stresses in each line;  this poem, therefore, is written in podic meters.

            Sometimes these stichs are line-phrased; that is, they are broken at the caesurae to become dipodic lines:

 

The cock's on the midden ·

Blowing his horn;

The bull's in the barn ·

Threshing the corn;

 

The maids in the meadow ·

Are making of hay;

The ducks in the river ·

Are swimming away.

 

The rhyme scheme now becomes abcb defe.  Notice another feature of podic verse — falling endings: midden, meadow, river

          Many nursery rhymes and ballads have this form:

 

Jack and Jill · went up the hill

To fetch a pail of water;

Jack fell down · and broke his crown,

And Jill came tumbling after.

 

Up Jack got and home did trot

As fast as he could caper,

To Old Dame Dob, who patched his nob

With vinegar and brown paper.

 

When Jill came in, how she did grin,

To see Jack's paper plaster;

Dame Dob, vexed, did whip her next

For causing Jack's disaster.

 

Anonymous Author

 

This is nothing more than rhyming song measure, q.v — a Norse edda measure quatrain whose first and third lines are stichs of Anglo-Saxon prosody, and whose second and fourth lines are tripodic...that is, they are quatrains rhyming abcb consisting of two couplets made of a full stich followed by a tripodic line.  There are falling rhymes and falling endings, the only thing new added being the internal rhymes in the full stichs: the hemistichs rhyme.  Secondary stresses do not figure in the system, only the strong stresses.

            This podic quatrain stanza is called ballad stanza, and many ballads are written in it (but not all of them, for the definition of a ballad is simply, "a relatively short lyric narrative," and it may be written in any stanza form).  Ballad stanza written in accentual-syllabic prosody rather than in podic prosody is called common measure or common meter, and it is the form of many hymns and other songs — lyrics.

            Although there are no verse feet to be found in podic prosody,  nevertheless J. R. R. Tolkien (see bibliography) isolated six basic hemistichs in Anglo-Saxon prosody, and these basic half-lines have been retained in many podic poems:  1)  The double-fall (¢È¢È) as in “Mistress Mary | Quite contrary”;  2) the double-rise (ȢȢ) as in “With silver bells | and cockle shells;”  3) the rise-and-fall (È¢¢È) as in “the two gray kits”; 4) the rise-and-descend (¢¢.È) as in “My Maid Mary”; 5) the fall-and-ascend  (¢¢È.) as in “To woo the owl”; 6) the descend-and-rise (¢¢È¢) as in “Hark! Hark! the lark!

            There are, however, many more rhythmic variations possible.  Two others are quite common: 7) the short rocking foot (¢È¢) as in “See them jump | up and down!  This is called the amphimacer  (cretic) in accentual-syllabic verse, where it is in fact seldom found in English language poetry written in that prosody.  There are also 8) the long rocking foot (¢ÈÈ¢) as in “Hippety-hop, | hippety-hop!”; 9) the long rise (ÈÈ¢¢) as in “And a one-two, and a three-four” — Harvey Gross in his book Sound and Form in Modern Poetry (see bibliography) calls this rhythm the double iamb and discovers it frequently in accentual-syllabic verse, where it substitutes for two iambic feet, and 10) the long fall (¢¢ÈÈ) as in “Come jump with me,” which in accentual-syllabic prosody would be the double trochee.

            The BALLAD is a relatively short lyric verse tale meant to be sung. There are distinctions to be made between literary ballads and folk ballads; the latter were passed down through oral traditions from balladeer to balladeer (a wandering minstrel, gleeman, jongleur, minnesinger, bard, or scop, an old English court or household poet-harpist-singer).  On the other hand, the troubadour (who composed in the langue d'oc in Provence, northern Italy and northern Spain) and trouvère (who composed in the langue d'oïl in northern France) were medieval French literary poets, composers of gestes and songs.

            First, English language literary ballads are usually written in accentual-syllabic prosody; folk ballads are often done in some podic meter.  Further, the literary ballad's author is usually known, whereas the folk-ballad's author is usually anonymous.  Third, because the literary ballad is still whole, it follows a more or less normal narrative pattern, but as the folk ballad was passed down from hand to hand, it has often — but not always — become eroded, and only the high points, or crises and climaxes, remain.  This phenomenon is called "leaping and lingering" — the folk ballad leaps from high point to high point, skipping connecting passages, and lingers on each a while before it leaps again. Here is a Scottish folk ballad that uses a number of sonic techniques, particularly repetition and incremental repetition — notice that every line is some sort of refrain. Notice, too, that the poem is not end-rhymed; it consonates:

 

LORD RANDAL

 

"Oh where have you been, Lord Randal, my son?

And where have you been, my handsome young man?"

"I've been at the greenwood; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"And who met you there, Lord Randal, my son?

And who met you there, my handsome young man?"

"Oh, I met with my true-love; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"And what did she give you, Lord Randal, my son?

And what did she give you, my handsome young man?"

"Eels fried in a pan; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"And who got your leavings, Lord Randal, my son?

And who got your leavings, my handsome young man?"

"My hawks and my hounds; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"What happened to them, Lord Randal, my son?

What happened to them, my handsome young man?"

"They swelled up and died; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"I fear you are poisoned, Lord Randal, my son.

I fear you are poisoned, my handsome young man."

"Oh yes, I am poisoned; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"O what will you leave me, Lord Randal, my son?

O what will you leave me, my handsome young man?"

"Twenty-four milk cows; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"And what for your sister, Lord Randal, my son?

And what for your sister, my handsome young man?"

"My gold and my silver; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"What's left for your brother, Lord Randal, my son?

What's left for your brother, my handsome young man?"

"My houses and lands; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

"What of your true-love, Lord Randal, my son?

What of your true-love, my handsome young man?"

"I leave her hellfire; mother, make my bed soon,

For I'm weary with hunting and wish to lie down.

 

            Anonymous Scots Author (v. Wesli Court)

 

            If one splits one fourteener couplet (see the Alexandrine line and poulter’s measure, (see The Book of Forms) and adds abcb rhyme, one will achieve a quatrain of common measure or ballad stanza, Here is a folk ballad written in ballad stanza:

 

THE UNQUIET GRAVE

 

“The wind doth blow today, my love,

            And a few small drops of rain;

I never had but one true love —

            In a cold grave she has lain.

 

“I’ll do as much for my true-love

            As any young man may;

I’ll sit and mourn all at her grave

            For a twelvemonth and a day.”

 

The twelvemonth and a day being spent,

            The dead began to speak:

“Oh, who sits weeping on my grave

            And will not let me sleep?”

 

“It is I, my love, sits on your grave,

            And will not let you sleep;

For I crave one kiss of your clay-cold lips,

            And that is all I seek.”

 

“You crave one kiss of my clay-cold lips?

            But my breath smells musty strong!

If you have one kiss of my clay-cold lips,

            Your time will not be long.

 

“‘Tis down in yonder garden green,

            Love, where we used to walk —

The finest flower ever seen

            Is withered to a stalk.

 

“The stalk is withered sere, my love,

            So will our hearts decay;

So make yourself content, my love,

            Till you are called away.”

 

Anonymous Author (v. Wesli Court)

 

Although this poem does not have a refrain, many ballads do, like “Lord Randal.”  This next poem originally appeared in my First Poems (1960); it was written while I was attending the University of Connecticut from 1956-59:

 

         AN IMMIGRANT BALLAD

 

My father came from Sicily

         (O sing a roundelay with me)

With cheeses in his pocket and

A crust of black bread in his hand.

He jumped ashore without a coat,

     Without a friend or enemy,

Till Jesus nailed him by the throat.

 

My father came to Boston town

     (O tongue a catch and toss one down).

By day he plied a cobbler's awl,

By night he loitered on the mall.

He swigged his wine, he struck his note,

     He wound the town up good and brown,

Till Jesus caught him by the throat.

 

He'd heard of Hell, he knew of sin

     (O pluck that wicked mandolin),

But they were for the gentle folk,

The cattle broken to the yoke.

He didn't need a Cross to tote:

     His eyes were flame, his ears were tin,

Till Jesus nabbed him by the throat.

 

He met a Yankee girl one day

     (O cry a merry roundelay)

Who wouldn't do as she was bid,

But only what the good folk did.

She showed him how the church bells peal

     Upon the narrow straitaway,

And Jesus nipped him by the heel.

 

My father heard a sermon said

     (O bite the bottle till it's dead).

He quit his job and went to school

And memorized the Golden Rule.

He drained his crock and sold his keg,

     He swept the cobwebs from his head,

And Jesus hugged him by the leg.

 

The girl was pleased: she'd saved a soul

     (O light a stogie with a coal).

No longer need she be so wary:

Daddy went to seminary

To find how warm a Yankee grows

     When she achieves her fondest goal.

And Jesus bit him on the nose.

 

At last he had a frock to wear

     (O hum a hymn and lip a prayer).

He hoisted Bible, sailed to search

For sheep to shear and for a church.

He asked the girl to share his life,

     His choir-stall and shirt of hair,

For Jesus bade him take a wife.

 

My father holds a pulpit still

     (O I have had enough to swill).

His eye is tame, his hair is gray,

He can't recall a roundelay.

But he can preach, and he can quote

     A verse or scripture, as you will,

Since Jesus took him by the throat.

 

And, of course, "An Immigrant Ballad" called for another, a distaff ballad with a double alternating refrain that is extracted and printed as a coda:

 

REQUIEM FOR A NAME

 

Believe it or believe it not,

           My mother was a Putnam once.

     On her ancestral tree she swears

The Lowells and the Deweys too

     Hang pendulous as lovely pears.

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce

Who rather let things go to pot —

 

Himself, his offspring, farm and wife.

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

     His homestead I remember well:

The floors were warped, the doors askew,

     And now and then the rafters fell.

           My mother was a Putnam once —

She led a less than social life,

 

So she went East from grampaw's West.

           My mother was a Putnam once

     Till she was married, woe O! woe.

No longer was she maiden free —

     She cursed her pa from pate to toe.

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce

To cheat the eaglet in its nest

 

By willing her a woman's form.

     My grampaw was a sort of dunce,

           But what a hefty name he wore!

He gave my middle name to me;

           It fits me like a saddlesore.

     My mother was a Putnam once,

I'd be one too, come sun or storm.

 

The Deweys and the Lowell hosts

     Are pendant from a hollow tree.

Now with this rime let them be felled,

     Let me be nothing more to me

Than windfalls blasted by the frosts.

 

           My mother was a Putnam once;

           My grampaw was a sort of dunce.

 

Suggested Writing Exercise:

 

Write a ballad in ballad stanza or in a nonce form of your own invention, with or without a refrain.

 

 

Related articles

Form of the Week : The Prose Poem

Form of the Week 10: Genre Poetry

 

This discussion is actually about “genre,” not “form.” The term “genre” means “kind” or ”type.” There are three traditional major genres of poetry and any number of minor ones.  The major genres of poetry are dramatic poetry, which is poetry written in monologue or dialogue; lyric poetryor songs; and narrative poetry, story poems.

Various traditional minor genres of poetry include bucolics or poems about the countryside, didactics, teaching poems; forensics or rhetorical poems, speeches; liturgics, or poems of religious ritual; occasionals, poems about events, and satirics, poems of mockery.

But there are many other categories of poems possible, and recent popular subgenres are confessionals or poems of remorse, rap, cowboy, and “performance” poetry, to name a few. Some others, however, are poems of the supernatural, ecological poetry, feminist poems, anti-war poetry, comics, poems of social conscience, civil rights, sports, space exploration, and so forth and so on. Regarding this last genre, on Monday, January 4, 2010, I received this e-mail message from Michael Chasar, a member of the English Department faculty at Willamette College in Oregon:

 “Dear Lewis,

“You may or may not be pleased to know that "Poetry & Popular Culture" (a blog at http://mikechasar.blogspot.com) will soon be remembering the publication of your poem "Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle" from the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.”

On December 2^nd, 1959, while I was a grad student in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I had submitted two poems to Fantasy & Science Fiction, which I had been reading since issue one: “A Great Grey Fantasy” and “Excerpts from the Latter Day Chronicle”; both were accepted, and the first poem mentioned was published almost immediately, in January of 1960:

 

A GREAT GREY FANTASY

 

No need to wound

the pride of witches

with dental pumpkins and

cardboard toots one autumnal

eve each year. Why raise the wrath

of wraiths; why rile

the local spook

 

or banshee? Let them lie there

sucking the blood of dreams.

You stay indoors. If

your id needs its lid lifted, flick

a knob in your parlor. You’ll

hear electronic chains scrape

 

and rattle, see

shadows larrup

the Laramie trail and Mike

Hammer’s image pound dickens

out of rubber jaws. The

Great Gray Phantom rides

again. Or, I

 

should say, still: Hallowe’en has

been perpetual now

for several years.

I have been here

in my easy chair

a month myself, bewitched

(i.e., made stone) by the runes

 

incanted by fakirs

of Commerce,

greatest of nether lords.

Come, I’m bloodless and it’s what!

Halloween? October

already? Out, then,

out of coffins;

 

out on the porch for air,

zombies! The moon’s full. Sniff.

What’s that wail, werewolves?

No, that window,

and that one, look there,

everywhere one notes tubes

flickering, faces pasted

 

to squares of grey

glass and gas. The sound!

it’s weird: hooves (cloven?), shots,

songs, shrieks (this Is Your Life) — what

a devilish din. What

are those black masses

against the moon?

 

Whither bound? Gad, brooms! Goblins,

ghosts, wizards, ogres! What’s

that banner say? “MARS

OR BUST!” In I

go for a good view.

a Mobile Camera

Rocket’s up ahead of them.

 

              — Lewis Turco

This poem is actually in the genre of “supernatural” or “Halloween” poetry, and the poem Chasar mentioned may be found on his blog mentioned above, but here is a much later example of a true “science fiction” genre poem taken from The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition, pp. 387-391:

 

THE DEATH OF THE ASTRONAUT

 

I.  Prologue

Flaming, he rose; flaming, he

came down — a circle bent and broken.

Through his dark sight the magnified

world burst upon his senses.  In token

of flesh wedded to the wooden tree

with golden spikes, he died,

 

his carnival face stripped of its hoses,

bright air frothing like bloody

steam from the imaginings of his eyes

and the silences of his body.

Below, folk looked out of their houses —

the night was filled with fireflies.

 

II.

Before the omen of fire, before

the pillar of my reentry was a sword

splitting the thin sky, and a sound

tailed out behind like a whispered word

that should have been a roar,

I saw darkness standing off the ground.

 

I had been sent star-probing

one other time.  It had been the same —

the instruments, the hard boost;

the man with a man's name

stunned within steel, flung

into too much freedom, kept just

 

busy enough not to notice

time gibbering in a labyrinth of dials.

The clock-watcher had become the clock

jabbing its hands at incredible numerals.

I was too slow to understand much of this.

I made my brain record, my hands work.

 

At last I could pause.  When

first I looked outward, I saw a clear

green hemisphere, slow as a recollected sea,

beating against the weir

of space, clouds rising like a thin

spume above an inaudible plangency.

 

It was then, for a moment, I felt

like an idea lost in a bubble —

but just for a moment.  Out of a cone

somewhere among the rubble

of data which my mind held,

there came a voice, its tone

 

urgent and made of earth.  My lips

responded: I felt them writhe,

the breath rustle between.

My hands were lithe

and sure on the controls; my eyes were whips

skimming dials, quick and keen.

 

Time lay catatonic.  Below, men went

stumbling and falling while I —

I! a man as well — might never fall,

but remain a strange light in a foreign sky

no longer sky but firmament.

The infinite swallows the infinitesimal.

 

III.

 

At this point — no.  Strike that.  Points dissolve.

A circle moving beneath the prickle of stars

has no mathematics.  Nevertheless,

somewhen within that curse

I programmed, I felt the earth revolve.

A pentacle of solitude was drawn; the press

 

of distances was nearly tangible.

I listened.  In my ear

a static crackle grated its beetle note.

All I could hear

was the mouth of silence approaching like the mandible

of a mantis.  Slate

 

is the color of fear; its scent is dust.

The chill the Caesars know in their sepulchres

began to breech

the armor I wore in that Circus

Maximus.  My phones were dead.  Just

filament and wire stood within reach

 

of my stilled hands — nothing sentient.

I saw sunrises fade and burn

among fleets of sparks.  The moon blossomed

like a lily carved of bone: the vast urn

which nourished it went

arching coldly about stars.  Sterile, chasmed,

 

my catafalque of steel

reeled through tracks the ancient

gods are said to have harrowed

among the planets.  But there was only trenchant

emptiness there, a wheel

of silence; wheels within wheels, darkness arrowed

 

with blue light.

I probed fiery axes with eyes

gone stark, grown calm as immobility:

I watched the sun rise

for the final time.  My sight

flamed out; nevertheless, I could see:

 

IV.

The Earth receded.  It became small,

and I saw that it was flat,

borne by an enormous turtle

waddling down a jet road.  The plate,

our planet, was fastened to the beast's shell

with golden wire that looked like sunlight.  A kettle

 

containing darkness and angels hung suspended,

upside-down, above the burden

and the burdened.  There was commerce

between Earth and Heaven.

Men ascended

a great ladder shaped like a cross

 

whose base was rooted in the rim

of the world; its crossbar bore

the kettle's lip.  The ladder was of wood

fastened with golden nails.  One star

topped the emblem.

I watched the carnival recede

 

till a monstrous serpent formed of mist

rose by the wayside, looped its coils

about the universe and swallowed.

Vast emptiness.  The blood boils.

I feel my cave of steel tossed

by furious winds.  I am a wick tallowed

 

and ignited.  Darkness is lurid

with voices hissing prayers, songs —

a litany of absence.

It is I who sing!

This is my torrid

hymn.  Who listens?

 

V.  Epilogue

Below, the folk in their houses quietly

heard the public announcement,

went out to their yards to search the skies.

They stood and waited there.  Summer was silent,

save for the crickets.  Suddenly,

the night air burned with plunging fireflies.

 

— Lewis Turco 

P. J. O'Brien was a pupil of mine at SUNY Oswego when he wrote "Cartoon Show," which I published in Poetry: An Introduction through Writing in 1973.  The assignment was to write a series of related poems on a particular subject.  O'Brien took as his model a Saturday morning children's television cartoon show such as most Americans will recall from their or their offspring's childhood. The first poem in this set of poems in the genre of “comics” was "The Old Skipper," the local host of the show, who spoke the prologue:

CARTOON SHOW

 

The Old Skipper

 

I announced every episode of

your lives,

knowing just what would happen;

that you would love, lust,

fight, go mad and a thousand other

meaningless passions.

And I sat on my film with my fake beard

looking like Zeus and feeling like an

oldtimer in a Greek chorus.

 

The mode of the poem is clearly prose, not verse, and all that O'Brien did was to disperse the prose lines according to phrases, one phrase to a line.  Some people like to call this method "free verse."  I call it "line-phrasing," and others call it "lineating."

The second poem in the set, "Brutus" — later called "Bluto" — moves us directly into the cartoon:

 

Brutus

 

In my lumbering ox obscurity

I lusted over you, Olive Oyl.

With my thick lipped bearded mouth

I wanted your flesh, to take it by

force and never let it go.

I had not the strength of vegetables

nor white clothes and noble ideals,

only the desire of animals.

With the cunning of beasts

I tracked you until, each time,

that runt kicked me silly, and

running with my tail between my legs

my hatred filled the land like poison.

Why couldn't that bastard have left his

spinach at home just once?

 

Although we recognize the character and the situation, we have never heard this language from the cartoon itself.  This is a "confessional" poem spoken by Brutus, and we detect a serious purpose behind the lines, even though we smile or even guffaw while we read.  The next character to enter is "Popeye":

 

Popeye

 

I have tasted the spinach of victory,

transforming matter with my bare fists

turning bulls into packaged meat

and alligators into shoes and purses.

I have fought every creation of man and God

on every battleground from Alaska to Mars

to prove my love, Olive Oyl.

But still you questioned it,

flirting with that lummox

with the "nyah nyah" in your voice,

the challenge in your eyes.

And yes to protect your chastity

after you had aroused the animal,

I swallowed my spinach and became

your white knight again and again.

Each time hoping I would lose,

to escape your prison.

But when films flashed in my biceps

and tattoos danced across my chest;

I loved you more than the sea,

I loved you more than spinach.

 

And "Olive Oyl," the object of contention, who turns out to be a human being also:

 

Olive Oyl

 

I am Helen of Troy.

I am Deirdre.

I am all the women men

have died for.

I am all the women men

have made fools of themselves over.

But I asked to be no Goddess,

and I asked to be no object.

All I simply asked for was

a mayun.

 

One of the overtones that O'Brien worked with was created from simple allusion — to the Greek chorus in a classical tragedy, to Zeus, to Helen of Troy and Deirdre.  Although this is a humorous poem, it takes a solemn dimension from such epic land tragic referents.

"Sweet Pea" provides an element of mystery and unease:

 

Sweet Pea

 

My parentage was never explained.

Continually crawling in my

Doctor Dentons, a doubt.

A doubt that kept me young,

never dreaming of puberty or

responsibility, cut off from

the forbidden vegetable,

I wanted your breast, mother.

I wanted your piggyback, father.

So I continued to creep away

from those strange sailors and

their lady friend, looking for

answers in circuses and construction yards,

missing lions' jaws and

iron girders by inches.  "Saved"

ad nauseam by the muttering bowlegged

warden with green teeth.

 

“Alice the Goon" is the spurned woman, the pariah:

 

Alice the Goon

 

I have been fed on the dog-food of despair

and in my raging bitterness I saw your

foolishness, my lungs filling with hysterics,

my mouth rabid with foam.

And because you could not understand

my madness you thought yourselves sane

and ran from my outstretched arms,

trying to impress that wench Olive Oyl.

Because I am tired of screaming alone,

tired of crying in the hills,

I will ask you why?

Why, in a world of ugliness, was mine so

repulsive, my flesh so leprous?

 

"Wimpy" comes bringing up the rear, as he always did.  He provides the poem with an architectural symmetry, for he speaks the epilogue as "The Old Skipper" spoke the prologue.  Both are observers more than participants:

 

Wimpy

 

I'm not bitter, nosireebob.

While you have talked of love and lust

I have devoured the hamburgers of fulfillment,

tasted the cheeseburgers of tranquility

and supped off the fat of the land.

You who laughed at Alice the Goon,

You who laughed at me, the roly-poly sponge,

I have watched your petty wars

waged for the smile of the ugliest

woman in the world.

I have watched you all chew your loco weeds.

And carrying my omniscience quite unobtrusively

I watched the cartoon roll by,

picking my teeth with celluloid

and farting noisily.

 

— P. J. O’Brien

 

Here are some titles of poems that are examples of various genres other than science fiction and comics; most of them can be found on the Web by using a search engine or simply by hitting these links:

 

Baseball: Herbert Coursen, “National Pastime,” from The Book of Forms cited above on pp. 151-152:

 

NATIONAL PASTIME

 

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, 1908-1911).

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). Also, Bob Sturgeon,

Oyster Burns, Catfish Hunter, Sea Lion Hall, and

George Haddock, whose locker was next to Davy Jones,

sure-fingered Tom Butters,

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

George Bone, and Stew Bolin, Rabbit Maranville and

Bunny Brief, Dave Brain, and Dodo Bird,

Turkeyfoot Brower, Deerfoot Bay, and Reindeer Killefer.

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 1928 (with 201), Glassarm 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 had on his throwing hand (229-13l).

But M. P. C. “T. F.” must yield a share of his

huge gallery in my special Hall of Fame

to Christian Frederick Albert John Henry David

Betzel, whom they called “Bruno” for some reason.

My Hall will house an armory, as some museums do,

for the display of weapons, like

Shotgun Shuba and 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

and MacFayden, Howie Nunn, Johnnie Priest,

Maurice Archdeacon, Max Bishop, and Dave Pope.

Amen.

 

By Herb Coursen

 

Battle of the Sexes: Carolyn Kizer, “Semele Recycled”  

Braggadocio: Gwendolyn Brooks, “We Real Cool”

Creation: A. D. Hope, “imperial Adam”

Exaggeration: W. H. Auden, “As I Walked Out One Evening”

Funerals: Kenneth Fearing, “Dirge”  

Parentage: Weldon Kees, “For My Daughter”

Perception: Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”

Popular Music: Dana Gioia, “Cruising with the Beachboys”

Racial prejudice: Langston Hughes, “Go Slow”

Recurring dreams: Wesli Court, “The Obsession”  

Riddles: Daniel Hoffman“As I Was Going to St. Ives”

Science Fiction: Lewis Turco, “Excerpts from the Latter-Day Chronicle”

Trash: Richard Wilbur, “Junk”

Warfare: Henry Reed, “Naming of Parts”

Witchcraft: Robert Frost, “The Witch of Coös”   

Woodslore: David Wagoner, “Staying Alive”

  

Suggested Writing Exercise:

 

         Choose an unusual genre in which to write a poem, and then write it in a form of your choice.

Indian Summer

SESTINA IN INDIAN SUMMER

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

  

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

 

By Lewis Turco

 

From 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; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback. Also available in a Kindle edition.

 

The Death of Carolyn Kizer

 

R.I.P. CAROLYN KIZER

December 10, 1925 – October 9, 2014

 

She made the battle of the sexes

Humorous, a fact that vexes

Feminists who are no wiser

For the efforts of Ms. Kizer.

 

By Lewis Turco

        

         Unlike Adrienne Rich, Carolyn  Kizer never  forgot how to keep an eye on the language and make it dance and go  deep  simultaneously. Born in Spokane,  Washington, in 1925, she was educated at Sarah Lawrence College.   She held a number of positions  both  in  and  out  of academics;  her  academic career included teaching stints in the Writers' Workshop of the University of  Iowa, Ohio University, University of North Carolina, Barnard College, Columbia University, and the University of Washington in Seattle.

         Kizer's first book, The Ungrateful Garden, was published in 1961. Her  long  poem "Pro Femina,"  from Knock Upon Silence (1965), was an early feminist work which, in the opinion of some, has never been excelled by any other poem on the same subject before or since.  She speaks in this poem "about women of letters, for I'm in the racket," and it's a man's world in which she must make her way and find her place.  Her third collection, Midnight Was My Cry: New and Selected Poems, appeared in 1971, Mermaids in the Basement and Yin in were published in 1984, and The Nearness of You came out in 1986.  In each of these books her wide range of emotion appeared packaged in all sorts of formal bottles — she has been accused by critics of using her technical skills to "distance herself from pain."  However,  Kizer was well aware that humor is a weapon with a sharp edge,  keener even than a sharp tongue.

         Another element of Kizer's success is that she never  forgot how  to  tell a story,  and no one told a story quite the way she did,  as a slow passage down the pages of Yin demonstrated. Though her material was topical, it was also timeless, and Kizer remembered how to get and keep  the  reader's  attention  without resorting  to  the  sensational  or  the  hortatory.   In "Semele Recycled," for instance, the poet told a narrative out of  Greek myth,  but she made it so near,  familiar, and compelling; loaded it with so much resonance,  that the reader wanted to keep  going and going.

         Semele  was  the  mother of Dionysus — god of wine and fertility — by Zeus, the supreme father-god. Semele asked Zeus to appear to her in all his majesty,  but the apparition was so terrifying that she died. Semele's various body parts were scattered and had undergone transformations and sundry adventures, but then her lover returned, and the body parts, hearing  the rumor, "leapt up" and as many as could do so reunited themselves.

         "This  empty body danced on the river bank. / Hollow, it called and searched among the fields / for those parts that steamed and simmered in  the sun,  / and never would have found them."  Then Semele and Zeus were reunited; their "two bodies met like a thunderclap / in mid-day — right at the  corner of  that wretched field / with its broken fenceposts and startled, skinny cattle. / We fell in a heap on the compost heap / and all our loving parts made love at once,..."

         When the poem ended, the reader might have wished to read it again immediately to savor its richly concrete language, its psychological complexity, the narrative embodiment of the war between the sexes, and the eternal truce that is struck again and again.  Then the reader may have turned the pages to find another poem as good — and one would be found, over and over.

         Although Mermaids in the Basement was subtitled Poems for Women, for many years Kizer wrote with real power for an audience that was wider than the special interest audiences that so many Post-Modern American poets tried to reach during the period following the Second World War: Kizer kept her balance with The Nearness of You which was subtitled Poems for Men.

Excerpted from Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-936205-30-1, paperback.

The poem “R, I. P. Carolyn Kizer” is from 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.

 

 

Form of the Week 9: Sestina

 

The sestina is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante (from whom it received its Italian name). The popularity of the poem in English is primarily a 20th century phenomenon, however, particularly in the United States. The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a specific order as end-words in the five succeeding sestet stanzas. In English the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters. Its thirty-nine lines are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi), q.v. In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing each line.

The order in which the end-words are repeated appears to have its roots in numerology, but what the significance of the pattern was originally is now unknown. The sequence of numbers is 6-1-5-2-4-3. Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3. If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters signifying repetitions) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.

The oldest British example — a double sestina, actually — is by Philip Sidney, "You Goat-Herd Gods" from his 16th century Arcadia; the version given here has had its spelling modernized. It is not merely a double sestina (twelve sestet stanzas rather than six), but a pastoral dialogue or eclogue as well:

 

YOU GOAT-HERD GODS¹

 

A Dialogue between Strephon and Klaius

 

Strephon. You goat-herd Gods who love the grassy mountains,

You nymphs that haunt the springs in pleasant valleys,

You satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests,

Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music

Which to my woes gives still an early morning

And draws the dolor on till weary evening.

 

Klaius. O Mercury, foregoer to the evening,

O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains.

O lovely star, entitled of the morning,

Which that my voice does fill these woeful valleys,

Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music

Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests.

 

Strephon. I that was once free-burgess of the forests,

Where shade from sun and sports I sought at evening;

I that was once esteemed for pleasant music

Am banished now among the monstrous mountains

Of huge despair, and foul affliction's valleys,

Am grown a screech-owl to my self each morning.

 

Klaius. I that was once delighted every morning,

Hunting the wild inhabitants of forests,

I that was once the music of these valleys,

So darkened am, that all my day is evening,

Heart-broken so, that mole-hills seem high mountains

.and fill the vales with cries instead of music.

 

Strephon. Long since, alas, my deadly, swinish music

Hath made itself a crier of the morning

And has with wailing strength climbed highest mountains:

Long since my thoughts more desert be than forests;

Long since I see my joys come to their evening

And state thrown down to over-trodden valleys.

 

Klaius. Long since the happy dwellers of these valleys

Have prayed me leave my strange, exclaiming music

Which troubles their day's work, and joys of evening.

Long since I hate the night, more hate the morning;

Long since my thoughts chase me like beasts in forests,

And make me wish myself laid under mountains.

 

Strephon. Me seems I see the high and stately mountains

Transform themselves to low, dejected valleys;

Me seems I hear in these ill-changed forests,

The nightingales do learn of owls their music;

Me seems I feel the comfort of the morning

Turned to the mortal serene of an evening.

 

Klaius. Me seems I see a filthy, cloudy evening

As soon as sun begins to climb the mountains;

Me seems I feel a noisome scent, the morning

When I do smell the flowers of these valleys;

Me seems I hear, when I do hear sweet music,

The dreadful cries of murdered men in forests.

 

Strephon. I wish to fire the trees of all these forests;

I give the sun a last farewell each evening;

I curse the fiddling finders-out of music:

With envy I do hate the lofty mountains

And with despite despise the humble valleys;

I do detest night, evening, day, and morning.

 

Klaius. Curse to myself my prayer is, the morning:

My fire is more than can be made with forests;

My state more base than are the basest valleys;

I wish no evenings more to see, each evening;

Shamed I have my self in sight of mountains

And stopped my ears, lest I grow mad with music.

 

Strephon.

For she whose parts maintained a perfect music,

Whose beauty shone more than the blushing morning,

Who much surpassed in state the stately mountains,

In straightness passed the cedars of the forests,

Has cast me, wretched, into eternal evening

By taking her two suns from these dark valleys.

 

Klaius.

For she, to whom compared, the Alps are valleys,

She, whose least word brings from the spheres their music,

At whose approach the sun rose in the evening,

Who, where she went, bore in her forehead morning,

Is gone, is gone from these our spoiled forests,

Turning to deserts our best pastured mountains.

 

Strephon, Klaius. These mountains witness all, so shall these valleys,

These forests too, made wretched by our music:

Our morning hymn is this, and song at evening.

 

— Philip Sidney (modern version by Wesli Court)

 

Here is a twenty-first century double sestina written by “Wesli Court,” the pen-name under which Lewis Turco generally writes his traditionally formal poems:

 

DOUBLE VISION¹

A Double Sestina

 

                  I. THE VISION²

 

It came upon me while I was on the crapper

of my father’s parsonage, my eyes

boring into the porcelain of the tiles

before me on the wall.  The tiles were white.

They spread across the vacancy of time

That seeped into my mind and filled that blank

 

jug of puberty with a vast Mont Blanc

of sorrow and ennui. On that crapper

I saw that I would have to fill up time

with something more than the nothing that met my eyes,

the emptiness that seeped out of those white

ranges of porcelain whose trackless tiles

 

led finally to death. I feared those tiles

worse than I feared my death, that ultimate blank-

ness waiting for me on the snowy white

crest of age. I saw life was a crapper

that had to be filled with something. If I closed my eyes

perhaps I could dream myself to a better time

 

than this one snowing before me. There was no time

to dream. What could I do? I could fill tiles

with words. I could write. I filled my eyes

with reading every day; I could fill blank

sheets with my own words. I rose off that crapper

thinking I might pave my way with white

 

sheaves laden with stories, poems — I could write

my way to death by filling my living tome

with endless lines of type till I came-a-cropper

at last and alas! perhaps, on the devil’s tines,

if I kept my gaze steady and didn’t blink,

and if I did not try to romanticize

 

my life with gods and demons, with the sighs

of wishful thinking, with the little white

lies of religion that covered up the blank

of existence with the stuff that fills a crapper.

I pulled myself out of the abyss of tiles

Ready to take on life and move in time.

 

I’d use my eyes to read. Perhaps in time

I’d use those words to write, to fill up tiles

With something more than blankness on that crapper.

 

 

                    II. SECOND SIGHT²

 

So that is what I’ve done. I’ve been the croupier

in life’s casino to this point, with ice

in my arteries. My column of tales

and songs has risen to a decent height

and I am old at last, although not tame

as maybe I should be. But I won’t blink

 

at this point, for why should I wish to blink?

I’ve been raking in what a good croupier

rakes in — coin of the realm like leaves of thyme,

minutes and moments that one can use to spice

the pot of emptiness when it gains heat

enough to flavor these mortal tales

 

that I’ve been cooking up. There’s nothing stales

a blend of blandishments quick as a blink

faster than losing interest at its height

even as one’s flesh grows crepier

with every year and hour. So, throw some ice

into the mix, perhaps, but never tame

 

the cold gazpacho one swallows nigh the tomb.

Trade the rake for a ladle, but keep those tales

swirling about in that bucket of mordant ice

and, before your readers can even blink,

serve it like a waiter, not a croupier,

when the flavor has hit its tasteful height.

 

Some folk feel that life is just a hoot,

a game of chance played with a friendly team

and not alone with “God” as one’s croupier

dressed in cummerbund and a set of tails

spinning the wheel. Before you can even blink,

the game is done and you are soused with ice

 

dumped on you by the “team.” You make your choice,

and if you manage to gain a little height

you place your bet, the wheel whirrs — if you blink

(or even if you don’t) the suave croupier

pushes over your pile of songs and tales

and you find out there is no game or team,

 

there’s only ice that chills you till you’re tame

and lowered by that croupier from about man’s height —

he doesn’t blink and he will tell no tales.

 

         — Wesli Court

In the 19th century Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote another double sestina titled "The Complaint of Lisa"; his "Sestina," which Swinburne made to rhyme ababab as well, turned its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increased the difficulty of the form, but some of the earliest French and Italian sestinas also rhymed, so this was not really an experiment:

 

SESTINA¹

 

I saw my soul at rest upon a day

         As a bird sleeping in the nest of night,

Among soft leaves that give the starlight way

         To touch its wings but not its eyes with light;

So that it knew as one in visions may,

         And knew not as men waking. of delight.

 

This was the measure of my soul's delight;

         It had no power of joy to fly by day,

Nor part in the large lordship of the light;

         But in a secret moon-beholden way

Had all its will of dreams and pleasant night.

         And all the love and life that sleepers may.

 

But such life's triumph as men waking may

         It might not have to feed its faint delight

Between the stars by night and sun by day,

         Shut up with green leaves and a little light;

Because its way was as a lost star's way,

         A world's not wholly known of day or night.

 

All loves and dreams and sounds and gleams of night

         Made it all music that such minstrels may,

And all they had they gave it of delight;

         But in the full face of the fire of day

What place shall be for any starry light,

         What part of heaven in all the wide sun's way?

 

Yet the soul woke not, sleeping by the way,

         Watched as a nursling of the large eyed night,

And sought no strength nor knowledge of the day,

         Nor closer touch conclusive of delight,

Nor mightier joy nor truer than dreamers may,

         Nor more of song than they, nor more of light.

 

For who sleeps once and sees the secret light

         Whereby sleep shows the soul a fairer way

Between the rise and rest of day and night,

         Shall care no more to fare as all men may,

But be his place of pain or of delight,

         There shall he dwell, beholding night as day.

 

Song, have thy day and take thy fill of light

         Before the night be fallen across thy way;

Sing while he may, man hath no long delight.

 

         — Algernon Charles Swinburne

 Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Swinburne, also wrote a "Sestina," and, as sometimes was the fashion, he italicized the teleutons. Not long after the turn of the 20th century Ezra Pound returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote the monologue "Sestina: Altaforte"; this, together with his "Sestina for Isolt," set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas.

The problem with the sestina is, generally, that the repeated end-words can be obtrusive. To draw the reader's attention away from the repetitions, poets often enjamb their lines so that sentences and phrases are not end-stopped on the teleutons, or they may use, on occasion, homographs of the end-words, like wind (as in "south wind") and wind (as in "wind your own clock"), or even such ploys as can and toucan:

 

THE FOREST OF MY SEASONS³

 

Desire today is a cavern of snow;

       ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.

              Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns

                    rampant on a field vert under the woods

                           quartered in a southern compass.  Toucan

                                  tones rose close beneath the surface of   

                                                                                          shade,

 

                                  threatening rupture.  Poet, draw your

                                                                                          shade

today upon a mirror made of snow

                           shadowed.  Men may hibernate if bears can.

       Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind

                    till it may be harried awake by wood-

              pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —

 

              Too many words, like girdles built of horn,

                                  confined in an attic.  How to say shade

                    but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood

laid for light to walk on; and to have snow

       imply more than God's linoleum.  Wind

                           is wind, but direction matters.  Who can

 

                           help me?  Where's my muse today?  Shake

                                                                                          your can,

              you errant Echo, and get home.  My horns

       sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind

                                  your own clock and make love with your

                                                                                 own shade

someplace up a cavern or down the snow

                    where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

 

                    The forest of my seasons grows strange woods

                           sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,

not as it ought.  My pen is cold as snow:

              its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns

                                  of silence.  Lie you down, lie down in

                                                                                          shade,

       word-warbler.  Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

 

       And while you sleep, dream.  Dream of the south wind

                    needling you awake with slivers of woods:

                                  birch and pine, maple that sweetens in

                                                                                          shade;

                           oak on the white hillside.  Dream, if you can,

              of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns

blown to silence.  Dream no longer of snow,

 

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can

to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.

There will be tonics.  It's time for shades now.

 

— Lewis Turco

 

However, in his "Age and Indifferent Clouds" Harry Mathews deliberately used such words as "hippopotamus" and "bronchitis," thus drawing the reader's attention to the teleutons rather than away from them, and the beginnings of the lines doubled the difficulty by making puns and ringing variations on six herbs and plants, which might go unnoticed because the end-words take so much of the reader's attention. Donald Justice's "Sestina: Here in Katmandu" has no envoy and its line-lengths vary, generally between four stresses and one:

 

SESTINA: HERE IN KATMANDU¹

 

We have climbed the mountain.

There's nothing more to do.

It is terrible to come down

To the valley

Where, amidst many flowers,

One thinks of snow,

 

As formerly, amidst snow,

Climbing the mountain,

One thought of flowers,

Tremulous, ruddy with dew,

In the valley.

One caught their scent coming down.

 

It is difficult to adjust, once down,

To the absense of snow.

Clear days, from the valley,

One looks up at the mountain.

What else is there to do?

Prayer wheels, flowers!

 

Let the flowers

Fade, the prayer wheels run down.

What have they to do

With us who have stood atop the snow

Atop the mountain,

Flags seen from the valley?

 

It might be possible to live in the valley,

To bury oneself among flowers,

If one could forget the mountain,

How, never once looking down,

Stiff, blinded with snow,

One knew what to do.

 

Meanwhile it is not easy here in Katmandu,

Especially when to the valley

That wind which means snow

Elsewhere, but here means flowers,

Comes down,

As soon it must, from the mountain.

 

— Donald Justice

 

It was Donald Justice who in the late 1950’s introduced the sestina to graduate students in his Poetlry Workshop at the University of Iowa through the example of Weldon Kees’ strange work,

 

AFTER THE TRIAL

 

Hearing the judges' well-considered sentence,

The prisoner saw long plateaus of guilt,

And thought of all the dismal furnished rooms

The past assembled, the eyes of parents

Staring through walls as though forever

To condemn and wound his innocence.

 

And if I raise my voice, protest my innocence,

The judges won't revoke their sentence.

I could stand screaming in this box forever,

Leaving them deaf to everything but guilt;

All the machinery of law devised by parents

Could not be stopped though fire swept the rooms.

 

Whenever my thoughts move to all those rooms

I sat alone in, capable of innocence,

I know now I was not alone, that parents

Always were there to speak the hideous sentence:

"You are our son; be good; we know your guilt;

We stare through walls and see your thoughts forever."

 

Sometimes I wished to go away forever;

I dreamt of strangers and of stranger rooms

Where every corner held the light of guilt.

Why do the judges stare?  I saw no innocence

In them when they pronounced the sentence;

I heard instead the believing voice of parents.

 

I can remember evenings when my parents,

Settling my future happily forever,

Would frown before they spoke the sentence:

"Someday the time will come to leave these rooms

Where, under our watchful eyes, you have been innocent;

Remember us before you seize the world of guilt."

 

Their eyes burn.  How can I deny my guilt

When I am guilty in the sight of parents?

I cannot think that even they were innocent.

At least I shall not have to wait forever

To be escorted to the silent rooms

Where darkness promises a final sentence.

 

We walk forever to the doors of guilt,

Pursued by our own sentences and eyes of parents,

Never to enter innocent and quiet rooms.

 

— Weldon Kees

Alan Ansen's "A Fit of Something Against Something" is a “diminishing sestina" which starts out normally but then begins to lose words until in the envoy all that's left are the teleutons of each line. Here is a twenty-first century sestina that uses as all its teleutons the word “sestina” itself, thus violating the “rule” regarding the use of six different teleutons:

 

SESTINA²

 

It drives you crazy to write a sestina.

First off, in order to write a sestina

you need six end-words that don’t shout, “Sestina!”

One should hide the fact that it’s a sestina

you’re writing. I mean, why holler “Sestina!”

if you don’t have to? Why give the sestina

 

game away right away? For a sestina

needs to be a subtle thing. A sestina

should lead readers away from the sestina,

make them think, “This is no kind of sestina,

it’s a sixteener, maybe, no sestina

sustaining itself on sestets. Sestina

 

indeed! I don’t believe it. A sestina

doesn’t announce itself, “I’m a sestina,

no less! I live on end-words, a sestina

to end sestinas! I’m a sustainer

of sounds, echoes of a choral Sistiner

bouncing off Michaelangelo sixteen or

 

so ways from Rome to Nome.” A fine sestina

that would be. Thirty-nine lines of sestina

mumbling into the reader’s ear, “Sestina,

sestina, sestina.” Who could sustain a

poem like that for so long? A sestina

ought perhaps to read more like a sonetto

 

rispetto than like what it is. Sestina

end-words are teleutons, and a sestina

should tell you tons about what a sestina

is all about. Certainly, a sestina

is about disguise, subtlety, sestina

reticence, reluctance to be sestina-

 

like. Rather, it ought to be a soul-stainer,

nuanced, a mind-mellower. A sestina

ought not to be the thing, just the sustainer

of thingness in the memory. Sestina

is teleutonals, not end-words. Sestina

is an earful of sense, not a sestina

 

ending in a coda that says sestina,

repeating end-words, sestina, sestina,

sestina, and a final time, sestina!

 

— Wesli Court

 

In 1979 Wesli Court took advantage of the obsessive quality of the sestina's repetitions in "The Obsession," one of the poems in a sequence titled “Letters to the Dead” which rings the changes on the rhymed iambic pentameter sestet. The first line of "The Obsession" contains all six of the end-words, and the same basic line is repeated incrementally as the first line of succeeding stanzas. Each time the line is repeated the syntax is transposed by hypallage; nonetheless, the line always makes sense. Because all six end-words do appear in this line, a particular problem arises at the envoy, for it cannot be of three lines.  Instead, the refrain line reappears a seventh time as a one-line envoy rather than as the normal triplet, but with the sense of the original first line reversed:

 

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

 

THE OBSESSION¹

 

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen.  He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

I greeted him.  I said, "How are you, father?"

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

We were together, older than when he'd died —

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror.  He looked his last

Into the glass and kissed it.  He saw he'd died.

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell.  I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

 

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so.  But what was it I dreamed

In fact?  An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream?  Who was it died

 

Again last night?  I dreamed my father died,

But it was not he — it was not my father,

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

Whose is it, his or mine?  Who dreams he dreamed?

 

My father died.  Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands.  And when at last

He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

 

— Wesli Court

 

Finally, here is another sestina without an envoi, also from “Letters to the Dead” and The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems:

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE²

 

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

For a sure and certain doubt?  He sighs.  It seems

There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets.  Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards.  "Is this the doom

Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him.  Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads.  What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

— Wesli Court

^________

¹This entire essay is an expansion of the section on the sestina to be found in 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, a companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible," copyright © and all rights reserved  2012 by Lewis Turco.

²From The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010.

³From Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007.

 

 

Form of the Week 8: Blues Forms

 

According to Ira Gershwin in his book Lyrics on Several Occasions (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1959, pp.33-34), “As a term for depressed spirits, ‘the blues’ goes back to the first decade of the nineteenth century: ‘and I saw he was still under the influence of a whole legion of the blues’ (Washington Irving: Salmagundi, 1807). Irving’s phrase is his shortened version of the earlier British and Scottish ‘the blue devils,’ which figuratively meant a visitation by the spirits of Melancholia. A century went by before The Blues began to be used as a music term; this, thanks principally to the talent and output of W. C. Handy and his world-famous ‘St. Louis Blues,’ ‘The Memphis Blues,’ and many more.”

Stephen Henderson in his book Understanding the New Black Poetry¹ wrote that some verse forms used in Afro-American literature were “adaptations of song forms,” which “include blues, ballads, hymns, children’s songs, work songs, spirituals, and popular songs.” Henderson said that in particular the ballad, the hymn, and the blues are “numerous and easily recognizable.” He continued, “The first two have numerous parallels in other literary traditions. But the blues as a literary form was developed and refined by Langston Hughes and later by Sterling Brown, though Hughes clearly overstated his case for the fixity of the blues form in his preface to Fine Clothes for the Jew.”²

Henderson mentioned the “’classic twelve-bar, three line form” of the blues, as in Eddie “Son” House’s “Dry Spell Blues”:

 

The dry spell blues have fallen, drove me from door to door.

Dry spell blues have fallen, drove me from door to door.

The dry spell blues have put everybody on the killing floor.

 

Wikipedia says that “The lyrics of early traditional blues verses probably often consisted of a single line repeated four times; it was only in the first decades of the 20th century that the most common current structure became standard: the so-called AAB pattern, consisting of a line sung over the four first bars, its repetition over the next four, and then a longer concluding line over the last bars. Two of the first published blues songs, ‘Dallas Blues’ (1912) and ‘St. Louis Blues’ (1914), were 12-bar blues featuring the AAB structure. W. C. Handy wrote that he adopted this convention to avoid the monotony of lines repeated three times.”

The musical notation of the structure of the blues, AAB, does not show the literary form which is AAa: the capital letters indicate a repeated line, and the small a is a synthetic (consequential) parallel that rhymes with them.  The rhyme would change in the second and succeeding stanzas, BBb, CCc, and so forth. Here is my description of the blues stanza from my The New Book of Forms⁵ in 1986:

American. A triplet stanza derived from the Black jazz tradition of lamentation or complaint, rhyming AAa. Usually written in loose iambic pentameter measures, the second line is an incremental repeton of the first line, the third line a synthetic parallel giving a consequence of the first two lines.

Later in his book Stephen Henderson, discussing improvisation, wrote that “A poem may…differ from performance to performance just as jazz performances of ‘My Favorite Things’ would. Moreover, it implies that there is a Black poetic mechanism, much like the musical ones, which can transform a Shakespearian sonnet into a jazz poem, the basic conceptual model of contemporary Black poetry. The technique, the fundamental device, would be improvisation, lying as it does at the very heart of jazz music.”

Thus, the BLUES STANZA is a triplet derived from the Afro-American tradition of lamentation or complaint in which line two is an incremental repetition of line one and the third line is a climactic parallel, AAa, BBb, etc.  This poem is written in straight blues stanzas:

  

HERB PLAYS WITH THE BLUES 

Listen to Lewis Turco read "Herb Plays with the Blues."

September 12^th, 2001:

 

Alas, my buddy Herb has got the blues,

My poor old buddy Herb's deep in the blues.

But it's an exercise, it's not the news

 

That's got him in the dumps. It's not the dust

That's covered New York City deep in dust

And rubble ¾ no, it's not the boom and bust

 

Of terror from the skies on a summer day,

A brilliant, clear and sunny summer day

Buried in suffocating clouds of gray

 

Smoke and soot and scattered body parts

Of once whole people merely body parts

That now must be removed in trucks and carts

 

From the streets of Old New York. Our world is changed

Forever now by monsters, forever changed,

And we who live in it have been estranged

 

From what was real. The solid earth we knew,

That solid sod that once we walked and knew

Is now surreal ¾ planes dropping from the blue

 

Into towers falling onto streets

That are no longer avenues and streets

But silent canyons. Herb, this form repeats,

 

This form called blues, but so too does despair,

These images of death and of despair

That sunder us beyond hope of repair.

 

Despite his overstatement of the fixity of the blues form, Langston Hughes was much looser in his practice. He never used this triplet form, preferring merely to express the sadness that is the tone and subject of “the blues,” which he defined in his poem titled,

 

THE BLUES

 

When the shoe strings break

On both your shoes

And you're in a hurry —

That's the blues.

 

When you go to buy a candy bar

And you've lost the dime you had

Slipped through a hole in your pocket somewhere —

That's the blues, too, and bad!

 

Hughes also tied “the blues” to music in a much less formal way in the title poem from his prize-winning first book in 1923,

  

THE WEARY BLUES

 

Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,

Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon

I heard a Negro play.

Down on Lenox Avenue the other night

By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light

He did a lazy sway...

He did a lazy sway...

To the tune o’ those Weary Blues,

With his ebony hands on each ivory key

He made that poor piano moan with melody.

O Blues!

Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool

He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.

Sweet Blues!

Coming from a black man's soul.

O Blues!

In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone

I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan —

"Ain't got nobody in all this world,

Ain’t got nobody but ma self.

I's gwine to quit ma frownin'

And put ma troubles on the shelf."

My own first attempt at writing the blues took place at Yaddo where I spent part of the  summer of 1959 between graduation from the University of Connecticut and entering the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa in the fall. Unwittingly following in Hughes’ footsteps, and in the true tradition of improvisation, I was having lunch in my room one day with the artist Roger Crossgrove. We were discussing how quickly one could create an image or write a poem, and I said that I could write a decent poem in fifteen or twenty minutes. Roger scoffed at me. I got a pad of paper and a pencil and said, “Give me a subject.” “How about that waitress we were flirting with last night at the dive across from the racetrack?” he replied. I said, “Okay,” and the result was "Lorrie." My collaborator of many years, the printmaker George O’Connell, who is also an amateur jazz musician and plays the vibes in local bands, loves this poem. He made a beautiful Xmas card of it in 1984 and, later on, an entire Artist Book which he gave to me:

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Lorrie."

 

My collaborator of many years, the printmaker George O’Connell, who is also an amateur jazz musician and plays the vibes in local bands, loves this poem. He made a beautiful Xmas card of it in 1984 and, later on, an entire Artist Book which he gave to me.

As to turning Shakespearian sonnets into jazz poems, as Henderson says, one can even blend the sonnet with the blues; this following sequence, written by my anagram avatar “Wesli Court,” was included in another of my books — like The New Book of Forms published in 1986, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry. The first three poems are terza rima sonnets, but the third, “Envoi,” is the first example ever written, to the best of my knowledge, of a blues sonnet which is a quatorzain (any fourteen-line poem or stanza other than a true sonnet) consisting of four blues stanzas written in iambic pentameter meters plus a heroic couplet: AAa BBb CCc DDd ee.  As in all sonnets, there is a volta or turn toward the end of each poem, in this case after the last triplet:

 

THE BONEYARD BLUES

 

I.

I'm sitting in the boneyard singing songs,

Sitting singing songs as blue as blue —

Considering my days, their shorts and longs,

 

The days we spent together, me and you.

Yes, you and me and all those other folks

Who've come and gone.  Oh, please don't misconstrue

 

My meaning — yesterday is gone in strokes,

In strokes and chimes, and time cannot be turned,

I'm well aware; it plays its dirty jokes

 

And leaves us on our ashes, bare and burned.

We bare our hearts, and then we burn our spans,

But who's to say what lessons we have learned?

 

The ifs and maybes, shall-bes, will-bes, cans

Turn into bonedust, rusting pots and pans.

 

II.

Rusting pots and pans pile up and ring,

Pile up and ring us round with shards of loss,

With echoes of the songs we used to sing

 

In living rooms and bedrooms filled with moss,

With moss and lichen now of recollection.

The kitchen where we used to sit and toss

 

Together meals of love and of affection

Has grown a mold upon the oven grate,

And there is nothing left of our confection

 

Except a little sweeting on a plate,

The plate of dreams, its edges chipped and cracked.

In the beginning already it was too late —

 

The gun was loaded and the deck was stacked.

The tune could not provide what the lyrics lacked.

 

III.

And so I'm sitting in this boneyard, blue

As blue, and singing songs that leave me cold.

The words — they may be false, they may be true,

 

They may be new — more likely they are old,

As old as flesh and time.  I hear the knell

Of generations as the peals are rolled

 

Among the stones, within the stony well —

That stone-cold well of destiny gone dry.

Who is the sexton hauling on the bell?

 

Why is the deacon grinning at us?  Why?

Why are his cheekbones sunken, and his teeth

So moonlight-gleaming?  Wherefore is his eye

 

The hollow of a heartbeat underneath

The zero of a withered floral wreath?

 

Envoi

Just let me drop this note into the dark,

Yes, let me drop this note into the dark —

I'll light it with a match and watch it spark.

 

I'll sail it into night with fire and flare,

Fly it into darkness, see it flare

And wink out in those shadows circling there.

 

I'll watch it take its place among the stars,

Among the minor planets and the stars.

I'll hum the blues, not much — a couple bars —

 

Until the spark has died to inky ash,

And words have flickered into smoken ash.

Then I'll have me a sip of sour mash,

 

And lean against this marker made of stone

That will not last as long as ink or bone.

 

In 1 George O’Connell used my next blues sonnet, “The Birdsong Blues,” in one of the series of Xmas cards he and I had been producing for many years:

The following year O’Connell used another “Wesli Court” blues sonnet in a card; there is a reproduction of it on the web page of the Smithsonian Institution Archive of American Art:

 

         The bluesanelle is a combination of blues stanza and the 19-line villanelle. This is the schematic diagram:

 

A¹A²A³  

B¹B²A¹  

C¹C²A³ 

D¹D²A¹

E¹E²A³

ffA²A¹

 

THE SACKBUT IS A SLIDE TROMBONE

 

The sackbut is a slide trombone,

An old-time kind of slide trombone.

The bagpipes make a Scotsman groan.

 

He won’t admit it, though. He’ll claim

It’s not the drone at all; he’ll claim

The sackbut is a slide trombone,

 

But he’d much rather hear the skirl

Than listen to the trombones curl.

The bagpipes make a Scotsman groan,

 

They remind him of the stone of Scone,

He’ll claim – the good old stone of Scone:

The sackbut’s but a slide trombone,

 

A slightly thinner sound of brass,                            

An older-fashioned sound of brass.

The bagpipes make a Scotsman groan

 

And think of things like Finnan haddie,

The stuff he ate as a ragged laddie,

So the bagpipes make a Scotsman groan,

But the sackbut is a slide trombone.

 

Rhina P. Espaillat wrote,

Thanks for sending me this article on the blues! I love the blues, especially the three-line form on one rhyme. As it happens, I composed a blues version of John Greenleaf Whittier's "Forgiveness" recently, for an event honoring his memory, sponsored by the Whittier Home Association. It was fun to do, and to perform to music by a local guitarist. I'm attaching it just for the fun of it:

 

LETTING IT GO

 

I was always good to my friends, but they treated me bad.

I trusted my friends, but they treated me so bad

my heart felt sore and heavy, and I was mad.

 

So I turned my back on them all and walked away

one Sunday morning last summer, just walked away

without nobody, to the graveyard where dead folks lay.

 

Got to thinking there about love and about hate,

and how the folks we love and the folks we hate

go down to the same dark place, some early, some late.

 

How mean people, and those they’re mean to, end up the same;

They fold their hands on their chests and look just the same

when they inherit the earth they lie in, all meek and tame.

 

We go shambling across the grass into the grave,

go all together for good, to our one grave.

That thought washed over me then like a big wave,

 

a wave of pity for people. I trembled so—

yeah, trembled with pity for people who hurt me so—

I forgot I was mad, and forgave them, just let it go.

 

Rhina P. Espaillat, a blues version of “Forgiveness,” by

John Greenleaf Whittier:

 

FORGIVENESS

 

My heart was heavy, for its trust had been


Abused, its kindness answered with foul wrong;


So, turning gloomily from my fellowmen,


One summer Sabbath day I strolled among


The green mounds of the village burial place;


Where, pondering how all human love and hate


Find one sad level; and how, soon or  late,


Wronged and wrong-doer, each with meekened face,


And cold hands folded over a still heart,


Pass the green threshold of our common grave,


Whither all footsteps tend, whence none depart,


Awed for myself, and pitying my race,


Our common sorrow, like a mighty wave,


Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave!

 

John Greenleaf Whittier

(December 17, 1807 – September 7, 1892     

 

 

Hey, this form is The One.

Tell ya, this form is The One.

I been writing blueses since nineteen fifty one.

 

See "Old Stolen Car," below:

 

Your fan,

 

Clarinda Harriss

 

 

OLD STOLEN CAR

 

Honey, when you stole me

hot-wired and stole me

Did you plan to keep me?

Did you plan to part me out?

 

I'm an older model

but don't think that I came cheap.

Yeah, I'm an older model

but I wasn't ever cheap.

You know older models

have mighty high upkeep.

 

When you stole me

hot-wired and stole me

Did you plan to keep me?

Did you plan to part me out?

 

You know I'm big and roomy--

ain't nothing I can't haul.

Yeah, I'm big and soft and roomy--

there ain't nothing I can't haul.

And I can save you money

cause I run on alcohol.

 

Honey, when you stole me

hot-wired and stole me

Did you plan to keep me?

Did you plan to part me out?

 

You can sell my bumpers

You can sell my wheels

Yeah, take me onto Ebay

cause my parts are looking sweet.

But my engine won't turn over

for every guy I meet.

 

Baby, now I'm stolen--

hot-wired, rigged and stole--

Gotta keep me, baby,

I'm worth more to you whole.

 

Clarinda Harriss

 

Suggested Writing Exercise:

Write four or five (or more) blues stanzas, a bluesanelle, or a blues sonnet.

Related articles

What Is a Stanza?

Getting One's Wordsworth at Henley

 

GETTING ONE’S WORDSWORTH AT HENLEY

A tailgater bluesanelle

 

I wandered lonely as a cloud,

Sad, forsaken as a cloud.

My nose was bloodied but unbowed.

 

I had abrasions and a mouse,

A black eye bigger than a mouse.

I wandered lonely as a cloud

 

Over country lane and moor --

I looked like a demolished Moor;

My nose was bloodied but unbowed

 

Unlike my head, which was a mess:

Broken nose, a mouse: a mess --

I wandered lonely as a cloud,

 

Looking for a friendly mist,

The sympathy that I much missed.

My nose was bloodied but unbowed,

 

I have not winced or cried aloud

(Although I whimpered). I was proud,

Bewildered as a lonely cloud,

My nose still bleeding but unbowed. 

 

By Lewis Turco

reprinted from Mea' sure, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 2013

All Rights Reserved

 

Related articles

Bluesanelle of the Day: An Essay on Thinking

Daily Bluesanelle 4/25/13

Invictus By William Ernest Henley

I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud By William Wordsworth