Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.
The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com), ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."
The BLUESANELLE verse form is a combination of blues stanza and the villanelle. 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. The French VILLANELLE is a poem of five triplet stanzas and a concluding quatrain, but it turns on only two rhymes. Lines one and three of triplet one are refrains, the first of which reappears as lines six, twelve, and eighteen; the second reappears as lines nine, fifteen, and nineteen: A1çbA2 abA1 abA2 abA1 abA2abA1A2 or, sometimes, in reverse order: abA2 A1. Every line is the same metrical length.
The BLUESANELLE cannot turn on only two rhymes, but like the villanelle it is nineteen lines long and ends in a quatrain rather than a triplet. All lines of triplet one are rhymed A and are refrain lines; the superscripts indicate that, though lines 1 & 2 are the same, differing only incrementally, line 3 is totally different except for the rhyme. The succeeding triplets, like blues stanza, change rhymes for lines 1 & 2, which are refrains, but line three in each stanza, like the villanelle, alternates lines 1 & 3 of the first stanza. The poem ends in a quatrain rhyming either FFA2 A1 or FF A1A2. This is the diagram:
A1
A1
A2
B
B
A1
C
C
A2
D
D
A1
E
E
A2
F
F
A2 or A1
A1 or A2
This is the second poem ever written in the form called the “bluesanelle”:
CHEMOTHERAPY BLUESANELLE
A bloody sunrise seeps into the sky,
A flaming sunrise burns across the sky.
I'll drink my tea and whistle my good-bye.
I ought to hustle, hurry on my way.
Go on, then, scramble, hasten on your way—
A bloody sunrise seeps into the sky.
The clinic's waiting, and I have to go.
Your IV's hanging, so you'd better go.
I'll drink my tea and whistle my good-bye.
The nurse is kind, but will she find a vein?
And what if all this chemo is in vain?
A bloody sunrise seeps into the sky.
I take the cocktail, hoping it's a cure.
You watch the bag drip. Pray that it's a cure.
I'll drink my tea and whistle my good-bye.
Slow drip by measured drip, the day dissolves.
The IV bag grows thin. Your day dissolves.
I'll drink my tea and whistle my good-bye
As bloody sunset seeps into the sky.
Miriam N. Kotzin, 18 March 2013
A MILTONIC BLUESANELLE
On a tailgater and challenge by R. S. Gwynn who said, “Is there a Miltonelle in your future? I hope not!”
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:
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:
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.
The Virginia Quarterly Review "The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).
The Tower Journal Two short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.
The Tower Journal A story, "The Car," and two poems, "Fathers" and "Year by Year"
The Tower Journal Memoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.
The Michigan Quarterly Review This is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).
The Gawain Poet An essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.
The Black Death Bryan Bridges' interesting article on the villanelle and the terzanelle with "The Black Death" by Wesli Court as an example of the latter.
Seniority: Six Shakespearian Tailgaters This is a part of a series called "Gnomes" others of which have appeared in TRINACRIA and on the blog POETICS AND RUMINATIONS.
Reinventing the Wheel, Modern Poems in Classical Meters An essay with illustrations of poems written in classical meters together with a "Table of Meters" and "The Rules of Scansion" in the Summer 2009 issue of Trellis Magazine
Bluesanelle of the Day: An Essay on Thinking
AN ESSAY ON THINKING
Or, Putting Descartes before the Hearse.
By Lewis Turco
"I think; therefore, I am," I think.
I think I think I am, I think,
But I can wink out in a blink --
In fact, I think I have done so,
But if I have, how do I know
I think? Therefore, I am, I think,
Unable now to think I think
Because I am not now, I think,
For I have winked out in a blink.
I wish I had a mirror now
To see if I can wink somehow,
For that might prove that I can think
If I could see how I might wink
Myself awake in just a blink
To prove myself alive, I think.
I thought; therefore, I was, I guess,
Before I got into this mess
Of thinking to myself, I think,
Before I winked out in a blink.
Copyright © Lewis Turco 2013, all rights reserved.
July 02, 2013 in Blues, Bluesanelles, Commentary, Essays, Humor & Satire, Literature, Poems, Poetry, Verse forms | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: Essay on Thinking