Poetics and Ruminations

"The Poet's Bible"

 

 

 

       A. R. Ammons, Robert Huff, Lewis Turco, Richard Frost at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1961.

 

A BRIEF HISTORY OF "THE POET'S BIBLE"

        In the fall of 1959 I was a graduate student in the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, a member of the poetry workshop taught by Paul Engle and Donald Justice.  I had always been interested in the traditional forms of poetry — I was born a formalist, and I wanted a reference book that contained the whole range of them, but I'd never been able to find one other than those that contained merely the standard sorts of things: the sonnet, the villanelle, the haiku and tanka, the sestina — mainly the Medieval Italian and Provençal forms plus a few others.

       But what else was there?  Perhaps there weren't enough forms to fill a short book.  Then, one day while I was browsing through the bargain bin of Iowa Book and Supply on Clinton Street in Iowa City, I ran across a book of poems by Rolfe Humphries titled Green Armor on Green Ground.  Humphries had laid out "the twenty-four official meters" of the Medieval Welsh bards, and he had written a poem in each of these complicated syllabic forms.  I bought the volume, of course — I think I paid a quarter for it, or maybe a dollar — and I took it home.  After I'd looked it over a while I got to wondering whether, with such forms as these, I might not be able to gather enough material for a book, particularly if I filled it out with examples of poems written in the forms.  I asked Don Justice whether he thought such a volume would be useful.  He encouraged me, and I began working on the project.

       That period of time when I began putting together what would eventually become, first, The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics  (1968), then The New Book of Forms (1986), The Book of Forms, Third Edition (2000), and finally The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition (2011), which included “Odd and Invented Forms,” was not auspicious for such projects.  The so-called "Beat Generation" was in the process of consolidating its anti-intellectual stranglehold on a generation, and the self-righteous, self-indulgent decade of the 1960s loomed ahead. Heedlessly, I plunged forward.  Within two years I had a manuscript, a combined reference work/anthology that I titled Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms.  Between 1961 and 1968 I revised the manuscript over and over again, researching it, sending for books to Europe, rewriting whole sections, paging through volumes of contemporary poetry for examples of poems in the forms and adding them to the volume. 

       Whenever I submitted the manuscript to a publishing house I would argue that, although the book might not sell big, it would sell steadily and it would eventually help to create its own market, but I was always disregarded.  The verdict was ever the same: although it was a good book, there was no market for it.  In 1967, after many fruitless efforts to find a home for the volume, I deleted the poems in order to shorten the book and limit its reprint permissions costs so that a potential publisher might find it more attractive, for the examples I'd chosen were all by living poets. I added a bibliography of the missing poems so that people who were interested might search them out. 

       By a fluke — quite literally by accident, and after more frustrations — E. P. Dutton accepted The Book of Forms in its non-anthology format.  Then I discovered that Cyril I. Nelson, the Dutton paperbacks and poetry editor, would have been happy to have the poems as part of the manuscript.  I wanted the book published without further delay, however, and so it was, in 1968.  Although it did share a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review when it appeared, it was reviewed only once, by my colleague at S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego Prof. Frank Hulme, in the local newspaper, The Oswego Palladium-Times; nevertheless, it began to sell, strictly by word-of-mouth.

        For sixteen years it stayed in print; then, although it was still selling at a steady rate, as I had predicted that it would, in 1984 The Book of Forms was dropped by Dutton without notification or explanation — Tom Trusky of Boise State University phoned to tell me he couldn't get copies for his classes anymore.  When I checked with the publisher, I found it was true.  Some folks out there in the world of "organic poetry" and "free verse" had bought more than 25,000 copies of The Book of Forms during the period that it was in print, not counting the passing around, the college resales, even the photocopying that went on.  I used to think it was 'passing strange that such a crowd of people was using a book that was at crosscurrents with the tidal flow of the times.

       I never stopped working on The Book of Forms, even while it was going through its several printings which, I might note, I was never informed were going to take place.  I was never given the opportunity to correct a number of typographical errors I had missed in the proofreading, or to reword some of the descriptions — people were misreading them; consequently, I was seeing such phenomena as villanelles with varying line lengths appearing in the London Times Literary Supplement and many other places.

       The year following publication of The Book of Forms the State University of New York Office of Continuing Education asked me to write a correspondence course study guide, Creative Writing in Poetry, and I used as the basis for that text the material I had collected since The Book of Forms had appeared.  The study guide went into service in 1970; the text it called for in the correspondence course was, of course, The Book of Forms.  At S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego, where I was teaching, I simultaneously developed a television course along the lines of the correspondence course; it was called “The Nature of Poetry.”  The Program in Writing Arts, which I had founded in 1968 and that I directed at Oswego, began offering such basic writing courses in the genres of fiction, drama, and poetry as the foundation of the tiered system of the Writing Arts major we developed despite the misgivings of the English Department, for no one believed that the students of the period would enroll in such demanding courses.  But they did, and in considerable numbers; they still do. In fact, the Program is now a Department of Creative Writing.

       In 1971 David M. Ungerer, vice-president of the newly organized Prentice-Hall spin-off Reston Publishing Company, saw a copy of the study guide lying on a table in the office of the Dean of Continuing Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo.  He wrote to ask me to develop a college text-anthology based upon the S.U.N.Y. guide, and in 1973 Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing was published.  I conceived of it as containing everything about poetry not covered by The Book of Forms.  While Poetry: An Introduction was going through its own extra printings, I dreamed of combining it with The Book of Forms eventually, and that is in effect what happened in The New Book of Forms which was snapped up two years after the first edition had gone out of print, as soon as I submitted it to the University Press of New England, an academic boutique publisher that had begun as the Dartmouth College Press.

       On Friday the 27th of June 1987, three days after I sent the proofread page proofs and the completed indices of The New Book back to the publisher, I began to gather together all the manuscript versions of the four books to send to the special collections archives of the Homer Babbidge Library of my Alma Mater, the University of Connecticut.  I also intended to send the typescripts of the Dacey-Jauss anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, just published, which X. J. Kennedy and I had evaluated separately at the request of the publisher, Harper and Row, and the Miller Williams text-anthology Patterns of Poetry, to be published at the end of the summer of '86, which I had gone over at the request of its editor before it was finally accepted by the Louisiana State University Press.  In the course of this gathering I found the original 1961 manuscript of Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms, which I had caused to be bound in order to preserve it as it went its hopeless rounds of the publishers. 

       For the first time in I don't recall how many years I began to read the Introduction I'd written a quarter-century earlier.  I'm afraid I was both pleased and mortified to discover how long I'd been saying the same things.  Here is what I wrote in 1961, the year before I founded the Fenn College Poetry Center of Cleveland at what is now Cleveland State University:

       It used to be said that a sign of the poet is his mastery of the form; the sign of the poetaster is the form's mastery of him. However, one does not hear this very often nowadays.  Instead, when one comes into contact with a writer of verse one is likely to hear that it is not the poet who writes the poem, but the poem that writes itself: the poet is merely a medium through which some kind of cosmic vibrations get themselves transmitted to paper.  One line grows out of another "organically," that is, the first line is somehow inspired by the gods and from the mysterious poetic womb of this line there is born another line, and another, and another, until the poem has completed itself.  The poem is thus seen as a vital organism which exists and procreates naturally.

       This all sounds fine and esthetic, and of course it is tremendously romantic as well, which lends passion to the concept, if such a theory may be dignified by the term "concept."  But upon reflection, perhaps it seems a shallow and useless theory, for then of course poets may be born only, touched by providence with the divine gift of the Muses.

       The truth is, of course, that any good poem must have organic unity, but it is the poet who gives the poem unity, and it can be no other way.  Regardless of all sophistry to the contrary, without the poet there can be no poem; it is the poet who breathes life into the verse which is trying to be a poem; it is the poet who is the creator: he lives, and the poem cannot be born without him.  One line cannot follow another without a mind to link them and a hand to write them.  The poet, therefore, and no other, makes the poem, and the making is seldom easy.

       Take, for instance, the example of Dylan Thomas, who is the very prototype of the romantic bard to most young poets writing today. His verse is full of music; his lines rise and fall majestically, invoking allusion, rhetoric; giving insight and raising towering symbols which are at once primal and sophisticated.  He seems a veritable great wild stallion on the plains of poetry, master of herds of lesser steeds.  His poems must have poured forth spontaneously and grandly, for as he speaks it seems he is talking to the soul's ear.

       But Dylan Thomas often wrote in strict syllabics, always in strict patterns.  His symbols have assigned meanings.  His rhyme schemes are sometimes fantastic, but they are sequential.  Some of Dylan Thomas's poems have been through a hundred drafts.

       Is this how a poem makes itself?  If so, we are slaves to words, lesser organisms being used by literature, and not intelligent beings creating a literature to serve mankind.

       In the interest of sanity the author of The Book of Forms rejects utterly any theory of automatic writing.  In the beginning there may have been The Word, but since then there have been simply words, and if there is magic in them it is a studied magic which only talent, craft, imagination, intelligence and passion may invoke.

       No one, unfortunately, may give a person talent, imagination, intelligence or passion.  These are qualities the origins of which may be debated by the theologians and sociologists, not by me. The Book of Forms can help only with craft — but perhaps one ought not to have said "only," for a writer may have many things, but if he hasn't craft, he will never be a poet.

       A strong statement, and a precarious one.  For what is craft? Simply, craft is skill, as distinguished from talent, which is aptitude.  Skill in what?  Skill in language, including words and their meanings, rhythms, sounds; skill in handling ideas within the conventions of writing; skill in constructing forms that will enhance meaning.  Skill perhaps in saying ordinary things in an extraordinary way, or saying extraordinary things in an ordinary way.

       For all good poems are formal, though not all formal poems are good.  That is, all poems are organized in some way.  The organization may be around an idea, or a symbol, or a sound, or a rhythm, or an image or sequence of images, or any number of things, for each poem has its own locale and focus.  It is for the poet to decide what he is trying to do, and for the reader and time to corroborate or reject the poet's vision and statement.

       But how does one acquire craft?  It is not bestowed upon one, it is learned.  One way in which to learn it is to construct your own forms and, by trial and error, discover what may be done with them. Another way is to experiment with traditional forms and see what may be done with them.  Certainly, reading good poems and analyzing them is a third way, but the best way is to do all three.

       It is more than five decades since I wrote those words.  The Book of Forms has given way to The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition and to two spin-offs, The Book of Literary Terms (1999) and The Book of Dialogue (2004). During that period of time we have had the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountaineers, the Confessional Poets, the Deep Image Surrealists, The Movement — which included the anti-war, the civil rights, and the early consciousness-raising schools; we have had the subsequent Feminists and the Gay Poetry movement, the Plain-Talkers of the Northwest, Hispanic and Native American and Cowboy and Rap poetry movements, and, most recently, the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.  In criticism we have gone from the New Criticism to Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstructionism.  But at last the pendulum has swung back, as it was bound to do eventually.

       Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry was published in August 1986 — it differed from the Dacey-Jauss book in that it was more specifically focused upon the traditional structures of poetry, and it included work by poets ranging back to the Middle Ages. The New Book of Forms appeared in November; less than three years later, in the summer of 1989, it went into its third printing, with more than 10,000 copies in print.  The other Neoformalist books were doing well, too, according to their publishers.

       During the previous score of years before the pivotal year 1986, The Mississippi Review had been nearly alone in devoting a special issue to the subject of form in poetry: in 1977 it had published "The Problem of Form" — poets had been asked to submit a poem and then to write a short comment upon its composition and organization.  Contributors to that issue included Richard Eberhart, William Stafford, Vern Rutsala, X.J. Kennedy, and Richard Wilbur.  A decade later, in 1987, another formalist book following the same format was published, David Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms.  Contributors included John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Richard Kenney, Brad Leithauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Louis Simpson (who had been one of the three editors, including Robert Bly and Donald Hall, of the original showcase of the "Academic Poets," The New Poets of England and America, which had been the first shot fired in "the War of the Anthologies" in 1957), Mona Van Duyn, and Richard Wilbur — a real potpourri of both the older formalist poets and Neoformalists, plus many antiformalists, young and old. Now there are many books that pay attention to the formal concerns of verse-writing, and Neoformalism, or "The New Formalism," is no longer a "new" movement in American literature.

 

_______

Notes

Phillip Dacey and David Jauss, editors, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, New York: Harper and Row, 1986.

Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, editors, The New Poets of England and America [first selection], Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957.

——, and Robert Pack, editors, The New Poets of England and America, Second Selection, Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962.

Rolfe Humphries, Green Armor on Green Ground, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956.

David Lehman, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, New York: Macmillan, 1987.

"The Problem of Form," Mississippi Review, vi:1, 1977.

Lewis Turco, The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004.

——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968.

——, The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.

——, The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.

——, Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms, bound ms., Special Collections archives, Iowa City: University of Iowa, n.d.

——, Creative Writing in Poetry, Albany: State University of New York Office of Continuing Education, 1970.

——, The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.

——, Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing, 1973.

Miller Williams, editor, Patterns of Poetry, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.

Birthday of THE BOOK OF FORMS

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 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.

Companion volumes:

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

The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry by Lewis Turco, Hanover: University Press of New England, (www.UPNE.com), 2004. ISBN 1-584653-61-2, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Forms and The Book of Literary Terms.

Correspondence with a Nephew

CORRESPONDENCE WITH A NEPHEW

By Lewis and Steven Turco

 

Steven Turco wrote (on 11/07/09):

 

Dear Uncle Lew,

    I read La Famiglia¹ over the last week on my work trip to Denmark (coincidentally, I surmised from your book that I am approximately 1/8 Danish). I must say I was quite enlightened by the amount of detail it gave me about my family history, especially my grandparents and obviously you. I've often wondered how Grandpa Luigi from Sicily found his way to be a Baptist minister in the U.S. He had quite a life, rich with experience, and overwhelming passion for his beliefs. I'm glad he had the opportunity to see the birth of a grandson and, although I don't remember him, the time we spent together in that first year apparently brought him great joy; knowing that will always live within me.

    Grandma Turco was very special to me. Dad and I and in later years Scott too would visit her almost every Friday evening. She'd greet me with kisses all over my face and have a plate of spaghetti waiting on the table. After dinner she'd always do her favorite trick for me and take out her dentures and put them in a cup of water. Obviously as a young child that scared the hell out of me but fascinated me at the same time.

    Her house was a mysterious adventure land for me, especially the attic, and I loved to explore it every time I visited. The old rooms, books, clothes, knick knacks everywhere stimulated my imagination to a degree that I will never forget.

    And then there was the typewriter. I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth. I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time, which is how I still type today, although I'm pretty fast at it. What I never really thought about and what struck me when reading your book was that typewriter was probably the same one that Grandpa Luigi used to write his weekly sermons. Thinking back now, I remember how Grandma would love to see me at that typewriter. She'd bring me cookies and help me if I had a question but never interrupted me as I "banged out" another story. Maybe it was just the sound of the typewriter that brought a sense of familiarity back into her household and gave her peace in a time of loneliness in her life. I sure hope it did.

One of the things I've always regretted was not spending more time reading your books. I always thought it was the coolest thing as a child to see your name on a book or better yet go to the library and look up one of your books and show one of my friends. On many occasions I would open the book and begin to read but very quickly become lost and/or confused and eventually just put it down. The poems that were sent at Christmas always struck me as "dark" and "non-joyous."

    I've never regarded myself as a "reader," but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes, though I could never seem to connect with your books. After reading La Famiglia, though, I not only have a better understanding of my family, its roots and fascinating history (on both sides), but of you, your experiences and the many reasons why you write what you do.

    I learned a great deal from this book, not only of who we are as a family but the trials, tribulations and hope and inspirations that affected many in our past and present and, more important, how it will positively influence the generations to come. I am extremely pleased that this book is dedicated to the future of the Turco clan and especially to my boys, who are the joy of my life.

    I attempted to write a book like this utilizing my past experiences and recollections, as I used to have a photographic memory, it just never fully developed.

Steve Turco

 

Dear Steve,

    I'm puzzled by several things you say in your letter. One of them is, "I used to have a photographic memory...." How can you "used to have" one of those? Short of a stroke, I would think it would be impossible to lose such a thing. It's just the way one's mind works. You seem to use that as an excuse for not writing the memoirs you planned to write. My memory is far from "photographic," but I remember enough things from my past to write memoirs. I'm sure everybody does. Take a look again at the memoir in La Famiglia that was written by my cousin Ann Badach.² She was never a writer, and that's the first thing she's ever published. The stuff she remembers is amazing and compelling.

    You also say, " I've never regarded myself as a 'reader' but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes."  Isn't that the definition of a reader?

    You say, too, "I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth." So did I, but I never quit. I used to walk to school making up stories for my friends as we walked. How does one manage to lose interest in telling stories? It's baffling to me. What happened to you anyway? 

     "I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time...." So did I. The Navy taught me to touch-type, but when in high school I worked at the Meriden newspaper, most of the journalists used the hunt-and-peck method, just as you and I and your grandfather did.

    Finally, you write that the Xmas cards I sent every year "always struck me as 'dark' and 'non-joyous.'" Where did you get the idea that writers are supposed to write stuff that's "joyous"? The world is a dark place, Steven, and that's what I often write about. Just this past week: people gunned down at Fort Hood; the D.C. sniper executed; more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, etc., etc. Have you ever read Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," the most popular poem in English literature? T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," perhaps the greatest poem of the 20th century? Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Shelley's "Ozymandias," Poe's "The Raven," just to name a few exceedingly popular ones? Even the "joyous" poet Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "A Noiseless, Patient Spider." 

    I'm attaching a book review titled "Happy Days" that appeared in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday.

Love, Uncle Lew

 

HAPPY DAYS

By Hanna Rosin

(New York Times, November 5, 2009)

 

BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, By Barbara Ehrenreich, 235 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” 

Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.”

What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.

Ehrenreich is the author of several excellent books about class — “Nickel and Dimed” is the best known. In this book she also reaches for a conspiratorial, top-down explanation. “Positive thinking,” she maintains, is just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers. I don’t exactly buy this part of her argument, but the book doesn’t suffer much for the overreaching. I was so warmed by encountering a fellow crank that I forgave the agenda.

Ehrenreich’s inspiration for “Bright-Sided” came from her year of dealing with breast cancer. From her first waiting room experience in 2000 she was choking on pink ribbons and other “bits of cuteness and sentimentality” — teddy bears, goofy top-10 lists, cheesy poetry accented with pink roses. The sticky cheerfulness extended to support groups, where expressions of dread or outrage were treated as emotional blocks. “The appropriate attitude,” she quickly realized, was “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” The word “victim” was taboo. Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” while another survivor described the disease as “your connection to the divine.” As a test, Ehrenreich herself posted a message on a cancer support site under the title “Angry,” complaining about the effects of chemotherapy, “recalcitrant insurance companies” and “sappy pink ribbons.” “Suzy” wrote in to take issue with her “bad attitude” and warned that “it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Kitty” urged her to “run, not walk, to some counseling.”

The experience led her to seek out other arenas in American life where an insistence on positive thinking had taken its toll. One of the more interesting chapters concerns American business culture. Since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1936, motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” Corporate managers transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments and hunches.” Corporate America began to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling” and “deep listening” all now common staples of corporate retreats.

This mystical positivity seeped into the American megachurches, as celebrity pastors became motivational speakers in robes. In one of the great untold stories of American religion, the proto-Calvinist Christian right — with its emphasis on sin and self-discipline — has lately been replaced by a stitched-together faith known as “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God wants believers to be rich. In my favorite scene of the book, Ehrenreich pays a visit to Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, now the nation’s largest church. She arrives a week after a court has dismissed charges against Victoria, accused of assaulting a flight attendant who failed to deal promptly with a stain on her first-class airplane seat on the way to Vail. One would think, Ehrenreich suggests, that the largely working-class, multiracial crowd might sympathize with the working stiff on the plane who happened to be African-American. But no, Joel is shown dabbing his eyes on the video screen, and Victoria crows about the “banner of victory over my head” as the crowd cheers.

“Where is the Christianity in all of this?” Ehrenreich asks. “Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’ ” Ehrenreich is right, of course, in her theological critique. But she misses a chance to dig deeper. I have spent some time in prosperity churches, and as Milmon F. Harrison points out in “Righteous Riches,” his study of one such church, this brand of faith cannot be explained away as manipulation by greedy, thieving preachers. Millions of Americans — not just C.E.O.’s and megapastors but middle-class and even poor people — feel truly empowered by the notion that through the strength of their own minds alone they can change their circumstances. This may be delusional and infuriating. But it is also a kind of radical self-reliance that is deeply and unchangeably American.

Hanna Rosin is a co-editor of Slate’s women’s Web site, DoubleX, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.

Thanks for the response, Uncle Lew. The "photographic memory" line was just a jab at humor, a pun (not fully developed), I didn't mean it literally. I do read a fair amount of books so I guess I would be considered a reader, but my point was more that even if I do consider myself to be a reader I don't currently have the passion to make it more of a priority in my life. Maybe someday that will change, but for now I feel satisfied with the balance I choose between my home life, work life and how I fit my reading into both.

I never lost interest in telling stories, I love to tell stories, I just chose to do it verbally, it saves time.

The world is what it is. It's as bright as it is dark. For every horror story that happens on a daily basis there is a story of love and kindness as well. Life is short, I choose to focus on the things in this world that make me smile, laugh and bring me happiness. I know the ugliness is out there, but why would I want to bring that into my life? I've chosen early on in my life to be a decent person with a positive outlook. To do that I choose to surround myself with people, books, art, places that bring me "joy" rather than listening or reading about the depressing horrors of our society. Fortunately I've never had any severe hardships in my life that would turn me to the "dark" side like some of the authors you mentioned (Gray had an abusive father, Eliot had a nervous disorder) but if I did, I believe that it is still my nature to turn them into positive aspects (as Lance Armstrong did with his cancer) and continue to see the good in life. And although some of these authors that you mentioned may be highly regarded academic poets, they were certainly not people I would want to emulate my life after (Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to run off with a 16 year girl and Poe was an alcoholic drug user.)

 

    I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich 100%. There is a lot of "positive thinking" bullshit out there that can cloud peoples' minds and affect their judgment, especially in corporate America. I see it every day. I don't think that just because I have a "positive outlook" on life that good things are going to come to me, or I'm going to become wealthy or not get sick, those things are going to come to me because I work hard and take care of myself. I'm a realist, I always have been, but I see no reason why I can't be a realist with a positive attitude.

Love. 

Steve

 

Ah, Steve,

    Nobody ever asked you to be anything but "a decent person with a positive outlook." I've always known you to be that, and it's one of the reasons I'm so fond of you. You're a lot like your dad, who is the same sort of person. He's a very decent guy and I've always been very fond of him, too. But I don't understand why you would condemn people like Gray and Poe and whoever for being who they are and writing out of their experience and their humanity. I've always thought I am a decent person too, who likes to surround himself with art, music, and all the things you mention, as well. That doesn't prevent me from seeing that the "balance" you mention doesn't seem to me to be a balance unless I'm able to observe and write about the rest of life. I can sing a happy song, but I can also sing a sad song, and the only thing I demand of any song is that it tell me the truth and be beautiful.

    Case in point: One of my colleagues at Oswego was a German Jewish economist named Richard Heiss. He was married to another native German called Jo Heiss. He came to SUNY Oswego in 1961, four years before I arrived, and he was active in the Oswego Opera Society for which Jean and I sang in the chorus most years. Jo was a ceramicist and a member of the Oswego Art Society like my Xmas card partner George O'Connor. While we were in Oswego last month I thought about them, wondered if they were still alive at ages 89 and 87 respectively. I thought about them while we were on our daily walk in Breitbeck Park at the bottom of the hill where we live on West 8th Street because we used to run into Dick and Jo sometimes when they walked there as well.

    On Monday last, while we were driving back to Dresden, Dick and Jo Heiss each took massive amounts of prescription narcotics, but before she died Dick shot Jo in the back of the head with a pistol. People found their bodies a couple of days later. The police determined that no third party was involved. Dick and Jo were also decent people, usually with positive outlooks. They did volunteer work and had many friends, but they had no children, no other known family in the U. S. Why would a good old couple die by murder-suicide at a great age? They must have hurt a great deal — why else would they have so many narcotics on hand? — and it was known that they were ill.

    Here's the question: What should I think about them? Should I dismiss them for their unforgivable actions? Maybe they were somehow psychically injured by having grown up in Nazi Germany. Maybe a husband should never be forgiven for killing his wife, no matter what the reason. But I understand how Dick and Jo could have done this to themselves (they injured no one else), because I'm getting old, too. Should I reject the idea of writing a poem for them? Because that's been revolving in my mind for a couple of days now as I read the developing story on-line in the Oswego Palladium-Times and hear from other colleagues via e-mail. Or should I just dismiss them from my memory as being unworthy subjects for an elegy? Because if I write it and do it well, I will show the few people who read it how human Dick and Jo Heiss were, and how sad their passing is.

Lew

 

Uncle Lew,

    I guess it comes down to what "balance" means in each individual's life.  For me, I tend to balance out the good stuff with the great stuff and shield out the bad stuff. You take it all in and go from there. I guess that's what makes the world what it is.

    Sorry to hear about your friends. I'm sure whatever you write will be honest and lasting.

Steve

_____

¹La Famiglia: The Family, Memoirs, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: www.BordigheraPress.org, VIA Folios 57, 2009, 196 pp., ISBN 978-1-59954-006-1, trade paperback.

²Ibid., “A Letter to My Cousin,” by Ann Badach, pp 185-189.

 

The Sonnetarium

This book is now available from any bookseller

 

BODY PART 

(Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "Body Part.")

 

I offer you the same old gift again:

This ancient shriveled organ of my flesh

That we have used since who remembers when?

 

It’s shoddy now, but it was strong and fresh

When we were young. You held it in your hand

And felt its pulse when we had seed to thresh.

 

It throbbed for you and needed no command

To flame and ache when it was called upon

To do its duty, dilate and expand

 

To fill the evening or the breaking dawn,

The morn or afternoon with the lover’s art…,

So many years have passed now and have gone

 

To seed, so many organs have come apart --

Still, I offer you this same old heart.

 

By Lewis Turco

 

From The Sonnetarium, by Lewis Turco, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 130, 2018. ISBN 978-1-59954-126-6, trade paperback. Available from any bookseller, on-line or off.

What's in a Name?

 

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

 

By Lewis Turco

 

 I. IL TURCO IN TRINACRIA

 

In August of 1961 I was a Poetry Fellow at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Middlebury, Vermont, which was directed then by the late John Ciardi. The Conference is held annually in the hills above Middlebury College, on its own summer campus where I was walking one day when I was approached by a woman named Elizabeth Guarnaccia. She introduced herself as one of the two curators at the Harry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury.

Ms. Guarnaccia asked if I were Lewis Turco, and when I replied that I was, she asked me if I knew the derivation of my last name. I said, “Yes, I do.”

“What is it,” she asked, smiling.

For as long as I can remember I have known that my last name in Italian means what it says: “Turk,” and that’s what my friends have always called me. It dates, I understand, from the period of Arab rule of “Trinacria,” the ancient name for Sicily, from the ninth to the tenth centuries CE. It is not an uncommon name in Sicily where my father was born and raised, and where he was recruited to be a participant in the Turco-Italian War, fought between the Ottoman Empire and the Kingdom of Italy from September 29, 1911, to October 18, 1912.

I didn’t go into that much detail with Ms. Guarnaccia, of course, but she nodded in agreement with what I had replied, said I was correct, and went on her way. Many years later I would discover a great deal more about my family name including the fact that there was no such country as “Turkey” until the thirteenth century; therefore, the word means simply “Arab” or “Moor,” not someone from a particular place. According to Halbert’s, a Turco family coat of arms can be found in Rietstap Armorial General,¹ and the shield is described as “Silver with a Turk, facing front, dressed in a blue tunic and red pantaloons; wearing a red turban on his head, holding in his right hand a silver scroll, and in his left hand a silver scimitar trimmed gold.” People with my background were members of the Syrian cavalry in classical times.

In the mid-nineteen-forties, when I was a fifth or sixth-grader living on North Third Street in Meriden, Connecticut, I was enthusiastic about prehistory, as I have been ever since.  One day I walked down to Ciotti's sundries store a couple of blocks away, on West Main Street, and I purchased a pamphlet about cavemen.  As usual, I walked back home with my nose buried in the booklet, and soon I was standing in front of the house where we rented a flat, showing it to Bob Strauss, my friend from across the street, who looked over my shoulder as I turned the pages.  Shortly we came across the drawing of a Neanderthal, the species of early man that disappeared after the advent of Cro-Magnon, the first version of our species, Homo Sapiens. The drawing was a reconstruction of what Neanderthal man must have looked like with his strong-featured face displaying its heavily-ridged brow, a bit like the brow-ridge I have myself and that I have observed on others.

As Bob and I stood before my two-storied home reading, we happened to glance at my upstairs neighbor, old Mr. Longo, who was leaning over the second-floor porch railing.  To say we were startled is to understate, for the picture in my book could have been a photograph of our neighbor.  Bob and I stood comparing the man with his likeness for several minutes. There was no doubt about it -- the man and the reconstruction were practically identical. From that moment I felt certain I knew what had happened to Neanderthal man: he had not been exterminated by Cro-Magnon, he had been absorbed into the general population of our ancestors. But who were the Cro-Magnon men and women?  What had happened to their contemporaries, the brutish-looking, yet intelligent race called Neanderthal man that in fact had brains that were slightly larger than ours? 

For decades paleoanthropologists and other sorts of scientists had been denying that our direct ancestors, the Cro-Magnons, and the Neanderthals had ever interbred. In July of 1993 there was an essay in The New York Times Book Review² that discussed three new books on the subject: Did Cro-Magnon destroy Neanderthal, or did he die out naturally, cataclysmically, because of some inherent flaw in his constitution? Over the years I had grudgingly grown more and more persuaded that these unbelievers were correct and I was wrong. However, over this interval, human DNA was studied, isolated, and sequenced; finally, in the May 2010 issue of Science,³ Green et al. reported that a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome composed of over 3 billion nucleotides from three individuals had been compared with the genomes of five modern humans. A companion paper by Burbano et al. described a method for sequencing target regions of Neanderthal DNA. A News Focus podcast segment and special online presentation featuring video commentary, text, and a timeline of Neanderthal-related discoveries provided additional context for their findings. Neanderthal man had not entirely died out, for two to four percent of his genome continues to exist in European and Asian human beings, though not in those Africans who never left the continent.

Hence, it turns out that a sixth-grader living in Meriden, Connecticut, in 1946, judging from the picture projected from partial skeletons of a Neanderthal in a popular pamphlet and from the heavy ridge that boy himself had on his brow, turned out to be correct and the academic Homo-Sapiens living in the interim between then and 2010, turned out to be wrong.

This interbreeding did not, however, take place as I and others assumed, for the two races did not meet in Europe and simply combine. Rather, Neanderthal, who had left Africa first and spread into Europe, apparently was driven back into the Middle East by an ice age, and it was there that the two species interacted, living in the same caves at different times, perhaps, but in the same geographical locations simultaneously. This must have been the case because Neanderthal's genes in Homo Sapiens are found not only throughout Europe, but throughout Asia as well, where the Middle Eastern modern humans spread, but it is not found in African strains of our race, in peoples who never left the African continent in ancient times and thus never lived in the Middle East. 

II. THE MAN HUNTERS

Was there a historical Garden of Eden?  Were there two people named Adam and Eve?  Did Genesis take place?  Was there an actual Exodus?  Whether or not mankind is able to answer these questions with any degree of certainty or faith, we know logically that there had to be a first human being somewhere in the dim past; there had to be the First Mother (now called “genetic Eve”) and the First Father (“genetic Adam”) of the race, and they existed in an environment that was conducive to their survival…or two environments, rather, because they lived at different times and in different places, but it was their DNA (YDNA in the case of the male, and mitochondrial MTDNA in the case of the female) that survived and spread throughout the living species of Homo Sapiens.

I have remained interested in the subject of mankind's origins all my life since my friend Bob Strauss and I identified old Mr. Longo as a contemporary avatar of Neanderthal Man.  We know that the race of Mankind spread across the globe from some point of origin in Africa; therefore, we can invent stories, like the book of Genesis or the epic of Gilgamesh, to explain our beginnings, and in those stories, though they be fiction — "lies," if you like — there will be a core of fact, and they will be lies in the service of truth. 

Many things fascinate me, but the idea of evolution fascinates me to the point of awe. One of the reasons I could not become the minister my pastor father wanted me to become is that I could not believe in a Creator, no matter how hard I tried. It didn’t seem reasonable to me that a creature so great and complicated could have existed a priori and have invented the cosmos because all that does is beg the question, “Who (or What) created the Creator?” It is easier for me to believe that the cosmos forever existed, exists now, and will forever exist (I will not at this point consider the so-called Big Bang theory) than it is to postulate an omnipotent Creator. He would have had to create Himself. That, in fact, may be what the Cosmos is doing: evolving the Godhead, for with the aid of science we can at least experience through our senses elements of the cosmos.

If evolution is inventing a godlike creature, and if one of the avatars of that creature is mankind, then at some point in the history of that evolution one of the predecessors of mankind must have given birth to the first true human being. What would that have been like? One of the things I enjoy is reading scientific books, especially anthropological works: I consider that Loren Eiseley’s book The Firmament of Time is one of the great works of literature of the twentieth century, and another great writer of anthropology was Margaret Mead. Sometimes in my reading I come up against a passage that arrests my eyes and causes my mind to begin to spin a fable. Such a passage was this portion of a sentence by Mead: "...world of the first rose, and the first lark's song."

What must it have been like for the first truly human being at dawn one day to awaken from her sleep, to look out on the savannah, and to realize that she was conscious of herself and of her plight and glory? To know, beyond all doubt, that she knew?

 

DAWN SONG

I am the first to know dawn for the dawn —

it breaks across my mind as across the eyes

of the beast I was, of the beasts from whom I come,

and the swift sun slows, and I know it for the sun

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see the sharp sun dawn,

breaking across my terror and my surprise;

to know that I am the beast who knows his name:

Beast of the Sun, beast of the spinning sun

of the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I am the first to see stone for a stone,

to heft it in my hand, to feel its weight

and know what it may do to the brittle bone

of the beasts of the sun, in the morning of the sun,

in the world of the first rose, and the first lark's song.

I see, and my sight is hard, hard as the stone

held in my hand, and this stone will be my fate.

The beast is my brother — beast is his only name.

He is the child of dust.  I am stone's son,

born of the first rose and the first lark's song.

 

If anthropologists could be good, clear-thinking scientists who also knew how to write, how to communicate their thoughts to readers and strike awe into their minds, they could also, unfortunately, be romantics who, if one thought about what they said, convey to readers ideas that fall apart under scrutiny, like Bryant’s “Thanatopsis.”

As a reader of science fiction when I was young — what is called “speculative fiction” these days, I guess, and of fantasy — “magical reality” now, I soon understood the difference between the two, between, let’s say, the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and the beautiful, impossible worlds of Ray Bradbury. I enjoyed the one for its projections of a possible reality, and the other for its imaginary evocations of primal hopes, joys, fears, and sorrows. Therefore, when I run across a scientist who confuses the two, as the anthropologist Robert Ardrey did in the passage I quote below, I feel constrained to comment on that confusion. How close have we come to populating the stars? So I once again put words into the mouth of a skull, as I did with “Dawn Song”:

 

THE MAN HUNTER

"But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides.  And so what shall we wonder at?...The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen.  We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses." — Robert Ardrey

When I saw, spinning webs of sense and dust,

the heart-shaped spider of the womb's demands,

I raised myself upright upon the crust

of earth and issued it my first commands:

"Give me what I may take before the glass

of time is empty as a brain's white bowl

where slugs drink, where the mosses gorge and green."

I walked out of the forest, across the grass —

it withered underneath my callous sole,

for I could not forget what I had seen.

I saw the scarab in the turning earth

spinning murders from its golden shell;

I saw the rooting beast probing death,

but death must root if it would hope to dwell.

Therefore, I walked the trench of lambs and ewes

with winter's humour snowing in my bones,

and in my web of veins the scratching, dumb

dry tongue of the beast feeding on my dews.

Then, when at last I lay down in these stones,

I knew that more of us would one day come.

And you have come to find yourself in me

here where I lie, a skull transformed to stone.

My sightless eyes look out at you and see

that under the eons we are still alone —

but we are billions now who were a few

to forsake the forest and face time with a rock,

a naked rock held in a naked hand.

We face the ages still, and we bestrew

this cairn of stars with the remnants of our stock:

a jawbone here and there wearing to sand.

 

Perhaps one day, many centuries from today, mankind will indeed get off the planet, a bit farther off it than Luna, and take with him the myths born of Earth. When I was young I thought that might begin to happen in my own lifetime.

 

FATHERS:

 

First Father

I see him standing on the empty plain

As dawn begins to break across his eyes.

He is alone, this first of all my fathers,

But he can sense his scions and his daughters

Following down the looming centuries,

For time has started weaving through his brain,

And he can think. He understands at last

What must become, and what’s become his past.

And here I stand upon this farthest link

Staring down the line of molecules

Twisted in a spiral arc. I gaze

The other way to where the whirling haze

Rises over dark and depthless pools

And wonder what the final man must think.

 

Fathers of the Tribe

 

His sons and grandsons travel with the tribe

As it drifts out of the immense savannah

Following the herds, but searching for

Something else as well. They must explore,

Apparently. For Eden? For Nirvana?

Their leaders are unable to describe

What they are seeking past these eastern sands,

Moving always northward to colder lands.

What have we found beyond those roaming droves

That led us into canyons made of glass?

Where do we go from here? How shall we feed

The starving myriads whose simplest need

No longer can be met on Earth? En masse

We need again a miracle of loaves.

 

The Final Father

 

And as they stop, wherever they may move,

Each scion takes his mate who bears his seed,

The generations of First Father’s loins.

Time spends these children like so many coins

Minted from the soil. The Earth has need

Of purses full of these. The parents rove

Into the mystery to make it known,

To turn the strangest climes into their own.

Now we are everywhere. The human race

Has filled the niches that the world provided.

What’s left is Easter Island duplicated

On a massive scale. We are checkmated

By ourselves; we are the tribe divided

Staring hopelessly to outer space.

 

III. THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT

In 2006 I participated in the National Geographic Human Genome Project⁴ and discovered that my blood confirms what my name asserts: I am paternally a Turk through and through! Males are traced genetically through the Y-DNA marker which is passed down unchanged from father to son over generations; women are traced through their mothers’ mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter, also unchanged. Of course every now and then, at great intervals, both Y-DNA and mitochondrial DNA do take on characteristics that differentiate them from other evolutionary lines, and these mutated lines can be traced.

So far as can be discerned with the data currently at hand, it turns out that my father’s branch of the Turco family is part of a group of people about which little is known. My Y-chromosome results identify us as members of haplogroup G, “a lineage defined,” my National Geographic report stated, “by a genetic marker called M201” which had its origin some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y-chromosome marker called M168.

According to Spencer Wells⁵ there was a single male who lived perhaps 75,000-100,000 years ago whose mutated Y-chromosome is carried by every male currently alive. Although scientists call this person “Genetic Adam,” or “Eurasian Adam,” in fact he was not likely the first fully human male, but none of the other males alive at the time have passed down to posterity their particular genetic markers. Adam’s line is the only one to have survived and proliferated.

A descendant of Adam identified by a mutation called “M94” was an inhabitant of the East African savannahs 75,000 years ago, and it was he who was the progenitor of most modern males because he was the founder of all haplogroups from B through R (haplogroup A did not leave Africa in ancient times). A later mutation on this male line called “M168” 60,000 years in the past is believed to have lived in an area that includes what is now Ethiopia in Africa, and he is the founder of haplogroups C through R.

To the north of Africa, according to  Spencer Wells, an ice age was developing and drying up Africa’s ecology to the extent that at least two groups that were descended from M168 migrated from Africa. The first group left around 60,000 years ago, and they are believed to have gone east following the southern coast of Asia populating southeast Asia, Australia, southern China, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. A few appear to have been reunited with their by-then-distant kinsmen in North America about 10,000 years ago. A second wave of M168 emigrants from Africa traveled to the east and the north from the area of what is now the Sahara through Egypt and the Middle East.

A mutant marker on the M168 line called “M89” inhabited what became Mesopotamia or “Erech,” now Iraq, perhaps 45,000 years ago. As the founder of haplogroup F, this male was the ancestor of all the members of haplogroups G through R which include almost all Middle Eastern, European, Asian, and native American males. Several groups of M89 males traveled in various directions to a variety of places, but the founder of haplogroup G appears to have lived around 30,000 years ago in the area of the Indus Valley in what is now northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Up to around 10,000 years ago the members of haplogroups G through J were hunter-gatherers, but those people who lived in what is known now as the “Fertile Crescent” developed agriculture, and “settled civilization” became possible — not only possible, but established, and disseminated far and wide. Populations expanded, farming and farmers followed the pioneers along the shores and through the islands of the Mediterranean, into the lands now called Turkey, the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Indo-European language and its offshoots were soon to be found in northern India — including the Indus Valley — the Middle East, and Europe.

The Indus Valley civilization was the largest of the four great early civilizations including Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, South Asia, and China, but it is the one that is least known and understood because, unlikely as it may seem, it was discovered only in the 1920’s! How it was possible for modern mankind to live unwittingly among the ruins of this Indus civilization in one of the most populous regions of the Earth is confounding, but so they did, and still do. Archaeological researches are in their infancy there, and very little is known of the early tongues of the Indus because few language-bearing artifacts, most of them square stone seals with indecipherable symbols and animal motifs, have been found. So far, for lack of a Rosetta Stone, none of those scripts can be read, but we can recognize the animals, in particular the mythical unicorn, the bull, the rhinoceros, and the elephant. However, some of the major Indus cities have been identified and explored to a certain degree.

The first, Harappa, discovered in the western part of South Asia during the early 19^th century, flourished from about 2600 to 1700 BCE. Its inhabitants built with bricks of the same size as were found in other Indus cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira.  Harappa had well laid-out wide streets, public and private water supplies and distribution-drainage systems. Remnants of this Indus civilization exist in the south from the former Bombay in India to the Himalayas and Afghanistan in the north, and in the east from beyond New Delhi in Uttar Pradesh to Baluchistan, Pakistan, in the west, adjacent to the border of Iran.

Since there is evidence that trade existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, some of those members of haplogroup G living in its western portion must have gravitated toward the major centers of the Middle East. The westernmost Harappan site is Sutkagen Dor, located on the border of Pakistan and Iran on what once was, apparently, a navigable inlet of the Sea of Arabia and thus part of the trade route to Mesopotamia — in particular the fishing trade — between 3500 and 1700 BCE. This is the route, or one similar to it, that the early Turcos must have taken on their way to Sicily.

Looking at a map of the world one notes that a straight line drawn between the Indus River and a spot just below Sicily in what is now Tunisia, the ancient site of Carthage (not that our forebears followed anything like a straight line) crosses Iran (once Persia), Iraq (once Mesopotamia), Arabia, Jordan / Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Other modern countries in the area between the Indus and Tunisia are Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Israel / Palestine.

Family Tree DNA is the name of the Internet organization that administers the DNA results of those people who have been tested and agreed to have their results publicly posted. Subgroups of FTDNA include organizations that follow individual haplogroups, including the Haplogroup G web group. There are other specialty groups including the Turk Name group, and the Sicily Project, to all three of which I belong. Peter Christy, administrator of the Haplogroup G organization, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Our haplogroup is seeking members from the Middle East and adjacent areas, but with little success. There are a number of ‘high profile’ members of the Saudi royal family, as well as a claimant to the throne of Iraq, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, that are members of Haplogroup G. Perhaps by your efforts to publicize our haplogroup in Saudi Aramco World, [to the editors of which I wrote a letter on October 25, 2006, to which I had not had no response] readers familiar with that part of the world may come to realize that they are a significant source of additional members.

“We have been attempting to contact those who have already been tested, but with little success. Bill Van Hemert has been using modal matching to profiles of known members of our haplogroup to find candidates who are registered at Ysearch. As you might expect, few of our emails even get through to the intended recipients and even fewer respond. All we have is some tantalizing clues left by a long list of potential Haplogroup G members with names that start ‘Al-‘ e.g., Al-Blais, Al-Bukhary, Al-Khalili, Al-Kureishi, Al-Qureshi, Al-Rikabi, Al-Ruwaili, Al-Sada, Al-Saman, Al-Shaibani, Al-Suwaidi and Al-Wazzan!”

The history of the swift spread of Islam is amazing. Muhammad was born in the Arabian city of Mecca circa 570 CE. Around 610 he experienced a revelatory vision, began to write what became the Koran, and in 613 he began to preach publicly. He left Mecca and settled in Medina in 622, and he died in 632 CE. Only sixty-five years later Islamic Arabs, many of them Moors — a mixture of Arabs and Berbers — lived in North Africa and occupied what was left of Carthage which had been destroyed in classical times and was again destroyed in 698. Today it is a wealthy suburb of Tunis.

In the ninth century CE, around 820, the Tunisian Arabs began to set up trading posts in Sicily. Incredibly, they were soon invited by Euphemius, a Byzantine general, to invade the island, and on June 13, 827, they did so from the town of Sousse, 120 km south of Carthage, with ten thousand infantry and seven hundred cavalry. According to Sandra Benjamin, “Although the invaders originated in many parts of the Muslim empire (including Spain), most of the men were Berbers (from the North African coast) and Arabs (from farther east).” Seventy-five years later, on August 1, 902, the Arabs captured Tauromenium, the Byzantine capital and the last unconquered Sicilian city. All the inhabitants were slain and the city burned to the ground.⁵

Surnames began to be used only about 1000 years ago, so the surname “Turco” dates from about 1000 CE, the eleventh century or 100 years after the Arab conquest of Sicily, that is to say about the same time as the Norman conquest of both England and Sicily. Sicily was the earlier to be conquered, by the brothers Hauteville, Robert the elder and Roger the younger who did most of the fighting, conquering Massena in 1061.

The Hautevilles’ success is said to have inspired both the envy and ambition of their countryman William the Conqueror who invaded and subjugated England in 1066. Although he never ruled there, he pretended to the kingship of Sicily as well. It was William who ordered the Domesday Book of England to be written in 1086, and it was in this statistical survey that surnames were first assigned to every family. Something similar during this period was occurring throughout Europe, including Sicily.

Michael Maddi who administers the FTDNA Sicily Project, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Have you noticed that out of 81 yDNA results in the Sicily Project, 10 are in the G haplogroup? That’s about 12%. This has been the biggest surprise to me so far in our Sicily Project results. My guess, based on my previous reading, was that we would have maybe 5%.

“I have always wondered what the Arab contribution is to Sicily’s genetic pool. It’s hard to figure out how many people of Arab ancestry remained in Sicily after the crackdown by Frederick II on Muslims about 1230. (Frederick actually had good relations with Muslim rulers and spoke Arabic and appreciated the scientific knowledge promoted by Muslim scholars. It was the Vatican which demanded that he expel Muslims from Sicily.) One book I read recently [see Benjamin, op. cit..} said that 1/3 of Sicily’s population was ethnically Arab when the Normans defeated the Muslim rulers around 1075. The town where my paternal grandparents were born, Mezzojuso, was founded by the Muslim rulers in the 10^th century. It remained a majority Muslim town until about 1220, when Muslim rebellions in western Sicily and the subsequent crackdown led to many Muslims fleeing their towns for mountain refuges.

“I think our [haplogroup] G results, if they continue to stay above 10%, indicate that there is significant Arab deep ancestry in Sicilians and Sicilian-Americans.”

The branch of the Turco family to which I belong has long resided in Riesi, a village in south-central Sicily. The closest city of any size is Licata, on the south coast. Although I know for a fact that a number of my relatives still live in the area, at the end of 2006 I was the only person worldwide with the surname Turco who has been identified through DNA analysis as belonging to haplogroup G2. (My son and my brother and his sons may be presumed to be members in this country.)

 

 

IV. GILGAMESH AND ENKIDU

Those who are interested in such things as epics are likely to know that The Epic of Gilgamesh “is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script,” the Academy for Ancient Texts avers on its Web page. “It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk [Erech, modern Iraq] (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).”  In fact, however, it is an amalgamation of two stories, the older having to do with the adventures of a most likely mythological person named “Enkidu,” and the second about an ancient King of Erech.

Over the course of no one knows how many centuries, the two tales of Enkidu and Gilgamesh became intertwined and it is in this form that Gilgamesh has come down to us in various versions and languages.  In order to blend the earlier tale of Enkidu with the later doings of Gilgamesh, apparently in order to ascribe to the latter many of the feats of the former, the pair came to be seen as in some essential ways twins, even to the point where they look alike, for the King is a bit taller, it seems, and his close companion Enkidu shorter and broader.

What I have attempted to do The Hero Enkidu¹⁰ is to cut away from the Gilgamesh epic those actions and events that can quite clearly be ascribed to the older Enkidu and to write his own tale in the manner of the author of the anonymous Medieval epic titled Gawain and the Green Knight, that is to say, in cantos of the strong-stress metric line called Anglo-Saxon prosody with appended five-line accentual-syllabic metrical tails called “bobs-and-wheels.”

I do not claim to have restored the Enkidu epic, nor am I writing history: I am still writing fiction, like the original author(s), and I could not absolutely separate Gilgamesh and his companion.  What I do claim is that I have given back to Enkidu what pretty clearly is his tale, and I hope I have written it in a comprehensible and interesting way for modern audiences.

 

___

^1”Turco Coat of Arms, Historiography,” Bath, Ohio: Halberts, n.d.

²The New York Times Book Review, Sunday, July 4, 1993.

³Science. May 2010 issue.

⁴National Geographic Human Genome Project, on-line at www.NationalGeographic.com.

⁵Spencer Wells, The Journey of Man—A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2004.

⁶Indus River Valley civilization, etc., on-line at www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html

⁷Sandra Benjamin, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.

⁸Morris Jastrow Jr., and Albert T. Clay, An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, etc., New Haven: Yale, 1920.

⁹Robert Lebling, “Monsters from Mesopotamia,” Saudi Aramco World, Vol. 63, No. 4, July-August 2012.

¹⁰Lewis Turco, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 107, 2015.

The Sonnetarium

 

THE XMAS BLUES

 

It’s Christmas Eve down at the Cabaret.

The combo’s swinging at the Cabaret—

Some of the dancers are in disarray.

 

We’re waiting for Santa to come jiving by,

Jiving along as he comes juking by,

Ringing his bells and flying kind of high.

 

Jerry whacks the keys, George bops the vibes,

Hugh hoots his horn while George raps on the vibes

And here and there a customer imbibes

 

A cup of nog or a glass of scuppernong,

A mug of yuletide cheer or some scuppernong To help

him listen to the Turk’s torchsong.

 

The band is wailing and Santa’s overdue.

He’s sporting red, but he’ll be swinging blue.

 

The Sonnetarium (Via Folios)

Mar 13, 2018

by Lewis Turco

Paperback

$12.00^$ 12 ⁰⁰ Prime

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The Heart is Improvisational

 

The Heart is Improvisational

Edited by Carol Lipszyc

Poets attribute an array of roles and capacities to the involuntary muscle. The heart becomes a repository of erotic and familial love, and a sanctuary for memory. The poets explore the flux of the heart’s responses and instigations: the heart’s tender overtures, its joyous pulse, its mating call for the other, its changeable temperament, its final tick in freeze-frame. Among the poets featured: Kenneth Sherman, Lorna Crozier, Marilyn Bowering, Roo Borson, Patrick Lane, Charles Bukowski, Eugénio de Andrade, John Barton, Robyn Sarah, Mary di Michele and Lewis Turco:

 

BODY PART 

 

I offer you the same old gift again: 

This ancient shriveled organ of my flesh 

That we have used since who remembers when? 

 

It’s shoddy now, but it was strong and fresh 

When we were young. You held it in your hand 

And felt its pulse when we had seed to thresh. 

 

 It throbbed for you and needed no command 

To flame and ache when it was called upon 

To do its duty, dilate and expand 

 

To fill the evening or the breaking dawn, 

The morn or afternoon with the lover’s art…, 

So many years have passed now and have gone 

 

To seed, so many organs have come apart -- 

Still, I offer you this same old heart.

 

— Lewis Turco

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John Ashbery

 

R.I.P. JOHN ASHBERY

July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017

 

He spins like a kaleidoscope

From word to word and trope to trope

Until his language honeycomb

Is wholly limned in polychrome.*

 

         Born in Rochester, New York, in 1927, John Ashbery was never an academic. He took his B.  A. from Harvard in 1949 and two years later an M.  A.  from Columbia University where he studied French literature. He did postgraduate work briefly at New York University 1957-58, worked in publishing, then went to France from  1960-65 as an art critic for the Paris edition of the New York Herald-Tribune and Art News, of which he subsequently became an editor.  He returned to New York City in 1965.

         Ashbery's first collection, Turandot and Other Poems, was published by the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in 1953; despite this previous publication, he won the first book award of the Yale Series of Younger Poets for his Some Trees in 1956. The judge was W. H. Auden who chose the collection over that of Ashbery's friend, Frank O'Hara. Subsequent books were The Poems (1960), The Tennis Court Oath (1962), Rivers and Mountains (1966),  Selected Poems, published in London in 1967,  The Double Dream of Spring (1970), Three  Poems (1972), The Vermont  Journal (1975), As We Know (1979). "At North Farm," the first poem from his A Wave (1984), is a good example of the level of abstraction to be found in his poems:

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents,

through narrow passes.

But will he know where to find you,

Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,

Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,

The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.

The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

Birds darken the sky.  Is it enough

That the dish of milk is set out at night,

That we think of him sometimes,

Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

         A great many critics have complained about the difficulty of Ashbery's work; indeed, of all abstract poetry. Jonathan Holder says that he admires Ashbery's work "even though Ashbery's 'use' of poetry often seems...too limited — an Olympian, noncommittal language-play that refuses engagement or to make value judgments, poetry that issues from a universe in which one never has to go outdoors or discipline a child or change a tire, from a universe consisting entirely of texts. Yet when I choose to amuse myself in the ludic, whimsical, lyric weathers of discourse, I read Ashbery" (1). Others have criticized Ashbery for being exactly what one would have expected he would not be and, in fact, never has been: an academic poet. Richard Nason wrote, "The Existential poetry of William Carlos Williams, sensible enough perhaps as a reaction to the heavy metaphysical burden of the poetry of Eliot, Pound and, to a lesser degree, Yeats, has in recent decades degenerated to the grudging gibberish of Ashbery and the vacuous, verbless maundering of [A.  R.] Ammons. The highly remote, almost indecipherable content of this verse has remained of interest only to those who study it so they may become initiates in the elite academia where it is taught" (Intro.). But it is not at all certain that, as Nason says, Ashbery's poetry is "almost indecipherable”; much more likely is the possibility that it is totally indecipherable, as music is "indecipherable" even as it is enjoyable to listen to.

         If Nason is categorical in his rejection of Ashbery, there is an ambivalence in Holden's attitude, almost as though he were abashed to like the poetry and unable to understand why he should do so against all reason. Raymond Carney wrote, "Ashbery has related a wry dialogue between himself and Kenneth Koch that is very much to the point: 'He asked me, "Does your poetry have any hidden meanings" And I said: "No."  "Why Not?" "Because somebody might find out what they were and then the poems would no longer be mysterious"'" (3). Ashbery does not want  to attach a "program" to his language music, as composers have done to their musical compositions from time to time. He wants to achieve in language, if he can, the mysterious pleasures of music by using abstract syntax.

         It is interesting to note the use of the musical term "minor key" at the end of this passage from Carney's essay: "There is no shortcut through an Ashbery text; no possibility of skimming it for key passages.  It is a wonderfully democratic verse. Just as in the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, the result of Ashbery's almost absolute renunciation of architectonic structures and rhetorical heightening is a paradoxical heightening of everything, of even the most ordinary details, in the poem. The common and mean, at moments, can become almost transcendent in Ashbery as in Bishop, who achieve their grand Romantic moments, as William Carlos Williams did, in a minor key" (14).

         Echoing Archibald Macleish's poem "Ars Poetica," Marjorie Perloff wrote, "Not what one dreams but how — this is Ashbery's subject. His stories 'tell only of themselves,' presenting the reader with the challenge of what he calls 'an open field of narrative possibilities'.... For, like Rimbaud's, his are not dreams 'about' such and such characters or events;  the dream structure is itself the event that haunts the poet's imagination" (252).

         Ashbery's method of composition may also explain something about how his poems manage to gather "mystery" to themselves. In an interview with Sue Gangel, Ashbery said, "I write down phrases and ideas on pieces of paper which I then can't keep track of. I put them in a drawer, and sometimes I can't  find them, and sometimes I use ones I've already used before and then I have to do something about that. I don't keep any journal. I write down things that seem suggestive to me when they occur and I think might be usable later on. Then if I can't find them, that's all right too because meanwhile I will have already started to think about something else" (p. 19).

         If Ashbery's syntax is "abstract," and if his method of composition is at the farthest remove from the mechanical or even the rational, nevertheless one may point out that the poet's approach to versifying is neither "ludic and whimsical," as Holden suggests, nor "academic," as  Nason defines it in these post-deconstructionist days, nor is it entirely without "architectonic structure," as Carney would have it. If it were so, why do some of Ashbery's poems find themselves located in the anthologies of the so-called "New Formalist" movement that was underway in the United States during the 1990s? Formalism might once have been considered academic, back in the 1950s, but formal approaches to poetry had been banned from American poetry since then. Neoformalism was considered by the later academy to be either reactionary or revolutionary, depending on whether one was defending the "tradition of Whitman," as Diane Wakoski has termed it in her apologies for the status quo, or advancing the argument that form, whether traditional or experimental, is necessary to meaning, as Dana Gioia and the other New Formalists maintained.

         But this description of Ashbery's method of composition is perhaps rule of thumb rather than categorical, for he had something a bit different to say when he described "Variation  on  a Noel," with its epigraph from the Christmas carol, "when the snow lay round about, / deep and crisp and even...", in Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms (3-4). This poem is written in the form of a pantoum. In his comment on the poem in Lehman's book Ashbery said, "I first  came across the word pantoum as the title of one of the movements of Ravel's 'Trio,' and then found the term in a manual of prosody. I wrote a poem called "Pantoum" in the early '50s; it is in my book Some Trees.   'Variation on a Noel' is the only other time I have ever used the form. The poem was written in December of 1979" (p. 5). This is the first stanza:

A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.

A thirsty unit by an upending stream,

Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication

If elixir were to be found in the world's dolor, where is none.

         A pantoum is an accentual-syllabic Malayan form. Its lines may be of any specific length, in any particular meter, and it consists of an indefinite number of quatrain stanzas with particular restrictions: lines two and four of each stanza, in their entirety, are refrains — they become lines one and three of the following stanza, and so on. The rhyme scheme is interlocking. Stanza two of Ashbery's poem reads,

A thirsty unit by an upending stream,

Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little

                                                               of her nakedness —

If elixir were to be found in the world's dolor, where is none,

Our emancipation should be great and steady.

         "I was attracted to the form in both cases," Ashbery continued,  "because of its stricture, even greater than in other hobbling forms such as the sestina or canzone. These restraints seem to have a paradoxically liberating effect, for me at least. The form has the additional advantage of providing you with twice as much poem for your effort, since every line has to be repeated twice" (5). The observation about the paradoxically "liberating" effect of writing in forms had been made by many poets over the years, but increasingly in recent years as young poets rediscovered formal poetry. Here is the penultimate stanza of "Variation on a Noel":

And I have known him cheaply.

Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus —

A form of ignorance, you might say. Let's leave that though.

The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.

The poem can be ended in one of two ways, either in a quatrain whose refrains are lines one and three of the first stanza in reversed order, or in a repeton couplet consisting  of lines one and three of the first stanza in reversed order. Ashbery decided to end the poem his own way: lines one and three  of the first stanza became lines two and four of the last stanza, in the same, rather than reversed, order:

Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus.

A year away from the pigpen, and look at him.

The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.

Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication.

         Besides Lehman's collection, Ashbery's poems also appeared in the New Formalist anthology Strong  Measures, edited by Philip Dacey and  David Jauss. One of these, the poet's original "Pantoum" from his book Some Trees, was included in the text as an example of that form. Also included are "Some Trees," the title poem of that collection, which serves as an example of what the editors call "nonce couplets" and "couplet quatrains";  and "Farm Implements  and  Rutabagas  in a Landscape," a sestina, from The Double Dream of Spring. The poet has always been supposed to make leaps of the imagination that surprise the reader, to make associations that others perhaps would not have made. It is evident that the difficulty readers have with Ashbery and others of the so-called “New York School” is that they jump from one association to another  without intervening transitions — it is a modernist technique, one that Ezra Pound discovered in the original draft of T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" by editing out those transitions and leaving only the fragments and abstract syntax that mirror the fragmentation and technological leaps of the twentieth century. It is a technique from which Wallace Stevens forged a career of writing poetry for himself, not for readers, but that some readers loved anyway — some, not many, for modernist and contemporary poetry left the common reader behind, just as modern music has done.

         David Shapiro noted in the chapter titled "The Meaning of Meaninglessness" in his study, John Ashbery: An Introduction  to the Poetry, that "John Ashbery once took a course of lectures in music by Henry Cowell at the New School. Ashbery recalls Cowell remarking that the intervals in music become wider as music grows more sophisticated: 'for instance, if you compare "The  Volga Boatmen" and the "Love Duet" in Tristan und Isolde you see how vastly wide the intervals have become;  and the ear seemingly becomes accustomed to unaccustomed intervals, "as time goes by"'.... One cannot really anticipate the next note in many serial pieces, and this suspense is a fine quality of Ashbery's own work..."(16).  It is, that is, and it isn't, depending on one's point of view...on whether one is Jonathan Holden, Richard Nason, David Shapiro,  or someone else. One thing is certain, however: John Ashbery writes his poems in an abstract "musical syntax," and this syntax is sometimes to be found bottled in traditional lyric verse forms. This new kind of poetry began displacing Robert Bly's "deep imagism" as the "avant garde" movement of the 1980s. It made inroads on the West Coast where most of the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets resided, but in 1986 signs of a  further spread became evident, through chapbook publications from the "alternative press" movement, to New England and the South in work by De Villo Sloan and the late George Butterick, two members of the second  generation  of Black Mountaineers from the State University of New York at Buffalo.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Donald M. Allen, ed., The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara,  New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

——,  ed., The New American Poetry 1945-1960,  New York: Grove Press, (1960)

John Ashbery, The Double Dream of Spring, New York: E. P. Dutton Co., 1970.

——, The Poems, New York: Tiber Press, 1960.

——,  Rivers  and  Mountains, New York: Holt, Rinehart  & Winston, 1966.

——, Selected Poems, London: Cape, 1967.

——, Some Trees, New Haven, Ct.: Yale University Press, 1956.

——, The Tennis Court Oath: A Book of Poems, Middletown, Ct.: Wesleyan University Press, 1962.

——, Three Poems, New York:  Viking Press, 1972.

——, Turandot  and  Other  Poems, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953.

——, The Vermont Journal,  Los Angeles: Black Sparrow Press, 1975.

——, A Wave, New York: Viking Penguin, 1984.

Raymond Carney, "John  Ashbery," in Donald J. Greiner, ed., American Poets Since World War II, Part 1: A-K,  Detroit MI: Gale Research, 1980.

Tracy Chevalier, ed., Contemporary Poets, Fifth Edition, Chicago: St. James Press, 1991.

Philip Dacey, and David Jauss, eds., Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms,  New York: Harper & Row, 1986.

Donald Davie, Articulate Energy, New York: Macmillan, 1958.

Sue Gangel, "Interview with John Ashbery," in Joe David Bellamy, ed.,  American Poetry Observed: Poets on Their Work,  Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.

Lyn Hejinian, The Guard, n.p.: Tuumba Press, 1983.

David Lehman, ed., Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, New York: Macmillan, 1987.

Frank O'Hara, A City Winter, and Other Poems, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1952.

——, The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971.

——, Jackson Pollock, New York: George Braziller, 1959.

——, Love Poems (Tentative Title),  New York: Tibor de  Nagy, 1965.

——, Lunch Poems, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1964.

——, Meditations in an Emergency, New York: Grove Press, 1957.

——, Odes, New York: Tiber Press, 1960.

——, Oranges, New York: Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 1953.

——, Robert Motherwell, New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1965.

——, Second Avenue, New York: Totem/Corinth Press, 1960.

Ron Padgett, and David Shapiro, eds., An Anthology of New York Poets, New York: Random House, 1970.

——,  The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud  to  Cage,  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981.

Marjorie Perloff,  Frank O'Hara, Poet Among Painters, New York: George Braziller, 1977.

David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An Introduction to the Poetry,  New York: Columbia University Press, 1979.

Radcliffe Squires, Cornar, Philadelphia, Pa.: Dorrance, 1940.

——,  Fingers  of  Hermes,  Ann  Arbor,  Mi.:  University  of Michigan Press, 1965.

——,  Where  the Compass Spins,  New York: Twayne Publishers, 1951.

Frederick Goddard Tuckerman, The Complete Poems,  ed.  N.  Scott Momaday, New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Lewis Turco, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1968.

——, The  New Book of Forms,  Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.

——, Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing,  Reston:  Reston Publishing Co., 1973.

——, Visions  and Revisions of American Poetry,  Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1986

Alberta Turner, ed., Poets Teaching: The Creative Process,  New York: Longman, 1980.

James Vinson, ed., Contemporary Poets, Second Edition, New York: St. Martin's, 1975.

 

This essay is 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. John Ashbery is 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.

Running

RUNNING

 

            In the dream I am

        running.  I am looking

            for something — my car

                parked God knows where,

in the City of Recall:

 

        the cinema gone

    dark with the flickering

        hours, the candy store

            next door, spiders

in the windows.  My legs are

 

        lead, there is no air;

    something I cannot see

        breathes in the alley.

            As I draw close

to what it is I'm seeking,

 

        the elm of childhood

    spreads its limbs again, grass

        grows between the flags

            over its roots,

the church my father preached in

 

        peels in the sunlight.

    My car is parked again

        under the shattered pear,

            and if I could,

I would move my feet to run

 

        heart pumping, slowing

    like an old film flickering

        over a story

            that runs backwards

when I stop and close my eyes

 

        to catch my breath.

 

From The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press (www.StarCloudPress.com), 2014, ISBN 978-1-932842-78-4, paperback. Available from all booksellers.

 

Two Ballades

 

A BALLADE OF LIBERATION

"Free of her lips, free of her hips."

 

What is it every jackal wants at last?

     The weak, the crippled beast, the easy kill.

He does not stalk the clever or the fast —

     The carcass on the plain is better still;

All he need do is come and gorge his fill.

The jackal feasting is not a pretty sight,

     But all he cares about is to work his will:

Thank you for giving up without a fight.

 

I pray you, Pretty, do not look aghast;

     I speak in allegory only.  Still,

My metaphor is apt.  That day is past

     When lovers need pursue your kind until

     You lie down at their mercy — they need no skill

To stalk a prey in whom there is no flight,

     Nor need they linger past the feeding's thrill —

Thank you for giving up without a fight.

 

The Serengeti herds are still and massed;

     They wait in panting states of dishabille

To serve the scavenger his dull repast.

     The jackal need not learn the veldt quadrille

     Or feral waltz — he merely scans the bill

Of fare as it comes strolling into sight.

     He gluts, then he departs over the hill —

Thank you for giving up without a fight.

 

Envoi:

     You've made of love a bump-and-grind treadmill.

The predator walks lazily home at night,

     Smiling all the way.  You foot the bill.

Thank you for giving up without a fight.

 

BALLADE OF THE WEAKER SEX

"Weak men had need be witty."

 

We woo you in your youth, hound you to bed,

     Lie lustily to you, with you girls.  Of course,

We marry you sometimes, and then, instead

     Of growing old along with you, remorse-

     Fully we grasp the hands of time and force

Them back to yesternoon — we chase the moon:

     The chase is what we crave! — and we divorce.

Forgive us, love, for leaving you so soon.

 

But sometimes life itself is what we dread,

     The aging of the flesh, not of the bride.

We see the color in our hair has fled,

     The sallow mirror-face, the belly wide

     With illnesses impending, and our pride

Lost to summer men, the boys of June:

     Sybil sings to us of suicide —

Forgive us, love, for leaving you so soon.

 

And if we last to gnaw the heel of bread

     At the loaf's end, the crust as dry as thirst,

We wonder why it was that we were wed,

     Or why conceived at all, why born and nursed

     At woman's breast.  Though all mankind is cursed,

We do not often sing your lonesome tune,

     For most of us at last at least die first —

Forgive us, love, for leaving you so soon.

 

Envoi:

     The world will spin and time will do its worst,

But we will seldom hear the shadows croon

     The ballad of the "weaker sex" reversed —

Forgive us, love, for leaving you so soon.

 

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 from Amazon.com in a Kindle edition.