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 TimesLiterary 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.
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."
My ancient friend Pierre Bennerup of Sunny Border Nurseries in Kensington, CT, wrote me recently:
Dear Lew,
As a one time English major like myself, 'I'm sure you're also concerned with the erosion of our great language, especially with respect to these so-called millennials.
I'm therefore forming a new society called, "Let's Call a Spade a Spade." As a poet, wordsmith and avid gardener, I'd like to appoint you as a charter member. Below is a short list of just a few of my concerns:
A spade should not be called a "shovel" as I've heard much too often.
A spading fork should not be called a "pitch fork."
A trowel should not be called a "little shovel."
It also disturbs me that perfectly good words describing garden implements have been co-opted to mean other things. A spade can describe a suit of playing cards. It can also be a racial slur. A "rake" can be someone who visits a bawdy house; a "hoe" is someone who works there.*
This bastardization of our language must be stopped. I hope you'll agree to assist me in this important task.
Best regards to my friend of longest standing,
Pierre.
I replied,
Sure(ly), Pierre,
sign me up, but I'm afraid it's a lost cause; the language is going to change no matter what. However, I do insist upon being a curmudgeon about it.
Almost all my life I have known that my last name, Turco, in Italian means what it says: “Turk.” It dates, I understand, from the period of the Arab rule of Sicily from the ninth to the tenth centuries, and it is not an uncommon name in Sicily where my father was born. Since there was no such place as Turkey at the time, the word simply means “Arab” or “Moor”; moreover, according to Halbert’s1, a Turco family coat of arms can be found in Rietstap Armorial General, 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. Family mottos are believed to have originated as battle cries in medieval times, but a motto was not recorded with the Turco coat of arms.”
However, I am something of a cynic, and I have long believed in an adage that would serve well for any family’s motto: “It is the wise child that knows its father.” Since everyone has trampled over Sicily since time began, including Sicils, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, French, Vikings, Normans, Danes, English, and so on ad infinitum, many of them raping and pillaging as they wandered across the countryside, I assumed that somewhere along the line there must have been a break in the chain and that my name might as easily have been Smith or Jones as Turco. So when it became possible, I decided to have my DNA tested to see where I really came from.
In 2006 I participated in the National Geographic Human Genome Project2 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 MT-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 Wells3 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, 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 and is 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 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 (since the early 20th century), 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 19th 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.
Gazing at a map of the world, one sees 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, as of February 8, 2007, I have not had a 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!” There is evidence that members of the haplogroup once served as members of the Persian cavalry.
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 Boke 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 10th 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.)
According to Halberts (op. cit.) “Census records available disclose the fact that there are approximately 450 heads of households in the United States with the old and distinguished Turco name. The United States Census Bureau estimates that there are approximately 3.2 persons per household in America today which yields an approximate total of 1440 people in the United States carrying the Turco name. Although the figure seems relatively low, it does not signify the many important contributions that individuals bearing the Turco name have made to history.”
In fact, although I am not so far as I know related to any of them, a survey of recent volumes of R. R. Bowker’s Books in Print yields a seemingly disproportionate number of Turcos who are authors: Richard P. Turco is a science writer who has collaborated with Carl Sagan; Peggy Turco is a nature writer; Marco Turco writes travel books; Christopher Turco (not the Christopher who is my son, a musician) pens science fiction; Laura Lo Turco has written on the pyramids of Egypt; Ronald, on crime; Lorenzo Del Turco is an art historian; Vincent J. Turco publishes in the field of medicine; Douglas is a sports writer; Alfred is a scholar of English literature; Emanuele, diplomacy; Frank, food; Antonio, chemistry; Michael P., the Everglades; Page Turco is a media writer and performer; Salvatore J. is a nutritionist, and Mario Turco, a music historian. One recollects that the Moor on the Turco crest in his left hand wields a saber, but in his right he flourishes a scroll!
Apparently, none of these people has ever had his or her DNA tested. However, analysis shows that a person with a different surname, Frank Ricchiazzi of Laguna Beach, California, is rather closely related to my people although all of his family is from Montalbano, a suburb of Messina in the northeast corner of the island, and Santa Maria. (Is there a connection between this family name and the Arabic name Al-Rikabi mentioned above?) On December 11, 2006, he wrote in an e-mail message, “Clearly, our DNA shows a lineage going into the Indus region many centuries ago.
“Right now, I’m trying to find the time when my lineage first came to Montalbano. I have traced each grandparent to approximately 1500, but there does not appear to be any way to go beyond that date because I have exhausted the furthest points of the church records and the Rivelli in Palermo.
“My thought is that sometime in the late 1400’s, there may be some information from the Kingdom of Two Sicilies that had a notation of a [member of my family] given some land in the Montalbano area. That of course means trying to locate some records from that Kingdom.
“One thing that you and I and others who do this research can say: Every day brings a new finding or another piece to the puzzles of who we are. Thank you for sharing your information.”
My first name, “Lewis,” is also a family name in both my paternal and maternal lines; it was originally a Middle English version of the French masculine “Louis,” of Franco-Germanic origin, derived from the German “Ludwig,” “hlōd” (fame) and “wīg” (war): “famous warrior.” The French “Louis” (pronounced lu-EE) was a common name among royalty and the nobility, dating from the 8th century King Louis I, son of Charlemagne. Louis XVI, last in the line of that name, was executed in 1793 during the French Revolution. The name was imported to Great Britain after the Norman Conquest in 1066; its spelling was often Anglicized as “Lewis.”
Various versions of the name include my father’s first name, “Luigi” (Italian — he had no middle name), “Aloysius” (Provençal), “Luis” (Spanish), and “Ludvig” (a “v” instead of the German “w,” Scandinavian). Pet or short forms of the name are Lou, Lew, Louie, Lewie, and Geno (Italian). In 2009 “Louis” was the 4th most popular boy’s name in France. The British prefer the spelling Lewis, but Americans usually opt for the French spelling. “Lewis” is currently the second most popular name in Scotland, the 27th most popular in the UK, and the 30th most popular in Northern Ireland. Lewis is also a popular name in Australia and New Zealand.
My middle name is “Putnam” (Lewis Putnam Turco) which was my mother’s maiden name (May Laura Putnam), and my namesake, “Lewis Putnam” (b.1763) was the second son of my triple-great grandfather Asa Putnam (1743-1795}. An earlier member of the family was George Puttenham (1529-1590), author of the first book on poetics and prosody in the English language, The Arte of English Poesy (1589).
Traditionally, Weird (Fortune) seems to smile on men named “Lewis” and is augmented by optimism and good-nature. Lewis has a quick wit, a cerebral mind, and is usually persuasive. The bearer of this name traditionally is believed to love the excitement of life and can easily adapt to all situations. A natural adventurer, Lewis thrives on the new and unexpected and prefers to be in constant motion. It makes him feel alive. Lewis will stir up some action if there's not enough around. Naturally rebellious, Lewis has no fear and never resists change. Traveling and new experiences feed his soul; he is social, attracts friends with ease — people enjoy being around Lewis’s humor and energy.
____
1”Turco Coat of Arms, Historiography,” Bath, Ohio: Halberts, n.d.
2National Geographic Human Genome Project, on-line at www.NationalGeographic.com.
3Wells, Spencer, The Journey of Man—A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2004.
4 Indus River Valley civilization, etc., on-line at www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html
5Benjamin, Sandra, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.
William H. Shurr of the University of Tennessee has been mining Dickinson's letters for nuggets overlooked by other Dickinson scholars, even Thomas H. Johnson whose The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, contains what the ordinary reader might have thought were all of Dickinson's poems, including those to be found originally in her letters. Evidently Shurr believes he hit paydirt in Dickinson's inexhaustible vein, for in September of 1993 he published his New Poemsof Emily Dickinson, in which he claimed to have discovered "Nearly 500 short epigrams and longer lyrics excavated from Dickinson's correspondence but not previously presented in poetic form. — 'Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility,'" as it was reported in the EDIS Bulletin.
Nearly simultaneously a review titled "Emily Warmed Over" by Gary Lee Stonum appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Professor Stonum wrote that these "New Poems [are] Anything but New." He continued, "The 'New Poems of Emily Dickinson,' sad to say, are not new, not often poems, and not even quite Emily Dickinson's. To produce this volume William Shurr has mined Dickinson's published letters, sometimes finding gems and sometimes fool's gold, but only rarely extracting anything Dickinson herself would have owned as one of her poems."
The book had a casual inception, according to Anita Manning, who wrote, "On a whim, Shurr set out some passages" from Dickinson's letters "as poems....” Evidently, according to information supplied on the title page of his book and elsewhere therein, Shurr's chief excavators were a graduate student, Anna Dunlap, and Shurr's daughter, Emily Grey Shurr, who did the exhumation under the editor's direction.
"The discovery is 'an exciting, innovative and important advance in Dickinson studies,' wrote Dickinson scholar Emory Elliott of the University of California, Riverside, on the book jacket. He called Shurr's work 'a major advance in our knowledge of Dickinson as poet and person.'"
"These poems use her [Dickinson's] preferred hymn or ballad meters and unusual rhymes," Shurr averred not only in his book and in the Bulletin, but in many of the media, including newspapers, television and radio. However, what struck this reader most strongly was the fact that "these poems" did not use rhymes — unusual or not — at all. Perhaps graduate students may be excused for being unaware of the various definitions of prosodics and verse forms, but one expects editors and scholars to know them.
Pertinent standard definitions (from my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, third edition) are as follows:
BALLAD: Universal in the Western world. Folk ballads are written in podic prosody, literary ballads in accentual-syllabics. The BALLAD STANZA is [rhymed] a4 b3 c4 b3. [The superscripts indicate line lengths.] For related forms see COMMON MEASURE (95-97).
Emily Dickinson did not write ballads, which are medium-length lyric narratives, nor did she write in the accentual folk ballad measure called "podic prosody"; thus, "ballad meters" is the wrong term — there is a clear difference between a "meter" and a "stanza." The correct term is common measure stanzas, which Dickinson found in the hymnals of Amherst and used as her models:
COMMON MEASURE: Accentual-syllabic. Rhymed. A QUATRAIN STANZA written in iambics.... The rhyme scheme is abcb. The first and third lines consist of four iambic feet; the second and fourth lines, of three iambic feet (119). HYMNAL STANZA is the same, except that it rhymes abab [ibid.].
Common measure and hymnal stanza must rhyme. Since the "poems" under discussion here do not rhyme, and only the most optimistic scansion would show that they were purposely written in iambic meters, they are not cast in Emily Dickinson's standard common measure and hymnal stanza patterns. Here is an example, "One of Shurr's favorites among the new poems," according to Manning:
A Letter always seemed to me
like Immortality,
for is it not the Mind alone,
without corporeal friend?
If "lines" one and two seem to set up a couplet rhyme pattern, then the reader's expectation is that lines three and four will do the same. Their complete failure to do so has the effect of anticlimax, undercutting not only the chime of the poem, but our expectation of what a Dickinson poem should accomplish. Taking these lines out of their context in this way, as though they were a finished quatrain, destroys the effect that they had in the letters and tends to trivialize the rest of Dickinson's verse oeuvre.
If it is true that Emily Dickinson never consciously wrote an unrhymed poem in her life, it follows that the passages in New Poemsof Emily Dickinson cannot possibly be said to be "new" poems by the Amherst poet under any of the circumstances its editor has discussed. Although she did sometimes use the same lines in both letters and poems, unless she used lines from the former in the latter, Dickinson clearly meant them as prose passages, and prose passages they remain, despite an editor's having "lineated" them according to phrasal patterns. People since the twentieth century have been calling line-phrased prose "free verse" (a contradiction in terms — “verse” is “metered language, “prose” is unmetered language; thus, “verse” cannot be “free”), but we know what Emily Dickinson thought of Whitman's prose poems.
These concerns of mine were embodied in a letter I wrote to Dr. Shurr on 8 August 1993, after he and I had attended the 1993 meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts, of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Dr. Shurr replied with a letter justifying his book. It was difficult to know where to begin to correct his errors, but I decided to start with this quotation from his response: "It is almost a cliché in Dickinson studies for nearly a century now to call this unit ['the two-line unit that alternates iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter'] ballad meter, or hymn meter, or more usually fourteeners."
If it is cliché it is also erroneous and another proof of something I have long bemoaned: Most scholars and critics of American literature know nothing whatever about prosodics and are quite disdainful of those who do. No doubt it is the "intuitive" Emerson/Whitman influence; as Dana Gioia has pointed out in a recent essay:
"Today prosody is a neglected subject.
"Few literary critics know more than the rudiments of metrics, and, in the aftermath of the free-verse revolution, even many poets have never studied versification. The last century, however, considered prosody an essential part of literary education" (93). "Surely one reason for the drop in Longfellow's reputation has been the decline of interest among both scholars and poets in formal prosody."
That does not, however, excuse the ignorance, nor ought one to condone its continuance.
First, that "two-line unit" is not a "unit." Many of the "poems" Shurr has identified are two lines long, what he calls "fourteener epigrams." However, fourteeners are not used singly, and Dickinson never intended that they should be; fourteeners are always paired with another line — either another fourteener, or an Alexandrine line to form a couplet of Poulter's measure (see pp. 226-227 of The Book of Forms). There is a caesura after iambic foot four of each fourteener, and the line has long been broken at that point to form two lines (small x = an unstressed, unrhymed syllable; capital X = a stressed, unrhymed syllable; capital A, B, C — any syllable other than x = a stressed, line-ending syllable that may rhyme):
xX xX xX xX · xX xX xX, i.e.,
xX xX xX xX ·
xX xX xX
If this were all, Shurr might have a case for his "fourteener epigram," but another fourteener is required to complete the unit, which is a couplet unit:
xX xX xX xA
xX xX xB
xX xX xX xC
xX xX xB
This quatrain is called common measure, (not "ballad meter" unless it is written in podic prosody), and when Dickinson used it as a poem or stanza form, she rhymed it as tradition required.
Shurr cited poem "J. 497" from the Johnson collection to prove that Dickinson sometimes did not rhyme her poems:
He strained my faith —
Did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust —
Did it then — yield?
Hurled my belief —
But — did he shatter — it?
Racked — with suspense —
Not a nerve failed!
Wrung me — with Anguish —
But I never doubted him —
'Tho' for what wrong
He did never say —
Stabbed — while I sued
His sweet forgiveness —
Jesus — it's your little "John"!
Dont you know — me?
It is true that, as Johnson has printed this poem, it does not rhyme. However, the poem first appeared as no. 608 in the section titled "Poems Incomplete or Unfinished" of Bolts of Melody. In that incarnation it was printed thus:
He strained my faith — did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust — did it then yield?
Hurled my belief — but did he shatter it?
Racked with suspense, not a nerve failed!
Wrung me with Anguish — must be I deserved it,
Though for what wrong he did never say,
Stabbed — while I sued his sweet forgiveness.
Jesus — it's your little "John"! Why me slay?"
(304)
This version certainly rhymes or, to be accurate, the first stanza consonates (off-rhymes) and the second true-rhymes. It took me less than five minutes to find this version in my personal library. To be sure, it would take me a bit longer to discover why there are differences in the versions — for instance, in the second version, "must be I deserved it" instead of "But I never doubted him — " in the "Wrung me with Anguish" line, or "Why me slay?" instead of "Don't you know — me?" in the last line.
According to Mrs. Todd, editor of Dickinson's 1931 Letters, "In her early twenties Emily began to conclude her letters with a poem, but as part of the text, written as prose, as if half hoping that the correspondent might not detect its presence. — Later, poems, as such, were not only part of the text; sometimes a poem constituted the entire letter." (455) Morever, she would often use the same "poem" in more than one letter; a note in Bolts says, "In Mrs. Todd's copy the last two words [of the last line] are inverted." (304) Some scholars have argued, however, that none of Dickinson's "prose" pieces ought to be counted a "poem" unless it appears in one of the "fascicles," the little ribbon-bound manuscript chapbooks that were found among the poet's effects after her death, and I tend to agree with this view.
For these, and many other reasons, the "poems" of Emily Dickinson are extremely problematic. Staying with the example Shurr chose, for instance, one might point out that, as he has given it, the poem not only does not rhyme externally, it also does not exhibit iambic meters. Here is an accurate scansion of the first "quatrain" in Johnson's version:
xX xX
xxX xXx
Xx XX
xxXX
The only iambs are to be found in "line" one, which is iambic dimeter. Line two has no normative foot but consists of one anapest and an amphibrach. Line three has a trochee and a spondee. Line four is what a classical metrist would call a pyrrhic and a spondee, what Harvey Gross calls "a double iamb," and what J. R. R. Tolkien calls a "long rise" when he is discussing accentual (podic) prosody.
Nor is the "quatrain" written in podic prosody, for if it were written out as two lines of Anglo-Saxon prosody (which is the basis for podic prosody, TBoF, pp. 26-32), accentually it would look like this (the dot indicates the caesura in the center of the stich):
xX xX · xxX xXx
Xx Xx´ · xxXX
Stich two has five stresses, three in the first hemistich, where two would be required. In other words, this "stanza" is not written in verse, which is "metered language"; it is written in prose, "unmetered language." All that Johnson did was to break Dickinson's prose up into lines according to phrasing, what some have called "lineation" and what I call "line-phrasing." (I direct the reader's attention to the chapter titled "Whitman and I" in my book The Public Poet, where I go into this matter in some detail.)
Either one must maintain that Emily Dickinson sometimes wrote prose poems, or that this was not intended by Dickinson as a poem to begin with. If the Todd ("T. 608") version comes to light, one may suspect that Dickinson never arrived at a version of the poem that she thought of as complete, for it exists in a short-line (J. 497) and at least two long-line versions. Though the latter may show tendencies toward regular meter, the rhythms are quite rough and it is clear why the editors considered the poem to be unfinished.
Here is my numeration of the various feet in this "poem": iambs, 14 (counting the double iamb); trochees, 11; anapests, 2; spondees, 4; amphibrachs, 3. If iambs predominate, barely, over trochees, this piece is far from regular metrically, either as an iambic poem or as a podic poem (although it is actually more regular accentually than it is accentual-syllabically, for the number of stressed syllables ranges only between four and five accents).
These are the sorts of things I meant when I called Shurr's scansions "creative." That Johnson's were as creative does not speak well for his understanding of what it is that poets do. There is no excuse for scholars and critics of American literature to ignore the prosodic practice of the poets themselves, yet they seem to be willing to be ignorant and to excuse that ignorance by citing other scholars' ignorance. In my opinion the whole of Dickinson's "poetic" oeuvre needs to be gone over again prosodically to determine what she intended to preserve as verse poems and what she meant to leave as prose. Dickinson knew when she wanted her words to appear as finished verses, and she knew when she intended to leave them as parts of letters.
Works cited in “Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine.”
Emory Elliott, book blurb on the jacket of Shurr, New Poems by Emily Dickinson, q.v.
Dana Gioia, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism," in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Jay Parini, ed., New York, NY: Columbia U. P., 1993.
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1963.
Anita Manning, signed news item, USA Today, June 23, 1993.
William H. Shurr, editor, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1993.
——, August 1993 reply to Lewis Turco's letter, q.v.
Gary Lee Stonum, "Emily Warmed Over," Cleveland, Ohio, Plain Dealer, September 5th, 1993.
Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Georgiana Strickland, ed., 5:1, May/June 1993.
Mabel Loomis Todd, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson, New and Enlarged Edition, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1931.
——, and Millicent Todd Bingham, eds., Bolts of Melody, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1945.
Lewis Turco, Letter to Dr. William H. Shurr, 8 August 1993; printed as a review in The Hollins Critic, xxx:1, Dec. 1993, pp. 12-13.
——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover, NH: U. P. of New England, 2000.
——, The Public Poet, Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry P., 1991.
PRIVILEGE. The South was settled by the younger sons of the British aristocracy in large part. They were given land grants by the Crown and were certainly more privileged traditionally than the settlers of the North which was founded by religious sectarians and merchants, very largely.
INHUMANITY. The plantations of the South would have been unprofitable without cheap labor, so the planters paid for slaves who were kidnapped in Africa, largely by other Africans, transported to America by Northern shipping magnates and captains, and sold in the South to people who treated blacks as property.
SLAVERY. Human beings from Africa (from which ALL human beings derive) were treated like chattels: beaten, starved, traded (breaking up families), and they were considered to be sub-human.
SEGREGATION. Although some slaves worked in the homes of the privileged, most of them were segregated in the cheapest of dwellings set apart from the main dwelling. It was considered a crime to treat blacks or people of mixed blood like human beings or to mingle with them.
HYPOCRISY. Nevertheless, there were many slaves who were of mixed race, the offspring of owners who treated black women as concubines, like Thomas Jefferson, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States, who created children with his mixed-blood mistress Sally Hemings.
DISLOYALTY. The commander of the Southern Army of North Virginia, Robert E. Lee, was educated in the North at West Point and swore allegiance to the United States of America when he took service with the U. S. Army, but renounced his country, his uniform, and his oath, in order to fight with the Rebels who also were, obviously, disloyal to the nation that the Southern States had helped to found.
BAD GRACE and ILL WILL. Lee surrendered the Southern Flag at Appomattox Courthouse on April 12, 1865. The Confederacy LOST THE WAR, but some southerners have held a grudge for 150 years and continue to fly the flag of a beaten army. This is called,
SEDITION. Wikipedia says, “Sedition is the crime of revolting or inciting revolt against government. However, because of the broad protection of free speech under the First Amendment, prosecutions for sedition are rare. Nevertheless, sedition remains a crime in the United States under 18 U.S.C.A. § 2384 (2000), a federal statute that punishes seditious conspiracy, and 18 U.S.C.A. § 2385 (2000), which outlaws advocating the overthrow of the federal government by force.”
This, then, is the “Southern Heritage” represented by the Confederate Battle Flag:
PRIVILEGE, INHUMANITY, SLAVERY, SEGREGATION, HYPOCRISY, DISLOYALTY, BAD GRACE, ILL WILL and SEDITION.
Europe has banned the SWASTIKA flag of Nazi Germany, yet the South feels free to fly its equivalent in this country, THE CONFEDERATE FLAG.
Recently an American teaching in Japan, Alzo David-West, wrote to ask me about a book he had found in his college library:
2014
Dear Professor Turco,
Greetings. I am an American lecturer of English in the Department of British and American Studies at Aichi Prefectural University in Japan. In another academic universe, I am also an associate editor for the social science and area studies journal North Korean Review at the University of Detroit Mercy.
I am writing to say that I had the chance to happily discover your Poetry: An Introduction through Writing (1973) at the campus library here at APU. Despite my fondness for reading and writing poetry on occasion, my areas were novels and short stories when I studied for my degrees in English; and as you write in your colorful introduction to Poetry, I too “do not know the different prosodies of poetry” nor have I heard of “dipodics.”
As I am quite eager to learn more about these things, I have found your book to be a useful and friendly guide -- clear language, concrete explanations, and authentic examples -- in helping me become more aware of the types, structures, modes, and genres of poetry. Needless to say, I will shortly be getting a copy of your Book of Forms.
Meanwhile, reading Poetry my other academic incarnation has taken an interest in the chapter “Minor Genres: Didactics.” Basically, I am researching didactic poetry from North Korea, and in a paper I am writing, I describe one such poem as a “verse speech.” Interestingly, you use the term “verse essay” to describe didactic poetry in general.
Again, it is a pleasure for me to read your book, and thank you for writing it. That said, if it is not too much trouble, I hope we can exchange some emails in the future or now and then on poems and prosodies.
Kind regards,
Alzo David-West
Aichi Prefectural University
Aichi 480-1198 Japan
On Tuesday, September 30, 2014, at 9:58 PM I replied:
Thank you, Prof. David-West,
For your very kind message. I'm happy that you found my ancient text and that it was of use to you. I'd be pleased to correspond with you from time to time. You may be interested to know that my Book of Forms contains most of the information in the book you have, and that more material on nonfiction and fiction may be found in two companion volumes, The Book of Literary Terms and The Book of Dialogue, all from the same publisher, UPNE, in uniform format.
Do you know Jesse Glass, an American poet who has lived in Japan for many years? He is publisher of Ahadada books. One of his on-line, free, downloadable poetry chapbooks is my Attic, Shed and Barn.
Best wishes,
Lewis Turco
Dear Professor Turco,
How are you? Thank you for pointing me to your two other books. I will make sure to get all three of the UPNE volumes for my personal library.
Jesse Glass is new to me, but I did read his online edition of your chapbook over the weekend. (It is now Monday morning here in Japan.) “Attic, Shed, and Barn” and “John’s Telescope” are outstanding; “Bikes” reminded me of a similar accident I had as a child, and the vivid scene made me jot down “Yikes!”; “Spiders” communicates an excellent sense of observation; and “Ballpoints” made me ask, “Why so sad?”
All your poems are concrete and real, not abstract and ideal. (Btw, am I correct to describe your poems as “narrative poems”? In Poetry, you say narratives are a major genre.) Several images and phrases stood out to me.
I am glad I had the opportunity to read your poetry. May I ask for your permission to use “Attic, Shed, and Barn” and “John’s Telescope” in some of my English courses this semester?
Kind regards,
Alzo
Dear Alzo,
I guess I haven't mentioned that I have been to Japan, as a sailor aboard the aircraft carrier USS Hornet, in late summer and the fall of 1954. I attach a PDF chapbook of poems written in the Japanese verse forms and published back in 1980. Charles E. Tuttle Co., published the anthology I mentioned in my last email message, Japan: Theme and Variations: A Collection of Poems by American Writers.
I don't have a copy of that here in Oswego, NY, where we are spending a couple of months before we go back to Maine, so I looked it up on Amazon and discovered that there is now a Kindle edition of it! Since I own a Kindle, I ordered it, received it immediately, and found that I had won third prize in the Tuttle contest! I had forgotten that completely, as well as two of the poems I have in the anthology. It's amazing to return in time to one's youth!
Yours,
Lewis Turco
Dear Professor Turco,
How are you? After reading your two chapbooks [Attic, Shed, and Barn and Seasons of the Blood,] I have decided to get a copy of your Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems, 1959-2007. (Is the title a play on William Blake’s phrase “fearful symmetry”?) There is a lot I am learning from your poetry, and for my aesthetic and literary enrichment, I really should have everything you have composed. I am looking forward to the publication of your epic poem The Hero Enkidu next year. Btw, I very much enjoyed your anecdote about Campbell Black.
About Japan: Theme and Variations, I will place an interlibrary loan order for it with my university library. Meanwhile, I was able to access part of the text at Google Books, and I could read your poems “New Song for Nippon,” “Elegy to a Japanese Garden,” and “Melody for Kyushu.” The second “spatial poem” (a term I have picked up from your Poetry) struck me as verbally and visually exquisite. The work is emotionally and sensorily captivating, and the adverb “prismatically” in the typographic flow simply fascinates me. I am not surprised you won a prize for this poem.
Japan must have been a very special experience when you were in the Navy in 1954. I recall another writer, Gerald Vizenor, who was in the Army in Japan at the same time. He has several collections of haiku, but I have only read his novel Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57.
Kind regards,
Alzo David-West
P.S. I read Seasons of the Blood immediately upon receiving the PDF, and I found the artistic persona to be different, more esoteric, than in Attic, Shed, and Barn. Still, there are similarities and resonances despite the differences.
Dear Lewis,
How have you been? Thank you for your last email and the wonderful neologism "pecuniast." I was delighted to learn of "Wesli Court," and I perused some of the available pages of The Collected Lyrics at Amazon.com. The poem "It Goes" seizes me somehow, and the phrase "souls of brontosaurs" is amazing. Who is "leola," by the way? I am constantly impressed by your poems and their range, and I fully agree with your artistic view that "the more one knows how to do, the more one can do."
Btw, here is some cliched and cringy piffle I jotted down a couple of weeks ago while my students were doing in-class work:
Her face is like the sun,
And when she smiles,
I feel so warm.
I kiss her in my dreams,
And my tears fall like rain.
We are doing poetry analysis (most important images, feelings and ideas, revealed truth) in my reading courses this semester, and I needed a simplistic example (alongside the better work) to help the students in one of the classes.
While I told them this bad sentimental poem is "not so good," they found what it was saying (desire, happiness, love, sadness) and how it is saying it sufficiently clear. I suggested "unrealized love."
But to get back to your point of creative knowledge, versatility, and practice, the illustrated limitations of the poem are formularism and tired phrases. Those lines have probably been written thousands of times before, and I was apparently following the six-step formula in Poetry for Rod McKuen's poems!
As [Richard] Londraville puts it in your book, "Formulas pander to those who prefer not to have to use their minds very much. [...] Formulas demand nothing except that one respond to them in superficial, automatic ways" (p. xix). Unlike formula poetry, true poetry allows us to "express or understand what is deepest inside the human mind and spirit" (p. xix).
Several of my students do not yet grasp the aesthetic significance of true poetry, and a few of them respond to emotionally searching and thought-provoking work in the most small-minded and egocentric ways. Here are two such cases on Langston Hughes' "Problems":
* "This is bad because it is not easy -- difficult."
* "This poem is not good because I can't understand it."
Comments like this, which are fortunately in the minority, say more about the reader than the poem.
Kind regards,
Alzo
“Leola” is no one, Alzo, a fictive character.
The poem is written in the form of a triversen. It's very early; I wrote it while I was in the navy.
Thanks for your newsy message. It sounds as though you're having a good time in the classroom. That's as it should be. I greatly enjoyed teaching myself.
Yours always,
Lewis
Dear Lewis,
I am very happy to learn about the triversen form. I looked up pages 95 to 97 in Poetry for the explanation and examples. I will have to make a closer study of accentual prosodies.
On "It Goes," it is to the merit of the poem that it made me ask who "leola" is. Perhaps a mimetic element in the fictive poetic world compelled the question. What is the authorial intention in the poem?
Kind regards,
Alzo
IT GOES
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem “It Goes" / "A Hollow Rush."
it goes away, leola,
as the rabble hooves have gone:
the prairies linger.
none, no, none may know
the sable mane for long,
nor the stallion’s great desire.
The souls of brontosaurs may run
their feathers course
for all I know, leola.
this is true, though:
oceans dwell
between the continents.
look through a hollow rush,
leola; sight is limited
and vaguely dry.
peer through your flesh
or mine, leola —
what do you see?
April 2015
Dear Lewis,
Apologies for the delayed reply. I hope all has been well. Thank you for posting the selections from our 2014 correspondence. Writing last year was a great joy for me. That said, I am happy to inform you that I assigned six poems from your Fearful Pleasures for out-of-class reading and reading reports in two of my reading courses this semester:
(1) “The Looking-Glass,” (2) “Sturgeon Moon” (a wonderful poem from a wonderful series), (3) “Ginger,” (4) “An Amherst Pastoral,” (5) “Burning the News” (a most relevant and topical poem today), (6) “The Girl You Thought You Loved”
At the end of the semester, the students will do presentations on a poem of their choice, any that they feel is most emotionally and intellectually interesting. I personally hope to write a paper on “Burning the News” in the near future. When I read the poem, it immediately communicated to my intuition that the subject was the Vietnam War:
Although the trope is “Asia,” the self-immolation of the Buddhist monk in Saigon in 1963 was the first (received) memory the work evoked in me. I now see that “Burning the News” was published in 1968; yet what is notable is that the poem is not out-of-date. As long as there are great-power conflicts and wars in Asia, the poem remains current.
Btw, I read your reminiscence, “Horneteers,” a few months ago, and the piece struck me as captivatingly literary, indeed much like a short story. Some scenes that I found quite memorable were of the arrival and adventure in Cuba, “Hong Kong: King Kong of the Chinese Coast,” and the fighter plane and the trapped pilot sinking into the sea.
Sometime later, in the last two weeks of March, I accidentally discovered your online story “Silence.” After reading it, I was compelled to gather all your other tales available in Per Contra, Nights and Weekends, and Tower Journal. Up until that time, I was not aware that the famous American poet Lewis Turco is also a fiction writer.
Altogether, there were over 45,000 words on 118 pages that I printed out (two pages per sheet, double-sided). I read the stories on and off while the family and I were vacationing in the Japanese countryside. I see you write comfortably in the speculative- and memoir-fiction genres, and I did enjoy a number of your narratives a great deal.
Six stories that distinguish themselves to me in aesthetic and literary terms are (1) “The Chair,” (2) “The Demon in the Tree” (what a laugh I had at the end), (3) “The Ferry,” (4) “Kelly” (I recalled Asimov’s “The Last Question”) (5) “Matinee,” and (6) “Silence.” They are thoughtful, engaging stories. I would recommend them all to others.
Kind regards,
Alzo
Dear Alzo,
It sounds as though you've been exceedingly busy since last we corresponded. That's an interesting and unusual choice of poems for your classes! I look forward to hearing the outcome of the assignment.
Yes, “Burning the News” was written during the Vietnam War, so-called. It appeared in several anti-war anthologies during that period, and on-line as recently as last year in voxpoplisphere.com/2014/12/14/. .
“Horneteers” [published in Portland (Maine) magazine for April 2015] was, in fact, resurrected from the World Cruise Book of the USS Hornet (CVA12), for which I wrote quite a number of essays. In fact, not long ago I went back to look at the credits listed in that volume, and discovered, I think for the first time, that I was the only enlisted man who wrote for the volume, and that I wrote more than anyone else! I was about 20 years old at the time and just beginning to publish poems in the journals (including Our Navy). The officer who asked me to write was Lt.(jg) Douglas Kiker, who later became a journalist for one of the major TV networks. He is long dead, but I owe him a debt of gratitude.
You didn’t need to search the whole internet to find my stories, there are links to all of them on my blog, “Poetics and Ruminations” at www.lewisturco.net. My stories are collected in The Museum of Ordinary People, and my memoirs in Fantaseers. Just log on to Amazon.com for a complete list of my titles. Save yourself some work.
Hi Lewis, your poem "As much as I like to BS..." is now live on Vox Populi. Perhaps you can post the link on Facebook and any other social media you use? It's a lovely poem, and I'd like for as many people as possible to read it. Thanks! Michael Simms:
VOLUNTEERISM AT THE WEST CHESTER UNIVERSITY POETRY CONFERENCE
By Lewis Turco
PREFATORY REMARK
I had decided not to publish this essay, but yesterday morning, Monday, September 15th, 2014, I discovered in a posting on Facebook by Allison Joseph, that Kim Bridgford, the director of the West Chester University Poetry Center and Conference, has been removed from her position, and the conference for 2015 has been canceled. I am not quite sure of the reasons yet, but part of it seems to be that attendance has been falling, also that the administration and/or others are unhappy because the conference has lost focus. Its original purpose was to plug formal poetry, which it did very well at first. And then a political agenda took over and formalism receded into the academic background.
_________________
At the 20th anniversary in 2014 of the West Chester University Poetry Conference in Pennsylvania, Dana Gioia, co-founder with Michael Peich, praised the tradition of volunteerism that has been associated with the Conference. I am acquainted with this tradition, as I volunteered as a “scholar” rather than as a poet on the first occasion of the conference. The schedule was so badly managed that year that we “scholars,” including the late poet Alfred Dorn, a fellow formalist, discovered that there were no attendees when we got up to give our presentations. Readings and workshops had been so thickly scheduled that it was impossible for people to come hear us “volunteers.” When Dana Gioia phoned to invite me to the next conference, I asked him what his terms were. He replied that there were none. I declined to attend.
When I had been an undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, as a member of the Student Union Board of Governors I was placed in charge of the Student Union’s guest writers series from 1956 to 1959. Over that period we invited many writers to campus including E. E. Cummings, Richard Wilbur, James T. Farrell, Richard Eberhart, Donald Hall, John Hollander, Philip Booth, and others. We gave them each an honorarium, provided them all with meals, accommodations and travel allowances. The only people we asked to read on a voluntary basis were faculty and students.
During the summer of 1959, after my graduation, I was invited to spend some time at Yaddo, an artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. Yaddo gave all its guests meals, travel, and accommodations. No one was asked to “volunteer” anything except readings for the attendees and staff.
The following year, while I was a Graduate Fellow at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop from 1959-60, I was able to attend programs very similar to those I had supervised at UConn. All those writers were given the same considerations that were provided at Storrs.
The summer I left Iowa my First Poems was published and I went to the State of Maine Writers’ Conference to meet with the co-founder, Loring Williams, who had also been one of the editors who had chosen my volume as a selection of The Book Club for Poetry, and with its publisher, Clarence Farrar. I gave a program of some sort and came back a number of times over the years, always with an emolument and accommodations.
In the fall I took my first job teaching at Fenn College, now the Cleveland State University. At the time C.S.U. was a downtown engineering school primarily, and in order to survive in such an atmosphere I began asking any poets and writers I knew who were local or visiting town, to come sit in on some of my classes as a favor, voluntarily, which some of them (actually, I recall no refusals) were happy to do. These were the origins of the C. S. U. Poetry Center.
The following summer of 1961 I attended Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference at Middlebury College in Vermont, as a Poetry Fellow; Miller Williams was another Fellow that the Director, John Ciardi, invited to come, and there were others in fiction and nonfiction. We all received the considerations that I was familiar with.
While at Bread Loaf I learned that the British novelist, William Golding, was going to make an American tour the following year, 1962. As soon as I got back to Cleveland I arranged to have Golding come to Fenn as the first guest of the newly instituted Cleveland Poetry Center which was scheduled to begin the year he was touring. I spent the entire first-year budget for the Center, $100.00, on Golding and arranged accommodations at the College for him. Although I had no money left for the rest of 1962-63, I managed to schedule events at Fenn for local and state organizations with visiting writers including John Crowe Ransom, and for volunteer area and local poets.
In 1964 I left Fenn for Hillsdale College in Michigan whose administration asked me to set up a Conference of Midwestern Poets for the summer of 1965. I did so, and of course I followed the procedures I had been using since UConn. Then I left for the State University of New York at Oswego where I remained for 31 years, until I retired in 1996.
It was no surprise that Erwin Palmer, the Chair of the English Department, wanted me to set up yet another program, which I did: a major in creative writing complete with visiting writers every semester. There have been many, many of those, some very famous, such as John Cheever, John Ciardi, William Everson (Brother Antoninus at the time), Donald Justice, Dana Gioia, and on and on – all of whom were given honoriaria, accommodations, meals, and travel expenses.
Thus, I never understood where Mike Peich and Dana Gioia, a poet-businessman who became Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts during the George W. Bush Administration, got the idea that it is all right to ask professionals to donate their time, money, work, and materials to a writers’ conference. Certainly Gioia was not unfamiliar with the system I employed to invite writers to campus during my entire academic career. He himself has been the beneficiary of that system many times and at many places, including Oswego.
I still don’t understand it. Personally, I would have felt embarrassed and miserly to ask people to travel sometimes great distances at significant expense to provide me and my school professional services gratis. (Although Peich was a faculty member at West Chester, to the best of my knowledge Gioia never taught there.)
Yet I myself provided such service to the West Chester Poetry Conference the first year it was held, and in 2013 as well. Over the past decade I have provided the Conference with a $100.00 Student Scholarship annually (for which I don’t recall ever being thanked except by one recipient of that emolument one year).
In 2013 I agreed to serve as a member of two panels. The Conference scheduled one panel on the first day, and the second on the last day, which meant that I had to be (as the director said), the “Formalist in Residence” at my own expense, except for one or two nights’ hotel accommodation and meals. When I was invited to come back again in 2014 I felt constrained again to decline except, perhaps, as a keynote speaker whom the Conference treats as a professional ought to be treated. That has not happened over the decades, and is unlikely to happen at this stage of my life, especially since the Conference now appears to be gone.
During the early 1960s while I was teaching at what is now Cleveland State University, a student named Russell Salamon walked into my office to show me a poem titled “She” in a repeating form that he had invented. In this poem Salamon began by taking a set of parentheses as his center:
()
He then took a sentence, "my hands cup her cup," broke it after the subject, and inserted the set of parens into the break (the technical term for a break in a line of verse is “caesura”):
my hands () cup her cup.
This is a metaphor: “My hands are a set of parentheses.” Next, a second clause: "all parentheses in which I am warm drizzle-rain inside her," thus:
All parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
And a third, "sizzling on snowscapes of her skin, her face, her arms, her thighs, forests full of soundless flowers waited once unseen, translucid [he probably meant “translucent”]; she carries rain constellations to fill flute basins where" with some changed punctuation and a bit of typographical dispersion, appears this way:
sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.
Her face, her arms, her thighs,
all parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
Forests full of soundless flowers
waited once unseen, translucid.
She carries rain constellations
to fill flute basins where
And finally, "My finger touch dis[s]olves into a shiverlong echo of rains; we wash our morning faces off":
SHE1
My finger touch dissolves
into a shiverlong echo of rains/
sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.
(Her face, her arms, her thighs,
all parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
Forests full of soundless flowers
waited once unseen, translucid.
She carries rain constellations
to fill f lute basins where
/we wash our morning faces off
— Russell Salamon
The split between f and lute in the penultimate line appears as it was originally printed in Salamon’s chapbook, Parent[hetical Pop]pies, published by d. a. levy’s Renegade Press in 1964; it may or may not be a typographical error.
After I had thought about it for a while, I recalled E. E. Cummings’ poem titled “l(a,” which was also built of parentheses, though all he did was to take the word “loneliness,” insert into it a single sentence, “a leaf falls,” and sprinkle it down the page. More to the point, though, I remembered a poem I had myself written when I was a G. I. Bill undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut only two or three years earlier, for the C. S. U. position was my first professional teaching experience. I had begun by taking the title sentence, “Time goes down in mirrors,” and writing a sentence that rhymed and metered (both halves had the same meters,) to parenthesize the title: “Sophia chatters, for nothing matters” and create the first stanza (with a change or two in punctuation):
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
The second stanza would add two more rhyming lines with the opposite meter (a “mirror image” as it were,):
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters;
Hence, his worldly smile.
In the third stanza I had decided that this time the meter would be normative iambic tetrameter for both lines,
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon.
The fourth stanza would repeat the plan:
Outdoors, the shadows listen as
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon,
Their movements metronomed by jazz.
Then, in the fifth stanza, while the central line remained the same, the lines above and below it would be inverted:
TIME GOES DOWN IN MIRRORS2
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters;
Hence, his worldly smile.
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon.
Outdoors, the shadows listen as
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon,
Their movements metronomed by jazz.
Sophia chatters.
Horace listens while
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Outdoors the shadows listen as
Time goes down in mirrors.
Their movements metronomed by jazz,
The pair will love each other soon.
Hence! his worldly smile...,
For nothing matters.
Both of these poems are rather complicated structures although both were written by undergraduates. As an exercise in repetition and in syntax rearrangement, though, parenthetics need not be so difficult, and I used it in class for decades. Here is a brief exercise poem laid out in different fonts so that one may see the sentence elements, none of which do anything fancy such as rhyming, metering, or using any sort of punctuation, including parentheses:
PINES3
They are the pines
I have seen them standing
in the hills where stone dwells
the wind shifts among their needles
roots touch toward silence in the earth
as though they have always been
strength drawn out of darkness.
Although it’s built of uncomplicated elements, notice that the poem can be read from top to bottom, from bottom to top, or from the middle out and it still makes sense.
NOTES:
This essay is from “Paren(t)hesis,” in Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, ed. Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, Austin: TX: Dos Gatos Press, 2011, pp. 194-99.
1Russell Salamon’s poem titled “She” is from his chapbook Parent[hetical Pop]pies, Cleveland: Renegade Press, 1964; all rights reserved by the author.
The Virginia Quarterly Review "The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).
The Tower Journal Two short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.
The Tower Journal A story, "The Car," and two poems, "Fathers" and "Year by Year"
The Tower Journal Memoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.
The Michigan Quarterly Review This is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).
The Gawain Poet An essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.
The Black Death Bryan Bridges' interesting article on the villanelle and the terzanelle with "The Black Death" by Wesli Court as an example of the latter.
Seniority: Six Shakespearian Tailgaters This is a part of a series called "Gnomes" others of which have appeared in TRINACRIA and on the blog POETICS AND RUMINATIONS.
Reinventing the Wheel, Modern Poems in Classical Meters An essay with illustrations of poems written in classical meters together with a "Table of Meters" and "The Rules of Scansion" in the Summer 2009 issue of Trellis Magazine
"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.
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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.
April 21, 2018 in American History, Books, Commentary, Criticism, Education, Essays, History, Literature, Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)