Poetics and Ruminations

Birthday of THE BOOK OF FORMS

Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.

The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com),  ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

Companion volumes:

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

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

Cold Comfort

Letters to the Dead

LETTERS TO THE DEAD

In Memory of Luigi and May, John and Bertha

 

OUR HERO

Here is our Hero, opening his eyes.

The daylight rises like a welling tide

And floats him out of slumber into time.

Two eggs and toast; coffee in a cup

Of thermal plastic; the thermostat turned up.

Slowly blood and temperature rise.

 

Shower and shave, and then his socks and pants

Crawl up his flesh to lock his shirt-tail in,

Though waking is his habit, and the sun

Clothes him like armor forged against those dreams

He's left among the linens — so it seems,

Or so he hopes. At least he has a chance

 

To down the darkness, drown it in the dawn.

For he is of an age when sleep comes hard,

But when it comes there trails behind its edge

A specter host, a horde of attic shades

Risen from the Nether Regions' glades

To walk again upon a morning lawn.

 

He'd buried them upstairs in trunks and cartons,

Their eyelids weighted down with trash and lace,

Mathoms and mementos: every face

Lies in its album while the hornet croons

Among the rafters summer afternoons

Or as, in spring, the maples fill with martins,

 

With greening leaves that fall to earth in fall —

But worst in winter. Then the photographs

Give up the ghost to cold, the petty griefs

Of dust as chill as snow. Their images

Arise, and then descend like salvages

Of musty seasons to our Hero's hall.

 

They walk the paisley carpet as the night

Fills with the moon. They pause before his door.

They enter, cast their shadows on the floor,

Loom over him. Then, one by one, they slide

Into his sleep — he recollects the stride

Of one, another's stance, their darkness bright

 

As candles guttering. The dreamer's lake

Has swallowed him — nevertheless, he sees,

His lids like film. The phantoms do not speak,

Nor does he speak to them, but words in spate

Sluice through his mind. He tries to close the gate

To capture them. He struggles to awake....

 

Here is our Hero, born to second sight.

The daylight rises like a welling tide

And floats him out of slumber into time...,

Two eggs and toast; coffee in a cup

Of thermal plastic; the thermostat turned up.

He takes a pad and pen and starts to write.

 

Two Epistles to Children Drowned:

 

LETTER TO A DROWNED BOY

He wants to write a letter to the child,

The boy drowned on the beach when he was young,

A boy himself. The letter is overdue.

Dear Friend, he writes. I recall your body flung

To that Wisconsin beach. Your flesh was blue,

A pallid blue. The day was dark, but mild —

 

Or was it dark? If so, why would my mother

Have taken us to swim where you had drowned?

What kind of darkness was it, has it been

Since first I saw you there where you'd been downed

By death, the first death I had ever seen?

Why had she let me see you? Did my brother

 

See you also? I have never asked,

But he was there, seven when I was twelve.

The firemen pumped you out. Their motor churned,

But darkness stalked that beach and, in its stealth,

Stole the march on all of us. I turned

Into a mortal. I saw that life was masked,

 

And underneath the mask I saw the bone.

I saw your chest sucked inward, then forced out;

I saw the blot of water on the sand

Under the hose. I saw you were without

The thing that made you you. Time waved its wand

Over the water — we blinked, and you were gone.

 

I don't remember feeling. I was cold.

I must have forced myself to turn to stone.

I think the crowd was small — a weekday crowd —

but since then you and I have been alone.

The Pulmotor drones, but silences are loud;

You took my hand; I cannot break your hold.

 

Your stillnesses encroach a ripple more

Each hour upon my sands, this beach-head birth

Allotted us, that now erodes away

Until I feel dark water sucking earth

From underfoot. The motor sings. The day

Fills my lungs. My ears begin to roar.

 

LETTER TO A THREE-YEAR-OLD

Ontario was calm that afternoon,

Still as the photograph of a summer day.

The beach was a fall of stones sloping down

To the water's edge. It was no day to drown,

The sun in the sky like a hazy red balloon.

Your father had been watching you at play

 

In depths that reached your waist and touched his knees.

The other picnickers sat on the shore

Or waded lazily not far away,

Watching you and the other children play.

The sailboats on the lake moved by degrees

Almost too small to note. One might ignore,

 

On such an afternoon, the shadow on

The imperceptible swell — the scudding cloud

That threw its umbra there, casting color

Along the lakeside. One might well ignore

The picnickers, the children in the sun,

The hazy heat that settled like a shroud

 

Impalpably on the water. Then,

Without a word or sign, summer faltered.

The silence you became still echoes loud

Upon Ontario's stones, under the shroud

Of haze and scudding cirrus. We hear it often.

The quality of stillness has been altered.

 

LETTER TO A GRANDSIRE

Dear Grandpa,

                           Here I am at forty-five,

And you've been dead for years. When I was twelve

I came to visit you at great remove

From my home town. I caught you by the barn,

Committing an act of nature, but reproof

Was lost on you. You turned as though to warn

 

The empty stalls of danger. Tall and thin,

Thereafter you left the room when I came in —

You imitated smoke. I'd see you there

Beside the iron stove; you'd start, a look

Like prey upon your eyes, then disappear.

You never held a job or read a book

 

Your whole life long, I've heard my mother claim.

You sired nine before time quenched your flame —

Or, much more likely, grandma's. Six were sons.

They all grew up inside that shell of boards

You called a house. The sunny, windy seasons

Belabored it. The autumn fell in cords,

 

And you were sapped by spring, became a ghost

Who fled from grandsons, that unruly host

Sprung from your loins. You opened up your fly

And soaked the barn. You saw me watching you,

Then turned and faded off. Was it my eye,

My look of accusation? I guess you knew

 

That in your daughter's world, therefore in mine,

Such things did not occur. You were a swine

Cast before pearls. I blush as I remember,

Not your simple act, but my disdain.

Grandpa, I cherish that familiar member,

That glimpse of greatness, your prolific reign.

 

LETTER TO A BARITONE

Our Hero is remembering his friend

From second grade and high school. He recalls

The early days — on weekends they'd pretend

That they were pilots in The War. The walls

Fade out about him in his reverie,

Fade into the quartet's close harmony.

 

Dear Curt (he writes),

                                How long have you been dead?

I don't remember. Last weekend I went back

To visit our home town. A passing dread

Lies waiting when we double in our track,

But this time I picked up the telephone

And called our choral teacher. Pure cornpone,

 

I know, but hearing him I felt relieved —

He sounded as he used to. I had brunch

Next day at his house — hard to be believed,

But he was just the same. I'd played a hunch

and won this once. We spent a splendid day;

We quipped and talked, and then I walked away.

 

He had our pictures, Curt, down in his den

Upon his desk, and on the wall as well:

That barbershop cartoon that I'd forgotten,

Drawn by our tenor but signed by one and all.

He tried to give it to me; I demurred.

I couldn't take it, but I nearly heard

 

Those chords again, spellbinding when we blended

Into a single voice of chiming parts;

The ringing silence when the song was ended —

This pen pursues its way by fits and starts.

"How maudlin this would sound to anyone,"

I think at first; then, "Lord, we did have fun."

 

The ringing silence when the song was ended:

No doubt that's what we've heard since you've been gone.

Tony and Ed became what they intended,

And so did I. We work, we mow the lawn,

Drive the kids to the dentist, wives to the store,

But we never get together anymore.

 

LETTER TO A GARDENER

Uncle Alfred, skinny as a pole,

Deaf as any post, blind as a vole,

You felt your way through age along the rows

And hillocks of your garden, furbelows

And furrows. Maine potatoes were your eyes,

And corn, your ears to hear the grackles' cries.

 

You felt your way through age along the rows —

You laid the autumn straitly in windrows

After your harvest, green and gold and brown,

Peered out of Mason jars all over town.

Your labors rested with us winter-long;

Now I will pay you for them with a song.

 

After your harvest, green and gold and brown,

I helped to bear your burden, Alfred, down

At last to harvest home. It was as light

To me as sun by day or dew by night,

Uncle Alfred, skinny as a pole,

Deaf as any post, blind as a vole.

 

LETTER TO A HALL-OF-FAMER

Our Hero reminisces, half awake.

The radio is playing, and his cat,

Black as midnight, is making up to him.

He wants to write a letter for the sake

Of auld lang syne; however, he must trim,

First, thirty years and more from all those that

 

He has accrued. He must remember when

The summer morning broke across a street

Of elms and maples.

                                  Mr. Walsh, he writes,

I couldn't have been more than nine or ten.

I slumbered soundly through such dreamless nights,

And rose up early, anxious to compete

 

With time, discover which of us should last

And which succumb. None of my friends had risen;

The street was mine — until I saw your pickup

Before the enigmatic shack we passed

Each day that we played ball. We used to kick up

Dust in the lot beside the shack. A dozen

 

Times when we had started home that summer,

We'd stopped before the dusty window panes,

Cupped our hands and tried to peer inside.

We thought we saw machines. We lived on rumor —

When we thought of it. Our interest died.

And then I saw your truck, all dents and stains,

 

Parked at the curb that dewy summer morning.

I found you bottling milk with your machines,

Racking bottles. You were a quiet man,

So tall that, as you loaded up, the awning

Brushed your head. So that's how they began,

Those early hours filled with brilliant greens

 

Along the bumpy roads outside of town

Where you were hailed as "Mr. Walsh" or "Ed"

By customers who met us at the door.

The milk was winter white — it wore a crown

Of cream beneath the cap. Those mornings wore

A luster. Your obituary said

 

That you were Big Ed Walsh, the Hall-of-Famer,

The White Sox great, best pitcher in the world

When giants roamed the diamond. I rode

A summer milk route with a forty-gamer

Who never hinted that he once bestrode

A famous mound and, like a titan, hurled

 

His smokeball past a batter. I've since gone

Driving through the hills to Cooperstown,

Mr. Walsh, down to the Hall of Fame

To see your plaque upon a wall of stone,

But you were not transfigured by your name —

All I recall is milk that wore a crown.

 

LETTER TO AN EDITOR

Our Hero conjures up his ancient friend,

The literary Weaver, editor

And correspondent, in his printery

Belowstairs in the house where East Cleveland

Becomes the Heights. He was the guarantor

Of evenings filled with printer's deviltry

 

And conversation — nights that otherwise

Would have been lost in smog and Erie mist.

     Dear Loring, he implores, I've missed you well

These several years. I know that you despise

Shows of emotion. Forgive me. You don't exist,

So I must follow though I go through Hell.

 

I dream about your office down below;

The flywheel of your press turning around,

The fonts of type, the tubes of murky ink.

Upstairs your fabled wife treads to and fro —

Hart Crane's aunt, billowing like a mound

Of lace and lavender, attempts to think

 

Of one more bar of music to compose.

Turn off the press — it rumbles to a halt.

We sit and talk among those paneled walls —

Cleveland recedes and starts to decompose.

The strokes of fate are muffled in your vault,

And we can barely hear her siren calls.

 

I count it as a personal offense,

Loring, when someone dies, someone I know,

Particularly you. What did you get

Out of this retreat? It makes no sense.

How can I calculate the tab I owe

And pay you back? You've buried me in debt.

 

I must resort to dreams. I turn within

My winding sheets and wait for you to come

To stand beside my stead. You proffer me

A book you've set in leaden type, but on

Those pages there is emptiness. I thumb

The volume through. I read that you are gone.

 

Interlude:

 

SLUMBER

Our Hero is exhausted, and his head

Is reeling from his labors. He glances to

The clock upon the wall. He sees the night

Is far advanced. He switches off the light

And sits in darkness feeling shades of blue —

He has been writing letters to the dead.

 

 

It's time, he thinks, to rise and go to bed.

He wonders whether he has laid to rest

Any of those ghosts who populate

His dreams — descend the attic stairs and wait

Beside his pillow. He understands their quest;

Therefore, he pens these letters to the dead.

 

He knows that everything was never said

Among them while they thrived; he further knows

That somehow he must say it, or his debt

Will grow until, entangled in its net,

He drowns within the depths of what he owes.

He gathers up his letters to the dead,

 

Shuffles them in darkness. But, instead

Of getting up and going to his room,

He hefts them in his hand. The slender sheaf

Feels as though composed of moss and leaf.

Then, thinking that he smells a grave perfume,

His eyes close on his letters to the dead.

 

He dreams his words are waiting to be read.

They lie upon the earth, begin to brown

And crumble into loam. Out of their mold

A herb begins to grow. Its leaves unfold

To drink the night. A bud swells at its crown;

Balm blossoms from the letters to the dead.

 

When he awakens, an incarnate red

Transfuses the horizon: it is dawn.

The letters, scattered on his morning table,

Show palely forth from under umbral sable —

The shades still linger; they will not be gone —

He must resume his letters to the dead.

 

THE OBSESSION

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem The Obsession.

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen. He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

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

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

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

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror. He looked his last

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

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell. I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so. But what was it I dreamed

In fact? An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream? Who was it died

 

Again last night? I dreamed my father died,

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

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

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

 

My father died. Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands. And when at last

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

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

 

REFLECTIONS IN AN ATTIC ROOM

A Sonnet Redoubled

 

As if one needed to begin to write;

As though one had to have a pen at hand,

Paper smoothening to the touch of night,

Light sifting across the page like wind and sand.

 

This is the scrivener's fallacy, the hour

Abraded by sand and wind, by willful words:

They scrape at vision, they scarify and scour —

The urn becomes a scattering of shards;

 

The wind, a voice freed of its hollow shell

Noting nothings echoing in the bone

Bleaching among the dunes of time that swell:

They shift, remembering they once were stone.

 

Sit stony-eyed; watch the words curl and come

Still-born to life between the joint and thumb.

 

Dear Father: You are dead. What's there to say?

Yet I'll go on to say it, as you know,

Or may not, as the case may be. Just so,

Our monologues continue on their way,

Two streams of silence rising out of clay,

Passing each other in the essential flow

Of stars and atoms. Watch them rise and go,

Falling in vortices of night and day:

 

The grass grows green, the suns and planets turn

Upon a field of sable. Brine turns to blood,

I turn to you as day turns into night,

As flesh turns in to earth. I cannot spurn

The flame you gave to me upon the flood

As if one needed to begin. To write

 

Is useless. "Poetry makes Nothing happen,"

As Auden said. It happens anyhow,

Rising upon the eternal tide of Now,

Engulfing everything — the field, the aspen,

Herb, rock and furrow. So we sigh, grasp pen,

Ink and paper, then we sit down to plow

Another row of letters. We endow

The meadow with another seed to open.

 

And when it does, what will the blossom be?

Another flower in a sea of flowers?

A blooming and a withering of the land

That once was ocean, that once more shall be sea

Rising to blood again to invest these hours

As though one had to have a pen in hand?

 

Here in an attic study rising to

A peak in the winter dark, one thinks at times

Of love; one thinks of synonyms and rhymes

That come as close as words are wont to do

To what it once was like when the flesh was new

And closed with flesh in torrid zones and climes.

What was it like? Whose were those pantomimes

Between the sheets that got the rave reviews?

 

Those sheets — those wrinkled sheets: they press in close

Upon recall. The books that line these shelves

Are filled with love songs yellowing and trite:

Verbena pressed between the leaves verbose.

Our sheets untwine, leaving to our selves

Paper smoothening to the touch of night.

 

The attic listens to the scratching pen.

Outdoors, the wind has sunk. The snow is deep,

The neighbors in their steads are fast asleep,

Dreaming of when they will awake again.

Nothing is happening, nor will it when

They lift their lids to look into the deep

Trance of wakening. The ink will keep

The stillness that inhabits books and men,

 

Will keep it and disgorge it as the leaf

Turns, veined and sere, and then begins to brown

Under the rooftree, beneath the moving hand.

The words accumulate, become a sheaf

Of seasons as the silence filters down,

Light sifting across the page like wind and sand.

 

Imagine this: a battering at the door;

The voice of anguish pleading, "Give us curds,

Crusts, crumbs of meaning — pray you, give us words!

We need the Secret Name, and so much more —

A sense of purpose from your ample store

Of synonyms and antonyms! Rewards

Undreamt await if you extend towards

Your fellow man a portion of your lore!"

 

But the knocker lies against the stolid wood,

The panel does not echo. The empty hall

Contains but peeling paper and a sour

Smell of waiting. It must be understood

There is no understanding, only gall:

This is the scrivener's fallacy. The hour

 

Is late. The atmosphere is thick. The earth

Is running down. The fishes in the sea

Are drowned in silt. Each blade of grass, each tree

Is blighted. There has been a monstrous birth,

And plenitude has been transformed to dearth —

The Magi slouch away from Galilee.

"The pen is mightier than the sword," but see

It beaten into shares of slender worth:

 

It settles in its rut and plows its row.

The poisonous sun and parching raindrops slough

From brow and temple. Emaciated birds,

Before the wrinkled seed can sprout and grow,

Seize it for ivied towers wearing down,

Abraded by sand and wind, by willful words.

 

Go, little book, and bear thy wordy freight

Away from me as fast as e'er thou may —

I'm sick to death of everything you say.

I wrote you out in sundry hours late

When I long since ought to have hit the hay —

But did I seek sweet dreaming? Did I sate

The wingéd Pegasus on an early date,

In a timely moment? Nay, I say you, neigh!

 

I entertained the nightmare in my room.

I watched that grim old nag bend to devour

The grain of bitterness, the oats of doom,

The silage of depression. Little, sour

Book, I loathe thy messages of gloom —

They scrape at vision, they scarify and scour.

 

Build me more stately vessels, O my Soul!

I have a pot to piss in, sure enough,

But I've a fancy for more fancy stuff:

Amphorae full of oils, a wassail bowl,

Kraters of flowers. Ceramics is my goal:

A funerary urn, built good and tough,

Of alabaster so that, when I slough

This clay, my ash won't end up in a hole.

 

But what is this? I look into my heart

And find a crock chock-full of feeble words;

A thunder-jug beladen with a fart;

Stained paper, and a nest of nestling turds —

And as I watch, the paper falls apart;

The urn becomes a scattering of shards.

 

I wrote a book called Curses and Laments.

There was, it seems, a modicum of scents

In such an exercise, but only that:

A modicum, for it relieves frustration,

But changes nothing else in God's creation.

You pucker up and whistle in your hat;

You break a little wind when you're intense —

I wrote a book called Curses and Laments.

 

You take a certain pleasure in the smell

Of fire and brimstone. They can go to Hell,

Those bastards that have muscled you around.

Leave them a curse and then go underground

To breathe the air where you have loosed to dwell

A wind, a voice freed of its hollow shell.

 

What will we talk about beneath the stone?

"I have a little dust stuck in my eye."

"Today the worms are restless. I can feel

Them turning." "Pardon me, I have a cold —

I cannot stop my coughin'." "Thought I'd die

Of laughter when my nasty neighbor went

Out in the rain and caught her death." "I saw

Pale Ryder the other day — he's looking old

And out of sorts." "I wait for the telephone

To ring, but my children never seem to call.

Perhaps it's out of order — the reaper-man

Doesn't service the equipment he has sold."

Perhaps it's much like life — we'll merely lie

Noting nothings echoing. In bone-

 

Yards poets slowly accumulate.

I sometimes wonder if, on Judgment Day,

We'll all rise up in glory to afflate,

Converse, and each recite his latest lai.

Can rime be so perverse? In Plato's State

We'd all be banished — even the great Good Gray

Poet. But where in God's name could we go —

To that grand Writers' Conference Below?

 

But even there we would, it seems to me,

Be welcomed none too warmly to pause or dwell.

There'd be the Devil to pay, inevitably,

For there are limits to tolerance in Hell.

If we are left alone with our poetry

Bleaching among the dunes of time, that's well.

 

So Limbo's won and Paradise is lost.

My attic room is filling up with smoke:

I sit and talk with Geoffrey, Will — a host

 

Of my confreres. We pass the time with joke

And bawdry. There is little else to do —

The centuries lie heavy as a yoke

 

Upon the roof; the crackling of the glue

In all our bindings shatters this still air.

Our words and verse go whistling up the flue.

 

We pilgrims to Perdition sit and stare

Into the silence of sere marrow-bone.

I proffer the hemlock cup — they do not dare

 

Accept, for if they drank I'd be alone.

They shift, remembering they once were stone.

 

And in my pipe smoke I can just discern

The outlines of a sonnet redoublé,

A skeleton of what is my concern:

The meaning of it all. My smoke is gray.

 

I ponder carefully these artful rounds

And think about the things I have to say —

I try some lines aloud. The noise redounds

To my House of Fame, and meters ricochet

 

From the sloping walls to die upon my ears.

Where are the hare of soul, the baying hounds

Of the Apocalypse? Where are the tears

Condensed from feelings language seldom sounds?

 

My room is silent; my pen is chill and dumb.

Sit stony-eyed with words that curl and come.

 

Now it is almost done, this foolish thing

That I have penned. The lines have nearly jelled,

And I must ask if I have felt compelled

To write, or merely willed myself to sing

 

This song that few will ever care to read.

And was I born, or was I merely made,

Concocted of myself — the man of trade,

Not the Bard God conjured out of need

 

To cure the universe? I do not care.

To be a poet of whatever sort

Will help to pass this journey to the Court

Of Ultimate Decisions. This is fare

 

I pay and eat — these lines that fall and come

Stillborn to life between the joint and thumb.

 

LETTER TO MOTHER

Dear Mother, writes Our Hero, You won't dread

My writing you this letter to the dead —

Not even if you read it. You'd not recall

A word a moment later. You've built a wall

Between the world and you, a wall of glass

Opaque as pearl, through which no moments pass.

 

You lie in one position all day long,

Oblivious to silence as to song.

You'd like to die, but you have been betrayed

By your own body. Death has been delayed

Because the flesh is not yet ready to

Give up the ghost — it will not take its cue

 

And ring the curtain down upon this play

That has no climax — the scene just seeps away.

Imperceptibly the footlights dim,

The heroine held hostage by the whim

Of fate and accident — not even age

Will help you in your exit from the stage.

 

There is no need for me here to rehearse

The acts in your decline. It seemed perverse

At first, and then I thought you must be ill,

But you were not. It was an act of will,

Wasn't it, Mother? You just gave up, gave in,

Threw up your hands — you lost the wish to win.

 

But who or what is it you've really killed?

Much of your past, and part of mine is stilled,

Lost to one-half of our common memory.

Time's siling hands have scoured it like emery

From your mind, and I am not your son

In some essential way, I'm not the one

 

I was when you remembered who I was,

But someone less. This is what dying does:

It murders the survivors, cell by cell,

Until we too fall victim to the fell

And fragile flesh. We owe it to each other

Not to give in until we have to, Mother.

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

 But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

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

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

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets. Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards. "Is this the doom

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

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him. Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads. What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

These two interlocking series of poems, "Letters to the Dead" and "Reflections in an Attic Room" are from The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 115 pp; copyright © 2019 and all rights reserved by Lewis Turco; may not be reprinted in whole or in part by anyone, anywhere, without the written consent of the author.

Related articles

Bordighera Press Publications

Sestinamania Part Eight

In Memory of George O'Connell, Printmaker

R.I.P. PHILIP LEVINE

 

 PHILIP LEVINE, Jan. 10, 1928 - Feb. 14, 2015

ABANDONED FACTORY

A Philip Levine tailgater bluesanelle

 

Beyond, through broken windows one can see

Barely, through broken panes, can barely see

A lot of subjects for great poetry.

 

Squint your eyes, or close your eyes completely

As you stand enraptured, rapt completely,

And through those busted windows you will see

 

Downtrodden workers…or their darkling ghosts,

The wraiths and phantoms of despairing hosts --

All of them subjects for great poetry.

 

They’re still downtrodden, everyone who labors,

Who toils for pelf, performing manual labors.

Beyond, through broken windows one can see

 

Prose odes and elegies to beaten workers

Written by academics, word-warrior workers

Who find in labor topics for poetry.

 

The mill towns of New England were a wreck,

But now it’s old Detroit that is the wreck --

Through all its broken windows one can see

A lot of Luddites reading poetry.

 

Copyright Lewis Turco 2015. All rights reserved.

Form of the Week 24 – Genethliacum

 

          OCCASIONAL POETRY is written to celebrate a particular occasion, such as a marriage (epithalamion, epithalamium, prothalamion), death (elegy, obsequy, ode, threnody), public event (triumphal ode, coronation ode) or person (encomium, pæan, panegyric), or to deliver an apology (palinode). The genethliacum is an occasional poem written in honor of a birth. It may be written in any prosody or in any form, traditional or nonce.  This genethliacum is written in the strong-stress prosody called “podics”; many ballads and nursery rhymes are written in podics -- for more information about this system, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition.

 

 

NURSERY RIME

 

                  What shall I say of my son,

That he is firm, fair of skin?

         That he rides his backside and can't know

He has not yet let the outside in?

                  There squalls a storm just begun.

         I stand fast; he lies low.

 

                  What may I say of this bone

Wound in flesh partly mine —

         Warp of my woof, thread of my skein —

He has come so supple to sup and dine,

                  To tangle the nets we have thrown

         To veil the waters that won't drain.

 

                  He would swim where I recline.

Toss him a hook.  Fish his schools:

         He will lure us down, take us in.

He will build us a weir for fools —

                  He is no man's yet he is mine.

         He is a death sign and a bulletin.

 

         These next two genethliacums are written in the traditional roundelay form invented by John Dryden in the 18^th century:

 

 

FOR CHRISTOPHER CAMERON TURCO

A Roundelay after Dryden, January 23, 1997

 

Christopher is twenty-four

Upon this January morn.

It makes his father pretty sore,

It leaves his mother looking worn

That they don't see him anymore

Because he's left where he was born:

 

It makes his father pretty sore,

It leaves his mother looking worn.

His sister's settled their old score —

Their sibling feud has been forsworn,

But they don't see him anymore

Because he's left where he was born.

 

His sister's settled their old score;

Their sibling feud has been forsworn.

It makes his father pretty sore,

It leaves his mother looking worn

That they don't see him anymore

Now Chris has left where he was born.

 

His family can but deplore

The way its fabric has been torn.

Christopher is twenty-four

Upon this January morn,

But they don't see him anymore

Since he forsook where he was born.

 

 

FOR JESSIMA SITI RANNEY

A Roundelay after Dryden, January 23, 1997

 

Jessima is one year old

On this January day.

Yes, the weather's pretty cold,

But we feel as warm as May;

Her father loves her big and bold,

Her mother loves her all the way —

 

Yes, the weather's pretty cold,

But we feel as warm as May:

Grandma will not break her hold,

Granddad's on the floor to play;

Her father loves her big and bold,

Her mother loves her all the way.

 

Grandma will not break her hold,

Granddad's on the floor to play —

Yes, the weather's pretty cold,

But we feel as warm as May:

Her father loves her big and bold,

Her mother loves her all the way —

 

Oh, the stories to be told!

Oh, the songs to sing and say!

Jessima’s a whole year old

On this cold and blowy day.

Her father loves her big and bold,

And mother loves her all the way.

 

These three genethliacums are written in the verse form called the rubliw which was invented by Richard Wilbur in the 20^th century:

 

RUBLIW FOR HAMLET ON HIS 400TH BIRTHDAY

 

            Dear Ham,

         I guess I am

      just about as damn

  full of you as any clam

is full of stuffing. I simply cannot cram

   you down past my diaphragm —

      not another gram.

         I wish you’d scram,

            you ham!

 

 

 

RUBLIW FOR MARGARET GROUT

On Her 100^th Birthday.

 

            Dear Mar-

         garet, you are

      without doubt, by far

   a century’s most shining star.

independent of the calendar,

   here is a ringing reservoir

      of lovesong poured afar

         from an Alcazar

            guitar.

 

 

 

RUBLIW FOR GEORGE O’CONNELL

On His Birthday, 16 October 2000

 

            Dear George,

         It would be gorg-

      eous to do as the Borg-

   ias did and take a meal to gorge

us all on your birthday. It will forge

   a closer bond among us four

      “jest folks.” Who could want more,

         George? Be food’s scourge —

            engorge!

 

 

This birthday poem is written in the traditional form called common octave, which is the quatrain stanza called common measure doubled:

 

 

GENETHLIACUM FOR GEORGE O’CONNELL

October 16, 2012

 

George’s birthday is this week,

He’s turning eighty-six.

I doubt I could administer

Half that many licks,

Or light that many candles on

A largish birthday cake

Before we’d all be standing in

A waxen burning lake.

 

So I am simply going to

Write these simple rhymes

And wish him well and many more --

Okay, A few more times

Like this one where we four have come

Together for a sharing

Of a meal, a drink, a laugh,

And a ritual of caring.

 

 

         This poem is written in iambic tetrameter lines, most of which are couplets, called “short couplets,” but not all of them:

 

 

A GENETHLIACUM FOR GARY GETCHELL

November 20, 1995

 

Gary Getchell’s turning seventy –

It seems more like a thousand-leventy.

His father, Ray, was a restless itch,

Which makes Gary a son-of-an-itch.

Jean, my wife, held her cousin in awe,

And I, his ancient cousin-in-law

Have had to swallow an incredible crawful

Over the years, so I do what’s in-lawful

And hold that he’s just somebody awful

Nice when he’s not feeling above it,

Which isn’t often, so I tell him to shove it

Into a corner and then forget it,

But does he do it? Never. He won’t quit

Being a fellow who’s forever noisome:

Smelly, you know, not to mention annoysome.

 

I don’t know how Judy, his long-suffering wife,

Has managed somehow to get on with her life

As well as she has, what with Gary’s gout,

His penchant for “projects” that seldom work out:

The studio gear, the outdoor umbrella

With table that he said could make a poor fella

Richer than Midas, or even than Croesus,

But did it? Ask Judy and she’ll holler “Jesus!

He’s driving me bonkers, he’s driving me wacky

With all these ideas that sound so damn tacky

That I could just scream.” She pauses, then does so,

Using her lung-power with a good deal of gusto.

 

Now he’s retired, so he’s asked for a hand up

From Judy the Sturdy so he can do stand-up

Saturday evenings, serve on the school board

And listen to speeches so he can be bored,

Call on his relatives to come break an arm

While erecting his opulent barn

And so on and so on. Well I could continue,

But as we can see, here’s a retinue

Who’d like to get up and give Gary a roasting.

I’ll build a pyre outdoors for his toasting.

 

         Finally, here is a poem written in a nonce (invented for the occasion) form:

 

 

RICHARD WILBUR ON HIS 80TH BIRTHDAY

 

Oh, if your name were only “Wilver,”

         With a v instead of b,

There would be a lot less silver

         On this head of mine. You’d see

                  Brown again — some gray, at least.

                  For sure, perhaps, I’d be well fleeced

 

The way I was when we were younger...,

         But you seem not to have grown old.

What’s going on, you ballad-monger?

         Who is this fellow I behold

                  Now and again and here and there,

                  This tall, good-looking guy with hair?

 

If my old cat saw Richard Wilbur

         I know exactly what she’d do

If she were young, too, and could still purr:

         She’d climb up in your lap and mew,

                  And then she’d settle down and choose

         To await the arrival of your Muse

         (Although she’d probably spell is Mews).

 

Suggested writing exercise:

 

Write a birthday poem for someone.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Form of the Week 19 – The Elegy

 

         On Thursday, October 11^th, 2012, I got back into the classroom for the first time in a long while. The week before I had dropped in on Dr. Bennet Shaber, Chair of the SUNY College at Oswego Department of English and Creative Writing, to drop off a couple of books for the Department’s display of faculty publications: Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets and my Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, both published in the same year. I was mildly surprised to see that Bennet seemed to be more interested in the former volume than in the book of literary criticism.

“I’m teaching the elegy this semester,” he told me. “It’s a seminar. How about coming to class next week and talking to my students?” he asked. “They’re smart and interested. These aren’t exactly ‘elegies,’ he observed, ‘but close.’”

I happily agreed, so I went home and prepared some materials. I asked Bennet to send me a list of the major elegies he had covered so far this year, and he sent me this list by email:

“Spencer's Astrophel, Nashe's A Litany in Time of Plague, Milton's Lycidas, Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Shelley's Adonais are the major poems so far.  We've also read some more modern/contemporary poems by Dennis O'Driscoll, Richard Garcia, Tess Gallagher, and Sharon Olds.  Next Tuesday they have a paper due, so I'll spend the class showing them some paintings that touch on pastoral elegy (Poussin's two Arcadian Shepherd paintings principally).  Then Thursday is YOU!  I've been using Sandra Gilbert's Inventions of Farewell to supply most of the modern poetry.  I can have them bring it to class if you know the volume and want to read some of those as well as your own poetry.”

I wrote back, “Attached you will find the titles and pages that I will read your class.” This is the attachment: 

ELEGIES

From The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics, Fourth Edition:

Occasional Poetry, pp. 266-269;

Elegiac Distich, Elegy, and “Elegy for John,: pp. 201-203

  

From Fearful Pleasures, The Collected Poems of Lewis Turco:

 

“In a White Direction,” p. 41

 “Lines for Mr. Stevenson,” p. 48

 “Trilogy for J. F. K.,” pp. 51-54

 “The Pilot,” pp. 179-180

 “Cancer,” pp. 401-402

 “The Recurring Dream,” pp. 403-404 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court:

“Elegy Composed in a Watermelon Patch,” pp. 181-183 

From The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition:

Sestina, pp. 334-344

 “The Obsession,” pp. 341-342

Interestingly, at least to me, is the coincidence that another book just out, Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776, edited by Dennis Barone, Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2012, contains, among an unusual but thoughtful selection of four of my poems, two elegies, “The Recurring Dream,” and the third part of “Trilogy for J. F. K.,” listed above, a Pindaric ode on the first anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, titled, “Ode on St. Cecilia’s Day 1964”:

ODE ON ST. CECILIA’S DAY 1964

by Lewis Turco

 

1.  Of the Past

 

Some music, then, for this day.  Let it be

Suitable to the mood of fallen snow,

The veil of a virgin saint.  Quietly

Let it come now, out of the silence; now

While the birds inexplicably forsake

The elm, the oak, the seed in the lilac....

Instead, drumrolls muffled in an old year,

An echo of trumpets in the streets.  Clear

But muted, there is a ragged tattoo

Of hooves, image of a sable horse, wild-

Eyed, resisting the rein, skittish among

The twin rows of witness citizens who,

Their voices frozen, give up to the cold

Air of the marble city an old song.

 

2.  Of the Present

 

But it’s another year, Cecilia’s day

Again, another part of the land.  So,

Let the phantoms of those dead days lie

Under these new burdens of snow.  Allow

That chorus of stricken men to dim like

Shadows into blackening film, the dark

Merging with the riderless horse.  Feature

By feature, let the scene fade into near

Distance, into perspective, then shadow.

This is music for St. Cecilia.  Yield

To her the lyric due her.  Let us sing

For her patronage — her martyrdom grew

Out of a summer heart: she is our shield

Against the winter.  She is always young.

 

3.  Of the Moment

 

Here beyond the window the campus lies.

The students pass in mufflers and coats, eyes

Almost hidden against the wind.  The sound

Of radio music settles around

The furniture, into the carpeting.

Choral voices: a requiem.  Distant

And urgent, the November church bells ring.

Outdoors a dog rags something.  An instant

Pause in his play — he has caught a squirrel

Which tosses and tosses in the gray air.

The mongrel, in the midst of his quarrel

With life, is assaulted by three girls.  There,

At the base of a tree, the limp ruff falls

From insensate jaws, starts to inch up walls

Of oak bark toward some invisible

Sanctuary.  The dog begins to howl.

The girls watch the squirrel into the limbs.

Cecilia’s radio is done with hymns.

 

Here is an elegy written in the form of a ballade; listen to the author read it:

 

LATE ELEGY FOR AN OLD SUICIDE

In memory of Thomas Chatterton 1752-1770

"There's nothing that agrees worse

Than a proud mind and a beggar's purse."

 

Descendant of Redcliffe's deacons, a Bristol boy,

                St. Mary's ghosts were native to his blood.

He haunted Canyng's tomb.  His only joy

                Was in his own invention: "Rowley" stood

                More clearly in his sight than real life could,

                       Of greater substance than apprentice wages.

                He made the priest his mask, put on his hood....

                       Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

He built a myth, turned Bristol into Troy

                And Camelot combined.  The Sacred Wood

Grew at the gate, and time became his toy.

                He brought the rill of local lore to flood

                And made St. Mary's cross the Holy Rood —

                       All for Rowley's sake.  Upon those pages

                He worked till Rowley's lyrics stood enthewed.

                       Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

At last he went to London to employ

                Himself and Rowley in the common good;

He managed but to starve himself, annoy

                Great Walpole, tender Johnson.  When his food

                And pence ran out at seventeen, he rued

                       The day that he'd been born.  London's sages

                Looked the other way, cried "Hoax!" and "Fraud!"

                       Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

 

Envoy:

                Yet what he wrote was true, the lines imbued

                       With haunting skill.  Death was his early wages.

                God rest his bones, however misconstrued.

                       Tom's suicide aches still across the ages.

    

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback,

Suggested Writing Assignment:

Write an elegy in a form or meter of your choosing.

Form of the Week 12: In the Footsteps of Basho

 

BASHO

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

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

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

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

 

A MEASURING WORM

 

This yellow-striped green

Caterpillar, climbing up

The steep window screen,

 

Constantly (for lack

Of a full set of legs) keeps

Humping up his back.

 

It's as if he sent

By a sort of semaphore

Dark omegas meant

 

To warn of Last Things.

Although he doesn't know it,

He will soon have wings,

 

And I too don't know

Toward what undreamt condition

Inch by Inch I go.

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

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

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

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

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

 

Am I in love?  Birds are flying.

Do birds fly?  I am in love.

 

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

 

       Why do these birds fly?

Where there is wind, there are wings.

Where there are wings, there is wind.

 

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

 

IN A STATION OF THE METRO

 

       The apparition

of these faces in the crowd:

petals on a wet, black bough.

 

— Ezra Pound

 

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

 

WHEEL OF FORTUNE

 

       TAROT in the Wheel;

mercury, sulfur, water,

       salt.  Mix well and turn.

The jackal-headed god bears

       up under the spin,

rising.  The Garden's serpent

       slithers down the west.

The Sphinx in blue — a woman —

       squats atop it all,

holding a sword against her

       breast.  Everything is

the same, despite the odd turns —

       so say the Fixed Signs,

each reading somebody's book:

       To the upper left,

Man with Wings; an Eagle to

       the right, a Lion

under.  And a winged Bull there,

       lower left, scanning

his blank pages with the rest.

 

       His blank pages, which

he fills with hoofprints, hoping

       consciousness evolves

into Godhood somewhere, some

       when.  Caught at this point

on the Mandala, the small

       bull confuses him-

self with Taurus, his Sign.  It

       is expected, to

be forgiven.  He is not

       affixed (nor is he

broken — not yet).  He hopes that

       all is relative,

 

and complete; that there is choice,

       though all is finished;

that the smallest is the largest...;

       that some sure thing

is accomplished by means of

       these clumsy hooves, these

dull horns that turn to silence.

 

— Lewis Turco

 

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

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

 

TURN

 

       If you should waken

at the first turn of moonlight,

       would you please follow

the silver road, not the dark

at the first turn of moonlight?

 

— Lewis Turco 

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

 

CUPS

 

       Moon takes the tide where

a tide must go: Light pierces

       the hardest crystal.

 

Stone shall be filled with water,

and dust will be filled with blood.

 

— Lewis Turco

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

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

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

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

 

AN AMHERST HAIKU

 

     Will you bring me a

jacinth for every finger,

     and an onyx shoe?

 

— Emily Dickinson / Lewis Turco

 

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

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

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

 

MARRIAGE

 

       So different, this

man and this woman: a stream

       flowing in a field.

 

-- William Carlos Williams

 

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

 

PARADIGM

 

       Why does the brook run?

The banks of the stream are green.         — MONDO

 

       Why does the stream run?

The banks of the brook bloom

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

 

       The trees are filled with

cups.  Grain in the fields, straw men

       talking with the wind.

Have you come far, water-

       borne, wind-born?  Here are

hounds-tongue and mistletoe oak.          — CHOKA

 

       When the spears bend as

you walk through vervain or broom,

       call out to the brook —

it will swell in your veins as

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

 

       Have you spoken aloud?  Here,

where the swallows' crewel-work

       sews the sky with mist?

You must cut the filament.

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

 

       The bole is simple:

Twig and root like twin webs in

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

 

-- Lewis Turco

 

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

  

ELEGY FOR A JAPANESE GARDEN

 

Sundissension:

  each slain ray

    lies splintered

      prismatically

        in rows between

      tall faountains,

    arranged

  in rainbow bouquets.

 

Descending

  into unity,

    a tune

      — plaintively

        rendered —

          blossoms in an

        inimitable

      Oriental mode

    throughout

  sequestered pathways.

 

Far from irradiation

 

  ...in semidarkness

    where jade

      holds ivory

        in abeyance,

      and jasminian

    luxury contends

  with cedar's

aromatics...

 

  a melodic

    condolence

      is conveyed

        to lamenting

      shadows.

 

    In twilight, then,

  the garden slumbers

as its unseen virtuoso

  creates

    his intangible,

      dragonscale

        mosaic.

SONG FOR HONSHU

 

Little Japanese girl,

Why do you sit

sailing your eyes out to sea?

Are they pushing you off

your green silk island?

They're pushing me, too.

 

Little ragamuffin,

sunskin ragamuffin,

Have you no place to go?

Neither have I.

 

Then come with me, come with me —

the moon is an almond, and the stars

are cherries waiting to be picked.

 

 

         NEW SONG FOR NIPPON

 

              When, sun dragon, when

Will you lift your broken wings?

              Tengu-san asks this.

 

              Why, bright lizard, why

Do city lights hurt your eyes?

              Where is your cold cave?

Tsuki-sama says you sleep

Beneath the snows of Fuji.

 

              When, wise spirit, when

Will your wings at last be healed?

New rains have washed the soils

That knew your brilliant shadow.

The rice has a strange flavor.

 

              Will you come to lend

Old wisdom to new knowledge?

              Tengu-san asks this,

Your people and Tengu-san.

 

 GROUND-WORK

 

            Will it soon be spring?

  They lay the ground-work for it,

            the plum tree and moon.

 

 

GLASS

 

One sees in the glass

mere glass, not quicksilver, not

spring in the plum tree.

 

 

PATH

 

On the mountain path

they arise at once — the scent

of plums and the sun!

 

 

HOLLYHOCKS

 

The hollyhocks turn

to follow the sun’s footpath

through the rains of May.

 

 

WINDS

 

The winds blow cherry

petals from all four quarters

to the lake’s currents.

 

 BED OF STONE

 

I would lie down drunk

on a bed of stone covered

with soft pinks blooming.

 

 

BUSH CLOVER

 

Bush-clover spills not

one drop of white dew, although

its waves never still.

 

 

CHIMING

 

The bell’s chiming fades;

scent blossoms from the echo

of evening shadow.

 

 

LIGHTNING

 

the lightning flickers;

still, darkness follows the voice

of the night-heron.

 

 

LEAF

 

Please come to visit,

for I am lonely. One leaf

falls from the kiri.

 

 

AUTUMN

 

The wind of autumn

is sharp in the chestnut tree,

yet its burrs are green.

 

 

CANES

 

Leaning on their canes

a snow-haired family comes

to visit the graves.

 

 

VOICE

 

Grave, shake you as well

as my quaking voice in this

chill wind of the fall.

 

 

AUTUMN DARKNESS

 

No one walks this road

on which I travel, on which

autumn darkness falls.

 

 

BUTTERFLY

 

Arise! Arise! I

want you with me on my road,

sleeping butterfly!

 

 

SPRING

 

Spring calls beginnings,

yet in solitary thought

lies the fall glaoming.

 

 

HAZE

 

Is it for spring’s sake

that this small, nameless mountain

hides in morning haze?

 

 

PERFUME

 

From what tree’s blossoms

does it waft? I wish I knew —

this phantom perfume!

 

 

MOON

  

Moon of the pond’s sky,

I meander about you,

and night is over.

 

 

CLOUDS

 

Sometimes the clouds come

to arrest our eyes, give rest

from this moongazingg.

 

 

ISLAND

 

Where the starling flies

till sight loses its wings,

there lies one island.

 

 

ADRIFT

 

The island adrift

in a wild sea; ovedrrhead

flows heaven’s river.

 

 

LOCUSTS

 

The day is so still

their voices drill into stone —

the locusts calling.

 

 

CICADA

 

Did it shrill until

it became only echo,

this cicada shell?

 

 

LARK

 

In the deep prairie

sunken in its solitude

the lark sings and sings.

 

 

DREAMS

 

Waving summer grass:

the dead weave dreams of it,

the warriors sleeping.

 

 

BUSH CLOVER

 

In the same house slept

the women of the evening,

bush-clover, the moon.

 

 

WINE

 

The blossoms have gone,

and the moon; he drinks the wine

of his solitude.

 

 

HIDDEN FLOWER

 

Butterfly and bird,

there is your hidden flower —

the sky of autumn.

 

 

SNOW

 

The snow that we watched

falling then — has it falllen

again with the year? 

 

 

WANDERING

 

Upon an ill road,

old among withered fields; dreams

will go wandering still.

 

 

WALL

 

         Mist builds a gray wall

where the lake begins among

         the stones of the shore.

 

 

CONTINUUM

 

     If space and time are

a continuum, then we

     have not yet arrived.

 

-- Lewis Turco

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

Suggested Writing Assignment:

 

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

 

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

For the Unknown Poets

 

FOR THE UNKNOWN POETS

By Lewis Turco

 

Here they lie, all the unknowns,

Reduced to ashes, dust and bones.

The songs they sang with lip and tongue

Have fallen still and lie among

The tattered leaves in a fold of time

Covered now with moss and rime.

 

Originally published in Trinacria, Fall, 2011 and collected in Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1, copyright © 2011, 2012 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

Friday, December 14, 2012

A Triolet for the Children

of Sandy Hook Elementary School, Newtown, Connecticut

 

There is little we can do −

Twenty children have been shot dead.

The killer shot his mother, too.

There is little we can do.

There are words, but far too few

And little more that may be said −

There is nothing we can do:

Twenty children have been shot dead.

November 22, 1963, 50th Anniversary

NOVEMBER 22, 1963

for J. F. K.

 

Weeping, I write this:  You are dead.  The dark

animal of the heart, the beast that bides

stilly in its web of flesh, has stolen

flight again out of the air.  What is there

to say?  That I wish we were gods?  That the

mind of man were equal to his lusts?  It

is not — not yet.  You were a man, but more:

you were an idea dreamt in a sweet

hour while the spider slept.  We make our

web; its habitant makes greatness of its

prey.  We are ourselves victim and victor.

You were and are ourselves.  In killing you

we murder an emblem of what we strive

to be: not men, but Man.  In mourning you,

good Man, we grieve for what we are, not what

we may become.

                             Sleep, John.  We will try

once more.  Sleep, sleep now.  We will try again.

 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem November 22, 1963 from Words of Protest, Words of Power . All rights reserved and copyright by the author.

Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper.