Poetics and Ruminations

Miss Pussy's Parlor Songs, Part 25

 

NATIONAL ENQUIRY

(To the tune of "Where Has My Little Dog Gone?")

 

Where, oh, where has my dear Pecker gone,

Where, oh where can he be,

With my tale cut short and his friendship quite long,

Where, oh where can he be?

 

Alas! I fear that my Pecker has flipped

And he's telling stories on me!

My ass is dragging and his tongue has slipped --

Alas and alack! Woe is me!

 

Where, oh, where has my old Pecker gone,

Where, oh where can he be?

My tale's is unsaved and his safe was quite strong,

Who knows where my sad tale may be?

 

 

R. I. P. JOHN MC CAIN

August 29, 1936 - August 25, 2018.

 

The senator of many terms

Must now become dessert for worms.

No war devoured his flesh or brain,

But his own cells ate John McCain.

 

 

FAREWELL TO DONALD TRUMP

 

Don't insult me, Donald, when I'm gone!

Buddy, though our friendship was never on,

Why not try doing something right 

Now and then? Try hard, with all your might.

We're parting, you'll go your way, I'll go mine

I have just this to do

Give a little diss and hope it brings

Little luck to you.

I think it's kind of funny

How with all your money

Your friends are far snd few.

 

Don't insult me, Donald, when I'm gone 

Please don't talk about me, Donny, when I'm gone.

Though our friendship ceases, from now on,

If you can't say anything real nice,

Do not talk at all, is my advice.

We're parting, you'll go your way, I'll go mine.

I have just this to do:

Here's a little diss, I hope it dumps

Lots and lots of shit on you,

But makes no difference how I carry on

Please don't talk about me

Please don't talk about me

Please don't talk about me

Please don't talk about me

Please don't talk about me

Please don't talk about me, Donny,

And don't come to my funeral when I'm gone!

 

 

MONKEY BUSINESS

 

"My language may be kinda clunky,"

Says Ron DiSantis, "but you know,

Voting for Gillum would be to monkey

Up my nomination, so

 

"Vote for me for Governor

Of Florida, and don't go ape

Over this Black guy! I'm for Trump, 

So you're sure I'll never rape,

 

"'Cuz I can pay for prostitutes,

As my mentor always does,

Fot I'm a Navy lawyer, pal,

Not some Demo-Commie scuz

 

"Like Andy Gillum -- put him back

In the Tallahassee zoo

Where he belongs with simians,

Not on the streets with me and you."

 

 

DONALD TRUMP HOT

 

Donald Trump hot,

Donald Trump cold,

Donald Trump in a plot

With his gold.

 

Some like him hot,

Some like him cold,

Most like him in his plot

With his gold.

 

 

KAVANAUGH

 

What's Justice Ginsberg made of?

Sugar and spice

And everything nice --

That's what she is made of.

 

What is Judge Kavanaugh made of?

Slugs and snails 

And old lizard tails --

That's what he is made of.

 

 

ANNE OMINOUS

 

"She bravely grows euonymus

And signs her tripe 'Anonymous.'"

 

 

TOME

 

As Santa admonishes each elf,

"You have nothing to fear but 'FEAR' itself."

 

 

LITTLE JEFF SESSIONS

(To the tune of "Little Sir Echo.")

 

Little Jeff Sessions, find out who wrote

That op-ed piece! (What op-ed piece?) THAT op-ed piece!

Little Jeff Sessions, don't be a goat! 

(Won't be a goat) Don't be a goat!

Won't you ever do what I say? (I say!)

YOU say? (YOU say!)

You're a dumb Southern fellow

I know by your voice,

But you never will do as I say! (I say!)

 

Don't you dare to recuse yourself! (Recuse myself?)

Again! (Again?) Again! (Again?)

Or I will put you back on the shelf!

(The shelf?) YOUR shelf)

(MY shelf?) YOUR shelf. 

So you had better do what I say! (I say!)

You're a dumb Southern fellow

I know by your voice,

But you'd better do what I say!

Or else! (Or else?) OR ELSE!

 

From MISS PUSSY'S PARLOR SONGS by Claudette McFang.

Sent from my iPhone

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.

Miss Pussy's Parlor Songs, Part Twenty

ARMS AND THE TRUMP

(With apologies to Robert Browning)

 

Boot, saddle, to horse and away!

Arm the teachers! Start shooting today --

No time to reason, no time to pray!

 

(Chorus) "Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

 

Shoot up the the suburbs, asleep as you'd say; 

Many's the shooter will not get away

Good luck to teachers who enter the fray!

 

(Chorus) "Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

 

Forty rounds fired, but none go astray!

Those teachers are deadly in their own way

Even though some of them must be gay!

 

(Chorus) "Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!" 

 

School boards will have to lower their pay

To purchase those guns, but heck, what the hey!

Teachers can work in the summer, can't they?

 

(Chorus) "Boot, saddle, to horse, and away!"

 

 

HERO WITH BONE SPURS

 

Even if i had no gun

I'd have run inside,

Even if the doors were locked

I'd bust them open wide

 

And tackle that young murderer

With his automatic gun,

Knock him to the high school      

     floor --

A face-off, one-on-one!

 

I wouldn't stand outside the 

     school

Listening to shots

Like that coward of a cop --

I hope to Hell he rots.

 

We need heroes who can act,

Not creeps who brag a lot.

We need men like those who

     lived

In Arthur's Camelot.

 

 

HOPE SOMETIME HICKS

 

What has happened tp Hope Hicks?

She hung around and took her licks, 

But now she's headed for the sticks

To deal with black flies and with ticks.

 

 

ROBIN

 

"I steal from the rich and give to the poor,"

Says the outlaw Robin Hood.

"I do the opposite," says Donald Trump,

"And trade wars are always good."

 

 

HUSHABYE

 

HIs lawyer bribed the porn star on his own,

Was never reimbursed by Donald Trump,

Was never thrown a scrap of rind or bone --

He simply tossed his money in the dump.

Do you believe such an egregious lie?

Alas, my friend, alack! Neither do I.

 

 

HEADS OF STATE

 

Orange Head and Mushroom Head

Both were ping- pong freaks;

They learned of this phenomenon

By reading "Wikileaks,"

Therefore they thought they'd play a game

And end their wordy fray

Before they got too old and tame

And could no longer play:

PYONGYANG!

 

So back and forth the white ball went --

They volleyed till, at last,

These noble heads of State were spent

And each was in a cast.

Then each one took a final shot

And could no longer play:

They heard their final ricochet --

PYONGYANG!

 

 

TRADE

 

Mrs. Trump didn't kill her son,

She fed him lots of mayo,

So now he's fired Tillerson

And traded him for Pompeo.

 

From MISS PUSSY'S PARLOR SONGS by Claudette McFang.

 

John Ashbery

 

R.I.P. JOHN ASHBERY

July 28, 1927 – September 3, 2017

 

He spins like a kaleidoscope

From word to word and trope to trope

Until his language honeycomb

Is wholly limned in polychrome.*

 

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

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

Somewhere someone is traveling furiously toward you,

At incredible speed, traveling day and night,

Through blizzards and desert heat, across torrents,

through narrow passes.

But will he know where to find you,

Recognize you when he sees you,

Give you the thing he has for you?

Hardly anything grows here,

Yet the granaries are bursting with meal,

The sacks of meal piled to the rafters.

The streams run with sweetness, fattening fish;

Birds darken the sky.  Is it enough

That the dish of milk is set out at night,

That we think of him sometimes,

Sometimes and always, with mixed feelings?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A thirsty unit by an upending stream,

Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication

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

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

A thirsty unit by an upending stream,

Ashamed of the moon, of everything that hides too little

                                                               of her nakedness —

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

Our emancipation should be great and steady.

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

And I have known him cheaply.

Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus —

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

The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.

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

Agree to remove all that concern, another exodus.

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

The mere whiteness was a blessing, taking us far.

Man doctors, God supplies the necessary medication.

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

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

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

*The poem "R. I. P. John Ashbery is from Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-936205-30-1, paperback.

Society for Calling a Spade a Spade

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

 

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.

Lew

From Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1:

*R. I. P. EDWIN MARKHAM

March 23, 1852 - March 7, 1940

 

"Man with a Hoe," his greatest lay,

Means something different today.

 

MISS PUSSYCAT'S PARLOR SONGS, PART TWO: INAUGURATION SPECIAL

 

 

 PART TWO

 

Meow, meow, meow,

Whose puss art thou?

Not Donny Trump's puss,

Not ever and not now.

 

 

Trump is but a braggart baboon

Who tootles a bad jazz bassoon.

       The end of this story: 

       He'll go on to glory

Playing jazz in a hot air balloon.

 

If Donald could write poultry too

(In a Poulter's measure or two),

       Then he might invent 

       Rhymes with a scent

Quite nasty, as I like to do.

 

 

Twitter, twitter, twitter,

Trump needs a pussy sitter --

Twitter. twitter, tweet,

He thinks that would be sweet.

 

Flitter, flitter, prance,

Oh! How he loves a dance,

Flitter, flitter, flap,

If pussy's on his lap.

 

 

Humpty Trumpty sat on his wall.

Humpty Trumpty had a great fall.

All Congress' whores and all congressmen

Couldn't put Humpty together again

Although they tried with main and with might,

And every one of them was white.

 

 

Bye, Donny Trumpkin,

Daddy's gone a-huntin'

To get a little snake skin

To wrap the Donny Trumpkin in.

 

 

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Poor Trumpkin has no clue:

He's lost his flabby fiddlestick

And can't tell what to do.

 

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

Niagara Falls are blue,

A lot like his Viagra pills,

Which serve him tried and true.

 

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

What is poor Don to do?

To find his sorry fiddlestick

He'll need Cialis too.

 

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

His dame has donned her shoe,

And he has found his fiddlestick,

Sing doodle-doodle-doo!

 

Cock-a-doodle-doo!

His dame will dance with you

While Donald fiddles with his stick

And makes it stand anew!

 

 

Remember old King Nero

Who worshipped Great God Zero?

Trump worships Zeros too -- 

He's collected quite a few.

He and his pussy minions

Like millions, but love billions

And are heading for sextillions.

 

 

If he could have, Dryden (1631-1700)

Would have gone into Haydn (1732-1809),

But Trump

Prefers the dump.

 

 

I love lots of pussy,

It makes me feel warm.

If I buy them diamonds

They'll do me no harm;

I'll just pat their tails,

Make sure they're not gay

Or cross-dressing males,

And then we can play.

They'll dance in my lap,

I'll feed them some food --

Good pecker, not pap --

Be maybe less rude.

I'll pat my sweet pussies,

And then they will purr,

Each showing thanks

For my kindness to her;

I'll not bite their knobs,

Nor tread on their paws

Lest I should provoke them

To use their sharp claws;

I'm sure that my pussies

Will not be displeased --

I will over-sex them

If they're not diseased.

 

 

Grump grump Donald Trump,

How I wonder why you pump

In the cellar with your sump

That sounds a lot like Forrest Gump.

 

 

Rub-a-dub-dub

Three Trumps in a tub,

And who do you think they be?

The Trumpet, the Strumpet, the lass who can hump it --

Waterboard them, all three!

 

 

Donny Douchekit's gone to sea, 

Silver buckles at his knee.

He'll come back and pee on me,

Pretty Donny Douchekit.

 

 

Hickory, dockery, dick,

Donnybrook tripped on his prick --

     He fell on his fly,

     And put out his eye --

Now, how did he pull off that trick?

 

 

KING TRUMPKIN'S WALL

 

Little King Trumpkin will build a fine wall,

The Mexican people will pay for it all.

The pales will be made of nothing but words,

The crossbars and slats, of batshit and turds.

 

"No, senor, no -- you pay for your fence

All by yourself, you spend your own Pence

Or pesos or euros...it's all your expense

And none of our own -- that's mucho nonsense.

People go over, go through, go around,

The cartels build highways deep underground.

The Great Wall of China was built to keep out

The nomads and Mongols -- you see them around

In Bejing and Hong Kong; they can be found

Everywhere these days, just like Hispanics

Who give Kinglet Trumpkin his asthma and panics.

So, no, senor, no -- you pay for your wall.

We Mexicans will not repay you at all."

 

Maxine Kumin

Maxine Kumin

 June 6, 1925-February 6, 2014

 

She wrote as well as she was able,

But when she tired she used the stable

On her farm — that way, of course,

She sometimes grew a little hoarse.

 

       Although she was born Jewish in Philadelphia in 1925, Maxine Kumin went to Catholic schools and Radcliffe College in Boston from which she received a B. A. in 1946 and an M. A. in 1948. She married an engineer, Victor Kumin, and raised a family of two daughters and a son. She studied poetry writing with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education where one of her classmates was Anne Sexton who became her friend and with whom she lunched the day before Sexton committed suicide. She became a colleague of Holmes at Tufts University in the late ‘fifties and the ‘sixties. Like Sexton and Holmes both, Kumin originally wrote in the standard academic formalist forms and style.

         Maxine Kumin's subject matter in her first book, Halfway (1961), was the same as that of the other Confessional Poets, that is, life as it must, not ought to be lived, but somehow this insight often got lost in the observation, even in a poem titled "The Moment Clearly" after the first simply described opening quatrain:

 

The pipes thump in the still house.

A mouse scratches behind the stair.

I hear the rise-and-fall of sleeping children

Calibrating the quiet and the night.

Write, saying this much clearly:

Nearly all, this is nearly all,

The small sounds of growing, the impress

Of unarrested time raising

The prized moment.

                                    And this is ours.

Love moves about, opening the doors.

 

          One of the things Kumin never forgot how to do, however, is to tell a story in this and subsequent books. The Privilege appeared in 1965 and was followed five years later by The Nightmare Factory. Some critics compared Kumin with Elizabeth Bishop rather than with Sexton because often her poems, as in The Long Approach (1985), were exceptions to the egopoetic rule-of-thumb. Although they logged the subjective voyages of the heart, they never excluded the reader from their narratives through excessive privacy, for the reader was always shown the compass, the latitude and the longitude of those voyages, and immersed in particulars. If the poems in this book that made the strongest impression were those that were longer-lined, those that approached, and sometimes achieved, the condition of verse, and the weaker poems were line-phrased prose, nevertheless this was a strong collection, one that gave sustained pleasure to the reader. This condition remained a characteristic of Kumin’s poems throughout her career as was shown clearly in her Selected Poems 1960-1990.

          Over the years Maxine Kumin continued to write some of the best poetry of her school, and she branched out into fiction and nonfiction as well. She was honored with a volume edited by Emily Grosholz, Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, in 1997.

The epitaph, "R.I.P. Maxine Kumin" is from Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1; the essay "Maxine Kumin" is from Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-936205-30-1, paperback, both are copyright © and all rights reserved by Lewis Turco and may not be reprinted anywhere in any manner or form without the written permission of the author.

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The Death of Carolyn Kizer

Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine

R.I.P. EMILY DICKINSON

December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886

The Maid of Amherst, Emily

Dickinson, sang quietly

Far from the roar of the madding throng,

But now she holds her breath too long.

         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 Poems of 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 Poems of 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.

            A version of "Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine" was originally published in The Emily Dickinson Journal, iv:1, 1995, pp. 108-117, copyright © 1995 and 2016 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved: may not be quoted in whole or in part by anyone anywhere without the written consent of the author.

            A collaborative book on poems derived from the prose letters of Dickinson is Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson's Letters Together with Essays on the Subject by Various Hands, edited with an introduction by Lewis Turco, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (www.SUNYPress.edu), 1993. ISBN 0-791414-17-5, cloth; ISBN 0-791414-18-3, paper. All poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, q.v.

 

 

 

OFF THE COAST, Fall, 2013

ONE NEVER KNOWS what he will find on the Web. I found this review while I was searching for references to "Wesli Court." I hadn't seen it before, though it has been in print for two years:

Epitaphs for the Poets by Wesli Court (Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012) 86 pages, softbound. ISBN: 978-1-938144-1. $15.

Reading this collection of epitaphs by Wesli Court (the nom d'anagram of poet Lewis "Turk" Turco), one quickly realizes this memorial form is an excellent vehicle for light verse. Nothing like death to bring out the wicked wit! Court, a master wordsmith, generously provides 150 or so British and American poets (and a few lyricists), most of them dead but some still kicking, with pithy hail-and-farewells to inscribe upon their tombstones.

As with the clerihew or one of Bill Cole's terse verse inventions, the epitaph challenges the poet to sum up a lifetime in a handful of lines. Court offers mostly quatrains, almost universally witty/clever, with rhymes that may, from time to time, make you Nash your teeth. Working chronologically by year of birth, he begins with John Gower in the 14th century and ends with Annie Finch (b. 1956), the latter one of a number of poets who have yet to meet their maker, but who, courtesy of this courtly poet, already have a possible marker. 

"Writing humorous poetry is technical work," D. Marbach has noted,* and epitaphing is no exception. The pressure's on: assuming these words will be etched in granite one day, better make each word count. Some of Court's epitaphs are more inspired than others. Indeed, at times the versifying seems perfunctory, even tortuous, as he systematically, shall we say, knocks off the pantheon. 

This book works best picked up from time to time—read a couple of sic transit Gloria Swansongs and then go back to your business. Another way to approach the collection is to turn to one's favorite poets, as this reviewer did. How, for example, did Elizabeth Bishop fair? Well, so-so: 

 

R.I.P. ELIZABETH BISHOP

February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979

She did not wish upon a star, 

But wrote about things as they are

Except, of course, when she would dish up

The visions of a roaming Bishop. …

 

While a few of the featured poets (Morton Marcus, Rhina Espaillat, Joseph Salemi) were new to this reader, most are familiar: Longfellow, Dickinson, Bogan, Booth, Olds. A few of the epitaphs would require research:

 

R.I.P. MAY SWENSON

May 28, 1919 – December 4, 1989

 

May Swenson

Sang the hen song(?).

 

Others border on the objectionable [though true]. Court writes,

 

R.I.P. ADRIENNE RICH

May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012)

 

When she was young she caught the itch

To versify and rime, the which

She lost when she began to switch

To the lesbofeministic pitch,

And this became her lifelong niche.

 

…and R.I.P. LEROI JONES

October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014

 

Born LeRoi Jones, he hated white,

So took a Muslim name to spite

Every goddam Southun cracka

And wound up Amiri Baraka.

 

Cleverly composed, yes, but not very funny. [Nevertheless, true.] Indeed, few of these epitaphs are LOL, but more of the admire-the-wordplay sort. That said, Edwin Markham's two-liner did prompt a smile:

 

R.I.P. EDWIN MARKHAM

April 23, 1852 – March 7, 1940

 

“Man with a Hoe,” his greatest lay,

Means something different today.

 

An epilogue, "The Mews of Poetry or Chasing Erato," offers epitaphs to beloved cats—Bozo, Reggie, Scooter and other feline friends get their due. "R.I.P. Crazy" is a favorite, with its touch of Edward Gorey:

 

 

R.I.P. CRAZY

 

Yes, he was well and truly named,

Our craziest by far.

Cross-eyed and manic till one day

He ran beneath a car.

 

Here, curt Court is at his Wesli best. 

 

—Carl Little

 

 

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R.I.P. ABRAHAM COWLEY

December ?, 1618 - July 28, 1667

 

"What shall I do to be for ever known,”

He wrote, “And make the coming age my own?"

During his lifetime he was famous truly,

But afterward he was treated Cowley.

 

From Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1.