A. R. Ammons, Robert Huff, Lewis Turco, Richard Frost at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1961.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF "THE POET'S BIBLE"
In the fall of 1959 I was a graduate student in the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, a member of the poetry workshop taught by Paul Engle and Donald Justice. I had always been interested in the traditional forms of poetry — I was born a formalist, and I wanted a reference book that contained the whole range of them, but I'd never been able to find one other than those that contained merely the standard sorts of things: the sonnet, the villanelle, the haiku and tanka, the sestina — mainly the Medieval Italian and Provençal forms plus a few others.
But what else was there? Perhaps there weren't enough forms to fill a short book. Then, one day while I was browsing through the bargain bin of Iowa Book and Supply on Clinton Street in Iowa City, I ran across a book of poems by Rolfe Humphries titled Green Armor on Green Ground. Humphries had laid out "the twenty-four official meters" of the Medieval Welsh bards, and he had written a poem in each of these complicated syllabic forms. I bought the volume, of course — I think I paid a quarter for it, or maybe a dollar — and I took it home. After I'd looked it over a while I got to wondering whether, with such forms as these, I might not be able to gather enough material for a book, particularly if I filled it out with examples of poems written in the forms. I asked Don Justice whether he thought such a volume would be useful. He encouraged me, and I began working on the project.
That period of time when I began putting together what would eventually become, first, The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (1968), then The New Book of Forms (1986), The Book of Forms, Third Edition (2000), and finally The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition (2011), which included “Odd and Invented Forms,” was not auspicious for such projects. The so-called "Beat Generation" was in the process of consolidating its anti-intellectual stranglehold on a generation, and the self-righteous, self-indulgent decade of the 1960s loomed ahead. Heedlessly, I plunged forward. Within two years I had a manuscript, a combined reference work/anthology that I titled Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms. Between 1961 and 1968 I revised the manuscript over and over again, researching it, sending for books to Europe, rewriting whole sections, paging through volumes of contemporary poetry for examples of poems in the forms and adding them to the volume.
Whenever I submitted the manuscript to a publishing house I would argue that, although the book might not sell big, it would sell steadily and it would eventually help to create its own market, but I was always disregarded. The verdict was ever the same: although it was a good book, there was no market for it. In 1967, after many fruitless efforts to find a home for the volume, I deleted the poems in order to shorten the book and limit its reprint permissions costs so that a potential publisher might find it more attractive, for the examples I'd chosen were all by living poets. I added a bibliography of the missing poems so that people who were interested might search them out.
By a fluke — quite literally by accident, and after more frustrations — E. P. Dutton accepted The Book of Forms in its non-anthology format. Then I discovered that Cyril I. Nelson, the Dutton paperbacks and poetry editor, would have been happy to have the poems as part of the manuscript. I wanted the book published without further delay, however, and so it was, in 1968. Although it did share a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review when it appeared, it was reviewed only once, by my colleague at S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego Prof. Frank Hulme, in the local newspaper, The Oswego Palladium-Times; nevertheless, it began to sell, strictly by word-of-mouth.
For sixteen years it stayed in print; then, although it was still selling at a steady rate, as I had predicted that it would, in 1984 The Book of Forms was dropped by Dutton without notification or explanation — Tom Trusky of Boise State University phoned to tell me he couldn't get copies for his classes anymore. When I checked with the publisher, I found it was true. Some folks out there in the world of "organic poetry" and "free verse" had bought more than 25,000 copies of The Book of Forms during the period that it was in print, not counting the passing around, the college resales, even the photocopying that went on. I used to think it was 'passing strange that such a crowd of people was using a book that was at crosscurrents with the tidal flow of the times.
I never stopped working on The Book of Forms, even while it was going through its several printings which, I might note, I was never informed were going to take place. I was never given the opportunity to correct a number of typographical errors I had missed in the proofreading, or to reword some of the descriptions — people were misreading them; consequently, I was seeing such phenomena as villanelles with varying line lengths appearing in the London TimesLiterary Supplement and many other places.
The year following publication of The Book of Forms the State University of New York Office of Continuing Education asked me to write a correspondence course study guide, Creative Writing in Poetry, and I used as the basis for that text the material I had collected since The Book of Forms had appeared. The study guide went into service in 1970; the text it called for in the correspondence course was, of course, The Book of Forms. At S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego, where I was teaching, I simultaneously developed a television course along the lines of the correspondence course; it was called “The Nature of Poetry.” The Program in Writing Arts, which I had founded in 1968 and that I directed at Oswego, began offering such basic writing courses in the genres of fiction, drama, and poetry as the foundation of the tiered system of the Writing Arts major we developed despite the misgivings of the English Department, for no one believed that the students of the period would enroll in such demanding courses. But they did, and in considerable numbers; they still do. In fact, the Program is now a Department of Creative Writing.
In 1971 David M. Ungerer, vice-president of the newly organized Prentice-Hall spin-off Reston Publishing Company, saw a copy of the study guide lying on a table in the office of the Dean of Continuing Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He wrote to ask me to develop a college text-anthology based upon the S.U.N.Y. guide, and in 1973 Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing was published. I conceived of it as containing everything about poetry not covered by The Book of Forms. While Poetry: An Introduction was going through its own extra printings, I dreamed of combining it with The Book of Forms eventually, and that is in effect what happened in The New Book of Forms which was snapped up two years after the first edition had gone out of print, as soon as I submitted it to the University Press of New England, an academic boutique publisher that had begun as the Dartmouth College Press.
On Friday the 27th of June 1987, three days after I sent the proofread page proofs and the completed indices of The New Book back to the publisher, I began to gather together all the manuscript versions of the four books to send to the special collections archives of the Homer Babbidge Library of my Alma Mater, the University of Connecticut. I also intended to send the typescripts of the Dacey-Jauss anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, just published, which X. J. Kennedy and I had evaluated separately at the request of the publisher, Harper and Row, and the Miller Williams text-anthology Patterns of Poetry, to be published at the end of the summer of '86, which I had gone over at the request of its editor before it was finally accepted by the Louisiana State University Press. In the course of this gathering I found the original 1961 manuscript of Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms, which I had caused to be bound in order to preserve it as it went its hopeless rounds of the publishers.
For the first time in I don't recall how many years I began to read the Introduction I'd written a quarter-century earlier. I'm afraid I was both pleased and mortified to discover how long I'd been saying the same things. Here is what I wrote in 1961, the year before I founded the Fenn College Poetry Center of Cleveland at what is now Cleveland State University:
It used to be said that a sign of the poet is his mastery of the form; the sign of the poetaster is the form's mastery of him. However, one does not hear this very often nowadays. Instead, when one comes into contact with a writer of verse one is likely to hear that it is not the poet who writes the poem, but the poem that writes itself: the poet is merely a medium through which some kind of cosmic vibrations get themselves transmitted to paper. One line grows out of another "organically," that is, the first line is somehow inspired by the gods and from the mysterious poetic womb of this line there is born another line, and another, and another, until the poem has completed itself. The poem is thus seen as a vital organism which exists and procreates naturally.
This all sounds fine and esthetic, and of course it is tremendously romantic as well, which lends passion to the concept, if such a theory may be dignified by the term "concept." But upon reflection, perhaps it seems a shallow and useless theory, for then of course poets may be born only, touched by providence with the divine gift of the Muses.
The truth is, of course, that any good poem must have organic unity, but it is the poet who gives the poem unity, and it can be no other way. Regardless of all sophistry to the contrary, without the poet there can be no poem; it is the poet who breathes life into the verse which is trying to be a poem; it is the poet who is the creator: he lives, and the poem cannot be born without him. One line cannot follow another without a mind to link them and a hand to write them. The poet, therefore, and no other, makes the poem, and the making is seldom easy.
Take, for instance, the example of Dylan Thomas, who is the very prototype of the romantic bard to most young poets writing today. His verse is full of music; his lines rise and fall majestically, invoking allusion, rhetoric; giving insight and raising towering symbols which are at once primal and sophisticated. He seems a veritable great wild stallion on the plains of poetry, master of herds of lesser steeds. His poems must have poured forth spontaneously and grandly, for as he speaks it seems he is talking to the soul's ear.
But Dylan Thomas often wrote in strict syllabics, always in strict patterns. His symbols have assigned meanings. His rhyme schemes are sometimes fantastic, but they are sequential. Some of Dylan Thomas's poems have been through a hundred drafts.
Is this how a poem makes itself? If so, we are slaves to words, lesser organisms being used by literature, and not intelligent beings creating a literature to serve mankind.
In the interest of sanity the author of The Book of Forms rejects utterly any theory of automatic writing. In the beginning there may have been The Word, but since then there have been simply words, and if there is magic in them it is a studied magic which only talent, craft, imagination, intelligence and passion may invoke.
No one, unfortunately, may give a person talent, imagination, intelligence or passion. These are qualities the origins of which may be debated by the theologians and sociologists, not by me. The Book of Forms can help only with craft — but perhaps one ought not to have said "only," for a writer may have many things, but if he hasn't craft, he will never be a poet.
A strong statement, and a precarious one. For what is craft? Simply, craft is skill, as distinguished from talent, which is aptitude. Skill in what? Skill in language, including words and their meanings, rhythms, sounds; skill in handling ideas within the conventions of writing; skill in constructing forms that will enhance meaning. Skill perhaps in saying ordinary things in an extraordinary way, or saying extraordinary things in an ordinary way.
For all good poems are formal, though not all formal poems are good. That is, all poems are organized in some way. The organization may be around an idea, or a symbol, or a sound, or a rhythm, or an image or sequence of images, or any number of things, for each poem has its own locale and focus. It is for the poet to decide what he is trying to do, and for the reader and time to corroborate or reject the poet's vision and statement.
But how does one acquire craft? It is not bestowed upon one, it is learned. One way in which to learn it is to construct your own forms and, by trial and error, discover what may be done with them. Another way is to experiment with traditional forms and see what may be done with them. Certainly, reading good poems and analyzing them is a third way, but the best way is to do all three.
It is more than five decades since I wrote those words. The Book of Forms has given way to The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition and to two spin-offs, The Book of Literary Terms (1999) and The Book of Dialogue (2004). During that period of time we have had the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountaineers, the Confessional Poets, the Deep Image Surrealists, The Movement — which included the anti-war, the civil rights, and the early consciousness-raising schools; we have had the subsequent Feminists and the Gay Poetry movement, the Plain-Talkers of the Northwest, Hispanic and Native American and Cowboy and Rap poetry movements, and, most recently, the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. In criticism we have gone from the New Criticism to Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstructionism. But at last the pendulum has swung back, as it was bound to do eventually.
Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry was published in August 1986 — it differed from the Dacey-Jauss book in that it was more specifically focused upon the traditional structures of poetry, and it included work by poets ranging back to the Middle Ages. The New Book of Forms appeared in November; less than three years later, in the summer of 1989, it went into its third printing, with more than 10,000 copies in print. The other Neoformalist books were doing well, too, according to their publishers.
During the previous score of years before the pivotal year 1986, The Mississippi Review had been nearly alone in devoting a special issue to the subject of form in poetry: in 1977 it had published "The Problem of Form" — poets had been asked to submit a poem and then to write a short comment upon its composition and organization. Contributors to that issue included Richard Eberhart, William Stafford, Vern Rutsala, X.J. Kennedy, and Richard Wilbur. A decade later, in 1987, another formalist book following the same format was published, David Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. Contributors included John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Richard Kenney, Brad Leithauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Louis Simpson (who had been one of the three editors, including Robert Bly and Donald Hall, of the original showcase of the "Academic Poets," The New Poets of England and America, which had been the first shot fired in "the War of the Anthologies" in 1957), Mona Van Duyn, and Richard Wilbur — a real potpourri of both the older formalist poets and Neoformalists, plus many antiformalists, young and old. Now there are many books that pay attention to the formal concerns of verse-writing, and Neoformalism, or "The New Formalism," is no longer a "new" movement in American literature.
_______
Notes
Phillip Dacey and David Jauss, editors, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, editors, The New Poets of England and America [first selection], Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957.
——, and Robert Pack, editors, The New Poets of England and America, Second Selection, Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962.
Rolfe Humphries, Green Armor on Green Ground, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956.
David Lehman, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, New York: Macmillan, 1987.
"The Problem of Form," Mississippi Review, vi:1, 1977.
Lewis Turco, The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004.
——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968.
——, The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.
——, The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
——, Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms, bound ms., Special Collections archives, Iowa City: University of Iowa, n.d.
——, Creative Writing in Poetry, Albany: State University of New York Office of Continuing Education, 1970.
——, The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.
——, Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing, 1973.
Miller Williams, editor, Patterns of Poetry, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.
The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com), ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.
The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."
I read La Famiglia1 over the last week on my work trip to Denmark (coincidentally, I surmised from your book that I am approximately 1/8 Danish). I must say I was quite enlightened by the amount of detail it gave me about my family history, especially my grandparents and obviously you. I've often wondered how Grandpa Luigi from Sicily found his way to be a Baptist minister in the U.S. He had quite a life, rich with experience, and overwhelming passion for his beliefs. I'm glad he had the opportunity to see the birth of a grandson and, although I don't remember him, the time we spent together in that first year apparently brought him great joy; knowing that will always live within me.
Grandma Turco was very special to me. Dad and I and in later years Scott too would visit her almost every Friday evening. She'd greet me with kisses all over my face and have a plate of spaghetti waiting on the table. After dinner she'd always do her favorite trick for me and take out her dentures and put them in a cup of water. Obviously as a young child that scared the hell out of me but fascinated me at the same time.
Her house was a mysterious adventure land for me, especially the attic, and I loved to explore it every time I visited. The old rooms, books, clothes, knick knacks everywhere stimulated my imagination to a degree that I will never forget.
And then there was the typewriter. I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth. I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time, which is how I still type today, although I'm pretty fast at it. What I never really thought about and what struck me when reading your book was that typewriter was probably the same one that Grandpa Luigi used to write his weekly sermons. Thinking back now, I remember how Grandma would love to see me at that typewriter. She'd bring me cookies and help me if I had a question but never interrupted me as I "banged out" another story. Maybe it was just the sound of the typewriter that brought a sense of familiarity back into her household and gave her peace in a time of loneliness in her life. I sure hope it did.
One of the things I've always regretted was not spending more time reading your books. I always thought it was the coolest thing as a child to see your name on a book or better yet go to the library and look up one of your books and show one of my friends. On many occasions I would open the book and begin to read but very quickly become lost and/or confused and eventually just put it down. The poems that were sent at Christmas always struck me as "dark" and "non-joyous."
I've never regarded myself as a "reader," but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes, though I could never seem to connect with your books. After reading La Famiglia, though, I not only have a better understanding of my family, its roots and fascinating history (on both sides), but of you, your experiences and the many reasons why you write what you do.
I learned a great deal from this book, not only of who we are as a family but the trials, tribulations and hope and inspirations that affected many in our past and present and, more important, how it will positively influence the generations to come. I am extremely pleased that this book is dedicated to the future of the Turco clan and especially to my boys, who are the joy of my life.
I attempted to write a book like this utilizing my past experiences and recollections, as I used to have a photographic memory, it just never fully developed.
Steve Turco
Dear Steve,
I'm puzzled by several things you say in your letter. One of them is, "I used to have a photographic memory...." How can you "used to have" one of those? Short of a stroke, I would think it would be impossible to lose such a thing. It's just the way one's mind works. You seem to use that as an excuse for not writing the memoirs you planned to write. My memory is far from "photographic," but I remember enough things from my past to write memoirs. I'm sure everybody does. Take a look again at the memoir in La Famiglia that was written by my cousin Ann Badach.2 She was never a writer, and that's the first thing she's ever published. The stuff she remembers is amazing and compelling.
You also say, " I've never regarded myself as a 'reader' but I've always as a child and an adult enjoyed reading for both enjoyment and educational purposes." Isn't that the definition of a reader?
You say, too, "I'd spend endless hours typing away at stories I'd made up about friends, school and adventures that took me to all ends of the earth." So did I, but I never quit. I used to walk to school making up stories for my friends as we walked. How does one manage to lose interest in telling stories? It's baffling to me. What happened to you anyway?
"I taught myself to type on that typewriter, one finger at a time...." So did I. The Navy taught me to touch-type, but when in high school I worked at the Meriden newspaper, most of the journalists used the hunt-and-peck method, just as you and I and your grandfather did.
Finally, you write that the Xmas cards I sent every year "always struck me as 'dark' and 'non-joyous.'" Where did you get the idea that writers are supposed to write stuff that's "joyous"? The world is a dark place, Steven, and that's what I often write about. Just this past week: people gunned down at Fort Hood; the D.C. sniper executed; more soldiers killed in Afghanistan, etc., etc. Have you ever read Gray's "Elegy in a Country Churchyard," the most popular poem in English literature? T. S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," perhaps the greatest poem of the 20th century? Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn"? Shelley's "Ozymandias," Poe's "The Raven," just to name a few exceedingly popular ones? Even the "joyous" poet Walt Whitman wrote "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" and "A Noiseless, Patient Spider."
I'm attaching a book review titled "Happy Days" that appeared in the New York Times Book Review last Sunday.
Love, Uncle Lew
HAPPY DAYS
By Hanna Rosin
(New York Times, November 5, 2009)
BRIGHT-SIDED: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America, By Barbara Ehrenreich, 235 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company, 2009. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.” When I was a young child, my family moved to the United States from Israel, where churlishness is a point of pride. As I walked around wearing what I considered a neutral expression, strangers would often shout, “What’s the matter, honey? Smile!” as if visible cheerfulness were some kind of requirement for citizenship. I must confess, I have waited my whole life for someone to write a book like “Bright-Sided.”
Now, in Barbara Ehrenreich’s deeply satisfying book, I finally have a moral defense for my apparent scowl. All the background noise of America — motivational speakers, positive prayer, the new Journal of Happiness Studies — these are not the markers of happy, well-adjusted psyches uncorrupted by irony, as I have always been led to believe. Instead, Ehrenreich argues convincingly that they are the symptoms of a noxious virus infecting all corners of American life that goes by the name “positive thinking.”
What started as a 19th-century response to dour Calvinism has, over the years, turned equally oppressive, Ehrenreich writes. Stacks of best sellers equate corporate success with a positive attitude. Flimsy medical research claims that cheerfulness can improve the immune system. In a growing number of American churches, confessions of poverty or distress amount to heresy. America’s can-do optimism has hardened into a suffocating culture of positivity that bears little relation to genuine hope or happiness.
Ehrenreich is the author of several excellent books about class — “Nickel and Dimed” is the best known. In this book she also reaches for a conspiratorial, top-down explanation. “Positive thinking,” she maintains, is just another way for the conservative, corporate culture to wring the most out of its workers. I don’t exactly buy this part of her argument, but the book doesn’t suffer much for the overreaching. I was so warmed by encountering a fellow crank that I forgave the agenda.
Ehrenreich’s inspiration for “Bright-Sided” came from her year of dealing with breast cancer. From her first waiting room experience in 2000 she was choking on pink ribbons and other “bits of cuteness and sentimentality” — teddy bears, goofy top-10 lists, cheesy poetry accented with pink roses. The sticky cheerfulness extended to support groups, where expressions of dread or outrage were treated as emotional blocks. “The appropriate attitude,” she quickly realized, was “upbeat and even eagerly acquisitive.” The word “victim” was taboo. Lance Armstrong was quoted as saying that “cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me,” while another survivor described the disease as “your connection to the divine.” As a test, Ehrenreich herself posted a message on a cancer support site under the title “Angry,” complaining about the effects of chemotherapy, “recalcitrant insurance companies” and “sappy pink ribbons.” “Suzy” wrote in to take issue with her “bad attitude” and warned that “it’s not going to help you in the least.” “Kitty” urged her to “run, not walk, to some counseling.”
The experience led her to seek out other arenas in American life where an insistence on positive thinking had taken its toll. One of the more interesting chapters concerns American business culture. Since the publication of Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” in 1936, motivational speaking has become so ubiquitous that we’ve forgotten a world without it. In seminars, employees are led in mass chants that would make Chairman Mao proud: “I feel healthy, I feel happy, I feel terrific!” Corporate managers transformed from coolheaded professionals into mystical gurus and quasi celebrities “enamored of intuition, snap judgments and hunches.” Corporate America began to look like one giant ashram, with “vision quests,” “tribal storytelling” and “deep listening” all now common staples of corporate retreats.
This mystical positivity seeped into the American megachurches, as celebrity pastors became motivational speakers in robes. In one of the great untold stories of American religion, the proto-Calvinist Christian right — with its emphasis on sin and self-discipline — has lately been replaced by a stitched-together faith known as “prosperity gospel,” which holds that God wants believers to be rich. In my favorite scene of the book, Ehrenreich pays a visit to Joel and Victoria Osteen’s Lakewood Church in Houston, now the nation’s largest church. She arrives a week after a court has dismissed charges against Victoria, accused of assaulting a flight attendant who failed to deal promptly with a stain on her first-class airplane seat on the way to Vail. One would think, Ehrenreich suggests, that the largely working-class, multiracial crowd might sympathize with the working stiff on the plane who happened to be African-American. But no, Joel is shown dabbing his eyes on the video screen, and Victoria crows about the “banner of victory over my head” as the crowd cheers.
“Where is the Christianity in all of this?” Ehrenreich asks. “Where is the demand for humility and sacrificial love for others? Where in particular is the Jesus who said, ‘If a man sue you at law and take your coat, let him have your cloak also?’ ” Ehrenreich is right, of course, in her theological critique. But she misses a chance to dig deeper. I have spent some time in prosperity churches, and as Milmon F. Harrison points out in “Righteous Riches,” his study of one such church, this brand of faith cannot be explained away as manipulation by greedy, thieving preachers. Millions of Americans — not just C.E.O.’s and megapastors but middle-class and even poor people — feel truly empowered by the notion that through the strength of their own minds alone they can change their circumstances. This may be delusional and infuriating. But it is also a kind of radical self-reliance that is deeply and unchangeably American.
Hanna Rosin is a co-editor of Slate’s women’s Web site, DoubleX, and a contributing editor at The Atlantic.
Thanks for the response, Uncle Lew. The "photographic memory" line was just a jab at humor, a pun (not fully developed), I didn't mean it literally. I do read a fair amount of books so I guess I would be considered a reader, but my point was more that even if I do consider myself to be a reader I don't currently have the passion to make it more of a priority in my life. Maybe someday that will change, but for now I feel satisfied with the balance I choose between my home life, work life and how I fit my reading into both.
I never lost interest in telling stories, I love to tell stories, I just chose to do it verbally, it saves time.
The world is what it is. It's as bright as it is dark. For every horror story that happens on a daily basis there is a story of love and kindness as well. Life is short, I choose to focus on the things in this world that make me smile, laugh and bring me happiness. I know the ugliness is out there, but why would I want to bring that into my life? I've chosen early on in my life to be a decent person with a positive outlook. To do that I choose to surround myself with people, books, art, places that bring me "joy" rather than listening or reading about the depressing horrors of our society. Fortunately I've never had any severe hardships in my life that would turn me to the "dark" side like some of the authors you mentioned (Gray had an abusive father, Eliot had a nervous disorder) but if I did, I believe that it is still my nature to turn them into positive aspects (as Lance Armstrong did with his cancer) and continue to see the good in life. And although some of these authors that you mentioned may be highly regarded academic poets, they were certainly not people I would want to emulate my life after (Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and child to run off with a 16 year girl and Poe was an alcoholic drug user.)
I agree with Barbara Ehrenreich 100%. There is a lot of "positive thinking" bullshit out there that can cloud peoples' minds and affect their judgment, especially in corporate America. I see it every day. I don't think that just because I have a "positive outlook" on life that good things are going to come to me, or I'm going to become wealthy or not get sick, those things are going to come to me because I work hard and take care of myself. I'm a realist, I always have been, but I see no reason why I can't be a realist with a positive attitude.
Love.
Steve
Ah, Steve,
Nobody ever asked you to be anything but "a decent person with a positive outlook." I've always known you to be that, and it's one of the reasons I'm so fond of you. You're a lot like your dad, who is the same sort of person. He's a very decent guy and I've always been very fond of him, too. But I don't understand why you would condemn people like Gray and Poe and whoever for being who they are and writing out of their experience and their humanity. I've always thought I am a decent person too, who likes to surround himself with art, music, and all the things you mention, as well. That doesn't prevent me from seeing that the "balance" you mention doesn't seem to me to be a balance unless I'm able to observe and write about the rest of life. I can sing a happy song, but I can also sing a sad song, and the only thing I demand of any song is that it tell me the truth and be beautiful.
Case in point: One of my colleagues at Oswego was a German Jewish economist named Richard Heiss. He was married to another native German called Jo Heiss. He came to SUNY Oswego in 1961, four years before I arrived, and he was active in the Oswego Opera Society for which Jean and I sang in the chorus most years. Jo was a ceramicist and a member of the Oswego Art Society like my Xmas card partner George O'Connor. While we were in Oswego last month I thought about them, wondered if they were still alive at ages 89 and 87 respectively. I thought about them while we were on our daily walk in Breitbeck Park at the bottom of the hill where we live on West 8th Street because we used to run into Dick and Jo sometimes when they walked there as well.
On Monday last, while we were driving back to Dresden, Dick and Jo Heiss each took massive amounts of prescription narcotics, but before she died Dick shot Jo in the back of the head with a pistol. People found their bodies a couple of days later. The police determined that no third party was involved. Dick and Jo were also decent people, usually with positive outlooks. They did volunteer work and had many friends, but they had no children, no other known family in the U. S. Why would a good old couple die by murder-suicide at a great age? They must have hurt a great deal — why else would they have so many narcotics on hand? — and it was known that they were ill.
Here's the question: What should I think about them? Should I dismiss them for their unforgivable actions? Maybe they were somehow psychically injured by having grown up in Nazi Germany. Maybe a husband should never be forgiven for killing his wife, no matter what the reason. But I understand how Dick and Jo could have done this to themselves (they injured no one else), because I'm getting old, too. Should I reject the idea of writing a poem for them? Because that's been revolving in my mind for a couple of days now as I read the developing story on-line in the Oswego Palladium-Times and hear from other colleagues via e-mail. Or should I just dismiss them from my memory as being unworthy subjects for an elegy? Because if I write it and do it well, I will show the few people who read it how human Dick and Jo Heiss were, and how sad their passing is.
Lew
Uncle Lew,
I guess it comes down to what "balance" means in each individual's life. For me, I tend to balance out the good stuff with the great stuff and shield out the bad stuff. You take it all in and go from there. I guess that's what makes the world what it is.
Sorry to hear about your friends. I'm sure whatever you write will be honest and lasting.
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 AWave (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.
For many years, despite her early involvement with the NAACP, Brooks wrote a formal poetry; during the 1960s, however, influenced by the militancy of her old friend Langston Hughes and by the aggressive posture of the young Blacks, such as Amiri Baraka, she found she could no longer afford to appear as though she remained on the sidelines. She therefore began to write a more militant kind of poem. In the lead essay of A Life Distilled edited by Gary Smith and herself, Maria K. Mootry, in her essay titled "'Down the Whirlwind of Good Rage': An Introduction to Gwendolyn Brooks," said that "at the nexus of Brooks's art lies a fundamental commitment to both the modernist aesthetics of art and the common ideal of social justice." (1)
Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, and educated at Wilson Junior College in Chicago, from which she was graduated in 1936. She married three years later and became the mother of two. During the Depression she worked as publicist for the NAACP Youth Council in Chicago, and subsequently she taught at various institutions of higher education in and around that city including Northeastern Illinois State College, Columbia College, and Elmhurst College.
"Nowhere is this dual commitment more apparent," Mootry continued, "than in the multiplicity of voices in her works. If the reader finds echoes of T.S. Eliot and Countee Cullen in her poetry, there are also equally strong folk vernacular voices punctuating her forty-year literary career. Her three early works, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), and The Bean Eaters (1960), present a wide range of poetic forms, including blues poems, ballads, experimental free verse, quatrains, Petrarchan sonnets and Chaucerian stanzas. Her subsequent publications, In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1971), Beckonings (1975), and To Disembark (1981), are written primarily in free verse and show her increasing concern with social issues, yet the variety of speakers continues."
Brooks' Selected Poems was published in 1963. In the "Foreword" to New Negro PoetsU.S.A., edited by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, "At the present time, poets who happen also to be Negroes are twice-tried. They have to write poetry, and they have to remember that they are Negroes. Often they wish that they could solve the Negro question once and for all, and go on from such success to the composition of textured sonnets or buoyant villanelles without the transience of a raindrop, or the gold-stuff of the sun. They are likely to find significances in those subjects not instantly obvious to their fairer fellows.
“The raindrop may seem to them to represent racial tears — and those might seem, indeed, other than transient. The golden sun might remind them that they are burning." (13)
One of Brooks' simplest and most-anthologized poems exemplifies both her innovative approach to traditional verse forms and her social commitment:
WE REAL COOL
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel
"We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon."
First, on the typographical level, it is clear that this is a poem written in couplet stanzas. The second immediately noticeable point is that it is a parallel series, for each line except the last ends with the word "we." Next, the eye is caught by the fact that immediately preceding the last word of each line, except the final one, there is a period — the series is made up of short independent clauses, a set of assertions.
When we read the poem, though, we wonder at first, perhaps, why we ends the lines; it ought to appear at the head of each line, for it is the subject of the parallel clauses: "We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon." But when we read it in its "correct" parallel arrangement we realize why Brooks wrote it otherwise: it is not syncopated. Read normally," another thing happens to its rhythms: Some of the strong stresses are demoted. Written as Brooks has written them, each line except the first and last consists of three strong stresses. The prosody is accentual verse. Line one has four beats, the last has two.
The rhymes of the poem from lines two through seven thus appear medially — they run right down the center of the poem. All the verbs — the strongest words — from line two on, are pushed to first place; they are drum beats. The rhyming words are also drum beats sprung by their sounds, and each is followed by a full stop, a rest. Then another drum stroke, we: ¢¢ [] ¢, and the line is enjambed into the next stress. The poem is jazz; it is a dirge played in the streets, like those of the black bands that march in slow time through New Orleans alleys to the graveyard. The dirge begins slowly with four beats, and it ends abruptly with two. The entire little poem is an exercise in linguistic counterpoint.
The level of diction of the poem is idiomatic, the tropes mainly rhetorical — it is heavy with macho braggadocio. And it ends with the assertion of a truth that brings the reader up short with a jolt. The major genre of the poem is, plainly, the lyric, but it is also almost equally a didactic poem with a clear social message.
Brooks' second book, Annie Allen, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. "Then, as now," Bernard W. Bell wrote in the introduction to his anthology Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry, "Miss Brooks' race consciousness was low-keyed, yet keenly felt in every line. And her lyrics pulsate with the joys and sorrows of life. (9-10)
"Stylistically, Annie Allen is a masterpiece. Tracing the path of a black child's movement from innocence to experience, Miss Brooks skillfully employs adaptations of many of the major metrical patterns and stanzaic forms in the English tradition, from couplets and blank verse to sonnet sequences and free verse. In this and subsequent volumes, she maintains a remarkable balance between being a poet's poet and a poet of the people."
Writing in Women Poets of the World, edited by Joanna Bankier and Deirdre Lashgari, Barbara Christian, in her essay titled "Cultural Influences: African American" said, "Gwendolyn Brooks wrote much of her poetry during the 1940s and 1950s when Blacks were striving to achieve integration into the American social structure. By the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement gave way to the Black Power movement. Brooks' later work, published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflects that shift. The dominant literary movement of that period, Cultural Nationalism, focused on the development of Black selfhood and nationhood. There was a renewed interest in African and Afro-American history and culture. Poets saw themselves as revolutionaries in the service of their people” (337-8). Gwendolyn Brooks died in 2007 as one of America’s most highly respected literary figures.
Since we graduated from high school in Meriden, Connecticut, Peter and I have kept in touch or, rather, he has. We never exchange letters — although I've written him, he's never written back. Instead, about once a year the phone will ring, and it will be Peter calling from California or wherever else he happens to be. In our high school yearbook The Annual for 1952 he is pictured with Carolyn Kamens among the class notables as "Most Likely to Succeed." Among the ads at the back of the book there's a snapshot of Peter standing in front of a blackboard. On the board there's a diagram and the caption reads, "The Peter Theorem," for the man has an I. Q. of 165.
Sometime during the fall of 1986 he phoned. "Luigi!" he said, "do you ever watch 'The Wheel of Fortune' on TV?"
I laughed. "Never. What's up?"
"Don't miss it tonight," he said, "tonight or tomorrow night — check your local listings. I'm on."
"Not again!" For Peter had been on a game show several years earlier, and he'd won quite a number of cash and prizes — but I'd missed that one. We chatted awhile.
"Do you have my new address?" he asked.
"I think so," I said, assuming he meant his second California address, though it wasn't that new. He asked if we'd be going back to Meriden for the Christmas holidays, but I said no, I had no family living there any more, and my wife Jean's sister Ann was the only member of her family still in town. "I'll be going to the Modern Language Association convention in New York City just after Christmas, though, to help publicize The New Book of Forms which will just have been published."
"I'll be in the east then, too," he said. "Where will you be staying?"
"At the Grand Hyatt."
He said he'd probably catch me there. "Don't forget 'The Wheel of Fortune,'" he said.
I answered something like, "Okay, Peter, I'll make an effort to watch you tonight." But I did better than that. Even though I couldn't be home to see the program, I asked a colleague to tape the show for me, and not long afterward I bought a VCR myself. The tape became one of my fourteen-year-old son Christopher's favorite playbacks for a while. He kept bringing in friends to watch it.
The first contestant was Lee Stewart, a sailor; a secretary, Becky Edsel, was the second. Pat Sajak, the host, introduced "Peter" as "George." In fact, his first two names, like those of his late father, are George Peter, but when he was young everyone knew his father as George and no one called the son "junior," so he was called Peter instead. After the death of his father Peter began using his real first name, but I could never get used to it.
Sajak said that he saw my friend was a writer, and this seemed to take Peter aback. What I surmise is that he had said he was a "grants writer," someone who puts together proposals for foundation and government funding — Peter had been free-lancing along those lines for several years on the West Coast — and Sajak had misunderstood. In fact, Peter had wanted to be a writer, but he had never done anything with it. I'd been responsible for publishing a science-fiction poem of his in a little magazine called Starlanes back in the early 1950s, but I am unaware that he'd ever followed up with efforts of his own to appear in print. Whatever the case Peter, typically, blustered through Sajak's error and said he'd written some short stories and was working on a novel.
Peter was a good deal balder than when I'd seen him ten years or so earlier when he'd visited us in Oswego, New York, and brought us all a virulent, alien strain of flu. There was no mistaking him, however: the prominent aquiline nose set among the matching Greek features; the slightly stooped posture, which he righted now and again with a hitch of his shoulders thrown back; the satyr's grin, and the lively eyes darting shrewdly about. He looked newly showered and he was immaculately groomed.
My wife says her clearest recollection of Peter was at a party during high school at the home of our high school classmate and her childhood playmate, Tomie DePaola, now the famous children's writer and illustrator. She walked into a nearly-empty livingroom to see Peter standing before the mirror over the mantel, preening in the glass and admiring himself. "I remember thinking to myself, 'That's pure Peter,'" she told me.
When the preliminaries are over the sailor begins the game. He is looking to fill in a phrase, and on his first spin of the big wheel he asks for a "T." Vanna White turns over the appropriate square, and he gets his letter, but when he spins again the arrow lands on "Bankrupt," and it is the secretary's turn. She asks for an "H" on her first spin and gets two of them. The first word on the board is obviously "The." On her second spin she asks for an "R," but there is none in the phrase, and Peter gets to spin for the first time.
The arrow lands on $250.00 and Peter says with a big grimace, "I'd like an 'N'!" There are three of them in the phrase. He says, "I'll buy a vowel" — there are two E's in the phrase, including one in the first word, "The." On the next spin the arrow lands on $400.00 and Peter asks for an "S" — there are two of them; then "F": one word is obviously "of." Peter cannot lose — he spins again while the other two contestants look on with envy and boredom.
Next Peter wants an "M" and he gets two of them; "K" next — Peter has it. He says, "The milk of human kindness" in the carefully enunciating voice of an intelligent robot. Applause, applause — Peter, who has $2750.00, applauds himself and the audience does likewise. He shakes hands with Sajak.
When he came to visit us in Oswego where I had been teaching college for many years, we reminisced about our high school days and our crowd. I showed him that I still had a copy of our "Fantaseers" calling card: white lettering on black plastic, and a photo of the Fantaseers' Salem Witch Trials skit that I'd written and we'd performed in our junior year. There was Ben Barnes on the bench as judge Hathorne, holding up a string of paper dolls and cutting their heads off with a pair of scissors. I am dressed in my father's old swallow-tail coat, and Paul Wiese is the other prosecutor in an insane getup no Puritan ever wore. Peter is a member of the jury with the rest of the boys — Lindsey Churchill, Bill Burns, George Hangen, Art Von Au and the rest of them. Paul had wanted to gouge the eyes out of one of the witches, palm a hard-boiled egg, and throw it out into the audience, but the faculty censors — one was Mark Bollman, as I recall, and another, the Latin teacher, Ruth Coleman — wouldn't let us do it. Nevertheless, the production was a great success.
Some of the girls in our crowd had played the witches. Peter selects gold cufflinks as part of his prize, and "I've got to have that oak tray set for munchies," he says. Jean and I are groaning with chagrin as we sit in our living room before the television set. This is her first viewing, but I've returned to the tape time and again, fascinated as a cobra in a wicker basket listening to his fakir's piping. This is vintage Peter, the Attic pixy.
In high school Peter and Lindsey were known as the brains of the school. They were both members of the National Honor Society, both straight A students. Lindsey and I had been occasional playmates when I'd lived on Curtis Street during the third and fourth grades at Israel Putnam School. The Churchills had lived on Elm Street, not far from the high school were Mr. Churchill taught English, and it was a considerable hike for me to Lindsey's house — I had no bicycle until the fifth grade. But we had gotten along well, though he was a year younger than I.
A year or two later Lindsey had skipped a grade, and in Meriden High during our sophomore and junior years, he was a member of our Class of 1952. Both he and Peter were charter members of the Fantaseers, our "Science Fiction Reading Club," the distaff side of which was the "Reesatnafs," of which my future wife was a peripheral member — peripheral in her own eyes, not in anyone else's. The combined bunch was "The Fantatnafs" — it was the girls who had coined that phrase.
Although Peter's I. Q. was well into genius range, Lindsey outstripped everyone at the end of our junior year by winning a full tuition scholarship to Yale University and skipping his senior year in high school. Peter was himself scheduled to attend Yale when he graduated. Although his classmates were well aware of Peter's brainpower, we also knew he was not as highly motivated as Lindsey, and we could hardly miss the fact that he tended to get through his courses with a minimum of effort and a maximum of glitter. Peter was nothing if not flashy in a sardonic sort of way.
Lee, the secretary, bends over to spin the Wheel of Fortune for her second try. She asks for a "T" — she is trying to figure out an event. She spins again and asks for an "H": there are two of them; spins again...and lands on "Bankrupt!" She loses her turn.
Back to Peter who spins, smiling. The arrow lands on $200.00 and he asks for an "R" — there are three in the event he's trying to guess. He elects to spin again; he calls out, "Pin! Pin! Pin!" and it does...the arrow lands on "Pin." He bends over the railing to pull the cover of the "Pin" space and discovers he has won only $150.00.
While we sat and talked during his visit to Oswego I was startled to hear Peter say, "I felt threatened by the Fantaseers."
"Threatened?" I asked.
"Yes. The Fantaseers seemed to be your milieu, but it was destabilizing for me. It wasn't the image I wanted. I wanted to be accepted by the athletes as well as the intellectuals, and the Fantaseers had the reputation of being oddballs."
"Then why did you belong?" I asked.
"Because all my non-jock friends belonged," he said.
He asks for an "N" — it begins to look as though his victory is assured. Vanna White turns over three N's on the board and Peter spins again. The arrow lands on $250.00 and Peter wants a "D" — the fourth word of the event is obviously "and." Peter wants an "A" and gets six of them!
Peter always wanted A's but, unfortunately, when he went to Yale he didn't get them. The glitter evidently wouldn't sustain him on the college level. While I was beginning my floating hegira about the world courtesy of the U. S. Navy, I heard that he'd had to leave Yale and, further, that he'd enrolled at New Britain State Teachers' College, now Central Connecticut State. I was amazed to learn eventually that he'd had no better luck there than at Yale.
Peter spins again, asks for an "L," gets two and elects to solve the puzzle for $1950.00: the event is, "Arriving an hour and a half late." Peter chooses a pocket watch for about $300.00, a chest for $435.00, an entertainment center for $1190.00 — after two rounds Peter has won $9275.00.
I'm not sure of the exact sequence of events that followed in Peter's early career. I know that he had to leave New Britain College a second time after being readmitted, and that he joined the Army and spent some time in Germany with the M.P.'s, but which came first I'm not sure. I do know that eventually, when he'd served his enlistment and returned to civilian life, he attended Fairfield University and acquired his B. A. at last. He was married.
Jean and I, and a friend, Marie, had dinner with the newlyweds one evening. Peter's bride served a dish I'd never had before but that I loved — hamburger Stroganoff. A year or two later their marriage was annulled — there were no children — and we were into the 1960's.
Jean and I had been married four years when, in 1960, our daughter Melora was born in Meriden during the summer between my leaving the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop and beginning my first teaching job at Fenn College, which is now Cleveland State University. My First Poems was published the same summer. I'm not sure in what year Peter founded an "alternative school" for children in or around New Haven, but he stayed there awhile. Next we heard he'd gone to Cape Cod to be the founder of a similar public school program there. And then we pretty much lost track of what he was up to, though he'd fill in a few details when he put through his annual phone call.
Peter gets to spin first in the third round of "The Wheel of Fortune." The arrow lands on $400.00 and he asks for an "S" — there are two of them; he spins — $500.00 — asks for an "N" and gets it. He spins again: $250.00, asks for an "R" and gets two. Another spin, Peter asks for a "T" and gets one of those as well. He buys an "E" — there are three of them in the three words.
When my daughter Melora was about seventeen and my son, Christopher, four or five, Peter got married again. His bride was the daughter of a well-to-do New Jersey couple. Jean and I went down to Meriden to visit our families, and we drove with Marie down to Jersey to the wedding. Unfortunately, we ran into a huge traffic jam on the Newburgh bridge along the route, and we arrived too late for the ceremony, but in time for the reception.
There we ran into several of our old high school classmates. One was Phil Riley who had lived nearly across the street from my family on North Third Street when I was in the fifth and sixth grades. Phil had a brother who was afflicted with Downs syndrome, and most of the neighborhood kids had been at least leery of him, if not downright afraid. Fortunately, these are more enlightened times. Jim Pagnam, also from the West Side unlike Peter, who was from the East Side of Meriden, was present as well, and one or two others including Jim Masterson. In high school Peter, like Lindsey, had been something of a jock as well as an intellectual, and these were more-or-less his jock friends rather than Fantaseers or Reesatnafs.
Peter wants another vowel, so he buys an "A" and Vanna White turns over the squares. He spins, the arrow lands on $900.00 this time! Peter wants a "P" — it's obvious now that the "thing" he is trying to guess is "Peppermint Life Savers," and Peter solves the problem. He applauds himself while Sajak celebrates his accomplishment. Peter selects his-and-her wedding bands and he says, "Okay, for $1800.00, let's go for the brass bed!" He says, "I'll take the books," and, with vast understatement, "I'm kind of a reader." He gets a stack of Simon and Schuster books, including the novel by John Erlichmann of Watergate infamy. Peter licks his lips as he listens to the list of all the things he's getting. He now has a total of $13,475.00 in money and prizes. We glimpse the sailor and the secretary out of the corner of the camera from time to time.
Peter worked for a New York publisher for a while as some sort of technical person having to do with the printing operation — or so I seem to remember, but that may have been earlier. He and Ceil moved out to California after a while and he began doing his grants writing for various colleges and institutions out there. I think, however, that eventually the Reagan administration cutbacks in support for science, health, and education seriously undermined Peter's ability to make a living by free-lancing, though Ceil always had a steady job.
This game-show program is practically a duplicate of the other that Peter had won not long after he began living on the west coast — it was, if I recall correctly, "Jeopardy" on that occasion. I hadn't seen it, but I heard that he'd won something like $40,000.00. Sajak wishes the sailor "Better luck next time" and thanks him and the silent secretary for being on the show. "It's a clean sweep for this guy," he says patting Peter on the shoulder.
Mugging away, Peter says, "Well, that's the way it goes." He says he's going to go for "The ca-a-ar!" — a Mazda RX7 sports car worth over $13,000.00. Peter has to guess a "Thing" in this portion of the show, which is a hurry-up version. He is given five consonants and a vowel, and he chooses "T, N, R, S, L," and "E." He gets the "L," the "N," two E's" — "Lead pencil" is the object. There is no way Peter can lose now. He solves the puzzle, and the audience goes bananas. Peter applauds too.
Pat Sajak takes the microphone off Peter, escorts him, with Vanna, to the car, and he gets in. Sajak says, "Look out, look like a winner, and wave to America." Peter hangs his head out the window, waves at the camera, and grimaces — it's supposed to be a smile, one surmises. He mugs away like crazy. Sajak says, "You know, back in the early days of television, there were a lot of kind of cerebral game shows with people like Bergen Evans and so forth...you look like a panelist on one of those shows."
Peter replies, "I would have been a panelist, but I ran out of wood." Sajak does a slow double take, mutters something half under his breath, says goodbye to the audience, and the game is over. Peter has won everything, over $32,000.00 in all.
That was in 1986. Four or five years later Peter put through his annual call, but he acted a bit oddly on the phone. When I tried to call him back at home I got Ceil who seemed startled. She said he wasn't there, and she gave me another number to call. When I got Peter back on the line he admitted that he'd phoned to ask for a loan but had chickened out. He and his wife had split up and he'd been living in an apartment with several other men. He was afraid he was going to be out on the street if he didn't get up his half of the rent.
"But what happened to the money you won on 'Wheel of Fortune'? I asked. Ah, he said, that had gone to pay the back taxes on the things he'd won on "Jeopardy" — the IRS had hounded him for years. I told him I'd send him a fair amount to help him out. He said he'd pay me back one day, but I told him not to worry about it.
A year or so later he phoned again. The touch was easier this time, it seemed. "I can't afford to adopt you," Peter, I said. He argued with me, but I refused. "I already have a family," I told him. "You have one too, don't you?"
"Yeah, if you can call them that," he said.
"I've already sent you a rather large sum of money on one occasion," I told him.
"Oh, yeah. That came in handy," he said.
Some time later he called once more. This time all he wanted was a small loan — he said he was living out of his car. I told him that what he wanted from me wouldn't solve his problem, nor even stave it off for long. There were social agencies in San Francisco that could do him some permanent good, so I refused again and he rang off in anger. Since then I have received one or two collect calls from San Francisco, but the caller on each occasion has hung up before I could accept. "You will not be charged for this call," the operator informed me.
In July of 1994, at a reunion of the old high school crowd that was held on Cape Cod in the home of Carolyn, one of the Reesatnafs, I discovered that Peter at one time or another had also phoned several of those who were present to request money, which some of them had sent. "You know, we saw him several times when he was working with his alternative school in Barnstable," Carolyn said. She told us that when Peter had called her from the West Coast to ask for a loan, it had coincidentally been on the evening that some friends of hers and her husband's had been visiting from San Francisco. When Peter had hung up Carolyn explained the situation to her guests, one of whom was herself a worker in the San Francisco social services system. She promised that when they got home she would try to locate Peter and give him a hand. "She did try," Carolyn said, "but she could never locate him anywhere."
On another visit to Meriden some time later I was discussing Peter with Jim Masterson. “You know what his problem is, don’t you?” he asked me.
“Not really.”
“He’s an addict.”
I was astonished. “I never saw Peter take drugs, though I’ve seen him drink some.”
Jim shook his head. “Not drugs or alcohol,” he said.
“What, then?”
“Gambling.”
I cast my mind back to the early years, and I recollected that Peter had always been involved in poker games, at Fantaseer meetings, at parties, after school, even during study halls sometimes.
“That’s why he never went to class in college,” Jim said. “All he did was play cards. That’s what happened to the money he won on those game shows, all the money his friends sent him. Sometimes he was lucky, most times he was not.”
And that’s what luck can do to a guy with an I. Q. of 165.
There is a belated epilogue for this story. Just before Christmas, 2016, Peter called me once more from San Francisco. He had been trying to phone me in Maine. He didn't know Jean and I were spending the winter at our home in Oswego, New York. He tried to get me twelve times and finally called the Lincoln County sheriff to ask him to check out our Dresden residence to make sure we weren't lying around dead inside. Our neighbor Nancy Call saw the sheriff's car in our drive and went over to see what was going on. It all got straightened out eventually, and I phoned George to reassure him that all was well.
It appears that all these years later he had decided to repay some of the “loans” he had received from his friends, including Jim Masterson and me, but when he tried to phone Jim, Peter discovered that Jim had recently died. Panic seems to have set in and he made the first of the calls to me to try to make sure he wasn’t too late in my case as well – I assured him I was not yet quite dead, and he said he was sending me a check for the $500.00 he owed me.
He did that. I received it, was amazed, and immediately deposited it in my bank account. Peter called once more to request that I deposit the check as soon as possible. I assured him I had done just that. He thanked me, and I told him I’d be in touch. By way of my gratitude for something I had never expected to happen, I sent him a few of my books. I hope he’s enjoying them.
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.
Almost all my life I have known that my last name, Turco, in Italian means what it says: “Turk.” It dates, I understand, from the period of the Arab rule of Sicily from the ninth to the tenth centuries, and it is not an uncommon name in Sicily where my father was born. Since there was no such place as Turkey at the time, the word simply means “Arab” or “Moor”; moreover, according to Halbert’s1, a Turco family coat of arms can be found in Rietstap Armorial General, and the shield is described as “Silver with a Turk, facing front, dressed in a blue tunic and red pantaloons; wearing a red turban on his head, holding in his right hand a silver scroll, and in his left hand a silver scimitar trimmed gold. Family mottos are believed to have originated as battle cries in medieval times, but a motto was not recorded with the Turco coat of arms.”
However, I am something of a cynic, and I have long believed in an adage that would serve well for any family’s motto: “It is the wise child that knows its father.” Since everyone has trampled over Sicily since time began, including Sicils, Greeks, Romans, Carthaginians, French, Vikings, Normans, Danes, English, and so on ad infinitum, many of them raping and pillaging as they wandered across the countryside, I assumed that somewhere along the line there must have been a break in the chain and that my name might as easily have been Smith or Jones as Turco. So when it became possible, I decided to have my DNA tested to see where I really came from.
In 2006 I participated in the National Geographic Human Genome Project2 and discovered that my blood confirms what my name asserts: I am paternally a Turk through and through! Males are traced genetically through the Y-DNA marker which is passed down unchanged from father to son over generations; women are traced through their mothers’ mitochondrial DNA which is passed from mother to daughter, also unchanged. Of course every now and then, at great intervals, both Y-DNA and MT-DNA do take on characteristics that differentiate them from other evolutionary lines, and these mutated lines can be traced.
So far as can be discerned with the data currently at hand, it turns out that my father’s branch of the Turco family is part of a group of people about which little is known. My Y-chromosome results identify us as members of haplogroup G, “a lineage defined,” my National Geographic report stated, “by a genetic marker called M201” which had its origin some 60,000 years ago with an ancient Y-chromosome marker called M168.
According to Spencer Wells3 there was a single male who lived perhaps 75,000-100,000 years ago whose mutated Y-chromosome is carried by every male currently alive. Although scientists call this person “Genetic Adam,” or “Eurasian Adam,” in fact he was not likely the first fully human male, but none of the other males alive at the time have passed down to posterity their particular genetic markers. Adam’s line is the only one to have survived and proliferated.
A descendant of Adam identified by a mutation called “M94” was an inhabitant of the East African savannahs 75,000 years ago, and it was he who was the progenitor of most modern males because he was the founder of all haplogroups from B through R (haplogroup A did not leave Africa in ancient times). A later mutation on this male line called “M168” 60,000 years in the past is believed to have lived in an area that includes what is now Ethiopia in Africa, and he is the founder of haplogroups C through R.
To the north of Africa, according to Spencer, an ice age was developing and drying up Africa’s ecology to the extent that at least two groups that were descended from M168 migrated from Africa. The first group left around 60,000 years ago, and they are believed to have gone east following the southern coast of Asia populating southeast Asia, Australia, southern China, and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. A few appear to have been reunited with their by-then-distant kinsmen in North America about 10,000 years ago. A second wave of M168 emigrants from Africa traveled to the east and the north from the area of what is now the Sahara through Egypt and the Middle East.
A mutant marker on the M168 line called “M89” inhabited what became Mesopotamia and is now Iraq perhaps 45,000 years ago. As the founder of haplogroup F, this male was the ancestor of all the members of haplogroups G through R which include almost all Middle Eastern, European, Asian, and native American males. Several groups of M89 males traveled in various directions to a variety of places, but the founder of haplogroup G appears to have lived around 30,000 years ago in the area of the Indus Valley in what is now northern Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Up to around 10,000 years ago the members of haplogroups G through J were hunter-gatherers, but those people who lived in what is known as the “Fertile Crescent” developed agriculture, and “settled civilization” became possible — not only possible, but established, and disseminated far and wide. Populations expanded, farming and farmers followed the pioneers along the shores and through the islands of the Mediterranean, into the lands now called Turkey (since the early 20th century), the Balkans, and the Caucasus. The Indo-European language and its offshoots were soon to be found in northern India — including the Indus Valley — the Middle East, and Europe.
The Indus Valley civilization was the largest of the four great early civilizations including Mesopotamia in the Fertile Crescent, Egypt, South Asia, and China, but it is the one that is least known and understood because, unlikely as it may seem, it was discovered only in the 1920’s! How it was possible for modern mankind to live unwittingly among the ruins of this Indus civilization in one of the most populous regions of the Earth is confounding, but so they did, and still do. Archaeological researches are in their infancy there, and very little is known of the early tongues of the Indus because few language-bearing artifacts, most of them square stone seals with indecipherable symbols and animal motifs, have been found. So far, for lack of a Rosetta Stone, none of those scripts can be read, but we can recognize the animals, in particular the mythical unicorn, the bull, the rhinoceros, and the elephant. However, some of the major Indus cities have been identified and explored to a certain degree.
The first, Harappa, discovered in the western part of South Asia during the early 19th century, flourished from about 2600 to 1700 BCE. Its inhabitants built with bricks of the same size as were found in other Indus cities such as Mohenjo Daro and Dholavira. Harappa had well laid-out wide streets, public and private water supplies and distribution-drainage systems. Remnants of this Indus civilization exist in the south from the former Bombay in India to the Himalayas and Afghanistan in the north, and in the east from beyond New Delhi in Uttar Pradesh to Baluchistan, Pakistan, in the west, adjacent to the border of Iran.
Since there is evidence that trade existed between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley Civilization, some of those members of haplogroup G living in its western portion must have gravitated toward the major centers of the Middle East. The westernmost Harappan site is Sutkagen Dor, located on the border of Pakistan and Iran on what once was, apparently, a navigable inlet of the Sea of Arabia and thus part of the trade route to Mesopotamia — in particular the fishing trade — between 3500 and 1700 BCE. This is the route, or one similar to it, that the early Turcos must have taken on their way to Sicily.
Gazing at a map of the world, one sees that a straight line drawn between the Indus River and a spot just below Sicily in what is now Tunisia, the ancient site of Carthage (not that our forebears followed anything like a straight line) crosses Iran (once Persia), Iraq (once Mesopotamia), Arabia, Jordan / Syria, Egypt, and Libya. Other modern countries in the area between the Indus and Tunisia are Turkmenistan, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Turkey, and Israel / Palestine.
Family Tree DNA is the name of the Internet organization that administers the DNA results of those people who have been tested and agreed to have their results publicly posted. Subgroups of FTDNA include organizations that follow individual haplogroups, including the Haplogroup G web group. There are other specialty groups including the Turk Name group, and the Sicily Project, to all three of which I belong. Peter Christy, administrator of the Haplogroup G organization, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Our haplogroup is seeking members from the Middle East and adjacent areas, but with little success. There are a number of ‘high profile’ members of the Saudi royal family, as well as a claimant to the throne of Iraq, Sharif Ali bin al-Hussein, that are members of Haplogroup G. Perhaps by your efforts to publicize our haplogroup in Saudi Aramco World, [to the editors of which I wrote a letter on October 25, 2006, to which, as of February 8, 2007, I have not had a response] readers familiar with that part of the world may come to realize that they are a significant source of additional members.
“We have been attempting to contact those who have already been tested, but with little success. Bill Van Hemert has been using modal matching to profiles of known members of our haplogroup to find candidates who are registered at Ysearch. As you might expect, few of our emails even get through to the intended recipients and even fewer respond. All we have is some tantalizing clues left by a long list of potential Haplogroup G members with names that start ‘Al-‘ e.g., Al-Blais, Al-Bukhary, Al-Khalili, Al-Kureishi, Al-Qureshi, Al-Rikabi, Al-Ruwaili, Al-Sada, Al-Saman, Al-Shaibani, Al-Suwaidi and Al-Wazzan!” There is evidence that members of the haplogroup once served as members of the Persian cavalry.
The history of the swift spread of Islam is amazing. Muhammad was born in the Arabian city of Mecca circa 570 CE. Around 610 he experienced a revelatory vision, began to write what became the Koran, and in 613 he began to preach publicly. He left Mecca and settled in Medina in 622, and he died in 632 CE. Only sixty-five years later Islamic Arabs, many of them Moors — a mixture of Arabs and Berbers — lived in North Africa and occupied what was left of Carthage which had been destroyed in classical times and was again destroyed in 698. Today it is a wealthy suburb of Tunis.
In the ninth century CE, around 820, the Tunisian Arabs began to set up trading posts in Sicily. Incredibly, they were soon invited by Euphemius, a Byzantine general, to invade the island, and on June 13, 827, they did so from the town of Sousse, 120 km south of Carthage, with ten thousand infantry and seven hundred cavalry. According to Sandra Benjamin, “Although the invaders originated in many parts of the Muslim empire (including Spain), most of the men were Berbers (from the North African coast) and Arabs (from farther east).” Seventy-five years later, on August 1, 902, the Arabs captured Tauromenium, the Byzantine capital and the last unconquered Sicilian city. All the inhabitants were slain and the city burned to the ground.5
Surnames began to be used only about 1000 years ago, so the surname “Turco” dates from about 1000 CE, the eleventh century or 100 years after the Arab conquest of Sicily, that is to say about the same time as the Norman conquest of both England and Sicily. Sicily was the earlier to be conquered, by the brothers Hauteville, Robert the elder and Roger the younger who did most of the fighting, conquering Massena in 1061.
The Hautevilles’ success is said to have inspired both the envy and ambition of their countryman William the Conqueror who invaded and subjugated England in 1066. Although he never ruled there, he pretended to the kingship of Sicily as well. It was William who ordered the Domesday Boke of England to be written in 1086, and it was in this statistical survey that surnames were first assigned to every family. Something similar during this period was occurring throughout Europe, including Sicily.
Michael Maddi who administers the FTDNA Sicily Project, in an e-mail message dated October 27, 2006, wrote me, “Have you noticed that out of 81 yDNA results in the Sicily Project, 10 are in the G haplogroup? That’s about 12%. This has been the biggest surprise to me so far in our Sicily Project results. My guess, based on my previous reading, was that we would have maybe 5%.
“I have always wondered what the Arab contribution is to Sicily’s genetic pool. It’s hard to figure out how many people of Arab ancestry remained in Sicily after the crackdown by Frederick II on Muslims about 1230. (Frederick actually had good relations with Muslim rulers and spoke Arabic and appreciated the scientific knowledge promoted by Muslim scholars. It was the Vatican which demanded that he expel Muslims from Sicily.) One book I read recently [see Benjamin, op. cit.] said that 1/3 of Sicily’s population was ethnically Arab when the Normans defeated the Muslim rulers around 1075. The town where my paternal grandparents were born, Mezzojuso, was founded by the Muslim rulers in the 10th century. It remained a majority Muslim town until about 1220, when Muslim rebellions in western Sicily and the subsequent crackdown led to many Muslims fleeing their towns for mountain refuges.
“I think our [haplogroup] G results, if they continue to stay above 10%, indicate that there is significant Arab deep ancestry in Sicilians and Sicilian-Americans.”
The branch of the Turco family to which I belong has long resided in Riesi, a village in south-central Sicily. The closest city of any size is Licata, on the south coast. Although I know for a fact that a number of my relatives still live in the area, at the end of 2006 I was the only person worldwide with the surname Turco who has been identified through DNA analysis as belonging to haplogroup G2. (My son and my brother and his sons may be presumed to be members in this country.)
According to Halberts (op. cit.) “Census records available disclose the fact that there are approximately 450 heads of households in the United States with the old and distinguished Turco name. The United States Census Bureau estimates that there are approximately 3.2 persons per household in America today which yields an approximate total of 1440 people in the United States carrying the Turco name. Although the figure seems relatively low, it does not signify the many important contributions that individuals bearing the Turco name have made to history.”
In fact, although I am not so far as I know related to any of them, a survey of recent volumes of R. R. Bowker’s Books in Print yields a seemingly disproportionate number of Turcos who are authors: Richard P. Turco is a science writer who has collaborated with Carl Sagan; Peggy Turco is a nature writer; Marco Turco writes travel books; Christopher Turco (not the Christopher who is my son, a musician) pens science fiction; Laura Lo Turco has written on the pyramids of Egypt; Ronald, on crime; Lorenzo Del Turco is an art historian; Vincent J. Turco publishes in the field of medicine; Douglas is a sports writer; Alfred is a scholar of English literature; Emanuele, diplomacy; Frank, food; Antonio, chemistry; Michael P., the Everglades; Page Turco is a media writer and performer; Salvatore J. is a nutritionist, and Mario Turco, a music historian. One recollects that the Moor on the Turco crest in his left hand wields a saber, but in his right he flourishes a scroll!
Apparently, none of these people has ever had his or her DNA tested. However, analysis shows that a person with a different surname, Frank Ricchiazzi of Laguna Beach, California, is rather closely related to my people although all of his family is from Montalbano, a suburb of Messina in the northeast corner of the island, and Santa Maria. (Is there a connection between this family name and the Arabic name Al-Rikabi mentioned above?) On December 11, 2006, he wrote in an e-mail message, “Clearly, our DNA shows a lineage going into the Indus region many centuries ago.
“Right now, I’m trying to find the time when my lineage first came to Montalbano. I have traced each grandparent to approximately 1500, but there does not appear to be any way to go beyond that date because I have exhausted the furthest points of the church records and the Rivelli in Palermo.
“My thought is that sometime in the late 1400’s, there may be some information from the Kingdom of Two Sicilies that had a notation of a [member of my family] given some land in the Montalbano area. That of course means trying to locate some records from that Kingdom.
“One thing that you and I and others who do this research can say: Every day brings a new finding or another piece to the puzzles of who we are. Thank you for sharing your information.”
My first name, “Lewis,” is also a family name in both my paternal and maternal lines; it was originally a Middle English version of the French masculine “Louis,” of Franco-Germanic origin, derived from the German “Ludwig,” “hlōd” (fame) and “wīg” (war): “famous warrior.” The French “Louis” (pronounced lu-EE) was a common name among royalty and the nobility, dating from the 8th century King Louis I, son of Charlemagne. Louis XVI, last in the line of that name, was executed in 1793 during the French Revolution. The name was imported to Great Britain after the Norman Conquest in 1066; its spelling was often Anglicized as “Lewis.”
Various versions of the name include my father’s first name, “Luigi” (Italian — he had no middle name), “Aloysius” (Provençal), “Luis” (Spanish), and “Ludvig” (a “v” instead of the German “w,” Scandinavian). Pet or short forms of the name are Lou, Lew, Louie, Lewie, and Geno (Italian). In 2009 “Louis” was the 4th most popular boy’s name in France. The British prefer the spelling Lewis, but Americans usually opt for the French spelling. “Lewis” is currently the second most popular name in Scotland, the 27th most popular in the UK, and the 30th most popular in Northern Ireland. Lewis is also a popular name in Australia and New Zealand.
My middle name is “Putnam” (Lewis Putnam Turco) which was my mother’s maiden name (May Laura Putnam), and my namesake, “Lewis Putnam” (b.1763) was the second son of my triple-great grandfather Asa Putnam (1743-1795}. An earlier member of the family was George Puttenham (1529-1590), author of the first book on poetics and prosody in the English language, The Arte of English Poesy (1589).
Traditionally, Weird (Fortune) seems to smile on men named “Lewis” and is augmented by optimism and good-nature. Lewis has a quick wit, a cerebral mind, and is usually persuasive. The bearer of this name traditionally is believed to love the excitement of life and can easily adapt to all situations. A natural adventurer, Lewis thrives on the new and unexpected and prefers to be in constant motion. It makes him feel alive. Lewis will stir up some action if there's not enough around. Naturally rebellious, Lewis has no fear and never resists change. Traveling and new experiences feed his soul; he is social, attracts friends with ease — people enjoy being around Lewis’s humor and energy.
____
1”Turco Coat of Arms, Historiography,” Bath, Ohio: Halberts, n.d.
2National Geographic Human Genome Project, on-line at www.NationalGeographic.com.
3Wells, Spencer, The Journey of Man—A Genetic Odyssey, New York: Random House, 2004.
4 Indus River Valley civilization, etc., on-line at www.harappa.com/har/indus-saraswati.html
5Benjamin, Sandra, Sicily, Three Thousand Years of Human History, Hanover: Steerforth Press, 2006.
William H. Shurr of the University of Tennessee has been mining Dickinson's letters for nuggets overlooked by other Dickinson scholars, even Thomas H. Johnson whose The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, contains what the ordinary reader might have thought were all of Dickinson's poems, including those to be found originally in her letters. Evidently Shurr believes he hit paydirt in Dickinson's inexhaustible vein, for in September of 1993 he published his New Poemsof Emily Dickinson, in which he claimed to have discovered "Nearly 500 short epigrams and longer lyrics excavated from Dickinson's correspondence but not previously presented in poetic form. — 'Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility,'" as it was reported in the EDIS Bulletin.
Nearly simultaneously a review titled "Emily Warmed Over" by Gary Lee Stonum appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Professor Stonum wrote that these "New Poems [are] Anything but New." He continued, "The 'New Poems of Emily Dickinson,' sad to say, are not new, not often poems, and not even quite Emily Dickinson's. To produce this volume William Shurr has mined Dickinson's published letters, sometimes finding gems and sometimes fool's gold, but only rarely extracting anything Dickinson herself would have owned as one of her poems."
The book had a casual inception, according to Anita Manning, who wrote, "On a whim, Shurr set out some passages" from Dickinson's letters "as poems....” Evidently, according to information supplied on the title page of his book and elsewhere therein, Shurr's chief excavators were a graduate student, Anna Dunlap, and Shurr's daughter, Emily Grey Shurr, who did the exhumation under the editor's direction.
"The discovery is 'an exciting, innovative and important advance in Dickinson studies,' wrote Dickinson scholar Emory Elliott of the University of California, Riverside, on the book jacket. He called Shurr's work 'a major advance in our knowledge of Dickinson as poet and person.'"
"These poems use her [Dickinson's] preferred hymn or ballad meters and unusual rhymes," Shurr averred not only in his book and in the Bulletin, but in many of the media, including newspapers, television and radio. However, what struck this reader most strongly was the fact that "these poems" did not use rhymes — unusual or not — at all. Perhaps graduate students may be excused for being unaware of the various definitions of prosodics and verse forms, but one expects editors and scholars to know them.
Pertinent standard definitions (from my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, third edition) are as follows:
BALLAD: Universal in the Western world. Folk ballads are written in podic prosody, literary ballads in accentual-syllabics. The BALLAD STANZA is [rhymed] a4 b3 c4 b3. [The superscripts indicate line lengths.] For related forms see COMMON MEASURE (95-97).
Emily Dickinson did not write ballads, which are medium-length lyric narratives, nor did she write in the accentual folk ballad measure called "podic prosody"; thus, "ballad meters" is the wrong term — there is a clear difference between a "meter" and a "stanza." The correct term is common measure stanzas, which Dickinson found in the hymnals of Amherst and used as her models:
COMMON MEASURE: Accentual-syllabic. Rhymed. A QUATRAIN STANZA written in iambics.... The rhyme scheme is abcb. The first and third lines consist of four iambic feet; the second and fourth lines, of three iambic feet (119). HYMNAL STANZA is the same, except that it rhymes abab [ibid.].
Common measure and hymnal stanza must rhyme. Since the "poems" under discussion here do not rhyme, and only the most optimistic scansion would show that they were purposely written in iambic meters, they are not cast in Emily Dickinson's standard common measure and hymnal stanza patterns. Here is an example, "One of Shurr's favorites among the new poems," according to Manning:
A Letter always seemed to me
like Immortality,
for is it not the Mind alone,
without corporeal friend?
If "lines" one and two seem to set up a couplet rhyme pattern, then the reader's expectation is that lines three and four will do the same. Their complete failure to do so has the effect of anticlimax, undercutting not only the chime of the poem, but our expectation of what a Dickinson poem should accomplish. Taking these lines out of their context in this way, as though they were a finished quatrain, destroys the effect that they had in the letters and tends to trivialize the rest of Dickinson's verse oeuvre.
If it is true that Emily Dickinson never consciously wrote an unrhymed poem in her life, it follows that the passages in New Poemsof Emily Dickinson cannot possibly be said to be "new" poems by the Amherst poet under any of the circumstances its editor has discussed. Although she did sometimes use the same lines in both letters and poems, unless she used lines from the former in the latter, Dickinson clearly meant them as prose passages, and prose passages they remain, despite an editor's having "lineated" them according to phrasal patterns. People since the twentieth century have been calling line-phrased prose "free verse" (a contradiction in terms — “verse” is “metered language, “prose” is unmetered language; thus, “verse” cannot be “free”), but we know what Emily Dickinson thought of Whitman's prose poems.
These concerns of mine were embodied in a letter I wrote to Dr. Shurr on 8 August 1993, after he and I had attended the 1993 meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts, of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Dr. Shurr replied with a letter justifying his book. It was difficult to know where to begin to correct his errors, but I decided to start with this quotation from his response: "It is almost a cliché in Dickinson studies for nearly a century now to call this unit ['the two-line unit that alternates iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter'] ballad meter, or hymn meter, or more usually fourteeners."
If it is cliché it is also erroneous and another proof of something I have long bemoaned: Most scholars and critics of American literature know nothing whatever about prosodics and are quite disdainful of those who do. No doubt it is the "intuitive" Emerson/Whitman influence; as Dana Gioia has pointed out in a recent essay:
"Today prosody is a neglected subject.
"Few literary critics know more than the rudiments of metrics, and, in the aftermath of the free-verse revolution, even many poets have never studied versification. The last century, however, considered prosody an essential part of literary education" (93). "Surely one reason for the drop in Longfellow's reputation has been the decline of interest among both scholars and poets in formal prosody."
That does not, however, excuse the ignorance, nor ought one to condone its continuance.
First, that "two-line unit" is not a "unit." Many of the "poems" Shurr has identified are two lines long, what he calls "fourteener epigrams." However, fourteeners are not used singly, and Dickinson never intended that they should be; fourteeners are always paired with another line — either another fourteener, or an Alexandrine line to form a couplet of Poulter's measure (see pp. 226-227 of The Book of Forms). There is a caesura after iambic foot four of each fourteener, and the line has long been broken at that point to form two lines (small x = an unstressed, unrhymed syllable; capital X = a stressed, unrhymed syllable; capital A, B, C — any syllable other than x = a stressed, line-ending syllable that may rhyme):
xX xX xX xX · xX xX xX, i.e.,
xX xX xX xX ·
xX xX xX
If this were all, Shurr might have a case for his "fourteener epigram," but another fourteener is required to complete the unit, which is a couplet unit:
xX xX xX xA
xX xX xB
xX xX xX xC
xX xX xB
This quatrain is called common measure, (not "ballad meter" unless it is written in podic prosody), and when Dickinson used it as a poem or stanza form, she rhymed it as tradition required.
Shurr cited poem "J. 497" from the Johnson collection to prove that Dickinson sometimes did not rhyme her poems:
He strained my faith —
Did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust —
Did it then — yield?
Hurled my belief —
But — did he shatter — it?
Racked — with suspense —
Not a nerve failed!
Wrung me — with Anguish —
But I never doubted him —
'Tho' for what wrong
He did never say —
Stabbed — while I sued
His sweet forgiveness —
Jesus — it's your little "John"!
Dont you know — me?
It is true that, as Johnson has printed this poem, it does not rhyme. However, the poem first appeared as no. 608 in the section titled "Poems Incomplete or Unfinished" of Bolts of Melody. In that incarnation it was printed thus:
He strained my faith — did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust — did it then yield?
Hurled my belief — but did he shatter it?
Racked with suspense, not a nerve failed!
Wrung me with Anguish — must be I deserved it,
Though for what wrong he did never say,
Stabbed — while I sued his sweet forgiveness.
Jesus — it's your little "John"! Why me slay?"
(304)
This version certainly rhymes or, to be accurate, the first stanza consonates (off-rhymes) and the second true-rhymes. It took me less than five minutes to find this version in my personal library. To be sure, it would take me a bit longer to discover why there are differences in the versions — for instance, in the second version, "must be I deserved it" instead of "But I never doubted him — " in the "Wrung me with Anguish" line, or "Why me slay?" instead of "Don't you know — me?" in the last line.
According to Mrs. Todd, editor of Dickinson's 1931 Letters, "In her early twenties Emily began to conclude her letters with a poem, but as part of the text, written as prose, as if half hoping that the correspondent might not detect its presence. — Later, poems, as such, were not only part of the text; sometimes a poem constituted the entire letter." (455) Morever, she would often use the same "poem" in more than one letter; a note in Bolts says, "In Mrs. Todd's copy the last two words [of the last line] are inverted." (304) Some scholars have argued, however, that none of Dickinson's "prose" pieces ought to be counted a "poem" unless it appears in one of the "fascicles," the little ribbon-bound manuscript chapbooks that were found among the poet's effects after her death, and I tend to agree with this view.
For these, and many other reasons, the "poems" of Emily Dickinson are extremely problematic. Staying with the example Shurr chose, for instance, one might point out that, as he has given it, the poem not only does not rhyme externally, it also does not exhibit iambic meters. Here is an accurate scansion of the first "quatrain" in Johnson's version:
xX xX
xxX xXx
Xx XX
xxXX
The only iambs are to be found in "line" one, which is iambic dimeter. Line two has no normative foot but consists of one anapest and an amphibrach. Line three has a trochee and a spondee. Line four is what a classical metrist would call a pyrrhic and a spondee, what Harvey Gross calls "a double iamb," and what J. R. R. Tolkien calls a "long rise" when he is discussing accentual (podic) prosody.
Nor is the "quatrain" written in podic prosody, for if it were written out as two lines of Anglo-Saxon prosody (which is the basis for podic prosody, TBoF, pp. 26-32), accentually it would look like this (the dot indicates the caesura in the center of the stich):
xX xX · xxX xXx
Xx Xx´ · xxXX
Stich two has five stresses, three in the first hemistich, where two would be required. In other words, this "stanza" is not written in verse, which is "metered language"; it is written in prose, "unmetered language." All that Johnson did was to break Dickinson's prose up into lines according to phrasing, what some have called "lineation" and what I call "line-phrasing." (I direct the reader's attention to the chapter titled "Whitman and I" in my book The Public Poet, where I go into this matter in some detail.)
Either one must maintain that Emily Dickinson sometimes wrote prose poems, or that this was not intended by Dickinson as a poem to begin with. If the Todd ("T. 608") version comes to light, one may suspect that Dickinson never arrived at a version of the poem that she thought of as complete, for it exists in a short-line (J. 497) and at least two long-line versions. Though the latter may show tendencies toward regular meter, the rhythms are quite rough and it is clear why the editors considered the poem to be unfinished.
Here is my numeration of the various feet in this "poem": iambs, 14 (counting the double iamb); trochees, 11; anapests, 2; spondees, 4; amphibrachs, 3. If iambs predominate, barely, over trochees, this piece is far from regular metrically, either as an iambic poem or as a podic poem (although it is actually more regular accentually than it is accentual-syllabically, for the number of stressed syllables ranges only between four and five accents).
These are the sorts of things I meant when I called Shurr's scansions "creative." That Johnson's were as creative does not speak well for his understanding of what it is that poets do. There is no excuse for scholars and critics of American literature to ignore the prosodic practice of the poets themselves, yet they seem to be willing to be ignorant and to excuse that ignorance by citing other scholars' ignorance. In my opinion the whole of Dickinson's "poetic" oeuvre needs to be gone over again prosodically to determine what she intended to preserve as verse poems and what she meant to leave as prose. Dickinson knew when she wanted her words to appear as finished verses, and she knew when she intended to leave them as parts of letters.
Works cited in “Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine.”
Emory Elliott, book blurb on the jacket of Shurr, New Poems by Emily Dickinson, q.v.
Dana Gioia, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism," in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Jay Parini, ed., New York, NY: Columbia U. P., 1993.
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1963.
Anita Manning, signed news item, USA Today, June 23, 1993.
William H. Shurr, editor, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1993.
——, August 1993 reply to Lewis Turco's letter, q.v.
Gary Lee Stonum, "Emily Warmed Over," Cleveland, Ohio, Plain Dealer, September 5th, 1993.
Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Georgiana Strickland, ed., 5:1, May/June 1993.
Mabel Loomis Todd, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson, New and Enlarged Edition, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1931.
——, and Millicent Todd Bingham, eds., Bolts of Melody, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1945.
Lewis Turco, Letter to Dr. William H. Shurr, 8 August 1993; printed as a review in The Hollins Critic, xxx:1, Dec. 1993, pp. 12-13.
——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover, NH: U. P. of New England, 2000.
——, The Public Poet, Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry P., 1991.
For many years, despite her early involvement with the NAACP, Brooks wrote a formal poetry; during the 1960s, however, influenced by the militancy of her old friend Langston Hughes and by the aggressive posture of the young Blacks, such as Amiri Baraka, she found she could no longer afford to appear as though she remained on the sidelines. She therefore began to write a more militant kind of poem. In the lead essay of A Life Distilled edited by Gary Smith and herself, Maria K. Mootry, in her essay titled "'Down the Whirlwind of Good Rage': An Introduction to Gwendolyn Brooks," said that "at the nexus of Brooks's art lies a fundamental commitment to both the modernist aesthetics of art and the common ideal of social justice." (1)
Brooks was born in 1917 in Topeka, Kansas, and educated at Wilson Junior College in Chicago, from which she was graduated in 1936. She married three years later and became the mother of two. During the Depression she worked as publicist for the NAACP Youth Council in Chicago, and subsequently she taught at various institutions of higher education in and around that city including Northeastern Illinois State College, Columbia College, and Elmhurst College.
"Nowhere is this dual commitment more apparent," Mootry continued, "than in the multiplicity of voices in her works. If the reader finds echoes of T.S. Eliot and Countee Cullen in her poetry, there are also equally strong folk vernacular voices punctuating her forty-year literary career. Her three early works, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), Annie Allen (1949), and The Bean Eaters (1960), present a wide range of poetic forms, including blues poems, ballads, experimental free verse, quatrains, Petrarchan sonnets and Chaucerian stanzas. Her subsequent publications, In the Mecca (1968), Riot (1969), Family Pictures (1971), Beckonings (1975), and To Disembark (1981), are written primarily in free verse and show her increasing concern with social issues, yet the variety of speakers continues."
Brooks' Selected Poems was published in 1963. In the "Foreword" to New Negro PoetsU.S.A., edited by Langston Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks wrote, "At the present time, poets who happen also to be Negroes are twice-tried. They have to write poetry, and they have to remember that they are Negroes. Often they wish that they could solve the Negro question once and for all, and go on from such success to the composition of textured sonnets or buoyant villanelles without the transience of a raindrop, or the gold-stuff of the sun. They are likely to find significances in those subjects not instantly obvious to their fairer fellows.
“The raindrop may seem to them to represent racial tears — and those might seem, indeed, other than transient. The golden sun might remind them that they are burning." (13)
One of Brooks' simplest and most-anthologized poems exemplifies both her innovative approach to traditional verse forms and her social commitment:
WE REAL COOL
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel
"We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon."
First, on the typographical level, it is clear that this is a poem written in couplet stanzas. The second immediately noticeable point is that it is a parallel series, for each line except the last ends with the word "we." Next, the eye is caught by the fact that immediately preceding the last word of each line, except the final one, there is a period — the series is made up of short independent clauses, a set of assertions.
When we read the poem, though, we wonder at first, perhaps, why we ends the lines; it ought to appear at the head of each line, for it is the subject of the parallel clauses: "We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin. We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon." But when we read it in its "correct" parallel arrangement we realize why Brooks wrote it otherwise: it is not syncopated. Read normally," another thing happens to its rhythms: Some of the strong stresses are demoted. Written as Brooks has written them, each line except the first and last consists of three strong stresses. The prosody is accentual verse. Line one has four beats, the last has two.
The rhymes of the poem from lines two through seven thus appear medially — they run right down the center of the poem. All the verbs — the strongest words — from line two on, are pushed to first place; they are drum beats. The rhyming words are also drum beats sprung by their sounds, and each is followed by a full stop, a rest. Then another drum stroke, we: ¢¢ [] ¢, and the line is enjambed into the next stress. The poem is jazz; it is a dirge played in the streets, like those of the black bands that march in slow time through New Orleans alleys to the graveyard. The dirge begins slowly with four beats, and it ends abruptly with two. The entire little poem is an exercise in linguistic counterpoint.
The level of diction of the poem is idiomatic, the tropes mainly rhetorical — it is heavy with macho braggadocio. And it ends with the assertion of a truth that brings the reader up short with a jolt. The major genre of the poem is, plainly, the lyric, but it is also almost equally a didactic poem with a clear social message.
Brooks' second book, Annie Allen, received the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. "Then, as now," Bernard W. Bell wrote in the introduction to his anthology Modern and Contemporary Afro-American Poetry, "Miss Brooks' race consciousness was low-keyed, yet keenly felt in every line. And her lyrics pulsate with the joys and sorrows of life. (9-10)
"Stylistically, Annie Allen is a masterpiece. Tracing the path of a black child's movement from innocence to experience, Miss Brooks skillfully employs adaptations of many of the major metrical patterns and stanzaic forms in the English tradition, from couplets and blank verse to sonnet sequences and free verse. In this and subsequent volumes, she maintains a remarkable balance between being a poet's poet and a poet of the people."
Writing in Women Poets of the World, edited by Joanna Bankier and Deirdre Lashgari, Barbara Christian, in her essay titled "Cultural Influences: African American" said, "Gwendolyn Brooks wrote much of her poetry during the 1940s and 1950s when Blacks were striving to achieve integration into the American social structure. By the 1960s, the Civil Rights movement gave way to the Black Power movement. Brooks' later work, published in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflects that shift. The dominant literary movement of that period, Cultural Nationalism, focused on the development of Black selfhood and nationhood. There was a renewed interest in African and Afro-American history and culture. Poets saw themselves as revolutionaries in the service of their people” (337-8). Gwendolyn Brooks died in 2007 as one of America’s most highly respected literary figures.
The Virginia Quarterly Review "The Mutable Past," a memoir collected in FANTASEERS, A BOOK OF MEMORIES by Lewis Turco of growing up in the 1950s in Meriden, Connecticut, (Scotsdale AZ: Star Cloud Press, 2005).
The Tower Journal Two short stories, "The Demon in the Tree" and "The Substitute Wife," in the spring 2009 issue of Tower Journal.
The Tower Journal A story, "The Car," and two poems, "Fathers" and "Year by Year"
The Tower Journal Memoir, “Pookah, The Greatest Cat in the History of the World,” Spring-Summer 2010.
The Michigan Quarterly Review This is the first terzanelle ever published, in "The Michigan Quarterly Review" in 1965. It has been gathered in THE COLLECTED LYRICS OF LEWIS TURCO/WESLI COURT, 1953-2004 (www.StarCloudPress.com).
The Gawain Poet An essay on the putative medieval author of "Gawain and the Green Knight" in the summer 2010 issue of Per Contra.
The Black Death Bryan Bridges' interesting article on the villanelle and the terzanelle with "The Black Death" by Wesli Court as an example of the latter.
Seniority: Six Shakespearian Tailgaters This is a part of a series called "Gnomes" others of which have appeared in TRINACRIA and on the blog POETICS AND RUMINATIONS.
Reinventing the Wheel, Modern Poems in Classical Meters An essay with illustrations of poems written in classical meters together with a "Table of Meters" and "The Rules of Scansion" in the Summer 2009 issue of Trellis Magazine
"The Poet's Bible"
A. R. Ammons, Robert Huff, Lewis Turco, Richard Frost at Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, 1961.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF "THE POET'S BIBLE"
In the fall of 1959 I was a graduate student in the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, a member of the poetry workshop taught by Paul Engle and Donald Justice. I had always been interested in the traditional forms of poetry — I was born a formalist, and I wanted a reference book that contained the whole range of them, but I'd never been able to find one other than those that contained merely the standard sorts of things: the sonnet, the villanelle, the haiku and tanka, the sestina — mainly the Medieval Italian and Provençal forms plus a few others.
But what else was there? Perhaps there weren't enough forms to fill a short book. Then, one day while I was browsing through the bargain bin of Iowa Book and Supply on Clinton Street in Iowa City, I ran across a book of poems by Rolfe Humphries titled Green Armor on Green Ground. Humphries had laid out "the twenty-four official meters" of the Medieval Welsh bards, and he had written a poem in each of these complicated syllabic forms. I bought the volume, of course — I think I paid a quarter for it, or maybe a dollar — and I took it home. After I'd looked it over a while I got to wondering whether, with such forms as these, I might not be able to gather enough material for a book, particularly if I filled it out with examples of poems written in the forms. I asked Don Justice whether he thought such a volume would be useful. He encouraged me, and I began working on the project.
That period of time when I began putting together what would eventually become, first, The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (1968), then The New Book of Forms (1986), The Book of Forms, Third Edition (2000), and finally The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition (2011), which included “Odd and Invented Forms,” was not auspicious for such projects. The so-called "Beat Generation" was in the process of consolidating its anti-intellectual stranglehold on a generation, and the self-righteous, self-indulgent decade of the 1960s loomed ahead. Heedlessly, I plunged forward. Within two years I had a manuscript, a combined reference work/anthology that I titled Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms. Between 1961 and 1968 I revised the manuscript over and over again, researching it, sending for books to Europe, rewriting whole sections, paging through volumes of contemporary poetry for examples of poems in the forms and adding them to the volume.
Whenever I submitted the manuscript to a publishing house I would argue that, although the book might not sell big, it would sell steadily and it would eventually help to create its own market, but I was always disregarded. The verdict was ever the same: although it was a good book, there was no market for it. In 1967, after many fruitless efforts to find a home for the volume, I deleted the poems in order to shorten the book and limit its reprint permissions costs so that a potential publisher might find it more attractive, for the examples I'd chosen were all by living poets. I added a bibliography of the missing poems so that people who were interested might search them out.
By a fluke — quite literally by accident, and after more frustrations — E. P. Dutton accepted The Book of Forms in its non-anthology format. Then I discovered that Cyril I. Nelson, the Dutton paperbacks and poetry editor, would have been happy to have the poems as part of the manuscript. I wanted the book published without further delay, however, and so it was, in 1968. Although it did share a full-page ad in The New York Times Book Review when it appeared, it was reviewed only once, by my colleague at S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego Prof. Frank Hulme, in the local newspaper, The Oswego Palladium-Times; nevertheless, it began to sell, strictly by word-of-mouth.
For sixteen years it stayed in print; then, although it was still selling at a steady rate, as I had predicted that it would, in 1984 The Book of Forms was dropped by Dutton without notification or explanation — Tom Trusky of Boise State University phoned to tell me he couldn't get copies for his classes anymore. When I checked with the publisher, I found it was true. Some folks out there in the world of "organic poetry" and "free verse" had bought more than 25,000 copies of The Book of Forms during the period that it was in print, not counting the passing around, the college resales, even the photocopying that went on. I used to think it was 'passing strange that such a crowd of people was using a book that was at crosscurrents with the tidal flow of the times.
I never stopped working on The Book of Forms, even while it was going through its several printings which, I might note, I was never informed were going to take place. I was never given the opportunity to correct a number of typographical errors I had missed in the proofreading, or to reword some of the descriptions — people were misreading them; consequently, I was seeing such phenomena as villanelles with varying line lengths appearing in the London Times Literary Supplement and many other places.
The year following publication of The Book of Forms the State University of New York Office of Continuing Education asked me to write a correspondence course study guide, Creative Writing in Poetry, and I used as the basis for that text the material I had collected since The Book of Forms had appeared. The study guide went into service in 1970; the text it called for in the correspondence course was, of course, The Book of Forms. At S.U.N.Y. College at Oswego, where I was teaching, I simultaneously developed a television course along the lines of the correspondence course; it was called “The Nature of Poetry.” The Program in Writing Arts, which I had founded in 1968 and that I directed at Oswego, began offering such basic writing courses in the genres of fiction, drama, and poetry as the foundation of the tiered system of the Writing Arts major we developed despite the misgivings of the English Department, for no one believed that the students of the period would enroll in such demanding courses. But they did, and in considerable numbers; they still do. In fact, the Program is now a Department of Creative Writing.
In 1971 David M. Ungerer, vice-president of the newly organized Prentice-Hall spin-off Reston Publishing Company, saw a copy of the study guide lying on a table in the office of the Dean of Continuing Education at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He wrote to ask me to develop a college text-anthology based upon the S.U.N.Y. guide, and in 1973 Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing was published. I conceived of it as containing everything about poetry not covered by The Book of Forms. While Poetry: An Introduction was going through its own extra printings, I dreamed of combining it with The Book of Forms eventually, and that is in effect what happened in The New Book of Forms which was snapped up two years after the first edition had gone out of print, as soon as I submitted it to the University Press of New England, an academic boutique publisher that had begun as the Dartmouth College Press.
On Friday the 27th of June 1987, three days after I sent the proofread page proofs and the completed indices of The New Book back to the publisher, I began to gather together all the manuscript versions of the four books to send to the special collections archives of the Homer Babbidge Library of my Alma Mater, the University of Connecticut. I also intended to send the typescripts of the Dacey-Jauss anthology Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, just published, which X. J. Kennedy and I had evaluated separately at the request of the publisher, Harper and Row, and the Miller Williams text-anthology Patterns of Poetry, to be published at the end of the summer of '86, which I had gone over at the request of its editor before it was finally accepted by the Louisiana State University Press. In the course of this gathering I found the original 1961 manuscript of Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms, which I had caused to be bound in order to preserve it as it went its hopeless rounds of the publishers.
For the first time in I don't recall how many years I began to read the Introduction I'd written a quarter-century earlier. I'm afraid I was both pleased and mortified to discover how long I'd been saying the same things. Here is what I wrote in 1961, the year before I founded the Fenn College Poetry Center of Cleveland at what is now Cleveland State University:
It used to be said that a sign of the poet is his mastery of the form; the sign of the poetaster is the form's mastery of him. However, one does not hear this very often nowadays. Instead, when one comes into contact with a writer of verse one is likely to hear that it is not the poet who writes the poem, but the poem that writes itself: the poet is merely a medium through which some kind of cosmic vibrations get themselves transmitted to paper. One line grows out of another "organically," that is, the first line is somehow inspired by the gods and from the mysterious poetic womb of this line there is born another line, and another, and another, until the poem has completed itself. The poem is thus seen as a vital organism which exists and procreates naturally.
This all sounds fine and esthetic, and of course it is tremendously romantic as well, which lends passion to the concept, if such a theory may be dignified by the term "concept." But upon reflection, perhaps it seems a shallow and useless theory, for then of course poets may be born only, touched by providence with the divine gift of the Muses.
The truth is, of course, that any good poem must have organic unity, but it is the poet who gives the poem unity, and it can be no other way. Regardless of all sophistry to the contrary, without the poet there can be no poem; it is the poet who breathes life into the verse which is trying to be a poem; it is the poet who is the creator: he lives, and the poem cannot be born without him. One line cannot follow another without a mind to link them and a hand to write them. The poet, therefore, and no other, makes the poem, and the making is seldom easy.
Take, for instance, the example of Dylan Thomas, who is the very prototype of the romantic bard to most young poets writing today. His verse is full of music; his lines rise and fall majestically, invoking allusion, rhetoric; giving insight and raising towering symbols which are at once primal and sophisticated. He seems a veritable great wild stallion on the plains of poetry, master of herds of lesser steeds. His poems must have poured forth spontaneously and grandly, for as he speaks it seems he is talking to the soul's ear.
But Dylan Thomas often wrote in strict syllabics, always in strict patterns. His symbols have assigned meanings. His rhyme schemes are sometimes fantastic, but they are sequential. Some of Dylan Thomas's poems have been through a hundred drafts.
Is this how a poem makes itself? If so, we are slaves to words, lesser organisms being used by literature, and not intelligent beings creating a literature to serve mankind.
In the interest of sanity the author of The Book of Forms rejects utterly any theory of automatic writing. In the beginning there may have been The Word, but since then there have been simply words, and if there is magic in them it is a studied magic which only talent, craft, imagination, intelligence and passion may invoke.
No one, unfortunately, may give a person talent, imagination, intelligence or passion. These are qualities the origins of which may be debated by the theologians and sociologists, not by me. The Book of Forms can help only with craft — but perhaps one ought not to have said "only," for a writer may have many things, but if he hasn't craft, he will never be a poet.
A strong statement, and a precarious one. For what is craft? Simply, craft is skill, as distinguished from talent, which is aptitude. Skill in what? Skill in language, including words and their meanings, rhythms, sounds; skill in handling ideas within the conventions of writing; skill in constructing forms that will enhance meaning. Skill perhaps in saying ordinary things in an extraordinary way, or saying extraordinary things in an ordinary way.
For all good poems are formal, though not all formal poems are good. That is, all poems are organized in some way. The organization may be around an idea, or a symbol, or a sound, or a rhythm, or an image or sequence of images, or any number of things, for each poem has its own locale and focus. It is for the poet to decide what he is trying to do, and for the reader and time to corroborate or reject the poet's vision and statement.
But how does one acquire craft? It is not bestowed upon one, it is learned. One way in which to learn it is to construct your own forms and, by trial and error, discover what may be done with them. Another way is to experiment with traditional forms and see what may be done with them. Certainly, reading good poems and analyzing them is a third way, but the best way is to do all three.
It is more than five decades since I wrote those words. The Book of Forms has given way to The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition and to two spin-offs, The Book of Literary Terms (1999) and The Book of Dialogue (2004). During that period of time we have had the Beats, the New York School, the Black Mountaineers, the Confessional Poets, the Deep Image Surrealists, The Movement — which included the anti-war, the civil rights, and the early consciousness-raising schools; we have had the subsequent Feminists and the Gay Poetry movement, the Plain-Talkers of the Northwest, Hispanic and Native American and Cowboy and Rap poetry movements, and, most recently, the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. In criticism we have gone from the New Criticism to Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, and Deconstructionism. But at last the pendulum has swung back, as it was bound to do eventually.
Miller Williams' Patterns of Poetry was published in August 1986 — it differed from the Dacey-Jauss book in that it was more specifically focused upon the traditional structures of poetry, and it included work by poets ranging back to the Middle Ages. The New Book of Forms appeared in November; less than three years later, in the summer of 1989, it went into its third printing, with more than 10,000 copies in print. The other Neoformalist books were doing well, too, according to their publishers.
During the previous score of years before the pivotal year 1986, The Mississippi Review had been nearly alone in devoting a special issue to the subject of form in poetry: in 1977 it had published "The Problem of Form" — poets had been asked to submit a poem and then to write a short comment upon its composition and organization. Contributors to that issue included Richard Eberhart, William Stafford, Vern Rutsala, X.J. Kennedy, and Richard Wilbur. A decade later, in 1987, another formalist book following the same format was published, David Lehman's Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms. Contributors included John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, Dana Gioia, Marilyn Hacker, Anthony Hecht, John Hollander, Richard Kenney, Brad Leithauser, Joyce Carol Oates, Molly Peacock, Robert Pinsky, Louis Simpson (who had been one of the three editors, including Robert Bly and Donald Hall, of the original showcase of the "Academic Poets," The New Poets of England and America, which had been the first shot fired in "the War of the Anthologies" in 1957), Mona Van Duyn, and Richard Wilbur — a real potpourri of both the older formalist poets and Neoformalists, plus many antiformalists, young and old. Now there are many books that pay attention to the formal concerns of verse-writing, and Neoformalism, or "The New Formalism," is no longer a "new" movement in American literature.
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Notes
Phillip Dacey and David Jauss, editors, Strong Measures: Contemporary American Poetry in Traditional Forms, New York: Harper and Row, 1986.
Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson, editors, The New Poets of England and America [first selection], Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1957.
——, and Robert Pack, editors, The New Poets of England and America, Second Selection, Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1962.
Rolfe Humphries, Green Armor on Green Ground, New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1956.
David Lehman, Ecstatic Occasions, Expedient Forms, New York: Macmillan, 1987.
"The Problem of Form," Mississippi Review, vi:1, 1977.
Lewis Turco, The Book of Dialogue, How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2004.
——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968.
——, The Book of Forms, Fourth Edition, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011.
——, The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism and Scholarship, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999.
——, Contemporary Poetry: The Book of Forms, bound ms., Special Collections archives, Iowa City: University of Iowa, n.d.
——, Creative Writing in Poetry, Albany: State University of New York Office of Continuing Education, 1970.
——, The New Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986.
——, Poetry: An Introduction through Writing, Reston: Reston Publishing, 1973.
Miller Williams, editor, Patterns of Poetry, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986.
April 21, 2018 in American History, Books, Commentary, Criticism, Education, Essays, History, Literature, Poetry | Permalink | Comments (0)