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."
According to Jeff Kacirk’s Forgotten English calendarentry for Saturday and Sunday, January 31 / February 1, 2015, “St. John Bosco. A 19th –century Italian patron of editors, is honored on January 31.
Greek- and Latin-based ‘inkhorn terms’ [esoteric neologiisms] abundantly coined beginning in the 1400s, were so called from their association with an ink container, originally made of horn and carried by scribes. In 1553, scholar Thomas Wilson finished The Arte of Rhetorique, which was intended to help budding poets develop their craft. The book lampooned the unnecessary use of pompous inkhornisms, offering such ridiculous examples of gibberish as, ‘I cannot but celebrate and extoll your magnifical dexterity above all other. For how could you have adepted such illustrate prerogative and dominical superiority if the fecundity of your ingeny had not been so fertile and wonderful pregnant?’
The 27-letter inkhornism ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’ – a 13-syllable monstrosity unleashed in Thomas Nash’s Lenten Stuff (1599), meaning ‘worthiness of honor’ – was once the longest English word. But in the late 1700s, it was surpassed by the 29-letter abomination ‘floccinaucinihilipilification,’ a noun which deemed something to be worthless. In the late 19th century, ‘antidisestablishmentarianism’ fell one letter short of the record,” but in 1959 “psychoproboscularanalizationist,” an inkhornism meaning “toady” or “bumkisser” was coined and mounted on a desk at the Bureau of Naval Personnel in Arlington, VA, becoming the longest non-scientific word in the English language.
During the early 1960s while I was teaching at what is now Cleveland State University, a student named Russell Salamon walked into my office to show me a poem titled “She” in a repeating form that he had invented. In this poem Salamon began by taking a set of parentheses as his center:
()
He then took a sentence, "my hands cup her cup," broke it after the subject, and inserted the set of parens into the break (the technical term for a break in a line of verse is “caesura”):
my hands () cup her cup.
This is a metaphor: “My hands are a set of parentheses.” Next, a second clause: "all parentheses in which I am warm drizzle-rain inside her," thus:
All parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
And a third, "sizzling on snowscapes of her skin, her face, her arms, her thighs, forests full of soundless flowers waited once unseen, translucid [he probably meant “translucent”]; she carries rain constellations to fill flute basins where" with some changed punctuation and a bit of typographical dispersion, appears this way:
sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.
Her face, her arms, her thighs,
all parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
Forests full of soundless flowers
waited once unseen, translucid.
She carries rain constellations
to fill flute basins where
And finally, "My finger touch dis[s]olves into a shiverlong echo of rains; we wash our morning faces off":
SHE1
My finger touch dissolves
into a shiverlong echo of rains/
sizzling on snowscapes of her skin.
(Her face, her arms, her thighs,
all parentheses in which I am
[my hands () cup her cup]
warm drizzle-rain inside her.
Forests full of soundless flowers
waited once unseen, translucid.
She carries rain constellations
to fill f lute basins where
/we wash our morning faces off
— Russell Salamon
The split between f and lute in the penultimate line appears as it was originally printed in Salamon’s chapbook, Parent[hetical Pop]pies, published by d. a. levy’s Renegade Press in 1964; it may or may not be a typographical error.
After I had thought about it for a while, I recalled E. E. Cummings’ poem titled “l(a,” which was also built of parentheses, though all he did was to take the word “loneliness,” insert into it a single sentence, “a leaf falls,” and sprinkle it down the page. More to the point, though, I remembered a poem I had myself written when I was a G. I. Bill undergraduate student at the University of Connecticut only two or three years earlier, for the C. S. U. position was my first professional teaching experience. I had begun by taking the title sentence, “Time goes down in mirrors,” and writing a sentence that rhymed and metered (both halves had the same meters,) to parenthesize the title: “Sophia chatters, for nothing matters” and create the first stanza (with a change or two in punctuation):
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
The second stanza would add two more rhyming lines with the opposite meter (a “mirror image” as it were,):
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters;
Hence, his worldly smile.
In the third stanza I had decided that this time the meter would be normative iambic tetrameter for both lines,
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon.
The fourth stanza would repeat the plan:
Outdoors, the shadows listen as
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon,
Their movements metronomed by jazz.
Then, in the fifth stanza, while the central line remained the same, the lines above and below it would be inverted:
TIME GOES DOWN IN MIRRORS2
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters;
Hence, his worldly smile.
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon.
Outdoors, the shadows listen as
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Horace listens while
Sophia chatters.
Time goes down in mirrors,
for nothing matters.
Hence, his worldly smile:
The pair will love each other soon,
Their movements metronomed by jazz.
Sophia chatters.
Horace listens while
The phonograph spins out its tune.
Outdoors the shadows listen as
Time goes down in mirrors.
Their movements metronomed by jazz,
The pair will love each other soon.
Hence! his worldly smile...,
For nothing matters.
Both of these poems are rather complicated structures although both were written by undergraduates. As an exercise in repetition and in syntax rearrangement, though, parenthetics need not be so difficult, and I used it in class for decades. Here is a brief exercise poem laid out in different fonts so that one may see the sentence elements, none of which do anything fancy such as rhyming, metering, or using any sort of punctuation, including parentheses:
PINES3
They are the pines
I have seen them standing
in the hills where stone dwells
the wind shifts among their needles
roots touch toward silence in the earth
as though they have always been
strength drawn out of darkness.
Although it’s built of uncomplicated elements, notice that the poem can be read from top to bottom, from bottom to top, or from the middle out and it still makes sense.
NOTES:
This essay is from “Paren(t)hesis,” in Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry, ed. Scott Wiggerman and David Meischen, Austin: TX: Dos Gatos Press, 2011, pp. 194-99.
1Russell Salamon’s poem titled “She” is from his chapbook Parent[hetical Pop]pies, Cleveland: Renegade Press, 1964; all rights reserved by the author.
What is the difference between the
words “important” and “importantly”? No one seems to know anymore, and
everything is “more importantly” this or that, and not “more important” than
that or this. The difference is that “important” is an adjective, and “importantly” is an adverb. Adjectives modify substantives, that is, nouns or pronouns:
“He was an important person.” Adverbs
modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs: “He spoke more importantly than was necessary.” “It was not important that he speak
more importantly.”
important |imˈpôrtnt|
adjective
of
great significance or value; likely to have a profound effect on success,
survival, or well-being : important habitats for wildlife | it is important
to avoid monosyllabic answers | [ sentence adverb ] the speech had passion
and, more important, compassion.
•
(of
a person) having high rank or status.
•
(of
an artist or artistic work) significantly original and influential.
ORIGIN
late Middle English : from medieval Latin important- ‘being of
consequence,’ from the verb importare (see import).
importantly |imˈpôrtnt-lē|
adverb
1
[
sentence adverb ] used to emphasize a significant point or matter: a
nondrinking, nonsmoking, and, importantly, nonpolitical sportsman.
2
in
a manner designed to draw attention to one's importance: Kruger strutted
forward importantly.
If we
are going to keep both words, we ought to distinguish between their usages. Otherwise,
it’s important that we just dump one or, perhaps more importantly, the other.
Attached is an op-ed column from Sunday's, 2/7/11, Plain Dealer. The columnist the PD's readers' representative (quasi-ombudsman, apologist). He gets to respond to all the conservatives who accuse the paper of being too liberal and vice versa for the liberals. He strayed a bit from the usual issues this week. After reading your blog I am curious as to whether you would agree.
William Becker
Whatever works, Bill.
But almost anything will work if you know how to do it.
If you're a good pilot there's no airplane you can't deal with. Even a Sopwith. And if you're a good driver there's no steed you can't deal with. Even a camel. Not to mention a Sopwith camel.
Lew
Always wondered what you sop a camel with? My son used to fly tourists round the Mt. St. Helen's area in a Jenny, but I think the plane has been retired. Maybe with good rubber it can at least clear the runway ....
Ruth
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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 Import of Important and Importantly
What is the difference between the words “important” and “importantly”? No one seems to know anymore, and everything is “more importantly” this or that, and not “more important” than that or this. The difference is that “important” is an adjective, and “importantly” is an adverb. Adjectives modify substantives, that is, nouns or pronouns: “He was an important person.” Adverbs modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs: “He spoke more importantly than was necessary.” “It was not important that he speak more importantly.”
important |imˈpôrtnt|
adjective
of great significance or value; likely to have a profound effect on success, survival, or well-being : important habitats for wildlife | it is important to avoid monosyllabic answers | [ sentence adverb ] the speech had passion and, more important, compassion.
• (of a person) having high rank or status.
• (of an artist or artistic work) significantly original and influential.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from medieval Latin important- ‘being of consequence,’ from the verb importare (see import).
importantly |imˈpôrtnt-lē|
adverb
1 [ sentence adverb ] used to emphasize a significant point or matter: a nondrinking, nonsmoking, and, importantly, nonpolitical sportsman.
2 in a manner designed to draw attention to one's importance: Kruger strutted forward importantly.
If we are going to keep both words, we ought to distinguish between their usages. Otherwise, it’s important that we just dump one or, perhaps more importantly, the other.
December 03, 2012 in Commentary, Corrections, Criticism, Education, Grammar | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Tags: important, importantly