"Honkytonk Revisited" by Lewis Turco was originally published in Salmagundi, i:3, 1966; and gathered in
Poetry: An Introduction Through Writing. Reston, VA: Reston Publishing Co., 1973. ISBN 0879096373, paper. O-P but available from ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) of the Institute of Education Sciences (IES) of the U. S. Department of Education.
Jean and Lew Turco in an Oswego Opera production of Carmen, 1980s
Shaking the Family Tree, A Remembrance, by Lewis Turco, West Lafayette, IN: www.BordigheraPress.org, VIA Folio 15, 1998, ISBN 188441916X, trade paperback.
-Listen to Jake Berry singDancing Days - Lew Turco - 10-11-15, 2.24 AM
DANCING DAYS
A tailgater bluesanelle on a line by Shakespeare
Dear, you and I may miss our dancing days,
For you and I are past our dancing days --
We’re too decrepit for the latest craze.
When we were young, as everybody knows,
We used to dance and I’d step on your toes,
But you and I are past our dancing days.
Now we sit quietly and simply rock --
We never rock and roll, we simply rock,
We’re too decrepit for the latest craze.
You like to sit and read your paperbacks,
I read my e-book reader; we spare our backs,
For you and I are past our dancing days.
I go on-line; you e-mail all your friends
Though we have few of those as time extends.
We’re too decrepit for the latest craze.
We’re far too old to be out raising Cain,
But when we walk I use my favorite cane --
We’re too decrepit for the latest craze.
For you and I are past our dancing days.
Music copyright © 2015 by Jake Berry, lyrics copyright © 2015 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.
Thanks to Nigel Holt for introducing me to this performance (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUcTsFe1PVs) of a portion of The Epic of Golgamesh by Peter Pringle, but of course no music has actually come down to us from the Sumerian era for the very good reason that neither musical notation nor tape recording had yet been invented, and no one really knows what the music sounded like, though one may make guesses from current Middle-Eastern music, as Pringle seems to have done. Nor do I know of any original musical instruments that survived the aeons. Third, this “beginning” of The Epic of Gilgamesh is not like any version I have seen, including my own version, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic.
Those who are interested in such things as epics are likely to know that The Epic of Gilgamesh “is, perhaps, the oldest written story on Earth. It comes to us from Ancient Sumeria, and was originally written on 12 clay tablets in cunieform script,” the Academy for Ancient Texts avers on its Web page. “It is about the adventures of the historical King of Uruk [Erech, modern Iraq] (somewhere between 2750 and 2500 BCE).” In fact, however, it is an amalgamation of two stories, the older having to do with the adventures of a most likely mythological person named “Enkidu,” and the second about an ancient King of Erech.
Over the course of no one knows how many centuries, the two tales of Enkidu and Gilgamesh became intertwined and it is in this form that Gilgamesh has come down to us in various versions and languages. To blend the earlier tale of Enkidu with the later doings of Gilgamesh, apparently in order to ascribe to the latter many of the feats of the former, the pair came to be seen as in some essential ways twins, even to the point where they look alike, for the King is a bit taller, it seems, and his close companion Enkidu is broader.
What I have attempted to do here is to cut away from the Gilgamesh epic those actions and events that can quite clearly be ascribed to the older Enkidu and to write his own tale in the manner of the author of the anonymous Medieval epic titled Gawain and the Green Knight, that is to say, in cantos of the strong-stress metric line called Anglo-Saxon prosody with appended five-line accentual-syllabic metrical tails called “bobs-and-wheels.”
I do not claim to have restored the Enkidu epic, nor am I writing history: I am still writing fiction, like the original author(s), and I could not absolutely separate Gilgamesh and his companion. What I do claim is that I have given back to Enkidu what pretty clearly is his tale, and I hope I have written it in a comprehensible and interesting way for modern audiences.
My sources are few and select. I used primarily An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic, etc., by Morris Jastrow, Jr., and Albert T. Clay, New Haven: Yale, 1920, supplemented by “Monsters from Mesopotamia,” an illustrated essay by Robert Lebling, in my favorite periodical of many years’ standing, Saudi Aramco World, Vol. 63, No. 4, July-August 2012, which gave me the idea for my endeavor, the first little bit of which was a sestina in Anglo-Saxon prosody with bobs and wheels added titled, “The Green Knight and the White” which appeared in a print journal, Mea'sure, in 2015 and which is appended to the text in the Afterword of The Hero Enkidu: An Epic by Lewis Turco, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 107, 2015, 101 pp. ISBN 978-1-59954-098-6, trade paperback.
CORRESPONDENCE
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Dear Lew, We returned a couple of days ago from our annual little vacation in Rockport, MA, where I had the opportunity to read your poem/translation/adaptation The Hero Enkidu, which I very much enjoyed. It is beautifully done, inventive, and precise in diction, viz, the several words signifying that Lilitu is a dangerous woman (as you know, whore is cognate with L. carus, and G. hetaira is fine since Lilitu has some of the requisite stature). Needless to say, you (il miglior fabbro, as Eliot might put it) manage the verse forms flawlessly. In short, it is a pleasure to read. Enkidu puts me in mind of the many exotic, mostly Asian, works our students at New Paltz were required to read in Freshman English back in 1963. Shifting to theShakuntala of Kalidas, the Genji of Lady Murasaki, and the Monkey of Wu Cheng'en was a challenge for someone who had been teaching McTeague in Cleveland just the year before. Had you done Enkidu then, surely it would have been on our reading list. (I dimly recall that we did look at the Gilgamesh, perhaps in some anthology.) Of course your use and discussion of verse forms, especially that of the Gawain poet, prompts me to think of the many times I have taught Gawain and the Green Knight over more than forty years (seventy by my estimate), not to mention my exposure to Old and Middle English literature at Columbia. In retirement, verses still swim around in my mind randomly but at appropriate moments, for example, as I pass a cemetery, “At the round earth's imagined corners, blow your trumpets, angels...”. There is even the banal example, as I watch a Yankee game, and the batter Didi Gregorius is announced, “Gregorius se halga papa anwearde on thisum daege heofonwarde” (not to be pedantic, but excuse the respelling and lack of diacritical marks). There is also, in your postscript, some discussion of the vernacular in literature, in which I have for decades been interested particularly with reference to Sicilian “dialect.” There is no region of Italy which has poured out such a stream of dialectal or dialect-based literature as Sicily, and the contribution to Italian literature is considerable: Capuana, Verga, Pirandello, Vittorini, Sciascia, Quasimodo, Lampedusa, et al. Andrea Camilleri, who is still active, is published world-wide in translation, however unfortunate translation is in his case, for his novels, the best known of which are detective stories featuring Inspector Montalbano, are brilliantly written in macaronic Italian/Sicilian but are flattened by translation. This is nothing new: Dante thought (De Vulgari Eloquentia) literary Sicilian the best of the 13th-14th century Italian dialects. So in perhaps a tangential way you are part of a great tradition. Lingua americana in bocca siciliana. Ciao, Anthony Cinquemani |
Captions by Lewis Turco
Listen to Lew Turco read his poem, "The Jazz Joint."
THE JAZZ JOINT
Images by George O'Connell,
Captions by Lewis Turco
Well, the gals were singing and we
On Wednesday, January 28, 2015, Alfred Nicol wrote me,
Dear Lew,
You may remember all of my excited talk about the songs I was writing back in the spring of 2012 at the Newburyport Literary Festival. Well, I'm excited to announce the completion of a project that I've put all of my creative energy into over the past few years, ever since classical / flamenco guitarist John Tavano invited me to write lyrics for his songs. It's an eclectic mix: four of the songs are in French, five in English; the musical style ranges from Parisian café to smoky bar room torch-song. I've attached the title song for you to hear —
Listen to attachment: Download Data
It's one of the two tracks where I get to sing!
Four years in the making, the CD is a recording of nine original songs by John Tavano and Alfred Nicol, featuring the beautiful, vulnerable voice of Ann Harter. We've gathered some of the finest musicians around to create a sound
unlike anything you're likely to hear on the radio. Chris Plante, formerly of The Brew, plays melodica and keyboards; Alex Sandman is superb on bass; Aaron Zaroulis, who was drummer for The Brew, appears on several tracks. Albert Lamar, who was part of the Mississippi Symphony for fifteen years and who has performed in orchestras for Ray Charles and The Chieftains, plays flute and sax for us. And of course the master guitarist John Tavano, who composed these melodies, brings his own vision and musicianship to the recordings.
The Subtle Thread
John Tavano, Alfred Nicol & Ann Harter
Released January 1, 2015
Walter Hekster and Nathalie Ahern in Dresden Mills, Maine, at the Cate Farm under the old blue spruce, September 1998.
R.I.P. WALTER HEKSTER
March 29, 1937 – December 31, 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hekster
Here we scatter all these motes
Of his ashes like the notes
He composed, like the sands
Of time that passed through his good hands,
Both the sinister and dexter,
Of our dear friend Walter Hekster.
Statue of Walter Hekster by David Bade at the Fundatie Museum in Zwolle, Netherlands, from November 28, 2013, until April 2014, with his widow, Alice Van Leuvan Hekster: “The orange thing is his clarinet!”
In the summer of 2012 the Dutch composer Walter Hekster and his wife Alice van Leuvan Hekster who had been a fellow classmate of my wife, Jean, and me at Meriden (CT) High School, class of 1952, came to visit us in Dresden Mills, Maine, from their summer home in Higganum, Connecticut. The four of us had a fine time, but Walter began to feel under the weather.
After their visit we were all supposed to attend our M.H.S. 60th class reunion, but when Jean and I arrived we discovered that Walter had returned to The Netherlands to see his doctors because he felt so ill.
I was in touch with Alice all fall, keeping tabs on Walter -- for whom I had on several occasions been librettist, so we had been expecting the sorry news of his passing. When I sent our condolences to Alice she replied, “Oh Lew, thanks. You know how sick Walt was, and it just got worse. I was with him and his Light just went out on New Years Eve.”
On Feb 8, 2013, Alice wrote, “We are going to put Walt's ashes into the harbor here on Sunday the 17th (his wish)…. My Auntie Margy is coming and I hope Marie [Delemarre Ho, also a classmate]. One of my friends wrote a poem for the occasion, in Dutch. Could you?
Love to Jeannie too,
Alice
On the same day I sent this to Alice:
R.I.P. WALTER HEKSTER
March 29, 1937 – December 31, 2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Hekster
Here we scatter all these motes
Of his ashes like the notes
He composed, like the sands
Of time that passed through his good hands,
Both the sinister and dexter,
Of our dear friend Walter Hekster.
Alice wrote afterward,
Aunt Margy and Marie came [from the U. S.] yesterday! I can't believe it. Marie and Margy and I loved it [the epitaph]! It was a beautiful day and a swan came by with signets and got covered with Walt's ash.
Alice
This is the playlet I wrote that was first published in Polemic of Western Reserve University (now Case-Western Reserve of Cleveland, OH) Vol. XI, No. 1, Winter, 1966; it was used as the libretto for The Fog: Chamber Opera in One Act commissioned by the Twents Conservatorium, Enschede, Holland; music by Walter Hekster, libretto by Lewis Turco, Amsterdam: Donemus, 1987. Folio, paper.
THE FOG: A CHAMBER OPERA IN ONE ACT
Dramatis personae: Character A, Character B, and a Voice.
ACT ONE
House lights down, curtain up.
Scene. A bare stage. Two figures are seen standing center stage. It is difficult to make out whether the figures are male or female, for a thick mist rolls in from both stage right and stage left. One of the figures speaks.
A. Aren’t we supposed to get somewhere sometime? When are we going to get there?
B. It’s too soon to tell. Not enough time has passed.
Voice (it is big and resonant). You’re almost there now. Don’t give up. You’ve almost made it.
A. Who was that? What was that voice?
B. That was some Being who watches over us. I think it was God.
A. What kind of Being? It’s hard to make out any shape in this fog. I can heardly see you, let alone a Voice. You look as though your body is made of shadow.
B. It’s possible I’m not even here. You could be talking to yourself. On the other hand, perhaps I’m here and you’re not. Maybe the mist is a mirror.
A. I’ve thought of that. I’ve given that very thing a good deal of reflection as we’ve been going along. But I can hear you breathing. Are you making this mist with your breath? If so, I wish you’d cut it out so I can see God. I’d like to find out who it is that’s talking to us.
B. We’re talking to each other. There’s no one else on this road.
A. But I think I heard a third voice. It came from somewhere overhead, I think.
B. Pay no attention. Just keep going.
A. The voice gave me courage. I’d like to hear it again.
B. What’s wrong with my voice? Isn’t the sound I make enough for you?
A. Yes.... No. That is, maybe. But what if it’s not your voice? What if it’s just an echo?
B. Then it’s an echo. It’s you giving yourself courage. So what? Isn’t that enough?
A. I don’t think so. I don’t want to be alone with myself in all this fog. It’s a frightening thing to think that I have to make it on my own. I don’t think I could do it.
B. Where is it you think you’re going? Do you have a map?
A. No, and that’s why it’s frightening. I don’t trust my sense of direction.
B. There doesn’t seem to be any direction out here. Every way looks like every other.
A. That’s the other thing that’s bothering me. Even if I could trust my sense of direction, I couldn’t trust the directions themselves.
B. Then why bother worrying? Just keep going. Follow me and don’t look back.
A. That’s the third thing. If I follow you, who am I following? And why should I trust you any more than I trust myself? You might even be myself — we’ve been all over that. I’d rather follow God. Maybe He can see better from up there — I wish He’d speak again.
Voice. Keep going. You’re almost there.
A. There! There He is again. Let’s go.
B. Lead the way. I’m right behind you.
A. I thought I was following you! I thought you knew the way.
B. You’re leading now. I didn’t hear Him.
A. That’s very strange. His voice was clear as a bell.
B. He must have been talking to you alone. You’re in charge now. Which way?
A. The way we’re going must be right. He said we were almost there.
B. We’ve been standing still. We haven’t moved an inch.
A. That’s the fourth thing. The fog seems to be getting thicker. We’d better hold hands so we don’t get lost. It would be death to be separated.
B. Now I’m beginning to be frightened. Here’s my hand.
A. Something solid at last! You’re not just my reflection after all.
B. Perhaps not. Anything is possible.
A. We still haven’t moved. Do you suppose we should try?
A bell begins to ring offstage, and it continues to ring throughout the next speech.
Voice. I was wondering when you’d get here. How do you do? I’m very happy to meet you both. This is it. This is the end in view. (The bell stops ringing.)
A. Did you hear something just then? I thought I heard a bell ringing in the fog.
B. It was the wind, I think. Perhaps the mist is lifting a little.
A. Maybe so. Let’s wait here a little while and see if it clears up.
B. All right. I can wait.
The figures stand together in the fog. A bell-buoy begins ringing somewhere offstage and continues to ring for a while after all stage lights fade out and all house lights down and out. Curtain.
Yaddo is the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs that abuts the Saratoga Raceway. I spent the month of July 1959 there between my stint at the University of Connecticut as both undergraduate and, during the spring semester, grad student-part-time-instructor of English, and my transfer to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop the following fall. One of my new Yaddo friends was the artist Roger Crossgrove who, coincidentally, would become a member of the UConn faculty.
Roger and I were having lunch in my room one day, and the conversation turned to how quickly or slowly one might compose a poem or work of art. The evening before he and I, and several others, had gone to a bar located across from the race track to drink and listen to live jazz. We were attended by a young waitress named Lorrie with whom we flirted and exchanged banter.
One of the features of jazz, of course, is improvisation which is no less a feature of poetry composition worldwide, as for instance in contemporary hip-hop and in the qasida or, particularly, the ghazal of Arabic poetry. Poe’s “The Bells” was discussed in the twentieth century as a “jazz poem” written before jazz had been invented.
While we ate our lunch I told Roger how fast I could write. I boasted that I could compose a decent poem in twenty minutes or less. He didn’t believe it, so I said, “Okay, I’ll prove it.” I took a pad of paper and a pencil off the table and said, “Give me a subject.”
“How about our waitress, Lorrie, at the bar last night?” Roger suggested. This is what I wrote (listen to Lewis Turco read his poem Lorrie):
The poem was published in The Carolina Quarterly in 1961; I included it in my master’s thesis at Iowa, Summer’s Raceway, in 1962 and in my chapbook, The Sketches of Lewis Turco, the same year. I read it as part of a poetry reading at George Washington University somewhere around the same time, or perhaps a bit later. Afterward a young black man, a student, came up to me and said, “A white man isn’t supposed to be able to write like that.” I guess it was a good thing I didn’t know that.
Many years later, in 1984 during my tenure as a professor at the State University of New York College at Oswego, my friend and colleague George O’Connell, a printmaker and amateur jazz musician who played the vibes in local combos and orchestras, decided he was in love with “Lorrie,” and he made an Xmas card of it that year, which we sent around.
In 1989 George made an entire artist-book of the poem* and gave it to me as a birthday present in 1996, the year I retired from teaching. I have posted the images on my blog, Poetics and Ruminations. It’s a beautiful production.
________
*Lorrie, Poem by Lewis Turco, Drawings by George O'Connell, Oswego, NY: Grey Heron Press, copyright 1989, all rights reserved.
R.I.P. JOHNNY MERCER
November 18, 1909 – June 25, 1976
He kept his sense of humor, chuckle merry,
Named the Mississippi “Huckleberry”;
Often of the songsters he was terser —
There were few as sharp as Johnny Mercer.
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