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."
In the kitchen the dishwasher is eating the dishes. The Inhabitant listens to the current of digestion — porcelain being ground, silver wearing thin, the hum and bite of the machine.
His wife does not hear it — she is humming, not listening. But the Inhabitant is aware of movement in the cupboards, of the veriest motion — the cast-iron skillet undergoing metamorphosis, perhaps, becoming its name: the wives' spider spinning beneath the counter, weaving and managing, waiting for the doors to open.
Each cup has its voice, each saucer its ear, and the thin chant planes between the shelves, touching the timbres of glass and crystal as it passes. The gentleman listens, is touched to the bone by this plainsong — he feels his response in the marrow's keening.
But the women do not — neither the elder nor the child — sense the music their things make. Their lips move, a column of air rises like steam, and there is something in a minor key sliding along the wall, touching the face of a plastic clock, disturbing the linen calendar beside the condiments.
It is as though, the Inhabitant reflects, the women are spinning. It is as though, while he waits, they weave bindings among the rooms; as though the strands of tune were elements of a sisterhood of dishes, the ladies, the spider in the cabinet, even of the dishwasher, done now with its grinding, which contributes a new add sound — a continuo of satiety — to the gray motet the kitchen is singing.
I am standing in the window of the tower at an artist’s colony in upstate New York, and I am looking down at the fountain behind the mansion because I can think of nothing to write today. That’s why I’m here, I’m supposed to be writing.
The man is walking toward the fountain, and the sky is blue. He stops at the wall and looks at the sculpture of two nude nymphs and a satyr that lies against the woods under the mountain.
In his pressed white jacket the man leaves the fountain, and the sky is still blue. The man stops beneath me on the lawn. He is waiting. The wall stops as well and surrounds the white sculpture of two nude nymphs and the satyr who lie beside the woods under the mountain. In the other rooms of the mansion people are writing things, and in the studios on the grounds artists are painting and sculptors are sculpting.
No one is left to look at the fountain, and the sky is less blue. One nymph stands and yawns in the white sculpture of two nudes and a smiling satyr lying beside the woods under the mountain. The first nymph stretches her arms above the fountain, and now the sky is clouding. The other trails her fingers in the green hue of the pool where the nymphs and satyr lie beside the woods beneath the mountain.
Above, I stand in the tower window watching. I should be sitting before my laptop tapping on the keys, listening to the patter of words falling onto the virtual page, but the mist of the water in the fountain is a curtain, and the sky is clouding.
The man in the jacket returns to the sculpture where the two nude nymphs and the satyr lie still beside the woods beneath the mountain. The mist of the water is a curtain, and the sky is cloudy. Now a girl trails her fingers in the aquamarine of the pool where the nymphs and the satyr lie beside the woods by the still mountain, where the man stands looking at the sculpture and at the girl as I stand watching rather than writing in the tower window.
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.
SUNY Oswego over the course of thirty-one years I collaborated with two printmakers; the second, George O’Connell, died this past spring, and I celebrated his life with an entry on this blog.
The first printmaker with whom I worked, however, was Thom. Seawell who died on Friday, August 28th, just before midnight. He and I collaborated on three poem-prints, and on a book, The Inhabitant, which was built on his very large print, “The House.” It hangs in my living-room here in Dresden, Maine, and it is a fold-out in the original edition of The Inhabitant, Poems by Lewis Turco, Prints by Thom. Seawell, Northampton: Despa Press, 1970. It was published in two editions, cloth and paper, both long out-of-print, but all the poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007. Here are two images by Seawell from the book, the cover and "Detail from 'The House: Kitchen,"
Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "The Kitchen."
THE KITCHEN
In the kitchen the dishwasher is eating the dishes. The Inhabitant listens
to the current of digestion — porcelain being ground, silver wearing
thin, the hum and bite of the machine.
His wife does not hear it — she is humming, not listening. But the
Inhabitant is aware of movement in the cupboards, of the veriest
motion — the cast-iron skillet undergoing metamorphosis, perhaps,
becoming its name: the wives' spider spinning beneath the counter,
weaving and managing, waiting for the doors to open.
Each cup has its voice, each saucer its ear, and the thin chant planes
between the shelves, touching the timbres of glass and crystal as it
passes. The gentleman listens, is touched to the bone by this
plainsong — he feels his response in the marrow's keening.
But the women do not — neither the elder nor the child — sense the music
their things make. Their lips move, a column of air rises like steam,
and there is something in a minor key sliding along the wall,
touching the face of a plastic clock, disturbing the linen calendar
beside the condiments.
It is as though, the Inhabitant reflects, the women are spinning. It is as
though, while he waits, they weave bindings among the rooms; as
though the strands of tune were elements of a sisterhood of dishes,
the ladies, the spider in the cabinet, even of the dishwasher, done
now with its grinding, which contributes a new sound — a continuo
of satiety — to the gray motet the kitchen is singing.
What Charles Eliot Norton said of Walt Whitman’s poetry in 1855 was as obvious then as it was to me ninety-five years later in 1950, when I was sixteen and in high school, and as it still is today: that Whitman wrote prose poems. He had never heard of “free verse” which was a term circulated in America after 1912 (Whitman had died twnty years earlier) by the Modernists because they thought they needed a term that included the word “verse” in order to legitimize their practice. They did not – prose poetry is as old as poetry itself. Verse is metered language, prose is unmetered language. “Unmetered metered language,” “free” “verse” makes no sense at all.
My dear friend and "artner," the printmaker George O'Connell, Emeritus Professor of Art at SUNY Oswego, passed from the scene on Sunday, May 10, 2015 at the age of 88. George was born in Madison, Wisconsin in 1926. He and I collaborated for more than three decades on books, exhibits, poemprints, memorials and Xmas cards -- our collection of these is in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution (www.aaa.si.edu/collections/lewis-turco-and-george-oconnell-christmas-card-collection-13428), By age 86 he had navigated so many health problems and accidents that I had begun to call him "Super George." In his last days he wanted nothing more than to be relieved of pain, and although those who knew him well are sad not to have him with us, we are relieved that he hurts no more.
I had more than one reason to admire and honor George. Everyone who served in the armed forces of the US during World War II was my hero or heroine. Tom Brokaw called them “the Greatest Generation,” and they were. George O’Connell was a veteran of the War in the Pacific, and it is one of my strongest sources of pride that he and I were collaborators for so long a time. I was deeply privileged and honored to work side-by side with one of my heroes. To me, he truly was Super George.
We began collaborating in 1976. Our first project was an Xmas card, "The House," the poem by me with "Owl," a silk-screen print by George O'Connell, published by George’s Grey Heron Press in a Limited edition of 130 cards signed by both of us.
Thereafter we began issuing more and more elaborate cards almost every year. The next. a broadside titled "A Winter Song," was rather large for a “card.” The poem was a modern version of an ancient Welsh poem by “Wesli Court,” (my anagram nom de plume) with a lithograph by George published by Grey Heron in 1977 in a limited edition of 200 numbered copies, of which 84 are signed by "Wesli Court." For some reason we skipped 1978 and ’79, but in 1980 we issued two cards to make up for it, I guess -- “Fading Things” and “First Snow,” both poems from a series I was working on at the time titled A Sampler of Hours: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters, published in book form by SUNY Press in 1993. We did more of Emily in 1987:
Our first book publication was arranged by Charlie Davis, the leader of the early Indiana jazz band called “The Joy Gang” and composer of the jazz classic “Copenhagen.” When he retired during the Depression Charlie opened a furniture store in Oswego, NY, and when he retired from that he took some poetry composition courses at the College from from Roger Dickinson-Brown (who also died this year) and me. In the last class he took Charlie wrote a long poem inspired by William Carlos Williams’ “Patterson,” which I had ordered him to read, and when he’d finished that he published it himself and then wanted to start the Mathom Publishing Company.
George had in common with Charlie that he was a jazz aficionado and musician; George had begun as a drummer in high school, and he played the vibes in local bands and orchestras. Charlie decided he wanted to publish a book of my poems from Mathom, American Still Lifes, so he asked George to do the cover and several illustrations. The book was published in 1981, the same year as the first exhibition was mounted in which George and I were partners.
The Albany exhibit was titled, The New York Landscape, Poems by twenty State University of New York poets, with visual responses by twenty State University of New York artists. Our contribution consisted of "Millpond," a broadside poem I had written in Saratoga Springs at Yaddo in 1959. It was printed in handset type on handmade paper by Buffalo Papers, together with "Dusk Light," an intaglio by O’Connell. The exhibit was held at The Plaza Gallery, from 16 October through 30 November, 1981, and at the Pratt Manhattan Center Gallery, New York City, from 18 December, 1982, through 15 January, 1983, with a subsequent tour of New York State. The Catalog was edited by Peter Gordon for the Plaza Gallery.
This original pairing led to establishment of the Jeffrey Sisson Permanent Memorial Exhibit: "Millpond," in calligraphy by Jean Garvey, together with four prints by George O'Connell, at the Aurelia Osburn Fox Memorial Hospital in Oneonta, New York, in 1982. Subsequently there was a Chancellor’s Reprise Exhibition of the original show in the South Tower of S.U.N.Y. Plaza during the Fall semester of 1994.
One of George’s favorite themes in his prints was, of course, jazz in all its glory and manifestations. The poem of mine that he liked best was titled “Lorrie” which I’d written at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs in 1959. This was the poem we used in the 1984 “Xmas card” paired with his print "The Girls Who Sing in the Band" in a limited edition from Mathom of 200 copies signed by both poet & artist.
Several years later, in 1989, George did an entire Artist Book on Lorrie, one of my prize possessions; one copy only exists.
It would take too much time and space to list the rest of our Xmas cards here, but readers may see our 1996 "The Falcon Carol" on-line at
We had the opportunity in the spring of 1996 to mount a full-fledged gallery exhibition at the Rathbone Gallery of Sage Junior College in Albany — with the assistance of an S.O.S. grant from the New York State Council on the Arts — of my sequence of poems titled Bordello, issued during the exhibition in a five-copy limited edition portfolio of poem-prints and images, printed on paper hand-made by both printmaker and poet – we had a fine time making the paper in the basement of his home on Baylis Street in Oswego.
Four years later George O’Connell and I collaborated on a series of black and white monoprints with poetry titled “The Jazz Joint” which was included in a four-person show, Some Kind of Narrative, at the Kirkland Art Gallery in Clinton, New York, from March 4 — April 11, 2001.
A retrospective exhibition of our work, “Collaboration: Prints and Text,” took place at the Tyler Art Gallery on the campus of the State University of New York College at Oswego from November 9 — December 9, 2001.
In 2009 I wrote a limerick for George’s 83rd birthday which we always celebrated at a dinner in an area restaurant, and I used his print of my poem titled “Jasper Olson”:
Even if I had wanted to go to college after I graduated from Meriden (CT) High School in 1952, at that point in my life I couldn’t afford it. Furthermore, I was tired of going to school and having other people tell me what I had to study. I was eligible for the draft (the Korean War was going on), and, although I could have put in less time if I had joined the Army, I didn’t want to spend any time at all crawling around in the mud, so I joined the Navy.
This turned out to be a wonderful idea because the Navy taught me how to touch-type, made me a Yeoman – a clerk – rather than a deck hand, shipped me around the country and then, aboard the aircraft carrier Hornet, around the world, quite literally. My friends all were attending college, but I was engaged in the Grand Tour.
In port Yeomen have lots to do, but at sea there is little to keep them busy, so I spent an amazing amount of time taking correspondence courses in fiction writing and journalism, in reading poetry and 100 classic books (there was a fine library aboard), and teaching myself all about the craft of verse writing. I began sending my work out to the little magazines, and I began to publish in 1953, one year after high school.
In 1956 I was released from active duty and just before I entered the University of Connecticut as a sophomore (I had done enough work in the service to have earned advanced placement), I had my first poem accepted by a major literary magazine, The Sewanee Review, which published it in 1959, the year I graduated from UConn, began graduate study there and then, first, spent part of the summer at Yaddo, the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York, and subsequently went to finish my graduate school work in the Writers’ Workshop of the University of Iowa. This was the poem:
Over the weekend of September 22-23 2012 Robert Mezey wrote me as follows:
"Dear Lew,
"Here’s an invented form, and certainly odd, that I’ve never seen or heard of before. An old student of mine has taken my sonnet "Hardy" and written another poem using exactly the same words. I don’t know whether she has given it a name—I seem to recall her saying something about “recombinant” (as in DNA?) Anyway, her poem surprised me; it seemed much better than I thought it would be. You might be interested in it for your collection."
Mezey's original poem is as follows:
Hardy
Thrown away at birth, he was recovered,
Plucked from the swaddling-shroud, and chafed and slapped,
The crone implacable. At last he shivered,
Drew the first breath, and howled, and lay there, trapped
In a world from which there is but one escape
And that forestalled now almost ninety years.
In such a scene as he himself might shape,
The maker of a thousand songs appears.
From this it follows, all the ironies
Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow
The way of things, the suffering one sees,
The many cups of bitterness he must swallow
Before he is permitted to be gone
Where he was headed in that early dawn.
Robert Mezey, From Collected Poems: 1952-1999, University of Arkansas
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
Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine
R.I.P. EMILY DICKINSON
December 10, 1830 - May 15, 1886
The Maid of Amherst, Emily
Dickinson, sang quietly
Far from the roar of the madding throng,
But now she holds her breath too long.
William H. Shurr of the University of Tennessee has been mining Dickinson's letters for nuggets overlooked by other Dickinson scholars, even Thomas H. Johnson whose The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, contains what the ordinary reader might have thought were all of Dickinson's poems, including those to be found originally in her letters. Evidently Shurr believes he hit paydirt in Dickinson's inexhaustible vein, for in September of 1993 he published his New Poems of Emily Dickinson, in which he claimed to have discovered "Nearly 500 short epigrams and longer lyrics excavated from Dickinson's correspondence but not previously presented in poetic form. — 'Most of all, these poems continue Dickinson's remarkable experiments in extending the boundaries of poetry and human sensibility,'" as it was reported in the EDIS Bulletin.
Nearly simultaneously a review titled "Emily Warmed Over" by Gary Lee Stonum appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Professor Stonum wrote that these "New Poems [are] Anything but New." He continued, "The 'New Poems of Emily Dickinson,' sad to say, are not new, not often poems, and not even quite Emily Dickinson's. To produce this volume William Shurr has mined Dickinson's published letters, sometimes finding gems and sometimes fool's gold, but only rarely extracting anything Dickinson herself would have owned as one of her poems."
The book had a casual inception, according to Anita Manning, who wrote, "On a whim, Shurr set out some passages" from Dickinson's letters "as poems....” Evidently, according to information supplied on the title page of his book and elsewhere therein, Shurr's chief excavators were a graduate student, Anna Dunlap, and Shurr's daughter, Emily Grey Shurr, who did the exhumation under the editor's direction.
"The discovery is 'an exciting, innovative and important advance in Dickinson studies,' wrote Dickinson scholar Emory Elliott of the University of California, Riverside, on the book jacket. He called Shurr's work 'a major advance in our knowledge of Dickinson as poet and person.'"
"These poems use her [Dickinson's] preferred hymn or ballad meters and unusual rhymes," Shurr averred not only in his book and in the Bulletin, but in many of the media, including newspapers, television and radio. However, what struck this reader most strongly was the fact that "these poems" did not use rhymes — unusual or not — at all. Perhaps graduate students may be excused for being unaware of the various definitions of prosodics and verse forms, but one expects editors and scholars to know them.
Pertinent standard definitions (from my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, third edition) are as follows:
BALLAD: Universal in the Western world. Folk ballads are written in podic prosody, literary ballads in accentual-syllabics. The BALLAD STANZA is [rhymed] a4 b3 c4 b3. [The superscripts indicate line lengths.] For related forms see COMMON MEASURE (95-97).
Emily Dickinson did not write ballads, which are medium-length lyric narratives, nor did she write in the accentual folk ballad measure called "podic prosody"; thus, "ballad meters" is the wrong term — there is a clear difference between a "meter" and a "stanza." The correct term is common measure stanzas, which Dickinson found in the hymnals of Amherst and used as her models:
COMMON MEASURE: Accentual-syllabic. Rhymed. A QUATRAIN STANZA written in iambics.... The rhyme scheme is abcb. The first and third lines consist of four iambic feet; the second and fourth lines, of three iambic feet (119). HYMNAL STANZA is the same, except that it rhymes abab [ibid.].
Common measure and hymnal stanza must rhyme. Since the "poems" under discussion here do not rhyme, and only the most optimistic scansion would show that they were purposely written in iambic meters, they are not cast in Emily Dickinson's standard common measure and hymnal stanza patterns. Here is an example, "One of Shurr's favorites among the new poems," according to Manning:
A Letter always seemed to me
like Immortality,
for is it not the Mind alone,
without corporeal friend?
If "lines" one and two seem to set up a couplet rhyme pattern, then the reader's expectation is that lines three and four will do the same. Their complete failure to do so has the effect of anticlimax, undercutting not only the chime of the poem, but our expectation of what a Dickinson poem should accomplish. Taking these lines out of their context in this way, as though they were a finished quatrain, destroys the effect that they had in the letters and tends to trivialize the rest of Dickinson's verse oeuvre.
If it is true that Emily Dickinson never consciously wrote an unrhymed poem in her life, it follows that the passages in New Poems of Emily Dickinson cannot possibly be said to be "new" poems by the Amherst poet under any of the circumstances its editor has discussed. Although she did sometimes use the same lines in both letters and poems, unless she used lines from the former in the latter, Dickinson clearly meant them as prose passages, and prose passages they remain, despite an editor's having "lineated" them according to phrasal patterns. People since the twentieth century have been calling line-phrased prose "free verse" (a contradiction in terms — “verse” is “metered language, “prose” is unmetered language; thus, “verse” cannot be “free”), but we know what Emily Dickinson thought of Whitman's prose poems.
These concerns of mine were embodied in a letter I wrote to Dr. Shurr on 8 August 1993, after he and I had attended the 1993 meeting in Amherst, Massachusetts, of the Emily Dickinson International Society. Dr. Shurr replied with a letter justifying his book. It was difficult to know where to begin to correct his errors, but I decided to start with this quotation from his response: "It is almost a cliché in Dickinson studies for nearly a century now to call this unit ['the two-line unit that alternates iambic tetrameter with iambic trimeter'] ballad meter, or hymn meter, or more usually fourteeners."
If it is cliché it is also erroneous and another proof of something I have long bemoaned: Most scholars and critics of American literature know nothing whatever about prosodics and are quite disdainful of those who do. No doubt it is the "intuitive" Emerson/Whitman influence; as Dana Gioia has pointed out in a recent essay:
"Today prosody is a neglected subject.
"Few literary critics know more than the rudiments of metrics, and, in the aftermath of the free-verse revolution, even many poets have never studied versification. The last century, however, considered prosody an essential part of literary education" (93). "Surely one reason for the drop in Longfellow's reputation has been the decline of interest among both scholars and poets in formal prosody."
That does not, however, excuse the ignorance, nor ought one to condone its continuance.
First, that "two-line unit" is not a "unit." Many of the "poems" Shurr has identified are two lines long, what he calls "fourteener epigrams." However, fourteeners are not used singly, and Dickinson never intended that they should be; fourteeners are always paired with another line — either another fourteener, or an Alexandrine line to form a couplet of Poulter's measure (see pp. 226-227 of The Book of Forms). There is a caesura after iambic foot four of each fourteener, and the line has long been broken at that point to form two lines (small x = an unstressed, unrhymed syllable; capital X = a stressed, unrhymed syllable; capital A, B, C — any syllable other than x = a stressed, line-ending syllable that may rhyme):
xX xX xX xX · xX xX xX, i.e.,
xX xX xX xX ·
xX xX xX
If this were all, Shurr might have a case for his "fourteener epigram," but another fourteener is required to complete the unit, which is a couplet unit:
xX xX xX xA
xX xX xB
xX xX xX xC
xX xX xB
This quatrain is called common measure, (not "ballad meter" unless it is written in podic prosody), and when Dickinson used it as a poem or stanza form, she rhymed it as tradition required.
Shurr cited poem "J. 497" from the Johnson collection to prove that Dickinson sometimes did not rhyme her poems:
He strained my faith —
Did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust —
Did it then — yield?
Hurled my belief —
But — did he shatter — it?
Racked — with suspense —
Not a nerve failed!
Wrung me — with Anguish —
But I never doubted him —
'Tho' for what wrong
He did never say —
Stabbed — while I sued
His sweet forgiveness —
Jesus — it's your little "John"!
Dont you know — me?
It is true that, as Johnson has printed this poem, it does not rhyme. However, the poem first appeared as no. 608 in the section titled "Poems Incomplete or Unfinished" of Bolts of Melody. In that incarnation it was printed thus:
He strained my faith — did he find it supple?
Shook my strong trust — did it then yield?
Hurled my belief — but did he shatter it?
Racked with suspense, not a nerve failed!
Wrung me with Anguish — must be I deserved it,
Though for what wrong he did never say,
Stabbed — while I sued his sweet forgiveness.
Jesus — it's your little "John"! Why me slay?"
(304)
This version certainly rhymes or, to be accurate, the first stanza consonates (off-rhymes) and the second true-rhymes. It took me less than five minutes to find this version in my personal library. To be sure, it would take me a bit longer to discover why there are differences in the versions — for instance, in the second version, "must be I deserved it" instead of "But I never doubted him — " in the "Wrung me with Anguish" line, or "Why me slay?" instead of "Don't you know — me?" in the last line.
According to Mrs. Todd, editor of Dickinson's 1931 Letters, "In her early twenties Emily began to conclude her letters with a poem, but as part of the text, written as prose, as if half hoping that the correspondent might not detect its presence. — Later, poems, as such, were not only part of the text; sometimes a poem constituted the entire letter." (455) Morever, she would often use the same "poem" in more than one letter; a note in Bolts says, "In Mrs. Todd's copy the last two words [of the last line] are inverted." (304) Some scholars have argued, however, that none of Dickinson's "prose" pieces ought to be counted a "poem" unless it appears in one of the "fascicles," the little ribbon-bound manuscript chapbooks that were found among the poet's effects after her death, and I tend to agree with this view.
For these, and many other reasons, the "poems" of Emily Dickinson are extremely problematic. Staying with the example Shurr chose, for instance, one might point out that, as he has given it, the poem not only does not rhyme externally, it also does not exhibit iambic meters. Here is an accurate scansion of the first "quatrain" in Johnson's version:
xX xX
xxX xXx
Xx XX
xxXX
The only iambs are to be found in "line" one, which is iambic dimeter. Line two has no normative foot but consists of one anapest and an amphibrach. Line three has a trochee and a spondee. Line four is what a classical metrist would call a pyrrhic and a spondee, what Harvey Gross calls "a double iamb," and what J. R. R. Tolkien calls a "long rise" when he is discussing accentual (podic) prosody.
Nor is the "quatrain" written in podic prosody, for if it were written out as two lines of Anglo-Saxon prosody (which is the basis for podic prosody, TBoF, pp. 26-32), accentually it would look like this (the dot indicates the caesura in the center of the stich):
xX xX · xxX xXx
Xx Xx´ · xxXX
Stich two has five stresses, three in the first hemistich, where two would be required. In other words, this "stanza" is not written in verse, which is "metered language"; it is written in prose, "unmetered language." All that Johnson did was to break Dickinson's prose up into lines according to phrasing, what some have called "lineation" and what I call "line-phrasing." (I direct the reader's attention to the chapter titled "Whitman and I" in my book The Public Poet, where I go into this matter in some detail.)
Either one must maintain that Emily Dickinson sometimes wrote prose poems, or that this was not intended by Dickinson as a poem to begin with. If the Todd ("T. 608") version comes to light, one may suspect that Dickinson never arrived at a version of the poem that she thought of as complete, for it exists in a short-line (J. 497) and at least two long-line versions. Though the latter may show tendencies toward regular meter, the rhythms are quite rough and it is clear why the editors considered the poem to be unfinished.
Here is my numeration of the various feet in this "poem": iambs, 14 (counting the double iamb); trochees, 11; anapests, 2; spondees, 4; amphibrachs, 3. If iambs predominate, barely, over trochees, this piece is far from regular metrically, either as an iambic poem or as a podic poem (although it is actually more regular accentually than it is accentual-syllabically, for the number of stressed syllables ranges only between four and five accents).
These are the sorts of things I meant when I called Shurr's scansions "creative." That Johnson's were as creative does not speak well for his understanding of what it is that poets do. There is no excuse for scholars and critics of American literature to ignore the prosodic practice of the poets themselves, yet they seem to be willing to be ignorant and to excuse that ignorance by citing other scholars' ignorance. In my opinion the whole of Dickinson's "poetic" oeuvre needs to be gone over again prosodically to determine what she intended to preserve as verse poems and what she meant to leave as prose. Dickinson knew when she wanted her words to appear as finished verses, and she knew when she intended to leave them as parts of letters.
Works cited in “Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine.”
Emory Elliott, book blurb on the jacket of Shurr, New Poems by Emily Dickinson, q.v.
Dana Gioia, "Longfellow in the Aftermath of Modernism," in The Columbia History of American Poetry, Jay Parini, ed., New York, NY: Columbia U. P., 1993.
Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P., 1963.
Anita Manning, signed news item, USA Today, June 23, 1993.
William H. Shurr, editor, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, Chapel Hill, NC: U. of North Carolina P., 1993.
——, August 1993 reply to Lewis Turco's letter, q.v.
Gary Lee Stonum, "Emily Warmed Over," Cleveland, Ohio, Plain Dealer, September 5th, 1993.
Emily Dickinson International Society Bulletin, Georgiana Strickland, ed., 5:1, May/June 1993.
Mabel Loomis Todd, ed., Letters of Emily Dickinson, New and Enlarged Edition, New York, NY: Harper & Brothers, 1931.
——, and Millicent Todd Bingham, eds., Bolts of Melody, New Poems of Emily Dickinson, New York, NY: Harper and Brothers, 1945.
Lewis Turco, Letter to Dr. William H. Shurr, 8 August 1993; printed as a review in The Hollins Critic, xxx:1, Dec. 1993, pp. 12-13.
——, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Hanover, NH: U. P. of New England, 2000.
——, The Public Poet, Ashland, OH: Ashland Poetry P., 1991.
A version of "Iron Pyrites in the Dickinson Mine" was originally published in The Emily Dickinson Journal, iv:1, 1995, pp. 108-117, copyright © 1995 and 2016 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved: may not be quoted in whole or in part by anyone anywhere without the written consent of the author.
A collaborative book on poems derived from the prose letters of Dickinson is Emily Dickinson, Woman of Letters: Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson's Letters Together with Essays on the Subject by Various Hands, edited with an introduction by Lewis Turco, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press (www.SUNYPress.edu), 1993. ISBN 0-791414-17-5, cloth; ISBN 0-791414-18-3, paper. All poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, q.v.
March 30, 2016 in Americana, Bad Poetry, Ballads, Books, Commentary, Correspondence, Criticism, Education, Epitaphs, Essays, Literature, Poems, Poetry, Prose poems, Prosody, Review, Verse forms | Permalink | Comments (0)
Tags: Emily Dickinson, Emily Dickinson Journal, of Letters, William H. Shurr