Poetics and Ruminations

Birthday of THE BOOK OF FORMS

Fifty (50) years ago, on 19 April 1968, I wrote in my journal, "The Book of Forms has arrived! It has the most incredible art nouveau cover." The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, first edition, by Lewis Turco, New York, NY: E. P. Dutton, 1968. Paperback original.

The New Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics (second edition of The Book of Forms), Hanover: University Press of New England, 1986 (www.UPNE.com),  ISBN 0874513804, cloth; 0874513812, paper.

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Third Edition, Hanover: University Press of New England, 2000. ISBN 1584650419, cloth; ISBN 1584650222, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. “The Poet’s Bible."

The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Including Odd and Invented Forms, Revised and Expanded Edition by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover, NH: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com) , 2012 • 384 pp. 3 illus. 5 x 7 1/2" Reference & Bibliography / Poetry 978-1-61168-035-5, paperback.

Companion volumes:

The Book of Literary Terms: The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, and Scholarship, Hanover: University Press of New England (www.UPNE.com), 1999. ISBN 0874519543, cloth; ISBN 0-874519-55-1, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Forms. A Choice  “Outstanding academic title” for 2000.

The Book of Dialogue: How to Write Effective Conversation in Fiction, Screenplays, Drama, and Poetry by Lewis Turco, Hanover: University Press of New England, (www.UPNE.com), 2004. ISBN 1-584653-61-2, paper. A companion volume to The Book of Forms and The Book of Literary Terms.

Running

RUNNING

 

            In the dream I am

        running.  I am looking

            for something — my car

                parked God knows where,

in the City of Recall:

 

        the cinema gone

    dark with the flickering

        hours, the candy store

            next door, spiders

in the windows.  My legs are

 

        lead, there is no air;

    something I cannot see

        breathes in the alley.

            As I draw close

to what it is I'm seeking,

 

        the elm of childhood

    spreads its limbs again, grass

        grows between the flags

            over its roots,

the church my father preached in

 

        peels in the sunlight.

    My car is parked again

        under the shattered pear,

            and if I could,

I would move my feet to run

 

        heart pumping, slowing

    like an old film flickering

        over a story

            that runs backwards

when I stop and close my eyes

 

        to catch my breath.

 

From The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press (www.StarCloudPress.com), 2014, ISBN 978-1-932842-78-4, paperback. Available from all booksellers.

 

Father's Day: The Recurring Dream

THE RECURRING DREAM

for Luigi, in memoriam.

(Listen t Lewis Turco read his poem, "The Recurring Dream."

 

   I seek my father — that minister

of the deep — among the furniture

      of my childhood.  I step out of waking

   into this room and know

that time has passed.  The windows are webbed

   and moonstreaked.  A lamp with a glass shade,

 

   green and saffron, burns

on a brass stem.  The bookcases hold sermons

      and silence.  My aquaria

   stand among tumbled

tomes and testaments.  The dust rises

   into the amber darkness.

 

   I disturb a desert of hours,

search for the fish that glide

      in musty waters — blue scales

   glint under my glance,

their eyes are corals budding

   among rusty blades of sea grass

 

and swordplants.  I remove the glass lids

and dip my hand into the water —

      it is what I have feared:

   shadow of a shadow, dim air

flowing from corner to corner.

   The fish rise along the curtains

 

   to swim about me in the air,

their black fins wavering.

      I dig in the gravel stranded

   among the shelving,

the decaying books.  I dig,

   and here, in the root

 

   of the largest plant, blooming

from a socket of bone, I find my father

   where he has scuttled,

at last to be brought back, smiling.

 

From The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco,  Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press (www.StarCloudPress.com), 2014, ISBN 978-1-932842-78-4, paperback. Available from all booksellers.

May, Merely

MAY, MERELY

 

                    The weeds pant

like the center of summer.

              I follow my nose

       to the dogwood in bloom:

 

                    it is May

merely, but Amherst blossoms

              in its early heat,

       sap oozes from the bark,

 

                    and the limbs

are heavy with what may be:

              phantom fruit, the seed

       in the dusty pollen.

 

-- Emily Dickinson / Lewis Turco

 

From "A Sampler of Hours," in 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.

A SAMPLER OF HOURS

SAMPLER

 

Many an angel, with its needle,

              toils beneath the snow

       making a sampler of hours

              that fades with the sun

just as the snowfall fades to reveal

              a green alphabet

       written in the script of flowers

              bordered in lilac:

the arbutus is a rosy boast

              adrift in morning;

       zinnia, an ochre brag

              along the far fence.

What is there between them but waiting

              for the sky to rise,

       lifted by the seraphim

              who ply their stitching?

 

From 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,

 

Sapphics for April

SAPPHICS FOR APRIL

 

“April is the cruelest month,” the poet

says. But then what’s March, or the other ten, one

wonders? Every month is a moon of mourning,

          generally speaking.

 

Born in May, I dread it when April’s over.

Here’s another birthday I try finessing.

Then comes June beginning the days of summer --

          maybe it doesn’t.

 

Graduation into the world of working:

fear and trembling for many, but for others

it is time to enter the Golden Years of

          useless retirement.

 

Ah! July! The twittering birdies sing you

songs of desuetudinous boredom, or you’re

captive in your cubicle while the sun shines

          elsewhere for others.

 

August and July -- they are sure to taunt you

with vacations over before they’ve started;

then September tells you to settle into

          fall for the long haul.

 

Here’s October, skeletons in one’s closet

open doors and warn you that here comes weather

stalking through November’s perfidious notions.

          Indian summer

 

plunges into winter and bleak December.

Holidays depress us and make us wish for

anything besides these unending carols

          dunning our eardrums

 

in between advertisements. Here comes snowfall --

melancholy buries us in the thermal

January nightmare. And when we look for

          respite from whiteness,

 

February blows us the kiss of madness:

March debouches into the muddy season.

After this “the cruellest month” continues

         Nature’s mandala.

 

Every month’s the cruelest of the dozen,

one way or another. The wheel goes spinning

down the universe till at last we’re flung off

        into the silence.

 

From The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco,  Scottsdale, AZ: Star Cloud Press (www.StarCloudPress.com), 2014, ISBN 978-1-932842-78-4, paperback. Available from all booksellers on-line and off.

 

Priscilla Bourne

PRISCILLA BOURNE

1705-1772

       There was time until there was no time.

       I made them bread with little leaven.

       I split wood and I carried water.

I bore them all — men, burdens, the hard years

       and the easy weather.  I weathered them

       and I withered, doing what women

       do. Did I regret it?  No.  These were

mine.  I would do it again if I could

       flesh that bone lying in the churchyard

       under the dying elms.  I throve while

       I could, and I watched my children thrive —

two of them.  We made the halls of the house

       echo and the bare fields yield.  We throve

       and we died.  Now our voices murmur

       in the dusty corners when the wind

rides up the valley bearing on its back

       a siege of storm.  We discuss the hours

       lying muffled in the dark eaves.

       Wasps humming in the summer attic

are our neighbors now.  All, all has fallen

       away into the lath and plaster

       that covers the first boards I scoured,

       into the clocks muttering upon

the mantels.  Now, at last, there is no time.

The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House by Lewis Turco, Dresden, ME 04342-0161: Mathom Bookshop, 2002. ISBN 0972271007, paper, $9.95, available from the author.  Poems in this volume won both the Cooper House chapbook competition and the Silverfish Review chapbook award. All poems are collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com.

A New Year

 

 

A NEW YEAR

 

       Who is approaching?

Oh, arctic February

       wading through snowdrifts.

 

       I have heard birds sing,

but I fear their bills will be

       frozen closed before

 

       their songs are finished.

Not yet has old King Frost had

       the cold pleasure of

 

       snatching them in his

frigid embrace. Would that we

       might spend this year, now

 

       fleeting swiftly by,

better than the one that we

       cannot now recall.

 

"A New Year" is from 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.

An Ordinary Evening in Cleveland

An Anthology of Poems Celebrating the 90th Birthday

of Cleveland Poet Russell Atkins

 

AN ORDINARY EVENING IN CLEVELAND

by Lewis Turco

 

I.

              Just so it goes: the day, the night —

       what have you. There is no one on TV;

              shadows in the tube, in the street.

In the telephone there are echoes and mumblings,

              the buzz of hours falling thru wires.

 

              And hollow socks stumbling across

       the ceiling send plaster dust sifting down

              hourglass walls. Felix the cat has

been drawn on retinas with a pencil of light.

              I wait gray, small in my cranny,

 

       for the cardboard tiger on the

kitchen table to snap me, shredded, from

       the bowl.

II.

                   Over the trestle go

the steel beetles grappled tooth-and-tail — over and

              over and over there smokestacks

 

              lung tall hawkers into the sky's

       spittoon. The street has a black tongue: do you

              hear him, Mistress Alley, wooing

you with stones? There are phantoms in that roof's trousers;

              they kick the wind. The moon, on a

 

              ladder, is directing traffic

       now. You can hardly hear his whistle. The

              oculist's jeep wears horn rim wind

shields; the motor wears wires on its overhead valves —

              grow weary, weary, sad siren,

 

              you old whore. It's time to retire.

 

III.

       The wail of the child in the next room quails

              like a silverfish caught in a

thread. It is quiet now. The child's sigh rises to

              flap with a cormorant's grace through

 

              the limbo of one lamp and a

       slide-viewer in your fingers: I cannot

              get thin enough for light to shine

my color in your eyes; there is no frame but this for

              the gathering of the clan. Words

 

              will stale the air. Come, gather up

       our voices in the silent butler and

              pour them into the ashcan of

love. Look, my nostrils are dual flues; my ears are

              the city dump; my eyes are the

 

              very soul of trash; my bitter

       tongue tastes like gasoline in a ragged

              alley.

IV.

                     The child cries again. Sounds

rise by the riverflats like smoke or mist in time's

              bayou. We are sewn within seines

 

              of our own being, thrown into

       menaces floating in shadows, taken

              without volition like silver

fish in an undertow down the river, down time

              and smog of evenings.

V.

                              The child cries.

VI.

              Do you hear the voice of wire?

       Do you hear the child swallowed by carpets,

              the alley eating the city,

rustling newsprint in the street begging moonlight with

                  a tin cup and a blindman's cane?

 

From In The Company of Russell Atkins, edited by Diane Kendig and Robert E McDonough, Cleveland, OH: Red Giant Books, http://[email protected], November 2016.

 

The Pilot

THE PILOT

by Lewis Turco

 

Calais, France, May 18, 1968 (AP) — Low tide yesterday uncovered a plane, presumably of World War II, with the remains of the pilot still at the controls. Its origin could not be determined immediately.

 

          It has been

a long flight. Like flak,

the seagrass exploded

beneath me as I fell

          out of light into

an older and a heavier air.

 

          My planing

continued in the tide.

When the scavengers had

done with my flesh, I found

          that still the stick would

answer, though more slowly than before.

 

          So I flew,

and am flying still, back

to the beginning. In

my marrow direction

          lay. Now the sea has

released me, and I have been constant.

 

          But I was

wrong. You see me at death's

controls, in the primal

mud where our flight began,

          but it has not been

a fleeing, as we have long supposed.

 

          I see that

now, with these sockets where

fish have swum. You, rising

from the shore, have shown me

          what the snail tried to

tell: the journey is the other way.

 

Turn me around. I am with you still.

 

"The Pilot" was originally published in The Saturday Review, lii:23, Jun. 7, 1969, and collected in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, copyright © 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper. Also available in a Kindle edition. All rights reserved: may not be reproduced anywhere for any reason without the written permission of the author, Lewis Turco.