Poetics and Ruminations

Wutchugonnado

 

WUTCHUGONNADO

A fable of the noble savage

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Wutchugonnado"

 

Wutchugonnado by the brookside,

Squaw at his side,

Crow caw overhead,

Speckled fish on the speckled riverbed,

Sat in the painted sun,

Thoughts on Wutsicumminto,

Wutsicumminto, his son.

 

Dappled ripples lap-lapped

At the mottled clay bank,

Shadows sank floating logs;

Thoughts were driftwood,

Little good;

Thoughts were braveness muscled in

Bronze skin;

Thoughts were stone-tipped,

Ice-nipped,                                                   

Birch-bark wilderness;

Thoughts were crushed dreams,

Dead schemes, sere themes

In the painted sun.

 

Wutchugonnado dreamt of

Savage hunt love,

Land of moccasin's pad-pad

On the forest trail;

Dreamt of clear eye,

Night cry,

Glowing-coal smoke, starlit night cloak,

Solemn peace pipe, flame on cheek bones —

Dreamt of these and many more things:

 

Of his offspring Wutsicumminto,

Of his son, his warrior son,

Bronzed and free

In the white man's factory.

 

From The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court 1953-2004, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004, 460 pp., ISBN 1-932842-00-4, jacketed cloth; ISBN 1-932842-01-2, trade paperback. Also available from Amazon.com in a Kindle edition.

Letters to the Dead

LETTERS TO THE DEAD

In Memory of Luigi and May, John and Bertha

 

OUR HERO

Here is our Hero, opening his eyes.

The daylight rises like a welling tide

And floats him out of slumber into time.

Two eggs and toast; coffee in a cup

Of thermal plastic; the thermostat turned up.

Slowly blood and temperature rise.

 

Shower and shave, and then his socks and pants

Crawl up his flesh to lock his shirt-tail in,

Though waking is his habit, and the sun

Clothes him like armor forged against those dreams

He's left among the linens — so it seems,

Or so he hopes. At least he has a chance

 

To down the darkness, drown it in the dawn.

For he is of an age when sleep comes hard,

But when it comes there trails behind its edge

A specter host, a horde of attic shades

Risen from the Nether Regions' glades

To walk again upon a morning lawn.

 

He'd buried them upstairs in trunks and cartons,

Their eyelids weighted down with trash and lace,

Mathoms and mementos: every face

Lies in its album while the hornet croons

Among the rafters summer afternoons

Or as, in spring, the maples fill with martins,

 

With greening leaves that fall to earth in fall —

But worst in winter. Then the photographs

Give up the ghost to cold, the petty griefs

Of dust as chill as snow. Their images

Arise, and then descend like salvages

Of musty seasons to our Hero's hall.

 

They walk the paisley carpet as the night

Fills with the moon. They pause before his door.

They enter, cast their shadows on the floor,

Loom over him. Then, one by one, they slide

Into his sleep — he recollects the stride

Of one, another's stance, their darkness bright

 

As candles guttering. The dreamer's lake

Has swallowed him — nevertheless, he sees,

His lids like film. The phantoms do not speak,

Nor does he speak to them, but words in spate

Sluice through his mind. He tries to close the gate

To capture them. He struggles to awake....

 

Here is our Hero, born to second sight.

The daylight rises like a welling tide

And floats him out of slumber into time...,

Two eggs and toast; coffee in a cup

Of thermal plastic; the thermostat turned up.

He takes a pad and pen and starts to write.

 

Two Epistles to Children Drowned:

 

LETTER TO A DROWNED BOY

He wants to write a letter to the child,

The boy drowned on the beach when he was young,

A boy himself. The letter is overdue.

Dear Friend, he writes. I recall your body flung

To that Wisconsin beach. Your flesh was blue,

A pallid blue. The day was dark, but mild —

 

Or was it dark? If so, why would my mother

Have taken us to swim where you had drowned?

What kind of darkness was it, has it been

Since first I saw you there where you'd been downed

By death, the first death I had ever seen?

Why had she let me see you? Did my brother

 

See you also? I have never asked,

But he was there, seven when I was twelve.

The firemen pumped you out. Their motor churned,

But darkness stalked that beach and, in its stealth,

Stole the march on all of us. I turned

Into a mortal. I saw that life was masked,

 

And underneath the mask I saw the bone.

I saw your chest sucked inward, then forced out;

I saw the blot of water on the sand

Under the hose. I saw you were without

The thing that made you you. Time waved its wand

Over the water — we blinked, and you were gone.

 

I don't remember feeling. I was cold.

I must have forced myself to turn to stone.

I think the crowd was small — a weekday crowd —

but since then you and I have been alone.

The Pulmotor drones, but silences are loud;

You took my hand; I cannot break your hold.

 

Your stillnesses encroach a ripple more

Each hour upon my sands, this beach-head birth

Allotted us, that now erodes away

Until I feel dark water sucking earth

From underfoot. The motor sings. The day

Fills my lungs. My ears begin to roar.

 

LETTER TO A THREE-YEAR-OLD

Ontario was calm that afternoon,

Still as the photograph of a summer day.

The beach was a fall of stones sloping down

To the water's edge. It was no day to drown,

The sun in the sky like a hazy red balloon.

Your father had been watching you at play

 

In depths that reached your waist and touched his knees.

The other picnickers sat on the shore

Or waded lazily not far away,

Watching you and the other children play.

The sailboats on the lake moved by degrees

Almost too small to note. One might ignore,

 

On such an afternoon, the shadow on

The imperceptible swell — the scudding cloud

That threw its umbra there, casting color

Along the lakeside. One might well ignore

The picnickers, the children in the sun,

The hazy heat that settled like a shroud

 

Impalpably on the water. Then,

Without a word or sign, summer faltered.

The silence you became still echoes loud

Upon Ontario's stones, under the shroud

Of haze and scudding cirrus. We hear it often.

The quality of stillness has been altered.

 

LETTER TO A GRANDSIRE

Dear Grandpa,

                           Here I am at forty-five,

And you've been dead for years. When I was twelve

I came to visit you at great remove

From my home town. I caught you by the barn,

Committing an act of nature, but reproof

Was lost on you. You turned as though to warn

 

The empty stalls of danger. Tall and thin,

Thereafter you left the room when I came in —

You imitated smoke. I'd see you there

Beside the iron stove; you'd start, a look

Like prey upon your eyes, then disappear.

You never held a job or read a book

 

Your whole life long, I've heard my mother claim.

You sired nine before time quenched your flame —

Or, much more likely, grandma's. Six were sons.

They all grew up inside that shell of boards

You called a house. The sunny, windy seasons

Belabored it. The autumn fell in cords,

 

And you were sapped by spring, became a ghost

Who fled from grandsons, that unruly host

Sprung from your loins. You opened up your fly

And soaked the barn. You saw me watching you,

Then turned and faded off. Was it my eye,

My look of accusation? I guess you knew

 

That in your daughter's world, therefore in mine,

Such things did not occur. You were a swine

Cast before pearls. I blush as I remember,

Not your simple act, but my disdain.

Grandpa, I cherish that familiar member,

That glimpse of greatness, your prolific reign.

 

LETTER TO A BARITONE

Our Hero is remembering his friend

From second grade and high school. He recalls

The early days — on weekends they'd pretend

That they were pilots in The War. The walls

Fade out about him in his reverie,

Fade into the quartet's close harmony.

 

Dear Curt (he writes),

                                How long have you been dead?

I don't remember. Last weekend I went back

To visit our home town. A passing dread

Lies waiting when we double in our track,

But this time I picked up the telephone

And called our choral teacher. Pure cornpone,

 

I know, but hearing him I felt relieved —

He sounded as he used to. I had brunch

Next day at his house — hard to be believed,

But he was just the same. I'd played a hunch

and won this once. We spent a splendid day;

We quipped and talked, and then I walked away.

 

He had our pictures, Curt, down in his den

Upon his desk, and on the wall as well:

That barbershop cartoon that I'd forgotten,

Drawn by our tenor but signed by one and all.

He tried to give it to me; I demurred.

I couldn't take it, but I nearly heard

 

Those chords again, spellbinding when we blended

Into a single voice of chiming parts;

The ringing silence when the song was ended —

This pen pursues its way by fits and starts.

"How maudlin this would sound to anyone,"

I think at first; then, "Lord, we did have fun."

 

The ringing silence when the song was ended:

No doubt that's what we've heard since you've been gone.

Tony and Ed became what they intended,

And so did I. We work, we mow the lawn,

Drive the kids to the dentist, wives to the store,

But we never get together anymore.

 

LETTER TO A GARDENER

Uncle Alfred, skinny as a pole,

Deaf as any post, blind as a vole,

You felt your way through age along the rows

And hillocks of your garden, furbelows

And furrows. Maine potatoes were your eyes,

And corn, your ears to hear the grackles' cries.

 

You felt your way through age along the rows —

You laid the autumn straitly in windrows

After your harvest, green and gold and brown,

Peered out of Mason jars all over town.

Your labors rested with us winter-long;

Now I will pay you for them with a song.

 

After your harvest, green and gold and brown,

I helped to bear your burden, Alfred, down

At last to harvest home. It was as light

To me as sun by day or dew by night,

Uncle Alfred, skinny as a pole,

Deaf as any post, blind as a vole.

 

LETTER TO A HALL-OF-FAMER

Our Hero reminisces, half awake.

The radio is playing, and his cat,

Black as midnight, is making up to him.

He wants to write a letter for the sake

Of auld lang syne; however, he must trim,

First, thirty years and more from all those that

 

He has accrued. He must remember when

The summer morning broke across a street

Of elms and maples.

                                  Mr. Walsh, he writes,

I couldn't have been more than nine or ten.

I slumbered soundly through such dreamless nights,

And rose up early, anxious to compete

 

With time, discover which of us should last

And which succumb. None of my friends had risen;

The street was mine — until I saw your pickup

Before the enigmatic shack we passed

Each day that we played ball. We used to kick up

Dust in the lot beside the shack. A dozen

 

Times when we had started home that summer,

We'd stopped before the dusty window panes,

Cupped our hands and tried to peer inside.

We thought we saw machines. We lived on rumor —

When we thought of it. Our interest died.

And then I saw your truck, all dents and stains,

 

Parked at the curb that dewy summer morning.

I found you bottling milk with your machines,

Racking bottles. You were a quiet man,

So tall that, as you loaded up, the awning

Brushed your head. So that's how they began,

Those early hours filled with brilliant greens

 

Along the bumpy roads outside of town

Where you were hailed as "Mr. Walsh" or "Ed"

By customers who met us at the door.

The milk was winter white — it wore a crown

Of cream beneath the cap. Those mornings wore

A luster. Your obituary said

 

That you were Big Ed Walsh, the Hall-of-Famer,

The White Sox great, best pitcher in the world

When giants roamed the diamond. I rode

A summer milk route with a forty-gamer

Who never hinted that he once bestrode

A famous mound and, like a titan, hurled

 

His smokeball past a batter. I've since gone

Driving through the hills to Cooperstown,

Mr. Walsh, down to the Hall of Fame

To see your plaque upon a wall of stone,

But you were not transfigured by your name —

All I recall is milk that wore a crown.

 

LETTER TO AN EDITOR

Our Hero conjures up his ancient friend,

The literary Weaver, editor

And correspondent, in his printery

Belowstairs in the house where East Cleveland

Becomes the Heights. He was the guarantor

Of evenings filled with printer's deviltry

 

And conversation — nights that otherwise

Would have been lost in smog and Erie mist.

     Dear Loring, he implores, I've missed you well

These several years. I know that you despise

Shows of emotion. Forgive me. You don't exist,

So I must follow though I go through Hell.

 

I dream about your office down below;

The flywheel of your press turning around,

The fonts of type, the tubes of murky ink.

Upstairs your fabled wife treads to and fro —

Hart Crane's aunt, billowing like a mound

Of lace and lavender, attempts to think

 

Of one more bar of music to compose.

Turn off the press — it rumbles to a halt.

We sit and talk among those paneled walls —

Cleveland recedes and starts to decompose.

The strokes of fate are muffled in your vault,

And we can barely hear her siren calls.

 

I count it as a personal offense,

Loring, when someone dies, someone I know,

Particularly you. What did you get

Out of this retreat? It makes no sense.

How can I calculate the tab I owe

And pay you back? You've buried me in debt.

 

I must resort to dreams. I turn within

My winding sheets and wait for you to come

To stand beside my stead. You proffer me

A book you've set in leaden type, but on

Those pages there is emptiness. I thumb

The volume through. I read that you are gone.

 

Interlude:

 

SLUMBER

Our Hero is exhausted, and his head

Is reeling from his labors. He glances to

The clock upon the wall. He sees the night

Is far advanced. He switches off the light

And sits in darkness feeling shades of blue —

He has been writing letters to the dead.

 

 

It's time, he thinks, to rise and go to bed.

He wonders whether he has laid to rest

Any of those ghosts who populate

His dreams — descend the attic stairs and wait

Beside his pillow. He understands their quest;

Therefore, he pens these letters to the dead.

 

He knows that everything was never said

Among them while they thrived; he further knows

That somehow he must say it, or his debt

Will grow until, entangled in its net,

He drowns within the depths of what he owes.

He gathers up his letters to the dead,

 

Shuffles them in darkness. But, instead

Of getting up and going to his room,

He hefts them in his hand. The slender sheaf

Feels as though composed of moss and leaf.

Then, thinking that he smells a grave perfume,

His eyes close on his letters to the dead.

 

He dreams his words are waiting to be read.

They lie upon the earth, begin to brown

And crumble into loam. Out of their mold

A herb begins to grow. Its leaves unfold

To drink the night. A bud swells at its crown;

Balm blossoms from the letters to the dead.

 

When he awakens, an incarnate red

Transfuses the horizon: it is dawn.

The letters, scattered on his morning table,

Show palely forth from under umbral sable —

The shades still linger; they will not be gone —

He must resume his letters to the dead.

 

THE OBSESSION

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem The Obsession.

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen. He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

I greeted him. I said, "How are you, father?"

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

We were together, older than when he'd died —

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror. He looked his last

Into the glass and kissed it. He saw he'd died.

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell. I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so. But what was it I dreamed

In fact? An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream? Who was it died

 

Again last night? I dreamed my father died,

But it was not he — it was not my father,

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

Whose is it, his or mine? Who dreams he dreamed?

 

My father died. Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands. And when at last

He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

 

REFLECTIONS IN AN ATTIC ROOM

A Sonnet Redoubled

 

As if one needed to begin to write;

As though one had to have a pen at hand,

Paper smoothening to the touch of night,

Light sifting across the page like wind and sand.

 

This is the scrivener's fallacy, the hour

Abraded by sand and wind, by willful words:

They scrape at vision, they scarify and scour —

The urn becomes a scattering of shards;

 

The wind, a voice freed of its hollow shell

Noting nothings echoing in the bone

Bleaching among the dunes of time that swell:

They shift, remembering they once were stone.

 

Sit stony-eyed; watch the words curl and come

Still-born to life between the joint and thumb.

 

Dear Father: You are dead. What's there to say?

Yet I'll go on to say it, as you know,

Or may not, as the case may be. Just so,

Our monologues continue on their way,

Two streams of silence rising out of clay,

Passing each other in the essential flow

Of stars and atoms. Watch them rise and go,

Falling in vortices of night and day:

 

The grass grows green, the suns and planets turn

Upon a field of sable. Brine turns to blood,

I turn to you as day turns into night,

As flesh turns in to earth. I cannot spurn

The flame you gave to me upon the flood

As if one needed to begin. To write

 

Is useless. "Poetry makes Nothing happen,"

As Auden said. It happens anyhow,

Rising upon the eternal tide of Now,

Engulfing everything — the field, the aspen,

Herb, rock and furrow. So we sigh, grasp pen,

Ink and paper, then we sit down to plow

Another row of letters. We endow

The meadow with another seed to open.

 

And when it does, what will the blossom be?

Another flower in a sea of flowers?

A blooming and a withering of the land

That once was ocean, that once more shall be sea

Rising to blood again to invest these hours

As though one had to have a pen in hand?

 

Here in an attic study rising to

A peak in the winter dark, one thinks at times

Of love; one thinks of synonyms and rhymes

That come as close as words are wont to do

To what it once was like when the flesh was new

And closed with flesh in torrid zones and climes.

What was it like? Whose were those pantomimes

Between the sheets that got the rave reviews?

 

Those sheets — those wrinkled sheets: they press in close

Upon recall. The books that line these shelves

Are filled with love songs yellowing and trite:

Verbena pressed between the leaves verbose.

Our sheets untwine, leaving to our selves

Paper smoothening to the touch of night.

 

The attic listens to the scratching pen.

Outdoors, the wind has sunk. The snow is deep,

The neighbors in their steads are fast asleep,

Dreaming of when they will awake again.

Nothing is happening, nor will it when

They lift their lids to look into the deep

Trance of wakening. The ink will keep

The stillness that inhabits books and men,

 

Will keep it and disgorge it as the leaf

Turns, veined and sere, and then begins to brown

Under the rooftree, beneath the moving hand.

The words accumulate, become a sheaf

Of seasons as the silence filters down,

Light sifting across the page like wind and sand.

 

Imagine this: a battering at the door;

The voice of anguish pleading, "Give us curds,

Crusts, crumbs of meaning — pray you, give us words!

We need the Secret Name, and so much more —

A sense of purpose from your ample store

Of synonyms and antonyms! Rewards

Undreamt await if you extend towards

Your fellow man a portion of your lore!"

 

But the knocker lies against the stolid wood,

The panel does not echo. The empty hall

Contains but peeling paper and a sour

Smell of waiting. It must be understood

There is no understanding, only gall:

This is the scrivener's fallacy. The hour

 

Is late. The atmosphere is thick. The earth

Is running down. The fishes in the sea

Are drowned in silt. Each blade of grass, each tree

Is blighted. There has been a monstrous birth,

And plenitude has been transformed to dearth —

The Magi slouch away from Galilee.

"The pen is mightier than the sword," but see

It beaten into shares of slender worth:

 

It settles in its rut and plows its row.

The poisonous sun and parching raindrops slough

From brow and temple. Emaciated birds,

Before the wrinkled seed can sprout and grow,

Seize it for ivied towers wearing down,

Abraded by sand and wind, by willful words.

 

Go, little book, and bear thy wordy freight

Away from me as fast as e'er thou may —

I'm sick to death of everything you say.

I wrote you out in sundry hours late

When I long since ought to have hit the hay —

But did I seek sweet dreaming? Did I sate

The wingéd Pegasus on an early date,

In a timely moment? Nay, I say you, neigh!

 

I entertained the nightmare in my room.

I watched that grim old nag bend to devour

The grain of bitterness, the oats of doom,

The silage of depression. Little, sour

Book, I loathe thy messages of gloom —

They scrape at vision, they scarify and scour.

 

Build me more stately vessels, O my Soul!

I have a pot to piss in, sure enough,

But I've a fancy for more fancy stuff:

Amphorae full of oils, a wassail bowl,

Kraters of flowers. Ceramics is my goal:

A funerary urn, built good and tough,

Of alabaster so that, when I slough

This clay, my ash won't end up in a hole.

 

But what is this? I look into my heart

And find a crock chock-full of feeble words;

A thunder-jug beladen with a fart;

Stained paper, and a nest of nestling turds —

And as I watch, the paper falls apart;

The urn becomes a scattering of shards.

 

I wrote a book called Curses and Laments.

There was, it seems, a modicum of scents

In such an exercise, but only that:

A modicum, for it relieves frustration,

But changes nothing else in God's creation.

You pucker up and whistle in your hat;

You break a little wind when you're intense —

I wrote a book called Curses and Laments.

 

You take a certain pleasure in the smell

Of fire and brimstone. They can go to Hell,

Those bastards that have muscled you around.

Leave them a curse and then go underground

To breathe the air where you have loosed to dwell

A wind, a voice freed of its hollow shell.

 

What will we talk about beneath the stone?

"I have a little dust stuck in my eye."

"Today the worms are restless. I can feel

Them turning." "Pardon me, I have a cold —

I cannot stop my coughin'." "Thought I'd die

Of laughter when my nasty neighbor went

Out in the rain and caught her death." "I saw

Pale Ryder the other day — he's looking old

And out of sorts." "I wait for the telephone

To ring, but my children never seem to call.

Perhaps it's out of order — the reaper-man

Doesn't service the equipment he has sold."

Perhaps it's much like life — we'll merely lie

Noting nothings echoing. In bone-

 

Yards poets slowly accumulate.

I sometimes wonder if, on Judgment Day,

We'll all rise up in glory to afflate,

Converse, and each recite his latest lai.

Can rime be so perverse? In Plato's State

We'd all be banished — even the great Good Gray

Poet. But where in God's name could we go —

To that grand Writers' Conference Below?

 

But even there we would, it seems to me,

Be welcomed none too warmly to pause or dwell.

There'd be the Devil to pay, inevitably,

For there are limits to tolerance in Hell.

If we are left alone with our poetry

Bleaching among the dunes of time, that's well.

 

So Limbo's won and Paradise is lost.

My attic room is filling up with smoke:

I sit and talk with Geoffrey, Will — a host

 

Of my confreres. We pass the time with joke

And bawdry. There is little else to do —

The centuries lie heavy as a yoke

 

Upon the roof; the crackling of the glue

In all our bindings shatters this still air.

Our words and verse go whistling up the flue.

 

We pilgrims to Perdition sit and stare

Into the silence of sere marrow-bone.

I proffer the hemlock cup — they do not dare

 

Accept, for if they drank I'd be alone.

They shift, remembering they once were stone.

 

And in my pipe smoke I can just discern

The outlines of a sonnet redoublé,

A skeleton of what is my concern:

The meaning of it all. My smoke is gray.

 

I ponder carefully these artful rounds

And think about the things I have to say —

I try some lines aloud. The noise redounds

To my House of Fame, and meters ricochet

 

From the sloping walls to die upon my ears.

Where are the hare of soul, the baying hounds

Of the Apocalypse? Where are the tears

Condensed from feelings language seldom sounds?

 

My room is silent; my pen is chill and dumb.

Sit stony-eyed with words that curl and come.

 

Now it is almost done, this foolish thing

That I have penned. The lines have nearly jelled,

And I must ask if I have felt compelled

To write, or merely willed myself to sing

 

This song that few will ever care to read.

And was I born, or was I merely made,

Concocted of myself — the man of trade,

Not the Bard God conjured out of need

 

To cure the universe? I do not care.

To be a poet of whatever sort

Will help to pass this journey to the Court

Of Ultimate Decisions. This is fare

 

I pay and eat — these lines that fall and come

Stillborn to life between the joint and thumb.

 

LETTER TO MOTHER

Dear Mother, writes Our Hero, You won't dread

My writing you this letter to the dead —

Not even if you read it. You'd not recall

A word a moment later. You've built a wall

Between the world and you, a wall of glass

Opaque as pearl, through which no moments pass.

 

You lie in one position all day long,

Oblivious to silence as to song.

You'd like to die, but you have been betrayed

By your own body. Death has been delayed

Because the flesh is not yet ready to

Give up the ghost — it will not take its cue

 

And ring the curtain down upon this play

That has no climax — the scene just seeps away.

Imperceptibly the footlights dim,

The heroine held hostage by the whim

Of fate and accident — not even age

Will help you in your exit from the stage.

 

There is no need for me here to rehearse

The acts in your decline. It seemed perverse

At first, and then I thought you must be ill,

But you were not. It was an act of will,

Wasn't it, Mother? You just gave up, gave in,

Threw up your hands — you lost the wish to win.

 

But who or what is it you've really killed?

Much of your past, and part of mine is stilled,

Lost to one-half of our common memory.

Time's siling hands have scoured it like emery

From your mind, and I am not your son

In some essential way, I'm not the one

 

I was when you remembered who I was,

But someone less. This is what dying does:

It murders the survivors, cell by cell,

Until we too fall victim to the fell

And fragile flesh. We owe it to each other

Not to give in until we have to, Mother.

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

 But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

For a sure and certain doubt? He sighs. It seems

There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets. Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards. "Is this the doom

Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him. Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads. What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

These two interlocking series of poems, "Letters to the Dead" and "Reflections in an Attic Room" are from The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by “Wesli Court,” a.k.a. Lewis Turco, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842-43-2, trade paperback, 115 pp; copyright © 2019 and all rights reserved by Lewis Turco; may not be reprinted in whole or in part by anyone, anywhere, without the written consent of the author.

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Sestinamania Part Eight

In Memory of George O'Connell, Printmaker

Richard Wilbur

 

R.I.P. RICHARD WILBUR

March 1, 1921 -- October 14, 2017

 

The finest singer of his time,

He knew the ins-and-outs of rime

Like no one else, but thought the norm

Was that the poem chose its form!

 

         Through all the social turmoil and fashionable change of the period since the end of World War II there were those who continued to ply their traditional craft quietly and well — Richard Wilbur, born in New York City in 1921, was one of those. Wilbur was educated at Amherst College, taking his B.A. in 1942. He served in the U.S. Army from 1943 to 1945; upon his discharge he attended Harvard University where he took an M.A. in 1947. He became an assistant professor there in 1950, moved on to Wellesley College in 1955, and settled into Wesleyan University two years later, remaining there except for academic excursions until his retirement.

         Among his contemporaries, Richard Wilbur most consistently developed and maintained much of what was best in the post-Modernist academic style. He continued to be, through the 1960-80s, that rare phenomenon of contemporary literature, a man of letters. To many critics Wilbur appeared to be a poetic throw-back to the original mainstream of American poets deriving from the British tradition, representatives of which include Longfellow, Whittier, Poe, Robinson, and Frost — that is to say, the formal traditionalists. That this line of descent is still viable has been often disputed since 1960, yet Wilbur's reputation steadily rose over the years despite attacks on his formalism, the elegance of his diction and style, and the equanimity of his vision.

         Wilbur's books include Ceremony (1950), Things of This World (1956) which received both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; Poems 1943-1956 (1957); Advice to a Prophet (1961); The Poems of Richard Wilbur (1963); Walking to Sleep (1969); Seed Leaves (1974), and New and Collected Poems (1988). Essentially a poet of ideas, and therefore in one sense at least a classical rather than a romantic poet, Wilbur wrote poems constructed in such a way that his themes stood out clearly before they were transformed into, anchored by, the images of the poem "Love Calls Us to the Things of This World":

And the heaviest nuns walk in a pure floating

Of dark habits,

Keeping their difficult balance.

         Another example of this method is his poem "The Aspen and the Stream" which is a dialogue between an idealist, the aspen (whose conversation is cast in stately heroic couplets) and a cynic, the stream (who speaks in quick iambic trimeter quatrains rhyming abab) (205). The tree addresses the stream,

Beholding element, in whose pure eye

My boughs upon a ground of heaven lie —

and the stream responds,

Why should the water drink,

Blithering little tree?

Think what you choose to think,

But lisp no more at me.

The verse forms themselves help to characterize the "persons" engaged in this argument, the optimism of the aspen showing forth in the stately measures of the long line, and the stream's pessimism in the quicker, livelier lines running through the debate.

         Donald L. Hill wrote in his book Richard Wilbur that there were four overlapping qualities in Wilbur's work, "a speculative and logical temper, sharp and true observation, technical virtuosity, and a kind of amused good humor." (19) Each and all of these are clearly characteristics not merely of the poems, but of the poet who wrote them. A consummate craftsman and therefore, assumedly, almost totally a conscious writer, Wilbur nevertheless held to a neo-romantic notion that took possession of the poetry of the 1960s that "the poem chooses its own form," as though it were a living organism rather than an artifice of language whose development is controlled by the writer. In no contemporary poet did this split-minded position appear to be so anomalous; in none was the contradiction between theory and practice so obvious as in Wilbur who, in his best work, gave as much pleasure through skill and contemplation as through vision and "inspiration," for of all his peers Wilbur was consistently the most overtly formal poet.

         Wilbur, like Auden, used many of the standard verse forms of the English tradition, ranging from alliterative, strong-stress Anglo-Saxon prosody in such poems as "The Lilacs" and "Junk" (pp. 118 & 185) —

An axe angles

from my neighbor's ashcan

It is hell's handiwork, ;                          

the wood not hickory,

The flow of the grain

not faithfully followed.

— to the "Sonnet," as in the poem so titled (235). In this formalism Wilbur defied the movement of most American poets since the 1950s toward so-called "organic" poetry, an extension of the undeveloped British tradition of lineated prose — that is to say so-called "free verse" — begun by Christopher Smart and William Blake in the 18th and early 19th centuries, and by Martin Farquhar Tupper who influenced the American Walt Whitman in the later 19th century.

         The origin of English prose poetry lies in the 17th-century translation of the King James version of the Bible. It was developed to a degree in the mystical and prophetic books of William Blake, beginning with The Book of Thel (1789) and ranging through Milton and Jerusalem, (both published in 1804); in the posthumous Rejoice in the Lamb (1839), written from 1759-1763 by Christopher Smart; popularized in both Great Britain and the early United States by the English poet Martin Farquhar Tupper whose Proverbial Philosophy (1838) sold a million copies in this country, ten years before America's first major prose poem, Edgar Allan Poe's Eureka (1848), and seventeen years before Whitman's influential book of prose poems, Leaves of Grass (1855). Many of the Modernists claimed Whitman as a precedent unique to the New World. A century after Whitman, however, few of the Academic Poets, including Wilbur, were using his mode, though it would experience a resurgence beginning in the 1950s at the hands of other schools of poetry.

 

FOR LEWIS TURCO

 

            Dear Lew,

         All hail to you,

      Old formalist, who through

   Your Book of Forms inform the new.

If you can name this bloody form, please do,

   before it disappears from view,

      For you're the one man who

         Might manage to.

            Adieu.

 

-- Richard Wilbur

 

 

FOR RICHARD WILBUR

 

            Dear Dick,

         It's quite a trick

      To name the form poetic

   You sent Sam Gwynn who, in the nick

Of time, included it in his panegyric

   Celebrating my arthritic

      Remove from the academic,

         But rubliw's a quick

            Kick.

 

-- Lewis Turco

         

 This essay is from Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.tamupress.com, 2012, 336 pp., ISBN 978-1-936205-30-1, paperback. Copyright © 2012 by Lewis Turco. All rights reserved; may not be reproduced in any form anywhere without the written permission of the author.

 

The epitaph "R.I.P. Richard Wilbur" is from Wesli Court’s Epitaphs for the Poets, by Lewis Turco, Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN: 978-1-938144-01-1. All rights reserved.

The "rubliw" titled "For Lewis Turco" by Richard Wilbur, and the one titled "For Richard Wilbur" by Lewis Turco are from 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. Allrights reserved.

 

 

 

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Gilgamesh Performed to Music

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

 

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

 

 

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THE RECURRING DREAM

By Lewis Turco for Luigi, in memoriam.

 

   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 Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, Scottsdale, AZ: www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007. ISBN 978-1-932842-19-7, cloth; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, paper. Also available in a Kindle edition.

 

VIGILANCE

By Lewis Turco

 

         You stand waiting.  You listen.

         At your back the house is still,

   between the tickings of clocks and timbers.

      Beneath the rough soles of your feet

you can feel the cellar stretching to its foundations —

   silence in the stone, the furnace brooding.

 

         Shades are partly drawn against

         the night.  The panes are harder

   than ice and as cold.  Were you to touch them

      they would shatter or seal you in.

The scent of dust is scattered in the air.  The breathing

   of the stairwell is a deep cascade.  Now.

 

         It will happen now:  The knob

         will turn, the tooth of the lock

   take a strain in the cheek of the door where

      it is set.  You do not ask, “Who

is it?”  It makes no mind; it is the wind of autumn,

   the winterchase, the sky of change.  The hours

 

         flatten on the walls where you

         have pinned them; you sense their weight

   dragging in their frames against the wire.

      a flake of plaster sifts onto

the carpet stretching like a lane of leaves along the

   hall.  You listen to the respiring rooms

 

         where youth is dreaming age, where

         aging sleeps.  And you patrol,

   you walk the hours listening to nibs scraping,

      paper rattling, clocks marking.  You

watch the knobs revolve, the windows shake, and in the flue

   you hear the cinders rustling to the grate.

 

From Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, op. cit. above.

 

BAD DAD

By Lewis Turco. Listen to him read his poem, "Bad Dad."

 

My son told me last evening

Something I did not know:

How bad a father I had been

While he had time to grow,

 

So now that he's done growing,

And his life has turned out bad, 

It's all my fault because I was

A failure as a dad

 

Not to him alone, he said,

But his older sister, too,

Who'd hated him he'd realized

Since he was only two.

 

Her two divorces both were owing

To my incessant ire,

As was his own failed marriage to

The girl of his desire

 

With whom he'd lived quite happily

For what had seemed like ages

And married on a whim one day

While they were in Las Vegas.

 

Oh, by the way, did i have some

Painkillers I'd not used

From my aortal stent? His girl

Had been badly abused

 

After her accident last spring

By doctors who refused

To treat the pain she suffered still.

I said that I recused

 

Myself because I did not know

The girl of whom he spoke

And what he asked was illegal --

Couldn't she smoke a toke?

 

I guess she can't because my son

Replied he could not handle

One more moment in the light

Of his father's guttering candle.

 

Farewell. My daughter and my son,

Farewell, familial dream,

Farewell as well to you, Bad Dad,

And to my self-esteem.

 

Lew, your "Bad Dad" poem keeps making me weep -- so why do I keep reading it?   I think maybe it's that somehow having somebody else write down what would be one's own worst nightmare is bizarrely comforting.   I don't know.  But indeed, sad stuff.

 

Stumbling onward as one tends to do, Cl.

 

Oh, Lew, this poem!   It should be as well known as "This Be the Verse."  -- MK

  

THIS BE THE VERSE

By Philip Larkin

 

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.   

    They may not mean to, but they do.   

They fill you with the faults they had

    And add some extra, just for you.

 

But they were fucked up in their turn

    By fools in old-style hats and coats,   

Who half the time were soppy-stern

    And half at one another’s throats.

 

Man hands on misery to man.

    It deepens like a coastal shelf.

Get out as early as you can,

    And don’t have any kids yourself.

 

HEAR, NATURE, HEAR; DEAR GODDESS, HEAR!

By William Shakespeare (from King Lear)

 

Suspend thy purpose, if thou didst intend 

To make this creature fruitful! 

Into her womb convey sterility! 

Dry up in her the organs of increase; 

And from her derogate body never spring 

A babe to honour her! If she must teem, 

Create her child of spleen; that it may live, 

And be a thwart disnatured torment to her! 

Let it stamp wrinkles in her brow of youth; 

With cadent tears fret channels in her cheeks; 

Turn all her mother's pains and benefits 

To laughter and contempt; that she may feel 

How sharper than a serpent's tooth it is 

To have a thankless child! Away, away!

 

FOR MY DAUGHTER

By Weldon Kees

 

Looking into my daughter’s eyes I read  

Beneath the innocence of morning flesh  

Concealed, hintings of death she does not heed.

Coldest of winds have blown this hair, and mesh

Of seaweed snarled these miniatures of hands;

The night’s slow poison, tolerant and bland,

Has moved her blood. Parched years that I have seen  

That may be hers appear: foul, lingering  

Death in certain war, the slim legs green.  

Or, fed on hate, she relishes the sting  

Of others’ agony; perhaps the cruel  

Bride of a syphilitic or a fool.  

These speculations sour in the sun.  

I have no daughter. I desire none.

 

A DAUGHTER MOVES OUT

for Melora.

 

            She has left

   her posters on the wall.

The phone lies overextended on

      the floor, humming: its

      black panel is gone;

         it shows its coils.

 

            There are dust

   bunnies under the bed.

The books on the yellow shelves study

      the color brown — an

      uncertain shade tilts

         against the sun

 

            falling down

   into the winter lake.

Who, though, is this in the closet, hung

      from a rack, his slit

      eyes lidded in the

         gloaming?  Is it

 

            the specter

   of the prom-watcher, ghost

of the dawn-waiter, the hanger-on?

      Yes, it is he who

      clutches at glass, sand

         siling out from

 

            beneath his

   feet, between his dry toes

into the lower cone.  Let him wear

      shadow, let him hang

         on for a while.

 

FAILED FATHERS

By Lewis Turco on a theme by, and with apologies to, Greg Pape. 

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem "Failed Fathers."

 

              Where do all the failed fathers

       go?  To Albuquerque?  Cleveland?

       After the slow slide down the drain,

       where do they go?  After the last

lay-off, the class reunion where they're shown

 

              kissing the matronly Queen

       of the Prom, where do they go.  Where

       do they go, these old young men, these

       paunchy guys with the eyes that squint

into the lens at the family picnic,

 

              the fishing expedition

       near the falls, the baseball game where

       they played second?  After the fights,

       the money fights, the brief affair,

after the spree and the morning after,

 

              where do the failed fathers go?

       Is there a bar where they gather,

       is there a bus they all take,

       is there a line at the Bureau

where they talk over their sons and daughters,

 

              their Old Ladies turning cold,

       the milkmen they caught spending time

       drinking coffee in their kitchens?

       Is there a motel in Cleveland

full of fathers playing poker,

 

              smoking cigarettes, squinting

       at their hands, drinking beer?  Is there,

       down in Albuquerque, some street

       full of walk-up rooms full of dreams

of mowing lawns, of paneling basements,

 

              propping children on their bikes,

       walking down the aisles of markets

       pushing shopping carts?  Of course, we

       know what happens to our mothers,

but where oh where do the failed fathers go?

 

From Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, op. cit. above.

 

"Bad Dad," Copyright © 2015 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.

 

Bestsellers Cafe Obsession Reading

The poetry reading by contributors to Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Carolyn Beard Whitlow and Marilyn Krysl, with an Afterword by Lewis Putnam Turco, Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2014, took place at Bestsellers Cafe in Medford, MA, at 2:00 p.m. on 19 July 2014. Above, left to right: Barbara J. Orton, organizer of the session, Alfred Nicol, Lewis Turco, Ada J. Schneider, Michael Cantor, Jeffrey Harrison, Rhina P. Espaillat, and Ruth Foley. Lewis Turco opened the program:

 

INTRODUCTION TO OBSESSION

By Lewis Turco 

          Although I knew neither Carolyn Beard Whitlow nor Marilyn Krysl, when they wrote to ask for my help in organizing and publishing their anthology, Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century, I was inclined to agree because it was fairly obvious that my sestina, “The Obsession,” had had some sort of influence on the book to begin with. In any case, I have seldom said “no” to anyone who had a poetry project that looked interesting.

          Therefore, I accepted, and the editors sent me their typescript. When we three had finished diddling with it I suggested they send it to the publisher of my text The Book of Forms, a boutique organization called the University Press of New England which has as its base the Dartmouth College Press. Dartmouth gave it a publishing grant, and the book was accepted and published under the Dartmouth imprint.

          That, in a nutshell, is why we are gathered here today to publicize this beautiful volume. The poems gathered in it are some of the best sestinas ever assembled anywhere, and the indices and various reading aids included are extraordinary.

          But what is a sestina? This is the description of the verse form from my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, Fourth Edition, the various manifestations of which have been called “the poet’s bible” for the decades since 1968:

The SESTINA is a verse form of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante (from whom it received its Italian name). The popularity of the poem in English is primarily a 20th century phenomenon, however, particularly in the United States. The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first stanza are repeated in a specific order as end-words in the five succeeding sestet stanzas. In English the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters. Its thirty-nine lines are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi), In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing each line.

         The order in which the end-words are repeated appears to have its roots in numerology, but what the significance of the pattern was originally is now unknown. The sequence of numbers is 6-1-5-2-4-3. Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3. If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters signifying repetitions) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.

          I will end by welcoming you all to this reading by some of the finest poets in the nation, including members of the Powwow River Poets organization; thank you for coming. Now let me step back and turn the reading over to Barbara Orton who organized it.

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