I am deeply sad to note the death of my old friend Nancy Willard on February 19th of this year. I reviewed her first book of poems in an essay titled, ”Of Laureates and Lovers,” published in TheSaturday Review, l:41, October 14, 1967. I thought that it was a fine first book, and she went on to write many more. When eventually we met, we liked each other, and we were friends until she left us this month. This is the review I wrote:
Nancy Willard's collection of poems, In His Country (1966), volume four of the Generation New Poets Series of Ann Arbor, is a fine first book. Ms. Willard has a mind that likes to tangle strange but relevant ideas in the skein of language, as in the first stanza of "Picture Puzzles":
It's because we're broken
that we love
puzzles; pictures
cut all askew, fifteen hundred
pieces, salvage
of divine catastrophe.
For two dollars my mother
buys, in good fait,
Fra Angelico's Nativity,
incredibly cracked,
sung
like God's defense
on a skeptic's tongue.
And then she unravels the strands gracefully in the dénouement. "See?" she seems to say, "This is where we were heading all the time. Everything makes sense at last."
Well, perhaps not everything, but Ms. Willard is capable of making us think so while she is performing, and that's half of art. The other half is perhaps indefinable, but one might bet she has that as well. This much is sure: Nancy Willard can build a whole poem, an unusual talent in this era of fragments and fragmented poets.
Although she was born Jewish in Philadelphia in 1925, Maxine Kumin went to Catholic schools and Radcliffe College in Boston from which she received a B. A. in 1946 and an M. A. in 1948. She married an engineer, Victor Kumin, and raised a family of two daughters and a son. She studied poetry writing with John Holmes at the Boston Center for Adult Education where one of her classmates was Anne Sexton who became her friend and with whom she lunched the day before Sexton committed suicide. She became a colleague of Holmes at Tufts University in the late ‘fifties and the ‘sixties. Like Sexton and Holmes both, Kumin originally wrote in the standard academic formalist forms and style.
Maxine Kumin's subject matter in her first book, Halfway (1961), was the same as that of the other Confessional Poets, that is, life as it must, not ought to be lived, but somehow this insight often got lost in the observation, even in a poem titled "The Moment Clearly" after the first simply described opening quatrain:
The pipes thump in the still house.
A mouse scratches behind the stair.
I hear the rise-and-fall of sleeping children
Calibrating the quiet and the night.
Write, saying this much clearly:
Nearly all, this is nearly all,
The small sounds of growing, the impress
Of unarrested time raising
The prized moment.
And this is ours.
Love moves about, opening the doors.
One of the things Kumin never forgot how to do, however, is to tell a story in this and subsequent books. The Privilege appeared in 1965 and was followed five years later by The Nightmare Factory. Some critics compared Kumin with Elizabeth Bishop rather than with Sexton because often her poems, as in The Long Approach (1985), were exceptions to the egopoetic rule-of-thumb. Although they logged the subjective voyages of the heart, they never excluded the reader from their narratives through excessive privacy, for the reader was always shown the compass, the latitude and the longitude of those voyages, and immersed in particulars. If the poems in this book that made the strongest impression were those that were longer-lined, those that approached, and sometimes achieved, the condition of verse, and the weaker poems were line-phrased prose, nevertheless this was a strong collection, one that gave sustained pleasure to the reader. This condition remained a characteristic of Kumin’s poems throughout her career as was shown clearly in her Selected Poems 1960-1990.
Over the years Maxine Kumin continued to write some of the best poetry of her school, and she branched out into fiction and nonfiction as well. She was honored with a volume edited by Emily Grosholz, Telling the Barn Swallow: Poets on the Poetry of Maxine Kumin, in 1997.
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.
A scholarly, peer-reviewed journal devoted to the study of mythopoeic literature, No. 127, Fall/Winter 2015.
By Nicholas Birns
The New School University
The Hero Enkidu: An Epic. Lewis Turco. New York: Bordighera Press, 2015. 102 pp. ISBN 978-1-59954-098-6. $14.00.
LEWIS TURCO, NOW PROFESSOR EMERITUS at SUNY-Oswego, has had a distinguished career as a poet and critic. His mythopoeic talents, though, have been kept under the wrap of a meticulous formalism; now they have burst through. This retelling of the tragic story of the hero Gilgamesh and his loving friendship with the wild but staunch Enkidu is of interest to readers of Mythlore for two reasons. Firstly, Turco wisely approaches the remote Mesopotamian language and culture through an analogous culture less remote to our language, the Anglo-Saxon of Beowulf. Both the alliterative verse and the grave yet tangible poetic mode of address are adapted from Beowulf, which makes good sense not just because of the comparable emphases on the narrative of male strength, the danger of nature and monsters, and the fragility of life, but because the Gilgamesh and Beowulf stories, as the historical record has left them to us, constitute so much of the little we know of these nearly lost worlds.
Turco’s sensitivity and imagination would make this reason enough for the Tolkien fan to read this book, but there is an extra surprise in store for us at the beginning of Canto II:
On their trek to Erech
Lilitu told
Enkidu the tale
of the city’s founding:
“In the second age
Isildur carried
Out of the ruins
of golden Númenor
A great globe
made of stone.
Upon the stone
he etched an oath
And caused the great
King of the Mountains
To place his hand
upon the rock
And swear that he
would bear fealty,
To Isildur’s lineage
and to Erech when
Its temple and walls
were raised upon
The crown of the hill. (27)
Turco goes on to tell a Mesopotamian version of the treason of the Dead, who betrayed their Númenórean overlords for “the wizard Sargon” (27). Although the Sauron/Sargon resemblance is to the moral disadvantage of the historical Akkadian king, who was more an Aragorn than a Sauron in fact, the fortuity of the resemblance between Tolkien’s name and that of the ancient Mesopotamian king is a verbal gleam in the word-hoard eagerly seized upon by the ingenious scop.
Other Mesopotamian referents also inspired Turco, most obviously the way Erech, the name used by both the Bible and Turco for Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh, was used by Tolkien for the resting-place of the Faithful Stone, while the Sumerian sea-god Ea might have given its name to Eá, the world that is.
In turn, Turco’s historical placement teaches us something about Tolkien’s’ world and its place in myth and history, Tolkien’s legendarium — after the Ainulindalë and the Akallâbeth, which (as Tom Shippey would put it) calque the Creation and the Flood in the Bible respectively — is located in the implied long stretch of pre-Abrahamic history about which the Bible lets us speculate. Thus, when Tolkien in his Letters says we are likely in the Seventh Age (283fn), one has to assume that the Old Testament is the Fifth, from the New Testament to modernity is the Sixth, with the previous four-the ones glimpsed in his stories-being the perceived times of creation, genesis, and myth, and the Fifth thus beginning with Yahweh’s call to Abraham, representing the transit-point from speculative myth to dynamic history. Turco’s interpolation of Isildur into the Gilgamesh-Enkidu story brings this implication into the forefront.
Although Tolkien, as a Christian, would hardly see Anu and Inanna, as related by Turco, as the gods worshipped by Isildur, on the other hand the very name Isildur, signifying ‘servant of the moon,’ has an inherently ‘pagan’ aspect to it, and in any event the Mesopotamians ‘felt’ about Anu and Inanna the way the Númenóreans no doubt ‘felt’ about Eru Ilúvatar. Turco’s poem opens up a rich trove of mythic traditions to us, and shows us that Tolkien’s twentieth-century secondary world can dwell in the same imaginative vault as stories that have been around for over five millennia.
— Nicholas Birns
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.
August 01, 2015
OFF THE COAST, Fall, 2013
ONE NEVER KNOWS what he will find on the Web. I found this review while I was searching for references to "Wesli Court." I hadn't seen it before, though it has been in print for two years:
Epitaphs for the Poetsby Wesli Court (Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, 2012) 86 pages, softbound. ISBN: 978-1-938144-1. $15.
Reading this collection of epitaphs by Wesli Court (the nom d'anagram of poet Lewis "Turk" Turco), one quickly realizes this memorial form is an excellent vehicle for light verse. Nothing like death to bring out the wicked wit! Court, a master wordsmith, generously provides 150 or so British and American poets (and a few lyricists), most of them dead but some still kicking, with pithy hail-and-farewells to inscribe upon their tombstones.
As with the clerihew or one of Bill Cole's terse verse inventions, the epitaph challenges the poet to sum up a lifetime in a handful of lines. Court offers mostly quatrains, almost universally witty/clever, with rhymes that may, from time to time, make you Nash your teeth. Working chronologically by year of birth, he begins with John Gower in the 14th century and ends with Annie Finch (b. 1956), the latter one of a number of poets who have yet to meet their maker, but who, courtesy of this courtly poet, already have a possible marker.
"Writing humorous poetry is technical work," D. Marbach has noted,* and epitaphing is no exception. The pressure's on: assuming these words will be etched in granite one day, better make each word count. Some of Court's epitaphs are more inspired than others. Indeed, at times the versifying seems perfunctory, even tortuous, as he systematically, shall we say, knocks off the pantheon.
This book works best picked up from time to time—read a couple of sic transit Gloria Swansongs and then go back to your business. Another way to approach the collection is to turn to one's favorite poets, as this reviewer did. How, for example, did Elizabeth Bishop fair? Well, so-so:
R.I.P. ELIZABETH BISHOP
February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979
She did not wish upon a star,
But wrote about things as they are
Except, of course, when she would dish up
The visions of a roaming Bishop. …
While a few of the featured poets (Morton Marcus, Rhina Espaillat, Joseph Salemi) were new to this reader, most are familiar: Longfellow, Dickinson, Bogan, Booth, Olds. A few of the epitaphs would require research:
R.I.P. MAY SWENSON
May 28, 1919 – December 4, 1989
May Swenson
Sang the hen song(?).
Others border on the objectionable [though true]. Court writes,
R.I.P. ADRIENNE RICH
May 16, 1929 - March 27, 2012)
When she was young she caught the itch
To versify and rime, the which
She lost when she began to switch
To the lesbofeministic pitch,
And this became her lifelong niche.
…and R.I.P. LEROI JONES
October 7, 1934 - January 9, 2014
Born LeRoi Jones, he hated white,
So took a Muslim name to spite
Every goddam Southun cracka
And wound up Amiri Baraka.
Cleverly composed, yes, but not very funny. [Nevertheless, true.] Indeed, few of these epitaphs are LOL, but more of the admire-the-wordplay sort. That said, Edwin Markham's two-liner did prompt a smile:
R.I.P. EDWIN MARKHAM
April 23, 1852 – March 7, 1940
“Man with a Hoe,” his greatest lay,
Means something different today.
An epilogue, "The Mews of Poetry or Chasing Erato," offers epitaphs to beloved cats—Bozo, Reggie, Scooter and other feline friends get their due. "R.I.P. Crazy" is a favorite, with its touch of Edward Gorey:
Alice Teeter’s second poetry collection, String Theory, won the 2008 Georgia Poetry Society’s Charles B. Dickson Chapbook Contest in 2008. It was an exceedingly unusual and very interesting collection of poems for several reasons, one of which is that the author had clearly developed a personal style of writing that is instantly recognizable as uniquely hers and no one else’s. This new collection, When It Happens to You (Scottsdale: Star Cloud Press, 2009) is an expansion of String Theory, and it is just as fascinating as its predecessor. Both books stand out because, of the four levels of poetry (the typographical, the sonic, the sensory, and the ideational) the third level, that of trope and image, is highly developed and engaging. If I had to describe Teeter’s style, I’d say that it is at base ambiguous — ambiguity is a strong feature of modern poetry — but simultaneously clear and concrete, as in these lines from “The Woman Who Ate Anger”:
She swam and started singing.
She sang so loud that the neighbors complained.
She said “Good.” “They should complain,” and “I don’t care.”
She swam and sang and the day came
When she left the pool all wrinkled like a prune,
And still singing, she danced naked across the lawn.”
But this final stanza depends on what has gone before, and one needs to read it in context in order to get the full effect of the poem.
Often the poems reminded me of one of my favorite novelists, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, whose landscapes and locales, characters and incidents are so dreamlike and simultaneously earthen that one might almost be persuaded that Marquez lives on two planes of existence simultaneously. Not that I think When It Happens to You has the mark of Marquez upon it, just that this author, too, lives on two levels in these poems, and both levels are absorbing. “One Variation on a Theme” says and shows so in almost so many words:
She walked out one night
to take the trash out
and never came back.
Somehow between the door
and the garbage can
she stepped out of line.
She wanders somewhere
with garbage in her hand
exchanging glances with
the trash men
and picking up bottles
no deposit
no return.
Poem after poem here is going to be hard for readers to forget: “10 year old dancing,” or “Poem for Ellen,” about the birth of twins — I won’t quote parts of it because to do so would be to commit an injury upon it; the very strange and beautiful “Nine Womensong”; “Sleeping Giant Love,” the point of which I could not, and would not want to, pin down because it says what it says in just the way it ought to have been said, whatever “it” is. “The 103rd Birthday of Emma Regina DeGraffenreid Smith” is a tour-de-force: it is both a double sestina — the best one I have ever read — and a closet drama. There are many voices in this verse play, and each one of them sounds authentic and believable though they are spoken from the points of view of several characters.
Here I am going through the collection again and picking out poems I think are wonderful, and I shouldn’t because there isn’t a poor poem, or even a mediocre one, anywhere on these pages. I’m just very pleased When It Happens to You came my way, and I am able to guarantee that others will happily read and bathe in it too.
As I read Alice Teeter's third collection, Elephant Girls (n.p.: Kelsay Books of the Aldrich Press, 2015), I imagined a calliope playing in the background and every once in a while a bass drum interrupting with a clap of thunder. Wonderfully engrossing sounds, images, deeps and highs in her developing surreal style. A truly enjoyable book of poems.
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.
Lewis Turco is one of the great undiscovered treasures of American poetry, though those who really follow the scene know his work well, both as poet and as critic. In that latter role, he has not only provided cogent commentary on major poets and on the mode of poetry itself (and I say that being a less ‘formalistic' reader myself than Turco is, but granting and celebrating his percipience), but he has also rediscovered and championed a major early nineteenth-century American poet in Manoah Bodman. He taught at SUNY Oswego for many years and has been a vigorous and constructive participant on the poetry scene. Though I know full well that Turco was born in 1934, that he was already mature and established by the time I started reading him in the early 1980s, it astonishes me to think of him as over eighty, as his work is not only still buoyantly being produced but vitally contemporary, offering perspectives on imagination just not available elsewhere.
Turco's latest book, The Hero Enkidu: An Epic, is particularly timely, as we are all thinking about Mesopotamian civilization in the light of the atrocities toward archaeological remains in Iraq and Syria of the terrorist group calling itself ISIS. Or at least we all should be. Sadly, many of the same people who celebrated the movie The Monuments Men, about the heroic attempts of a special detachment of the U.S. Army to save European art treasures both from Nazism and general wartime destruction, do not seem to give a darn about these ancient Near Eastern antiquities. Not only are they so remote from most of us, erected by people whose languages are no longer spoken or known—they were not Arabs any more than they were Israelis —but they were built by people often described as villains in the Bible, and under the aegis of harsh-ruling kings whose combination of rigid authority and appreciation of artistic skill and craft brings to mind Walter Benjamin’s dictum that every document of civilization is also a document of barbarism. This is true of the history of Western art works, often born of hierarchy and privilege. But in the Middle Eastern context it is far more obvious that ‘we’ cared about Palmyra more than ‘we’ did about Hatra or Nimrud simply because Palmyra, architecturally, shows Greco-Roman influence and was influential on neoclassical architecture, is the proof of this shameful bias. Western concern about Palmyra may have—knock on wood—stopped the ISIS from utterly destroying it. But we should have spoken up just as much for Hatra and Nimrud.
This Western bias against the ancient Near East has extended even to the most prominent document of Mesopotamian civilization, the poem called Gilgamesh. As the recent scholarship of David Damrosch and Wai-Chee Dimock, has shown, Gilgamesh has assumed a privileged role in accounts of 'world literature' and has in turn been translated by writers of various gifts and dispositions such as David Ferry, John Gardner/John Meier, Herbert Mason, and, most recently, Stuart Kendall. As Michael Palma reminds us in his splendid introduction to Turco’s book, the Gilgamesh poem has also inspired a para-literature of epic, fantastic, and historically minded retellings.
One might see Turco’s focus on Enkidu, the best friend, homosocial soulmate, and sidekick of our hero Gilgamesh, as simply another instance of the various postmodern retellings of canonical stories from the vantage point of subordinate or alternate points-of-view. But Turco is turning to Enkidu for a different reason: to make sense of the tremendous distance between us and the poem, or the cultural origins of the poem, as figured not only by ‘our’ indifference towards the terrorist atrocities in Iraq and Syria but the way it is acceptable to be an intellectual in the humanities and have near-complete ignorance of ancient Mesopotamia; for instance, a literate reader of one of the translations mentioned above said to me, in deprecation of his ultimate abilities to assess the translator’s achievement, that he did not know the original Sanskrit! As if Sumerian were Sanskrit, a language that it has as little relation to as it does to Sindarin!
Turco uses Enkidu as a prism through which to relate to the poem: as Enkidu's earthiness, primal rage, and unbridled bundle of emotions are closer to us psychologically than Gilgamesh’s heroism, always imbricated with themes of piety to both his gods and his city, barriers that do not hinder our view of Enkidu, wild, unfettered, in Turco's words “hairy and naked” and thus unacculturated in Mesopotamian civilization. With this psychological proximity, Turco gives us verbal proximity: by making the bold, but infinitely successful, decision to approach the material through the verse forms of Anglo-Saxon and alliterative Middle English poetry.
Turco is not just making a a comment on the comparable ‘state’ of civilization between the two cultures, but also a musing on the possibility that Gilgamesh might have had, in Mesopotamian culture, a similar role to what which Beowulf might have had in Anglo-Saxon culture. (We can never know, as both works were rediscovered much later, after many of the other elements of the literary corpus of those cultures had been lost). Though we actually are as much at sea concerning the original date, author, or cultural purpose of Beowulf as we are of Gilgamesh, we have linguistic connections to Beowulf we do not to Gilgamesh, and even more to the Middle English alliterative corpus such as Pearl and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Turco’s verse maximizes these connections, especially in his deft use of alliteration:
Nimrod entered
the fertile forest
And found the traps
that he had dug
Had all been filled
with soil and scrub;...
Turco even uses rhyme at times, though this is highly anachronistic, as rhyme only entered the Western tradition in the High Middle Ages—the Greeks and Latins, as I discuss in chapter 4o of my recent book Barbarian Memory, did not use rhyme—it is our primary mode of poetic coherence. Since Turco only uses rhyme sparingly and tactically, it does not make the verse mawkish or stringy, as too much of it might:
Enkidu stopped,
To stare, astonished,
at this wonder,
then stood in sorrow,
in agony and woe
to see this man aglow
with manliness as though
he were godlike crown to toe.
This is disciplined and restrained, and coexists happily with the alliteration, blank verse, and Turco’s own elegant attempt to simulate the distich-structure of the Mesopotamian originals (as the text was first written in Sumerian then 'adapted' into Akkadian). The very end of the poem also rhymes in ways both apt and gratifying. My favorite mode, though, is the alliteration, which can capture ingenuous cultural truths in a sly apothegm, as when the gods Anu and Inanna are called "sky sovereigns”: simple, supple, and stark. In something i read by him in the 1980s, Turco pointed out that his middle name is Putnam, and that this is the same surname as that of George Puttenham, the great Elizabethan anatomist of metaphor. Turco's deft and seamless handling of figuration would have warmed the heart of his Elizabethan forebear.
There are some aspects of Turco’s poem I could have done without—I did not like the intrusion of Biblical personages based on, but not themselves present in, Mesopotamian myths and histories, although this objection is merely “Johnsonian” on my part and not meant to be taken as universal cavil. On the other hand I rather like the intrusion of Tolkienian references, based on Tolkien’s use of “Erech”—the Hebrew rendering of “Gilgamesh's home city and the version, rather than “Uruk” employed by Turco—to the resting-place of the Faithful Stone brought to Gondor by the Númenoranean exiles, themselves fleeing from a flood much like the Gilgamesh story's Utnapishtim.
On their trek to Erech
Lilitu told
Enkidu the tale
of the city’s founding:
“In the second age
Isildur carried
Out of the ruins
of golden Númenor
A great globe
made of stone.
Upon the stone
he etched an oath
And caused the great
King of the Mountains
To place his hand
upon the rock
And swear that he
would bear fealty,
To Isildur’s lineage
and to Erech when
Its temple and walls
were raised upon
The crown of the hill.
I myself explore this connection in my essay on Tolkien and Mesopotamia in Jason Fisher’s Tolkien and the Study of His Sources. Turco uses the Tolkien allusion to explore how the Gilgamesh story contains both history and prehistory, both the human and the supernatural. Turco’s moving poem shows how literature can be a bridge between the immortality Gilgamesh vainly seeks and the frail mortality that envelops even the ferocious Enkidu:
When he saw its walls
He also saw
that they were his
Immortality,
for they would last
Eternally.
Walls can in fact be destroyed, as we have seen all too vividly recently, but the stone tablets of the Gilgamesh story miraculously made it into the permanent record, and Turco has given us a thoughtful, innovative, and perceptive expansion on it, a contribution to the literary trove in its own resplendent right.
******************************************
Amazon Reviews
Turco's New Take on Oldest Extant Epic
The Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh is five millenia old. Such an antiquity doesn't seem likely to speak to readers today, in any measure. But it is a story examining the nature of friendship, the nature of loss, and the troubling question of human mortality. It is therefore as relevant to modern readers as it was in the beginning, when it existed first as an oral tale, and then when writing came along, as cuneiform inscriptions on clay tablets.
Gilgamesh has heretofore been the hero, the epic's central figure.The story's emphasis has of course been on the semi-divine king, over the centuries in various renderings.
What Lewis Turco does infuses the old tale with warm new energy by placing the emphasis on Enkidu, the wholly mortal and vulnerable companion to the king. In the course of the tale, Enkidu grows: from the innocent playmate of the animals, through experience, to become a seasoned and trusted warrior and leader. When Gilgamesh is set on destroying the ogre Humbaba, Enkidu advises him against it, but takes the dangerous lead position when they undertake the enterprise. The elders advise Gilgamesh:
Let Enkidu
be in the van
And you will be safe
Shamash has sworn.
Using the Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse form, Turco gives the tale the feel of antiquity, but a fresh antiquity, not that of Homer or the Bible. The story races along—it never lags--and that speed is due in part to the hemistich line pattern. Much of the delight of the rest is due to the splendid diction, the exacting choices, of a peerless poet.
And forth they marched
together, the heroes
And their warrior army
to find the spot
Where Humbaba dwelt
in the Cedar Forest
Where Enkidu
had been born ...
Ruth F. Harrison
Another tour de force-- in service of a great cause.
I speak with a forked tongue: one fork is that of a person immersed in Medieval literature, hence very much interested in the epic tradition; one fork is that of a person so sophomoric she had never been able to hear or see "Enkidu" without singing "inky dinky parlay voo" all day long. But thanks to Lew Turco's masterly poem Enkidu has been rescued from his thousands of years as merely an epic sidekick in the first epic poem ever written. Thank you, Lew. Another tour de force -- in service of a great cause. Oh, and great fun to read!
Clarinda Harriss
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COMMENTARY FROM CORRESPONDENTS
Lew,
The mailman dropped off The Hero Enkidu about an hour ago, and I’m already deep into the Afterword, which is fascinating! But first I read the Prologue to Tim Murphy, who called from North Dakota just about when the mailman arrived and I had just opened the package. When I finished reading he said, “Oh God! I have to order that!” And I replied, “Yes, you do.” I’ve just now e-mailed him the announcement you sent out in May, with information from Bordighera Press, and the quotes from the cover. I told Tim it’s so good that it reminds me of his translation of Beowulf, which is very high praise.
It seems impossible, but it’s even better than I remember, faster, stronger, more daring in its music, somehow reckless but perfect. Tomorrow I’m going to pass it around during the Powow River Poets’ workshop, but in the afternoon I’m going to read from it during the Open Mic that will follow the readings by Rick Mullin and Anton Yakovlev. Those guys are both wonderful, so we’ll have a fairly large audience, with guests coming up from Boston and NYC and down from NH. I’m excited over introducing it to the group! The Intro by Palma is excellent, by the way.
Alfred sends you his congratulations and best wishes: I read him the Prologue over lunch, and told him something about the legend itself.
I forgive you—just barely—for wreaking havoc on Walt Whitman. Tim Murphy did away with him some years ago in our screened-in porch, which has been known ever since as The Walt Whitman Memorial Porch. Tim says I had to mop up Walt’s blood after his savage discussion of several poems proved that poor Walt deserved to die. I am, I must confess, unconvinced by the evidence, and am still profoundly moved by many passages in Leaves of Grass. But we’ll let that issue rest, along with Walt, and I’ll close with this instead: Kudos to you, mio caro fratello, for achieving this magnificent project, and thank you for my copy with its priceless inscription!
Affectionately,
Rhina
Dear Mr. Turco,
I am fascinated that you fastened on heroic tetrameter with caesura mid-line as the form for your epic. Rhina has sent me a couple of emails and read some over the phone. I've wanted to translate the Gilgamesh since I was a kid, but now that is unnecessary. Congratulations! You manage the Gawain [and the Green Knight] meter far better than the poet did. Again, Congratulations.
Tim Murphy
Lew,
I passed your book around to the 19 people present at our Powow River Poets Workshop this morning, and some of them asked to see it again and jot down information from it during lunch. Then during the Open Mic section of our very well-attended reading this afternoon (by Rick Mullin and Anton Yakovlev), I discussed it briefly, and read the Prologue and the opening pages of the first section.
Everyone enjoyed hearing it! Some people were surprised to learn that The Epic of Gilgamesh is the oldest written story, and the source of much of what has come down to us as "biblical," and others were intrigued by the "bob & wheel."
Glad to see you're getting good reviews! And no surprise.
Love,
Rhina
Dear Lew,
Thanks ever so much for the kindly signed copy of The Hero Enkidu. Beautiful cover, sterling innards! What an accomplishment, to liberate the Enkidu story from the longer surrounding epic that obscured it. The Anglo-Saxon verse line makes the poem all the more tempting to read out loud, and willread out loud very well. Here’s hoping Enkidu finds a host of readers. And it’s clear that nobody will try to do what you’ve done, for a long while. Heartfelt congratulations!
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.
Today, April 6, 2015, Ann Putnam, the mother of one of my former students at SUNY Oswego, Laura Putnam, sent this to me:
Ann Putnam
Dear Lew,
I'm semi-rising from slugdom, and want to tell you about the two groups that I talked to about your books.
The first group turned into a three-hour event and was more animated and engaged than usual, especially given the state many of the members were in -- one whose husband had died suddenly in February, from the flu, at age 61, one who had to leave the table occasionally to wrestle with her cough, and one who was having post-chemo therapy for breast cancer. Etc. But it is a tenacious group.
We focus on one book a month, and I chose The Familiar Stranger, poems by Lewis Turco. I read a bio of you that I had put together, then (wildly breaking with tradition) passed out copies of “Brontophobia” from another book [Fearful Pleasures]:
BRONTOPHOBIA: The Fear of Thunder
The first time she could remember hearing thunder
she’d been sitting on her grandma’s lap
in the formal parlor of the big old house where she
was visiting. She flinched and shuddered. “What’s that,
grandma?” She’d asked. “That is the voice of God,”
the old woman said, and then they heard it again
rolling out of the clouds, across the sky
and into the formal parlor hung with drapes
where the portrait of her dead grandfather hung above
the mantel and stared at her
as though with the eyes of God. She blanched and shuddered,
and had been shuddering ever since, whenever
the great dark clouds rolled over the deep blue sky,
shutting all the earth into a parlor
hung with mists and rain, where a dead old man
stared down at them out of the roaring heavens
and told them what he thought without a word,
with only the sound of warning, the sound of dread,
the clap resounding out of admonition
and into the parlor in which they were entombed.
I then read and discussed “Trinity.” (I'm tempted to say it went over with a bang.)
TRINITY
I. The Big Bang
•
II. The Big Blink
Is it a butterfly or a wasp? No matter,
catch it in our net – don’t let it get away:
When life blinks out, that’s it: Nothing existed, ever.
The Big Blink takes place. There’s nothing to regret,
no one to regret it. There will be no darkness —
darkness so deep we are of it, no silence
so vast one can hear oneself think, nothing to wish for,
nothing to want, no one to think or wish for,
no darkness or silence so vast and deep that we
are the silence, nor so deep and vast we are of
it, nor in it, nothing to want, no self to wish
or wish for, no being to become, to Be.
III. The Big Blank
One member chose “The Skater,” one chose “A Song,” others read “The Stone,” “Mon Coeur” and “Aubade to Say The Least,” and each one was discussed at length.
Whenever I saw an opening, I tried sneak attacks of poems from other books – “Dorothy,” “Burning the News,” “The Cat,” touting the amazing range of your books.
What was amazing was how deeply everyone got into your poems. They especially liked your word choices, how brilliant the words were, how layered, how perfect for the poem. As for the collection, some felt it may not have been as cohesive as your other books. I believe you said the poems were mostly ones that didn't fit in other collections.
This was one of the most interesting meetings I've been to in seven years with the group. Sadly, two members were missing -- one with scheduling conflicts, one with agoraphobia. (Both of them men, leaving us with a 5 - 1 female/male ratio for the day.) Poets are such an interesting bunch.
Then last Thursday, at a group that allows a 15-min. presentation before critiquing poetry we have written for the meeting, I did a brief bio and then read several poems –“Trinity,” “Brontophobia,” “The Stranger,” “The Stockyard,” “The Trees” and one that absolutely wowed everyone –“Lovers.” In fact several members asked for copies, which I'll send them if it is ok with you. The members range in age from mid-50's up to me, and “Lovers” seemed to really hit home. Very powerful.
How many decrepit, hoary, harsh, writhen, bursten-bellied, crooked, toothless, bald, blear-eyed, impotent, rotten, old men shall you see flickering still in every place! — Burton.
The bed frames them. Their eyes
tell little of the story. Some old passion
has been eroded. Rivulets of time have
eaten their cheeks until their faces
lie flat against linen
landscapes — or against each other in a dark
room, on a night empty even of owlcries.
Their flesh is a sophistry of shadow:
nothing is hidden. They
must therefore film their eyes in order not to
notice there is nothing there to see. They sang
songs once, to each other, in moon light.
Now, not even night hawks
call out to the lovers in their still stead. Not
even sleep lifts the veils from their sight, returns
They were all very impressed, and I flashed Fearful Pleasures, The Familiar Stranger and The Shifting Web around, letting them see what's available but not, of course, letting them borrow anything that might not come back to me.
Wesli Court's Epitaphs for the Poets went home with Donna Marbach after the first meeting, as she was loving it and can be trusted to bring it back. And as far as Satan's Scourge goes, my son Jim thinks his wife let her cousin borrow it. So I just up and ordered a new copy, instead of waiting to track it down.
Donna Marbach, one of the group members, writes a monthly newsletter, Pencil Marks. She asked me to contact you about interviewing you for one of the up-coming issues. So if you are interested in that, I'll let her know. She also sponsors a chapbook contest every couple of years, and I am one of the first readers.
Well, gosh, I suppose I should do something else today besides chat. It's possible you also would like to do something besides listen to me. And thanks for writing so much for me to appreciate.
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