Poetics and Ruminations

Birthday of THE BOOK OF FORMS

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

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

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

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

Companion volumes:

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

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

The Sonnetarium

This book is now available from any bookseller

 

BODY PART 

(Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem, "Body Part.")

 

I offer you the same old gift again:

This ancient shriveled organ of my flesh

That we have used since who remembers when?

 

It’s shoddy now, but it was strong and fresh

When we were young. You held it in your hand

And felt its pulse when we had seed to thresh.

 

It throbbed for you and needed no command

To flame and ache when it was called upon

To do its duty, dilate and expand

 

To fill the evening or the breaking dawn,

The morn or afternoon with the lover’s art…,

So many years have passed now and have gone

 

To seed, so many organs have come apart --

Still, I offer you this same old heart.

 

By Lewis Turco

 

From The Sonnetarium, by Lewis Turco, New York: Bordighera Press (www.BordigheraPress.org ), VIA Folios 130, 2018. ISBN 978-1-59954-126-6, trade paperback. Available from any bookseller, on-line or off.

The Sonnetarium

 

THE XMAS BLUES

 

It’s Christmas Eve down at the Cabaret.

The combo’s swinging at the Cabaret—

Some of the dancers are in disarray.

 

We’re waiting for Santa to come jiving by,

Jiving along as he comes juking by,

Ringing his bells and flying kind of high.

 

Jerry whacks the keys, George bops the vibes,

Hugh hoots his horn while George raps on the vibes

And here and there a customer imbibes

 

A cup of nog or a glass of scuppernong,

A mug of yuletide cheer or some scuppernong To help

him listen to the Turk’s torchsong.

 

The band is wailing and Santa’s overdue.

He’s sporting red, but he’ll be swinging blue.

 

The Sonnetarium (Via Folios)

Mar 13, 2018

by Lewis Turco

Paperback

$12.00^$ 12 ⁰⁰ Prime

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60th Wedding Anniversary, June 16, 2016

Jean and Lew Turco in an Oswego Opera production of Carmen, 1980s

Shaking the Family Tree, A Remembrance, by Lewis Turco, West Lafayette, IN: www.BordigheraPress.org, VIA Folio 15, 1998, ISBN 188441916X, trade paperback.

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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Richard Wilbur on His 95th Birthday

 

RICHARD WILBUR ON HIS BIRTHDAY (1997)

Listen to Lewis Turco read his poem,  "Richard Wilbur on his Birthday."

 

Oh, if your name were only “Wilver,”

      With a v instead of b,

There would be a lot less silver

      On this head of mine. You’d see

               Brown again — some gray, at least.

               For sure, perhaps, I’d be well fleeced

 

The way I was when we were younger...,

      But you seem not to have grown old.

What’s going on, you ballad-monger?

      Who is this fellow I behold

               Now and again and here and there,

               This tall, good-looking guy with hair?

 

If my old cat saw Richard Wilbur

      I know exactly what she’d do

If she were young, too, and could still purr:

      She’d climb up in your lap and mew,

               And then she’d settle down and choose

               To await the arrival of your Muse

               (Although she’d probably spell it "Mews").

 

-- Lewis Turco

from The Formalist, viii:1, 1997, p. 37.

 

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Alfred Moskowitz, R.I.P.

Rhina Espaillat and her husband Alfred Moskowitz

 

NEWBURYPORT, MA: On the evening of February 27, 2016, in Newburyport, Mass., Alfred Moskowitz passed away in his home on Charron Drive, where he had lived since late 1990.

Born in the Bronx, N.Y., to Rumanian immigrants David and Mary Moskowitz, Alfred was educated in New York public schools, served as an infantryman on the European front during WW II, returned home in 1945 to attend NYU on the G.I. Bill, and went on to teach Industrial Arts in the NYC public schools for 30 years.

In 1952, he married Rhina P. Moskowitz, with whom he had two sons, and brought up a third. He took a highly active part in the formation of the United Federation of Teachers, and in demonstrations for civil rights, desegregation of the schools, and other liberal social causes. In 1990, the couple moved to Newburyport, Mass., from New York City. For many years Alfred Moskowitz was an active member of the Newburyport Art Association, and of the News & Views Club of Newburyport, among other organizations.

He is survived by his wife, son and daughter-in-law, Philip and Lauren of Georgetown; son and daughter-in-law, Warren and Lori of Ipswich; foster-son, Gaston and daughter-in-law, Colleen of New York; as well as grandchildren, Evan, Ilana, Ambrose, and Perry; brothers, Marvin and Howard; sister-in-law, Gayle; nephews, Gregg, Brad and Keith; and nieces, Janine and Diana.

FOR ALFRED MOSKOWITZ

When last I visited Alfred and his wife
We spent the evening talking about his art.
Sculpture was his passion, the largest part
Of his endeavor, his creative life.

Rhina is a writer. She and I
Became the best of friends. Her poetry
Shows readers how the heart and mind can fly
Through the Muses' ever-greening tree.

Now Alfred's mind and heart have taken wing
And she is left alone to write her songs --
She feeds them to the wind: it, too, can sing
Even when her heart breaks and belongs

To breezes in the needles and the limbs
Of brooding woodlands that can echo hymns.

-- Lewis Turco

Two Poems by Lewis Turco

PO-BIZ

For Janice D. Soderlund, on a phrase by Ann Drysdale

 

"Bugger decorum! Bugger decorum!"

That is the motto of Facebook's forum!

Let all your "friends" know how groovy you are!

Tell all your buddies that you are a star

Brighter than they are, by golly, by far!

 

"Bugger decorum! Bugger decorum!"

Tell all your foes that you got there before 'em!

You've been accepted? Let everyone know

Before there is anything for you to show,

And then you will have double chances to crow!

 

"Bugger decorum! Bugger decorum!"

Count up acceptances just as you score them,

List them on Facebook and toss them at friends --

Drown them and give them a case of the bends!

You are the Chosen Erato attends!

 

"Bugger decorum! Bugger decorum!"

Sniff at rejections, don't even deplore them,

PoBiz is yours for the taking, that's sure,

Hesperus waits for you, welcoming, pure,

Beckoning from the apex of manure.

  

LEAVINGS

 

I don't see how the world could get along

Without me in it, but of course it can.

My passing wouldn't matter very long.

Before I came I'm certain that it ran

Just fine, but even that is hard for me

To process. In my nervous circuitry

 

It's hard for thought to leap across those gaps

Where I am not. No time seems to elapse

From then to when I will have disappeared

Once again into dark pre-birth.

As a fetus I wonder if I feared

Life as much as I do leaving Earth.

 

Living, it appears, is ever fatal,

Just as dying is forever fetal.

 

From Trinacria, Issue No. 12, Fall 2014

 

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Form of the Week 34 – The “haikoum” (and the “sonnetoum”).

         While I was at the 2013 West Chester University Poetry Conference from June 4-8 I met many old friends and made some new ones, including Anna Evans with whom I discussed the pantoum and some of her experiments with it. This is the entry on the pantoum from the new Fourth Edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics:

         The PANTOUM, a Malayan form, is an interlocking poem composed of quatrain stanzas, and all the lines are refrains.  The meter is generally iambic tetrameter or pentameter.  The second and fourth lines of each stanza become the first and third lines of the following stanza: A¹B¹A²B², B¹C¹B²C² and so forth.  It can be ended with a circle-back to the two unrepeated lines of the first stanza, or in a couplet made of those lines in reversed order: A²A¹.

 

THE EUNUCH CAT

 

She went to work until she grew too old,

     Came home at night to feed the eunuch cat

That kept the mat warm and its eyeballs cold.

     She walked, but ran to wrinkles, then to fat,

 

     Came home at night to feed the eunuch cat,

Then went to bed, slept dreamlessly till eight,

     And waked.  She ran to wrinkles, then to fat.

She fixed her supper, snacked till it was late,

 

Then went to bed, slept noisily till eight —

     Must I go on?  She'll feed the cat no more.

She fixed her supper, snacked till it was late,

     Then died at dawn, just halfway through a snore.

 

     Must I go on? — she'll feed the cat no more

To keep the mat warm and its eyeballs cold.

     She died at dawn, just halfway through a snore;

She went to work until she grew too old.

 

-- Wesli Court      

 

When I got back home I found this e-mail message from Anna already waiting for me:

 

Dear Lewis,

 

It was great meeting you at West Chester and being able to talk about forms. Thanks for offering to consider putting my haikoum on your blog. Here it is, along with another two I've written and the information you wanted.

In April 2010 I decided to follow the National Poetry Month challenge of writing a poem a day, and in order to make this easier on myself I decided all of them would be pantoums. (Note: I knew this would be easier, but whether this is because I'm a formalist geek or simply because I'm obsessed with structure and control, I couldn't say!)

Of course, writing 30 basic pantoums in blank verse iambic pentameter quatrains would be incredibly dull, so I aimed for variations, and therefore over the course of the month I invented two new versions of the pantoum--the haikoum and the sonnetoum. A haikoum is 8 haiku which is also a 6 quatrain pantoum:

 

HAIKOUM 

 

Red tulips bloom

beside wilting daffodils:

spring changes hands.

 

Storm-felled trees scattered

beside wilting daffodils:

the sky is too blue.

 

Storm-felled trees scattered

by winter's last big tantrum:

the sky is too blue.

 

Patched up, the fabric ripped

by winter's last big tantrum:

the quarrel is done.

 

Patched up, the fabric ripped

out of the family home.

The quarrel is done.

 

They have closed the blinds

out of the family home:

no one can reach them.

 

They have closed the blinds;

they will not come out again.

No one can reach them.

 

Red tulips bloom;

they will not come out again:

spring changes hands.

 

-- Anna Evans

 

TRIPLE LUTZ

 

The ice, newly smooth:

a sheet of crisp white paper;

the skate blades, the ink.

 

Skaters trace the ice,

a sheet of crisp white paper,

with strange loops and whirls.

 

The skate blades, the ink

emptied into new poems

strange with loops and whirls.

 

All life's sadnesses

empty into new poems:

white anesthesia.

 

Our life's sadnesses,

erased by skating backwards:

white anesthesia.

 

Keep checking behind:

erased by skating backwards,

your first strokes forward.

 

Keep checking behind;

avoid others in your path.

You're first! Stroke forward!

 

The ice, newly smooth;

avoid others in your path,

skaters. Trace the ice!

 

-- Anna Evans

 

 

MEMORY PALACE

 

The old poets set down words,

drinking vessels, purses, stones,

so they'd remember:

 

The frames of the songs,

drinking vessels, purses, stones,

the things they lived with.

 

The frames of the songs

lean like ancient monuments,

the things they lived with.

 

The day your parents

lean like ancient monuments

you cover your ears.

 

The day your parents

forget how to remember

you cover your ears.

  

Furnish the rooms or

forget how to remember—

pictures, figurines.

 

Furnish the rooms or

prepare to lose the building,

pictures, figurines.

 

The old poets set down words,

prepared to lose them, building

so they'd remember.

 

-- Anna Evans

 

A sonnetoum is 2 sonnets which is also a 7 quatrain pantoum, rhyme scheme:

 

A1B1A2B2B1C1B2C2C1D1C2D2D1D3   D2D4D3E1D4E2E1A3E2A4A3A1A4A2.)

 

Here's the sonnetoum:

 

YALTA

 

Brooding on this awkwardness with you,

in tangled sheets, I could not sleep last night,

and though I hadn't worked out what to do

the room hung heavy with the new day's light.

I could not sleep in tangled sheets. Last night

I wished you were as usual in my bed—

the room hung heavy with the new day's light,

me tucked against your body as you said

you wished I would be always in your bed,

me trying to believe you. I grew cold,

not tucked against your body. As I've said

we should get past this soon. We're getting old.

But you did not believe me and grew cold.

I only want a kiss, a hand to hold.

 

We should get past this. Soon we will be old,

but you are stubborn and will not be told

I only want a kiss. A hand to hold

would make this uphill road less of a chore.

You are so stubborn! I will not be told

again to keep my mouth shut. To endure

won't make this uphill road less of a chore.

We won't be young or beautiful, it's true,

again. But keep my mouth shut and endure

another thirty years alone? In two,

we won't be young. It's beautifully true:

if brooding on this awkwardness with you

means thirty years, alone, I hope in two

minutes I'll have worked out what to do.

 

-- Anna Evans

 

I wrote a blog entry about my pantoum journey here: http://annamevans.com/wordpress/?p=325

I read "Triple Lutz" in New York and David Katz fell in love with the form. He has since written several, one of which, "Haikoum for James Dean," we published in the Raintown Review. You can reach him at <[email protected]>

I hope this is sufficiently interesting for your blog and please feel free to email me with any further questions.

Best,

Anna M. Evans

http://annamevans.com

http://theraintownreview.com

 

Suggested writing exercise:

 

Write either a haikoum or a sonnetoum. Or both.

Form of the Week 20 — The Recipe Poem

Form of the Week 20 — The Recipe Poem

 

On October 11^th 2012 Clarinda Harriss wrote:

Dear Hotties:

Sorry if I'm taking liberties with that salutation, but it's a habit Moira Egan and I got into among ourselves when working with our Hot Sonnets anthology. I hope you're taking note of the rave reviews it continues to get and are aware that the book is being used in numerous college classrooms—doubtless improving the class atmosphere and temperature.

Here's my idea: I'd like to look at another "something hot" from you — specifically, a recipe or description of a dish — for possible use in a piece of fiction I'm working on. It stars Simone Stiles, a Johns Hopkins PhD drop-out who is becoming famous for her erotic cookbooks, including Orgasmic Organics, Smokin’ Loins and Buggery (this last about making yummy and/or aphrodisiac edibles out of stuff — not excluding bugs — which people find yucky. (Of course that makes way for all sorts of oysters, ocean- and mountain.)

The epigraph for Simone's abandoned PhD dissertation, by the way, is Mark Strand's "Eating Poetry." Thanks to Moira, Strand has already given me permission to quote it in the story. Since I'm rather fond of fiction which contains some non-fictitious people (Thomas Pynchon liked it too), I'm hoping to include Moira, Hot Sonnets (surely it was a source of inspiration to Simone), and some food fun from real-life contributors to the anthology.

So: how about sending me a recipe or just a description of a dish which is somehow "hot"— in the sexy sense or the double entendre sense? Or something for Buggery which uses ingredients that many find repellent but produce something delicious?

If you do send, please include a few of your own words characterizing the dish and also let me know whether you'd be OK with my using your actual name in the story or would prefer me to characterize you simply as "one of the famous poets from the anthology."

Here's an example of what I had in mind: Ilse Munro, wonderful writer and online editor of Little Patuxent Review, sent me a recipe for a Latvian aspic from pig-parts-broth, pointing out that its gelatinous quivering upon the platter "can be quite suggestive." I have a few recipes of my own which involve possibilities during the cooking process, and Simone particularly likes this kind of recipe for her barbecue book (Smokin’ Loins). In fact, there are a number of poems about sexy cooking in Hot Sonnets. You might be willing to let me quote some tidbits even if you don't have an actual recipe to send.

Don't think about this too hard. Just let your mind riffle freely and a bit raunchily through your cookery file and your poem file and hit “Reply.” I would like to have your contribution by Thanksgiving, which is just around the corner. (I guess turkey giblets qualifies — do you do anything interesting with giblets? Ever nibbled leftover candied yams in bed w/a friend?) Also, please understand that the story, even if it develops into a novella, may not provide room for all recipes received.

Off to tend the tongue simmering on my stove as I write—

Clarinda

 

 

"Three Recipes" first appeared in The Critic, xxvii:1, Aug.-Sep., 1968;

"Sherried Artichoke Chicken" was anthologized in John Keats's Porridge, edited by Victoria McCabe, Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1975. 

 

Lew,

 These are a marvel!  Thank you, thank you!   I imagine Simone will be quoting from all three, though I personally think #1 is the sexiest (despite the painful idea of hatching an artichoke).   Since her public name, Simone Stiles, is one she made up in homage to another exhibitionist, Simon Stylites, she will probably want to use both your names.  

Hmmm.   Perhaps she'll start on another book, Carousing (only recipes using booze), Savagery (wild game cooking, which really, there is, in real life, a need for), or maybe Drinking with Savages (booze and wild game)  or (but no, I can hardly bring myself to type it) Soread-Eagled (devoted to stuffings).

I am so grateful!  And btw, these are three of my favorite Turco/Court poems.

 

Clarinda

 

Glad you're happy with them, Clarinda,

Though they were published in the 'sixties, and one of them was even anthologized, they were lost for years until I reacquired them by writing to a library for a photocopy; they've never been collected. I remember writing them from recipes I saw in a women’s magazine my wife had.

Lew