Letter to Barnwood from Lewis Turco
During the winter of 1980 I was reading a book that contained an essay about Emily Dickinson, and in that essay there were quoted some lines from Emily Dickinson’s letters: “The Moon rides like a girl through a topaz town.” “Tonight the Crimson Children are playing in the west.” “The lawn is full of south and the odours tangle, and I hear today for the first the river in the trees.” “Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do is what detains the sky.”
I was so struck by these expressions—not least by the modernity of their sounds and images, more modern, I felt, than even the lines of her poetry—that I immediately set to work writing poems that included, and tried to live up to, Dickinson’s lines.
This was, no doubt many people will feel, a foolhardy thing to do, but I had attempted the same sort of thing with Robert Burton’s 17th century book, The Anatomy of melancholy, and I produced a book of poems based on Burton’s lines called The Compleat Melancholick, subtitled, “A Sequence of Found, Composite, and Composed Poems.” I felt, and feel, that the poems did little damage to Burton, and that some of them are among my better work. When I had finished the first four Dickinson-based poems, I went to the library and checked out her collected letters, hoping to find other lines I might quarry.
Now, something over a year later, I have written forty poems is a series I call tentatively, A Sampler of hours. People who read these pieces always want to know which lines are Dickinson’s and which are mine. At first I had tried italicizing (underlining) her words, but that practice seemed to break up the poems badly. Sometimes internal evidence (Dickinson often used capital letters, which I have kept) will provide clues, but not always. As a result, some people fall into a guessing game almost automatically, which I deplore, but it can be amusing (to me, frustrating to the guesser), because the conjectures are very often wrong. If they were not, I would have been unable to assimilate Dickinson’s lines, and the poems would be failures. The shortest poem in the series may serve as an example of my method of composition:
The Gift
A one armed Man conveyed the flowers.
I gave him half a smile.The first line is Dickinson’s, the second is mine. Sometimes most of the poem will be Dickinson’s edited, usually from various letters, so that they are nearly “found poems”; others will have only a line or two of hers, the rest being mine—and still other may contain any combination of original and borrowed work between these extremes.
In have, on one occasion, been accused of “tampering with an American classic,” but this is not so. I have touched none of Dickinson’s poems, only her letters, which few people read. If any of my poems work, then all I’ve done is bring to the attention of a modern audience a number of Dickinson’s beautiful and startling observations that would otherwise have stayed buried in the bulk of her prose.
An Old Tale
On Lines from Emily Dickinson's Letters
I hear the wind blow the wide way
in the orchard, snaring itselfin the April limbs,telling its story to the lymph
rising to Spring. It is an oldtale, forever fresh,and in it one can nearly hear,
diminuendo, the first linesof Autumn's legend:the bloom and the fading away,
the sere blossom, the petal pressedbetween the ancient leaves.PassingOn Lines from Emily Dickinson's Letters
Autumn is coming on
along the country street.
Chestnut husks lie clovenalong the walk,one and another.The sun is lost The sky
wears masks of smoke on gray,
and there is moss showingupon the oaks,one and another,
one and another.The walk is made of slate,
and roots have buckled it.
The child on the trike ridesup and over--one and another,
one and another,
how we pass away!Lewis Turco
Washing Our Hair in Lake ChamplainThe Beekeeper's Treatpast the mucky near
shore tangle of reeds
lake grasses first
down the rotting
weathered stairs glisten
ing with webs that
held night's water till
afternoon avoiding
slugs and spiders
squooshing mud under
toes until where we could
stand past the row boats
buttery cups for the
day on oil cloth shelves
under low ceilings
smelling of kerosene
and citronella walls the
color of chartreuse no
men until Friday night the
mothers a buoy. I wasn't
afraid of being in any
thing over my head thenLyn Lifshin
Not chocolate kisses
or hard candy
in a fine bowl
mirrored in the middle
of a lemon-scented
high-gloss table,
rather a battered pan
oozing with honeycombs
on a bench across
from the wood stove,
a bucket of well water
to wash it down.
Now and then a dead bee
we simply pushed aside
or let drip free
over the wood pile.
And it was luck to be there
when he robbed the hives
even though we always
winced at the ones
crawling up his arms
which he bared once
to show us they don't
exactly give it away.Roger Pfingston
The Virtues of Stones
It is widely acknowledged
that stones are patient, enduring
the worst privations for the sake of peaceStones teach us, too, humility,
for not one will move of its own accord
unless it be to lower itself.As a rule,
stones keep still, their silence
the resonance of all that is known.(Once, on the island of Thera,In status as well as substance
I stole a blue stone from the mouth of a stream
and set it in silver to wear as a charm on my hand.
That night, as I slept, I heard the stone singing,
and when I woke I understood
the riddle of sunlight
and what it means when flowers open.)
the least removed from earth of living things,
stones, if lifted, long only to return:
their weight is the ache of nostalgia.Small wonder it is said that stones
are the souls of saints
kneeling in prayer and petitioning
God's grace for all of us.Nick Bozanic
October Dialogue
The world is physical. The white-ash leaves
Are changing color as the weather's change
Yields to the prevalence of cold. The leaves
Will be released into the weather's change,
Be offered downward, earthward, and be still.
The World is physical. It is its will.The world is spirit. See! The white-ash leaves
Are changing color as the weather's change
yields to the prevalence of cold. The leavesWill be released into the weather's change,
In beauty spoken to the realm of air.
The world is spirit, and it word, Prepare.Paul Ramsey
