Lewis Turco & The Workshop System - A Test

In my sojourns around the country hunting for collectible books to trade, I recently happened upon a copy of the poet Lewis Turco's first book, First Poems [Francestown, New Hampshire, The Golden Quill Press, Publishers, 1960]. I knew Turco's name well, having encountered his poems in countless periodicals over the years. He seemed to be the darling of poetry journals, such that it may have seemed that Turco had mastered the metier of the ideal magazine poem. Not the perfect New Yorker poem, or the perfect Paris Review poem, perhaps, but the poem of the academic quarterlies, which once constituted the platform of acceptance in a system of trial and initiation. 

     

Turco's work--and this book--its format, its neat politeness, its formal presentation--with its brief "Forward" by Donald Justice, no less (who, I must presume, was one of Turco's teachers at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop)--indeed, Justice had hardly published his own first trade collection, The Summer Anniversaries [Middletown, Connecticut, Wesleyan University Press, 1960], at the moment he was writing the ''Forward"--as Justice, certainly one of the greatest stars in the Iowa Workshop firmament of graduate-teaching-assistant-poets--would certainly represent the true spirit of that institution--its purpose, its meaning, its expression, its perpetuation as a social/political/literary/academic vehicle--so seeing this book of Turco's brought me immediately face to face with an artifact of literary history: A moment in which the hegemony and influence of the Iowa Workshop as a literary and academic force in the world of letters may have been--oh, surely, was!--at its height.    

 

      

First Poems, as an artifact of a certain set of presumptions and cliches, not just of poetry, but of book-making and presentation of text, has a characteristic purity and specificity which captures a whole period and style of literary activity, one which from this perspective, circa 2009, might strike one as extraordinarily dated. As opposed to "timeless" against which the temporality of a "living literature" might be posited. 

As an exercise--or a demonstration--of the modes of formality, let me quote the jacket blurb of this book, in its entirety:

   These poems, modestly labeled "first," certainly will not be the last from Lewis Turco. He notes that they reflect an experimental period in his development, emphasizing his concern for "technique, sound, thought, language, and the host of detail which any craftsman must master." In spite of his youth--he is only twenty-six--he has already mastered that technique and acquired a virtuosity which glides easily over the intricacies of ancient verse forms, and the subtleties of modern ones, besides inventing a few of his own.

   

   Yet there is much more to his verse than mere technical proficiency. He insists that facility with language should be subservient to clarity of meaning; and what is meaningful to Turco concerns people, their lives and emotions. Hence the moving quality of his character sketches, in which a caustic wit, and sometimes youthful impudence, are softened by genuine compassion.

   This winnowing of his best early poems marks the synthesis of his technical experimentation, the development of a style of his own, and the direction of his future work. "Crow," which he calls a pivotal poem of his collection, hints the trend of his next book, Raceway and Other Poems, already written and recorded for the American Poets Collection of the Library of Congress.

   The Editors of the Book Club for Poetry are excited over this young poet and his predictable future.  Indeed, anyone who is not excited after reading this book does not deserve a real poet!

   Readers curious about the person behind the poems will find his vital statistics comparatively unexciting:--Born in Buffalo, the son of an Italian Baptist minister, he grew uup in Connecticut, enlisted in the Navy, and after his term of duty (which he seems to have spent mainly in learning the technique of verse writing) married Jean Houdlette, a hometown girl, and entered the University of Connecticut. Graduating in three years, he taught a term there, and then went to the University of Iowa as a graduate fellow, where he is now a member of the Writer's Workshop and studying for his M.A. in English.

The Book Club for Poetry, it turns out, was an organization of the publisher, Golden Quill Press, comprised of a committee of three, which chose the books for publication from among submissions--presumably in the manner of a contest. 

As an exercise, it's useful to note the underlying presumptions behind the implied judgments in this blurb--"mastered that technique" "acquired a virtuosity" "glides easily over the intricacies of ancient verse forms" "technical proficiency" "the synthesis of technical experimentation" "the development of a style"--all descriptive phrases which originate in a concept of poetry which takes the imitation of traditional forms and patterns as a given, at least for the beginning apprentice. Turco's "mastery" of traditional form was acquired through "experimentation"--not an experimentation with new or different form, but with rhyme and meter as numerical or linguistic variation, a preoccupation that would characterize his poetry and his thinking about poetry for the rest of his life (Lewis Turco, The New Book of Forms, University Press of New England, 1986--a compendium of the categories and variation of poetic techniques).

Let's quote the full text of Donald Justice's "Forward" to the book, to see what it might tell about the meaning of Turco's talent, as seen through the eyes of his mentor/teacher at Iowa:

   These are the poems Lew Turco wrote in his early twenties, while he was trying out his talent, seeing which way it wanted to go, and one of the interests they are likely to have for the future is that of a literary record, the record of a poet's initiation into the rites of the craft.

   There is a good deal here of what some people call versifying, meaning something unpleasant, perhaps. It is as if the poet had come across a handbook on versification and set himself to working out the problems there, as the student of mathematics might do, a process sure to appall the tender-minded. The models to be found in such handbooks are, to be sure, appalling enough, clever at best and very soft. But Mr. Turco is not soft and he is very clever. One is reminded less of the H.C. Bunners of this world than of someone like Hardy, that great versifier who was also, at times, a great poet. There is something of Hardy's approach to poetry here, not that of the gloomy philosopher, but of the poet who set himself repeatedly the most trying technical problems and in solving them took and gave pleasure both.

   For part of Lewis Turco's exuberance, which is everywhere in evidence, is a matter of technique. No reader can avoid noticing the variety of forms here. There are sapphics, several of the French forms, sonnets, syllabics, and a number of what this young poet, who originated the form, calls "triversens," or triple-verse-sentences; curiously, no villanelles, no sestinas--fashionable forms at the moment. The result of all this is, on occasion, a highly agreeable kind of showing off, not far from the young Rimbaud's when he chose to make a refrain out of that impossible line, Ithyphalliques et pioupiesques.

   A bright and productive future is the easiest thing in the world to predict for Lew Turco, who is just turning twenty-six. Meanwhile, reading this book is a little like listening to a gifted musician practicing scales, arpeggios, and the sonatas of Clementi. Very pleasant to hear, of course, and I think most of us will want to take tickets for the concert.

   Donald Justice

   Iowa City, Iowa

   April 3, 1960

By the age of 26, then, Turco had managed to place his poems in dozens of the then reigning periodicals of the day, including Antioch Review, Carleton Miscellany, Kenyon REview, New Orleans Poetry Journal, San Francisco Review, Shenandoah, etc. Dozens and dozens more would follow throughout his life. Justice's short note, as always, is ironically diffident, damning with faint praise, while placing Turco, alongside himself, in the company of poets for whom a knowledge of complex and varied traditional forms is at least a prerequisite to serious composition. In short, Turco was one of the Workshop's prize students of that day (1960), the inheritor of a critical and editorial brand of writing which had dominated American (and British) verse since World War II. Karl Shapiro, Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, Anthony Hecht, Mona Van Duyn, Philip Levine had all taught or been students there in the 1940's-50's. It seems fair to say that the dominant trend of poetic theory and writing in the 15 years leading up to the publication of Turco's First Poems was primarily formalistic. The Formalists had won the day, though their time would soon come to a close, as the 1960's ushered in a disintegration of this hegemony of publication, editorial opinion, and academic preoccupation. It was in 1960 that Donald Allen's New American Poetry hit the stalls, a harbinger of convulsive change. 

 

Here's a poem from Turco's book, typical in many respects of the collection as a whole, both in its formal play, trite tone, and in its showy, knowing manner. 

 

 

ODE FOR THE BEAT GENERATION

 

Sophia chatters.

  Time goes down in mirrors,

For nothing matters.

 

Horace listens while

  Sophia chatters.

    Time goes down in mirrors,

  For nothing matters;

Hence, his worldly smile.

 

The phonograph spins out its tune.

  Horace listens while

    Sophia chatters.

      Time goes down in mirrors,

    For nothing matters.

  Hence, his worldly smile:

The pair will love each other soon.

 

Outdoors, the shadows listen as

  The phonograph spins out its tune.

    Horace listens while

      Sophia chatters.

        Time goes down in mirrors,

      For nothing matters;

    Hence: his worldly smile.

  The pair will love each other soon,

Their movements metronomed by jazz.

 

        Sophia chatters.

      Horace listens while

    The phonograph spins out its tune.

  Outdoors the shadows listen as

Time goes down in mirrors.

  Their movements metronomed by jazz,

    The pair will love each other soon.

      Hence! his worldly smile...,

        For nothing matters. 

                    

I think it would not be too much to claim that the workshop system of the 1950's actually encouraged this kind of writing, inasmuch as the emphasis upon the mastery of "traditional forms" was deemed to represent both a useful qualification and a healthy exercise for the poet bent on achieving public recognition, and the possibility of academic placement. Once you'd mastered (demonstrated) an ability to "fill" empty forms with grammatically correct speech, and managed to make some kind of resonant sense (however trivial), you were then "ready" to talk of important things, and to "say" what you'd now be entitled (and trained) to say, in verse. As Justice says in his Forward, "one of the interests they [the poems] are likely to have for the future is that of a literary record, the record of a poet's initiation into the rites of the craft." In other words, the correct path of approach to the role of poet in mid-Century America, is by way of an "initiation" into the "rites of the craft" (i.e., the proper imitation, the practice and performance of formal patterns from the history of poetry).

 

Is it an exaggeration to suggest that the workshop system, as well as the periodical and publication editorial establishment (along with the grants/awards/contests systems), have always functioned together, mutually reinforcing each other, in a tacit combination of judgment and encouragement designed to preserve a narrow definition of the kind of poetry which a master-apprentice relationship sets up? 

 

The narrow definition of English verse which comes down through the university and college system in the 20th Century--for the first time, really, in an academic, as opposed to an aesthetically "secular" medium--dominates our literary scene, certainly until well towards the end of the millennium. Isn't it possible, too, that the very institutional habits which produced apprentice-work, like Turco's (in 1960), exists today? We tend to think that our age, our era, is enlightened by comparison with earlier times and styles. Fashions do change, but do they change according to influences and discoveries from within, or without the dominant institutional channels which govern public taste and awareness? 

 

With Jorie Graham and Lyn Hejinian recently instructing at the Iowa Workshop, we tend to think that there has taken place a turnover, of an attitude and an approach to composition, which these poets' presence and position suggests, demonstrating (signifies) a dramatic change in the way that literature, as an activity and practice, is perceived. But does it? Institutional systems like the Iowa Workshop are designed to function as continuing programs, self-contained, self-referential, in perpetuity. The superficial styles of writing considered as models may change somewhat, but the meaning of the process does not. 

 

True original writing does not require a workshop setting. As the example of Turco shows, his discrete, playful interest in formal shapes--"practicing scales" like Clementi--preceded his participation in the workshop, but he was cycled through it precisely because his approach was formalist, not formally experimental. What workshop writers "look for" in probable applicants--as in probable faculty--is a "demonstrated" skill. That skill may be in writing palindromes or haiku or villanelles--or even in making "accidental" poems from chance methods (which often look and sound quite predictable), but the criteria under which such a system functions doesn't change. The means by which formal innovation is carried out, does not, cannot, by definition and practice, occur within an institutional setting. All these facilities do is capture available stereotypes of established use, perhaps offering convenient opportunities for comparison and evaluation of the past. Whatever is "taught" at a place like the Iowa Workshop isn't new writing--it's old writing, writing of 10, 20, 50, 100 years ago. As much as we might like to think that this year's workshop instructors and students are struggling against the confines of the given, to achieve an originality of expression and utterance, to "make it new" (in the famous injunction by Pound), it's inevitable that the system under which they labor legislates against any kind of innovation. That's why the avant garde and the classroom forever repel each other.