Lewis Turco Reviews "The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram"

Editor's Note: When P&PC received a gold-foil-wrapped review copy of The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram, our first thought was:

If Ingram, Paul
Has a ball
Writing clerihews,
Who's to lose?

We wondered if the pun on "to lose" and "too loose" was not audible enough. But then our thoughts turned to poet Lewis Turco (pictured here), author of, among other things, The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Who else—cleriwho else—we figured, than Turco to best tell us about the complex structure of the clerihew form as well as its bawdy history, which Ingram has now both inherited and expanded? Publishing both under his own name and the pseudonym Wesli Court, Turco is the author of numerous books including, most recently, The Familiar Stranger (Star Cloud Press) and The Hero Enkidu: An Epic (Pen & Anvil Press), both set to drop this coming week on May 2. (If you're a devoted P&PC reader, you might remember an interview we did with Turco a number of years back about his youthful indiscretions writing sci-fi genre poetry.) In short, we kept the gold foil for ourselves and sent the book to Turco. Here's what he had to say:

According to the publisher, this collection of "lost" clerihews by the "Legendary bookseller at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City, Iowa, Paul Ingram," came to light after having been "long lost," apparently in the author's basement. In his Introduction Ingram says, "I started writing Clerihews about twenty years ago. The process seemed involuntary, rather quick Tourette's-like explosions bound by rhyme and form. I would speak a name and the rest of the poem would spill from me without careful thought."

When I was attending Paul Engle's Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa considerably earlier, in 1959-60, there were two bookshops in town, Iowa Book and Supply, and Prairie Lights, both of which are still there, and both of which I haunted. One of them supplied a book, Green Armor on Green Ground, by Rolfe Humphries, that caused me to begin writing The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, which was published by E. P. Dutton in 1968. This is the way that I describe the verse form called the clerihew in book's fourth edition:

The clerihew, a particular type of epigram, was invented by E[dmund] Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956). It is a quatrain in dipodic [two-beat] meters rhyming aabb, the first line of which is both the title and the name of a person:

SIGMUND FREUD AND KARL JUNG

Sigmund Freud
Became annoyed
When his ego
Sailed to Montego.

Sigmund Freud
Became more annoyed
When his id
Fled to Madrid.

Sigmund Freud
Grew most annoyed
When his superego
Tried to Montenegro.

Sigmund Freud
Was nearly destroyed
When his alter-ego
Showed up in Oswego.

Karl Jung
Found himself among
Archetypes
Of various stripes. 

 Oddly enough, Ingram's collection begins with this clerihew:

Carl Gustav Jung
Was impressively hung,
Which sorely annoyed
The good Dr. Freud. 

Wikipedia says:

"E. C. Bentley (10 July 1875 – 30 March 1956) was a popular English novelist and humorist of the early twentieth century, and the inventor of the clerihew, an irregular form of humorous verse on biographical topics. One of the best known is this (1905):

Sir Christopher Wren
Said, "I am going to dine with some men.
If anyone calls
Say I am designing St. Paul's."

Perhaps in my definition I ought to have said simply "podic" rather than "dipodic," because Clerihew's practice was to allow his lines three, or as many as four beats if an author such as Ingram wishes; even I allowed myself three stresses in some of the lines of my examples above. But the inventor of this form was even less strict than the Wikipedia definition, for sometimes Clerihew (pictured here) didn't write about people:

The art of Biography
Is different from Geography.
Geography is about maps,
But Biography is about chaps. 

And sometimes personal opinion is more important than biography:

What I like about Clive
Is that he is no longer alive.
There is a great deal to be said
For being dead. 

On occasion fiction overcomes even personal opinion in Clerihew's epigrams:

Edward the Confessor
Slept under the dresser.
When that began to pall,
He slept in the hall. 

Clerihew even allowed himself at times to be judgmental:

It was a weakness of Voltaire's
To forget to say his prayers,
And one which to his shame
He never overcame. 

But this is a review, not an encyclopedia entry, and the book under consideration is certainly a worthy descendent of the work of the English journalist who invented the form, which Ingram stretches to the breaking point on occasion:

Margaret Mead
Used to fart when she peed,
A fact well known
To every Samoan. 

Of course, the object of derision in a clerihew must be famous, or at least well-known, if the verselet is going to be effective:

Charles Baudelaire
Picked at his scrotal hair,
And found a weevil
In his Flowers of Evil. 

Baudelaire's reputation has stood the test of time, but other of Ingram's targets may not be quite so lucky:

Forrest Gump
Told Donald Trump
"You know I like you
We have the same IQ."

Although Clerihew was a journalist, it was not his practice to be historically accurate, as Ingram is well aware:

Rebecca West
Became obsessed,
With the nether smells
Of H. G. Wells. 

and

Vivian Vance
Put cheese in her pants,
Both Swiss and Havarti,
When she used to party. 

I might have gone on with this review for quite some time except that a phone call came in from an old friend and colleague, Robert Shure, the author of a little book called Twink, full of epigrams in dialogue form that was popular back in the 1960s and 70s. I hadn't heard from him since those days, so we talked for an hour or more. Besides, I want to leave something for the reader to discover, and there is lots more in The Lost Clerihews of Paul Ingram, which I recommend happily.

Poetry & Pop Culture Heroes: Firefly, Sci-Fi, & the Latterday Chronicles of Lewis Turco

In Joss Whedon's short-lived, much- acclaimed, 2002 TV series Firefly, the show's main characters repeatedly refer to "The Universe" as "The 'verse"—an abbreviation that suggests, to Poetry & Popular Culture at least, that outer space is one big poem and that Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his team of intergalactic space cowboys have set out to read it all.

This overlap of poetry and science fiction isn't new to Firefly, though. While we were browsing the used books section at the local Book Bin, for example, we came across a stack of decrepit old magazines including the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction from February 1962 pictured below. On taking a look at it, we landed on a poem by Lewis Turco—a University of Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and prolific author of a bunch of books including eleven poetry collections and The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Turns out, Turco—who also writes under the pseudonym Wesli Court—penned "Excerpts from The Latterday Chronicle" while studying under Paul Engle and Donald Justice at Iowa. This struck the P&PC office interns as kind of odd, for when they think of poets trained at the Writers' Workshop, they don't at all imagine them wanting to publish in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So we caught up with Turco and asked him to explain himself.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Can you explain yourself?

Lewis Turco: Sure. I wasn't "trained" at the Workshop, I was almost entirely self-taught. I was publishing poems in my home-town paper's poetry column all through high school, and when I graduated in 1952, I went into the Navy for four years where I bought and studied prosody books and anthologies of modern poetry. I began publishing in the "little" magazines when I was 19 years old...

P&PC: Wait a minute. What do you mean you wrote for the local paper? Did you write good bad poetry?

LT: You bet. In my teens I was a high school correspondent and cub reporter for the Meriden, CT, Morning Record, and I was the morgue clerk—the "morgue" is the clippings file that newspapers kept of their stories which were clipped out and filed for future reference. I won a local fiction prize in 1949 and that story was my first publication in a local paper. From then on I wrote all sorts of things, including news items and verse for the local papers.

P&PC: Sorry to interrupt. Back to sea.

LT: In the Navy, I was a yeoman—not an English farmer but an office clerk—and sailed around the world (actually) aboard an aircraft carrier, the Hornet. There's nothing for a clerk to do at sea, so I read a lot and wrote a lot—the ship had a good library. By the time I got out of the Navy and went to college, I was already better published than many of my teachers at UConn. In college, after the Navy, besides receiving the G.I. Bill (which is why I'd enlisted), I was awarded two scholarships by the Record newspaper. The reason I got into the Workshop was because of my publication record.

P&PC: "Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle" (pictured to the left) wasn't the first poem you'd published in Fantasy and Science Fiction either. What did people make of this habit?

LT: While I was a grad student in the Workshop, I submitted two poems to F&SF, which I'd been reading since issue one. Both were accepted, and the first, "A Great Grey Fantasy," was published almost immediately, in January of 1960. "Excerpts" wasn't published until 1962. I don't remember people having any reaction to either poem. The Workshop people would have sneered if they'd known about it, and academics didn't read sci-fi or fantasy then, though they do now.

P&PC: But Engle had just written a libretto for a Hallmark Hall of Fame opera, A Christmas Opera, by Philip Bezanson, which aired in 1960. Would Engle have sneered too?

JT: I'm sure he would not have. In fact, I was his Editorial Assistant in the Workshop at the time, working on a Hallmark anthology, Poetry for Pleasure, and another for Random House, Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so I may have shown him "A Great Grey Fantasy," though maybe not—he was gone off campus so much.

P&PC: Where's the rest of The Latter Day Chronicle?

LT: There is no more. The "Excerpts" were merely meant to suggest the rest of it.

P&PC: We're used to talking about "genre fiction." What would it mean to talk about "genre poetry" as well? You know, "I read a lot of sci-fi poetry..."

LT: I don't know if it still exists, but there used to be a Science Fiction Poetry Association located in Los Angeles. They published a magazine called Star*Line, and I used to publish there and in their Rhysling Anthology of prize poems. But you know, this idea of "genre" writing annoys the hell out of me. Edgar Allan Poe wrote fantasy poetry, and so have poets throughout history. Anybody ever read Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or The Faerie Queene, or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," or "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Gimme a break.

P&PC: Well, what's the future hold for such poetry then?

LT: Last night my wife and I went to see the new movie Avatar. It's a great sci-fi/fantasy flick, the biggest one ever and great fun. I suspect that writers of all kinds are going to keep on writing imaginative literature in every genre. When I was teaching, I used to tell my students, "Writing is writing." There will continue to be good writing in every genre.

P&PC: Live long and prosper, then.

LT: May the force be with you.