RIP Lewis Turco
He may have been out of the spotlight for a while, but the loss of Lewis Turco is still a loss for formal poetry. He had forgotten more about form and meter than most of us will ever learn. Since 2012, I have kept his Book of Forms as close as any thesaurus or other reference, and it has traveled with me to many conferences.
I only met Lewis once, at West Chester in 2013. After we were introduced (I forget by whom), we had a short discussion about the terzanelle form he had invented by merging the terza rima and villanelle forms. I asked him if he had intended the terzanelle to be a "closed" form; i.e., limited to 19 lines. He responded that he thought of it as a closed form. I then told him that I had written a terzanelle, but it had an extra tercet, so it was 22 lines. Was that ok? He said "that's fine" and made it clear that he had no problem with doing that. That was the extent of the conversation, but for me it served as an example of Lewis' receptiveness to experimentation with forms. He was not the strict, hide-bound formalist he is sometimes presented as. The terzanelle was, after all, one of his many inventions.
I haven't had any contact with Lewis since that one in 2013, but I still feel I owe him a lot as a writer of formal poetry. RIP indeed.
|