[Lance Levens]

I have also posted an essay by David Catron over on Musing for Mastery
that contains generous examples of Mr. Cassity's work. Here is a general introduction:


Turner Cassity’s books include Watchboy, What of the Night? (1966); Steeplejacks in Babel (1973); a verse play Silver Out of Shanghai (1973); Yellow for Peril, Black for Beautiful (1975); The Defense of the Sugar Islands (1979); Phaëthon unter den Linden (1979); Keys to Mayerling (1983); The Airship Boys in Africa (1984); a verse play The Book of Alna (1985); Hurricane Lamp (1986); Lessons (1987); a book-length poem To the Lost City, or, the Sins of Nineveh (1989); Between the Chains (1991); The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998); No Second Eden (2002); and Devils and Islands (2007), for which Cassity received a Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association. He has also received the Levinson Prize for Poetry, the Michael Braude Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Ingram Merrill Foundation Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Cassity writes with a voice that is impersonal, sober, and gritty and a language that is at once "clear and mysterious," as critic J. D. McClatchy observes. From Yvor Winters, his teacher at Stanford, Cassity acquired a penchant for both moralism and metrical rigor. A typical Cassity line runs in couplets, but he also uses tercets, quartets, and blank verse, among other variations. His poem "In Sydney by the Bridge," commonly regarded as Cassity's ars poetica, compares verse to the ferry and vers libre to the cruise ship, and hints that "the scheduled ferry, not the cruise ship, [is] precious," for the former is free from detours. Another poem, "The Metrist at the Operetta," indicates that formal verse allows enough freedom for creation since "in the arts / [i]t is the tricks that are the trade."

Cassity's views of the South are iconoclastic, despite his use of traditional literary forms. Though he is a poet from the Bible Belt, he asserts that a poet should be more than a mere teller of moral tales. In "By the Waters of Lexington Avenue," Cassity likens a poet to a steeplejack who builds the modern tower of Babel, a symbol of humanity's "will to power" erected to conquer "the quotidian." To Cassity a poet sings the "[t]wanging sound" of "the elevator cables" sending people up nearer to God.

Moreover, in Cassity's opinion, the meaning of "the South" has broadened and transformed as southerners have traveled and colonized the country and the globe, suffusing new lands with southern regionalism. His poem "Cartography Is an Inexact Science" accentuates his idea of cultural syndication by suggesting that geography is defined more by people's interrelationships than by space: "We thrive a little, one the other's climate, / Our two backs / A sort of landfall." Cassity's poetry depicts a postcolonial South in which sin, avarice, pride, and morality unveil themselves in exotic outposts, in the interplay of colonial forces of the past and postcolonial lives of the present.

Cassity considers himself a southerner yet disagrees with the notion that southernness is merely a "literary convention," since such a convention can no longer describe modern southern life. Rather than continuing the myths of a tragic and guilt-ridden South evoked by Faulkner and other writers, Cassity's poetry implies that southern writers can and should reinvent their language and subject matter.

Considered by poet and critic Dana Gioia to be perhaps the "most brilliantly eccentric poet in America," Cassity continues to use traditional literary form to express his complex and imaginative vision. He lives in Decatur, GA.

(adapted from The New Georgia Encyclopedia)

[Gail White]

Delighted to hear of a another good Southern poet, especially one who does not equate southernness with tragedy, guilt, and madness.
(It goes well with eccentricity, though.)

[Tim Murphy]

In the author bio in Hurricane Lamp, the editor recites all of Turner's academic degrees, the universities, and concludes "but he received his education in the United States Army." No editor wrote that, and you have to love a man who ghost writes that well for a jacket flap. Welcome, Mr. Cassity.

[Kevin Cutrer]

I am looking forward to the discussion. The Poem Tree features some fine examples of his work.

[T.S. Kerrigan]

For years I kept Watchboy, What of the Night? below my bed, hoping that some of its mastery would rub off on me. Sadly, it never did.

[Rose Kelleher]

Thanks for posting that link, Kevin.

His poems are fierce. I like that.

Adding: And much better, more thoughtful, more complex, than that terrible essay gave him credit for. I'm sorry, but Catron made him sound like a crotchety old coot with nothing interesting to say.

Adding: Though he couldn't be more wrong about Robin Hood.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Yes, I agree with Rose that the poet was ill-served by the essayist. The poem about Fortune is especially good.

Nemo

[Rick Joines]

Here is a little entry on Cassity I wrote some time ago (5 years ago!), which is scheduled to appear in the Mississippi Encyclopedia, which is scheduled to appear someday . . . :

Turner Cassity

(Allen) Turner Cassity is a poet whose rigorously formal and wickedly satirical poems take aim at the hubris of human nature. Born 12 January 1929, in Jackson, Mississippi, to Allen and Dorothy (Turner) Cassity, he grew up around his families' sawmill businesses and in silent movie theaters where his mother played piano. Cassity attended Millsaps College (B.A., 1951) and Stanford University (M.A., 1952) where he learned from poet-critic Yvor Winters to eschew the irrational emotionalism of twentieth-century imagistic free verse and master traditional poetic forms. After serving in the Army during the Korean War (1952-1954), Cassity earned a master's degree from Columbia University in library science (1956). Cassity worked at the Jackson Municipal Library (1957-58) and in South Africa at the Transvall Provincial Library (1959-61) before his long tenure at the Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta (1962-1991).

Cassity's poems are an unusual combination of the classical moral austerity of Yvor Winters and the playfully punning exoticism of Wallace Stevens. His sardonic wit skewers the persistent folly of human judgment throughout history from the grandest of human aspirations to conquer the globe to the latest popular culture trends. Among his greatest themes is the role of chance. In "Calvin in the Casino" from his first book, Watchboy, What of the Night? (1966), the theologian of divine election says of the roulette ball, "By whose autonomy one apprehends / The limits where predestination ends." In "Why Fortune Is the Empress of the World,” from Hurricane Lamp (1986), he asks, "What then is human wholly?" Regularity exists in nature, but what characterizes humanity is our reliance not on reason but our turning "To Fortune, as a mindlessness of mind," knowing that "The random that we create creates us." Combining themes of chance, religion, and history in "When in Doubt, Remain in Doubt," from Between the Chains (1991), he writes that Delphi never gave "a competent response. / No oracle does, ever. That is why / Great men consult them. Oracles are doubt / Objectified, but left ambiguous, / So as to force a choice." Here "Harry Truman / Hears exotic dancers speak in tongues. / The meaning is not clear, but just may be / 'Waste not, want not,' of which one must assume / H. heard the first fourth only, as he wastes / Hiroshima and Nagasaki." The predestination that awaits all human vanity is the topic of "WTC" from No Second Eden (2002). Cassity's obsession with fate, the ubiquity of self-love and evil, and the ruins of great cultures zeroes in on New York City, September 11, 2001. He writes, "Against the best advice, / We put up Babel twice," and as the twin symbols of economic might fall, we realize we never relinquished the dream of the Tower of Babel or learned its lesson as we remain "Unschooled as to response."

Cassity's ten volumes of poetry are represented in The Destructive Element: New and Selected Poems (1998). Among his prizes are the Blumenthal-Leviton-Blonder Prize, the Oscar Blumenthal-Charles Leviton Prize, the Michael Braude Award for Light Verse, and the Levinson Prize.

Richard Joines