Lewis Turco Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Felix Stefanile

Critical Essay by Felix Stefanile

Turco seems to have the whole of the English lyric tradition at his fingertips, and though this is not entirely a good thing—too much tinkle here and there, here a bit of Keats, there a bit of Mother Goose—I belong to the old school, and see in this bravura the commitment of a poet to craft. I trust poets who show clear influences, and I don't trust the groggy, toneless, "spontaneous" mutter of much that goes by the name of verse today among the younger, studiously untutored poets of the confessional school. (p. 297)

I would like to see Turco … return to the inspiration of "The Sketches," the sequence that forms the middle third of [Pocoangelini: A Fantography]. There, in a handful of character vignettes—A. R. Ammons called them "an autobiography of biographies"—we have a poet who is direct, clear-seeing, musical, and quite real. Poems like "Guido the Ice...
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