Lewis Turco

Lewis P. Turco (born May 2, 1934), is an American poet, teacher, and writer of fiction and non-fiction. Turco is an advocate for Formalist poetry (or New Formalism) in the United States.

Life and work
Turco took a keen interest in poetry as a teenager and after high school, while serving in the U.S. Navy aboard the USS Hornet, he had work published in various little magazines and quarterlies. He graduated from the University of Connecticut in 1959, published his First Poems in 1960, and completed an MA at the University of Iowa in 1962 (at the Iowa Writers' Workshop). It was there that he cultivated an interest in formal verse and began, to use his words, "collecting forms." Turco collected these forms in the Book of Forms, published in the 1960s, a time when it would seem odd to do so since most poets were writing free verse.

Turco taught at Fenn College in Cleveland (now Cleveland State University) where he founded the Cleveland Poetry Center and at the State University of New York at Oswego where he was founding Director of the Program in Writing Arts. In retirement he now resides in Dresden, Maine, with his sweet wife, Jeannie. He has two granddaughters of which he is very found of. These lovely girls go by the name of Jessima and Phoebe.

He writes and posts almost daily on his blog Poetics and Ruminations.

In 1986 Lewis Turco won the Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America for his book of criticism "Visions and Revisions of American Poetry" and in 1992 he received a Distinguished Alumnus Award from the Alumni Association of the University of Connecticut. He was inducted into the Meriden, Connecticut, Hall of Fame in 1993, and in 1999 he received the John Ciardi Award for lifetime achievement in poetry sponsored by the National Italian American Foundation. In May 2000 he received an honorary degree, Doctor of Humane Letters, from Ashland University in Ohio and a second from the University of Maine at Fort Kent in 2009. His book Satan's Scourge: A Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697 won the Wild Card category of the New England Book Festival in the same year.

Among Turco's former students is National Book Award-winning and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist author Alice McDermott (BA, SUNY Oswego, 1975, NBA for Charming Billy, 1998); Robert O'Connor (author), author of Buffalo Soldiers; Ben Doyle (now writing under the name Ben Doller), who won the Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets for his first book ''Radio! Radio!'' in 2001; Christian Langworthy; Diana Abu-Jaber; Matthew Spireng.

Turco also published work under the pseudonym Wesli Court, which is an anagram of his name.

Recent work
Recent books are Satan's Scourge, a Narrative of the Age of Witchcraft in England and New England 1580-1697; La Famiglia /  the Family, Memoirs, and  a free on-line e-chapbook of poems titled Attic, Shed, and Barn, all published in 2009. In the same year he started a new venture to collect more forms at a blog called The Book of Odd and Invented Forms.

Turco's classification of rhymes
In his book The New Book of Forms (University Press of New England, 1986), Turco gives the following classification of rhymes:
 * 1) End rhyme full rhyme at line endings
 * 2) Falling rhyme (or feminine rhyme) is rhyme for feminine endings with stress pattern / x, example: falling / calling
 * 3) Light rhyme example: falling / ring (Dale calls this Uneven Rhyme)
 * 4) Internal rhyme rhymes line end with word in the middle of the same line
 * 5) Linked rhyme rhyme end of one line with beginning of next
 * 6) Interlaced rhyme  rhymes middle of one line with middle of next line
 * 7) Cross rhyme rhymes ending of one line with middle of adjacent line
 * 8) Head rhyme rhymes syllables at the beginning of lines
 * 9) Apocopated rhyme breaks a word across a line-break; example: morn- / -ing / born
 * 10) Enjambed rhyme uses first sound of next line to make rhyming unit; example: he / descended / seed)
 * 11) single rhyme
 * 12) double rhyme
 * 13) triple rhyme
 * 14) compound rhyme treats groups of words as though they were one word; example: people call work / maid-of-all-work.
 * 15) mosaic rhyme is compound + normal; example: shy lot / pilot
 * 16) trite rhyme is the used of overused rhymes
 * 17) omoioteleton
 * 18) rich rime, rime riche, false rhyme example: cyst / persist / insist
 * 19) consonance, slant-rhyme, off-rhyme, near-rhyme allows similar sounds, example: bridge / hedge / gouge / rage / rouge)
 * 20) analyzed rhyme example: moon / divine / chide / brood
 * 21) wrenched rhyme ... a pun ... example: rhinestones / noses to their grindestones
 * 22) amphisbaenic rhyme or backward rhyme; examples: later / retail, or stop / pots
 * 23) Lyon rime ... word by word pailindrome structure of a stanza
 * 24) sight rhyme or eye rhyme: example: eight / sleight
 * 25) dialect rhyme is rhyme that s true rhyme in a particular dialect
 * 26) historical rhyme is rhyme that was true rhyme in another historical period
 * 27) echo
 * 28) alliteration
 * 29) cynghanedd


 * 1) ... see Peter Dale's classification of rhymes

Awards and honors

 * First Poems was a selection of The Book Club for Poetry In 1960.
 * The Compleat Melancholick, supported by a National Endowment for the Arts grant, was published in 1985, received a Chicago Book Clinic Exhibit Certificate of Award in 1986, and was selected for inclusion in the National Endowment for the Arts' New American Writing Exhibits at the International Book Fairs of Frankfurt and Liber.
 * Chapbook prizes include The Sketches, a 1962 American Weave Award volume; A Family Album, the Silverfish Review Chapbook Award for 1990, and Murmurs in the Walls, winner of the Cooper House Chapbook Competition in 1992.
 * In 1998 A Book of Fears: Poems won the first Bordighera Bi-Lingual Poetry Prize.
 * A second edition of The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, originally published in 1968 and known to The New Formalists as “The poet’s Bible,” was published as The New Book of Forms in 1986, and a Third Edition appeared in 2000.
 * A companion to The Book of Forms, The Book of Literary Terms, was a 1999 Choice “Outstanding Academic Book” in 2000; and a third, the 2004 The Book of Dialogue, was chosen in 2005 as a “University Press Book Selected for Public and Secondary School Libraries.”
 * In 1986 Turco’s book of criticism, Visions and Revisions of American Poetry, won the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Cane Award.