Fantaseers A Book of Memories

In 2004 Star Cloud Press of Scottsdale, Arizona, published both A Sheaf of Leaves: Literary Memoirs and The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, two of the most recent books by Lewis Turco, who was the founding director of both the Cleve-land State University Poetry Center, in 1962, and of the Program in Writing Arts at the State University of New York, from 1968 through 1995. He is the author of some 44 books, monographs and chapbooks including The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics (1968); Awaken, Bells Falling: Poems 1959-1968 (1968); The New Book of Forms (1986); Visions and Revisions of American Poetry (winner of the Poetry Society of America’s 1986 Melville Cane Award for literary criticism); The Shifting Web: New and Selected Poems (1989), The Public Poet: Five Lectures on the Art and Craft of Poetry (1991); and Emily Dickinson: Woman of Letters, Poems and Centos from Lines in Emily Dickinson’s Letters (1993). He was the 1997 winner, with his Italian translator Joseph Alessia, of the first annual Bordighera Bilingual Poetry Prize for his A Book of Fears (1998); a chapbook of memoirs, Shaking the Family Tree, was published simultaneously. The Book of Literary Terms, The Genres of Fiction, Drama, Nonfiction, Criticism and Scholarship was published in 1999 and was cited by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Title for the year 2000. In the latter year a companion volume, the third edition of The Book of Forms, A Handbook of Poetics was published, and in 2004 a third volume in the series was published, The Book of Dialogue, all by the University Press of New England. Mr. Turco has collaborated with various artists over the years. At S.U.N.Y. Oswego the poet collaborated first in 1966 with the printmaker Thom. Seawell in three poemprints. Their final collaboration was on a book, The Inhabitant, poems, with prints by Thom. Seawell, including the inspiration for the book a fold-out reproduction of a huge woodcut, The House,” by Seawell, both projects funded by summer Faculty Fellowships from the Research Foundation of State University of New York. The book was published by Despa Press in 1970. While the Spider Slept,” a ballet based upon his poem November 22, 1963,” choreographed by Brian Macdonald with music by Maurice Karkoff, was performed in 1968 and subsequently by the Royal Swedish Ballet and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. With the Dutch composer Walter Hekster (who is married to a Reesatnaf, Alice Van Leuvan) Lewis Turco wrote and published a chamber opera, The Fog (Donemus, 1987). Four Turco poems from two short collections, A Family Album (1990), winner of the Silverfish Review Chapbook Award, and Murmurs in the Walls (1992), winner of the Cooper House Chapbook Award, appeared in national juried art and poetry exhibits mounted by the Peconic Gallery of Riverhead, Long Island, New York. The complete series of these poems, The Green Maces of Autumn: Voices in an Old Maine House, was published in 2000 by the Mathom BookTurco, Lewis is the author of 'Fantaseers A Book of Memories', published 2005 under ISBN 9781932842159 and ISBN 1932842152.