At the New Poetry list, Sam Gwynn pointed the rest of us to this article on Chaucer as the father of free verse and to this interview with Lewis Turco by Daniel Nester. The first appears to be a sadly typical piece of School of Phlogiston academic sensationalism, extrapolating from Chaucer's not always rigorous adherence to the foreign forms he was adapting to a claim that Chaucer anticipated free verse. The finished work may, of course, be better and more coherent than the blurbish article, but as Timothy Steele sometimes remarks, Chaucer is the only New Formalist.
Nester's interview of Turco, though, is very interesting. Most people who know only The Book of Forms will be surprised at his practicality as a writer and poet — he treats it as a job, and one he does damned well. We could use more of his kind of professionalism in poetry.
I found the Book of Forms in 1978, still in the original format with what Lew told me last summer at West Chester was the ugliest cover he'd ever seen, and I've got it with me right now. Turco was a writer-in-residence at the University of Louisville around that time, when I taught comp and creative writing. I showed him my first sonnet and he said "You're a pretty literary guy, aren't you?" It wasn't a compliment, and it was the perfect thing to say to me.
1:38:49 PM 
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