(Turner Cassity is like a highly accomplished traditional ...)
Turner Cassity is like a highly accomplished traditional composer - Camille Saint-Saëns, say, or Richard Strauss - who does not doubt that the music is the score and the score is the music. That is, poetry is verse and verse is poetry. Given that confidence, he is prepared to take on any subject. In the forty years he has been publishing, Mr. Cassity has never once written about nothing. Without being predictable, his material nevertheless has certain orientations: colonialism, the military, the Sun Belt, popular culture, Biblical figures, the Muslim countries, architecture, technology, banking. ... Although he can be a relentless satirist - idealists are repeatedly savaged - he has surprising sympathies. NCO Clubs should erect a monument to him. Now and then he writes a personal poem, though one suspects it is with some effort. Most of his oeuvre is very impersonal third person. Mr. Cassity’s work makes one realize that there is a difference between a truly intellectual poem and a mindless poem on an intellectual subject. Although the author suggested that students of Western Imperialism would have a special interest in this book, we would recommend it to readers of first-rate contemporary poetry as well.
(As he approaches eighty, Turner Cassity may finally be ou...)
As he approaches eighty, Turner Cassity may finally be out of control. His hatchet has never fallen more lethally, meaning if you have the stomach for him he is more enjoyable than ever. Under the blade come to Martha Graham, Johann Sebastian Bach, musicologists, tree huggers, Frank Gehry, folk music, folk art of all times and all places, folk... There are, however, his unpredictable sympathies: Edith Wilson, skyscrapers, Pontius Pilate, Pilate’s legionnaires. He obviously has a soft spot for Pop Culture, although he cannot avoid seeing it de haut en bas. As usual, he is all over the place geographically. One feels he would slash his wrists before he would write a poem about any city on the traditional Grand Tour. Manaus, Campeche, Trieste, Budapest (as destroyed by Godzilla) - these are his places. He has a disturbing willingness to write on both sides of an issue, resembling in this Bernard Shaw. You have to read very carefully to see whether he tips his hand. One looks forward to Mr. Cassity’s posthumous poems when he is beyond the reach of libel. For now, at least, we have Devils & Islands.
Turner Cassity was an American poet, playwright, and author. His poetry is renowned for its satiric humor and tight structure.
Background
Turner Cassity was born on January 12, 1929, in Jackson, Mississippi, United States. He was the son of Allen Davenport and Dorothy (Turner) Cassity. He told about his family, "My father's mother's family were cabinetmakers in Texarkana before the Civil War. During the war, they evaded conscription and profiteered by turning their talents and their equipment to the manufacture of gun stocks. By the 1880s they controlled the means of production and were sawmilling in Louisiana, first in Webster and later in Bienville Parish. My great-grandfather Cassity, who did fight in the Civil War, was so unreconstructable that he afterward joined Quantrill's Raiders. The story in the family is that he quarreled with Quantrill over the killing of Yankees. Whether killing too many or killing too lewis not certain. He then fled, depending on which story you accept, to Panama or to Nicaragua. I should like to think of him as filibustering with Walker or wallowing in the corruption of the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, but the chronology does not quite work out in either case. My father's mother, who was badly crippled by arthritis, had notions about the plant life as idiosyncratic as mine. She took great pleasure in gardening - well, in the gardening of her yard boys - but for her, it was a morality play. My mother and her mother were musicians in silent-movie theatres."
Education
In 1947 Turner Cassity graduated from Central High School in Jackson, Mississippi, United States. In 1951 he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from Millsaps College. In 1952 he obtained a Master of Arts degree from Stanford University. In 1956 Cassity gained a Master of Science degree from Columbia University.
Turner Cassity was an assistant librarian at the Jackson Municipal Library from 1957 to 1958. One day when a stranger came in and asked if he would like to work in South Africa, Cassity's response was an emphatic "yes." For the next two years, he was an assistant librarian at the Transvaal Provincial Library in Pretoria, South Africa. When Cassity returned to the United States, he joined the staff of the Robert Woodruff Library at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. He served as chief of the serials and binding department at the library from 1964 until his retirement in 1991.
Watchboy, What of the Night? (1966), Cassity’s first book, is a collection of fifty-six poems, the majority of which had appeared first in Poetry magazine. The book is divided into six named sections and has a multinational focus; Cassity draws from his life in Mississippi, his service in the United States Army stationed in Puerto Rico, and his work in South Africa. He easily mixes French, Dutch, German, and English into many of the pieces. Between 1966 and 1986, when Hurricane Lamp was published, Cassity brought out seven more books of various sizes, some in limited editions with small presses noted for their exceptional book design and quality crafting with special papers, types, and bindings.
In 1983 Cassity published Keys to Mayerling with Robert L. Barth, a poet and small press publisher in Florence, Kentucky, who produced The Book of Alna and a second printing of Keys to Mayerling in 1985. In 1987 Barth and Cassity collaborated on a sixteen-page limited edition collection of verse entitled Lessons, and in 1988, Barth, Susan Barth, and Charles Gullans compiled a descriptive bibliography of Cassity’s publications from 1952 to 1987. Hurricane Lamp and Between the Chains were published in the Phoenix Poetry Series of the University of Chicago Press. Hurricane Lamp has fifty-eight poems and was written with the aid of the 1980 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant.
His other works include Lessons (1987), 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), Devils & islands: poems (2007).