Frederick Turner (poet)
Encyclopedia
Frederick Turner is an American poet
, polymath and academic. He is the author of two science fiction epic poems, The New World and Genesis, several books of poetry, and a number of scholarly works on topics ranging from beauty
and the biological basis of artistic production and appreciation to complexity and Julius Thomas Fraser
's umwelt theory of time.
and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (a terminal degree equivalent to the Ph.D.) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977. His brother is Robert Turner
.
Frederick Turner is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, having held academic positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara (assistant professor 1967-72), Kenyon College (associate professor 1972-85), and the University of Exeter in England (visiting professor 1984-85). From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review. He has been married since 1966 to Mei Lin Turner (née Chang, a literary periodical editor), and has two sons.
Turner's UT Dallas faculty page
As a poet he is known especially for his use of the longer genres, the narrative, science fiction, and strict metrical forms, and his work in these areas has been widely discussed. He is a founder of and spokesman for two recent and influential movements in contemporary American poetry, the New Formalism and the New Narrative (sometimes named together as Expansive Poetry).
His epic poems The New World and Genesis have been the subject of several critical studies, theses and dissertations. Some of his poems have been set to music by the composers Stefania de Kenessey and Claudia Annis.
He is a winner of the Milan Fust Prize (Hungary's highest literary honor), the Levinson Poetry Prize (awarded by Poetry), the PEN Dallas Chapter Golden Pen Award, the Missouri Review essay prize, the David Robert Poetry prize, the Gjenima Prize, and several other literary, artistic and academic honors, and has participated in literary and TV projects that have respectively won a Benjamin Franklin Book Award and an Emmy. He is a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008 (46 international nominations).
1983 Levinson Prize
1995 Milán Füst prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth)
Deep Sea Fish (poetry). Santa Barbara, California: Unicorn Press, 1968.
Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (criticism). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.This book, a revised and expanded version of Turner's Oxford dissertation, shows through close analysis of Shakespeare’s poems and plays that he had a coherent philosophy of the nature of time, in which human moral purposes were at odds with the entropic and deterministic features of physical time and with social institutions based on a reduction of human motivations to such features. J.T. Fraser, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, invited Fred to contribute to the Society on the basis of this book.
Between Two Lives (poetry). Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1972. Turner’s first full length book of poetry. Though it is partly in the form he inherited from his times, the free verse existentialist autobiographical lyric, its second half has already begun to break with those traditions and uses metrical forms and complex narrative devices. Fred’s philosophical tendency is already in evidence.
Romeo and Juliet (critical edition of Shakespeare’s play). London: London UP, 1974. A student edition of the play, whose introduction emphasizes the differences between the psychology and spiritual ethics of the old and the young, especially with respect to how they perceive time.
A Double Shadow (science fiction). New York: Berkeley/Putnam, 1978. (Also published in England by Dutton, in French by Denoel, and Japanese by Sanrio) Turner’s only published novel (as of 1997; there also exists an unpublished novel, The Sunstone, a thriller set in Africa). A Double Shadow is set on Mars 1,300 years in the future, and describes a future human society of immortals, of three sexes and endowed with godlike physical and mental powers. Their values do not include moral or ethical ones, but are based on strict aesthetic rules that are constantly being refined through competition. The ethos of the novel strongly recalls the Heian Japan of Lady Murasaki’s novel Genji and the aesthetic, performative values of the Balinese as described by Clifford Geertz. In this book Turner discovered the absolute necessity for morality by noting the deficiencies of a purely aesthetic culture that lacked an ethical and moral awareness.
Counter-Terra (poetry). Goleta, California: Christopher’s Books, 1978. These poems, whose entire first printing was destroyed in a California brush fire, are mainly free verse narratives often surreal in mood, though there are also some shorter narrative, philosophical, and lyric poems in formal meter. They emphasize the heroic independence of fictions from the constraints of the real world.
The Return (long poem). Woodstock, Vermont: Countryman Press, 1981. A long narrative poem that nostalgically recalls the ‘sixties, tracing the adventures of two reporters, male and female, who are caught up in the chaos following the fall of Saigon, and captured by Cambodian drug lords; they escape into China, spend time in a communist commune, are released into Burma where they experience enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery, and finally return to America. The poem, composed in a loose five-stress line, seeks a way for America to recover from the cultural wounds suffered in the period, and looks toward the end of modernism.
The New World (epic poem). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Turner’s first poem conceived as an epic (it is probably better described as a romance with epic overtones, like Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated or The Fairy Queene). Set in the Ohio Valley four hundred years in the future, it recounts the Parsifal-like story of the hero James George Quincy and the heroine Ruth McCloud, her father Shaker McCloud, the Black general Anthony Manse, and the sinister Simon Raven. James Quincy leads a confederation of county-sized independent Jeffersonian republics to victory after they have been invaded by a jihad of Appalachian religious fundamentalists. The poem is a meditation on the mysterious power of goodness when united with a full Nietzschean awareness of the gamelike rules of any moral system.
The Garden (poems and aphorisms). Algonac, Michigan: Ptyx Press, 1985. Some people regard this as Fred’s finest work. It embodies the paradise-like experience Fred enjoyed during his fifth year in Ohio, when he was building a house and garden, reading deeply in science, theology, philosophy, nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, and poetry, and awaiting the birth of his second son, Victor Benjamin Turner. Here the core of Fred’s cosmology, psychology, ethics, and social philosophy, founded deeply on the theory of evolution, is first tentatively explored. At first Fred was not interested in publishing this book, nor did he believe that it could be published, as it so completely rejected the poststructuralist and late modernist theory of the time. A friend, Edwin Watkins, published it, partly at his own personal expense.
Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science (interdisciplinary studies). New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986. Reprinted in paperback UP of Virginia, 1991. The first of five books outlining in prose the ideas discovered in The Garden and The New World. It contains several essays that have been reprinted many times, including The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time, which summarizes Turner's pathbreaking research on the cultural universality and neuroevolutionary foundations of poetic meter, and which has spawned a whole field of audiology and infant brain research. This essay won the Levinson Poetry Prize, and also helped form the intellectual core of the New Formalist movement in American poetry.
Genesis: An Epic Poem (epic poem). Dallas: Saybrook Publishing Co., 1988. This poem is a true epic in form and style. Composed in iambic pentameter, it is exactly 10,000 lines long, and tells of the transformation of Mars into a planet habitable by human beings and Earthly lifeforms. The preface claims that it was not composed by Turner but communicated to him in part by a future poet on a timeline that may not be realized. Genesis is, however, a full expression of Turner’s metaphysics, scientific philosophy, and theology, as well as being an action-packed science fiction narrative of war, family inheritance, betrayal, and gigantic technological achievement. It is something of a cult book in space research circles, and has led to invitations to speak and consult by NASA and the international space science association, COSPAR. It was the subject of a successful master’s thesis by Curtis Carbonell at Clemson University. An excerpt from Genesis is available.
Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education (essays). Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. The second of Turner’s four prose statements of his philosophical principles. The essay on Beauty is the most succinct version of his neuroevolutionary/chaos theory system of aesthetics; the essays on environmentalism have become classics in the fields of landscape architecture and ecological restoration; the essays on performative pedagogy are now being used in a variety of disciplines, including Asian Studies and Performance Studies; the essay on Virginia Woolf’s “immortal conversation” won the Missouri Review Essay Prize; the essay on the human sciences may have been the first application of chaos theory to social and historical studies, and broke new ground in the field of sociology. Originally titled Reconstructive Postmodernism, this book reluctantly abandons the term “postmodern” as an accurate name for the new era; eventually Turner settled for “natural classicism” as his preferred term.
Tempest, Flute, and Oz: Essays on the Future. New York: Persea Books, 1991. The third in the series of books outlining Turner’s theoretical discoveries, this book turns to social, cultural and economic issues arising from the birth of a new age to replace modernism. This book shows how, while in some ages the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past, in the new era the past will create the future by breaking the shackles of the present. Its essay on artificial intelligence has been influential in neural network research, and its essay on angels has been reprinted several times.
Beauty: The Value of Values (monograph). University of Virginia: UP of Virginia, 1991. A monograph on the neurophysiology, evolution, cosmology and psychology of beauty, this book summarizes the aesthetic theory that he believes will energize the new era that is to come. There is special attention to the evolutionary role of shame, chaos/complexity/nonlinearity elements in aesthetic experience, and the neuroanatomy of beauty–which is now being used as a source of hypotheses for MRI brain research.
April Wind (poems). University of Virginia: UP of Virginia, 1991. This collection of short poems written during the 1980s explores a connected group of ideas, feelings, and themes on the experience of beauty. A leader of the New Formalism movement, Turner has said that “meter is no limitation to a poet, but a liberation”. The strict metrical forms of the poems in April Wind illustrates this position. Written while Turner researched the poetic and neurobiological principles he set forth in Beauty: The Value of Values, these passionate and lyrical poems show a variety of moods, voices and worlds. Turner’s poetry embodies the intuition that the human experience of beauty is both ancient and universal. Beauty, he believes, emerged from genetic-cultural coevolution and is part of the awakening of the cosmos. Turner’s work on poetic meter helped to reveal that the three-second line is universal among human cultures, that it is mediated by neurochemical rewards, and that it is in tune with the three-second acoustic information processing pulse in the human brain. The poems in April Wind celebrate the birth and the experience of Turner’s discoveries about the nature of beauty. In his own words, the poems deal with “the nature of beauty itself and the recognition of a universal process of emergent orderliness, a chaotic but self-organizing evolution; the cosmic teleology implied by the anthropic principle in physics; the emergence of value and meaning out of sensory experience; marriage, and its joyful-shameful juxtaposition of animal and spiritual; the connection between beauty and shame; the pain of personal self-consciousness; the problem of death; and the nature of the passage through karmic attachment, sexuality, shame, and death to the mystical experience of beauty”.
Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti (translations with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Miklos Radnoti was a great Hungarian poet tragically murdered as a Jew by the Nazis in 1944. A poet of exquisite beauty, heroic vision, classical sensibility, and astonishing formal virtuosity, his last poems were found in his coat pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass grave after the war. Turner worked closely with his colleague Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, herself a Holocaust survivor, in producing this collection; a particular feature of it is that it preserves in English the meter and rhyme of the original Hungarian. The book won the Milan Fust prize, Hungary’s highest literary honor. An excerpt from Foamy Sky is available.
The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (cultural criticism). New York: The Free Press, 1995. Taking “the third side in the culture wars,” this book is a cultural manifesto that concludes Turner's series of five critical prose works on “natural classicism.” It has been the subject of a Liberty Fund conference, the first devoted exclusively to a living author, and of several essays and monographs. Its highly controversial positions have been attacked by both the right and the left; the right because of its foundational use of evolutionary theory and its defense of liberal freedoms, the left because it systematically refutes the logical and evidentiary underpinnings of much contemporary academic feminist, multiculturalist, environmentalist, and deconstructionist social theory. It welcomes a new era of evolutionary hope.
The Ballad of the Good Cowboy (poetry). Eagle Pass, Texas: Maverick Press, 1997. A small press reprint of a long poem written in the seventies and published in the The Reaper, a literary magazine devoted to narrative poetry. This poem is in the tradition of cowboy poetry, a mystical/comic/mythic adventure of a West in which there was nothing east of Chicago, and three cowboys, based on Parsifal, Bors, and Galahad, set out to rescue Christ’s imprisoned sister from her mysterious snake-eyed abductor. The poem explores Aztec, Northwest Indian, and Eskimo cosmology, and includes an episode at the siege of the Alamo.
Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (essays by various hands, edited with Brett Cooke). Paragon House, 1999.
Hadean Eclogues (poetry). Ashland, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1999.
Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
The Iron-blue Vault: Selected Poems of Attila Jozsef (translations with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath). Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Bloodaxe Books, 1999.
On the Field of Life, On the Battlefield of Truth. Pivot Press, New York, 2004.
Paradise: Selected Poems, 1990-2003. David Robert Books, Cincinnati, 2004.
Natural Religion. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2006. There is widespread belief that the world’s religions contradict each other. It follows that if one religion is true, the others must be false – an assumption that implies, and may actually create, religious strife. In “Natural Religion”, acclaimed poet, critic and essayist Frederick Turner sets out to show that the natural world offers grounds for stating that all religions are, in some respect, true. Through the ages, various ways have been proposed to resolve religious differences. Some argue for the destruction of all religions but one’s own. Others substitute an abstract principle for the real ritual and moral practice of religion. Still others doubt all religious truth and, consequently, all truth. Others accept a kind of pluralistic relativism. This book explores syncretism, whereby all religions are seen as grasping the same strange and complex reality, but by very different means and handles. The idea that all religions are true raises a supervening question: if so, what must the real physical universe be like? Turner approaches these questions in terms of scientific inquiry. There is not enough room in space itself to fit in all theologies; but there may be enough room in time if new scientific descriptions of time’s nature are to be believed. Turner argues that in the time-models of contemporary cosmological and evolutionary science all times may be connected and time may be infinitely branched and causally looped so that both forward-in-time and backward-in-time factors may be in operation in the same event. Thus, the fundamental substance of the universe may be information rather than matter or energy. The universe is more like a vast living organism than a vast machine. Turner argues that all existing religions can be shown to fit into this model, which in turn points to deeper implications of religious doctrines, languages and practices. There would be plenty of “room” in such a view of time for a tree of different, yet linked religious worlds and poetic language may be the most effective tool for describing the divine.
Në Shpellën e Platonit (“In Plato’s Cave”, full-length collection of poems by Frederick Turner translated into Albanian by Gjekë Marinaj). Marinaj Publishing, Dallas, Frankfurt, Tirana, 2006.
The Prayers of Dallas (poetry). Turning Point Press, Cincinnati, Ohio 2006.
Frederick Hart: The Complete Works: Essays by Donald Kuspit and Frederick Turner. Butler Books, Louisville, 2007.
He is a founder of the literary-critical school known as Natural Classicism. His three most recent books of essays and his monograph on beauty explore these ideas. A founder and board member of the International School of Theory in the Humanities, and the Georgia-based Institute of Global Studies, he has helped create institutions that express and develop his cultural ideas.
Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. He has thus been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of esthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory.
His book The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assesses the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology.
He has been a leading theorist of restoration environmentalism, staking out, with William R. Jordan III, a new vision of the human place in nature, where human welfare and technological progress can work with, rather than against, natural evolution.
His contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in the fields of literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, oral tradition studies, landscape architecture, photography, planetary biology, space science, performance theory, photography, education, the sociology of knowledge, ecological restoration, political philosophy, the physics of computation, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory, audiology and speech pathology, Medieval and Renaissance literature, philanthropic theory, media studies, architecture, and art history.
He is or has been a member of several research groups, on subjects including the biological foundations of esthetics, artificial intelligence, ecological restoration, law and systems research, time, interdisciplinarity, the sociological study of emotion, chaos theory and ecopoetics.
His essay (with the distinguished German neuropsychologist Ernst Pöppel) on the neurobiology and cultural universality of poetic meter has been widely cited and reprinted, as have his essays for Harper’s on modernism, education and environmentalism.
He is an adviser to the Society for Ecological Restoration and a contributor to its periodical, Restoration and Management Notes. He has been a consultant to NASA’s long range planning group, and was invited to the Ames Space Center in California with Carl Sagan, Christopher McKay and other experts in 1991 for a workshop on Mars terraforming.
He has been a contributing editor for Reason Magazine and Tech Central Station. He is or has been an advisor to the Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Hellas, Poems and Poetics, The American Arts Quarterly, American Enterprise, Discrete Chaotic Dynamics in Nature and Society, the Djerassi Foundation, the Quest Foundation, the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, the Peace University of Berlin, and the Werner Reimers Stiftung research group on biology and esthetics, and is a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
He has been a trustee of the Greenhill School and the Isthmus Institute, and is the literary adviser for “Wishbone,” the prizewinning children’s literary TV series. He has been an editorial reader for the University Press of Virginia, the Free Press, the University of Missouri Press, The University of Illinois Press, SUNY Press, Behavior and Brain Studies, Mosaic, the University of Pennsylvania Press, MIT Press, and others. He is a black belt (second degree) in the Shotokan school of Karate, and is a senior instructor in the martial arts.
As a translator he has been working for the last several years with a Hungarian colleague, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, on a series of Hungarian poetry translations. They include a major collection of translations of the great Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, who perished in the Holocaust, a collection of the poems of Attila József, and a historically-organized anthology of Hungarian poetry. This work involves unusual methods and theories of translation; the originals, which are often in very strict Magyar meters, are rendered into the identical metrical forms in English, and the translation process is largely oral. The result has been praised for its accuracy and feeling by the Hungarian literary establishment, and greeted on its publication by critical acclaim. More recently he has collaborated with Ozsváth on a collection of translations of the poems of Goethe.
Poet
A poet is a person who writes poetry. A poet's work can be literal, meaning that his work is derived from a specific event, or metaphorical, meaning that his work can take on many meanings and forms. Poets have existed since antiquity, in nearly all languages, and have produced works that vary...
, polymath and academic. He is the author of two science fiction epic poems, The New World and Genesis, several books of poetry, and a number of scholarly works on topics ranging from beauty
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...
and the biological basis of artistic production and appreciation to complexity and Julius Thomas Fraser
Julius Thomas Fraser
J. T. Fraser made important scholarly contributions to the interdisciplinary Study of Time and was a founding member of the International Society for the Study of Time...
's umwelt theory of time.
Life
Frederick Turner was born in Northamptonshire, England, in 1943. After spending several years in central Africa, where his parents, the anthropologists Victor W.Victor Turner
Victor Witter Turner was a British cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage...
and Edith L. B. Turner, were conducting field research, Frederick Turner was educated at the University of Oxford (1962-67), where he obtained the degrees of B.A., M.A., and B.Litt. (a terminal degree equivalent to the Ph.D.) in English Language and Literature. He was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1977. His brother is Robert Turner
Robert Turner (scientist)
Robert Turner is a director at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, and is an internationally recognized expert in brain physics and magnetic resonance imaging...
.
Frederick Turner is presently Founders Professor of Arts and Humanities at the University of Texas at Dallas, having held academic positions at the University of California at Santa Barbara (assistant professor 1967-72), Kenyon College (associate professor 1972-85), and the University of Exeter in England (visiting professor 1984-85). From 1978-82 he was editor of The Kenyon Review. He has been married since 1966 to Mei Lin Turner (née Chang, a literary periodical editor), and has two sons.
Turner's UT Dallas faculty page
Awards
Turner's contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in the fields of literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, oral tradition studies, landscape architecture, photography, planetary biology, space science, performance theory, photography, education, the sociology of knowledge, ecological restoration, political philosophy, the physics of computation, chaos theory, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory, Medieval and Renaissance literature, media studies, architecture, and art history. He is or has been a member of several research groups, on subjects including the biological foundations of esthetics, artificial intelligence, ecological restoration, law and systems research, time, interdisciplinarity, the sociological study of emotion, chaos theory and ecopoetics. His work has been translated and published in Albanian, French, German, Japanese, Hungarian, Italian, Macedonian, Rumanian, Russian, Spanish, Turkish, Vietnamese and other languages. He has lectured or given poetry readings at over two hundred institutions in the U.S., Canada, and Western and Eastern Europe.As a poet he is known especially for his use of the longer genres, the narrative, science fiction, and strict metrical forms, and his work in these areas has been widely discussed. He is a founder of and spokesman for two recent and influential movements in contemporary American poetry, the New Formalism and the New Narrative (sometimes named together as Expansive Poetry).
His epic poems The New World and Genesis have been the subject of several critical studies, theses and dissertations. Some of his poems have been set to music by the composers Stefania de Kenessey and Claudia Annis.
He is a winner of the Milan Fust Prize (Hungary's highest literary honor), the Levinson Poetry Prize (awarded by Poetry), the PEN Dallas Chapter Golden Pen Award, the Missouri Review essay prize, the David Robert Poetry prize, the Gjenima Prize, and several other literary, artistic and academic honors, and has participated in literary and TV projects that have respectively won a Benjamin Franklin Book Award and an Emmy. He is a fellow of the Texas Institute of Letters, and was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2004, 2006, 2007, and 2008 (46 international nominations).
1983 Levinson Prize
1995 Milán Füst prize of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth)
Books
Full list here.Deep Sea Fish (poetry). Santa Barbara, California: Unicorn Press, 1968.
Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (criticism). Oxford: Oxford UP, 1971.This book, a revised and expanded version of Turner's Oxford dissertation, shows through close analysis of Shakespeare’s poems and plays that he had a coherent philosophy of the nature of time, in which human moral purposes were at odds with the entropic and deterministic features of physical time and with social institutions based on a reduction of human motivations to such features. J.T. Fraser, the founder of the International Society for the Study of Time, invited Fred to contribute to the Society on the basis of this book.
Between Two Lives (poetry). Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan UP, 1972. Turner’s first full length book of poetry. Though it is partly in the form he inherited from his times, the free verse existentialist autobiographical lyric, its second half has already begun to break with those traditions and uses metrical forms and complex narrative devices. Fred’s philosophical tendency is already in evidence.
Romeo and Juliet (critical edition of Shakespeare’s play). London: London UP, 1974. A student edition of the play, whose introduction emphasizes the differences between the psychology and spiritual ethics of the old and the young, especially with respect to how they perceive time.
A Double Shadow (science fiction). New York: Berkeley/Putnam, 1978. (Also published in England by Dutton, in French by Denoel, and Japanese by Sanrio) Turner’s only published novel (as of 1997; there also exists an unpublished novel, The Sunstone, a thriller set in Africa). A Double Shadow is set on Mars 1,300 years in the future, and describes a future human society of immortals, of three sexes and endowed with godlike physical and mental powers. Their values do not include moral or ethical ones, but are based on strict aesthetic rules that are constantly being refined through competition. The ethos of the novel strongly recalls the Heian Japan of Lady Murasaki’s novel Genji and the aesthetic, performative values of the Balinese as described by Clifford Geertz. In this book Turner discovered the absolute necessity for morality by noting the deficiencies of a purely aesthetic culture that lacked an ethical and moral awareness.
Counter-Terra (poetry). Goleta, California: Christopher’s Books, 1978. These poems, whose entire first printing was destroyed in a California brush fire, are mainly free verse narratives often surreal in mood, though there are also some shorter narrative, philosophical, and lyric poems in formal meter. They emphasize the heroic independence of fictions from the constraints of the real world.
The Return (long poem). Woodstock, Vermont: Countryman Press, 1981. A long narrative poem that nostalgically recalls the ‘sixties, tracing the adventures of two reporters, male and female, who are caught up in the chaos following the fall of Saigon, and captured by Cambodian drug lords; they escape into China, spend time in a communist commune, are released into Burma where they experience enlightenment in a Buddhist monastery, and finally return to America. The poem, composed in a loose five-stress line, seeks a way for America to recover from the cultural wounds suffered in the period, and looks toward the end of modernism.
The New World (epic poem). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985. Turner’s first poem conceived as an epic (it is probably better described as a romance with epic overtones, like Tasso’s Jerusalem Liberated or The Fairy Queene). Set in the Ohio Valley four hundred years in the future, it recounts the Parsifal-like story of the hero James George Quincy and the heroine Ruth McCloud, her father Shaker McCloud, the Black general Anthony Manse, and the sinister Simon Raven. James Quincy leads a confederation of county-sized independent Jeffersonian republics to victory after they have been invaded by a jihad of Appalachian religious fundamentalists. The poem is a meditation on the mysterious power of goodness when united with a full Nietzschean awareness of the gamelike rules of any moral system.
The Garden (poems and aphorisms). Algonac, Michigan: Ptyx Press, 1985. Some people regard this as Fred’s finest work. It embodies the paradise-like experience Fred enjoyed during his fifth year in Ohio, when he was building a house and garden, reading deeply in science, theology, philosophy, nineteenth and twentieth century fiction, and poetry, and awaiting the birth of his second son, Victor Benjamin Turner. Here the core of Fred’s cosmology, psychology, ethics, and social philosophy, founded deeply on the theory of evolution, is first tentatively explored. At first Fred was not interested in publishing this book, nor did he believe that it could be published, as it so completely rejected the poststructuralist and late modernist theory of the time. A friend, Edwin Watkins, published it, partly at his own personal expense.
Natural Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science (interdisciplinary studies). New York: Paragon House Publishers, 1986. Reprinted in paperback UP of Virginia, 1991. The first of five books outlining in prose the ideas discovered in The Garden and The New World. It contains several essays that have been reprinted many times, including The Neural Lyre: Poetic Meter, the Brain, and Time, which summarizes Turner's pathbreaking research on the cultural universality and neuroevolutionary foundations of poetic meter, and which has spawned a whole field of audiology and infant brain research. This essay won the Levinson Poetry Prize, and also helped form the intellectual core of the New Formalist movement in American poetry.
Genesis: An Epic Poem (epic poem). Dallas: Saybrook Publishing Co., 1988. This poem is a true epic in form and style. Composed in iambic pentameter, it is exactly 10,000 lines long, and tells of the transformation of Mars into a planet habitable by human beings and Earthly lifeforms. The preface claims that it was not composed by Turner but communicated to him in part by a future poet on a timeline that may not be realized. Genesis is, however, a full expression of Turner’s metaphysics, scientific philosophy, and theology, as well as being an action-packed science fiction narrative of war, family inheritance, betrayal, and gigantic technological achievement. It is something of a cult book in space research circles, and has led to invitations to speak and consult by NASA and the international space science association, COSPAR. It was the subject of a successful master’s thesis by Curtis Carbonell at Clemson University. An excerpt from Genesis is available.
Rebirth of Value: Meditations on Beauty, Ecology, Religion, and Education (essays). Albany: SUNY Press, 1991. The second of Turner’s four prose statements of his philosophical principles. The essay on Beauty is the most succinct version of his neuroevolutionary/chaos theory system of aesthetics; the essays on environmentalism have become classics in the fields of landscape architecture and ecological restoration; the essays on performative pedagogy are now being used in a variety of disciplines, including Asian Studies and Performance Studies; the essay on Virginia Woolf’s “immortal conversation” won the Missouri Review Essay Prize; the essay on the human sciences may have been the first application of chaos theory to social and historical studies, and broke new ground in the field of sociology. Originally titled Reconstructive Postmodernism, this book reluctantly abandons the term “postmodern” as an accurate name for the new era; eventually Turner settled for “natural classicism” as his preferred term.
Tempest, Flute, and Oz: Essays on the Future. New York: Persea Books, 1991. The third in the series of books outlining Turner’s theoretical discoveries, this book turns to social, cultural and economic issues arising from the birth of a new age to replace modernism. This book shows how, while in some ages the present creates the future by breaking the shackles of the past, in the new era the past will create the future by breaking the shackles of the present. Its essay on artificial intelligence has been influential in neural network research, and its essay on angels has been reprinted several times.
Beauty: The Value of Values (monograph). University of Virginia: UP of Virginia, 1991. A monograph on the neurophysiology, evolution, cosmology and psychology of beauty, this book summarizes the aesthetic theory that he believes will energize the new era that is to come. There is special attention to the evolutionary role of shame, chaos/complexity/nonlinearity elements in aesthetic experience, and the neuroanatomy of beauty–which is now being used as a source of hypotheses for MRI brain research.
April Wind (poems). University of Virginia: UP of Virginia, 1991. This collection of short poems written during the 1980s explores a connected group of ideas, feelings, and themes on the experience of beauty. A leader of the New Formalism movement, Turner has said that “meter is no limitation to a poet, but a liberation”. The strict metrical forms of the poems in April Wind illustrates this position. Written while Turner researched the poetic and neurobiological principles he set forth in Beauty: The Value of Values, these passionate and lyrical poems show a variety of moods, voices and worlds. Turner’s poetry embodies the intuition that the human experience of beauty is both ancient and universal. Beauty, he believes, emerged from genetic-cultural coevolution and is part of the awakening of the cosmos. Turner’s work on poetic meter helped to reveal that the three-second line is universal among human cultures, that it is mediated by neurochemical rewards, and that it is in tune with the three-second acoustic information processing pulse in the human brain. The poems in April Wind celebrate the birth and the experience of Turner’s discoveries about the nature of beauty. In his own words, the poems deal with “the nature of beauty itself and the recognition of a universal process of emergent orderliness, a chaotic but self-organizing evolution; the cosmic teleology implied by the anthropic principle in physics; the emergence of value and meaning out of sensory experience; marriage, and its joyful-shameful juxtaposition of animal and spiritual; the connection between beauty and shame; the pain of personal self-consciousness; the problem of death; and the nature of the passage through karmic attachment, sexuality, shame, and death to the mystical experience of beauty”.
Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklos Radnoti (translations with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath). Princeton: Princeton UP, 1992. Miklos Radnoti was a great Hungarian poet tragically murdered as a Jew by the Nazis in 1944. A poet of exquisite beauty, heroic vision, classical sensibility, and astonishing formal virtuosity, his last poems were found in his coat pocket when his body was exhumed from a mass grave after the war. Turner worked closely with his colleague Zsuzsanna Ozsvath, herself a Holocaust survivor, in producing this collection; a particular feature of it is that it preserves in English the meter and rhyme of the original Hungarian. The book won the Milan Fust prize, Hungary’s highest literary honor. An excerpt from Foamy Sky is available.
The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit (cultural criticism). New York: The Free Press, 1995. Taking “the third side in the culture wars,” this book is a cultural manifesto that concludes Turner's series of five critical prose works on “natural classicism.” It has been the subject of a Liberty Fund conference, the first devoted exclusively to a living author, and of several essays and monographs. Its highly controversial positions have been attacked by both the right and the left; the right because of its foundational use of evolutionary theory and its defense of liberal freedoms, the left because it systematically refutes the logical and evidentiary underpinnings of much contemporary academic feminist, multiculturalist, environmentalist, and deconstructionist social theory. It welcomes a new era of evolutionary hope.
The Ballad of the Good Cowboy (poetry). Eagle Pass, Texas: Maverick Press, 1997. A small press reprint of a long poem written in the seventies and published in the The Reaper, a literary magazine devoted to narrative poetry. This poem is in the tradition of cowboy poetry, a mystical/comic/mythic adventure of a West in which there was nothing east of Chicago, and three cowboys, based on Parsifal, Bors, and Galahad, set out to rescue Christ’s imprisoned sister from her mysterious snake-eyed abductor. The poem explores Aztec, Northwest Indian, and Eskimo cosmology, and includes an episode at the siege of the Alamo.
Biopoetics: Evolutionary Explorations in the Arts (essays by various hands, edited with Brett Cooke). Paragon House, 1999.
Hadean Eclogues (poetry). Ashland, Oregon: Story Line Press, 1999.
Shakespeare’s Twenty-first Century Economics: The Morality of Love and Money. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
The Iron-blue Vault: Selected Poems of Attila Jozsef (translations with Zsuzsanna Ozsvath). Newcastle upon Tyne, England: Bloodaxe Books, 1999.
On the Field of Life, On the Battlefield of Truth. Pivot Press, New York, 2004.
Paradise: Selected Poems, 1990-2003. David Robert Books, Cincinnati, 2004.
Natural Religion. Transaction Publishers, New Brunswick, NJ, and London, 2006. There is widespread belief that the world’s religions contradict each other. It follows that if one religion is true, the others must be false – an assumption that implies, and may actually create, religious strife. In “Natural Religion”, acclaimed poet, critic and essayist Frederick Turner sets out to show that the natural world offers grounds for stating that all religions are, in some respect, true. Through the ages, various ways have been proposed to resolve religious differences. Some argue for the destruction of all religions but one’s own. Others substitute an abstract principle for the real ritual and moral practice of religion. Still others doubt all religious truth and, consequently, all truth. Others accept a kind of pluralistic relativism. This book explores syncretism, whereby all religions are seen as grasping the same strange and complex reality, but by very different means and handles. The idea that all religions are true raises a supervening question: if so, what must the real physical universe be like? Turner approaches these questions in terms of scientific inquiry. There is not enough room in space itself to fit in all theologies; but there may be enough room in time if new scientific descriptions of time’s nature are to be believed. Turner argues that in the time-models of contemporary cosmological and evolutionary science all times may be connected and time may be infinitely branched and causally looped so that both forward-in-time and backward-in-time factors may be in operation in the same event. Thus, the fundamental substance of the universe may be information rather than matter or energy. The universe is more like a vast living organism than a vast machine. Turner argues that all existing religions can be shown to fit into this model, which in turn points to deeper implications of religious doctrines, languages and practices. There would be plenty of “room” in such a view of time for a tree of different, yet linked religious worlds and poetic language may be the most effective tool for describing the divine.
Në Shpellën e Platonit (“In Plato’s Cave”, full-length collection of poems by Frederick Turner translated into Albanian by Gjekë Marinaj). Marinaj Publishing, Dallas, Frankfurt, Tirana, 2006.
The Prayers of Dallas (poetry). Turning Point Press, Cincinnati, Ohio 2006.
Frederick Hart: The Complete Works: Essays by Donald Kuspit and Frederick Turner. Butler Books, Louisville, 2007.
Other Publications
Criticism
As a literary and cultural critic Turner was first known for his Shakespeare criticism and for his scholarship in the field of English Renaissance philosophy. In recent years he has written on Renaissance science and art, Shakespearean theater and performance, Christopher Marlowe, The Tempest, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and The Merchant of Venice, and his book Shakespeare’s Twenty-First-Century Economics has met with critical acclaim.He is a founder of the literary-critical school known as Natural Classicism. His three most recent books of essays and his monograph on beauty explore these ideas. A founder and board member of the International School of Theory in the Humanities, and the Georgia-based Institute of Global Studies, he has helped create institutions that express and develop his cultural ideas.
Another emphasis has been on the relationship between science and technology on one hand, and the arts and humanities on the other. He has thus been involved in groundbreaking studies of the neurobiology of esthetics, the ritual and performative roots of the arts, and the humanistic implications of evolution, ecology, recombinant DNA technology, space travel, artificial intelligence, brain science, and chaos theory.
His book The Culture of Hope: A New Birth of the Classical Spirit assesses the chances for a revival of our cultural energies at the turn of the millennium, based on the remarkable new developments in scientific cosmology and technology.
He has been a leading theorist of restoration environmentalism, staking out, with William R. Jordan III, a new vision of the human place in nature, where human welfare and technological progress can work with, rather than against, natural evolution.
His contributions as an interdisciplinary scholar have been recognized, cited, or published in the fields of literary and critical theory, comparative literature, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience, sociobiology, oral tradition studies, landscape architecture, photography, planetary biology, space science, performance theory, photography, education, the sociology of knowledge, ecological restoration, political philosophy, the physics of computation, theology, the history and philosophy of science and technology, translation theory, audiology and speech pathology, Medieval and Renaissance literature, philanthropic theory, media studies, architecture, and art history.
He is or has been a member of several research groups, on subjects including the biological foundations of esthetics, artificial intelligence, ecological restoration, law and systems research, time, interdisciplinarity, the sociological study of emotion, chaos theory and ecopoetics.
His essay (with the distinguished German neuropsychologist Ernst Pöppel) on the neurobiology and cultural universality of poetic meter has been widely cited and reprinted, as have his essays for Harper’s on modernism, education and environmentalism.
He is an adviser to the Society for Ecological Restoration and a contributor to its periodical, Restoration and Management Notes. He has been a consultant to NASA’s long range planning group, and was invited to the Ames Space Center in California with Carl Sagan, Christopher McKay and other experts in 1991 for a workshop on Mars terraforming.
He has been a contributing editor for Reason Magazine and Tech Central Station. He is or has been an advisor to the Journal of Social and Biological Structures, Hellas, Poems and Poetics, The American Arts Quarterly, American Enterprise, Discrete Chaotic Dynamics in Nature and Society, the Djerassi Foundation, the Quest Foundation, the Newington-Cropsey Foundation, the Peace University of Berlin, and the Werner Reimers Stiftung research group on biology and esthetics, and is a Fellow of the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
He has been a trustee of the Greenhill School and the Isthmus Institute, and is the literary adviser for “Wishbone,” the prizewinning children’s literary TV series. He has been an editorial reader for the University Press of Virginia, the Free Press, the University of Missouri Press, The University of Illinois Press, SUNY Press, Behavior and Brain Studies, Mosaic, the University of Pennsylvania Press, MIT Press, and others. He is a black belt (second degree) in the Shotokan school of Karate, and is a senior instructor in the martial arts.
As a translator he has been working for the last several years with a Hungarian colleague, Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, on a series of Hungarian poetry translations. They include a major collection of translations of the great Hungarian Jewish poet Miklós Radnóti, who perished in the Holocaust, a collection of the poems of Attila József, and a historically-organized anthology of Hungarian poetry. This work involves unusual methods and theories of translation; the originals, which are often in very strict Magyar meters, are rendered into the identical metrical forms in English, and the translation process is largely oral. The result has been praised for its accuracy and feeling by the Hungarian literary establishment, and greeted on its publication by critical acclaim. More recently he has collaborated with Ozsváth on a collection of translations of the poems of Goethe.
Reviews
In describing the work of Frederick Turner, it may help to borrow a line from the introduction to his 1985 book, Natural Classicism: "That whole of which I speak is, like a solid as opposed to a plane or a curve, not easily scanned, expounded, or even described by a single line of argument." He has been called a universal scholar-a rare find in a world of over-specialization-whose work transects and borrows from several rather disparate fields. Turner is as comfortable trafficking in the language of theoretical physics and evolutionary biology as he is discussing the sonnet form.
Turner, a REASON contributing editor and a professor of arts and humanities at University of Texas at Dallas, senses that the time is ripe for a re-evaluation of Shakespeare's view of commercial activity. The collapse of communism has discredited Marxist theory, and the worldwide success of market reforms has forced even professors of economics to take a fresh look at how capitalism works. Turner sees that the virtue of the free market goes beyond merely economic considerations; it encompasses a whole range of ethical and political goods.