THE CHAMPIONSHIP: MARILYN CHIN V. BEN MAZER

July 21, 2012 at 9:41 pm (Ben Mazer, March Madness, Marilyn Chin)

A mid-summer evening as Scarriet’s March Madness finally draws to a close.

West coast poet Marilyn Chin and east coast poet Ben Mazer clash in the championship game of Scarriet March Madness 2012.

64 poets, and we are now down to two.

In 2010 and 2011 (this is our third annual tournament) a poet and his or her one chosen poem battled to the top, but this year a poet used a new poem in every contest, so it becomes a question of: well, poet, how many great poems have you got?

In our first year, using Lehman’s BAP, a Billy Collins poem won it all, a playful take on a Wordsworth trope, “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey”—the title itself sums up David Lehman, Billy Collins, and cheerfully post-modern, late 20th century poetry.  In year two, using an APR anthology, Larkin’s “Aubade” swept to the title: a dead English poet’s rueful, fearful, honest, atheistic, speculation on death.

This year we used Rita Dove’s Penguin anthology of 20th century poetry, the book with a lot of black poets and ‘traditional,’ Iowa workshop, free verse lyrics.  Marilyn Chin is in Dove’s anthology; Ben Mazer is one of a handful of poets not in the anthology—the Scarriet selection process is too complicated to explain.

Mazer has emerged as a new Ashbery, an Ashbery not ashamed of running, hat flying off, down Romanticism Lane—which is refreshing, since every last bit of Modernist poetry for at least 100 years has been a rejection of anything resembling Romantic poetry, or Tennyson, or anything Byronic.  We sometimes wonder: what do they mean when they say Writer’s Workshop poems are all the same?  They are not the same—they are clearly free, and different.  But they are the same in this: they eschew Shelley and Byron and Keats. Workshop poems might be a little like Wordsworth—because Wordsworth, well, he genuinely liked trees.  But the sublime of Keats, Byron, Shelley?  Not allowed.  The New Critics, supposedly ‘conservative,’ wrote in tremendous opposition to the Romantics, as did T.S. Eliot and Pound and Williams, and this is really what Modernism felt obligated to do—even more important than the poetry that it did write, was the poetry it didn’t.  Modernism didn’t write on modern subjects, necessarily; its ‘experiments’ were finally wan or cute, when they were not lengthy & unread; it didn’t distinguish itself in any manner at all with the public—except to retire from its notice with a shrug and a smirking apology.  The modern poems of Frost, Millay, Cummings, Eliot, Auden, Jarrell, and Larkin that did make a dent on the public all sounded like Tennyson, or maybe Tennyson’s anti-war, younger brother.

If poetry is a language, that some people speak and some do not, the only difference between English and French or Italian or Japanese or Arabic and poetry is that poetry is 1) easier to learn and 2) is characterized by sounding good. Since Tennyson sounds good, this is how we know the language known as poetry.  We speak poetry because our speech is good, not because we know the meanings of French words.  Speech is good as speech, not as individual words or isolated debating points—sustained good speech is the simplest and most accurate definition of good poetry.

This is what Keats meant when he said you dive into a lake for the sensual experience, not to ‘work out the lake.’  Poetry isn’t a banner waving; it is swimming in a lake.  It is intellectualization sensualized.  Theory walks along the edges of the lake; the water or the swimming is not for theory.  Theory needs to know its place.  ‘Conceptual’ art is art infected with the dried-up-lake of theory.

Women poets are more susceptible to theory and banner-waving these days out of an inferiority complex thrust upon them by the men, which is too bad.  Women are being led astray by modern experiments.

Marilyn Chin is somewhat immune to theory, for she has history and wit.

We offer this as her poem, and following that, Mazer’s.

Who immerses themselves in the lake?  Who gives us the lake?

The poet who gets us soaking wet will win.

THE BARBARIANS ARE COMING

 War chariots thunder, horses neigh, the barbarians are coming.

What are we waiting for, young nubile women pointing at the wall,
    the barbarians are coming.

They have heard about a weakened link in the wall.
    So, the barbarians have ears among us.

 So deceive yourself with illusions: you are only one woman,
    holding one broken brick in the wall.

So deceive yourself with illusions: as if you matter,
    that brick and that wall.

The barbarians are coming: they have red beards or beardless
with a top knot.

The barbarians are coming: they are your fathers, brothers,
    teachers, lovers; and they are clearly an other.

The barbarians are coming:
    If you call me a horse, I must be a horse.
    If you call me a bison, I am equally as guilty.

When a thing is true and is correctly described, one doubles
    the blame by not admitting it: so, Chuangtzu, himself,
    was a barbarian king!

Horse, horse, bison, bison, the barbarians are coming—

and how they love to come.
The smells of the great frontier exalt in them!

 

  

Crisping the Comedian C

 

And with my sword cane I rapped the dog on its head.

To its master I said:

“The soul’s expanding to make room for you

among the piles of rusted bric a brac

that make men grimace, revile themselves in church. . .

I felt the ground beneath begin to lurch,

increased my laughter with its rolling waves

laughter increase. . .

as he lunged forward trying to save himself. . .

I was an honest man. What could I do?

I pushed him forward where the great vacuum grew

and marvelled as he fell. . .

into the silence of the pits of hell.

“That’s one less editorial to write,”

I thought, and blinkered to recall the light,

and blinkered to recall the blight. . .

the scourge of man. . .

I like to help them any way I can.

In my emotions not a thought of man. . .

but that his docile sudden-widowed wife

might serve the lord. . .

replace, with some improvements in accord

with justice and increase, a missing life. . .

I dyed my hair.

A most enticing shade of emerald green,

and knowing the precise dimensions of her lair,

(and its location)

I took me there. . .

in search of satisfaction, and a queen.

She was the best damned thing I’d ever seen.

I smiled to mechanize my spotless luck.

As we proceeded. . .

no human call we heeded. . .

I do not think that men will speak to me.

But wider, wider, like a churning sea

of foaming lavender and sapphire green

I met my match. . .

How can the blameless blame me for my snatch?

I laughed to see

that God had spread his vistas out for me,

his servant lord,

no matter how much I murdered or I whored. . .

I was quite sane.

And turned to mark my profile in a pane

of ice that served my child-bride for a heart. . .

She promised a new start. . .

and I was wondrous, seeing how I’d changed;

the souls of men were cobbled there and ranged

across the germ of my experiment. . .

But at the crack of dawn these visions went,

and I was back among the human race;

answering servants in my modern palace. . .

though one thought, ordinary, flamed and flitted

of how my research proofed that I had fitted. . .

and I was not incognizant of place. . .

answering letters in unbridled solace. . .

an evening like a fortnight had them piled

and crumpled on my desk. . .

Although I cannot, I afford a smile. . .

and set out half a mile. . .

My soul was stirred, and hungered to be reviled,

revived and furnished. . .

where the creature’s dignity was burnished

on all she touched. . .

I bowed my head. My emerald locks she brushed. . .

grew wiry and strange…

yes, in that glass I recognized a change

of heart. She wept and promised a new start. . .

But how can I begin. . .

A child sees vistas in the hammering rain,

and does not ask if everything’s the same. . .

one night I fell. . .

and nothing shall restore me to His Grace.

Yet in its infancy the new-born face

is pocked and filed. . .

and strangely familiar. Something in me smiled.

It’s hard to find a perfect spot of shade. . .

Life is the best thing that I ever made. . .

The Mazer poem is uncanny.

The Chin poem is attempting to be uncanny.  Marilyn Chin’s poem keeps waking from its dream—what did I mean by horse?  By Bison?

Mazer’s poem does not allow us to wake from its dream.

*

*

*

Mazer 90 Chin 81

BEN MAZER IS THE 2012 SCARRIET MARCH MADNESS CHAMPION!!