NINE POEMS AND THREE EPIGRAMS OF THE NEW ROMANTICISM

May 14, 2022 at 2:07 pm (Alexandra Gaujan, Allen Ginsberg, Ana-Maria Tone, Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism, Dan Sociu, Edgar Allan Poe, Elizabeth Bishop, John Milton, Romanticism, Samuel Johnson, Scarriet Editors, T.S.Eliot, Thomas Graves, William Shakespeare)

John Milton is John Keats.

Samuel Johnson is T.S. Eliot.

Literature repeats, just as happy thoughts commonly intrude upon sad ones.

Vermilion beauty is reached, but the sun brings a new day. New philosophers congratulate themselves. A shadowy sage announces, “You are not enjoying the spring! You are someone else!” Philosophy vomits a new stone. A city shudders. Romanticism and youth, together with Conscience panting after the Good, are mocked and overthrown at last. Or this is only hyperbole getting the last word.

Milton, writing an elegy for his college friend, Edward King, drowned, spends most of the following passage asking “valleys low” to do something. The educated will have no trouble understanding and enjoying poetry like this—resembling a race horse able to burn for the entire course. It is excellent, whether or not you “like” it. It is too fanciful for Modernists—the same ones who lament that modern life is estranged from nature, so how dare Milton commune with nature. Ah the intricacy of modernity. Eliot and Pound were not high on Milton.

Every poetry has faults—Poe pointed out for America’s readers that Milton babbling to, and with, the non-human was annoying. It was. Poe said Paradise Lost was too long—and he was not blaming Milton, exactly, but ourselves, since none of us, limited as we are physically, can be entranced by a poem for very long.

The old will influence, even if it’s not perfect, even if it’s sheared by modern shepherds. Keats learned from Milton. To learn from (and improve on) the past is a truism, which some damn, anyway, like the avant-garde, which prepares its feast on a very little table—or makes a large table for a small feast.

Here is the passage from Milton’s “Lycidas”—as far from the avant-garde as possible:

Return, Alphéus; the dread voice is past
That shrunk thy streams; return, Sicilian Muse,
And call the vales, and bid them hither cast
Their bells and flowerets of a thousand hues.
Ye valleys low, where the mild whispers use
Of shades and wanton winds and gushing brooks
On whose fresh lap the swart star sparely looks,
Throw hither all your quaint enameled eyes,
That on the green turf suck the honied showers
And purple all the ground with vernal flowers.
Bring the rathe primrose that forsaken dies,
The tufted crow-toe, and pale Jessamine,
The white pink, and the pansy freaked with jet,
The glowing violet,
The musk-rose, and the well-attired woodbine,
With cow-slips wan that hang the pensive head,
And every flower that sad embroidery wears;
Bid Amaranthus all his beauty shed,
And daffadillies fill their cups with tears,
To strew the laureate hearse where Lycid lies.
For so, to interpose a little ease,
Let our frail thoughts dally with false surmise,
Ay me! whilst thee the shores and sounding seas
Wash far away, where’er thy bones are hurled…

Keats could not have written “Ode To A Nightingale” but that he saw this passage—which is Romantic before any scholar said it was. The Metaphysical Poets had the silliness knocked out of them by their successors and self-conscious Romanticism kept the Miltonic luxury—even as the 18th century, in a bizarre detour through Johnson, condemned it. Just as the 20th century, in a harrowing road through T.S. Eliot, condemned it.

Is the following by Johnson or Eliot? It’s hard to tell.

“One of the poems on which much praise has been bestowed is Lycidas of which the diction is harsh, the rhymes uncertain, and the numbers unpleasing. What beauty there is we must therefore seek in the sentiments and images. It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion, for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Minicus, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.”

Dissociation of sensibility, in other words.

The writer continues:

“In this poem there is no nature, for there is no truth; there is no art, for there is nothing new. Its form is that of a pastoral, easy, vulgar, and therefore disgusting; whatever images it can supply are long ago exhausted, and its inherent improbability always forces dissatisfaction on the mind.”

What was thought to be the greatest lyric in English gets an ‘F.’

It is Johnson who tramples Milton’s flowerets, not Eliot, but it could have been either one.

It is not our intention to defend Milton.

No one needs to defend Milton—or Johnson.

I am not here to defend Romanticism—only to point out that literature is a roller coaster ride and Romanticism is now ready to trample Johnson—the Enlightenment genius and contemporary of Mozart—who dared to call John Milton’s exquisite lyricism in Lycidas “disgusting.”

Who else would dare? The amusement park of Letters is for your pleasure, but you don’t own the rides—only guys like Johnson do. You don’t know anything about this. You own an opinion the way you own a book—you bought the book; you did not write the book. You think what everyone else thinks.

But Scarriet is here to guide you.

Poe, unafraid to trash Milton, writes the following on the man who dared to trash Milton, Dr. Johnson:

“What is Poetry? — Poetry! that Proteus-like idea, with as many appellations as the nine-titled Corcyra! Give me, I demanded of a scholar some time ago, give me a definition of poetry? “Tres- volontiers,” — and he proceeded to his library, brought me a Dr. Johnson, and overwhelmed me with a definition. Shade of the immortal Shakspeare! I imagined to myself the scowl of your spiritual eye upon the profanity of that scurrilous Ursa Major. Think of poetry, dear B—, think of poetry, and then think of — Dr. Samuel Johnson! Think of all that is airy and fairy-like, and then of all that is hideous and unwieldy; think of his huge bulk, the Elephant! and then — and then think of the Tempest — the Midsummer Night’s Dream — Prospero — Oberon — and Titania!”

It would be silly for any of us to censor Poe as he damns Johnson—we are in a war, you twits!

Whether Poe is correct, or not, is beside the point.

Your opinion doesn’t matter to the gods. You collect only.

Dismissing Poe’s “elephant passage” on Samuel Johnson would be as useless as dismissing Lycidas, or dismissing what Johnson said about Lycidas—one hundred years before Poe and one hundred years after Milton. Poe was dismissed by Eliot one hundred years later. And now you cannot stop, one hundred years on, what is going to happen to Eliot, who used Johnson as a cudgel and now in turn will be beaten to a pulp by a Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For it is a dream—all literature is a dream! You cannot defend the poet who writes “honied showers” against the poet who writes about beefsteaks; but one day the spell will wear off and the poet who proudly rejected “vernal flowers” and wrote on ham will seem an ass.

It doesn’t matter who is winning the Pulitzer Prize these days, or what anyone is saying about anything.

In Letters, whatever Johnson and Eliot represent is now plummeting, and whatever Milton and Keats represent is on the rise—tempered, of course, by adjustments made over the centuries; the Romantics were not as artificial as Milton, but preferred him to Johnson, finding Milton thrilling, Johnson, pedantic.

Eliot turned his Samuel Johnson-Laser on Romanticism. Eliot, in turn, must fall, and we can see the nature of his destruction simply by looking at what Johnson wrote—and putting it in reverse.

“Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.” Here, in a nutshell, is Eliot’s “Objective Correlative,” a theory (obviously cribbed from Dr. Johnson) Eliot used to condemn “Hamlet.” This is what the genius dares—and you do not—in the service of these hundred year- swings. Shakespeare, himself, is censored.

Remember, Shakespeare’s poetry was not appreciated much in the 18th century (he was converted to a story-teller)—and there came a revival in the 19th century, and to be honest, Shakespeare as a playwright found popularity in the 20th century, but as a poet, his Sonnets were turned into soap opera; T.S. Eliot, as we just mentioned, damned him; and if we look at Understanding Poetry, the leading poetry textbook of the 20th century, Frost gets more attention than Shakespeare, Yeats just as much, and Shakespeare is discussed in many places as if he were a Modern—his “imagery” held aloft, the immortal Bard just a more emotional version of WC Williams. Even genius goes up and down every century, so inevitable are trends.

Romanticism has plenty of “leisure for fiction.”

And all the “grief” they want.

And why not?

Think about it.

What literary “theory” (the “Objective Correlative” or any one you choose) can possibly prevent words of the imagination—literature—from doing whatever it wants?

Let Milton be Milton—but not for one hundred years.

It’s time to be Milton again. Modified, of course. “Lycidas” perfected into the Odes of Keats, and then further modified.

The new Romantic poets of the middle 21st century may not be that great. That’s not the point.

Whenever has “the green turf suck the honied showers,” “beside the white chickens,” “angry fix,” “bag full of God,” or “Does my sexiness upset you?,” been good enough that the new cannot mock it?

The New Romanticism is even now arriving.

Think of the distinguished and praised poems of the 20th century—they had no time for “leisure of fiction;” they were anxious to give us the real—and with it, tremendous grief.

Let’s take three: “Prufrock,” “The Waiting Room,” and “Supermarket in California.”

In Lycidas, Milton describes “grief” with the “leisure of fiction.” The sorrowful delight of Milton’s extended “leisure” includes flowers of “white pink.”

In all three of the 20th Century poems we get darkness as the impulsive force. The 20th century played in a grave.

Eliot: “the wind blows the water white and black.”
Bishop: “The waiting room was bright/and too hot. It was sliding/beneath a black wave…”
Ginsberg: “…and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?”

Eliot’s poem has a “patient etherised upon a table” and a “bald spot.”
Bishop’s poem features the “horrifying” breasts in National Geographic and pain in a dentist’s chair on a dark winter day during World War One.
Ginsberg gives us a “headache” and a homeless guy “eyeing the grocery boys” in a supermarket.

Some say this is “progress.” But is it?

It’s poetry writing as far away from Milton as possible.

There’s no progress in poetry.

What we choose to include in a poem can only be a matter of taste, not science, since what exists outside the poem is not impacted by the poem. Has there ever been a headache, in Milton’s or Ginsberg’s day, which knew a poem, or was known by a poem, or was cured by a poem? We cannot remove the “headache” from Ginsberg’s poem without changing it irrevocably—what is essentially a meaningless bridge between life and poetry (a “headache”) is, no one can deny, essential to the poem. Therefore it follows that poetry exists as its own product, within its own rules and influences, within a “tradition”—not in the world—which the moderns were more adept at superficially recording, but only as it affects the poetry; any other conclusion by the modern poet is vanity.

Any poetry can be denied.

A movement cannot.

Romanticism can be defined simply, then. It is poetry not afraid of the “leisure of fiction.” Johnson, the anti-Romantic, says the “leisure of fiction” cannot have “grief,” and Eliot, with his Objective Correlative, agrees. But Romanticism finds nothing preventing “grief” from attending the “leisure of fiction.” It isn’t science. It’s literary taste—which, for scientific reasons, comes and goes.

The New Romanticism is proving the Moderns wrong. This is happening right now.

One hundred years from now, the New Romanticism will be wrong, again, for reasons no one will quite understand—even as long lines of “prophetic” professors and their theories will pretend they do.

Romanticism and its Samuel Johnson counterpart—which trade fashionable places every hundred years can also be looked at this way:

Romanticism: the World is newly and differently Glorious—my poetry will demonstrate this fact.

Dr. Johnson-ism: the World is Wretched—no artificiality can change that fact. Perhaps some glory will be glimpsed among the bald spots and the headaches, but we will know that glory is earned and legitimate, for that very reason.

Romanticism responds: poetry succeeds on its own merits and it doesn’t matter whether you add the flaws of the world or not—it’s the poetry that matters; the tedious pedantry that makes rules about what should be “put in” poetry to make it “less artificial,” will only in the long run, inhibit poetry.

Back and forth it goes. The argument is not as important as the back-and-forth.

The courting world brings flowers to the poem. Then gets tossed out.

Every one hundred years.

It was no good writing Romantic poetry, as some did, in the 1980s. It was still the 20th century. Pound lived until 1972. Many of us can remember 1972.

But something is going to happen in 2022.

Because it’s 2022—100 years since “The Waste Land.”

But Eliot won the Nobel in 1948. That’s only 75 years ago.

So we may need to wait another 25 years for the true New Romanticism. Poems on headaches, however, don’t seem to be the thing right now. The shift appears to be happening.

Here is a sampling of nine New Romantic poems and three epigrams, a hint of what will emerge with even greater force in the next few years. Scarriet guarantees it. The content is more or less modern; it’s the delicate formalism, the chaste emotionalism, combined with Romantic-philosophical sensitivity, which is the difference.

One could say what follows is really nothing more than Edna Millay or Edward Arlington Robinson or Donald Justice—the sort of earnest, tasteful, non-pretentious poetry that was appreciated in the 20th century, in spite of Romanticism on the wane. Fireworks and trumpets don’t necessarily accompany these one hundred years shifts; sometimes the archeological alteration appears after the fact, in the midst of scholarly digging. The distinction could be as subtle as this: Edna Millay and Donald Justice considered as major 20th century poets—rather than let’s say, Ezra Pound and WC Williams. Romanticism very well could be accused of saying, “It’s only poetry, and once you admit this, poetry is saved.” The shifts are not necessarily earth-shaking. Poe and Emerson were contemporaries—they reviled each other; it was Emerson, precursor of Nietzsche, who insisted, seer-like, the poet is a god; Poe, herald of detective fiction, was merely the better poet. And yet…something unmistakably human—not watered down by fetish, politics, or pretense, of the low or high kind—stains the writing of the New Romanticism.

DAN SOCIU (trans. Thomas Graves, Ana-Maria Tone, Alexandra Gaujan)

AFTER SOME DAYS OF BEING DEAD

This tomb was built like a fort
but he still pushed out of it
and feverish, Lazarus stumbled to Earls Court
for some lemons and sparkling water.

The drizzling air was a fresh kiss
he breathed in greedily—
in the crowd he smiled stupidly, like me,
because I went thru something like this.

A man just risen has a special gravity.
Women, kids, feel it—even dogs pulled
their owners closer and it was remarkable—
the vending machine gave him water for free.

NIMIC NU MAI E POSIBIL

Nothing is possible anymore between me
And a nineteen year old girl, just as nothing
was possible when I was nineteen
years old. I listened to them carefully, they ruffled my hair,
they’d gently reject my touches, no, Dan,
you are not like this, you are a poet. They came
to me for therapy, they’d come with their eyes in tears
to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love
around the poet and none with him.
The poet would go out every evening
quaking like a tectonic wave and
in the morning he’d come back humiliated
in his heart—the quakes moving
for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

TWO PAPER LANTERNS

two paper lanterns
flying over the sea
one is lost
beyond the horizon
into the unknown
where only planes
fly on

two paper lanterns
one near the shore
still shimmering
the other far
barely in sight
which one is
the finer lantern

the one you see
or the one lost
where only planes
flew on?

THOMAS GRAVES

CLOUDY IN THE CITY AND EVERYTHING IS COLD AND GREY

You are superior to me because you are obscure.
No one quite knows what your poetry means
and this gains you sophisticated followers,
nonetheless shy when questioned.
Rattling the New York Times in the beginning of the day,
they feign surprise when I accost them with tears.
Is this a bullet train? Or is the driver drunk?
When do we arrive in Swampscott?
The commute home, when you are tired,
calmly surrendering to the motion of the train—
a mass of hurry—is a rich feeling. Out of the corner of your eye,
a torn ticket. A slightly windy sky.

THE HUG

When we finally hug I know
It will hurt you, even as you love
In the forgiveness of the hug,
Because, to forgive, you were so slow.
Maybe there will be no hug,
Since friendship and forgiveness are as irrational as love.
Maybe we waited too long;
Now we are weak in ratio to how much our love was strong.
You miss my friendship. I know
You miss my friendship, the hug
Will be that; our passionate love
Hid the friendship, so the hug
Will be a feeling and a symbol of that,
Yet who knows that friendship and sex are not exactly the same
When, after years, you hug the one who broke your heart, and call them by their name.

A SIGH SINCERELY SIGHED

I saw a lady in an emptying train, sighing.
Troubles are infinite,
But when you see someone sigh, sometimes you know why.
The exiting passengers filed past the lady;
She was in no hurry to leave her seat.
She was sitting there sighing, this lady;
Had she sighed to her lover, it might have been sweet.
But this was no sigh of love. The lady
Was no longer young, and the lines
On her face, I could see, had come
Only in the past few years.
Everyone wants to be beautiful and young.
This is why she remains in her seat,
And the sigh she sighs is more sad than sweet.
She knew she would never be young, again.
Some miseries are greater than others.
Age is the worst thing that happens to us.
But something tells me, I don’t know why,
I stopped for a moment, when I heard her sigh,
When I sighed, because she sighed, I thought,
As I left the train, in the station, I thought,
The world is going to happen again,
With the very same ladies, and the very same men.

BEN MAZER

DELIRIUM

I hear my mother rattling in the sink,
though I am loose in dreamy marble halls,
my sense of time is present, and I think
that comfort ravages the castle walls.
Night is as tall as those who are within
should wish to speak, of anything at all,
with fever burning underneath the skin,
to whom infinity could be so small.
I fall to earth in my delirium,
and wake to life to find I’m being shot
by someone who was real but now is not,
a skinny robber, canceling out the sum.
Dad’s in his parka in the cold garage;
I’m strangely comforted by this barrage.

THE SUN BURNS BEAUTY

The sun burns beauty, spins the world away,
though now you sleep in bed, another day
brisk on the sidewalk, in your camel coat,
in another city, wave goodbye from a boat,
or study in an archival library,
like Beethoven, and thought is prodigy.
Do not consume, like the flowers, time and air
or worm-soil, plantings buried in the spring,
presume over morning coffee I don’t care,
neglect the ethereal life to life you bring.
O I would have you now, in all your glory,
the million-citied, Atlantic liner story
of what we were, would time come to forget
being so rich and passing, and yet not covet.

ST. MARTIN’S LANE

Remember when we went to see St. Martin’s Lane?
We huddled in Charles Laughton’s room
just as I huddled there with you,
shivering. Popcorn for dinner. Breath like fog.
We followed Charles out to the London streets
without ever stirring from our seats.
We could have worked an act up for busking,
I might have even kissed you for the asking.
You were so still, sitting next to me,
covered by the flickering reflections
of the inhuman mechanical projections
of the original camera’s inspections.
The darkened rain, the poverty of gloom,
were only ours, stuck in a little room.
But when the film ends, and we leave our seats,
it’s pouring outside, and the whole film repeats.
(I too have often followed Sylvia Sidney
to a small diner for some beans and kidney.)
These fantasies are real. Our life is real.
Our quiverings half-concealing when we feel.
Our waverings aligned with electricity and steel.
Who do we thank for bringing things to order?
Charles Laughton, Vivien Leigh, Alexander Korda.
When the film’s over, we have grown up too fast,
like Barbara Stanwyck’s daughter in Stella Dallas.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The ache to kiss her like the ache to kick the ball found on the path

—Dan Sociu

Intelligence is panic. Imagination is panic that sleeps well.

—Thomas Graves

A greater amount of emotion is the effect of a greater work of art.

—Ben Mazer

The sampling could have included others (who have appeared in Scarriet, or poets you like) but the above features what must be considered the core of the New Romanticism right now, its Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron. Sociu, Graves, and Mazer.

Salem, MA 5/14/22

1 Comment

THE ROMANIAN POETRY OF DAN SOCIU, PLUS REMARKS ON FREE VERSE AND TRANSLATION

April 18, 2022 at 2:23 pm (Alexandra Gaujan, Dan Sociu)

Dan Sociu is a Romanian poet who really makes you feel and think. A wonderful poet.

Sociu is good enough to please in English translations—I made a stab at learning Romanian when I traveled to Arad, Romania, for a literary conference in 2016, but even a basic understanding of the language, more Latin than Romance, eluded me.

How do I know if Sociu is first-rate in Romanian?

I don’t.

My opinion of his work is due entirely to the fact that his ideas, and the way he presents those ideas, give me pleasure—in English. Notice that I didn’t say poetry, but “ideas and the way he presents those ideas.”

There is a current dust-up online, small, but large, perhaps, in the poetry world, in which someone had the audacity to say out loud in public that Amanda Gorman “wasn’t a poet.” Great offense was taken by many—“she’s young! she’s stylish!”

A few did admit her work was formless and cliched—but the default response, even by those who tacitly or otherwise wouldn’t say she was good, was: no matter how good or bad someone is, the one thing you are not allowed to say is “they are not a poet” or what they write “isn’t poetry.” This, a few opined, is the height of “dead white male” arrogance. Social issues matter today “in poetry,” said some Gorman defenders. Their implicit logic: any “social issues writing” is automatically poetry, whether it appears to be poetry, or not—being good at something is good enough to be good at poetry.

The irony of the whole issue is this—poetry, to be poetry, must “appear” to be poetry. Only superficial appearances confirm it as poetry. The profound reasons are not germane, since how can we tell if something is a poem unless it appear so?

Let us say that I insist I am a poet but produce nothing whatsoever. I walk. I talk. That’s it. And therefore, according to me, since I walk and I talk, I am “a poet.” How would this be refuted? Profoundly? Or superficially? Only in a superficial manner, obviously. As soon as the profound ones begin to speak, a minute will not have gone by before it is “proven” that “speech is quite capable of being poetry and therefore speech counts,” and so on. Only the most superficial objection—“I see no poems!” could be brought to bear against me, the imposter.

If we reject superficial explanations then, when it comes to poetry, and we only accept profound meditations and profound discourses on poetry, this creates imposters everywhere, and the more profound we are, the more imposters there will be.

But what if my “talk” was great poetry? How would a reader know? Someone would have to write my spoken words down. But in what context?

I—the great poet—could only be seen so in some other person’s editing or translation—and there would still be doubters: this is not poetry; it is only snippets stolen from casual speech.

My response to this dilemma, therefore, is to reject all profundity on the subject of poetry and immerse myself in appearances as much as possible.

The formal poem and the free verse poem are like newlyweds arguing in a comedy—we want—no, they must—remain a couple. The comedy (poetry) depends on it.

Poetry is such, that a bad translation can not only ruin a poem by a master, but make it appear like the poet is not only not a master, but no poet.

Poems which are subtle, use puns and sound-patterns a great deal, and transcend traditional approaches—these demand complete fluency on every level—otherwise they will fail to some degree, and mostly likely, to a significant degree. Some poems, on the other hand, are quite easy to translate. Good poets are the hardest to translate—I imagine this is because all good poetry is nothing more than hyper-fluency.

Good free verse is a good translation of the poem we will never see. Everyone likes good translations—and therefore, we condone free verse.

Originality has been called the most important feature of poetry by more than one distinguished critic, though I can recall at this moment only one—Poe.

Originality of thought can hide in the tissues of hyper-fluency, hidden forever from those who are not fluent in the tongue in which the poet is writing. However, can originality of thought not manifest itself in the crudest of translations? And if it can, it must be a wonderful originality, indeed.

Scarriet has attempted to translate some of Dan Sociu’s poems—using English translations by Alexandra Gaujan, as well as the poems themselves in Romanian for crude reference.

Scarriet believes it is crucial that sound resemblances are kept. (Remember what was said about superficiality.) But maybe it isn’t crucial. (Remember what was said about originality of thought.) And it’s risky. Fluency may abort the attempt to superficially match sounds. Fluency will no doubt be kinder to crude translations which attempt to capture originality of thought.

This is why prose translations are generally preferred these days. Scarriet’s attempts could crash and burn. Dan Sociu understands this as well as anybody. When we gave him a peek at what we were doing, he more or less said, “these are yours, not mine.” Fair enough.

I don’t know Romanian well at all, but when I look at a Romanian poem, at least I can tell if the poem rhymes. This was enough to send me on my quixotic quest.

Below are the Romanian poems, then Gaujan’s translations. Scarriet’s are the second set of translations.

GOD MADE EVERYTHING FLAWLESS

Dumnezeu le-a făcut perfecte pe toate
cînd a făcut cacaua cu lapte
și pîinea cu unt și cu sare

a căzut în visare
și s-au furișat pe lume frigul la picioare
și celelalte

God made everything flawless
when He made hot cocoa with milk
and salty buttered toast

He slipped into a daydream
and the cold air drafts
and all other trials

snuck in

~~

God made everything perfect and complete:
Hot chocolate with a thin milk sheet.
Buttered toast a bit salty and sweet.
Distracted by a languid tweet,
Cold wind and all the troubles we meet
snuck past God. Remarkable feat.

****

IN MY RUST-WORN LIFE

în viața mea mîncată de rugină
a oprit pentru o clipă o regină
și-a revărsat părul regesc pe patul unde am visat-o
și-a coborît privirea minunată peste mine și am adorat-o
a stat numai o clipă dar m-a-nălțat la veșnicie
pur pur plutesc prin ceruri de lumină purpurie

in my rust-worn life, for a wink,
a queen stopped by
she spread her queenly hair on the bed
where I dreamed of her
cast her lovely gaze over me and I adored her
stayed only a wink but made me soar to eternity
pure pure I float through purple skies

~~

My life, a rust-eaten monument
Was visited by a queen for a moment
She spread her queenly hair all over my bed—
I dreamed and adored her, her head near my head—
and for one moment I felt passion eternal—
I pushed up and up, purple skies purple, purple

****

I’LL WASH THE TROWEL

spăl și de-o mie de ori mistria
dacă-mi cere Meșterul meu
că pîn-la urmă cine-oi fi și eu
să-i pun la îndoială măiestria

și fiindcă nu-i ies din vorbă defel
mi-a zis că-mi dă o altfel de mistrie
cînd o să ies de-aici din sihăstrie
și-o să vină să mi-o dea chiar El

I’ll wash the trowel a thousand times
should my Craftsman require it
‘cause after all who am I to
question His true mastery

and for I never disregard His words
He said He’d give me a different trowel
when I get out of this seclusion here
He’ll come Himself and hand it to me

~~

I will wash, for days, this shovel in mist
in order to please you.
I will follow you. I will always do
what you, the Builder, insist.

Your instruction my soul understands.
A new shovel will be given to me,
as I emerge from the fortress of your sagacity—
placed by you the Master into my own hands!

****

AFTER SOME DAYS OF BEING DEAD

după niște zile-n care a fost mort
dar cu dureri în gît și-o febră rece și nasoală
Lazăr a ieșit la el pe stradă în Earls Court
să-și ia din Coop lămîi și-un bacs de apă minerală

ploua mărunt și mirosea a viu și prospețime
și aerul îl săruta cu lăcomie
pășea plutind pe-un zîmbet prin mulțime
știu pentru că așa ceva mi s-a-ntîmplat și mie

omul abia înviat are o gravitație specială
femeile simt și simt și copiii și cîinii
trăgeau spre el de-și dezechilibrau stăpînii
și-automatul a uitat să-i încaseze apa minerală

after some days of being dead
but with a sore throat and a cold, nasty fever
Lazarus went out in the street in Earls Court
to get lemons and a case of sparkling water from Coop

it drizzled and smelled like life and freshness
and he was kissing greedingly the air
floating on a smile he trod through the crowd
I know ‘cause I also went through something like it

a man just risen has a special gravity
women feel it and children and dogs feel it
they were pulling towards him, jerking their owners
and the machine forgot to charge for his sparkling water

~~

This tomb was built like a fort
but he still pushed out of it
and feverish, Lazarus stumbled to Earls Court
for some lemons and sparkling water.

The drizzling air was a fresh kiss
he breathed in greedily—
in the crowd he smiled stupidly, like me,
because I went thru something like this.

A man just risen has a special gravity.
Women, kids, feel it—even dogs pulled
their owners closer and this was remarkable—
the vending machine gave him water for free.

****

YOUR LOVE, BOTH LIGHT AND SUBSTANTIAL

dragostea ta, și ușoară și grea
cade pe mine ca un munte de nea

fulg după fulg cad pe casa mea în amurg

eu fac foc și focul te-ncălzește
și căldura casei mele te topește

your love, both light and substantial,
falls over me like a mountain of snow

flake after flake settles over my house in the twilight

I kindle the fire and the flames warm you up
and the warmth of my house makes you mellow

~~

Like a mountain of snow falling on me
your love is both light and heavy.

Flake after flake settles over my house in the twilight.

I coax the yellow fire and the flames rise up
and the mellow warmth of my house warms you.

****

The following three poems we copy in the translations by Alexandra Gaujan alone—because they strike a Romantic chord and seem to be the best of their kind. To attempt to re-translate these three I feel would be in vain.

two paper lanterns

flying over the sea

one is lost

beyond the horizon

into the unknown

where only planes

fly on

.

two paper lanterns

one near the shore

still shimmering

the other far

barely in sight

which one is

the finer lantern

.

the one you see

or the one lost

where only planes

flew on?

****

one could’ve barely seen us on

your last day with me in Wiesbaden

the way we glided in the light melting with love

between the garden fences all abloom

I knew that you would leave next day at noon

and I could hardly keep myself from weeping

but then I did, so our Wiesbaden garden

of perfect bliss would not wither away

****

the ache to kiss her

like the ache to kick the

ball found on the path

****

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

All poems, photos, Dan Sociu

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LOOKING BACK AT SCARRIET 2021

January 1, 2022 at 7:03 pm (14 International Younger Poets, Alan Cordle, Amanda Gorman, Annie Finch, Ben Mazer, Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism, Blog:Harriet, Cate Marvin, Charles Bernstein, Dan Sociu, Daniel Rifenburgh, Eileen Myles, Ezra Pound, Frank Sinatra, Harold Rosenberg, Jericho Brown, Joy Harjo, Kent Johnson, March Madness Poetry, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Nina Simone, Noor Hindi, Philip Nikolayev, Ruth Lepson, Scarriet Hot 100, Stephen Cole, Thomas Brady, Thomas Graves, Tom Brady, William Logan)

I’ve edited Scarriet since September 2009, when Alan Cordle, who I met on the poetry-contest-exposing website Foetry, created Blog Scarriet as an alternative to the Poetry Foundation’s Blog Harriet—which banned poets (yours truly included) from Harriet’s Comments for being “off-topic” (whatever that means; digression is a sign of intelligence in my book) and soon thereafter Blog Harriet (Poetry magazine’s online site) erased Comments as a feature altogether. Poets like Eileen Myles and Annie Finch were regulars on the Harriet Comments; it was a lively good time, I thought, but management didn’t see it that way, which is fine; Harriet managed to birth Scarriet (indirectly).

Poetry and its politics boils down to one question: Is this a good poem?

Alan Cordle’s question on Foetry.com was narrower: did you take contest fees to publish the winner’s book and was that winner your friend? I did not personally expose anyone; I was just an online participant on Foetry because I was curious about Alan’s quest, which seemed to me a sincere attempt to correct a wrong. Today I still believe this.

I broadened the investigation (watering it down to something more intellectual and benign) to Is This A Good Poem? This question is the ruling spirit of Scarriet. I understood, during my unofficial Foetry membership, that poets are allowed to be friends and help each other. This will always happen, and why not? But what ultimately matters is that the best poems are praised (no matter who writes them, or what manifesto is attached to them) and the worst poems are noticed as such.

This gives rise to a sweet philosophical complexity: how do we know what a good poem is? Who are you as a critic (and a person) to make this judgment? Are you, the judge, able to write a good poem? Who are the famous poets who write bad poems? Who are neglected poets who write good poems? What inhibits us from being honest about this?

Anyway, that’s me and Scarriet in a nutshell.

The poet Ben Mazer is a friend of mine. I have written a book on Ben Mazer—which praises his poetry. I defend him as a writer of good poetry, and the friendship matters less in the ratio of how well I defend him as a poet—and how good he actually is compared to poets not on my radar.

Ben was hanging out with the poet Charles Bernstein last year and Ben said, “Charles doesn’t like you.” This flattered me, as I hadn’t realized a poet of some note knew of me or Scarriet. There’s never any excuse to be a jerk—I have been, at times, in the past, in an effort to have strong, honest, opinions—and make a name for myself.

I’ll take this moment to apologize to anyone I may have offended.

I judge (dead and living) poets in the Scarriet March Madness “contests.” A few of these poets I know, but how good they are, and how I am able to articulate how good they are, is on display for all to see, though how well I know this or that poet, is not always known. Those who know me, know I have very few poet pals, and I try very hard not to get close to bad poets. 😆 I met Marilyn Chin as a friend (not a close friend) a long time ago at Iowa before her career took off. I know Philip Nikolayev because I know Ben. I’m a shy person; my life is not full of friendships with poets—not even close. I think this helps me as Scarriet editor. (Yes you’ll notice Mazer and Chin showing up often, but some things can’t be helped, and I honestly believe they are both really good). I also met Dan Sociu in Romania in 2016, and I do think he’s a good poet. If an unpublished poet is good, I will say so. Discovering truly good poets takes a great deal of time and work—I wish I could do more in this area, but no one alive can single-handedly offer this kind of justice to the Poetry world.

I apologize for this laborious introduction; I wanted to look back at 2021:

January “Winter Threw Its Shadow Over the River of My Years” (1/30) is perhaps the best poem of this month because of its poetic cohesion; a poem can have a great idea, but unity is all. A Jeopardy poem, a CIA poem, a NFL rigging poem (life as “rigged” courts self-pity, but Scarriet siezes on the theme a lot) a love-revenge poem (another common theme) but again, interesting topics don’t make a poem good—but (I don’t think I’m wrong) an accessible idea (no matter how simple) is necessary. “Bored” (1/4) is one of the best of the month, and “My Iranian Girlfriends” (1/3) is subtle and witty.

February “I Can Confirm” (2/1) sounds like Blake, which no Scarriet poem tends to sound like. “In The Evenings” (2/9) is richly poignant, probably the best Scarriet poem of early 2021. Scarriet Poetry Hot 100! (2/15) is always exciting. Amanda Gorman is no. 1, Cate Marvin no. 2 (“Republican Party Is Evil” poets really talk like this), followed by Louise Gluck (Nobel), Joy Harjo (3rd term laureate), Don Mee Choi (National Book Award), Jericho Brown (Pulitzer), Noor Hindi (“Fuck Yr Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”), Naomi Shihab Nye (Emma Thompson reads her poem “Kindness” on Instagram to 2.3 million views), Wayne Miller (wrote article on talking about poetry online at Lithub) and William Logan (the critic/poet) rounding out the top 10. Also on the Top 100 list, the wonderful fugitive poets Mary Angela Douglas and Stephen Cole—I discovered them not too long ago online. As an experiment, a letter to my dad is published as a poem (2/21). “Now That The Poem Is Over” (2/22) works well.

March “This Poem Can Only Speak For This Poem” (3/7) , “Happy Marriage” (3/11), and “The Object” (3/26) (on musical fame), are the best poems. March Madness—the topic is Pop Music—(3/20) runs through early April, with interesting essays on your favorite artists and bands as they compete with each other. Nina Simone and Led Zeppelin are among those who go far. The tourney includes Spanky and Our Gang (“Sunday Will Never Be The Same”), as well as Dylan, Elvis, and Frank Sinatra.

April Many good poems this month as spring 2021 inspires love poems—not maudlin but suave and biting. Failed love poems unfortunately plague Scarriet, but in certain months real wit, rather than bitterness, accompanies the love. This month seems to be one of them. A Brief History of U.S. Poetry revised (4/30). Check out this post! Scarriet literary history at its best.

May continues with lots of good poems. “When You See Me You Insult Me” (5/25) is a classic Scarriet love poem (who hurt you so badly, Scarriet poet?) and the first of many great literary essays arrives on 5/31—a look at the critic Harold Rosenberg, who hadn’t really been on Scarriet’s radar previously.

June Poems of high quality continue. Book announcement of Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism by Thomas Graves (6/26).

July I read “Weather Poem” by Dan Sociu (7/5). Another audio feature—2 of my songs on YouTube (low-fi) (7/8) Self-indulgent, perhaps; I’ve composed many pop songs never given professional treatment for one reason or another. “Man, Those Decades In American Poetry Went By Fast” (7/11) Another historical re-posting. Finally, an essay: “The Four Quartets Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha” (7/19) in which an overrated work is just one of the things looked at.

August Some of the poems which begin to appear are slightly revised poems written long ago. Three reviews appear this month: The poems of Ruth Lepson (8/1), poems of 14 Younger Poets published by Art and Letters press (8/18) and poems of Daniel Riffenburgh (8/22). Many definitely prefer Scarriet’s prose to its poetry.

September A rather odd article in which the timelines of Delmore Schwartz and Giuseppe Verdi are compared and some observations on the partially neglected poet Schwartz are made. (9/12) An article on Tom Brady and NFL stats (9/26) Scarriet has a very opinionated, love-hate, relationship to sports. Old original poems continue to see the light of day.

October A great month for prose (and poems of decent quality continue) as Scarriet seems to be enjoying one of its best years. “One Hundred Years of Pulitzers” is a revealing historical survey (10/18). “The Poem Defined” (10/21) is a fine essay. Another Poetry Hot 100 (10/27) features the unstoppable Kent Johnson as no.1. The month ends with the scintilating “100 Greatest Poems by Women” (10/31).

November has more Scarriet essays. “Trickle Down Verse” (11/8). “The Good” (11/10). “The Textbook Which Changed Everything: Understanding Poetry” (11/19). In the autumn of 2021, Kent Johnson and his avant friends on FB goaded me into defending my core principles and beliefs. Thanks, Kent! Also this month, you can hear me recite Poe’s “For Annie” on video on my phone, one evening alone in my house, holding my copy of Library America Poe gifted to me by Hilton Kramer many years ago. (11/16)

December The year ends with an essay on Ezra Pound’s The Spirit of Romance, as I attempt to come to grips with this figure who was the subject of a Kent Johnson inspired online debate, “Can a bad person write good poetry?” (12/11) Poems on ‘poetry politics’ (inspired by Kent Johnson and friends) and politics—similar in theme to poems from January 2021, close out the month.

Happy New Year.

Thomas Graves (aka Thomas Brady and Scarriet Editors) Salem, MA 1/1/2022

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WEATHER POEM

July 5, 2021 at 8:26 pm (BOLINTIN, COSMIN POSTOLACHE, Dan Sociu, IOANA VLAD, Thomas Graves)

https://bolintin.bandcamp.com/track/weather-poem?fbclid=IwAR2y5jIgLcCYTQEIqCxgiJ-O6eO8mr5OIu5v1sSERX92qifMg2APyrrWCqM

Weather Poem, by Bolintin

Cosmin Postolache – music, Dan Sociu – text, Thomas Graves – voice; translated from Romanian by Ioana Vlad

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SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED!

February 15, 2021 at 4:59 pm (A.E Stallings, Alan Cordle, Amanda Gorman, Anne Carson, Ariana Reines, Ben Mazer, Best American Poetry 2015, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Brian Rihlmann, Carl Phillips, Carolyn Forche, Cate Marvin, Charles Baudelaire, Claudia Rankine, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Danez Smith, David Lehman, Delmore Schwartz, Derrick Michael Hudson, Don Share, Dorianne Laux, Fatimah Asghar, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Glyn Maxwell, Helen Vendler, Jim Behrle, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Kevin Young, Louise Gluck, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Michael Dickman, Monday Love, Patricia Smith, Paul Engle, Poetry Hot 100, Richard Howard, Rita Dove, Robin Richardson, Ron Silliman, Rupi Kaur, Sharon Olds, Stephanie Burt, Stephen Cole, Steven Cramer, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, The New Yorker, Tracy K. Smith, William Logan)

Image result for poet with a mask

1 AMANDA GORMAN is an “American poet and activist,” according to Wikipedia.
2 CATE MARVIN “THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS EVIL. Straight up evil. It’s just beyond.” –Facebook
3 LOUISE GLUCK 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature
4 JOY HARJO In her third term as Poet Laureate.
5 DON MEE CHOI DMZ Colony, Wave Books, wins 2020 National Book Award.
6 JERICHO BROWN The Tradition, Copper Canyon Press, wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize
7 NOOR HINDI Poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” in Dec 2020 Poetry.
8 NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Her poem “kindness” read online by Emma Thompson has 2.3 million Instagram views
9 WAYNE MILLER “When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong” 2/8/21 essay in Lithub.
10 WILLIAM LOGAN “she speaks in the voice of a documentary narrator, approaching scenes in a hazmat suit.”
11 VICTORIA CHANG Obit Copper Canyon Press, longlist for 2020 National Book Award; also, in BAP.
12 ALAN CORDLE founder of Foetry, “most despised..most feared man in American poetry” —LA Times 2005
13 RUPI KAUR Has sold 3 million books
14 DON SHARE Resigned as Poetry editor August of 2020.
15 MARY RUEFLE Dunce, Wave Books, finalist for 2020 Pulitzer Prize
16 ANTHONY CODY Borderland Apocrypha, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
17 LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM Travesty Generator, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
18 EDUARDO C. CORRAL Guillotine, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
19 PAISLEY REKDAL Poet Laureate of Utah, Guest editor for the 2020 Best American Poetry
20 DORIANNE LAUX Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems, Norton, finalist for 2020 Pulitzer Prize
21 DANEZ SMITH Latest book of poems, Homie, published in 2020.
22 ILYA KAMINSKY LA Times Book Prize in 2020 for Deaf Republic.
23 RON SILLIMAN in Jan. 2021 Poetry “It merely needs to brush against the hem of your gown.”
24 FORREST GANDER Be With, New Directions, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize
25 RITA DOVE Her Penguin Twentieth-Century of American Poetry Anthology is 10 years old. Collected Poems, 2016.
26 NATALIE DIAZ Postcolonial Love Poem, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
27 TERRANCE HAYES “I love how your blackness leaves them in the dark.”
28 TIMOTHY DONNELLY The Problem of the Many, Wave Books, 2019
29 REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS In 2020 BAP
30 FRANK BIDART Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (FSG) winner, 2018 Pulitzer
31 OCEAN VUONG “this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue”
32 MATTHEW ZAPRUDER Disputed Ocean Vuong’s Instagram reflections on metaphor.
33 SHARON OLDS Stag’s Leap won 2013 Pulitzer; she’s in 2020 BAP
34 HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS The Age of Phillis, longlist for 2020 National Book Award.
35 CLAUDIA RANKINE Citizen came out in 2014.
36 HENRI COLE Blizzard, FSG, is his tenth book of poems.
37 TRACY K. SMITH In the New Yorker 10/5
38 DIANE SEUSS In the New Yorker 9/14
39 SUSHMITA GUPTA “She missed her room, her pillow, her side of the bed, her tiny bedside lamp.”
40 ANNE CARSON has translated Sappho and Euripides.
41 AL FILREIS Leads “Poem Talk” with guests on Poetry’s website
42 MARY ANGELA DOUGLAS “the larks cry out and not with music”
43 STEPHEN COLE “…the everlasting living and the longtime dead feast on the same severed, talking head.”
44 MARILYN CHIN Her New and Selected was published in 2018 (Norton).
45 KEVIN GALLAGHER Editor, poet, economist, historian has re-discovered the poet John Boyle O’Reilly.
46 DAVID LEHMAN Series Editor for Best American Poetry—founded in 1988.
47 JIM BEHRLE A thorn in the side of BAP.
48 ROBIN RICHARDSON The Canadian poet wrote recently, “I have removed myself completely from Canadian literature.”
49 PAOLA FERRANTE New editor of Minola Reivew.
50 A.E. STALLINGS Like, FSG, finalist for 2019 Pulitzer
51 TAYLOR JOHNSON Poetry Blog: “felt presence of the black crowd as we study our amongness together.”
52 PATRICA SMITH Incendiary Art, TriQuarterly/Northwestern U, finalist for 2018 Pulitzer
53 TYLER MILLS in Jan. 2021 Poetry “Gatsby is not drinking a gin rickey. Dracula not puncturing a vein.”
54 SEUNGJA CHOI in Jan. 2021 Poetry “Dog autumn attacks. Syphilis autumn.”
55 ATTICUS “It was her chaos that made her beautiful.”
56 JAMES LONGENBACH Essay in Jan. 2021 Poetry, wonders: would Galileo have been jailed were his claims in verse?
57 DAN SOCIU Hit 3 home runs for the Paris Goths in Scarriet’s 2020 World Baseball League.
58 PHILIP NIKOLAYEV Editor of Fulcrum and “14 International Younger Poets” issue from Art and Letters.
59 SUSMIT PANDA “Time walked barefoot; the clock gave it heels.”
60 BRIAN RIHLMANN Poet of working-class honesty.
61 TYREE DAYE in the New Yorker 1/18/21
62 JANE WONG in Dec. 2020 Poetry “My grandmother said it was going to be long—“
63 ALAN SHAPIRO Reel to Reel, University of Chicago Press, finalist for 2015 Pulitzer
64 PIPPA LITTLE in Dec. 2020 Poetry “I knew the names of stones at the river mouth”
65 PATRICK STEWART Read Shakespeare’s Sonnets online to millions of views.
66 STEVEN CRAMER sixth book of poems, Listen, published in 2020.
67 HIEU MINH NGUYEN In 2020 BAP
68 BEN MAZER New book on Harry Crosby. New book of poems. Unearthing poems by Delmore Schwartz for FSG.
69 KEVIN YOUNG Poetry editor of the New Yorker
70 BILLY COLLINS Poet Laureate of the U.S. 2001 to 2003
71 ARIANA REINES In 2020 BAP
72 VALERIE MACON fired as North Carolina poet laureate—when it was found she lacked publishing credentials.
73 ANDERS CARLSON-WEE Nation magazine published, then apologized, for his poem, “How-To,” in 2018.
74 DANA GIOIA 99 Poems: New and Selected published in 2016. His famous Can Poetry Matter? came out in 1992.
75 YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA In 2020 BAP
76 MARJORIE PERLOFF published Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire in 2016.
77 HELEN VENDLER her The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry came out in 2015.
78 MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE A Treatise On Stars, longlist for 2020 National Book Award—her 13th book.
79 GEORGE BILGERE  Belongs to the Billy Collins school. Lives in Cleveland.
80 CAROLYN FORCHE 2020 saw the publication of her book In the Lateness of the World: Poems from Penguin.
81 BOB DYLAN “Shall I leave them by your gate? Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?”
82 RICHARD HOWARD  has translated Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, Breton, Foucault, Camus and Gide.
83 GLYN MAXWELL The playwright/poet’s mother acted in the original Under Milk Wood on Broadway in 1956.
84 KAVEH AKBAR published in Best New Poets
85 D.A. POWELL The poet has received a Paul Engle Fellowship.
86 JOHN YAU In 2020 BAP
87 DAIPAYAN NAIR “Hold me tight. Bones are my immortality…”
88 ANDREEA IULIA SCRIDON in 14 International Younger Poets from Art and Letters.
89 LORI GOMEZ Sassy and sensual internet poet—Romantic who uses F-bombs.
90 JORIE GRAHAM In 2020 BAP
91 SIMON ARMITAGE In the New Yorker 9/28
92 TOMMYE BLOUNT Fantasia for the Man in Blue, longlist for 2020 National Book Award.
93 TYLER KNOTT GREGSON on Twitter: “let us sign/our names/ in the/emptiness”
94 STEPHANIE BURT Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry published in 2009
95 WILLIE LEE KINARD III in Jan. 2021 Poetry “The lesbians that lived in the apartment to the left…”
96 MICHAEL DICKMAN His poem about his grandmother in 2020 July/August Poetry was controversial.
97 FATIMAH ASGHAR published in Best New Poets
98 RICK BAROT The Galleons, Milkweed Editions, on longlist for 2020 National Book Award and excerpted in BAP 2020
99 DERRICK MICHAEL HUDSON had his 15 minutes of fame in Best American Poetry 2015.
100 JEAN VALENTINE (d. 12/30/20) in New Yorker 1/18/21

18 Comments

SCARRIET POETRY BASEBALL STATS

August 23, 2020 at 4:31 pm (Amy Lowell, anais nin, Anand Thakore, Andrew Marvell, Andy Warhol, Aphra Behn, Aristotle, Arthur Rimbaud, Arthur Schopenhauer, Baudelaire, Ben Mazer, Berlin Pistols, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Billy Beane, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Bob Hope, Bram Stoker, Carolyn Forche, da Vinci, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Dante, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Darwin, Delmore Schwartz, Devon Sun, Elizabeth Bishop, Fellini, G.W.F. Hegel, Garrison Keillor, Glyn Maxwell, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Goya, Hafiz, Harry Crosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeet Thayil, John Cage, John Dewey, John Donne, John Ruskin, John Townsend Trowbridge, John Updike, Johnny Depp, JP Morgan, Judith Butler, Jules Laforgue, Keats, Khoemeini, Kolkata Cobras, Mao, Marcel Duchamp, Mark Twain, Mary Angela Douglas, Milton, Napoleon Bonaparte, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Nietzsche, Paul Engle, Paul Valery, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Picasso, Plato, Poetry Baseball, Rabelais, Rabindranath Tagore, Randall Jarrell, Randolph Churchill, Richard Wagner, Robert Browning, Robert Burns, Robert Frost, Robert Lowell, Sarah Teasdale, Sartre, Satyajit Ray, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League, Shakespeare, Sharon Olds, Stephanie Burt, Stephen Cole, steven spielberg, Wolfgang Mozart, Woody Allen)

Amazon.com: Woody Allen wearing a baseball uniform Photo Print (24 ...

The first place LA Gamers were in last place when they signed Woody Allen (7-2).

WINS

Rimini Broadcasters  Owner, Fellini, Manager Claudius, Motto, “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.”  50-62, Fifth

Maurice Ravel 4-1
Samuel Coleridge 8-6
George Orwell 10-7
Jacques Lacan 6-5
Vladimir Nabokov 9-15
Giacomo Leopardi 6-10
Paul Valery 3-7
Alfred Hitchcock 1-5

Corsica Codes Owner, Napoleon Bonaparte, Manager, Alexander the Great, Motto “Let the more loving one be me” 57-55 Second

William Logan 3-1
Homer 13-6
Hegel 13-7
Kant 8-9
Balzac 8-11
Cicero 7-11
Hesiod 3-7
Edmund Wilson 2-3
Wislawa Szymborska 0-0

Madrid Crusaders  Owner, Philip II of Spain, Manager Christopher Columbus, Motto “If in my thought I have magnified the Father above the Son, let Him have no mercy on me.” 57-55 Second

Beethoven 9-2
Handel 14-4
Mozart 5-4
Thomas Aquinas 9-13
GK Chesterton 4-5
St. John of the Cross 4-5
George Berkeley 5-7
Plotinus 3-7
Scarlatti 2-2
Joan of Arc 1-0
Tolkien 1-2
Lisieux 0-3

Paris Goths Owner, Charles X, Manager, Arthur Schopenhauer, Motto “Every great enterprise takes its first step in faith.” 60-52 First

Francois Chateaubriand 16-7
Oscar Wilde 13-6
Johann Goethe 12-8
Goya 7-8
Thomas de Quincey 2-0
AW Schlegel 3-4
Gautier 2-4
Dostoevsky 1-1
Camille Paglia 0-2
Baudelaire 3-13

Rome Ceilings  Owner, Pope Julius II, Manager Cardinal Richelieu, Motto “They also serve who only stand and wait.” 60-52 First

GE Lessing 6-3
John Milton 12-7
Ludovico Ariosto 12-8
JS Bach 10-7
Augustine 10-9
John Dryden 8-10
Octavio Paz 1-1
George Gascoigne 1-4
Vivaldi 0-1

Berlin Pistols  Owner, Eva Braun, Manager Randolph Churchill, Motto “A life subdued to its instrument.” 49-63 Fifth

TS Eliot 12-10
William James 11-9
Richard Wagner 7-5
Rufus Griswold 4-3
George Santayana 4-9
Ezra Pound 3-4
Ernest Hemingway 3-8
Horace Greeley 3-6
Hugh Kenner 1-2
Wyndham Lewis 1-6

London Carriages  Owner, Queen Victoria, Manager, Prince Albert, Motto “Ours but to do and die.” 57-55 Third

Andrew Marvell 13-7
Henry James 11-10
Virginia Woolf 11-11
William Hazlitt 9-13
Charles Lamb 3-1
Descartes 3-2
Charlotte Bronte 3-2
Jeremy Bentham 3-9

Florence Banners Owner, Lorenzo de Medici, Manager, Erasmus, Motto “The One remains, the many change and pass.” 60-52 Second

Percy Shelley 15-7
Virgil 13-8
Leonardo da Vinci 10-8
Dante 11-10
Marsilio Ficino 2-1
Boccaccio 5-6
Sandro Botticelli 2-4
William Rossetti 1-3
Bronzino 0-2

The Devon Sun  Owner, PM Lord Russell, Manager, Winston Churchill, Motto “A good indignation brings out all one’s powers.” 51-61 Fourth

John Ruskin 7-3
Bertrand Russell 7-3
Aldous Huxley 11-9
Ralph Emerson 10-12
JS Mill 6-9
Thomas Carlyle 8-15
Henry Thoreau 2-6
Christopher Ricks 0-3

Dublin Laureates Owner, Nahum Tate, Manager, President Ronald Reagan, Motto “Luck is bestowed even on those who don’t have hands.” 64-48 First

Jonathan Swift 16-3
Livy 10-5
Pascal 6-2
Robert Louis Stevenson 9-3
Samuel Johnson 8-8
JD Salinger 2-1
Dana Gioia 2-1
Hans Christian Anderson 1-0
Robert Boyle 4-5
Thomas Peacock 2-7
Edmund Burke 3-9
Arthur Conan Doyle 0-0

Westport Actors  Owner, Harvey Weinstein, Manager, Johnny Depp, Motto “I am no hackney for your rod.” 48-64 Fourth

Chaucer 11-7
Petronius 10-10
Sade 8-8
George Byron 7-7
Norman Mailer 4-7
Richard Rorty 2-3
Henry Beecher 3-7
Andre Gide 1-4
Flaubert 0-6
Hugh Hefner 0-0
Erich Fromm 0-0

Virginia Strangers  Owner, David Lynch, Manager, Bram Stoker, Motto “So still is day, it seems like night profound.” 43-69 Fifth

Alexander Pope 11-9
HP Lovecraft 5-3
Franz Kafka 5-5
Robert Bloch 2-2
Friedrich Nietzsche 7-12
Salvador Dali 3-7
Samuel Beckett 3-9
Shirley Jackson 2-5
Albert Camus 2-11
Philip K Dick 1-3
Luis Bunuel 0-2
Antonin Artaud 0-3
Jean-Luc Godard 0-0

Connecticut Animals  Owner, PT Barnum, Manager, Walt Disney, Motto “Majesty and love are incompatible.” 60-52 Second

Amy Lowell 16-4
Jules Verne 14-9
Ovid 13-8
A.A. Milne 5-4
Melville 7-15
Robert Bly 2-5
Jose y Ortega Gasset 2-0
Gerard de Nerval 1-6
Christopher Hitchens 0-0

The New York War Owner, JP Morgan, Manager, Machiavelli, Motto “The fire-eyed maid of smoky war all hot and bleeding will we offer them.” 60-52 Second

Jack London 5-1
Erich Remarque 15-8
Walter Scott 12-6
William Shakespeare 11-7
Julius Caesar 4-4
Giordano Bruno 2-2
David Hume 9-13
Edward Gibbon 1-4
Richard Aldington 1-6

Boston Secrets Owner, Ben Franklin, Manager, George Washington Motto “We come in the age’s most uncertain hour and sing an American tune.” 71-41 First

Plato 18-6 -leads league
Pushkin 13-4
Edgar Poe 11-8
Moliere 10-9
Thomas Jefferson 5-1
James Monroe 4-2
James Madison 2-1
F Scott Fitzgerald 2-2
Alexander Hamilton 1-1
F Scott Key 4-7

Kolkata Cobras Owner, Satyajit Ray, Manager Rupi Kaur, Motto “Is it true that your love traveled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?” 58-54 Second

Gandhi 14-10
Rumi 13-8
Rabindranith Tagore 13-12
Hermann Hesse 8-10
Kabir Das 4-5
Nissim Ezekiel 2-0
Raja Rao 1-0
Faiz A Faiz 1-1
Krishnamurti 1-1
Kannada 1-2
Ramavtar Sarma 1-2
Acharya Shivapujan Sahay 0-1
Hoshang Merchant 0-1
Suryakant Tripathi 0-0
Sri Ramakrishna 0-0

The Tokyo Mist Owner, Kurosawa, Manager Eiji Yoshikawa, Motto “In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto.” 45-67 Fifth

Yukio Mishima 12-10
Yone Noguchi 9-9
Issa 10-14
Basho 7-11
Haruki Murakami 3-3
Kobe Abe 2-7
Takaaki Yoshimoto 1-1
Heraclitus 1-2
Murasaki Shikibu 1-3
DT Suzuki 0-5
Mitsuyo Kakuta 0-2

Beijing Waves Owner, Chairman Mao, Manager Jack Dorsey, Motto “Death gives separation repose.” 58-54 Second

Lao Tzu 15-7
Voltaire 14-9
Confucius 8-4
Lucretius 12-11
Rousseau 8-13
Lu Xun 1-0
Lenin 1-0
Khomeini 1-4
Friedrich Engles 0-1
Ho Chi Minh 0-3

Santa Barbara Laws Owner, Dick Wolf, Manager Moshe Rabbenu, Motto “In poetry everything is clear and definite.” 57-55 Third

Francis Bacon 13-11
Aristotle 11-10
Horace 10-12
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. 8-9
Ferdinand Saussure 5-3
Mark Van Doren 4-2
Quintilian 3-3
Ring Lardner Jr. 1-0
Yvor Winters 1-1
ML Rosenthal 1-2
Frank Stella 0-1
Frederick Law Olmstead 0-1

Los Angeles Gamers, Owner Merv Griffin, Manager, Bob Hope, Motto “He thought he saw an elephant that practiced on a fife” 60-52 First

Menander 11-4
Woody Allen 7-2
Democritus 10-6
Lewis Carroll 11-10
Charlie Chaplin 5-3
James Tate 5-5
Christian Morgenstern 3-3
Clive James 2-1
EE Cummings 1-0
Muhammad Ali 1-0
Garrison Keillor 1-2
Derrida 1-7
Antoine de Saint Exupery 0-1
Charles Bernstein 0-4

Arden Dreamers Owner, Pamela Digby Churchill Harriman, Manager, Averell Harriman Motto  “Not the earth, the sea, none of it was enough for her, without me.” 50-62 Fifth

Mary Wollstonecraft 8-4
Margaret Atwood 11-10
Anais Nin 10-13
Jane Austen 4-2
Floyd Dell 4-4
bell hooks 2-1
Helene Cixous 2-1
Michael Ondaaatje 1-0
Jean-Paul Sartre 2-3
Louise Gluck 1-3
Simone de Beauvoir 2-6
Germaine Greer 2-8
William Godwin 1-4
Frida Kahlo 0-0
Diego Rivera 0-0

Manhattan Printers Owner, Andy Warhol, Manager, Brian Epstein, Motto “The eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag, that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.” 52-60 Fourth

Hans Holbein (the Younger) 10-2
John Cage 6-2
Marcel Duchamp 7-7
Marjorie Perloff 8-13
Hilton Kramer 4-3
Toulouse Lautrec 3-2
Paul Klee 6-7
Guy Davenport 1-1
F.O. Matthiessen 3-4
RP Blackmur 2-4
Stephanie Burt 1-6
Mark Rothko 1-8

Chicago Buyers Owner, John D. Rockefeller, Manager, Charles Darwin, Motto “Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?” 61-51 First

Paul Engle 13-11
Mark Twain 12-7
Sigmund Freud 12-10
Walt Whitman 9-11
Helen Vendler 5-4
Judith Butler 3-2
J.L. Austin 2-3
WK Wimsatt 1-2
Monroe Beardsley 1-2
Thomas Hart Benton 0-0

The Philadelphia Crash, Owner, AC Barnes, Manager Cezanne, Motto “But for some futile things unsaid I should say all is done for us.” 55-57 Third

John Crowe Ransom 12-7
Pablo Picasso 7-3
John Dewey 12-10
Ludwig Wittgenstein 10-11
Walter Pater 8-11
Jackson Pollock 4-6
Walter Benjamin 1-0
Clement Greenberg 1-2
IA Richards 0-3
Kenneth Burke 0-1
Roger Fry 0-1

The Phoenix Universe, Owner Steven Spielberg, Manager, Billy Beane, Motto “I know why the caged bird sings.” 59-53 Second

Jean Cocteau 8-1
Raymond Carver 8-3
Czeslaw Milosz 7-2
Harriet Beecher Stowe 9-10
Martin Luther King Jr 5-4
Michel Foucault 4-3
Harold Bloom 5-6
Lucien Freud 4-5
Marge Piercy 3-5
Lionel Trilling 2-3
Eric Said 2-3
Randall Jarrell 3-6
Timothy Leary 0-0

HOME RUNS BY TEAM

EMPEROR DIVISION

Robert Burns Broadcasters 20
Anne Sexton Broadcasters 16
Rainer Maria Rilke Broadcasters 16
Jim Morrison Broadcasters 10
Mick Jagger Broadcasters 6
Gregory Corso Broadcasters 6

Victor Hugo Codes 29
WH Auden Codes 25
Jean Racine Codes 21
Wole Soyinka Codes 12
Derek Walcott Codes 8
Jules Laforgue Codes 6

Anne Bradstreet Crusaders 23
Aeschylus Crusaders 23
Mary Angela Douglas Crusaders 15
Joyce Kilmer Crusaders 10
Phillis Wheatley Crusaders 9
Saint Ephrem Crusaders 8

Sophocles Goths 25
Heinrich Heine Goths 21
Torquato Tasso Goths 14
Madame de Stael 8
Friedrich Holderlin Goths 7
Thomas Chatterton Goths 6
Dan Sociu Goths 3

Euripides Ceilings 20
Edmund Spenser Ceilings 14
William Blake Ceilings 8
Michelangelo Ceilings 8
John Milton Ceilings 7
Tulsidas Ceilings 5

GLORIOUS DIVISION

Yeats Pistols 29
James Joyce Pistols 22
Ted Hughes Pistols 18
John Quinn Pistols 12
DH Lawrence Pistols 9
Alistair Crowley Pistols 8
Ford Maddox Ford Pistols 5
T.S. Eliot Pistols 5

Henry Longfellow Carriages 22
Alfred Tennyson Carriages 18
Robert Browning Carriages 15
GB Shaw Carriages 11
Paul McCartney Carriages 11
Sylvia Plath Carriages 6
Elizabeth Barrett Carriages 5

Friedrich Schiller Banners 29
DG Rossetti Banners 19
John Keats Banners 14
Ben Mazer Banners 10
Stefan George Banners 9
Christina Rossetti Banners 8
Dante Banners 5
Glyn Maxwell Banners 4

William Wordsworth Sun 26
Matthew Arnold Sun 16
Rudyard Kipling Sun 16
Horace Walpole Sun 13
HG Wells Sun 11
Ralph Emerson Sun 8
Margaret Fuller Sun 5

Alexandre Dumas Laureates 24
Charles Dickens Laureates 24
Aphra Behn Laureates 18
JK Rowling Laureates 13
Sarah Teasdale Laureates 12
Ghalib Laureates 12
Boris Pasternak Laureates 8
Oliver Goldsmith Laureates 6
John Townsend Trowbridge Laureates 6

SOCIETY DIVISION

Thomas Nashe Actors 22
Hafiz Actors 19
Amiri Baraka Actors 10
Gwendolyn Brooks Actors 7
Leonard Cohen Actors 6
Johnny Rotten Actors 4
Marilyn Hacker Actors 3
Audre Lorde Actors 3

Francois Rabelais Strangers 22
Arthur Rimbaud Strangers 22
Theodore Roethke Strangers 18
Knut Hamsun Strangers 7
Mary Shelley Strangers 3

Edward Lear Animals 16
Wallace Stevens Animals 14
Seamus Heaney Animals 10
Lawrence Ferlinghetti Animals 8
Marianne Moore Animals 8
Jack Spicer Animals 7

Stephen Crane War 16
Harry Crosby War 15
Phillip Sidney War 11
Wilfred Owen War 11
Apollinaire War 10
James Dickey War 9
William Shakespeare War 5
Robert Graves War 5
Howard Nemerov  War 5

Robert Frost Secrets 24
Emily Dickinson Secrets 20
Woody Guthrie Secrets 13
Kanye West Secrets 10
Nathaniel Hawthorne Secrets 8
Cole Porter Secrets 6
Stephen Cole Secrets 5
Paul Simon Secrets 4
Edgar Poe Secrets 4

PEOPLES DIVISION

Vikram Seth Cobras 22
Jadoo Akhtar Cobras 21
George Harrison Cobras 20
Gajanan Muktibodh Cobras 10
Anand Thakore Cobras 9
Allen Ginsberg Cobras 8
Kalidasa Cobras 4
Jeet Thayil Cobras 4
Adil Jussawala Cobras 4
Daipayan Nair Cobras 3

John Lennon Mist 19
Hilda Doolittle  Mist 18
Sadakichi Hartmann Mist 16
Yoko Ono Mist 8
Haruki Murakami Mist 6
Gary Snyder Mist 5
Natsume Soseki  Mist 5

Li Po Waves 26
Tu Fu Waves 18
Karl Marx Waves 18
Li He Waves 6
Bertolt Brecht Waves 4

John Donne Laws 22
Thomas Hardy Laws 17
Martial Laws 13
Donald Hall Laws 7
Jane Kenyon Laws 6
Reed Whitmore Laws 6
Antonio Machado Laws 6
Walter Raleigh Laws 5

Eugene Ionesco Gamers 26
Billy Collins Gamers 25
Thomas Hood Gamers 17
Joe Green Gamers 8
Ernest Thayer Gamers 4
John Betjeman Gamers 4

MODERN DIVISION

Sharon Olds Dreamers 24
Edna Millay Dreamers 22
Louis MacNeice Dreamers 20
Jack Gilbert Dreamers 10
Stevie Smith Dreamers 9
Richard Lovelace Dreamers 8
Louise Bogan Dreamers 5
Carolyn Forche Dreamers 4

Aristophanes Printers 24
John Updike Printers 24
Garcia Lorca Printers 11
John Ashbery Printers 10
Andre Breton Printers 9
Lou Reed Printers 7
Hart Crane Printers 6
Christopher Isherwood Printers 5
Marcel Duchamp Printers 5
James Baldwin Printers 5

Elizabeth Bishop Buyers 30 —leads  league
Dylan Thomas Buyers 25
Robert Lowell Buyers 17
Edgar Lee Masters Buyers 8
Kenneth Rexroth Buyers 8
Walt Whitman Buyers 6
Robert Penn Warren Buyers 5
Duke Ellington Buyers 5

Allen Tate Crash 20
Stephen Spender Crash 19
Franz Werfel Crash 11
Donald Davidson Crash 8
Archilochus Crash 8
John Gould Fletcher Crash 6
John Crowe Ransom Crash 6
WC Williams Crash 3
Stanley Kunitz Crash 3

Bob Dylan Universe 24
Juvenal Universe 22
Paul Celan Universe 14
Anthony Hecht Universe 10
Delmore Schwartz Universe 9
Chuck Berry Universe 7
Maya Angelou Universe 7

~~~

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THE FINAL FOUR AS MARCH MADNESS CONCLUDES!

March 30, 2020 at 12:59 pm (Cornelius Mathews, Dan Sociu, F. Scott Fitzgerald, ISLANDS - kinetic light installation, Karina Smigla-Bobinski, Olympiapark Munich, Germany, 2004, March Madness, Marla Muse, Ovid, Scarriet Editors)

Scarriet finishes its March Madness Poetry Tournament (the Sublime) for the year 2020 in this post. Congratulations to all the participants, in this our 10th anniversary season.

The crowds are fevered, excited, massing in great numbers into the arena with whoops and screams, as Final Four play descends upon March Madness Island.

Ovid (Classical Bracket) It is art to conceal art.

Matthews (Romantic Bracket) Green dells that into silence stretch away.

Fitzgerald (Modern Bracket) So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Sociu (Post-Modern Bracket) The quakes moving for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

When it comes to the sublime, we have no time to think.

The sublime stops thought as it overwhelms our senses.

But paradoxically, poetry is not sensual—poetry is born of a priori thought; it is a medium made, and that medium, language, is a system of signs, not something which, in itself, is sensual; nor does the creative impulse have anything that we can recognize as sensual—we cannot “see” the chess player thinking, nor do we know how the moves of the chess pieces are shaped by the mind, or what sensuality belongs to any decisions as such.

And, as opposed to the mere 64 square chess board of the mere chess player, the blank page of the poet contains many more possible “moves” than a chess board, which nothing physical could understand in real time and not be overwhelmed and defeated before it starts.

Perhaps the sublime is the paradoxical attempt of thought to be physical—the poem understood physically is sublime by this very fact, beyond any “content” per se.

But this does not seem quite right—content must matter.  The sublime simply cannot be codified in words.  And  yet—would the sublime be satisfied with no definition of itself?

I suppose one could attempt a formula for the sublime, as Poe did, with his “Raven”—what is the best way to write a popular, yet learned poem?  How many lines?  What subject?  What structure?

To attempt a definition of the sublime right here and now (as fans at this moment are filling the arena, and before Marla Muse has appeared on the scene):

A sublime expression requires two compact, highly simple, and distinct, ideas which war and unite in a wave/particle state of paradox, in a manner which gives us a pleasant, non-thinking experience.

Ovid: It is art to conceal art.

If art is good, then we should not want to conceal it, and if art is bad, then art is good to conceal itself, but how can art be both good and bad?—in both cases Ovid’s assertion would seem to be false.

Unless art is both good and bad—bad when it is not concealed, good when it is concealed, and therefore good when it conceals itself, and therefore the concealing (which if it is good, we don’t see) is the good action, and therefore it does fit our definition: “two compact, highly simple, and distinct, ideas which war and unite in a wave/particle state of paradox.”  But does it meet the second requirement?  Does Ovid’s “It is art to conceal art” give us a “pleasant, non-thinking experience?” For the cheering, singing, and excitable Ovid fans, the answer would seem to be yes.

“Green dells that into silence stretch away” would seem—

But now it is too late.  Play has begun, Marla Muse has turned down the lights; fires lit all around dance to the collective urges of the fans.

Away, away stretch the green dells…

The vista resists the concentrated might of the screaming circle in the center of the throng.

The art of each opponent looks for an opening, creates an opening—but to enter, or to trap?

What risks are taken!  The “art” is momentarily exposed, and a gasp goes up from the crowd!  Matthews suddenly brings what he has from silence, into the green dells…

The play is unbelievable!

The fans are going crazy!

Ovid concealed a bit too long!

Cornelius Matthews wins! He’s going to the championship!

~~~~~~~~~

In the other Final Four match-up, F. Scott Fitzgerald has us “beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

We attempt to go forward, but the current takes us back.

Here is the whole passage:

Most of the big shore places were closed now and there were hardly any lights except the shadowy, moving glow of a ferryboat across the Sound. And as the moon rose higher the inessential houses began to melt away until gradually I became aware of the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house, had once pandered in whispers to the last and greatest of all human dreams; for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an æsthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.

And as I sat there, brooding on the old unknown world, I thought of Gatsby’s wonder when he first picked out the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock. He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Fitzgerald’s passage has so many marvelous parts: “that flowered once for Dutch sailors’ eyes—a fresh, green breast of the new world. Its vanished trees, the trees that had made way for Gatsby’s house…”

Please open your gold filigree program, Poetry March Madness acolytes, to Dan Sociu’s poem (Marla will bring up the lights in just a moment):

Nimic Nu Mai E Posibil

Nothing is possible anymore between me

And a nineteen year old girl, just as nothing

was possible when I was nineteen

years old. I listened to them carefully, they ruffled my hair,

they’d gently reject my touches, no, Dan,

you are not like this, you are a poet. They came

to me for therapy, they’d come with their eyes in tears

to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love

around the poet and none with him.

The poet would go out every evening

quaking like a tectonic wave and

in the morning he’d come back humiliated

in his heart—the quakes moving

for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

******

Here, then, the paradox which slams us in the heart as true:

“they’d come with their eyes in tears to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love around the poet and none with him.

Dan Sociu defeats F. Scott Fitzgerald!

~~~~~~~~~~

Dan Sociu faces Cornelius Matthews in the 2020 March Madness Championship!!

Sociu has saved the best for last.

“Green dells that into silence stretch away” has concision, it has painterly beauty, and loftiness and yes, sublimity.

And now the conclusion of Sociu’s poem:

The poet would go out every evening

quaking like a tectonic wave and

in the morning he’d come back humiliated

in his heart—the quakes moving

for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

The arena erupts. The fans are now pure energy. The sounds of the arena blare across the sea, the news hesitant and anxious no longer. Even the children know.

Dan Sociu has won the 2020 Poetry March Madness.

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LAST TWO FIRST ROUND MATCHES IN SUBLIME MARCH MADNESS!

March 28, 2020 at 12:56 pm (Ben Mazer, Carolyn Creedon, Dan Sociu, March Madness, Marla Muse, Mary Angela Douglas)

Clearing in the Woods | Detroit Institute of Arts Museum

We love the hum of crowds, their jostling, anonymous company, when, with friends, we climb the stairs, joking with each other, on the way to our seats in the Poetry Arena, for Poetry March Madness.

After these two matches, all 64 contestants will have made their sublime presence known against an opponent in the 2020 Scarriet March Madness—its 10th anniversary.

Ten years of Poetry March Madness on Scarriet.  It’s hard to believe.

What do you think, Marla?  A proud moment, huh?

Marla Muse:  It’s only time, Tom. Don’t be so full of yourself. It’s only time.

True, Marla, true.

The fans are crazy about this contest.  Here’s one of the most haunting love poems ever written, “Litany” by 7th seeded Carolyn Creedon:

Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant?
I will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and I will eat it and call
it a carolyn sandwich. Then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayon­naise and
that is how you shall love me in my restaurant
.
Tom, will you come to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed?
Yes, and I will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later,
it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby
.
Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen
and watch the people with me?
Yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. I will win and we will tangle up
on your comforter while the sweat rains from our stomachs and fore­heads
.
Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s
jewelry box. Later can we walk to the duck pond?
Yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. I will push you on
the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. If you fall I might disappear
.
Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a
loved face and give you a squalling red daughter.
No, but I will come inside you and you will be my daughter
.
Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person?
No, but I will lie down on your sheets and taste you. There will be feathers
of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you
.
Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your
back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook
of your shoulder blade?
No, but later you can lie against me and almost touch me and when I go I will
leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed
up against the thought of me
.
Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday
you will need me?
No, but I will sit in silence while you rage, you can knock the chairs down
any mountain. I will always be the same and you will always wait
.
Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just
hanging there and I want it.
No, it will burn my fingers. No one can have the sun: it’s on loan from God.
But I will draw a picture of it and send it to you from Richmond and then you
can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun
.
Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from
Richmond and baptize me with sex and cool water?
I will come back from Richmond. I will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the
back of your neck and then I will lick the salt off it. Then I will leave
.
Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me?
I have left you. That is how you will know
.
.
Does this need any commentary?  Do great poems need any added words?
.
Opposite Carolyn Creedon is a poet of faith and exquisite beauty, whose many poems invoke childhood reigning over the fallen: the sensitive and delicate 10th seeded Mary Angela Douglas. She presents a portion of a poem; many of the sublime examples are excerpts. Few words, but we still feel Mary Angela Douglas has a good chance to win, since how can the soul deny the steady iamb (the voice you hear from long a-go…) drifting into a surprise, which stuns—the trochaic ransacked.  Never has one word been so elevated by the melody of poetry.
.

the voice you hear
from long ago
could be the voice
of all the snows
could be the light of all the stars
of all the feelings near or far
you felt just when
the world was new
until the sorrows
ransacked you

Both poets are from the American South—which implies poems of heartbreak and pessimism, and a beauty of decay which is sadder and more beautiful than anything.  In the calm evening the poets circle each other. It’s a shame that someone has to lose.

~~~~~~~~~~~
Dan Sociu lives in Romania. This masterpiece was translated with help from Ana-Maria Tone.  The Romanian title by the 8th seeded Sociu is “Nimic Nu Mai E Posibil.”

Nothing is possible anymore between me

And a nineteen year old girl, just as nothing

was possible when I was nineteen

years old. I listened to them carefully, they ruffled my hair,

they’d gently reject my touches, no, Dan,

you are not like this, you are a poet. They came

to me for therapy, they’d come with their eyes in tears

to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love

around the poet and none with him.

The poet would go out every evening

quaking like a tectonic wave and

in the morning he’d come back humiliated

in his heart—the quakes moving

for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

It’s impossible to define “poet” without intellectual bragging in a high-toned manner which no one quite believes, on one hand, or sounding the alarm against falsity and the fake, on the other. If a poet is truly praised, the definition begins to leave the poet behind; despite Shelley’s “Defense,” for instance, no one looks at today’s poets and then believes what Shelley said.  In this poem, Sociu manages to capture better than anyone, what’s going on underneath what all of us talk about when we talk about the “poet.”  “Nimic Nu Mai E Posibil” manages to sympathize, laud, pity, and disdain what a poet is in a manner visionary, intimate, grounded, and sublime.

Ninth seeded Ben Mazer is one of our best living poets.  In “Cirque D’etoiles,” the sublime keeps gaining speed as we read:

And after all is made a frozen waste
of snow and ice, of boards and rags. . .
if I should see one spark of permanent,
… one chink of blue among the wind-blown slags
approaching thus, and mirroring my surmise,
one liquid frozen permanence, your eyes. . .
should meet you at the end of time
and never end. . .
for always, even past death, you are my friend. . . .
and when at last it comes, inevitable,
that you shall sit in furs at high table
(for what other fate can one expect?)
dispensing honours, correlating plans
for every cause, for education, science. . .
what will I miss? how can I not be there?
who see you sputtering wordless in despair. . .
as I do now “miss nothing, nothing”
and to know you are some other man’s
(the stupid jerk), who once had your compliance. . .
and do these things ever end? (and if so, where?)
I ask myself, and should I feel despair?
to know, to love, to know, and still not care?
in winter, spring, and summer, and in fall,
on land or sea, at any time at all,
to know that half the stars on each night shine,
the other half are in your eyes, and mine. . .
and what is there? And what, I ask, is there?
Only these hurt and wounded orbs I see
nestled against a frozen stark brick wall. . .
and there are you, and there is me,
and that is all, that is all. . .
How from this torment can I wrestle free?
I can’t. . . . for thus is my soliloquy.
And you shall sit there serving backers tea.
And running ladies circles. Think of me. . .
Think of me, when like a mountainous waste
the night’s long dreaming stretches to a farther coast
where nothing is familiar. . . two paths that may have crossed
discover what had long been past recall. . .
that nothing’s really changed at all,
that we are here!
Here among flowering lanterns of the sea,
finite, marking each vestige of the city
with trailing steps, with wonder, and with pity!
And laugh, and never say that you feel shitty,
are one whose heart is broken, like this ditty.
And think that there is nothing there to miss.
Think “I must not miss a thing. I must not miss
the wraps, the furs, the teaspoon, or the kiss.”
And end in wishes. And leave not this abyss.
For all is one, beginning as it’s done.
Never forgetting this, till I am no one.
There is no formula that can forget. . .
these eyes pierce though ten thousand suns have set,
and will keep setting. . . now tuck in your head,
the blankets folded, and lay down in your bed.
And stir the stars, long after we are dead.

The fans are on their feet for both Dan Sociu and Ben Mazer.

The first round of Sublime March Madness action is complete.

The poets gather in the rotunda for music and wine.

Some make their way down the wooded pathways towards the sighing shore alone.

 

 

 

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THE POST-MODERN BRACKET IN THE SUBLIME MARCH MADNESS!!

March 13, 2020 at 2:19 pm (Ben Mazer, Brian Rihlmann, Camille Rankine, Carolyn Creedon, Carolyn Forche, Dan Sociu, Derek Walcott, Jeff Calloway, John Lennon, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Paul McCartney, Philip Nikolayev, Rutger Hauer, Sean Harvey, Sharon Olds, Stephen Cole)

Image result for eleanor rigby in painting

Here is the Post-Modern Bracket, 16 heart-breaks which belong to now—our era, beginning with a boomer anthem, “Day in the Life,” and ending with a memory very recently seen on Facebook. This completes the 4 brackets and the 64 “teams” competing in the Scarriet 2020 Sublime March Madness.

How will future readers read us?  With silence and tears?  With pity?  With gratitude, in digital anthologies tucked inside the heart?  With long essays? With ridicule? With puzzlement?  With sighs?

Anyway, here they are:

1) John Lennon & Paul McCartney (day in the life)

I read the news today, oh boy.
About a lucky man who made the grade.
And though the news was rather sad,
I just had to laugh.
I saw the photograph.
He blew his mind out in a car.
He didn’t noticed that the lights had changed.
A crowd of people stood and stared.
They’d seen his face before.
Nobody was really sure if he was from the House of Lords.

I saw a film today, oh boy.
The English army had just won the war.
A crowd of people turned away.
But I just had to look
Having read the book.

I’d love to turn you on.

Woke up, fell out of bed,
Dragged a comb across my head.
Found my way downstairs and drank a cup
And looking up, I noticed I was late.
Found my coat and grabbed my hat,
Made the bus in seconds flat.
Found my way upstairs and had a smoke
And somebody spoke and I went into a dream:
I read the news today, oh boy.
4,000 holes in Blackburn, Lancashire,
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all.
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall.

I’d love to turn you on.

 

2) Carolyn Forche (the colonel)

WHAT YOU HAVE HEARD is true. I was in his house. His wife carried
a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went
out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the
cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over
the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English.
Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to
scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On
the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had
dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for
calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of
bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief
commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was
some talk then of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot
said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed
himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say
nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries
home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like
dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one
of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water
glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As
for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck them-
selves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last
of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some
of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the
ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.

3) Rutger Hauer (blade runner dying speech)

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
Near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments
Will be lost in time, like tears
In the rain. Time to die.

4) Marilyn Chin (how i got that name)

I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin.
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g
of “becoming.”  Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paper son
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond
transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse—for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.
My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.”
She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot”
for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die
in sublime ignorance, flanked
by loving children and the “kitchen deity.”
While my father dithers,
a tomcat in Hong Kong trash—
a gambler, a petty thug,
who bought a chain of chopsuey joints
in Piss River, Oregon,
with bootlegged Gucci cash.
Nobody dared question his integrity given
his nice, devout daughters
and his bright, industrious sons
as if filial piety were the standard
by which all earthly men are measured.

*

Oh, how trustworthy our daughters,
how thrifty our sons!
How we’ve managed to fool the experts
in education, statistic and demography—
We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning.
Indeed, they can use us.
But the “Model Minority” is a tease.
We know you are watching now,
so we refuse to give you any!
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!
The further west we go, we’ll hit east;
the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China.
History has turned its stomach
on a black polluted beach—
where life doesn’t hinge
on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our new lover
in the final episode of “Santa Barbara”
will lean over a scented candle
and call us a “bitch.”
Oh God, where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources!

*

Then, one redolent spring morning
the Great Patriarch Chin
peered down from his kiosk in heaven
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge
Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd.
A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry.
And I, his least favorite—
“not quite boiled, not quite cooked,”
a plump pomfret simmering in my juices—
too listless to fight for my people’s destiny.
“To kill without resistance is not slaughter”
says the proverb.  So, I wait for imminent death.
The fact that this death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.

*

So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong,
granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch”
and the brooding Suilin Fong,
daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong
and G.G. Chin the infamous,
sister of a dozen, cousin of a million,
survived by everbody and forgotten by all.
She was neither black nor white,
neither cherished nor vanquished,
just another squatter in her own bamboo grove
minding her poetry—
when one day heaven was unmerciful,
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She did not flinch nor writhe,
nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed!  Solid as wood, happily
a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized
by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away!

 

5) Derek Walcott (this page)

This page is a cloud between whose fraying edges
a headland with mountains appears brokenly
then is hidden again until what emerges
from the now cloudless blue is the grooved sea
and the whole self-naming island, its ochre verges,
its shadow-plunged valleys and a coiled road
threading the fishing villages, the white, silent surges
of combers along the coast, where a line of gulls has arrowed
into the widening harbour of a town with no noise,
its streets growing closer like print you can now read,
two cruise ships, schooners, a tug, ancestral canoes,
as a cloud slowly covers the page and it goes
white again and the book comes to a close.

6) Philip Nikolayev (litmus test)

Didn’t want to go to the damn party in the first place,
needed to “catch a lecture” the next morning
on Renaissance Florence, one of those stupid 9-a.m.-on-Saturday
events, but my buddy insisted sangria, perfect chance to chat
up Jessica and Jake, so we went
at midnight. Sangria my ass. I mean it tasted extra nice,
bootilicious, but they’d run out of ice
and Jessica and Jake had already left. Half an hour later
three spluttering purple volcanoes
of indeterminate size, but perfectly harmless and hospitable,
spun winking out of the texture of the tabletop,
pouring forth an interminable wordlist full of words
into pulsating Buddha-faced saucers. My armchair
floated in the breeze over the seaweed-infested carpet
dead to rights. I was chary of wading through its Dead Sea
waters, though I needed to pee. My buddy goes man,
I think we just drank some acid, should’ve
poured the stuff that’s on the table but I wanted it cold
from the fridge cuz they’ve no ice
so anyway we can always and later too you know
all that, now best stay where you are, best to just to hang in look
I know you have to pee “like ouch” but listen
I’ve been thinking this week all week every day
for three years now, it’s driving me nuts I’ve always
wanted to talk you up about how you know sometimes
that feeling that we call sublime or subliminal whichever
you can also feel it right that wholesome feeling
a bird tipping from branch to branch to branch in luminous light
a bee crawling from bract to bract a strange kind of lyric feeling
the inexpressible what we felt in childhood
is really what we’re all about like they’re cluing you in on it now
gluing suing slewing you in on it. Spack,
a strange music turned itself on and wouldn’t quit,
that bizarre non-quitter music. Anyway when they sang
happy birthday dear Humphrey
at 2 a.m. I needed to pee especially badly
and trudged off through the interminable apartment
though my buddy hadn’t yet finalized his discourse.
I’d never been in a non-finite apartment before,
after 27 rooms I stopped counting
because I almost wet my pants before finding the bathroom
plus had to wait another ten minutes
while someone was getting sick in there.
And finally when I felt I was going back to normal
and washing my hands, I saw in the mirror,
which was in the key of E flat minor,
myself as a winged demon with golden horns on top
and colored rotating spirals for my pupils, my stare
expressive of the universal doom.
Then there was a descent down the three-mile jade
staircase and gigantic escalades of diamond snow.
My buddy and I sat to our heart’s content on steaming grilles
in the pavement by the Store 24 warming ourselves
(though in fact it was hot) with other nocturnal characters,
who thankfully seemed to know no English, and in the end
I realized that we are chemical through and through,
so determinate and so chemical, while sliding in crystal insects up
the conic mountain of spacetime, with its mass but no weight,
pure composition. Soon by the creaking of refreshed pedestrians
I opened up to the idea that there was one hour left until the lecture.
Is supermarket coffee inherently such a palette of taste,
or was it the radically contingent chemistry of my palate
that temporarily made it so? My buddy had left to sleep it off
(wish I had his worries), but I tried to recompose alone
the ordinary coherency of life. All I heard were the dubious
reverberations of a mid-90s train passing underground.
Savonarola’s sermon, to which I had eventually made it
across the Alps, focused on the ideals of asceticism, poverty
and visionary piety. His project of a bohemian republic
appealed to me deeply as I took faithful notes
diagonally across my notebook (which was unliftable).
Fellow aspirants peeked at me inquisitorially,
but I waved them off, staring at the preacher’s
skinny jowl, enormous nose, dark cowl in profile. Then
I had nothing left or planned for the rest of Saturday
except to get home to my two-bit moth-devoured
studio with its many topological holes
and zip up my brain. I stepped across some literature
to my solitary bed, dedicated exclusively to the twin purposes
of study and sleep, and elongated myself as best I could.
Sleep was out of the question, issues of the irreducible
multiplicity pressing harshly upon my overburdened lobes.
I yearned to be one, complete, so I arched and reached
for the telephone. Yes, dropped some acid last night
first time ever, haven’t slept. Please come save me,
I hate acid. You hadn’t slept much since New York either,
but you arrived instantly, as if wading through atrocious snow
came as naturally to you as levitation to a saint.
I laughed suddenly, for the first time in a month,
shocked to discover your red hair had its usual color.
You had American Spirit cigarettes (I was out),
and in minutes we stood at the foot of Lee Bo’s Cantonese Kitchen,
whose second floor seemed unreachable on foot.
I sighed with relief in the pentatonic elevator.
In the bathroom things went well this time,
no dragons in the mirror. You fed me with a spoon,
then with chopsticks. The hot and sour soup
was indeed hot and sour, it counteracted my internal chill,
and the salt jumbo shrimp were verily salty and jumbo.
The green tea you poured into me sip by tiny sip
made me realize for the first time
how perfect we were for each other. I wept like a whale.
You had changed my chemical composition forever.

 

7) Carolyn Creedon (litany)

Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant?
I will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and I will eat it and call
it a carolyn sandwich. Then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayon­naise and
that is how you shall love me in my restaurant
.
Tom, will you come to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed?
Yes, and I will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later,
it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby
.
Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen
and watch the people with me?
Yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. I will win and we will tangle up
on your comforter while the sweat rains from our stomachs and fore­heads
.
Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s
jewelry box. Later can we walk to the duck pond?
Yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. I will push you on
the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. If you fall I might disappear
.
Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a
loved face and give you a squalling red daughter.
No, but I will come inside you and you will be my daughter
.
Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person?
No, but I will lie down on your sheets and taste you. There will be feathers
of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you
.
Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your
back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook
of your shoulder blade?
No, but later you can lie against me and almost touch me and when I go I will
leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed
up against the thought of me
.
Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday
you will need me?
No, but I will sit in silence while you rage, you can knock the chairs down
any mountain. I will always be the same and you will always wait
.
Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just
hanging there and I want it.
No, it will burn my fingers. No one can have the sun: it’s on loan from God.
But I will draw a picture of it and send it to you from Richmond and then you
can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun
.
Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from
Richmond and baptize me with sex and cool water?
I will come back from Richmond. I will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the
back of your neck and then I will lick the salt off it. Then I will leave
.
Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me?
I have left you. That is how you will know
.

8) Dan Sociu (nimic nu mai e posibil)

Nothing is possible anymore between me

And a nineteen year old girl, just as nothing

was possible when I was nineteen

years old. I listened to them carefully, they ruffled my hair,

they’d gently reject my touches, no, Dan,

you are not like this, you are a poet. They came

to me for therapy, they’d come with their eyes in tears

to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love

around the poet and none with him.

The poet would go out every evening

quaking like a tectonic wave and

in the morning he’d come back humiliated

in his heart—the quakes moving

for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

9) Ben Mazer (cirque d’etoiles)

And after all is made a frozen waste
of snow and ice, of boards and rags. . .
if I should see one spark of permanent,
… one chink of blue among the wind-blown slags
approaching thus, and mirroring my surmise,
one liquid frozen permanence, your eyes. . .
should meet you at the end of time
and never end. . .
for always, even past death, you are my friend. . . .
and when at last it comes, inevitable,
that you shall sit in furs at high table
(for what other fate can one expect?)
dispensing honours, correlating plans
for every cause, for education, science. . .
what will I miss? how can I not be there?
who see you sputtering wordless in despair. . .
as I do now “miss nothing, nothing”
and to know you are some other man’s
(the stupid jerk), who once had your compliance. . .
and do these things ever end? (and if so, where?)
I ask myself, and should I feel despair?
to know, to love, to know, and still not care?
in winter, spring, and summer, and in fall,
on land or sea, at any time at all,
to know that half the stars on each night shine,
the other half are in your eyes, and mine. . .
and what is there? And what, I ask, is there?
Only these hurt and wounded orbs I see
nestled against a frozen stark brick wall. . .
and there are you, and there is me,
and that is all, that is all. . .
How from this torment can I wrestle free?
I can’t. . . . for thus is my soliloquy.
And you shall sit there serving backers tea.
And running ladies circles. Think of me. . .
Think of me, when like a mountainous waste
the night’s long dreaming stretches to a farther coast
where nothing is familiar. . . two paths that may have crossed
discover what had long been past recall. . .
that nothing’s really changed at all,
that we are here!
Here among flowering lanterns of the sea,
finite, marking each vestige of the city
with trailing steps, with wonder, and with pity!
And laugh, and never say that you feel shitty,
are one whose heart is broken, like this ditty.
And think that there is nothing there to miss.
Think “I must not miss a thing. I must not miss
the wraps, the furs, the teaspoon, or the kiss.”
And end in wishes. And leave not this abyss.
For all is one, beginning as it’s done.
Never forgetting this, till I am no one.
There is no formula that can forget. . .
these eyes pierce though ten thousand suns have set,
and will keep setting. . . now tuck in your head,
the blankets folded, and lay down in your bed.
And stir the stars, long after we are dead.

10) Mary Angela Douglas

the voice you hear
from long ago
could be the voice
of all the snows
could be the light of all the stars
of all the feelings near or far
you felt just when
the world was new
until the sorrows
ransacked you

11) Camille Rankine (emergency management)
The sun eats away at the earth, or the earth eats away
at itself and burning up,
.
I sip at punch.
So well practiced at this
living. I have a way of seeing
.
things as they are: it’s history
that’s done this to me.
It’s the year I’m told
.
my body will turn rotten,
my money talks but not enough,
I feel my body turn
against me.
.
Some days I want to spit
me out, the whole mess of me,
but mostly I am good
.
and quiet.
How much silence buys me
.
mercy, how much
silence covers all the lives it takes to make me.
.
In the event of every day and its newness
of disaster, find me sunning on the rooftop, please
don’t ask anything of me.
.
If I could be anything
I would be the wind,
.
if I could be nothing
I would be.
.

 

12) Stephen Cole (unreal city philosophy breakdown)

Keep the knives in the decider box
Where you make your choices.
Rattle the caustic chambers pots
At eye level
In the high mystical arch
Where the pigeons blur.
Reality is the paragon of confusion.

The surface cave is painted
In primary colors
On a mountain wall
But the snow is real.

It bares repeating
The fake cementing
On fracas light goes on
Piecing itself together
Over the top of a barren dream scape.
How reliable after all
Are dreams in dreams?

It goes just that far
And no further.
At this point
the universe turns back on itself.
The content is thrown back into eye
For the regulated comfort.
If some nefarious spirit
Changes the channel:
You’re gone.

 

13) Jeff Callaway (the greatest poems of all)

The greatest poems are never written down,
But lonely and forgotten before pen can be found,
The greatest poems never find the ink,
In the time it takes you to think;
Slowly with time they fade,
And face the guilliotine of jilted poems
And unrequited lovers,
Or glued to my own vague memory
Of what could have been
If only I’d had a pen,
And the recollection
To keep repeating what it was
I was trying to say.

The greatest poems are girls
Who poured Dewars on the rocks
Down their breasts with a splash of water
As I drink it off.

The greatest poems lick the ink
From the tip of my idea.
The greatest poems of all get drunk
From the bottle, straight, no chaser,
No requiem for a dream,
No teen queen Chinese angels on a silver screen,
No Hollywood homecoming queens,
Leaping side to side in ecstasy,
Or just beautiful girls who once
Gave me their phone numbers,
Or girls back in high school
Who kissed me, and later became strippers,
Midnight sirens to madness, mad, drunkard,
Barroom brawls, bras, panties, imported beers.

The greatest poems of all, who put my drinks
On my tab, and heavenly broads
Who brought me elixers which I did drink
Down into my self the likes of abinsthe,
Sugar, laudunum, or I read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Mad at midnight, typing poems furiously
Toward glory, or mayhem, or maybe for
Nothing at all, or maybe just
For the greatest poems of all.

So here, here! to the greatest poems of all!
To bikini contests, to Bikini Kill, to Bukowski,
To Rimbaud and other roughnecks,
To the wet T-shirts at Cedar Isle,
And to the Cedar Creek Lake rememberers
Who still remember all of the greatest poems of all.

To Siberian huskies named Molly who lived in Dallas Texas
With dirty filth, and to dirty filth,
To pain and pills and poems,
To words that slide into lyrical oblivion;
Sometimes these can be
The better rhymes of all times,
Dare I say the greater poems that can rhyme
From poets here today, like drunken
Ramblings, drunken one nighters,
Far beyond driven, drunk drivers,
In Dracula, no more drama before hot actress,
Sexy angel poetess,
Prostitutes, politics, and to the Texas outlaw press,
And to all of the greatest poems of all.

To Polly, to Pam, to the paranormal,
To the ghosts of the greatest poems of all,
To the ghouls, to the grim reaper,
To death, and its poetic casting call for us all;
I’d like to give a shout out to the gangsters,
Of the ghettos of Grand Prairie,
To the hypodermic hipsters of Plano
Who never made it, never got to hear
The greatest poems of all.

To poems that got kicked out of Magnolia
For drinking salt shakers, fat jokes, plastic chairs,
Who never swept the petty shit,
But always pet the sweaty shit,
From shinola to shangri-la,
From 26th and San Gabriel to the angel Gabriel,
From trumpets to cherubim,
To these crazy, insane, hot American chicks
Who love poets, poems, and Palm Pilots,
To an Austin poetry renaissance, or to purgatory.

How ’bout another round of drinks
To the greatest poets and poems of all.

14) Brian Rihlmann (untitled)

we used to joke about it
on days when you could—
his possible ethnicity
his identity…
the “who?” of this man
she kept from you
for 45 years—
even in her final breaths

and the crackle of the crematory flames
told you nothing
nor the rising smoke
nor the box of her ashes
you carried up the flank of Mt. Rose
and scattered in sight of that pond

once, when I hiked up there
alone….after we had died, also
I spoke to her—
“you know you fucked her up….
don’t you?” who were you protecting?”

“mother—your shield was nothing
but a sword…
and she is still falling on it.”

15) Meera Nair (yet another pongala)

What wouldn’t one do
To appease a Goddess?

The city is a bitch in heat
A lighted furnace
Waiting to go up in smoke

Bricks have lined up on pavements
Boundaries drawn
And territories captured
The women arrive in hordes
Laying claim to this fragile city

Goddess, I have no offering to make
No pot of grain
No boiling water
No lit fire
But here is a prayer
From within the walls of my agnostic house

Goddess, make it rain
Torrents and torrents of water
Wash out this hysteria on the streets
Cleanse this litter

Goddess, restore sanity to my city
She burns

 

16) Sean Harvey (reminiscence on facebook)

My Eleanor Rigby. It was 1974, and I was about 11 years old and a student at Charles Peck Elementary. Before the administration figured out that I really wasn’t all that bright, I was briefly in what was then referred to as “the gifted” program for smart kids. I hated it because the special sessions only occurred Tuesdays and Thursdays during physical education, which to me was the best part of the day. I’d be immersed in dodge ball, and I’d see some kid in the distance coming to fetch me to take me away to the creepy portable building; a windowless classroom-like trailer on wheels located at the far end of campus.

The Tuesday and Thursday buzzkill went on for a year, until one day I noticed that there was a new girl in the class. She was a Hollywood version of a shy child, with simple short brown hair and thick-framed glasses, and she sat all the way in the back of the room and she never said a single word. Three weeks passed and I paid absolutely no attention to her, EXCEPT that I noticed she wore the same brown and red dress every single day. One afternoon, our teacher happened to mention how much she herself liked The Beatles, and, in particular, the song “Eleanor Rigby.”

Up shot the hand of the quiet little girl.

I remember that even our teacher was surprised.

“I can sing it for you,” said the girl.

Baffled, the teacher asked: “Sing what?”

I wondered, what is wrong with this kid? I started to feel uncomfortable.

She repeated: “I can sing it. I can sing “Eleanor Rigby” for you.”

I don’t remember how she got permission, or if she just took it upon herself, but up she popped, standing aside her desk, porcelain skin and coke-bottle glasses, and she began to sing:

“Ah …look at all the lonely people …
Ah … look at all the lonely people …
Eleanor Rigby, picks up the rice
in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face
That she keeps in a jar by the door…
Who is it for?”

Do you know how sudden, raw beauty has a way of transcending age or even previous exposure? I am in NO way gifted musically, but the ability to appreciate what’s miraculous is innate. I can remember maybe 10 minutes of fifth grade, and that scene comprises most of it. Listening to her, I immediately understood two things: that her voice was great, angelic, and that an important part of the reason it was great was because she was lonely and afraid. I was deeply and permanently smitten. This quiet little person had sung so bravely and so beautifully, we were all astounded and our teacher actually choked up and began to cry.

All the lonely people
Where do they all come from?
All the lonely people
Where do they all belong?

After, the class sat silently for what seemed like a minute, and as I sat there, I actually felt that something had changed. I knew, perhaps for the very first time in my life, that I would remember a moment, maybe forever.

Leading up to the next class session, no one had to come and fetch me because as fast as I could I ran out to the portables and got there early so I could sit in the seat right next to where the little girl had been. But when the bell rang, she wasn’t there. She had, apparently, moved away from our school just as suddenly as she had arrived. And I never saw her again.

To this day, thinking of that moment makes me sad. But more than that, it makes me yearn for answers to things that no one can answer. Things like where did that little Eleanor Rigby come from? And, in all the years since, did she ever find the place that she belonged?

 

 

 

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SCARRIET’S HOT POETRY ONE HUNDRED 2019—“BEST LINES”

December 5, 2019 at 2:20 pm (Aaron Smith, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, Adil Jussawalla, Ae Hee Lee, Alicia Ostriker, Amy Gerstler, Anne Carson, Anthony Anaxagorou, Babitha Marina Justin, Ben Mazer, Ben Zarov, Blake Campbell, Brian Rihlmann, Bruce Weigl, Carolyn Forche, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Danez Smith, Deryn Rees-Jones, Dorianne Laux, Eleanor Wilner, Eliana Vanessa, Emily Lawson, Fanny Howe, Fatimah Asghar, Fiona Benson, Franny Choi, George Bilgere, Glyn Maxwell, Hera Lindsay Bird, Ilya Kaminsky, Indah Widiastuti, Jeet Thayil, Jill McDonough, Joie Bose, Joy Harjo, Julia Alvarez, Justin Phillip Reed, Karen Solie, Kathleen Jamie, Kevin Young, Kushal Poddar, Laura Foley, Li-Young Lee, Linda Ash, Lloyd Schwartz, Luke Kennard, Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada, Mary Angela Douglas, Mary Ruefle, Meera Nair, Merryn Juliette, Nabina Das, Nalini Priyadarshni, Ocean Vuong, Patricia Smith, Paul Farley, Peter Gizzi, Raquel Balboni, Ravi Shankar, Robert Pinsky, Roger Robinson, Rupi Kaur, Safiya Sinclair, Scarriet Editors, Sharon Olds, Sophie Collins, Stephanie Burt, Stephen Cole, Steven Cramer, Sushmita Gupta, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Tina Chang, Tishani Doshi, Tracy K. Smith, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Wendy Videlock, Zaffar Kunial)

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I don’t know any format—except this one, Scarriet, now in its tenth year—which attempts to bring together every kind of poet in one place.

There are four kinds of poets who never touch each other and exist in separate universes: the formalist poet, the colloquial poet, the professional, and the amateur. Poets of radically different styles insult one another, stylistically, that is—the novelist is more like the poet than different kinds of poets from each other. I can no longer go to a library or a bookstore and seek “poetry” without entering a shooting zone of competing forms and sentiments.

The colloquial now dominates the professional; the beautiful and well-made book cover of the contemporary poet hides more f-bombs than rhymes.

The professional, with their prizes and book deals, wants nothing to do with the amateur—who posts their accessible love poems online. The gulf is such, that a person “who hates poetry” will sooner read, and even like, the amateur’s efforts, before the well-connected professional will deign to glimpse what, in their opinion, is trash (or perhaps to their jealous consternation, good) given away too easily.

One delightful thing I’ve noticed: how a few selected words from a poet’s work can explain the entirety of the kind of poet they are; as much as this is true, it validates this list, and makes it more than just an exercise in which a formalist amateur like myself attempts to ram together, in a feverish fit of schadenfreude, things which do not belong.

These poets do belong together—or, rather, they do not.

Yet here they are.

Thomas Graves, Salem, MA 12/4/2019

*******

1) Laura Foley “to look back and see, on the hilltop, our life, lit from inside.”

2) Luke Kennard “I take the murderer for coffee.”

3) Ilya Kaminsky “What is a child? A quiet between two bombardments.”

4) Kathleen Jamie “Walking in a waking dream I watched nineteen deer pour from ridge to glen-floor”

5) Linda Ashok  “the moon licked up the landscape with her fervent tongue”

6) Fiona Benson “How light I was. How doubtfully safe.”

7) Ben Mazer “Some must be publishers, and some must be spot on, in a horse drawn carriage, taking in the dawn”

8) Sushmita Gupta “She gave a last look at her solitary car, in her garage, with seats folded down so paintings could lay, the slope that rolled down the hill that ended in a roundabout, with palms and coloured grass that looked like hay.”

9) Stephen Cole “You still disturb the meadow with your words.”

10) Julia Alvarez “I’ve broken up with my true love man after man”

11) Brian Rihlmann “nail guns pop pop pop I heard stilettos on concrete the lady of old Reno wandering”

12) Patricia Smith “Who shot you, baby?”

13) Joie Bose “I see you in all the faces I see, crisscrossing the pavements aimlessly.”

14) Indah Widiastuti “Who is the poem I wrote? He speaks a language I never use; read by those I never know.”

15) Kevin Young “We curl down the slide one at a time, blue light at the end.”

16) Joy Harjo “I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn to find the sun.”

17) Jill McDonough “I am not interested in makeup. I am interested in jail.”

18) Chelsey Minnis “People in their nightgowns, smoking cigarettes, they give great speeches.”

19) Nabina Das “It’s in love that we wait & let all other loves wither & waste.”

20) Eliana Vanessa “impediment of roses: and this is not the sort of thing you can control, no, how our bodies trembled, post-love, nor the way I will keep falling, to explain it, just so.”

21) Adeeba Shahid Talukder “Splinter the sun, wake all its ashes.”

22) Dorianne Laux “Broken the days into nights, the night sky into stars”

23) Sharon Olds “I caught bees, by the wings, and held them”

24) Alicia Ostriker “there are no pauses in this game”

25) Tishani Doshi “to fall into that same oblivion with nothing. As if it were nothing.”

26) Vidyan Ravinthiran “this isn’t the right kind of snow.”

27) Glyn Maxwell “he goes his way delighted”

28) Anne Carson “During the sermon, I crossed my legs.”

29) Peter Gizzi “I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.”

30) Li-Young Lee “From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches”

31) Blake Campbell “And he entered, great spelunker, the resonant and ancient darkness”

32) Diana Khoi Nguyen “You cannot keep your brother alive.”

33) Marilyn Chin “I watched the world shrink into a penlight: how frail the court poet’s neck, how small this poetry world.”

34) Fanny Howe “We are always halfway there when we are here”

35) Babitha Marina Justin “It is rolling from roof to roof”

36) Meera Nair “You set us up against each other. Men against Women. We are all bovine.”

37) Anthony Anaxagorou “is that your hand still on my elbow?”

38) Tracy K. Smith “We wish to act. We may yet.”

39) Wendy Videlock “He watches ball. She throws a fit. She cannot stand to see him sit.”

40) Daipayan Nair “Autumn leaf! Nothing to keep—apart from beauty.”

41) Mary Angela Douglas “and let the tiny silver trumpets blow”

42) Carolyn Forché “What you have heard is true.”

43) Martin Espada “No one could hear him.”

44) Tina Chang “love is crowding the street and needs only air and it lives, over there, in the distance burning.”

45) Danez Smith “I have left earth.”

46) Ocean Vuong “this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.”

47) Eleanor Wilner “the blood that is pouring like a tide, on other shores.”

48) Marge Piercy “a woman is not made of flesh: she is manufactured like a sports sedan”

49) Yusef Komunyakka “My muse is holding me prisoner.”

50) Naomi Shihab Nye “Each day I miss Japanese precision.”

51) Terrance Hayes “I love how your blackness leaves them in the dark.”

52) Carl Dennis “Lending a hand, I’d tell him, is always dignified, while being a hero is incidental.”

53) Jeet Thayil “Some are sweet and old, others are foul-mouthed and bold. Mine is dead and cold.”

54) Victoria Chang “Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite.”

55) Kushal Poddar “ferns, orchids, hyacinths sprawl like insomniac veins.”

56) Karen Solie “We itch and prosper heavenward on bands of grit and smoke”

57) Richard Blanco “Stare until the trembling leaves are tongues”

58) Paul Muldoon “putting its shoulder to the wheel it means to reinvent.”

59) Safiya Sinclair “Isn’t this love? To walk hand in hand toward the humid dark”

60) Frank Bidart “Fucked up, you know you’d never fall for someone not fucked up.”

61) Nick Flynn “My therapist points out that fifteen minutes of movie violence releases as many opiates into the body as if being prepped for major surgery.”

62) Jennifer Moss “all beauty turned hostile”

63) Fatimah Asghar “your lantern long ahead & I follow I follow”

64) Hannah Sullivan “All summer the Park smelled of cloves and it was dying.”

65) Jamal May “The counting that says, I am this far. I am this close.”

66) William Logan “Don’t be any form’s bitch.”

67) Juan Felipe Herrera “No food. No food no food no food no food!”

68) Hera Lindsay Bird “it was probably love that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true”

69) Ae Hee Lee “She asks your husband to step in.”

70) Jay Bernard “I file it under fire, corpus, body, house.”

71) Sophie Collins “pails full of oil all dark and density and difficult for a girl to carry”

72) Hollie McNish “I let myself go cycling slow as I unbutton my clothes jacket unzipped helmet unclipped”

73) Zaffar Kunial “I didn’t know the word for what I was.”

74) Paul Farley “he fell up the dark stairwell to bed and projected right through to Australia”

75) Deryn Rees-Jones “The movie I’m in is black and white.”

76) Roger Robinson “he picks you up in the hand not holding the book”

77) Lloyd Schwartz “or if not the girl, then Vermeer’s painting of her”

78) Nalini Priyadarshni “but I love tea and so do you.”

79) Raquel  Balboni “Come off as harsh even if I’m friendly”

80) Robert Pinsky “When I had no temple I made my voice my temple.”

81) Emily Lawson “I step out to meet the wanderer: its black-veined hindwings”

82) Bruce Weigl “Why do we murder ourselves and then try to live forever.”

83) Steph Burt “I want to go home, paint my nails until they iridesce, clamp on my headphones, and pray to Taylor Swift.”

84) Merryn Juliette “There is no ceremony to her—she was simply there when yesterday she was not”

85) Thomas Sayers Ellis “It’s entrancement, how they govern you. The entertainment is side effect.”

86) Amy Gerstler “Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.”

87) Rupi Kaur “i change what i am wearing five times before i see you”

88) Forrest Gander “What closes and then luminous? What opens and then dark?”

89) Justin Phillip Reed “when you fuck me and i don’t like it, is that violence.”

90) Franny Choi  “i pick up the accent of whoever i’m speaking to. nobody wants to fuck a sponge.”

91) Emily Skaja “when night came, an egg-moon slid over the steeple.”

92) Mary Ruefle “Night falls and the empty intimacy of the whole world fills my heart to frothing.”

93) Aaron Smith “If a man is given dick, he’s never full.”

94) Donald Revell “Time might be anything, even the least portion of shadow in the blaze, that helpless Hare of darkness in the hawk’s world.”

95) Dan Sociu “people have infinite capacity for transformation, into anything, and I know that I myself can transform”

96) Ben Zarov “There are many, many wrong ways.”

97)  Adil Jussawalla “Twenty years on, its feet broken, will its hands fly to its face when a light’s switched on?”

98) Steven Cramer “no matter how we plead they won’t come down.”

99) George Bilgere “My father would take off his jacket and tie after work and fire up the back yard grill. Scotch and a lawn chair was his idea of nature. Even Thoreau only lasted a couple of years.”

100) Ravi Shankar “I watch, repose, alone.”

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SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED! WITH BEST LINES!

January 22, 2019 at 11:01 pm (A.E Stallings, Alex Dimitrov, Anand Thakore, Ann Leshy Wood, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Ben Mazer, C.P. Surendran, Charles Adès Fishman, Christian Wiman, Christopher T. Schmitz, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Danez Smith, Divya Guha, Eliana Vanessa, Garrison Keillor, Hoshang Merchant, Indian poetry, Jeet Thayil, Joanna Valente, Jorie Graham, Kushal Poddar, Lily Swarn, Linda Ashok, Marilyn Chin, Medha Singh, Meera Nair, Merryn Juliette, Michael Creighton, N Ravi Shanker, Nabina Das, Nalini Priyadarshni, Nandini Dhar, Nathan Woods, Nitoo Das, Philip Nikolayev, Poetry Hot 100, Ranjit Hoskote, Rochelle Potkar, Rupi Kaur, Ryan Alvanos, Sam Sax, Sampurna Chattarji, Scarriet Editors, Scarriet Hot 100, Semeen Ali, Sharanya Manivannan, Sharon Olds, Smita Sahay, Sophia Naz, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Tishani Doshi, Urvashi Bahuguna, Veils Halos & Shackles, William Logan, Zachary Bos)

Image result for sushmita gupta poet

 Sushmita Gupta

Poetry doesn’t have a center—therefore this “hot” list is not legitimate, but is.

Good poems and poets are everywhere. These happened to hit my eyes.

The best poems are not being published by the major publishers or the glossy magazines or the Poetry Foundation, but by our Facebook friends, our girlfriends, or the guy sitting next to us at the café. The best poem in English, being written somewhere right now—right now—is probably being written in India. Comforting or not, this is the fact.

The death of Mary Oliver, and its fairly large public notice, shows poetry has a kind of shadow center, if not a real one, occasionally manifesting itself as seemingly real, only to fade into Auden’s cry, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Slowly, in obscure corners of people’s hearts, poetry does happen. It has no intellectual, philosophical, or critical identity, and its social identity is crushed by cinema and the popular song. But times change, and poetry does seem to be simmering towards something larger in the places where large things occur.

Poetry as the technical art, and poetry as it vaguely exists in the everyday efforts and reflections of the world are two different things. No poet or critic is responsible for the vastness of the latter.

In this contemporary snapshot list of poems, I intentionally made the search greater to include the best-known sources, for two reasons: “what are the most distinguished outlets doing?” and for the sake of variety.

So the poems on this list are poems I happily and locally and accidentally see, and also poems gleaned from sources which a slightly larger audience sees.

This explains why you see the poems you do.

As far as how the poems are actually ranked, the best first, and so on, again, I plead guilty to subjectivity, which never excuses authoritarian decisions—it only makes them seem more authoritarian; but the word authoritarian is overused and misused these days—whatever decisions the comfortable, fake-revolutionaries don’t like, are called, after the fact, authoritarian.

The poems are ranked by the best lines uttered in these poems.

Philip Nikolayev (on the list) has a theory that poetry lives, finally, in great lines.

It was a great Facebook discussion, and I forget what I said about it, then, which is all that matters—the Scarriet Hot 100 I introduce here is my authoritarian moment in the sun—and why I bring it up, I don’t know, because I agreed with Nikolayev, then, and now, perhaps, I don’t.

All the poems on the Hot 100 list are good—but some, as good as they are, have nothing but plain and ordinary lines, or phrases. No stand-alone piece of the poem—good when the poem is read as a whole—sounds very interesting.

In rare instances, the title of the poem, coupled with the selected mundane part of the poem, combines to be of interest, or surprising. As you judge, keep the titles in mind as you read the line.

Because the ranking here is by line (or part of a line, or lines) I should say a word or two about what makes a good line.

I believe it can be summed up: a good line is where the vision and the rhythm speak together.

Some lines are good for purely prose fiction reasons—they sound like the start of a great short story. They point, rather than being the point.

One more thing: since Scarriet has written on Indian poetry recently, many poets are from India; those designated “Scarriet” were featured on that date on this site, though found elsewhere. Please search, enjoy, and support, will you? all 100 of these poets.

 

(1) Jennifer Barber —Continuum (2018 The Charles River Journal #8) “Sure, it was a dream, but even so/you put down the phone so soundlessly”

(2) A.E. Stallings —Pencil (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The Atlantic) “Perfection was a blot/That could not be undone.”

(3) Sushmita Gupta —Gently Please  (12/18 FB) “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”

(4) William Logan —The Kiss (2017 Rift of Light Penguin) “‘I’ve never thought of you that way, I guess.’/She touched me then with the ghost of a caress.”

(5) Eliana Vanessa —this black rose (12/13 FB) “I’d rather be outside, with him,/turning stones in the rain,/than here,/listening to the hum/of so many skulls, alone.”

(6) Abhijit Khandkar —Bombil  (Poetry Delhi 12/1) “So I write this poem and feed it to the ravenous sea.”

(7) Philip Nikolayev —Blame (1/4/19 FB) “within its vast domain confined”

(8) Sharanya Manivannan —Keeping the Change (12/5/18 Scarriet) “burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”

(9) Hoshang Merchant —Scent of Love (10/12/18 Scarriet) “I have myself become wild in my love for a wild thing”

(10) Divya Guha —Non-attendance (1/16/19 Gmail) “The shaver missing, your greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.”

(11) Ravi Shankar —Buzzards (12/5/18 Scarriet) “What matters cannot remain.”

(12) Mary Angela Douglas —Epiphany of the White Apples (1/3/19 Scarriet) “one candle grown lilac in a perpetual Spring”

(13) N Ravi Shankar—Bamboo (12/26/17 FB) “You are nude, sweet mother,/so am I/as the bamboos creak a lullaby”

(14) Aseem Sundan —The Poet Lied About The Paradise (1/12/19 Indian Poetry) “How do I make the paper turn blood red?/How do I make everyone read it?”

(15) Stephen Cole —The descriptor heart (1/18/19 FB) “I feel the wind-tides/Off San Fernando Mountain./I hear the cry of suicide brakes/Calling down the sad incline/Of Fremont’s Pass.”

(16) Yana Djin —Days are so slow, adoni, so slow (1/2/19 Vox Populi) “In the dusk leaves like golden suns shiver and glow”

(17) Ann Leshy Wood —Thanksgiving, For my father, 1917-2012 (11/23/16 FB) “where groves of oranges rot,/and somber groups of heron graze/by the bay.”

(18) Shalim Hussain —Dighalipukhuri (12/5/18 Scarriet) “His downy heart bleeds over the bliss beneath.”

(19) Linda Ashok —Tongue Tied (4/4/18 Cultural Weekly) “How deep is the universe? How many/light years will it take to reach your belly”

(20) Marilyn Chin —How I Got That Name (2018 Selected Poems, Norton) “by all that was lavished upon her/and all that was taken away!”

(21) Diane Lockward —The Missing Wife (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles Fishman, Sahay, eds) “The wife and the dog planned their escape”

(22) Daipayan Nair —Roseate with Jyoti (Season 2) Poem VI (12/30/18 FB) “you hold my hand like possibilities”

(23) Ranjit Hoskote —Effects of Distance (8/10/18 Scarriet) “Blue is the color of air letters, of conqueror’s eyes./Blue, leaking from your pen, triggers this enterprise.”

(24) Nabina Das —Death and Else (9/7/18 Scarriet) “under the same ceiling/fan from where she/later dangled.”

(25) Sridala Swami —Redacted poetry is a message in a bottle (6/9/18 Scarriet) “There is only this book, and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words in it.”

(26) Anand Thakore —Elephant Bathing (7/5/18 Scarriet) “As pale flamingoes, stripped irretrievably of their pinks,/Leap into a flight forever deferred.”

(27) Danez Smith —acknowledgments (December 2018 Poetry) “i call your mama mama”

(28) Anne Stevenson —How Poems Arrive (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The Hudson Review) “Or simply wait/Till it arrives and tells you its intention.”

(29) Jennifer Robertson —Coming Undone (4/14/18 Scarriet) “ocean after ocean after ocean”

(30) Srividya Sivakumar—Wargame (1/12/19 Scarriet) “I’m searching for coral and abalone deep in the dragon’s lair.”

(31) Medha Singh —Gravedigger (January 2019 Indian Quarterly) “you’ve/remembered how the winter went/as it went on”

(32) Lily Swarn —The Cobbler (1/7/19 Pentasi B World Friendship Poetry) “The stink of poverty cowered in fear!!”

(33) Sophia Naz —Neelum (5/2/18 Scarriet) “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”

(34) James Longenbach —This Little Island (November 2018 Poetry) “And when the land stops speaking/The wave flows out to sea.”

(35) Sam Sax —Prayer for the Mutilated World (September 2018 Poetry) “that you are reading this/must be enough”

(36) Raena Shirali —Daayan After A Village Feast (Anomaly #27) “we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”

(37) Priya Sarukkhai Chabria —She says to her girlfriend (12/5/18 Scarriet) “in the red slush/open/to flaming skies.”

(38) Nitoo Das —How To Write Erotica (10/12/18 Scarriet) “You’re allowed to be slightly long-winded.”

(39) Sukrita Kumar —The Chinese Cemetery (4/14/18 Scarriet) “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”

(40) Zachary Bos —All that falls to earth (May, 2018 Locust Year—chapbook) “In a library properly sorted/ecology stands beside eulogy.”

(41) Khalypso —Women Are Easy To Love Over The Internet (Anomaly #27) “to wake up/strangers & sticky & questioning.”

(42) C.P. Surendran —Prospect (10/12/18 Scarriet) “A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”

(43) Dan Sociu —The Hatch (Trans. Carla Bericz, National Translation Month) “the man with the tambourine went off cursing me”

(44) Nalini Priyadarshni —When You Forget How To Write a Love Poem (12/21 Chantarelle’s Notebook a poetry e-zine) “You try different places at different hours,/dipping your pen in psychedelic summer skies”

(45) June Gehringer —I Don’t Write About Race (1/16/19 Luna Luna Magazine) “I don’t write about race,/ I write about gender,/ I once killed a cis white man,/ and his first name/ was me.”

(46) Robin Flicker —I fell asleep holding my notebook and pen (12/22 FB) “In my dream, the pen was a pair of scissors, and I had to cut out every letter of every word.”

(47) Robin Morgan —4 Powerful Poems about Parkinson’s (10/15/15 TED Talk You Tube) “Growing small requires enormity of will.”

(48) Arundhathi Subramaniam —Prayer (11/15/18 Scarriet) “when maps shall fade,/nostalgia cease/and the vigil end.”

(49) Menka Shivdasani —The Woman Who Speaks To Milk Pots (9/7/18 Scarriet) “I shall turn the heat up,/put the lid on./Watch me.”

(50) Ryan Alvanos —7:30 (2011 From Here—album online) “not too long and not too far/I carefully left the door ajar”

(51) Tishani Doshi —The Immigrant’s Song (3/16/18 Scarriet) “hear/your whole life fill the world/until the wind is the only word.”

(52) Semeen Ali —You Look At Me (3/16/18 Scarriet) “for a minute/That one minute/contains my life”

(53) Kim Gek Lin Short —Playboy Bunny Swimsuit Biker (American Poetry Review vol 48 no 1) “If truth be told/the theft began/a time before/that summer day.”

(54) Lewis Jian —Mundane Life (1/9/19 World Literature Forum) “who’s wise enough to reach nirvana?”

(55) Dimitry Melnikoff —Offer Me (1/12/19 Facebook Poetry Society) “Offer me a gulp of this light’s glow”

(56) Kushal Poddar —This Cat, That (12/13/18 FB) “call its name around/with the bowl held in my cooling hand./I can see myself doing this. All Winter. All Summer.”

(57) Ben Mazer —Divine Rights (2017 Selected Poems) “her room/retains the look/of the room of a stranger”

(58) Christopher T. Schmitz —The Poet’s Oeuvre (12/24 FB) “poems that guess/at the argot of an era to come/and ache with love/for the world he’s leaving/and couldn’t save.”

(59) Simon Armitage  —To His Lost Lover (2017 Interestingliterature) “And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,/about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.”

(60) Akhil Katyal —For Someone Who Will Read This 500 Years From Now (7/5/18 Scarriet) “How long did India and Pakistan last?”

(61) Minal Hajratwala —Operation Unicorn: Field Report (8/10/18 Scarriet) “The unicorns are a technology/we cannot yet approximate.”

(62) Jehanne Dubrow —Eros and Psyche (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles Fishman, Sahay, eds) “my mother might stay asleep forever, unbothered by the monument of those hands”

(63) Rochelle Potkar —Friends In Rape (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles Fishman, Sahay, eds) “Doesn’t she smile at each one of your jokes?”

(64) Merryn Juliette —Her Garden (9/21 FB) “grey as I am”

(65) Marilyn Kallet —Trespass (Plume #89) “Maybe that’s what Verlaine said,/at the end.”

(66) Meera Nair —On Some Days (12/17 FB) “on all days/Without fail/I need you”

(67) Nathan Woods —Wander, Wonder (12/26 FB) “into wands for spells to scatter the beasts”

(68) Rajiv Mohabir —Hybrid Unidentified Whale (11/15/18 Scarriet) “no others/can process its cries into music.”

(69) Dana Gioia —The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves (Video, Dana Gioia Official Site) “a crack of light beneath a darkened door.”

(70) Paige Lewis —You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm (January 2018 Poetry) “Right now, way above your head, two men”

(71) Smita Sahay —For Nameless, Faceless Women (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles) “change the way you tell your stories.”

(72) Sampurna Chattarji —As a Son, My Daughter (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles) “You fear nothing./You frighten me.”

(73) Michelina Di Martino —Original Sin (1/12/19 Intense Call of Feelings) “Let us make love. Where are we?”

(74) Jo-Ann Mort —Market Day (Plume #89) “wanting the air/ beside me to welcome you.”

(75) Sohini Basak—Laconic (1/12/19 Scarriet) “the rude dove just blinked”

(76) Carol Kner —Pieces of us Keep Breaking Off (Plume #89) “to quench the rage that lunges daily”

(77) Shikha Malaviya —September 9, 2012 (A poem in 9 hours) (11/15/18 Scarriet) “Our hips swaying badly/to Bollywood beats”

(78) Michael Creighton —New Delhi Love Song (8/10/18 Scarriet) “all are welcomed with a stare in New Delhi.”

(78) Ranjani Murali —Singing Cancer: Ars Film-Poetica (8/10/18 Scarriet) “Anand jumps to his death from the staggering height of two feet”

(79) Jeet Thayil —Life Sentence (7/5/18 Scarriet) “your talk is of meat and money”

(80) Urvashi Bahuguna —Boy (6/9/18 Scarriet) “Girl kisses/some other boy. Girl wishes/it was Boy.”

(81) Huzaifa Pandit —Buhu Sings an Elegy for Kashmir (3/16/18 Scarriet) “The beloved weeps in a hollow tongue”

(82) Nandini Dhar —Map Pointing At Dawn (2/21/18 Scarriet) “Ghost uncle is a calligrapher who cannot hold/a pen between his fingers.”

(83) Sumana Roy —Root Vegetables (2/21/18 Scarriet) “darkness drinks less water than light”

(84) Jorie Graham —Scarcely There (January 2019 Poetry) “We pass here now onto the next-on world. You stay.”

(85) Christian Wiman —The Parable of Perfect Silence (December 2018 Poetry) “Two murderers keep their minds alive/while they wait to die.”

(86) Martha Zweig —The Breakfast Nook (December 2018 Poetry) “One day it quits./The whole business quits. Imagine that.”

(87) Alex Dimitrov —1969 (September 2018 Poetry) “Then returned to continue the war.”

(88) Campbell McGrath —My Music (12/17/18 The New Yorker) “My music is way better than your music”

(89) Terrance Hayes —American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The New Yorker) “It is possible he meant that, too.”

(90) Garrison Keillor —I Grew Up In A Northern Town (1/12/19 FB) “Starved for love, obsessed with sin,/Sunlight almost did us in.”

(91) Dick Davis —A Personal Sonnet (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The Hudson Review) “These are the dreams that turned out to be real.”

(92) Sharon Olds —The Source (2018 All We Know of Pleasure—Poetic Erotica by Women, Shomer) “Ah, I am in him”

(93) Manjiri Indurkar —Diabetes at a Birthday Party  (1/12/19 Scarriet) “Who talks about diabetes at someone’s birthday party?/Ma’s life is a cautionary tale.”

(94) Jayanta Mahapatra —Her Hand (1/12/19 Scarriet) “The little girl’s hand is made of darkness/How will I hold it?”

(95) Rony Nair —Solarium (1/12/19 Scarriet) “some people get off on sleeping with your enemy”

(96) John Murillo —A Refusal To Mourn The Deaths By Gunfire, Of Three Men In Brooklyn (American Poetry Review vol 48 no 1) “You strike your one good match to watch it bloom/and jook”

(97) CA Conrad —a Frank poem (12/31/18 Facebook Fraternity of Poets, DonYorty.com) “one experience is quietly/consumed by the next”

(98) Sara J. Grossman —House of Body (Anomaly #27) “weather of abundant appendages”

(99) Rupi Kaur —did you think i was a city (1/5/19 Instagram) “i am not street meat i am homemade jam”

(100) Warsan Shire —The House (2017 Poetry Foundation) “Everyone laughs, they think I’m joking.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

18 Comments

OH NO, PLEASE HELP US! ANOTHER SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED

September 18, 2018 at 10:04 pm (Anders Carlson-Wee, Arjun Rajendran, Arun Sagar, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Carmen Giminez-Smith, Carolyn Forche, Cathy Park Hong, Christopher Poindexter, Dan Sociu, Danielle Georges, David Lehman, Derrick Michael Hudson, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Edna Millay, Fanny Howe, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Glyn Maxwell, Grace Schulman, Helen Vendler, How I Got That Name, Huzaifa Pandit, Jeet Thayil, Jim Behrle, Joanna Valente, Joe Green, John Cooper Clarke, Jos Charles, Kent Johnson, Kevin Young, Linda Ashok, Marilyn Chin, Marjorie Perloff, Mary Oliver, Meera Nair, Merryn Juliette, N Ravi Shanker, Nabina Das, Nikita Gill, Patricia Lockwood, Patricia Smith, Paul Rowe, Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry, Philip Nikolayev, Ranjit Hoskote, Raquel Salas Rivera, Richard Howard, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Semeen Ali, Sherry (Shohreh) Laici, Smita Sahay, Sophia Naz, Stephanie Burt, Sushmita Gupta, The Nation, Tyler Knott Gregson, Urvashi Bahuguna, Yrsa Daley-Ward)

angry-mob

1 Anders Carlson-Wee: Brilliant, empathic poem, “How-To,” published in The Nation—then a mob ends his career.

2 Stephanie Burt: Harvard professor and Nation poetry editor publishes Carlson-Wee—caves to the mob.

3 Carmen Giminez-Smith: Nation co-editor, with Burt, apologizes for “disparaging and ableist language” giving “offense,” “harm,” and “pain” to “several communities.”

4 Grace Schulman: Former Nation poetry editor: “never once did we apologize for publishing a poem.”

5 Patricia Smith: Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, a slam poet champion, leads Twitter outrage which greets Carlson-Wee’s Nation poem.

6 Ben Mazer: Selected Poems out, discovering unpublished Delmore Schwartz material for Library of America.

7 Rupi Kaur: Milk and Honey, her debut self-published book of viral Instagram ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ verse, has put a young woman from Toronto on top of the poetry popularity heap.

8 Tyler Knott Gregson: NY Times pointed out this Instagram poet’s first collection of poetry was a national bestseller.

9 Christopher Poindexter: This Instagram poet has been compared to Shakespeare by Huffpost. (He’s nothing like Shakespeare.)

10 Nikita Gill: Probably the best of the feminist Instagram poets.

11 Yrsa Daley-Ward: Her Instapoetry memoir, The Terrible, was praised by Katy Waldman in the New Yorker.

12 Marilyn Chin: Her New and Selected (Norton) this October contains her famous poem, “How I Got That Name.”

13 Frank Bidart: Awarded 2018 Pulitzer for his Collected Poems.

14 William Logan: New prose book: Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods. New book of poems, Rift of Light, proves again his formal verse is perhaps the best poetry published today.

15 Kevin Young: New New Yorker poetry editor.

16 Evie Shockley: Was on short list for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

17 David Lehman: Series editor for Best American Poetry since 1988—30 years.

18 Linda Ashok: Poet (Whorelight), songwriter (“Beautiful Scar”) and champion of Indian poetry in English.

19 Derrick Michael Hudson: Who still remembers this “Chinese” BAP poet?

20. Dana Gioia: Guest editor of Lehman’s Best American Poetry 2018.

21 Akhil Katyal: “Is Mumbai still standing by the sea?”

22 Urvashi Bahuguna: “Girl kisses/some other boy. Girl wishes/It was Boy.”

23 Jeet Thayil: “you don’t want to hear her say,/Why, why did you not look after me?”

24 Sridala Swami: Jorge Louis Borges of English Indian poetry.

25 Adil Jussawalla: Born in Mumbai in 1940, another Anglo-Indian poet ignored in the U.S.

26 Rochelle D’Silva:  Indian slam poet who writes in English.

27 Billy Collins: Pajama and Slippers school of poetry. And nothing wrong with that at all.

28 W.S. Merwin: One of the few living major poets born in the 20s (goodbye Ashbery, Hall).

29 Valerie Macon: Quickly relieved of her NC poet laureate duties because of her lack of creds.

30 Mary Angela Douglas: a magical bygone spirit who sweetly found her way onto the Internet.

31 Stephen Cole: Who is this wonderful, prolific lyric poet? The daily Facebook fix.

32 Sophia Naz: “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”

33 Rochelle Potkar: “But can I run away from the one cell that is the whole Self?”

34 Helen Vendler: No one finally cares what non-poets say about poetry.

35 Huzaifa Pandit: “Bear the drought of good poems a little longer”

36 N Ravi Shankar: “a toy train in a full moon night”

37 Sharon Olds: Like Edna Millay, a somewhat famous outsider, better than the men.

38 Nabina Das: “the familiar ant crawling up”

39 Kaveh Akbar: “the same paradise/where dead lab rats go.”

40 Terrance Hayes: “I love poems more than/money and pussy.”

41 Dan Sociu: Plain-spoken, rapturous voice of Romania

42 Glyn Maxwell: Editor of Derek Walcott’s poems— The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013

43 Arjun Rajendran:  Indian poet in English who writes sassy, seductive poems.

44 A.E. Stallings: With Logan, and a few others, the Formalist torch.

45 Patricia Lockwood: Subsiding from viral into respectability.

46 Marjorie Perloff: An old-fashioned, shaming of NYU professor Avital Ronell in the Nimrod Reitman case.

47 Daipayan Nair: Great love and sex poet of India

48 Shohreh Laici: Proud young voice of restless, poetic Iran

49 Smita Sahay: “You flowed down the blue bus/into a brown puddle/below the yellow lamp post/and hung there”

50 Mary Oliver: An early fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she assisted Edna’s sister, Norma, in assembling the great poet’s work.

51 Natasha Trethewey: Former U.S. laureate, her New and Selected favored to win National Book Award this year.

52 Anand Thakore: “a single tusk/White as a quarter-moon in mid-July,/Before the coming of a cloud.”

53 Carl Dennis: Author of the poem, “The God Who Loves You.”

54 Tony Hoagland: Today’s Robert Bly.

55 Meera Nair: “I live in a house/Someone else has loved in”

56 Fanny Howe: “Eons of lily-building/emerged in the one flower.”

57 Rita Dove: Won Pulitzer in 1987. Her The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) was panned by Vendler and Perloff.

58 Diana Khoi Nguyen: Poet and multimedia artist studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.

59 Matthew Zapruder: Poetry editor of the New York Times magazine since 2016.

60 Jenny Xie: “I pull apart the evening with a fork.”

61 Mary Jo Bang: Chair of the National Book Award judges.

62 Jim Behrle: Hates David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series and “rhyme schemes.”

63 Semeen Ali: “diverting your attention/for a minute/contains my life/my undisclosed life”

64 George Bilgere: Ohio’s slightly more sophisticated Billy Collins.

65 Aishwarya Iyer: “When rain goes where will you find/The breath lost to the coming of love?”

66 Sukrita Kumar: “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”

67 Sushmita Gupta: “So detached, so solid, so just, so pure. A glory unbeholden, never seen or met before.”

68 Merryn Juliette: “before your body knows the earth”

69 John Cooper Clarke: “The fucking clocks are fucking wrong/The fucking days are fucking long”

70 Justin Phillip Reed: His book (2018) is Indecency.

71 Cathy Park Hong: Her 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” rules our era. The avant-garde is no longer automatically cool.

72 Carolyn Forche:  “No one finds/ you no one ever finds you.”

73 Zachary Bos: “The sun like a boat drowns.”

74 Bob Dylan: “You could have done better but I don’t mind”

75 Kanye West: The musical guest when SNL open its 44th season September 29th

76 Raquel Salas Rivera: “i shall invoke the shell petrified by shadows”

77 Jennifer Reeser: Indigenous, her new collection, will be available soon.

78 Forrest Gander: Be With from New Directions is his latest book.

79 Arun Sagar: “through glass and rain./Each way out/is worthy, each way leads/to clarity and mist,/and music.”

80 Joanna Valente: “Master said I am too anti-social.”

81 Richard Howard: Like Merwin, an American treasure, born in the 1920s.

82 J.Michael Martinez: Museum of the Americas on 2018 National Book Award longlist.

83 Amber Tamblyn: The actress/poet’s dad does the amazing flips in the movie West Side Story.

84 Paul Rowe: Stunning translation of Cesario Verde’s “O Sentimento dum Ocidental.”

85 Jill Bialosky: Norton editor caught plagiarizing by William Logan

86 Robert Pinsky: Editor of the 25 year anniversary edition of Best American Poetry in 2013.

87 Philip Nikolayev: Poet, linguist, philosopher: One Great Line theory of poetry is recent.

88 Ada Limón: The poet lives in New York, California, and Kentucky.

89 Rae Armantrout: Her poems examine, in her words, “a lot of largely unexamined baggage.”

90 Alex Dimitrov: “I want even the bad things to do over.”

91 Sam Sax: “Prayer for the Mutilated World” in September Poetry.

92 Danielle Georges: “You should be called beacon. You should be called flame.”

93 Stephen Sturgeon: “These errors are correct.”

94 Hieu Minh Nguyen: “Maybe he meant the city beyond the window.”

95 Richard Blanco: presidents, presidents, presidents.

96 Kent Johnson: His magazine Dispatches from the Poetry Wars continues the fight against poetry as commodity/career choice.

97 Parish Tiwari: “between falling rain/and loneliness…/the song/that once was ours”

98 Eliana Vanessa: Rrrrr. Lyric internet poet of the Tooth, Death, Love, Sex and Claw school.

99 Rachel Custer: Best known poem is “How I Am Like Donald Trump”

100 Jos Charles: “wen abeyance/accidentlie”

 

 

 

7 Comments

NOVEMBER 2017. THE SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100.

November 7, 2017 at 3:00 pm (Ada Limon, Afaa Weaver, Alex Dimitrov, Amber Tamblyn, Ana-Maria Tone, Ben Lerner, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Gary B. Fitzgerald, George Bilgere, Jennifer Reeser, Joe Green, Joie Bose, Kushal Poddar, Linda Ashok, March Madness, Mary Angela Douglas, Merryn Juliette, Nahid Arjouni, Nalini Priyadarshni, Nathan Woods, Philip Nikolayev, Ruth Awad, Saira Shah Halim, Shohreh Laici, Sushmita Gupta, W.S. Merwin)

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1) Sushmita Gupta— When the waves lashed and the clouds loomed and I was alone.

2) Diane Seuss— I could do it. I could walk into the sea!

3) Rachel  McKibbens— as you lie still within the soft forgotten witch of your body

4) Daipayan Nair— The maker of a house carries its hardness.

5) Eminem— The best part about me is I am not you.

6) Sharon Olds—  I had not put it into words yet, the worst thing

7) Natasha Trethewey— two small trout we could not keep.

8) Billy Collins— The name of the author is the first to go

9) Terrance Hayes— but there are tracks of your syntax about the land

10) Robert Pinsky— The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.

11) Bob Dylan— How does it feel?

12) Dan Sociu— the quakes moving/ for nothing, under uninhabited regions. (trans. Ana-Maria Tone)

13) Ben Mazer— Mother then/I am your son/The King.

14) Denise Duhamel— Ken wants to feel Barbie’s toes between his lips

15) Molly Fisk—  Then someone you love. And then you.

16) Sherman Alexie— They were common people who believed only in the thumb and the foot.

17) Jorie Graham— the infinite finding itself strange among the many

18) Charles Simic— Have you found a seat in your room/For every one of your wayward selves?

19) Louise Glück— In her heart, she wants them to go away.

20) Richard Howard— inspired by some wag’s verbose variations on the theme of semi-porn bric-a-brac

21) Donald Hall— so that she could smell the snowy air.

22) Stephen Cole— For the knowing heart the known heart cannot know.

23) Laura Kasischke— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it.

24) Mary Ruefle— the dead borrow so little from the past.

25) Tony Hoagland— Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.

26) Kevin Young— a freshman, I threw/a Prince party, re-screwed/ the lights red & blue

27) Maxine Beneba Clarke— penny lane/on the Beatles trail/all the locals say and they nod/as if for sure they know/our tourist game

28) Carolyn Forché— What you have heard is true.

29) Mary Jo Bang— A plane lit down and left her there.

30) Dan Beachy-Quick— Drab bird unseen in the dark dark’s underbrush

31) Carl Dennis— Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.

32) Christian Wiman—  Do you remember the rude nudists?

33) Stanley Plumly— I clapped my hands just for the company.

34) Major Jackson— All seeing is an act of war.

35) Gary B. Fitzgerald— A life is gone and, hard as rock, diamonds glow in jet black skies.

36) Mary Angela Douglas—  the larks cry out and not with music

37) A.E. Stallings— From the weeds of the drowned.

38) Joe Green—  the teacup is filled with the eyelashes of owls

39) Dorianne Laux—  It’s tough being a guy, having to be gruff and buff

40) Collin Yost— I’ll love you when you’re mad at me

41) Rupi Kaur— Don’t tell me my women aren’t as beautiful as the ones in your country

42) Wendy Cope— The planet goes on being round.

43) Warsan Shire— when the men come, set yourself on fire.

44) Savannah Brown— Hi, I’m a slut. What?!

45) Brenna Twohy— My anxiety is a camera that shows everyone I love as bones

46) Lily Myers— My mother wanes while my father waxes

47) Imani Cezanne— Addiction is seeking comfort in that which is destroying you.

48) Ada Limón— What’s left of the woods is closing in.

49) Olivia Gatewood— resting bitch face, they call you

50) Vincent Toro—  This island like a basket/of laundry 

51) Koraly Dimitriadis— the day I moved out, I took my wedding dress to mum’s house

52) Nayuka Gorrie— I lose it and find it and lose it again.

53) Hera Lindsay Bird— Keats is dead so fuck me from behind

54) Marie Howe— Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?

55) Valerie Macon— You are the boss of your canvas

56) Patricia Lockwood—  OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

57) Danielle Georges—  O poorest country, this is not your name.

58) Frank Bidart—  In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead.

59) Eileen Myles— I write behind your back.

60) Leila Chatti— Are you also dreaming? Do you still worship me, now that I’m here?

61) Claudia Rankine—  After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news.

62) Anne Carson—  I can hear little clicks inside my dream.

63) William Logan—  the pastel salons require/the formalities of skin

64) Marilyn Chin—  lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency.

65) George Bilgere—  The mysteries/from the public library, due

66) Robin Coste Lewis—  what’s greyed/In and grey slinks ashamed down the drain.

67) Daniel Borzutzky—  hieroglyphics painted on the/walls of financiers who accumulate capital through the/unjustified sexual behavior of adulterous/women

68) Maggie Smith—  Any decent realtor,/walking you through a real shithole, chirps on/about good bones

69) Kim Addonnizio—  a man who was going to be that vulnerable,/that easy and impossible to hurt.

70) Kay Ryan—  If it please God,/let less happen.

71) Dana Gioia—  there is no silence but when danger comes.

72) Megan Fernandez— The bullet is a simple, adolescent heartache.

73) Kushal Poddar— My mom, a wheelchair since two thousand and one

74) Sascha Aurora Akhtar— I ate/But I am/Hungrier than before

75) Jennifer Reeser— your coldness and my idealism/alone for all this time have kept us true.

76) Linda Ashok—  a sudden gust of Kalbaisakhi/changed the conversation.

77) Ramsha Ashraf— tremble and tremble and tremble/With every kiss

78) Amber Tamblyn— If it had been Hillary Clinton, this would’ve never happened to Harvey Weinstein.

79) Ruth Awad— Nothing grows from me except the dead

80) Merryn Juliette— I will love her all insane

81) Nathan Woods— The best poems swell the lungs.

82) Nahid Arjouni— My headscarf will shudder if you speak with anyone. (trans. Shohreh Laici)

83) Philip Nikolayev— the fool moon/couldn’t stand the iambic pentameter any longer

84) Saira Shah Halim— The rains left behind a petrichor of shared verses

85) Jay Z— I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.

86) Nalini Priyadarshni— mostly bookish, as sinfulness should be

87) Mark Doty— Into Eden came the ticks, princes of this world, heat-seeking, tiny

88) Paige Lewis— I’m making love easy for everyone.

89) Mary Oliver—  You don’t have to be good.

90) Lyn Hejinian— to change this nerdy life upon row upon row upon row

91) Afaa Weaver— I stand here where I was born,/ and the masks wait for me.

92) Alex Dimitrov— What is under the earth followed them home.

93) Ben Lerner— jumpsuits, they have changed/painting

94) Wendy Videlock— the owl devours/ the hour,/ and disregards/ the rest

95) Joie Bose— I own that you from that night in November

96) Amy Gerstler— Pardon my/frontal offensive, dear chum.

97) Nathaniel Mackey—  Some new Atlantis known as Lower/Ninth we took leave of next

98) W.S. Merwin— into a world he thought was a thing of the past

99) Juan Felipe Herrera— Where is our exile? Who has taken it?

100) Charles Bernstein—  Think about it, Mr./Fanelli.

9 Comments

FOUR POEMS OF DAN SOCIU

July 17, 2017 at 2:00 pm (Ana-Maria Tone, Dan Sociu)

The world needs the poems of Dan Sociu. It probably doesn’t make any sense to talk like this, but we might speak of Sociu as a combination of Bukowski and Rilke. Confessions of real life, with classical rigor—the best of both, and, in combination, better, at times, than either. This seems too easy to say, which is why we qualified it above in strong terms: it “doesn’t make sense.” But surely this slyly advertises, to a certain degree, what we are saying: there is something about the poems below (translated from the Romanian by Ana-Maria Tone) plainly uncanny—odd and strange from the ease of their honesty; matter-of-factly profound from a depth of patient understanding—as in the portrait of the cat, which reminds us of Rilke’s “The Panther'” beyond the mere feline similarity; the time traveling visit to anxious school; the masterpiece of love poet not loved; and finally, a love poem that documents, it seems, almost everything. Nicer than Bukowski, more approachable than Rilke, Dan Sociu is, with or without this comparison, an important poet. Enjoy.

 

SI FRUMOS E CÎND

How sad and beautiful man is when he’s wrong

about the world (and maybe he’ll never

know), like the cat driven mad

by the shining of a knife on the wall.

It forgets about everything else and it flies

into a rage directly to the playful spot

of light—and every time

it falls flat on its face and every time,

without hesitation, it throws itself

on that glow which is actually

nothing, doesn’t mean anything, is

useless. Indeed, if it disappears, it lies

still at the wall and waits,

with trembling whiskers, for it to return.

 

PARE UN VIS UNIVERSAL

It seems to be a universal dream. I’ve heard it

being told by others as well, the first part

is the same at least, the rest depends:

I’m at school, we are given

a test paper and as usual I haven’t studied

anything. I’m afraid and I’m ashamed then

I suddenly realize I finished school

a long time ago, I am an adult and they cannot

do anything to me anymore. I lie back and stretch

my legs on the bench, I look at my classmates

pitifully, how little and clumsy they are, caught

in the anxiety like a fly in a curtain—

don’t you already know that we were born in death

and that all cares are already over?

 

NIMIC NU MAI E POSIBIL

Nothing is possible anymore between me

And a nineteen year old girl, just as nothing

was possible when I was nineteen

years old. I listened to them carefully, they ruffled my hair,

they’d gently reject my touches, no, Dan,

you are not like this, you are a poet. They came

to me for therapy, they’d come with their eyes in tears

to the poet. I was a poet and everyone was in love

around the poet and none with him.

The poet would go out every evening

quaking like a tectonic wave and

in the morning he’d come back humiliated

in his heart—the quakes moving

for nothing, under uninhabited regions.

 

 

BECAUSE WE LISTENED TOFETHER TO THE HEART OF THE LITTLE GYMNAST BEATING IN THE CORNER OF THE HUGE MAT (PENTRU CA AM ASCULTAT)

First there was that beautiful gesture of yours in the bus

when you caressed with your fingers in the paper the photo

of a writer who died at 27.

 

I had seen girls doing that to celebrities’ faces before

and your gesture, very short and sensuous, on the features

of a dead young man, of a stranger,

moved me like a hundred obituaries.

 

Poor dear, you said.

 

I sensed you then, through your whole disguise

beyond your nice PR persona

I perceived the little girl who struggled to grab

a flower on the lower branch of a cherry tree.

 

Then there was a Sunday afternoon in the subway to the railway station.

We were talking about kids and I said that I didn’t want any more kids,

that I didn’t feel up to it. And that it would be unfair to my daughter.

 

In the station you kept trying to get out by the other door,

the one that leads to the disgusting abyss between the tracks

and you hid your eyes so I wouldn’t see you crying.

 

You once told me—I’m not beautiful, not in the classical sense.

And I told you—I know, I mean at first I knew,

now I don’t care anymore.

 

Some other time you told me you weren’t conceived out of love

and I wondered where you got all your love from.

 

So what if your parents didn’t want you.

I wanted you.

 

 

 

 

 

3 Comments

SCARRIET SUCCESS

April 13, 2017 at 7:44 pm (Ben Mazer, Charles River Journal, Chumki Sharma, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, George Bilgere, Hessamedin Sheikhi, Joe Green, Joie Bose, Kushal Poddar, Linda Ashok, Lori Desrosiers, March Madness, Mary Angela Douglas, Merryn Juliette, Nalini Priyadarshni, Noah Cicero, Paige Lewis, Payal Sharma, Philip Nikolayev, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League, Scarriet Editors, Scarriet Hot 100, Sherry (Shohreh) Laici, Simon Seamount, SpoKe, Stephen Cole, Stephen Sturgeon, Sushmita Gupta, Valerie Macon)

We are busy at Scarriet—publishing new posts on almost a daily basis: original essays, poems, epigrams, Scarriet March Madness Poetry contests—in its 8th year, going on right now, Scarriet Poetry Hot 100’s, you tubes of poem readings, and even song compositions.  And one day we would like to repeat our successful Scarriet Poetry Baseball League—in 2010 (when I was teaching English Composition as an adjunct professor and working full time at my real job) Blog Scarriet ran an entire season with 16 teams of all-time poets with entire lineups, pitching staffs, trading deadlines, statistics, pennant races, and a world series—Philadelphia Poe defeated Rapallo Pound.

Scarriet Poetry Hot 100 allows us to bring attention to poets who are not famous yet, but who have written wonderful things: Daipayan Nair, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Payal Sharma, Mary Angela Douglas, Nalini Priyadarshni, Philip Nikolayev, Paige Lewis, Valerie Macon, George Bilgere, Kushal Poddar, Joe Green, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Merryn Juliete, Chumki Sharma, Stephen Sturgeon, Simon Seamount, Lori Desrosiers, and Noah Cicero.

This is a personal note to just say THANK YOU to all our readers—as we head towards a million views since our founding in 2009.  “The One Hundred Greatest Hippies Songs Of All Time” (published in February 2014) still gets over 2,000 views a week.  “The Top One Hundred Song Lyrics That Work As Poetry” (published in 2013) still gets 1,000 views a week.  And posts like “Yeats Hates Keats: Why Do The Moderns Despise The Romantics?” (published in 2010) are constantly re-visited.

A poet (who I’ve never met) on Facebook, Linda Ashok, originally from Kolkata, today requested her FB Friends share “what’s happening to your poetry” and, without thinking, I quickly wrote a post—and realized your friendly Scarriet Editor has been up to quite a lot, lately, and Scarriet readers might as well hear about it:

*******************

Shohreh Laici  who lives in Tehran and I are working on a Persian/Iranian poetry anthology—in English.   (See Laici’s translations of Hessamedin Sheikhi in Scarriet 11/26/16)

My critical study of the poet Ben Mazer will be published by Pen & Anvil Press.

My review of Dan Sociu’s book of poems Mouths Dry With Hatred  is in SpoKe issue 4

Also in SpoKe issue 4: is my review of the Romanian poetry scene (after attending Festival de Literatura, Arad, 9-12 June 2016, Discutia Secreta)

Thanks to poet and professor Joie Bose, I participated in Kolkata’s Poetry Paradigm Coffee for a Poem on World Poetry Day, March 21, in Cambridge MA.

Charles River Journal will be publishing chapters of my Mazer book.

Facebook and Scarriet is where it all happens: so I’m actually not that busy—the literary world comes to me!

Below: the new family dog.  If I don’t walk her, she pees in my bed.  Seems fair.

Image may contain: people sitting, dog, living room, table and indoor

 

 

7 Comments

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2017 SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100

January 4, 2017 at 2:30 pm (A.E Stallings, Alan Cordle, Alice Notley, Anne Carson, Ben Lerner, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Bollyverses, Cate Marvin, Charles Simic, Christopher Ricks, Chumki Sharma, Claudia Rankine, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Daipayan Nair, Dan Chiasson, Dan Sociu, Dana Gioia, Derrick Michael Hudson, Don Share, Donald Hall, Donald J. Trump, Edgar Allan Poe, Eileen Myles, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Harold Bloom, Joe Green, John Ashbery, Joie Bose, Jorie Graham, Kay Ryan, Kushal Poddar, Laura Kasischke, Lyn Hejinian, Marie Howe, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Mary Oliver, Nikky Finny, Paige Lewis, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Blanco, Rita Dove, Robin Coste Lewis, Ron Silliman, Scarriet Hot 100, Sharon Olds, Stephen Burt, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Yellowface)

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1 Bob Dylan. Nobel Prize in Literature.

2 Ron Padgett. Hired to write three poems for the current film Paterson starring Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani.

3 Peter Balakian. Ozone Journal, about the Armenian genocide, won 2016 Pulitzer in Poetry.

4 Sherman Alexie. BAP 2015 ‘yellow-face controversy’ editor’s memoir drops this June.

5 Eileen Myles. Both her Selected Poems & Inferno: A Poet’s Novel making MSM lists.

6 Claudia Rankine. Citizen: important, iconic, don’t ask if it’s good poetry.

7 Anne Carson. The Canadian’s two latest books: Decreation & Autobiography of Red.

8 Paige Lewis. Her poem “The River Reflects Nothing” best poem published in 2016.

9 William Logan. In an age of poet-minnows he’s the shark-critic.

10 Ben Mazer. “In the alps I read the shipping notice/pertaining to the almond and the lotus”

11 Billy Collins. The poet who best elicits a tiny, sheepish grin.

12 John Ashbery. There is music beneath the best of what this New York School survivor does.

13 Joie Bose. Leads the Bolly-Verse Movement out of Kolkata, India.

14 Mary Oliver. Her latest book, Felicity, is remarkably strong.

15 Daipayan Nair.  “I am a poet./I kill eyes.”

16 Nikky Finny. Her book making MSM notices is Head Off & Split.

17 Sushmita Gupta. [Hers the featured painting] “Oh lovely beam/of moon, will you, too/deny me/soft light and imagined romance?”

18 A.E. Stallings. Formalism’s current star.

19 W.S. Merwin. Once the house boy of Robert Graves.

20 Mary Angela Douglas. “but God turns down the flaring wick/color by color almost/regretfully.”

21 Sharon Olds. Her Pulitzer winning Stag’s Leap is about her busted marriage.

22 Valerie Macon. Briefly N.Carolina Laureate. Pushed out by the Credentialing Complex.

23 George Bilgere. Imperial is his 2014 book.

24 Stephen Dunn. Norton published his Selected in 2009.

25 Marilyn Chin. Prize winning poet named after Marilyn Monroe, according to her famous poem.

26 Kushal Poddar. “The water/circles the land/and the land/my heaven.”

27 Stephen Burt. Harvard critic’s latest essay “Reading Yeats in the Age of Trump.” What will hold?

28 Joe Green. “Leave us alone. Oh, what can we do?/The wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.”

29 Tony Hoagland. Tangled with Rankine over tennis and lost.

30 Cristina Sánchez López. “I listen to you while the birds erase the earth.”

31 Laura Kasischke. Awkward social situations portrayed by this novelist/poet.

32 CAConrad. His latest work is The Book of Frank.

33 Terrance Hayes. National Book Award in 2010, a MacArthur in 2014

34 Robin Coste Lewis. Political cut-and-paste poetry.

35 Stephen Cole. “And blocked out the accidental grace/That comes with complete surprise.”

36 Martín Espada. Writes about union workers.

37 Merryn Juliette “And my thoughts unmoored/now tumbling/Like sand fleas on the ocean floor”

38 Daniel Borzutzky. The Performance of Being Human won the National Book Award in 2016.

39 Donald Hall. His Selected Poems is out.

40 Diane Seuss. Four-Legged Girl a 2016 Pulitzer finalist.

41 Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf published his 2014 Pulitzer winner.

42 Sawako Nakayasu. Translator of Complete Poems of Chika Sagawa.

43 Ann Kestner. Her blog since 2011 is Poetry Breakfast.

44 Rita Dove. Brushed off Vendler and Perloff attacks against her 20th century anthology.

45 Marjorie Perloff. A fan of Charles Bernstein and Frank O’hara.

46 Paul Muldoon. Moy Sand and Gravel won Pulitzer in 2003.

47 Frank Bidart. Winner of the Bollingen. Three time Pulitzer finalist.

48 Frederick Seidel. Compared “Donald darling” Trump to “cow-eyed Hera” in London Review.

49 Alice Notley. The Gertrude Stein of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.

50 Jorie Graham. She writes of the earth.

51 Maggie Smith. “Good Bones.” Is the false—“for every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird”— poetry?

52 Adrian Matejka. His book The Big Smoke is about the boxer Jack Johnson.

53 Elizabeh Alexander. African American Studies professor at Yale. Read at Obama’s first inauguration.

54 Derek Walcott. Convinced Elizabeth Alexander she was a poet as her mentor at Boston University.

55 Richard Blanco. Read his poem, “One Today,” at Obama’s second inauguration.

56 Louise Glück. A leading serious poet.

57 Kim Addonizio. Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life came out in 2016.

58 Kay Ryan. An Emily Dickinson who gets out, and laughs a little.

59 Lyn Hejinian. An elliptical poet’s elliptical poet.

60 Vanessa Place. Does she still tweet about Gone With The Wind?

61 Susan Howe. Born in Boston. Called Postmodern.

62 Marie Howe. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time is her latest book.

63 Glynn Maxwell. British poetry influencing Americans? Not since the Program Era took over.

64 Robert Pinsky. Uses slant rhyme in his translation of Dante’s terza rima in the Inferno.

65 David Lehman. His Best American Poetry (BAP) since 1988, chugs on.

66 Dan Sociu. Romanian poet of the Miserabilism school.

67 Chumki Sharma. The great Instagram poet.

68 Matthew Zapruder. Has landed at the N.Y. Times with a poetry column.

69 Christopher Ricks. British critic at Boston University. Keeping T.S. Eliot alive.

70 Richard Howard. Pinnacle of eclectic, Francophile, non-controversial, refinement.

71 Dana Gioia. Poet, essayist.  Was Chairman of NEA 2003—2009.

72 Alfred Corn. The poet published a novel in 2014 called Miranda’s Book.

73 Jim Haba. Noticed by Bill Moyers. Founding director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.

74 Hessamedin Sheikhi. Young Iranian poet translated by Shohreh (Sherry) Laici

75 Pablo Larrain. Directed 2016 film Neruda.

76 Helen Vendler. Wallace Stevens champion. Helped Jorie Graham.

77 Kenneth Goldsmith. Fame for poetry is impossible.

78 Cate Marvin. Oracle was published by Norton in 2015.

79 Alan Cordle. Still the most important non-poet in poetry.

80 Ron Silliman. Runs a well-known poetry blog. A Bernie man.

81 Natalie Diaz.  Her first poetry collection is When My Brother Was An Aztec.

82 D.A. Powell. Lives in San Francisco. His latest book is Repast.

83 Edward Hirsch. Guest-edited BAP 2016.

84 Dorianne Laux. Will always be remembered for “The Shipfitter’s Wife.”

85 Juan Felipe Herrera. Current Poet Laureate of the United States.

86 Patricia Lockwood. Her poem “Rape Joke” went viral in 2013 thanks to Twitter followers.

87 Kanye West. Because we all know crazy is best.

88 Charles Bernstein. Hates “official verse culture” and PWCs. (Publications with wide circulation.)

89 Don Share. Editor of Poetry.

90 Gail Mazur. Forbidden City is her seventh and latest book.

91 Harold Bloom. Since Emerson, Henry James, and T.S. Eliot are dead, he keeps the flame of Edgar Allan Poe hatred alive.

92 Alan Shapiro.  Life Pig is his latest collection.

93 Dan Chiasson. Reviews poetry for The New Yorker.

94 Robert Hass. “You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.”

95 Maurice Manning.  One Man’s Dark is a “gorgeous collection” according to the Washington Post.

96 Brian Brodeur. Runs a terrific blog: How A Poem Happens, of contemporary poets.

97 Donald Trump. Tweets-in-a-shit-storm keeping the self-publishing tradition alive.

98 Ben Lerner. Wrote the essay “The Hatred of Poetry.”

99 Vidyan Ravinthiran. Editor at Prac Crit.

100 Derrick Michael Hudson. There’s no fame in poetry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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