HAS T.S. ELIOT KILLED THE SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED?

January 1, 2023 at 9:15 pm (Aakriti Kuntal, Aaron Poochigian, Ada Limon, Anna Liu, Ben Mazer, Daipayan Nair, Danez Smith, David Lehman, Deepanjan Chhetri, Delmore Schwartz, Diane Seuss, George Bilgere, Jason Koo, John Keene, John Koethe, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Kent Johnson, Kevin Young, Louise Gluck, Marilyn Chin, Marjorie Perloff, Martin Espada, Mary Angela Douglas, Matthew Walther, Matthew Zapruder, Ocean Vuong, Paul Engle, Rupi Kaur, Sharon Olds, Stephen Cole, Susmit Panda, Terrance Hayes, Tuwanda Mulalu, William Logan, Wong May, Yana Djin)

The last Scarriet Hot 100 list was headed up by Kent Johnson, a talented poet who loved everything to do with poetry and interacted with me on the internet recently—a good man, a good soul, a loving father. He passed away this year. Before I get into the new list, I wanted to mention him.

There are two ways to think generally about poetry today.

One—poetry is thriving: in academia, in MFA writing workshops, in hard copy book publishing, in the slam bars, in the anthologies, in the inaugural ceremonies in Washingtion DC, in magazines, in prizes, in cash awards, in the federal, state, and local, laureates, in political radicalism, in traditional ways, in experimental ways, on millions of internet outlets, and in every proud, marginalized community.

Two—poetry is thriving AND YET it isn’t as good or important as it used to be.

Every 5-10 years—the latest is a NYTimes piece by Matthew Walther called “Poetry Died 100 Years Ago This Month”—successful American Poetry is tested by a smack-in-the-face, AND YET essay, which ruffles feathers and gets people talking.

This essay is always written by someone who is vaguely “conservative,” rude-yet-polite, and is either not a poet, or a poet who belongs somewhat, but not really, to the top-award-and-prize nexus of the American poetry enterprise.

The response (incensed, mostly uniting) to these once-or-twice-in-a-decade reminders that American poetry, despite all the official and unofficial cheer-leading, no longer matters, takes the following forms—from vehement disagreement to gradually conceding something may be wrong:

One) Your essay is lousy. You obviously don’t read contemporary poetry. You may be racist.

Two) No. Poetry is thriving. You need to read X, Y, and Z (see the top 100 list below).

Three) 90% of poetry is garbage (and I purchase and read new poems every day of the week) but that’s always been true—the bad poetry of the past has been forgotten. I don’t agree with anything you say in your essay.

Four) 99% of poetry is garbage today but that’s because there’s “too many poets.” But it’s better to have too many than too few, and the 1% good poetry today is as good as the best poems from the past—just evolved and different. I agree with one or two things in your essay.

Response One comprises about half the total response, which is perhaps why essays which question poetry’s contemporary worth appear rather infrequently.

Some form of Two, Three, and Four equals an additional 25% of the reactions.

Five) Modern poetry does kind of suck but contemporary poetry lives on in pop lyrics: Paul Simon, Bob Dylan, rap. Your essay is only partially correct.

Response Five fits about 15% of the usual reaction to such essays.

The remaining 10% of the feedback looks more or less like Six, Seven, Eight, and Nine.

Six) World War One and better university training did make Modernist poetry an ideal expression of a certain, unified, mournful sentiment which once paid dividends, but poetry today is written by different people for different purposes. I agree with your essay up to a point, but it’s much too pessimistic.

Seven) You make some good points, but you’re too narrow-minded. If you read more widely, you’d find contemporary poetry reflects the past more than you realize and historically, poetry has always had its revisions and revolutions. You’re too alarmist.

Eight) Poetry has sucked since 20th century prose poetry replaced Millay, Dickinson, Barrett, Tennyson and Keats, never mind Shakespeare and Milton. I agree with your essay 100% but I must take issue with your implication that early 20th Century Modernism was a golden age—Williams’ Wheelbarrow and Pound’s Cantos was, in fact, when the rot set in.

Nine) You’re spot on. Contemporary society is shallow and dumbed-down; only back-scratching poets read poetry today and as far as the general public is concerned, poetry is dead. I recall a previous essay of this kind where academic poetry was compared to subsidized farming. What you say has been true for many years. Thank you for your essay.

Below are poets getting the most attention in this early 2023 moment.

Latest book in quotes, when deemed necessary. BAP = Best American Poetry. Many of the names below were simply the most mentioned as “living poets you need to read” by those objecting to Walther’s essay—not a bad way to take a Zeitgeist temperature.

1) Matthew Walther. Catholic columnist. T.S. Eliot killed poetry.
2) Ada Limón “The Hurting Kind.” U.S. Laureate.
3) Diane Seuss “frank: sonnets.” Pulitzer.
4) David Lehman BAP ed. see Scarriet 11/7/22
5) Tawanda Mulalu “Please Make Me Pretty”
6) Matthew Zapruder BAP ’22 Guest editor
7) Wong May Tang Dynasty translations
8) Ocean Vuong
9) Jason Koo Longest poem in BAP ’22
10) Anni Liu “Border Vista”
11) William Logan slapped by Lehman in ’09 BAP
12) Terrance Hayes
13) Kevin Young New Yorker Poetry ed.
14) Sharon Olds “Balladz”
15) Danez Smith
16) John Keene “Punks” National Book Award
17) Louise Glück best poem in BAP ’22?
18) Martin Espada
19) Joy Harjo
20) John Koethe “Beyond Belief”
21) Forrest Gander
22) Natalie Diaz
23) Robert Wood Lynn 22′ Yale Younger Prize
24) Alice Fulton “Coloratura On A Silence Found In Many Expressive Systems”
25) Saeed Jones “Alive at the End of the World”
26) Elisa Gabbert NYT poetry columnist
27) Jorie Graham
28) Jayme Ringleb “So Tall It Ends In Heaven”
29) Chen Chen “Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced An Emergency”
30) Laura Kasischke best poem in BAP ’22?
31) Ross Gay publishes essays as well as poems
32) Rupi Kaur Instagram Bestseller
33) Amanda Gorman presidential inauguration poet
34) Mary Ruefle
35) Simon Armitage British Poet Laureate
36) Marilyn Chin worked with Paul Engle at Iowa
37) Niina Pollari “Path of Totality”
38) Gerald J Davis “Divine Comedy” prose trans. bestseller
39) Aaron Poochigian “American Divine”
40) Patricia Lockwood
41) Yusef Komunyakaa “Everyday Mojo Songs of the Earth: New & Selected”
42) Illya Kaminsky
43) Maggie Smith “Goldenrod”
44) C. Dale Young “Prometeo”
45) Daipayan Nair “tilt of the winnowing fan” Hawakal press
46) Reginald Dwayne Betts founder & director, Freedom Reads
47) Kirk Wood Bromley verse playwright
48) Cathy Park Hong “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde” essay
49) Dilruba Ahmed “Bring Now the Angels”
50) Yousif M. Qasmiyeh
51) Sherwin Bitsui “Dissolve”
52) Jake Skeets “Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers”
53) Brian Teare “Doomstead Days”
54) Billy Collins
55) Naomi Shihab Nye
56) Robert Pinsky
57) Tracy K. Smith
58) Warsame Shire
59) Wendy Cope
60) Marie Howe
61) Ron Silliman lowbrow avant critic
62) Marjorie Perloff highbrow avant critic
63) CA Conrad
64) Rae Armantrout current Yale Younger Judge
65) Susmit Panda
66) Alexandra Lyfton Regalado “Relinquenda”
67) Sara Deniz Akant “Hyperphantasia”
68) George Bilgere “Blood Pages”
69) Ben Mazer ed. Collected Poems, Delmore S.
70) Paul Tran “All the Flowers Kneeling”
71) Shelley Wong “As She Appears” debut publication
72) No’u Revilla “Ask the Brindled”
73) Safia Elhillo “Girls That Never Die”
74) Rio Cortez “Golden Ax” first book
75) C.T. Salazar “Headless John the Baptist Hitchhiking”
76) Nina Mingya “Magnolia”
77) Roger Reeves “Best Barbarian”
78) Luther Hughes “A Shiver In the Leaves”
79) Solmaz Sharif “Customs”
80) Franny Choi “The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On”
81) Dana Gioia poet who wrote one of those essays
82) Mary Angela Douglas
83) Cate Marvin “Event Horizon”
84) Aakriti Kuntal
85) Rita Dove
86) Stephen Cole
87) Deepanjan Chhetri
88) Carl Phillips “Then the War: And Selected Poems”
89) Joshua Michael Stewart “Break Every String”
90) Robert Hass
91) Gregory Pardlo Pulitzer 2015
92) Christian Wiman “Survival Is a Style”
93) Padraig O Tuama ed. “Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems To Open Your World” Amazon bestseller
94) Yana Djin
95) Glyn Maxwell
96) Jenny Xie “The Rapture Tense”
97) Shelby Leigh “mental health poet,” Amazon bestseller
98) Kei Miller “There Is an Anger that Moves”
99) Layli Long Soldier
100) Aimee Nezhukumatahil

~~~~

Salem, MA 1/1/2023

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GREAT POEMS SCARRIET FOUND ON FACEBOOK NO. 9

December 19, 2022 at 2:35 pm (Aakriti Kuntal, Ben Mazer, Daipayan Nair, Deepanjan Chhetri, G.E. Lessing, George Bilgere, Joshua Michael Stewart, Kushal Poddar, Ron Silliman, Scarriet Editors, Stephen Cole, Susmit Panda, William Carlos Williams, Yana Djin)

The following “Great Poems Scarriet Found on Facebook” essay was originally published in Outlook India on August 14th, 2022, thanks to Kushal Poddar. It was going to be sixth, but in terms of Scarriet publication, its place here is ninth—if you like to keep track of these things. The series began July 17th of this year and has featured the following poets, starting with number one: Aakriti Kuntal, Yana Djin, Stephen Cole, Deepanjan Chhetri, George Bilgere, Susmit Panda, Joshua Michael Stewart, and Ben Mazer. (A few clarifying remarks were added to this essay about half-way through.) –Ed.

Literature is currently in disarray. It is because, I think, people, even truthful types, generally pursue literature to escape facts—but facts are more important in literature than they are in life. Let me give you an example: A team wins a basketball game (or cricket match) despite the fact that it played badly. In life, the fact the team played badly is instantly forgotten in the celebration of the victory. In fiction, however, the reader naturally demands to know how it was possible that the team played badly—and won. The fact is not forgotten. The fact is urged, by plausibility, to be understood.The reader cannot be satisfied: fiction is not luck, but fiction, which is not life, is forced to explain luck, and sounds hopefully artificial when it does—like those tales of historical fiction where the fiction murders the history and the history, in an act of revenge, murders the fiction. It doesn’t take a Plato to see that Fiction is Bad History. And no one reads poetry. So what are we to do?

My facts are these: I am the editor of Blog Scarriet (2009—present), the “scary” version of Blog Harriet, the Poetry Foundation website. Scarriet grew out of Alan Cordle’s Foetry.com. Mr. Cordle, a university librarian, noticed poetry contests were unfairly awarding prizes to friends of the judges.

Scarriet practices more general and historical criticism, but likes to simply promote poetry, as well.

The following is from the sixth in a series Scarriet recently began: Great Poems Scarriet Found On Facebook:

Inevitably, Scarriet would find a fine haiku to present in this series. And now a reckoning must occur. Daipayan Nair has seduced us with this haiku first published in the June issue of haikuKATHA, 22:

long phone call—
the smell of burnt rice
from the kitchen

Scarriet is infamous for abusing “The Red Wheelbarrow”—and the Modernist era’s occasionally fraudulent aesthetics.

If Scarriet is now discovered calling a haiku a “great poem,” the charge of hypocrisy will come crashing down around us at once.

Haiku was the first kind of poetry I wrote, as a school exercise in New York City, having just turned 11. (6th grade, P.S. 145 elementary school W. 104th St, Manhattan.) I’ll never forget the rules (which are hardly followed) 5-7-5. Three lines of five, seven, and five syllables.

Is this all poetry is? A piece of writing with rules?

This is easy, (and delightful) my eleven year old self thought. I recall thinking I had joined the ranks of the haiku masters with my first efforts. I was arrogant even then, even as a terribly shy eleven year old.

There are two ways to look at this.

One. I was a fool to think at eleven I was writhing good haiku.

Two. Only fools believe there are masters who write masterful haiku.

5-7-5 has no clothes.

A democratic art form has no place for elitism.

The arrogant child at P.S. 145 was correct. The child had joined the ranks of the “masters.”

But my haiku arrogance was a democratic arrogance, not an elitist one.

Inevitably, there will be these two things: Poetry and Criticism.

The latter (Criticism) is where democratic arrogance and elitist arrogance fight it out.

Poetry cannot be arrogant. Poetry is a kind of anti-arrogance. The poem obeys rules, or tacitly, humbly, breaks one or two of them. One can see why the “humble” haiku would rank high on the all-important anti-arrogance scale.

A person writing haiku-length criticism would be met with disdain—how can one reason and review in syllables so few? Humility can’t work itself up into the arrogance naturally necessary for criticism.

Criticism, unlike poetry, is arrogant:

“Ha ha ha! What a ridiculous rule!” (Democratic)

“Look how exquisitely the poet has bent (but not quite broken) this time-honored rule! Without question he deserves the title of master!” (Elitist)

Swarms of literary gnats are attracted to what we have termed above elitist criticism, while the lone, haughty, maverick tends to choose democratic criticism. There is a political lesson here somewhere.

We mentioned above the “humble” haiku.

Criticism, merely on account of its length, can never be as “humble” as the haiku.

The more words I write, the less humble I will appear.

Length, as Poe made it clear in his “Philosophy of Composition,” is the foremost physical reality of the poem.

The ultimate humility is silence, all the way up to the highest arrogance—the novel, poem or lecture continuing (or seeming to be capable of continuing) forever.

The “avant-garde,” a term I never liked, takes the humble and makes it arrogant. Ron Silliman, in a recent talk, praised a poem which merely consists of “Look! Look!” Here is zen taken to the extreme. Unfortunately, zen isn’t poetry.

We should keep the following in mind: We can’t have too much humility. We can’t have too much arrogance. They simply turn into one another. The golden mean always applies.

“Look! Look!” is humility which turns into arrogance, especially in the hands of Ron Silliman, the “avant-garde” circus-master, who forever de-centers, and never met a wheelbarrow he didn’t like.

I use the terms, “humble” and “arrogant,” as imperfect feelings others have regarding poetry, only to now throw them away.

Scarriet will, with Criticism (how few practice the true, democratic, Criticism!) save its reputation (per the character Portia in the Merchant of Venice) by arguing how one haiku is infinitely better than another. The “pound of flesh” always contains “blood;” a poem is never just a poem—it is watered by all kinds of things; the poem living in a nearly infinite context. (The New Critics were wrong.)

Now for this Wheelbarrow:

“Depends” is a term I doubt—for how do I, or any of us, or anything, “depend” on a series of objects (red wheelbarrow, white chickens)—these things obviously depend on other things much more than other things depend on them.

The radical wheelbarrow author’s implied triumph is that the reader of the “Red Wheelbarrow” depends on the poem (and its images) for the reading experience.

This rather easy reductionism is exactly like another Modernist joke (played around the same time and in the same elitist circles) in which the museum-goer “depends” on Duchamp’s toilet for their museum-exhibit experience. Reality (a toilet) comes into the museum—which is true for all “fine art” objects finding their way into a museum.

You want a “rule,” Mr. Aesthete? I’ll give you a “rule!” W.C. Williams and Duchamp are funny, as well as philosophical (the greatest philosophy is surprisingly funny just as the greatest poems tend to have “punchlines”).

Modernism is a joke, but unfortunately a joke that is funny but once, it being so fundamental and profound. To persist in the Modernist trope is to quickly become unfunny—a humorless troll. Putting all our eggs in that (joke) basket, they are now broken. It is why Modernism (Post-Modernism etc) for the most part is hopelessly elitist, fragmented and ridiculous.

As for Daipayan Nair’s poem. We’ve seen Daipayan’s work on Facebook for about ten years now and believe he is a genius—whether the world has made him one, or he is one, or the world would not like him to be one and has failed (that’s always a possibility) I am not certain.

Unlike the “Red Wheelbarrow,” we aren’t told that “so much depends” on a bunch of objects presented to us as static images.

As the German critic G.E. Lessing told the world in his Laocoon, poetry and painting are radically different. We don’t see anything (really) in poetry; we hear about things. Daipayan Nair goes all in on this, which is why I find his poem so wonderful:

long phone call—
the smell of burnt rice
from the kitchen

In human life, there is actually no vacation. We are always working. To be mature is to realize that work and human existence are the same.

Daipayan Nair’s (“long phone call!”) poem is brief.

But with all short poems, we sometimes forget the immense work it took to “boil down” the “story” so it is perfectly suggested in the briefest possible manner. (“Briefest possible” is the science of poetry.)

Ezra Pound said he boiled down “In The Station at the Metro” (celebrated almost as much as the annoying wheelbarrow) from a longer piece of writing. Pound, the Modernist godfather, would later do the reverse in his Cantos—the second of two extremes which haunted the almost hellish landscape of the Modernist vision.

The boiling down is crucial. Which is why “the smell of burnt rice” is as funny as the “long phone call.”

“from the kitchen” almost seems unnecessary, and yet it gives the poem dimensionality, space. The long phone call occurs away from the kitchen; in fact, we are not sure if the “smell” has reached the cook yet, distracted by the “long phone call.” For all we know, not only is the rice boiling down to a hideous crisp, a life-threatening fire is imminent.

Weighed in the balance, which is more exciting? Which more fully evinces genius?

Daipayan Nair’s poem?

Or the most famous Modernist poem of them all?

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GREAT POEMS SCARRIET FOUND ON FACEBOOK NO.4

July 31, 2022 at 12:46 pm (Deepanjan Chhetri, Scarriet Editors)

What has happened to us? Where is sophisticated love poetry? Spiritual longing and hurt with natural references is all very good, and eroticism is certainly not in short supply, though poetry isn’t really a good medium for it—and the better poets instinctively understand this. But the more sophisticated the poetry these days, the more we get the crunchy weirdness and pain of the Modernism school, which gained access to our schools several generations ago and shows no sign of loosening its grip.

Blame, perhaps, the Creative Writing Workshop and its group analysis—love poems don’t go well in a group setting—a group of students don’t want to be courted. Nor does Criticism. The love poem, presented by a living ‘poet-lover’ to the absent beloved, runs the risk of falling flat (humiliation) in a classroom setting. “Who do you think you are? Byron?” Such attempts can seem embarrassing on a number of levels. Love is like rhyme. It better be extremely good if you try it. Bad poets try it all the time, but that’s why they are “bad” poets. Love and rhyme make up an old language and a new language (Modernism) has taken its place, one which is not romantically presumptuous.

Scarriet found a sophisticated love poem. A true miracle—because only a fool would attempt it today. Here’s the question. How can it possibly be “sophisticated?” How can a bad type of poem succeed, and second, succeed in the hands of a poet who is obviously a fool?

Witness the miracle:

“Beatrice Guides Dante To Paradise” by Deepanjan Chhetri:

Walking past the department of French,
The stairs stared at us as in Hitchcock films;
We talked while my boots traced her footsteps:
“Do we have time?” “We have enough of it.”

Turning away from Comparative Literature,
I looked down from dizzying heights;
A little wind would twirl her hair,
As we spoke of ELT and suicide.

I stood against an infernal heat,
And watched the city through her eyes:
The Hindu Hostel, and the Howrah Bridge;
The moving cars appeared like toys,

And men, like ants, toiled for food:
My views hadn’t altered with altitude.

~~~~~~~~~

Deepanjan Chhetri has climbed into the first rank with this poem—and he has written a series of them.

Life can be grounded or lofty—by asserting there is no difference, in the final line, the poet introduces duality paradoxically—his awareness of the not different is the difference. And the poem is given an added lift, since the final observation flies in the face of expectation. Is it the feigned indifference of the lover?

The difference in height is a symbol for duality in love—a height casually traveled by the two potential lovers together. Are they just stairs? Or stairs of danger? The altitude won’t affect his attitude. This observation is the key to the whole poem, and best expressed, of course, in the last line.

Scarriet Editors

July 31, 2022

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