Picking up, at random, the 2023 February issue of Poetry, I perused coldly its self-conscious verses.
The iconic Poetry! Founded in the beginning of the previous century by a female poet with funds raised in the Chicago business community, it was immediately a target of Pound, who got his work into it right away.
The little magazine has not only lasted, it has turned into the Poetry Foundation, having been gifted with millions by the Lilly pharmaceutical company a generation ago.
Poetry lost its editor recently to the “cancel culture.”
Despite its fortune and the zeitgeist, it has the same look it had when Miss Harriet Monroe was accepting poems written by those born in the 19th century.
It looks like a community college literary magazine.
Unfortunately—and this might be some kind of ironic joke—it often reads like one, as well.
In the middle of the 19th century, America had about a 50/50 chance of surviving as a nation before the end of Queen Victoria’s reign. Victoria, granddaughter of the king who lost America, George III, was Queen of India. America had big problems, which Lincoln had partially solved, dying in the process; Victoria must have dreamed (perish the thought!) the United States could one day be hers.
To American patriots living in Chicago in the early 20th century, like the young, ambitious, Miss Monroe, there must have been something a bit troubling about English poet laureate Alfred Lord Tennyson’s ringing verses. When she put together her new magazine, she must have been aware of the need to give it a modern, American stamp. This was the natural, if not the practical, thing to do, if her project was going to be taken seriously at all. It had nothing to do with Modernist “theory.” It must have occurred to her as a simple necessity.
Chicago in 1912 wasn’t India. It wasn’t even New England, the South, or 19th century Britain. There was no “Waste Land” yet. Poets like Tennyson (Tagore, Goethe) and poets interested in that kind of music, were not the enemy, of course, but the more provincial a poet like Tennyson’s music seemed, the greater the chance a woman from the great heartland of the United States could join the earnest chorus: “We may be full of imitators, but the United States is its own country! And worldly! With its own serious literature and poetry!”
Here we are in 2023 and Poetry is still Harriet Monroe’s child. Plain. Modern. Yes, somewhat worldly. Somewhat avant-garde. In a self-conscious, newsy, American textbook sort of way. Prosaic and true!
The 2023 February issue—
apparently has no craft—it is about as musical as someone sitting very still at the piano. The poems within contain very little which the souls of earth have, since the beginning of time, associated with song, verse, poetry.
Metrical, rhyming stanzas are not only particularly suited to poetry—they are how poetry became known as poetry. But it’s nowhere to be seen here.
In fact, the use of repetition, playful, or otherwise, is hard to find in the latest Poetry.
Poetry has no hint of traditional poetry. It runs from it.
I think it is partly because American poetry in general takes itself very seriously.
American secular intellectuals implicitly know that traditional, King James Bible, religious language in English has a dignity which eschews the playfulness of rhyme.
Since poetry is religion for the moderns, their poetry needs to be serious.
Rhyme is not serious.
For instance, one would never say “Papa, who art in Heaven…”
To English ears this sounds ridiculous.
It is due to the chime of pa-pa.
“Father, who art in Heaven…” meets the non-rhymey standard of the typical modern American poet.
The academic poets today are careful to not indulge in the excesses of sound-repetition or sound-playfulness. It’s too undignified, like pop music poets or 19th century poets—poets who often wrote against religion, but who implicitly allowed religion its top place in the dignity pecking-order. Father over Papa.
Sumana Roy recently published a lovely essay in Lithub (“Crow, Donkey, Poet,” December 2022) which demonstrates how India’s most famous poet Rabindranath Tagore—and the Bangla language in general—is full of rhyming “nicknames,” as it were (sho sho, chupi chupi, etc)—pa-pa, as opposed to fa-ther, is everywhere. In affectionate family spaces, Roy “relaxes” with her native tongue, even as she uses English to earn her living as an academic. Bangla is not as serious. As a language, Bangla is closer to poetry. And she confesses this self-consciously and almost guiltily. “I write in English and cannot write in any other language to my satisfaction, but I cannot live in it. It seems a kind of betrayal to say this, like gossiping about a grandparent.”
The Moderns are more serious, because they don’t feel comfortable playing second fiddle to religion’s more august music. The Moderns, only half in love with the rhyming Wordsworth, seek a natural religion to replace the King James religion. Any hint of rhyming—Papa—won’t do.
It’s not that modern poets have rejected craft; they have rejected the relaxed and repetitive tone of “papa” language as opposed to “father” language, finding, unfortunately, that poetry, in an act of childish revenge, has given them all the rope they need to hang themselves with earnest and alliterative prose—for a tiny, academic, audience.
Metaphor is a way of talking about something—it helps to explain—or mystify—and is not poetic, per se, since prose can make use of it exactly in the same way poetry can. Metaphor has a sub-importance when it comes to poetry, not a primary importance. (Aristotle would disagree, but then he was wrong about the fixed stars.)
Alliteration and other more subtle sound effects, such as line-break pauses, do far more work in academic poetry than rhyme and meter will probably ever do again. Perhaps one day, humanity’s ear will develop a subtlety so fine poetry will triumph in sound, alliteratively only.
But let’s move on to what is really important to modern poetry.
Suspense.
Edgar Poe made a host of interesting remarks on poetry in his published “Marginalia,” which have largely escaped notice. Here’s a gem, which helps illustrate exactly what I am trying to say:
“A friend of mine once read me a long poem on the planet Saturn. He was a man of genius, but his lines were a failure of course, since the realities of the planet, detailed in the most prosaic language, put to shame and quite overwhelm all the accessory fancies of the poet.”
The planet Saturn—it’s vast size, its tremendous velocity through space, its moons, the perfection of its rings—is pure sublime reality—which makes a serious poem on it silly and redundant. I like this example, because a poet today, as well as Poe in the 19th century, can detect a certain absurdity in “a long poem on the planet Saturn.”
Facts (of Saturn) speak for themselves. Sublimity is up to the poem, not its facts.
The poem is allowed, or expected, to talk about what is not special, interesting, or extraordinary.
The poem is expected to rise to the extraordinary in subtle and limitless ways.
Here’s why I used the word suspense. The suspense may be small in a poem—but it is the suspense of how the poem will manage to be interesting, when it is only describing a rainy day, for instance. Suspense is at the center of all poetry which forgoes what Poe calls the “accessory fancies” of the poet, whether this is alliteration, rhyme, meter, or stanza.
Suspense is more important in the modern poem than in any other literary form—because it is not suspense super-imposed as plot; it is suspense which makes or breaks the poem itself.
The unfolding of the humble poem qua poem—using limitless, free-ranging rhetorical and fictional strategies—is what is, in itself, suspenseful.
Nothing is really cast aside—neither the sublimity of “the planet Saturn” nor even the beauty of lines like this:
“I see the summer rooms open and dark.”
This is also from Poe’s “Marginalia,” —Poe selected the above line for praise by an anonymous author— as Poe observed, “Some richly imaginative thoughts, skillfully expressed, might be culled from this poem—which as a whole is nothing worth.”
This, too, is something Poe, the so-called 19th century “jingle man” (Emerson’s crude insult) and the modern poet can agree on, the simple and homely beauty of “I see the summer rooms open and dark.”
The first poem in the most recent volume of Poetry is by Joanna Klink.
Five published books, born in Iowa City, befriended Jorie Graham to advance her career (hello, Alan Cordle!) when the latter taught at Iowa.
The strategy of Joanna Klink’s poem is the modern one—it takes the ordinary and uses every rhetorical device it can to succeed as a good poem (what we all want, even in the 21st century).
To quote her poem from the beginning:
Rain falls across the avenues. What can I say anymore that might be equal to this sound, some hushed drumming that stays past the gravelly surge of the bus. In the apartment complex a songbird strikes a high glass note above those rushing to work, uneasy under umbrellas. It is they who are meant, is it me who is meant, my listening, my constant struggle to live on my terms, unexemplary, trying always to refuse anything but the field, the wooden rowboat, veils of wind in the pine. Films of gold in my throat as I say out loud the ancient words that overlay isolation. And yet I miss stillness when it opens, like a lamp in full sunlight.
This is the first half of the poem—17 lines of 34.
It is the poet talking—about talking—about what they see. (“What can I say…”)
There is no ostentatious repetition.
Notice the multiple alliteration, (“uneasy under umbrellas”) which gets as close to rhyme as possible without crossing into forbidden territory, especially in “gold…throat…out loud…”
Alliteration remains a dignified enterprise.
No one protests, “how do you know they are uneasy under their umbrellas?”
Or, “gold? throat? Can June/moon be far behind?”
We trust our academic poets to resist the off ramp as they ride the steady, alliterative highway. The route rhyme in 5 miles sign never tempts.
It is obvious what the new religion of today’s poets is. But we’ll say it anyway.
Nature.
Does anyone else find it ironic that nature is the “new religion” for today’s academic poets across the world?
One more share from Sumana Roy’s essay.
Asking her students on the first day of creative writing class what they feel is “poetic,” Roy begins her essay by offering her own definition.
A crow, she says, flies, into the class picture at the end of the term, the photographer keeps the crow, and of all the class pictures hanging in the hall twenty years later—only one is unique and “poetic,” the one which contains the “surprise” and the “surplus” of the “crow.”
All in all, a pretty good definition of what many find nearly impossible to pin down—the “poetic.” But I find it telling that the photo bomb is by a bird, not a human being—even as Roy doesn’t mention “the natural” as having anything to do with the “poetic”—it’s just an unconscious feeling in more and more modern poets.
Back to the first half of Klink’s poem. What the poet in the poem sees is ordinary, without drama—an urban landscape—where the poet lives—invaded in the poem by a landscape wished for—one more bucolic—(“field, rowboat, wind in the pine”) even as the poet struggles to express the worship for what is plain and natural (“What can I say…equal to this sound [the rain]”).
This is pure Wordsworth, pure “I think that I will never see a poem lovely as a tree.” But embarrassing for the 21st century academic poet to see this, I know. I feel ashamed for pointing it out (though Harriet Monroe might smile).
There follows a piece of rhetoric which sounds self-consciously “poetic:”
“Films of gold in my throat as I say out loud/the ancient words that overlay/isolation.”
It is almost as if the poet wants to break free of mundane Wordsworth and hint that she can pull off the sublime if she wants: “films of gold…ancient words….”
But, alas, no. “Stillness” is more important. And the poet’s inability to notice it: “And yet I miss stillness/when it opens, like a lamp in full sunlight.” A fine metaphor.
The fast-paced use of strategy after strategy—almost as if the self-conscious use of various poetic strategies is what counts the most.
Joanna Klink self-consciously writing a failing poem because the modern poet isn’t allowed to be sublime—so what’s to be done now?
This is the attitude, the challenge, the existential dilemma, the suspense of the modern poem.
By “modern,” I mean, whatever has come after Romanticism. The modern poem is everywhere pretty much the same: to various degrees, the modern poem sheds overt ‘sound’ strategies for more subtle ones—but still belongs to the 19th century.
Joanna Klink is aiming for the beauty of “I see the summer rooms open and dark.”
A line Poe loved in the 1840s.
And of course we love now.
Amen.
Or, if you were speaking Bangla?
Amen-amen.
Or, Ah-Ah.
Or, men-men.
Do we need to see the second half of Klink’s poem? As we might expect, its philosophical naturalism makes an effort at repetition, echo, and closure, but only broadly within its theme, which might be loosely stated: I think I will never attain a poem lovely as the rain.
The prosaic services of the modern poems serve old poetic themes.
There is craft—but it’s all focused on alliteration. The poem’s “rain” (which is “hazy“) travels in sound-sense alliteration to “water” to “river” to “partial” to “blur” to “dark” and then back to “rain,” the final and the first word of the poem.
As we pick up Klink’s poem at line 18:
I’m ready to sense the storm before the trees reveal it, their leaves shuffling in thick waves of air. I have said to myself This too is no shelter but perhaps the pitch of quiet is just a loose respite from heat and loss, where despite ourselves the rain makes hazy shapes of our bones. Despite ourselves we fall silent—each needle of rain hits the ground. Whoever stops to listen might hear water folded in the disk of a spine, a river barely move. A bird ticking on a wire. I no longer believe in a singing that keeps anything intact. But in the silence after the raincall that restores, for a moment at least, me to my most partial self. The one content to blur into the dark smoke of rain.
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
Ben Mazer is looking forward to the months ahead: his “The Ruined Millionaire: New and Selected Poems” will be available November 1st, and in 2023 Farrar will publish his “Collected Poems of Delmore Schwartz.”
Neither Schwartz nor Mazer are overrated—Scarriet can attest both are talented and deliver the goods. But both lack that spark of genius which is necessary to be popular. Schwartz was overtaken by mania—he never allowed himself to be wrong, to suffer in public, poetically—which would have been a beautiful thing to see.
Mazer, unlike Schwartz, did not find himself struggling against an insider literary group who half-accepted him.
On the contrary, Mazer lives in a time when there are no literary groups. In poetry today, no one has ideas.
Nothing exists that says here is what Marjorie Perloff is (“she supports the avant-garde?”). Nothing exists that says here is what William Logan is (“he’s a mean critic?”).
Nothing exists that says here is what Mazer is.
I tried, by writing a book, “Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism,” (2021).
Glyn Maxwell’s 2022 introduction to Mazer’s “New and Selected” makes no attempt, merely mentioning a couple of poets who put Maxwell up years ago when he, Glyn Maxwell, visited America.
No literary movements—the consciousness simply doesn’t exist. Since the Beats. In the wake of the Beats there was the madman Lowell who was not a Beat. And Larkin, more isolated than Lowell and a much better poet—lesson learned.
Mazer is the best living poet. A great poet of no ideas in an era of no ideas. Ashbery is great—only when the clever think they find ideas in him that others do not. Mazer is better than Ashbery because he doesn’t allow this kind of vanity—there really are no ideas. Mazer’s poetry is purer and greater. (Diane Seuss and Sharon Olds are beautiful and profound when they are talking about the details of their lives.)
There is nothing to join or not join. Poetry has no atom—only electrons obeying nothing, except maybe left wing politics.
Left wing politics is great. But it’s not poetry.
There hasn’t been an idea in poetry since Harold Bloom became famous for an idea which said: Rivalry in poetry is all, a pernicious idea which helped ensure no one dared to form or manufacture literary movements, or care about the past—all the writers were alone and precious. Can you imagine Jorie Graham starting a trend based on a spontaneous, all-night bull session? Academia—as it absorbed Modernism (not fit for it, finally) and then French Theory—ended spontaneity and literary movements and gradually became a publishing platform for lonely talents like Graham.
Ben Mazer has put his published poems on Facebook recently. Here’s one I like. As you read it, you’ll see exactly what I mean about the pure poem which doesn’t let you posture vainly over ideas—Mazer’s genius doesn’t allow it. The spell is all.
Epilogue
It is youth that understands old age and your repulsion is but a projection an image of the loathing you obtain. I’ve seen the fall come in and think I shall follow each leaf that winds about the house to where you stutter, the end of the tether where grace walks through the bridal foliage and no one could mistake you for another. After that, they are only leaves to burn. And when the flowers burst upon the rain the roofs shall keep their solemn gentle witness far from the young men who travel far to fill their noses with the autumn air. Daybreak is decent as awakening. And love is gentle, though he is no scholar. What if I filled my notebook with his words sketched suddenly with no least hesitation would she return to him when it came fall or would she sink into a bitter winter not even counting the blossoms that are gone. How many times the autumn rain recurs to wind about the river in the evening or fall like one great ocean in the dawn. No matter, he has had enough of her and leaves his youth in hope of something better. A drop expresses all the flooding water, the wind instills the trees with sentiment, and no one, no one can reverse the patter of the darkness that’s enclosed within. It stares across the city in the dawn and cannot wake these shrouds of memory.
The secret to the poem’s success is its sound. It uses a device few will notice—and which even the poet may not be aware. There is a constant stream of trochaic words beginning with “loathing”—“stutter, tether, bridal, flowers, solemn, gentle, witness, travel, noses, autumn, decent, scholar” (“mistake,” correctly, an exception) until we reach the emotional center of the poem and her “return,” the iamb in the buzzword, trochaic, river—and immediately returning: “bitter, winter…”
Mazer is unconscious, as poets like Tennyson and Dickinson—too busy being poets—were. Mazer once told me a poem he liked of mine reminded him of Robert Lowell’s poetry. I didn’t bother to respond, but it was nothing like Robert Lowell. My poem had an idea.
The late Harold Bloom, 25 years ago, was asked by David Lehman—who recently ‘liked’ one of my poems on FB—to compile a Best of the Best American Poetry 1988 — 1997 and Bloom complied, but his compilation completely omitted the 1996 Best American Poetry volume by the late lesbian poet, Adrienne Rich. Bloom wrote a scathing introduction saying political correctness was ruining poetry and destroying universities.
Bloom’s 10 year BAP anniversary anthology considered 10 volumes by these 10 guest editors: John Ashbery, Donald Hall, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, Charles Simic, Louise Glűck, A. R. Ammons, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, and James Tate, 1988 to 1997.
There are several stories here.
The headline grabber, obviously: Bloom snubbed every choice by Adrienne Rich (she did find a few good poems: Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada)—Rich, a distinguished poet who was awarded the Yale Younger Poet prize by king-maker W.H. Auden.
Bloom could have included one or two poems and moved on, but the most famous literary critic of his day decided to make a statement. Series editor Lehman suggested what he thought were worthy poems from 1996, but succumbed to Bloom’s editorial fiat. Lehman has turned out to be a wise editor for BAP. He doesn’t encourage controversy, but he doesn’t run from it, either.
Are you sitting down? Here is Bloom, from his introduction:
“That 1996 anthology is one of the provocations for this introduction, since it seems to me a monumental representation of the enemies of the aesthetic who are in the act of overwhelming us. It is of a badness not to be believed, because it follows the criteria now operative: what matters most are the race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnic origin, and political purpose of the would-be poet. I ardently wish that I were being hyperbolical, but in fact I am exercising restraint…”
“Sincerity, as the divine Oscar Wilde assured us, is not nearly enough to generate a poem. Bursting with sincerity, the 1996 volume is a Stuffed Owl of bad verse, and of much badness that is neither verse nor prose.”
“[Literary] Criticism…is dying…replaced…by ‘cultural criticism,’ a would-be social science.”
“When I was a young teacher of poetry at Yale, the English Romantic poets were Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, and Keats, as well as Blake and Shelley, whose place in the canon I helped restore. On hundreds of campuses now, these poets have to share attention with the ‘women Romantic poets.'”
Bloom doesn’t help himself here. Why can’t women poets (or poets of color, etc) be studied, too? Poems ought to matter as much as poets—there is no such thing as a small group of poets—even if it’s the magnificent Coleridge, Byron, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Blake—who wrote only perfect poems. Women writers sold as well as their male counterparts in the 19th century. If Shelley is being canceled, that’s one thing; to ostentatiously lock the clubhouse door—on some lesser known women poets (some of whom are worth reading)—seems a bit much.
“I have seen my profession dying for over a quarter century now, and in another decade it may be dead.”
“Walt Whitman was not only the strongest of our poets…but…the most betrayed…Whitman’s poetry does the opposite of what he proclaims its work to be: it is reclusive, evasive, hermetic, nuanced, and more onanistic even than homoerotic, which critics cannot accept, particularly these days when attempts are made to assimilate the Self-Reliant Whitman into what calls itself the Homosexual Poetic.”
“Authentic American poetry is necessarily difficult; it is our elitist art, though that elite has nothing to do with social class, gender, erotic preference, ethnic strain, race, or sect. ‘We live in the mind,’ Stevens said, and our poetry is either Emersonian or anti-Emersonian, but either way is informed by Emerson’s dialect of power:”
And here Bloom quotes a passage from Emerson’s “Experience” which takes no prisoners in its radical assertion that within the sanctity of the self, everything is allowed. Emerson: “We believe in ourselves, as we do not believe in others. We permit all things to ourselves, and that which we call sin in others, is experiment for us. It is an instance of our faith in ourselves, that men never speak of crime as lightly as they think: or, every man thinks a latitude safe for himself, which is nowise to be indulged to another. The act looks very differently on the inside, and on the outside; in its quality, and its consequences. Murder in the murderer is no such ruinous thought as poets and romancers will have it; it does not unsettle him, or fright him from his ordinary notice of trifles: it is an act quite easy to be contemplated…For there is no crime to the intellect.”
Whoa. Mr. Emerson. Are you really saying this?
But let us be alive to what Emerson (and Bloom, who astutely rode to profit two or three important ideas) is saying here: 1) Human beings are wicked 2) Poetry’s highest calling is to energize itself by both using and getting to the bottom of, human wickedness. Poetry is best when it is an uncompromising vessel for every kind of expression, encouraging a divine individuality of which the “good” and the “fit” and the “beautiful” have no necessary part (though they may). This echoes Plato’s embrace of “madness” as ultimately necessary for creativity (and love).
Poe thought Emerson, and broad, cultural, poetry formulas like this, crazy, recommending instead “method” in the hands of a calm practitioner—think of the “escape from personality” per Eliot. “Beauty” (non-violent madness) was necessary in poetry for Poe—“beauty” wasn’t just one arrow in the quiver; it was the arrow. Emerson, seen through the Poe lens, was hyperbolic and unrealistic, like an ugly guy trying to get laid, enforcing fantastic laws on the universe. One can see here the Poe/Emerson divide which was so important to Bloom (who also apparently thought of himself as an ugly guy trying to get laid). Bloom embraced Emerson-as-Faust—and had zero patience for Poe’s buzzkill.
Bloom couldn’t reconcile.
Back to Bloom’s introduction:
“Every attempt to socialize writing and reading fails; poetry is a solitary art, more now than ever, and its proper audience is the deeply educated, solitary reader…”
The “solitary art” for the “solitary reader” recalls what Bloom just said above: his “onanistic” (it means masturbation) description of Whitman.
Bloom prefers the poetry of the private and squishy, objecting to broader political amorousness. The Yale professor is quite certain that concern for the “injured” belongs to him. Is he right?
“The Resenters prate of power, as they do of race and gender: these are careerist stratagems and have nothing to do with the insulted and injured, whose lives will not be improved by our reading the bad verses of those who assert that they are the oppressed.”
Bloom ends his introduction by quoting from “The Poet,” in which Emerson lauds “insanity,” “questionable facts,” “angels, devils, magic, astrology, palmistry, mesmerism, and…departure from routine.” According to Emerson, the best is when the poets, “liberating gods,” have it that “dream delivers us to dream, and, while the drunkenness lasts, we sell our bed, our philosophy, our religion, in our opulence.”
The radical individualist will have his private, drunken, transcendent dream. This is the essence of Bloom and Emerson (kind of like geniuses on LSD). Here, then, is their democratic, demonic, elitism of lonely difficulty, where the morals of political correctness declaimed by those like Adrienne Rich are cast out as too “sincere” (Wilde).
Bloom is correct. One cannot have the wayward freedom of the private dream and moralizing politics at the same time; they are too antithetical.
But, in the end, there’s nothing really politically intransigent or personally bitter about this quarrel. (As far as I can tell, Rich never responded to Bloom’s attack.) It’s an academic disagreement only, except Bloom’s academy isn’t some 19th century prison: Bloom protests too much; his and Emerson’s pleas for “drunkenness” are more than satisfied in the Humanities, today—which is no longer a Latin-and-Greek, theological, boot camp. Bloom’s political beliefs (leftist, liberal) mirror Rich and the “Resenters”—who, according to Bloom, hate real poetry.
Adrienne Rich, in her introduction, lays out the method for her selections in the very first paragraph:
“This is a gathering of poems that one guest editor, reading through mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry, found especially urgent, lively, haunting, resonant, demanding to be reread.” (Italics mine)
What could be more bland? “mailboxesful of journals that publish poetry…” It sounds quaint. Especially next to this by Bloom, which is how his introduction begins, and which made Rich smile, I’m sure:
“My epigraph [They have the numbers; we, the heights.] is from Thucydides and is spoken by the Spartan commander at Thermopylae. Culturally, we are at Thermopylae: the multi-culturalists, the hordes of camp-followers afflicted by the French diseases, the mock-feminists, the commisars, the gender-and-power freaks, the hosts of new historicists and old materialists—all stand below us. They will surge up and we may be overcome; our universities are already travesties, and our journalists parody our professors of “cultural studies.” For just a little longer, we hold the heights, the realm of the aesthetic.”
Wow. 25 years ago—this actually rang across the book marts and the halls of academe.
Bloom ends his first paragraph by defining his criterion for the 75 poems he chose (leaving out Rich’s selections):
“These pass my personal test for the canonical: I have reread them with pleasure and profit.” (Italics mine)
Neither Bloom nor Rich is an Einstein. This is not Baudelaire. Or Edgar Poe. Or T.S. Eliot. This BAP battle has one professor imagining himself as a Spartan commander against another professor who thinks L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E poems written by people of color would be an improvement for a Best American Poetry volume. (She writes “Language” with the stars. Do people still do that?)
Here’s Rich, again, from her introduction:
“We need poetry as living language, the core of every language, something that is still spoken, aloud or in the mind, muttered in secret, subversive, reaching around corners, crumpled into a pocket, performed to a community, read aloud to the dying, recited by heart, scratched or sprayed on a wall.”
What say you, commander?
Rich and Bloom are both Emersonian—so no sparks flew, or could fly. Rich’s hip, “living language” pastiche is just Waldo sounding a little more like Paul Simon.
Still, there is a gulf, and here it is:
Bloom wants to preside over the chaotic dream of poetry and be its psychiatrist/critic—the Resenters (they care about freedom, too) don’t want to give Bloom that power; he represents to them exactly what their politics-meddling-with-poetry represents to him; both sides are radicals who differ only where the limited authority should be placed; Bloom wants it placed in him—who will decide which difficult, radical-individual, dream is in fact a good poem; Rich wants authority situated in a set of politically enlightened principles under which poetry can aspire, but not compete.
The final consideration is: how are Bloom’s selections? In his introduction, Bloom names four “major” poets represented in his Best of 1988 to 1997 anthology: Elizabeth Bishop, Amy Clampitt, James Merrill, and May Swenson—who are no longer living, adding Ashbery and Ammons (then living) as worthy to be in their company.
But as Marjorie Perloff (she agreed with Bloom that Rich’s 1996 volume was aesthetically weak) pointed out (I paraphrase her) in her general response to Bloom in the Boston Review:
1) In his introduction, Bloom did not bring himself to mention any other poets in his Best anthology, focusing instead on Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Stevens, Hart Crane, and especially Emerson. (Bloom loves to quote the dead—who invariably make his points far better than he does.)
2) Bloom, like Rich, is mostly a culture critic, and therefore deserves blame for what he laments: the decline of hard-nosed, close-reading, aesthetics.
Two good points from Marjorie Perloff.
Bloom champions Ashbery—which would seem, at first blush, a little strange. Professor Bloom began his career defending Blake and Shelley; the traditional canon suits him, Bloom quotes Tennyson in his Best introduction as an example of beautiful poetry which transcends politics; Emerson, whom he adores, is always making easily understood (if sometimes snide and psychotic) points; and Shakespeare leads the Bloom parade—so what is it which attracts Bloom so much to this grinning, nonsensical, prose poetry, jokester, Ashbery? Isn’t Bloom afraid the Ashbery hipsters are laughing at him, and not with him?
Bloom was wise to include Ashbery in his canon.
First, Ashbery is apolitical. Bloom had to like that.
Second, Bloom’s avant-garde creds rose enormously by embracing the Harvard poet, who was liked by W.H. Auden. With Ashbery on his side, Bloom, from a distance at least, looks less like a dour, old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy.
Third, Ashbery is never guilty of the dreaded “sincerity”—in his poems, John Ashbery, the real person, is always hiding. If you hide who you are, well of course you can never be sincere. Ashbery learned this hide-John-Ashbery trick from the beginning and stuck to it—in a steady, unassuming manner, to the end of his career.
Finally, Ashbery’s stream-of-conscious, meandering, prose, poetry, is rhapsodic rather than digressive. Especially in lengthier pieces, the line between rhapsodic (good) and digressive (bad) is very fine, indeed; to pull off the former takes a real, but difficult-to-define, skill.
If this is a legitimate poetic talent—I’ve put my finger on it precisely with these two opposite terms (rhapsodic, digressive) which nevertheless hint at being one—then here is where the whole modern poetry experiment (dubious everywhere else) succeeds: in the strange rhapsody of Ashbery.
We can see this quality clearly in one of Ashbery’s shorter poems, selected by Bloom:
The Problem Of Anxiety
Fifty years have passed since I started living in those dark towns I was telling you about. Well, not much has changed. I still can’t figure out how to get from the post office to the swings in the park. Apple trees blossom in the cold, not from conviction, and my hair is the color of dandelion fuzz.
Suppose this poem were about you—would you put in the things I’ve carefully left out: descriptions of pain, and sex, and how shiftily people behave toward each other? Naw, that’s, all in some book, it seems. For you I’ve saved the descriptions of finger sandwiches, and the glass eye that stares at me in amazement from the bronze mantel, and will never be appeased.
This might be the best poem in the whole volume, but I also love “litany” by Carolyn Creeden, “Histoire” by Harry Matthews, “Manifest Destiny” by Jorie Graham, “Prophecy” by Donald Hall, “Facing It” by Yusef Komunyakaa, “Morning, Noon, and Night” by Mark Strand, “One Train May Hide Another” by Kenneth Koch, and “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone” by Galway Kinnell.
There is something to be said for the compilers art, for these extraordinary poems come from poets who also have published (never mind written) poems which are less than good.
The vanity of poets (who think all their poems are good) will get in the way of truly good poems, such that it may be said the honest anthologist is really the one person to whom poetry gives itself.
One “major” poet of Bloom’s, who to this author is overrated, is Ammons—his long poem included, “Garbage,” feels digressive, not rhapsodic. The reason? It’s sincere (Oscar Wilde—and Bloom agreeing with him—get this right).
From “Garbage:”
…(I hope) to live from now on on in elegance and simplicity—
or, maybe, just simplicity—why shouldn’t I at my age (63) concentrate on chucking the
advancements and rehearsing the sweetnesses of leisure, nonchalance, and small-time byways: couple
months ago, for example, I went all the way from soy flakes (already roasted and pressed)
and in need of an hour’s simmering boil to be cooked) all the way to soybeans, the
pure golden pearls themselves, .65$ lb. dry: they have to be soaked overnight in water and they
have to be boiled slowly for six hours—but they’re welfare cheap, are a complete protein,
more protein by weight than meat, more”…
This is too sincere by half. Ammons is sharing. This is not rhapsodic. It’s digression.
Why Bloom could not tell the difference I am not really sure. But since Bloom was not a poet himself, and found no elegance except in quoting others—either the dead, or his colleague W. Jackson Bate, from whom he lifted his anxiety of influence theory—perhaps the Yale professor was finally an emotional, miserable, copying machine?
If we don’t separate out Ammons, we can’t see Ashbery clearly. The rhapsody of Ashbery and the digression of Ammons get confused. Aesthetics is blurry without the surgeon’s knife. Casual readers don’t get together and consult each other. Poems don’t talk. The Critic is necessary.
In a bit of irony, I am going to quote a definition of poetry from the 19th century, which answers to that rhapsody we sometimes get from Ashbery, a definition which Edgar Poe, of all people, said of it that this definition of poetry “embodies the sole true definition of what has been a thousand times erroneously defined.”
Here is the definition. It happens to likewise come from an anthologist in a preface to a poetry anthology:
“He who looks on Lake George, or sees the sun rise on Mackinaw, or listens to the grand music of a storm, is divested, certainly, for a time, of a portion of the alloy of his nature. The elements of power in all sublime sights and heavenly harmonies, should live in the poet’s song, to which they can be transferred only by him who possesses the creative faculty. The sense of beauty, next to the miraculous divine suasion, is the means through which the human character is purified and elevated. The creation of beauty, the manifestation of the real by the ideal, ‘in words that move in metrical array,’ is poetry.”
The author of this poetry definition is a man who called Whitman’s poetry “filth” and betrayed his friend, Edgar Poe.
Rufus Griswold.
If you don’t think the lyric Ashbery poem quoted above is sublime in the way Griswold describes, what do you think the “dark towns” are meant to invoke, or the unseen “you,” and what do you think the “eye” represents? As for “metrical array,” it is there, too: spondees pair up brilliantly with anapests in Ashbery’s sonnet-like work.
Well this is nuts. Bloom and Griswold, (along with Emerson) will long be remembered as deeply hostile to Poe. But here is Bloom, with the help of Griswold (and Poe nodding in agreement) hoisting Ashbery high over Adrienne Rich, guest editor of BAP 1996—who did not include Ashbery, or Ammons in her selections. But what I have outlined is really no crazier than anything poetry has given us since America became a nation (one which Rich did not like), including Spartan commander Bloom (from the “heights”) glowering down at professor Rich, the “people’s” 1996 BAP guest editor.
Are all the poems in the 1996 BAP, Rich, ed. inferior to those in the Best of BAP 1988-1997, Bloom, ed.? It would make things easier for critics if it were true. Suffice it to say there are poems Bloom chose from the first 10 volumes—he tended to choose longer poems (going for “difficulty,” I imagine)—which, like “Garbage” by Ammons, have their moments, but which ultimately strike me as pedantic, digressive and yawn-producing (though perhaps this merely indicates I’m not able to appreciate poetry on the “heights.”)
I think it’s safe to say that poems (which are not book-length epics) should be good to us immediately—we shouldn’t need to read a poem on and on for a “story” to develop.
Aesthetics should hit us in the face, and then, and only then, can the story “develop” in a way that pleases us.
Or, how about this? Arresting start, turn, great end: the sonnet.
There’s not much in the way of sonnet-like poems in these competing BAP volumes—except the Ashbery poem quoted (the “Naw” is the turn) from Bloom’s selection. “Like Most Revelations” by Richard Howard (16 lines) is admirable, but the turns are multiple and a little abstract. Richard Howard might be called Oscar Wilde-lite; he had some of the manner but not all of the wit of the great Wilde; unfortunately for 20th century poetry, there is not so much a difference—as the 20th century (great in the horrors of war, certainly) holds its own, but is mostly the 19th century—watered down.
Wouldn’t that be something if the “champion” in this instance were a traditional form poem—by John Ashbery? (Though the wise money is on Kinnell or Carolyn Creedon—stunning poems, really.)
Adrienne Rich’s 1996 volume avoids what Rich explicitly doesn’t like: “the columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line,” like the poem by W. S. Merwin, “Lament for the Makers” which Richchose. Or Ammons, which she did not. Her selections, compared to Bloom’s, are shorter, edgier, conversational, graffiti-like, shape-y, too consciously attempting not to be digressive, perhaps.
Rich or Bloom? Academic brevity or academic length. It’s basically Emerson, either way.
Robert Lowell ruled mid-20th century poetry. Privileged, no fiction, crazy, avoided rhyme. Perfect.
What’s poetry? Names of race horses.
The necessarily accidental is important to poetry, just as it is for any pleasurable human activity.
J.V. Cunningham (1911-1985) is given 3 pages in J.D. McClatchy’s 560 page The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (McClatchy was a long time professor at Yale and editor of the Yale Review).
Cunningham, the rhyming, court jester, poet among the prose poetry royalty of this post-High-Modernism 20th century-defining anthology, is represented by 2 poems and some epigrams.
Here’s Cunningham’s first stanza from “For My Contemporaries” (reprinted in the volume); the quatrain serves as an ironic epitaph for the book and its 65 poets:
How time reverses The proud in heart! I now makes verses Who aimed at art.
The irony is that “verses” are not “art” since the Pound/Eliot/Williams revolution a hundred years ago. Cunningham, the oddball rhymer, has failed to make “art,” and now merely makes “verses.”
When McClatchy’s anthology came out in 1990—during the glorious beginnings of MFA America, this was surely how these verses were read: Poor Mr. Cunningham, versifier, admits he failed at “art.”
Today, we can read these lines as a sly prophecy: time punishes the “proud” who “aimed at art,” (“art” according to MFA tastes) the “proud,” in the end, forced to admit poetry is “verses.”
There is some verse in this anthology—Roethke, for instance.
McClatchy’s high-minded and reconciling introduction begins:
“There is no need for any anthology to choose sides. No critic has to deploy our poets into opposing battle lines with names like Paleface and Redskin, or Academic and Avant-Garde.”
Hold on a second. The avant-garde is academic. “Paleface and Redskin” one ought to recognize as poetry criticism terms, such as “raw” and “cooked” or “ancient” and “modern.”
American poetry criticism has been timid since 1900—pushing real critics like Edgar Poe and William Logan aside as too fearsome or mean (honest talk apparently promotes those dangerous “battle lines).
Not only timid, but naive, for McClatchy’s battle talk assumes academia isn’t everywhere since Modernism’s climb to prominence in the early 20th century.
McClatchy goes on:
“Best just to duck: the field echoes with sniper fire from the poets themselves. Whitman complained he couldn’t stomach Poe’s “lurid dreams.” Dickinson wouldn’t read Whitman at all: she had been told he was “disgraceful.” William Carlos Williams railed at T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land for having wiped out our world as if an atom bomb had been dropped upon it.”
McClatchy assumes that Whitman dissing Poe is an issue for people outside of academia—it’s not. The man on the street today, if they look at poetry at all, is not saying to themselves, “Oh God, Whitman doesn’t like Poe!” It’s a purely academic concern. McClatchy’s second example is pertinent outside of academia—the morality of poetry—but notice this example is from the 19th century. In the third example we are back in the 20th century: it’s only an issue to a few inside academia that WC Williams felt “The Waste Land” was an “atom bomb.”
Richard Hugo (1923-1982), with 5 pages in the anthology beginning on page 194, wrote gritty, authentic poems about Montana working-class towns—when he was a professor. (University of Montana.) “Degrees of Gray In Philipsburg” begins:
You might come here Sunday on a whim. Say your life broke down. The last good kiss you had was years ago. You walk these streets laid out by the insane, past hotels that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try of local drivers to accelerate their lives. Only churches are kept up. The jail turned 70 this year. The only prisoner is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
The poem goes on for three more stanzas like this—it would make a great beginning to a hard-boiled detective novel, but as a poem, what’s the only thing we get?
“You” are having a really lousy time in Philipsburg, Montana.
We see in the short Vintage bio of Hugo: “Hugo was born and educated in Seattle. He studied there with Theodore Roethke, the strongest influence on his early work.” (Both were troubled men who didn’t live to be 60.)
Roethke was born in 1908, almost too old to be in this anthology, but perhaps McClatchy, in his ecumenical spirit needed to include “The Waking” with “Skunk Hour,” “One Art” and “Daddy,” some decent rhyming poems, among all the 20th century prose poems.
Or maybe the issue isn’t rhyme at all—Roethke taught Hugo; this is what’s important; respectful, institutional continuity.
Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, who open the anthology, privileged, and privileged to receive 20 pages apiece (most poets get about 5) were both teachers. Bishop taught at Harvard; Lowell was the first “name” poet to teach at Iowa and jump-start the Creative Writing Program era.
Creative Writing programs typically consist of two branches: Fiction and Poetry.
This leads to an interesting observation about contemporary American poetry.
Let’s forget about rhyme and form. It became increasingly irrelevant as the 20th century progressed. Writing students choose fiction or poetry. So what characterizes this “poetry” that no longer looks like poetry?
It makes sense that what’s most important for American poetry is that it be unlike fiction, or at least unlike what fiction often aspires to become—a film. Otherwise the MFA in poetry might just disappear—why couldn’t “poetry” students just get an MFA in writing?
Why get a poetry MFA? To learn the craft of rhyme and meter? Is that what Jorie Graham learned and subsequently taught? No.
What, then, describes the kind of poetry that we see in 1990’s The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry?
Is this why poetry has become so unpopular? Why poetry these days has no clout? Look what it had to do and what it has to do (we are still in the MFA era): don’t be fiction and don’t be poetry—as it existed for centuries prior to the 20th.
I already mentioned Hugo (whose work in the anthology seems nothing like Roethke’s) and his poetry which reads like the first page of a hard-boiled detective novel set in Montana.
Is critically acclaimed poetry today nothing more than a kind of mentally defective fiction? Fiction, but fiction unable to be carried to completion?
The ballad is a poem that tells a story; but there are no ballads in McClathchy’s anthology of five hundred plus pages.
One does not get an MFA in poetry to learn to write ballads.
It seems the MFA in poetry is determined to keep “story” away, since students might be inclined to get a fiction MFA, instead.
Is there a kind of unspoken rule about poetry as comatose fiction? Fiction which deliberately fails as fiction? Richard Hugo can write a damn good introductory paragraph or two for a Montana mystery novel—therefore he’s a poet.
Richard Hugo’s poetry is depressing.
The introductory (or back-drop) rhetoric of hard-boiled detective fiction is commonly stark and moody.
Edgar Poe, creator of the template, begins one of his famous detective tales: “At Paris, just after dark one gusty evening in the autumn of 18__”
The master sets the mood with just a few words.
20th century poets generally did the same—but using far more words; perhaps because they had to write about something, but no actual tale was forthcoming?
Very few Americans are going to sit and watch a movie without a love story. Movies and novels need a love plot. Your fiction MFA student knows this.
Was MFA poetry, which began to dominate letters starting in the middle of the 20th century, concerned with love?
McClatchy’s anthology contains only a few pages of what could be called love poetry. There are but two love poems of the “I love you” variety—only two, in its 537 pages: “Having a Coke with You” by Frank O’Hara and “To Dorothy” by Marvin Bell, the latter of which may be the worst love poem ever, as it begins:
You are not beautiful, exactly. You are beautiful, inexactly.
Robert Lowell sets the tone. In his 20 pages of poetry there’s one reference to romance: “too boiled and shy/and poker-faced to make a pass.” It isn’t until page 47 of the anthology that we get “I Knew a Woman” by Roethke, which seems more about sex than love, but in this anthology we certainly can’t be picky.
Audrey Lorde’s “Movement Song” (p. 414) opens with
I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck moving away from me beyond anger or failure your face in the evening schools of longing through mornings of wish and ripen we were always saying goodbye in the blood in the bone over coffee before dashing for elevators going in opposite directions without goodbyes.
“Over coffee before dashing…? This is OK but still rather reticent and indirect. Not the mad Romanticism of Diane Seuss (whose collection just won the Pulitzer).
There’s this from “Meditation at Lagunitas” by Robert Hass (p. 470) but can this even remotely be called love?:
There was a woman I made love to and I remembered how, holding her small shoulders in my hands sometimes, I felt a violent wonder at her presence like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river… …It hardly had to do with her.
Yes, a poet can certainly stand above a man and a woman and make remarks about how they will never be one, as Hass does in “Misery and Splendor” (p. 472) but what is this really saying except ‘too bad, you guys?’ This might end a novel nicely; the poem hasn’t earned this ending, though; that’s sort of the problem:
They feel themselves at the center of a powerful and baffled will. They feel they are an almost animal, washed up on the shore of a world— or huddled against the gate of a garden— to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.
It’s a brutal scene—though it feels like a poetry invested in abstraction somewhat against its will.
The height of love in the volume is reached by Marilyn Hacker’s
If we talk, we’re too tired to make love, if we make love, these days, there’s hardly time to talk.
Or this, from Hacker, with roaring rhetoric, a few pages later:
Tomorrow night the harvest moon will wane that’s floodlighting the silhouetted wood. Make your own footnotes; it will do you good. Emeritae have nothing to explain. She wasn’t very old, or really plain— my age exactly, volumes incomplete. “The life, the life, will it never be sweet?” She wrote it once; I quote it once again midlife at midnight when the moon is full and I can almost hear the warning bell offshore, sounding through starlight like a stain on waves that heaved over what she began and truncated a woman’s chronicle, and plain old Margaret Fuller died as well.
Or we could possibly consider these from the anthology, love: “Daddy” by Plath or Sexton’s “I have gone out, a possessed witch…” or Louise Glück’s
It is not the moon, I tell you. It is these flowers lighting the yard.
I hate them. I hate them as I hate sex, the man’s mouth sealing my mouth, the man’s paralyzing body—
Not really.
C.K. Williams has a poem on suburban pals lured by a pimp for cheap, quick sex in NYC; the poem lurid, passive, reactive, helpless.
The overriding tone of the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry is learned, luxurious, meditation tied up by sadness. Here is Richard Howard, one of those masters born between 1925 and 1929:
Rezzonico…Disraeli…We realize our task. It is to print earth so deep in memory that a meaning reaches the surface. Nothing but darkness abides, darkness demanding not illumination—not from the likes of us— but only that we yield. And we yield.
The poets of this volume have all been trained not to be Romantics; a few rebel, but mostly they shy away from poetic devices that moan and sing. The anthology meticulously talks and talks and talks.
When did American poetry feel comfortable with the fact that the Keats cat and the Shelley cat and the Byron cat no longer dwell in the household, just because a guy named Ezra told them to go? When did poetry become supercilious chat, baroque chatter? If perception in life is nearly all, think how ruthlessly perception rules poetry: when rejection of rhyme came to be seen not as a palace assassination but as an exhausted queen doing loads of purple laundry, “I’m too busy to rhyme,” American contemporary poetry must have begun to feel like a starving person listening to financial advice—on how to give endlessly to charity.
How does one bypass all the usual academic netting and state plainly the gist of what troubles professional contemporary American poetry? I may be failing, but I hope we can see it’s necessary more than one person try.
Modern American poetry has long needed a wake-up slap. Which, of course, will not do any good. Time must deal with poetry.
What do we get in McClatchy’s excellent anthology? Character development, psychological insight, plain talk, insights, philosophy, humor, love? Not really. We get something more effete and specialized. The chaste and the vocabulary-heavy.
I hope it doesn’t sound too strange to say it plainly.
The voice in almost all the poems in the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry is the same: the voice of a very wealthy person, cultured, delicate, shy, deeply self-absorbed, of a calm disposition, fond of secular iconography, passing memories, trinkets, country roads, and anxious to introduce us to a sky as it might appear at dusk…
Anthologies are my favorite way of reading poetry.
Authorial vanity cries out “Read my book! Get to know me! Immerse yourself in my book’s theme!”
I reply, “Have you written Paradise Lost? If not, let me return to The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry (I am only fluent in English and don’t have much faith in translation) where I can read not only many poems, but many poets, and immerse myself in an era.”
In 1990 J.D. McClatchy, editor of the Vintage anthology just mentioned, assembled the best of Elizabeth Bishop (b. 1911) thru Gjertrud Schnackenberg (b. 1953), 65 poets in a not-too-heavy paperback—over 500 pages, which I purchased in 1999, and still not falling apart.
When was an entire book of poems, by one poet, been worthy of praise for all the lines in it? We probably need to go back to a small quarto volume by Poe or Tennyson.
Beyond Tennyson floating in dust or Shakespeare staged in heaven, a poetry anthology, light enough to peruse while holding it aloft in one hand, is the only way to properly commune with the Muse.
As I read my McClatchy (actually a gift to my wife, but between her subscription to Poetry and several other journals; recent purchases of Nikolayev’s translation of Pushkin, Steven Cramer’s latest volume; and the ten million novels she’s currently reading, I don’t believe she’ll miss it) I discovered good poems from poets I never had any interest in, and poems so bad they made me laugh. My laughter produced not a smidgen of guilt, since the anthologist selected only poets covered in poetry prizes—my mockery could never in a million years break down their highly credentialed immunity.
I will be guilty, however, in the eyes of a few of my readers (I am thinking of one in particular, a highly educated, avant-collecting, condescending, fellow) should I make these private feelings known, that I now take the liberty to reveal, chuckling a bit, I won’t lie, at the very thought of it.
Why isn’t Marilyn Hacker (pg 489) more famous? She writes like Byron. I think the problem is, in order to write like Byron, you must be Byron. Also, Hacker was born around the same time as John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Had she been born in 1842, instead of 1942, Hacker would be better known. No one really talks about her anymore.
There was just too much competition for a poet publishing in the sex, drugs, and rock and roll 60s and 70s—the worst time to be a poet in the United States. Hacker’s work is impressive—as reproduced in the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. Is she still risqué? That shouldn’t be the question. Is she good? She is, and accessible, too, unlike poets who eclipsed her, such as Louise Glück and Jorie Graham—poets we occasionally pretend to understand, but don’t. (Glück and Graham were model-beautiful in the 80s. Hacker was not.) It was a quieter and cooler world in the 1980s when Graham and Glück became known, a window of time for high-brow poetry to carve out a dignified and contemplative space for itself; the 60s rock culture, which had sucked all the cool out of the room for so long, had come down to earth. John was dead, Paul had a mullet. Poets could now be called on to deliver “Eleanor Rigby” and “A Day In The Life” vibes—in a place both more rarefied and more practical—the MFA as a ticket to poetic respectability was still real and fresh. The college protest was now less cool than college itself—the poets could smoke pot in college; they could have their cake and eat it.
Donald Justice (p. 210 in the Vintage anthology, poorly represented by mid-life crisis poems) was a poet (40 years old in 1965) swallowed up by the youth culture; old, he mentored Jorie Graham at Iowa—the critic William Logan learned under Justice at the same time; Logan, whom Graham admired, reviewed her first book.
In 1980, the original Modernists were dead, the Rock culture was exhausted, the larger culture had become corporate, cheap, goofy, and trite; it was time for academia and poetry to shine. Helen Vendler and Jorie Graham, who would have been buried and ignored in the 1960s, were somehow actual (gulp) stars in the 1980s. William Logan became the sybil who reminded the poets of the 80s and 90s that they weren’t really stars—because, well, they weren’t. Somebody had to be funny (rude?) and tell them.
Poetry died in the poetic 60s and gave birth to comedy in the non-poetic 80s. William Logan was SNL for what was left of the poetry public that the Modernists had chased away with their unsentimental theory and sophistication.
The New Critics—only one of its core members is represented, p. 67, Robert Penn Warren (b. 1905)—made a great deal of giving the study of poetry largely over to the text. Yet I can describe most of the poets in the 1990 Vintage anthology with a single gesture-–I don’t need words, and my summation refers to no text whatsoever. Imagine I am making the universal sign of sucking on a joint—thumb and finger planted on pursed lips.
One could learnedly can go on for hours about form and its relationship to content, the theories of the French, and Pound’s “make it new,” but hey you try reading the late night confessions of C.K. Williams, Robert Pinsky, Mark Strand, Robert Hass, Charles Simic, Gary Snyder, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Hugo, and Frank O’Hara without smiling knowingly at my gesture. So much for the authority of text-centered New Criticism.
The Vintage anthology is 65% white men, 30% white women—who published largely in the 50s thru the 80s.
It’s a record of weed.
We just couldn’t see it for all the Brooks and R.P. Warren tweed.
New Criticism was the only real educated influence on poetry in the 20th century, mingling the text-obsession of Derrida with the sandy grains of Imagism, a crashing wave that reached from the early days of the 20th Century—John Ransom, the T.S. Eliot of the American South, was born, like Eliot, in the late 19th century, to Debussy and the turmoil of the French avant-garde—all the way to the 1990s and its small End of History window where the inscrutable poetry of a Jorie Graham could mesmerize and soothe us.
There are two types of bad poetry.
One. A poem describes some well-known event in which the poet feels he is heightening or adding meaning to the event—but isn’t.
Two. A poem attempts to be metaphysical—no event is described, except accidentally, so the poet hopes the reader will not be able to judge whether an event is described well—or even at all—since that was not the intention.
The first example can be found in the Vintage anthology on pg. 521, in a poem by Edward Hirsch. The poem is called “Fast Break” and attempts to describe a basketball game.
A rebound: “gathering the orange leather/from the air like a cherished possession.”
The prose-poem’s line breaks and stanzas are supposed to replicate the quickness of the play (they don’t).
The failure of the poem increases in its attempt to find a final straw of meaning in its empty enthusiasm (“our gangly starting center”) at the end:
with a wild, headlong motion for the game he loved like a country and swiveling back to see an orange blur floating perfectly through the net.
Edward Hirsch is a distinguished poet (even if in a pot-smoking era) and yet this may be the worst poem ever written.
The second type of bad poem is demonstrated on page 525 by Jorie Graham’s “Over and over Stitch.” Unlike Hirsch’s poem—which attempts to describe what is already real (sadly, “orange leather” for “basketball”) Graham takes the opposite approach, describing nothing at all:
Late in the season the world digs in, the fat blossoms hold still for a moment longer. Nothing looks satisfied, but there is no real reason to move on much further: this isn’t a bad place; why not pretend
we wished for it?
The poet is being intentionally vague (here in the first 7 lines) hoping the reader will mistake vacuousness for philosophy. The poet isn’t going to let herself err in the direction of describing a basketball as “orange leather,” and look! she triumphs.
We might blame Graham’s distinguished teacher, Donald Justice, more than Graham’s privileged and highly educated background. Just look at this existential nightmare of a poem written and published by Justice himself and unfortunately reprinted by McClatchy in the Vintage anthology (p 210):
The Evening of the Mind
Now comes the evening of the mind. Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood; Here is the shadow moving down the page Where you sit reading by the garden wall. Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises, Shudder and droop. You know their voices now, Faintly the martyred peaches crying out Your name, the name nobody knows but you. It is the aura and the coming on. It is the thing descending, circling, here. And now it puts a claw out and you take it. Thankfully in your lap you take it, so.
I won’t quote the whole poem. You get the idea. The poem is embarrassing. “Faintly the martyred peaches crying out your name” is beyond bad. It’s laughable.
Back to Graham’s poem:
The bushes have learned to live with their haunches. The hydrangea is resigned to its pale and inconclusive utterances. Towards the end of the season it is not bad
to have the body.
The poet isn’t following Ovid any more than John Muir. We never thought of her hydrangea as doing anything in the first place; so when she first mentions the plant as being “resigned,” we simply don’t know what to think and quickly don’t care.
The final assertion that “the dry stalks of daylilies” mark “a stillness we can’t keep” only shows us the poet is at least consistent in never letting up from the poem’s dry observation that there is nothing that matters, whatever the poet might do or say. Her single-minded pursuit of not committing herself to anything recalls a haiku being stretched; a paralysis of purpose becomes the purpose. They also write who only stand and wait.
“The bushes have learned to live with their haunches.” Bushes are described as being, or having, “haunches”—childish, though not as bad as using “orange leather” to describe a basketball; it is the addition of “learned to live with” which self-consciously recalls the vacant theme: Nature’s OK, I’m OK, we’re OK; this is what moves the poem from merely mediocre to pot-smoking horrendous.
These, then, are the two faults good poets make: either they fail to describe something or, they describe nothing, but since a poem demands we say something—the second type of bad poem often becomes like the first, only ten time worse, because the flaws of the first become magnified by the strategies used in the second—to avoid the flaws of the first. Describing something is all a poem finally does, or fails to do—this dilemma, then, is the primal one; its failures are legion.
The more common type of failure—triteness and lack of originality, afflict the bad poet.
These two types of bad poems I have described here are important—because good poets so often indulge in them.
Scarriet’s Hot 100 has been going on for over 10 years. It’s now a fixture on the poetry scene.
Those toiling in the poetry trenches struggling to be read don’t look up.
Those who do make this list (most aren’t read much, either) are afraid to look down. (Ask Don Share or Michael Dickman)
Therefore no one else really bothers to do what Scarriet does here, taking a long vertical look to judge harshly and succinctly poets in the moment.
I don’t know if the Hot 100 is fruitful—or merely feeds resentment and idle curiosity.
I don’t like to summarize poets’ subjective lives (who cares, really?)—their travels, their membership in hipster guilds, their predictable neo-liberal politics, their fragile creds, their backroom alliances—frankly it bores me to tears.
I do this as an obligation. I just feel—damn— someone ought to do it.
I guess a secondary reason might be that I seek poetic or critical genius, or signs of it, at least. We need the haystack to find the needle.
A final point is that Scarriet putting poets on the list makes them hot. My own subjectivity is involved in the process.
Let’s look back at the previous names, reputable or controversial, who made the list as number one. See if you know them all:
Amanda Gorman 2021 Laura Foley 2019 Jennifer Barber 2019 Anders Carlson-Wee 2018 Garrison Keillor 2018 Sushmita Gupta 2017 Bob Dylan 2017 Matthew Zapruder 2016 Ben Mazer 2016 Vanessa Place 2015 Yi-Fen Chou 2015 Kenneth Goldsmith 2015 Claudia Rankine 2014 Valerie Macon 2014 John Ashbery 2014 Mark Edmundson 2013 Natasha Tretheway 2012 Rita Dove 2011 Billy Collins 2010 John Barr 2010 Harold Bloom 2010
And now, the current list!
1. Kent Johnson —this well-known avant hoaxster asked for reviews to be anonymous 10 years ago. The best minds in poetry said, “great idea!” It hasn’t happened.
2. William Logan —in an era of “too many poems” (Marjorie Perloff) there’s always criticism and reviews—Logan’s the great guilty pleasure, still the most mentioned.
3. Ben Mazer —Randall Jarrell’s living example: the Romantic Modern. Auden (who read Byron) was loud. Mazer has a quieter beauty. Also an editor, Mazer is bringing out The Collected Poems (with never published material) of Delmore Schwartz. Ben Mazer and the New Romanticism (2021) is a critical study of Mazer’s work from Spuyten Duyvil press.
4. Barbara Epler —Editor, New Directions. ND launched Delmore Schwartz when Delmore and founder James Laughlin were companions in their twenties.
5. Don Share —the last poetry editor of the now defunct Partisan Review, a position Delmore Schwartz once held. Share was recently forced out of his position at Poetry.
6. Su Cho —took over Poetry magazine editorship duties after Share was forced to quit. In general, the too-much-white-space poetry of Poetry still sucks.
7. Michael Wiegers —Editor in Chief, Copper Canyon Press.
8. Kevin Young —New Yorker poetry editor. Studied with Seamus Heaney at Harvard along with Ben Mazer.
9. Jonathan Galassi —FSG poetry editor who will publish Mazer’s Delmore Schwartz, much of it seen for the first time.
10. Marilyn Chin —Jury Chair for the 2021 Pulitzer. I knew her when she was a shy poet/translator at Iowa when we both worked for Paul and Hualing Engle’s International Writing Program.
11. Donald Futers —Penguin poetry editor.
12. Fiona McCrae —director and publisher, Graywolf
13. Eric Lorberer —Rain Taxi editor
14. Cal Bedient —with David Lau, edits Lana Turner
15. Robert Baird —reviewed William Logan’s Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods in the NY Times, claiming Logan was attempting to play nice (to balance out his literary reputation) with a book of over-fastidious literary research.
16. John Beer —his parody poem, “The Waste Land” is a real achievement.
17. Michael Robbins —influenced by James Schuyler. In an interview, he strongly objected to “deforestation.”
18. Bill Freind —edited book of essays on the poetry of Araki Yasusada—a poet thought by many to be Kent Johnson’s creation.
19. Matthew Zapruder —Wave Books editor
20. Jill Bialosky —Norton poetry editor. Accused of plagiarism by William Logan.
21. Natalie Diaz —2021 Pulitzer prize winner.
22. Ange Mlinko —was the Nation poetry editor
23. Jericho Brown —Won the Pulitzer in 2020.
24. Frank Bidart —recently recognized with major awards. You can read his “Ellen West” online.
25. Laura Newbern —Arts and Letters editor.
26. Ira Sadoff —poet and critic, who once said he is “trying to resist the return to formalism.”
27. David Orr —poet and poetry critic for the NY Times, he once defended Alan Cordle of Foetry.
28. Johannes Goransson —his 2020 book of criticism is Poetry Against All.
29. Joe Amato —he has published a novel on poetics.
30. Jos Charles —she is the founding-editor of THEM.
31. Arthur Sze —won the 2021 Shelley Memorial Award and the 2019 National Book Award.
32. Desiree Bailey —short-listed for 2021 National Book Award.
33. Daniel Slager —publisher of Milkweed editions.
34. Barry Schwabsky —poet and art critic of the Nation.
35. Michael Theune —Structure and Suprise is the name of his textbook on poetry.
36. A.E. Stallings —this New Formalist almost won the Pulitzer in 2018.
37. Adam Kirsch —Jury Chair for the Pulitzer in 2020.
38. Al Filreis —MOOCS and PennSound
39. Dorianne Laux—best known for “The Pipe Fitter’s Wife,” recent runner-up for a major prize.
40. Joy Harjo —current U.S. poet laureate—in her third term.
41. Natasha Trethewey —pulitzer prize winner and latest jury member for that prize.
42. Dale Smith —his Poets Beyond the Barricade: Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Dissent After 1960 came out in 2012 from U Alabama Press.
43. Glyn Maxwell —probably the best living British poet.
44. Robert Archambeau —protested the poet laureatship of Billy Collins.
45. Victoria Chang —shook things up when she said “fuck the white avant-garde.”
46. Mei-mei Berssenbrugge —finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer.
47. Blake Campbell —young, gifted formalist poet who currently lives in Salem, MA.
48. Maureen McLane —in 2019 her Selected Poems published by Penguin.
49. Martin Espada —on the short-list for this year’s National Book Award.
50. Annie Finch —featured in the Penguin Book of the Sonnet. I met her on the old Blog Harriet Comments. I was a feisty comment writer, then, having sharpened my teeth as “Monday Love” on Foetry.com with visitors like Robert Creeley. Later, “Thomas Brady” would tangle with Franz Wright on Scarriet.
51. Charles Bernstein —stung by Scarriet. In a 1984 Alabama conference (Annie Finch pointed me to the transcript, with an unforgettable performance by panelist Denise Levertov) Gerald Stern demanded Bernstein name the “policemen-poets” of “Official Verse Culture.” Harold Bloom attacked Poe in a monster hit piece in the October 11 NY Review at the same moment. Defining point in history for poetry. “Alabama” will bring it up in a Scarriet site search.
52. Forrest Gander —Pulitzer prize winner, friends with Kent Johnson.
53. Marjorie Perloff —avant titan. One of the greatest conversations I ever witnessed was her and Philip Nikolayev debating the worth of Concrete Poetry in the Hong Kong restaurant in Harvard Square. Philip won (but it was his turf).
54. Mark Wallace —was a student assistant for Bernstein at Buffalo.
55. Robin Coste Lewis —is it really that long ago she won the National Book Award? (2015).
56. Philip Nikolayev —met Mazer at Harvard. Fulcrum editor has just published book of Pushkin translations.
57. Rupi Kaur —someone needs to publish a big important anthology which includes poets from all walks of life and mediums and points in history, taking an honest and serious look at all the selections, with popularity one criterion, and critical judgment the other. Poetry cannot keep going on like this. A reckoning is needed.
58. Billy Collins —hated by other prose poets. Because he sells. Kill Robert Frost. Poetry as mobsters fighting for turf. So anyway, how many poets can fill an arena these days? Is Collins the last famous poet living? Are famous poets necessary?
59. Helen Vendler —she must remember Alabama, too.
60. Jorie Graham —in a pretense to be non-pretentious, she lost her gift. Got in trouble with Foetry.com. But survived.
61. John Latta —works at the University Michigan library.
62. Ron Silliman —not sure what’s going on with his blog.
63. Fanny Howe —won the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.
64. Julie Carr —Omnidawn published her in 2018.
65. Mary Angela Douglas —a poet of beauty and childhood.
66. Don Mee Choi —National Book Award 2020.
67. Rita Dove —her Penguin anthology produced controversy. She was too dignified to exploit it.
68. Daniel Borzutzky —won the National Book Award in 2016.
69. Sharon Olds —she won the Pulitzer with a book about divorcing her husband. She has written some extraordinary poems.
70. Mary Ruefle —destined for major prize greatness.
71. Peter Gizzi —was the lyric hope for a while.
72. Layli Long Soldier —her first volume of poetry was published in 2017 by Graywolf.
73. Dan Sociu —one of the best Romanian poets; had a chance to meet him (and the late David Berman) in Romania when Mazer and I visited.
74. Ocean Vuong —one of the strategies of contemporary poetry is the trope of tactile feeling. Winner of the 2017 T.S. Eliot prize.
75. Lawrence Rosenwald —editor of War No More: Three Centuries of American Antiwar & Peace Writing, 2016
76. Carlos Lara —Subconscious Colossus is his latest book.
77. Rachel Kaufman —Many To Remember is her new book of poems.
78. Billie Chernicoff —high praise from Kent Johnson.
79. Carolyn Forche —more poets! Bring them in, by the thousands, by the millions! Poets! Poets!
80. Michael Dickman —if a poem is cancelled because of something unkind in the poem (and yet not a reflection of the poet’s own views) is our complicity in this the death of poetry itself? Have the narrow dreams of Plato won?
81. Luke Kennard —from the Guardian (Sun 24 Oct 2021) : has won the Forward Prize for best collection for his “anarchic” response to Shakespeare’s sonnets, a work judges are predicting could “transform” students’ relationship with the Bard.
82. Louise Gluck —from the NY Times (Oct 26 2021) : Consisting of just 15 poems, “Winter Recipes from the Collective” extends the Nobel Laureate’s interest in silence and the void…
83. Murat Nemet-Nejat —a poet and editor of an anthology of contemporaryTurkish poetry.
84. Tom Orange —conceptual poet who has written on Clark Coolidge.
85. John Bradley —the editor of Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath (Backwaters Press) which appeared in 2009.
86. Richard Owens —Damn the Caesars is his literary journal and Those Unknown his punk band.
87. Toi Derricote —The 2021 Wallace Stevens Award winner. She was a judge for the Wallace Stevens Award for many years, beginning in 2012. The stipend is $100,000.
88. Mark Halliday —a critic called his poetry “ultra-talk.”
89. Ben Lerner —poet, novelist, MacArthur genius grant recipient.
90. Seth Abramson —this lawyer, prof and poet went from Poetry MFA advocate to rabid political tweeter. Seems a throw-back, somehow, to the rough-and-tumble literary times of Poe. Fisticuffs and odes.
91. David Lehman —His BAP (Best American Poetry) began in 1988 with John Ashbery as guest editor. In the latest volume (2021) introduction he brags about the number of guest editors who have won Pulitzer prizes. Well, sure.
92. Jim Behrle —annually pokes fun of BAP.
93. Tracy K. Smith —Pulitzer prize winner and 2021 guest editor of BAP. Whitman-type poems of near-endless listing appears to be the latest trend.
94. Dana Gioia —2018 BAP guest editor. His essay decrying American poetry as a dying, sell-out industry is about 30 years old now and reflects feelings which were not new at the time, and will never go away. All we can do is forget everything else and keep our eyes focused on that Nobel.
95. Terrence Hayes —in the 2021 BAP.
96. Jonny Diamond —editor-in-chief of the always interesting Literary Hub.
97. Daisy Fried —nominated for a Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry.
98. Thomas Brady —makes these ridiculous lists.
99. Atticus —so much depends on “An open window in Paris/is all the world I need.” (poem from his “best-selling” book)
100. Stephen Cole— just some poet who puts his poems on Facebook (he’s really good).
To judge 100 years of prize-winning poetry is both a challenge and an illumination—the challenge is that in 100 years our idea of poetry has changed.
The landmark year of Modernism, 1922—when The Waste Land and Ulysses were published—saw the first official Pulitzer in Poetry awarded to the Collected Poems of Edwin Arlington Robinson, a retiring, self-published, versifier who got lucky when a friend showed his book to the president of the United States (Teddy Roosevelt)—Robinson the very opposite of Pound and his manifesto-band of revolutionary opportunists.
Pound and his clique were not just for the “new;” they resented Millay, Frost, Robinson, and poets who rhymed, sold lots of books, and won Pulitzers. Hugh Kenner, author of The Pound Era, had unkind things to say about Millay’s work. It was no secret that American poetry was split in two in the early part of the 20th century—and the two groups did not like each other. Robert Hillyer, a Harvard professor who won the Pulitzer in 1934 and 15 years later objected strenuously to Pound’s Bollingen Prize award, would leave the room if Pound or Eliot came up in conversation.
For years, the Pulitzer poetry award was administered by a committee of three. The chair for years was Wilbur Cross, a literary critic, Yale alum and Connecticut governor in the 1930s. Cross was on the jury until 1947, when Robert Lowell was awarded the prize by Cross, Henry S. Canby, and Louis Untermeyer. The next year Alfred Kreymborg joined the group, and he, Canby, and Untermeyer gave the Pulitzer to Auden.
The Dial magazine Prize (the revived journal lasted only for the decade of the 1920s) was, as any objective person should be able to ascertain, a circle-jerk of poet-comrades awarding each other prizes. Prize winners included Williams, Pound, Eliot, Cummings, and Marianne Moore—who replaced Scofield Thayer (a wealthy prep-school chum of Eliot’s) as Dial editor in 1926. Cummings eloped with Thayer’s wife at this time, with the latter’s approval, as the nephew of Casey At the Bat author, Ernest Thayer, was later hospitalized for mental instability.
No judging committee is going to be perfect, but the early years of the poetry Pulitzer judging seemed to get it right: don’t let poets award the prize; let a certain objective distance prevail—let judges be those who write opera librettos or teach philosophy, not poets seeking the prize itself. By the 1960s, poets (often winners of the prize) became judges. Poet-judging was already a thing in the 1930s, (there seemed to be a group centered around the long-defunct Saturday Review, a clique-ish center of gravity, if you will) but it was rare.
Po-biz has long since been taken over by the poets. Frost served on the jury once, in the 1930s. Leonard Bacon served on the jury for four years (’36—’39), and then won in 1941. Stephen Vincent Benet served on the jury briefly, and then won. If poets are good, one doesn’t resent this so much. No judging apparatus is air-tight. But it seems a no-brainer: let judges be credentialed in arts and letters, not to a circle of prize-desiring poets.
By the middle of the century, the gap between the two poetry camps (populist and modernist) had almost closed—the skirmish around Pound’s Bollingen Prize in 1949 was the last battle. It is difficult to describe the resulting one camp, except that it was vaguely anti-Romantic. I don’t believe it had anything to do with politics, since Pound was celebrated by Marxists; I think it was just a natural consolidation of friendly power. The cool kids (however that’s defined) prevailed—the outsiders were never quite sure what the favored and consolidating “cool” was, which is why they were outsiders, looking on with a mixture of indignation, admiration, jealousy, and puzzlement.
In the 21st century, the white avant-garde began to be replaced by identity politics, but Romanticism was still a thing of the past. A consolidation was happening within a consolidation. Expressive skill continued to take a back seat to the thing expressed.
The challenge of reconciliation still existed in the 1920s—Edwin Arlington Robinson or T.S. Eliot? Edna Millay or WC Williams? We feel a bit lost in the duality—which side do we like? It’s a challenge.
But as one reads the poets of the 1920s, aware of the split, and thinks about the Pulitzer’s 100 year history, there’s also illumination.
We tend to be binary—we cheer for one side over the other—and in our partisanship we exaggerate differences. As one reads E A Robinson, Edna Millay Robert Frost, and Amy Lowell, the Pulitzer winners of the 20s, poets eventually, and pretty much today, left behind during the Long March of Modernism’s revolution, one cannot help but notice in these populists an obsession with the past, with everything old—and this characterizes the Modernist revolutionaries, as well: for all their “modernism,” Pound and Eliot, too, wore hats and cloaks of the bygone.
As Randall Jarrell said: aren’t we all Romantics, really?
Both camps embraced the past seamlessly in their way: the Modernists attempted to write in a classic manner (stiff, humorless), while the early 20th Century school engaged the old in modes playful, fanciful, passionate—knowingly or unknowingly, it didn’t really matter; they did so energetically. The irony is that Modernist “revolutionaries” were rather staid, by comparison, bogged down by bullet-point, manifesto-ist, decrees.
Just to give a brief example—here’s a passage from Amy Lowell’s prize-winning book, What’s O’clock:
Hot with oranges and purples, In a flowing robe of a marigold colour, He sweeps over September spaces. Scheherezade, do you hear him, And the clang of his scimitar knocking on the gates? The tawny glitter of his turban, Is it not dazzling — With the safron jewel set like a sun-flower in the midst? The brown of his face! Aye, the brown like the heart of a sun-flower.
Whatever can be said of this passage, it is colorful, it has swagger, even as we wonder, wouldn’t “flowing robe of marigold” be better than “flowing robe of a marigold color?”
Mundane things, like syntax and grammar, which the avant-garde dismisses as shallow, inhibiting, or old, will contribute to the quality of poetry forever—whether our meta-theoretical brains like it or not.
(T.S. Eliot, the best of the Modernists, plain knew how to write. He had Harvard. He had grammar—though you don’t necessarily need the Harvard for the grammar. Harvard, most importantly, quickly became the social meeting spot for the anti-Romantic “new,” whether you were Gertrude Stein, e.e. cummings, or Wallace Stevens.)
Obviously, the following colorful poem is not better than Amy Lowell, but the tone is different—there is nothing “revolutionary” here; the fancy and the expansive have simply been set aside for a boiled-down, self-conscious, lecture:
“So much depends on the red wheel barrow…the white chickens…”
The Modernist poets wanted to ‘get things right’ in a narrower, more serious manner—and this is why they kept manifestos. The Populists (Millay sold 10,000 books for every one by Pound or Williams) were actually more experimental, more imaginative, and took more risks. Which means, yes, some of them did write poems which today make us wince. The Populists were more apt to be zany, to be ridiculous, to be odd, to take a subject and look at it in a bizarre way. They were out to please, without feeling they had to obey some revolutionary decree.
In one of Robert Frost’s four Pulitzer-winning volumes, there is a poem about a girl named “Maple”—those who went to school with the girl insisted it was “Mable.” No, Frost assures us, it was “Maple.” And Frost elaborates in one of his “story” poems.
Maple vs. Mable. This is unusual, bizarre, crazy—crazier than the Modernists, who actually took themselves far more seriously—and took fewer risks and in fact had less fun.
Poetry, the Modernists thought, needed to be serious and tweedy, not a fanciful romp—and this, as it turned out, in a crazy historical twist of fate, worked better in the university—and this is where the revolutionary Modernists finally won—in the ivory tower; they got into textbooks, initially published by the New Critics, anti-Romantics, who brilliantly played the game of Traditionalists who got themselves (the Modernists) in.
The Populists were more apt to write (why not?) like a 17th century bard and occasionally hit one out of the park (think of Millay’s “What Lips These Lips Have Kissed”). Robert Frost, Edna Millay, and Amy Lowell sometimes rhymed and sometimes did not (and come to think of it, T.S. Eliot, the best Modernist, did this as well). Edwin Arlington Robinson made a humorous retort when asked why he didn’t write free verse: “I’m bad enough as it is.” There is something rather puritan, it seems to me, about the narrow ones, frowning in the corner, who never rhyme. You can do all kinds of wonderful things in poetry—and rhyme, as well. But if, on principle, you don’t rhyme—is this really broadening, novel, imaginative, or revolutionary? And how did it become to be thought of as so?
The answer has already been alluded to—rhyme sold books, especially when a writer like Millay (who also had a sexy, rock-star persona) could rhyme almost as skillfully as Shakespeare—could, on occasion at least, pull it off. But the gold mine of getting onto a university syllabus required mining of a special sort:
First, we can’t keep just teaching Shakespeare (and writers like Millay writing sonnets like Shakespeare) forever, can we?
Second, since the establishment pushes for scholarly historical phases of art, it is only natural that we begin to teach those “of their time period,” i.e., the “Modernists.”
Third, is a sexy best-seller by the terribly loose Millay the best thing for serious study in the university? The Populists in the 20s featured lots of rhyming women. The prominent female in the Modernist club was the dour, buttoned-up, anti-Romantic, Miss Marianne Moore. Ironically, free verse was associated with free love. Neither side was necessarily staid. But the Modernists, led by the melancholy T.S. Eliot, seemed more fit for the university.
The generally neo-classical stiffness of the Moderns appealed to educators and deans, at last. The Populists sold books, but when did a “best-seller” ever appeal to a scholarly mind?
I’m going to assign four phases to the poetry Pulitzer history.
The first phase might be called the Wilbur Cross phase, when a Yale scholar and Democrat Governor of Connecticut who gave his name to the Wilbur Cross Parkway led the jury until 1946—when winners were poets like Edna Millay, Amy Lowell, Leonora Speyer (very good, utterly forgotten), George Dillon, Archibald MacLeish, and Audrey Wurdemann (another good poet and now ignored).
The second phase should be called the Alfred Kreymborg phase, a modernist-cooling-into conservatism judge who ruled the jury from 1947 (a young Robert Lowell won) to 1959—when Stanley Kunitz won.
Richard Wilbur (1957) and Kunitz comprised the two-man jury which chose Louis Simpson in 1963 and by now we are in the third phase, which could be called the Stanley Kunitz phase—prize-winning, establishment poets choosing prize-winning, establishment poets. As poetry sold less, it became necessary for poets to breathe “establishment” air. Kreymborg was on the jury one more time—in 1961, when he chose (along with Louis Untermeyer) the now forgotten Phyllis McGinley. The 1967 judges who picked Anne Sexton were Pulitzer prize poets, too: Richard Eberhart, Phyllis McGinley, and Louis Simpson.
The fourth phase begins with Vijay Seshadri winning in 2014—this might be called the Marilyn Chin phase (the latest Jury Chair).
The third phase is a long one, the consolidation of the Modernist hegemony, taking us through Ashbery winning in 1976, Charles Simic in 1990, C.K. Williams in 2000, to Sharon Olds’ win in 2013. We might also call the Kunitz phase the Wright phase: James Wright (1972), Charles Wright (1998), and Franz Wright (2004).
The fourth phase winners are: Seshadri, Greg Pardlo, Peter Balakian, Tyehimba Jess, Frank Bidart, Forrest Gander, Jericho Brown, and Natalie Diaz. Is the fourth phase really just an extension of the third phase? Perhaps.
Vijay Seshadri has a poem which ends with Al Green singing a Bee Gees song. If the music of the Bee Gees or Al Green appeal to you at all, you should find yourself pulled out of the poem (“Bright Copper Kettles”) because let’s face it, prose poets, who work in that familiar prose-poem-template-of-no-particular voice-or-personality—and are neither comics nor composers, and who are not Edna St. Vincent Millay—cannot possibly compete with popular culture (which is probably why, as modern poetry gradually turned into prose, which it mostly is now, poets felt the overwhelming need to professionally bond together in the MFA, award-giving hive, to protect each other from anything which might possibly resemble mass culture—ostentatious rhyme, ostentatious music, ostentatious comedy, sweeping themes, memorable speech.
The monotony of the prose-poem template is perhaps the longest cloud in the history of rapid-fire modernism, and lours over us—despite the wide and varied experience of the poet, or their advanced vocabulary—and it is the very fact of their immense experience and vocabulary which is partly to blame, since a host of sights and sounds observed with loving intelligence is a nullity—when it comes to poetry. The sights and sounds have to be the poem’s. There are limits to what words can describe. If the poet has twelve brothers, if the poet drinks in a bar, if the poet observes the wind’s behavior on a windy day, the translation of these events into words by an observant and intelligent person has absolutely nothing to do with poetry—if that person is not writing as a skilled writer of—poetry. He can reference all the pop songs and dances and memories of dad and world events he wants.
Enough editorializing on truism. The list, please.
(A note: Some won the award more than once, some won for a first book, some for a Collected—all are ranked as poets, but the work that actually won is taken into account, as well.)
The Pulitzer Prize Winning Poets, Ranked, From Best to Worst:
One Robert Hillyer 1934 He vigorously protested Pound’s post-treason Bollingen. Are you shocked he is number one? This owes mostly to the hearsay of poetic reputation. A Harvard prof who wrote like Shelley. Here’s 3 stanzas to give you an idea, from the poem, “Arabesque” published in Poetry magazine, August, 1924:
Rejected by a heliotrope, The drunken butterfly has sworn To hang himself with cobweb rope From the black hawthorn.
The ocean floor is not more still— That moonstone half suffused with green; The sunlight pours forth from hill to hill, Shadow between.
*
Death, not yet. The fountain has not sung enough. One other afternoon, A few more hours. Then, when the sun has set, A few more hours of moon In other gardens, other flowers.
Two Edna Millay 1923 She threw herself into song—and became a rock star. Her sonnets are some of the best of all time. She took song-risks. Failed a lot, but who cares? She doesn’t need to quote the Bee Gees in her poems. She is the Bee Gees.
Three Robert Frost 1924, 1931, 1937, 1943 He was a chatter-box. Sometimes didn’t know when to shut up. He actually did what Wordsworth recommended—blended poetry and speech. As if this means anything. Does it?
Four Edward Arlington Robinson 1922, 1925, 1928 Not since Poe and Longfellow dominated the 1840s were there two poets like Robinson and Millay who owned the 1920s. The public will be pleased by the effusions of whatever strikes its fancy without learned encouragement. The profound which manages to please the public is in danger of being underestimated. Robinson is the real deal. He avoids the fruitless amateur descriptions of trees and such—his poetry speaks.
Five James Tate 1992 Of all the free verse poets, who wrote poems in paragraphs, making no pretense to form whatsoever, he is the one who is probably the most amusing and thoughtful. His Selected Poems won.
Six Howard Nemerov 1978 The oil crisis, disco, the collapse of Jimmy Carter’s presidency. But here came Nemerov’s sane, polished, witty, Collected Poems to save us. Humorous/profound in a folksy manner such as we get from this WW II poet makes the rebellious/avant-garde uncomfortable. When you are funny, no one takes your cynicism seriously—and then no one takes you seriously at all. This is what happens to poets, like Nemerov, with range. He also had the audacity to have a good formalist ear. We prefer the tragic poets who have no range at all. In another hundred years, this choice will perhaps make more sense.
Seven Archibald MacLeish 1933, 1953 Won the Pulitzer the second time for his Collected. A poet’s poet. Not as funny as Nemerov—he took himself a bit too seriously, but he was of that time.
Eight Richard Wilbur 1957, 1989 This formalist dynamo did not always match his skills with great subjects—his most famous poem is about laundry (comparing it to angels) but he has a great poem about a fountain. One is always listening for a wrong step—so delicately precise he is—and so you hold your breath when you read him, making your way delicately through the formal delights.
Nine James Merrill 1977 The first part of his Ouija Board epic won the prize—how to tell the elegant Merrill from the scholarly Richard Howard? Merrill is a bit more metrically precise, a bit easier to read. Howard has more philosophical heft.
Ten Leonard Bacon 1941 Writes like Byron. His work is hard to find. Get it. It will be worth something one day.
Just to give you an idea, a few excerpts from his previous work (damn if I can find the book that won):
In short he was the very symbol of The second nature of free verse—free love.
Still polyphonic prose is simply—prose. Free verse is but the shadow of a song, Though sham sham sham and pose repose on pose, Though Greenwich Village pillage still in gutters, Though Arensburg believe what Kreymborg utters.
She beat her bosom, which appeared to be Flat as the level of democracy.
Eleven W.H. Auden 1948 Major formalist poet who was born in England. came to America in 1940 and won the U.S. award with an unrhymed tetrameter narrative poem about barflies in New York called The Age of Anxiety. Not his best but still Auden.
Twelve Donald Justice 1980 Observant, emotionally intelligent, knew how to write the lyric poem.
Thirteen Sylvia Plath 1982 Her life and work are so intertwined, one might say the critic has an impossible task. The New Critics would say, “delete the life!” But as we examine the flaky parts of the poem, all the competing ironies and resonances, we find “the life” in the poem, its energetic source; we cannot delete the poet’s life—its energies, its content, from the poem. Not the famed life, the life.
Fourteen Theodore Roethke 1954 He was very much like a mad, 19th century, English, poet. He ranks high because 19th century England wrote better poetry than 20th century America.
Fifteen Elizabeth Bishop 1956 Her reputation continued to grow as the century progressed and now I imagine it’s as high as it can go. If you got tired of Moore, you could read Bishop (Millay was not modern enough, Parker too dramatic, Teasdale too sad.) I imagine she took a secret delight in being able to write a better “Robert Lowell poem” than her friend Robert Lowell—a poem that was finally updated Wordsworth.
Sixteen John Berryman 1954 Won for Dream Songs—they were certainly uneven and well, crazy. I wonder if we’ll look back some day at 20th century American poetry and see its lunacy? Not as in: good art-crazy, but as in: “oh my God that was crazy.”
Seventeen Leonora Speyer 1927 We choose the best by one thing: their best poems, don’t we? And that makes nearly everyone who is not an epic poet famous (if they are lucky) for a handful of poems, sometimes one. Here’s one of hers I like—though I can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic—called “Ascent:”
Mountains take too much time. Start at the top and climb.
Eighteen Stephen Dunn 2001 If you’re going to write free verse and you’re not an Imagist, it doesn’t hurt to be gossipy and poignant—a bartender Socrates.
Nineteen Mark Van Doren. 1940 He wrote lovely, slightly mystical lyrics. Also taught Allen Ginsberg at Columbia.
Twenty Richard Howard 1970 Very much a student of poetry—so absorbed in it, he wrote it almost as if it belonged to a different medium.
Twenty One Wallace Stevens 1955 Overrated, in my opinion. He seems quite consciously to be pulling our leg. I don’t care what Helen Vendler says. Does anyone else think of him as rather a joke? He did have range—though most of what he tried I didn’t like. But he’s still #21. He ought to be happy.
Twenty Two Amy Lowell 1926 Won an Imagist pissing contest with Pound—he was a mere scholar; she was a Sappho. See: “The Letter,” “Venus Transiens,” “The Garden by Moonlight,” “The Taxi,” and her famous “Patterns.” The pity is that she was the one who died early (1925)—rather than him.
Twenty Three William Rose Benet 1942 The Benets (the two brothers who won the prize—Stephen for a Civil War epic, William for an epic on his life of four marriages, including one with the Populist, Anne Sexton-lite poet, Eleanore Wylie). What do you say about the Benets? William’s verse had more energy.
Twenty Four Sharon Olds 2013 finally joined the Pulitzer club with her break-up book, Stag’s Leap—not at all her best work. She made a name for herself by being racy (though she was always more than that) and the Pulitzer for a very long time imagined itself to be rather classy: Robert Penn Warren, not Charles Bukowski. Stripped of her sex-partner, she gained a prize.
Twenty Five Galway Kinnnell 1983 He won for his Selected, before he wrote, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.” More patience, Pulitzer, more patience.
Twenty Six Audrey Wurdermann 1935 Brief bios tell she was the great-great-grandaughter of Shelley. I would love to hear the story—none of Shelley’s known heirs grew to adulthood. She was only 24 when she won for her lyric songs. What do you think of this one:
Persephone
When she first came there, Pluto wept, Streaking cinders down his face, While she competently slept In her alloted place. She catalogued her little hells, Cupboarded the fires, And placed in tabulated wells Old lost desires. She made his Lordship stoop to gather Ashes from the floor; She regulated stormy weather, And polished Hades’ door. The Devil was unhappy in Such cleanliness and space. She said it was a mortal sin, The way he’d kept the place! Now, after several million years, (For time can reconcile), He tip-toes with quite human fears About their domicile.
Twenty Seven Carl Dennis 2002 Nimble rhetorician. His work has a wondering-out loud, Billy Collins feel—but a little more respectable. Don’t know if that’s good or bad.
Twenty Eight Anne Sexton 1967 She won for Live or Die, poems from the early 60s, a housewife Robert Lowell—but with bursts of Dionsyian frenzy. She ought to be ranked higher, but the pain is too great. She out-Plaths Plath. Remember this from her?
from “Consorting With Angels”
I was tired of being a woman, tired of the spoons and the pots *
O daughters of Jerusalem, the king has brought me into his chamber. I am black and I am beautiful. I’ve been opened and undressed. I have no arms or legs. I’m all one skin like a fish. I’m no more a woman than Christ was a man.
Twenty Nine Richard Eberhart 1966 The groundhog poem. He lived to be very, very, old.
Thirty Robert Penn Warren 1958, 1979 A prize machine, he belonged to the Fugitives, the Southern Agrarians, and co-wrote Understanding Poetry, the New Critics textbook, a tome of many editions mid-century which made it official: WC Williams yea, Poe nay.
Thirty One John Ashbery 1976 Anyone can rhyme, and now, thanks to Ashbery, anyone can write poetry.
Thirty Two Anthony Hecht 1968 “The Dover Bitch” wins the Pulitzer Prize!
Thirty Three Stanley Kunitz 1959 His poems stake out a sentimental pitch and then retreat, ashamed for doing so. I love him and can’t stand him.
Thirty Four Robert Lowell 1947, 1974 There’s something show-offy about him. Always seemed too prog-rock, not rock enough for my taste. I’ll admit I thought the Lowell name opened doors, and found it strange that he left Harvard for New Critic-dom in Tennessee. A Fugitive poet was the family psychiatrist. The first Big Star Writing Program prof (Iowa, Boston U.), his early promise, the idea of his greatness, didn’t come to fruition.
Thirty Five W.S. Merwin 1971, 2009 Has that lack of punctuation poignancy which floats off to somewhere else, allowing nothing very important to be finally said, and if this is what poetry finally is, damn he’s good.
Thirty Six Robert Hass 2008 He perfected that middle period free verse ability to ironically lecture while invoking the sensual.
Thirty Seven Natasha Tretheway 2007 Her poetry snaps and zings as good poetry should. She’s underrated. Her lyricism has force.
Thirty Eight Louis Simpson 1964 O the contemplative wisdom in the darkness! His work seems a little plainer and duller now than I remembered it. Some poetry has a way of impressing us more in our youth when professors-as-human hold more sway.
Thirty Nine Louise Gluck 1993 I must admit she completely bored me at first. She seemed emotionally distant in her poems and I read her that way, and so I fell asleep to what she was doing.
Forty Gwendolyn Brooks 1950 “We die soon.”
Forty One Carl Sandburg 1951 He really did write a lot of bad poems. Maybe folk-singers do that.
Forty Two George Dillon 1932 One of Millay’s boyfriends. Poetry magazine editor—while serving in WW II. Here’s his “Beauty Intolerable:”
Finding her body woven As if of flame and snow, I thought: however often My pulses cease to go, Whipped by whatever pain Age or disease appoint, I shall not be again So jarred in every joint, So mute, amazed and taut, And winded of my breath,
Beauty being at my throat More savagely than death.
Forty Three Stephen Vincent Benet 1929, 1944 The Civil War epic! He received his second award posthumously. He was also a well-known fiction writer.
Forty Four Phyllis McGinley 1961 A formalist housewife poet. Made the cover of Time in 1965.
Forty Five Natalie Diaz 2021 The latest winner. She played professional basketball before earning her MFA. “It Was the Animals” is a brilliant poem.
Forty Six Peter Viereck 1949 He dared to invoke old, swooning themes in rhyme. My God, it was 1949! I guess the free verse revolution hadn’t happened yet. His poem, “Again, Again!” sounds like a pop song. Here’s how it begins and ends:
Who here’s afraid to gawk at lilacs? Who won’t stand up and praise the moon? Who doubts that skies still ache for skylarks And waves are lace upon the dune?
*
I’ll see. I’ll say. I’ll find the word. All earth must lilt, then, willy-nilly And vibrate one rich triple-chord Of August, wine, and waterlily.
Billy Collins sounds bad ass compared to this. I still like it, though. I’m not afraid to praise the moon. It’s difficult to understand that when poetry rejects—in principle—whatever Viereck is doing here: 1649, 1949, 2021, it doesn’t matter, options don’t increase; they diminish.
Forty Seven Alan Dugan 1962 Who are these poets who feel so damn sorry for themselves, writing spare little poems in diners and used clothing shops? Hey don’t knock it. Sylvia Plath was dying and he was winning a Pulitzer prize.
Forty Eight Charles Wright 1998 Almost won in 1982 but was beaten by Plath’s posthumous Collected. His winning volume has that resigned, bird-watching, lawn-sprinkler, reality which is perfectly good even as it bores us to tears. “If there’s nothing going on,/there’s no reason to make it up.” Yeah, I guess.
Forty Nine Kay Ryan 2011 Brevity is the soul of wit, not poetry. She has an Emily Dickinson quality, but much drier. The idea of her greatness, but in fact, not. Occasionally good.
Fifty Paul Muldoon 2003 Seamus Heaney-lite, or maybe closer to Ted Hughes-lite. Whimsical, with an edge.
Fifty One Tyehimba Jess 2017 Born in Detroit, a Slam poet who received his MFA at NYU. “a woman birthed him/back whole again.” He knows how to end poems. Many good poets don’t know how to do that.
Fifty Two W.D. Snodgrass 1960 Confessional Poetry. What was “confessional,” anyway? What did it confess? Snodgrass went through a divorce as he earned his MFA at Iowa.
Fifty Three Yusef Komunyakaa 1994 One of America’s great tragic poets.
Fifty Four Rita Dove 1987 Her winning book is about her maternal grandparents. She responded with great dignity when her anthology of 20th century poetry was attacked from respectable academic and avant-garde quarters for filling it with certain types of poets. Her poetry celebrates affection.
Fifty Five Marianne Moore 1952 She was not only didactic at times, but she explicitly warned us away from beauty in the old high sense. Sorry, no.
Fifty Six James Schuyler 1981 You cannot totally hate poetry when at least a friendly, observant, personality shows through.
Fifty Seven Gregory Pardlo 2015 You can say a lot of things in prose poetry. I love this: “She makes a jewelry of herself and garlands/the ground with shadows.”
Fifty Eight Philip Levine 1995 Won for his book The Simple Truth. Run-on prose lines; breathless sameness to his poetry. A Hemingway plain-speaking tone imprisoned in pseudo-lyric form.
Fifty Nine Jericho Brown 2020 Influenced by Gwendolyn Brooks and Langston Hughes.. He’s director of the Creative Writing program at Emory.
Sixty Philip Schultz 2008 Shared his win with Hass. Confessional—the Stanley Kunitz school.
Sixty One Jorie Graham 1996 She won for later work that was pedantic—poison to her mystical flair. Early Graham was better.
Sixty Two Marya Zaturenska 1938 Her verses are below the quality of what I expect to see from that time; somewhat heavy-handed, but they certainly have their moments.
Sixty Three Mary Oliver. 1984 The first member of the ‘Feel-Good School.’ It certainly has worth (and may even win the day for some) even if hers is the shadow of poetry, the shadow of what might be called nature poetry (which is impossible anyway—“I think I will never see…”).
Sixty Four Robert Coffin 1936 Has some OK ballads. He was the poetry editor of Yankee magazine.
Sixty Five Conrad Aiken 1930 A friend of Eliot’s, he and John Gould Fletcher (in 1939) were the first of the “hostile camp” Modernists to slip in and win a Pulitzer—Aiken’s lyrics were not terribly good but had an Eastern feel. Everyone in America—Populist or Modernist—loved Eastern art and poetry: from the Japanese victory in the Russo-Japanese War to Pearl Harbor.
Sixty Six Vijay Seshadri 2014 And why not put Al Green singing a Bee Gees song in your poem?
Sixty Seven Peter Balakian 2016 I don’t know. His poetry has that scholarly, thoughtful sheen.
Sixty Eight George Oppen 1969 Fashionably minimalist.
Sixty Nine Tracy K. Smith. 2012 She was young when she won the award. I saw her read around that time, and she seemed apologetic around her fellow readers. She’s a much better poet now.
Seventy Mona Van Duyn 1991 Witty, formalist, didactic. A pleasant poet from Iowa who could rise to a mighty rhetoric from which one felt she pretty quickly needed to get down.
Seventy One Charles Simic 1990 Like so many free verse poets, whatever at-the-time-magic hovered around their utterances previously, is now fled. I found The World Doesn’t End haunting when it came out. It didn’t bother to do anything except describe (briefly and plainly) what was odd and the reader would fill in the rest. Was it this novelty itself which charmed? It haunts no more.
Seventy Two William Carlos Williams 1963 He won at the end of his life for a book of poems on Bruegel. I guess if you want you can try to use words to compete with…Bruegel. Well, advertisers can make us taste beer, can’t they?
Seventy Three Rae Armantrout 2010 By the time she won, Ron Silliman’s avant-garde was getting desperate. It would try anything. Do you want to hear a few jokes?
Seventy Four Ted Kooser 2004 He nearly destroyed the Poetry Pulitzer’s reputation by winning. It was between the old avant-garde running out of steam and the complete triumph of Identity Politics. Remember that window? Kooser slipped in.
Seventy Five William Meredith 1988 Nice. And the dull, which tends to rust the nice, has done so.
Seventy Six Frank Bidart 2019 Highly interesting, but I had to rank him here because he borrows explicitly to such an extent. “Ellen West” enthralls me.
Seventy Seven James Wright. 1972 Just awfully sentimental. He was writing during a time when the sentimental had almost been demolished by High Modernism’s brutalist take-over—and I suppose there was a backlash.
Seventy Eight Caroline Kizer 1985 She has a Marianne Moore vibe.
Seventy Nine C.K Williams 2000 Long lines of exuberant tastelessness.
Eighty Gary Snyder 1975 In his poems we glimpse the real good life.
Eighty One Forrest Gander 2018 A highly self-conscious effort at stylishness is what jumps out at me from this winning book. Self-conscious stylishness (or at least what feels self-conscious) is what bothers me about Robert Lowell (he won during a hybrid era when warring Imagism and Romanticism had died in the 1920s, socialist ballads had died after the Hitler/Stalin pact, and post-WW II, ‘good and the stylish, vaguely blending old and new’ was what everyone was expecting) but Robert Lowell could at least versify somewhat.
Eighty Two Franz Wright 2004 An honest and tempestuous man, his poetic legacy now seems largely one of self-pity—with the occasional lyric of shining light.
Eighty Three Claudia Emerson 2006 Prosaic—as if the poem doesn’t know what she’s talking about—though we do.
Eighty Four Lisel Mueller 1997 Free verse without personality is like reading a dictionary or an encyclopedia. Some nice thoughts, but presented in such a way that the air doesn’t move. The sailboat doesn’t go.
Eighty Five Maxine Kumin 1973 She operates poetry’s ranger station.
Eighty Six Karl Shapiro 1945 Childish, description, poetry. Poetry which feels like an exercise. “The Fly,” for instance, is pure horror, and I don’t mean in a good way.
Eighty Seven Henry S. Taylor 1986 Perfected the Modernist, Iowa Workshop, mundane life-plain voice template.
Eighty Eight John Gould Fletcher 1939 He was the one, more than anyone else, who belonged, hesitantly, not intentionally, armed with money, to all the groupings of High Modernism—Amy Lowell’s, Pound’s, the Fugitives, disappointing them all, apparently, by not being loyal enough, or by not spending his money enough. He reminds me of that hapless friend of Iago’s who was advised, “sell all your lands!” He wrote perhaps the worst poem of all time in which he grieves for a “black rock,” sticking out of the ocean, over and over again, in the same way, over multiple stanzas.
Eighty Nine Mark Strand 1998 He represents the nadir of establishment 20th century American free verse. Once a highly acclaimed poet of zen-like poems of profound emptiness which now seem merely empty—the title poem of his winning book, “Blizzard of One,” is really about a single snow flake that floats into a man’s home and sits on his chair and “That’s all/There was to it.”
Here’s an earlier poem by Mark Strand from the late 70s. This was once considered good. I think I probably liked it at one time. Now it just seems embarrassing.
Eating Poetry
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs burn like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams.
I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
So there we have it—the best and the worst of the first hundred years of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Through WW II, nearly half the prizes (10) were given to Frost, EA Robinson, and the Benet brothers.
There has been only one repeat winner since 1989 (W.S. Merwin in 2009).
Depending on your taste, you may want to flip this ranking on its head.
Poetry today is crying out for criticism. There is hardly an honest word said about poetry since Ezra Pound said he didn’t like the Russians or Thomas Brady said he didn’t like the Red Wheel Barrow and Thomas Brady doesn’t count because that was me.
Poetry is both the easiest and the most difficult thing to do. The shame of failure is two-fold: 1. Unable to do something which is easy 2. Bitter to discover our vanity had convinced us of immense self-worth, since actually writing great poems is a million-to-one long shot. Failure in poetry is unacceptable. Reviewers, take heed.
It is probably unwise to preface a review of young poets with these words—can young poets handle the truth? Do they deserve it?
Yes and yes.
Youth has everything going for it, especially failure, which is the best path to success. Every poet deserves a chance to understand failure. Also, truth is hardly the proper word—unless I mean “true to myself.”
I wrote (and still write) bad poems. The seduction is the ease of writing the inconsequential in a therapeutic trance. Also, poetry exists in a well (there is puffery but no true public) and therefore poetry expects a rescue crew—not condemnation.
To attempt honest criticism is the fantasy of a crank; honest is a goal of no possible joy—the expectation is kindness and cheering on. To fail to meet this expectation is both to fail to please and to fail generally.
Better to say nice things. The bad will fade away on its own.
But the bad does not fade away at all. It repeats itself in subsequent generations in the form of millions of poems (puffed with great effort) in millennia going forward.
There is a duty, then.
A reviewer ought to be a critic who flushes out poison.
This can be done in a generous spirit, with learning and elan. The poison can be flushed out without having to look at the poison.
The duty can be a cheerful one, then.
Poets, be not afraid.
The first poet in 14 International Younger Poets (from the new and exciting Art and Letters press) is Avinab Datta-Aveng. He has the most pages in the volume. Perhaps because he has a book coming out from Penguin. We are not sure. His first poem has an intriguing title: “My Mother’s Brain.” The title could be tender, tragic or cheeky, depending.
It is a very impressive poem. It features excellent lines:
Unremembered line in my mind
Muttered mother I only heard murder
And an outstanding ending:
…small birds make A line at the mouth of the gutter Rushing with rain water. Crowds clamor to see the view, The unbearable beauty of the rest Of the world renewed each time By what you will never utter.
Greatness hits us right from the start!
Now I’d like to say a word about meaning.
As far as the meaning of poems, there are three kinds.
We don’t understand but understand we are not supposed to understand.
We don’t understand but we believe perhaps others do understand—we believe we may be missing something.
We understand.
A poem which reminds me of “My Mother’s Brain,” Bertolt Brecht’s “Vom armen b.b.,” belongs to the first type. The narrator smokes his cigar, intimates he is not a good person, says he was carried by his mother in the womb from the black forest to the town. We don’t finally understand exactly what the poem is trying to say, but Brecht makes it clear he doesn’t understand, either.
I put Datta-Areng’s poem (it is more complex than Brecht’s poem) in the second category. Unlike one and three, two might possibly be annoying to one without a good dose of negative capability.
Blake Campbell’s “The Millenials” is my favorite poem in the volume. The idea is realized and the versification is exquisite. I have italicized the best parts:
What tempts us to this world That light has half-erased— Distraction’s abstract toxins, love Distilled for us to taste?
No silence here, no slumber; No slackening this tide Of lies and knowledge. We are left Unable to decide
Between them. Sudden flashes Scorch most of what coheres. At once the distance shrinks and grows And flickers with the years.
The cold blue light we live in Unreels us by the yard In strips of snapshots someone else Will find and disregard.
To prove this triumph of “The Millenials” is no accident, from Blake Campbell’s”Prism:”
You say I’ll surely ace it. How the sun Spends its abundance brightening your eyes, Your beauty I have yet to memorize From every angle. How could anyone?
This is not just good; it is Best of All Time good.
I should say something about rhythm.
A poet usually decides between “forms” or prose. “Free verse” is an unfortunate term—it clouds the topic.
T.S. Eliot and Ben Mazer, two masters of poetic rhythm—good for both verse forms and other kinds of poetry—dismissed free verse. Eliot: “it can better be defended under some other label.” And Eliot: “there is no freedom in art.” And Ben Mazer, in a remark after a poetry reading: “it all rhymes.”
The masters of poetic rhythm typically do not wish to discuss prosody.
“Scansion tells us very little.” —Eliot. And again, Eliot: “With Swinburne, once the trick is perceived, the effect is diminished.”
Leaving-out-punctuation is a trick to make prose sound like verse. As with the Swinburne-trick, however, a trick won’t sustain great poetry; rhythm is the secret, and everything besides is nothing but embellishment: rhyme, mood, syntax, idea. A certain completion involving the other elements is great, but without a rhythmic identity uniting the poem, it is dead. This is nothing but a reviewer’s opinion, but can it hurt to offer it?
Formalism—as it survived in the mid-20th century—seems to be finding its way back into poetry.
“Formalism,” as a precise term, like “free verse,” deludes us, as well, however. Check out every masterpiece of poetry. Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is far more like a pop hit by the Supremes than a lump in a museum. Rhythm, not form.
To repeat: poets see two paths: forms or free (prose). But the third way is rhythm—bursting the “forms” or breaking out of “prose;” this aspiration to music (which is what it is) is not properly defying prose, but visual art—the temporal counter to the spatial. If the poet is not able to struggle with these opposing and dancing vectors (music, speech, idea) in their mind at once, a dreary prose results.
I’m happy to report that none of the poets represented here suffers from the affliction of dreary prose.
Editor Philip Nikolayev, in his modest introduction, calls these poets simply poets “he is lucky enough to know.”
Philip Nikolayev keeps very good company.
The urgency of speech, whether in William Blake’s “Tyger” or Raquel Balboni’s “
Relics in disguise foamy mouths through the screen you can always break into my room through the porch
You can always break into my car with your steel fist.
from “Twin Cars” is the engine. We may think Blake’s tyger is described, or Balboni’s porch, but it never is. Prose is the launch-pad and poetry rockets towards an image it never reaches. As Mazer says, “It all rhymes.” Emerson called Poe “the jingle man” pejoratively. But now we can finally begin to see Emerson’s remark as praise—as, in the early 21st century, poetry is refined into one of those narrow categories John Ransom said was Modernism (division of labor) itself. Romanticism is beginning to return (Swinburne hiding in the backseat perhaps) precisely in this way.
Describing something perfectly in a poem? To quote Blake Campbell, again, “How could anyone?” But rhythm can be perfect. It simply and actually can.
All the poets in 14 International Younger Poets have their individual charm.
Zainab Ummer Farook resembles William Carlos Williams.
Flamboyant in the shade of a clean slate, we had three of our walls painted pink
Emily Grochowski, Gertrude Stein.
Avoided writing. A void in writing. A voided writing.
Chandramohan S, Marianne Moore.
Now, the history of humankind Snores in my language.
Susmit Panda, Seamus Heaney
I found a curious bronze head by the lake, and, baffled, showed it to the village folk … all lands glimmer upon the brows of kings.
Justin Burnett, Creeley, but “Witchcraft Heights,” more Williams.
In winter I stuck out from the snow— Freezing in the gutted grot,
Regretfully, I recall That innocent numbness,
When white adhered to white, And I hid.
Sumit Chaudhary, Robert Penn Warren, Marvin Bell, Auden.
feeling from dazzle so far removed into the arms of things that move.
Paul Rowe, Dylan Thomas.
upon the crumpled glass of Aegean twilight; volcanic wasps rise, sulfurous effusions, mercurial breath that carves the crater, admits the flood, shapes the ochre crescent, mirrors what’s above.
Shruti Krishna Sareen, Baudelaire.
In a riot of colour, the lawn is ablaze The red silk cotton tree seen half a mile away Hanging brooms of bottle brush scarlet sway The waxy crimson poppy petals glaze
Andreea Iulia Scridon, Plath.
When they listen to my somniloquy, the angels weep in compassion for my misery. They erase the veins on my legs, put back together my head,
Kamayani Sharma, Mark Strand.
His face slipping out of doorways ajar, Like keys falling from Manilla envelopes.
Samuel Wronoski, Jorie Graham.
Otherwise, the day was practical and made of minutes when nothing happened whatsoever.
Blake Campbell, Bishop, Ransom, Roethke.
The sleeping earth retains her tiny lives,
And even stripped of leaves, the paper birch Subsists on what has been and what is lost. But what in other living things survives.
Raquel Balboni, Leslie Scalapino, Ashbery, Eliot
To get to the end of the endless thinking and write it down again from the beginning.
Avinab Datta-Areng, Geoffrey Hill
On a terrace an old man squints At the sun, as if trying hard To pay attention to his genealogy, To the point at which a rupture occurred.
The resemblances I mention are by no means definitive—it only applies to this volume and springs from my own limited knowledge; poetry is a world in which you don’t need to know a poet directly to be influenced by them, or, occasionally, be them.
Every poet must ask themselves: am I in the wave? Or is the wave me?
In the context of this question, 14 International Younger Poets is a delight.
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 DMZColony, Wave Books, wins 2020 National Book Award. 6 JERICHO BROWNThe 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 RUEFLEDunce, Wave Books, finalist for 2020 Pulitzer Prize 16 ANTHONY CODYBorderland Apocrypha, longlist for 2020 National Book Award 17 LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAMTravesty Generator, longlist for 2020 National Book Award 18 EDUARDO C. CORRALGuillotine, 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 DIAZPostcolonial 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 BIDARTHalf-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 OLDSStag’s Leap won 2013 Pulitzer; she’s in 2020 BAP 34 HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERSThe Age of Phillis, longlist for 2020 National Book Award. 35 CLAUDIA RANKINE Citizen came out in 2014. 36 HENRI COLEBlizzard, 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. STALLINGSLike, FSG, finalist for 2019 Pulitzer 51 TAYLOR JOHNSONPoetry 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 GIOIA99 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 BERSSENBRUGGEA 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 BLOUNTFantasia 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 BURTClose 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
George Byron in a pensive mood, before taking part in the opening day Scarriet baseball ceremonies.
Happy Easter!
Scarriet has expanded and restructured its baseball league!!
Gone the 2 leagues of 20 teams led by 20 American poets—Eliot, Pound, Frost, Poe, Williams, Stevens, Moore, Dickinson, Millay, Jorie Graham, Ginsberg, Ransom, Cummings, Whittier, Whitman, Bryant, Longfellow, James Lowell, Ashbery, and Emerson.
Now poets like Emerson, Eliot and Poe can be player/managers—to contribute to their teams both at the plate and in the field.
The field is more international—Scarriet Poetry Baseball is now 25 historical teams from all over the world.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The gods and muses must be pleased with our ten years of Poetry March Madness and our first Poetry Baseball season, where poetry is worshiped through time and space in a manner which no one has ever seen.
Fortunately one of the Muses has always been here to help us, Marla Muse.
Marla Muse: They are indeed pleased, Tom!
You have spoken to the other muses who live in other realms, in those shadowy timeless realms where time is one and poetry lights up suns distantly—
Marla Muse: Yes, and they approve! The stars in the heavens love you more than you know… I would rather die than see poetry die.
This baseball season is different. Mysterious and wealthy owners throughout time and space are bidding, some in secret, for players to fill their rosters.
In the Great Emperor League, we have the Broadcasters. Their motto is “Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name” and they feature Mick Jagger, Jim Morrison, Gregory Corso, Anne Sexton, Bobby Burns, Omar Khayyam, Rilke, Coleridge, Leopardi, Anacreon, Sappho, and Ingrid Jonker. They are rumored to be owned and funded by a business group led by Federico Fellini, and their ballpark is in Rimini, Italy.
These ballclubs are timeless, in every sense of the word (these teams compete, with actual statistics, where chance unfolds out of space, out of time) but real money, blood money, purchases these players. We know JP Morgan, for instance, wanted Shakespeare and bid heavily to get him.
The Pistols, who play in Berlin, are said to be associated with Eva Braun, but this cannot be confirmed; one older muse claims to have overheard Eva say, “I take care of this. Adolf is too busy talking to bankers and architects. He doesn’t have time for poetry.” But honestly we cannot say who owns the Pistols.
Nahum Tate, owner of the Laureates, for those who do not know, re-wrote a popular King Lear with a happy ending (after Shakespeare’s death when, for a long period, the Bard was out of fashion,) and was chosen as Poet Laureate of England in 1692.
Dick Wolf produces Law & Order on television, and appears to have a controlling interest in the Laws, playing out of Santa Barbara. He’s got Aristotle, Lord Bacon, and Horace.
John Rockefeller opened his purse to get Walt Whitman, and he thinks that will be enough to win a championship. We don’t know. We do know baseball is all about pitching. All you need is a few good arms which dominate, defense behind them, and some clubhouse chemistry, and not too many injuries. It’s a crap shoot, in many ways, and this is why Rockefeller grumbled he wasn’t going to waste money on superstars who hit home runs and have a high batting average. He’s probably right. A team that wins 2-1 is better than a team that wins 7-4, by pure mathematics, even though the former score wins by 1 and the latter by 3 runs. It’s the ratio that counts. 2-1 = 2. 7-4 = 1.7 This simple reason is why defense wins in every sport. Rockefeller is using this formula, and the oil baron was also advised that you can’t buy a pennant—throwing money at sluggers doesn’t do any good; it’s 90% pitching and luck. Just put a a poet with critical depth on the hill and three good versifiers in the infield and sit back.
Some of the rosters might have some question marks, but that’s what happens in a free market. It’s an historical fact that Longfellow did meet Queen Victoria in person. But no one expected him to play for her!
And W.H. Auden just “wanted to play for Napoleon, I don’t why.”
Marla Muse: I can’t wait for the season to begin! Spring is in the air! Around Rome, and in those still fairer isles… Let’s forget about plagues and the starvation for awhile. Songs are going to sing.
Here then, are the Teams, their Mottoes, and the preliminary rosters—they are always changing (there’s a big minor leagues!)
~~~~~~
THE GREAT EMPEROR LEAGUE
Federico Fellini, Rimini The Broadcasters [Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name]
-Mick Jagger, Sappho, Gregory Corso, Charles Bukowski, Paul Valery, Anne Sexton, Omar Khayyam, Robert Burns, Ben Jonson, Coleridge, Jim Morrison, Edmund Waller, Nabokov, Rilke, Giacomo Leopardi, Anacreon, Ingrid Jonker, Swinburne
Napoleon, Corsica The Codes [Let the more loving one be me]
-W.H. Auden, Homer, Hesiod, Racine, John Peale Bishop, Edmund Wilson, Mina Loy, William Logan, Irving Layton, Villon, Jean-Baptiste Tati-Loutard, Wole Soyinka, Jules Laforgue, Derek Walcott, Callimachus, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius
King Philip II, Madrid The Crusaders [If in my thought I have magnified the Father above the Son, let Him have no mercy on me]
-Saint Ephrem, G.K. Chesterton, Tolkien, Thomas Aquinas, Hilaire Beloc, John Paul II, Saint Theresa of Lisieux, Joyce Kilmer, Saint John of the Cross, Mary Angela Douglas, Anne Bradstreet, Phillis Wheatley, Countee Cullen, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Aeschulus
Charles X, Paris The Goths [Every great enterprise takes its first step in faith]
-A.W. Schlegel, Baudelaire, Goethe, Oscar Wilde, Walter Pater, Madame de Stael, Chateaubriand, Sophocles, George Herbert, Heinrich Heine, Robert Herrick, Clement Marot, Ronsard, Saint-Beuve, Catulus, Thomas Gray, John Clare, Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Theophile Gautier
Pope Julius II, Rome The Ceilings [They also serve who only stand and wait]
-Milton, Michelangelo, William Blake, Robert Lowell, Petrarch, G.E. Lessing, John Dryden, Klopstock, GE Horne, Ferdowsi, Ariosto, Luis de Camoens, Swift, Tulsidas, Edmund Spenser, Kwesi Brew, Pindar, Euripides
~~~~~
THE GLORIOUS LEAGUE
Eva Braun, Berlin The Pistols [A life subdued to its instrument]
-Ted Hughes, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats, Ford Madox Ford, James Joyce, Hugh Kenner, Wyndham Lewis, DH Lawrence, Alistair Crowley, George Santayana, F.T. Marinetti, Giacomo Balla, Richard Wagner, Jung
Queen Victoria, London The Carriages [Theirs but to do and die]
-Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth Barrett, Robert Browning, Longfellow, Philip Larkin, Sylvia Plath, Hazlitt, Paul McCartney, Geoffrey Hill, Henry James, Andrew Marvel, John Suckling, Virginia Woolf, Theocritus
Lorenzo de’ Medici, Florence The Banners [The One remains, the many change and pass]
-Percy Shelley, Dante, William Rossetti, Christina Rossetti, DG Rossetti, John Keats, Marlowe, Guido Cavalcanti, Glyn Maxwell, Ben Mazer, Friedrich Schiller, Thomas Moore, Philodemus, Virgil, Stefan George, Boccaccio, Leonardo da Vinci
P.M. Lord John Russell, 1st Earl Russell, Devon The Sun [A good indignation brings out all one’s powers]
-Emerson, Horace Walpole, Thomas Carlyle, Thoreau, Wordsworth, Rudyard Kipling, Aldous Huxley, Matthew Arnold, Sir John Davies, Margaret Fuller, Robert Southey, Marilyn Chin, Joy Harjo, Basil Bunting, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye
Nahum Tate, Dublin The Laureates [Luck is bestowed even on those who don’t have hands]
-Ghalib, Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Peacock, Leigh Hunt, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Sara Teasdale, Pasternak, Louis Simpson, Dana Gioia, Oliver Goldsmith, Edmund Burke, Aphra Behn, Rod McKuen, JK Rowling
~~~~~
THE SECRET SOCIETY LEAGUE
Harvey Weinstein, Westport CT The Actors [I am no hackney for your rod]
-John Skelton, Langston Hughes, Henry Ward Beecher, Chaucer, Amiri Baraka, Lord Byron, Hafiz, Thomas Nashe, Marilyn Hacker, Petronius, Gwendolyn Brooks, Jim Carroll, Lucille Clifton, Etheridge Knight, Audre Lorde, Jimmy Page, Andre Gide
David Lynch, Alexandria VA The Strangers [So still is day, it seems like night profound]
-Jones Very, Alexander Pope, William Burroughs, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Robert Graves, Laura Riding, Weldon Kees, Berryman, Mary Shelley, Rabelais, Charles Simic, Eric Satie, Labid, Roethke, Camille Paglia, HP Lovecraft, Nietzsche, Samuel Beckett
P.T. Barnum, Fairfield CT The Animals [Majesty and love are incompatible]
-Ovid, Gerald Stern, Robinson Jeffers, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Seamus Heaney, Jack Spicer, Kay Ryan, Leslie Scalapino, Mary Oliver, W S Merwin, Melville, Camille Saint Saens, Edward Lear, Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens, Gerard de Nerval, Robert Bly
J.P. Morgan, Madison Avenue The War [The fire-eyed maid of smoky war all hot and bleeding will we offer them]
-Shakespeare, Louis Untermeyer, Apollinaire, T.E. Hulme, Richard Aldington, Rupert Brooke, Sir Walter Scott, Philip Sidney, James Dickey, Harry Crosby, Keith Douglas, Wilfred Owen, Howard Nemerov, Stephen Crane, Erich Remarque, Alan Seeger
Ben Franklin Philadelphia The Secrets [We come in the age’s most uncertain hour and sing an American tune]
-Paul Simon, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Edgar Poe, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, F. Scott Key, Cole Porter, Plato, Hawthorne, Pushkin, Walter Raleigh, Moliere, William Cullen Bryant, Amy Lowell, Emma Lazarus, Carl Sandburg, Pete Seeger, Natasha Trethewey, Amelia Welby, Woody Guthrie, JD Salinger, John Prine, Kanye West, Stephen Cole, Bob Tonucci
~~~~~
THE PEOPLE’S LEAGUE
Sajyajit Ray, Calcutta The Cobras [Is it true that your love traveled alone through ages and worlds in search of me?]
-Tagore, Allen Ginsberg, Jeet Thayil, Rupi Kaur, Anand Thakore, Dhoomil, G.M. Muktibodh, Rumi, A.K. Ramanujan, Samar Sen, Daipayan Nair, R. Meenakshi, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Hermann Hesse, Persius, George Harrison, Adil Jussawalla, Tishani Doshi, Sushmita Gupta, Vikram Seth
Kurosawa, Tokyo The Mist [In Kyoto, hearing the cuckoo, I long for Kyoto]
-Basho, Hilda Doolittle, Robert Duncan, Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, D.T. Suzuki, Yone Noguchi, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Kobayashi Issa, Lady Izumi Shikibu, Cid Corman, Sadakichi Hartmann, Heraclitus, Richard Brautigan
Chairman Mao, Beijing The Waves [Death gives separation repose. Without death, grief only sharpens]
-Tu Fu, Lucretius, Karl Marx, Voltaire, Rousseau, Guy Burgess, Amiri Baraka, Brecht, Neruda, Li Po, Li He, Bai Juyi, Lu Xun, Guo Moruo, Ho Chi-Fang, Yen Chen, Billie Holiday, Khomieni, Lu Ji , Wang Wei, Lao Tzu, Gary B. Fitzgerald, Wendell Berry
Dick Wolf, Santa Barbara The Laws [In poetry everything is clear and definite]
-Ajip Rosidi, Aristotle, John Donne, Donald Hall, Jane Kenyon, Donald Justice, Anna Akhmatova, Thomas Hardy, Thomas Campion, Frederick Seidel, Antonio Machado, Mark Van Doren, David Lehman, Lord Bacon, Martial, ML Rosenthal, Horace, Gottfried Burger, Yvor Winters
Merv Griffin, Los Angeles The Gamers [He thought he saw an elephant that practiced on a fife]
-Lewis Carroll, James Tate, E.E. Cummings, Tony Hoagland, Ogden Nash, Billy Collins, Eugene Field, W.S. Gilbert, Thomas Hood, Noel Coward, X.J. Kennedy, John Betjeman, Wendy Cope, Tristan Tzara, Heather McHugh, Charles Bernstein, Jack Spicer, James Whitcomb Riley, Joe Green, Menander, Morgenstern
~~~~~
THE MODERN LEAGUE
Pamela Harriman, Arden NY The Dreamers [not the earth, the sea, none of it was enough for her, without me]
-Sharon Olds, Edna Millay, George Dillon, Floyd Dell, Dorothy Parker, Stanley Burnshaw, Richard Lovelace, Stevie Smith, Louis MacNeice, Louise Bogan, Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Marge Piercy, Carolyn Forche, Muriel Rukeyser, Jean Valentine, May Swenson, Propertius, Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir
Andy Warhol, East 47th St The Printers [the eye, seeking to sink, is rebuffed by a much-worked dullness, the patina of a rag, that oily Vulcan uses, wiping up.]
-John Updike, Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, James Merrill, Hart Crane, Lorca, Thom Gunn, Stephen Burt, Frank Bidart, Mark Rothko, Marjorie Perloff, John Quinn, Duchamp, Aristophanes, Christopher Isherwood, Andre Breton, Lou Reed, John Cage
John D. Rockefeller, Chicago The Buyers [Have you no thought, O dreamer, that it may be all maya, illusion?]
-Walt Whitman, Alcaeus, Edgar Lee Masters, Kenneth Rexroth, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Helen Vendler, Jorie Graham, Franz Wright, Mark Twain, Robert Penn Warren, Paul Engle, William Alexander Percy, Richard Hugo, Carl Philips, Harriet Monroe, Duke Ellington, Dylan Thomas, Jack Kerouac, Sigmund Freud
A. C. Barnes, Philadelphia The Crash [But for some futile things unsaid I should say all is done for us]
-Allen Tate, John Gould Fletcher, John Crowe Ransom, John Dewey, Cleanth Brooks, Donald Davidson, Merrill Moore, Walter Pater, Wittgenstein, Andrew Nelson Lytle, Archilochus, Anne Waldman, Stanley Kunitz, Jackson Pollock, WC Williams, Luigi Russolo, Stephen Spender, Richard Howard
Steven Spielberg, Phoenix AZ The Universe [I know why the caged bird sings]
-Maya Angelou, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Bob Dylan, Margaret Atwood, Paul Celan, Czeslaw Milosz, Delmore Schwartz, Randall Jarrell, Anthony Hecht, Galway Kinnell, Philip Levine, Larry Levis, Claudia Rankine, Harold Bloom, Alice Walker, James Wright, Juvenal, Chuck Berry, Stephen King
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.”
(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.”
(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.”
1. Matthew Zapruder: Hurricane Matthew. Hired by the Times to write regular poetry column. Toilet papered the house of number 41.
2. Edward Hirsch: Best American Poetry 2106 Guest Editor.
3. Christopher Ricks: Best living critic in English? His Editorial Institute cancelled by bureaucrats at Boston University.
4. Joie Bose: Living Elizabeth Barrett Browning of India.
5. Sherman Alexie: Latest BAP editor. Still stung from the Chinese poet controversy.
6. Jorie Graham: Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric at Harvard
7. W.S Merwin: Migration: New and Selected Poems, 2005
8. Terrance Hayes: “I am not sure how a man with no eye weeps.”
9. George Bilgere: “I consider George Bilgere America’s Greatest Living Poet.” –Michael Heaton, The Plain Dealer
10. Billy Collins: Interviewed Paul McCartney in 2014
11. Stephen Cole: Internet Philosopher poet. “Where every thing hangs/On the possibility of understanding/And time, thin as shadows,/Arrives before your coming.”
12. Richard Howard: National Book Award Winner for translation of Les Fleurs du Mal in 1984.
13. William Logan: The kick-ass critic. Writes for the conservative New Criterion.
14. Sharon Olds: Stag’s Leap won the T.S. Eliot Prize in 2012.
15. Nalini Priyadarshni: “Denial won’t redeem you/Or make you less vulnerable/My unwavering love just may.” Her new book is Doppelgänger in my House.
16. Stephen Dobyns: “identical lives/begun alone, spent alone, ending alone”
17. Kushal Poddar: “You wheel out your mother’s latte silk/into the picnic of moths.” His new book is Scratches Within.
18. Jameson Fitzpatrick: “Yes, I was jealous when you threw the glass.”
19. Marilyn Chin: “It’s not that you are rare/Nor are you extraordinary//O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree”
20. E J Koh: “I browsed CIA.gov/for jobs”
21. Cristina Sánchez López: “If the moon knows dying, a symbol of those hearts, which, know using their silence as it was an impossible coin, we will have to be like winter, which doesn’t accept any cage, except for our eyes.”
22. Mark Doty: His New and Selected won the National Book Award in 2008.
23. Meghan O’ Rourke: Also a non-fiction writer, her poetry has been published in the New Yorker.
24. Alicia Ostriker: Born in Brooklyn in 1937.
25. Kay Ryan: “One can’t work by/ lime light.”
26. A.E. Stallings: Rhyme, rhyme, rhyme.
27. Dana Gioia: Champions Longfellow.
28. Marilyn Hacker: Antiquarian bookseller in London in the 70s.
29. Mary Oliver: “your one wild and precious life”
30. Anne Carson: “Red bird on top of a dead pear tree kept singing three notes and I sang back.”
31. Mary Jo Bang: “A breeze blew a window open on a distant afternoon.”
32. Forrest Gander: “Smoke rises all night, a spilled genie/who loves the freezing trees/but cannot save them.”
33. Stephen Burt: Author of Randall Jarrell and his Age. (2002)
34. Ann Lauterbach: Her latest book is Under the Sign (2013)
35. Richard Blanco: “One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes/tired from work”
36. Kenneth Goldsmith: “Humidity will remain low, and temperatures will fall to around 60 degrees in many spots.”
37. Rita Dove: Her Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry is already 5 years old.
38. Stephen Sturgeon: “blades of the ground feathered black/in moss, in the sweat of the set sun”
39. Marjorie Perloff: Her book, Unoriginal Genius was published in 2010.
40. Kyle Dargan: His ghazal, “Points of Contact,” published in NY Times: “He means sex—her love’s grip like a fist.”
41. Alan Cordle:Foetry.com and Scarriet founder.
42. Lyn Hejinian: “You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon.”
43. Stephen Dunn: Lines of Defense: Poems came out in 2014.
44. Ocean Vuong: “Always another hour to kill—only to beg some god/to give it back”
45. Marie Howe: “I am living. I remember you.”
46. Vanessa Place: Controversial “Gone with the Wind” tweets.
47. Helen Vendler: Reviewed Collected Poems of John Crowe Ransom, editor Ben Mazer, in the NYR this spring.
48. Martin Espada: Vivas To Those Who Have Failed is his new book of poems from Norton.
49. Carol Muske-Dukes: Poet Laureate of California from 2008 to 2011.
50. Sushmita Gupta: Poet and artist. Belongs to the Bollyverses renaissance. Sushness is her website.
51. Brad Leithauser: A New Formalist from the 80s, he writes for the Times, the New Criterion and the New Yorker.
52. Julie Carr: “Either I loved myself or I loved you.”
53. Kim Addonizio: Tell Me (2000) was nominated for a National Book Award.
54. Glynn Maxwell: “This whiteness followed me at the speed of dawn.”
55. Simon Seamount: His epic poem on the lives of philosophers is Hermead.
56. Maggie Dietz: “Tell me don’t/ show me and wipe that grin/ off your face.”
57. Robert Pinsky: “When you were only a presence, at Pleasure Bay.”
58. Ha Jin: “For me the most practical thing to do now/is not to worry about my professorship.”
59. Peter Gizzi: His Selected Poems came out in 2014.
60. Mary Angela Douglas: “the steps you take in a mist are very small”
61. Robyn Schiff: A Woman of Property is her third book.
62. Karl Kirchwey: “But she smiled at me and began to fade.”
63. Ben Mazer: December Poems just published. “Life passes on to life the raging stars”
64. Cathy Park Hong: Her battle cry against Ron Silliman’s reactionary Modernists: “Fuck the avant-garde.”
65. Caroline Knox: “Because he was Mozart,/not a problem.”
66. Henri Cole: “There is no sun today,/save the finch’s yellow breast”
67. Lori Desrosiers: “I wish you were just you in my dreams.”
68. Ross Gay: Winner of the 2016 $100,000 Kingsley Tufts award.
69. Sarah Howe: Loop of Jade wins the 2016 T.S. Eliot Prize.
70. Mary Ruefle: Published by Wave Books. A favorite of Michael Robbins.
71. CA Conrad: His blog is (Soma)tic Poetry Rituals.
72. Matvei Yankelevich: “Who am I alone. Missing my role.”
73. Fanny Howe: “Only that which exists can be spoken of.”
74. Cole Swensen: “Languor. Succor. Ardor. Such is the tenor of the entry.”
75. Layli Long Soldier: “Here, the sentence will be respected.”
76. Frank Bidart: Student and friend of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell.
77. Michael Dickman: “Green sky/Green sky/Green sky”
78. Deborah Garrison: “You must praise the mutilated world.”
79. Warsan Shire: “I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes/On my face they are still together.”
80. Joe Green: “I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.”
81. Joan Houlihan: Took part in Franz Wright Memorial Reading in Harvard Square in May.
82. Frannie Lindsay: “safe/from even the weak sun’s aim.”
83. Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright: Translates contemporary German poetry.
84. Noah Cicero: This wry, American buddhist poet’s book is Bi-Polar Cowboy.
85. Jennifer Barber: “The rose nude yawns, rolls over in the grass,/draws us closer with a gorgeous laugh.”
86. Tim Cresswell: Professor of history at Northeastern and has published two books of poems.
87. Thomas Sayers Ellis: Lost his job at Iowa.
88. Valerie Macon: Surrendered her North Carolina Poet Laureate to the cred-meisters.
89: David Lehman: Best American Poetry editor hates French theory, adores tin pan alley songs, and is also a poet .”I vote in favor/of your crimson nails”
90: Ron Silliman:Silliman’s Blog since 2002.
91: Garrison Keillor: The humorist is also a poetry anthologist.
92: Tony Hoagland: “I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain/or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade”
93. Alfred Corn: One of the most distinguished living poets.
94. Philip Nikolayev: He values spontaneity and luck in poetry, logic in philosophy.
95. Laura Kasischke: Read her poem, “After Ken Burns.”
96. Daipayan Nair: “I was never a part of the society. I have always created one.”
97. Claudia Rankine: Her prize-winning book is Citizen.
98. Solmaz Sharif: Her book Look is from Graywolf.
99. Morgan Parker: Zapruder published her in the NY Times.
100. Eileen Myles: She makes all the best-of lists.
Scarriet Poery March Madness first round winners have battled it out—and here are the final 16 contestants, the Sweet Sixteen!
These are extraordinary lines, evoking entire poems, entire books of poems.
Nicknames for this tournament have flooded in: The Mouse That Roared, Less Madness is More Madness, A Little Says It All, A Nutshell’s Unlimited Space.
The most common tropes in poetic history are all here in these magnificent microcosms: love, emotion, psychology, birds, music, fire, clouds, urgent definitions of time and space.
Marla Muse: I’m thrilled to death for all these poets! What amazing lines!
We chose wisely.
Marla Muse: We did.
In the North
Maura Stanton: Who made me feel by feeling nothing
Ben Mazer: All is urgent, just because it gives, and in the mirror, life to life life gives.
Jorie Graham: A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls.
Molly Brodak: boundlessness secretly exists, I hear
In the West
Mary Angela Douglas: The larks cry out and not with music.
Cristina Sanchez Lopez: Have you heard strings? They seem like hearts that don’t want to forget themselves.
Emily Kendal Frey–How can you love people without them feeling accused?
Ada Limón–just clouds—disorderly, and marvelous and ours.
In the East
Lori Desrosiers–I wish you were just you in my dreams.
Joie Bose–Isn’t that love even if it answers not to the heart or heat but to the moment, to make it complete?
Kushal Poddar–Your fingers are alight. Their blazing forest burns towards me.
Stephen Cole–Where every thing hangs on the possibility of understanding and time, thin as shadows, arrives before your coming.
In the South
Nalini Priyadarshni–Denial won’t redeem you or make you less vulnerable. My unwavering love just may.
Chumki Sharma–After every rain I leave the place for something called home.
Joe Green–I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
There are times when lines collide and comment on each other wonderfully, like in this battle between American poet Jorie Graham (Iowa, Harvard) and Indian poet, novelist, and musician, Jeet Thayil.
Graham has been a force (and a controversy) in American poetry since the early 1980s—when this line was published:
A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls.
The line from Thayil is more recent, but do we care when a line was written?
There are no accidents. There is only God.
These two lines strike different parts of our brains, with equal pleasure.
The inner eye of our senses registers the rooster and the mist and the walls.
Our speculative faculty ponders what it means to say there are no accidents—there is only God.
The order in which elements arrive in a line of poetry make a subtle difference in how we feel about it.
Why is there a sublime feeling of distance in the Graham line? Because we travel in the line from the rooster—to its crowing—to its crowing all day—to the mist—to outside—to outside the walls.
Graham is not a formalist; but this, her best line, is a perfect alexandrine—6 iambics, one more than in the common iambic pentameter—and this stately meter contributes to the line’s sublimity.
The sublimity of Jorie Graham’s line is no accident.
Let’s change the sequence of the line, keeping all its parts, all its elements the same, and see what happens.
Outside the walls, All day, from mist, A rooster crows.
Just by changing the order, it now sounds like a haiku, with a homely, intimate, “Eastern” feel, rather than a poignant, majestic, “Western” one. (And it’s still iambic.)
Change the order of the other line and:
There is only God. There are no accidents.
Somehow this now sounds less certain, more dubious, and almost invites the reply: what do you mean there are no accidents?
The line make more sense when God follows accidents; for accidents can seem to exist when they happen, and then only afterwards—we feel, ahh! that was meant to be. In order for the line to have force, it must be in the order Thayil presented it—with God at the end.
And now, Marla, let us walk outside these walls and discuss which one of these lines finally ought to win at last.
Marla Muse: It is a pleasant evening. Yes, let us go.
It is becoming more and more apparent to Americans—who, for all their worldly clout and influence, have recently become fixated on their Writing Program careers—that, holy cow!, there is something happening on the other side of the globe, in India, where totally mad people prepare for bed just when they should be waking up—don’t these people know how crazy that is? Well, give them a little credit: in India right now they are writing poems in English in the great Romantic Tradition, and, despite not attending writing programs, and despite their odd sleeping habits, poets from India are, at this very moment, writing better poetry than Americans—with the exception of Ben Mazer, who is a living Romantic Tradition unto himself: pilgrimages should be made to Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA—near Harvard Square.
Philip Nikolayev, an American, Harvard-educated poet, originally from Russia, had the good sense to go to India, and, to make a long story short, social media has led Scarriet to a world of heartbreak and beauty in which poetry exists as sweetly and commonly as a scent of perfume or a right arm.
In America, poets study at Writing Programs.
These costly one-year or two-year programs essentially teach the student of poetry one thing: Do not write like Keats—sound, in your writing, as different from Keats as possible, and this will guarantee that you will sound contemporary, and sound like yourself, because, after all, you are not Keats, and this is a good thing, since Keats is in the ground! We cannot tell you how to sound, for that is too complicated, given that poetry can sound like absolutely anything, it being defined by nothing, and so we cannot teach that; all we can do is make sure you don’t sound like Elizabeth Barrett Browning or Edna Millay. They are dead! Dead! Be a student of English literature if you want to sound like the dead. And, by the way, did we tell you the field of study at one time called the English Major is also dead? Good. Talk amongst yourselves, students, and commence writing! And just remember, I, with my degree from one of the most distinguished writing programs in the world, will be watching, to make sure you do not ever write like Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Or anyone with three names! Horrors! Better to be known simply as Trudy. Or Billy. Or Sam. And write. poetry. like. this.
Laura Kasischke is a writing program graduate, and yet has still managed to distinguish herself as a poet of wonderful ability: she is known to write complete, comprehensible, sentences on comprehensible topics. This may be due to the fact, however, that she is also a successful novelist.
Her champion is Stephen Burt, a rising poetry critic star who teaches with Jorie Graham at Harvard; Burt broke into the big time with a damning piece in the Boston Globe on Foetry.com, Alan Cordle’s website which exposed systemic poetry contest cheating and reputation puffing in academic American poetry. It was fun, enlightening, painful (for people like Graham) depending on where you were on the map of poetry reputation. Everyone, due to Foetry.com’s influence, which was quite extensive, is sadder—but wiser. Wisdom has quietly turned to joy—and one can see it in Scarriet’s “To Sir With Love” exuberance. Burt has edited an anthology of sonnets—the tacit assumption that sonnets were once written can be made with impunity once in a while, if a publisher is willing to suffer a material, if not a spiritual, loss.
Kasischke had one of the better poems in the latest (2015) Best American Poetry, Sherman Alexie, guest editor (The BAP Series has been edited by David Lehman since 1988) and we found her best line there:
but this time I was beside you…I was there.
Affection produced in prose language can, by its directness and homeliness, be extremely touching. Poetry can be iconic, but that doesn’t mean prose cannot occasionally outdo poetry by being more affectionate in its plainess. Prose may sometimes catch us off guard by smelling sweeter than poetry. This confuses the poets, who then proceed to drown themselves in the sea which the plain talkers successfully sail. Kasischke, we might entertain for a paranoid moment, might owe her success to this anti-poetry phenomenon.
Any language we do not understand sounds poetic to our helpless ears; as we come to understanding we come away from poetry, and by this formula the more purely prosaic we sound the more we understand and what we understand is the falsity of the one we once loved, dear poetry, the one who seduced us in a castle about 200 years ago in a frilly shirt—and now must die.
One solution to not sound prosaic and not sound 19th-century either, as a poet, is surrealism.
Kushal Poddar, from Calcutta, a self-taught genius, Kasischke’s opponent, writes very exciting poetry in a pyrotechnical inventiveness that fits the short, lyrical form to the unusual image—he never has a red wheel barrow in his poetic landscape unless that wheel barrow is fully on fire, and that is how he expresses his passions and his desires. Here is his line:
Your fingers are alight. Their blazing forest burns towards me.
Poddar, like a true poet, suggests as much as he presents—the shadows produced by his mind are as lovely as the flames. We think him one of the better poets in the world writing in English, and one more reason to visit Calcutta—if you can get your head out of your résumé.
So which will win? The plain-speaking or the fire?
Marla: Of course! A sudden death playoff within four brackets. The winner of each bracket makes it to the Final Four, and then a champ is crowned!
Scarriet: We have 64 living poets, represented by their best lines of poetry—and these lines will compete for the top prize.
Marla: Exciting! To be sad, to be happy, or intrigued, or fall into a reverie—from a single line! Only the best poets can do that to you! Are all of these exceptional poets?
Scarriet: Of course they are. The New Wave of Calcutta poetry is represented; poets who have won prizes recently; poets published in the latest BAP; some fugitive poets; and we’ve included a few older lines from well-known poets to populate the top seeds, for a little historical perspective.
Marla: A famous line of poetry! It seems impossible to do these days.
Scarriet: There are more poets today. And no one is really famous. Some say there are too many poets.
Marla: Marjorie Perloff!
Scarriet: Maybe she’s right.
Marla: Enough of this. Let’s see the brackets! The poets! The lines!
Scarriet: Here they are:
NORTH BRACKET
Donald Hall–To grow old is to lose everything.
Jorie Graham–A rooster crows all day from mist outside the walls.
Mary Oliver–You do not have to be good.
Anne Carson—don’t keep saying you don’t hear it too.
Robert Haas–So the first dignity, it turns out, is to get the spelling right.
Maura Stanton–Who made me feel by feeling nothing.
Sean O’Brien–‘People’ tell us nowadays these views are terribly unfair, but these forgiving ‘people’ aren’t the ‘people’ who were there.
Warsan Shire–I have my mother’s mouth and my father’s eyes—on my face they are still together.
Ben Mazer–All is urgent, just because it gives, and in the mirror, life to life life gives.
Melissa Green–They’ve mown the summer meadow.
Peter Gizzi–No it isn’t amazing, no none of that.
Traci Brimhall–I broke a shell to keep it from crying out for the sea.
Molly Brodak–boundlessness secretly exists, I hear.
Charles Hayes–Her sweaty driver knows his load is fair.
Jeet Thayil–There are no accidents. There is only God.
Jennifer Moxley–How lovely it is not to go. To suddenly take ill.
WEST BRACKET
Louise Gluck–The night so eager to accommodate strange perceptions.
A.E. Stallings–The woes were words, and the only thing left was quiet.
Patricia Lockwood–How will Over Niagara Falls In A Barrel marry Across Niagara Falls On A Tightrope?
Kevin Young–I want to be doused in cheese and fried.
Ross Gay–One never knows does one how one comes to be.
Andrew Kozma–What lies we tell. I love the living, and you, the dead.
Denise Duhamel–it’s easy to feel unbeautiful when you have unmet desires
Sarah Howe–the razory arms of a juniper rattling crazily at the edge of that endless reddening haze.
Emily Kendal Frey–How can you love people without them feeling accused?
Cristina Sánchez López–Have you heard strings? They seem like hearts that don’t want to forget themselves.
Natalie Scenters-Zapico–apartments that feel like they are by the sea, but out the window there is only freeway
Donna Masini–Even sex is no exit. Ah, you exist.
Meredith Haseman–The female cuckoo bird does not settle down with a mate. Now we make her come out of a clock.
Candace G. Wiley–My dear black Barbie, maybe you needed a grandma to tell you things are better than they used to be.
Ada Limón–just clouds—disorderly, and marvelous and ours.
Mary Angela Douglas–The larks cry out and not with music.
EAST BRACKET
Marilyn Hacker–You happened to me.
Charles Simic–I could have run into the streets naked, confident anyone I met would understand.
Laura Kasischke–but this time I was beside you…I was there.
Michael Tyrell–how much beauty comes from never saying no?
Susan Terris–Cut corners fit in marry someone.
Chana Bloch–the potter may have broken the cup just so he could mend it.
Raphael Rubinstein–Every poet thinks about every line being read by someone else.
Willie Perdomo–I go up in smoke and come down in a nod.
Tim Seibles–That instant when eyes meet and slide away—even love blinks, looks off like a stranger.
Lori Desrosiers–I wish you were just you in my dreams.
Philip Nikolayev–I wept like a whale. You had changed my chemical composition forever.
Stephen Sturgeon–City buses are crashing and I can’t hear Murray Perahia.
Joie Bose–Isn’t that love even if it answers not to the heart or heat but to the moment, to make it complete?
Kushal Poddar–Your fingers are alight. Their blazing forest burns towards me.
Marilyn Chin–It’s not that you are rare, nor are you extraordinary, O lone wren sobbing on the bodhi tree.
Stephen Cole–Where every thing hangs on the possibility of understanding and time, thin as shadows, arrives before your coming.
SOUTH BRACKET
W.S. Merwin–you know there was never a name for that color
Richard Wilbur–not vague, not lonely, not governed by me only
Terrance Hayes–Let us imagine the servant ordered down on all fours.
Claudia Rankine–How difficult is it for one body to see injustice wheeled at another?
Richard Blanco–One sky, toward which we sometimes lift our eyes tired from work.
Brenda Hillman–Talking flames get rid of hell.
Les Murray–Everything except language knows the meaning of existence.
Susan Wood–The simple fact is very plain. They want the bitterness to remain.
Lawrence Raab–nothing truly seen until later.
Joe Green–I’m tired. Don’t even ask me about the gods.
Lynn Hejinian–You spill the sugar when you lift the spoon.
Connie Voisine–The oleanders are blooming and heavy with hummingbirds
Rowan Ricardo Phillips–It does not not get you quite wrong.
Chumki Sharma–After every rain I leave the place for something called home.
Nalini Priyadarshni–Denial won’t redeem you or make you less vulnerable. My unwavering love just may.
1. Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and valleys, dales and field, And all the craggy mountains yield. (Marlowe)
2. Every Night and every Morn Some to Misery are born. Every Morn and every Night Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to sweet delight, Some are born to endless night. (Blake)
3. Last night, ah, yesternight, betwixt her lips and mine There fell thy shadow, Cynara! thy breath was shed Upon my soul between the kisses and the wine; And I was desolate and sick of an old passion, Yea, I was desolate and bowed my head: I have been faithful to thee, Cynara! in my fashion. (Dowson)
4. April is the cruelest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. (Eliot)
5. No motion has she now, no force; She neither hears nor sees; Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course, With rocks, and stones and trees. (Wordsworth)
6. If the red slayer think he slays, Or if the slain think he is slain, They know not well the subtle ways I keep, and pass, and turn again. (Emerson)
7. The sea is calm tonight, The tide is full, the moon lies fair Upon the straits;—on the French coast the light Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. (Arnold)
8. When I am dead and over me bright April Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, Though you should lean above me broken-hearted, I shall not care. (Teasdale)
9. The soul selects her own society, Then shuts the door; On her divine majority Obtrude no more. (Dickinson)
10. We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile. (Dunbar)
11. This is the waking landscape Dream after dream walking away through it Invisible invisible invisible (Merwin)
12. I made a model of you, A man in black with a Meinkampf look And a love of the rack and the screw, And I said I do, I do. (Plath)
13. It is easy to be young. (Everybody is, at first.) It is not easy to be old. It takes time. Youth is given; age is achieved. (May Swenson)
14. There is no disorder but the heart’s. But if love goes leaking outward, if shrubs take up its monstrous stalking, all greenery is spurred, the snapping lips are overgrown, and over oaks red hearts hang like the sun. (Mona Von Duyn)
15. Long life our two resemblances devise, And for a thousand years when we have gone Posterity will find my woe, your beauty Matched, and know my loving you was wise. (Michelangelo)
16. Caesar’s double-bed is warm As an unimportant clerk Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK On a pink official form. (Auden)
BRACKET TWO
1. Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds Or bends with the remover to remove. (Shakespeare)
2. In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. (Coleridge)
3. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of Being and ideal Grace. (Barrett)
4. Say to the Court, it glows And shines like rotten wood; Say to the Church, it shows What’s good, and doth no good: If Church and Court reply, Then give them both the lie. (Raleigh)
5. Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicaean barks of yore, That gently o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, wayworn wanderer bore To his own native shore. (Poe)
6. Some for the Glories of This World; and some Sigh for the Prophet’s Paradise to come; Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go, Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum! (Omar Khayyam)
7. Yet it creates, transcending these, Far other worlds and other seas; Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade. (Marvell)
8. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (Gray)
9. O hark, O hear! how thin and clear, And thinner, clearer, farther going! O, sweet and far from cliff and scar The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying, Blow bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying. (Tennyson)
10. I have a rendezvous with Death, At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air. (Seeger)
11. I have put my days and dreams out of mind, Days that are over, dreams that are done. Though we seek life through, we shall surely find There is none of them clear to us now, not one. (Swinburne)
12. When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d, And the great star early droop’d in the western sky in the night, I mourn’d, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. (Whitman)
13. O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms, Alone and palely loitering? The sedge has withered from the lake, And no birds sing. (Keats)
14. Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village, though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow. (Frost)
15. If her horny feet protrude, they come To show how cold she is, and dumb. Let the lamp affix its beam. The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. (Stevens)
16. I was, being human, born alone; I am, being a woman, hard beset; I live by squeezing from a stone The little nourishment I get. (Wylie)
BRACKET THREE
1. The world was all before them, where to choose Their place of rest, and Providence their guide: They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow Through Eden took their solitary way. (Milton)
2. Though the night was made for loving, And the day returns too soon, Yet we’ll go no more a roving By the light of the moon. (Byron)
3. I arise from dreams of thee In the first sweet sleep of night, When the winds are breathing low, And the stars are shining bright. (Shelley)
4. What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons. (Owen)
5. We have heard the music, tasted the drinks, and looked at colored houses. What more is there to do, except to stay? And that we cannot do. And as a last breeze freshens the top of the weathered old tower, I turn my gaze Back to the instruction manual which has made me dream of Guadalajara. (Ashbery)
6. Soldiers are sworn to action; they must win Some flaming, fatal climax with their lives. Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin They think of firelit homes, clean beds and wives. (Sassoon)
7. Why is it no one ever sent me yet One perfect limousine, do you suppose? Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get One perfect rose. (Parker)
8. The shopgirls leave their work quietly. Machines are still, tables and chairs darken. The silent rounds of mice and roaches begin. (Reznikoff)
9. It’s not my business to describe anything. The only report is the discharge of words called to account for their slurs. A seance of sorts—or transport into that nether that refuses measure. (Bernstein)
10. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed. (Rich)
11. When I see a couple of kids And guess he’s fucking her and she’s Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives (Larkin)
12. I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground. So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind: Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned with lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned. (Millay)
13. Those four black girls blown up in that Alabama church remind me of five hundred middle passage blacks in a net, under water in Charlestown harbor so redcoats wouldn’t find them. Can’t find what you can’t see can you? (Harper)
14. It’s good to be neuter. I want to have meaningless legs. There are things unbearable. One can evade them a long time. Then you die. (Carson).
15. On my way to bringing you the leotard you forgot to include in your overnight bag, the snow started coming down harder. I watched each gathering of leafy flakes melt round my footfall. I looked up into it—late afternoon but bright. Nothing true or false in itself. (Graham)
16. The rape joke is that you were 19 years old. The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend. The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee. Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. (Lockwood)
BRACKET FOUR
1. Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending, the wanderer, harried for years on end, after he plundered the stronghold on the proud height of Troy. (Homer)
2. And following its path, we took no care To rest, but climbed, he first, then I—so far, through a round aperture I saw appear Some of the beautiful things that heaven bears, Where we came forth, and once more saw the stars. (Dante)
3. With usura, sin against nature, is thy bread ever more of stale rags is thy bread dry as paper, with no mountain wheat, no strong flour with usura the line grows thick with usura is no clear demarcation and no man can find site for his dwelling. Stonecutter is kept from his stone weaver is kept from his loom WITH USURA (Pound)
4. 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. (Chin)
5. Dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind. (Sexton)
6. I loved you; and the hopelessness I knew, The jealousy, the shyness—though in vain—Made up a love so tender and so true As God may grant you to be loved again. (Pushkin)
7. We cannot know his legendary head And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze is turned down low, burst like a star: for here there is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. (Rilke)
8. So much depends on the red wheel barrow glazed with rain water besides the white chickens. (Williams)
9. I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night. (Ginsberg)
10. The Walrus and the Carpenter Walked on a mile or so, And then they rested on a rock Conveniently low: And all the little Oysters stood And waited in a row. (Carroll)
11. What dire offense from amorous causes springs, What mighty contests rise from trivial things; Slight is the subject, but not so the praise, If she inspire, and he approve my lays. (Pope)
12. Harpo was also, know this, Paul Revere. And Frankenstein, and Dracula, and Jane. Or would you say that I have gone insane? What would you do, then, to even the score? (Mazer)
13. Come, read to me a poem, Some simple and heartfelt lay, That shall soothe this restless feeling, And banish the thoughts of day. (Longfellow)
14. So Penelope took the hand of Odysseus, not to hold him back but to impress this peace on his memory: from this point on, the silence through which you move is my voice pursuing you. (Gluck)
15. Death, be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so: From rest and sleep, which but thy pictures be, Much pleasure; then from thee much more must flow. (Donne)
16. I lost two cities, lovely ones. And vaster, Some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent. I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster. The art of losing isn’t hard to master. (Bishop)
17. Practice your beauty, blue girls, before it fail; And I will cry with my loud lips and publish Beauty which all our power will never establish, It is so frail. (Ransom)
Collecting is where material pride, wisdom and love uneasily sit, an endless pursuit which moves product, an endless boon to any enterprise. To collect is to amass, to buy, to own, to bring into one’s circle the niceties of some industry for one’s own comfort and inspection. The collectable items should be unique, if not numerous, and if not unique, at least very rare. Collecting is to break off pieces of some whole, but the item, when found, bought, discovered, possessed, is a shining whole to the collector, and compared to it, the universe is a sad jumble—such is the profundity of collecting.
Poetry anthologies spread wealth; poetry is centrifugal; it scatters itself outward freely. Except where it overlaps with the ‘rare book collector,’ poetry, despite its fecundity, is not collectable; collecting is centripetal; it waits in vaults and rooms crowded with unique paintings, coins, and cars. To know coins, one must darken them in one’s palm; to know poetry, one merely glimpses what every other person glimpses.
The following list is not a rare book list; increasingly, great old poetry, important translated poetry, and all sorts of rare poetry, simply lives on the internet.
This, in many ways, is a perfectly centrifugal list, readily available to whatever soul—no matter how mysterious, no matter how centripetal, no matter how hidden, no matter how curious—happens to want it.
Poetry is against collecting. Poetry doesn’t hoard; you can be deeply poetic for free.
These are books you could own, or read, or memorize, or teach, or learn, and probably already have.
Good translations are necessary, but impossible. Old poems are necessary, but impossible. Good, new poetry is necessary, but impossible.
The list below is mundane, but necessary. This—mostly from the top of the list—is what you read if you want to know poetry.
It is everywhere, but it still must hit you.
1. SHAKESPEARE SONNETS, AUDEN INTRODUCTION Modern poetry begins here. A definite sequence: 1-14 children as immortality, 15-28 poems as immortality, etc.
2.POE: POETRY, TALES, AND SELECTED ESSAYS(LIBRARY OF AMERICA) Iconic poems, tales of poetic quality, even criticism of poetic quality
3.VIKING BOOK OF POETRY OF THE ENGLISH SPEAKING WORLD, RICHARD ALDINGTON H.D.’s husband, got Eliot out of the bank, solid anthology by this Brit wounded in WW I who knew all the Modernists and hated most of them (375 poets)
4.PLATO: THE COLLECTED DIALOGUES, BOLLINGEN SERIES, EDITH HAMILTON, EDPoetry being born
5. THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE, COMPLETE WORKSWith Shakespeare the best is just to read, and forget all the notes
6.THE DIVINE COMEDY, DANTE, JOHN D. SINCLAIR, TRANSLATOR (OXFORD U. PRESS) Verse translation hopeless; take the prose Sinclair with Italian on the facing page
7. THE ILIAD OF HOMER TRANSLATED BY ALEXANDER POPE(PENGUIN) The king of men his reverent priest defied/And for the king’s offense the people died
8. THE ODYSSEY OF HOMER TRANSLATED INTO ENGLISH VERSE BY ALEXANDER POPE(MACMILLAN, 1911) The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d/Long exercised in woes, O Muse! resound
9.EDNA MILLAY COLLECTED, NORMA MILLAY (HARPER) Tragically undervalued as Modernism came into vogue, Millay’s Collected is a must
10. PHILIP LARKIN THE COMPLETE POEMS, ARCHIE BURNETT recently published master of the short lyric
11. LYRICAL BALLADS, WORDSWORTH, COLERIDGEA shame Coleridge didn’t contribute more
12. WASTELAND AND OTHER POEMS, T.S. ELIOTThe one Modernist who could really write poetry (and prose).
13. LEAVES OF GRASS, WHITMAN(1855 EDITION) The first edition, before it got too long-winded
14. THE COMPLETE POEMS OF JOHN MILTON WRITTEN IN ENGLISH (HARVARD CLASSICS) You can’t go wrong with melodious Milton
15. UNDERSTANDING POETRY, BROOKS AND WARREN Textbooks are propaganda—this most used anthology in the 20th c. attacked Poe and elevated Pound/Williams
16. SELECTED POETRY & LETTERS, BYRON, EDWARD BOSTETTER, ED Byron was very, very unhappy
17. POCKET BOOK OF MODERN VERSE, OSCAR WILLIAMS (1954) Okay. Some of modern verse is good
18. A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS, AN INTRODUCTORY ANTHOLOGY, CZESLAW MILOSZ International poetry collections are good things
19. SELECTED POEMS AND TWO PLAYS, WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, ROSENTHAL, ED Yeats benefits from Selected as opposed to Collected
20.OVID, THE LOVE POEMS, A.D. MELVILLE, ED. And you can really learn something, lovers
21. THE BEST LOVED POEMS OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE, HAZEL FELLEMANBecause these uncritical anthologies always have some gems
22. ROBERT BROWNING, THE POEMS, PETTIGREW, ED. 2 VOLS Because it’s Robert Browning
23. A NEW ANTHOLOGY OF MODERN POETRY, SELDEN RODMAN (1938) Great snapshot of poetry in the 1930s: lots of ballads of political anguish
24. 100 GREAT POEMS OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, MARK STRAND, ED. A very nice selection from a poet whose reputation is fading
25.POETRY OF WITNESS: THE TRADITION IN ENGLISH 1500-2001, CAROLYN FORCHE, DUNCAN WU, EDS Poetry handles real horror
26. BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1988, LEHMAN, SERIES ED. ASHBERY, GUEST ED. The first volume in the series may be the best
27. ARIEL, SYLVIA PLATH A whirlwind of rhyme and rage
28. PABLO NERUDA, TWENTY LOVE SONGS AND A SONG OF DESPAIR, DUAL-LANGUAGE EDITION(PENGUIN) Neruda may get you laid
29. GREAT POEMS BY AMERICAN WOMEN: AN ANTHOLOGY, SUSAN RATTINER(DOVER) Women once had a higher standing as poets
30. OXFORD BOOK OF LIGHT VERSE, W.H. AUDEN, EDITOR Who said light verse was light?
31. PALGRAVE’S GOLDEN TREASURY, FRANCIS TURNER PALGRAVE (1861) Look out! Right-wing poetry!
32.LIBRARY OF WORLD POETRY, WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT Worth a peek
33.100 POEMS FROM THE JAPANESE, KENNETH REXROTH blossoms and other stuff
34. BLACK POETS OF THE UNITED STATES: FROM PAUL LAURENCE DUNBAR TO LANGSTON HUGHES, JEAN WAGNER Before rap
35. THE OXFORD BOOK OF NARRATIVE VERSE, PETER OPIE A narrative poem does not exist?
36. A BOY’S WILL, ROBERT FROST His first book, published in England while the 40 year old poet made contacts there
37. THE NEW AMERICAN POETRY 1945-1960, DONALD ALLEN Dawn of the post-war avant-garde
38. BEST AMERICAN POETRY 1990, LEHMAN SERIES EDITOR, JORIE GRAHAM, GUEST EDITOR Has that wonderful poem by Kinnell…
39. FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY, JON SILKIN, EDITOR While being slaughtered, they wrote
40. SPANISH POETRY: A DUAL LANGUAGE ANTHOLOGY 16TH-20TH CENTURIES, ANGEL FLORES Dual Languages are a must, really
41. THE HERITAGE OF RUSSIAN VERSE, DIMITRI OBOLENSKY “From The Ends To The Beginning A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse” is available on-line
42. BEST AMERICAN POETRY 2007, LEHMAN, SERIES EDITOR, MCHUGH, GUEST EDITOR One of the best volumes in the series
43. POETS TRANSLATE POETS, A HUDSON REVIEW ANTHOLOGY, PAULA DIETZ, ED. Nice historical sweep…
44. ART AND ARTISTS: POEMS, EMILY FRAGOS (EVERYMAN POCKET LIBRARY)Art really meets poetry; lovely poems
45. W.H. AUDEN COLLECTED POEMS Best poet of the 20th century; slighted by anthologies
46. POEMS 1965-1975 SEAMUS HEANEYNever quite made it to major status
47. POEMS BEWITCHED AND HAUNTED, JOHN HOLLANDER, ED (EVERYMAN’S POCKET LIBRARY) Some really darling pieces here
48. COMPLETE POEMS OF KEATS AND SHELLEY(MODERN LIBRARY) The two best—the best, the best
49. THE 20TH CENTURY IN POETRY, HULSE, RAE, EDS (PEGASUS BOOKS) Wonderful idea: poems in close chronology throughout the century
50. VITA NOVA, DANTE, MARK MUSA, TRANSLATOR (OXFORD) A great book for so many reasons
51. CHAUCER: THE CANTERBURY TALES (PENGUIN) father of English literature, we hear
52. HYPERION; BALLADS & OTHER POEMS, LONGFELLOW (1841) “Hyperion” is a very modern poem…
53. THE RAG AND BONE SHOP OF THE HEART: A POETRY ANTHOLOGY, ROBERT BLY, EDITOR A lot of Rumi and Neruda
54. WORLD POETRY: AN ANTHOLOGY OF VERSE FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT, WASHBURN, MAJOR, FADIMAN, EDSThe translations are terrible, the selections are generally weak, but kudos for the attempt
55. LESFLEUR DU MAL, BAUDELAIRE Ah…Baudelaire!
56. VICTORIAN WOMEN POETS: AN ANTHOLOGY, LEIGHTON, REYNOLDS, EDS (BLACKWELL) That backwards era when women poets sold better than their male counterparts
57. IMMORTAL POEMS OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE, OSCAR WILLIAMS Solid overview (150 poets) without too much emphasis on annoying moderns
58. ALEXANDER POPE, SELECTED (OXFORD POETRY LIBRARY) You could do worse than his verse
59. A TREASURY OF GREAT POEMS, LOUIS UNTERMEYERAlmost 2OO poets
60. AMERICAN POETRY: THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, HOLLANDER, ED, LIBRARY OF AMERICA A good look around at two centuries ago
61. ANEID, VIRGIL, ROBERT FITZGERALD, TRANSLATOR Poet of the silver age…
62. THE POETICAL WORKS OF ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING, RUTH M. ADAMS INTRO She was the famous poet when Robert met her
63. THE ESSENTIAL RUMI, COLEMAN BARKS, ED Passion pushed to the limit of wisdom
64. EUGENE ONEGIN BY ALEXANDER PUSHKIN, STANLEY MITCHELL (PENGUIN) The most modern of all epics
65. DYLAN THOMAS, COLLECTED, PAUL MULDOON, INTRO Too drunk to write many poems; this may be good or bad
66. POETRY OF DEREK WALCOTT 1948-2013, SELECTED BY GLYN MAXWELL Between obligation and pleasure, we read…
67. BRITISH POETRY SINCE 1945, EWARD LUCIE-SMITH. The poor modern Brits, neither old nor quite modern
68. THE PALM AT THE END OF THE MIND, WALLACE STEVENS, SELECTED POEMS & A PLAY Pretentious rot, but fun
69. ROBERT LOWELL, COLLECTED Most overrated poet of the 20th century, but has his moments
70 AMERICAN PRIMITIVE, MARY OLIVER Our little Wordsworth
71. GORGEOUS NOTHINGS, EMILY DICKINSON, WERNER, BERRIN, EDS (NEW DIRECTIONS) A really bizarre document
72. ELIZABETH BISHOP, POEMS (FSG) Another one of those poets who wrote few, but good, poems
73. A CHOICE OF ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY, STEPHEN SPENDER(DIAL PRESS) Rare, if you can track it down…(it’s at the Grolier in Hvd Sq)
74. CHIEF MODERN POETS OF BRITAIN AND AMERICA, 5th Edition, SANDERS, NELSON, ROSENTHAL Can’t get enough of those chief poets
75. NEW AMERICAN POETS OF THE 80s, MYERS & WEINGARTEN Look back into the recent, recent past
“In speaking of the Poetic Principle, I have no design to be either thorough or profound.” —Edgar Poe
Last Friday evening at the Grolier poetry bookshop, Robert Archambeau, Stephen Burt, and Ben Mazer each read a paper on ‘Poetry: What’s Next?’ Wise man Henry Gould, up from RI, was in the audience, as was Philip Nikolayev, extraordinary poet and translator. Scarriet, fortunate the Grolier is in our own backyard, attended out of mere curiosity and a certain low motive pertaining to literary friendship.
Archambeau, Burt, and Mazer are powerhouses of Letters: they are scholars and authors we need to know about.
Mazer is a scowler; Archambeau, a smiler; and Burt simply harangues, mouth perpetually open. But do not be fooled by these superficial observations, which we make with affection; all three, when one moves into their personal orbit, are as sweet as can be, civilized by poetry in that conspiracy which outsiders must feel is the purpose of poetry: to strive to make manners and politeness supreme. Those educated by Letters are nice. The poet with low morals belongs to another era, and something tells us the lacking morals part was always a myth. With poets, a handshake is never a handshake; or it may be one, or less of one, or more of one, and one never knows this, and that is the whole point, and the joy, or the despair, of the poet and their poetry. But they do, finally, shake hands like everyone else, even the most philosophical of them.
But to the presentation itself: the three papers stuck to poetry, and thus were not about poetry.
To properly discuss a thing, one must discuss its parts. The parts, however, because they are parts, do not resemble the thing, and discussing parts is to stray from the thing, like being in the ocean away from the island (it can be scary), and none of the speakers, as witty as they were, had the intellectual courage to do this. They were all very much aware that they were to speak on poetry—poetry as it is always generally discussed by their contemporaries, and this is what they did.
Or at least Mazer and Burt did so.
Archambeau pointed out the post-modern marketing phenomenon of naming an electronic device a Blackberry, saying this was an act of Symbolist Poetry, and here this author and critic, a brilliant man of substance with a shy smile, was, in his cleverness, feeling his way towards the principle.
But alas, the tendency to discuss actual parts, so we might better familiarize ourselves with the actual thing comes up against that which most hinders it: poetry—in this case, Symbolist Poetry, one of many self-contained stars in a modernist firmament with astronomers obsessed with “what’s next?” and leaving “what is it?” to the old-fashioned, like Aristotle, Plato, and Shelley, who knew that “what’s next” cannot be discussed if we don’t wonder “what is it?” and that we should never take the latter for granted.
We are always discussing newly “what is it?”
“What’s next?” belongs only to Modernism’s sleight-of-hand.
But back to Blackberry. Archambeau gave us the wonderful counter-example, “Murphy’s Oil,” the old way of naming before Mallarme’s allusiveness fired up the imagination of the market; yet weren’t they calling baseball teams Giants back in the 19th century?
Archambeau also claimed that in the near future poets were going to rhyme like they had never rhymed before. A rhyme would become like a dare-devil “stunt,” Archambeau happily assured us, quoting some Jay-Z, and as we were swept up in this prophecy of euphoria, we still managed to wonder: where were the edifying examples? What makes a good rhyme and a bad rhyme? For to ask, “what is it?” implies the good: What is good poetry? What is good rhyme? We don’t want the bad, whether it’s behind us or before us.
The three gentlemen unconsciously pursued this course, as well: it was assumed all that was coming was good. Mazer, perhaps, escaped this, for he spoke on what poetry should be, in general; his was more an ought than a prophecy: Burt and Archambeau hewed to ‘this is a particular thing that is actually going to happen if it is not sort of happening already,’ predictions without much daring, saying only: we will see more of this already fully developedtype of poetry.
None seemed conscious of it, but all three, we were rather pleased to hear, struck a concerted blow against the “what’s next?” trope.
Mazer fought the good fight with his scornful, “your avant-garde is not avant-garde.”
Burt, blurting “if I see one more book on Conceptualism or Flarf, I will…refuse to read it!” was another sign that there is a rebellion brewing against the whole blind, played-out, modernist, “what’s next?” syndrome, and a desire to get off the ‘what’s new’ treadmill for a moment.
But what did they say was coming?
We already mentioned that Archambeau sees a revival of rhyme, together with a counter movement of Symbolist “nuance,” and spent the rest of his twenty minutes naming familiar poetries in recent history: the Fireside Poets, featuring Longfellow, and their poetry of “middle class values” (and thus deserving, we assume, oblivion), Gertrude Stein foregrounding language for its own sake, with a ‘poetry only’ sub-culture of magazines and bookstores growing in the wake of poetry detaching itself from middle class values, giving rise to Vanessa Place and Conceptualism, as poetry against middle class values (and capitalism) replaces poetry for middle class values. And then we come full circle as Archambeau reminds us the modernist Frost is a poet of middle class values and really, so are the current poets of the Ethnic, Gender, Racial, Regional, Disability, micro-communities.
Archambeau ended with the epigrammatic observation that ‘what’s next’ is a revival of the past and it is “hard to predict the past.”
It is even harder to say what the past is, and what poetry is. This we did not get. “Rhyme” and “middle class values” satisfy a superficial hunger; the salted popcorn we eat forever without getting close to what poetry is, exactly.
Burt came next, and Burt, who has read more than anyone else, seemed determined to give us not only the forest and the trees, but a command to protect both: the big thing on the horizon for Burt is a big thing: poems of “area study,” which are “reported facts of a place,” grounding the poet in geographical reality, and one has to admire the ambition and the practicality, not to mention the many neo-classical, Romantic, and Modernist precedents. Williams’ Patterson and Olson’s Gloucester, as Burt quickly concedes, may fail in the “elegance and concision” departments, but what better way to talk about Climate Change?
Burt, a Harvard professor, pays homage, consciously, or not, to his institution’s illustrious poetic tradition: Emerson through Jorie Graham (her recent acute concern for the planet is her expansive-lyric trump card) champion America’s and the World’s Wilderness; this was explicit in Burt’s talk: “Area Study” poetry ought not to be “a cultural center,” Burt warned, like “Brooklyn or San Francisco;” a poet like Ammons should record planetary destruction where the public might not notice.
The other vital development for Burt will be poetry that, unlike “Area Study,” does embrace “ornament,” in poetry that is “uselessly beautiful.” And again, Stephen Burt makes sure his political sensitivity is on display: women are doing this kind of poetry, he tells us.
Burt is mad for the Eternal Feminine, embracing the earth in Area Study and, in his counter trend, women’s work that is “elaborate without worrying about the past,” and “not efficient or war-like.” This is the passive, receptive Muse of Shelley; this is Archambeau’s New Rhyme movement, but Burt is completely female, and so no dead white male “revivalist” interest is allowed; he mentions Angie Estes, “not a New Formalist of the 80s” and quotes her in perhaps the best example offered in an evening with few examples: “scent of a sentence which is ready to speak.” Note the absence of rhyme’s muscle, and instead the liquid alliteration.
Burt is ready for the pastoral and the pretty, the rustic and the raw. Burt is the female sprawl to Archambeau’s male all. Burt cannot abide the gallery and its Conceptual, urbane cleverness and really seems to want to leave the past behind; the closest he comes to cultural centrality is a nod to what he sees as a “smarter performance poetry” on the horizon, a “de-centered, tweetable, slam poetry, far from the literary past.” The poets Burt cites in this third movement are women, too: Ariana Reines, Patricia Lockwood, and Daniella Pafunda.
Mazer followed, and he was the rock rising above the fire and the water, rather glum compared to the first two, arguing for abiding truths like “empathic imagination” and “divine oracularity,” quoting early 20th century figures not to signal revolutionary beginnings, but to eulogize trends fizzling out in the “de-radicalization” and ahistorical “creative writing boon” and “awards” obsessed present. Mazer was playing the real poet in the room, intoning a dark warning to the glib critics. He did not mention any contemporary poets. Archambeau pointed to the fire in the sky, Burt showed us the chuckling streams hidden around the mountain. Mazer, by implication, was the mountain.
No one spoke on the anthology; and what possible role that would play in the future of poetry.
There were a few questions from the audience afterwards: Henry Gould wondered about the Balkanization of poetry; obsessed with movements and trends, aren’t we watering down what should be a poetry of the best combination of all possible parts?
Gould is right, of course. If Burt, for instance, is unwilling to clear a space where even Global Warming Deniers can participate, then, rightly or wrongly, the whole thing is finally about Global Warming, not poetry.
Poetry should have one, and only one, political rule: inclusivity. The inclusivity should be radical; that is, we should all be includedright now; a participatory government may say: your candidate lost—work, work, work, and come back in four years; poetry is more inclusive, still. No subject gets special treatment in poetry. Will certain political beliefs lend themselves better to the poetic enterprise? Perhaps. But we need to find out only when the example is before us, and cooly examined.
We have a feeling only Mazer, standing aloof from contemporary clamor, would really judge a new poem solely on its poetic merit. Brilliant Burt and artful Archambeau, immersed as they are in pluralistic poetics, would pigeon-hole first, and then judge. This we feel, even as we confess to being more entertained by Burt and Archambeau’s presentations.
Lyric poetry was born from graffiti of Classical Greece.
Lyric poetry was spawned by the epigram, and concision, the memorable, the august, the mournful, inhabited the lyric soul by necessity, due in large part to the physical atmosphere surrounding the funerary monuments upon which epigrams were inscribed.
Ekphrasis lives in the epigram: its meaning, ‘to write on,’ to physically inscribe, chimes with ‘to write on (about) someone or something. The surface, as much as the subject, determines its source.
A rhyme, a couplet, is a great way to be brief and memorable:
Go tell the Spartans, passerby,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Inscribed on a monument to the Greco-Persian wars by Simonides (b. 556 BC), this is a war poem, just as much as the Iliad is.
Let’s face it: everyone wants to write something that is remembered. You might write an epic, and one line of it is recalled; or you might write one memorable epigram among thousands; in either case it’s an epic task.
But it doesn’t have to rhyme; brevity is all.
Pound’s “make it new,” (1934) a stupid phrase, but one, nonetheless, that became famous, is a mere 9 letters in length, and is beaten out only by the famous, “Odi et amo,” (I hate and love) by Catullus, which is only 8 letters.
Since life is short, a short poem can be successful for that very reason; think of the popular elegiac trope, ‘oh life is short! drink today!’ as symposium and mournfulness mingles.
The Romans brought satire and obscenity to the august Greek epigram, and the Roman poet Martial (40 AD) is known as the “original insult comic:”
Long poems can have unified strength,
But shit, your couplet, Cosconi, has too much length.
This critical spirit, alive to measurement and unity, lived in all eras of poetry, from Ancient to Romantic, until it died in the looseness of the modern era.
Shakespeare’s works are bursting with epigrams:
For as the sun is daily new and old,
So is my love still telling what is told.
One of our favorite epigrams is Pope’s
I am His Highness’ dog at Kew.
Pray tell me sir, whose dog are you?
And William Blake has many wonderful ones:
A truth that’s told with bad intent
Beats all the lies you can invent
The questioner, who sits so sly,
Shall never know how to reply
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They’d immediately go out
Some are born to sweet delight
Some are born to endless night
We are led to believe a lie,
When we see not thro’ the eye
One simply cannot imagine any of these coming from the pen of a Jorie Graham or a John Ashbery.
Coleridge called the epigram a “dwarfish whole.” The idea of the “whole” seems to be what irks the loose and open moderns.
The early 20th century had its wits—Dorothy Parker, J.V. Cunningham, Ogden Nash—but as we move closer to our era, compressed wit and wisdom seems to have eluded our poets.
John Crowe Ransom, another early 20th century writer who attempted to be witty, wrote:
In all the good Greek of Plato
I lack my roast beef and potato.
But like “Make it new” and Williams’ silly wheel barrow, this has no wit whatsoever: Plato was the most lifestyle-conscious, political science, ‘meat-and-potatoes’ philosopher ever, a superficial view of his ‘forms,’ notwithstanding.
Just give us, “Little strokes fell great oaks” by Benjamin Franklin. And writing epigrams of an afternoon, we believe even Scarriet can do better:
Hart Crane was totally insane.
Robert Lowell was a broken bowl.
Sylvia Plath fell victim to wrath.
Delmore Schwartz never wore shorts.
Appearance is all, even in the depths.
Just enough hunger prevents insanity.
Beautiful women are wrong in love and right in everything else.
Boredom is the devil’s only weapon.
Feminism wants one thing: freedom from love.
A woman is pretty until she is loved; then she is beautiful.
A woman is ambitious in love; when she is loved, cautious.
A man is cautious until he is loved; then he’s ambitious.
A man is beautiful when loving; when he is loved, pretty.
We have two choices in life: sleep or poetry.
Death has this advantage: it is the only thing that’s not complex.
There are 3 types of poets: One puts emotion in poems, one leaves it out; the genius does both.
Parent to child, lover to beloved want to be friends—but cannot.
Music exists for one reason: to add body to poetry.
The right context is just a way of saying the wrong context is no context at all.
Public speaking is the art of joking while serious.
Good sex for couples is based on one thing: whether it is before or after dinner.
Desire hopes; love knows.
Love can cool desire as it increases it.
Friendship is love’s runway: smooth on takeoff, rough on landing.
Nature’s not right just because the ingredients on the box are wrong.
Nature wishes to create us and kill us: people tend to do this, too.
Why is life tragic? Nature wants more, humanity, less.
The endless dilemma: guilty for caring too much, guilty for caring too little.
All successful endeavors—moral or not—have one thing in common: the future.
Literature is politics with the politics put tastefully out of sight.
The greatest error the mind makes is thinking truth is for it—and not the heart.
1. Mark Edmundson Current Lightning Rod of Outrage
2. David Lehman BAP Editor now TV star: PBS’ Jewish Broadway
3. Rita Dove She knows Dunbar is better than Oppen
4. Matthew Hollis Profoundly researched Edward Thomas bio
5. Paul Hoover Status quo post-modern anthologist, at Norton
6. Don Share Wins coveted Poetry magazine Editorship
7. Sharon Olds Gets her Pulitzer
8. Michael Robbins The smartest guy writing on contemporary poetry now–see Hoover review
9. Marjorie Perloff Still everyone’s favorite Take-No-Prisoners Dame Avant-Garde
10. Natasha Trethewey Another Round as Laureate
11. Ron Silliman The Avant-garde King
12. Tony Hoagland The Billy Collins of Controversy
13. Billy Collins The real Billy Collins
14. Kenneth Goldsmith Court Jester of Talked-About
15. Terrance Hayes The black man’s Black Man’s Poet?
16. William Logan Favorite Bitch Critic
17. Avis Shivani Second Favorite Bitch Critic
18. John Ashbery Distinguished and Sorrowful Loon
19. Stephen Burt P.C. Throne at Harvard
20. Robert Hass West Coast Establishment Poet
21. Harold Bloom Reminds us ours is an Age of Criticism, not Poetry
22. Helen Vendler She, in the same stultifying manner, reminds us of this, too.
23. Dana Gioia Sane and Optimistic Beacon?
24. Bill Knott An On-line Bulldog of Poignant Common Sense
25. Franz Wright Honest Common Sense with darker tones
26. Henry Gould Another Reasonable Poet’s Voice on the blogosphere
27. Anne Carson The female academic poet we are supposed to take seriously
28. Seth Abramson Will give you a thousand reasons why MFA Poetry is great
29. Ben Mazer Poet of the Poetry! poetry! More Poetry! School who is actually good
30. Larry Witham Author, Picasso and the Chess Player (2013), exposes Modern Art/Poetry cliques
31. Mary Oliver Sells, but under Critical assault
32. Annie Finch The new, smarter Mary Oliver?
33. Robert Pinsky Consensus seems to be he had the best run as Poet Laureate
34. Mark McGurl His book, The Program Era, has quietly had an impact
35. Seamus Heaney Yeats in a minor key
36. W.S. Merwin Against Oil Spills but Ink Spill his writing method
37. George Bilgere Do we need another Billy Collins?
38. Cate Marvin VIDA will change nothing
39. Philip Nikolayev Best living translator?
40. Garrison Keillor As mainstream poetry lover, he deserves credit
41. Frank Bidart Poetry as LIFE RUBBED RAW
42. Jorie Graham The more striving to be relevant, the more she seems to fade
43. Alan Cordle Strange, how this librarian changed poetry with Foetry.com
44. Janet Holmes Ahsahta editor and MFA prof works the po-biz system like no one else
45. Paul Muldoon How easy it is to become a parody of oneself!
46. Cole Swensen Some theories always seem to be missing something
47. Matthew Dickman Was reviewed by William Logan. And lived
48. James Tate For some reason it depressed us to learn he was not a laugh riot in person.
49. Geoffrey Hill His poetry is more important than you are
50. Derek Walcott A great poet, but great poets don’t exist anymore
51. Charles Bernstein A bad poet, but bad poets don’t exist anymore, either
52. Kay Ryan Emily Dickinson she’s not. Maybe Marianne Moore when she’s slightly boring?
53. Laura Kasischke She’s published 8 novels. One became a movie starring Uma Thurman. Who the hell does she think she is?
54. Louise Gluck X-Acto!
55. Rae Armantrout “Quick, before you die, describe the exact shade of this hotel carpet.”
56. Heather McHugh “A coward and a coda share a word.”
57. D.A. Powell “Of course a child. What else might you have lost.”
58. Peter Gizzi Take your lyric and heave
59. Marilyn Chin Shy Iowa student went on to write an iconic 20th century poem: How I Got That Name
60. Eileen Myles Interprets Perloff’s avant-gardism as mourning
61. Lyn Hejinian As I sd to my friend, because I am always blah blah blah
62. Nikki Finney Civil Rights is always hot
63. K. Silem Mohammad This Flarfist Poet composes purely Anagram versions of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Fie on it.
64. Meg Kearney Lectured in public by Franz Wright. Still standing.
65. Noah Eli Gordon Teaches at Boulder, published by Ahsahta
66. Peter Campion A poet, a critic and a scholar!
67. Simon Ortiz Second wave of the Native American Renaissance
68. Maya Angelou She continues to travel the world
69. Lyn Lifshin “Barbie watches TV alone, naked” For real?
70. Ange Mlinko Born in ’69 in Philly, writes for The Nation
71. Jim Behrle They also serve who only write bad poetry
72. Elizabeth Alexander She read in front of all those people
73. Dorothea Lasky The Witchy Romantic School
74. Virgina Bell The poet. Do not confuse with burlesque dancer
75. Fanny Howe Wreaks havoc out of Boston
76. Erin Belieu Available for VIDA interviews
77. Ariana Reines Another member of the witchy romantic school
78. Jed Rasula Old Left poetry critic
79. John Hennessy “Too bad I felt confined by public space/despite her kinky talk, black net and lace”
80. Timothy Donnelly “Driver, please. Let’s slow things down. I can’t endure/the speed you favor, here where the air’s electric”
81. Clive James His translation, in quatrains, of Dante’s Divine Comedy, published this year
82. Danielle Pafunda “We didn’t go anywhere, we went wrong/in our own backyard. We didn’t have a yard,/but we went wrong in the bedroom”
83. Michael Dickman Matthew is better, right?
84. Kit Robinson “Get it first/but first get it right/in the same way it was”
85. Dan Beachy Quick “My wife found the key I hid beneath the fern./My pens she did not touch. She did not touch/The hundred pages I left blank to fill other days”
86. Ilya Kaminsky Teaches at San Diego State, won Yinchuan International Poetry Prize
87. Robert Archambeau Son of a potter, this blog-present poet and critic protested Billy Collins’ appointment to the Poet Laureateship
88. Kent Johnson Best known as a translator
89. Frederick Seidel An extroverted Philip Larkin?
90. David Orr Poetry columnist for New York Times wrote on Foetry.com
91. Richard Wilbur Oldest Rhymer and Moliere translator
92. Kevin Young Finalist in Criticism for National Book Critics Circle
93. Carolyn Forche Human rights activist born in 1950
94. Carol Muske Dukes Former California Laureate writes about poetry for LA Times
95. William Kulik Writes paragraph poems for the masses
96. Daniel Nester The sad awakening of the MFA student to the bullshit
97. Alexandra Petri Began 2013 by calling poetry “obsolete” in Wash Post
98. John Deming Poet, told Petri, “We teach your kids.”
99. C. Dale Young “Medical students then, we had yet to learn/when we could or could not cure”
100. Clayton Eshleman Sometimes the avant-garde is just boring
Anis Shivani might be a bitter guy, but as a literary critic at the Huffington Post he exemplifies the sort of high-brow hating which pleases like a good nerdy fuck.
Let’s say this much of criticism which pummels its subjects: it will always be closer to the truth.
Think about your own life. Really knowing your friends, your lovers, your spouses, your places of unemployment, are you not palpably aware of numerous flaws, faults, stupidities, culpabilities and insanities, and isn’t your intimate experience the reason for this—not because you happen to be mean?
Criticism is—criticism. Why shouldn’t we expect criticism to provide the insights of the inevitable flaws? Sure, there are perfect poems here and there, perhaps a flawless short story, but when reviewing the corpus of a fashionable writer, life being what it is, there’s got to be let-downs, just as we are disappointed by our friends, our lovers, our jobs.
Social decorum should keep us from attacking our personal relationships—but why shouldn’t we be honest regarding a book that wants out time and money?
Anis Shivani is correct—both in his criticism and by what his criticism symbolizes: In Literary Criticism, the bland and cheery is always bad, always a lie.
Anis Shivani is correct—even as we disagree with him; disagreeing with him (he over-values High Modernism, for instance) is not the point, for Shivani’s whole impulse his correct, and his audience responds—people deeply want honest criticism, and despite what the status quo sometimes says, they shouldn’t feel guilty for wanting it.
We disagree with Shivani when he writes of Billy Collins’ work: “escapist denial of death is pervasive.” Has Shivani read Collins’ poem, “Passengers?” And we are only mildly miffed that Shivani stole our idea—debuted on Scarriet several years ago—that Collins’ poetry is “stand-up comedy.” We forgive Shivani, for this nice observation alone: “[Collins]poems have lately become mostly about writing poems–in his pajamas, with a cup of coffee in hand.”
We also like that Shivani is well-acquainted with all genres; there’s nothing we hate more than ghetto-izing and niche-ing. In his recent The 15 Most Overrated Contemporary American Writers, 7 are fiction writers, 6 are poets, and 2 are critics.
Shivani opens with a moral, common sense overview:
Are the writers receiving the major awards and official recognition really the best writers today? Or are they overrated mediocrities with little claim to recognition by posterity? The question is harder than ever to answer today, yet it is a worthwhile exercise to attempt (along with identifying underrated writers not favored by bureaucracy).
It’s difficult to know today because we no longer have major critics with wide reach who take vocal stands. There are no Malcolm Cowleys, Edmund Wilsons, and Alfred Kazins to separate the gold from the sand. Since the onset of poststructuralist theory, humanist critics have been put to pasture. The academy is ruled by “theorists” who consider their work superior to the literature they deconstruct, and moreover they have no interest in contemporary literature. As for the reviewing establishment, it is no more than the blurbing arm for conglomerate publishing, offering unanalytical “reviews” announcing that the emperor is wearing clothes (hence my inclusion of Michiko Kakutani).
The ascent of creative writing programs means that few with critical ability have any incentive to rock the boat–awards and jobs may be held back in retaliation. The writing programs embody a philosophy of neutered multiculturalism/political correctness; as long as writers play by the rules (no threatening history or politics), there’s no incentive to call them out. (A politically fecund multiculturalism–very desirable in this time of xenophobia–is the farthest thing from the minds of the official arbiters: such writing would be deemed “dangerous,” and never have a chance against the mediocrities.)
The MFA writing system, with its mechanisms of circulating popularity and fashionableness, leans heavily on the easily imitable. Cloying writers like Denis Johnson, Amy Hempel, Lydia Davis, Aimee Bender, and Charles D’Ambrosio are held up as models of good writing, because they’re easy enough to copy. And copied they are, in tens of thousands of stories manufactured in workshops. Others hide behind a smokescreen of unreadable inimitability–Marilynne Robinson, for example–to maintain a necessary barrier between the masses and the overlords. Since grants, awards, and residencies are controlled by the same inbreeding group, it’s difficult to see how the designated heavies can be displaced.
As for conglomerate publishing, the decision-makers wouldn’t know great literature if it hit them in the face. Their new alliance with the MFA writing system is bringing at least a minimum of readership for mediocre books, and they’re happy with that. And the mainstream reviewing establishment (which is crumbling by the minute) validates their choices with fatuous accolades, recruiting mediocre writers to blurb (review) them.
If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing. Bad writing is characterized by obfuscation, showboating, narcissism, lack of a moral core, and style over substance. Good writing is exactly the opposite. Bad writing draws attention to the writer himself. These writers have betrayed the legacy of modernism, not to mention postmodernism. They are uneasy with mortality. On the great issues of the day they are silent (especially when they seem to address them, like William T. Vollmann). They desire to be politically irrelevant, and they have succeeded. They are the unreadable Booth Tarkingtons, Joseph Hergesheimers, and John Herseys of our time, earnestly bringing up the rear.
It’s hard to argue with his general points, and we like his pedagogical earnestness, too: “If we don’t understand bad writing, we can’t understand good writing.”
Here are the summary observations on the 15, and Shivani is definitely a critic of the twitter age, as he packs each line with left-wing, moral outrage:
Ashbery: When reality = language (as his carping cousins the language poets, have it) politics becomes vacuous, and any usurper can, and will step in.
Collins: Pioneered the poet as the stand-up comedian…
Cunningham: Proves the point that to be successful as a fiction writer today, all you have to do is create facile pastiche assemblages.
Diaz: Replaces plot in stories and novels with pumped-up “voice.”
Foer: Always quick to jump on the bandwagon of the moment.
Gluck: Her flatness of tone (mistaken as equanimity by infatuated critics) suggests paralysis after emotional death.
Graham: Started off modestly, but with increasing official recognition, her abstractions, pseudo-philosophizing, self-importance, and centerless long lines have spun out of control.
Kakutani: Simply the worst book critic on the planet.
Lahiri: Utterly unwilling to write about any thing other than privileged Bengali immigrants with PhDs living in Cambridge’s Central and Inman Squares and making easy adjustments to top of American meritocratic pyramid.
Nelson: Workshop writing, dysfunctionality is thy name, and there is no better writer to learn family dysfunction from…
Oliver: A “nature poet” whose poems all seem to follow the same pattern: time, animal, setting, observation, epiphany.
Olds: Infantilization packaged in pseudo-confession…
Tan: Empowered other immigrant writers to make mountains out of molehills of their minor adjustment struggles.
Vendler: Zero poetic feeling…has never uttered one original insight…
Vollmann: Encapsulates ethical vacuity of American fiction after the collapse of 1970s postmodernism.
It does not matter, for instance, that we feel Sharon Olds has written some moving poems: Anis Shivani is entitled to his opinion of Olds’ poetry—and if that’s how he feels about it, he should be allowed to utter it, and everyone should be encouraged to be that opinionated—if only to combat the reverse condition: the true literary nightmare of know-nothing politeness.
1. Natasha Trethewey Beautiful! Black! Poet Laureate!
2. Billy Collins Still sells…
3. David Lehman Best American Poetry Series chugs along…
4. Stephen Burt Harvard Cross-dresser takes Vendler’s mantle?
5. William Logan Most entertaining poetry critic…
6. Christian Wiman He’s the “Poetry” man, he makes me feel alright…
7. Sharon Olds Sock-in-the-gut, sexy frankness…
8. Tracy K. SmithYoung Pulitzer winner
9. David Orr The New York Times Poetry Critic…
10. Harold Bloom Not sure on Naomi Wolfe; we know he abused Poe….
11. Matthew Dickman OMG! Is he really no. 11?
12. Anne Carson Professor of Classics born in Toronto…
13. Dana Gioia Famous essay still resonates & not a bad formalist poet…
14. Jorie GrahamJudge not…
15. Rita Dove The Penguin Anthology really wasn’t that good…
16. Helen Vendler Almost 80!
17. John AshberyHas he ever written a poem for no. 16? Where’s the love?
18. David FerryThis translator is almost 90!
19. Kevin YoungWe hear he’s a leading poet of his generation…
20. Robert PinskyThe smartest man in the universe…
21. Cole Swenson The Hybrid Queen, newly installed at Brown…
22. Marjorie Perloff “Poetry on the Brink” praises cut-and-paste…
23. John Barr Financial leader of Poetry Foundation and poet worth reading?
24. Seamus Heaney The inscrutable Irish mountain…
25. Geoffrey Hill A mountain who is really a hill?
26. Robert Hass West-coast cheerleader.
27. Stephen Dunn Athlete, philosopher, poet
28. Laura Kassichke Championed by Burt.
29. Mary Oliver The John Clare of today…
30. Kay Ryan Come on, she’s actually good…
31. Don Share Riding “Poetry” gravy train…
32. W.S. Merwin Noble, ecological, bull?
33. Dana LevinDo you know the way to Santa Fe?
34. Susan Wheeler Elliptical Poet. At Princeton.
35. Tony HoaglandHas the racial controversy faded?
36. Mark DotySharon Olds’ little brother…
37. Frank BidartThe Poet as Greek Tragedian
38. Simon ArmitageTilda Swinton narrates his global warming doc
39. D.A. PowellHe likes the weather in San Francisco…
40. Philip LevineSecond generation Program Era poet
41. Ron SillimanExperimental to the bone, his blog is video central…
42. Mark StrandPlain-talking surrealist, studied painting with Josef Albers…
43. Dan ChiassonInfluential poetry reviewer…
44. Al Filreis On-line professor teaches modern poetry to thousands at once!
45. Paul MuldoonIf you want your poem in the New Yorker, this is the guy…
46. Charles BernsteinDifficult, Inc.
47. Rae Armantrout If John Cage wrote haiku?
48. Louise GluckBollingen Prize winner…
49. Ben Mazer 2012Scarriet March Madness Champ, studied with Heaney, Ricks…
50. Carol Muske-DukesCalifornia Laureate
51. Peter RileyHis critical essay crushes the hybrid movement…
52. Lyn HejinianCalifornia Language Poet…
53. Peter Gizzi12 issues of O.blek made his name…
54. Franz WrightCantankerous but blessed…
55. Nikky Finney2011 National Book Award winner
56. GarrisonKeillorGood poems!
57. Camille Paglia She’s baaaack!
58. Christian BokAuthor of Canada’s best-selling poetry book
59. X.J. Kennedy Classy defender of rhyme…
60. Frederick SeidelWears nice suits…
61. Henri ColePoems “cannily wrought” –New Yorker
62. Thom DonovanPoetry is Jorie-Graham-like…
63. Marie HoweState Poet of New York
64. Michael DickmanThe other twin…
65. Alice OswaldWithdrew from T.S. Eliot prize shortlist…
66. Sherman AlexiePoet/novelist/filmmaker…
67. J.D. McClatchyAnthologist and editor of Yale Review…
68. David WagonerEdited Poetry Northwest until it went under…
69. Richard WilburA versifier’s dream…
70. Stephen CramerHis fifth book is called “Clangings.”
71. Galway KinnellWe scolded him on his poem in the New Yorker critical of Shelley…
72. Jim BehrleGadfly of the BAP
73. Haruki MurakamiThe Weird Movement…
74. Tim SeiblesFinalist for National Book Award in Poetry
75. Brenda Shaughnessy Editor at Tin House…
76. Maurice Manning The new Robert Penn Warren? 77. Eileen MylesWe met her on the now-dead Comments feature of Blog Harriet
78. Heather McHughStudied with Robert Lowell; translator.
79. Juliana SpahrPoetry and sit-ins
80. Alicia OstrikerPoetry makes feminist things happen…
81. William ChildressHis ‘Is Free Verse Killing Poetry?’ caused a stir…
82. Patricia SmithLegendary Slam Poet…
83. James TateThe Heart-felt Zany Iowa School…
84. Barrett WattenLanguage Poet Theorist.
85. Elizabeth AlexanderObama’s inaugural poet.
86. Alan CordleFoetry changed poetry forever.
87. Dean YoungHeart transplanted, we wish him the best…
88. Amy Beeder“You’ll never feel full”
89. Valzhyna MortFranz Wright translated her from the Belarusian…
90. Mary Jo SalterStudied with Elizabeth Bishop at Harvard…
91. Seth AbramsonLawyer/poet who researches MFA programs and writes cheery reviews…
92. Amy Catanzano“My aim is to become incomprehensible to the machines.”
93. Cate Marvin VIDA co-founder and co-director
94. Jay WrightFirst African-American to win the Bollingen Prize (2005)
95. Albert JackHis “Dreadful Demise Of Edgar Allan Poe” builds on Scarriet’s research: Poe’s cousin may be guilty…
96. Mary Ruefle“I remember, I remember”
97. John GallaherSelfless poet/songwriter/teacher/blogger
98. Philip NikolayevFrom Fulcrum to Battersea…
99. Marcus BalesDemocratic Activist and Verse Poet
100. Joe GreenAnd Hilarity Ensued…
The disgrace of seeming pre-Modern is a stigma created by the Modernists themselves, the small clique which dominated poetry for most of the 20th century.
That was done then, therefore we can’t do that now is the formula, and, despite the allure of originality, it’s a dangerous formula—for the self-evident reason that society should never stigmatize so generally.
If we can reject something as immense as the past, then anything or anyone can, and will, be rejected, for just about any reason at all.
We cannot assume that a fanatical formula (yes, “Make it new,” I’m talking to you) will be tempered by caveats: ‘we really mean a blend of the old and the new!’ As human history has witnessed, human loss of reason on a mass scale can occur quickly and dangerously.
Obviously, we cannot dispense with the new in the name of the old, either. The evils of political fundamentalism crushing the new is a danger, as well; but the point is that we are intolerant if we don’t realize intolerance uses any excuse—the new kills as easily as the old kills. The old and new are both useful.
In poetry and art, however, the normal process has become: We don’t need this. Let’s jettison that. It might be rhyme, narrative, the painterly, the accessible, the moral, whatever it is; what the bourgeois want, the radical theorist inevitably decides we don’t need. For 200 years we have witnessed the radical impulse march forward through time in an orgy of self-justification, as one limited style continually replaces another. Re-reading The Painted Word by Tom Wolfe reminds one how silly this art-march can be.
Since poetry and art are so important in shaping the sensibilities of people in all walks of life: school teachers, professors, higher ed administrators, journalists, etc, this impulse does have universal importance.
It is refreshing then, to witness recently in poetry a new grande style emerging, one that wisely embraces rather than superficially jettisons.
The grande school kicks up dirt here at Scarriet. The literary ambition embodied here is not merely lusty and wide, mocking the twaddle of pin-headed theorists who inhabit self-serving cliques of fussy and narrow tracks of inquiry, but also holds forth in rigorous terms of good, basic common sense that rejects snap political judgments, pretense, and superfluity.
No school can escape a drawback or two; it could be said the grande school perhaps suffers from egomania. Say what you will about Jorie Graham or Ron Silliman, they are not egomaniacs. Graham no doubt had real affection for the poets she cheated for when she was a poetry contest judge; Silliman no doubt has real affection for his woolly avant ideals and what he feels are their political virtues.
The grande school celebrates Byronic individualism. The grande school is not afraid of the word, genius. The grande school is not afraid of embracing other arts, interests and views which may be innocently anti-poetry. The grande school is not afraid of rebuking poetry in its own name. The grande school knows there can be a sweet Socratic method in a madness. The grande school is not afraid of genius when it takes the form of madness. The grande school is not afraid of Jorie Graham or Ron Silliman, nor do they fear Ron Silliman or Jorie Graham’s several hundred admirers.
Perhaps the most successful poet writing today in the manner of the grande school is Ben Mazer, recent winner of Scarriet’s March Madness contest. The following is from part 32 of his long poem, “The King.” The yearning, self-conscious wish for poetry to be more like the pictorial arts is a mad wish, perhaps, but it is a sign of genius to wish to escape a genre within that genre itself in a wholly child-like and uncomplicated way. The failure is a rousing success; only melancholy genius dares embrace failure so vehemently and earnestly; this melancholy desperation shines a helpful light.
Words! How can I deploy a dozen at once
on top of each other, the way I might read a page
backwards and forewards, in one photographic instant,
stretching the tongue in all directions at once,
to say the unsayable, cumulative and percussive
explosions signifying an enduring silence,
one fusion of confluence and inclusion,
packed with the weight, the indivisible density,
of all remembered experience and emotion,
and fraught with primordial defiance of the linear,
stabilizing possibility in one vocable,
one sound of thesis and antithesis,
one word for everything, all words in one,
a form large enough into which to put anything!
In this passage by Mazer we find the sensibility, the attitude and the mind of the grande school wonderfully documented. It is wishful and hopeful and expansive, and appears to transcend the old Modern order, so often doomed by its own intricacy. Mazer questions his own art—runs (and this part is part of a longer poem) towards the limits of his craft—while aspiring to the infinite. The poem manages to achieve a “photographic instant” as it dispenses with discursiveness and makes manifest one idea, reinforced by the fact that Mazer’s poem is nothing like a painting. A painting is not limited by a poem’s unwinding, but can flash upon us in an instant. There is a secret knowing humor, then, in Mazer’s plea to “words”; a Byronic, satiric jollity inevitably combines with a Byronic melancholy in Mazer’s work.
Is this the new poetry? Is Mazer the first real poet of the 21st century?
In Mazer’s poetry we see the fissure of modernism/post-modernism’s facade—the self-conscious glibness finally about to burst before a force of uncanny weight of sublime and timeless aspiration. Mazer is not a poet who longs; Mazer is a poet who makes poetry long.
The question must always be: what material thing can we do?
Two implicit questions emerge after reading the poetry of Mazer quoted above:
1. Is poetry the explaining of a painting that doesn’t exist?
2. Is painting the picture of a poem that hasn’t been written?
Poetry and painting no longer love each other. In the 19th century, they were in love with each other.
‘The medium is the message’ signals a philosophy which signals the present gulf between them. Is the imagination really confined to its ‘medium?’
Abstract painting, with its indulgence of flatness and color, turns its back on poetry—since no poem is depicted by colored abstraction.
Missing her illustrative twin, poetry desperately assumes various roles to make up for the loss, going abstract herself with surface linguistic effects that depict nothing a painter would be inspired by; or, going in the opposite direction, poetry attempts imagery, story and jokes in such a manner that she over-reaches, forgets who she is, slides into inferior prose, into bad taste, into over-description, into obscurity.
The painter, in turn, flounders in the machinery and mechanics of the overtly conceptual.
Poets and painters, knowing they are different types of artists, are hardly aware of the timeless importance each share with each; poetry and painting do not even understand that they are out of balance with each other, while sensual film and moral novels breed, producing all the children—the great majority brats without beauty or taste.
Mazer’s poem confronts the gulf between poetry and painting, confronts the pre-Modern stigma found in the modern formula: ‘the medium is the message,’ a formula which traps us inside of itself today. If ‘the truth’ of this formula traps us, this is still no reason why we shouldn’t attempt to escape from it, and Mazer seems to understand this, as only a genius can.
Nietzsche, just before he went mad, wrote that he found in Horace—an author neglected by the Moderns—what Mazer ponders in his passage from “The King”:
To this day, no other poet has given me the same artistic delight that a Horatian ode gave me from the first. In certain languages that which Horace has achieved could not even be attempted. This mosaic of words, in which every word — as sound, as place, as concept — pours out its strength right and left and over the whole, this minimum in the extent and number of the signs, and the maximum thereby attained in the energy of the signs — all that is Roman and, if you will believe me, noble par excellence. All the rest of poetry becomes, in contrast, something too popular — mere sentimental blather.
We will be the first to admit that these are unsettled questions—Whither poetry? Whither painting? Whither Horace? Whither Modernism? Whither Mazer? Will poetry and painting inspire each other again?
But we like what’s shaking with the grande school.
Marie Howe ponders her fate against Jorie Graham in the Scarriet March Madness East Regional.
Marla Muse.
Marla Muse: Yes?
I just realized something.
Marla Muse: What?
The East Bracket this year is all white people. Yet this year Scarriet is using Dove’s Anthology as much as possible. How did that happen?
Marla Muse: Dove is from Ohio; the South and Midwest Brackets look very different from the East. Maybe it’s not a race thing, at all, but a regional issue. In poetry, the Northeast is no longer king. By focusing on race, Vendler didn’t get it. Poe’s dream is coming true. Poetry New England has finally been dethroned by other parts of the country.
Iowa.
Marla Muse: The Workshop phenomenon has really spread things around.
Mmm. You’re right. Still, it’s funny how New England and New York are still white. And least in this March Madness.
Marla Muse: I’m looking forward to the rumble between these two white gals, Jorie and Marie. There will be a lot of hair to pull.
Marla, how can you say that? You know March Madness is clean!
Marla Muse: Nothing is as clean as it looks.
Jorie Graham was quietly picked for just one of her early poems by Dove, a further signal that Graham’s reputation may have peaked about 5 years ago.
SAN SEPOLCRO
In this blue light
I can take you there,
snow having made me
a world of bone
seen through to. This
is my house,
my section of Etruscan
wall, my neighbor’s
lemontrees, and, just below
the lower church,
the airplane factory.
A rooster
crows all day from mist
outside the walls.
There’s milk on the air,
ice on the oily
lemonskins. How clean
the mind is,
holy grave. It is this girl
by Piero
della Francesca, unbuttoning
her blue dress,
her mantle of weather,
to go into
labor. Come, we can go in.
It is before
the birth of god. No one
has risen yet
to the museums, to the assembly
line–bodies
and wings–to the open air
market. This is
what the living do: go in.
It’s a long way.
And the dress keeps opening
from eternity
to privacy, quickening.
Inside, at the heart,
is tragedy, the present moment
forever stillborn,
but going in, each breath
is a button
coming undone, something terribly
nimble-fingered
finding all of the stops.
What to say about this poem, which shows off the ‘high style’ of late 20th century Modernism? The short line breaks attempt to open up vistas—make the reader pause and see the “open air” of the “open air market,” for instance.
and wings—to the open air
market. This is
The syntax rushes on, pouring down the page, while the line-breaks slow things down. It’s schizophrenic, really. Two opposing modes at once. Bet you never noticed the “open air” of “open air market” before, did you? Oh, but let’s hurry on: “This is…”
Similarly, the line breaks imply simple, intimate speech, but the speech is not simple at all. No one talks like Jorie Graham’s poem. Again, the schizophrenia. The two warring impressions finally cancel each other out. The attempt to sound classically lofty and cold on one hand, and conversationally intimate on the other, results in a herky-jerky sublime; the trick finally doesn’t work. The justification for the line-breaking seems merely odd, like a once-interesting, but now outdated, fashion. Jorie Graham took William Carlos Williams as far as possible into the wild blue sublime, but that experiment has run its course. The line break is broken. It now seems artificial, no substitute for sturdy music, daring architecture, or an actual voice.
We’ll never know how much Graham’s poem depends on Early Italian Renaissance master Piero della Francesca for its majesty; the references are key to the otherworldly atmosphere; the poem’s mystery hearkens after the pagan and the Yeatsian in the midst of the half-rural, half-airplane factory, Tuscan landscape, with its rooster, the church and the lemontrees. The poem works, and it works because of its last line. “Stops” has multiple meanings, for not only do we think of buttons on a dress or holes in a flute, but the frequent “stops” of a poem with many line-breaks. The poem is commenting on itself, and Graham’s reputation, while it grew, was powerful enough to make this an implied reading.
Marie Howe has one poem in the Dove anthology, and it comes right after Graham’s in the book because they are the same age. Graham’s poem is a tangle of strange associations as the narrator leads the reader forward. Howe, too, has the reader follow her along, but in this case the reader is her deceased brother and she is showing him her life: what the living do.
WHAT THE LIVING DO
Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won’t work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up
waiting for the plumber I still haven’t called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It’s winter again: the sky’s a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through
the open living-room windows because the heat’s on too high in here and I can’t turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,
I’ve been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,
I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.
What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.
But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I’m gripped by a cherishing so deep
for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless:
I am living. I remember you.
Howe’s life is mundane, and that’s the point. The “egotistical sublime” moment at the end, when she glimpses her reflection is strange and remarkable. Howe’s poem has more clarity and more emotional punch than Graham’s.
Don’t we hate them? Those introductions praising a poet before they go on? Why do they have them? They are stupid, and they seem more stupid the more clever they are. They are not necessary. Shut up. I don’t care how many prizes this poet has won. Let the poet get up on the podium and read their goddamn poems. Enough with this tradition already. The oily professors and graduate students with their prefaced remarks for the visiting poet: look how clever I am! Bet you didn’t know how many layers of meaning gleam in the title of our poet’s latest book! Maybe I’ll get laid! The poet doesn’t need an introduction. Imagine how annoying it would be if you went to the theater, and before the play: “Before we begin, I’d like to make a few remarks about our playwright tonight. William Shakespeare, as you all know…” Save it.
And then blurbs. Has there ever been a blurb which does not negate everything we mean when we utter the sacred word, poetry? The blurb is like the Introduction, but a frozen version of it, a cold stain. Shall we do away with blurbs forever? Yes. Just give me a plain book that says “Poems” on it, and, in smaller letters, the author’s name. The blurb is a sugary humiliation, a confectionery wreck, a cotton candy tomb, a blah blah blah that chokes and humiliates. Have we no shame?
Therefore, without introduction, we present the 2012 Scarriet March Madness EAST BRACKET!
EAST
1. John Ashbery 2. Seamus Heaney 3. Geoffrey Hill 4. Billy Collins 5. Jorie Graham 6. Robert Pinsky 7. Mary Oliver 8. James Tate 9. Paul Muldoon 10. Charles Simic 11. Charles Bernstein 12. Marie Howe 13. Carol Ann Duffy 14. Franz Wright 15. Carolyn Forche 16. Ben Mazer
Blurbless, sans introduction, these names stand before you.
These poets want to do one thing: Win.
They want to win, because the winner will spend an entire night with Marla Muse.
Marla Muse: I beg your pardon?
Marla! You’re supposed to say, “And they will never forget it.”
Marla Muse: I never agreed to do that! And I don’t think it’s funny!
I was just kidding…in the name of poetry…these poets…don’t you think the winner…? I wasn’t implying…
Marla Muse: It’s not funny.
Sorry. Well, they still want to win…
Marla Muse: Of course they do.
And soon we’ll announce what poems the poets will be going with in the first round!
The Scarriet editors, with the help of Marla Muse—
Marla Muse: Hi.
Hi, Marla. —are in the process of choosing the 64 poets who will rumble for the championship this year. How do we choose?
MM: May I speak?
In matters of poetry, the Muse should always speak.
MM: Thank you. Public contests exist for the audience, not the participants. So we pick big names.
Wait a minute—that doesn’t make any sense!
MM: 63 poets have to lose. Unknown poets—most of our audience—envy big name poets; our audience is guaranteed to enjoy themselves—and that’s the whole point.
But what’s a “big name” in poetry these days?
MM: Someone born in 1927, like John Ashbery, for instance.
The year Babe Ruth hit 60 homeruns for the New York Yankees.
MM: Don’t try and be poetic. Don’t distract. Don’t show off. Let me make my point.
Sorry, Marla.
MM: Go back a little further. Wallace Stevens was 20, and it was still the 19th century. But 1927 is probably far back enough. There are not too many famous poets in Rita Dove’s recent 20th Century Poetry anthology born after 1900. Before 1900, you’ve got Frost, T.S. Eliot, Edna Millay, E.E. Cummings, and then if you want to throw in Stevens, Williams, Pound, and Stein, you may. But after 1900—
There’s lots, right?
MM: The bulk were born between 1925 and 1940—old enough to still be living and old enough to have won plenty of awards. But none are household words, like Robert Frost or E.E. Cummings; none are really famous. Then there’s Billy Collins born in 1941; after that, no one is even close to being famous, not even a little bit.
What a cynical analysis!
MM: You are being sentimental. Time and fame are not cynical; they just are. The topic is not poetry, but poets.
And poets are made of flesh.
MM: Exactly. And Helen Vendler and Rita Dove are flesh and their fight, I feel, was based on age. Let’s look at the best known poets by decade of birth in Dove’s book:
1860s: Edgar Lee Masters
1870s: Robert Frost
1880s: T.S. Eliot
1890s: E.E. Cummings
1900s: W.H. Auden (or Theodore Roethke)
1910s: Elizabeth Bishop (or John Berryman)
1920s: Anne Sexton (Allen Ginsberg not in Dove’s anthology)
1930s: Amiri Baraka (Sylvia Plath not in Dove’s anthology)
1940s: Billy Collins
1950s: Rita Dove (or Jorie Graham)
1960s: Sherman Alexie (or Joanna Klink)
1970s: Kevin Young
No poet born in the 20th century is famous. Except maybe Anne Sexton—because she committed suicide.
Marla, that’s depressing. So the anthologist, Rita Dove, is the most famous American poet born in the 1950s?
MM: Who would you choose instead? Cathy Song?
What about Paul Muldoon?
MM: We speak of fame, here, that is so minute, that a reader holding this anthology in their hands will feel, at that moment, that Rita Dove is the most famous poet born in the 1950s.
OK, I see your point.
MM: The most famous poet in Dove’s anthology born in the ’50s might possibly be Jorie Graham, and born in the 60s? Jorie Graham’s baby-sitter, Joanna Klink. Dove, born in 1952, has 40 poets represented in her anthology born between 1880 and 1919—and 26 born between 1950 and 1954; the biggest single group of poets in the anthology were born around the same time as Dove herself, including Iowa classmates, Joy Harjo and Sandra Cisneros.
Interesting.
MM: Finally, Vendler was born in the 1930s, and Amiri Baraka is the best known American poet (from political controversy) born in the 1930s from Dove’s anthology. Given Vendler’s expressed views on Dove’s Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry in the New York Review of Books that Dove’s anthology was a little too affirmative action, these dateshave to make Ms. Vendler wonder. Poets included, like Walcott, Clifton, and Lourde were also born in the ’30s; Vendler has to travel back to almost the middle of the 19th century to find the birth date of her beloved poet, Wallace Stevens. This can’t help but make Vendler feel like the game is being lost.
Dove has picked good poems, but that doesn’t change the fact that her anthology feels very much driven by agenda rather than poetry.
MM: We shouldn’t get into that controversy. Dove couldn’t help what she did, for anthologies are always about poets, not poetry.
LIfe too, is about poets, not poetry. This is why we need to forgive Dove.
MM: Big names.
Let the games begin! Stay tuned for the East Brackets.
1. Rita Dove—Penguin editor reviewed by Helen Vendler in the NYRB
2. Terrance Hayes—In Dove’s best-selling anthology, and young
3. Kevin Young—In Dove’s anthology, and young
4. Amiri Baraka—In Dove’s anthology
5. Billy Collins—in the anthology
6. John Ashbery—a long poem in the anthology
7. Dean Young—not in the anthology
8. Helen Vendler—hated the anthology
9. Alan Cordle—Time’s masked Person-of-the-Year = Foetry.com’s once-anonymous Occupy Poetry protestor?
10. Harold Bloom—you can bet he hates the anthology
11. Mary Oliver—in the anthology
12. William Logan—meanest and the funniest critic (a lesson here?)
13. Kay Ryan—our day’s e.e. cummings
14. John Barr—the Poetry Man and “the Man.”
15. Kent Johnson—O’Hara and Koch will never be the same?
16. Cole Swensen—welcome to Brown!
17. Tony Hoagland—tennis fan
18. David Lehman—fun lovin’ BAP gate-keeper
19. David Orr—the deft New York Times critic
20. Rae Armantrout—not in the anthology
21. Seamus Heaney—When Harvard eyes are smilin’
22. Dan Chiasson—new reviewer on the block
23. James Tate—guaranteed to amuse
24. Matthew Dickman—one of those bratty twins
25. Stephen Burt—the Crimson Lantern
26. Matthew Zapruder—aww, everybody loves Matthew!
27. Paul Muldoon—New Yorker Brit of goofy complexity
28. Sharon Olds—Our Lady of Slightly Uncomfortable Poetry
29. Derek Walcott—in the anthology, latest T.S. Eliot prize winner
30. Kenneth Goldsmith—recited traffic reports in the White House
31. Jorie Graham—more teaching, less judging?
32. Alice Oswald—I don’t need no stinkin’ T.S. Eliot Prize
33. Joy Harjo—classmate of Dove’s at Iowa Workshop (in the anthology)
34. Sandra Cisneros—classmate of Dove’s at Iowa Workshop (in the anthology)
35. Nikki Giovanni—for colored girls when po-biz is enuf
36. William Kulik—not in the anthology
37. Ron Silliman—no more comments on his blog, but in the anthology
38. Daisy Fried—setting the Poetry Foundation on fire
39. Eliot Weinberger—poetry, foetry, and politics
40. Carol Ann Duffy—has Tennyson’s job
41. Camille Dungy—runs in the Poetry Foundation forest…
42. Peter Gizzi—sensitive lyric poet of the hour…
43. Abigail Deutsch—stole from a Scarriet post and we’ll always love her for it…
44. Robert Archambeau—his Samizdat is one of the more visible blogs…
45. Michael Robbins—the next William Logan?
46. CarlPhillips—in the anthology
47. Charles North—What It Is Like, New & Selected chosen as best of 2011 by David Orr
48. Marilyn Chin—went to Iowa, in the anthology
49. Marie Howe—a tougher version of Brock-Broido…
50. Dan Beachy-Quick—gotta love that name…
51. Marcus Bales—he’s got the Penguin blues.
52. Dana Gioia—he wants you to read Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, so what r u waiting 4?
53. Garrison Keillor—the boil on the neck of August Kleinzahler
54. Alice Notley—Penguin’s Culture of One by this Paris-based author made a lot of 2011 lists
55. Mark McGurl—won Truman Capote Award for 2011’s The Program Era: Rise of Creative Writing
56. Daniel Nester—wrap your blog around my skin, yea-uh.
57. Yusef Komunyakaa—in the anthology
58. Adrienne Rich—in the anthology
59. Jeremy Bass— reviewed the anthology in the Nation
60. Anselm Berrigan—somebody’s kid
61. Travis Nichols—kicked us off Blog Harriet
62. Seth Abramson—poet and lawyer
63. Stephen Dunn—one of the best poets in the Iowa style
64. Philip Levine—Current laureate, poem recently in the New Yorker Movin’ up!
65. Ben Mazer—Does anyone remember Landis Everson?
66. Reb Livingston—Her No Tells blog rocks the contemporary scene
67. Marjorie Perloff—strutting avant academic
68. John Gallaher—Kent Johnson can’t get enough punishment on Gallaher’s blog
69. Fred Viebahn—poet married to the Penguin anthologist
70. James Fenton—said after Penguin review hit, Dove should have “shut up”
71. Rodney Jones—BAP poem selected by Dove riffs on William Carlos Williams’ peccadilloes
72. Mark Doty—no. 28’s brother
73. Cate Marvin—VIDA and so much more
74. Richard Wilbur—still hasn’t run out of rhyme
75. W.S. Merwin—no punctuation, but no punk
76. Jim Behrle—the Adam Sandler of po-biz
77. Bin Ramke—still stinging from the Foetry hit
78. Thomas Sayer Ellis—not in the anthology
79. Henri Cole—poetry editor of the New Republic
80. Meghan O’Rourke—Behrle admires her work
81. Anne Waldman—the female Ginsberg?
82. Anis Shivani—get serious, poets! it’s time to change the world!
83. Robert Hass—Occupy story in Times op-ed
84. Lyn Hejinian—stuck inside a baby grand piano
85. Les Murray—greatest Australian poet ever?
86. Sherman Alexie—is this one of the 175 poets to remember?
87. Geoffrey Hill—great respect doesn’t always mean good
88. Elizabeth Alexander—Frost got Kennedy, she got Obama
89. A.E. Stallings—A rhymer wins MacArthur!
90. Frank Bidart—in the anthology
91. Robert Pinsky—in the anthology
92. Carolyn Forche—in the anthology
93. Louise Gluck—not in the anthology
94. Keith Waldrop—his Hopwood Award paid her fare from Germany
95. Rosmarie Waldrop—her Hopwood helpled launch Burning Deck
96. C.D. Wright—born in the Ozark mountains
97. Forrest Gander—married to no. 96
98. Mark Strand—translator, surrealist
99. Margaret Atwood—the best Canadian poet of all time?
100. Gary B. Fitzgerald—the poet most likely to be remembered a million years from now
Just when we thought the state of poetry could not be less visible, Adam Plunkett digs its hole even deeper. “Why Critics Praise Bad Poetry,” he titles his Sept 15 Bookforum piece, and begins by surmising, “False advertising” is “probably why a lot of people don’t pay attention to the poetry world.”
Plunkett offers only one reason for “why critics praise bad poetry:”
Uncertain of an obscure poem’s meaning, critics worry they will “miss something” and “look like fools.”
Great!
Not only are the poets bad, according to Plunkett, but the critics are stupid.
Plunkett then goes on to prove there may be some truth to his idea—by praising bad poetry himself.
First, he shows himself astute enough not to praise (Michael Dickman’s) bad poetry:
“His super-outfit is made from handfuls of oil and garbage blood and pinned together by stars.” Unless I’m missing something, that’s vaguely whimsical but impossible to visualize at all. Blood, toil, sweat, and tears are also ethereal, I get it, but the words are tossed together like a collage I can’t actually imagine—is there oil and bloody garbage floating near the Milky Way, in which case how can the poet see it? How does it look to him like a superhero’s outfit? How is the line not sappy, trite, and nonsensical?
Yes, “His super-outfit is made from handfuls of oil and garbage blood and pinned together by stars” is bad poetry, very bad poetry. Congratulations, Mr. Plunkett; you are not completely stupid.
Now Plunkett goes on to review Michael Dickman’s new book, Flies, a book Plunkett calls a “case study in failed difficulty.”
Is there a successful difficulty? The whole notion that a poem “ought to be difficult” has tripped up many a critic and helped to destroy poetry since T.S. Eliot made the unfortunate choice to advance such an illogical monstrosity, one that is not even counter-intuitively interesting—but merely asinine—almost a hundred years ago. A sonnet by Shakespeare can be highly complex, in terms of ideas and grammatical structure, but not because Shakespeare intended his poem to be “difficult.” A writer should never intentionally make things difficult for a reader. Difficulty is a by-product of sloppy writing, not a standard to be sought. If a reader does not ‘get’ something, the reasons—if the writing is clever—are always more profound (even if superficially) than from the reason of mere “difficulty.”
Plunkett quotes more of Michael Dickman’s bad poetry:
they shine like
the blind
But the beak is real
A real beak
instead of a mouth
And then, to prove he isn’t just a dick, Plunkett thinks of something good to say:
A welcome contrast is Katherine Larson’s lucid incoherence, which invites reflection as it escapes paraphrase:
The Milky Way sways its back
across all of wind-eaten America
like a dusty saddle tossed
over your sable, lunatic horse.
There’s no simple literal sense to the simile (The Milky Way is to America as a saddle is to a mad-horse), but the visceral descriptions draw the objects together (“back,” “saddle,” “dusty,” “wind-eaten,” “lunatic”) with an associative certainty the final rhyme secures (“tossed” / “horse” is a Yeats rhyme, imperfect but accruing). Her image of the Milky Way is a perfect point of comparison with Dickman’s, which is literally incoherent but frustratingly rather than breathtakingly so. Hers is so charged with a depth of sensuous associations that it feels raw and unconscious, dreamlike and primeval, exciting precisely because you can pleasantly think it over endlessly without ever making sense of it or having it lose its mystery. Dickman’s image aims for this, fails to please the reader, and just looks silly, a failure absent from Larson’s stunning first book.
After having proven to everyone’s satisfaction (most of all his) that he is not a stupid critic, Plunkett thrusts out his chest and praises this absolute horror: “The Milky Way sways its back/across all of wind-eaten America/like a dusty saddle tossed/over your sable, lunatic horse.” This sounds like bad Jim Morrison poetry. Bad poets over-use metaphor, and in this case the Milky Way is compared to a dusty saddle. Mr. Plunkett, please remove your Critic’s badge. Now. Adam Plunkett, stuck in a nightmare from which he is unable to awake, attempting to establish his critical acumen to all the world, kills every critical cred he could possibly have, in a suicidal gesture of incomprehensible dumb. The Milky Way sways its back across all of wind-eaten America like a dusty saddle over your sable, lunatic horse. And according to Plunkett, “horse” and “tossed” is a “Yeats rhyme.” Magnificent.
Benjamin continues his self-murder, making sure that we know all about the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, as he inflicts himself, orgasmically, with
The book, Radial Symmetry, earned Larson the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, which since it started in 1919 has honored promising young poets for their first books, poets such as John Ashbery and Adrienne Rich and Robert Hass, titans whom Larson can stand with. She is that good, and her style captures and expands on some of the most significant stylistic achievements of contemporary American verse. Larson, a molecular biologist, has Hass’s exquisite descriptions of nature (a squid has “no blood / only textures of gills folded like satin, / suction cups like planets in rows”), with a measured sensuousness whose sounds trace our reactions, enticing “satin,” strange “suction,” mysterious “planets.” Larson’s poems say little about herself but manage the felt intimacy of the best Confessional verse (Anne Sexton’s, Robert Lowell’s):
Last night I threw my lab coat in the fire
and drove all night through the Arizona desert
with a thermos full of silver Tequila.
Larson retells Greek myths with the longing, rage, and beautiful brutality of a young Louise Glück (although Larson contains her anger more than Glück, the Yale Series’s judge):
…And the windows lit
with displays of red corals
from just off the coast
said to be the blood that streamed
from Medusa’s severed neck
when Perseus laid her head beside the sea.
Larson has Jorie Graham’s mastery of rhythm and pacing, her looping, involuted meters:
Here are the goblets filled with wine.
The smell of sunlight
fading from the stones.
We must take it on Plunkett’s word that Larson’s “stunning” book partakes of Jorie Graham’s “mastery” and Louise Gluck’s “beautiful brutality.” Plunkett can pick on Dickman, but Jorie Graham and Louise Gluck and Robert Hass and Adrienne Rich and John Ashbery—and now Katherine Larson: hands off! These are “titans!”
The “goblets filled with wine” passage is nice; I admit the possibility of liking “the smell of sunlight fading from the stones,” but Plunkett’s admiration only proves even a blind squirrel will occasionally find a nut.
Why such a inept critic would tackle a thesis on ‘why we praise bad poetry’ is simply hilarious.
The recent hubbub over the respectable poetry press which demanded their authors pay for the cost of producing their own book struck a real nerve.
Why? Because an uncomfortable truth was brought into the open: U.S. poetry market inflation is so severe, a book of new poems not only has no value–it has a negative value.
In today’s marketplace, a new book of poems represents not growth, but a grave—new poetry not only does not add wealth, it takes wealth away from the world.
The truth will be argued away by some, convinced their poetry is worth something.
But this rationale fails, since the economic fact of this uncomfortable truth is no less true for being a general truth.
At least when a publisher asks you to pay for your book’s publication costs, it’s better than the contest system—where you pay for the publication of someone else’s book, and unethically so, in the crooked contest system judged or run by once respected poets such as Jorie Graham and Bin Ramke, who were exposed by Alan Cordle’sFoetry.com.
The press which asked its own authors to pony up did so because it couldn’t stomach the contest system. Ironies such as this will breed when a market collapses—and the market for new poems has collapsed big time.
Hence, it is no wonder that financial aid is the chief criterion in rating MFA programs.
What other criteria could there possibly be? Earning an MFA degree in poetry is nothing more than an individual poet’s desperate gamble against inflation—even as MFA numbers add to that inflation.
The poets swim in the sea of their own doom, unable to be a poet unless they get wet.
A bunch of MFA profs and administrators have signed a letter of protest against the Poets & Writers rankings of MFA programs put together by Seth Abramson.
It’s unfair, say the protestors, who include relative titans such as Robert Pinsky and Tony Hougland, to weigh financial aid so heavily; there are other criteria, they protest, such as teaching methods.
Really? What teaching methods? Even the MFA programs themselves admit they don’t teach anyone to be a poet—the programs only give one time to make the attempt, with varying degrees of informal contact with peers.
Classical criteria, based on quantity and measurement, never did grace Poetry MFA curricula. The aesthetics of Plato, Aristotle and Horace would seem horribly old-fashioned in today’s MFA. Classical learning is not even included in a hybrid. It is the enemy. It is out. Byron is out, because he may have read a classical author once. The exclusion of the old is total. Intelligence is the only hallmark: intelligence left to swim on its own. This is poetry education: We can’t teach you is what we will teach you.
Modernists outlawed quantity about 90 years ago, and these same gentlemen established the MFA programs 60 years ago. The result? Inflation as the world has never seen.
Scarriet’s MFA Poetry program criterion is simple. Find one book of poems published by administration or faculty in the MFA program which has been purchased freely by a general reader. Then, check out the financial aid package.
Can Carol Muske-Dukes make it three out of four women in Scarriet’s 2011 March Madness APR Final Four? Does she have what it takes to beat Stephen Dunn? Both of their poems concern kisses, and maybe this is typical, maybe not—the man’s is a wild desire for one, the woman’s an actual dull one.
Women poets have done extremely well in the Scarriet March Madness Tournament, despite the pool being typically under-represented by women in the APR anthology, The Body Electric. The split in the APR anthology is about 70/30 in favor of the men—yet 10 women poets reached the Scarriet Sweet Sixteen.
Vida has made headlines in American Letters recently by simply publishing some inescapable statistics: the percentages of women writers published in major literary magazines and anthologies—and the numbers are not good for women, especially in essays, criticism and poetry: women trail men in the Fine Arts of Letters—poetry and essays—by two to one.
We’re not talking about construction jobs, or all-time sports heroes, or U.S. presidents, or 19th century composers, or Italian homemakers. We’re talking about U.S. poetry and criticism in 2011: two to one in favor of men. These numbers are staggering, and should be a wake up call to women everywhere.
The overall author split is 60/40 in favor of men, not too horrible, but in terms of reviewing (or criticism) the ratio is 4/1 in favor of men, and as Vida showed, the ratio of reviewing in The New York Review of Books is 5/1 in favor of men. As we get more high-brow, as we get more intellectual, as we get more opinionated, as we get more philosophical, the women flounder, in terms of representation.
For every Harold Bloom, there’s a Helen Vendler or a Camille Paglia, for every Billy Collins, there’s a Mary Oliver or a Louise Gluck, for every John Ashbery, there’s a Jorie Graham or a Kay Ryan , for every Seamus Heaney, there’s a Sharon Olds or a Margaret Atwood.
Generally, women have had great success in writing, and, in numbers of readers, women are surely equal, or very close to men, just in terms of literacy. Women are well-placed in the readership and marketplace of Fine Letters; there is no craven, muscle-bound machismo element keeping them down.
Why, then, are the women so woeful and backwards in these key areas of poetry and essays and reviewing and criticism?
So, girls, what the fuck is wrong with you?
Criticism is the Head of Letters. If you’re not reviewing consistently, or writing philosophical essays, or making your opinions known about writers and writing, then what do you expect?
We know you have opinions about nearly everything—why not writing? You are nearly 50/50 in fiction, and fiction is great, but we all know most fiction is either thinly disguised diary and memoir or vampires having sex with each other. If Criticism is the Head, Fiction is the Rear. And, in terms of opinions about writing, we don’t mean sweet, supportive blurbs for the sisters—we mean real criticism.
And here’s the thing: if you won’t write essays or reviews or philosophy or criticism, you’ll never change these numbers.
Vida, your numbers are shocking, but what do they really mean? And how are we going to make those numbers better?
Any ideas, girls?
I recently found myself having an email dialogue, quite by chance, with one of the founders of Vida, whose stated mission is “to explore cultural and critical perceptions of writing by women through meaningful conversation and the exchange of ideas among existing and emerging literary communities.”
The conversation came about because she, the Vida founder, wanted clarification from me concerning gossip linking her to a powerful male poet mentor. But such talk does not belong in public. It has that smell which consigns it to the garbage pail. Robert B__ eloping with EB is glorious. Put it on the front page. Professor B__ helping to market EB’s poems? Eh, not so glorious.
But every consideration, glorious or not, involving men, women and Letters has an impact every day on the cold facts of Vida’s statistics. Somewhere, between the numbers, and the sorry state of things which those numbers point to, are actual stories involving actual men and women. Do we dare speak these stories and these names? Or do we traffic forever in statistics and polite reactions to them?
We can’t run from theses numbers, but we can run from the truth—of its smelly and corrupt windings—which those numbers signify.
Or, we can follow Ariadne’s thread; we can do the patient, historical work of patiently examining the lives of actual literary men and women, and what it finally means, philosophically.
Here’s an example: Elizabeth Barrett was an extraordinary poet, and better known than the male poet who eventually eclipsed her, Robert Browning. When Mr. Browning came courting in 1845, Elizabeth was the famous poet, not Robert, and she had already published, to much acclaim, the type of dramatic poem Robert Browning would later glory in. This is not to diminish the remarkable Mr. Browning, but only to point out how Miss Barrett fell under Browning’s shadow. Barrett was depicted in the modern era as a rescued recluse known for one poem penned—to Browning, which fit right into the Victorian stereotype. Who perpetuates such stereotypes? The critics. And the critics are men. Elizabeth Barrett Browning fades away, and takes with her a more accurate picture of the Victorian period, a richer selection of poetry, and a powerful example of a powerful woman poet. All the male critics had to do was refute the Victorian era. Women are larger-than-life figures—unless they are reduced by abstract critical thinking which rejects, in the name of “modern progress,” the actual life of women in the past. The “progressives” are then insidiously reactionary. All ahistoricism is reactionary. Let us have improvements, but please let’s not pre-suppose that means chucking history.
A second example: Edna Millay, who wrote sonnets as good as any in the history of literature, was abused in the press by Ezra Pound’s clique: Hugh Kenner and Horace Gregory, to name two. We all know how one well-placed review can harry and destroy. This is the sort of ugly side of Letters which might be characterized as gossip, but we demean Letters by being squemish—so that we brush the ugly side of Letters under the rug. Unfortunately, thugs and bullies exist in “polite literature.” But the bigger problem is, that because Pound and his group was associated with a certain avant-garde progressivism, “make it new” and all that, critics are not always objective in writing literary history or making critical judgments. Because there is this excitable and revolutionary assumption that the avant-garde is always liberal and forward-thinking, we are blind to when the opposite is true.
It’s not too late to undo these mistakes, since literature always has a past, and is always being made anew within the context of that past. But if women are on avant train they think is going in the right direction, but is not, those Vida numbers could get even worse.
One more example: Elinor Wylie (1885-1928) is a marvelous poet, an amazing, crazy, lyrical, predecessor to Plath and Sexton, but like Millay, Wylie fell off the Parade Float of Modernism. The better-known American women poets, who were quietly conservative, such as Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, were close to Pound’s clique or Robert Lowell; actually, Moore was Bishop’s mentor, and Robert Lowell fell in quickly with Pound’s group via Tate and Ransom, so it’s all pretty cozy. Wylie is a strong, but neglected, poet who would appeal to the same audience inspired by Sexton, and it certainly does not diminish a poet like Sexton to comprehend the significance of Wylie as her influence. (Another neglected poet if we go back futher: Ellen Wheeler Wilcox.) Women in Letters will be hurt if women don’t celebrate good women poets right under their nose, or they only celebrate women poets annointed by men. When it comes to literature, networking in the present can only go so far. Knowing history is invaluable.
So here’s the advice, so far. 1. Be critical, not timid and polite. 2. Be historical, intensely so; follow historical threads back to motivations, and groups who act clandestinely and corruptly. These historical phenomena tend to be the rule, not the exception. If the women say, “Leave the conspiracies to the men,” the women will only suffer accordingly, and the Vida numbers will get worse.
As far as The New York Review of Books, which we now know is 80% male, thanks to Vida, women, I think, would make an important statement if they boycotted that magazine, rather than pleading to be let in. The New YorkReview stats should not be read as an indication of failure by women, but rather as a failure by the New York Review, a scholarly failure, since the editors are infatuated with the very Modernism school that joyfully throws poets like Barrett, Millay and Wylie under the bus, and they review the same handful of canonized figures over and over again. The researchers at Vida should analyze a few issues of the New York Review, and discover for everyone not just the numbers, but the faulty philosophy, history and scholarship. Remember: Criticism, ladies, criticism! Get in the face of the New York Review! And enjoy doing it! Letting the 5/1 ratio just sit there without comment, after the initial gasps, implies that women lack the talent to write for the New York Review and women better get cracking and improve themselves! Is this the impression Vida wants to give? No! Go on the offense!
And speaking of offense, Carol Muske-Dukes, in her poem, “A Former Love, a Lover of Form,” is not particularly nice, which is not necessarily a bad thing:
When they kiss,
she feels a certain revulsion,
and as they continue to kiss
She’s trapped by a dull kiss. She’s a victim.
The following sounds too much like all that bad confessional poetry composed in the 1970s:
Her glasses fall forward on her nose,
her mouth opens: all around
are objects that desire, suddenly, her.
Not just clothes, but open doorways,
love seats, Mother’s bright red
espadrilles kicked off in the damp grass.
The poem ends with more puzzlement and complaining:
Is she seducer or seduced?
And which is worse,
a dull lover’s kiss or the embrace
of his terrible laundry?
She’d rather have the book
he wrote than him.
The Stephen Dunn poem features a narrator questioned by a crowd, and gender is completely hidden. It also features a mysterious, yearning self-sacrificing love.
What They Wanted
They wanted me to tell the truth,
so I said I’d lived among them,
for years, a spy,
but all that I wanted was love.
They said they couldn’t love a spy.
Couldn’t I tell them other truths?
I said I was emotionally bankrupt,
would turn any of them in for a kiss.
I told them how a kiss feels
when it’s especially undeserved;
I thought they’d understand.
They wanted me to say I was sorry,
so I told them I was sorry.
They didn’t like it that I laughed.
They asked what I’d seen them do,
and what I do with what I know.
I told them: find out who you are
before you die.
Tell us, they insisted, what you saw.
I saw the hawk kill a smaller bird.
I said life is one long leavetaking.
They wanted me to speak
like a journalist. I’ll try, I said.
I told them I could depict the end
of the world, and my hand wouldn’t tremble.
I said nothing’s serious except destruction.
They wanted to help me then.
They wanted me to share with them,
that was the word they used, share.
I said it’s bad taste
to want to agree with many people.
I told them I’ve tried to give
as often as I’ve betrayed.
They wanted to know my superiors,
to whom did I report?
I told them I accounted to no one,
that each of us is his own punishment.
If I love you, one of them cried out,
what would you give up?
There were others before you,
I wanted to say, and you’d be the one
before someone else. Everything, I said.
Stephen Dunn wins! Stephen Dunn is in the Final Four!
David Orr, a refreshingly smart, honest, and independent critic—and kind of sexy, too.
Scarriet’sThomas Brady used to be Monday Love on Foetry.com, Alan Cordle’s poetry consumer protection site that warned poets against rigged poetry contests.
Foetry.com came to my attention in a Boston Globe piece by Stephen Burt in 2005. Despite Burt’s attempt to discredit Cordle’s site, I knew immediately that Foetry.com was something new and different, and as soon as I began reading the site, Cordle impressed with his honesty and tenacity. Po-biz corruption obviously meant something to Cordle, and he was doing something about it by ‘naming names.’
A few thought it was wrong that Cordle exposed ‘foets’ anonymously—but I thought of Foetry.com’s anonymous nature as similar to an anonymous suggestion box in a workplace: the anonymity of Foetry.com was simply a method to uncover deeply entrenched wrongs: poetry contest cheating.
Academic poetry contests were important. Why? Because a public for poetry no longer existed, academic ‘fame’ was the next best thing, and winning an academic poetry contest was not only the step to academic renown, but contest entry fees paid for the publication of the winning manuscript. Judges were choosing their friends and their students. It was easy to find this out, and it was easy to see this wasn’t fair.
The self-righteous, indignant responses made it easy to see that a nerve had been struck.
The art of poetry was never supposed to be about private contests and academic awards. It was supposed to be about fame and genius. I had sent my poems to magazines and had some published, I had an advanced degree and had taught, but reading contemporary reviews, criticism and poetry and comparing it to the way poetry used to be, I knew, from a critical point of view, that something was rotten; Alan Cordle’s work—which quickly made him famous in po-biz—made sense to my whole way of thinking. I knew there were ambitious poets who mailed out more poems to magazines than anybody else, who earned advanced degrees and got to know the right people and were shaping po-biz through personal influence. I knew that I was probably lazier than these people. But poetry was poetry and truth was the truth.
And the truth, it seemed to me, was this:
1) Poetry was still an important academic credential.
2) Reaching out to the public (‘selling books’ the old-fashioned way) was no longer possible.
3) An art form once popular and prestigious was now only prestigious.
4) The game was now controlled by a relatively small number of networking academics.
When opponents of Foetry.com uncovered Alan Cordle’s identity, it turned out the ‘masked crusader’ was a librarian. His wife was the published, contest-winning poet (uneasy in fact, with his crusade, and not signed on to it) and this only confirmed that Foetry.com’s crusade was indeed a chivalrous one.
Complaints against Foetry.com inevitably took three forms:
1. The Witch Hunt Charge.
Foetry.com’s investigations were mild—they used documents in the public record: who judged a contest, who went to what school, the contents of a mass-mailed letter to potential contestants in a poetry contest. Perhaps the guiltiest foet, Jorie Graham, didn’t lose her job at Harvard, or any prestige, really, and she probably gained a few book sales from all the excitement; Bin Ramke stepped down from a Contest Series (that was crooked) but life goes on the same for every foet. Public awareness was raised—and this was important, because of the very issue that made Foetry.com necessary in the first place—poetry has a small public, and so: Alan Cordle’s consciousness-raising and public shaming was huge. The net amount of ‘pain’ was the moral humiliation of those who were guilty. If the anonymous Foetry.com was the Dark Knight, he was gentle, and performed a much-need service for poetry.
2. With all the wrongs in the world, why focus on pettiness in poetry?
But this question is unfair. If a wealthy, corporate criminal, for instance, gives to charity, are they the moral authority in every other sphere? If a person with little means wishes to do some small good, should this be resented?
3. Haven’t the great poets always networked and helped each other?
Not really. Byron and Shelley were companions, but neither judged the other a winner in a poetry contest, or wrote fawning notices in the press for each other—their pride would have found this abhorrent. Poe and Alexander Pope attacked puffery, mediocrity and self-serving cliques with glee.
Pound, Eliot and their friends at the Dial Magazine, however, did give each other (Cummings, Williams, Moore) annual Dial Prizes of $1,000 (equal to a year’s salary for Tom at Lloyd’s bank).
American poets Edgar Poe, Amy Lowell, and Edna Millay were attacked by the Pound clique, and naked ambition was the cause, even historical revenge, as Eliot’s New England roots trace directly back to the hatred between Poe and “English Traits” Emerson. Scarriet is the first to investigate this.
Scarriet has moved closer to solving Poe’s probable murder.
Scarriet is Foetry.com with a highly historical and critical perspective.
And Scarriet will not ban or censor or silence anyone for their views.
Foetry.com closed down and was archived in 2007. One day in September of 2009, without warning, Thomas Brady, Alan Cordle, Desmond Swords and Christopher Woodman were banned from making comments on Blog Harriet. The always amusing, ‘don’t-get-mad-get-even,’ Alan Cordle set up Scarriet.
So we can’t help but celebrate the publication of Beautiful & Pointless by the NY Times Poetry Critic, David Orr. From theSlate review (4/14):
So who are these poets, anyway? Orr says they suffer from the fact that “even if most people don’t know what poets do, the average person feels that whatever it is, it must be spectacular.” Orr cuts them down to size, an exercise that turns out to be bracing for all concerned. Poets spend an inordinate amount of time sitting in front of computers typing, or else reading, or else worrying over the fact that they can’t muster the concentration to read or write. When not writing, poets also preoccupy themselves with “sending dozens of envelopes filled with poems to literary magazines read by, at most, a few hundred people,” mostly fellow poets.
No wonder their world is what Orr calls a “chatty, schmoozy, often desperate reality.” There are, as you’d expect, the drunken book parties and the annual Association of Writers and Writing Programs annual conventions, which are more like returning to college—or is it high school?—than anyone would like to admit. And Orr reports at length on a full-blown scandal, “the Foetry eEpisode,” capitalizing on the gossip while also issuing a cautionary tale: Inbred cultures beware! Between 2004 and 2007, the Web site Foetry.com, run by a man named Alan Cordle, took aim at corruption in the supposedly anonymous book contests that land many poets their small and university-press-publishing contracts. Orr describes the site “stocked with outraged allegations of favor-trading, creepy insinuations about people’s personal lives, and buckets of name-calling (including my personal favorite, ‘foet,’ which referred to careerist poets).” People got hurt, at least one prize was shut down, and targeted poets like Jorie Graham basically stopped judging contests. It was ugly, often petty, and it made headlines outside of Poetryland. It was enough to make you forget that what poets really are is craftspeople: They make intricate little things out of very carefully chosen words, presumably at least in part for other readers to examine.
Alan Cordle has come a long way since he got mad and decided to do something about it.
The art of poetry has been treated shabbily by “the new.” It sometimes seems the dollar has been replaced by the Pound. But we can always find some good in the new: we have the internet now, and it wasn’t all that long ago that all the news came from sources like Walter Cronkite, or Understanding Poetry by a couple of crotchety old Southern Agrarians turned New Critics.
Elimination. It has to happen. All grass cannot grow. All things cannot live. All chimneys cannot puff. The poet who plays his pipe may play his pipe in vain.
The APR anthology, The Body Electric, features 180 poets published in the APR in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Only 64 of those poets are chosen for the tournament, and each one of those 64 rumble to the top with their best poem, chosen by Scarriet, with help, of course, from the ancient, but still lovely, Marla Muse.
The cuts do not reflect the talent of the esteemed poet, but rather the worth of the particular poems selected by the APR editors. The editors were guilty, occasionally, as we all are, of being dazzled by names. Famous poets at the bitter end of their careers tossed scraps at the magazine, and this is just one obvious instance of the sorts of errors in judgment which the Scarriet March Madness process will judiciously correct.
Marla Muse will read one of her own compositions before we announce the first of the cuts.
Take it away, Marla:
“Thank you, Thomas. Ahem…first I just want to say that elimination is not a bad thing. Death is not always bad. We get rid of things. We push away the worst and make room for the better. And don’t be sad, poets, if you get eliminated. You can always come back, next time. This is only death for this time.
Death Is Love
Death is love’s friend.
Death is the one thing we cannot pretend;
All fools go on, except this end.
Death helps love live,
For nothing can withstand the long hours that give
Beauty wrinkles, and youth something even more primitive.
I once felt beautiful pain
Thinking of my own love’s dear name
On a stone, swept by leaves—but in vain…
My love, instead, fell gradually old with stumbling grace;
Death did not leave the memory of a beautiful face,
But took love slowly down to a different place.”
Beautiful, Marla! Speaking of death, here are the first cuts:
John Berryman: Little pitiful-drunk rants Jorie Graham: Early lyric promise crashes and burns Louis Simpson: Surprisingly banal Louise Gluck: Dully abstract Anne Sexton: Booze Muse C.K. Williams: Can’t finish a poem. Richard Wilbur: Rhyme buries sense. Michael Ryan: Bitter confessing: adolescent. Gerald Stern: Come on! Love me! Please! Charles Simic: Two-cent Symbolism. Kenneth Rexroth: Robot Zen. Stanley Plumly: Chance of poetry, turning to prose. John Hollander: Grade A Bombast Kenneth Koch: Encyclopedic insincerity Fred Seidel: I’m more connected and dangerous than you. James Dickey: White spaces? You? Richard Eberhart: Eh? Charles Bernstein: He started a joke and started the whole world crying.
There are many more poets who have to go. And we’ll let you know who the other losers are, and publish the 2011 March Madness brackets soon!
Everybody knows there’s cheating in poetry. Jorie Graham, as public contest judge, picked poetry by students and friends.
Shameful. And silly, because someone winning a contest and getting a book published doesn’t do anything for poetry.
There’s no drama. We don’t get to see the losers cry and gnash their teeth. We don’t get to see the winners celebrate. We don’t even see the losers. We don’t even know who they are. And there can’t really be a winner worth the name if the losers aren’t visible. That’s the problem with poetry. The tragedies and triumphs are completely hidden.
All we see are books with boring blurbs on them.
Where’s the blood and the glory?
Does anyone really believe, or care, about blurbs?
Of course not.
Where’s the trash talk?
Jorie Graham had a pretty face. Po-biz should have worked hard to make her the face of poetry, instead of having her work behind-the– scenes as a corrupt judge. What did that do for poetry? Nothing.
If you’re able to corrupt morals in a general way, maybe you’ll make a real name for yourself. Maybe you’ll get exiled, but you’ll be famous, really famous, one-name famous, like Ovid. If you’re going to be corrupt, do it big, so it spreads fame for your company, in this case, poetry.
What I want to see on someone’s book is: “To win this Press prize, the author beat out the following jackasses…” and pictures of the sorry losers, and blurbs ridiculing their poetry.
You want people to read poetry? You’ve got to show the winners and losers.
It would have been better if Jorie Graham had judged her own poetry as winner in contest after contest; the pure arrogance and aplomb of that act would have helped to focus poetry-stardom, making it more accessible to all.
Look at the NFL.
People love it.
But pro football was once moribund, like poetry is today. The tapes of the first two Super Bowls were erased by NBC and CBS; that’s right: no one can watch the first two Super Bowls, because they are gone forever; the networks didn’t think Super Bowls I and II were worth saving.
Now every obscure NFL fumble, concussion, and tantrum is studied by millions. The football player, Moss, is a million times more famous than the poet, Moss. Why does one moss grow under a rock, and the other moss scream in our ears?
It all began with Joe Namath and Super Bowl III. Broadcasters felt the first two Super Bowls were not worth preserving.
Even though Namath played for what was then the nearly illegitimate AFL, even though Namath was told to quit football if he did not sell his Manhattan restaurant that was frequented by mobsters, even though many in-the-know thought Super Bowl III was fixed, with the Colt QB making all sorts of questionable throws (as they say on the street, “no one can throw a game like a QB”), Super Bowl III was a spectacular success with TV-watchers.
Namath not only put a badly-needed face on the NFL, he made millions (and future billions) thanks to the legitimacy he gave to the AFL with the nearly-3 touchdown underdog Jets’ Super Bowl victory, allowing the NFL/AFL merger to occur smoothly the following season. Joe Namath’s 1969 victory put the Super Bowl on the road from an erasable item to a national institution.
The Black Sox Scandal (a thrown World Series in 1919) almost destroyed the integrity of major league baseball.
The remedy?
Babe Ruth and his homeruns.
Baseball officials decided to juice the ball in 1920, and baseball got its first modern homerun hitter, Babe Ruth, the season after the 1919 World Series.
The rule is: when faced with a cheating scandal or declining popularity, the only way a league can save itself is with a display of massive fireworks.
Joe Namath in 1969 was like Babe Ruth in 1920, a savior of a sport in the eyes of a fickle public.
Western poetry’s “fireworks”—in order to excite public interest—has largely consisted of not transcending scandal with firework-heroics, but embracing scandal: think of Ovid and Byron; think of the obscenity trials of Joyce’sUlysses and Ginsberg’sHowl. If one looks for true poetry “heroics,” perhaps we’re talking of Virgil and Dante and Milton? And today, “heroics” is perhaps a poet who has been murdered by a tyrannical regime—but this is a far cry from anything which might be cynically manipulated by po-biz for its own survival.
Sexual morality can become so corrupt in society, that corrupt poets can no longer shock, or be considered scandalous.
Sports, however, to be legitimate, has to be “clean.” Not morally clean—look at the recent cases in the NFL of Michael Vick and Ben Roethlisberger— but free of the cheating-taint: steroids or fixed contests.
Gambling and organized crime will probably always be ‘hidden but present’ in pro sports. But as long as the sport is perceived to be clean by those who follow it for its thrill of competition, (competition is a better word, we think, than the more vague “entertainment”) most everyone is happy.
The old NFL franchises, like the Giants and Steelers, used gambling winnings as start-up funding. Vince Lombardi’s old Green Bay Packers had star players who were convicted football gamblers. But as long as these unpleasant facts remain outside the minds of the TV-viewing public, they’ll watch, with pride, what they think is sport, and not manipulated entertainment.
Heroics in sports is vital, and heroics has to seem real, not manipulated.
Poets and psychologists may understand this better than the mere fans and TV-watchers, but it’s also important for a league to have a dynasty, a great team that people can take pride in; the dynastic team gives a mysterious legitimacy to a sport. What would major league baseball be without the Yankees—a team to love, a team to admire, and a team to beat/hate? There has never been a major league sport without a dynasty: the Celtics, the Canadians, the Yankees, the Packers. It lends legitimacy to a sport in an uncanny manner. True winning cannot seem to be random or lucky, or, worst of all, the result of a fix—the latter a horror that dare not speak its name among earnest tribes of sports fans; no, winning has to be seen as the product of an ordained person, or team; winning has to have a certain inevitable, historic, almost holy aura to it.
There are two truths right now about the NFL: One: Robert Kraft, the billionaire owner of the New England Patriots, is the most powerful person in the NFL. He personally negotiates major media contracts for the NFL, the current NFL commissioner was his pick, he built a football stadium with his own money, he has numerous media and corporate contacts, and he gives widely to charity. Two: Tom Brady, in a game filled with thuggish personalities, is the face of the NFL. He is tall, handsome, a winner, dates a supermodel, has a squeaky-clean reputation, and never breathes a negative word about anything in public.
Kraft was able to buy low when he acquired the Patriots (he bought the real estate before he bought the team) because they were highly unsuccesful at the time. The Patriots almost moved to St. Louis, and then Hartford, before Kraft invested a great deal of his own money to purchase the team outright. In 2000, Bill Belichick fell into the Patriots lap, even though he was going to be the coach for the New York Jets. Belichick, a convicted cheater (the NFL fined him half a million dollars) quickly brought the Patriots three Super Bowls in four years, with Tom (Face of the NFL) Brady at the helm; Brady, Belichick, and Kraft made it to their first Super Bowl by surviving a game-ending fumble by Brady in the playoffs when the “Tuck Rule” was called by an official, a bizarre, little-known rule, impossible to interpret, reversing the fumble, and saving the Patriots’ season.
After Belichick was fined for cheating, the Patriots, like major league baseball suddenly discovering the homerun ball in 1920 after the 1919 black sox scandal, erupted with a fireworks offense (never seen before, or since) and a perfect season—helped along by a number of questionable officials’ calls. Congress was threatening to investigate Spygate (the Patriots cheating scandal) in the weeks leading up to the 2008 Super Bowl—and the perfect-season, juggernaut Spygate Pats turned into a lamb, and lost.
In the 2010 season, the Patriots, with mostly rookies and second-year players, are still winning, (although every opponent marches down the field on them,) and their victories seem to be coming from fluke plays and fluke calls. The Patriots did get hammered this year by the Cleveland Browns; the Browns’ head coach once worked for Belichick—and was the coach for the Jets in the game when Belichick was caught cheating.
Speaking of the bizarre ‘Tuck Rule,’ the game of football has such fuzzy rules that fuzzy rules are the rule. When a player is ‘holding’ another, or when ‘pass interference’ really occurs are as puzzling as the infamous ‘Tuck Rule,’ never mind the question of when a player is really down, or when the ball is really dead, or was that player out-of-bounds, or was that a fumble or not (‘tuck rule,” no.)? If there’s one constant in the NFL, it’s this: teams that benefit from this fuzziness always win.
TV-watchers prepare for the game by reminding themselves of how great their favorite team’s defense or offense is, but when the game begins, suddenly it’s not a players’ game, but an officials’ game, as every other play brings some head-scratching interpretation of the “rules.”
Ex-football-player broadcasters display impotent expertise-ism as they—and often the camera—express blatant (but always harmless) consternation at the officials’ on-field rulings, rulings that dominate the contest in ratio to the degree they befuddle.
There is something comforting about the fuzzy rules of the NFL to Americans, who love to put their faith in the decisions of nearly-invisible government officials who always know best.
Presidents, and other visible leaders, or political candidates, can be safely mocked, but officials behind-the-scenes simply do what they do with impunity: the referee as God. Most in football today, however, would say it’s Bob Kraft who is the God. Or Tom Brady.
Those who know the game of football know it is very much like a long volley in tennis; games go back and forth, with each team moving the ball down the field, and scoring, or giving up the ball on a punt. A team will only get a handful of possessions in each half, (sometimes a team’s offense will only touch the ball once in a quarter) and one error (an interception returned for a touchdown, for instance) is often enough to decide a game. One fumble , one interception, or one crucial ref call (or non-call) is all it takes. The TV-watcher, however, wants to believe the winner was better and the loser is a…loser. The pride of the fan demands it.
Pro-wrestling (WWE) is rigged, scripted, immensely popular, and relies on the perception of good guys, bad guys and ‘bad’ good guys: Tom Bradys, Michael Vicks and Ben Roethlisbergers. Here’s the question no ESPN analysist will ask, for fear of losing their job, and no proud NFL fan will ask, for fear of losing their soul: How close is pro football to pro wrestling?
The NFL is successful.
The NFL has a face. Poetry does not.
The poet today is as unknown and faceless—as an NFL referee.
1. Billy Collins -a poet of wit and popularity
2. Dana Gioia -his famous essay still resonates
3. David Lehman -BAP takes the pulse better than prizes/contests do.
4. Louise Gluck -the new Jorie; has stepped down as Yale judge.
5. John Ashbery -the most famous unknown person ever
6. W.S. Merwin -emerging as the e.e. cummings of our time
7. David Orr -elegant critical manner, writes poetry, too
8. Helen Vendler -when the dust settles, what has she done, exactly?
9. Paul Muldoon -as long as he’s at the new yorker, he’ll be on this list.
10. Harold Bloom -will he ever live down his nutty hatred of Poe?
11. Glyn Maxwell -a one-man british invasion
12. G.C. Waldrep -he’s all the rage, and deserves it
13. Anne Carson -managed to secure that all-important ‘classical’ rep…
14. Robert Hass -he sort of reminds us of Paul Engle…
15. Mary Oliver -popular ’cause she feels, rather than thinks, nature poetry.
16. James Tate -founder of the funny/absurd/surreal/realism school
17. Dean Young -James Tate lite?
18. Sharon Olds -nobody does frank sexuality so morally and deftly
19. Charles Simic -perfected the small, vivid, cinematic poem
20. Marvin Bell -long time U. Iowan
21. Donald Hall -our Thomas Hardy?
22. Karen Solie -2010 Griffin Poetry prize and good poet
23. Terrance Hayes -beautiful, black, and a National Book Award…
24. Robyn Schiff -Jorie love-blurbed her madly, UG Iowa Wrkshp dir…
25. Adrienne Rich -for the sisters
26. Barbara Hamby -rides the new ‘excessive’ style
27. Lucia Perillo -2010 BAP; rocks the newly minted ‘A.D.D. School’
28. Matt Donovan -2010 Whiting Writers award
29. Ron Silliman -this is his time
30. Amy Gerstler -2010 Best American Poetry editor
31. Henry Hart -found a poem I liked by someone on the web, damn!
32. Sandra Beasley -this gal is worth checking out!
33. Shane McCrae -warning: this poetry may actually be good…
34. Philip Gross -2010 T.S. Eliot Prize
35. Simon Armitage -the closest brit who possesseth any wit
36. L.S. Klatt -2010 Iowa poetry prize winner
37. Margaret Atwood -she’s never boring
38. Carolyn Forche -that ‘bag full of ears’ poem, seems like only yesterday…
39. Matthew Yeager -2010 BAP, “Go now, my little red balloon of misery!”
40. Stephen Burt -one day vendler’s empire will be his
41. Barrett Watten -selling Language Theory to British academia
42. Cole Swensen -Iowa City/Paris gal
43. Christopher Reid -first poetry book to win Costa since ’99 (Heaney)
44. D.A. Powell -seems to be making all the right moves
45. Frank Bidart -actor James Franco digs his poetry
46. Carl Phillips -one of our most understated, thoughtful poets…
47. Rachel Hadas -writing, judging…
48. Alan Cordle -the david who slew goliath
49. Bin Ramke -has that ‘Bladerunner’ fallen angel look…
50. Donald Revel -the blue twilight school
51. Jorie Graham -has her move to p.c. extremism doomed her?
52. Natasha Saje’ -we like her poetry
53. Paul Hoover -tortured, philosophical poetry, but good…
54. Conor O’Callaghan -Bess Hokin winner
55. Terri Erickson -exploded onto Scarriet, and won Nooch’s heart…
56. George Szirtes -Hungarian Brit
57. Abigail Deutsch –Poetry magazine’s 2010 reviewing prize…
58. Jason Guriel -poet/reviewer making his mark with Poetry…
59. D.H. Tracy -fastidious, not fawning, as Poetry critic…
60. A.E. Stallings -studied classics in Athens!
61. Dan Chiasson -belongs to new crowd of poet/critics
62. Mark Levine -the David Foster Wallace of workshop poetry…
63. Katherine Larson -2010 Yale Younger, Gluck’s last pick…
64. Dara Wier -workshop queen at Amherst & has a Selected…
65. Joseph Donahue -“the angel’s jibe would harry the glitter from the dew”
66. Robert Casper -poetry society of america, jubilat
67. Ben Mazer -Man of Letters: poet, editor, critic? He has first two…
68. Eileen Myles -will not self-edit, thank you…
69. Derek Walcott -his Pure Style, like buttah…
70. Bob Hicok -the school of manly sentimentalism…
71. Janet Holmes -‘ass hat uh’ press is how you pronounce it, I think…
72. August Kleinzahler -he chased Garrison Keillor away…
73. John Barr -runs the Evil Empire? Blog Harriet: zzzzzz
74. Philip Schultz -his 8 year-old son told him he won the Pulitzer…
75. Seamus Heaney -his iconic Bog-status is nearly blinding…
76. Kevin Young -curator of the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library…
77. Charles Bernstein -his school producing a new generation of folly?
78. Tony Hoagland -he dares to write like Billy Collins…
79. Ilya Kaminsky -the spirit of translation…
80. Matthea Harvey -carries a flag for a style which others do better…
81. Mary Jo Salter -the most respectable force in poetry ever!
82. William Logan -if his critic ever reads his poetry, he’s done…
83. Alice Quinn -20 years picking poems for New Yorker
84. Julianna Spahr “MFA is under-realized, under-theorized…”
85. Rae Armantrout -one of the greatest little poem poets…
86. Rita Dove -Clinton was prez, she was poet laureate, Oasis was cool…
87. Seth Abramson -ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my client’s poetry…
88. Adam Kirsch -the Harvard kid who made good…
89. Daniel Nester -We Who Are About To Die is a funny website…
90. Meghan O’ Rourke -poetry’s audrey hepburn
91. Jim Behrle -funny, creative, but can’t get laid!
92. Martin Espada -“Latino poet of his generation” says his website
93. William Kulik -scarriet march madness final four
94. Patricia Smith -slam queen, rattle prize winner
95. C.D Wright -tickled by the Elliptical…
96. Philip Nikolayev -where’s Fulcrum?
97. Carl Adamshick -latest Walt Whitman winner
98. Dora Malech -everything going for her but poetic talent
99. Eleanor Ross Taylor -best 90 year old poet around
100. Valzhyna Mort -beautiful russian-american…uh…poetry.
Take the official Scarriet Poetry test and find out!
1. You have graduated from, or are in, an MFA program.
2. You mostly read poems written by your teachers and friends.
3. You mostly read poems by moderns and post-moderns.
4. You have published at least two favorable reviews of work by your friends.
5. You have published in some form the work of at least two of your friends.
6. You have organized readings for at least two of your friends.
7. A friend has published a favorable review of your work.
8. Your work has been published by a friend.
9. A friend has organized a reading for you.
10. Your friends are mostly poets.
11. You never argue about poetry.
12. You only have friends in your poetry circles.
13. You have little interest in quibbling about the definitions of poetry.
14. You admit to strangers pretty quickly that you are a poet.
15. You consider yourself a poetry critic.
16. You wish poetry conversations were more civil.
17. You prefer John Ashbery to Walt Whitman.
18.. You prefer Charles Olson to Edna Millay.
19. You prefer Ezra Pound to Edgar Poe.
20. You prefer Geoffrey Hill to Percy Shelley.
21. You prefer Tony Hoagland to Rae Armantrout.
22. You prefer Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley.
23. You prefer Charles Bernstein to Charles Bukowski.
24. You prefer Jorie Graham to William Carlos Williams.
25. You prefer Jennifer Moxley to Billy Collins.
26. You prefer Walt Whitman to Alexander Pope.
27. You prefer Robert Frost to Wallace Stevens.
28. You prefer Emily Dickinson to William Wordsworth.
29. You prefer Dante to Robert Lowell.
30. You prefer Pound’s Cantos to Shakespeare’s Sonnets.
31. You prefer Li Po to Leslie Scalapino.
32. You prefer 20th century translations to Tennyson.
33. You read more poetry than prose.
34. You read more poetry criticism than poetry.
35. Your favorite part of ‘Poetry’ magazine tends to be the poems.
36. Your favorite part of ‘Poetry’ magazine tends to be the commentary.
37. The first thing you do when you see a new anthology is to check to see which poets have been published in it.
38. When you look at any poetry anthology, it matters to you how many poems/pages are allotted to each poet—whether or not the poets are living or dead.
39. When you look at any poetry anthology, it matters to you which poets have been left out/included—whether or not the poets are living or dead.
40. You are naturally more interested in living poets than dead ones.
41. You generally think poetry as an art has improved since 1900.
42. You generally think poetry as an art has improved since 1960.
43. You generally think poetry as an art has improved since 1990.
44. Over half of the books on your nightstand right now are books of poems.
45. Over half of the books on your nightstand right now are books of poems by living poets.
46. You would rather read a new, self-published book by an unknown poet than a book of reviews by William Logan.
47. You would rather read a new book by an unknown poet published by an establishment press than a book of reviews by William Logan.
48. You would rather read essays by Stephen Burt than by William Logan.
49. You prefer the prose of Walter Benjamin to the prose of Coleridge.
50. You would rather read essays by Robert Hass than letters of Byron.
51. You would rather read an anthology of contemporary female poets than a book on Shakespeare’s London.
52. You would rather read the latest book of poems by Peter Gizzi than a recently published anthology of essays by New Critics.
53. You would never read a poetry textbook if you didn’t have to.
54. You prefer Charles Simic to Philip Larkin.
55. You would rather read a book of poems by Sharon Olds than an anthology of WW I poets.
56. You would rather go to a poetry reading than attend a movie.
57. Everything else being equal, you would always choose a poet for a lover.
58. Your poems never rhyme.
59. You teach/have taught in the Humanities.
60. You teach/have taught poetry, exclusively.
61. You administer poetry contests.
62. You enter poetry contests.
63. You have won a poetry contest.
64. You have won a major award.
65. You have published in mainstream publications.
66. You’ve met Franz Wright on a blog.
67. You think Jim Behrle is hot.
68. You have a private method or trick to writing poems.
69. Ron Silliman has good taste in poetry.
70. You read ‘Poets and Writers’ from cover-to-cover every month.
71. You read books of poems from cover-to-cover in one sitting.
72. You are proficient in at least one other language beside your native one.
73. You have a degree other than in English or Creative Writing.
74. Jorie Graham deserves her prestigious Chair at Harvard.
75. Poetry is ambassador to the world’s peoples.
76. You have a secret crush on Alan Corlde.
77. Metaphor is the essence of poetry.
78. You want to sit at Daniel Nester’s knee and have him tell you the ways of the world.
79. You understand what the post-avants are talking about.
80. Flarf is really cool.
81. Conceptualism knocks your socks off.
82. Poets turn you on.
83. You want desperately to have a wild affair with a poet.
84. Your secret goal is to teach poetry.
85. When you are published in a magazine you buy copies for friends.
86. At least one of your parents is an artist.
87. It really bugs you that poetry has become prose.
88. Marjorie Perloff is the bomb.
89. Poetry is a way to explore political identity.
90. Poetry is the best way to communicate the deepest truths.
91. Humor for a select audience is poetry’s most important function today.
92. The bottom line is that poetry helps nerds get laid.
93. Poetry contributes to the dignity of the human race.
94. Slam poetry is a great antidote to bookworm-ism.
95. Your favorite poetry event is a slam poetry fest.
96. You are wary that you might be a ‘school of quietude’ poet.
97. You dig Language Poetry.
98. You look for trends in poetry, but just so you can be informed.
What thoughts I have of you tonight, Jorie Graham, for I walked down the sidestreets under the trees with a Fullbright self-conscious looking at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into your volume “The End Of Beauty,” dreaming of your enumerations!
What marbles and what marimbas! Whole workshops stopping in your volume! Poems full of husbands! Wives in the paragraphs, a baby in the caesura!–and you, Helen Vendler, what were you doing down by the iambics?
I saw you, Jorie Graham, mother, fashionable grubber, poking among the discourses, eyeing the poetry prizes.
I heard you asking questions of each: who smelled my students? What price betrayal? Are you my winner?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant derailments following you, and followed in my imagination by the editor of the American Poetry Review.
We strode down the open stanzas together in our solitary fancy tasting insinuations, possessing every parenthetical, and never passing the denouement.
Where are you going, Jorie Graham? I close the book in an hour. Which way do your locks point tonight?
(I touch your Pulitzer and dream of our odyssey in the committee and feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through Cambridge? The blurbs add light to light, lights out in the classrooms, we’ll both be happy.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past the little shops outside of Harvard Yard?
Ah, dear mother, husky-voiced courage-teacher, what America did you have when Ramke and Sacks quit poling the ferry and you got out on a smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of Lethe?
This is Bob Poetry and Art Prose with Scarriet Sports Highlights!
Brought to you by…Silliman’s Blog…the place to go… when poetry’s on your mind.
Bob: “OK, Art, let’s get right to it. The big story this week has to be Sigmund Freud.”
Art: “Oh boy, Bob, what a story.”
Bob: “The Cambridge Cummings are bottom dwellers in the American League with only 4 victories in 20 games. Their pitching staff is just not scaring anyone: T.E. Hulme, Vladmir Mayakovsky, A.J. Ayer, ScofieldThayer. The Cummings team E.R.A. is around 5. The team is demoralized. So E.E. Cummings says, “Enough is enough” and he goes out there and gets Freud…Freud! Can you believe it?”
Art: “The Cigar guy! Freud.”
Bob: “Cummings gets Freud.”
Art: “Sigmund Freud!”
Bob: “Look in the dugout… and there’s Cummings and Freud next to each other, chewing the fat, like they’ve known each other all their life. Amazing.”
Art: “Sigmund joins ‘em in Iowa City.”
Bob: “The Cummings open up a four game series in Iowa City with their two new acquisitions…Freud and Charles Darwin…”
Art: “Don’t forget Charles Darwin.”
Bob: “Yea, Darwin’s in their rotation now, too. So Mayakovsky is scheduled to pitch against the Iowa City Grahams and the Grahams are tied for third in the American League with a 12-8 record, and Iowa City has an old Iowa City guy on the mound, John Berryman…and Mayakovsky throws a shutout! The Cummings win! Then they split the next two and now it’s Freud’s turn to pitch.”
Art: “Let’s pick up the call of the game…”
IOWA CITY BROADCASTER…. “Two outs…and now Freud’s coming up…they’re not pinch hitting for Freud…he’s staying in the game. Freud, with a one hitter so far, stands in…still no score here…in the top of the ninth…here’s the first pitch from Sacks…there’s a fly ball…to left…pretty deep in the corner…this one could…it’s a homerun…a homerun for Freud! I don’t believe it! Freud pumping his fist as he rounds the bases! The Cummings lead, 1-0!”
Bob: “That was the call from Iowa City. Freud finished off the Grahams in the ninth, striking out the side, as Freud shut out the Iowans 1-0 and homered for his team’s only run, as the rejuvenated Cummings took 3 out of 4 against the Grahams in Iowa City.”
Art: “The Cummings improve to 7-17, and I think they’re on their way, Bob.”
Bob: “The other big stories we’re watching. Over in the National League, the Tennessee Ransoms continue to play well with Aristotle in the middle of their lineup. They took 3 of 4 from the Ashberys, who have made some good pickups recently: Cage, Dali, Ionesco, Camus, ChristopherSmart…”
Art: “But the Ransoms proved to be too much as Tennessee got the better of Brooklyn.”
Bob: “Let’s talk about London!”
Art: “Back in the AL, T.S. Eliot picked up Winston Churchill and Matthew Arnold.”
Bob: “Dover-Beach-Arnold and We’ll-fight-them-on-the-beaches-Churchill. Wow.”
Art: “Ron Silliman ruined Churchill’s debut in the Williams’ Jersey Shore ballpark, beating the Prime Minister 3-1 as the Eliots and the Williams opened up a 4 game series, but the Eliots took the next 3 from the Williams, as Matthew Arnold shut out the Williams in game 2 of that series.”
Bob: “What a statement from London’sMatthew Arnold!”
Art: “ I like the London Eliots now, Bob, I really do…the Eliots in second place in the AL now… only one game behind the Hartford Stevens…
Bob: “I don’t know if Eliot has the hitting, though…check out his lineup…obscure Elizabethans, obscure French poets…
Art: “You make a good point there…the Eliots are not scoring a ton of runs right now…but I like London in the American League…which is really up for grabs…
Bob: In the National League, the Philadelphia Poe began the season 9-0, as their pitching, led by Alexander Pope, was dominating, but Poe is starting to struggle…and how about those Hartford Whittiers? They have revamped their pitching staff, adding Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison!
Art: And the Poe play the Whittiers next! That should be an interesting matchup…probably the biggest one in the National League…in the AL, the series to watch this week…the Concord Emersons travel to Tennessee to take on the Ransoms!
Bob: “Thanks, Art! This is Bob Poetry.”
Art: “And I’m Art Prose. For both of us, this is Scarriet Poetry Sports!”
all of a piece which of course it was but how seldom
it seemed that way when it was still happening and was
the air through which I saw it as I went on thinking
of somewhere else in some other time whether gone
or never to arrive and so it was divided
however long I was living it and I was where
it kept coming together and where it kept moving apart
while home was a knowledge that did not suit every occasion
but remained familiar and foreign as the untitled days
and what I knew better than to expect followed me
into the garden and I would stand with friends among
the summer oaks and be a city in a different
age and the dread news arrived on the morning when the
plum trees
opened into silent flower and I could not let go
of what I longed to be gone from and it would be that way
without end I thought unfinished and divided
by nature and then a voice would call from the field
in the evening or the fox would bark in the cold night
and that instant with each of its stars just where it was
in its unreturning course would appear even then
entire and itself the way it all looks from afterward.
HARVARD, April 30, 2010. Jorie Graham was worried about the oil slick. She said it was “extraordinary” that W.S. Merwin was coming to visit the “campus” and especially during “these days.” She told everyone to be very quiet. Then she had eight of her poetry students, all in a line, recite, robot-like, Merwin’s old poetry from the early 1960s. The poems all sounded alike and they were read in the same sort of monotone, with slight feeling, and the students looked and sounded a bit uncomfortable—whether it was from Jorie Graham’s presence or from the oil slick moving towards the Louisiana coast, it was hard to tell. It wasn’t from the poems themselves, however, which rolled off their tongues, understood, or not understood, in this line or that. The recitations had a certain degree of quiet elegance, even when uttered with an air of disdainful Crimson confidence; Merwin’s poetry is always quietly elegant, if not much more.
The audience was certainly quiet; there was hardly a peep for the hour and a half presentation. No one seemed to register any feeling or thought, for there was very little feeling or thinking expressed in the room, not when Merwin made his ‘man is destroying the earth’ pitch, which was expected, nor when he later apologized for sounding ‘preachy,’ which he ‘hated,’ because his father was a minister, he said, and he (the poet) had always rebelled against that vibe.
The audience was very quiet; it was a respectful ‘let the old guy rant’ silence, and Merwin felt it, no doubt, which was why he later apologized. It was Jorie who set the tone, however: “Oh! The oil slick!” “Turn off your cell phones, please, while my students read their poetry of homage!” It was really quite horrible. And then in-between: Joanna Klink’s actual introduction of the poet, endless and cliche-ridden, with her smiley-faced: “Merwin has won every prize. He’s won them all!”
The poetry, frankly, didn’t help. It couldn’t rise above the oppressive occasion. Most of the time the audience hadn’t the faintest idea what the poetry was saying. Merwin’s poetry doesn’t say very much; it drifts from one simile to the next, the metaphors not explaining or embellishing, as with Shakespeare; Merwin’s metaphors compare and philosophize in a highly mystical way; Merwin’s poetry is existential; it’s all about what not-knowing feels like, and, when read without punctuation, that disembodied voice can be very effective, since disembodiment is really what Merwin is about—there’s really very little actual life in Merwin’s poems. (I had heard Shakespeare’s work read at a noisy cafe open-mike the evening prior and the contrast was startling.) Merwin has a wonderful, human, dramatic speaking voice and when he reads his poetry aloud, he reads very much with punctuation; his voice rises, falls, and pauses in all the right places, and thus humanizes the poetry, which scatters the mist from it and reveals its depressive quality, its humorless, dull, reflective, passivity. I looked around at the young faces in the room and noticed they were blank, and bored.
When the students read Merwin’s early 1960s poetry, I counted the word “like” until I lost count. The passage quoted above was selected for its special excellence from “The Vixen,” a more recent book (1996) in a review by Richard Howard. This passage does not contain the word “like” at all, so in that regard Merwin cleaned up his act; he rid himself of that indulgence; one hears in the excerpt from “The Vixen” verbs rather than simile. But it’s still virtuous, vague, metaphysical, sleepy Merwin.
The evening was boring. As soon as Merwin stopped reading, his Harvard hosts surrounded him.
This was a Harvard event.
It was certainly not open-mike Shakespeare, while the dishes rattled.
It was more about comfort than rattle.
At one point in that deathly silence in the Thompson room at the Barker Center, when Merwin first stood up and picked up Jorie’s reference to the oil slick, he sort of looked over at her and her little group, and said, with a little shrug and a smile, “This is nothing new. Man has always been destroying the earth.”
Here are the teams. They play in little bucolic ballparks. No DH.
National League
Philadelphia Poe
New York Bryants
Hartford Greenleaf Whittiers
Cambridge Longfellows
Boston Lowells
Concord Emersons
Brooklyn Ashberys
New Jersey Ginsbergs
Tennessee Ransoms
Maine Millays
American League
Brooklyn Whitmans
New England Frost
London Eliots
Rapallo Pound
New Jersey Williams
Hartford Stevens
New York Moores
Cambridge Cummings
Amherst Emily
Iowa City Grahams
Baseball Poetry Commissioner: the honorable Harold Bloom
Player Union Rep: Camille Paglia
There are still some hold-outs, most notably W.H. Auden from the Ashberys.
Scouting Report Highlights:
NL
The brawling Philadelphia Poe features Lord Byron in the clean-up spot and Alexander Pope does mound duties as the ace of a pitching staff not afraid to throw inside.
The elegant New York Bryants have Abraham Lincoln as their chief twirler and the slugging Thomas Cole hitting no. 4 in a highly distinguished lineup.
The Hartford Greenleaf Whittiers bring William Lloyd Garrison as their ace and Charles Dickens just signed up to play centerfield.
The Cambridge Longfellows have Washington Irving roaming center and Dante and Horace as mound aces.
The Boston Lowells field Mark Twain at short, Robert Browning in left, and Charles Eliot Norton and Leigh Hunt as their dominant hurlers.
Beware the Concord Emersons: William James is their ace, Swedenborg bashes from the cleanup spot, and Thoreau tends centerfield.
The Brooklyn Ashberys have Frank O’Hara leading off and Andy Warhol is their ace. Kenneth Koch and James Tate anchor the infield, while Charles Bernstein is in the bullpen.
The Ginsbergs of New Jersey have William Blake slugging from the No. 4 hole, Charles Bukowski and Bob Dylan as their double play combination and Mark Van Doren and William Burroughs on the mound.
The Tennessee Ransoms have Allen Tate at catcher and Cleanth Brooks, Robert Penn Warren, I.A. Richards, and Paul Engle on the hill.
Rounding out the National League, we have the Maine Millays with Edmund Wilson and Philip Sidney pitching, with Sappho out in center.
AL
The Brooklyn Whitmans have Oscar Wilde and F.O. Matthiessen as no. 1 and no. 2 starters, with Lawrence Fernlinghetti, C.K. Williams and William Michael Rossetti providing up-the-middle defense at second, short, and center.
The New England Frost have William Wordsworth in the clean-up spot with Louis Untermeyer as their no. 1 hurler.
The London Eliots have Bertrand Russell and Lady Ottoline Morrell on the mound with Tristan Corbiere at first, Jules LaForgue at third, and Arthur Symons behind the plate.
The Rapallo Pound are stocked, with Benito Mussollini in right, Hugh Kenner on the mound and Ernest Fenollosa at shortstop. Negotiations are continuing with Joyce, Yeats, and Duchamp.
The New Jersey Williams have Man Ray as their ace and Robert Creeley in the lead-off spot. They also want Duchamp.
The Hartford Stevens have pitching depth with George Santayana, Helen Vendler, andJohn Hollander. James Merrill is in the clean-up spot.
The New York Moores have Elizabeth Bishop at the top of the lineup and Pater in the bullpen. Ted Hughes is their big slugger.
The Cambridge Cummings have Picasso batting no. 3 and Scofield Thayer and T.E. Hulme anchoring the pitching staff.
The Amherst Emily has Thomas Wentworth Higginson as their pitching ace with Alfred Tennyson, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Barrett in the outfield.
Finally, the Iowa City Grahams have Bin Ramke and Peter Sacks as key pitchers and James Galvin powering the middle of the lineup.
Stay tuned for complete team rosters.
We’ll give you updates during the season…every trade, every management dispute… individual stats, stat leaders, and team standings as the season progresses.
The Best American Poetry March Madness Tournament is down to 16 poets.
“Poets don’t know a lot of math, but I can count to sixteen,” a grinning Billy Collins said after his close win over Harvard professor Jorie Graham.
“Don’t you count syllables in your poems?” a reporter yelled from the back of the Kennedy Center lobby.
“I count wins,” Collins quipped, obviously on cloud nine after making the Sweet Sixteen with a hard fought victory.
Billy’s poem, “Lines Composed Over Three Thousand Miles From Tintern Abbey,” looks back at Wordsworth looking back; it resonated a little more than Jorie Graham’s “On Difficulty,” which looks down at Adam and Eve looking up.
They can look up and wonder no longer. Adam and Eve are going home.
John Hollander chose the Collins poem for the 1998 volume. Ashbery chose the Graham poem for the first BAP 1988 book.
Collins is the only one who has made the Sweet 16 as BAP poet and BAP editor (2).
Heather McHugh (3) has the most editor selections in the Sweet 16. Richard Howard (2) and Donald Hall (2) are making strong showings as editors in the Sweet 16 as well.
Sweet Sixteen Results:
Let’s start with the East. Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Robert Pinsky, and Harry Mathews have survived.
In the North, jubilation for Louis Simpson, William Kulik, MargaretAtwood, and Franz Wright.
In the West, the winners were Brad Leithauser, Janet Bowdan, Dean Young, and Lewis Buzbee.
And finally, in the South, rounding out the Sweet 16, are Kenneth Koch, Alan Shapiro, Bernard Welt, and Reb Livingston.
Able to stop Jorie Graham, Billy Collins now has to be the favorite to go all the way.
Scarriet newswire: GRAHAM UPSETS KINNELL IN FIRST ROUND
Galway Kinnell after the loss: “We compose the poem in a dream and the audience hears the poem in a dream. What can we finally expect from a dream?”
Kinnell had a big lead over Jorie Graham, but as the evening wore on, something happened. The repeating phrase, “When one has lived a long time alone” somehow drifted away from the other lines in the poem. It didn’t come together for Galway last night, reading the poem on a bare stage at the Kennedy Center.
It was a stunning win for Jorie Graham. This changes the whole playoff picture. The feeling is that anyone can win now. The performance of “On Difficulty” was brilliant. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were low-key as Adam and Eve. “It’s a brilliant poem,” said Helen Vendler afterwards, “it brings an extra dimensionality to poetry. My head was lifted off my body when I first read it.”
The other top seeds prevailed in East play last night. Billy Collins, Stephen Dunn, Robert Pinsky, J.D. McClatchy, Harry Matthews, and Louise Gluck are all moving on. Finally, the 9th seed, T. Allan Broughton, got past 8th seeded Marc Jafee.
Scarriet has learned of a petition protesting Jorie Graham’s Best American Poetry tournament position as a 16th seed, saying the Harvard Humanities Chair professor and Pulitzer-prize winning poet ought to be a top-seeded choice in the 2010 March Madness competition.
The petition is signed by Seamus Heaney, Helen Vendler, Harold Bloom, Robert Pinsky, John Ashbery, Peter Sacks, James Galvin, James Wright, Marvin Bell, Joshua Clover, Bin Ramke, Don Share, Joan Houlihan, Brad Pitt, Michele Glazer, Joanna Klink, and Mark Levine, earning tens of thousands of Poetry MFA student signatures across the land.
The Best American Poetry March Madness Committee released a brief statement in response: “We have not officially released the 2010 brackets. When released, our choices are final.”
Reporters have been knocking down his door to get some kind of reaction to the whole controversy attending his poem, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone,” which is slated to oppose Jorie Graham’s “On Difficulty”—with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie playing Adam and Eve for Graham’s poem—in the first round of Best American Poetry March Madness.
Kinnell is just going to read his poem, and most were feeling Graham’s strategy would backfire and lead to a humiliating defeat for “On Difficulty” and its Adam and Eve pageant.
But now Jolie has issued a statement:
“Brad and I are thrilled to participate in this event. We both love poetry. Yes, we’ll be naked. We feel it is an honor to use art to raise awareness. Adam and Eve were the first homeless people, you know.”
Here’s the passage from Graham’s poem, “On Difficulty,” that reporters are slobbering over:
If you asked them, where they first find the edges of each other’s
bodies, where
happiness resides they’d look up through the gap
in the greenery you’re looking down through.
What they want to know—the icons silent in the shut church (to the left),
the distance silent in the view (to the right)—
is how to give themselves away,
which is why they look up now,
which is why they’ll touch each other (for your
looking),
With Brad and Angelina now being so seriously involved, those in Kinnell’s camp have new fears that, despite Kinnell being the no. 1 seed with his outstanding poem, he cannot possibly win.
Kinnell would not talk to reporters; he was clearly annoyed by all the attention, and to make them go away, he finally threw a scrap of paper at them.
This reporter made off with it, and now Scarriet is able to show the world Kinnell’s “reply” to the storm that’s raging.
Kinnell did not sign this piece of paper, but we feel certain this is a genuine Galway Kinnell poem, and in a Scarriet exclusive, we present the puzzling work for the first time anywere, here:
by Galway Kinnell???
All She’s Thinking About Is Money
When the pale sky spreads against the night at dawn,
All she’s thinking about is money.
When the heat of day begins to warm the rocks, money.
When the gray geese stir in the reeds, money.
When the brown beaver gnaws in the shadow, money.
When the red woodpecker awakens his meal, money.
When the yellow butterfly drowses on the green moss, money.
When the lake swoons into a deeper shade of blue at the beginning of the evening, money.
When night descends, bough by bough, through the pine, money.
The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts will host BAP March Madness
BAP March Madness regulations allow poets to perform their poems in any manner they choose.
Jorie Graham, fearing elimination in the first round, has pulled off a coup.
The Harvard professor and Pultizer prize winning poet will have Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play Adam and Eve in her poem, “On Difficulty” (1988, Ashbery, Lehman, eds.)
The tournament’s 64 seeds will not be officially announced until Monday.
But this reporter was able to confirm that Graham’s “On Difficulty” has made the tourney as a 16th seed, and will have to face Galway Kinnell’s masterpiece, “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone,” the no. 1 seed in the East, in the first round.
In Graham’s poem, the reader peers down voyeuristically as Adam and Eve touch one another.
The annoucement has put not only the poetry world, but the entire entertainment world, on red alert.
Is this for real?
Apparently it is.
Poets quickly took sides, some expressing outrage that Hollywood’s most famous couple could sway the outcome of an important poetry contest.
Tony Hoagland, reached by phone, spoke for many: “Kinnell’s poem is probably the best published in this country in the last 25 years. It would be a travesty of justice if Brangelina tips the scales against ‘When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.’ I won’t believe it until I see it, though.”
Robert Pinsky, however, said in a statement this morning: “Jorie Graham has courageously fought during her entire career for difficult poetry, believing the difficult can be accessible. She refuses to dumb down. A poet of her intelligence and skill can and should be heard. I salute her.”
At this point, Scarriet will say just a quick word on “difficulty.” Someone without any musical ability, jotting down various notes at random, would produce a composition more difficult to play and hear than any dreamed of by Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Mozart, or Cage. Popular and accessible pieces of music are often more difficult to play than anything else in the repetoire. Difficulty as a quality or virtue in itself has no merit. T.S. Eliot created much mischief using that word. It should be retired, once and for all.
Hiring Brad and Angelina: now that’s difficult, or, more properly, a difficulty happily overcome.
Rumor has it that James Earl Jones was being asked by one of Kinnell’s friends to read “When One Has Lived A Long Time Alone.” Mr. Kinnell and Ms. Graham have so far refused to comment.
Scarriet 