1 AMANDA GORMAN is an “American poet and activist,” according to Wikipedia.
2 CATE MARVIN “THE REPUBLICAN PARTY IS EVIL. Straight up evil. It’s just beyond.” –Facebook
3 LOUISE GLUCK 2020 Nobel Prize for Literature
4 JOY HARJO In her third term as Poet Laureate.
5 DON MEE CHOI DMZ Colony, Wave Books, wins 2020 National Book Award.
6 JERICHO BROWN The Tradition, Copper Canyon Press, wins 2020 Pulitzer Prize
7 NOOR HINDI Poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying” in Dec 2020 Poetry.
8 NAOMI SHIHAB NYE Her poem “kindness” read online by Emma Thompson has 2.3 million Instagram views
9 WAYNE MILLER “When Talking About Poetry Online Goes Very Wrong” 2/8/21 essay in Lithub.
10 WILLIAM LOGAN “she speaks in the voice of a documentary narrator, approaching scenes in a hazmat suit.”
11 VICTORIA CHANG Obit Copper Canyon Press, longlist for 2020 National Book Award; also, in BAP.
12 ALAN CORDLE founder of Foetry, “most despised..most feared man in American poetry” —LA Times 2005
13 RUPI KAUR Has sold 3 million books
14 DON SHARE Resigned as Poetry editor August of 2020.
15 MARY RUEFLE Dunce, Wave Books, finalist for 2020 Pulitzer Prize
16 ANTHONY CODY Borderland Apocrypha, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
17 LILLIAN-YVONNE BERTRAM Travesty Generator, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
18 EDUARDO C. CORRAL Guillotine, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
19 PAISLEY REKDAL Poet Laureate of Utah, Guest editor for the 2020 Best American Poetry
20 DORIANNE LAUX Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems, Norton, finalist for 2020 Pulitzer Prize
21 DANEZ SMITH Latest book of poems, Homie, published in 2020.
22 ILYA KAMINSKY LA Times Book Prize in 2020 for Deaf Republic.
23 RON SILLIMAN in Jan. 2021 Poetry “It merely needs to brush against the hem of your gown.”
24 FORREST GANDER Be With, New Directions, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize
25 RITA DOVE Her Penguin Twentieth-Century of American Poetry Anthology is 10 years old. Collected Poems, 2016.
26 NATALIE DIAZ Postcolonial Love Poem, longlist for 2020 National Book Award
27 TERRANCE HAYES “I love how your blackness leaves them in the dark.”
28 TIMOTHY DONNELLY The Problem of the Many, Wave Books, 2019
29 REGINALD DWAYNE BETTS In 2020 BAP
30 FRANK BIDART Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (FSG) winner, 2018 Pulitzer
31 OCEAN VUONG “this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue”
32 MATTHEW ZAPRUDER Disputed Ocean Vuong’s Instagram reflections on metaphor.
33 SHARON OLDS Stag’s Leap won 2013 Pulitzer; she’s in 2020 BAP
34 HONOREE FANONNE JEFFERS The Age of Phillis, longlist for 2020 National Book Award.
35 CLAUDIA RANKINE Citizen came out in 2014.
36 HENRI COLE Blizzard, FSG, is his tenth book of poems.
37 TRACY K. SMITH In the New Yorker 10/5
38 DIANE SEUSS In the New Yorker 9/14
39 SUSHMITA GUPTA “She missed her room, her pillow, her side of the bed, her tiny bedside lamp.”
40 ANNE CARSON has translated Sappho and Euripides.
41 AL FILREIS Leads “Poem Talk” with guests on Poetry’s website
42 MARY ANGELA DOUGLAS “the larks cry out and not with music”
43 STEPHEN COLE “…the everlasting living and the longtime dead feast on the same severed, talking head.”
44 MARILYN CHIN Her New and Selected was published in 2018 (Norton).
45 KEVIN GALLAGHER Editor, poet, economist, historian has re-discovered the poet John Boyle O’Reilly.
46 DAVID LEHMAN Series Editor for Best American Poetry—founded in 1988.
47 JIM BEHRLE A thorn in the side of BAP.
48 ROBIN RICHARDSON The Canadian poet wrote recently, “I have removed myself completely from Canadian literature.”
49 PAOLA FERRANTE New editor of Minola Reivew.
50 A.E. STALLINGS Like, FSG, finalist for 2019 Pulitzer
51 TAYLOR JOHNSON Poetry Blog: “felt presence of the black crowd as we study our amongness together.”
52 PATRICA SMITH Incendiary Art, TriQuarterly/Northwestern U, finalist for 2018 Pulitzer
53 TYLER MILLS in Jan. 2021 Poetry “Gatsby is not drinking a gin rickey. Dracula not puncturing a vein.”
54 SEUNGJA CHOI in Jan. 2021 Poetry “Dog autumn attacks. Syphilis autumn.”
55 ATTICUS “It was her chaos that made her beautiful.”
56 JAMES LONGENBACH Essay in Jan. 2021 Poetry, wonders: would Galileo have been jailed were his claims in verse?
57 DAN SOCIU Hit 3 home runs for the Paris Goths in Scarriet’s 2020 World Baseball League.
58 PHILIP NIKOLAYEV Editor of Fulcrum and “14 International Younger Poets” issue from Art and Letters.
59 SUSMIT PANDA “Time walked barefoot; the clock gave it heels.”
60 BRIAN RIHLMANN Poet of working-class honesty.
61 TYREE DAYE in the New Yorker 1/18/21
62 JANE WONG in Dec. 2020 Poetry “My grandmother said it was going to be long—“
63 ALAN SHAPIRO Reel to Reel, University of Chicago Press, finalist for 2015 Pulitzer
64 PIPPA LITTLE in Dec. 2020 Poetry “I knew the names of stones at the river mouth”
65 PATRICK STEWART Read Shakespeare’s Sonnets online to millions of views.
66 STEVEN CRAMER sixth book of poems, Listen, published in 2020.
67 HIEU MINH NGUYEN In 2020 BAP
68 BEN MAZER New book on Harry Crosby. New book of poems. Unearthing poems by Delmore Schwartz for FSG.
69 KEVIN YOUNG Poetry editor of the New Yorker
70 BILLY COLLINS Poet Laureate of the U.S. 2001 to 2003
71 ARIANA REINES In 2020 BAP
72 VALERIE MACON fired as North Carolina poet laureate—when it was found she lacked publishing credentials.
73 ANDERS CARLSON-WEE Nation magazine published, then apologized, for his poem, “How-To,” in 2018.
74 DANA GIOIA 99 Poems: New and Selected published in 2016. His famous Can Poetry Matter? came out in 1992.
75 YUSEF KOMUNYAKAA In 2020 BAP
76 MARJORIE PERLOFF published Edge of Irony: Modernism in the Shadow of the Habsburg Empire in 2016.
77 HELEN VENDLER her The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar: Essays on Poets and Poetry came out in 2015.
78 MEI-MEI BERSSENBRUGGE A Treatise On Stars, longlist for 2020 National Book Award—her 13th book.
79 GEORGE BILGERE Belongs to the Billy Collins school. Lives in Cleveland.
80 CAROLYN FORCHE 2020 saw the publication of her book In the Lateness of the World: Poems from Penguin.
81 BOB DYLAN “Shall I leave them by your gate? Or sad-eyed lady, should I wait?”
82 RICHARD HOWARD has translated Baudelaire, de Beauvoir, Breton, Foucault, Camus and Gide.
83 GLYN MAXWELL The playwright/poet’s mother acted in the original Under Milk Wood on Broadway in 1956.
84 KAVEH AKBAR published in Best New Poets
85 D.A. POWELL The poet has received a Paul Engle Fellowship.
86 JOHN YAU In 2020 BAP
87 DAIPAYAN NAIR “Hold me tight. Bones are my immortality…”
88 ANDREEA IULIA SCRIDON in 14 International Younger Poets from Art and Letters.
89 LORI GOMEZ Sassy and sensual internet poet—Romantic who uses F-bombs.
90 JORIE GRAHAM In 2020 BAP
91 SIMON ARMITAGE In the New Yorker 9/28
92 TOMMYE BLOUNT Fantasia for the Man in Blue, longlist for 2020 National Book Award.
93 TYLER KNOTT GREGSON on Twitter: “let us sign/our names/ in the/emptiness”
94 STEPHANIE BURT Close Calls With Nonsense: Reading New Poetry published in 2009
95 WILLIE LEE KINARD III in Jan. 2021 Poetry “The lesbians that lived in the apartment to the left…”
96 MICHAEL DICKMAN His poem about his grandmother in 2020 July/August Poetry was controversial.
97 FATIMAH ASGHAR published in Best New Poets
98 RICK BAROT The Galleons, Milkweed Editions, on longlist for 2020 National Book Award and excerpted in BAP 2020
99 DERRICK MICHAEL HUDSON had his 15 minutes of fame in Best American Poetry 2015.
100 JEAN VALENTINE (d. 12/30/20) in New Yorker 1/18/21
SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED!
February 15, 2021 at 4:59 pm (A.E Stallings, Alan Cordle, Amanda Gorman, Anne Carson, Ariana Reines, Ben Mazer, Best American Poetry 2015, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Brian Rihlmann, Carl Phillips, Carolyn Forche, Cate Marvin, Charles Baudelaire, Claudia Rankine, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Danez Smith, David Lehman, Delmore Schwartz, Derrick Michael Hudson, Don Share, Dorianne Laux, Fatimah Asghar, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Glyn Maxwell, Helen Vendler, Jim Behrle, Jorie Graham, Joy Harjo, Kevin Young, Louise Gluck, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Michael Dickman, Monday Love, Patricia Smith, Paul Engle, Poetry Hot 100, Richard Howard, Rita Dove, Robin Richardson, Ron Silliman, Rupi Kaur, Sharon Olds, Stephanie Burt, Stephen Cole, Steven Cramer, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, The New Yorker, Tracy K. Smith, William Logan)
GAMERS BEAT COBRAS AND WAVES IN A RACE FOR THE AGES TO WIN PEOPLES DIVISION!
September 27, 2020 at 9:34 pm (Anand Thakore, Aristotle, Beijing Waves, Bertolt Brecht, Billy Collins, Bob Hope, Charlie Chaplin, Donald Justice, Garrison Keillor, Gary B. Fitzgerald, Jack Dorsey, Jeet Thayil, Joe Green, John Lennon, Kolkata Cobras, LA Gamers, Merv Griffin, Sushmita Gupta, Woody Allen)
Merv Griffin told his manager Bob Hope to keep smiling and Bob Hope told his team to keep smiling, and they not only smiled, they laughed, even when they were 25-38 in early June. Then Merv Griffin told Bob Hope, “I found you a couple of pitchers. Charlie Chaplin and Woody Allen. They’ll sign and start playing tomorrow.” The Gamers started winning. Muhammad Ali and MC Escher joined Menander, Charles Bernstein, Clive James, EE Cummings, and Christian Morgenstern in the bullpen in August. The Gamers played too recklessly, at first. James Tate, replaced by Garrison Keillor, and then Chaplin, thought it was funny to throw at hitters. Bob Hope called an April meeting. “It’s okay to taunt the opposing team, but do it gently, subtly,” Joe Green, the Gamers third baseman (.263 11 homers), remembers Hope saying. Billy Collins would homer to put his team ahead, then make an error in the field to lose the game. As the season went on, the Gamers began to focus more. They put their wit into winning on the field, and transformed themselves from a team playing for fun into a team winning for fun.
The season for the Kolkata Cobras, Beijing Waves, and Los Angeles Gamers came down to the final day.
Chairman Mao’s Waves (managed by Jack Dorsey) were hosting the Cobras in Beijing, having been knocked out of the race the day before, when Tagore beat Voltaire 7-3 in Kolkata, as Jeet Thayil and Sushmita Gupta homered and Anand Thakore went 4-4 for the Cobras. The Cobras owned the Waves in head-to-head meetings most of the year, and Rumi, a 21 game winner and riding a 7-0 streak, was going for Kolkata.
The Gamers had kept even with the Cobras the previous day behind Lewis Carroll’s fourth straight win, a 5-4 victory against Aristotle, in Los Angeles. Lewis Carroll, hitting in the ninth spot, took Aristotle deep early, as the Gamers took a 2-0 lead. After Santa Barbara tied it 4-4, Thomas Hood homered on a 3-2 pitch from Aristotle to lift the Gamers in their biggest win of the season so far.
With Rumi going for the Cobras, Merv Griffin’s team was sure they had to win their final game against the Laws in Santa Barbara—where LA owned a miserable 3 and 12 season record. The pitching match up favored the Laws—Santa Barbara was sending Francis Bacon, a 15 game winner, against Democritas (12-13). Lord Bacon had been up and down all year, but he did have 4 shut outs and 250 Ks.
The Waves did the Gamers a favor. Lucretius beat Rumi 8-3, as the Waves revenged themselves on the Cobras, a team which had stood between them and a division title all year. Billie Holiday, Gary B. Fitzgerald, Bertolt Brecht, and Wendell Berry homered for Mao’s Waves.
John Donne and Walter Raleigh hit back to back homers against Democritas, as the Santa Barbara Laws took a 2-0 lead. With the bases loaded, Joe Green speared a line drive to prevent further damage. Green led off the next inning and singled. With two out, Betjeman homered and tied the score for the Gamers. Lord Bacon struck out the next seven hitters in a row; Democritas loaded the bases in the 5th and 6th innings, escaping with double plays. In the 8th, the Laws went ahead 4-2. Donald Justice tripled in Reed Whitmore and Anna Akhmatova. Bacon, who had retired 16 straight hitters, started the 9th. Green singled, Dorothy Parker, batting for Democritas, walked. Noel Coward walked. Ferdinand Saussure relieved Bacon for the Laws. Billy Collins then hit his 39th homer of the season for the Gamers, an opposite field pop fly down the line, pushed by the wind, just inches fair, for a home run. It was almost comical; no one could believe it was a home run. The Laws loaded the bases (again!) in the ninth against Muhammad Ali. MC Escher got the final out, striking out Fred Seidel, making the Gamers champs of the Peoples Division.
Gamers 82 72 Winner Owner Merv Griffin, Manager Bob Hope, Team Leaders: Billy Collins 39 homers, John Betjeman .325, Noel Coward 23 SB, Lewis Carroll 17-13, 3.04 ERA
Cobras 81 73 Owner Satyajit Ray, Manager Rupi Kaur, Jadoo Akhtar 32, Vikram Seth .334, Samar Sen 28 SB, Rumi 21-10, Tagore 2.76
Waves 81 73 Owner Chairman Mao, Manager Jack Dorsey, Li Po 28/Tu Fu 28, Li Po .333, Li He 25 SB, Voltaire 18-14, Lao Tzu 3.05
Laws 76 78 Owner Dick Wolf, Manager Moshe Rabbenu, John Donne 35, Jane Kenyon .297, Gottfried Burger 21 SB, Horace 16-15, Aristotle 3.44
Mist 63 91 Owner Akira Kurosawa, Manager Eiji Yoshikawa, Hilda Doolittle 29, John Lennon .342, Richard Brautigan 32 SB, Issa 15-18, Yukio Mishima 3.10
SCARRIET’S HOT POETRY ONE HUNDRED 2019—“BEST LINES”
December 5, 2019 at 2:20 pm (Aaron Smith, Adeeba Shahid Talukder, Adil Jussawalla, Ae Hee Lee, Alicia Ostriker, Amy Gerstler, Anne Carson, Anthony Anaxagorou, Babitha Marina Justin, Ben Mazer, Ben Zarov, Blake Campbell, Brian Rihlmann, Bruce Weigl, Carolyn Forche, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Danez Smith, Deryn Rees-Jones, Dorianne Laux, Eleanor Wilner, Eliana Vanessa, Emily Lawson, Fanny Howe, Fatimah Asghar, Fiona Benson, Franny Choi, George Bilgere, Glyn Maxwell, Hera Lindsay Bird, Ilya Kaminsky, Indah Widiastuti, Jeet Thayil, Jill McDonough, Joie Bose, Joy Harjo, Julia Alvarez, Justin Phillip Reed, Karen Solie, Kathleen Jamie, Kevin Young, Kushal Poddar, Laura Foley, Li-Young Lee, Linda Ash, Lloyd Schwartz, Luke Kennard, Marilyn Chin, Martin Espada, Mary Angela Douglas, Mary Ruefle, Meera Nair, Merryn Juliette, Nabina Das, Nalini Priyadarshni, Ocean Vuong, Patricia Smith, Paul Farley, Peter Gizzi, Raquel Balboni, Ravi Shankar, Robert Pinsky, Roger Robinson, Rupi Kaur, Safiya Sinclair, Scarriet Editors, Sharon Olds, Sophie Collins, Stephanie Burt, Stephen Cole, Steven Cramer, Sushmita Gupta, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Tina Chang, Tishani Doshi, Tracy K. Smith, Vidyan Ravinthiran, Wendy Videlock, Zaffar Kunial)
I don’t know any format—except this one, Scarriet, now in its tenth year—which attempts to bring together every kind of poet in one place.
There are four kinds of poets who never touch each other and exist in separate universes: the formalist poet, the colloquial poet, the professional, and the amateur. Poets of radically different styles insult one another, stylistically, that is—the novelist is more like the poet than different kinds of poets from each other. I can no longer go to a library or a bookstore and seek “poetry” without entering a shooting zone of competing forms and sentiments.
The colloquial now dominates the professional; the beautiful and well-made book cover of the contemporary poet hides more f-bombs than rhymes.
The professional, with their prizes and book deals, wants nothing to do with the amateur—who posts their accessible love poems online. The gulf is such, that a person “who hates poetry” will sooner read, and even like, the amateur’s efforts, before the well-connected professional will deign to glimpse what, in their opinion, is trash (or perhaps to their jealous consternation, good) given away too easily.
One delightful thing I’ve noticed: how a few selected words from a poet’s work can explain the entirety of the kind of poet they are; as much as this is true, it validates this list, and makes it more than just an exercise in which a formalist amateur like myself attempts to ram together, in a feverish fit of schadenfreude, things which do not belong.
These poets do belong together—or, rather, they do not.
Yet here they are.
Thomas Graves, Salem, MA 12/4/2019
*******
1) Laura Foley “to look back and see, on the hilltop, our life, lit from inside.”
2) Luke Kennard “I take the murderer for coffee.”
3) Ilya Kaminsky “What is a child? A quiet between two bombardments.”
4) Kathleen Jamie “Walking in a waking dream I watched nineteen deer pour from ridge to glen-floor”
5) Linda Ashok “the moon licked up the landscape with her fervent tongue”
6) Fiona Benson “How light I was. How doubtfully safe.”
7) Ben Mazer “Some must be publishers, and some must be spot on, in a horse drawn carriage, taking in the dawn”
8) Sushmita Gupta “She gave a last look at her solitary car, in her garage, with seats folded down so paintings could lay, the slope that rolled down the hill that ended in a roundabout, with palms and coloured grass that looked like hay.”
9) Stephen Cole “You still disturb the meadow with your words.”
10) Julia Alvarez “I’ve broken up with my true love man after man”
11) Brian Rihlmann “nail guns pop pop pop I heard stilettos on concrete the lady of old Reno wandering”
12) Patricia Smith “Who shot you, baby?”
13) Joie Bose “I see you in all the faces I see, crisscrossing the pavements aimlessly.”
14) Indah Widiastuti “Who is the poem I wrote? He speaks a language I never use; read by those I never know.”
15) Kevin Young “We curl down the slide one at a time, blue light at the end.”
16) Joy Harjo “I walked out of a hotel room just off Times Square at dawn to find the sun.”
17) Jill McDonough “I am not interested in makeup. I am interested in jail.”
18) Chelsey Minnis “People in their nightgowns, smoking cigarettes, they give great speeches.”
19) Nabina Das “It’s in love that we wait & let all other loves wither & waste.”
20) Eliana Vanessa “impediment of roses: and this is not the sort of thing you can control, no, how our bodies trembled, post-love, nor the way I will keep falling, to explain it, just so.”
21) Adeeba Shahid Talukder “Splinter the sun, wake all its ashes.”
22) Dorianne Laux “Broken the days into nights, the night sky into stars”
23) Sharon Olds “I caught bees, by the wings, and held them”
24) Alicia Ostriker “there are no pauses in this game”
25) Tishani Doshi “to fall into that same oblivion with nothing. As if it were nothing.”
26) Vidyan Ravinthiran “this isn’t the right kind of snow.”
27) Glyn Maxwell “he goes his way delighted”
28) Anne Carson “During the sermon, I crossed my legs.”
29) Peter Gizzi “I guess these trailers lined up in the lot off the highway will do.”
30) Li-Young Lee “From blossoms comes this brown paper bag of peaches”
31) Blake Campbell “And he entered, great spelunker, the resonant and ancient darkness”
32) Diana Khoi Nguyen “You cannot keep your brother alive.”
33) Marilyn Chin “I watched the world shrink into a penlight: how frail the court poet’s neck, how small this poetry world.”
34) Fanny Howe “We are always halfway there when we are here”
35) Babitha Marina Justin “It is rolling from roof to roof”
36) Meera Nair “You set us up against each other. Men against Women. We are all bovine.”
37) Anthony Anaxagorou “is that your hand still on my elbow?”
38) Tracy K. Smith “We wish to act. We may yet.”
39) Wendy Videlock “He watches ball. She throws a fit. She cannot stand to see him sit.”
40) Daipayan Nair “Autumn leaf! Nothing to keep—apart from beauty.”
41) Mary Angela Douglas “and let the tiny silver trumpets blow”
42) Carolyn Forché “What you have heard is true.”
43) Martin Espada “No one could hear him.”
44) Tina Chang “love is crowding the street and needs only air and it lives, over there, in the distance burning.”
45) Danez Smith “I have left earth.”
46) Ocean Vuong “this is how we loved: a knife on the tongue turning into a tongue.”
47) Eleanor Wilner “the blood that is pouring like a tide, on other shores.”
48) Marge Piercy “a woman is not made of flesh: she is manufactured like a sports sedan”
49) Yusef Komunyakka “My muse is holding me prisoner.”
50) Naomi Shihab Nye “Each day I miss Japanese precision.”
51) Terrance Hayes “I love how your blackness leaves them in the dark.”
52) Carl Dennis “Lending a hand, I’d tell him, is always dignified, while being a hero is incidental.”
53) Jeet Thayil “Some are sweet and old, others are foul-mouthed and bold. Mine is dead and cold.”
54) Victoria Chang “Her last words were in English. She asked for a Sprite.”
55) Kushal Poddar “ferns, orchids, hyacinths sprawl like insomniac veins.”
56) Karen Solie “We itch and prosper heavenward on bands of grit and smoke”
57) Richard Blanco “Stare until the trembling leaves are tongues”
58) Paul Muldoon “putting its shoulder to the wheel it means to reinvent.”
59) Safiya Sinclair “Isn’t this love? To walk hand in hand toward the humid dark”
60) Frank Bidart “Fucked up, you know you’d never fall for someone not fucked up.”
61) Nick Flynn “My therapist points out that fifteen minutes of movie violence releases as many opiates into the body as if being prepped for major surgery.”
62) Jennifer Moss “all beauty turned hostile”
63) Fatimah Asghar “your lantern long ahead & I follow I follow”
64) Hannah Sullivan “All summer the Park smelled of cloves and it was dying.”
65) Jamal May “The counting that says, I am this far. I am this close.”
66) William Logan “Don’t be any form’s bitch.”
67) Juan Felipe Herrera “No food. No food no food no food no food!”
68) Hera Lindsay Bird “it was probably love that great dark blue sex hope that keeps coming true”
69) Ae Hee Lee “She asks your husband to step in.”
70) Jay Bernard “I file it under fire, corpus, body, house.”
71) Sophie Collins “pails full of oil all dark and density and difficult for a girl to carry”
72) Hollie McNish “I let myself go cycling slow as I unbutton my clothes jacket unzipped helmet unclipped”
73) Zaffar Kunial “I didn’t know the word for what I was.”
74) Paul Farley “he fell up the dark stairwell to bed and projected right through to Australia”
75) Deryn Rees-Jones “The movie I’m in is black and white.”
76) Roger Robinson “he picks you up in the hand not holding the book”
77) Lloyd Schwartz “or if not the girl, then Vermeer’s painting of her”
78) Nalini Priyadarshni “but I love tea and so do you.”
79) Raquel Balboni “Come off as harsh even if I’m friendly”
80) Robert Pinsky “When I had no temple I made my voice my temple.”
81) Emily Lawson “I step out to meet the wanderer: its black-veined hindwings”
82) Bruce Weigl “Why do we murder ourselves and then try to live forever.”
83) Steph Burt “I want to go home, paint my nails until they iridesce, clamp on my headphones, and pray to Taylor Swift.”
84) Merryn Juliette “There is no ceremony to her—she was simply there when yesterday she was not”
85) Thomas Sayers Ellis “It’s entrancement, how they govern you. The entertainment is side effect.”
86) Amy Gerstler “Here on earth, another rough era is birthed.”
87) Rupi Kaur “i change what i am wearing five times before i see you”
88) Forrest Gander “What closes and then luminous? What opens and then dark?”
89) Justin Phillip Reed “when you fuck me and i don’t like it, is that violence.”
90) Franny Choi “i pick up the accent of whoever i’m speaking to. nobody wants to fuck a sponge.”
91) Emily Skaja “when night came, an egg-moon slid over the steeple.”
92) Mary Ruefle “Night falls and the empty intimacy of the whole world fills my heart to frothing.”
93) Aaron Smith “If a man is given dick, he’s never full.”
94) Donald Revell “Time might be anything, even the least portion of shadow in the blaze, that helpless Hare of darkness in the hawk’s world.”
95) Dan Sociu “people have infinite capacity for transformation, into anything, and I know that I myself can transform”
96) Ben Zarov “There are many, many wrong ways.”
97) Adil Jussawalla “Twenty years on, its feet broken, will its hands fly to its face when a light’s switched on?”
98) Steven Cramer “no matter how we plead they won’t come down.”
99) George Bilgere “My father would take off his jacket and tie after work and fire up the back yard grill. Scotch and a lawn chair was his idea of nature. Even Thoreau only lasted a couple of years.”
100) Ravi Shankar “I watch, repose, alone.”
POETRY MAGAZINE’S INDIA ISSUE, JULY/AUGUST 2019
July 13, 2019 at 4:44 pm (Aakriti Kuntal, Adil Jussawalla, Aishwarya Iyer, Anand Thakore, Arun Sagar, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Biswamit Dwibedy, British Empire, C.P. Surendran, Daipayan Nair, Divya Guha, Edgar Allan Poe, Ezra Pound, Hoshang Merchant, Huzaifa Pandit, Indian poetry, Jeet Thayil, Joie Bose, Kushal Poddar, Kushore Kumar, Linda Ashok, Mani Rao, March Madness Poetry, Medha Singh, Meera Nair, Modernism, N Ravi Shanker, Nabanita Kanungo, Nabina Das, Nalini Priyadarshni, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Poetry magazine, Rabindranath Tagore, Rajiv Mohabir, Ranjit Hoskote, Ravi Shankar, Rochelle Potkar, Romanticism, Sampurna Chattarji, Scarriet Editors, Sharanya Manivannan, Sophia Naz, Sridala Swami, Sushmita Gupta, T.S.Eliot, Urvashi Bahuguna)
Poetry’s India issue is not an India issue.
In the globalist introduction by editors Kazim Ali and Rajiv Mohabir, we are told countries do not exist; only colonies and far-flung sub-cultures do.
In their introduction to Poetry’s “Global Anglophone Indian Poems,” the editors wish to erase the nation of India:
“Indian” is the wrong word to encompass and label diasporic subjectivities of South Asians that descend from a system of indenture.
This sounds like something one would hear in the British Foreign Office around 1933.
Narratives flip. History repeats. The optimism of Indian independence from the British in the middle of the 20th century has been replaced by the pessimism of learned, anti-colonialist academics, who hold that there was no “Indian” independence from the “British” after all—because, according to Ali and Mohabir, “There is no such thing as cultural purity—Indian or not.”
A nation—which gathers together differences in a happy embrace—is this possible? It was not, according to the British Empire, whose very rule depended on division, nor is it anything the editors wish to get behind, spending most of the introduction asserting India isn’t real. Because nothing “culturally pure” exists. Which we all know, but…
“Culture” is a term always used broadly, and in terms of connection—and this is the very essence of the word; and this aspect of it shouldn’t inspire fear, unless one wants to get rid of culture altogether. We all admire gardens, and gardens grow, even as they remain gardens. Nations are nations in as much as they have a culture which binds the nation as a nation together, and this is a good thing. The editors, however, see danger:
The notion of a culturally pure India is a dangerous weapon leveraged to maintain social distance, as in some cases it fans anti-Muslim and anti-Black politics.
Is “social distance” civility? What do they mean by this?
And what exactly is “Muslim politics?” And is “Muslim” or “black politics” ever “pure,” and, because of this “purity,” is it, too, “dangerous?”
Or is it only the “culturally pure India” which is “dangerous?”
Division is always good, according to the editors—since the greatest unity India ever achieved was “an India that does not exist today, except for in histories kept by elders: a pre-partition British India, a single landmass owned by white masters.”
God forbid Indians get to rule a “landmass.” Better, according to the editors, that Indians are divided—to the point where they don’t really exist.
For Ali and Mohabir, Indian unity of any kind is either non-existent, white, or bad. India as a Hindu country is something the editors cannot bring themselves to even mention, as this, perhaps to them, is the ultimate horror. They refer to Hindus once—in the first paragraph, as if the religion practiced by a billion Indians, 4 Indians in 5, were a minor anomaly:
On the one hand, “Indian” languages were always transnational, or—in more modern times—global. Regional languages encountered one another, as well as Farsi and Urdu, during Mughal conquests; the concepts of Hindi as a national language and Hindustan as a national space were both developed in response to the perceived foreign influence of the northern empire builders. Crosspollination existed between the Urdu-speaking Mughals and Farsi- and Arabic-speaking cultures, both in spoken and written literatures. Queen Elizabeth I and Emperor Akbar the Great were exchanging letters in Urdu and English through their translators before there was a British East India company.
This is their first paragraph. What does this mean?
I understand protecting minority rights—constitutions and laws cover this; but to forever and preemptively assume the majority is the devil, and to always undermine it on principle isn’t exactly the recipe for a strong and happy nation.
The editors point of view seems to be that anything which has anything to do with “indenture” and “diaspora” is the best thing of all. A kind of strange, unholy, celebration of the results of the British Empire keeps breaking out in the rhetoric of the editors. Are the “white masters” hiding in the wings? In high rises in London? In the editorial offices of Poetry? We hope not.
That British Empire was quite a thing. “Colonies” and the “indentured” and “diaspora” everywhere. Did the British make India? Yes, absolutely, according to Ali and Mohabir—exemplifying the truth that the British “Divide and Rule” Empire still lives, spilling into everything, even the rhetoric which attempts to summarize the topic in a short introduction:
The earliest Indian poetry in English, including those poems by nationalist anti-colonial poets like Rabindranath Tagore and Sarojini Naidu, were poems from the British literary tradition. It would take a new generation of Indian poets, who included the Kala Goda poets Arun Kolatkar, Adil Jussawalla, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, and others, to begin developing a new Indian English aesthetic that drew not only on British influences, but local traditions as well as global ones.
Just as the British Empire both made and destroyed India, it continues to erase all sense of what anyone might say—including these editors, Ali and Mahobir—about Indian poetry in English.
The Indian “nationalist anti-colonial” poems were “poems from the British literary tradition.”
Got that?
Indian literary independence was British.
Therefore, Ali and Mohabir say,
It would take a new generation to begin developing a new Indian English aesthetic that drew not only on British influences, but local traditions as well as global ones.
But what is British influence if not “global,” thanks to its global empire? And how could poets like Tagore not have been influenced by “local traditions” back then, writing poems from “the British literary tradition?”
One can see how any attempt to extract “India” from “English” is hopeless. That is, if one ignores the content of poems and puts them into implicitly denigrated categories such as the “British literary tradition,” the only discernible aesthetic gesture made by the editors—whose introduction is otherwise lost in politics. Their aesthetic point begins with a platitude made regarding “tradition” and reasons from that nothing into more nothing. All the editors say is true—if truth is a circle starting at nowhere and ending at no place.
And now we come to the poetry selection.
As one might expect, there is no “British literary tradition” anywhere in sight.
The poems in the “Global Anglophone Indian Poems” issue of July/August Poetry, establish themselves right away as that which could not possibly belong to any tradition at all, except perhaps this one: Poems in English That May As Well Have Been Written in Urdu Since No English Speaker Can Understand Them. This will show those British white devils! And anyone who speaks their language!
The interesting thing about the 42 “Indian” poems in the Poetry Indian issue is that almost all of them sound like they could have been written by Ezra Pound—redolent of that flat, unthinking, anti-Romantic, anti-lyricism which roams the desert looking for an oasis of sweet rhyme intentionally never found, for the journey is to punish such desires. And in this desert we rarely come across a person who speaks as a real person about some accessible thing that matters in a life really lived. It’s poetry that vaults at once past actual life, and any Romantic ideal of actual life, into some abstract library of learned reference. What we get is not Kishore Kumar as a poem (if only!) but a condescending or ironic reference to Kushore Kumar—in the abstract, attenuated, machine-like speech of the anti-lyrical, footnote, poem.
One of the better poems in the portfolio, by Arundhathi Subramaniam (it actually has a somewhat personable and lyric beauty) happens to contain the Kushore Kumar reference, a footnote gesture less annoying than usual. I also enjoyed the poems by Nabina Das, Rochelle Potkar, Sridala Swami, Jennifer Robertson, Ranjit Hoskote, Mani Rao, and Hoshang Merchant, though in most cases I’ve seen better examples of their work elsewhere. I’ve written about these poets in Scarriet. I compared Swami to Borges, praised Subramaniam as a “lullaby” poet, called Potkar a wonderful discovery, and even placed these poets into this year’s Scarriet Poetry March Madness. But here they are in Poetry. And of course I am happy for them.
Have I soured on the Indian poetry in this special edition of Poetry because I read the introduction first, and that soured me? Or were my expectations too high, thinking the venerable Poetry magazine would offer the best Indian Poetry selection I had ever seen?
Here’s the first poem we meet in the volume. It’s a kind of flickering, black and white, news reel of broken images, half-memories, abstracted references. Modernist to the core. What is it saying? We are not sure, exactly. India was never free, never happy? The ends of lines and the end of the poem, swoon towards their termination in an Eliotic whimper. What we do know is the poem is vaguely complaining, inglorious, and trying its best not to sound poetic (because the Romantics are not allowed).
Freedom (Nabanita Kanungo)
One imagines a Modernist school teacher shaping this poem—and what is ironic about this, of course, is that Modernism was the period when the English were still (cruelly) ruling India. The Greeks, the Romantics, where is their influence? Why is Indian poetry ruled by a style belonging to early 20th century American Anglophiles, like Pound and Eliot? Pessimistic, anti-Romantic Pound and Eliot? Why? Poe fought for American literary independence—and was rejected, even reviled, by the Anglo-American modernist establishment (Eliot hated Poe as much as he hated Shelley).
Look how the first poem in the volume ends: “with meanings barely gathered into a heap.” Why should Indian poets linger in the tidal pools of late British Empire despondency? “Because we have troubles!” Of course you do—but why is the aspiration and promise and identity of the poetry you choose the sour, anti-Romanticsm of your British masters? The ones even British poets like Shelley found objectionable? Indians, what are you thinking?
What is the editorial mission of this Indian Poetry portfolio?
Poems not enjoyed as poetry, but deemed useful as vague, Modernist, teaching-sorts-of-things?
And as much as this may be somewhat useful, and wide-ranging, the editors have somehow managed, even in this case, to present a narrow vision of Indian poetry. Not so much Wall of Sound, as Wall of Pound. Indian poets stuck in a desultory, lost-in-time, Modernism. The editors have put Indian Poetry in a certain container, coloring what it contains. It doesn’t have to be this way. The Indian poets writing in English have access to a long tradition of poetry in English, including every sort of world historical poet translated into English. There’s no reason they must, in such large numbers, wear the stiffness of Anglo/American Modernism.
Trapped in the dullness of this anti-poetry (referencing all sorts of cultural things in a stilted manner) one dutifully marches through the gray maze of this highly learned affectation thinking: is Indian poetry today the attempt to smash the “British Literary Tradition,” in solidarity with a few dead, white, male, American poets, who killed their “British Literary Tradition” with the cudgel of Ezra Pound? (Never mind that the “British Literary Tradition”—whatever shallow idea one has of it—didn’t have to be “killed,” and why with Ezra Pound?)
I have discovered many poems by Indian poets lately, many of them poets in this Poetry issue, as well as many excellent amateurs who by dint of their academic outsider status, would never be selected for a collection like this.
I’m convinced the quality of Indian poems in English today is equal, or greater, to, the quality of poems written in the UK and America.
Yet Indian poets get scant attention.
Unfortunately (and this is nothing against the poets themselves represented here) you would not know this quality exists from Poetry’s India issue—which is a terrible shame.
It’s almost a betrayal.
When I was younger, I naturally thought poetry was everything, and editing was nothing. Now I’m beginning to think the opposite is true. I could name exciting Indian or Indian-background poets I admire, poets who don’t write like Ezra Pound, but write with honesty and vigor, and inhabit a variety of styles in a thrilling, even memorable, manner, and yet one might be moved to go find a poem by these poets and be underwhelmed—since no poet publishes poems of equal quality.
The selection matters.
Every poet—because it is finally the poems, not the poet, which matter—has bad and good poems.
It is important we find and assemble the good ones. Critics and reviewers must judge. This is all they are supposed to do.
Let me name some wonderful poets left out of this selection: Linda Ashok, Anand Thakore, Ravi Shankar, Medha Singh, Daipayan Nair, Kushal Poddar, Sharanya Manivannan, Sarukkhai Chabria, Joie Bose, Menka Shivdasani, Ranjani Murali, Akhil Katyal, Jeet Thayil, Sushmita Gupta, Urvashi Bahuguna, N Ravi Shankar, Abhijit Khandkar, Aseem Sundan, Sukrita Kumar, CP Surendran, Nalini Priyadarshni, Divya Guha, Arjun Rajendran, Aishwarya Iyer, Sophia Naz, Meera Nair, Arun Sagar, Tishani Doshi, Huzaifa Pandit, Bsm Murty, Sumana Roy, Aakriti Kuntal.
Sensual, hopeful, colorful, wise, spiritual, romantic, scientific, wry, affectionate. And yes, anti-Modernist. That’s why I love these poets.
It may seem an act of sour grapes to list a few of my favorite poets the editors missed, and there’s a danger an incomplete search of their work will disappoint. The last thing I wish to bring to Poetry’s Indian Poetry party is bitter words and no answers. Even passable Ezra Pound imitators deserve better than that.
THE BEAUTIFUL BRACKET PLAYS FOR SWEET SIXTEEN
March 26, 2019 at 12:56 pm (Ann Leshy Wood, C.P. Surendran, Jennifer Robertson, March Madness, Mary Angela Douglas, Medha Singh, Raena Shirali, Sharanya Manivannan, Sushmita Gupta)
To say, with Edgar Poe, that poetry should be beautiful, is the most rigorous, scientific thing one can say about poetry.
Why is the idea misunderstood, dismissed, or even ridiculed, then?
Because the talkers stop talking when beauty enters the room.
Poetry wants nothing to do with beauty, we think, because beauty is an argument without words.
It is not the beauty poetry rejects, it is the wordless way beauty makes itself felt, which is the poetic problem.
Or so most poets think.
Beauty, it is true, is not poetry—but poetry can imitate beauty, which makes them the same, since all art is first and foremost, imitation.
Beauty does not mean merely “pretty.”
Beauty’s ability to argue without words is a faculty no poet should be without—because what is a poet most of all?
A poet is swift—they use far less words to make an impression than writers of prose.
Poetry, then, imitates beauty’s ability to make its point instantaneously.
In the time it takes to read a single line of poetry, we could never say we have taken the time to read a novel, an essay, or a short story.
But if in that brief moment in which we read that line of poetry, we feel we are reading poetry, then we are reading poetry, and beauty has been the midwife to the poetry—and, if we don’t feel we are reading poetry, hasn’t the poetry failed already, since poetry (like beauty) should be recognized immediately? And if the first line doesn’t seem to be poetry, what of the second line? And should we really be waiting around for the poetry? Isn’t the whole point to be poetry right away? Otherwise we might as well say we are writing a short story or an essay. An essay needs time to argue, to explain. And poetry, because it is poetry, does not.
It is not precisely beauty which poetry invokes—it is the swiftness in which something is communicated, and that something exists in a mysterious sweet spot between argument, which needs time, and beauty, which does not—and this is what poetry is, and how it comes closest to being beautiful, in fact.
March Madness contests require time. But quickness will triumph. Upsets are few where there is one factor—a towering center, a diminutive guard; it makes no difference, for quick on the ball, quick to defend, quick to shoot, quick to rebound, quick to pass, quick to get in position, is all. There is no division of labor. The blur of intention and action is the essence of physical sport. Poetry is almost the same.
Poetry conveys image, idea, feeling, originality, and rhythm in as few words as possible. This wins. Beauty of the eye? No poem can compete. Argument of the mind? No poem can compete, or would compete, since the rationale of poetry is different—it invokes what we think is beauty, what we think is argument, but which is actually a hybrid blur of the two.
Mobile, graceful, accurate, and swift is a summation of all we describe as the beautiful, either ideally in the mind or materially in nature. The excellence of which the poem is the owner is excellent in ratio to how quickly the reader grasps it.
With this in mind, we proceed to the matchups themselves:
Mary Angela Douglas “one candle grown lilac in a perpetual spring”
This is a great example of irresistible swiftness. This is not 30% poetry and 70% prose, as most poems are, but 100% poetry: “one. candle. grown. lilac. in. a. perpetual. spring.”
Sharanya Manivannan “burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”
This is not quite as pure—the action is less focused, specific, forceful.
Mary Angela Douglas advances to the Sweet Sixteen.
****
Ann Leshy Wood “where groves of oranges rot,/and somber groups of heron graze/by the bay.”
We may think we are seeing what Ann Leshy Wood has “painted,” but the aural quality is in fact fooling the eye into thinking it perceives beauty—the “o” sound is doing all the work: “groves, oranges, rot, somber, heron.” Just as poetry is a mysterious hybrid of argument and beauty, so the best poetry entices our eyes with its sound.
Jennifer Robertson — “ocean after ocean after ocean”
This is splendid. And why? It is simple and repetitive. Why is this better than a million far more detailed paragraphs? For the reasons we have just outlined. This is like a jump shot looking exactly the same three times in a row with the shooter hitting all three shots. No sports fan could want anything more.
Jennifer Robertson has made it to the Sweet Sixteen.
****
Medha Singh “you’ve/remembered how the winter went/as it went on”
This is one of the most remarkable poetic utterances a poet ever thought to make. “You’ve,” a rather clumsy-sounding word lumbers out of the starting gate, and “remembered,” another slow and awkward word embraces it—the fat ground is prepared; we have almost a novel already—swift, but slow. The phrase “you’ve remembered” has the weight of someone else’s memory thrown back onto, and into, the past—not “you remember” or “I’ve remembered,” but “you’ve remembered.” The next phrase, “how the winter went” continues the funereal rhythm of the trochaic, HOW the/ WIN-ter /WENT as / and introduces winter (a funereal season) as “how it went,” which introduces memory’s movement into the remembering—which is then repeated: “it went on, so we have “went” repeated, the “w” sound mingling with the “w” of winter, overwhelming the memory with remembering how winter “went on” (continued and continued) even as it “went”!!
C.P. Surendran — “A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”
This is also a remarkable group of lines, but compared to Medha Singh’s lines, which have the heft of a 19th century Russian novel, this is only an extremely clever description of a train coming out of a tunnel. “Window by window regained vision” is a brilliant way to cap “a train, blindfolded by a tunnel.”
The winner: Medha Singh. She’s going to the Sweet Sixteen.
****
Sushmita Gupta “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”
There is nothing here which is not morally ingenious. All great art requires not only the moral, but the morally ingenious. The complaint is not shy: “Everything hurts.” Too often even the great love poets complain of a heart that aches, but Sushmita Gupta knows love the best:”Everything hurts.”
She then moves quickly from heavy complaint to winged, ironic wit: “even that which seems like love.” And after the heavy (“everything hurts”) and the light (“even that which seems like”) the balance of both is exemplified by the last word: “love.” It is a dazzling, yet a sober and sad and wise performance. “Love” and “seems” never seemed so attractive and hateful at the same time.
Raena Shirali “we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
There is transformation and action in Reana Shirali’s two short lines, enough for an entire Greek or Roman or Hindu myth. The excitement is memorable, but it is more like an action movie than a performance which is morally ingenious.
Sushmita Gupta wins. Welcome to the Sweet Sixteen!
****
BEAUTIFUL BRACKET—THE END OF ROUND ONE
March 20, 2019 at 1:29 pm (C.P. Surendran, Dimitry Melnikoff, March Madness, Raena Shirali, Sushmita Gupta)
Sushmita Gupta is the sixth seed in the Beautiful Bracket:
“Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”
The artist turns pain into beauty, and this transformation makes it possible to live.
Art has a life of its own, whether we are happy, or not. The poet’s poems are personal, but to us, they are just poems—which don’t care about us. Why should they? They are just poems, and true audiences exist only when the readers don’t know the poets personally.
There is nothing we can say about poems. The poem is the “saying” itself. A poem is not a friend telling us something; so why do we care at all when Sushmita Gupta expresses hurt?
We (audiences) don’t. We (audiences) only care about the beauty of the poem. We (audiences) only care when someone is able to transform pain into beauty. This is the miracle.
Does this mean that we are perfectly heartless when we admire poems?
Yes.
Because obviously, people are moved to sympathy and pity by each other—imagine if this were only possible with the help of poems. Then we would be in real trouble.
So, yes, we are heartless when we admire the sentimental beauty of poems.
“Sentimental beauty.” Endowing beauty with sentiment and sentiment with beauty is the cool, impersonal work of poems.
To overcome sorrow as either a poet or a person, we can have nothing to do with sorrow, and not feeling sorrow, we cannot feel pity, and so yes, poems and poets have no heart, and neither does beauty, and this instructs us as individuals to be strong, and not weak.
Art is the public expression of individual resourcefulness. Beauty and sentiment, which are opposites, are forced by art to be one.
Sushmita Gupta’s opponent is Dimitry Melnikoff, whose beautiful line is:
“Offer me a gulp of this light’s glow”
Beauty loves the uncanny and the uncanny loves the beautiful. When we sense this beauty is inevitable—that this beauty had to be beautiful in this way only—it produces the effect of the uncanny. The ‘o’ sounds of “Offer” and “glow” and the ‘g’ sounds of “gulp” and “glow” make the visual and the action of the line feel inevitable, and so the beauty of the line feels uncanny—which is better than beauty alone.
The Scarriet March Madness arena is swaying with small globes of light.
The rhythm of “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love” finds the pain, the “minor” chord, of the dactlyic/trochaic, EV-‘ry-thing/ HURTS, ev-/ giving way to the more hopeful, “major key” iambic, -en THAT/which SEEMS/like LOVE.
The entire sequence turns on “seems,” for what seems to hurt, hurts; seeming has to do with the senses; but also “seems” implies a mistake; so there is a hidden optimism: “love” which only “seems,” hurts, but what if love were true, and not seeming? Perhaps then the hurt of everything will be transcended. A lesser poet would not have put the stress on SEEMS; Sushmita makes sure the rhythm and the (hidden) meaning work as one.
Sushmita Gupta wins.
****
How would William Shakespeare do in this tournament? Let’s find out. The Fragment Handicap is a challenge to all. Can we feel Shakespeare’s greatness in brief?
“Those were pearls that were his eyes”
No matter how great the poet, they are only allowed one volley, one swipe at the ball, and the opponent gets to hit it briefly back. The volley is not a 150-mile-per-hour shot, but a few words.
C.P. Surendran tackles the pearls with this:
“A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”
Both Shakespeare and Surendran picture blindness in a beautiful way: Eyes as pearls. A train in a tunnel—window by window—regaining sight.
If poetry is finally speech, Shakespeare is a great lesson. In this instance, the odd, “Those were pearls that were his eyes,” still sounds like something someone would say.
“A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision,” not so much.
But must a poem sound like speech? Surely that is open for debate, but I have a feeling it helps.
The division between reading a line of verse, and hearing it spoken by a person, must give us pause.
Reading poetry is much like a train going over a track.
What is a train’s vision? How does a train see, window by window? There is a sweet, teasing, entrancement in contemplating this.
It’s really impossible the immortal Shakespeare would lose, isn’t it?
The crowd goes wild.
C.P. Surendran has won!
****
And now the final contest in the First Round.
A.E. Housman, who published in the late 19th century, but died in 1936—not that long ago—often contemplates grief in the English countryside, and when the British Empire encircled the world from icy sea to tropical pool, it was from their own meadows and garden plots English poetry most sweetly poured. Soldiers left Britain and conquered, but when the poets left Britain they died. As a proud and strict professor of Latin, Housman was said to bring women to tears with his scolding manner. He also had trouble remembering their names. It is said he made frequent trips to France, because they had dirty books which were banned in Britain. Housman’s tournament entry:
“The rose-lipped girls are sleeping/In fields where roses fade.”
In poetry, one can never go wrong by repetition: the rose-lipped girls…where roses fade.
Raena Shirali is not as famous as Housman, but google will yet tell you a thing, or two. Her book of poems, GILT, has been widely reviewed, and the Chicago Review of Books says, “Shirali, the daughter of Indian immigrants, has written a collection that dissects experiences against a white Southern background and begs the question: “What does America demand of my brown body?”
In her battle with Housman, she is quicker, by far:
“we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
There isn’t the music of “The rose-lipped girls are sleeping/In fields where roses fade.”
In Housman’s time, there were heavy leather books of poems in every home, and quotation books with iambic lines on roses.
Shelley died with a book by Keats in his pocket.
Today, poets carry an electronic universe.
“we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
Raena Shirali, nearly invisible, in a close game, wins.
****
Here are the 32 winners of Round One
The Bold Bracket
Diane Lockward (d. Aaron Poochigian)
Aseem Sundan (d. Hoshang Merchant)
Linda Ashok (d. Menka Shivdasani)
Edgar Poe (d. John Milton)
Daipayan Nair (d. Philip Larkin)
Eliana Vanessa (d. Joie Bose)
Robin Richardson (d. Robin Morgan)
Khalypso (d. Walter Savage Landor)
**
The Mysterious Bracket
Jennifer Barber (d. Sophia Naz)
Srividya Sivakumar (d. Percy Shelley)
Aakriti Kuntal (d. A.E. Stallings)
Merryn Juliette (d. Ranjit Hoskote)
Michelina Di Martino (d. Meera Nair)
Kushal Poddar (d. Sukrita Kumar)
Nabina Das (d. Ben Mazer)
Sridala Swami (d. Richard Wilbur)
**
The Life Bracket
William Logan (d. Garrison Keillor)
Danez Smith (d. Akhil Katyal)
Divya Guha (d. Semeen Ali)
N Ravi Shankar (d. Lily Swarn)
Kim Gek Lin Short (d. Rupi Kaur)
Alec Solomita (d. June Gehringer)
Stephen Cole (d. Marilyn Chin)
Sam Sax (d. Dylan Thomas)
**
The Beautiful Bracket
Mary Angela Douglas (d. Abhijit Khandkar)
Ann Leshy Wood (d. Ravi Shankar)
Medha Singh (d. Philip Nikolayev)
Sharanya Manivannan (d. Yana Djin)
Jennifer Robertson (d. John Keats)
Sushmita Gupta (d. Dimitry Melnikoff)
C.P Surendran (d. William Shakespeare)
Raena Shirali (d. A.E. Housman)
****
SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED! WITH BEST LINES!
January 22, 2019 at 11:01 pm (A.E Stallings, Alex Dimitrov, Anand Thakore, Ann Leshy Wood, Arundhathi Subramaniam, Ben Mazer, C.P. Surendran, Charles Adès Fishman, Christian Wiman, Christopher T. Schmitz, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Danez Smith, Divya Guha, Eliana Vanessa, Garrison Keillor, Hoshang Merchant, Indian poetry, Jeet Thayil, Joanna Valente, Jorie Graham, Kushal Poddar, Lily Swarn, Linda Ashok, Marilyn Chin, Medha Singh, Meera Nair, Merryn Juliette, Michael Creighton, N Ravi Shanker, Nabina Das, Nalini Priyadarshni, Nandini Dhar, Nathan Woods, Nitoo Das, Philip Nikolayev, Poetry Hot 100, Ranjit Hoskote, Rochelle Potkar, Rupi Kaur, Ryan Alvanos, Sam Sax, Sampurna Chattarji, Scarriet Editors, Scarriet Hot 100, Semeen Ali, Sharanya Manivannan, Sharon Olds, Smita Sahay, Sophia Naz, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Tishani Doshi, Urvashi Bahuguna, Veils Halos & Shackles, William Logan, Zachary Bos)
Sushmita Gupta
Poetry doesn’t have a center—therefore this “hot” list is not legitimate, but is.
Good poems and poets are everywhere. These happened to hit my eyes.
The best poems are not being published by the major publishers or the glossy magazines or the Poetry Foundation, but by our Facebook friends, our girlfriends, or the guy sitting next to us at the café. The best poem in English, being written somewhere right now—right now—is probably being written in India. Comforting or not, this is the fact.
The death of Mary Oliver, and its fairly large public notice, shows poetry has a kind of shadow center, if not a real one, occasionally manifesting itself as seemingly real, only to fade into Auden’s cry, “poetry makes nothing happen.” Slowly, in obscure corners of people’s hearts, poetry does happen. It has no intellectual, philosophical, or critical identity, and its social identity is crushed by cinema and the popular song. But times change, and poetry does seem to be simmering towards something larger in the places where large things occur.
Poetry as the technical art, and poetry as it vaguely exists in the everyday efforts and reflections of the world are two different things. No poet or critic is responsible for the vastness of the latter.
In this contemporary snapshot list of poems, I intentionally made the search greater to include the best-known sources, for two reasons: “what are the most distinguished outlets doing?” and for the sake of variety.
So the poems on this list are poems I happily and locally and accidentally see, and also poems gleaned from sources which a slightly larger audience sees.
This explains why you see the poems you do.
As far as how the poems are actually ranked, the best first, and so on, again, I plead guilty to subjectivity, which never excuses authoritarian decisions—it only makes them seem more authoritarian; but the word authoritarian is overused and misused these days—whatever decisions the comfortable, fake-revolutionaries don’t like, are called, after the fact, authoritarian.
The poems are ranked by the best lines uttered in these poems.
Philip Nikolayev (on the list) has a theory that poetry lives, finally, in great lines.
It was a great Facebook discussion, and I forget what I said about it, then, which is all that matters—the Scarriet Hot 100 I introduce here is my authoritarian moment in the sun—and why I bring it up, I don’t know, because I agreed with Nikolayev, then, and now, perhaps, I don’t.
All the poems on the Hot 100 list are good—but some, as good as they are, have nothing but plain and ordinary lines, or phrases. No stand-alone piece of the poem—good when the poem is read as a whole—sounds very interesting.
In rare instances, the title of the poem, coupled with the selected mundane part of the poem, combines to be of interest, or surprising. As you judge, keep the titles in mind as you read the line.
Because the ranking here is by line (or part of a line, or lines) I should say a word or two about what makes a good line.
I believe it can be summed up: a good line is where the vision and the rhythm speak together.
Some lines are good for purely prose fiction reasons—they sound like the start of a great short story. They point, rather than being the point.
One more thing: since Scarriet has written on Indian poetry recently, many poets are from India; those designated “Scarriet” were featured on that date on this site, though found elsewhere. Please search, enjoy, and support, will you? all 100 of these poets.
(1) Jennifer Barber —Continuum (2018 The Charles River Journal #8) “Sure, it was a dream, but even so/you put down the phone so soundlessly”
(2) A.E. Stallings —Pencil (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The Atlantic) “Perfection was a blot/That could not be undone.”
(3) Sushmita Gupta —Gently Please (12/18 FB) “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”
(4) William Logan —The Kiss (2017 Rift of Light Penguin) “‘I’ve never thought of you that way, I guess.’/She touched me then with the ghost of a caress.”
(5) Eliana Vanessa —this black rose (12/13 FB) “I’d rather be outside, with him,/turning stones in the rain,/than here,/listening to the hum/of so many skulls, alone.”
(6) Abhijit Khandkar —Bombil (Poetry Delhi 12/1) “So I write this poem and feed it to the ravenous sea.”
(7) Philip Nikolayev —Blame (1/4/19 FB) “within its vast domain confined”
(8) Sharanya Manivannan —Keeping the Change (12/5/18 Scarriet) “burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”
(9) Hoshang Merchant —Scent of Love (10/12/18 Scarriet) “I have myself become wild in my love for a wild thing”
(10) Divya Guha —Non-attendance (1/16/19 Gmail) “The shaver missing, your greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.”
(11) Ravi Shankar —Buzzards (12/5/18 Scarriet) “What matters cannot remain.”
(12) Mary Angela Douglas —Epiphany of the White Apples (1/3/19 Scarriet) “one candle grown lilac in a perpetual Spring”
(13) N Ravi Shankar—Bamboo (12/26/17 FB) “You are nude, sweet mother,/so am I/as the bamboos creak a lullaby”
(14) Aseem Sundan —The Poet Lied About The Paradise (1/12/19 Indian Poetry) “How do I make the paper turn blood red?/How do I make everyone read it?”
(15) Stephen Cole —The descriptor heart (1/18/19 FB) “I feel the wind-tides/Off San Fernando Mountain./I hear the cry of suicide brakes/Calling down the sad incline/Of Fremont’s Pass.”
(16) Yana Djin —Days are so slow, adoni, so slow (1/2/19 Vox Populi) “In the dusk leaves like golden suns shiver and glow”
(17) Ann Leshy Wood —Thanksgiving, For my father, 1917-2012 (11/23/16 FB) “where groves of oranges rot,/and somber groups of heron graze/by the bay.”
(18) Shalim Hussain —Dighalipukhuri (12/5/18 Scarriet) “His downy heart bleeds over the bliss beneath.”
(19) Linda Ashok —Tongue Tied (4/4/18 Cultural Weekly) “How deep is the universe? How many/light years will it take to reach your belly”
(20) Marilyn Chin —How I Got That Name (2018 Selected Poems, Norton) “by all that was lavished upon her/and all that was taken away!”
(21) Diane Lockward —The Missing Wife (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles Fishman, Sahay, eds) “The wife and the dog planned their escape”
(22) Daipayan Nair —Roseate with Jyoti (Season 2) Poem VI (12/30/18 FB) “you hold my hand like possibilities”
(23) Ranjit Hoskote —Effects of Distance (8/10/18 Scarriet) “Blue is the color of air letters, of conqueror’s eyes./Blue, leaking from your pen, triggers this enterprise.”
(24) Nabina Das —Death and Else (9/7/18 Scarriet) “under the same ceiling/fan from where she/later dangled.”
(25) Sridala Swami —Redacted poetry is a message in a bottle (6/9/18 Scarriet) “There is only this book, and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words in it.”
(26) Anand Thakore —Elephant Bathing (7/5/18 Scarriet) “As pale flamingoes, stripped irretrievably of their pinks,/Leap into a flight forever deferred.”
(27) Danez Smith —acknowledgments (December 2018 Poetry) “i call your mama mama”
(28) Anne Stevenson —How Poems Arrive (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The Hudson Review) “Or simply wait/Till it arrives and tells you its intention.”
(29) Jennifer Robertson —Coming Undone (4/14/18 Scarriet) “ocean after ocean after ocean”
(30) Srividya Sivakumar—Wargame (1/12/19 Scarriet) “I’m searching for coral and abalone deep in the dragon’s lair.”
(31) Medha Singh —Gravedigger (January 2019 Indian Quarterly) “you’ve/remembered how the winter went/as it went on”
(32) Lily Swarn —The Cobbler (1/7/19 Pentasi B World Friendship Poetry) “The stink of poverty cowered in fear!!”
(33) Sophia Naz —Neelum (5/2/18 Scarriet) “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”
(34) James Longenbach —This Little Island (November 2018 Poetry) “And when the land stops speaking/The wave flows out to sea.”
(35) Sam Sax —Prayer for the Mutilated World (September 2018 Poetry) “that you are reading this/must be enough”
(36) Raena Shirali —Daayan After A Village Feast (Anomaly #27) “we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
(37) Priya Sarukkhai Chabria —She says to her girlfriend (12/5/18 Scarriet) “in the red slush/open/to flaming skies.”
(38) Nitoo Das —How To Write Erotica (10/12/18 Scarriet) “You’re allowed to be slightly long-winded.”
(39) Sukrita Kumar —The Chinese Cemetery (4/14/18 Scarriet) “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”
(40) Zachary Bos —All that falls to earth (May, 2018 Locust Year—chapbook) “In a library properly sorted/ecology stands beside eulogy.”
(41) Khalypso —Women Are Easy To Love Over The Internet (Anomaly #27) “to wake up/strangers & sticky & questioning.”
(42) C.P. Surendran —Prospect (10/12/18 Scarriet) “A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”
(43) Dan Sociu —The Hatch (Trans. Carla Bericz, National Translation Month) “the man with the tambourine went off cursing me”
(44) Nalini Priyadarshni —When You Forget How To Write a Love Poem (12/21 Chantarelle’s Notebook a poetry e-zine) “You try different places at different hours,/dipping your pen in psychedelic summer skies”
(45) June Gehringer —I Don’t Write About Race (1/16/19 Luna Luna Magazine) “I don’t write about race,/ I write about gender,/ I once killed a cis white man,/ and his first name/ was me.”
(46) Robin Flicker —I fell asleep holding my notebook and pen (12/22 FB) “In my dream, the pen was a pair of scissors, and I had to cut out every letter of every word.”
(47) Robin Morgan —4 Powerful Poems about Parkinson’s (10/15/15 TED Talk You Tube) “Growing small requires enormity of will.”
(48) Arundhathi Subramaniam —Prayer (11/15/18 Scarriet) “when maps shall fade,/nostalgia cease/and the vigil end.”
(49) Menka Shivdasani —The Woman Who Speaks To Milk Pots (9/7/18 Scarriet) “I shall turn the heat up,/put the lid on./Watch me.”
(50) Ryan Alvanos —7:30 (2011 From Here—album online) “not too long and not too far/I carefully left the door ajar”
(51) Tishani Doshi —The Immigrant’s Song (3/16/18 Scarriet) “hear/your whole life fill the world/until the wind is the only word.”
(52) Semeen Ali —You Look At Me (3/16/18 Scarriet) “for a minute/That one minute/contains my life”
(53) Kim Gek Lin Short —Playboy Bunny Swimsuit Biker (American Poetry Review vol 48 no 1) “If truth be told/the theft began/a time before/that summer day.”
(54) Lewis Jian —Mundane Life (1/9/19 World Literature Forum) “who’s wise enough to reach nirvana?”
(55) Dimitry Melnikoff —Offer Me (1/12/19 Facebook Poetry Society) “Offer me a gulp of this light’s glow”
(56) Kushal Poddar —This Cat, That (12/13/18 FB) “call its name around/with the bowl held in my cooling hand./I can see myself doing this. All Winter. All Summer.”
(57) Ben Mazer —Divine Rights (2017 Selected Poems) “her room/retains the look/of the room of a stranger”
(58) Christopher T. Schmitz —The Poet’s Oeuvre (12/24 FB) “poems that guess/at the argot of an era to come/and ache with love/for the world he’s leaving/and couldn’t save.”
(59) Simon Armitage —To His Lost Lover (2017 Interestingliterature) “And left unsaid some things he should have spoken,/about the heart, where it hurt exactly, and how often.”
(60) Akhil Katyal —For Someone Who Will Read This 500 Years From Now (7/5/18 Scarriet) “How long did India and Pakistan last?”
(61) Minal Hajratwala —Operation Unicorn: Field Report (8/10/18 Scarriet) “The unicorns are a technology/we cannot yet approximate.”
(62) Jehanne Dubrow —Eros and Psyche (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles Fishman, Sahay, eds) “my mother might stay asleep forever, unbothered by the monument of those hands”
(63) Rochelle Potkar —Friends In Rape (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles Fishman, Sahay, eds) “Doesn’t she smile at each one of your jokes?”
(64) Merryn Juliette —Her Garden (9/21 FB) “grey as I am”
(65) Marilyn Kallet —Trespass (Plume #89) “Maybe that’s what Verlaine said,/at the end.”
(66) Meera Nair —On Some Days (12/17 FB) “on all days/Without fail/I need you”
(67) Nathan Woods —Wander, Wonder (12/26 FB) “into wands for spells to scatter the beasts”
(68) Rajiv Mohabir —Hybrid Unidentified Whale (11/15/18 Scarriet) “no others/can process its cries into music.”
(69) Dana Gioia —The Stars Now Rearrange Themselves (Video, Dana Gioia Official Site) “a crack of light beneath a darkened door.”
(70) Paige Lewis —You Can Take Off Your Sweater, I’ve Made Today Warm (January 2018 Poetry) “Right now, way above your head, two men”
(71) Smita Sahay —For Nameless, Faceless Women (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles) “change the way you tell your stories.”
(72) Sampurna Chattarji —As a Son, My Daughter (2016 Veils, Halos & Shackles) “You fear nothing./You frighten me.”
(73) Michelina Di Martino —Original Sin (1/12/19 Intense Call of Feelings) “Let us make love. Where are we?”
(74) Jo-Ann Mort —Market Day (Plume #89) “wanting the air/ beside me to welcome you.”
(75) Sohini Basak—Laconic (1/12/19 Scarriet) “the rude dove just blinked”
(76) Carol Kner —Pieces of us Keep Breaking Off (Plume #89) “to quench the rage that lunges daily”
(77) Shikha Malaviya —September 9, 2012 (A poem in 9 hours) (11/15/18 Scarriet) “Our hips swaying badly/to Bollywood beats”
(78) Michael Creighton —New Delhi Love Song (8/10/18 Scarriet) “all are welcomed with a stare in New Delhi.”
(78) Ranjani Murali —Singing Cancer: Ars Film-Poetica (8/10/18 Scarriet) “Anand jumps to his death from the staggering height of two feet”
(79) Jeet Thayil —Life Sentence (7/5/18 Scarriet) “your talk is of meat and money”
(80) Urvashi Bahuguna —Boy (6/9/18 Scarriet) “Girl kisses/some other boy. Girl wishes/it was Boy.”
(81) Huzaifa Pandit —Buhu Sings an Elegy for Kashmir (3/16/18 Scarriet) “The beloved weeps in a hollow tongue”
(82) Nandini Dhar —Map Pointing At Dawn (2/21/18 Scarriet) “Ghost uncle is a calligrapher who cannot hold/a pen between his fingers.”
(83) Sumana Roy —Root Vegetables (2/21/18 Scarriet) “darkness drinks less water than light”
(84) Jorie Graham —Scarcely There (January 2019 Poetry) “We pass here now onto the next-on world. You stay.”
(85) Christian Wiman —The Parable of Perfect Silence (December 2018 Poetry) “Two murderers keep their minds alive/while they wait to die.”
(86) Martha Zweig —The Breakfast Nook (December 2018 Poetry) “One day it quits./The whole business quits. Imagine that.”
(87) Alex Dimitrov —1969 (September 2018 Poetry) “Then returned to continue the war.”
(88) Campbell McGrath —My Music (12/17/18 The New Yorker) “My music is way better than your music”
(89) Terrance Hayes —American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The New Yorker) “It is possible he meant that, too.”
(90) Garrison Keillor —I Grew Up In A Northern Town (1/12/19 FB) “Starved for love, obsessed with sin,/Sunlight almost did us in.”
(91) Dick Davis —A Personal Sonnet (2018 Best American Poetry, Lehman, Gioia—The Hudson Review) “These are the dreams that turned out to be real.”
(92) Sharon Olds —The Source (2018 All We Know of Pleasure—Poetic Erotica by Women, Shomer) “Ah, I am in him”
(93) Manjiri Indurkar —Diabetes at a Birthday Party (1/12/19 Scarriet) “Who talks about diabetes at someone’s birthday party?/Ma’s life is a cautionary tale.”
(94) Jayanta Mahapatra —Her Hand (1/12/19 Scarriet) “The little girl’s hand is made of darkness/How will I hold it?”
(95) Rony Nair —Solarium (1/12/19 Scarriet) “some people get off on sleeping with your enemy”
(96) John Murillo —A Refusal To Mourn The Deaths By Gunfire, Of Three Men In Brooklyn (American Poetry Review vol 48 no 1) “You strike your one good match to watch it bloom/and jook”
(97) CA Conrad —a Frank poem (12/31/18 Facebook Fraternity of Poets, DonYorty.com) “one experience is quietly/consumed by the next”
(98) Sara J. Grossman —House of Body (Anomaly #27) “weather of abundant appendages”
(99) Rupi Kaur —did you think i was a city (1/5/19 Instagram) “i am not street meat i am homemade jam”
(100) Warsan Shire —The House (2017 Poetry Foundation) “Everyone laughs, they think I’m joking.”
OH NO, PLEASE HELP US! ANOTHER SCARRIET POETRY HOT ONE HUNDRED
September 18, 2018 at 10:04 pm (Anders Carlson-Wee, Arjun Rajendran, Arun Sagar, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Carmen Giminez-Smith, Carolyn Forche, Cathy Park Hong, Christopher Poindexter, Dan Sociu, Danielle Georges, David Lehman, Derrick Michael Hudson, Diana Khoi Nguyen, Edna Millay, Fanny Howe, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Glyn Maxwell, Grace Schulman, Helen Vendler, How I Got That Name, Huzaifa Pandit, Jeet Thayil, Jim Behrle, Joanna Valente, Joe Green, John Cooper Clarke, Jos Charles, Kent Johnson, Kevin Young, Linda Ashok, Marilyn Chin, Marjorie Perloff, Mary Oliver, Meera Nair, Merryn Juliette, N Ravi Shanker, Nabina Das, Nikita Gill, Patricia Lockwood, Patricia Smith, Paul Rowe, Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century Poetry, Philip Nikolayev, Ranjit Hoskote, Raquel Salas Rivera, Richard Howard, Rita Dove, Robert Pinsky, Semeen Ali, Sherry (Shohreh) Laici, Smita Sahay, Sophia Naz, Stephanie Burt, Sushmita Gupta, The Nation, Tyler Knott Gregson, Urvashi Bahuguna, Yrsa Daley-Ward)
1 Anders Carlson-Wee: Brilliant, empathic poem, “How-To,” published in The Nation—then a mob ends his career.
2 Stephanie Burt: Harvard professor and Nation poetry editor publishes Carlson-Wee—caves to the mob.
3 Carmen Giminez-Smith: Nation co-editor, with Burt, apologizes for “disparaging and ableist language” giving “offense,” “harm,” and “pain” to “several communities.”
4 Grace Schulman: Former Nation poetry editor: “never once did we apologize for publishing a poem.”
5 Patricia Smith: Runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in 2018, a slam poet champion, leads Twitter outrage which greets Carlson-Wee’s Nation poem.
6 Ben Mazer: Selected Poems out, discovering unpublished Delmore Schwartz material for Library of America.
7 Rupi Kaur: Milk and Honey, her debut self-published book of viral Instagram ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’ verse, has put a young woman from Toronto on top of the poetry popularity heap.
8 Tyler Knott Gregson: NY Times pointed out this Instagram poet’s first collection of poetry was a national bestseller.
9 Christopher Poindexter: This Instagram poet has been compared to Shakespeare by Huffpost. (He’s nothing like Shakespeare.)
10 Nikita Gill: Probably the best of the feminist Instagram poets.
11 Yrsa Daley-Ward: Her Instapoetry memoir, The Terrible, was praised by Katy Waldman in the New Yorker.
12 Marilyn Chin: Her New and Selected (Norton) this October contains her famous poem, “How I Got That Name.”
13 Frank Bidart: Awarded 2018 Pulitzer for his Collected Poems.
14 William Logan: New prose book: Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods. New book of poems, Rift of Light, proves again his formal verse is perhaps the best poetry published today.
15 Kevin Young: New New Yorker poetry editor.
16 Evie Shockley: Was on short list for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
17 David Lehman: Series editor for Best American Poetry since 1988—30 years.
18 Linda Ashok: Poet (Whorelight), songwriter (“Beautiful Scar”) and champion of Indian poetry in English.
19 Derrick Michael Hudson: Who still remembers this “Chinese” BAP poet?
20. Dana Gioia: Guest editor of Lehman’s Best American Poetry 2018.
21 Akhil Katyal: “Is Mumbai still standing by the sea?”
22 Urvashi Bahuguna: “Girl kisses/some other boy. Girl wishes/It was Boy.”
23 Jeet Thayil: “you don’t want to hear her say,/Why, why did you not look after me?”
24 Sridala Swami: Jorge Louis Borges of English Indian poetry.
25 Adil Jussawalla: Born in Mumbai in 1940, another Anglo-Indian poet ignored in the U.S.
26 Rochelle D’Silva: Indian slam poet who writes in English.
27 Billy Collins: Pajama and Slippers school of poetry. And nothing wrong with that at all.
28 W.S. Merwin: One of the few living major poets born in the 20s (goodbye Ashbery, Hall).
29 Valerie Macon: Quickly relieved of her NC poet laureate duties because of her lack of creds.
30 Mary Angela Douglas: a magical bygone spirit who sweetly found her way onto the Internet.
31 Stephen Cole: Who is this wonderful, prolific lyric poet? The daily Facebook fix.
32 Sophia Naz: “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”
33 Rochelle Potkar: “But can I run away from the one cell that is the whole Self?”
34 Helen Vendler: No one finally cares what non-poets say about poetry.
35 Huzaifa Pandit: “Bear the drought of good poems a little longer”
36 N Ravi Shankar: “a toy train in a full moon night”
37 Sharon Olds: Like Edna Millay, a somewhat famous outsider, better than the men.
38 Nabina Das: “the familiar ant crawling up”
39 Kaveh Akbar: “the same paradise/where dead lab rats go.”
40 Terrance Hayes: “I love poems more than/money and pussy.”
41 Dan Sociu: Plain-spoken, rapturous voice of Romania
42 Glyn Maxwell: Editor of Derek Walcott’s poems— The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013
43 Arjun Rajendran: Indian poet in English who writes sassy, seductive poems.
44 A.E. Stallings: With Logan, and a few others, the Formalist torch.
45 Patricia Lockwood: Subsiding from viral into respectability.
46 Marjorie Perloff: An old-fashioned, shaming of NYU professor Avital Ronell in the Nimrod Reitman case.
47 Daipayan Nair: Great love and sex poet of India
48 Shohreh Laici: Proud young voice of restless, poetic Iran
49 Smita Sahay: “You flowed down the blue bus/into a brown puddle/below the yellow lamp post/and hung there”
50 Mary Oliver: An early fan of Edna St. Vincent Millay, she assisted Edna’s sister, Norma, in assembling the great poet’s work.
51 Natasha Trethewey: Former U.S. laureate, her New and Selected favored to win National Book Award this year.
52 Anand Thakore: “a single tusk/White as a quarter-moon in mid-July,/Before the coming of a cloud.”
53 Carl Dennis: Author of the poem, “The God Who Loves You.”
54 Tony Hoagland: Today’s Robert Bly.
55 Meera Nair: “I live in a house/Someone else has loved in”
56 Fanny Howe: “Eons of lily-building/emerged in the one flower.”
57 Rita Dove: Won Pulitzer in 1987. Her The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011) was panned by Vendler and Perloff.
58 Diana Khoi Nguyen: Poet and multimedia artist studying for a PhD in Creative Writing.
59 Matthew Zapruder: Poetry editor of the New York Times magazine since 2016.
60 Jenny Xie: “I pull apart the evening with a fork.”
61 Mary Jo Bang: Chair of the National Book Award judges.
62 Jim Behrle: Hates David Lehman’s Best American Poetry series and “rhyme schemes.”
63 Semeen Ali: “diverting your attention/for a minute/contains my life/my undisclosed life”
64 George Bilgere: Ohio’s slightly more sophisticated Billy Collins.
65 Aishwarya Iyer: “When rain goes where will you find/The breath lost to the coming of love?”
66 Sukrita Kumar: “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”
67 Sushmita Gupta: “So detached, so solid, so just, so pure. A glory unbeholden, never seen or met before.”
68 Merryn Juliette: “before your body knows the earth”
69 John Cooper Clarke: “The fucking clocks are fucking wrong/The fucking days are fucking long”
70 Justin Phillip Reed: His book (2018) is Indecency.
71 Cathy Park Hong: Her 2014 essay, “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” rules our era. The avant-garde is no longer automatically cool.
72 Carolyn Forche: “No one finds/ you no one ever finds you.”
73 Zachary Bos: “The sun like a boat drowns.”
74 Bob Dylan: “You could have done better but I don’t mind”
75 Kanye West: The musical guest when SNL open its 44th season September 29th
76 Raquel Salas Rivera: “i shall invoke the shell petrified by shadows”
77 Jennifer Reeser: Indigenous, her new collection, will be available soon.
78 Forrest Gander: Be With from New Directions is his latest book.
79 Arun Sagar: “through glass and rain./Each way out/is worthy, each way leads/to clarity and mist,/and music.”
80 Joanna Valente: “Master said I am too anti-social.”
81 Richard Howard: Like Merwin, an American treasure, born in the 1920s.
82 J.Michael Martinez: Museum of the Americas on 2018 National Book Award longlist.
83 Amber Tamblyn: The actress/poet’s dad does the amazing flips in the movie West Side Story.
84 Paul Rowe: Stunning translation of Cesario Verde’s “O Sentimento dum Ocidental.”
85 Jill Bialosky: Norton editor caught plagiarizing by William Logan
86 Robert Pinsky: Editor of the 25 year anniversary edition of Best American Poetry in 2013.
87 Philip Nikolayev: Poet, linguist, philosopher: One Great Line theory of poetry is recent.
88 Ada Limón: The poet lives in New York, California, and Kentucky.
89 Rae Armantrout: Her poems examine, in her words, “a lot of largely unexamined baggage.”
90 Alex Dimitrov: “I want even the bad things to do over.”
91 Sam Sax: “Prayer for the Mutilated World” in September Poetry.
92 Danielle Georges: “You should be called beacon. You should be called flame.”
93 Stephen Sturgeon: “These errors are correct.”
94 Hieu Minh Nguyen: “Maybe he meant the city beyond the window.”
95 Richard Blanco: presidents, presidents, presidents.
96 Kent Johnson: His magazine Dispatches from the Poetry Wars continues the fight against poetry as commodity/career choice.
97 Parish Tiwari: “between falling rain/and loneliness…/the song/that once was ours”
98 Eliana Vanessa: Rrrrr. Lyric internet poet of the Tooth, Death, Love, Sex and Claw school.
99 Rachel Custer: Best known poem is “How I Am Like Donald Trump”
100 Jos Charles: “wen abeyance/accidentlie”
MARCH MADNESS CONTINUES. THOMAS HARDY VS. SUSHMITA GUPTA!!
April 2, 2018 at 1:23 pm (March Madness, Sushmita Gupta, Thomas Hardy)
Utterly In Love –Sushmita Gupta
Of all the remarkable,
Things and feelings,
In my life,
You are one.
And I guard you,
And your identity,
In the deepest,
Quietest corner,
Of my heart,
With a passion,
That some show,
For religion,
And if not religion,
Then they show it,
For revolution.
But me,
I am a mere mortal.
I only know,
To love you,
And love you secretly.
Secretly,
I melt in a pool,
By your thoughts.
Secretly,
I wish,
That you would,
Mould the molten me,
And give me,
A shape,
A form,
And eyes,
That twinkle,
Like far away stars.
And I,
With twinkling eyes,
And fragrant body,
From loving you,
Shall love you,
Even more.
The Man He Killed –Thomas Hardy
“Had he and I but met
By some old ancient inn,
We should have set us down to wet
Right many a nipperkin!
“But ranged as infantry,
And staring face to face,
I shot at him as he at me,
And killed him in his place.
“I shot him dead because—
Because he was my foe,
Just so: my foe, of course he was;
That’s clear enough; although
“He thought he’d ‘list, perhaps,
Off-hand like— just as I—
Was out of work— had sold his traps—
No other reason why.
“Yes; quaint and curious war is!
You shoot a fellow down
You’d treat if met where any bar is,
Or help to half-a-crown.”
These are two sentimental poems, the first by a poet from India, who writes in English, little known in the United States, and the second by Thomas Hardy, (1840–1928) well known in the English speaking world as a novelist and poet.
Why we should even wonder why poetry is “sentimental,” or why poetry is censored for being “too sentimental,” says more about us as a race, currently, than about poetry. Sentimentality is really nothing more than inscrutability, or having profound feelings in the face of inscrutability. And when we stop to think about it, this is how we spend about 100% of our days—having feelings, in the face of what, to us, is inscrutable. Sentimentality is not only the rule—it is really just about all there is.
The pride of our education wants to say otherwise; we, in our scientific pride, pretend we know a great deal—though we don’t know how we fall in love, we don’t know where we came from, what made the world, where we are going after we die, the thoughts of others, and there is a great deal more we don’t know—a tiny part of which we learn in a day, and then quickly forget.
All respectable poetry production—since the mid-20th century—has been swallowed by the university. Learning is embarrassed by inscrutability, for obvious reasons. It is a simple, unspoken, defensive reaction: modern, academic poetry hates sentimentality. Education is uncomfortable with the inscrutable. The inscrutable and the sentimental are nearly the same.
But since human beings have feelings, and since we actually know (if we are honest) very little, sentimental is what we are—and to suppress this in our poetry, by making poems dry repositories of unsentimental events and facts, is sure to ruin poetry. And it has.
“The Man He Killed” is a favorite, despite its sentimentality, of modern critics—the mid-20th century New Critics’ textbook, Understanding Poetry, spotlights the poem for praise.
The poem is sentimental, however; Hardy admits that its subject—war—is completely inscrutable; the exasperated utterance Hardy uses is [how] “quaint and curious war is!” Men enlist out of boredom, or chance, and kill each other, dying for no reason at all. This is the sentimental theme. The school master, if they are anti-war, will teach this poem for the sake of a good conscience. Conscience, rather than wisdom, now drives the Humanities departments in college. Hardy, then, gets a pass, by the progressive college professor.
A sentimental objection to war satisfies the new academic urge. This sentimentality is allowed.
If one were to point out that statistics show that more deaths result from collecting debts (half-a-crown, or more) or from drinking and fighting “where any bar is,” than in armed conflicts, throughout history, Hardy’s sanctimonious poem falls apart. It is too self-satisfied with its anti-war argument. The poem’s “sentimentality” is not the problem. Its argument is. The poem assumes men are good and war is bad. But in fact men are bad, and the reason why men are bad is inscrutable—Hardy escapes this uncomfortable fact—and sentimentalizes a hatred of war, while simultaneously taking the sentimental position that men outside of war are always friendly and good.
Or Hardy assumes they could be.
And this is at the heart of the poem’s sentimentality. Blokes savoring drinks with each other in pubs. Generals tell us to kill each other in war. “I would rather take my chances in a bar,” announces Hardy, deeply awash in sentimentality—and alcohol, perhaps.
Just so that is out of the way, we can now look at Gupta’s sentimental poem about love.
“Utterly In Love” is a poem of far more complex sentiment than Hardy’s—which basically says “instead of drinking with this bloke, I’m shooting at him! How absurd!”
Gupta is not mounting an argument against war, or anything the reader is expected to perceive as bad. She is truly sentimental, which is in her favor. She is not mixing some piece of impure intellectuality into her poem, as Hardy, the know-it-all, did.
The love of “Utterly In Love” is “secret,” but does not belong to “religion” or “revolution”—the speaker of the poem admits she has nothing to do with heavenly grace or earthly progress—hers is the love of a “mere mortal.”
Immortality, either from God, or from improving the lot of the human race, is not what she seeks, at least not overtly.
A poem is public, yet poems speaks of secret things, secret loves. Yet what is the most sacred and divine thing we feel, if not secret love?
Immortality is public—God recognizes you, or the human race builds you a monument for your revolutionary deeds.
But placing herself besides these two—religion or revolution—as a “mere mortal” with a “secret” love, the poet describes herself has having no identity whatsoever, going in a thoroughly opposite direction from an accomplished public figure. She is a “pool,” without even a shape. She is receptive, in her complete lack of will. And does this not describe the ultimate, pure, state of the true beloved? She is in a state to be formed by the one she secretly adores. This is psychologically true, since a secret crush makes us formless and helpless, with a desire that melts us. Perhaps we have no will, but the good thing is, we have no ego, either. We are ready to be a poet. We are purely and truly sentimental.
The poet wishes to be created—well, not quite—formed, by the secret love, and here’s the irony; the poet is creating herself, since she writes the poem. The poet becomes God, but this is only implied, not stated. And here’s a further irony, and even more delightful: if the poet is God, the secret love is God, who is forming her—so the more divine she is, as poet, the more divine the secret love is—so we have mutual true love, and the truth of it is expressed at the end of the poem, “And I…From loving you, Shall love you Even more.” The love increases, and is immortal. The mutuality of the lovers exists in the strongest terms, and the secrecy of the secret beloved of the poem enables the other to possibly be God—who is responsible for forming the poet—as well as the poem itself. Which makes God, who is the beloved, and the lover, and the poet, and the poem not “secret” at all—even as the secrecy is the agency which makes it possible to create the poem as a public document.
The winner: Sushmita Gupta.
NOVEMBER 2017. THE SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100.
November 7, 2017 at 3:00 pm (Ada Limon, Afaa Weaver, Alex Dimitrov, Amber Tamblyn, Ana-Maria Tone, Ben Lerner, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, Gary B. Fitzgerald, George Bilgere, Jennifer Reeser, Joe Green, Joie Bose, Kushal Poddar, Linda Ashok, March Madness, Mary Angela Douglas, Merryn Juliette, Nahid Arjouni, Nalini Priyadarshni, Nathan Woods, Philip Nikolayev, Ruth Awad, Saira Shah Halim, Shohreh Laici, Sushmita Gupta, W.S. Merwin)
1) Sushmita Gupta— When the waves lashed and the clouds loomed and I was alone.
2) Diane Seuss— I could do it. I could walk into the sea!
3) Rachel McKibbens— as you lie still within the soft forgotten witch of your body
4) Daipayan Nair— The maker of a house carries its hardness.
5) Eminem— The best part about me is I am not you.
6) Sharon Olds— I had not put it into words yet, the worst thing
7) Natasha Trethewey— two small trout we could not keep.
8) Billy Collins— The name of the author is the first to go
9) Terrance Hayes— but there are tracks of your syntax about the land
10) Robert Pinsky— The label, the labor, the color, the shade. The shirt.
11) Bob Dylan— How does it feel?
12) Dan Sociu— the quakes moving/ for nothing, under uninhabited regions. (trans. Ana-Maria Tone)
13) Ben Mazer— Mother then/I am your son/The King.
14) Denise Duhamel— Ken wants to feel Barbie’s toes between his lips
15) Molly Fisk— Then someone you love. And then you.
16) Sherman Alexie— They were common people who believed only in the thumb and the foot.
17) Jorie Graham— the infinite finding itself strange among the many
18) Charles Simic— Have you found a seat in your room/For every one of your wayward selves?
19) Louise Glück— In her heart, she wants them to go away.
20) Richard Howard— inspired by some wag’s verbose variations on the theme of semi-porn bric-a-brac
21) Donald Hall— so that she could smell the snowy air.
22) Stephen Cole— For the knowing heart the known heart cannot know.
23) Laura Kasischke— as if the worship of a thing might be the thing that breaks it.
24) Mary Ruefle— the dead borrow so little from the past.
25) Tony Hoagland— Nature’s wastefulness seems quietly obscene.
26) Kevin Young— a freshman, I threw/a Prince party, re-screwed/ the lights red & blue
27) Maxine Beneba Clarke— penny lane/on the Beatles trail/all the locals say and they nod/as if for sure they know/our tourist game
28) Carolyn Forché— What you have heard is true.
29) Mary Jo Bang— A plane lit down and left her there.
30) Dan Beachy-Quick— Drab bird unseen in the dark dark’s underbrush
31) Carl Dennis— Which for all you know is the life you’ve chosen.
32) Christian Wiman— Do you remember the rude nudists?
33) Stanley Plumly— I clapped my hands just for the company.
34) Major Jackson— All seeing is an act of war.
35) Gary B. Fitzgerald— A life is gone and, hard as rock, diamonds glow in jet black skies.
36) Mary Angela Douglas— the larks cry out and not with music
37) A.E. Stallings— From the weeds of the drowned.
38) Joe Green— the teacup is filled with the eyelashes of owls
39) Dorianne Laux— It’s tough being a guy, having to be gruff and buff
40) Collin Yost— I’ll love you when you’re mad at me
41) Rupi Kaur— Don’t tell me my women aren’t as beautiful as the ones in your country
42) Wendy Cope— The planet goes on being round.
43) Warsan Shire— when the men come, set yourself on fire.
44) Savannah Brown— Hi, I’m a slut. What?!
45) Brenna Twohy— My anxiety is a camera that shows everyone I love as bones
46) Lily Myers— My mother wanes while my father waxes
47) Imani Cezanne— Addiction is seeking comfort in that which is destroying you.
48) Ada Limón— What’s left of the woods is closing in.
49) Olivia Gatewood— resting bitch face, they call you
50) Vincent Toro— This island like a basket/of laundry
51) Koraly Dimitriadis— the day I moved out, I took my wedding dress to mum’s house
52) Nayuka Gorrie— I lose it and find it and lose it again.
53) Hera Lindsay Bird— Keats is dead so fuck me from behind
54) Marie Howe— Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
55) Valerie Macon— You are the boss of your canvas
56) Patricia Lockwood— OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.
57) Danielle Georges— O poorest country, this is not your name.
58) Frank Bidart— In the evening she takes a lethal dose of poison, and on the following morning she is dead.
59) Eileen Myles— I write behind your back.
60) Leila Chatti— Are you also dreaming? Do you still worship me, now that I’m here?
61) Claudia Rankine— After the initial presidential election results come in, I stop watching the news.
62) Anne Carson— I can hear little clicks inside my dream.
63) William Logan— the pastel salons require/the formalities of skin
64) Marilyn Chin— lust drove men to greatness, not goodness, not decency.
65) George Bilgere— The mysteries/from the public library, due
66) Robin Coste Lewis— what’s greyed/In and grey slinks ashamed down the drain.
67) Daniel Borzutzky— hieroglyphics painted on the/walls of financiers who accumulate capital through the/unjustified sexual behavior of adulterous/women
68) Maggie Smith— Any decent realtor,/walking you through a real shithole, chirps on/about good bones
69) Kim Addonnizio— a man who was going to be that vulnerable,/that easy and impossible to hurt.
70) Kay Ryan— If it please God,/let less happen.
71) Dana Gioia— there is no silence but when danger comes.
72) Megan Fernandez— The bullet is a simple, adolescent heartache.
73) Kushal Poddar— My mom, a wheelchair since two thousand and one
74) Sascha Aurora Akhtar— I ate/But I am/Hungrier than before
75) Jennifer Reeser— your coldness and my idealism/alone for all this time have kept us true.
76) Linda Ashok— a sudden gust of Kalbaisakhi/changed the conversation.
77) Ramsha Ashraf— tremble and tremble and tremble/With every kiss
78) Amber Tamblyn— If it had been Hillary Clinton, this would’ve never happened to Harvey Weinstein.
79) Ruth Awad— Nothing grows from me except the dead
80) Merryn Juliette— I will love her all insane
81) Nathan Woods— The best poems swell the lungs.
82) Nahid Arjouni— My headscarf will shudder if you speak with anyone. (trans. Shohreh Laici)
83) Philip Nikolayev— the fool moon/couldn’t stand the iambic pentameter any longer
84) Saira Shah Halim— The rains left behind a petrichor of shared verses
85) Jay Z— I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man.
86) Nalini Priyadarshni— mostly bookish, as sinfulness should be
87) Mark Doty— Into Eden came the ticks, princes of this world, heat-seeking, tiny
88) Paige Lewis— I’m making love easy for everyone.
89) Mary Oliver— You don’t have to be good.
90) Lyn Hejinian— to change this nerdy life upon row upon row upon row
91) Afaa Weaver— I stand here where I was born,/ and the masks wait for me.
92) Alex Dimitrov— What is under the earth followed them home.
93) Ben Lerner— jumpsuits, they have changed/painting
94) Wendy Videlock— the owl devours/ the hour,/ and disregards/ the rest
95) Joie Bose— I own that you from that night in November
96) Amy Gerstler— Pardon my/frontal offensive, dear chum.
97) Nathaniel Mackey— Some new Atlantis known as Lower/Ninth we took leave of next
98) W.S. Merwin— into a world he thought was a thing of the past
99) Juan Felipe Herrera— Where is our exile? Who has taken it?
100) Charles Bernstein— Think about it, Mr./Fanelli.
WHO IS THE GREATEST LIVING POET?
August 2, 2017 at 2:09 pm (Bhilai, Creative Writing Programs, Scarriet Editors, Shelley, Sushmita Gupta, Sushness)
Sushmita Gupta, painter, mother, teacher, wife, was born in Kolkata. She grew up in Bhilai, a Russian-Indian steel township in central eastern India, with perpendicular roads, and large trees which flowered during the summer and became fragrant at night. She presently lives in Oman.
She is proof that the sensitive female soul is the essence of poetry. She reconciles the elements of the universe.
Her online site, Sushness supplies a much better view of her tasteful and prolific output.
Here on Scarriet we offer only a few poor, inflamed arguments in favor of her (the best arguments contain fire) and two of her poems.
She reminds us of Shelley, who embraced primary elements of psychology and nature.
Nor is she afraid to offer wisdom, in the ancient sense.
American poets—after Poe—a sophisticated lot, tend to be suspicious of wisdom—their excellence lies in quirky and difficult points of view. The school of Bishop/Lowell, for instance. Auden, perhaps, was the last poet in English who made a real attempt to sound wise.
The Bold And The Peaceful
I rushed.
It was bright.
It was crazy.
A tornado full of life.The unpredictability!
The speed!
The danger!
My bold streak drew me to it.I rushed across the field,
To be carried and caressed
By a tornado.Almost there,
I stopped.
The peace within me,
Made a terrible mismatch.The bold and the peaceful.
That is me.
In this minor poem by Sushmita Gupta, which resembles the minor poems of Shelley, we are struck by emotion, clarity, and psychological truth—the poem carries us away with its energy and immediacy—exactly like a tornado; the poem delivers its expressiveness without fuss, and because there’s no fuss, the reader is engaged; there is no hesitation, pretense, or straining after the right little details. The poem has the rigor of religion, the flow of the poem has an epic force and size, which permits the whole of the emotional expression to make itself felt. A child could understand the poem, and this is part of its appeal, and yet its subtlety is profound. The poem’s movement is psychologically astute. The key line in the poem is “I rushed across the field” and here is all the remarkable imagery we need. The very balance of the poem threatens to break it apart. The duality is not a cancelling one, but in a brilliantly ironic way, the very source of the poem’s fury.
Sushmita Gupta is the greatest living poet.
Fame, as we all know, is based on hearsay—the T shirt is an extremely popular piece of clothing, but its popularity is not up for discussion, nor can it be mitigated by academic debate.
None can say what a great T-shirt is—it is the simple design of the T-shirt—invisible, ubiquitous—which is the “great” thing; the great poem is not akin to a great T-shirt, obviously; but the great poem achieves an excellence similar to the invisible, ubiquitous reality of the T-shirt as it exists in the practical world of clothes.
We should make it clear that Sushmita Gupta is the last person in the world who would make the claim that she is a “great” poet, much less the “greatest living poet.” She is too busy enjoying life, which includes writing poems, to ever worry about such a thing; she writes for friends, which is the practice of most poets—famous, or not.
She is humble and gracious—Scarriet makes this “great” claim on her behalf, without her knowledge, for pedagogical purposes only. We call her “great” only to advertise our own critical taste in poems written in English, which we have long developed and maintained. It ultimately doesn’t matter what a poet thinks, or whether their life circumstances justify the content of their poetry; we care, and only hope our readers care, for the poetry.
Judging poetry today is hindered by two things.
First: poetry criticism is hobbled by the cant which supposes that poetry has no relation to a made object with a clear design. “Poetry is not a T-shirt!” Yes, true.
But indeed the poem—which belongs to life, and not to a rarefied, non-place, swirling about in a haze of intellectualized assumptions—is, like a T-shirt, a made object with a clear design.
Intellectual pedantry—which seeks to dazzle, without making sense—disagrees with the common sense premise that poetry is a “made object with a clear design,” and this pedantry wildly expands to assert that the more a poem is unlike a “made object with a clear design,” the better it is.
And so authority becomes not just partially perverted, but completely perverted. This is common in rhetorical pursuits, such as poetry, literary criticism, or politics—where rhetoric itself separates people, even though all people, in almost all cases, want the same things.
This is the first thing: on dubious authority, a poem is not recognized as a poem.
Second: although an appreciation of poetry will always exist among people who wear T-shirts, the process by which poetry is “officially” recognized is in the hands of the well-placed, academic, few—who devotedly pursue the error we just outlined. This is especially the case, since the teaching of poetry was replaced, in mid-20th century America, by the college writing program apparatus, in which ambitious individuals transformed themselves from poets seeking fame into poetry teachers seeking fame, ensuring critical, philosophical confusion on one hand, and the precise kinds of unfortunate divisiveness and calculating hierarchy, often seen in politics, on the other—with the emptiness we would expect.
“Who is Sushmita Gupta?”
To the ambitious and well-positioned who ask this indignantly, we have no response.
Sushmita Gupta has neither bought into the expertise-cant of razzle-dazzle, formless, unclear poetry, nor has she ambitiously clambered her way into the maze of the creative writing industry.
Now obviously, this article, featuring two Sushmita Gupta poems, will not reveal to our readers what a real poem is, or any such nonsense—our argument above is not to be taken as a definition of poetry, but only a glimpse into what informs our own particular taste, out of which arises our judgment—that Sushmita Gupta’s poetry is deserving of lofty notice and serious recognition.
We spoke earlier of the importance of a poem’s formal design. Every poet should properly, and naturally, have a specific design on the reader—these two “designs” are nothing without the other—the poem’s visible, formal properties on one hand, and the poet’s invisible, emotional, and social intention, on the other. The more these match, the more successful the poem.
When we first had the pleasure of reading “His Words,” by Sushmita Gupta, we felt an emotional kick, and we were pleased at how seemingly without effort the emotional kick was administered. Only after reading the poem, again, with a critical eye, did we recognize its formal perfection.
The poem contains six stanzas. In stanzas two through five, the first part of each stanza is concerned with what “he” does to “her.”
The final line of these four stanzas reveals, progressively, the result of what he does to her.
We see effect on her, and also the effect of her—as when an image, such as “petal” is used.
The result of the last line of each of these stanzas is also her words, the poet’s, on “his words”—his words and her words contend within the poem, in an unspoken manner.
Sushmita Gupta’s poem, “His Words,” is more than a poem vindicating itself. The poem transcends its own poetic rhetoric in its final line—even as it remains securely within the arc of the poem.
It could be argued that the poet, in her final accusation—as a poet—is accusing herself, though this is not explicit. There is meaning within meaning—within the poem, and one final possible meaning—outside the poem itself.
Nothing is left out, nothing more is needed—and every part of the poem belongs to every other part, as well as to the whole. The measured perfection and ease, is breathtaking—even as the subject itself is a dramatic whirlwind.
~~~~~~~~~~
His Words
He chose
Each word,
With utmost care.
He strung
The sentences
Into lyrical poetry.
His writings
Touched her,
Like she was
The most beautiful.
His writings
Caressed her,
Like she was
A fragrant being.
His writings
Stroked her,
Like she was
A tender petal.
And she felt,
Being carried,
Over the threshold,
And pledged herself to him.
Only,
He did not know
She lived.
WHEN I DISAPPEARED
April 26, 2017 at 1:28 pm (Daipayan Nair, Scarriet Editors, Sushmita Gupta)
“Death of one eye is loving. Death of both is love.” —Daipayan Nair
“Ashes & diamonds, foes and friends, are quite the same in the end.” —Sushmita Gupta
~~~
First I disappeared, caring for myself less and less,
As I fell madly in love.
Oh God I loved you more and more and more
And everything certain became a guess,
As my known self was replaced by you.
You triumphed in love which really is a war
One wins: love, singular, alone,
Made one where there had been two.
Love has no opposition or borders; it is Eden all around,
Dissolving in one person. Shapeless bliss!
My whole self hung on the valley of your kiss,
Until a snake entered with a certain sound.
Then you were gone.
And loving one became none.
Then, once loving, I knew love: sad, blind, profound.
Paradise itself, in every feature,
Was now its own hell. Punishment because I needed you, and you were a creature.
How sweet and friendly and nice we were, when we were casually, two—
But now there is nothing. No friend. No foe. No you.
SCARRIET SUCCESS
April 13, 2017 at 7:44 pm (Ben Mazer, Charles River Journal, Chumki Sharma, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Daipayan Nair, Dan Sociu, George Bilgere, Hessamedin Sheikhi, Joe Green, Joie Bose, Kushal Poddar, Linda Ashok, Lori Desrosiers, March Madness, Mary Angela Douglas, Merryn Juliette, Nalini Priyadarshni, Noah Cicero, Paige Lewis, Payal Sharma, Philip Nikolayev, Scarriet Baseball Poetry League, Scarriet Editors, Scarriet Hot 100, Sherry (Shohreh) Laici, Simon Seamount, SpoKe, Stephen Cole, Stephen Sturgeon, Sushmita Gupta, Valerie Macon)
We are busy at Scarriet—publishing new posts on almost a daily basis: original essays, poems, epigrams, Scarriet March Madness Poetry contests—in its 8th year, going on right now, Scarriet Poetry Hot 100’s, you tubes of poem readings, and even song compositions. And one day we would like to repeat our successful Scarriet Poetry Baseball League—in 2010 (when I was teaching English Composition as an adjunct professor and working full time at my real job) Blog Scarriet ran an entire season with 16 teams of all-time poets with entire lineups, pitching staffs, trading deadlines, statistics, pennant races, and a world series—Philadelphia Poe defeated Rapallo Pound.
Scarriet Poetry Hot 100 allows us to bring attention to poets who are not famous yet, but who have written wonderful things: Daipayan Nair, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Payal Sharma, Mary Angela Douglas, Nalini Priyadarshni, Philip Nikolayev, Paige Lewis, Valerie Macon, George Bilgere, Kushal Poddar, Joe Green, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Merryn Juliete, Chumki Sharma, Stephen Sturgeon, Simon Seamount, Lori Desrosiers, and Noah Cicero.
This is a personal note to just say THANK YOU to all our readers—as we head towards a million views since our founding in 2009. “The One Hundred Greatest Hippies Songs Of All Time” (published in February 2014) still gets over 2,000 views a week. “The Top One Hundred Song Lyrics That Work As Poetry” (published in 2013) still gets 1,000 views a week. And posts like “Yeats Hates Keats: Why Do The Moderns Despise The Romantics?” (published in 2010) are constantly re-visited.
A poet (who I’ve never met) on Facebook, Linda Ashok, originally from Kolkata, today requested her FB Friends share “what’s happening to your poetry” and, without thinking, I quickly wrote a post—and realized your friendly Scarriet Editor has been up to quite a lot, lately, and Scarriet readers might as well hear about it:
*******************
Shohreh Laici who lives in Tehran and I are working on a Persian/Iranian poetry anthology—in English. (See Laici’s translations of Hessamedin Sheikhi in Scarriet 11/26/16)
My critical study of the poet Ben Mazer will be published by Pen & Anvil Press.
My review of Dan Sociu’s book of poems Mouths Dry With Hatred is in SpoKe issue 4
Also in SpoKe issue 4: is my review of the Romanian poetry scene (after attending Festival de Literatura, Arad, 9-12 June 2016, Discutia Secreta)
Thanks to poet and professor Joie Bose, I participated in Kolkata’s Poetry Paradigm Coffee for a Poem on World Poetry Day, March 21, in Cambridge MA.
Charles River Journal will be publishing chapters of my Mazer book.
Facebook and Scarriet is where it all happens: so I’m actually not that busy—the literary world comes to me!
Below: the new family dog. If I don’t walk her, she pees in my bed. Seems fair.
WHEN YOU EXPRESS YOURSELF LIKE THIS
March 26, 2017 at 3:21 pm (Scarriet Editors, Sushmita Gupta)
When you express yourself like this,
What can you say to me?
I guess all I can do is kiss
You and hug you and let you sleep.
Everyone reads your poetry.
Looks at your paintings divine.
You make men pause and women, weep.
There is no bottle that holds such a wine.
There is no city that contains
A gift I could give you. I go outside. It rains.
I march around between ten and two
And maybe some people wonder what I do,
Or wonder if there is a moon in the sky
That’s also a sun, and can I explain why
The revolution in the mountains
Has not spread to the sea.
When you express yourself in art,
What can you say to me?
INDIE INDIA
February 3, 2017 at 3:19 pm (Emily Dickinson, Joie Bose, MFA, Oscar Wilde, Payal Sharma, Rabindranath Tagore, Rumi, Sushmita Gupta)
The poet and painter Sushmita Gupta.
There’s something happening in poetry at present which ought to make many very proud, and a smaller, but a still significantly large amount of people, uncomfortable.
The best poetry in English right now is being produced by non-MFA poets from India.
We can name this phenomenon anything we want—some have called it the Bolly Verse phenomenon. Its center is Kolkata, or West Bengal, where a great deal of poems today are written in English. Kolkata (Calcutta), which we hear is an enchanting, mystical, modern city, was the cultural capital of British India. Rabindranath Tagore, the Tolstoy/Hugo/Poe/Borges/Shakespeare of India, was Bengali.
Contemporary Indian poets are inspired both by modern ways and old leather books from the 19th century.
These amateur Indian poets, amateur in the best sense of that word, are dimly aware of Whitman and William Carlos Williams, but they are just as likely to be inspired by Rumi or Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
These Indian poets have an advantage over American sophisticates—who are brutally and self-consciously modern.
Rumi sells far more books in America than any modern American poet—Rumi’s popularity rolls over the chilling influence of MFA programs; Rumi has an immense following in spite of American MFA-program success—a kind of pyramid-scheme success, if one is honest, and which, to be critically valid, demands a kind of anti-populist, historically-blank, hyper-individualist poetry: the kind published by university presses; academically rewarded—but since popularity is considered by sophisticates to be a bad thing—MFA-produced poetry has an almost nonexistent readership.
These indie Indian poets are not consciously writing against the MFA. And we do not bring these Indian poets to the world’s notice to make an anti-MFA point. Live, and let live, is a fine motto. These Indian poets have as many admiring readers on Facebook as the most successful American poets do, with the exception of poets like Billy Collins and Mary Oliver—but even these are, relatively speaking, no lions; Rumi is a thousand times more influential.
These indie Indians are probably a little better, however, just because they are not beholden to Modernist or MFA sensibilities—which is sometimes a bee hive, death star, hodgepodge of crackpot, over-educated impulses.
These indie Indians are good, in large part because they are good in the way poems have been good and will always be good, despite the Modernist, MFA detour—confusing many Western hair-shirt wearers since 1913.
Joie Bose writes like a foul-mouthed Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The foul-mouthed part is not “modern.” The ancient Roman poets were foul-mouthed. Peel the Modernist onion and you find ancient, and then perhaps nothing—the good poet happily and desperately on their own. There is no need to advertise Bose as modern—because she’s good.
The poetry of Joie Bose, and to be less pretentious, the poems of Joie Bose, belong to the center of what poetry has always been; when you’re drunk and you get up close to someone at a party, or any situation where you find yourself in a position to really hear what a person is really thinking—not what they think about X, Y, or Z-–but what they are thinking, as a person navigating this absurd, strange, beautiful, threatening world just like you, and navigating it means feeling along with the thinking, you get the total human experience. Too much of poetry is somebody thinking about something and then coming up with a poem (let me use this image! let me use this rhyme!)—the good poets actually do less work and skip that step of “thinking about what they are going to write” and instead plunge right into it, so we experience the thinking—the thinking does not orchestrate the correct sort of speech behind the facade of the poem. The thinking is the poem.
And let’s quote a Joie Bose poem so you’ll see exactly what we mean:
Stop talking! Shut your trap,
You better shut the fuck up!Revolution is revolting and
we see that it’s the same
phrases and people on both sides
not knowing much about the cause
for these causes are mere pawns
and their quest is the same.Why do you get up in the morning
Everyday and gear up to get out of bed?I do, to board a train called Hope
It passes by many stations
For my destination changes.I am a vagabond. Home is where I am.
People die when I rub them off
And I don’t believe in obituaries, ecologies and funerals.Don’t ask me to stop if you can’t be me
And when you become, you will cease to care.
This poem is very heavy on the attitude. And to its credit.
Because that’s what poetry is. It’s attitude.
Think about it. Poetry isn’t science. When Keats famously said beauty is truth, he was presenting an attitude. Think of Byron. He was all attitude.
Poe made great efforts to get across the important point that poetry is neither moral nor intellectual, but resides in an area between the two. Once poetry attempts to be moral, it dies, because poetry is too truthfully subjective to be moral; when poetry becomes too intellectual, it perishes for the same reason, losing the subjective thrill which is the key to poetry’s expression. This does not mean that the moral and intellectual faculties of the poet are absent; the poet is aware of these—but the reader wants cohesion, not precepts.
Joie Bose’s poem has its reasons. “Causes are mere pawns” is the same thing as saying causes are effects—which they certainly can be; there is a sound and playful philosophy going on here. The way hope inside hope rides a train which stops, but doesn’t, carries more interest—the poet is calling the shots, and that’s refreshing; she’s not letting the world and its stock images (train stations, destinations, these normally dull objects of sorrow and limitation) spoil her fun. But this is not to say the poet is making a train a nice thing on a whim—the whole poem follows out the entire essence of what the poet is saying at every point, and, finally, “Don’t ask me to stop if you can’t be me” which is piling on more of that “shut the fuck up” attitude—and “cease to care” opposes “hope,” and these two opposites interact precisely because the poet’s attitude is strongly expressed—we connect with the poet who apparently doesn’t give a fuck (or does she?) There’s a person in Bose’s poem—one is bumping into an attractive stranger, not hearing a lecture. Her poem is exciting.
The poet Sushmita Gupta also makes poetry from a plain, homely, yet gracious place—poetry coming out of a tradition which sells the human. As with Bose, Sushmita Gupta is not interested in intellectual or aesthetic distance, something modern poets often do—and why must they do it? What if poetry is harmed by intellectual distancing, and modern poetry has made a horrible miscalculation? For calculation is at the center of modern poetry—if nothing else, it is highly intellectual and historically and theoretically conscious, and if it does take its calculations seriously—and this means miscalculation is possible—the moderns need to at least acknowledge this. In speaking of a “modern temper,” and speaking of it pejoratively, we are sure our modern readers, every one, will say to themselves, “Well this isn’t my attitude! I have no “modern” limitations! Scarriet is building a straw man!” This indeed may be true, but any sophisticated reader who reads the following poem by Sushmita will find themselves immediately confronting what their modern education tells them is insufficient, even as their very soul is swept away by the beauty of this poem:
Why Me
Beyond the forest
By the river swollen,
Stood a single tree.
Often times,
I ran away
From it all,
And sat underneath,
Where branches,
From the sun,
Barely covered me.One evening,
On a day of betrayal,
I sat sobbing.
And by the time
The sun was gone,
And tiny stars
Just began showing,
My quiet sobbing
Had turned to a howl.
Past hurt,
Came crawling,
Out of deep dungeons,
They were on a prowl.
I asked,
Of the wildly hungry,
Wind,
Why me.
Why always me.
That angered
The dark
And brazen
Wind to a frenzy.
It threw me
In the river,
Of fast flowing,
Spiraling waters,
That was used to
Smoothening rocks,
In a day,
To pebbles.
I was blown away,
By just that one question.
Why me.
I groped,
I screamed,
I cried for help,
But the waters rumbled,
The winds roared,
My cries drowned,
To a tiny yelp.
I was cruised,
Over rocks,
Over branches,
Till I was thrown,
On the shores,
Of an unknown land.
My clothes in tatters,
My head and hair,
Covered in wet sand.
The sun
Was beginning to rise,
But I just wished,
For sleep,
For rest,
For some
Peaceful time.
Happy to be alive,
I once again asked,
But more in gratitude,
You saved me o divine lord,
Why me.
Why in spite of my failings,
Why me.
This poem by Sushmita Gupta succeeds not because it’s telling a highly realistic story; it is not successful for any modern reason at all—it succeeds almost mathematically—the pure timing of “why me,” its musical repetition. If Sushmita’s poem is mathematical, it seems unobtrusively musical, instead, seeming to spring directly from the heart. It succeeds where all great art succeeds; not in some critical guide book—but with the audience.
We found this poem by Payal Sharma printed out on Facebook recently, and include it in our random piece on a great nation’s poetry; it reminds us of Emily Dickinson or even Sylvia Plath. We have no great motive for sharing this, except as a pleasing addition to the vague idea that Indian women writing by their wits alone are making great poetry today. Payal lives in the north of India, works in an office, is intelligent, passionate, and counts among her influences Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, E.E. Cummings, Virginia Woolf, William Shakespeare, W.H. Auden, Wilfred Owen, Lord Byron, Kahil Gibran, Mirza Ghalib, Sarojini Naidu, and Rabindranath Tagore. If William Shakespeare or W.H. Auden or Oscar Wilde find you in offices in Mexico, childhoods in India, or MFA seminars in the U.S.A., they find you. That’s all that matters.
In the following poem by Payal, we find “exhaling sad to inhale relief” exquisite, and the conclusion of the poem sounds like the pure yelp of divine Miss Emily herself: “demurely silent pearls, which nobody earned more so!”
As you may
Half drowned,
treading through the narrow waters
in numbing black void,
greased with slippery layers
of lard extracted from my old epithets.Dear lover, come as you may-
A chrome door to murky corridor,
leading to the virgin smells
of crushed black olives
in medieval castles.A faint hint of corrosive carbon,
peered with miraculous oxygen,
released in deep audible
breaths of night trees,
exhaling sad to inhale relief.A knight in decent armour,
sent by gown-less fairies
from the oppressed villages of
valour and essential ignorance.A tang of air from several yards,
carrying the mental notes
from past teachers,
coiled around my neck for a while,
like demurely silent pearls,
which nobody earned more so!
~~~~
These three Indian poets, Joie, Sushmita, and Payal are different, independent—and magnificent!
We are proud to be able to present them.
Payal Sharma
HAPPY NEW YEAR! 2017 SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100
January 4, 2017 at 2:30 pm (A.E Stallings, Alan Cordle, Alice Notley, Anne Carson, Ben Lerner, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bob Dylan, Bollyverses, Cate Marvin, Charles Simic, Christopher Ricks, Chumki Sharma, Claudia Rankine, Cristina Sanchez Lopez, Daipayan Nair, Dan Chiasson, Dan Sociu, Dana Gioia, Derrick Michael Hudson, Don Share, Donald Hall, Donald J. Trump, Edgar Allan Poe, Eileen Myles, Frank Bidart, George Bilgere, Harold Bloom, Joe Green, John Ashbery, Joie Bose, Jorie Graham, Kay Ryan, Kushal Poddar, Laura Kasischke, Lyn Hejinian, Marie Howe, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Mary Oliver, Nikky Finny, Paige Lewis, Patricia Lockwood, Richard Blanco, Rita Dove, Robin Coste Lewis, Ron Silliman, Scarriet Hot 100, Sharon Olds, Stephen Burt, Stephen Cole, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Yellowface)
1 Bob Dylan. Nobel Prize in Literature.
2 Ron Padgett. Hired to write three poems for the current film Paterson starring Adam Driver and Golshifteh Farahani.
3 Peter Balakian. Ozone Journal, about the Armenian genocide, won 2016 Pulitzer in Poetry.
4 Sherman Alexie. BAP 2015 ‘yellow-face controversy’ editor’s memoir drops this June.
5 Eileen Myles. Both her Selected Poems & Inferno: A Poet’s Novel making MSM lists.
6 Claudia Rankine. Citizen: important, iconic, don’t ask if it’s good poetry.
7 Anne Carson. The Canadian’s two latest books: Decreation & Autobiography of Red.
8 Paige Lewis. Her poem “The River Reflects Nothing” best poem published in 2016.
9 William Logan. In an age of poet-minnows he’s the shark-critic.
10 Ben Mazer. “In the alps I read the shipping notice/pertaining to the almond and the lotus”
11 Billy Collins. The poet who best elicits a tiny, sheepish grin.
12 John Ashbery. There is music beneath the best of what this New York School survivor does.
13 Joie Bose. Leads the Bolly-Verse Movement out of Kolkata, India.
14 Mary Oliver. Her latest book, Felicity, is remarkably strong.
15 Daipayan Nair. “I am a poet./I kill eyes.”
16 Nikky Finny. Her book making MSM notices is Head Off & Split.
17 Sushmita Gupta. [Hers the featured painting] “Oh lovely beam/of moon, will you, too/deny me/soft light and imagined romance?”
18 A.E. Stallings. Formalism’s current star.
19 W.S. Merwin. Once the house boy of Robert Graves.
20 Mary Angela Douglas. “but God turns down the flaring wick/color by color almost/regretfully.”
21 Sharon Olds. Her Pulitzer winning Stag’s Leap is about her busted marriage.
22 Valerie Macon. Briefly N.Carolina Laureate. Pushed out by the Credentialing Complex.
23 George Bilgere. Imperial is his 2014 book.
24 Stephen Dunn. Norton published his Selected in 2009.
25 Marilyn Chin. Prize winning poet named after Marilyn Monroe, according to her famous poem.
26 Kushal Poddar. “The water/circles the land/and the land/my heaven.”
27 Stephen Burt. Harvard critic’s latest essay “Reading Yeats in the Age of Trump.” What will hold?
28 Joe Green. “Leave us alone. Oh, what can we do?/The wild, wild winds go willie woo woo.”
29 Tony Hoagland. Tangled with Rankine over tennis and lost.
30 Cristina Sánchez López. “I listen to you while the birds erase the earth.”
31 Laura Kasischke. Awkward social situations portrayed by this novelist/poet.
32 CAConrad. His latest work is The Book of Frank.
33 Terrance Hayes. National Book Award in 2010, a MacArthur in 2014
34 Robin Coste Lewis. Political cut-and-paste poetry.
35 Stephen Cole. “And blocked out the accidental grace/That comes with complete surprise.”
36 Martín Espada. Writes about union workers.
37 Merryn Juliette “And my thoughts unmoored/now tumbling/Like sand fleas on the ocean floor”
38 Daniel Borzutzky. The Performance of Being Human won the National Book Award in 2016.
39 Donald Hall. His Selected Poems is out.
40 Diane Seuss. Four-Legged Girl a 2016 Pulitzer finalist.
41 Vijay Seshadri. Graywolf published his 2014 Pulitzer winner.
42 Sawako Nakayasu. Translator of Complete Poems of Chika Sagawa.
43 Ann Kestner. Her blog since 2011 is Poetry Breakfast.
44 Rita Dove. Brushed off Vendler and Perloff attacks against her 20th century anthology.
45 Marjorie Perloff. A fan of Charles Bernstein and Frank O’hara.
46 Paul Muldoon. Moy Sand and Gravel won Pulitzer in 2003.
47 Frank Bidart. Winner of the Bollingen. Three time Pulitzer finalist.
48 Frederick Seidel. Compared “Donald darling” Trump to “cow-eyed Hera” in London Review.
49 Alice Notley. The Gertrude Stein of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project.
50 Jorie Graham. She writes of the earth.
51 Maggie Smith. “Good Bones.” Is the false—“for every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird”— poetry?
52 Adrian Matejka. His book The Big Smoke is about the boxer Jack Johnson.
53 Elizabeh Alexander. African American Studies professor at Yale. Read at Obama’s first inauguration.
54 Derek Walcott. Convinced Elizabeth Alexander she was a poet as her mentor at Boston University.
55 Richard Blanco. Read his poem, “One Today,” at Obama’s second inauguration.
56 Louise Glück. A leading serious poet.
57 Kim Addonizio. Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life came out in 2016.
58 Kay Ryan. An Emily Dickinson who gets out, and laughs a little.
59 Lyn Hejinian. An elliptical poet’s elliptical poet.
60 Vanessa Place. Does she still tweet about Gone With The Wind?
61 Susan Howe. Born in Boston. Called Postmodern.
62 Marie Howe. The Kingdom of Ordinary Time is her latest book.
63 Glynn Maxwell. British poetry influencing Americans? Not since the Program Era took over.
64 Robert Pinsky. Uses slant rhyme in his translation of Dante’s terza rima in the Inferno.
65 David Lehman. His Best American Poetry (BAP) since 1988, chugs on.
66 Dan Sociu. Romanian poet of the Miserabilism school.
67 Chumki Sharma. The great Instagram poet.
68 Matthew Zapruder. Has landed at the N.Y. Times with a poetry column.
69 Christopher Ricks. British critic at Boston University. Keeping T.S. Eliot alive.
70 Richard Howard. Pinnacle of eclectic, Francophile, non-controversial, refinement.
71 Dana Gioia. Poet, essayist. Was Chairman of NEA 2003—2009.
72 Alfred Corn. The poet published a novel in 2014 called Miranda’s Book.
73 Jim Haba. Noticed by Bill Moyers. Founding director of the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.
74 Hessamedin Sheikhi. Young Iranian poet translated by Shohreh (Sherry) Laici
75 Pablo Larrain. Directed 2016 film Neruda.
76 Helen Vendler. Wallace Stevens champion. Helped Jorie Graham.
77 Kenneth Goldsmith. Fame for poetry is impossible.
78 Cate Marvin. Oracle was published by Norton in 2015.
79 Alan Cordle. Still the most important non-poet in poetry.
80 Ron Silliman. Runs a well-known poetry blog. A Bernie man.
81 Natalie Diaz. Her first poetry collection is When My Brother Was An Aztec.
82 D.A. Powell. Lives in San Francisco. His latest book is Repast.
83 Edward Hirsch. Guest-edited BAP 2016.
84 Dorianne Laux. Will always be remembered for “The Shipfitter’s Wife.”
85 Juan Felipe Herrera. Current Poet Laureate of the United States.
86 Patricia Lockwood. Her poem “Rape Joke” went viral in 2013 thanks to Twitter followers.
87 Kanye West. Because we all know crazy is best.
88 Charles Bernstein. Hates “official verse culture” and PWCs. (Publications with wide circulation.)
89 Don Share. Editor of Poetry.
90 Gail Mazur. Forbidden City is her seventh and latest book.
91 Harold Bloom. Since Emerson, Henry James, and T.S. Eliot are dead, he keeps the flame of Edgar Allan Poe hatred alive.
92 Alan Shapiro. Life Pig is his latest collection.
93 Dan Chiasson. Reviews poetry for The New Yorker.
94 Robert Hass. “You can do your life’s work in half an hour a day.”
95 Maurice Manning. One Man’s Dark is a “gorgeous collection” according to the Washington Post.
96 Brian Brodeur. Runs a terrific blog: How A Poem Happens, of contemporary poets.
97 Donald Trump. Tweets-in-a-shit-storm keeping the self-publishing tradition alive.
98 Ben Lerner. Wrote the essay “The Hatred of Poetry.”
99 Vidyan Ravinthiran. Editor at Prac Crit.
100 Derrick Michael Hudson. There’s no fame in poetry.
SHE PAINTS
December 23, 2016 at 2:39 pm (Scarriet Editors, Sushmita Gupta)
She paints, and when she paints
I love her more.
She paints her face so beautifully
That art critics who enter by the back door
Know all at once what painting and poetry is for.
They sadly recognize that when you say
“I love you” it could be on the very day
You leave, because you said it only to make someone glad,
And when the words fled to them, they made you sad.
We think nothing, but only say what we think we ought to say
Until the red shadows come and we vanish in the blue day.
But now she presents herself at the front of the hall,
And even you look at her, and even you will fall
On your knees and worship her. And that is all.
LOVERS HYPNOTIZE THEMSELVES
December 14, 2016 at 2:53 pm (Scarriet Editors, Sushmita Gupta)
It wasn’t you, it was the breathing of slumber while awake.
It was the quiet poetry of the breathing lake.
It was “I love you,” shyly spoken
Which made the previous world’s broken love a thing finally broken.
Time hurried to take the place of time.
You took me in my weakness with a mere rhyme.
It was a warmth we consciously enjoyed—
A kindness inside the words employed.
It was a deep breathing that gave us pleasure,
Thought to be love, due to the slower measure
Of breath, and each rising and falling breath
Became slow, and almost resembled death.
We gave birth to love; our love, a new born baby
We as parents, looked upon, knowing that maybe
Love would be love. To be love, love must grow.
Love’s growth requires kind words to make breathing slow.
Writing, the mystery of love!
My eyes shared in the beauty that you are.
My eyes and yours arrived from the same star,
The same stream. Our hearts keep
The same insouciant beat.
They miss together one, and then,
Beat fast, faster again,
And again, fall twinkling down in tune,
With the falling leaves falling about the moon.
Leaves of soft sorrow, leaves of grief,
Leaves in which we hide
Inside the same sorrow, side by side.
Now deep, and slow the breath.
I never knew that love was death!
My fingers shyly entwined in yours,
Holding moments, begging to rhyme,
Begging to run in leaves of time,
And there I lived, beyond,
Reality of time and space,
Here, my warm embrace,
Here my greatest solace,
Death of pride and yesterday
You, oh, you, today.
Love requires a wedding of red paint,
A lengthy ritual, a ceremony to make sadness faint,
As a beautiful lampshade covers a white light,
The passion, warm, but too much for our sight.
And so we made these words our own,
And put love on a commoner’s throne,
We, who needed love far more—
For we had never loved before.
BEAUTY WITHOUT BEAUTY
December 6, 2016 at 3:34 pm (Scarriet Editors, Sushmita Gupta)
You, who don’t read, must think it strange
That I use my eyes
Not to navigate moving seas—
Not to chart moving orbs in the skies—
Not to pick out the one
I love under the sun—
But to squint instead at marks,
Which deface trees and parks.
What eyes could possibly love to look
At looking in a book?
Why seek freedom in prisons?
Beauty in blind words? Smiles in dark, visionless visions?
I’ll tell you why. Please read well:
Loving one by sight, I found myself in hell.
All that could go wrong in love, had.
Her beauty hurt me. It was bad.
I was drowning in vulgarity and sin.
I couldn’t think. Ugly images poured in.
Then a beautiful poet wrote to me.
I was protected from her beauty,
And found more beauty apart from piercing eyes;
Into our hearts poured the beauty of the skies,
And writing to her I found a calm, admiring bliss;
We felt love, and something close to the happiness of a kiss.
Beauty without beauty—the secret to intelligence and grace.
Beauty sending beauty. Love sent ahead by her beautiful face.
WHAT BECAME OF YOU
November 23, 2016 at 2:50 pm (Scarriet Editors, Sushmita Gupta)
What became of you?
I tried to love you—
You were determined to go many miles without a man.
If I cannot hold you, then let me write you a poem when I can.
If I cannot kiss you, let me kiss you with poems instead,
Like that one, you told me, long ago, you read—
Which sings of things today you barely know,
Because of all that happened. Because you had to go.
SCARRIET POETRY HOT 100 IS HERE AGAIN!!!
October 5, 2016 at 1:27 pm (Alan Cordle, Ben Mazer, Billy Collins, Bollyverses, Carol Muske, Christopher Ricks, Cole Swensen, Daipayan Nair, Dana Gioia, David Lehman, Edward Hirsch, Eileen Myles, George Bilgere, Joie Bose, Jorie Graham, Kushal Poddar, Laura Kasischke, Lori Desrosiers, Marilyn Chin, Mary Angela Douglas, Matthew Zapruder, Nalini Priyadarshni, New Criterion, Philip Nikolayev, Rita Dove, Ron Silliman, Sharon Olds, Stephen Burt, Stephen Cole, Stephen Sturgeon, Sushmita Gupta, Terrance Hayes, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Valerie Macon, W.S. Merwin, Warsan Shire, William Logan)
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.