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To amuse our readers, each year, Scarriet puts together a bracket of 64 poets/poems for a “March Madness” Tournament of Criticism that figures up winners, losers, and finally one champion.
It’s crazy, we know.
One cannot reconcile the enjoyment and contemplation of a poem with a competition between that poem and another poem.
That’s nuts, right?
It’s not like we ever use the critical faculty of comparison to read poetry!
Okay, maybe we do, but comparison has nothing to do with competition, right?
Well…okay, maybe…and so March Madness for poetry was born.
There is a natural interest in Poetry March Madness for those who like poems, and it’s a good way to learn new poems, and re-think old poems, too.
There are still those purists who object…but more seem to be realizing that it’s harmless fun.
The challenge is that each year for Scarriet March Madness we need to find new anthologies and new poems.
This year’s theme will be the Soul Of Romanticism, Old and New.
Tony Hoagland made the biggest splash at the AWP this year, striking another controversial blow against post-modern obscurity, asking for poetry of “soul,” “wisdom,” and “humanity.” These virtues in poetry are associated mostly with the great Romantics, like Blake, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Hugo and Goethe.
Poets of Hoagland’s generation studied Keats and Byron in their English classes, those modern-ish marvels of poet’s poetry, and poets such as Keats were fixtures of literary study—not electives, but the main course if you were reading poetry in school.
The Romantics were central; they looked back, self-consciously, to the Greeks, to Dante and the troubadour poets, (and Shakespeare, of course) and they also looked forward to poets like Millay, Frost, Eliot and Larkin, with the New Critics and the Beats steering an uneasy and experimental shift, in school and on the street, respectively, towards a yet unrealized future—and it still seems that way, for ‘the future’ has arrived not so much with new greatness, but with millions of specialist, experimental Writing Program poets, the Frankenstein experiment of New Critical scientists like John Crowe Ransom—the American T.S. Eliot—who helped friends like Paul Engle, starting slowly, back in the late 1930s, to get ’New Writing’ professors/poets to replace Keats professors “watering their own gardens.”
So here we are, with Hoagland and his allies asking for “soul,” “wisdom,” and “humanity,” and those like Gallaher, Perloff, and Silliman horrified.
Scarriet has selected 64 poems, new and old, we call, loosely, The Soul of Romanticism. Ben Mazer, who won Scarriet’s 2012 March Madness championship last year, is one of the new proponents of what might be called a new Romantic school, or perhaps in Mazer’s case, the Twighlight of Ashbery-ism.
Mazer also happens to be a scholar helping to revive interest in John Crowe Ransom, among a number of other projects. It just so happens that Ransom, and his Modernist circle of friends, felt the need to self-consciously move beyond Romanticism, which we feel was an error, since building on the past is a natural thing, and the worst thing (like cutting off the nose to spite the face) is abandoning it. Mazer, like the Romantics, is mostly a lyric poet, but with other genres and models hectically included as inspiration sees fit.
The world is where the Romantic poet does his experimentation; the Modernist confines his experiments mostly to the poem itself. This seems a rather obvious distinction, but few seem to make it.
Perhaps the Romantic mode—experimenting in the world rather than on the poem—is a more exciting way to ‘make it new.’ And, further perhaps experiment isn’t everything when it comes to art. Take that, Perloff.
There are four Number One Seeds in the four brackets—sixteen poems in each bracket.
The following poem will be in the 2013 Tournament. Will it be a Number One Seed?
It has a handicap. It requires translation. It is by Goethe, “The Holy Longing.”
Tell old wisdom what you feel
Or else shut up, because it won’t seem real
To your friends. They’ll just make fun of you—
Quietly dreaming of burning to death will have to do.
In the calm sighings of the love-nights,
Where you were made, where you, too, kissed in the shade,
You now feel a powerful yearning
When you glimpse the silent candle burning.
Come on! Older and wiser today,
Your childish obsession with the dark has faded away;
You love serene lights in the sky,
And aren’t afraid to look in an old man’s eye.
You don’t care how long you burn
Or the journey lasts, or how long you yearn;
You want the light madly, that’s blinking on—
You are the moth, and now you are gone.
Your thoughts are empty, you want to rest,
You don’t understand your own worth—
You are only a troubled guest
On the dark earth.
We have taken the liberty of using our own translation.
Goethe’s famous poem is the essence of Romanticism: a certain lyric modesty (merely a song) together with a human touch, and a penetrating presence of soul.
Who can bring it in this way, today?
Who did it best, then?
Find out in this year’s Scarriet Poetry March Madness Tournament 2013!
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
