It’s here once again. Poetry March Madness!!
Previously, Scarriet has used Best American Poetry Series poems, Speeches by Aesthetic Philosophers, and poems of, and inspired by, Romanticism
This year, our tenth!—and we’ve done this once before—lines of poetry compete.
The great majority of these poets are living contemporaries, but we have thrown in some of the famous dead, just to mix things up.
The line is the unit of poetry for ancients and moderns alike—moderns have argued for other units: the sentence, the breath—but to keep it simple, here we have fragments, or parts, of poems.
Is the poem better when the poetic dwells in all parts, as well as the whole? I don’t see how we could say otherwise.
What makes part of a poem good?
Is it the same qualities which makes the whole poem good?
A poem’s excellent and consistent rhythm, by necessity, makes itself felt both throughout the poem and in its parts.
A poem’s excellent rhetoric can be strong as a whole, but weaker in its parts—since the whole understanding is not necessarily seen in pieces.
This is why, perhaps, the older, formalist poets, are better in their quotations and fragments than poets are today.
But this may be nothing but the wildest speculation.
Perhaps rhythm should become important, again, since rhetoric and rhythm do not have to be at war—rhythm enhances rhetoric, in fact.
Some would say modern poetry has set rhythm free.
No matter the quality under examination, however, any part of a poem can charm as a poem—with every quality a poem might possess.
Before we get to the brackets, let’s look at three examples in the 2019 tournament:
Milton’s “Glory, the reward/That sole excites to high attempts the flame” is powerfully rhythmic in a manner the moderns no longer evince. It is like a goddess before which we kneel.
Sushmita Guptas “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love” also has rhythm, but this is not a goddess, but a flesh and blood woman, before which we kneel and adore.
Medha Singh’s “you’ve/remembered how the winter went/as it went on” is so different from Milton, it almost seems like a different art form; here is the sad and homely, with which we fall madly in love.
And now we present the 2019 March Madness poets:
I. THE BOLD BRACKET
Diane Lockward — “The wife and the dog planned their escape”
Aseem Sundan — “How do I make the paper turn blood red?/How do I make everyone read it?”
Menka Shivdasani — “I shall turn the heat up,/put the lid on./Watch me.”
John Milton — “Glory, the reward/That sole excites to high attempts the flame”
Philip Larkin —“They fuck you up, your mum and dad.”
Eliana Vanessa — “I’d rather be outside, with him,/turning stones in the rain,/than here,/listening to the hum/of so many skulls, alone.”
Robin Richardson — “Please let me be a blaze. I will destroy,/I mean create again this place.”
Khalypso — “to wake up/strangers & sticky & questioning.”
Walter Savage Landor —“I strove with none, for none was worth my strife”
Robin Morgan — “Growing small requires enormity of will.”
Joie Bose — “I am a fable, a sea bed treasure trove/I am your darkness, I am Love.”
Daipayan Nair — “I run, run, run and run/Still I don’t reach my birth/I don’t cross my death”
Edgar Poe — “Over the mountains/of the moon,/Down the valley of the shadow”
Linda Ashok — “When you have a day, let’s meet and bury it.”
Hoshang Merchant — “I have myself become wild in my love for a wild thing”
Aaron Poochigian — “beyond the round world’s spalling/margin, hear Odysseus’s ghosts/squeaking like hinges, hear the Sirens calling.”
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II. THE MYSTERIOUS BRACKET
Jennifer Barber — “Sure, it was a dream, but even so/you put down the phone so soundlessly”
Percy Shelley —“Dear, and yet dearer for its mystery.”
A.E. Stallings — “Perfection was a blot/That could not be undone.”
Merryn Juliette — “grey as I am”
Michelina Di Martino — “Let us make love. Where are we?”
Sukrita Kumar — “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”
Ben Mazer — “her room/retains the look/of the room of a stranger”
Richard Wilbur —“The morning air is all awash with angels.”
Sridala Swami —“There is only this book, and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words in it.”
Nabina Das — “under the same ceiling/fan from where she/later dangled.”
Kushal Poddar — “Call its name around/with the bowl held in my cooling hand./I can see myself doing this. All Winter. All Summer.”
Meera Nair — “How long can you keep/The lake away from the sea”
Ranjit Hoskote — “The nightingale doesn’t blame the gardener or the hunter:/Fate had decided spring would be its cage.”
Aakriti Kuntal — “Close your eyes then. Imagine the word on the tip of your tongue. The warm jelly, the red tip of the quivering mass.”
Srividya Sivakumar— “I’m searching for coral and abalone deep in the dragon’s lair.”
Sophia Naz — “Deviants and dervishes of the river/lie down the length of her”
III. THE LIFE BRACKET
William Logan —‘I’ve never thought of you that way, I guess.’/She touched me then with the ghost of a caress.”
Danez Smith — “i call your mama mama”
Divya Guha — “The shaver missing, your greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.”
N Ravi Shankar—“You are nude, sweet mother,/so am I/as the bamboos creak a lullaby”
Rupi Kaur — “i am not street meat i am homemade jam”
June Gehringer — “I don’t write about race,/ I write about gender,/ I once killed a cis white man,/ and his first name/ was me.”
Marilyn Chin — “by all that was lavished upon her/and all that was taken away!”
Sam Sax — “that you are reading this/must be enough”
Dylan Thomas —“After the first death, there is no other.”
Stephen Cole — “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.”
Alec Solomita — “All of the sky is silent/Even the jet shining/like a dime way up high”
Kim Gek Lin Short —“If truth be told/the theft began/a time before/that summer day.”
Lily Swarn — “The stink of poverty cowered in fear!!”
Semeen Ali — “for a minute/That one minute/contains my life”
Akhil Katyal — “How long did India and Pakistan last?”
Garrison Keillor — “Starved for love, obsessed with sin,/Sunlight almost did us in.”
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IV. THE BEAUTIFUL BRACKET
Mary Angela Douglas — “one candle grown lilac in a perpetual spring”
Ann Leshy Wood — “where groves of oranges rot,/and somber groups of heron graze/by the bay.”
Medha Singh — “you’ve/remembered how the winter went/as it went on”
Yana Djin — “Morning dew will dress each stem.”
John Keats —“Awake for ever in a sweet unrest”
Sushmita Gupta — “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”
William Shakespeare —“Those were pearls that were his eyes”
A.E. Housman —“The rose-lipt girls are sleeping/In fields where roses fade.”
Raena Shirali — “we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
C.P. Surendran — “A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”
Dimitry Melnikoff —“Offer me a gulp of this light’s glow”
Jennifer Robertson — “ocean after ocean after ocean”
Sharanya Manivannan — “burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”
Philip Nikolayev — “within its vast domain confined”
Ravi Shankar — “What matters cannot remain.”
Abhijit Khandkar — “So I write this poem and feed it to the ravenous sea.”
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