Often the most delightful mysteries occur when we find ourselves contemplating deeply what has always been there, in plain sight.
Hidden, it is off our radar, and has no chance to even be a mystery.
Mysteries intrigue and startle us most when we notice what previously escaped us, and was always in front of our nose.
As Shelley said, mystery can be “dear” to us, a source of delight, and even humor.
We usually associate mystery with a killer in the midnight, London, fog.
Mystery, however, may be our destiny and delight; the reason for the reason is the mystery.
A.E. Stallings, the no. 3 seed, a distinguished, formalist American poet who lives in Greece, presents a puzzle, a mystery indeed:
“Perfection was a blot/That could not be undone.”
Plato equated the truly true with eternity—if it lasts, it’s true, and this seems to have influenced our March Madness no. 3 seed poet: “Perfection…could not be undone.” This is why it’s “perfection”—nothing can remove it. But the joke, is “perfection” is a “blot.” One thinks of a stain one cannot get out. (Lady Macbeth?) Is Stallings hinting at moral justice? The blot, or plot, that cannot be undone? But the larger point is: perfection is equated with a blot. Perfection, stays, but is imperfect.
The notion of perfection as a blot is funny—as well as profound. Didn’t we say mystery and humor are related?
Aakriti Kuntal, a young poet, is Stallings’ opponent in the Round One Mystery Bracket.
Kuntal is being funny, too, as she contemplates the nature of imagination.
To imagine is to see against our will—do we read imaginative works for what the writer has intended to imagine, or what they cannot help but imagine?
A genius could be involuntary—imagining what they do not want to imagine—and no one would think any less of their genius.
Kuntal directs the action:
“Close your eyes then. Imagine the word on the tip of your tongue. The warm jelly, the red tip of the quivering mass.”
The imagination of the poet “imagines the word,” and the word to the poet is that perfect blot—in this case, “jelly” and “mass.”
The complexity of Kuntal’s line is breathtaking. It makes you say to yourself: how could someone write this? It resembles a lecture on the physics of the poetic imagination.
First, deprive yourself of sight—a good advice for poets, for the poet is not a painter.
Second, imagine the word. More excellent counsel. Without sight, which the poet doesn’t need, the imagination succeeds poetically when it imagines not the world, but the word.
Third, since the first two steps are sufficient advice, having reached the limits of poetic imagination, self-consciousness begins; the poet is thrown back on herself, and naturally, as we “imagine the word,” we are stopped by a figure of speech—“the word is on the tip of my tongue.”
To get beyond a figure of speech, which blocks creative and original speech, the poet fastens on the word on the tip of the tongue—that is, speech itself, which the tongue represents. To get past “imagine the word,” that is, turning the word into an image, which the word already is, in the poet’s imagination, we get over the hump of unoriginal speech (a figure of speech) and enter speech itself, the engine of poetic imagination. There is no escape. Poetry, no matter how imaginative, is speech, and the tongue described is the tongue speaking.
Kuntal’s joke is even better than Stallings’ joke: “perfection” as a “blot.”
The word on the tip of the tongue—is the tongue!
“The warm jelly, the red tip of the quivering mass.”
Poetry is a “mass” of words. Poetry is that point when quivering words reach a critical “mass.”
Kuntal’s advice, or tip—“close your eyes and imagine the word” is “the red tip” of all the speech which follows.
Aakriti Kuntal wins, and advances to Round Two.
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The fourth contest in the Mystery Bracket is the following:
Merryn Juliette “grey as I am”
Ranjit Hoskote “The nightingale doesn’t blame the gardener or the hunter:/Fate had decided spring would be its cage.”
The eye cannot help but see the fragment of a poem as a poem.
But what should the eye have to do with a poem? Surely an eye’s illusion cannot touch the poem.
If we could have a shorter poem, we would—it concentrates our delight, and the secret of delight itself (as opposed to how long the delight lasts) is concentration of a bodily feeling. Even a slightly long poem does not exist.
A mystery cannot be nothing. A mystery comes to be such just at that moment when nothing is left behind.
“grey as I am” transfixes us.
“The nightingale doesn’t blame the gardener or the hunter:/Fate had decided spring would be its cage” impresses us.
Spring fated to be the nightingale’s cage is wonderful.
But “grey as I am” wins.
The fragmentary context of the examination proper to Madness competition absolutely favors “grey as I am” in a manner which would go against the whole spirit of the fragment to explain.
It takes tremendous skill to be poetic for any length of time. This is the law which actually benefits “grey as I am.”
Who knows that “grey as I am,” in the future, when all art is abstract art, and art only intrigues us as such, will not be considered by itself a great poem? Painting, so rich and engaging—think of the masterpieces of the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th centuries!—became Abstract Painting, and who knows the same thing will not happen, when all useless chatter ceases, to poetry? And what finer example than “grey as I am?”
Merryn Juliette advances.
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Coming up next in the Mystery Bracket:
Michelina Di Martino — “Let us make love. Where are we?”
versus
Meera Nair — “How long can you keep/The lake away from the sea”
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Sukrita Kumar — “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown”
versus
Kushal Poddar — “Call its name around/with the bowl held in my cooling hand./I can see myself doing this. All Winter. All Summer.”
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Ben Mazer — “her room/retains the look/of the room of a stranger”
versus
Nabina Das — “under the same ceiling/fan from where she/later dangled.”
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Richard Wilbur —“The morning air is all awash with angels.”
versus
Sridala Swami —“There is only this book, and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words in it.”