Meer Nair plays in the Mystery Bracket
Poetry charms us just as any other kind of speech does. This should give us pause. What is poetry, then? How do we know we’re reading poetry?
In the this First Round contest in the Mystery Bracket we have this, which is infinitely charming, though we are not really sure why:
“Let us make love. Where are we?”
Michelina Di Martino is the poet.
Di Martino’s fans and supporters and followers resemble the followers of dionysus, which is to be expected. We cannot think of a more delirious meme than “Let us make love. Where are we?” Frenzied acolytes make for a loud and enthusiastic fan base, which has to make Di Martino the favorite in this contest.
Her opponent is Meera Nair, who is a mother, a poet, and a movie actress.
Her is: “How long can you keep/The lake away from the sea”
It is supremely beautiful—we could ponder this line for hours in a sweet fit of melancholy; the lake, as we will believe, will be drawn to the sea, and landscapes with both lake and sea invoke all the peace and longing we might expect when contemplating robust and watery nature as she lies upon the land.
If Di Martino thrills, as we contemplate unburdening ourselves in smoky, far off hills, Nair allows us to reflect in our rooms, with a window open to the air. We consider things broad and wide, or trivial perhaps, concerning a lake, and gentle hills leading the watery confinement gurgling down to the sea. We know Meera Nair’s fragment is poetry. We cannot be sure Michelina Di Martino’s is. It is perhaps because the packed March Madness arena is filled with noise and confusion, and the warm, heart-rending screams of the crowd, that “Let us make love. Where are we?” wins.
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Sukrita Kumar’s “Flames are messengers/Carrying the known/To the unknown” burns us with its mysterious wisdom.
What is known more acutely than fire? And what burns? The unknown. Everything is unknown to leaping flames. Unknown, the cavernous space filled with sparks, dark and cool above the conflagration which desperately attempts to warm and light our lives.
In stark contrast, Kushal Poddar’s: “Call its name around/with the bowl held in my cooling hand./I can see myself doing this. All Winter. All Summer.”
What could be more different from “Flames are messengers,” a loud pronouncement from the god Vulcan, perhaps, words belonging to the center of the earth, roaring to us from the metal doors of old time? “Call its name around/with the bowl held in my cooling hand./I can see myself doing this. All Winter. All Summer” is the essence of affectionate, domestic tranquility, the lean cat eluding its kind master in the cooling shadows.
How to decide between these two states?
There is no time decide. Only the impetuous result beneath the lights and clock in the old trembling arena of March Madness.
We smile when we read Kushal Poddar’s offering. It warms our heart, and this warmth douses the flames.
Poddar will advance to the second round.
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Ben Mazer is another demonstration that poetry’s force often lies away from whatever we commonly think of as poetry. Mazer is the champion of a previous Scarriet March Madness, perhaps the greatest prize a poet today can claim. Nobel? Pulitzer? Everyone knows these prizes are political.
“her room/retains the look/of the room of a stranger” is the line the Mazer crowd wildly cheers from the rooftops of the Madness arena.
What is this poetic force that Mazer has?
There are so many ways for poetry to excel. But to excel, to stand out, to be regarded with awe, one must evince a quality, a mysterious quality, a strange combination of qualities, which teases the soul of the reader so they surrender almost immediately to the spell.
“her room/retains the look/of the room of a stranger” is all Mazer. It is mesmerizing, but why?
We would venture to say that Mazer succeeds through the most profound introversion it is possible to evince.
The profound secret to Mazer’s success is simple. The success is not simple, but the secret is. And the secret is that Mazer proffers introversion to such an extreme degree, that the reader is disarmed, the reader’s blood pressure is reduced to near-zero, and in the resulting trance, the sweet poison is easily administered, and the spell effortlessly cast.
The great poet cannot be measured by rhymes, words, subject. Or perhaps they can. Anything can be quantified before the lynx eye. But in this instance, as we contemplate the mystery that is the wonder of Mazer, we venture to say it is this: he is greater than nearly all of his peers in poetry (and any extreme in the realm of good taste can succeed in poetry) because his poetry is marked more by introversion than anyone else’s.
This is not to say that Mazer’s poetry cannot say bold or extroverted things. It is the introverted life from which it comes which conquers.
One can see at once the advantage of introversion in poetry: the hush, the mystery, the unruffled beauty, the calm, the deep breathing, the concentration, the privacy, the reverie, the reverential, the quiet tension, the tender, abashed sinking into the unknown.
Mazer’s opponent is Nabina Das. She has produced the for this bracket the one entry which might be intimates an actual mystery:
“under the same ceiling/fan from where she/later dangled.”
The future is blisteringly manifest: “where she later dangled.” Or perhaps the dangling is done in fun?
We doubt it, for there is a menacing finality about the whole thing: “the same ceiling fan from where she later dangled.”
The ambiguity would be more of a problem if the line were not so much fun in itself:
“Under the same” locks nicely into “ceiling fan from where” and the line travels straight up into the thin atmosphere of “she later dangled.”
It’s the kind of line which resembles a surfing wave—it belongs to nature almost as much as it belongs to ink:
“under the same ceiling fan from where she later dangled.”
It is not introverted, by any means. Not like this, anyway:
“her room retains the look of the room of a stranger”
Both lines could almost be from the same poem. It is almost as if fate matched these lines in March Madness.
Both are neatly divided in two:
her room retains the look—of the room of a stranger.
under the same ceiling fan—from where she later dangled.
Both are masterpieces of aural architecture:
“room” and “look” and “room” from a group, as do “retains” and “stranger.”
“under” and “where she later” form a group, as do “same ceiling fan” and “dangled.”
It is too close to call.
Nabina Das defeats Ben Mazer!
Fans in the rooms are going crazy.
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In the final, Mystery Bracket Round One contest, we have Richard Wilbur, and his famous “The morning air is all awash with angels.”
Richard Wilbur’s (1921-2017) opponent is Sridala Swami:
“There is only this book, and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words in it.”
Richard Wilbur was a leading 20th century formalist, and we can see this in the exuberance of all those “a’s:” air, all, awash, angels. Not to mention the iambic pentameter: The MOR-ning AIR is ALL a-WASH with AN-gels.
Sridala is trying to do something quite different.
There are no angels. There is no morning air.
“There is only this book” and we are already post-modern, or is the a reference to what Dante, in his Vita Nuova, says is his “book of memory,” which creates the smaller book of his Vita Nuova?
Sridala’s line begins with three anapests: There is ON-ly this BOOK, and your ONE
And the caesura in the middle of the line is the spondee, ONE CHANCE—which is the perfect place to make a dramatic pause: you’ve got one chance, bub.
of SPEAK-ing to the WORLD is THROUGH the WORDS in IT.
A long anapest: -ing to the WORLD, and then three iambs ends it: is THROUGH the WORDS in IT.
If we read both lines aloud, we find both scan, the Wilbur with more concentrated force, but hers is equally strong, and more subtle.
Hers is speech within speech. One chance.
His is the singularity of something supernatural, or perhaps merely descriptive, we see in, and around, the morning air.
Wilbur’s is more fanciful, but there is something beautifully somber and philosophically contemplative in Sridala Swami’s “There is only this book, and your one chance of speaking to the world is through the words in it.”
Sridala Swami wins.
Next up: The Life and Beautiful Brackets.