Semeen Ali competes in the Life Bracket with 15 other poets
William Logan is known for fierce criticism.
His poetry is nicer.
His poetry is where his scholar smiles, that aging tour guide, who gently waves his hand. He has published a lot of poems, but the criticism is what he is known for. His critical lash has stung. His poems? Not a mark.
His criticism is the offense, his poetry, the defense. His poems are thick walls to cover himself. His critical reviews score big. His educated poetry defends against the long pass. As a poet, he belongs to the Difficult School, that briar patch established by Sir Geoffrey Hill, admired, but rarely entered, and when you get into it, you will die by scratches unless you exit with great difficulty—this is why Poe’s gardens were razed; to bad poets, everything is difficult, (even writing poetry), and therefore difficulty easily becomes a banner of the academic realm. The frowning briars are tenacious, like pride, and they are all that’s needed to keep the million flowers and their scents away.
Logan is not a bad poet, however; just one who is always looking over his shoulder. What if some offended poet intends a criticism as a form of revenge? Logan’s poems dare not make a mistake; the dictionary is carefully consulted.
Because he is a good critic—agree, or not with him, he’s good—the law of aesthetics says Logan must be a good poet; poetry is what the critic in us writes. He seems to have decided contemporary poetry is mostly bad because it offends High Modernism; but where Pound was a critical crackpot, Logan is a critical lion; his defense of High Modernism has surpassed by great lengths what it ostensibly defends; he has forgot himself, gone into his humor and become a Poe (who, if read correctly, is funny; wit is criticism’s best weapon) or a Pope, or a Byron, and thank goodness he has! How dreary poetry would be today, without the prune and dance of William Logan.
Just as he escapes overrated High Modernism in his heated criticism, Logan occasionally escapes High Modernism in his poetry; but why he soars in criticism, and not in poetry, it is difficult to say. Perhaps his poetry is the diffident, abashed Dr. Jekyll to the criticism of his Mr. Hyde. The split in Logan is artificial, since the natural split which once existed, between prose and verse, has closed up; the poets write in prose, too. A hint of this truth is that when Logan writes formalist poetry, he’s much better. He doesn’t want to sing so much in poetry, perhaps, because he doesn’t want to seem doubly odd: a Poe-like critic and a Poe-like poet. He wants a little respectability, at least.
Logan is the no. 1 seed in the Life Bracket (the brackets are somewhat randomly named) and the line is from one of his formalist poems:
“‘I’ve never thought of you that way, I guess.’/She touched me then with a ghost of a caress.”
(It almost needs a comma after “then;” it is the pause right there that creates glory.)
It just so happens his opponent is Garrison Keillor. We found this by Keillor on FB:
“Starved for love, obsessed with sin, /Sunlight almost did us in.”
There’s a greater aesthetic distance possible between two formalist lines than between any two lines of prose. Have you noticed that? The Keillor is delightful. Starved for love, obsessed with sin, Sunlight almost did us in.
But Logan wins.
****
Danez Smith, the no. 2 seed in the Life Bracket, is a contemporary poet getting a lot of attention lately. His poetry doesn’t need verse. It has so much attitude.
“I call your mama mama”
Akhil Kaytal is also a contemporary poet who throws into poetry the best and funniest of what he finds.
“How long did India and Pakistan last?”
Attitude is really not about attitude. It’s about fact. “I call your mama mama” is a fact. It’s not speculative. The speculation naturally follows after. The speculation, the thinking, and the poetry, is implied. And this, really, sums up the respectable, contemporary, academic, vers libre view.
Is it really love when you call your lover’s mama mama? And when your imagination takes you far into the future, from where you ask one you loved if a little graffiti you made on a marble step is still there, you naturally want to know: How long did India and Pakistan last?
Danez Smith advances.
****
Divya Guha breaks our heart in ten seconds.
No, in ten words:
“The shaver missing, your greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.”
It doesn’t cry about the leaving—it discovers the leaving, which is better.
The contrast between the shaver (a device belonging to the body) and the laptop (a device belonging to a great deal else) is complex and effective. The “shaver missing” is the real blow; because of the sequence of things, we assume this is the first thing the poet notices that is gone, a device which is mundane—but intimates the domestic and the intimate—which makes the “gone too” poignant, if only because the “greedy” laptop can “hide” much more of a person, and whether it (or he) is gone, or not.
Guha, the third seed, tangles with Semeen Ali’s broader observation—also a discovery, and also poignant on a small scale:
“for a minute/That one minute/contains my life”
Semeen Ali is the author, and we love the box-within-a-box-within-a-box aspect of her contribution. We think to ourselves, “how is it possible, really, that one minute contains a life?” But the poet is very sly, because, after all, it is only “for a minute” this miraculous “minute” occurs.
Nine words by Semeen Ali against ten by Divya Guha.
We love both, but there is a little more happening with “The shaver missing, your greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.”
Divya Guah will advance to the second round.
****
The sentiment expressed by the fourth seed, N Ravi Shankar, is overwhelming:
“You are nude, sweet mother,/so am I/as the bamboos creak a lullaby”
Who would write something like this, but someone very comfortable in their own skin? Writing lovely poetry may only take one thing, and one thing, alone: don’t be uptight.
The pleasure evinced is such that it almost seems like wisdom. Why is that? When does the sensual become philosophy? The great secret to this seems to hover within Shankar’s fond and rapturous lines.
Lily Swarn, another poet from India, counters with:
“The stink of poverty cowered in fear!”
This, too, has an uncanny strangeness about it. It strikes us as marvelously original, as if the force of a personality, or the primitive cleverness of a god, were uttering divine poetry in a half-dreaming, prophetic trance.
The insouciant rhyme of “You are nude, sweet mother,/so am I/as the bamboos creak a lullaby” gives it the edge.
R Ravi Shankar wins.
A lullaby roared by fans fills the arena.
****
Next:
Rupi Kaur v. Kim Gek Lin Short.
June Gehringer v. Alec Solomita
Marilyn Chin v. Stephen Cole
Sam Sax v. Dylan Thomas