Yana Djin and Sharanya Manivannan are the 4th seed v. 13th seed contest in Bracket Beautiful.
Their lines have a wonderful delicacy, an overlooked quality in these paranoid, swaggering days of “hard knocks” political poetry and hoarse voices calling out from the real human to the real human in the avalanche of the continuing Modern-Against-Victorian backlash.
Edgar Poe, a poet more familiar with the “hard knocks” of life than most, opined that “delicacy” was poetry’s “eldorado.”
It is not that poetry is unable to do other things—but if you’ve studied your Aristotle and your logic, never mind your Plato, you understand that you want to do in poetry what poetry is able to do better than anything else.
If delicacy means keen-eared and sensitive, traits which are desirable in society, no matter what political party you swear to—and poetry as society’s glue spotlights delicacy better than any other intellectual activity—bring it on.
“Morning dew will dress each stem” by Yana Djin is as delicate as you’re likely to find, and this by Sharanya Manivannan is, too:
“burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”
What is it that we mean by delicacy, exactly? Is it possible to depict an indelicate act in sensitive writing?
Slugging it out on the floor
In the middle of the bar next door.
This, of course, has the advantage of “floor/door” pow! pow!
What about this? “The delicate fist flew into his face.”
This only goes to show, perhaps, that delicacy is at the bottom of all attractive language—and it’s a hybrid quality; it can usefully combine with all sorts of things all day.
“Morning dew will dress each stem” has uses no person of Letters can deny—the delicacy of observing dew upon a stem is manifest in the delicacy of the speech of the poetry itself, which manifests rigor, and not merely “weakness,” as the delicate, could, in some instances, be described.
Scholars like to assign art to a century, and then say, you cannot do this anymore. But originality is in every time period the same, breaking through every fence a mere scholar might erect.
This reminds me of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but what of that?
“burdening the wisps of things,/their threats to drift away.”
In a very close contest, Sharanya Manivannan wins.
****
John Keats would find himself in this contemporary contest, this March Madness tournament, like waking briefly from a strange dream to a stranger one. We imagine him on a small hill with leaves all around him, hearing this spoken by a voice not his own:
“Awake for ever in a sweet unrest”
The 12th seeded poet unfortunate enough to be matched with Keats in the Beautiful Bracket is Jennifer Robertson, but there is no shame in her line,
“ocean after ocean after ocean”
Fate will have been kind to her, to match her against Keats, if she wins. Some, I suppose, will want to travel to this tournament’s end, suffering the indignity of poetry playing against itself, fans yelling in the poet’s ears, in a setting of critical artificiality.
Fate is kind to Jennifer Robertson.
“ocean after ocean after ocean” wins.
Keats can go back to sleep.
****