Sushmita Gupta is the sixth seed in the Beautiful Bracket:
“Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love.”
The artist turns pain into beauty, and this transformation makes it possible to live.
Art has a life of its own, whether we are happy, or not. The poet’s poems are personal, but to us, they are just poems—which don’t care about us. Why should they? They are just poems, and true audiences exist only when the readers don’t know the poets personally.
There is nothing we can say about poems. The poem is the “saying” itself. A poem is not a friend telling us something; so why do we care at all when Sushmita Gupta expresses hurt?
We (audiences) don’t. We (audiences) only care about the beauty of the poem. We (audiences) only care when someone is able to transform pain into beauty. This is the miracle.
Does this mean that we are perfectly heartless when we admire poems?
Yes.
Because obviously, people are moved to sympathy and pity by each other—imagine if this were only possible with the help of poems. Then we would be in real trouble.
So, yes, we are heartless when we admire the sentimental beauty of poems.
“Sentimental beauty.” Endowing beauty with sentiment and sentiment with beauty is the cool, impersonal work of poems.
To overcome sorrow as either a poet or a person, we can have nothing to do with sorrow, and not feeling sorrow, we cannot feel pity, and so yes, poems and poets have no heart, and neither does beauty, and this instructs us as individuals to be strong, and not weak.
Art is the public expression of individual resourcefulness. Beauty and sentiment, which are opposites, are forced by art to be one.
Sushmita Gupta’s opponent is Dimitry Melnikoff, whose beautiful line is:
“Offer me a gulp of this light’s glow”
Beauty loves the uncanny and the uncanny loves the beautiful. When we sense this beauty is inevitable—that this beauty had to be beautiful in this way only—it produces the effect of the uncanny. The ‘o’ sounds of “Offer” and “glow” and the ‘g’ sounds of “gulp” and “glow” make the visual and the action of the line feel inevitable, and so the beauty of the line feels uncanny—which is better than beauty alone.
The Scarriet March Madness arena is swaying with small globes of light.
The rhythm of “Everything hurts,/Even that/Which seems like love” finds the pain, the “minor” chord, of the dactlyic/trochaic, EV-‘ry-thing/ HURTS, ev-/ giving way to the more hopeful, “major key” iambic, -en THAT/which SEEMS/like LOVE.
The entire sequence turns on “seems,” for what seems to hurt, hurts; seeming has to do with the senses; but also “seems” implies a mistake; so there is a hidden optimism: “love” which only “seems,” hurts, but what if love were true, and not seeming? Perhaps then the hurt of everything will be transcended. A lesser poet would not have put the stress on SEEMS; Sushmita makes sure the rhythm and the (hidden) meaning work as one.
Sushmita Gupta wins.
****
How would William Shakespeare do in this tournament? Let’s find out. The Fragment Handicap is a challenge to all. Can we feel Shakespeare’s greatness in brief?
“Those were pearls that were his eyes”
No matter how great the poet, they are only allowed one volley, one swipe at the ball, and the opponent gets to hit it briefly back. The volley is not a 150-mile-per-hour shot, but a few words.
C.P. Surendran tackles the pearls with this:
“A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision.”
Both Shakespeare and Surendran picture blindness in a beautiful way: Eyes as pearls. A train in a tunnel—window by window—regaining sight.
If poetry is finally speech, Shakespeare is a great lesson. In this instance, the odd, “Those were pearls that were his eyes,” still sounds like something someone would say.
“A train, blindfolded by a tunnel,/Window by window/Regained vision,” not so much.
But must a poem sound like speech? Surely that is open for debate, but I have a feeling it helps.
The division between reading a line of verse, and hearing it spoken by a person, must give us pause.
Reading poetry is much like a train going over a track.
What is a train’s vision? How does a train see, window by window? There is a sweet, teasing, entrancement in contemplating this.
It’s really impossible the immortal Shakespeare would lose, isn’t it?
The crowd goes wild.
C.P. Surendran has won!
****
And now the final contest in the First Round.
A.E. Housman, who published in the late 19th century, but died in 1936—not that long ago—often contemplates grief in the English countryside, and when the British Empire encircled the world from icy sea to tropical pool, it was from their own meadows and garden plots English poetry most sweetly poured. Soldiers left Britain and conquered, but when the poets left Britain they died. As a proud and strict professor of Latin, Housman was said to bring women to tears with his scolding manner. He also had trouble remembering their names. It is said he made frequent trips to France, because they had dirty books which were banned in Britain. Housman’s tournament entry:
“The rose-lipped girls are sleeping/In fields where roses fade.”
In poetry, one can never go wrong by repetition: the rose-lipped girls…where roses fade.
Raena Shirali is not as famous as Housman, but google will yet tell you a thing, or two. Her book of poems, GILT, has been widely reviewed, and the Chicago Review of Books says, “Shirali, the daughter of Indian immigrants, has written a collection that dissects experiences against a white Southern background and begs the question: “What does America demand of my brown body?”
In her battle with Housman, she is quicker, by far:
“we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
There isn’t the music of “The rose-lipped girls are sleeping/In fields where roses fade.”
In Housman’s time, there were heavy leather books of poems in every home, and quotation books with iambic lines on roses.
Shelley died with a book by Keats in his pocket.
Today, poets carry an electronic universe.
“we become mist, shift/groveward, flee.”
Raena Shirali, nearly invisible, in a close game, wins.
****
Here are the 32 winners of Round One
The Bold Bracket
Diane Lockward (d. Aaron Poochigian)
Aseem Sundan (d. Hoshang Merchant)
Linda Ashok (d. Menka Shivdasani)
Edgar Poe (d. John Milton)
Daipayan Nair (d. Philip Larkin)
Eliana Vanessa (d. Joie Bose)
Robin Richardson (d. Robin Morgan)
Khalypso (d. Walter Savage Landor)
**
The Mysterious Bracket
Jennifer Barber (d. Sophia Naz)
Srividya Sivakumar (d. Percy Shelley)
Aakriti Kuntal (d. A.E. Stallings)
Merryn Juliette (d. Ranjit Hoskote)
Michelina Di Martino (d. Meera Nair)
Kushal Poddar (d. Sukrita Kumar)
Nabina Das (d. Ben Mazer)
Sridala Swami (d. Richard Wilbur)
**
The Life Bracket
William Logan (d. Garrison Keillor)
Danez Smith (d. Akhil Katyal)
Divya Guha (d. Semeen Ali)
N Ravi Shankar (d. Lily Swarn)
Kim Gek Lin Short (d. Rupi Kaur)
Alec Solomita (d. June Gehringer)
Stephen Cole (d. Marilyn Chin)
Sam Sax (d. Dylan Thomas)
**
The Beautiful Bracket
Mary Angela Douglas (d. Abhijit Khandkar)
Ann Leshy Wood (d. Ravi Shankar)
Medha Singh (d. Philip Nikolayev)
Sharanya Manivannan (d. Yana Djin)
Jennifer Robertson (d. John Keats)
Sushmita Gupta (d. Dimitry Melnikoff)
C.P Surendran (d. William Shakespeare)
Raena Shirali (d. A.E. Housman)
****