The Bold Bracket
How can poetry be bold? Only by going against the grain of what we expect poetry to be.
All art is trapped in its traditions.
Even the experimental exists within the bounds of what the polite audience has come to expect.
So poetry can never be bold in actually, and if so, it is not poetry.
This may sadden the impolite and the avant-garde, but we’re afraid it’s true.
The spectrum might look something like this: Beautiful on one end, and disgusting, on the other.
Art swims in one direction, towards the beautiful. If it partakes of the bold, it may get away with a certain amount of disgust, or shame.
The gradations are extremely fine. Poetry may travel through the embarrassing, or an excess of emotion, to get near the beautiful, for human feelings are always of interest—even if it is a recognition of no interest.
But the only way for a poem to be shocking is to be somewhere on the disgusting scale.
The poet who says they are against war will never shock, never stun, never surprise, since this sentiment is so common among poets, and lacks originality, and also the idea itself is not necessarily beautiful.
But a poet who says they are in favor of war may shock enough to triumph—in terms of the other end of the spectrum.
A pro-war poem would be considered shameful and disgusting.
As these 8 poets in the Bold Bracket of the 2019 Scarriet Poetry March Madness attempt to advance, we might add to our pleasure, as we view the competition, if we keep this in mind. Where are the poets on the scale of the beautiful versus the disgusting? And is there any irony in how they manipulate this scale?
Diane Lockward, the no. 1 seed in the Bold Bracket, attempts to get by Linda Ashok, a poet and editor from India.
“The wife and the dog planned their escape” is Lockward’s line and when two of the noblest creatures in the universe, a “wife” and a “dog” are planning an “escape” we are in the middle of a thrilling and moral adventure, even if we don’t know the underlying situation. Our hearts are moved purely: “The wife and the dog planned their escape.” This is way up on the Beautiful side of the scale.
Linda Ashok offers, “When you have a day, let’s meet and bury it.”
This is far up on the Beautiful scale, too. And why? Because it is speech. It talks to you. It is not in the third person, like “The wife and the dog planned their escape.”
The poet who is speaking is making an offer to another person to escape—all of us are trapped, and we rarely “have a day,” and now another person wants to meet you and “bury” the day—this could mean anything; is it to forget? Or be with a person? Or bury the day for later use? The phrase is intriguing, but it also sounds like an idiom people use every day, which has its dangers when the goal is to make original poetry. When Paul McCartney dreamed “Yesterday” and first wrote it down he was afraid it was stolen, and was not original. This bedevils every poet—poetry’s coin is the word, which people use all day every day. Poetry is the “escape” from the common place; we want to “bury” the common day, the common word.
When writing in the third person, we tend to operate within the realm of the incomplete: “The wife and the dog planned their escape” sounds like the beginning of a story. It is nowhere near complete, and this is its charm: “The wife and the dog planned their escape.”
When writing in the first person, as in speech, “When you have a day, let’s meet and bury it,” the operative condition is completeness. There’s more finality when someone utters something, and this surely fits the bill: “When you have a day, let’s meet and bury it.” This is the plan: “When you have a day, let’s meet and bury it;” we are not talking about someone talking about a plan: “The wife and the dog planned their escape.” The third person is farther away, in every sense, and this is why the third person tends to exist in the wide, long views of novels and fiction, that expansiveness the introverted poet in his cave, who likes things to happen immediately, does not envy.
Still, the long view of “The wife and the dog planned their escape” still works in a poem. The poet can be extroverted. The poet can say more things than fiction can. The success of a poem obeys no rules.
“The wife and the dog planned their escape” by Diane Lockward advances to the Sweet Sixteen.
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Aseem Sundan tangles with Robin Richardson, who lives in Canada and edits an all women review.
Aseem Sundan’s “How do I make the paper turn blood red?/How do I make everyone read it?” is bold—but also helpless and desperate. Since poetry can never really be bold, it helps when the bold turns in on itself as it does here: “How do I? How do I?”
Robin Richardson pleads in a very similar manner, “Please let me be a blaze. I will destroy,/I mean create again this place.”
Aseem Sundan makes a bolder, more particular, and more universal statement, to our ears.
Aseem Sundan “How do I make the paper turn blood red?/How do I make everyone read it?” has made it to the Sweet Sixteen.
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Eliana Vanessa, a young poet from New Orleans clashes with Khalypso, a very young poet from Sacramento, California.
Vanessa: “I’d rather be outside, with him,/turning stones in the rain,/than here,/listening to the hum/of so many skulls, alone.” This conjures up all we have seen so far in this bracket: first person speech, finality, pleading and, of course, the bold.
Khalypso has given us what feels more like the beginning of a story, “to wake up/strangers & sticky & questioning.”
The “poem” (closed) versus “the story”(open) can produce great tension in poetry; and every device imaginable—point of view, rhythm, syntax, character, mystery, clarity—contributes. The risk of closing the opening too quickly or being too open in a closed manner may find the writing to be obscure. We always need to know certain things.
In a close contest, Eliana Vanessa wins.
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Edgar Poe will only advance to the Sweet Sixteen if he defeats Daipayan Nair.
Edgar Poe “boldly rides” with “Over the mountains/of the moon,/Down the valley of the shadow”
Daipayan Nair is an urgent, prolific poet.
Poets who achieve anything tend to be one of two types: massively prolific or eerily precise. Some poets work and work on each poem and each poem is a gem. The prolific poet is like a garden run wild; from the massive output, a few gems drop. The sum total of great poems in each case tends to be the same.
Poe was a master of haunting precision who did not spend a lot of time writing poems. The vast majority of his output was prose.
Poe’s opponent in the 2019 March Madness, Daipayan Nair, is prolific, but since his best poems tend to be brief, Nair has many properties of the poets who modestly court, with a serious face, the exact. Daipayan doesn’t orate like Whitman, or shout like Ginsberg. (Okay, maybe sometimes!) He etches delicately on glass the roaring furnace of his feelings.
“I run, run, run and run/Still I don’t reach my birth/I don’t cross my death” by Daipayan Nair is similar in spirit to Poe’s lines.
The Poe, as one might think, is fanatical in its simplicity—over the mountains, and down the valley, I go.
Daipayan Nair’s is divided: “I run, I run, I don’t, I don’t.” We should note the verbs: “reach” my birth and “cross” my death. Is to reach one, to cross the other? A marvelous terror is implied. Running never seemed so desperate and sad.
The moon looks down on Poe’s followers, who cannot believe the result.
Diapayan Nair has reached the Sweet Sixteen!
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Still to come:
The Mysterious Bracket
Jennifer Barber mixes it up with Sridala Swami.
Srividya Sivakumar takes on Nabina Das.
Aakriti Kuntal has to deal with Kushal Poddar
Merryn Juliette and Michelina Di Martino go toe to toe.
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The Life Bracket
William Logan, the poet and critic, squares off against Sam Sax.
Danez Smith attempts to defeat Stephen Cole.
Divya Guha with take on Alec Solomita
N Ravi Shankar will play Kim Gek Lin Short
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The Beautiful Bracket
Mary Angela Douglas has her hands full with Sharanya Manivannan.
Ann Leshy Wood must duel Jennifer Robertson.
Medha Singh will take on Raena Shiraldi.
Sushmita Gupta goes up against C.P. Surendran.
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