Modernism attempted to shrug off traditions.
It failed. Or did it?
What it produced were two things: little magazines which no one read, and Ezra Pound, their leader, in a cage (captured for treason as WW II ended).
Modernism’s goal in literature was to make things which no one could read. Ulysses and Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The Cantos by Pound. The Red Wheel Barrow by W.C. Williams, which no one read because unlike Ulysses and The Cantos which were too long, The Red Wheel Barrow was too short—so it wasn’t read; it was only looked at.
If a few traditional works were admired by the Modernists, in every case they were works also unreadable, like Moby Dick, a long novel with alternate chapters on whaling techniques.
Modernism succeeded modestly in one area, however. The schools, which tell you what to read, thought it proper to embrace works no one wants to read. So literary modernism has done pretty well there.
If you add in the Creative Writing Programs (you too! can be a Red Wheel Barrow poet! You too! can write books no one really likes but which highbrows say one ought to like!) we can almost say Modernism from the 1930s to our present day has been nearly triumphant.
The poetry traditions have been mostly shrugged off, what with all these academically credentialed poets supporting each other with awards and prizes, teaching one another, publishing one another, so that even one of their own number occasionally mourn there’s too many poets. Are these countless poet good? No, they are bad, and even intentionally so, since they are the children of Modernism, whose reason for being is to create unreadable works. It is all part of demolishing all the traditions. Reading. Democracy. Nations. Marriage. Religion. Hard work. After 1930, or so, to be a poet meant you had to hate all these things. Well, Mr. Wheel Barrow, how else are you expected to be understood as a respectable poet? No one is expected to read you, much less enjoy reading you, so you need to make it clear you are a good Modernist in some other way. You hate marriage and have no time for children. You hate your country and you hate hard work and you hate all the traditions. As long as this is clear, and your poems cannot be understood, and do not sound like poems at all, you will be a recognized as a poet today, just as you were in 1922.
Unlike literature professors, working class people cannot afford to see traditions as trends. Traditions keep working class people sane, safe, and fed.
One of the oldest traditions is sports.
“Casey At The Bat” is not a modernist poem.
It seemed an impossible task to get hard working sports fans to show up for a contemporary poetry contest.
The 2019 March Madness poetry tourney does not feature sports poems.
So the Scarriet March Madness committee came up with a brilliant compromise.
The Scarriet March Madness 2019 tournament would use small pieces of poems. Too small to look ancient or modern in style, a timeless quality is evinced. A small piece of a poem, judged on its own limited merits, fails or succeeds as poetry in the cosmic sense, not as a trendy, modernist, tradition-smashing work.
In the spirit of ancient Athens, which gave birth to democracy, tragedy, and playwright contests, sports fans began acting like poets, choosing their favorite words to follow and poets began acting like sports fans, picking their favorite words to win.
William Logan, the no.1 seed in the Life bracket, is known more as a critic than a poet, and his criticism resembles a gladiator arena, where poets are regularly and mercilessly cut to pieces, to the joy of his readers. It isn’t just about liking poetry, it’s about seeing bad poets get justice, too. Any worthy judgment of a poem furthers poetry. To judge poetry is to love poetry. Poetry is a tradition. Loving, judging, and protecting it is a tradition, too.
Logan writes two kinds of poems—formalist poems for the ages and modernist, “difficult” poems for his brainwashed peers. Logan has chosen a brilliant, three-part, career strategy: 1. write poems the academics expect, 2. write a small amount of perfected formalist poems, and 3. write brilliant critical takedowns of your peers.
Logan hopes to be a champion in 2019 with this, from one his formalist poems:
“I’ve never thought of you that way, I guess.”/She touched me then with the ghost of a caress.
The ambiguity of desire is spoken by the conversational “guess,” and then the speech is echoed in the rhyme and rhythm of the body language of “ghost of a caress.” Nothing too fancy here, but the execution is admirable. What else do we want from poetry qua poetry, anyway? An act of legislation? A history lesson? A campfire tale? A menu? A contract? A marriage proposal? A scientific discovery? Food advice? What?
Logan hopes to overcome Kim Gek Lin Short, the 12th seed, and
If truth be told/the theft began/a time before/that summer day.
This seems like the wonderful start of a novel in blank verse. We love the rhythm which hits on the important monosyllabic “t” words:
If TRUTH be told, the THEFT began a TIME before
with the additional “th” movement from “truTH” to “THeft”
and staying with the iambic all the way, her sequence ends on a word with a “d” sound, more definite by exactly half than the similar “t” sound:
that SUM-mer DAY.
Almost enough to make you weep, it’s so beautiful.
But still Logan wins.
Willam Logan has made it to the Sweet Sixteen.