Danez Smith goes for Sweet 16
In so many fields of study, categories matter.
It is a curious thing how little categories matter in the study of poetry.
We don’t seem to know what to say about poetry (we don’t even know what it is) so in order to support the art as we review it, critics fall into raptures about who the poet is, where they are from, and make only passing remarks on the subject matter, if it happens to matter.
But what of the poetry itself?
The New Critics spent most of the 20th century rejecting the biographical emphasis of Romanticism. But little has changed. Instead of young Keats coughing up blood there is the MFA, the gender, or the latest prize. What the poetry is actually doing barely registers. All we know is that it is most likely going to be about suffering.
But look at this matchup:
Danez Smith “I call your mama mama”
versus
Alec Solomita “All of the sky is silent/Even the jet shining/like a dime way up high”
Even with a few words, nothing could be more different than these two poetry opponents.
One is speech: “I call your mama mama.”
One is visual: “All of the sky is silent/Even the jet shining/like a dime way up high”
What makes us call these two very different things poetry?
Even if that question can never be answered, the game still must be played.
Mach Madness must go on.
It is almost April.
Danez Smith is more concise, and the two most important words of the five are identical: mama, a rather universal word of immense importance. If poetry cannot define this by Danez Smith, then this by Danez Smith defines poetry.
But “I call your mama mama” is something people might say every day.
Surely, as a construct, as an expressive thing, the following is infinitely more unique: “All of the sky is silent/Even the jet shining/like a dime way up high” —Surely this is one in a million—to compare a jet high in the sky to a dime—and it causes us to see it, the metaphor being wonderfully true.
On the other hand, doesn’t “like a diamond in the sky” come immediately to mind?
And it could be said that the uniqueness is based on an obscure fact of no real consequence—a far away jet looking like a dime.
But the metaphor of jet-as-dime also contributes to “All of the sky is silent.” The distant jet not only shines like a dime, it is the same size as a dime, and silent like a dime, too, and so there’s two working parts, the “silent sky,” and the jet-as-a-dime metaphor, and they work nicely together.
Mama and mama also work well together, and the dramatic brevity of “I call your mama mama” is understated and arresting. The “I” carries interest; without it, the line falls apart, and so in a natural sort of way this is lyricism of the highest order.
But let us return (as we must, in the back and forth of the game) to “All of the sky is silent/Even the jet shining/like a dime way up high”
Both Solomita’s silent sky and far away, silent jet, achieves a melancholy effect, based on factual description alone, a skill we attach to poetry.
This part: “the jet shining like a dime way up high” sounds like the poet is saying the “dime” is “way up high”—but in fact it’s the “jet” which is “shining (like a dime) way up high.” This confusion actually helps the metaphor.
Alec Solomita edges out Danez Smith! Alec Solomita has made it to the Sweet Sixteen!
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This second round contest in the Life bracket also features objects which elicit emotion.
Is this an admirable human trait? Do only poets have emotional responses to objects? When is this response nothing more than superstition and weakness? Is it poetry’s job to encourage these responses?
Divya Guha is taking advantage of the trope. “The shaver missing, your greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.”
But the poet will protest: It is not the shaver, the laptop; it is the fact that they are gone that matters.
Ah, wonderful trick—mention a thing gone and it works twice as hard—as a thing and as a missing thing.
And then to exploit the whole idea further—one, the laptop; two, the missing laptop; and three, the “greedy laptop: gone too, hiding you.” The object is “hiding you” almost as if the missing person introduced as “you” at the very end of the line were still there, hiding in the room—but the real message (a message we may find on the laptop itself if we only look hard enough) is that the person the poet cared about was in some ways always gone, swallowed by the greediness of impersonal laptop technology.
The poet uses “greedy” to describe both the laptop and “you,” who, it is assumed, was selfishly inclined to bury themselves in the internet. So a whole bunch of things are missing. Ten of the saddest and most poignant words ever written.
Stephen Cole uses a similar strategy with his objects—they are missing, or away from him, but we see and hear them through the poet, doing a whole lot:
“I feel the wind-tides/Off San Fernando Mountain./I hear the cry of suicide brakes/Calling down the sad incline/Of Fremont’s Pass.”
A poet names objects to bring them back.
But Stephen Cole knows his poem’s objects will not come back—they are chasing themselves, indifferent to him. He can “feel” the “wind-tides” which belong to a mountain he has named; he can “hear” the action of things, “brakes” which belong to other things (vehicles) attached to an “incline” of a “Pass,” also named by the poet. The effect is so powerful and melancholy and strange that some say we almost don’t need the “suicide” of the “brakes” or the “sad” of the “incline,” the whole thing works so well.
Is this poetry? The second naming of things after Adam, things which are never quite defined and never quite stay?
Excuse the melancholy impulse. The March Madness arena is roaring—the fans want their conclusion.
These collections of objects, which make their poets sad, smash into each other.
The laptop. Fremont’s Pass.
The game—this crying thing—must end.
The “greedy laptop” wins.
Divya Guha advances to the Sweet Sixteen.
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The advantage of speech is that objects are always either contained or implied in it, whereas poet who don’t speak, but attempt to objectively paint scenes like a painter, are removed from speech, so remain painters solely. Speech can also describe.
These two final contestants in round two of the Life bracket utilize what might be called high speech—an utterance which does not sound entirely natural; it belongs more to oratory or opera.
The first, by N Ravi Shankar, is sweet and bizarre:
“You are nude, sweet mother,/so am I/as the bamboos creak a lullaby”
The second, by Sam Sax, affects a humble wisdom:
“that you are reading this/must be enough”
The object for Sax is “this,” which “you” are reading, so the poetry is the object itself, a delight which ought to be enough.
The “lullaby” of the bamboos creaking substitutes for the mother’s voice, who is “nude” with the poet—and we are not sure why. How can we seriously judge this? Well, that’s the point. Our judgment falters, and in the moment that it does, the nudity of mother and son and the creaking of the bamboo branches invade us with a calm which erases understanding. Objects can be felt, but not understood. They don’t have to be understood in poems.
“that you are reading this” completely understands “this,” for the “reading” of it “must be enough.” There is an urgency and a clarity and an abstractness here, utterly beyond objects and utterly at odds with the “bamboo lullaby.”
To such an effect, produced by the bamboo lullaby, we almost have to laugh.
N Ravi Shankar has won round two! He’s off to Sweet Sixteen!
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