Celebs are everywhere for this first round match up! We feature a Hollywood film—as it takes on a mere poem!
Marla Muse: I influence the movies too, but not nearly as much as I would like.
Aww, Marla, you don’t know nuttin’ about da movies!
Marla Muse: That which merely jars the senses makes people dumb and dumber.
Dumb and Dumber! One of my favorites!
Marla Muse: Anyway, whatever aspires to the sublime, I am there.
Another one of my favorites—Blade Runner.
Rutger Hauer:
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
Near the Tannhauser Gate.
All those moments
Will be lost in time, like tears
In the rain. Time to die.
Taking on Hollywood is Brian Rihlmann, with this untitled poem:
we used to joke about it
on days when you could—
his possible ethnicity
his identity…
the “who?” of this man
she kept from you
for 45 years—
even in her final breathsand the crackle of the crematory flames
told you nothing
nor the rising smoke
nor the box of her ashes
you carried up the flank of Mt. Rose
and scattered in sight of that pondonce, when I hiked up there
alone….after we had died, also
I spoke to her—
“you know you fucked her up….
don’t you?” who were you protecting?”“mother—your shield was nothing
but a sword…
and she is still falling on it.”
Rihlmann’s poem is like a whole movie.
It’s an interesting thing. You can watch a two hour movie and think, “The essence of what I saw could fit on a small post-it note”—especially if it’s an intimate family drama where people fight and there’s a love/sex scene or two, and a family secret is revealed, and after the credits roll over sad music with a car driving down the road, you’re left with a feeling: this wasn’t bad, it calmed me down, because I was able to forget about my problems for two hours, but finally, it really doesn’t matter, other than X can really act, and why is that same English dude in almost every film I see?
And then you read a 22 line poem in about 25 seconds—and damn if it doesn’t kill you, and feel like an entire movie. A two hour movie on a postage stamp.
So what wasted more of your time and money?
Brian Rihlmann advances!
Astonishment rises up from the crowd. Hollywood starlets, in a cloud of perfume, ascend to congratulate the poet, Brian Rihlmann.
~~~~~~~
Speaking of movies, the Scarriet Madness Committee saw this poem on You Tube and decided it was extraordinary. The poet is Jeff Callaway, and “The Greatest Poems Of All” video is linked in the comments below.
The greatest poems are never written down,
But lonely and forgotten before pen can be found,
The greatest poems never find the ink,
In the time it takes you to think;
Slowly with time they fade,
And face the guillotine of jilted poems
And unrequited lovers,
Or glued to my own vague memory
Of what could have been
If only I’d had a pen,
And the recollection
To keep repeating what it was
I was trying to say.
The greatest poems are girls
Who poured Dewars on the rocks
Down their breasts with a splash of water
As I drink it off.
The greatest poems lick the ink
From the tip of my idea.
The greatest poems of all get drunk
From the bottle, straight, no chaser,
No requiem for a dream,
No teen queen Chinese angels on a silver screen,
No Hollywood homecoming queens,
Leaping side to side in ecstasy,
Or just beautiful girls who once
Gave me their phone numbers,
Or girls back in high school
Who kissed me, and later became strippers,
Midnight sirens to madness, mad, drunkard,
Barroom brawls, bras, panties, imported beers.
The greatest poems of all, who put my drinks
On my tab, and heavenly broads
Who brought me elixers which I did drink
Down into my self the likes of abinsthe,
Sugar, laudunum, or I read
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,
Mad at midnight, typing poems furiously
Toward glory, or mayhem, or maybe for
Nothing at all, or maybe just
For the greatest poems of all.
So here, here! to the greatest poems of all!
To bikini contests, to Bikini Kill, to Bukowski,
To Rimbaud and other roughnecks,
To the wet T-shirts at Cedar Isle,
And to the Cedar Creek Lake rememberers
Who still remember all of the greatest poems of all.
To Siberian huskies named Molly who lived in Dallas Texas
With dirty filth, and to dirty filth,
To pain and pills and poems,
To words that slide into lyrical oblivion;
Sometimes these can be
The better rhymes of all times,
Dare I say the greater poems that can rhyme
From poets here today, like drunken
Ramblings, drunken one nighters,
Far beyond driven, drunk drivers,
In Dracula, no more drama before hot actress,
Sexy angel poetess,
Prostitutes, politics, and to the Texas outlaw press,
And to all of the greatest poems of all.
To Polly, to Pam, to the paranormal,
To the ghosts of the greatest poems of all,
To the ghouls, to the grim reaper,
To death, and its poetic casting call for us all;
I’d like to give a shout out to the gangsters,
Of the ghettos of Grand Prairie,
To the hypodermic hipsters of Plano
Who never made it, never got to hear
The greatest poems of all.
To poems that got kicked out of Magnolia
For drinking salt shakers, fat jokes, plastic chairs,
Who never swept the petty shit,
But always pet the sweaty shit,
From shinola to shangri-la,
From 26th and San Gabriel to the angel Gabriel,
From trumpets to cherubim,
To these crazy, insane, hot American chicks
Who love poets, poems, and Palm Pilots,
To an Austin poetry renaissance, or to purgatory.
How ’bout another round of drinks
To the greatest poets and poems of all.
Jeff Callaway’s opponent is a poem also plain-spoken, without pretense.
“How I Got That Name” by Marilyn Chin.
I am Marilyn Mei Ling Chin.
Oh, how I love the resoluteness
of that first person singular
followed by that stalwart indicative
of “be,” without the uncertain i-n-g
of “becoming.” Of course,
the name had been changed
somewhere between Angel Island and the sea,
when my father the paper son
in the late 1950s
obsessed with a bombshell blond
transliterated “Mei Ling” to “Marilyn.”
And nobody dared question
his initial impulse—for we all know
lust drove men to greatness,
not goodness, not decency.
And there I was, a wayward pink baby,
named after some tragic white woman
swollen with gin and Nembutal.
My mother couldn’t pronounce the “r.”
She dubbed me “Numba one female offshoot”
for brevity: henceforth, she will live and die
in sublime ignorance, flanked
by loving children and the “kitchen deity.”
While my father dithers,
a tomcat in Hong Kong trash—
a gambler, a petty thug,
who bought a chain of chopsuey joints
in Piss River, Oregon,
with bootlegged Gucci cash.
Nobody dared question his integrity given
his nice, devout daughters
and his bright, industrious sons
as if filial piety were the standard
by which all earthly men are measured.
*
Oh, how trustworthy our daughters,
how thrifty our sons!
How we’ve managed to fool the experts
in education, statistic and demography—
We’re not very creative but not adverse to rote-learning.
Indeed, they can use us.
But the “Model Minority” is a tease.
We know you are watching now,
so we refuse to give you any!
Oh, bamboo shoots, bamboo shoots!
The further west we go, we’ll hit east;
the deeper down we dig, we’ll find China.
History has turned its stomach
on a black polluted beach—
where life doesn’t hinge
on that red, red wheelbarrow,
but whether or not our new lover
in the final episode of “Santa Barbara”
will lean over a scented candle
and call us a “bitch.”
Oh God, where have we gone wrong?
We have no inner resources!
*
Then, one redolent spring morning
the Great Patriarch Chin
peered down from his kiosk in heaven
and saw that his descendants were ugly.
One had a squarish head and a nose without a bridge
Another’s profile—long and knobbed as a gourd.
A third, the sad, brutish one may never, never marry.
And I, his least favorite—
“not quite boiled, not quite cooked,”
a plump pomfret simmering in my juices—
too listless to fight for my people’s destiny.
“To kill without resistance is not slaughter”
says the proverb. So, I wait for imminent death.
The fact that this death is also metaphorical
is testament to my lethargy.
*
So here lies Marilyn Mei Ling Chin,
married once, twice to so-and-so, a Lee and a Wong,
granddaughter of Jack “the patriarch”
and the brooding Suilin Fong,
daughter of the virtuous Yuet Kuen Wong
and G.G. Chin the infamous,
sister of a dozen, cousin of a million,
survived by everybody and forgotten by all.
She was neither black nor white,
neither cherished nor vanquished,
just another squatter in her own bamboo grove
minding her poetry—
when one day heaven was unmerciful,
and a chasm opened where she stood.
Like the jowls of a mighty white whale,
or the jaws of a metaphysical Godzilla,
it swallowed her whole.
She did not flinch nor writhe,
nor fret about the afterlife,
but stayed! Solid as wood, happily
a little gnawed, tattered, mesmerized
by all that was lavished upon her
and all that was taken away!
Edgar Allan Poe, in his “Philosophy of Composition,” said the ideal length is about 100 lines for a poem aiming to be popular but also critically admired. His “Raven” was 108 lines.
Since Poe’s time, popular poems with critical weight tend to be about 20 lines (Do Not Go Gentle, The Road Not Taken) and this may be the result of shorter modern attention spans. Eliot’s Prufrock (and Eliot secretly studied Poe) is about 150 lines. I’m not sure what Poe would have thought about haiku. Perhaps Poe’s formula is a bit of a stuffy old joke—yet surely a poem’s length is not without some significance in the way it makes an impression on us.
Marilyn Chin’s poem is 95 lines.
Jeff Callaway’s poem is 82 lines, so they’re both in the neighborhood of what Poe was asking for.
At the ‘100 line’ length, you feel like you’re reading something. You’re in something. You’re an audience to something. The poet (how long was “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner?”) has you, so to speak. The poem better be good, if it has any chance to be liked, if it’s more than 20 lines.
Songs we listen to should last, minimally, about 2 minutes, and Poe’s formula then, equates reading a poem, in terms of time, with listening to a song.
What is “The Raven,” if not a performance piece—thus a song recording? And is it any accident, that Jeff Callaway’s rather lengthy poem now sits in You Tube as a ‘song performance?’ Marilyn Chin’s poem is about her, and the self-worth one needs to pursue a poem about oneself certainly needs to rise to the level of a performance. Otherwise, you are too humble, and let’s face it, no good poet is humble.
These poems by Chin and Callaway, brought together briefly by March Madness 2020, have a similar raucous, yet resigned, spirit; in a way, they are both happy/sad drinking songs.
We like their lengths. We like them both exceedingly.
They insinuate themselves into the evening, resting on every leaf surrounding the arena, and upon every tongue in the arena, poems meant to be, in our contest, a moaning and a groaning, of the sublime.