Advocates of Literary Modernism are threatening to boycott the 2023 Scarriet March Madness Tournament (Sex and Death Poetry) in Colombo, Sri Lanka. They feel Marla Muse has too much influence. “She’s old.” “We don’t like her.” “Power-hungry.”
“My opponents are old, decrepit professors who can’t accept the fact that Modernism is no longer new or relevant—or that Modernism was never really that revolutionary in the first place. Get over it, fellas,” said Marla Muse yesterday, who is 10,000 years old, but still beautiful.
The sticking point is this:
The distribution of poetry in the four tournament brackets known as Early, International, Romantic, and Modern—specifically the latter two.
Ancient poems (translated) fill the Early Bracket.
International poems (translated) fill the International Bracket.
The outrage results from early 20th Century poets (High Modernism) occupying the Romantic Bracket—T.S. Eliot refuses to share the same March Madness Bracket with Percy Shelley.
“Eliot is an asshole,” Marla Muse said yesterday, as reporters mobbed her at her favorite Colombo watering hole. “T.S. can’t accept the fact that there’s been a reassessment. He’s a Romantic poet. The Tradition is no longer what it was in 1963. Sorry.”
Scarriet officials desperately attempted to placate Eliot, Nobel Prize Winner 1948, who questioned the worth of Jews and Shelley in the 1930s as a guest at Harvard—where he was escaping his first wife back in England.
A press release was quickly circulated by Robert Tonucci: “The sole reason the great literary Modernist and Nobel Prize winning poet, critic, playwright, and lecturer, Thomas Stearns Eliot, occupies the Romantic Bracket is for purely logistical reasons—there are too many recent poets—much younger than Mr. Eliot—who must occupy the fourth, or Modern Bracket.”
But Marla’s tongue may have already done too much damage.
Hopefully, poets will remain calm and somewhat united—so the whole Sex and Death tournament will not have to be postponed.
The Romantic Bracket is filled with the likes of Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Keats, Thomas Campion, Robert Herrick, Andrew Marvell, E.E.Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Swinburne, Donne, Wilfred Owen, DH Lawrence, Emily Dickinson, and the deeply offended Eliot.
The Modern Bracket is packed with poets such as Philip Larkin, Paul Blackburn, Helen Adam, Denise Levertov, Dorothy Parker, Kim Addonizio, Sharon Olds, Marilyn Chin, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, William Kulik, and Carolyn Creedon, whose poem, “litany,” has been generating a lot of buzz around Colombo:
litany
Carolyn Creedon (b 1969)
Tom, will you let me love you in your restaurant?
I will let you make me a sandwich of your invention and I will eat it and call
it a carolyn sandwich. Then you will kiss my lips and taste the mayonnaise and
that is how you shall love me in my restaurant
Tom, will you come to my empty beige apartment and help me set up my daybed?
Yes, and I will put the screws in loosely so that when we move on it, later,
it will rock like a cradle and then you will know you are my baby
Tom, I am sitting on my dirt bike on the deck. Will you come out from the kitchen
and watch the people with me?
Yes, and then we will race to your bedroom. I will win and we will tangle up
on your comforter while the sweat rains from our stomachs and foreheads
Tom, the stars are sitting in tonight like gumball gems in a little girl’s
jewelry box. Later can we walk to the duck pond?
Yes, and we can even go the long way past the jungle gym. I will push you on
the swing, but promise me you’ll hold tight. If you fall I might disappear
Tom, can we make a baby together? I want to be a big pregnant woman with a
loved face and give you a squalling red daughter.
No, but I will come inside you and you will be my daughter
Tom, will you stay the night with me and sleep so close that we are one person?
No, but I will lie down on your sheets and taste you. There will be feathers
of you on my tongue and then I will never forget you
Tom, when we are in line at the convenience store can I put my hands in your
back pockets and my lips and nose in your baseball shirt and feel the crook
of your shoulder blade?
No, but later you can lie against me and almost touch me and when I go I will
leave my shirt for you to sleep in so that always at night you will be pressed
up against the thought of me
Tom, if I weep and want to wait until you need me will you promise that someday
you will need me?
No, but I will sit in silence while you rage, you can knock the chairs down
any mountain. I will always be the same and you will always wait
Tom, will you climb on top of the dumpster and steal the sun for me? It’s just
hanging there and I want it.
No, it will burn my fingers. No one can have the sun: it’s on loan from God.
But I will draw a picture of it and send it to you from Richmond and then you
can smooth out the paper and you will have a piece of me as well as the sun
Tom, it’s so hot here, and I think I’m being born. Will you come back from
Richmond and baptise me with sex and cool water?
I will come back from Richmond. I will smooth the damp spiky hairs from the
back of your neck and then I will lick the salt off it. Then I will leave
Tom, Richmond is so far away. How will I know how you love me?
I have left you. That is how you will know
~~~~~~~~~
And now let us take a look at Eliot’s poem—in the Romantic Bracket. Does it belong there?
La Figlia che Piange
T.S. Eliot (b 1888)
“O quam te memorem virgo …” Virgil
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair—
Lean on a garden urn—
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair—
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise—
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
~~~~~~~~~
As of last night, still no comment on whether Tom Eliot would remain in Scarriet’s Sex and Death Poetry Tournament.
Colombo, Sri Lanka