In the old days, poets would attempt to kill each other in order that their aesthetics might win. This was barbaric, but poems worth dying for were certainly beautiful.
Then someone (a minor poet, no doubt) invented games or sport, where competition gradually meant humiliation, not death, and triumph became uneasy, recorded, fragile, unfair—since games had to stop at some previously designated, artificial point in time and luck and cheating were layered into the whole enterprise.
Betting made the gamblers rich, the players, poor—and poets walked away from this, lamenting.
Poets who once thrived in war, were eliminated from sport which replaced war—and this has been the poet’s plight ever since.
Today’s basketball star knows nothing, is passively but generously lauded; but the poet is a poet solely because they complain: a life of games is empty.
Is everything an accident? Yes. So why play the game? Wouldn’t it be better to announce which poem is best? Who knows why at any given moment a player makes the shot in the last moment of a game which must be made—or not? This will always be a mystery—and therefore winning and losing is a mystery—except to the gamblers who win by fixing the game.
Poets used to be the player, the gambler, and the fixer. Now they are not found anywhere near war, except as victims of war, and nowhere near sports—poets are on the outside, disparaging sports and its haphazard, merely physical, artificiality.
This is to be a poet today.
To be on the outside of everything.
But Scarriet seeks to return poetry as the judge of everything.
The wonder at a new poem is as real as a last-minute shot made—or not. Poetry must become a ruthless, tyrannical philosophy, or die.
Marla Muse (our relationship is…complicated) has proclaimed—with her 10,000 year experience in languages and taste—the best sex and death poems of all time.
But like a game, it’s only true once.
Marla’s judgments are more important than anything else. The low ambitions of fat or skeletal government officials, the waste and untruths of all of us—will all fade away.
MM: Why, thank you, Tom
You’re welcome, Marla.
But all kidding aside, there is no way to judge a poem correctly—accident interferes with perception and, even more so, with judgment, since judgment depends on the multiplying accidents of ongoing perception. How we feel, at any given moment, about a poem we are reading, cannot possibly correspond to any theoretical mastery of the poem, no matter how thorough and well-articulated.
We might agree with the sentiment of this poem by Petronius—but do we need a poem to say it?
65 A.D. Petronius “Doing, A Filthy Pleasure Is, And Short”
Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short;
And done, we straight repent us of the sport:
Let us not then rush blindly on unto it,
Like lustful beasts, that onely know to doe it;
For lust will languish, and that heat decay
But thus, thus, keeping endlesse Holy-day
Let us together closely lie, and kisse,
There is no labor, nor no shame in this;
This hath pleas’d, doth please, and long will please; never
Can this decay, but is beginning ever.
(trans. Ben Johnson)
from the Sex and Death Poetry Early Bracket 12th seed
MM: Maybe. When a ‘bad’ team beats a ‘good’ team, we rather enjoy it. But we can never get over the fact that we might be aesthetically incorrect about a poem if we take poetry seriously.
THE FINAL FOUR.
The Early Bracket
Song of Everlasting Sorrow, Po Chu-i (translator Dore J. Levy)
The International Bracket
“When Last Night Blew Down” Anonymous Korean 16th Century (translators Virginia Olsen Baron and Chung Seuk Park)
The Romantic Bracket
“I Shall Come Back” by Dorothy Parker
The Modern Bracket
“litany” Carolyn Creedon
The Championship Game
WIND LAST NIGHT BLEW DOWN
Wind last night blew down
A gardenful of peach blossoms.
A boy with a broom
Is starting to sweep them up.
Fallen flowers are flowers still.
Don’t brush them away.
~~~~~~~~
The poems in the Sex and Death final could not be more different.
Imagery (which only hints at the subject) v.
Narrative (clear, human, heart-breaking)
Anonymous, 500 year old lyric from Korea v.
21st Century MFA dramatic poem from America
LITANY
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 the winner is “litany” by Carolyn Creedon.
Goodbye from Sri Lanka.
Thank you, Marla Muse.