MAZER:
Sunlight rests like a package at the door.
Nothing sees. The rich interior
is useless to persons and chronology.
Once when the spring came to our caravan
I’d say the mountain streams ran in her hair.
Let these things rest without memory.
RANSOM:
The lazy geese, like a snow cloud
Dripping their snow on the green grass,
Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud,
Who cried in goose, Alas,
For the tireless heart within the little
Lady with rod that made them rise
From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle
Goose-fashion under the skies!
**********************************************
Now we get to see who is in the Final Four*****************************************
But how is this possible?***************************************************
Look back on a few recent posts.******************************
Michelangelo versus Teasdale: how can we declare a winner? The very secret of Michelangelo’s soul in a newly translated sonnet. A heart-breaking lyric by the under appreciated Teasdale. How can there be a “winner?”**********************************************************************
Oh God! Milton’s passionate paean to Virtue. Or Byron’s passionate paean to…passion. Oh God! Trembling are the knees of the judges!*******************************************************
Poe against Coleridge! Verses that drown the senses and tickle the smallest whiskers of the soul! How can a mortal decision be made?***********************************************
Mazer, the contemporary representative! Contemporary poetry, generally, is flat, compared to great, old poetry. Ben Mazer, by a miracle, still in this tournament, among the greatest verse-makers of all time! Against the Tennessean, Ransom, New Critic and T.S. Eliot of the American South, poet of old women and dead children!*****************************************
The Final Four will appear in a cloud of tears.
