A classic never goes out of style

It's almost five years old, but Jonathan Mayhew's BAP face-off (available in his Sept. 2003 archives) is still a total hoot. (Octopus reprinted it as a "review" in their second issue.) He set the rules up here: "Poem by poem comparison of BAP 2002 (Creeley) and BAP 2003 (Komunyakaa). Rules: First poem in Creelely versus first poem in Kumunyakaa, etc... until the end of the shorter of the two volumes. I am the infallible judge. You are free to disagree with me, of course; just remember that I KNOW MORE THAN YOU DO." And so unfolds the boxing match as review.

SPOILER ALERT***: Bob stomps Yusef.

If you missed this brilliant bit of bloggery the first time around (when the age of poetry blogging had only just begun) I urge you to visit it now. An excerpt after the jump --

Round 26

Yusef: "Rhythmic Arrangements (on Prosody)" by Michael S. Harper

Bob: "Reunion" by Louise Glück

This round features two of the four poets who appear in both volumes (the others are Bidart and Warsh.) I got mixed up for a second about which poem was chosen by which editor. Harper's poem starts off:

I was forced to memorize and recite
in front of an atonal white hostess

made to do it again
in Iowa tests of critical argot complicit

with theatrical endrhymes . . .

The "atonal white hostess" might very well be Louise, whose tone-deafness here is astounding:

It is a pleasure, now, to speak of the ways in which
their lives have developed, alike in some ways, in others
profoundly different...

or

... Time has been good to them, and now
they can discuss it together from within, so to speak,
which, before, they could not.

Harper's deft metaprosodic poem wins the round for Yusef. The thought crossed my mind that Glück was parodying the empty, banal way we think about our lives. I kind of doubt it.