Tangled lives around his spot

  Vi har passerat tio av de Förenta Staterna i serien Poet Laureates. Vi började i staten New York hos Marie Howe och avslutar resan i Ohio, med ett inlägg om Amit Majmudar. Jag tycker att två av poeterna höjer sig över mängden, Elizabeth Austen (Washington) och gårdagens Dana Gioia (Kalifornien). Floridas Peter Meinke blixtrade också till i sina texter. 
  Ohios nytillträdde poet lägger sig i mittfåran, enligt min bedömning.

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  Amit Majmudar växte upp i Cleveland. Han tog en BS vid University of Akron och en MD vid Northeast Ohio Medical University. Han är en diagnostisk radiolog som specialiserat sig på nukleärmedicin och jobbar heltid i Columbus, Ohio, där han bor med sin fru Ami och deras två söner, Shiv och Savya. Källa: Wikipedia

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

To Anne Sexton, by Amit Majmudar (f. 1979)
(from Dothead : poems. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.)

A naked woman
used to be sacred, once.
A woman clothed in nothing
but her own words (and what words, Anne,
what words)
is beyond naked: is transparent.
I stare at photographs online sometimes
and try to peer through
the Delphic chasm, the sibylline leaf of you.
I have aborted poetry like yours in the womb
simply by prescribing lithium.
Every time I wonder, am I killing Anne
by keeping Anne
from killing Anne?
If you were alive today, I might have been your shrink.
Framed diploma, Freudian sangfroid.
I like to think
I would have dropped my prescription pad
and kissed your right hand from the knuckles
around to the life line and out to the nicotine fingertips.
But I am flattering myself.
In real life, I’m scared of heights
and open flames
and women poets. One does not marry
a precipice. One does not have a daughter
with a spiked blue crown of natural gas.
And women who live as fire falling
endlessly from the sky
tend to fall in with hurricanes.
Aeneas looks on piously
while the Sibyl moans and the god mounts her.
You deserved a religion of goddesses,
priestesses, talking birds.
What you got was diagnosed.
I’m no hurricane, I’m a worrywart, Anne,
I’m the shy heart with the side part, Anne,
too scared to ride in your stationary car.
On what blue coast did you coast to a stop?
What song was on the radio?
And when your irises turned into seas
did you strip off your dress and swim?

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  "In his precise, often formally driven poems, Majmudar explores themes of identity, history, spiritual faith, and mortality." Citat från Poetry Foundation

  Jag upplevde att texterna i Dothead var alldeles för disparata, och dessutom saknade boken segmentindelning. Det blev alltför tvära kast mellan dikternas innehåll och deras form. Jag fick svårt att reda ut rötterna (dikter om hans bakgrund) som lagts omkring versfötterna (dikter och ordlekar i bunden form). Nåväl, ett exempel till släpper jag fram.

Ohio Theater

Love song for doomed youth, by Amit Majmudar
(from Dothead : poems. New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.)

We weren’t born to live
long among the cracked
homes and crack
houses of the real.
The basketball court
fault lines smoke 
with dandelion clocks,
something volcanic
in this city’s decay.
Car alarms sing
across widowed lots,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.

We weren’t born to live
long drinking the tapwater
zinc, the expired 
milk of the real.
We must grow our hearts up 
in this hothouse
of broken windows
because our bodies
have grown up by themselves.
The vets nest
in the hollows of buildings,
and in rushes the sea.
Baby, be good to me.

***

  Resultat Poetry Mix Championship
16-delsfinaler:
Brasilien-Kina 5-2
Tyskland-Litauen 4-6 (Överraskande! Jan Wagners Tyskland utslagna)
Nya Zeeland-Slovenien 7-3
Italien-Ryssland 3-4

  I morgon får ni dikter och resultat från de två första åttondelsfinalerna: Belgien-Nederländerna och Polen-England