Round 50

Yusef: "What Happened to Everybody" by Naomi Shihab Nye

Bob: "Haunt" by Alice Notley.

I liked Nye's "ubi sunt" prose-poem, which has a deep "mono no aware" and "lacrymae rerum" feeling. Some really well-chosen details here. Notley's poem also details loss, though less sharply:

Why are you
I'm looking for poetry
it's here where it hurts us so much
I have to go on doing this

Yusef wins the round; Notley is one of my top 15-20 contemporary poets, but this particular poem struck me as diffusely written.

After 50:

15-26-9