A Poet Who Doesn’t Suck (review from 2011)

“Garden of Eye” canvas created by Digital-Matrix.*

The following review was published in American Book Review, Volume 32, Number 2, January/February 2011. 

It is reprinted with permission of the author.

The Future Is Happy, BlazeVOX [books], 2009. $16.

The Eccentric St. Sarai, a Poet Who Doesn’t Suck

by Melissa Studdard

The unspoken rules for writing contemporary literary poetry are clear

to all serious poets. For starters, it is NOT okay to use words like

“love,” “rose,” “heart,” “soul,” “butterfly,” or “grandmother” unless

you intend to systematically deconstruct, or even better, negate,

them. If you do insist on using these horrid words (which, I remind

you, is not recommended), you must find a way to rough them up and

scrape away the centuries of grime left on them by the grubby hands of

former poets, such as Shakespeare, Donne and Petrarch (who sadly, did

not know what they were doing) . You must concede to the premise that

sentiment is embarrassing and sincerity is downright disgusting, and

you must recognize that if you’re feeling attached to a line you’ve

written, it’s probably too “precious” to be published and should be

deleted quickly, before anyone else sees the shameful thing that you

have done. Most of all, you must never, ever do anything that comes

across as too poetic. God forbid that anyone should see your poem and

deduce from it that you are a poet. Better for your poem to imply that

you are a bricklayer, waitress, or serial killer.

The problem is that the anti-cliché has itself become clichéd, and the

gruff tone and handling of subject matter are now as anticipated as

the sentimentality they replaced. So what’s a poet to do in a post

post era, when everything that can be done has seemingly been done and

surprise itself is a cliché? Literary history would suggest a swing

back to a kinder, gentler poetry, as each new literary movement has

been a reaction against what came before it. However, the poets of

this generation find themselves in a particularly bitter pickle in

that anyone who writes in the old style would appear not to be aware

of the new style and would therefore run the risk of coming across as

uneducated. That, we cannot have.

What we do find, however, is that there are poets who are aware of

craft, literary history and current trends but who have decided to lay

their own unique voices and minds down on the page anyway, poets who,

finding themselves at the crossroads of convention and deviance,

choose neither but instead drop the reigns altogether and lift into

Pegasian flight. They are smart and sensitive and funny and well-read.

They are aware of what’s going on around them and what came before

them, yet they allow that knowledge to inform rather than dictate

their work. They are skilled at craft, but they do not craft the life

out of their poems.

And so, despite what might have initially sounded like a complaint

about contemporary poetry, I’m here to tell you that there is still

much good poetry being written, and there are still many good

collections coming out. One such collection is The Future is Happy,

by Sarah Sarai, published by BlazeVox Books, a press that proclaims to

publish “poetry that doesn’t suck.” In Sarai’s case, I wholeheartedly

agree. It doesn’t suck at all. It is, in fact, a poetry of luminous,

brave transparency, and though it would by no means be considered

confessional, it lays bare the unique mechanisms of Sarai’s mind, the

wild fluctuations of her pulse, skipped beats of her heart. Sarai has

no qualms about mentioning weed, chili peppers, the bible and the

afterlife all in the same poem, and her wacky, unique perceptions of

the world spawn metaphor after metaphor, analogy after analogy of

sparkling, lyrical, hilarious insight. Crossing the border is compared

to crossing into the afterlife, Emily Dickinson is presented as a Jew

in hiding, and poop cleaned from a baby’s butt is likened to sin wiped

away by grace. What may appear at first to be flippant always has a

deeper meaning, and the mundane is frequently combined with the

sacred. Take the poem “Aristotle,” for instance, short enough to be

considered in its entirety:

There’s no clean slate

in God’s classroom.

He was clapping erasers

as your ebullient soul popped

like gleeful corn charging

an aluminum lid.

You ker-chewed

from dust falling milky.

What an act of hubris, to be born. 

(Sarai 50, 2009)

Here we see Sarai’s characteristically zany way of handling subject

matter. Reincarnationists have long considered the idea of the earth

as a schoolhouse for the soul, but Sarai makes the idea palpable by

giving God a classroom and erasers to clap. One only need look at the

titles of the individual poems, such as “St. Sarai Carrying the Infant

Christ Child,” “Like Breasts on the Copier,” and “When the Sun Sets

Like a Nice Salmon Mousse,” to pick up on the humor and originality of

the collection. Yet reading the poems reveals a voice that is also

earnest, vulnerable and raw. Alongside these wacky, philosophical

poems are poems about losing faith in poetry, running into a former

lover, and empathizing with a mother who has cancer. Particularly

stunning is the poem, “My Various and Sloppy Forgiveness,” which ends

with an unabashed portrayal of longing.

Sarai is sexy, funny, philosophical, gracious and irreverent –

sometimes all in the same poem, combining the elevated with the lowly,

the drab with the lyrical, the complex with the simple. But in the

end it is not her eclectic subject matter or her charming, sassy style

that will win the reader over - it is her willingness to, without

artifice or pretension, offer her truth to the page.

American Book Review, Volume 32, Number 2, January/February 2011.

Melissa Studdard is the author of the bestselling novel Six Weeks to Yehidah (winner of  the Forward National Literature Award), as well as the newly released My Yehidah, both published on All Things That Matter Press.  She is a book reviewer at-large for The National Poetry Review, a contributing editor for Tiferet Journal, and host of the radio interview program Tiferet Talk.  

Melissa's blog, Bareback Alchemy. Her website.

*Digital Matrix: http://maat-order.org/blog/?p=1113