My 3,000 Loving Arms

Mad Crazy Love. 3 Years Later, Jane Eyre. Charlotte Bronte. She Endured.

2012-01-27T14:35:00.000-05:00

Professor Heger,
maybe 20 years after Charlotte
worked for his family.

I cannot separate Charlotte Bronte from the collectivefemale. Her poems are, perhaps, undistinguished. (Emily Bronte hasthree poems on Poets.org but Charlotte has none.) But she (and Emily) towers over literature.

And that's why my first reaction to the news that Charlotte's love letters were being published today was dismay. Can't we allow the woman a little privacy? Many, female and male alike, have known torments and grief of illusion and unrequited love. Whole industries serve that impulse with how-to books, including the classic of my generation, Women Who Love Too Much, with its iterations for men and across all gender preferences.

But what next struck me about Charlotte's infatuation with her employer Professor Constantin Heger, an older man with a wife and children (this when she was a governess in Belgium), was the timeline.

So she's 28, and that's a Victorian 28, not a wise, once-divorced 28 of the new millennium. She falls in love, whatever love is.

And three years later, when she's 31, publishes Jane Eyre. This is not Medea killing her children because of Jason's infidelity. This is not Dido, self-immolating when Aeneas dumps her. (Both accomplished women, myths surely based on flesh and blood.) Charlotte's life, however, doesn't end. It just has a bump.

I'm posting this article from the Telegraph hereBECAUSE I can't separate Charlotte Bronte from the collective femalewhich she advanced and amplified.

Stupid crazy love, yes.

Three years later, Jane Eyre. One hundred years later? A television or movie re-envisioning of Jane Eyre practically every other year. A book which remains a favorite for readers and critics. A woman who endures.

What will the indecipherable future dream? ... Borges (Still missing Etta & Johnny)

2012-01-22T23:52:00.001-05:00

It doesn't feel quite right to move on from the deaths of Etta James and Johnny Otis so soon (my previous post), but their lives and impact are being sung in so many publications, including the L.A. Times and the Guardian, which I regularly read, and beautifully so, in articles, photos, appreciations.

Every so often I'm proud of the human race. We don't have much capacity to identify stupidity, but sometimes we do know genius.

Tonight I'm going to post another selection from Poems of the Night, a gathering of work from several of Jorge Luis Borges' collections. I want, for myself, his easy passage into dream and back, his understanding of depth, process and transparency of the collective unconsciousness, of the momentous occasion of its existence, and a personal access through myth and dream (and good fortune). Borges gives me hope as an artist and as a believer (in many things).

Each sentence below is a meditation.

Someone Will Dream

What will the indecipherable future dream? A dream that Alonso Quijano can be Don Quixote without leaving his village and his books. A dream that the eve of Ulysses can be more prodigious than the poem that recounts his hardships. Dreaming human generations that will not recognize the name of Ulysses. Dreaming dreams more precise than today's wakefulness. A dream that we will be able to do miracles and that we won't do them, because it will be more real to imagine them. Dreaming worlds so intense that the voice of one bird could kill you. Dreaming that to forget and to remember can be voluntary actions, not aggressions or gifts of chance. A dream that we shall see with our whole body, as Milton wished from the shadow of those tender orbs, his eyes. Dreaming a world without machines and without that afflicted machine, the body. Life is not a dream, Novalis writes, but can become a dream.

Suzanne Jill Levine tr.

_____________
Borges, Waiting for the Night, Poems of the Night (Penguin).

Great Souls Creating Their Own Proximity: Etta James & Johnny Otis. America's Great Black Musical Triumph. A Poem by Pessoa.

2012-01-20T18:34:00.000-05:00

A great soul creates its own proximity. I don't need to have seen or touched Etta James or Johnny Otis to have been touched by them and in some way seen, my raging heart witnessed and deafened, especially by Etta. My life was as, hey, more, enriched by their presence on the planet as by any number of people I've shook hands with, taken classes with, received paychecks from.

As you know they were astonishing soul musicians. Neither had to make the choice to be other than messengers, though for Johnny Otis, a Greek American, there was a transition and it was a bit more conscious than Etta's. She was black. He wasn't, but Johnny Otis understood himself to be a musician in the tradition and community of America's great black musical triumph. He decided to move in that community very early in his career. Otis was a different kind of beautiful.

Miss James was all kinds of beautiful.

So to honor them I wanted to post a poem about joy and about humility, the true victory. The True Victory. Which is, at least as of 6:30 p.m., 1/20, to have lived and understood the meaning of all this, which is to say the humiliations and sufferings, the rapture of being alive. I don't presume to say they did or didn't understanding what I naively refer to as "the meaning." Like I do?

I bow to them.

Courtesy of Fernando Pessoa:

XVIII

If only I were the dust on the road
And the feet of the poor were tromping on me...

If only I were the flowing rivers
And there were washerwomen on my bank...

If only I were the poplars next to the river
And only had the sky above me and the water below me...

If only I were a miller’s donkey
And he beat me and valued me...

Better those than someone going through life
Looking back and feeling sorry about it...
____
Pessoa, 1914 (Portugal), from http://alberto-caeiro.blogspot.com/

"In My Room" ... Brian Wilson & the Boys of Beach

2012-01-19T19:42:00.000-05:00

As a non-adult I thought "In My Room" was so strange, a combo of eerie, skeevie and over-share. But I also sensed that the absence of a filter, the soul on-the-page, on the musical staff-edness was an astonishment. In the airwaves, Beach Boy Brian Wilson's song, co-written with Gary Usher, overshadowed my kneejerk desire to dismiss it as so intimate as to be artless.

So, okay. I knew very little about myself back then. Some little nub poked my psyche. Not that I thought about it. I was in junior high. I was in my room and my room was still a retreat.

Sometime in the early seventies, my musician sister told me Wilson's composition compared with Bach's. I believed her but still can't say I had any place inside me, any room in which to consider that statement in depth. I experienced songs, felt them, didn't necessarily analyze.

While I didn't, then, disapprove of "In My Room," I sure didn't get the striped shirt-look of the The Beach Boys. It is good that they reformed and got sloppy.

Thank you, Sarah Gancher Sarai's parents, for never ever objecting to rock, pop, r&b or soul, even though you were Bach, Beethoven, Brahms (and Rogers and Hart)-happy.

By the way, I've wanted to read Wilson's autobiography, Wouldn't It Be Nice since it was published, but there were layers of glass between me and the book. The layers dissolved like sin in the grace of the Noon-day sun, a month ago. I'm doing a lot of work and it's paying off. Yeah, it was a great read, and yeah, for me, a necessary read, if only to hear about art and rawness, transparency, filters.
Lyrics to "In My Room":

There's a world where I can go and tell my secrets to
In my room, in my room
In this world I lock out all my worries and my fears
In my room, in my room

Do my dreaming and my scheming
Lie awake and pray
Do my crying and my sighing
Laugh at yesterday

Now it's dark and I'm alone
But I won't be afraid
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room
In my room, in my room

_______
Brian Wilson and Gary Usher

You Open to the World ("you" vs "I" in a poem)

2012-01-15T22:18:00.003-05:00

I'm working on a new poem. It's a mystery how it came into life although the midwife is enough gifted and magically so, it's a mystery why I say it's a mystery.

Second poem in a row I've opened a collection of Borges' poems and found a word to start me. When you think of Borges, with his bottomless knowledge of myth and bottomless well of mythical creation, it may seem a poor reflection on duncehead simple-minded me that the word was, in fact, "myth." But there you have it. When a girl is starting a new poem, she ingests the sure witchery without looking back, the sure transformation from emotion to word with gratitude and unquestioning acceptance.

I began:

Myth is the man with the hook
cramped on the door handle of
my family's red Rambler. Seems
I'm about to leak the hue's variant,
a worser rose oxidized in
Mulholland's moist night air.

The poem moves on to the hereafter and the here and now. Writing some days later, some drafts later, I realized that what satisfied me most about the poem--it's obvious hint of self-revelation--worked against the poem opening to the universal and becoming more than confessional. So (with the second stanza added here) I changed pronouns:

Myth is the man with his hook
cramped on the door handle of
your family's red Rambler.
Seems you're about to leak the hue's
variant, a worser rose oxidized in
Mulholland's moist night air.

Your death will be a mystery because
you don't drive on Mulholland at night.

As a reader I'm now more excited about the poem, where it's heading. I have a tingling sense of participation. Granted, I'm easy, a willing participant, happy to be suspended in disbelief, more so after the change because I'm a "you."

This poem, currently "Poem for Mr. Sage," weaves death, the caring and uncaring universe, kindness, callousness, connection, family, a lover. I think it does, anyway. I believe the poem stands a better chance of being what I just promised it was, with the pronoun substitution. YOU, dear reader, are invited in through more stanzas, more transformation.

Pessoa, Bossa Nova, "I'm in no hurry." A Pessoa poem.

2012-01-11T09:24:00.001-05:00

BeatrizMilhazes (Brazilian,1960)

Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro does seem to presage bossa nova with its languorous love of the now of beauty. My comparison of Pessoa to bossa nova is based on the shared language--Portuguese, rather than geography, which wasn't shared. Pessoa lived in Portugal, as we all know, and as we all know, bossa nova, Antonio Carlos Jobim & co., are Brazilian.

But this thought, which, really (or as you might suspect), just occurred to me, does incline me to transmigrate my soul into a Portuguese-speaking body, and, while we are at it, in Brazil rather than Portugal. I'm always eager to escape European shadows though Pessoa's is a shadow providing sun.

Hey, ignore me and read this poem which I found on http://alberto-caeiro.blogspot.com/. A better blogger than myself would rethink her freewheeling associations and present interpretation. I am not the better blogger. Heart heart Pessoa. This poem is not titled.

I’m in no hurry. What for?
The sun and moon aren’t in a hurry: they’re right.
Hurrying is believing people can get past their legs,
Or that, jumping, they can land past their shadow.
No; I don’t know how to hurry.
If I stretch out my arm, I get exactly where my arm gets---
Not even a centimeter farther.
I only touch where I touch, not where I think.
I can only sit down where I am.
And that’s funny like all really true truths,
But what’s really funny is that we’re always thinking something else,
And we live truant from our reality.
And we’re always outside it because we’re here.
__________________
Fernando Pessoa / Alberto Caeiro (6/20/1919)

Legislators of the World (There Should be a Club in High School)

2012-01-09T18:50:00.000-05:00

from
The African Tarot

Yesterday I was with a group of poets toward the end of the day, toward the end of the weekend. None of us could remember the exact quote or the correct poet.

I shamefacedly, humbly admit I came up with Keats, Auden and Eliot. Why not Shakespeare? Why not the Bible, with whom Ben Franklin has been confused, quote wise.

It was easy enough to Google and even more fun to Google an image. My Tarot deck is the Haindl, but that's a tricky deck to find online. It's so beautiful and very mysterious. I am very happy, however, to have discovered The African Tarot. Sleek and otherworldly.

Of course Shelley wasn't thinking about Tarot decks when he wrote In Defense of Poetry, though I wouldn't be surprised if he or any of the Romantics studied Tarot. Many poets have. I keep getting sidelined.

Here is the quotation in full. As you know, a hierophant is a priestess or priest, an interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge.

Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle, and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. Percy Bysshe Shelley

Dream Bed. A short story from 1988.

2012-01-08T15:10:00.001-05:00

Dream Bed
by Sarah Gancher Sarai
{Reprinted from The Written Arts. King County Arts Commission, Seattle, WA}

My nineteenth summer, before my Sophomore year, I went to San Francisco to stay with Fredric, an old friend of my newly divorced parents. I was given a bedroom facing the afternoon sun, the setting sun. Its bed was double-sized and more than soft. The sinking pliancy was empyrean. So cushioning and tranquilizing was that bed, I slept from ten at night to ten by day, or nine to nine, or eleven to eleven, making my waking life a half-life or my life of dreams and imagination the same. Altogether, the effect was that of living an evenly divided sphere of waking and sleeping so balanced and contiguous, all summer was a rhythmic lap of waves on a mirror-smooth sheathing.

Each morning Fredric ground coffee and whisked eggs. He’d scout European bakeries for heavy, dark bread on which we’d smear avocados, then salt and pepper them for our lunch. Our dinners were seafood sweetly simmered in wines and sherries, roasts lovingly coddled, basted as often as sleeping infants are checked by tender mothers. I was as treasured as rare beef; a delight under any circumstances I’m sure, and a necessary slab of humanity in these circumstances. Fredric’s lover had left a few months before my stay. Friends still visited to join in lamentation, as if for the dead.

“Nola, Lon was tops for Fredric, that’s for sure,” I’d hear.

“He was such a beautiful man.”

“So kind.”

“And handsome.”

“So smart.”

“I thought Fredric should have kicked Lon out long ago. Lon’s cold.”

“He was offered a job with a public relations firm. He wanted it more than he wanted me. What could I say?” Fredric explained when the guests had gone and we were still seated, fiddling with the pie’s crust. “Well, of course I tried and said everything, but none of it took. The Sunday before he left we saw a play matinee, then a movie, then a cabaret that evening. He indulged me. Who else will do that?”

I fell asleep sad that night.

I woke one morning to find him moored on my bed. “Let’s go.” He tapped my arm. We drove to Ocean Beach where he and Lon had talked. He pointed to the very wave that pounded Lon’s moving announcement.

“Each time he spoke my stomach opened like an anemone and was crushed by his words.”

We sat, cold, on the sand.

“When I drove Lon to airport,” Fredric said, “I didn’t walk in with him. We stayed in the car until he almost missed his flight. Both of us were crying. Both of our hearts were broken and we knew it.

“Death may hit hard, Nola, but there’s nothing like lost love for a full emotional sweep. Maybe it would help if I had an office to go to. I should buy another restaurant instead of living off my past laurels.” My parents had met him while dining at his spare, moderate and fabulous establishment.

I heard Fredric moving around in the kitchen that same night.

“I’m sorry to wake you.” He stroked my hair.

“It’s okay.”

He threw a dish towel on the counter. “My nightmare ended and I had to get myself out of bed.”

I needed an explanation.

“I was driving back from the desert, a resort in a desert, and I realized I’d left something behind and looked, someone else was driving, and I saw the Saguaro cactus twisting like ocean flora, then grow huge, then fade. Lon became a Saguaro, twisting on the horizon. I shouted, but he wouldn’t hear. I believed he wouldn’t hear, refused to hear.”

It was six in the morning; we stayed up. I ground coffee. Fredric made omelets and passed them under the broiler. The cheese-graced eggs puffed.

Another day I was reading in bed and heard him yell.

“His heart!”

“What?”

“When we were at the beach, Lon and I, we stuck close and quiet. Did I tell you this? That’s why we’d gone there, to work us out, peaceably. I’ve been remembering this, Nola. We didn’t talk after a while. I was trying to exude hope. I could feel Lon’s heart. It wouldn’t move. Mine kept pounding like the waves. I realized it always would, no matter what.”

“That you’d keep living.”

“Of course I’ll live. But I decided I’d never use any excuse, any excuse, to lose heart.” He lifted a glass I'd set on the bedstand. “That I wouldn’t be a downer, Nola. Like Lon. When I’m honest about him, I can admit he was a downer, cold, not willing to try.” The glass rattled with melted ice.

I trekked to and from the kitchen. “Drink,” I told him.

He put both hands around the glass I held out. “I was the one doing the thinking. I was the one hoping.”

“I understand hope,” I said, “but I understand wanting better.” I wanted the arts of history and prophecy abolished. The surprise divorce of my parents was an ambush of my innocent serenity. My world had been overturned and I not unreasonably saw their unhappiness as a threat to my future happiness; an indication of my future inabilities.

I never slept fitfully in Frederic’s house but I slept thickly one night and awoke fraught and coincidental to the phone’s ringing I sprang into the kitchen and yanked the receiver. My father was on the line. He talked and talked and I kept my ear dutifully glued. My friend was by my side by the time my father had finished.

“He drives me crazy!” It was my turn. “ He called to see if I’d talked to my mother recently because even though they’re miles apart, in all ways apart, he’s still attached. Of course he is. But he has to let meknow. ‘Your mother’s a good-looking woman,’ he says and I hear the clink of ice in the glass and more than o.j. is being poured.” I click my glass of spring water against his.

“‘You don’t understand any of this,’ my pop says, ‘you kids don’t understand. So have you been in touch with your mother? Your mother and I spent many years together. What do you know? What does your mother know, anyway? That temper of hers. Your mother should take care of herself. Your mother has some deep troubles. Maybe a psychologist would help. Have you considered that? Have you asked her?’ Finally, we said our good-byes. I was crying but I didn’t let him know.”

Fredric poured me coffee then raced out and returned with fresh raspberries from the little market on the corner and served crisp waffles under berries.

I walked and rode the bus that day, all over the city. Twice, cast-adrift men followed me and it was part my doing. By looking into faces, by trying to read character and nature, I connected with the vulnerable fringe. I had to divest myself of my enamorees, once by hopping on a bus, once by asking directions from a cop. When I returned home, I asked:

“How could you two break up after crying together about breaking up?”

“It was bad,” he conceded, “and it doesn’t make sense. I guess the heart isn’t connected to the brain; and I believe the body does have a deep wisdom. Maybe it’s too deep.”

I slept soundly that night and dozed the next day and slept even more deeply the following night and said to Fredric in the kitchen the next morning:

“It’s doomed. My future is doomed. My love future. All the information I’ve been given is deceptive.”

“Because your parents divorced?”

I stared. “All of it. Because everything they passed on that could lead me to believe I could live and love and do it all successfully, has been changed by the divorce.”

“Now, Nola . . .”

“No, listen,” I interrupted. “Something went wrong way back. Have I told you my aunt’s story? My mom told me. This was years ago when they were still living at home. Aunt Sheila fell totally in love. And he was totally in love with her. A nice guy, too, my mother said. They became engaged and he asked her if she’d work the first couple of years of the marriage so they could get ahead. Sheila refused and the engagement busted. She turned down her true love and then she cried for a year. Can you imagine that? She cried a whole year. My mother watched and vowed she’d never get hurt like that. Maybe she adored my father when she married him, but he wasn’t the man for my poor mother to love. So what chance do I have?”

“Thatisan awful story.” He turned the radio on and off. “They could make an opera about Sheila. I can see that kind of resolve in your mother. But didn’t you write last spring you were seeing someone?”

“Yes, and it was crappy. Thank God it didn’t last. Three months of begging for love.”

“You’re not the first.”

“Well, any begging is too much. I’d be at his place and it would be logical for me to spend the night and he’d say no and I’d have to ask a couple of times for him to relent. Who knows who’s right. It felt like begging and as I did it I swore I’d never do it in another romance. Do you believe romance and marriage is all no-fault?”

“Not always.” Fredric sounded balanced.

“He wanted everything his way. I stayed with him the last few days before finals were over and vacation began. I had one dream.” I described the dream:

“There was a light-skinned black woman. She had purple blemishes on her body, below the collarbone and across her cheeks. I thought they were splotches and began trying to be overtly sympathetic. Then I saw her boyfriend. He had the same markings. I inspected him. The blemishes were swirls in the marble. Both man and woman were statues. I touched them. The man was perfect. She crumbled.”

We busied ourselves. We beat eggs. We baked three layers of genoise; light, rich, spongy cake. The confectioners of heaven get orders for this sybaritic delight. Angels eat their namesake cake as an everyday dalliance and genoise for on-high holy days. We saturated it with rum, spread the layers with mocha cream and dropped slivered almonds on top. We both had unruly dreams that night. I dreamt hot butter was oozing from a chocolate bar and a chorus of shrill women were sighing in the background. Fredric dreamt the clouds were hurling black eggs, far too large to be coffee beans, on the city. He remembered regretting they weren’t coffee beans.

Several days later I was again resting and again I heard the phone ring. I’d just crawled into bed. The time was only 7:30 p.m. but an increasing despondency had prompted me, maybe dulled me, to choose an earlier shift in my bed-bound summer. I hadn’t yet patted the final pat on my pillows and therefore rolled without resentment onto the floor to answer the phone. My bed wasn’t going anywhere without me.

Lon was on the line. He asked for Fredric, who by this time was at my side, wrapped in a towel.

“I knew it,” he declared as he took the receiver from my hand. “I knew it would be you. I’ve been thinking of you in the bath. I was in the bath.” Fredric shooed me away, then grabbed me before I was farther than arms’ distance and pulled me to his moist towel and held me throughout the conversation. I was able to hear it all. Lon had overshot his mark in settling into luxury living and was in debt. The firm he worked for had provided moving expenses, and a big salary, but he’d been banking on a commission, too, and had spent with that in mind; apparently done betting and didn’t want to blemish his reputation in a new town. He asked to borrow money. Fredric was ecstatic.

“And I’ll send some right now, tonight, by Western Union.” He hung up the phone and turned to me. “Excuse me, my dear.” He ripped off the towel and shouted, “Hope!” He dressed and raced out with cash he kept under his mattress and I returned to my bed of dreams where I saw a moon rise and a lizard try to leap over it without success, then claw at its center.

I described this lizard the next morning. Fredric was delighted with the lizard—with everything. He was glad Lon had called. He hoped, with calculation, Lon would find his new life unfeasible, and return.

“And you’d take him back?” I asked.

“You think I shouldn’t?”

“Beats me what should happen. I just want to know.”

“Well, I would,” he said. “I refuse to give up. You haven’t met him. You’d like him.”

“How will I meet him? I’m leaving soon,” I moaned. “Where’d the summer go?”

“Nola, there’s so much we haven’t done.” He leaned on me, as friends do. “There’s so much we haven’t cooked. We must atone.”

“Let’s make pancakes.”

“Why not!” He set me to grating orange while placing pecans on a cookie tray for roasting. “Roasted pecan and orange pancakes. Nola, don’t bother with your degree. Stay here and eat your way into old age.”

The day before I left, there was a post card in the mail from Lon, from the Bahamas. He was on vacation and he wasn’t alone. Frederic didn’t say much, except he’d always been prepared for the worst. He went out and I wandered the apartment all day. He still hadn’t returned at midnight and I pulled back all the drapes so the moonlight aided by city light could enter. The rooms felt sallow and ill as I roamed the wooden floors for hours. Each thing in the apartment stood remote and objective in the night glow. Each thing looked distant and self-sufficient. Each thing was impersonal and I began to feel very lonely. I went to my room and stood at the window. The moon was full, almost bursting its sphere. I pushed my dream bed to the window so I could sink in and keep watch. I stared so long my gaze numbed. I slept. In my sleep I saw it happen. I looked to the night sky whose velvet was corroded by city light and with horrified eyes I saw the moon break. In a wrenching snap, the translucent twins cruelly outlined against the night sky, two things, two half-symbols, fell. I awoke shaking.

My mind flicked on and I began to bawl, unrelentingly, unremittingly, loudly and unceasingly. The giant tears poured onto the pillow and my sobs, at first muted by discretion, soon filled the air.

“Nola?” Fredric was in the room.

I kept crying.

“Don’t stop.” He held me.

I cried until I was drained and then I stopped.

“It’s almost four p.m. Why don’t we have high tea.”

“Do you have cookies?”

“Cookies!”he shouted. “High tea isn’t for cookies. We need cakes and pears. We need the tea of old Russia. Come and help.”

And so while Fredric zipped to the bakery and little market, I was set up at the kitchen table, polishing a samovar, making it bright. I lit the charcoals to brew the tea that could sustain all the Russias through a nineteenth-century winter. At the end of a warm and good summer, Fredric and I sipped mighty tea and nibbled rum cakes, pears and grapes.

We did this together.
________

Sarah Gancher Sarai. Reprinted with permission. The Written Arts. King County Arts Commission, Seattle, WA. 1988.

Dear 1 Percenters. Have I Too Glibly Addressed You?

2012-01-07T18:46:00.001-05:00

America's uncle.

I wrote about money, its lack, its impact on me as a poet, for Poets on the Great Recession.***

In my brief and poetically illustrated essay I address my audience directly, assume that “You” live a life similar to mine, that “You” have as negligible a bank balance as I do. You might. You might not.

What do I know? There are poets who make good bread, and more power to them. Ed Hirsch, who in addition to being poet and professor, heads the Guggenheim Foundation—seems like a good job. He deserves all and any monies, if only for How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry. What a rare tribute to poetry and its readers that book is; it assures and creates more readers of poems.

I figure Rita Dove is doing okay, but then she teaches, has racked up some decent prizes and grants, and just edited the Penguin Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Poetry.

Cornelius Eady travels the world promoting poetry, encouraging poets of color—all colors and shapes and styles—to write. I've seen his and his wife's New York apartment—it's terrific but modest. Still he may have a little up his sleeve financially, being a teacher, and all. But Cornelius is not in the 1 percent, nor is Dove, and probably not even Hirsch.

Which leaves a silent member of the silent minority of 1 percenters to chance upon my work. Are you there, Ma'am or Sir? I'm interested in knowing. Let's meet at a bar, talk. If you like poetry or fiction, I like you. Okay?

***Poets on the Great Recession is a series of essays and poems curated by Eileen R. Tabios.

The Dry Spell Is Over

2012-01-05T11:07:00.000-05:00

Art by Fan Zhou

Sometimes writers don't write. It is not the end of their writing life. It is not the end of all creativity on Earth evermore, though some writers, such as this one, harbor such fears like they are creaky wooden vessels and the harbor teeming with thieves and conscripted sailors.

I'm not sure I know what that means, but shivers are sailing up and down my spine, matey. The main news here is good. Yesterday I didn't think I could write. This morning I got up and wrote. By "got up" I mean made two cups of coffee. By wrote, I mean remembered I title I decided on just as I was falling asleep.

Sometimes you get lucky and don't forget what you were thinking of the night before. I got lucky. Perhaps because title of my newest poem, "Rolling on the Floor Killing Elves," is not subtle. Perhaps because it is, in some form, archived in a series of comments, a conversation I had on FB with another poet. Whose name I withhold merely to protect her.

Who besides Sarah Sarai wants to be associated with "Rolling on the Floor Killing Elves." It may be dangerous to explore so much about spanking new work, but, well, I'll find out, soon enough. The thing is, the poem starts silly and self-evolves into a vehicle for dreams remembered and not, and a family member who never, until last night, visited one of my dreams.

I love creativity and the process. I love seeing words spill out of me in combinations I never before knew.

One more possible reason for the end of the siege. Last night I submitted two poems to a journal for which I tailored the poems. The poems weren't requested. There is no guaranty they will be accepted and a great margin of possibility they will be rejected. I wrote them after being told by an editor who had accepted one of my poems, once, my new work wasn't quite what this editor's readers were looking for. So I had, against all belief in the possibility of doing so, tailored my work. Then discovered the journal was closed to submissions.

But, lo! these many months later, submissions were opened, I tried. When one door opens, so do many many more. Keep your doors open, universe. Sarah Sarai is moving on in.

Horny for Creativity. The Tendency to Create.

2012-01-03T12:51:00.001-05:00

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, / But in ourselves, that we are underlings." Okay. So there is no word, mood, conviction, delineation of the condition by Shakespeare I dispute, but each piercing of our veil is state-dependent, maybe plot-, story- or historical-fact ("fact") dependent. I am no Caesar; whatever tragedies allotted me have been lived. I'm sure of that, and my surety is interesting.

I can't say another plane won't fly into a building, that my neighborhood won't become a shrine, again, to the lost; that the unpleasant, the shouldn't have happened happenings or memories from the past won't spring to action like Civil War reenactors. I can say my response and assessment instincts are changed. All that damn positive thinking has its impact.

Trying to break what feels like a creative dry spell I found this quotation: I can always be distracted by love, but eventually I get horny for my creativity. [Gilda Radner]

Amen, sister. Point is, well, a sigh. The impulse to explore this further has, as they say, fled. Seeding the fallow is what I'm doing, is the connecting thread and threat to this posting, my working out impulses and letting them work me creatively, however, whenever, but, preferably, soon.

Hey, does underling mean what we take it to mean, not that we (I) are beneath the fatey stars, but that we are under some a boss, the law, some (any) power. Whatever. We're not in control. Lack of control forces our hand, makes us trust. Calls us to a belief in the tendency to create.

History of the Night. Borges. I change "men" to "women"

2012-01-03T00:08:00.001-05:00

Truthis, I'm in a fallow period. Fallow, like a field in the Bibleawaiting a parable to make me spring me to life. I'm counting on Borges,fate, luck, the odds, to change my tide, or to release me from laziness.

Onejumpstart is my appropriation and probably misappropriation of this poem. I read it four or five times today, and in each reading made an agreement with Borges that "men" was inclusive, a trope of language, of its time. And then as I copied it out, I was not happy.

I thought, no, Sarah, look for a poem by a woman. And I might have, except for the fact that this is a beautiful, haunting, terrifying, specific delineation. So I just changed the word "men" to the word "women" both times it's used. Borges is larger than that. Equally true is that none of us are larger. Most true: "History of the Night" is remarkable and you must read it. The night, the dark, fear, blindness, ancient braveries, masteries, the heavens in their velvet revolving.

By the way. Luisde León was a Sixteenth Century Spanish priest. He was a guest of the Inquisition not once but twice, translator (Song of Songs), academic and poet.

Historyof the Night

Downthrough the generations

womenbuilt the night.

Inthe beginning it was blindness and sleep

andthorns that tear the naked foot

andfear of wolves.

Weshall never know who forged the word

forthe interval of shadow

whichdivides the two twilights;

weshall never know in what century it stood as a cipher

forthe space between the stars.

Otherwomen engendered the myth.

Theymade it the mother of the tranquil Fates

whoweave destiny,

andsacrificed black sheep to it

andthe cock which presages its end.

TheChaldeans gave it twelve houses;

infiniteworlds, the Gateway.

Latinhexameters gave it form

andthe terror of Pascal.

Luisde Leónsaw it in the fatherland

of hisshuddering soul.

Now wefeel it to be inexhaustible

likean ancient wine

and noone can contemplate it without vertigo

andtime has charged it with eternity.

And tothink it would not exist

butfor those tenuous instruments, the eyes.

JorgeLuis Borges, tr. Charles Tomlinson. Waiting for the Night, 1978-1985, in Poems of the Night, Penguin, 2010.

Borges, my last of '11, my first of '12. "Someone," a poem

2012-01-01T11:33:00.002-05:00

It seems the right thing, to remember the last poem I read in 2011, and to make it my first in 2012. It's from one of my bedside collections the past few months, Poems of the Night, a selection from three of Borges' books.

"Someone" ("Alguien" in Spanish) is from A Gift of Blindness, 1958-1977.

Like someone, I live with "reasons more terrible than a tiger." Please note and admire how Jorge Luis Borges defines our crouched fears as impossibly muscular.

This morning I jimmied a flyer for an Occupy Language event that will be held on January 26, 5-7:30, at the Bowery Poetry Club, and in hunting for a quote looked no further than James Baldwin. Everylegend, moreover, contains its residium of truth, and the rootfunction of language is to control the universe by describing it.

"...to control..." the universe seems too colonial, but "describing it," is just the ticket, a ticket I buy. Borges describes.

Someone

Aman worn down by time,

aman who does not even expect death

(theproofs of death are statistics

andeveryone runs the risk

ofbeing the first immortal),

aman who has learned to express thanks

forthe days' modest alms:

sleep,routine, the taste of water,

anunsuspected etymology,

aLatin or Saxon verse,

thememory of a woman who left him

thirtyyears ago now

whomhe can call to mind without bitterness,

aman who is aware that the present

isboth future and oblivion,

aman who has betrayed

andhas been betrayed,

mayfeel suddenly, when crossing the street,

amysterious happiness

notcoming from the side of hope

butfrom an ancient innocence,

fromhis own roots or from some diffused god.

Heknows better than to look at it closely,

forthere are reasons more terrible than tigers

whichwill prove to him

thatwretchedness is his duty,

buthe accepts humbly

thisfelicity, this glimmer.
____________
Jorge Luis Borges, A Gift of Blindness, 1958-1977, in Poems of the Night, Penguin, 2010. (Many translators are listed.)

2012: get rich or die mayan

2011-12-30T08:38:00.001-05:00

Expect to hear a lotta jokes in 2012. A lotta comics complaining. Hey, I'm mayan up here.

Flamingo Watching [Kay Ryan]

2011-12-26T17:50:00.000-05:00

Needless to say, I identify and overly identify with the flamingo, here, as I am meant to. She is the odd kid in high school, the arty one in a dull, stale office. The unnatural elect scorned by the "natural elect" who are less interesting and yet oddly and perennially empowered by their mediocrity.

Ryan's rhymes and twists, slanting and sinuous as the flamingo herself, are a joy. This is a good poem to type out, a fingertip-happy ear-snappy poem. And by the way, since I had to look it up, I might as well share. Furbelow: A ruffle or flounce. [by folk etymology from French dialect farbella; see falbala]

Flamingo Watching

Wherever the flamingo goes,
she brings a city's worth of
furbelows. She seems
unnatural by nature--
too vivid and peculiar
a structure to be pretty,
and flexible to the point
of oddity. Perched on
those legs, anything she does
seems like an act. Descending
on her egg or draping her head
along her back, she's
too exact and sinuous
to convince an audience
she's serious. The natural elect,
they think, would be less pink,
less able to relax their necks,
less flamboyant in general.
They privately expect that it's some
poorly jointed bland grey animal
with mitts for hands
whom God protects.

______
Kay Ryan, from, Flamingo Watching, 1994, in The Best of It, New and Selected Poems, Grove Press, 2011.

She Blasted the Canon to Hell

2011-12-13T17:21:00.004-05:00

The older I get, the more I am convinced the canon of "literary" "classics" should be blasted to hell. It's just fine with me if we start over with a perspective not born in the faux democracy of the Greeks, woman-fearing religions of the west and colonialism.

This relates to the latest outrage, Helen Vendler's tasteless critique of the Penguin Anthology of American Poetry, edited by Rita Dove. Dove redefines the canon and bless her for that. Vendler is sour about a redefinition --a-- and --b-- making it clear she is not guided by dictates of democracy, kindness, openmindedness, or a belief in the equalify of all personkind.

I've commented, cross-commented, posted new links including one to a new interview with Dove, already, on Facebook, Twitter and a listserv. All relevant links and opinions are a Google away.

A mere Google away. I'm not going to replicate the effort here, but in case I'm the only poet left standing after China and Pakistan destroy us,form a pact and destroy us, something I thought about on December 6, Pearl Harbor Day, I want to let the record show that Vendler attacked Dove, and that I was aware of it.

And pro-Dove. I am a dove! Now give me the money to buy the anthology which is long and tasty and not cheap but doable and enjoy a new concept of American verse.

The Democracy of the Open Mic

2011-12-06T15:47:00.001-05:00

What I like about Open Mics is the democracy, given limits of time and space.

Why write this? I recently heard a poet say, No one goes to open mics if they they write good poetry (or--are connected). That's not a direct quote, but it conveys the gist.

Okay. What's different between open mics and poetry readings with featured readers. In New York, the latter are generally staged by the under forty-set. The under-forty set who have graduated from a local MFA program and have friends their age, with their interests.

The poetry readings with featured readers do not, in fact, necessarily offer a finer quality poetry than open mics do, not overall. I recently attended a reading of three featured readers. Each had an MFA. One was a wonderful poet--or a poet I consider wonderful, as does a publisher and critics and the friend I went with. The other two were not wonderful. Much self-absorption. No wit, no wisdom, no lyricism, no ear.

That said, I may only hear one or two poets whose poems make me yearn for more when I go to an open mic of, say twenty poets. And unless I get lucky, I don't hear a Frank O'Hara or Rita Dove or Marilyn Nelson or Doug Anderson in the making.

(Of course, God knows what the other poets think of me. Usually they avoid me. We all make our judgments.)

Unless I attend a reading at Cave Canem, the organization for Black poets, it's unlikely I'll see a Black poet at a featured-reader event. Sad and most often true. Open mics are often mixed, maybe not fully representative of all New York, but lively, of more than one social set--or more than one esthetic. I remember a young woman--this was years ago in Seattle--improvise a poem about being made love to by her supremely attentive boyfriend. It wasn't a great poem but the event of it, the lighting, her voice, the remarkably quiet (for a bar) room, not to be forgotten. And not to be missed.

Yes. Sometimes I want to hear high level art honed by years of work. Sometimes I want to hear a famous poet. But sometimes I just want a chance to test out my own poems. Sometimes I want to be around people who love poetry. How wonderful is that.

"Blame It on Family" > Andromeda, her boastful mother, gods doing what gods do

2011-11-30T15:54:00.001-05:00

*see below

You want troubled families, I suggest Greek mythology. You want a boastful mother, zero in on Cassiopeia. A precursor to Sleeping Beauty's stepmother, Cassiopeia needed that thing that women think we need or that thing which the men who write about women think we need--to be considered gorgeous. And not just gorgeous, but best-in-show fabulous lovely.

What Cassiopeia made known was that she was prettier than the Nereids, Poseidon's female posse. Why this story isn't about the death wish or self-destructive vanity, I don't know. Well, maybe I do, because I don't know what happened to Cassiopeia but I do know that Poseidon, who was Zeus' brother, had some angry Nereids to deal with, which he did by having Cassiopeia's daughter, Andromeda, picked up by the too-pretty police.

A monster was rented from Monsters-R-Us, the most profitable business going in mythology, and dispatched to Cassiopeia's own Ethiopia.

Word was that that only when Andromeda was slain would everyone mythical and powerful be happy (for happy, read, triumphant).And since anticipation is half the joy in killing a beautiful woman or any woman (what's wrong with this story? lots!), Andromeda was chained to a rock. Rocks and chains--ancient Greek holding cells. Women in distress--the stuff of every other t.v. show or movie.

The rest of the story, which varies, is in my poem, "Blame It on Family," kindly presented in the Fall 2011 issue of Redheaded Stepchild. Please read it! Thanks.

*By the way, I couldn't bear to post one of those classical images of half-naked Andromeda twisting on her chains, her breasts a twitter. She is a rose. All women are roses. In the picture above, the rose in encased, courtesy of the Rosicrucian order.

As the Police Move in, so Does Poetry

2011-11-16T19:26:00.001-05:00

The poet Sparrow, who ran for President
as a revolutionary communist
within the Republican Party

When I met with Stephen (see previous post), he streamed a video of the eviction from Zucotti Park. Yes, there were policemen and women, there were batons at rest before the cops started moving in. There was the gloomy, cold night, odd city lights, confusion, taunts. And there was poetry.

Whatever was happening as part of the melee, Stephen J. Boyer was reading from the Poetry Anthology. The cops were standing at attention and Stephen was reading from the Poetry Anthology. The cops were rousting and Stephen was reading from the Poetry Anthology.

Among the poems he read, Stephen told me, were some by Sparrow, who, as I recall, stormed The New Yorker years ago, no small feat. So of course Stephen said "Sparrow" more than once. Later--the next day--I'm not sure, the police were calling him Sparrow. Not mocking. Identifying the poetry purveyor and acknowledging the flame of art burns a hell of a lot brighter than the quick, bitter triumph of violence.

Once policeman told Stephen he'd liked hearing the poetry read. I'll try to get Stephen to post the video. I'm writing now so I don't forget. A major aim of Occupy Language is use poetry to disseminate ideas and also to disseminate poetry. This here seems like a good enough example.

Maybe you'll come up with another way to disseminate.

Here's a terrific profile of Sparrow by Chris Dodge. In Utne.

Poetry Anthology 1.0 (Occupy Wall Street) available for download.

2011-11-16T18:43:00.001-05:00

Anna Akhmatova

I spent some time with Stephen J. Boyer this afternoon. He'd slept maybe three hours since his--all of Occupy Wall Street's--eviction from Zucotti Park, but being young and glowing with fires of sane righteousness, was still working on the Poetry Anthology.

The Anthology was stored in organizing white binders, by week and month. Poets from around New York, the country, the world contributed. That the Anthology would be digitized seemed a lazy inevitability last Sunday night when Occupy Language held its weekly meeting. When Bloomberg and Kelly ordered their henchmen and henchladies to pepper-spray and sometimes beat, to, at the very least, evict, without warning, protesters at Zucotti, when the Occupy Wall Street Library was nearly destroyed and cartons of books thrown in Dumpsters, the digitization became a necessity. Like, now.

And Stephen, who I caught up with at a friend's apartment, wouldn't sleep until he'd put it online. My hungry ego wants you to know that I cut and pasted the poems into a document (yes, I did a Control-A, Control-C, Control-P--I'm fairly amazing), and suggested a way to create a pdf. I didn't live at Zucotti, didn't night and day build a library like Sean, Stephen, others.The Poetry Anthology was not my idea.

Here's the first version of the Poetry Anthology. Consider this Anthology 1.0. There are many more poems waiting, and many more will be sent in. In the meantime here it is. If the great library of Alexandria had been digitized,well, there'd be less mystery, less a sense of loss. The Poetry Anthology from the Occupy Wall Street Library is being digitized.

Hoorah.

Marathon Reading of Bartleby the Scrivener. So far, no reaction from Police Commissioner Ray Kelly

2011-11-11T11:59:00.001-05:00

I wonder what Mayor Bloomberg would have to say to Bartleby the Scriviner when up against his "flute-like" tone of voice and his "I prefer not to."

Bloomberg: "Well, he has the right to his opinion, I am a strong proponent of freedom of speech, but there's a point where you just have to get moving. And Bartleby has passed that point."

As for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly who I once admired for his intelligence and education, I don't know how he'd handle Bartleby. I hope even combat veteran Kelly would balk at throwing a net over the ginger-nuts eating scriviner. Kelly, by the way, continues to have an intelligence of sorts and his accomplishments are many. His heart, alas, is shrinking.

Yesterday's marathon reading of Bartleby the Scrivener, by Melville, sparks these questions. Just a few blocks from Zucotti Park, at 55 Wall Street, an indoors public space which generously doesn't throw nets over anyone, so far, when used for committee meetings.The event fresh in my mind, it is easy enough to imagine Kelly and/or Bloomberg confronting the text. Hmmm.

Far better to imagine was the group of well more than fifty who gathered. And efficiently, as everything connected with Occupy Wall Street is organized and mannered. The reading took around two hours.

Thanks to Occupy Language, Melville House Publishers, Housing Works Bookstore and whoever else for sponsoring the event and for my portion which offered an insight into the narrator--alternately boastful but, in the light of morning, honest at his ineffectual efforts to move Bartleby. "He was more a man of preferences than assumptions."

You and a whole bunch of others, Bartleby.

I Need To Become Myself (being Sarah Gancher Sarai)

2011-11-04T15:31:00.000-04:00

How do I legally become myself?

I was born Sarah Gancher. No doctor was present but there was a midwife and I have a certificate stating what seems obvious to me. I'm here. My parents would serve as good witnesses but they have chosen to view the whole thing of life from the perspective of the passed.

Sometime in the early nineties I started using my pen name and when I told my bank and the social security office (the bank was in Seattle and the social security office was in Oakland), no one objected. Suddenly I became Sarah Sarai, no questions asked.I might write, "suffice it to say this couldn't happen now," but who knows. When I go through airport security the big guards look at me with contempt, as if I were an insult to their strength and canny, so obviously am I nonthreatening. No one asks me anything. When I start talking, things sometimes change, but my point is, I could smuggle things if I were so inclined. Of course I'm not (really and truly) so maybe I have earned the contempt the airport screeners have for me. I skate through some things that hold up other people.

It is more than likely there would have been more hoops to jump through if I approached my bank or a social security office with a name change, or the same hoops would be proffered but they'd be flaming. I have social security cards in both names.

I have college transcripts from three colleges. All three have the same social security number, but my graduate school knows me as Sarah Sarai. It didn't question the difference in names. Hmmmm. That may be a key to getting help. So that I can seamlessly (relatively) skate through the systems ahead of me, those being social security and various other state and federal agencies. I could probably enter the penal system without so much as a howdy do, but like Bartleby, I'd prefer not.

To repeat, I do not have a piece of paper which states that Sarah Sarai is Sarah Gancher. See? Think like someone who works for the government and has a job to do. In L.A. my nieces and nephews could stand up for me. But could they? They didn't meet me until I was a teenager, and then they were more involved with getting their poo cleaned off and being burped. I have a few high school friends in L.A. who could stand up for me, as well as a sister. And one cousin.

In my most recent published short story, An Archive of Paranormal Inquiry Into Coping (in The Writing Disorder), I decided to sign the story as Sarah Gancher Sarai. It feels like who I am. It stands out more than Sarah Sarai and the numerology was more positive.

The really cool result of this was that two days later a friend from high school emailed me. She'd just found me. She must have set a Google alert on Sarah Gancher. Anyway, family curse on "Gancher" aside, it is a good thing to be fully me. All Sarah fiction hereon is written by Sarah Gancher Sarai.

Now the job is to convince the government. All good and sane ideas welcome.

My stories: The Wild Night I Was Born

2011-11-04T14:47:00.002-04:00

by Sarai Gancher Sarai
from Tampa Review 23: 2003
I, Adin Pearlman, am a tailor and salesman. My haberdashery establishment is on Wilshire Boulevard, the Miracle Mile of Los Angeles. I don’t mean to press a point as flat as I would an inseam, but I think about miracles as I alter and sell suits. Suits are my living, although I had other plans when I was younger.

It’s a Friday; I’m in the store, thinking, Why? Why? Am I a failure? Must my thoughts always fray into useless scraps? I’m agonizing; the buzzer rings, and I look up to see a lawyer, I can tell right away from his arrogant and stagy, yet lumbering, stride. He takes one step back, investigates, his eyes half-closed, and coughs, nervously.

This lawyer is cautious and a little broken. I zoom in. A look of fatigue crossed his face years ago and lingered—I’ve seen it before. He’s a big man, big shoulders, thick hands, broad belly, and a head you want to grasp for the pleasure of feeling its heft. The lawyer tells me his name, Simon Zimmerman, and we get to work.

“So, Simon” I remove an ill-placed pin from a light wool hound’s tooth check jacket. “You’re a lawyer, an attorney.” His eyebrows rise. “This suit proclaims your dignity which an attorney needs.”

“Everyone needs dignity” As if they were a balanced scale of justice, Simon holds out his hands palm up. Your honor, his pose suggests, let us be fair.

I lower his arms. Motion denied. I explain that for all the heartache in my life, I’ve always dressed so as to advertise my worth and additionally, my education and scholarship. “My suit for example. A nice blue, very good lines, right?” I pound my stomach which has no give—not bad for a 50 year-old. “I wasn’t always a haberdasher, you know. I was going to become a professor of literature at U.C.L.A.”

Simon buttons and unbuttons the vest with ease; smiles. “From academic to haberdasher? You left school?”

As if I were an opera singer—Jan Pearce or Placido belting out an aria, I fling my arms wide. Silver pins silently plip on the carpet. “It wasn’t a lack of publications, nor lack of tributes that caused my career transition, Simon.” I’m pleased his vest doesn’t gap, is quite flattering. “It wasn’t even doubting the possibility of tragedy and classical sentiment in this shoddy world.”

“Was it a woman?”

I slap my forehead. This Simon’s an astute man, a seer, so I offer him a low price, over which we dicker and I offer to buy him a beer in the bargain. “What about Canter’s?” I notice he’s not wearing a wedding band; neither am I. “Like me you’re a bachelor.” I bend down to pick up a pin, a maneuver requiring delicacy and persistence.

“Adin, you’re making assumptions.”

“You’re divorced?” I glance up as I slide the entrapped pin from the carpet.

“I’m widowed, but there’s more.”

I shake out the crease to my trousers. “You’re dark with a furrowed brow, you’re a sufferer. Is that right?” I’m not convinced this Simon Zimmerman is a human of overwhelming dimension, but as usual, I need to talk to someone—anyone.

“A sufferer?” They say that Sarah laughed and now, apparently, it’s Simon’s turn.

I’m veering towards sensitive at Simon’s guffaw, but continue. “Where was your family from?”

Simon shrugs. “Russia, the Caucasus.”

Ah! “Georgian, that explains ferocity.”

“Like Stalin?”

“Russian accounts for the sadness.”

“What’s all this genealogy? I’m Jewish.”

“Right, landsman, Jewish accounts for the suffering. But...” I victoriously plunge the retrieved pin into a cushion around my wrist, “...Russians suffer better than anyone, so it follows that Russian Jews suffer better than other Jews.” Suffering: a topic of consequence. Don’t we all suffer? Greatly?

“You should have been a lawyer.” Growls from Simon’s stomach.

Separately we drive to the twenty-four-hour deli on Fairfax, and soon are seated at a round booth roomy enough for a party of five. Before sliding in, I wipe the maroon vinyl with a paper napkin. Even a little grease is no good for the gander, as I tell my customers.

A gray-haired waitress saunters over. She leans on her left leg, making her left hip a table for her crooked arm. I don’t like it when they lean.

“Do you want to bring us a couple of beers, dear?” I scan the menu.

“Ellen.”

She has a name; good for her. “You want to bring us two Heinekens?” I consult, first the menu, second, Simon. “That okay with you, Si?”

Maybe Simon prefers Bud Lite or Corona; he doesn’t say. “Certainly. And I’ll order.” He smiles at this Ellen.

“Let the girl get our drinks.”

She, Ellen, taps the order pad with her pencil. The dark gleam in her eyes is no cipher: two post middle aged farts; bad tippers; can’t get it up. The woman does not have my gift of perception.

I order roast chicken. Simon, the special, brisket, gravy, latkes, a vegetable, a dinner salad. He struggles with himself before requesting a bowl of chicken soup with two matzo balls. “I shouldn’t push my luck.”

Feh. “Now, Simon, my life’s an open book.” As is my face, which, like my almost kinky hair, is red, not florid, but bright, a pimento. My forehead is lined. My eyes faded blue as if they had been left in a sunny window and forgotten. “I’ve told volumes of it to different people.”

I left my jacket at the shop and now I roll up my shirt sleeves. “I was born in Palmdale—a few Jews lived there, and this is my story.”

From the moment of my grand entrance in the universe, I reveal, there were signs I could have been a Jonah. For on the night I was born, desert winds blustered, dust swirled and stars shivered. This night, wild enough for a prophet’s birth, the midwife coddled me in the fullness of her encircling arms, then offered me to my mother who sighed. What a sigh! I remember it with perfect clarity—and I am born anew, alas, each time I remember). “No thanks.” Mother was resolute. Ten months later she sped off, leaving me and Pop with one another.

“You could be more sensitive than some of us.” Simon drums his round fingers on the marbleized table top. “Your mother said 'No thanks’?”

I calm myself, admirable considering the lava flows erupting from my volcanic heart. Ellen bangs our dinner salads before us. Her manicured nails are crimson; her fingers are short, round and strong.

“Dear, I’ll tell you what I would really like.” A woman such as this does not get my goat. “Ranch dressing. Think you can find a side of Ranch for me?”

“One Ranch, coming up.” Ellen is a train conductor, announcing. Away she plods to return with a bowl of flecked white stuff, it’s quite tasty, which I spoon over iceberg lettuce, two cherry tomatoes, four cucumber slices and carrot. Grated.

“So, Simon.” I shake on the pepper. “As a man of integrity and intelligence, what do you think?”

“If your story’s accurate, and of course it is,” he adds hastily, “it’s remarkable. From prophet to academic to tailor. And many stops in between, I’m sure.”

I think, how true.

“I, as I mentioned, am not entirely what I appear to be.”

“Tell.”

Simon pauses to swipe at his forehead with his embossed paper napkin. Does he want a Jewish deus ex machina, a device of an argumentative Yahweh to descend and outtalk us both? Simon, Simon, only to a few did God speak. Only in the Bible or a few dark shtetl tales are human events influenced by anything but time and a theoretically natural course of events.

“So be it. My wife died recently.”

“I’m sorry!”

“And now I can be open.”

I note Simon’s uneaten tomato. Sometimes food draws my keen attention.
“I didn’t want to get married, but my father forced me.” Ellen arrives to clear our salad plates. “I realized very young that I was,” he pronounces all syllables, “homosexual.” Ellen’s head juts forward. I shoo her away.

“We shouldn’t tip the waitress.” In the abstract I have no trouble with Simon’s revelation.

“Adin, I realized it when I was 12, but what could I do about it? I couldn’t say a word to my father—and my mother? My Jewish mother, if you’ll indulge me, converted to Christian Science. My father was domineering, hateful to her, the woman needed escape. After she gave birth to my youngest sister she was ill; one of our neighbors introduced her to Mary Baker Eddy and the concepts of Christian Science.”

It’s hard to imagine Simon, so weighted by his body, connected to Christian Science, a woman’s religion, an hysteric’s religion, advocating avoidance of medical attention.
But he was. “My daughter tells me that Mary Baker Eddy was a victim of internalized misogyny. We’re all victims of the internal. I was in the closet until my wife died.”
My hand speeds to my Vesuvius heart.

“My mother didn’t have much use for most things in the perceivable world, i.e., the human body. I don’t know how much of that came from dealings with my father.” We both gulp.

“I learned about Matter, Mortal Mind, and how to disregard the body and its wants. I learned Puritanism. Jews can be Puritans, you know that.”

We have that strain, certainly there is the possibility of being a little tight in Judaism, although: “I would like to say no other religion understands life’s joy like Judaism.”

“Joy, celebration, the holidays, shabbat, right. But, if you’ll allow me, Adin, being Jewish is no Sunday picnic. I stay away from religion. I eat Jewish, that’s how I’m Jewish.”

Ellen arrives with the entrees. “One chickie, one beefie.” She winks at Simon as she plops down his full plate.

“Have you considered the stage, dear?” I ask.

At me, Ellen sneers, and shifts her half-century of weight, left to right leg. Far better to suit up men than women, I reflect.

“Terrible person, I’m sorry I came here.”

“I think she’s funny.” Simon fumbles for his fork.

I remonstrate myself for my facile dismissal, earlier in the day, of this humane and oh-so-suffering soul.

“What’s to say?” Simon continues. “My father terrified me. My mother taught me to disregard my body. They set the stage; I was the actor. Until recently I’d never been to a gay bar and to tell you the truth, at this point in my life, I have a mix of feelings, of which relief is only part.”

I spear slippery chicken skin and pile it on the plate’s ledge.

“And my wife would have been happy with an arranged marriage. I gave her two daughters. Maybe she suspected. Life isn’t perfect, life can be disappointing. We all know it.”

He chews and talks; the roast beef adds robustness to his words. “I wish things could have been different. I wish I could have been brave enough to come out, but I raised two children, I’m respected in my field—this is all legitimate. I’ve done what I’ve done and I’ve lost what I lost. And now, at least, I’m honest.”

In the rubble of Simon’s middle-aged life I see an inner-Phoenix taking wing. I reach over for some brisket from his plate. A little beef is good. You’ll notice even the Chinese, whose arteries run free, eat just a little beef with many vegetables. “You don’t mind, do you?”

Simon’s eyes are lapel wide.

“Look at me.” My fork is in my hand; its tines pointing to my chest. “I thought I was a scholar and a husband.” I steal a bit of Simon’s latke, plunk applesauce on top.

“While I was teaching I married Sansi. I was in love before we spoke. You should have seen her! I took her to the desert on our first date, hoping the stars would inspire her heart.”

I slump. “We married, we divorced. It took years before I ceased awaiting her return, during which time she slept with every man in West L. A., and then married an English professor at U.S.C. I became a tailor, suiting up others so they could attract and conquer.

“And irony reigns supreme. I hear she’s faithful to her new husband.” I sigh. “I’m a good haberdasher.”

“What good, you’re great. Adin, listen, you’re right, we all need to come out. You need to come out as a sufferer.” He considers. “No, as an ascetic. You’ve lived without a wife, without the career of your dreams. There’s a reason.”

“I hope so.” I reflect. I’ve hoped that for years. I’ve hoped for something, someone. Trust me, I’ve hoped. “You know, I sometimes wonder about women.” Simon snickers. I’m entertaining! “Like your wife, didn’t she have her own story to tell—how she kept her inner flame burning, fanned by a goose feather of hope. Was she happy? Was happiness a possibility?”

“I didn’t say this is a happy story or that I’m always a righteous man.” Simon’s phoenix becomes a falcon with talons. “I gave her a home. It was a marriage. At least in the beginning. If I’ve turned her into cardboard when I talk about our marriage, it’s because she wasn’t a complainer.” He lowers a hood over the falcon. “I know there are always two sides to an issue.”

“That isn’t true in my life!” I snort. “In my life there’s one story, it’s mine, and the women can all go to hell.”

“You boys done?” Ellen taps her pencil against her thumbnail. Tapping, tapping. So this one is a raven. I glare. “Excuse me.” As if she cares. “But I’m doing my job.”

“Why don’t you give us the check?” Simon reaches towards his back pocket.

“We’re not done.” I’m adamant. “Leave the plates. There’s more to eat here.” I refer to the bits and pieces of meat and vegetables, scraps. Ellen heaves a sigh and marches, heavily, I might add, to another table. I touch Simon’s arm. “Here you’ve told me a phenomenal story and I go on about my troubles.”

“What do you want, Adin? Your wife left you. What if you’d left your wife! Think of the guilt you’d be feeling. At least you didn’t cause anyone pain.”

I consider. “If you mean you caused your wife pain, well, we all cause pain.”

“So what’s left?”

“Maybe I’m gay.”

“By now, you’d know.”

I rest my head on my hands folded before me on the tabletop. “How can I trust anyone when I was betrayed?”

“How long ago was that?”

“Twenty years.” I giggle.

Simon purses his lips. He lifts two twenties from his wallet. “I insist.” I don’t protest. He calls out. “Ellen!” He says to me, “You need someone who is honest, will speak her mind. A person, you need a person.”

“You called?”

Simon hands Ellen the money and check and asks, “Are you married?”

“What do you care?” This is not a woman well-versed in the civil reply.

“It’s a question, you’re a woman,” he pauses to make sure judge and jury are attentive, “of depth, and I want to know if you’re married.”
She rubs the pencil eraser on the tip of her nose.

“My friend here, Adin, is divorced.”

“Surprise, surprise.”

“Simon, please.” His line of thought hangs between us, its dirty laundry flapping in the breeze.

“Pay at the cash register.” Ellen tosses the bills on the table.

“Good, I’ll do that. But first add on two deserts and two coffees. I want you and Adin to have desert. Isn’t it time you took a break?”

“This is ridiculous, no offense, Ellen, you’re a fine person, I’m sure.” What is happening here?

“You’re not sure, and I certainly don’t have much good to say about you.”
Simon rummages in his wallet and spreads five more twenties on the table. “The tip.”

She laughs. “I feel like Julia Roberts. And at my age!” She scrutinizes the money; me. “I like cheesecake. My break’s coming up and I do like cheesecake.” She pushes next to me in the booth. There’s no escape. My life passes before my eyes.

“Good, then it’s settled.” Simon waits as Ellen adds in the deserts, then takes the check to the register and leaves the twenties. “Adin, I’ll pick up the suit in a week.”
I squirm.

“You’re a tailor?” Ellen zeroes in. “Where are you from, do I hear a little New York accent?”

“My parents were New Yorkers,” I explain with reluctance, noting, however, she knows place-of-birth is important. “I come from a long line of tailors.”

“You were born in L.A.?”

“I was born in Palmdale, a few Jews lived there.”

“Just a sec.” She leaps up with more speed than I’ve yet seen her exhibit. “Let me get our dessert.” She prances off—a girl.

I press my fingertips against each other. I consider. Perhaps my guru Simon has provided me with an object lesson. Then again, perhaps I should leave now. Ellen’s back. Oh well. She takes Simon’s seat. I grab my fork, slice a corner of her cheesecake. I tell her, “On the night I was born, winds blustered, dust swirled and stars shivered.”
As for Simon Zimmerman, maybe after he starts his car he turns onto Rosewood, then waits at the light on Fairfax. When the light is green maybe he turns left to Sunset or Santa Monica and an assortment of clubs and bars; maybe right to Wilshire and his apartment.

Meanwhile, back at the House of Ranch Dressing, I tell Ellen the story of my life, the joy, the not-so-joyous. She listens. I’ll give Ellen that much credit.

With her consent, I’m no weirdo, I follow her to her apartment in Hollywood proper, to the small, tidy living room with its long, beige couch upon which a weary waitress has flopped many a night and thumbed through a magazine. I sit at one end, instruct myself to disregard fraying on the arm rest, kick off my shoes and continue talking. I know Ellen has a life of her own, problems, I’m not unaware that such empathy as Ellen displays is wrought from having lived through not a few ordeals.

“Your mother had her story,” Ellen suggests, taking a seat not quite at the couch’s opposite end. “Maybe your father was cold?”

“My father said he was never good enough for her.”

“And you weren’t good enough for your wife.”

“And she left.”

“You’ve been hoisting some heavy luggage, doll.” She runs her hand under the couch cushion. This is no time to clean. There I go again, judging.

“I’ve been living with hopes that an archaic god will talk to me.” Just what kind of a person am I? Has this been a life?

“You need fire, or a wheel turning in the sky. I’ve read prophets, I know.”

“What do I need with a wheel?” What’s this?

Ellen is rubbing her stockinged feet, which are not dainty. She’s been on them most of her life.

“You need a sign, you need something Biblical.”

I cannot believe I mocked this woman just hours before. I need a sign? Of course I need a sign. That’s exactly what I need. That’s what I was hoping for today.

“Myself, I’ve been looking for something for a long time, buster, I don’t know if you’d call it a sign, but a way out of this.” Ellen points to her feet, which as I have mentioned, have borne a burden.

“Retirement, a new job?”

Ellen stares. A possible rude assessment is being made. “My first husband left me, my second husband died. And that was all within five years.”

Two husbands; I need to think.

“I killed my second husband.” Now she is brushing her hands together. Lady Macbeth. I killed him. It hangs there in the air between us, not her husband’s corpse, but the challenge she is posing to me, because I realize she did not kill her husband. She is taunting me.

“He had leukemia, was in bad shape, it all came so quickly, we only had two years together. He was very near the end and asked me to help him. I did it.”

So I was wrong. She killed her husband. I think about it for a while, what it would be like to know that for the rest of your life. This was not a crime of passion, although it was a crime of love, to be sure. Premeditated murder, although I don’t know if murder is the correct term. Assisted suicide, that’s what they say, isn’t it, and hers went unchallenged. I think about Simon Zimmerman, what he would say to Ellen. I summon the spirit of the great man I have known less than one day, but whose being lingers. Simon would not judge Ellen. Hers would be one more story. He deceived his wife, she “helped” her husband. My wife deceived me. My mother didn’t want me. My father did what he could. And God has not lived up to His promise. Those winds, the stars. What right does He have to set me up for disappointment?—I’m sensitive. Maybe winds and stars herald every birth. If that’s so, everyone is unique, and life is more of a cruel joke than I believe.

Ellen’s words intrude on my reverie. “Are you judging me?” She’s picked up a ball point pen from the heavy, dark coffee table next to the solid couch and now is rapping it against her palm. A waitress and her pen. Bonded for life.

“What, what’s so wrong about what you did?” I lift one foot to the table, far from hers. “It has something to commend it.”

She’s interested.

“You had a life going with your husband. I haven’t had a life going for quite a while. I didn’t have a chance, my wife left, and I don’t understand why I’ve been deprived of that opportunity.”

Ellen scans the room as if she’s left a book lying about that contains the answers. “So everything happens for a reason?”

“That’s what I’m wondering about, that’s it, I don’t know.”
“You feel deprived.”

That’s a fair assessment. I have been cheated, yes, of the chance to help someone end their life, of the chance to deceive someone, all that.

“You loved your wife.”

I respond that I was hoisted with the petard of my affection.

“But you interacted. You got killed in a way. My husband was in pain, you know.” I wonder if she’s going to cry; she doesn’t look happy.

“Prophets don’t even get to marry. When do you ever hear of a husband and wife prophet? You don’t.” All my pain and suffering would be redemptive if I had a truth to tell the world. Of course if I were to feel happy about my life—I try that on for size, it’s an emperor’s new suit. Fits the emperor well, nicely tailored, but he’s exposed, no grumbling to hide him. This won’t do. “I do have something to tell the world.”

Ellen leans and hands me a pen and a torn envelope she’s been using as a bookmark. “So say it. Write it, start, here, here’s an envelope, be like Lincoln, write on an envelope.”

Be like Lincoln, thoughtful, if not anguished. “But I don’t have it formulated.”

She grabs back pen, and the envelope. “Dictate,” she commands, “What do you want to say?”
“I don’t want to say anything. I want to be told.”

“But you’ve already been told. A windy birth, an unloving mother—someone was trying to get something across. What, what, we’re just brainstorming here.”

Well, even Jonah had a boyhood; it had to make a difference. “I grew up waiting for a sign. This reflected in my choice of a wife who I wished would recognize nature’s innuendo.”

“What kind of a prophet waits for signs?” Ellen’s head juts forward. I shoo her away.

“You are the sign.”

No, Simon Zimmerman was the sign. I’m not the sign. Ellen’s asking me to justify my life. I put my other foot on the coffee table. Both of my feet; both of hers. Ellen is smiling.

“Why such a big smile?”

“I think you made a prediction.” She squints at my socks. Not a hole to be seen. I’m a clothier, after all. But it’s not the socks which this transparent and, thank goodness, decent-enough, woman is assessing. It’s the whole move. Two feet, two feet. This woman, Ellen, communicates with a mere, crushing, glance.

“What, because I rest both feet on your card table?”

Why is she doing that—inching down the couch so her feet are closer to mine? Next she’ll be removing my socks. And God knows what. And then—I realize—I’ve done it! I’ve made a prediction. No shoes, no socks, nature’s course.

And I wonder, as I accept Ellen’s massaging touch on my tight instep, if I’m about to save the world, or merely my life.

Sarah Sarai, Tampa Review: 23, 2002

White People Are on my Mind These Days {a poem}

2011-10-26T12:59:00.000-04:00

From the Spring/Summer 2011 issue of Mary, A Literary Quarterly {Publisher and Editor, William Johnson}. Thanks again to Wm. for inviting me participate, earlier this year, in a benefit reading at the Montauk House in Brooklyn. THAT was an evening.

{Note that when I read this poem to an audience, I preface it thusly: I know a mixed/interracial couple, both parties are named Robert.

Plus, the poem was conceived on a street corner in Soho, where my great-nephew and I discussed the demise of the Caucasian peoples.} I'm already exhausted. Poems shouldn't be introduced, right?

White People Are on my Mind These Days

We are going to disappear.
I say good riddance though
I'll miss myself.
Robert said Well what culture do they have.
The next day my answer.
Uh, the novels of Thomas Hardy,
farmers bent by winds off the Channel?

Do the dying move on with grace,
knowing there's new life and they're part of it
no matter?
Some hit the dirt oblivious to
lights strung up in the tunnel.
This is personal but what isn't.

Explorers were curious gold.
Conquistadors filed teeth for blood.
I can't figure out history.

I said we were on the way out and Robert's
Robert said Don't worry, we'll cause more damage
before we're gone.

My great-nephew promised to be kind,
as he looked into my eyes and
spotted the loving goddess, clawing to get out.

____
Sarah Sarai, Spring/Summer 2011 Mary, A Literary Quarterly {Publisher and Editor, William Johnson}

The Occupation of Poetry Occupies the Occupation

2011-10-25T17:38:00.000-04:00

A poet's rendering of the atrium.

Sunday I was a co-facilitator (in the realm of poetry) of Occupy Wall Street, and volunteered to be secretary for the meeting. Some of my notes are sketchy but main points have been honored. I want to slap this down now before I forget everything.

I hope I captured the spirit of the first meeting, held in the spacious atrium at 55 Wall Street amidst the indoor palm trees of capitalism. If capitalism were only about palm trees, I wouldn't mind.

Before the formal meeting began there was general talk about dissemination—such as creating a “handout” with Occupation-related text to be distributed anywhere, a sort of hand-distributed graffiti (graffiti being a positive). In fact, dissemination became the most common theme of the evening. Also discussed was the Anthology, in its present state. As I understand it, there are 3-ring binders in the Occupation library. They are added to weekly, and contributions are sought on an ongoing basis.

Call for Work: We are encouraged to distribute a call for work, along the lines of: "Poems wanted for the Occupation at Zucatti Park poetry anthology. Send, as an attachment, to stephenjboyer @ gmail.com" I'm not posting anything anywhere else until I'm sure I have the facts down, but anyone can post a notice for poems--on listservs, Facebook and elsewhere. I suggest that each submission be limited to three poems.

There was talk of an online anthology, expanding it and making use of it to draw people to the park.

Per Occupation procedure a "stack" was created, a sort of instant agenda, with a caretaker, who made the list by asking people (present) to briefly identify ideas or issues they wanted to share on. Then facilitator then worked through the list, as would a traditional Chair. (O. was co-facilitator)

R. suggested creating something to hand out publically (dissemination). An object, such as folded paper with text and using this to create a bigger space for poetry at the park
Silent readings (headphones) Inviting poets to give readings and talks.
Thought piece: How does poetry influence. Infiltrating Manhattan.
Poetry Assembly (discussions of this were scattered throughout our meeting. Friday nights. New facilitator each time. Hope to make it function like General Assembly.
Any day, there's a mic at the park. Anyone can use it, state, “mic check,” and read a poem (or whatever).
There was talk of changing the time at the Poetry Assembly for each poet, but general agreement was to keep it at 3 minutes (given that 3 is fungible at open mics, sufficient for each reader, given wiggle room.
A public clock would be useful and/or audible signals – when the 3 minutes is up, the co-facilitator could hit wind chimes or something similarly gentle but specific
The topic continually revisited was dissemination, verbally or by objet. The MTA was discussed as a soft target, with problems of choreography being addressed. Where, what text, how to perform so the result was beneficial. Performers referenced included Sharon Hays & Mark F. who reenacted speeches of national and international Civil Rights Leaders.
Considerations of poetry/politics, intersections thereof.
Emulating or using as a springboard, sixties aphorisms.
(I suggest Free Money instead of Free Huey. Tune In, Wake Up, Stay Alert instead of Tune in, turn on, drop out.
While there are obvious obstacles to reading on a subway (noise and riders' expectation of some level of public isolation), the advantages are many, including interaction with people beyond downtown, a more diverse group, or differently diverse and the serendipity of right place, right time, right person—finding riders who become intrigued with the message, and with poetry itself (poetry widely defined).
Public Poetics may include incantations, repetitions; sitting (alone or with a friend) near passengers and reading out loud so only a few hear but have a chance to become intrigued. Poetry as overheard. The message as whispered.
Binlingual readings or disseminations. Posting the poem (electronically or othrwise) in both languages.
Specific venues suggested were the Highline and the Staten Island Ferry. There was a brief philosophic interlude during which the poet as shaman was discussed, how these gestures (of poetry in public venues) could serve to eviscerate a static mindset. At the end of the first scheduled meeting, a subgroup met for further discussion of dissemination. The Verso Book of {{{political text}}} (donated generously by Verso Press) was suggested, and some copies handed out so we could cull them.

2 EOAGH poems & a little Long Island serendipity

2011-10-18T10:00:00.000-04:00

"I boiled the eggs until they confessed their sins."
poem: Inquisition

So I was at a party Friday night, sitting with a small group of poets clustered around a giant bowl of potato chips. It was so sixties, with the onion dip and all.

Anyway, I was pleased to meet one of the quietly iconic poets, and his wife who really truly was charming, and knew from hard experience to follow the conversation and not butt in, much, anyway.

Out of the blue the one person I didn't know started talking to me. What's up with that? So family history outs, mine including a move from Long Island to Los Angeles when I was eight. And he asks, Where on Long Island, and I tell him, and it turns out he lives in my hometown. His daughter attends the high school (at which) my oldest sister was valedictorian.

So what? Well, I'll tell you so what. I sent him the link to the two just published poem. Ground zero for the first poem is that little town on Long Island's north shore.

I was born at home.

Thanks now and always to the twins, Tim and Trace Peterson, who everything EOAGH. The poemses is "One Day a Year You Can Take Something Home from the Met" and "Inquisition."

No Harem Pants for Me! Unmarriage Defended.

2011-10-13T10:50:00.000-04:00

In truth, I would do pretty much anything
for this outfit. Really. It's beautiful.

Talk about the Lonely Crowd of lonely Americans. Apparently it's now a crowd of golden and single women, golden and single and, according to Kate Bolick's too easily named, “All the Single Ladies,” really very lonely in lonely rooms in lonely beds in which self-actualization has its many meanings. (Thanks to poet Elisa Gabbert and her blog to alerting me to this Atlantic article, link below.)

Because no matter how Bolick phrased the lament, no matter how many sociologists and culture analysts she visited (note the consistent style of the article—short bio of the sociologist type, then Kate's visit), the choice to be alone, or the circumstances of aloneness—for a woman—suck, according to her. Only women are unhappy, I gather. All men are trippin' with their, er, female friends.

It is Bolick's mother's fault. You know the saying, If it's not one thing it's your mother. Mom was feminist. Influenced daughter. That arc is one I've read over and over though I never knew of a writer so influenced by the slogan, “A Woman Without a Man Is Like a Fish Without a Bicycle.” I don't mean to go ninja intellectual on Bollick, but I was more influenced by Ai. Or George Eliot. Or Audre Lourde. Or the Brontes. Or Rita Dove. Or Virginia Woolf. Or Mary Shelley (or her mom). Or Loorie Moore. Or Elizabeth Bishop. Or Zora Neale Hurston. Or Adrienne Rich.

Women have been struggling with being women forever. And men have had their correlative struggles. As with perfectly straight, long blonde hair, marriage (hetero or homosexual) does not have to be top of the social chain. It is because we agree it is ("we" being loosely and inexactly defined). But no one should second guess their choices, as Bolick does her choice to go solo. What's that Zen koan, maybe in an Alan Watts' book, where the farmer says his son broke his leg, which is bad, but then he doesn't have to join the army, so that's good, but then the crows ate the corn, which is bad, but then they don't have the bother of harvesting, which is good (huge paraphrase).

Who the heck knows what the right choice is or should have been. We are defined more by our reactions and reshapings of events than the initial impulse. I have a friend who was caught passing a joint in a high school classroom and from that one stupid incident, which spiraled, was no longer invited to attend Julliard. Pretty awful. But she is such an amazing person and used her talents and energies to help many (I can't get too specific). Maybe at Julliard she would have been run over by a bus her first time off campus. You just don't know.

If Bolick's mom could have given her a Stand by Your Man t-shirt, Bolic might have heeded the sage advice and ended in a shelter with her kids hiding from a brutal, incesting husband. I've seen that one happen, too. I've seen more happen than I lived, and that's fine with me. There is something perversely conservative about the article, subtly reactionary, as if someone from the old moral majority wrote it and gave it to Bolick, as if the Koch Brothers arranged for it to be published. Satisfaction generates from how we navigate circumstances. Not the circumstances. And marriage is neither bad nor good, though I am not neutral on community, which is good, warm, complicated, how we get through. The Atlantic article.

The Quiet Softness (of a penis sighing). New poem in Gargoyle

2011-10-11T12:04:00.001-04:00

See below for credit.

The Aeneid has been one of my occasional purse books over the past few years. That means I toss the Allen Mandelbaum-translated paperback in my purse and read on the bus or subway; when I'm in a waiting room or waiting for room. Easy breezy. I've read it before so if I skip around or stop reading altogether (temporarily--there is always tomorrow's or next year's purse book), no problem.

Truthfully, no problem even if I hadn't previously read the book. Beginning to middle to end is not one of the Ten Commandments. Anyway, this latest run got me about a third of the way through, and also a new poem, "The Quiet Softness."

Richard Peabody graciously selected the poem for inclusion in the just released Gargoyle 57. There are many many other writers in there, wonderful and more wonderful, and I'm not going to name one of them.

I include these lines as a teaser (not spoiler). Excerpted from "The Quiet Softness" (oh, by the way, "she" is Queen Dido, who built Carthage, a plus, but made some bad life choices).

Forgetting rapture in

the arms of an accomplished heart  
or the quiet softness of a penis  
sighing, Aeneas sailed his cock  
to Rome, leaving her in Carthage,  
the city of her breasts stomach  
hips, configurations of the universe.

The photo is from
http://supphire.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/ds05_dido_and_aeneas_orig1.jpg and is titled, Dido, Don't Think of Me.

( poem from, again, "The Quiet Softness," my contribution to Gargoyle 57)

Tribal Warfare at the Dinner Table...When Scholars Debate

2011-10-10T10:55:00.000-04:00

A few years ago I read a book review in the New York Times about the invention of Hinduism***. The spiritual practice/religion was millennia old, yes, but didn't exist as Westerners know it, until it was existed.

In other words, it took the British Empire, the colonialists, to codify, encyclopedia-ize and, most of all, explain Hinduism so the west could get it. We are a simple peoples, we westerners, simple. But cruel.

A review ("The Most Versatile of Mystics") in the esteemable Los Angeles Review of Books brings this home, er, reinforces the fact that on the one hand, in temples, churches, mosques, mountaintops, people worship and get our comfort, we do; on the other hand, in research libraries and Ivy League archives, scholars dissect. The Library of Alexandria had its archives. Disassociated and disembodied research--not all of it bad, of course, but all of it worthy of challenge--is eons old.

That the Los Angeles Review of Books reviews the book which critiques a psycho-sexual critique of a religious hero (I'm okay with hero) is all for the good. Since the debate is ongoing the debaters, especially those who have both have heart and brain in the arena, must be heard. So more thanks-- for Swami Tyagananda and Pravrajika Vrajaprana's Interpreting Ramakrishna, and again to Los Angeles Review of Books for the review.

***If anyone can locate that NYT review... I remember discussing it with a friend, we were Tompkins Square, he doubted me, I sent on the review, he no longer doubted. Four or five years ago. I can't locate it now. However, here is an essay on the same topic, written earlier than the review in question ... NS Essay: How the British Invented Hinduism.

New Story Published!%***%! in THE WRITING DISORDER

2011-10-02T10:32:00.003-04:00

With no fanfare but much personal satisfaction I would like to announce publication of my short story, "An Archive of Paranormal Inquiry Into Coping" in The Writing Disorder, a new(er) and very hip online journal.

The Writing Disorder's editor, publisher, designer, Christian Lukather, is also designer for POOL, which published a few of my poems last month. He didn't realize the crossover, however, until he'd accepted my story (so I got no favors). When you visit his journal you'll realize his humungo talent.

As for this story, it is a sort of answer to the rejection letter I posted not long ago (see, I Am Rejected: Because I Write Stories Like This). Some years ago I wrote "An Archive of Paranormal Inquiry Into Coping" in hopes of being less weird. My records (submissions/rejections) are home so I can't be exact but I can be inexact. It took a mere six or so years to get this non-weird story published, if indeed it's non-weird. I like it lots. That's what counts, for me. I like this story lots.

Weird. Not weird. Husband/wife (American loves husbands and wives, right?). It is pure fiction in my life. Here's the opener (you're in New York City, the apartment of a traditional boy-girl married, middle-class couple).

      “I’m just the psychic." Ms. Marie shrugged as she peered at her cigarette ashes as if they were professional equipage.
      Ludlow brushed them off the table and into her palm. Her mother would have been appalled by the medium’s wanton disregard for waxed furniture.
      “Take it for what it’s worth, but they say you’re everything and everyone in your dreams. It’s a theory, although I’m sure you’ve—”
      “—Heard it.”
      A month ago, Ludlow woke with a mountain—thundering skies, moss turning into ice at the peak, a Sisyphean lug up, a nameless female saint dressed by Hindu devotees—wall-to-wall in her brain. The mountain was old although Ludlow doubted there were young mountains. Younger-er, maybe,than other mountains, she conceded, but young?
      “So maybe you could be the mountain.”
      “Why not, I was the walrus.”
      “Weren’t we all.”

Read the rest here: The rest of the story . . .

Kickstart the love, my friends. A soulful, funkalicious project

2011-09-29T11:23:00.001-04:00

Send your love now! To

Fanny Franklin Soul-Oo Record!

Okay, I'll back up. First. That's Mark Cross on keyboards. He "wailed all through the first year of his life." A natural-born musician.

The line is from my poem "The Rebirth Live" -- my contribution to the anthology, Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown.

What's happening? Mark is collaborating with soulful, funky temptress Fanny Franklin on getting a CD out there, there!, so you can download the love.

Love costs, my friends, sadly, these days. The project is on Kickstarter, however, so, really, all the love will cost you is a minimum of, say, $1. Say, $5. Say, $30. More if you have more.

But really love doesn't cost so much as work. Love works. It does. So if you don't have money, send love. Here's a thought, you could send both. Okay, I'll shut up. I'll end this with another line from the poem.

"God is in the funk the beat the blues."

Believe. Believe it.

Fanny Franklin Soul-Oo Record!

For more info about Say It Outloud, go to James Brown.

Alas we live in the Age of Cupcakes . . . (2 poems in Scythe poetry journal)

2011-09-26T18:53:00.002-04:00

A quick howdy to tell you I have two poems in Scythe, a poetry journal created by Joseph and Chenelle Milford, which, as the two explain on the journal's landing page, originated in the spirit and mission of The Joe Milford Poetry Show.

The Milfords are one of poetry's energy fields. They produce an online interview show, archive same and edit a literary journal. And raise kids. And write.

So thanks to them and I hope you enjoy "No Need for a Door" ("The lotus was a premise, floating / and so what") and "Look Now" ("Alas we live in the Age of Cupcakes. / Those who know the past are likely as those / who don't to forget to bake at 350° 'til /springy to touch. . .").

In case I haven't been self-serving enough, let me guide you to the archive of the The Joe Milford Poetry Show, wherein you will find, what?, yes!, my name!, Sarah Sarai, yes, an interview with Sarah Sarai. Oh joy!

Scythe, Issue IV: includes work by J.P. Dancing Bear, Oliver de la Paz, Arielle LaBrea-Lancaster, Jee Leong Koh, Lyn Lifshin, Laura Carter and many others.

Your Daily Prayer, Courtesy of Rumi

2011-09-23T12:01:00.001-04:00

*caption below

My Peeps. I just saw this on the Parabola website. This poem is enough beautiful and enough true it must be shared with as many as possible.

All bodies are temples. We forget all bodies are homes. I don't know what liberties Coleman Barks took with the title or the translation in general, but I do know we are all guests to poetry.

And, "Every morning a new arrival."

The Guest House

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

—Rumi

From The Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks

*from: thebluelantern

I am rejected. Because I write "stories like this."

2011-09-20T13:42:00.000-04:00

The editor thinks I'm weird.
I'll give him weird.

Here's a new rejection letter for two short stories. I found it painful and useless. While I understand the editor was being generous in writing me and that you, My Reader, probably think I'm crazy for being offended, please understand. I have never followed up on a letter like this and had a story accepted.

In other words, while this editor thinks he has his reasons for not selecting this specific submission, he simply doesn't like my writing and doesn't understand that. My experience tells me he is going to keep finding fault. Been there. And there. And there. No thanks.

His utter lack of specificity left me confused. Kind sir: don't like my writing. Fine. But if you don't (and this relates to fiction), give me at least one sentence or scene you'd make different.

Weird? I am posting the letter in full (but for redacted titles and names) in hopes of getting rid of some of the ick.

Dear Sarah,

We've decided to pass on ...... But I want to encourage you pretty strongly to submit again. Here's where what should be a fairly standard rejection letter becomes longer and oddly personal, but I think it's worth doing.

See, I myself wrote--and, to some extent, still write--stories like this. And for a number of years, I got rejection letters that said, in essence, "these stories are good, but they're too weird." I didn't want to get more normal. So I was determined to reverse the clauses in that sentence--you know, write until I got a letter that said "this story is weird, but too good to pass up." So it was a question of making the weirdness more accessible, without becoming less weird; to give someone a really compelling reason to keep reading despite the weirdness.

I can tell you now that there is an audience for that sort of thing. Not a very big one, but it's pretty dedicated--and I myself am in it. Of course, you can write however you wish--maybe the direction I've described is not at all interesting to you--but in any case, I'm interested in reading more from you, and I'd like to see where you go next.

Thanks!

Reader, if you were a seam, I'd take you out anywhere: 3 new poems

2011-09-14T18:02:00.000-04:00

Painting by Megan Hinton

Well, there's not much to be said here except that POOL's latest is online and three of my poems are in it. POOL publishes once a year, used to be print, has always been chic.

And Californian. No, not just Californian, but Southern Californian. It is of my hometown.

Thank you, editors Judith Taylor and Patty Seyburn. Thank you fellow contributors, whose names await you here, at POOL, a journey of poetry.

My three poems are "Commerce for the Good of the Peoples," "You Are the Confusing Identity I Write For" and "On the Way to the Gallery."

9/11, an excerpt, "I remember thinking, They are shades. They are gone."

2011-09-09T16:57:00.001-04:00

I'm letting myself feel it this year. One moment I was thinking about my mother who'd died in August, the next moment I was in a new kind of numb.

It is strange, or not, but I watched the second tower fall on a television in a bar. I'd called an elderly friend on a routine check-in, she started screaming at me and I had the sense to go outside and pay attention. I don't have a television. During the next days and weeks I was thankful for the absence of repetitious terror, visually, at least.

The bar wasn't usually open so early. I don't think, I didn't track its timings and now it's under new ownership, and shiny and glossy so I don't have the luxury of sentimentality, another plus. Anyway. Anyway. Anyway.

. . .an excerpt from "Everywhere Woman Is Born Free,"* which I posted here in full, a few years ago. It's in my collection.

Carr Futures/Tower 1/WTC

I rememberworking one Wednesday

on the 92ndfloor. The people were pleasant,

like they’dall make great neighbors.

I rememberpangs in my stomach. An ulcer?

and asking afriend if I should see a doctor.

I’m going out on a limb here, Sarah,

but you gotta have some fun.

I remember mymom died a month earlier.

I rememberMartha called to say she was

in Jersey anddid I want to visit.

I rememberbeing asked back to Carr Futures

after Marthaand I made plans. I called

my friend ona limb. Should I turn down

work rightnow? I remember I went to Jersey.

It was aThursday. I remember rolling down

grassy slopeswith Martha’s grandkids.

I never wentback to Carr Futures.

By 11 a.m. onTuesday everyone was gone.

Everyone. Every employee of Carr Futures

who was therethat day was gone.

Where werethey? I remember the floor plan:

the oblonglobby, the maple reception area.

The officesbeyond. I remember wondering

if any of theexits were contemplated.

I remember praying it all went fast.

I rememberthinking, No one?

I remember thinking, So many in sucha short time?

I remember thinking, They areshades. They are gone.

I remember thinking, Not one personmade it out.

Poof. I remember, No one?

The Armory
I remember the Armory across the street became the

first DNA collection center.

I remember my neighborhood a media event.

I remember streets blocked for two weeks.

Everything darker than a nightmare.

Candles, vigils, wax on sidewalks, shattered flames.

Flyers on every wall. Photographs ofsmiling people

with their hair well-groomed, missing.

I remember being interviewed: Do you want revenge?

I remember telling the people of France I wouldn’t

put anyone through this.

I remember hoping someone understood.

I remember there was no getting away from it.

The doors of my building opened to the funeral train.

I remember the line down the block and around

the corner. Loved ones waiting toregister.

I remember trying to give blood.

I remember being asked to hand out fliers.

I remember crying because I wanted everyone

to understand I cared as much as Jennifer Lopez.

__________

Sarah Sarai...excerpt from *"Everywhere Woman Is Born Free," (click on poem title for full poem), in The Future Is Happy

Carr Futures was a commodities broker/trader. They've merged. Jennifer Lopez had given money or visited the troops. She is wonderful and whatever she did was a blessing. It's just, I cared so much. So many of us did. It's just me.

The power & the glory & the Blaze & the VOX meet a pouter. My 3000 Loving Arms hug Gatza.

2011-09-05T16:00:00.000-04:00

Earlier today I was googling sleep studies, trying to help a friend find a study which meets his peculiarities. Which reminded me that if I am going to sleep tonight I better say something or other about the rather unhappy young fellow who complained, yesterday, about BlazeVOX [books]. {Links at the end.}

I have two somethings to say. One is that Mr. Unhappy went public. That, to glorify his sense of great injustice, this young fellow who was so grievously treated by life as to get an MFA, have been an editor for a respected publication, be young, complained in a blog sure to attract attention. Because of its affiliations. And his blogging was somehow confused for thoughtful writing or journalism. So many people added their two cents which more often than not amounted to a hill of beans signifying a singular inability to think clearly or seek truth as if one were a missile bound for the heat of great soul, which one must be at all times if one to survive and remain beautiful and honest and dear. Transparency is one thing. Untempered and false transparency is an agenda.

Complaint two and final. He went after my publisher. I'm not personally affronted. I'm enough arrogant to believe in my work insofar as my work deserves its place, not that it is better than. I'm not threatened with the prospect no one will ever respect me again. My publisher, who selected my manuscript from a pile of a gazillion, is de facto, de jure, without doubt, my friend.
So the loyalty button was pressed.

Bonus round with many extra points for valor of a grand and petal-y blossoming nature. Geoffrey Gatza of BlazeVOX [books] does so much good for poetry. Has rescued manuscripts gone out of print (as by Anne Waldman, yes, Anne Waldman, ahem). Has given a chance to so many new though old poets (as in Sarah Sarai, yes, Sarah Sarai, ahem). He has made the world better, which is a cliche perhaps but cliches can be factual.

So bug off,

***
Reb Livingson speaks out at No Tell Books Supports BlazeVOX. She also provides a background and links.
Shanna Compton deconstructs vanity in its poisoned dartness at BlazeVOX hurled, at Oh vanity.

Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown

2011-09-02T13:22:00.000-04:00

Exciting news.

Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown has just been released from Whirlwind Press.

Featured poets are Patricia Smith & Amiri Baraka.

Intrepid co-editors (and writers) are Mary E. Weems & Michael Oatman. They got the whole project rolling.

Whirlwind Press, P.O. Box 109, Camden NJ 08108-0109.

ISBN: 0-922827-32-X.

Poets include Kim Arrington, Ashkari, D.C. Copeland, Beth Bosworth, Erin Bower, Emotion Brown, James E. Cherry, Curtis L. Crisler, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Tim Joyce, Reginald Lockett, Randolph Lewis, Rachel Loden, Michelle Rankins, Vince Rogers, Nia l'man Smith, Sarah Sarai, ValJean Jeffers-Thompson, George Wallace, and many others.

I received a copy in the mail yesterday and am sending it off today to my nephew so I, too, need to order a copy.

Not much more information available but I will update.

Poem: Distance in Nature: Bare feet best?

2011-08-23T17:47:00.001-04:00

"Anger as soon as fed is dead- / 'Tis starving makes it fat."
--Emily Dickinson

Ignoring the red zone does make things worse and could lead to explosion, but even Mother Earth needs to explode now and then.

Anyway, few nights ago I came across that couplet and mentally bookmarked it. It reminded me of my poem, not published, "Distance in Nature."

I was syllable counting at the time I write "Distance," which seems a perfect approach for a description of an emotion so baffling (sometimes) we work to contain it. Unexpressed love is sad. Unexpressed anger is, huh, sad, too, but I was going to say, fearsome and controlling.

(By the way, the Easter scene, those eggs with the tiny tableaux, like ships in bottles--not sure they are still around.)

Distance in Nature

Fitted glass seals the shell.
Hissing sand, mollusks, trapped.
Great wonder? Bare feet best.

This separateness not good:
No Easter scene in egg.
A shell is bad enough.

Great anger? Estrangement
From compassion. Distance
In nature, swept away.
_______________________
Sarah Sarai

Amy Clampitt & Homer’s gibbering Thespesiae iache

2011-08-21T22:28:00.001-04:00

I have Amy Clampitt beat by three years. She published her first poetry collection at 63, whereas I was a mere lass of 60 when The Future Is Happy emerged from the womb of BlazeVOX [books].

There comparisons dissolve but they are odious anyway as we all know and mean nothing unless one is writing an essay comparing and contrasting the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with the rise and fall of hula hoops. Then comparisons are pretty cool.

And speaking of beautiful which we weren't but it's time we did, here is one of Amy Climpitt's poems. She's right. "Syntax comes last, there can be / no doubt of it. . ."

Syrinx

Like the foghorn that’s all lung,
the wind chime that’s all percussion,
like the wind itself, that’s merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?—
much less whether a bird’s call
means anything in
particular, or at all.

Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer’s gibbering
Thespesiae iache:

those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.

Amy Camplitt, 1920-1994

Illustration by John Ezra Keats

Like Earth we're "beatified now by a thing / borne in the dust"

2011-08-03T14:41:00.001-04:00

Everything is what it is but fortunately for artists, the opposite is equally true. Nothing is what it is or everything is a bit of this and that and nothing contains multitudes same as everything; or it doesn't.

What am I even talking about?

A poem. The "Garden of Sex" by Jeanne Larsen. It's from Why We Make Gardens, which I reviewed for The Rumpus earlier this year.

Here the earth is a sweet lover, the skin has "windowed leaves" and surrender is a thing, a being, a presence. It's wise, surrender, in knowing "it too will be fed."

The Garden of Sex

This earth is sown
with salt. And it blossoms

wholly, beatified now by a thing
borne in the dust, undeniable,

tender. Its stark
rain still intimates.

It soothes and insists
that it never will stop. Why,

of course this ground trembles,
relentless. This wild garden grips

the stem of the brain. It
yields up the soft

blood's opaque, wet, spent
fruits. It looks out

past your skin's windowed
leaves. At the downpour’s

warm eye, this breathing terrain
simply swells. Rhizomes spread out,

eager and curiously calm.
What holds them's no more

than surrender that knows
it too will be fed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeanne Larsen, Why We Make Gardens (Other Other Poems), Mayapple Press, 2011.

Why I Used a Pen Name Today

2011-08-02T15:30:00.005-04:00

I submitted a short story under a different name today. By different I mean not Sarah Sarai. I used a last name that has meaning to me and instead of a first name, cleverly (hah) used an initial.

The email I submitted through is my back-up email. My name isn't visible though since it has embedded therein a quotation from Emily Dickinson--something that didn't occur to me until I hit "send"--it's not the great ruse to beat all ruses.

I made the choice of using a pen name because this story was just rejected with the comment that although well-written it seemed a bit young adult.

That wasn't intended as an insult or taken as such. I did wonder, however, if the reaction might not have factored in my being a woman. Catcher in the Rye is a bit young adult, but no one (except the fool right-wingers who like to burn books) would reject Catcher.

Brainstorming ways to fool with a false scent, I also changed the protagonist's name from Jennie, which is super girlie, to C.G., which evokes neither Barbies nor high school. (And not in the least bit coincidentally, use C.G. as a prefix to Jung and you have C.G. Jung, who collected the unconscious and then regifted it to all of us.)

The protagonist name change is a good idea in general. It improves the story. Whether or not changing my name to a more gender ambiguous initial plus a last name will have an effect on getting published, I can't be sure. My poetry gets accepted enough I don't let my mind wander to the number of rejections I might get because I am a woman.

My fiction, however, has such a distinctly and surprisingly, to me, female voice, it is at risk of dying of neglect. With Vida publicizing the discrepancies in number of women versus men who get published, I can feel at least a little assured this feeling of annoyance is not sour grapes on my part.

We'll see.

Milosz, carried by the waters of the river

2011-07-30T11:47:00.002-04:00

Today is his birthday. I celebrate with a pleasing poem, pleasing, a pleaser, and true, true like colors, true like vision.

FAITH

Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004 (b. Poland; d. U.S.)

I had two pairs of really cute black shoes. "On, Footwear," my short short, at Fiction at Work

2011-07-28T10:59:00.002-04:00

from my short-short "On, Footwear" . . ." I had two pairs of really cute black shoes. To a party Saturday night I was going to wear one pair of my totally cute black shoes."

Fiction draws on life's grim realities. My dark moment came about ten years ago. I walked to a party in my sneakers, my girly cute-shoes in my backpack.

Except I'd brought mismatched shoes. I suppose that some chronicle of history informs of a greater catastrophe occuring since woman first shod her feet, but at the time, I couldn't think of one worse blow.

Thanks to Fiction at Work (July 27, 2011) for accepting this riff which has seen divers (to use an Arabian Nights' version of the word) versions over the years. I, apparently, do not give up on anything I've written. Too bad I didn't have children, but, I didn't. I had stories and poems.

from my short-short "On, Footwear" . ."People said I was the life of the party, but deep inside I had two really cute shoes I could not wear."

COPYEDITOR'S NOTE: regarding "pair" vs. "pairs" (I went with the editor's query to use "pairs" instead of "pair" in the first paragraph. But only because I thought that in a story so short, the reader's attention might be snagged on "two pair" in the first paragraph. The reader's attention trumps all, especially when all choices are correct. "Useage":
"When used without a modifier, pairs is the only possible plural: Pairs of skaters glided over the ice. When modified by a number, pairs is the more common form, especially referring to persons: Six pairs of masked dancers led the procession. The unmarked plural pair is used mainly in reference to inanimate objects or nonhumans: He has three pair (or pairs ) of loafers. Two pair (or pairs ) of barn owls have nested on our property."
http://fictionatwork.com/dss1.aspx (July 27, 2011)

Subversion and Sidestepping: The e-chapbook's value (in this case, Paul Sohar's)

2011-07-27T16:47:00.000-04:00

Here's a nifty e-chapbook. Most e-chapbooks, or at least those I've seen, are PDFs. They unfold on the screen, or so it seems, as a sort of magic simulacrum of print. Click here or there and pages are lifted and opened. It's a wonderful update of print, not necessarily (or by any means) superior, but it works.

The Wayward Orchard by Hungarian-born Paul Sohar is, as published by Wordrunner Electronic Chapbooks, more of a dedicated literary journal than a chapbook, a one-person show (worth viewing). Below the artwork of the cover lies the table of contents, which is clickable. Once a poem's read its sisters on left-side navigable. A PDF can also be downloaded.

Sohar is a poet worth reading, know that, although in this posting I'm more commenting on form than content. Please don't think faint praise. Please think, I want to check that out! And delight in the cyber possibility of subversion by not relying on traditional publishing, and the sidestep of clearcuts, by not relying on trees.

Proust on Skates (not roller)

2011-07-26T13:45:00.003-04:00

(That's a Mendini Proust chair. Link below.)

I grabbed Anthony Hecht's Flight Among the Tombs from off library shelves a few weeks ago, thumbed through and landed on "Proust on Skates." I liked the poem for its biographical fiction, its lovely rendering of the most horizontal or writers momentarily vertical. Its formal control, something I don't aim for in my poetry but admire.

Oddly simultaneous with my reading of Hecht, I saw this comment from poet and critic Dan Chiasson, who writes, "Anthony Hecht, to me the most wearisome of plausible poets."

On the one hand, I admit that as I read other poems in the collection I wasn't impressed or drawn in, although to see my thoughts voiced so vigorously gives me pause. Anyway, here's the poem I did admire.

Proust on Skates

He stayed in bed, and at the beginning of October still wasn’t getting up till two in the afternoon. But he made a seventy-mile journey to Chamonix to join Albu [Louis Albufera] and Louisa [de Mornand, Albufera's beautiful mistress] on a mule-back excursion to Montanvert, where they went skating. Ronald Hayman, Proust: A Biography

The alpine forest, like huddled throngs of mourners,
Black, hooded, silent, resign themselves to wait
As long as may be required;
A low pneumonia mist covers the glaciers,
Spruces are bathed in a cold sweat, the lat
Sun has long since expired.

Though barely risen, and the gray cast of the day
Is stark, unsentimental, and metallic.
Earth-stained and chimney-soiled
Snow upon path and post is here to stay,
Foundered in endless twilight, a poor relic
Of a once gladder world.

Spare café patrons can observe a few
Skaters skimming the polished soapstone lake,
A platform for their skill
At crosscut, grapevine, loops and curlicue,
Engelmann’s Star, embroideries that partake
Of talent, coaching, drill,

While a few tandem lovers, hand in hand,
Perform their pas de deux along the edges,
Oblivious, unconcerned.
This is a stony, vapor-haunted land
Of granite dusk, of wind sieved by the hedges,
Their brances braced and thorned.

Escaped from the city’s politics and fribble,
Hither has come an odd party of three,
Braided by silken ties:
With holiday abandon, the young couple
Have retreated into the deep privacy
Of one another’s eyes,

While the third, who in different ways yet loves them both,
Finds himself now, as usual, all alone,
And lacing on his skates,
Steadies himself, cautiously issues forth
Into the midst of strangers and his own
Interior debates.

Sweatered and mufflered to protect the weak
And lacey branches of his bronchial tree
From the fine-particled threat
Of the moist air, he curves in an oblique
And gentle gradient, floating swift and free –
No danseur noble, and yet

He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes
Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,
Comes to the minute point,
Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,
Larger Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,
Preoccupied, intent

On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script
Incised with twin steel blades and qualified
Perfectly to express,
With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped
Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,
A glancing happiness.

It will not last, that happiness; nothing lasts;
But will reduce in time to the clear brew
Of simmering memory
Nourished by shadowy gardens, music, guests,
Childhood affections, and, of Delft, a view
Steeped in a sip of tea.

Anthony Hecht, from Flight Among the Tombs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
http://www.greatinteriordesign.com/tag/usd/

N.Y.C. + L.A. I am a New Yorkaleno.

2011-07-17T16:12:00.001-04:00

I'm like one of those funny male caricatures who claim to love all women. Like Christopher Walken's The Continental.

Hear me: Skinny, fat, Page Six-reader, Anatomy of Melancholy-memorizer, I love them all. Whether they smell like dead rat topped by spoiled gefilte fish and Limburger cheese or Chanel 19 from a Rodeo Drive atomizer, Thank You to Both.

It may entail a twenty minute walk to find a cup of coffee and wi fi. The coffee, the wifi, a grocery, a health food store, post office and five thrift shops may be in a three-block radius. Mmmmmwah youse.

The time-consuming stretch may be gorgeous. The 3-blocks stinky and without enough sunlight. You're my honeys, both of ya.

Intellect everywhere. Great art everywhere. Rapid transit everywhere. What to do.

I'm a New Yorkaleno. A poet who loves New York AND Los Angeles, a New Yorker and an Angeleno. It's a cruel fate for the underly employed, the dirty lucre-challenged but there you have. I should open a New Yorkaleno Cafe. Everyone would have to wear breezey shirts, have beautiful welcoming smiles (L.A.) and be agressive and team-spirited (N.Y.).

Well, that's that. Name it, claim it.

Acceptance. A Writer's Life

2011-07-16T21:26:00.000-04:00

I gave a sort of impromptu talk today on art as career. How I ended up talking to that particular group of people is another story.

What interests me greatly in this story came when my mostly new friends were giving feedback. A few used the word humble. They didn't mean to say I was being humble about my achievements. I wasn't. My achievements are mere within the world of poets and that's that.

No. "Humble" was not, in fact, the correct word. What was meant and admired in me was my acceptance. "Acceptance." I don't need to be Wm. Butler Yeats or Elizabeth Bishop. I would love to be Rita Dove because that woman can tango, but I don't need to be her, either.

I want to publish my novel. I don't need it to be the great American. It's not. It's entertaining. That's enough. I will continue to publish poems and stories.

A few days ago a woman friended me on Facebook and commented she really liked my poem, "This Flesh Divine," published in Numinous in 2008. Yowza. That was three years ago. How wonderful. How satisfying. My writing hits a few in the right place and for that I am immensely grateful.

The Online-ification of Tender Beauty (Boston Review)

2011-07-13T18:05:00.000-04:00

As an addendum to my previous posting about Boston Review (which published "From Love, Imagination" and "So Tender Beauty" in the July/August 2011 issue), both poems are online.

At least today. I'm cautious. This could be a *Poetry Wednesday* thing and the poems could disappear from the website until there's another Poetry Wednesday or until some other primitive urge strikes the diabolical editors of Boston Review. I don't know the decision-making process and haven't seen smoke rise from the chimney of their stoned quarters up there in ye-olde land (Boston).

I am in fact in love with each and every Boston Review editor but how sappy is that.

TO READ MY POEMS, AT LEAST TODAY, JULY 13, 2011, GO H E R E FOR "So Tender Beauty" and h e r e for "From Love, Imagination."

Thank you.

My poems "From Love, Imagination" & "So Tender Beauty" are in Boston Review

2011-07-09T11:35:00.001-04:00

"As many bridges as I can walk / I have . . ." My poem "From Love, Imagination" opens with a narrator announcing affection for suspension of a sort. Maybe, like me, she's had friends stop the car so she could climb out and walk the bridge.

Poems expand the reality of their poets.

"A sign of your times, a rose-happy glow / enameled on dawn’s fingertips" has rosy-fingered dawn fresh from the manicurist. Or something. That's from "So Tender Beauty" which seems like a dream and ends in "spray of silvered light" and more.

Both are in the July/August issue of Boston Review, a journal with spine and pages.

Many thanks to Timothy Donnelley for selecting the poems. There was a span between submission and acceptance, acceptance and publication. All worth the wait. I don't know that patience is a virtue, but it is slow joy, anticipation an agony equal to pleasure.

To subscribe to Boston Review, "a magazine of ideas" where ideas of the idiots in charge are challenged, go here: https://www.ezsubscription.com/brv/subscribe.asp. Poetry, fiction, essays, politics, art.

The Hammer [museum]. Startling. L.A. as found art. Fresh inventive Thek. And some ho hum Ruscha. Women needed.

2011-06-30T12:39:00.001-04:00

Yesterday I went to the Hammer. [On the corner of Wilshire and Westwood in L.A.]

The first thing I do is sidle into a dark room to watch a Paul McCarthy video, grotesque puppets, a fabulous mockery of Disney, grunting. A human puppet simulation asks a puppet puppet insinuating questions and of course the puppet puppet just sits there. Things turn crappy, literally. I move on. The point being, I've been in a dark room, take the elevator up, and walk into the main floor which startles me.

The Hammer is a treehouse of a museum. Stepped out of the elevator, left the stairwell, and I am looking north and west to the hills and sun from a massive wraparound terrace. Slim trees reach into the space. Sun, at least yesterday, pervades. Like the Getty, the Hammer uses Los Angeles' beauty in its readymade glory.

Exhibits? Paul Thek, for one. An artist who matches the space--joyous, sweet, mournful, detailed, dying like dry leaves on the terrace. Sontag dedicated Against Interpretation to Thek.

The museum's standing collection is small but every painting is extraordinary. They just are. Maybe, because I've only seen a few previously in traveling exhibits, their newness to me helps but I spend enough time staring at art to be, not inured but able to expect a level of special. These exceed mere special. Someone has an astounding eye.

The bad news is the Ruscha. Ed R. illustrating or accompanying Kerouac text. It's been done and done better. At that point there is no excuse not to include an exhibit by a woman. This all male, male on male thing is tiresome.

The poster for the Thek is misleading. A male figure diving into a pool. A set up for Hockeny-esque work which isn't what Thek painted. Cheap tricks are cheap tricks. The Hammer is a great museum in its airy way and should be above such.

Wherein the author thinks she is witnessing the End of Days but discovers it's just the end of the day

2011-06-19T14:03:00.001-04:00

The weirdest thing happened last week. I was leaving work at 5:30, heading uptown but still in Tribeca, when teams, bevies, squads of white men in dark slacks and white shirts open at the collar (it was a hot day) streamed up a side street, moving en masse toward me.

They looked similar to southern Baptist preachers (via movies) and I wondered if they were running from end-times, which, apparently, had started on Greenwich and threatened Hudson Ave. Tribeca does not have imposing skyscrapers so I didn't know what office they could possibly be coming from. (Hey. I knew they weren't missionaries; they had the blessed corruption of the less-than-sacred in them.)

If I'd been Midtown or Downtown or some other neighborhood where Fortune 500 companies had headquarters or corporate settlements, as it were, I wouldn't have been surprised, though even standing outside, say, the old Lehman Brothers (R.I.P.) wasn't the same experience as this. Every other office I'd worked in had lower and higher level workers in the mix, the mail team, the proofreaders, the cafeteria crew, the assistant; non-whites and women.

The next day at lunch I kept an eye out, and the day after I found myself surrounded by some of their homogeneous midst when I got take-out on Beach St. I still had no clue and was reluctant to inquire after their origin. The day after, I happened to amble down to Greenwich at lunch and observed their like yet again, looked over to see an odd building hidden between apartment structures. It was a corporate Citibank outpost.

Mystery over, they were bankers and traders, maybe in a trainee incarnation. No mystery, but still the odd image of clones or pod people, evolving. Night of the dead living. Each person is an individual but group the persons together and isolate the group, make it all of one type, and it gets weird. My father had his weirdness, but not that weirdness, hallelujah.

Happy Fathers' Day.

The 'List Review.' If it didn't exist before, it now does, and of The Future Is Happy.

2011-06-11T12:22:00.000-04:00

*A future not so happy?

Stephen Page has written a list review. Whether or not that's an established type of review, Page's musing on my collection The Future Is Happy is a fait acompli,. Please note that "accomplished" waits to devour accompli. Page's review is both accomplished and (further) accomplished the deed of highlighting my brain of odd filters. Here goes.

A saxophone in Count Basie’s band. An Ode by Keats. George Harrison’s guitar. Cain. St. Sarai carrying infant Jesus. A Jewish Emily Dickinson hiding in an attic. Moses breaking tablets. Baden-Baden, Germany. Miss Piggy. Tijuana. Jodie Foster. Billy Bob Thornton. Denzel Washington. Ingmar Bergman. Laurence Fishburne. The Rosetta Stone. Superman’s mother. Clark Kent. Orpheus. The Oregon Highway. An angel. The goddess Venus. Jim Thorpe. New York. Rilke. Skin cancer. The Married with Children television series. Jack Kerouac. My Favorite Martian. A Woolworth’s store. James Joyce. Ulysses. Ithaca. Penelope. Helios. Socrates. Kilimanjaro. Jason of the Argonauts. California. Conan Doyle. Jenifer Lopez. The Ritz-Carlton. Strawberries. Woody Allen. A labyrinth. Walt Whitman. Sméagol with his ring in his pocket. Holden Caulfield. Humbert Humbert. Jane Eyre. Mecca. The Zig Zag Man. Such are the many allusions, images, and sounds used in Sarah Sarai’s eclectic collection of poetry, The Future is Happy.

My fact checker assures me I did not allude to My Favorite Martian in the book, which I find to be a great relief as I never cared for that show. Clearly Stephen Page is a closet fan of My Favorite Martian. It's out in the open now, Mr. Page. Deal with it.

Special thanks to Page for hearing the rhythm in the work. He's right, I'm not a formalist but I hear.

The full review is posted at the intriguingly named, Group Pen B.A. Book Reviews and the Type and Byte Review. Do not be fooled by the photo, which is of Stephen himself, I presume, reclining in, perhaps, in Buenos Aires where he resides at least part of the year. Nothing in my life is so leafy and bright, at least nothing outside my oddly filtering noggin.

**http://cdn.archdaily.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/1292440518-index-image-352x500.gif

How dare you, V.S. Naipaul. + I like to think of myself as a stately pleasure dome.

2011-06-05T16:20:00.000-04:00

Dear V.S. Naipaul,

Gosh darn. Thanks for your trash talk on culture. I can't wait to see you and Philip Roth go all girlfight over who has the worst time reckoning himself to his anatomy.

You told a journalist that all fiction by women was sentimental, narrow and inferior, and thus, you sly cat, you got me, a woman, thinking. Think about that! Oddly, though I read several of your books when I was in my twenties, I can't remember titles, plots, if I liked them or didn't. Just sayin'. In terms of sentimentality, however, I wonder about the following books which I can remember reading when I was in my twenties.

Madame Bovary. The women kills herself. Loves goes wrong, society is a hard place for a woman, and so she paints her lips a tasteful blue and falls into the big sleep. Sentimental? If she had become a whore on the streets of Paris it would be less sentimental.

Anna Karenina. The woman kills herself. Karenina is a more engrossing book than Bovary but not quite as finely stitched--Flaubert is a real real careful writer, even I could tell that and I have a vagina and breasts. Russian society is a worse place to live in than Bovary's society and Anna chooses death by the D Train. Sentimental?

D.H. Lawrence, works thereof. Granted that for those of us of a certain age it is hard to disengage from images of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed man-wrestling on fur, when we think of Lawrence. Still Lawrence writes of Big Love and not Salt Lake City style. Sentimental, Sir. Lawrence is sentimental.

Karl Marx was so fully human in his love of each person's capacity for fulfillment and so fully committed to creating a world where that is possible, that well, he must be sentimental. Cause that ain't happening anytime soon. Certainly not equality for men and women, not as long as your types smirk and strut.

Proust. Well, no one would accuse a man who creates seven volumes of written memorabilia in search of lost times sentimental. Would they? A thousand-page docket of hard thinking? Nu-uh.

The Lake Poets? Nuttin' sentimental in a field of daffodils or a stately pleasure dome. I like to think of myself as a stately pleasure dome, but that's something altogether different.

Bold Lord Byron on whose verse butter melts? He's a wonderful poet but in disfavor, in some circles, for that boldness which is sentimental in its own way.

What about some of the great saints? Theresa, John of the Cross, Francis? Isn't it implicit in such kick-butt faith a level of sentimentality which allows us to believe the unseen.

Though I've read him, I'm going to take a pass on Rabelais here but I cannot ignore the sweeping gestures of Cervantes and his windmill-dualist as sentimental.

Clear-headed and divine though he was, Spinoza expressed some sentimentality in his notion of us ending up on a far star. And please, there nothing as sentimental as one of Leibniz’s monads. Those guys and gals are all about pulling out their handkerchiefs and showing us they cannot go in or out because they are monads, boo hoo. I'm tired of it!

Blake? Thomas Hardy?

I loved reading every book and author mentioned above. Except you who I neither like nor dislike as I cannot remember one thing about your novels.

Yours until the end of this posting,
Sarah "Sentimental Me" Sarai

p.s. Have you read Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead? I doubt it.
From some of my sisters. . .
From One Writer To Another: Shut Up, V.S. Naipaul by Diana Abu Jabar

In a Sentimental Mood by Danielle Pafunda

Sentimental, Narrow, Women’s Writing. Alas, Alack, Anon! by Roxane Gay

**The gorgeous monads available here. (If you don't know Leibnitz look elsewhere for what a real monad is. This monad is a computer thing but lovely.)

Review: G.E. Schwartz, LVNGinTONGUES, poems in a different margin

2011-06-04T13:14:00.002-04:00

Lokesh Khodke*

G.E. Schwartz writes with one eye on "our dust" and the other (our third?) on us--us--here. I just read his chapbook LVNGinTONGUES (Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press) and now want you to read it.

It's a flow of poem, LVNGinTONGUES, an aggregate of short poems unfettered by titles, which makes me wonder if titles aren't a needless colonizing marker: Hey, folks, let me tell you what this here poem is about! (I use them but that's no excuse.) Instead of being drawn to a title as we expect, in Schwartz' chapbook we are thrown to an unfamiliar place, a different margin, a place slightly disquieting, riveting and dislocating, over there, on the other side.

And thus (and through poetic alchemy) prepared for death in all its daily guises and for a greater death. We are reminded of our fragility and of that which is awe-inducing.

WHITES or blacks, linen

or porphyry,

one in the same to the

same of us --

but out where dust

is blown -- there's a tomb

built of clay and bronzed

that should make us

waver

These poems are written as quiet revelations of the dark hope that we are even capable of wavering. That if we can't transcend, we can know our lack, our inability. Better to realize that, say, I can't become Gerard Manley Hopkins, than to be so dulled I toss the book aside and return to t.v. and Ruffles. (That's me speaking, though I know Schwartz a bit and thus know he likes Hopkins. I saw Schwartz read down here--he lives upstate New York--and know he appreciates the gifts (jazz, friendships).

THROAT-HAWK nightscreaming

stand up leave the rest

of us on the table

when life is with you

are struck across time

bark at strangers

feed the incorrigible

appetite of edifices

shadow dust, hate the light

. . . the incorrigible appetite of edifices . . . Yeah. I say yeah however I read the word edifices--our culture, our corporations, the body as structure . . . (And oh, I suppose the capitalizing of the first words of each poem serves as an ex officio title. Maybe the eye needs something. Anyway it's a nice touch.)

The ultimate disclaimer is that Schwartz reviewed my book, here. And so with that frisson of joy that someone who has insight into my writing is so intelligent and gifted himself I recommend these poems. oH, i assuME the title IS A NOd to lanGUAge poetrY.

Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press. PO Box 453, Arroyo Grande, CA 93421. $7.

*Beautiful painting, Edifices, by Lokesh Khodke. Found here.

Religion Switching . . .a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. . .

2011-06-02T13:11:00.002-04:00

***

Maybe I've said this before, but when I was in my early twenties, I decided I needed limits.

I was at the Bodhi Tree, a bookstore of mysticism, religion and of course a little tripe east, west and in the middle. The sun was setting, maybe I was looking out a window or onto a courtyard, hard to be specific some thirty years later but there was sun and however many miles I stood from its thousand hot tongues I was close enough to its Pacific reflections to feel the distant yet present love of the universe.

Classically inclined, I'd been working my way through writings of the saints west and east. Dope-smoking and contemporary I read Be Here Now (Baba Ram Das) and other books which were great reads at the time and maybe still are. I was always reading.

But at that moment, that point in flowing time which has no one point in point-of-fact and perhaps no point other than its own silky flow, I knew I needed restraining. I could go anywhere and did, mentally and spiritually and psychically.

You will stay in the west, I said. (I was you.) That means Christianity, Judaism, Islam.

Note that I was not limiting my reading. Reading cannot be limited. I was limiting my joining. I can't quite say if this transpired before or after my two-year once-a-week training at the Healing Light Center (Rosalyn Bruyere is a real deal aura reader, per the UCLA Dept. of Kinesiology and she just is) or other interests and ventures. It was definitely years before I taught at a Catholic high school.

I'd been trucked over to the Annie Besant Center in high school by my Christian Science mom, though I can't say why, exactly. It might have had something to do with guitar lessons. My Jewish father believed, to his credit, but didn't quite have the gene for spirituality qua place-in-the-heart to hobby I did, my mom did, two of my three sisters did. (The third sister would not allow so much as a Thanks, You! before a big meal, which reveals a ungene to be respected.)

Hopefully some reader or other is tracking this posting because I cannot figure out where I am right now (in the writing, not my body). But lifetime-wise, I did stay within Sarah-proscribed guidelines, which were, I admit, partly a matter of style--I dreaded seeing those super serious westerners being so obviously devotee-like when it came to all things Buddhist. That sort of public demonstration of faith has been discredited by luminaries such as Hafiz, Rumi, Jesus, and every single religious person of serious intent. And my intent is serious. God help me.

But also I believed it to be a good idea and though I've had regrets, as a married person regrets her or his beautiful choice when there are so many gorgeous choices, I stayed on track.

Thus here I am, writing this because someone urged a short-lived discussion on a poetry listserv about Buddhist poetry, one of my madeleines (I buy them by them by the dozens) and it got my mind a'wandering. See the problem?

What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. (James 4: 14; not sure which tr.)

***painting by Richard Bizley

W. G. Sebald and the crummy gift of history

2011-06-01T18:17:00.001-04:00

A seacow. Stellar saw and described them
for the non-indigenous.

I had some challenges getting into After Nature, W. G. Sebald's first and final work (first book written but last published), which is historical, biographical and autobiographical. No daffodil fields in After Nature, even if Sebald did move to England from Germany in his twenties and stay put until his accidental death some thirty years later.

I set the book aside as a full-on read and dipped into portions randomly, and a few weeks later started at the end with the final of three sections, the autobiographical poem. His parents being adults during WW II, Sebald had the crummy gift of history going for him.

Then I returned to the second section, about Georg Wilhem Steller, a botanist who accompanied the brooding explorer Bering into the Arctic. Here are melancholy, troubled Herr Bering, Europe's savaging of indigenous peoples, and Stellar's gloomy death, and poetic ambiguity. Nature has her way. Oh? with a godless ??? Lutheran (of course) from Germany.

At Tyumen they carry him out of the sledge,
drag his half-petrified body
out of the ice into the fire,
into a furnace house.
Now begins alchimia,
Steller recognises the mortem improvisam,
the stroke and all its appendage,
sees his death, how it is mirrored
in the field-surgeon's monocle.
Such are you, doctores,
split lamps,
thus nature has her way
with a godless
Lutheran from Germany.

Back to section one which had at first won my heart, being poetry and art history all-in-one. It's about Matthias Grunewald, a late-medieval painter of, needless-to-say, sorrow, the man of sorrows, His holy mother, angels. Like Stellar, Grunewald saw European barbarity: pogroms and quashed peasant rebellion.* The lines feel telegraphed, a not uncommon sensation for a reader of poetry, but this reader didn't think they had been telegraphed on the same day.

But the bodies of peasants piled up
into a hetacomb, because. As though they were mad,
they neither put up any resistance
Nor took to their heels.
When Grunewald got news of this
On the 18th of May
He ceased to leave his house. Yet he could hear the gouging out
Of eyes that long continued
Between Lake Constance and
The Thuringian Forest. For weeks at that time he wore
A dark bandage over his face.

What made the reading difficult is the almost arbitrary nature of line breaks and stanzas in the first section. I thought it was me, fresh off of three some months of researching streams of information for a client. I thought I could not bear one more fact. But on looking at it again and on noodling around the Internet to read other impressions of the book I feel safe in agreeing with myself about the first section. (Michael Hamburger's translation is not the issue.)

On the first of October the moon's shadow
slid over Eastern Europe from Mecklenburg
over Bohemia and the Lausitz to southern Poland,
and Grünewald, who repeatedly was in touch
with the Aschaffenburg Court Astrologer Johann Indagine,
will have travelled to see this event of the century,
awaited with great terror, the eclipse of the sun,
so will have become a witness to
the secret sickening away of the world,
in which a phantasmal encroachment of dusk
in the midst of daytime like a fainting fit
poured through the vault of the sky,
while over the banks of mist and the cold
heavy blues of the clouds
a fiery red arose, and colours
such as his eyes had not known
radiantly wandered about, never again to be
driven out of the painter's memory.
These colours unfold as the reverse of
the spectrum in a different consistency
of the air, whose deoxygenated void
in the gasping breath of the figures
on the central Isenheim panel is enough
to portend our death by asphyxiation; after which
comes the mountain landscape of weeping
in which Grünewald with a pathetic gaze
into the future has prefigured
a planet utterly strange, chalk-coloured
behind the blackish-blue river.

I also feel confident in recommending After Nature. A little struggle and disappointment in a beautiful read is good for a poet.

*[An exceptional exploration of the Grunewald section by Dorothea von Mücke is available here.]

Sisters, Memorial Day

2011-05-30T11:34:00.000-04:00

This is a weird way to memorialize Memorial Day. But honest, if that counts. I woke up thinking about my sister, Judy.

Who died in the past ten years. Of cancer. She'd braved chemo for four years. Of the four girls--me and my three sisters--she was the only one who had kids, a comment on my family of course. There's a whole lot I'm not going to say here.

We didn't have a great relationship and I knew I'd need help mourning her when she passed so I tried Gilda's Place, you know, Gilda Radner. It's a great gift for grieving relatives but for me, flawed. Gene Wilder unabashedly loved his wife. Him, I believe. I needed another way to talk about my sister and ended up elsewhere (no specifics, sorry).

What I have never chipped away at in trying to grieve or mourn her is what could have been. What was--was my niece and nephew, two amazing, intelligent, joyous, complicated (but not too complicated), beautiful kids who are now beautiful adults. Other than them and the fact of family (a big fact, granted) we, Judy and I, wouldn't have been friends (unless, in the big hypothetical, my not being family would made me more worthy in her eyes). Probably because our interests were so different but more because her response to mine was too often disinterest and contempt I had to hide so much of who I was around her. She made fun of my friends.

Who she met, granted, only because I lived in her house for two years in the early seventies. It was my only fallback, my mother having moved on divorce before my first year in college was over. There was no other family. So when I was in my early twenties Judy left me there with her husband while she went on long business trips. No, it wasn't worse case scenario, but it was funky.

I can't even begin to explain how race figures into this. Mainly as a gift. Really and truly. But I was a chubby white hippie-influenced intellectual with a black inlaws, living in the Crenshaw District. And my white sister was anti-intellectual and anti-art--or any art I liked.

She talked to me long and hard about her life. I could never say much about mine. Not to her. I don't think she wanted to know me, but I think she liked me. A lot of people liked me for a lot of years, but they didn't want to know me. These days I want to know me and honestly care about only a few people. My triple-Aquarianness accounts for my great caring for anyone used by others, the wretched on our earth, to paraphrase Frantz Fanon. Otherwise, today at l east, I'm just trying to figure out how to connect better with the few.

Cool website: Writers and Kitties. {I kinda sorta lied. No W.G. Sebald today.}

2011-05-24T16:51:00.000-04:00

"George Bernard Shaw being Irish with his kitty."

Time is a wild stallion and I'm no horse whisperer. I couldn't tame a lunch hour, let alone twenty-four hours of potential lunch hours, i.e., a day.

Which is to say that contrary to yesterday's promise of a bit about W.G. Sebald in My 3,000 Loving Arms on Tuesday, today (Tuesday) there is nothing here about W.G. Sebald (unless we count my writing that there is nothing here about W.G. Sebald as being about W.G. Sebald). (Not likely.)

Instead and with much delight I am offering you a neato website I chanced on, Writers and Kitties. See lumniaries of the written word along with their familiars, Pyewackets, meow mixers.

Truman Capote, Camus, Bishop, Twain, Burroughs, Smith, HIGHsmith. (Smith is Patti, Highsmith is Patricia. Okay?) And more.

The captions are not pushy or cute (thank God), but some are funny. "Jim Thompson and his kitty star in another police pulp fiction." "V.S. Naipaul and his postcolonial kitty." "Mark Twain shooting pool with his kitty. They get their hair done in the same place."

Someday, when I run dry of ways to avoid writing, I will go to this site and read the hundreds of comments viewers have posted on each photo.

My Mind is not a Database

2011-05-23T11:46:00.000-04:00

Over the past three months I have researched and entered well over 100,000 facts, pieces of information, data related to medical advertising, medical editing, scientific research and good restaurants for take-out, into my brain.

When, two Saturdays ago, I attended a lecture on one school of Sufi thinking, I luxuriated in the possibility of overriding some of the nesting and organized details of Pub Med (see previous posting) and academic honors with more beautiful facts. Having been shown gorgeous slides of Sufi shrines and tombs to Sufi teachers I felt a possibility of peace and a cleaner, less encumbered mind.

One teaching numbed me in an exciting way. A sage had urged Muslims should pray for all Muslims. I hear parallel versions of that in churches--praying for all Christians--but I never gave it much thought before. (And parallel, also, in synagogue, to include the third of my personal triad.) Seemed like a standard issue preaching from the pulpit. At the time I thought that if I generalize Islam, reduce it to its most mystical branch, praying for all Muslims is a joy. However:

If I reduce Christianity, reduce it to its mystics and decent faithful believers who really try to do good, help the poor, and get enough inspiration to keep going, blanket prayers are also easy. But my mind instantly went to Christians I dislike: the hateful rightwingers; "pro-lifers" who kill in the name of pro-life; the well-fed aristocracy of clerics all religions have now and in history which commit abuses including sexual abuse and, by refusing to allow use of condoms, are responsible for millions and millions of deaths by AIDS, well, then my praying is challenged.

You won't believe it, but I thought I was leading up to writing about poet W.G. Sebald's After Nature, which was my subway book last week. It's part of my database mind reaction. I'll tell you about that tomorrow. For today, I hope (and pray) for everyone's highest angels to elevate us all. It's the best I can do; may it be doable for our higher angels.

This is not a leak. This is public info about FDA approval of a perinatal drug.

2011-05-21T10:22:00.001-04:00

from the movie Babies

This is not a leak. This is public information, posted at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21471853. First a bit of background on Pub Med, then the nonleak itself (about a drug the FDA approved).

Pub Med is the online, open-access archive of all articles published in medical journals. While the full article may not be available for free online, the abstract is (not all articles in the New York Times or many literary journals are for free, either). The full article is in the specific journal, and all relevant information needed to hunt that down is in the link. For your edification the number at the end of the link is specific.

Every article published in medical journals is assigned a number and can be researched by inputting the number, in this case 21471853, into Pub Med. I do a bit of related research (is how I know this).

Now for "Unjustified Increase in Cost of Care Resulting From U.S. Food and Drug Administration Approval of Makena (17α-Hydroxyprogesterone Caproate)."

Six physician/researchers from, variously the Albert Einstein Medical Center; the Yale University School of Medicine; the Washington University School of Medicine; the University of North Carolina School of Medicine; Massachusetts General Hospital; and the University of Texas Medical Branch, Galveston co-wrote the article.

The plot is simple and time-tested. A drug company (Big Pharm twirling its shellacked mustachio) and the FDA (a few select officials made all the happier) got together.

I am in no position to say if there was malfeasance or simple neglect. Also I am taking the researchers' words to be true--something I can't verify. That said, I have never seen an article like this.

The drug is Makena. It is manufactured by KV Pharm. Its use run $30,000 per pregnancy (for preterm deliveries; those costs are prohibitive to many. BUT there are alternatives to its use. Good, scientific, medically sound low-cost 9or far lower cost) medicines for preterm deliveries / perinatal care.

Makena's approval ENDANGERS lives. "This increased health care cost is not justified at this time."

And further, the team maintains:

The price barrier to access imposed by KV Pharmaceutical actually could result in an increase in preterm deliveries over current rates. Actions are needed by the FDA, national societies, and the manufacturer to ensure that all high-risk patients continue to get the needed therapy to reduce the number of preterm births.

So I am doing my little bit to get the information out there, to you and whoever you pass it onto. Pro-lifers, by which I mean vigilant anti-abortion groups, should take up the cause. Right?

Some Ways I Kept My Foot in the Waters Today

2011-05-16T23:50:00.000-04:00

Still unable to carve out serious writing time, so for now I'm just happy I do anything. Today? On the way to work I read a few poems from W. G. Sebald's first collection, After Nature which I picked up at a used books store last night. Involving poems and great interweaving of stories and history.

Tonight I went to KBG Bar and heard Deborah Landau read from her new collection. Her sensibility is sweetly raw, gently painful, fluid, female. I bought The Last Usable Hour (Copper Canyon Press). More later.

Well, that's it. What did you do today to please The Blessed Mother Art? If nothing, there's still time.

Illustration: http://linda-severn.blogspot.com/2009/11/lady-philosophy.html

Consumer Complaint: Best Buy's Lies

2011-05-15T14:56:00.000-04:00

A few months ago I bought a new notebook. I knew what I wanted, played with a few models to be sure, and efficiently and independently made my decision.

Then Best Buy's standard practice went into operation. The young man who was assigned to get my computer from storage told me he'd see if there were any left (of the notebook that had been nationally advertised). He was sure there weren't and urged me to buy a pricier model.

I asked that he check for my model. It was in.

Then he tried to sell me a Word package. I told him a use OpenOffice--shareware. He shook his head in warning but saw I wasn't budging and so launched into the protection plan offer. You know how wise guys sell "insurance" to candy store owners and butcher shops. That's what it felt like. He kept insisting my computer would not be safe unless I spent another hundred dollars on a Best Buy maintenance plan.

I've been using computers since 1985. Maybe around 1987 I had to get my harddrive checked out but other than that, nothing. I declined, but what was insulting (yes, I know I'm taking this personally) was his comment to the sales girl about me, how I was a lost cause. She ignored him. Buying my little $300 and change Toshiba was one long lying sales pitch from Best Buy.

Now I have a new cell phone I have to return to Best Buy. The clerk lied to me. I know lied is a strong word, but I am quoting the phone carrier. We just got off the line. I've been using this make phones and plans since the get-go. Best Buy has stepped up its bid to fill in its financial holes by way of pressure and misrepresentation or mistakes of ignorance; I'm especially annoyed.

Big picture is I am thankful I can currently swing purchases--a new notebook a few months ago--a new phone (my old died). I'm thankful for the convenience and opportunity. My very first cell phone about seven years ago paid for itself in less than four hours through some freelance work.

So that's that. A rant. A nonpoetic segue. And now I see it is an opportunity for me to recalibrate my emotions so I remember what I want out of life--it's not anger. Onward and with less emotion.

And for today, I am saved-er; when one job ends another looms; writing

2011-05-13T15:27:00.000-04:00

I'm going to start with a post script. Using a Homer Simpson illustration may just undermine any attempt at seriousness here. Oh well. Here goes.

There is space in my head today, the kind of space a westerner appreciates, with sweeps of sky thinning into infinite firmament, mountain ranges on the horizon, shrubs, the many passions of dirt..

One job ended. It had been a long spell of databasing and so much information my brain rearranged itself. That's okay. It's malleable, my brain is. Further arrangements can be made and the rearrangement isn't so bad. I felt its impact a few weeks ago when I wrote a few drafts. Not so later with a different draft but any influence on a poem is if not good, then at least worth consideration and evaluation.

Makes me wonder, did driving myself so much for these past few months open a few new passageways, block a door or two, narrow a circuit? Does the new wallpaper work for me or doesn't it. Yeah, I'm being abstract but then I'm not saying so much that detail is called for.

Only four hours of work today. A full half-day vacation--time to detox or adjust as if I just stepped off a cross-country flight and am vibrating in solidarity with the airplane.

Something new on Monday. And creation this weekend. Energy's being lowered like stars onto a stage. Everything's a prop. Every prop serves.

For today, I am saved

2011-05-09T21:35:00.000-04:00

After work --ten hours-- I walked straight to a park for bark leaves shadows a whole different (lower thrum) vibration like a giant freezer might have if its shiny depth held tree trunks leaves shadows.

Breathe breathe.

My almost escaped Soul chooses to give me another shot. She is always ready to bolt.

Hope for me, there is hope for me, She believes. My Soul She likes flesh, likes a body without which She is intelligent ether only.

Without my Soul I am unintelligent electrochemistry. Souls find new bodies. Bodies don't find new Souls. That's a mystery.

Apple, spinach, celery. Fresh juice. Cashews. Carob-covered raisins. Dinner. I tell my soul She is happy. She doesn't care about spinach cashews raisins. She wouldn't care if I were macrobiotic or ate beef and chocolate cake for every meal.

Would She?

Why am I writing about Soul? Why do I always land here? Minutes ago I said, Sarah, write something anything, for any reason, or because you're a writer.

It's done. Thanks for your indulgence. For today, I am saved.

The Lower Depths and The O.C.

2011-05-06T15:52:00.000-04:00

I saw a performance of The Lower Depths last night.

In life and writing Gorki was loyal to the concept of freedom. He'd been friends with an early version of Lenin and criticized the later, repressive and vicious version. The Lower Depths is modern to the core and chatty, packed with conversations of the eternally bamboozled (who are always with us). His bamboozled are in a basement. That alone put me on edge because I'm allergic to mold.It's not a bar but did remind me of the dark bar and bar stool-ees in The Iceman Cometh.

Booze, more booze, hitting wives, greed and centuries of resignation also put me on edge. The production counted among its beautiful czarist-era sluttish derelicts a dear relative of mine. And was intelligent, witty and dark. Nothing there to displease Gorki. The audience was especially attentive and supportive.

Oddly I was reminded of the O.C., a t.v. show that takes place in a dreamy Southern California bedroom community (in, duh, Orange County). Characters in the O.C. have dental and medical plans, great bodies, great wardrobes, great skin, great nutrition, sun, fun, school, and a little tribulation but troubles always work out. And there's a lot of hanging out and talking about life.

And that's why it came to mind last night. I guess. I was laughing at myself (on the inside) when I thought that, but in a weird way that outlandish comparison with smooth, sunny Southern Cal. makes the play even more universal. People hang out. They have problems (who to take to the prom or as is the case of Gorki's characters, how to avoid eviction in the dead of a Russian winter or stop a husband from relentless beatings of his wife or flat-out life-sucking despair).

I'm so proud my relative was riveting. And in a classic. Acting was strong. Set was spot on. Wardrobe close to perfect. Gorki's depiction is a reveal on possibilities of higher natures. Of course I'm American to my positive thinking core. And still proud of my grand niece.

Poem: A Cruel Mistress Is a Cruel Mistress

2011-05-05T11:03:00.003-04:00

The moon is in the seventh house to the left,
up from the corner, your left, not mine.
The seventh seal bounces a beach ball on her snout.
The beach balled.
Don't ask.
Your trousers got sandy.
His dancing shoes were abducted by kelp.
Kelp! Kelp! the heels called.
Her gown hemmed and hawed.
The moon is hemmed in by hope.
The seventh sandal has no soul.
Death stalks celery.
Your soul, She moons my beach ball.
The heels grieve for their leather uppers.
If I were a carpenter you'd be a county fair.
A cigar is just a cigarillo happy to see you.
The dance of the seventh veil
distracted the kelp.
The first six have no rhythm.
The heels had a new hero while the soul
slipped into Her gown.
You are part of my journey,
She whispered to the bodice.
Venus threw water on the moon.
Get a room, the sun said,
as the towel sang
it wanted to be loved by you,
by you,
and nobody else.

___________
the above written by Sarah Sarai in celebration of taking a day off to spend with beautiful nieces. o, a leisurely morning. o, coffee, o, eggs, o yes.

Notes of a Pre-pre-birther: Show me the dotted line with God's John Hancock

2011-05-01T11:38:00.001-04:00

For too long this nation has been swept up like fallen Corn Flakes by a feverish broom the handle of which is gripped by "birthers."

My hunch is the broom handle is old and dried out, and the birthers in their frenzied states got splinters and by now have oozing wounds which cause them to be crazier than their God-given insanity specified.

What I am is a Pre-pre-birther. I want proof of the spark in the eye of Barack's father and the spark in the eye of Barack's mother. I want written certification that Barack Obama was once a a little bit of universal consciousness waiting his turn at this thing called "being human." "Being human" is a duty all bits of universal consciousness must fulfill even though most understand it obliges them to 0-100 (and change) years of misunderstanding and embarrassment, of forgotten anniversaries, of the opportunity to participate in colonialism as either a colonel or colonel-ee.

Sure "being human" does come with party gifts, those being the occasional heart-stopping sunset of colors which make your eyes spin and your toes curl plus at least a few personal moments of dizzying joy and connection, and yay for all that. But basically it must be proven, to me, that humans are human.

So until you show me the dotted line with God's John Hancock, I will continue in my delirious understanding that Barack Obama is a global hallucination. Ditto Dolly Parton. Ditto me. Ditto you.

*I love Dolly Parton and will fight to the death any who make fun of her. Ditto Barack. Ditto me.

Wallace Stevens; Susan "My Emily Dickinson" Howe, Wallace Stevens

2011-04-26T22:47:00.001-04:00

On that space for religion? The enlightened write: Wallace Stevens.

Poet Susan "My Emily Dickinson" Howe and Wallace Stevens scholar Joan Richardson so worship, and tonight hit the pulpit at the Philactetes Center on East 82nd. They said this and that. Read some Stevens. Preached the word.

Being a group of western civ-central white people (sigh) there was alot of talk about categories. We white people like our categories. Is it a [Stevens'd work] poem? Can it be music? Rembrandt? Plato, of course, was mentioned. We white people like the Greeks.

Your intrepid reporter cum slightly sarcastic Stevens lover suggested that's why many poets create collages--music on words next to doilies next to a road map superimposed on Plato.

Catallus was the Platonic dialog referenced (though I jotted Cratallus). I didn't care about careful notes so I can't tell you which poem submits itself to Socratic questioning.

Susan "My Emily Dickinson" Howe talked about the opacity of "Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour" and how one of the lines (I can't read my notes!) (I'm so tired!) has lo and behold a word she looked up in the OED. Its fourteenth meaning was a bingo and she wondered if she was "the one reader" (equalling all readers) Stevens has written about. If he chose that word for her. He did!

Am I making sense?

Final jotted note: Peter Quince took a bite out of himself and winced. That's me. Rest assured that not even exhausted Sarah Sarai can ruin Stevens. Why? SHE LOVES STEVENS. She also loves the feeling of rearrangement signaling new work soon to appear. Howe and Richardson are lovely, by the way.

Night night.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

________________
by Wallace Stevens, a great American poet

In the Clouds; site-specific; a first grouping of a new collection

2011-04-24T23:58:00.001-04:00

Last night friend of mine told me he'd closed his e-mail account because he bought a new computer. T.'s belief was that e-mail was hardware-specific.

"But it's the Internet," I said. "I could access my e-mail from a computer in Russia." Not having been to Russia, I couldn't test my assertion. But T., who I've known for almost fifteen years, also lacks quality, or any, time spent on the rich Russian soil so we were at a stalemate.

I spend much of my work time on a computer and with the exception years teaching have done so since the mid-eighties. And when I was on unemployment my head was living in the clouds of cyber space.

Yikes. Now I have to retrace my aha! between T.'s e-mail quandary, blogging and poetry. I saw it five minutes ago. Drat, as we used to say in junior high.

Leading up to that aha!, instantly forgotten, I was wondering why I am less drawn to blogging these days. Work? No poetry there. There are narratives everywhere in life; ditto fiction; but despite my optimistic nature and open-minded perspective (I'm pretty fabulous), I'm not sure poetry is so equally accessible. An exception comes to mind--some James Wright (the novelist) haiku about insects, roaches. He was living in France. He brought an entirely new perspective to the art form.

Mainly, however, poets know idleness. We carve out the time or would if carving and whittling weren't such arduous tasks. We find work which has down time or summer vacations. Like T. and his (misunderstood) problem with email, I'm wedded to the notion of time, which is a notion, a concept, an elusive frame for life.

Nothing will keep me from poetry or the joy of thinking outloud (I'm assuming my words speak their presence) here. At work, however, I'm in the clouds these days. I'm a Google document. I see this posting isn't quite cohering. Oh well. For the record, a few hours ago I completed assembling my first go at a new collection. I didn't think I had written enough new work, but there it is, shorter than The Future Is Happy, bound to change, but a draft of a second book.

I'll call T. later in the week to see how things are going.

Wobbly Me

2011-04-23T00:09:00.000-04:00

How's this for a title: Wobbly Petals.

Shake-a shake-a flutter. Flutttttter.

Since I didn't use a question mark you may infer what I implied. It's a good title.

Full: Wobbly Petals: Sarah Sarai's Princess Di.

That's from Lisa Howe's blog, Sister Arts: Gardens, Homes, Art, Community. Earlier this week, Howe, who is a poet, professor, scholar, bon vivant, featured one of my poems, and by featured I mean created ekphrasic art. Responding to "A Bullish Run Into Chambers," published by Fringe, Howe created a lush photo essay and commentary.

That's enough from me. Please take a look. Again, Wobbly Petals: Sarah Sarai's Princess Di.

http://www.fringemagazine.org/lit/poetry/were-always-in-a-room-and-two-more-poems/

Smelly and creepy? Comfort is not a domino effecting hygiene. I was at the laundromat tonight.

2011-04-19T23:30:00.000-04:00

WHY DON'T PEOPLE BATHE? I'm not talking about the shower-less, about the homeless, the disenfranchised. I'm talking about people with gainful employment who do not with any regularity lather up the lavender-scented French-milled soap. Not even the damn Ivory.

Tonight? Smelly man in the laundromat. My gender may have more flaws than a safety glass storefront window after a Chevette rams in (I cannot explain why Chevette came to mine) but, with notable and distasteful exception, we wash.

And don't be saying, but Sarah, it was a laundromat as if that were an excuse for layered on clinging noxiousness. We all have various oddly exotic outfits. I love mine and wear them to the laundromat--wrinkled mismatches I wish we could wear on formal occassions; in brief, the laundromat is not Fashion Week.

But comfort is not a domino effecting hygiene. Be ever slovenly of garb. Of body be even relatively smell-free. This laundromat guy stank. I guaranty it wasn't a one-off. He was a type. I've worked with them.

They always have modulated voices in freakish contrast to their appearance and odor. Often their jeans droop to show hairy butt crack. Their hair is vicious, a wild animal, hating.

They are rank. They are rank and in the laundromat. I issue a fatwah on smelly men (and the occasional woman). Their odor near--near my fluffed variables? Euuuuuu and feh.

William Matthews, Onions, minutest whiff

2011-04-18T22:38:00.000-04:00

I don't have too awfully much on my mind tonight. Isn't that a gift? No rancor, no hidden fears nibbling, no loneliness or regret. This too shall pass, of course, but hey, smoke 'em if you got 'em.

In fact I decided to post just now because I saw this illustration, anime, and knew there had to be a poem to accompany. While there must be a Japanese poem--how could there not be, so many little gardens, so much flavor--I am settling on a William Matthews' onion poem, droll and fine. Cultural juxtaposition never hurt anyone.

Is that true? I doubt it. Still, here's the poem. It's entitled "Karl Marx." No! It's called "Bridget Fonda on the Bridge." No!

Onions

by William Matthews

How easily happiness begins by
dicing onions. A lump of sweet butter
slithers and swirls across the floor
of the sauté pan, especially if its
errant path crosses a tiny slick
of olive oil. Then a tumble of onions.

This could mean soup or risotto
or chutney (from the Sanskrit
chatni, to lick). Slowly the onions
go limp and then nacreous
and then what cookbooks call clear,
though if they were eyes you could see

clearly the cataracts in them.
It’s true it can make you weep
to peel them, to unfurl and to tease
from the taut ball first the brittle,
caramel-colored and decrepit
papery outside layer, the least

recent the reticent onion
wrapped around its growing body,
for there’s nothing to an onion
but skin, and it’s true you can go on
weeping as you go on in, through
the moist middle skins, the sweetest

and thickest, and you can go on
in to the core, to the bud-like,
acrid, fibrous skins densely
clustered there, stalky and in-
complete, and these are the most
pungent, like the nuggets of nightmare

and rage and murmury animal
comfort that infant humans secrete.
This is the best domestic perfume.
You sit down to eat with a rumor
of onions still on your twice-washed
hands and lift to your mouth a hint

of a story about loam and usual
endurance. It’s there when you clean up
and rinse the wine glasses and make
a joke, and you leave the minutest
whiff of it on the light switch,
later, when you climb the stairs.

_________
William Matthews, “Onions” from Selected Poems and Translations, 1969-1991, Houghton Mifflin Company.

The Future? Keeps Being Happy! A new review in American Book Review

2011-04-17T12:29:00.001-04:00

Being my mother's daughter, boasting—she don't come easy. I anticipate Mom will express regret over so much enforced humility when I meet up with her in Yonville, The Beyond So Great, The Mysterious Phase Next of Existence.

(And I would love to meet up with her. I miss my mother.)

Let's get back on message. American Book Review, a print journal (print: archaic term, wiki it), published a review of my poetry collection, The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX).

The beautifully written review begins with a beautifully written manifesto of contemporary poetics, then offers insight to the specific of my work, in light of the sardonic, tongue-in-cheek and brave manifesto.

Melissa Studdard is reviewer. She is also a poet and fiction writer. Pulled quote:

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.

More information about American Book Review at http://americanbookreview.org/issueContent.asp?id=193. The review is in the Jan/Feb 2011 issue.

Poem: Unreasonable. "These silver nets in my breast?"

2011-04-11T08:31:00.000-04:00

From my collection, The Future Is Happy. I have made things happen in my time, but--long view--tonight is always the night.

Unreasonable

These silver nets in my breast?

When the moon rises in my throat

I cast them over desire. It's worked.

I've said, “Tonight's the night”

and stars wove a reasonable fate.

Every fate has rotations, and each

friendship. The planets’ are simple

compared to ours, requiring

wiry equations and convincement

the party’s a hoot, or paranoia

(Venus is in the wrong house).

Oh, you want the reasonable fate.

Details, like did he kiss me, and

why didn't I follow through on

women? That door's not closed

and, yes. (With three older sisters,

I may know too much.) My net,

silver in my breast – I draw your

attention to its Arabian magic.

To the date palm so comfortable

outside the Hollywood Bowl, and

brass lamps with dulled bellies to rub,

to sorcerers who are potent before an

innocent new stammering vocabulary.

Tragedy is a shard, pottery, broken

and exhibited for its poignancy.

Life is full, holds water, cracks and

gets repaired. I've gone abstract

(again). What I need is another kiss.

_______
Sarah Sarai, published in The Future Is Happy, BlazeVOX [books], 2009.

Return of the Chapbook Decisions, picking the right poem (and more)

2011-04-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

This is my third-in-a-row posting on assembling a chapbook.

I had to set myself a faux deadline because though I was extended an offer of probably publication, I procrastinated, a problem. The deadline I set was last Monday. On Friday I met it head-on, was laughed at, and several hours later laughed at it as I pressed send.

Two of my last-minute decisions were contradictory. You see I had began to doubt I should include on particular poem, "Poetics of the Unemployed," which is jaunty/funny. Would it jar a reader or betray the other poems which are less funny but wonderful all the same?

I suspect I was less concerned with jarring readers than I was with assuaging the Critic, Critical Reader, the Evil Critic on my Shoulder. Judging myself as I fear others judge me, I shied away from telltale wit or cleverness. That's so Sarah, and of course Sarah is so helplessly jokey.

Jokey is, in and of itself, an issue. I suspect that was part of the problem in my all female-faculty graduate program. Heck, it's a lifelong problem. At parties in the seventies, someone might be telling me a hugely sincere and tragic story of family break-ups and terminal illness along with bedside confessions of betrayal and tragedy and I'd hear a joke starting up in another room and head for the joke.

The men would laugh at my cleverness, but the women would appear lost, or many of them would. What they lacked in speed-of-light comebacks, they made up for in skinniness and, of hair, straightness and shininess. I was lost to my own ping ponging sexuality, which didn't help.

Back to the chapbook. I cut "Poetics of the ..." and added "Unreasonable" [to be posted tomorrow] and "No End Out of Mind" from The Future Is Happy. I wanted to give more air-time. Then I thought, Why would anyone want to read poems available in previous book? Wasn't the point of getting more new work out there, getting more new work out there? So I control-z-ed my way back to my original choice, tidied up that.

The Collected Poems of Sarah Sarai, which could include some poems from Happy, is but a twinkle in this poet's eye. Best to keep writing, which I haven't done much of this year. Look Up, Up is full of new work. Yay.

More to reveal as revelation demands.

Artwork from: http://www.artknowledgenews.com/files2009b/Marshall_Dalek.jpg painting by James Marshall ("Dalek"))