Open Letter: Finally getting my thoughts together (for Team Poetry at the very least)

This is an open letter to a woman I have only seen (at a poetry reading) but not met; Facebooked (but not met). She sent me an e-mail lovely and self-revelatory and all I could think of was how different we were. I struggled with the differences and responded with some quick tart comments.

And that was that.

That was in late November. I'm not going to explore why it took so long to get my thoughts together. I suppose I should celebrate the fact that I'm not spending another ten years in shame and hostility as I consider a fate (uh, romanticized word) different from mine, (fate: as if I were a Greek maiden who risked Hera's rancor by sleeping with Zeus, or daughter of a tragic hero destined for an eye-catching end). I'm neither; I'm an American woman, for good and bad and bad and good.

My friend wrote--I can't find the e-mails--she was a bit of a loner and suspected I was the same.

And I was off and running on the endless track in my wee brain.

First off, friend, I wanted to say, I am not a loner, I'm a joiner. My ten years in Seattle were joining upon joining. My joining in New York was hampered, true. I attended the world's most unfriendly grad. school which set a pace. For years, New York City was me bouncing against brick walls and I tried to be part of various literary communities. The closest I came was to have my photo in a PEN newsletter with the wrong name identifying me. Last year I volunteered to be part of a jury for a PEN prison writing competition and was told they "were going in a different direction (with PEN members)" which was a lie. PEN members weren't chosen as jurors, something I have strong experience with (jurying), blah blah. More of the same.

I digress. Friend, you've been married, twice as I understand it, have grown children. I am a spinster. No kids. Health issues affecting every adult decade. Allergy issues that had me identifying with The Sleeping Detective so much I couldn't watch. Economic hardship as a way of life.

But that's it. All the above is a way of life. My tendency to see myself as a victim is a tendency and a poor insight into the fates' weavings. It's true that my combination of extreme wit, verbal skill, brains and imperfect body, plus my age (as in my being old enough to have lived through unrestrained open hatred of smart women) has stood in my way but my greatest obstacle to, uh, happiness, a.k.a. self-acceptance has been me.

We were getting to know each other because we share a subversive perspective. The differences--marriage (to a man or woman, I'm open) are not indictments. It may be we are each of us creatures of light and individuality and my only "problem" has been my struggle with my lights and my extreme (yeah, I can be pretty extreme) Sarah-ness.

Emerson wrote, Each man is a unique. This woman is a uniquer unique.

Friend, because there's no point in my going into enough detail to identify you or further blueprint my schema of correspondences and lights Trojan War-long and then some, I'm holding off on specifics.

But let me say this. I remember when I read Lee Ann Roripaugh's second book, wondering how she had the guts to reveal so much. By the time I met Lee Ann, I'd forgotten (me being me), and assured her I found nothing her mother might object to in her work. A week or so later I remembered being blown away by Roripaugh's openness. Other writers, poets, bloggers lead the way in honesty.


In brief: A good writer should be so simple that (s)he has no faults, only sins. [Yeats' journal]
Perhaps: Sarah Sarai was sent to earth to help Team Poetry save the righteous.

Metaphors, Masks, Clarity, Roripaugh, Corn: I'm learning how to write

A few months ago I jotted some lines in response to a friend's comment questioning the depth or validity of impersonal public mourning--a pile of bouquets honoring a stranger's death. I knew, or believe, those flowers do indeed represent a sincere grief, and not mawkishness.

The lines I wrote had to do with a scene in Crime and Punishment. Raskilnikov dreams of a horse being beaten to death. It's pretty gruesome, but that is what came to mind, then Princess Diana and the outpouring when she was killed. My thoughts moved closer to home, America--New York and L.A.--cities where I know teenagers are killed by random bullets.

It was all a good idea for a poem but I couldn't move it. The lines sat on the virtual page in my computer. I considered deleting, but didn't, more out of laziness than any belief the poem would ever get legs. But a few days ago, it did. I can't say why, but I returned to it, partly because it was there in the long document that holds all new poems, and I was there. I worked on it every day with glee.

This morning it occurred to me to question my memory of the Dostoevsky. Given that it once took me about fourteen tries to get the name right for Achilles' friend (Patroclus) killed in that war, I knew I should not rely on memory. What I wrote above is correct, but I hadn't remembered it that way. And if I couldn't remember--for my own poem--why should I expect anyone else to?

In the time between my first draft and this morning I read Lee Ann Roripaugh's latest collection, On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year (Southern Illinois University Press). I can't overstate how fine, marvelous, astute, rhythmic, sensual, funny, tragic, transformative and insanely affecting Roripaugh's work is. And what lingered in my para-conscious mind, relative to "For One Who Questioned the Grief," the poem mentioned above, was how clear her work is.

The easy word is accessible but that could be wrongly read as easy, which Roripaugh is far from. As a professor, she has a bead on how all sorts understand and think about poetry, true, but more than that she has the gift--which may also be sheer willingness to write draft after draft--of creating luminosity in the everyday, a caterpillar, a midnight drive home, "the flittering plop of moths."

Not one of the poems in this collection begins, as "For One..." did, "No one mends the horse's leg, / not Raskilnikov, not Fyodor."

I can laugh now. What was I thinking? Not very poetry-y and quite a reach. This is not Tom Sawyer getting Huck Finn to help him paint a fence. Not a paraphrase of "the best of times, the worst of times" & co. In other words, not a reference it's relatively fair to expect readers to remember. It's a reference that must be retrieved from the memory banks, if not Google.

As of this morning the poem opens with, "When a stranger is killed and laid to rest / at the alter for Public Mass of Remembrance." I'm not saying that's my high point but it's clear. For me it's risky in that I'm stating where I'm headed, what this poem is going to be about. For me, that feels--repeat--risky. My training--in life, not poetry--was to be clever. And stylistically, again in life, to hint rather than state. Of course my nature is more blunt so there's always a battle.

I was prompted to write this entry in response to the remarkably thoughtful Alfred Corn's Weblog. His essay today, Metaphor, Masks, Coding

http://alfredcornsweblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/metaphor-mask-code.html
is an exploration of a poet's decision to metaphorize rather than be "straightforward" (Corn's word). The title is almost Margaret Meadish, as if we poets were so distant from our culture as to think we needed masks from any dimension as intercessionary devices.

Anyway, I have felt, over the past month, that I am just beginning to know how to write a poem. Sometimes I purposely metaphorize (nasty word) or create a metaphor because I am bored. In the same way a poet told me to meet her at the little yellow man. When I got to the street corner in Brooklyn there was no little yellow statue. She'd been referring to markings on an online map. This last little incident is hardly conclusive but does demonstrate poets' odd ways of seeing and describing the world.

Note: Sorry I still haven't figured out links, here. Sigh.

The image is young Margaret Mead with an Eskimo mask.

Blurb and Be Blurbed: or, as ye blurb . . .

Blurb is not an attractive word. Visually it is at best whimsical, a bulging clown. Audibly it is the anti-onomatopoeia. A bl-ur-b is written in praise?

But it is.

From Wikipedia: "The concept of a 'brief statement praising a literary product' dates back to medieval literature of Egypt from the 14th century. The concept was known as taqriz in medieval Arabic literature." From medieval Arabic literature to God’s ears.

Movie blurbs are laughable—there are so many “best” movies of the year according to blurbs, Oscar ballots could be bound books rather than short lists.

As for fiction, I once heard an author—a good writer—at a reading—state he didn’t have time to read the books he blurbed. Maybe he was being flip?

It’s blurbs on back covers of poetry collections that interests me here, although I never gave them much thought until I had to ask poets to “blurb me.” I asked five and four agreed. (Their comments are at the end of this entry.) I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t admire their work and when I read the comments, I found temporary residence in another world where Sarah Sarai is a temple goddess of 3,000 loving arms and one heart, where chocolate is iridescent, where seersucker is the fabric of royalty.

The Future Is Happy is a first book. The fact that four poets were willing to link their names with mine made my present happy.

I don’t know that blurbs are necessarily useful or even necessary in helping me select books I like. Even if admired and beloved John Ashbery or Rita Dove recommend a book I’m not necessarily going to buy or like it. Taste is individual.

An acquaintance commented, on a social networking site, “Attention poetry publishers: when sending promo for a new book, don't even bother sending blurbs. Blurbs are bullshit and everyone knows it. Send sample poems and some kind of description. Really. A movie trailer shows scenes from a movie, right? Common sense. And poetry books are way more expensive than movie tix.”

My reaction was immediate and kneejerk, not to the sentiment (such as it is) but to the sweeping generalization. “Blurbs are bullshit and everyone knows it.” Are they? They reveal writing quality of the blurber at the very least, but also can convey a sense of WHY someone liked the book. Even briefer, they give a sense of the book.

This same poet added, “I just think it's a stupid custom, largely unquestioned although everyone I know mocks them.” EVERYONE?

Anyway. I'm not a total idiot. Every field is fixed at times by which I mean, some poets write praise they don't mean. I have read stupid blurbs of generic praise. I have doubted some poets ever internalized Camp Fire Girl, Girl Scout or Boy Scout codes of honesty.

You know. I was going to write my reaction to the blurbs on my book but realized I would be blurbing the blurbs which might invite another blogger to blurb the blurbs of my blurbs. Search on the BlazeVOX [books] catalog for a blurb written by one Sarah Sarai (for Charles Freeland’s Eros & (Fill in the Blank).

And, ta-dah, here are mine:

Sarah Sarai’s poems are charged with the terrible presence of the now and the dangerous fact of words. This is poetry as it should be. Scary, strange, generous, intensely in a physical world while illuminating an unimaginable spiritual world. This is writing that sings. The song it sings is the song of our hearts.

—Jack Wiler (Fun Being Me, I Have No Clue)

With both wit and tenderness, Sarah Sarai rigorously navigates the dialectics of knowledge and not knowing, thinking and being, the fantastic and the quotidian, the spiritual and the earthy, in language that is by turns crisp and lush. These are heady, whip-smart, funny and moving poems in which time becomes fluid and vertical—high-rise pageant of art, ephemera, filigree and memory through which our physical and temporal bodies spark and fall much too quickly.

—Lee Ann Roripaugh (On the Cusp of a Dangerous Year; Year of the Snake; Beyond Heart Mountain)

How often we hear it: "No ideas but in things." But Sarai throws pie in the face of such doctrine, and a tasty pie it is. Here, abstractions such as connection, morality and "sloppy forgiveness" form the crust of her work. But the filling, juicy with the polymorphous perversity of a living breathing world, teems with a compote of voices, textures, colors. Socrates, James Brown, Anna Karenina are tossed together with bebop, chili peppers and "100 billion neurons nipping maybe 268 mph." So much to chew on! The poet serves it all with an uncommon heart and broad-ranging intellect. The result is writing which is naked, urgent, frisky and sublime.

—Nina Corwin (Conversations with Friendly Demons and Tainted Saints; Inhabiting the Body: A Collection of Poetry and Art by Women-editor; Fifth Wednesday Journal-poetry editor)

Sarah Sarai’s poetry is hot-wired and hip-swivel all the way up the spine! Emily Dickinson is Jewish and Moses breaks tablets for stellar sex. She’s retained the best of modernism (especially that syncopated variable foot Charlie Parker bop in the word-love) and moved onto new red earth for her own vision. Eat this book! It’s terrific.

—Doug Anderson (The Moon Reflected Fire; Blues for Unemployed Secret Police; Keep Your Head Down-a memoir)

Buy The Future Is Happy from Amazon or Small Press Distribution.

Links to reviews are HERE!

 

See also: Polonius on Acid (re: art of the blurb)