Open Books: my alma mater

I was living a few blocks from Seattle's  Open Books: a poem emporium when I started writing poetry. Owners Christine Deavel and John Marshall hadn't yet made the move to stocking only poetry, but shelves devoted to poetry easily outvoted the rest of the stock. Worked for me.

By the time the store moved a bit down the way, the Deavel-Marshall team went all out: poetry and its handmaidens only.

Grand to know the bookstore's thrived; grand to learn tastes and interests, if one is educable, can be further educated under the tutelage--the personal shoppingness--of its owners, both graduates of Iowa's Writers' Workshop. If you are set in your ways, no problem. The books are there.

I learned to distinguish between reading for...pleasure/out of interest/to keep up and reading poetry to learn how to write (this may be Sarah-specific--I don't mean to hold John & Christy to conversations that took place fifteen years ago). I also got necessary feedback on my first poem to be published, First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn.

Deavel and Marshall are both poets. John (John W. Marshall) won the Oberlin College Press FIELD Poetry Prize a few years ago with his wonderful collection, Meaning a Cloud. 

Click on the bookstore name in the first paragraph for address, hours, mail order info, readings and events.

Poem: First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn (& the Rapture, Mom, movies)

First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn

When the trumpets blow,
I will see her, the angel Evelyn,
lifted on a cloud,
air-jet transporting her
to heights. Pleasure is slight,
perfection interpreted.
She wants to be healed.
Please, grant her
that rare sex
that doesn't start
when it begins or end
when it is over.
Little Evelyn, soon an angel,
one maimed leg, I weep
to see it, the slight
drag of her right foot.
______
Sarah Sarai, pub. in ZYZZYVA
& included in The Future Is Happy, available at Amazon and Small Press Distribution.
An earlier posting also mentioned but didn't include full text of this poem: My 3,000 Loving Arms: Delirious Feminism

If there'd been a sign-up table in the theater lobby when I saw The Exorcist (opening day, without warning of what the movie was about), I'd be a Catholic. Damn, I love movies.

Eighteen years later  I was similarly swept away in psyche. Michael Tolkin's The Rapture, with Mimi Rogers (who once married Tom Cruise, in itself scary).Tolkin's version of the Apocalypse stays close to the Bible. The Four Horsemen gallop along despite flying boulders and natural disasters. It's set in my L.A. - funky, as opposed to glossy - and nearby barren desert. So I was living in Seattle; my friend dropped me off after the movie; I went upstairs and wrote. I had intensely complicated relationships with my mom and with Los Angeles. When she was a little girl she had polio.

I wrote "The First Appearance of the Angel Evelyn" in my first or second year of poeming; it was my first published poem. Howard Junker, editor of ZYZZYVA, and John Marshall, co-proprietor of Open Books, made helpful suggestions. My mom was indeed religious, Christian, but not literal in interpretation; at all.