Renegade Sonnets Once Removed

"September" by Gerhard Richter
Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C.

Renegade Sonnets Rendered via Ekphrasis

A few notes on Rob Stanton’s Once Removed (Nono Press/2022)

 

by Sarah Sarai

 
We look to the past to understand the past. Also repetitive disorders and daily stupidities. We look to the past to understand a shared present, greed and hauteur acted out, to divine a future we pretend we can’t foresee. Or we try to persuade our leaders in a pursuit of common sense, kindness, equality. One much-studied and globally shared event of the past, the attack on the Twin Towers, is interrogated by Rob Stanton in his ekphrastic chapbook Once Removed. 
 
The object of Stanton’s contemplation is, of course, not the attack but the remarkable painting September by Gerhard Richter, whose work often magnetizes viewers. I’ve watched museum patrons squint and study his canvases in a manner that feels unique from interrogations of other artwork. Strictly anecdotal, on my part. 
 
Nudged by an anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and through a study of Richter’s 2005 painting, Stanton created these stencil sonnets. My term. They are a cry from a heftier sonnet of classical literary history and the many contemporary iterations. They are stripped. As in September. Neither better nor worse than earlier iterations of a loved form of poetry, each wee sonnet is comprised of four stanzas: two brief, each four lines, all short; then two stanzas, three lines each. Each a puff of word or each word is a puff of smoke. Appropriate by design as September depicts the Towers after the second building was hit. Matching what we witnessed on that day, in Richter’s work the structures are discernable only through menace of dust and aggregation. From Rob Stanton’s Sonnet 154:
 
A corona of suddenly
insignificant 
 
                        litter spills
                        Blow back.
                        blow back 
 
On the twentieth anniversary of the attack I broke down and watched the documentaries. That’s what there was, “litter spill.” For the record, Richter was flying to New York in a commercial plane that had to be diverted to Halifax. But that fact makes him no more privy to this wound that will not heal than anyone else. 
 
From “160.” “...already / pockets of flouted sky / cerulean blue / are being tendered.” 
 
Once Removed is a Nono Press venture, as is Sonnets 1-159, in a longer work “dedicated to the work of Luc Tuymans.” 
 
 
 
A native of the UK, Rob Stanton teaches in Austin, Texas. He is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) and Trip- (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2013). Contact him for more information.
 
 
 
 
 
 

"this poet is tuned in to the idiosyncratic and has something to say about it" - review of Strapless

Susan Tepper wrote a delightful Amazon review of That Strapless Bra in Heaven & here it is, in full: Reviewed in the United States on January 28, 2020:

Poet Sarah Sarai knows how to make a line zing, grab your attention, shock you a little or a lot, and make you laugh. All in one stanza. That is no small feat. This poet is very tuned in to the idiosyncratic and has something to say about it. Actually, a lot to say. "My mood is London longing for a blue sky. I take the Hudson River as my lover, / the Southwest as my comforter, Mount Shasta as my tomb. Who wouldn’t want to spend millennia in a fine female breast? …” from her book THAT STRAPLESS BRA IN HEAVEN where life IS a train wreck. But Sarai gets past all that with other train wrecks, from other lives, from history, near and far, from myths and legends, from the wake-up call of a weary friend: “One morning he pulled me aside, to advise I never check myself into Bellevue.” This is poetry on acid with a twist of real. You have to be wide open to rap lines the way Sarai does. The book is lyrical, musical, unforgiving. I’m not suggesting this poet is heartless. Not by any stretch. She just keeps the soft and mushy under wraps, giving us a peek, here and there. Because she’s an original. Very highly recommended.

The Amazon path to That Strapless Bra in Heaven, poems by Sarah Sarai.

Or go to Kelsay Books to order your copy of That Strapless Bra in Heaven, 

poems by Sarah Sarai.

Susan Tepper is author of, most recently, the novel 

What Drives Men (Wilderness House).

photo: The East River. Taken by Sarah Sarai.