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| “Garden of Eye” canvas created by Digital-Matrix.* |
The following review was published in American Book Review, Volume 32, Number 2, January/February 2011.
It is reprinted with permission of the author.
The Eccentric St. Sarai, a Poet Who
Doesn’t Suck
by Melissa Studdard
The unspoken rules for writing
contemporary literary poetry are clear
to all serious poets. For starters, it
is NOT okay to use words like
“love,” “rose,” “heart,”
“soul,” “butterfly,” or “grandmother” unless
you intend to systematically
deconstruct, or even better, negate,
them. If you do insist on using these
horrid words (which, I remind
you, is not recommended), you must find
a way to rough them up and
scrape away the centuries of grime left
on them by the grubby hands of
former poets, such as Shakespeare,
Donne and Petrarch (who sadly, did
not know what they were doing) . You
must concede to the premise that
sentiment is embarrassing and sincerity
is downright disgusting, and
you must recognize that if you’re
feeling attached to a line you’ve
written, it’s probably too “precious”
to be published and should be
deleted quickly, before anyone else
sees the shameful thing that you
have done. Most of all, you must never,
ever do anything that comes
across as too poetic. God forbid that
anyone should see your poem and
deduce from it that you are a poet.
Better for your poem to imply that
you are a bricklayer, waitress, or
serial killer.
The problem is that the anti-cliché
has itself become clichéd, and the
gruff tone and handling of subject
matter are now as anticipated as
the sentimentality they replaced. So
what’s a poet to do in a post
post era, when everything that can be
done has seemingly been done and
surprise itself is a cliché? Literary
history would suggest a swing
back to a kinder, gentler poetry, as
each new literary movement has
been a reaction against what came
before it. However, the poets of
this generation find themselves in a
particularly bitter pickle in
that anyone who writes in the old style
would appear not to be aware
of the new style and would therefore
run the risk of coming across as
uneducated. That, we cannot have.
What we do find, however, is that there
are poets who are aware of
craft, literary history and current
trends but who have decided to lay
their own unique voices and minds down
on the page anyway, poets who,
finding themselves at the crossroads of
convention and deviance,
choose neither but instead drop the
reigns altogether and lift into
Pegasian flight. They are smart and
sensitive and funny and well-read.
They are aware of what’s going on
around them and what came before
them, yet they allow that knowledge to
inform rather than dictate
their work. They are skilled at craft,
but they do not craft the life
out of their poems.
And so, despite what might have
initially sounded like a complaint
about contemporary poetry, I’m here
to tell you that there is still
much good poetry being written, and
there are still many good
collections coming out. One such
collection is The Future is Happy,
by Sarah Sarai, published by BlazeVox
Books, a press that proclaims to
publish “poetry that doesn’t suck.”
In Sarai’s case, I wholeheartedly
agree. It doesn’t suck at all. It is,
in fact, a poetry of luminous,
brave transparency, and though it would
by no means be considered
confessional, it lays bare the unique
mechanisms of Sarai’s mind, the
wild fluctuations of her pulse, skipped
beats of her heart. Sarai has
no qualms about mentioning weed, chili
peppers, the bible and the
afterlife all in the same poem, and her
wacky, unique perceptions of
the world spawn metaphor after
metaphor, analogy after analogy of
sparkling, lyrical, hilarious insight.
Crossing the border is compared
to crossing into the afterlife, Emily
Dickinson is presented as a Jew
in hiding, and poop cleaned from a
baby’s butt is likened to sin wiped
away by grace. What may appear at
first to be flippant always has a
deeper meaning, and the mundane is
frequently combined with the
sacred. Take the poem “Aristotle,”
for instance, short enough to be
considered in its entirety:
There’s no clean slate
in God’s classroom.
He was clapping erasers
as your ebullient soul popped
like gleeful corn charging
an aluminum lid.
You ker-chewed
from dust falling milky.
What an act of hubris, to be born.
(Sarai 50, 2009)
Here we see Sarai’s
characteristically zany way of handling subject
matter. Reincarnationists have long
considered the idea of the earth
as a schoolhouse for the soul, but
Sarai makes the idea palpable by
giving God a classroom and erasers to
clap. One only need look at the
titles of the individual poems, such as
“St. Sarai Carrying the Infant
Christ Child,” “Like Breasts on the
Copier,” and “When the Sun Sets
Like a Nice Salmon Mousse,” to pick
up on the humor and originality of
the collection. Yet reading the poems
reveals a voice that is also
earnest, vulnerable and raw. Alongside
these wacky, philosophical
poems are poems about losing faith in
poetry, running into a former
lover, and empathizing with a mother
who has cancer. Particularly
stunning is the poem, “My Various and
Sloppy Forgiveness,” which ends
with an unabashed portrayal of longing.
Sarai is sexy, funny, philosophical,
gracious and irreverent –
sometimes all in the same poem,
combining the elevated with the lowly,
the drab with the lyrical, the complex
with the simple. But in the
end it is not her eclectic subject
matter or her charming, sassy style
that will win the reader over - it is
her willingness to, without
artifice or pretension, offer her truth
to the page.
Melissa Studdard is the author of the bestselling novel Six Weeks to Yehidah (winner of the Forward National Literature Award), as well as the newly released My Yehidah, both published on All Things That Matter Press. She is a book reviewer at-large for The National Poetry Review, a contributing editor for Tiferet Journal, and host of the radio interview program Tiferet Talk.
*Digital Matrix: http://maat-order.org/blog/?p=1113
