Acceptance. A Writer's Life

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.

Poem: How to Love Your Country

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First I suggest you engage in a stripe of
healing like peoples we no longer are
whose transubstantiated hands recognize
energies local-and-guarding-the-heart and
reach in raw to jimmy it open and wounded
but still a heart to salute in its numinous

oneness. Next I recommend admitting
of a buzzing confusion like hallucation’s
chimerical scrim glinting that word diverse
as if fancies of Mother-Father-AllCreative
were even more plentiful than Eskimos’
happy valleys of snow or of snow is the
perdural stew of snowflake christenings

where shapes are recorded in the Book of
Ice Eternal in Great America’s hush-hush
archives. Finally I advise nothing but to
stalk and cherish moments you almost see
the amaranthine beauty of life’s binding
truth: You belong to nothing. You belong.











from: The Future Is Happy (by Sarah Sarai), available at Open Books (Seattle); Unmoveable Books (Brooklyn); who knows where else; and Amazon -- http://www.amazon.com/Future-Happy-Sarah-Sarai/dp/1935402358