Kickstart the love, my friends. A soulful, funkalicious project

Send your love now! To

Fanny Franklin Soul-Oo Record!

Okay, I'll back up.  First.  That's Mark Cross on keyboards.  He "wailed all through the first year of his life." A natural-born musician.

The line is from my poem "The Rebirth Live" -- my contribution to the anthology, Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown.

What's happening? Mark is collaborating with soulful, funky temptress Fanny Franklin on getting a CD out there, there!, so you can download the love.

Love costs, my friends, sadly, these days. The project is on Kickstarter, however, so, really, all the love will cost you is a minimum of, say, $1.  Say, $5.  Say, $30.  More if you have more. 

But really love doesn't cost so much as work. Love works. It does. So if you don't have money, send love. Here's a thought, you could send both.  Okay, I'll shut up. I'll end this with another line from the poem.

"God is in the funk the beat the blues."

Believe. Believe it.

Fanny Franklin Soul-Oo Record!

For more info about Say It Outloud, go to James Brown.

Alas we live in the Age of Cupcakes . . . (2 poems in Scythe poetry journal)

A quick howdy to tell you I have two poems in Scythe, a poetry journal created by Joseph and Chenelle Milford, which, as the two explain on the journal's landing page, originated in the spirit and mission of The Joe Milford Poetry Show.

The Milfords are one of poetry's energy fields. They produce an online interview show, archive same and edit a literary journal. And raise kids. And write.  

So thanks to them and I hope you enjoy "No Need for a Door" ("The lotus was a premise, floating / and so what") and "Look Now" ("Alas we live in the Age of Cupcakes. / Those who know the past are likely as those / who don't to forget to bake at 350° 'til /springy to touch. . .").

In case I haven't been self-serving enough, let me guide you to the archive of the The Joe Milford Poetry Show, wherein you will find, what?, yes!, my name!, Sarah Sarai, yes, an interview with Sarah Sarai. Oh joy!

Scythe, Issue IV: includes work by J.P. Dancing Bear, Oliver de la Paz, Arielle LaBrea-Lancaster, Jee Leong Koh, Lyn Lifshin, Laura Carter and many others.

Your Daily Prayer, Courtesy of Rumi

*caption below

My Peeps.  I just saw this on the Parabola website.  This poem is enough beautiful and enough true it must be shared with as many as possible.

All bodies are temples.  We forget all bodies are homes.  I don't know what liberties Coleman Barks took with the title or the translation in general, but I do know we are all guests to poetry.

And, "Every morning a new arrival."

The Guest House

 

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

—Rumi

From The Essential Rumi, versions by Coleman Barks

*from: thebluelantern

I am rejected. Because I write "stories like this."

The editor thinks I'm weird.
I'll give him weird.

Here's a new rejection letter for two short stories.  I found it painful and useless.  While I understand the editor was being generous in writing me and that you, My Reader, probably think I'm crazy for being offended, please understand. I have never followed up on a letter like this and had a story accepted.

In other words, while this editor thinks he has his reasons for not selecting this specific submission, he simply doesn't like my writing and doesn't understand that. My experience tells me he is going to keep finding fault. Been there. And there. And there.  No thanks.

His utter lack of specificity left me confused. Kind sir: don't like my writing. Fine. But if you don't (and this relates to fiction), give me at least one sentence or scene you'd make different. 

Weird? I am posting the letter in full (but for redacted titles and names) in hopes of getting rid of some of the ick.

Dear Sarah,

We've decided to pass on ...... But I want to encourage you pretty strongly to submit again. Here's where what should be a fairly standard rejection letter becomes longer and oddly personal, but I think it's worth doing.

See, I myself wrote--and, to some extent, still write--stories like this. And for a number of years, I got rejection letters that said, in essence, "these stories are good, but they're too weird." I didn't want to get more normal. So I was determined to reverse the clauses in that sentence--you know, write until I got a letter that said "this story is weird, but too good to pass up." So it was a question of making the weirdness more accessible, without becoming less weird; to give someone a really compelling reason to keep reading despite the weirdness.

I can tell you now that there is an audience for that sort of thing. Not a very big one, but it's pretty dedicated--and I myself am in it. Of course, you can write however you wish--maybe the direction I've described is not at all interesting to you--but in any case, I'm interested in reading more from you, and I'd like to see where you go next.

Thanks!

Reader, if you were a seam, I'd take you out anywhere: 3 new poems

Painting by Megan Hinton

Well, there's not much to be said here except that POOL's latest is online and three of my poems are in it.  POOL publishes once a year, used to be print, has always been chic.

And Californian.  No, not just Californian, but Southern Californian.  It is of my hometown. 

Thank you, editors Judith Taylor and Patty Seyburn.  Thank you fellow contributors, whose names await you here, at POOL, a journey of poetry.

My three poems are "Commerce for the Good of the Peoples," "You Are the Confusing Identity I Write For" and "On the Way to the Gallery."

9/11, an excerpt, "I remember thinking, They are shades. They are gone."

I'm letting myself feel it this year. One moment I was thinking about my mother who'd died in August, the next moment I was in a new kind of numb.

It is strange, or not, but I watched the second tower fall on a television in a bar. I'd called an elderly friend on a routine check-in, she started screaming at me and I had the sense to go outside and pay attention. I don't have a television. During the next days and weeks I was thankful for the absence of repetitious terror, visually, at least.

The bar wasn't usually open so early. I don't think, I didn't track its timings and now it's under new ownership, and shiny and glossy so I don't have the luxury of sentimentality, another plus.  Anyway. Anyway. Anyway.

. . .an excerpt from "Everywhere Woman Is Born Free,"* which I posted here in full, a few years ago.  It's in my collection.

Carr Futures/Tower 1/WTC

I remember working one Wednesday

on the 92nd floor.  The people were pleasant,

like they’d all make great neighbors.

I remember pangs in my stomach.  An ulcer?

and asking a friend if I should see a doctor. 

I’m going out on a limb here, Sarah,

but you gotta have some fun.

I remember my mom died a month earlier.

I remember Martha called to say she was

in Jersey and did I want to visit.

I remember being asked back to Carr Futures

after Martha and I made plans.  I called

my friend on a limb.  Should I turn down

work right now?  I remember I went to Jersey. 

It was a Thursday.  I remember rolling down

grassy slopes with Martha’s grandkids. 

I never went back to Carr Futures.

By 11 a.m. on Tuesday everyone was gone. 

Everyone.  Every employee of Carr Futures

who was there that day was gone. 

Where were they?  I remember the floor plan:

the oblong lobby, the maple reception area. 

The offices beyond.  I remember wondering

if any of the exits were contemplated. 

I remember praying it all went fast.

I remember thinking, No one? 

I remember thinking, So many in such a short time?

I remember thinking, They are shades.  They are gone.

I remember thinking, Not one person made it out. 

Poof.  I remember, No one?

The Armory
I remember the Armory across the street became the

first DNA collection center.

I remember my neighborhood a media event.

I remember streets blocked for two weeks.

Everything darker than a nightmare.

Candles, vigils, wax on sidewalks, shattered flames.

Flyers on every wall.  Photographs of smiling people

with their hair well-groomed, missing.

I remember being interviewed:  Do you want revenge?

I remember telling the people of France I wouldn’t

put anyone through this. 

I remember hoping someone understood.

I remember there was no getting away from it. 

The doors of my building opened to the funeral train.

I remember the line down the block and around

the corner.  Loved ones waiting to register.

I remember trying to give blood.

I remember being asked to hand out fliers.

I remember crying because I wanted everyone

to understand I cared as much as Jennifer Lopez.

__________

Sarah Sarai...excerpt from *"Everywhere Woman Is Born Free," (click on poem title for full poem), in The Future Is Happy

Carr Futures was a commodities broker/trader. They've merged. Jennifer Lopez had given money or visited the troops.

The power & the glory & the Blaze & the VOX meet a pouter. My 3000 Loving Arms hug Gatza.

Earlier today I was googling sleep studies, trying to help a friend find a study which meets his peculiarities. Which reminded me that if I am going to sleep tonight I better say something or other about the rather unhappy young fellow who complained, yesterday, about BlazeVOX [books]. {Links at the end.}

I have two somethings to say. One is that Mr. Unhappy went public. That, to glorify his sense of great injustice, this young fellow who was so grievously treated by life as to get an MFA, have been an editor for a respected publication, be young, complained in a blog sure to attract attention. Because of its affiliations. And his blogging was somehow confused for thoughtful writing or journalism. So many people added their two cents which more often than not amounted to a hill of beans signifying a singular inability to think clearly or seek truth as if one were a missile bound for the heat of great soul, which one must be at all times if one to survive and remain beautiful and honest and dear. Transparency is one thing. Untempered and false transparency is an agenda.

Complaint two and final.  He went after my publisher. I'm not personally affronted. I'm enough arrogant to believe in my work insofar as my work deserves its place, not that it is better than.  I'm not threatened with the prospect no one will ever respect me again. My publisher, who selected my manuscript from a pile of a gazillion, is de facto, de jure, without doubt, my friend.
So the loyalty button was pressed.

Bonus round with many extra points for valor of a grand and petal-y blossoming nature.  Geoffrey Gatza of BlazeVOX [books] does so much good for poetry. Has rescued manuscripts gone out of print (as by Anne Waldman, yes, Anne Waldman, ahem). Has given a chance to so many new though old poets (as in Sarah Sarai, yes, Sarah Sarai, ahem).  He has made the world better, which is a cliche perhaps but cliches can be factual.

So bug off,

***
Reb Livingson speaks out at No Tell Books Supports BlazeVOX. She also provides a background and links.
Shanna Compton deconstructs vanity in its poisoned dartness at BlazeVOX hurled, at Oh vanity.

Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown

Exciting news. 


Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown has just been released from Whirlwind Press.


Featured poets are Patricia Smith & Amiri Baraka.

Intrepid co-editors (and writers) are Mary E. Weems & Michael Oatman. They got the whole project rolling.


Whirlwind Press, P.O. Box 109, Camden NJ 08108-0109. 


ISBN: 0-922827-32-X.


Poets include Kim Arrington, Ashkari, D.C. Copeland, Beth Bosworth, Erin Bower, Emotion Brown, James E. Cherry, Curtis L. Crisler, Thomas Sayers Ellis, Tim Joyce, Reginald Lockett, Randolph Lewis, Rachel Loden, Michelle Rankins, Vince Rogers, Nia l'man Smith, Sarah Sarai, ValJean Jeffers-Thompson, George Wallace, and many others.


I received a copy in the mail yesterday and am sending it off today to my nephew so I, too, need to order a copy. 


Not much more information available but I will update.

Poem: Distance in Nature: Bare feet best?

"Anger as soon as fed is dead- / 'Tis starving makes it fat." 
       --Emily Dickinson

Ignoring the red zone does make things worse and could lead to explosion, but even Mother Earth needs to explode now and then.

Anyway, few nights ago I came across that couplet and mentally bookmarked it.  It reminded me of my poem, not published, "Distance in Nature."  

I was syllable counting at the time I write "Distance," which seems a perfect approach for a description of an emotion so baffling (sometimes) we work to contain it.  Unexpressed love is sad. Unexpressed anger is, huh, sad, too, but I was going to say, fearsome and controlling.

(By the way, the Easter scene, those eggs with the tiny tableaux, like ships in bottles--not sure they are still around.)



Distance in Nature

Fitted glass seals the shell.
Hissing sand, mollusks, trapped.
Great wonder?  Bare feet best.

This separateness not good:
No Easter scene in egg.
A shell is bad enough.

Great anger?  Estrangement
From compassion.  Distance
In nature, swept away.
_______________________
Sarah Sarai

Amy Clampitt & Homer’s gibbering Thespesiae iache

I have Amy Clampitt beat by three years. She published her first poetry collection at 63, whereas I was a mere lass of 60 when The Future Is Happy emerged from the womb of BlazeVOX [books].

There comparisons dissolve but they are odious anyway as we all know and mean nothing unless one is writing an essay comparing and contrasting the rise and fall of the Roman Empire with the rise and fall of hula hoops. Then comparisons are pretty cool.

And speaking of beautiful which we weren't but it's time we did, here is one of Amy Climpitt's poems. She's right. "Syntax comes last, there can be / no doubt of it. . ."

Syrinx

Like the foghorn that’s all lung,
the wind chime that’s all percussion,
like the wind itself, that’s merely air
in a terrible fret, without so much
as a finger to articulate
what ails it, the aeolian
syrinx, that reed
in the throat of a bird,
when it comes to the shaping of
what we call consonants, is
too imprecise for consensus
about what it even seems to
be saying: is it o-ka-lee
or con-ka-ree, is it really jug jug,
is it cuckoo for that matter?—
much less whether a bird’s call
means anything in
particular, or at all.

Syntax comes last, there can be
no doubt of it: came last,
can be thought of (is
thought of by some) as a
higher form of expression:
is, in extremity, first to
be jettisoned: as the diva
onstage, all soaring
pectoral breathwork,
takes off, pure vowel
breaking free of the dry,
the merely fricative
husk of the particular, rises
past saying anything, any
more than the wind in
the trees, waves breaking,
or Homer’s gibbering
Thespesiae iache:

those last-chance vestiges
above the threshold, the all-
but dispossessed of breath.

Amy Camplitt, 1920-1994

Illustration by John Ezra Keats

Like Earth we're "beatified now by a thing / borne in the dust"

Everything is what it is but fortunately for artists, the opposite is equally true. Nothing is what it is or everything is a bit of this and that and nothing contains multitudes same as everything; or it doesn't.

What am I even talking about?

A poem. The "Garden of Sex" by Jeanne Larsen. It's from Why We Make Gardens, which I reviewed for The Rumpus earlier this year.

Here the earth is a sweet lover, the skin has "windowed leaves" and surrender is a thing, a being, a presence. It's wise, surrender, in knowing "it too will be fed."


The Garden of Sex

This earth is sown
with salt. And it blossoms

wholly, beatified now by a thing
borne in the dust, undeniable,

tender. Its stark
rain still intimates.

It soothes and insists
that it never will stop. Why,

of course this ground trembles,
relentless. This wild garden grips

the stem of the brain. It
yields up the soft

blood's opaque, wet, spent
fruits. It looks out

past your skin's windowed
leaves. At the downpour’s

warm eye, this breathing terrain
simply swells. Rhizomes spread out,

eager and curiously calm.
What holds them's no more

than surrender that knows
it too will be fed.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Jeanne Larsen, Why We Make Gardens (Other Other Poems), Mayapple Press, 2011.

Why I Used a Pen Name Today

I submitted a short story under a different name today. By different I mean not Sarah Sarai. I used a last name that has meaning to me and instead of a first name, cleverly (hah) used an initial.

The email I submitted through is my back-up email.  My name isn't visible though since it has embedded therein a quotation from Emily Dickinson--something that didn't occur to me until I hit "send"--it's not the great ruse to beat all ruses. 

I made the choice of using a pen name because this story was just rejected with the comment that although well-written it seemed a bit young adult.

That wasn't intended as an insult or taken as such. I did wonder, however, if the reaction might not have factored in my being a woman.  Catcher in the Rye is a bit young adult, but no one (except the fool right-wingers who like to burn books) would reject Catcher.

Brainstorming ways to fool with a false scent, I also changed the protagonist's name from Jennie, which is super girlie, to C.G., which evokes neither Barbies nor high school.  (And not in the least bit coincidentally, use C.G. as a prefix to Jung and you have C.G. Jung, who collected the unconscious and then regifted it to all of us.)

The protagonist name change is a good idea in general.  It improves the story. Whether or not changing my name to a more gender ambiguous initial plus a last name will have an effect on getting published, I can't be sure.  My poetry gets accepted enough I don't let my mind wander to the number of rejections I might get because I am a woman.

My fiction, however, has such a distinctly and surprisingly, to me, female voice, it is at risk of dying of neglect.  With Vida publicizing the discrepancies in number of women versus men who get published, I can feel at least a little assured this feeling of annoyance is not sour grapes on my part. 

We'll see.

Milosz, carried by the waters of the river

Today is his birthday. I celebrate with a pleasing poem, pleasing, a pleaser, and true, true like colors, true like vision.

FAITH

Faith is in you whenever you look
At a dewdrop or a floating leaf
And know that they are because they have to be.
Even if you close your eyes and dream up things
The world will remain as it has always been
And the leaf will be carried by the waters of the river.

You have faith also when you hurt your foot
Against a sharp rock and you know
That rocks are here to hurt our feet.
See the long shadow that is cast by the tree?
We and the flowers throw shadows on the earth.
What has no shadow has no strength to live.

Czeslaw Milosz, 1911–2004 (b. Poland; d. U.S.)

Subversion and Sidestepping: The e-chapbook's value (in this case, Paul Sohar's)

Here's a nifty e-chapbook. Most e-chapbooks, or at least those I've seen, are PDFs. They unfold on the screen, or so it seems, as a sort of magic simulacrum of print. Click here or there and pages are lifted and opened. It's a wonderful update of print, not necessarily (or by any means) superior, but it works.

The Wayward Orchard by Hungarian-born Paul Sohar is, as published by Wordrunner Electronic Chapbooks, more of a dedicated literary journal than a chapbook, a one-person show (worth viewing). Below the artwork of the cover lies the table of contents, which is clickable. Once a poem's read its sisters on left-side navigable. A PDF can also be downloaded.

Sohar is a poet worth reading, know that, although in this posting I'm more commenting on form than content. Please don't think faint praise. Please think, I want to check that out! And delight in the cyber possibility of subversion by not relying on traditional publishing, and the sidestep of clearcuts, by not relying on trees.

Proust on Skates (not roller)

(That's a Mendini Proust chair. Link below.)

I grabbed Anthony Hecht's Flight Among the Tombs from off library shelves a few weeks ago, thumbed through and landed on "Proust on Skates." I liked the poem for its biographical fiction, its lovely rendering of the most horizontal or writers momentarily vertical. Its formal control, something I don't aim for in my poetry but admire.


Oddly simultaneous with my reading of Hecht, I saw this comment from poet and critic Dan Chiasson, who writes, "Anthony Hecht, to me the most wearisome of plausible poets."

On the one hand, I admit that as I read other poems in the collection I wasn't impressed or drawn in, although to see my thoughts voiced so vigorously gives me pause. Anyway, here's the poem I did admire.

Proust on Skates

He stayed in bed, and at the beginning of October still wasn’t getting up till two in the afternoon. But he made a seventy-mile journey to Chamonix to join Albu [Louis Albufera] and Louisa [de Mornand, Albufera's beautiful mistress] on a mule-back excursion to Montanvert, where they went skating.    Ronald Hayman, Proust: A Biography

The alpine forest, like huddled throngs of mourners,
Black, hooded, silent, resign themselves to wait
As long as may be required;
A low pneumonia mist covers the glaciers,
Spruces are bathed in a cold sweat, the lat
Sun has long since expired.

Though barely risen, and the gray cast of the day
Is stark, unsentimental, and metallic.
Earth-stained and chimney-soiled
Snow upon path and post is here to stay,
Foundered in endless twilight, a poor relic
Of a once gladder world.

Spare café patrons can observe a few
Skaters skimming the polished soapstone lake,
A platform for their skill
At crosscut, grapevine, loops and curlicue,
Engelmann’s Star, embroideries that partake
Of talent, coaching, drill,

While a few tandem lovers, hand in hand,
Perform their pas de deux along the edges,
Oblivious, unconcerned.
This is a stony, vapor-haunted land
Of granite dusk, of wind sieved by the hedges,
Their brances braced and thorned.

Escaped from the city’s politics and fribble,
Hither has come an odd party of three,
Braided by silken ties:
With holiday abandon, the young couple
Have retreated into the deep privacy
Of one another’s eyes,

While the third, who in different ways yet loves them both,
Finds himself now, as usual, all alone,
And lacing on his skates,
Steadies himself, cautiously issues forth
Into the midst of strangers and his own
Interior debates.

Sweatered and mufflered to protect the weak
And lacey branches of his bronchial tree
From the fine-particled threat
Of the moist air, he curves in an oblique
And gentle gradient, floating swift and free –
No danseur noble, and yet

He glides with a gaining confidence, inscribes
Tentative passages, thinks again, backtracks,
Comes to the minute point,
Then wheels about in widening sweeps and lobes,
Larger Palmer cursives and smooth entrelacs,
Preoccupied, intent

On a subtle, long-drawn style and pliant script
Incised with twin steel blades and qualified
Perfectly to express,
With arms flung wide or gloved hands firmly gripped
Behind his back, attentively, clear-eyed,
A glancing happiness.

It will not last, that happiness; nothing lasts;
But will reduce in time to the clear brew
Of simmering memory
Nourished by shadowy gardens, music, guests,
Childhood affections, and, of Delft, a view
Steeped in a sip of tea.


Anthony Hecht, from Flight Among the Tombs (Alfred A. Knopf, 1995)
http://www.greatinteriordesign.com/tag/usd/

N.Y.C. + L.A. I am a New Yorkaleno.

I'm like one of those funny male caricatures who claim to love all women. Like Christopher Walken's The Continental.

Hear me: Skinny, fat, Page Six-reader, Anatomy of Melancholy-memorizer, I love them all. Whether they smell like dead rat topped by spoiled gefilte fish and Limburger cheese or Chanel 19 from a Rodeo Drive atomizer, Thank You to Both.

It may entail a twenty minute walk to find a cup of coffee and wi fi. The coffee, the wifi, a grocery, a health food store, post office and five thrift shops may be in a three-block radius. Mmmmmwah youse.

The time-consuming stretch may be gorgeous. The 3-blocks stinky and without enough sunlight. You're my honeys, both of ya.

Intellect everywhere. Great art everywhere. Rapid transit everywhere. What to do.

I'm a New Yorkaleno. A poet who loves New York AND Los Angeles, a New Yorker and an Angeleno. It's a cruel fate for the underly employed, the dirty lucre-challenged but there you have. I should open a New Yorkaleno Cafe. Everyone would have to wear breezey shirts, have beautiful welcoming smiles (L.A.) and be agressive and team-spirited (N.Y.).

Well, that's that.  Name it, claim it.

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.

The Online-ification of Tender Beauty (Boston Review)

As an addendum to my previous posting about Boston Review (which published "From Love, Imagination" and "So Tender Beauty" in the July/August 2011 issue), both poems are online.

At least today. I'm cautious. This could be a *Poetry Wednesday* thing and the poems could disappear from the website until there's another Poetry Wednesday or until some other primitive urge strikes the diabolical editors of Boston Review. I don't know the decision-making process and haven't seen smoke rise from the chimney of their stoned quarters up there in ye-olde land (Boston).

I am in fact in love with each and every Boston Review editor but how sappy is that. 

TO READ MY POEMS, AT LEAST TODAY, JULY 13, 2011, GO H E R E FOR "So Tender Beauty" and h e r e for "From Love, Imagination."

Thank you.

My poems "From Love, Imagination" & "So Tender Beauty" are in Boston Review

"As many bridges as I can walk / I have . . ." My poem "From Love, Imagination" opens with a narrator announcing affection for suspension of a sort. Maybe, like me, she's had friends stop the car so she could climb out and walk the bridge.

Poems expand the reality of their poets.

"A sign of your times, a rose-happy glow / enameled on dawn’s fingertips" has rosy-fingered dawn fresh from the manicurist. Or something. That's from "So Tender Beauty" which seems like a dream and ends in "spray of silvered light" and more.

Both are in the July/August issue of Boston Review, a journal with spine and pages.

Many thanks to Timothy Donnelley for selecting the poems. There was a span between submission and acceptance, acceptance and publication.  All worth the wait. I don't know that patience is a virtue, but it is slow joy, anticipation an agony equal to pleasure.

To subscribe to Boston Review, "a magazine of ideas" where ideas of the idiots in charge are challenged, go here: https://www.ezsubscription.com/brv/subscribe.asp.  Poetry, fiction, essays, politics, art.

The Hammer [museum]. Startling. L.A. as found art. Fresh inventive Thek. And some ho hum Ruscha. Women needed.

Yesterday I went to the Hammer. [On the corner of Wilshire and Westwood in L.A.]

The first thing I do is sidle into a dark room to watch a Paul McCarthy video, grotesque puppets, a fabulous mockery of Disney, grunting. A human puppet simulation asks a puppet puppet insinuating questions and of course the puppet puppet just sits there. Things turn crappy, literally. I move on. The point being, I've been in a dark room, take the elevator up, and walk into the main floor which startles me.

The Hammer is a treehouse of a museum. Stepped out of the elevator, left the stairwell, and I am looking north and west to the hills and sun from a massive wraparound terrace.  Slim trees reach into the space. Sun, at least yesterday, pervades. Like the Getty, the Hammer uses Los Angeles' beauty in its readymade glory.

Exhibits?  Paul Thek, for one.  An artist who matches the space--joyous, sweet, mournful, detailed, dying like dry leaves on the terrace. Sontag dedicated Against Interpretation to Thek.

The museum's standing collection is small but every painting is extraordinary. They just are. Maybe, because I've only seen a few previously in traveling exhibits, their newness to me helps but I spend enough time staring at art to be, not inured but able to expect a level of special. These exceed mere special. Someone has an astounding eye.

The bad news is the Ruscha. Ed R. illustrating or accompanying Kerouac text. It's been done and done better. At that point there is no excuse not to include an exhibit by a woman.  This all male, male on male thing is tiresome.

The poster for the Thek is misleading. A male figure diving into a pool. A set up for Hockeny-esque work which isn't what Thek painted. Cheap tricks are cheap tricks. The Hammer is a great museum in its airy way and should be above such.

Wherein the author thinks she is witnessing the End of Days but discovers it's just the end of the day

The weirdest thing happened last week. I was leaving work at 5:30, heading uptown but still in Tribeca, when teams, bevies, squads of white men in dark slacks and white shirts open at the collar (it was a hot day) streamed up a side street, moving en masse toward me. 

They looked similar to southern Baptist preachers (via movies) and I wondered if they were running from end-times, which, apparently, had started on Greenwich and threatened Hudson Ave.  Tribeca does not have imposing skyscrapers so I didn't know what office they could possibly be coming from.  (Hey. I knew they weren't missionaries; they had the blessed corruption of the less-than-sacred in them.)

If I'd been Midtown or Downtown or some other neighborhood where Fortune 500 companies had headquarters or corporate settlements, as it were, I wouldn't have been surprised, though even standing outside, say, the old Lehman Brothers (R.I.P.) wasn't the same experience as this. Every other office I'd worked in had lower and higher level workers in the mix, the mail team, the proofreaders, the cafeteria crew, the assistant; non-whites and women.

The next day at lunch I kept an eye out, and the day after I found myself surrounded by some of their homogeneous midst when I got take-out on Beach St. I still had no clue and was reluctant to inquire after their origin. The day after, I happened to amble down to Greenwich at lunch and observed their like yet again, looked over to see an odd building hidden between apartment structures. It was a corporate Citibank outpost.

Mystery over, they were bankers and traders, maybe in a trainee incarnation. No mystery, but still the odd image of clones or pod people, evolving.  Night of the dead living. Each person is an individual but group the persons together and isolate the group, make it all of one type, and it gets weird.  My father had his weirdness, but not that weirdness, hallelujah.

Happy Fathers' Day.

Stephen Page hears, samples, and reviews The Future Is Happy.

Stephen Page has written a delightful insightful sampling review, a list review. Here's an excerpt.

A saxophone in Count Basie’s band. An Ode by Keats. George Harrison’s guitar. Cain. St. Sarai carrying infant Jesus. A Jewish Emily Dickinson hiding in an attic. Moses breaking tablets. Baden-Baden, Germany. Miss Piggy. Tijuana. Jodie Foster. Billy Bob Thornton. Denzel Washington. Ingmar Bergman. Laurence Fishburne. The Rosetta Stone. Superman’s mother. Clark Kent. Orpheus. The Oregon Highway. An angel. The goddess Venus. Jim Thorpe. New York. Rilke. Skin cancer. The Married with Children television series. Jack Kerouac. My Favorite Martian. A Woolworth’s store. James Joyce. Ulysses. Ithaca. Penelope. Helios. Socrates. Kilimanjaro. Jason of the Argonauts. California. Conan Doyle. Jenifer Lopez. The Ritz-Carlton. Strawberries. Woody Allen. A labyrinth. Walt Whitman. Sméagol with his ring in his pocket. Holden Caulfield. Humbert Humbert. Jane Eyre. Mecca. The Zig Zag Man. Such are the many allusions, images, and sounds used in Sarah Sarai’s eclectic collection of poetry, The Future is Happy.

Special thanks to Page for hearing the rhythm in my work. He's right, I'm not a formalist but I hear.

The full review is posted at Stephen Page's blog.  Originally published at "Group Pen B.A. Book Reviews" -- a site no longer live.

How dare you, V.S. Naipaul. + I like to think of myself as a stately pleasure dome.

**

Dear V.S. Naipaul,


Gosh darn. Thanks for your trash talk on culture. I can't wait to see you and Philip Roth go all girlfight over who has the worst time reckoning himself to his anatomy.

You told a journalist that all fiction by women was sentimental, narrow and inferior, and thus, you sly cat, you got me, a woman, thinking. Think about that! Oddly, though I read several of your books when I was in my twenties, I can't remember titles, plots, if I liked them or didn't. Just sayin'. In terms of sentimentality, however, I wonder about the following books which I can remember reading when I was in my twenties.

Madame Bovary. The women kills herself. Loves goes wrong, society is a hard place for a woman, and so she paints her lips a tasteful blue and falls into the big sleep. Sentimental? If she had become a whore on the streets of Paris it would be less sentimental.

Anna Karenina. The woman kills herself. Karenina is a more engrossing book than Bovary but not quite as finely stitched--Flaubert is a real real careful writer, even I could tell that and I have a vagina and breasts. Russian society is a worse place to live in than Bovary's society and Anna chooses death by the D Train. Sentimental?

D.H. Lawrence, works thereof. Granted that for those of us of a certain age it is hard to disengage from images of Alan Bates and Oliver Reed man-wrestling on fur, when we think of Lawrence. Still Lawrence writes of Big Love and not Salt Lake City style. Sentimental, Sir. Lawrence is sentimental.

Karl Marx was so fully human in his love of each person's capacity for fulfillment and so fully committed to creating a world where that is possible, that well, he must be sentimental. Cause that ain't happening anytime soon. Certainly not equality for men and women, not as long as your types smirk and strut.

Proust. Well, no one would accuse a man who creates seven volumes of written memorabilia in search of lost times sentimental. Would they? A thousand-page docket of hard thinking? Nu-uh.

The Lake Poets? Nuttin' sentimental in a field of daffodils or a stately pleasure dome. I like to think of myself as a stately pleasure dome, but that's something altogether different.

Bold Lord Byron on whose verse butter melts? He's a wonderful poet but in disfavor, in some circles, for that boldness which is sentimental in its own way.

What about some of the great saints? Theresa, John of the Cross, Francis? Isn't it implicit in such kick-butt faith a level of sentimentality which allows us to believe the unseen.

Though I've read him, I'm going to take a pass on Rabelais here but I cannot ignore the sweeping gestures of Cervantes and his windmill-dualist as sentimental.

Clear-headed and divine though he was, Spinoza expressed some sentimentality in his notion of us ending up on a far star. And please, there nothing as sentimental as one of Leibniz’s monads. Those guys and gals are all about pulling out their handkerchiefs and showing us they cannot go in or out because they are monads, boo hoo. I'm tired of it!

Blake? Thomas Hardy?

I loved reading every book and author mentioned above. Except you who I neither like nor dislike as I cannot remember one thing about your novels.

Yours until the end of this posting,
Sarah "Sentimental Me" Sarai

p.s. Have you read Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead?  I doubt it.
From some of my sisters. . .
From One Writer To Another: Shut Up, V.S. Naipaul by Diana Abu Jabar

In a Sentimental Mood by Danielle Pafunda

Sentimental, Narrow, Women’s Writing. Alas, Alack, Anon! by Roxane Gay

**The gorgeous monads available here. (If you don't know Leibnitz look elsewhere for what a real monad is. This monad is a computer thing but lovely.)

Review: G.E. Schwartz, LVNGinTONGUES, poems in a different margin

 Lokesh Khodke*

G.E. Schwartz writes with one eye on "our dust" and the other (our third?) on us--us--here. I just read his chapbook LVNGinTONGUES (Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press) and now want you to read it.

It's a flow of poem, LVNGinTONGUES, an aggregate of short poems unfettered by titles, which makes me wonder if titles aren't a needless colonizing marker:  Hey, folks, let me tell you what this here poem is about!  (I use them but that's no excuse.)  Instead of being drawn to a title as we expect, in Schwartz' chapbook we are thrown to an unfamiliar place, a different margin, a place slightly disquieting, riveting and dislocating, over there, on the other side.

And thus (and through poetic alchemy) prepared for death in all its daily guises and for a greater death. We are reminded of our fragility and of that which is awe-inducing.

WHITES or blacks, linen

or porphyry,

one in the same to the

same of us --

but out where dust

is blown -- there's a tomb

built of clay and bronzed

that should make us

waver

These poems are written as quiet revelations of the dark hope that we are even capable of wavering.  That if we can't transcend, we can know our lack, our inability.  Better to realize that, say, I can't become Gerard Manley Hopkins, than to be so dulled I toss the book aside and return to t.v. and Ruffles. (That's me speaking, though I know Schwartz a bit and thus know he likes Hopkins. I saw Schwartz read down here--he lives upstate New York--and know he appreciates the gifts (jazz, friendships).

THROAT-HAWK nightscreaming

stand     up leave the rest

of us on the table

when life is with you

are struck across time

bark at strangers

feed the incorrigible

appetite of edifices

shadow dust, hate the light

. . . the incorrigible appetite of edifices . . .   Yeah. I say yeah however I read the word edifices--our culture, our corporations, the body as structure . . .   (And oh, I suppose the capitalizing of the first words of each poem serves as an ex officio title.  Maybe the eye needs something. Anyway it's a nice touch.)

The ultimate disclaimer is that Schwartz reviewed my book, here. And so with that frisson of joy that someone who has insight into my writing is so intelligent and gifted himself I recommend these poems. oH, i assuME the title IS A NOd to lanGUAge poetrY.

Hank's Original Loose Gravel Press. PO Box 453, Arroyo Grande, CA 93421. $7.

*Beautiful painting, Edifices, by Lokesh Khodke. Found here.

Religion Switching . . .a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. . .

***

Maybe I've said this before, but when I was in my early twenties, I decided I needed limits.

I was at the Bodhi Tree, a bookstore of mysticism, religion and of course a little tripe east, west and in the middle.  The sun was setting, maybe I was looking out a window or onto a courtyard, hard to be specific some thirty years later but there was sun and however many miles I stood from its thousand hot tongues I was close enough to its Pacific reflections to feel the distant yet present love of the universe.

Classically inclined, I'd been working my way through writings of the saints west and east. Dope-smoking and contemporary I read Be Here Now (Baba Ram Das) and other books which were great reads at the time and maybe still are.  I was always reading.

But at that moment, that point in flowing time which has no one point in point-of-fact and perhaps no point other than its own silky flow, I knew I needed restraining. I could go anywhere and did, mentally and spiritually and psychically.

You will stay in the west, I said. (I was you.)  That means Christianity, Judaism, Islam.

Note that I was not limiting my reading. Reading cannot be limited. I was limiting my joining. I can't quite say if this transpired before or after my two-year once-a-week training at the Healing Light Center (Rosalyn Bruyere is a real deal aura reader, per the UCLA Dept. of Kinesiology and she just is) or other interests and ventures. It was definitely years before I taught at a Catholic high school.

I'd been trucked over to the Annie Besant Center in high school by my Christian Science mom, though I can't say why, exactly. It might have had something to do with guitar lessons. My Jewish father believed, to his credit, but didn't quite have the gene for spirituality qua place-in-the-heart to hobby I did, my mom did, two of my three sisters did.  (The third sister would not allow so much as a Thanks, You! before a big meal, which reveals a ungene to be respected.)

Hopefully some reader or other is tracking this posting because I cannot figure out where I am right now (in the writing, not my body).  But lifetime-wise, I did stay within Sarah-proscribed guidelines, which were, I admit, partly a matter of style--I dreaded seeing those super serious westerners being so obviously devotee-like when it came to all things Buddhist. That sort of public demonstration of faith has been discredited by luminaries such as Hafiz, Rumi, Jesus, and every single religious person of serious intent. And my intent is serious. God help me.

But also I believed it to be a good idea and though I've had regrets, as a married person regrets her or his beautiful choice when there are so many gorgeous choices, I stayed on track.

Thus here I am, writing this because someone urged a short-lived discussion on a poetry listserv about Buddhist poetry, one of my madeleines (I buy them by them by the dozens) and it got my mind a'wandering. See the problem?

What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. (James 4: 14; not sure which tr.)

***painting by Richard Bizley