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| "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
insignificant
Blow back.
blow back
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| "September" by Gerhard Richter Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C. |
Another Way of Looking
by Sarah Sarai
The poem on the page
remains on the page
the page with the poem is
the page with the poem it
may lift it self (up)
or snack and nap
but there it is on the page
in all its theory
in all its wisdom which
is not all wisdom
hey, a blackbird knows wisdom
just one blackbird
no need to cast shade over
the whole of them
from Prelude Journal, Stu Watson, ed.
Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
from the Poetry Foundation website.
First draft, 2/11/23. I'm a stone cold, birthright English major who can edit the sense out of the angels and proofread the evil out of Satan's cold soul.
I was about twenty-five years old when I first realized I could edit. I hadn't thought about it, rarely used the word "edit." But my oldest sister mailed me a few of her poems. I read them, and realized they could use a change here or there. And I would never make a suggestion to my sister about anything. I both worshipped her and found her a bit scary. It's a shame I didn't speak up. I buried my editing self to read read read, smoke marijuana, go back to school for a secondary diploma, teach high school English for three years. That was all in Los Angeles. I moved to Seattle, where I was invited to participate in a small workshop for writers. I was writing short fiction. A woman in the workshop very much appreciated my editing finesse and mentioned me to her supervisor who hired me, when the woman (let's say Queen of Queens) left. For four year I was the Writing Lab person at Antioch College in Seattle. That's close to editing.
I started the year with a long walk, longer than expected, on the sidewalks of musty New York, first to a bar where I discovered an event had been canceled then across town to a building complex that demands I walk an extra ten blocks in the wrong direction before it will allow me into its time-honored walls. Every time. There, people I know, all warm smiles, warm hugs. And in-between the Lower East Side and the evasive building down some from the Whitney Museum I ran into a friend. And that was unexpected - insofar as, what! you? yay! - and delightful. An unexpected, impromptu, generous meet-up. Somehow helped me clear a bit of the baggage I was hauling from 2022.
After seeing some warm acquaintances, and friends, on top of two-and-a-half hours of walking on sidewalks, I caught a bus, but only part way. It gets complicated. Once home I popped into bed, fully clothed, fell asleep. Woke. Did some things people do when awake, such as removing a sports bra, reading a poem, watching a t.v. show I knew would lull me back to sleep.
So no booze, no big parties. I like booze and I like big parties. Another time. Soon!
One more event. When I woke for the small portion of time I saw that new work of mine had been published. A Flash autobiographical essay* of mine was online. "O Faded Elegant World" in MacQueen's Quinterly. That surely wins the prize for a journal name. It mixes the hip and the quaint. My mini-essay is personal history as recalled by the personal historian who was seven? six? when the events took place. So. Grain of sand. Definitely with a toss of salt over your left shoulder. And truth.
Here's to 2023! Peace and sanity, please.
*500 words or less, in this case
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| You tell me. |
Reviving drafts of unfinished short stories which is proving to be enormously rewarding. And by rewarding I mean I'm diggin' the words. The current drafts are just that - fiction that's unfinished or finished but not polished. Stores not new to the party, such as the writing party is. Well, obviously the cellar's been dug and the foundation laid so there's that. Yeah. Stop. Okay.
I haven't sent one of the previously unpublished (and now reworked) stories out yet, mainly because there are few and when the few are gone ... girl, they'll be gone. They'll be gone, girl.
We're talking two or three new stories one of which is novella-like. It's like a novella because it is one.
Some days I am up against depression. It throws me to the ground and holds me down with vicious glee. The counteractive to depression is joy.
Repeat: The counteractive is joy. Words and their heftier cousins, sentences, are joy. New and reworked and working on reworking. Joy. Sarah Sarai 8/4/22
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| a hefty cousin |
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| Ahab's white whale, courtesy of the NYTimes. |
The Avoirdupois Chic
More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. – Melville
My depraved indifference to death
sets Ahab to thumping his peg
against my leg so we’ll perchance into
that which precedes an heir bearing
his bi-syllabic surname on banners bright
through the belly of the whale warm as
mutton and potatoes tea towel-topped.
If you can’t bear a son, at least a splinter
Mr. Ahab says, for use against blubbery
blowhard though how, you might puzzle.
No intimate to his intricacies am I
who harbor soft-spots for heavyweights
fat as concubines, the avoirdupois chic.
Given the length of a life in nautical miles
there’s hardly time for history to congeal
for the slain to raise kin underskin the
abandoned to banshee dreams as locust
swoop hover and hum desert-side
Ahab Uno’s tent on palmy summer eves.
Ecstasy is all it’s cracked up to be,
insufficient, a means to a cul-de-sac.
Are locust merely in love with love?
Starting soon, let’s no longer be afraid.
The locust are at the door, dear.
Well, set a plate for the happy couples!
Tomorrow Ahab goes with his gut,
with its celiac flora. Sing a seafaring
song of fish fingers, ladies, avast! ahoy!
Childhood fosters the eternal orphan.
God wants what God wants.
You, my dear Ahab, merely want,
though That Can Change, a sea battle
dispatch, a motto conceived of
circumstance and truth, life’s sequels,
now ebooks or available for download
at a workstation near me. Near you.
by Sarah Sarai. first published in Berfrois in 2011.
Berfrois (https://www.berfrois.com) remains a remarkable amalgam of idea, narrative, poetry, perspective, philosophy, natural history, science, art, architecture, you-name-it-ism.
| https://wallpapercave.com/w/uwp2109286 |
Is March 1 a special day? Do we prank each other? In Arts class do we begin construction of a 15-day calendar to note the advent of the Ides of March. Any day, every day, anyone can be betrayed, being the theme?
The antidote to betrayal is to keep your expectations low. Don't convince yourself that today is the day your lottery ticket rings a bell. Don't assume that today, today, your luck is amping up and you will meet a gorgeous kind generous fertile not-fertile mate of any persuasion. The earth keeps moving. Most often, when you smile at someone they will not report you to the police. Somewhere, some child is happy.
I'm ignoring the ruthless man in Russia.
Back to me. I showed up here to wish everyone a day of hope. Yeah, hope can be a killer of tender dreams, but we need it. This weirdo, me, is less tuned into hope, a future fantasy - not to be turned away but the now. The now. Whatever they're doing the clouds are astounding in their visual brilliance. Clear skies. Atmospheric struggles between pollution and clean air aside, there are pigeons. Always there are pigeons, plump and strutting, at least here in N.Y.C. If pigeons have earned an attitude of superiority and desire to parade their chubby selves, so can I. (I don't know why that's true. Let's pretend it is.)
I had a poem published in February, one I shall herein, here and now, share with you. It's about a painful swath of my life. About hope and persistence. Pulling away from pain. Moving on. One friend called it a "hair poem." Okay. Not really. Whatever you want.
"iv.
In the year of covid-fear all the hairs on my head turned shock-white, all white, only white."
Read "Shock-White" on the gorgeous and historical site, Big City Lit. I love the editors - Alyssa Yankwitt, Christopher Cappeluti, Barry Wallenstein, Richard Levine - who took over from Nick (Nicholas Johnson), who I loved also. Everyone loved.
Everyone loves. Yes, we can all love. Don't have to admit it. Just enjoy. We're all forgiven every day.
For the Children of Poets
Children of poets, how do you find Your haven? Maybe you escape to
A cousin’s or some other place? If There are two homes, off and on,
Separately (the parents’), would you Be directed by where you have little
But private stress to cope with? (With Her mother away, Deborah Milton
Had to be used, by ear and by pen Especially, at her alternate home.
Imagine, in the dark deeps of night, The blind poet, her father, haplessly
Rounding with a surge of line upon Line till he could bear no burdening
Anymore, and at four-thirty a. m., The hired secretary ill, unavailable!)
You heard, and wrote: a process by-Passing mind, or heart, I’d guess. Did
Sister Mary, too, have to learn Hebrew, Latin, other languages, he wanted
Read aloud? Children of dust, the call Can come at harsh hours, disrupting
The sleep of nature. The voice must Be heeded, the unfathomable words
Forming at best a promise that, in Some way, someday, everything will
Come into clarity. Warm-hearted Samuel Johnson must have been so
Exasperated on your behalf, saying That you had ben schooled only in
Alphabets and sounds of all those Languages, not in the words, their
Meanings that might have made all The long hours a little less wearisome.
Children, sleep well while all time Runs on. Rise, docile, dim of spirit.
Someday someone sometime will bless you for it.
_ _ _
G.E. Schwartz. "For the Children of Poets" first appeared in Dappled Things, and is included in G.E. Schwartz' collection Murmurations (Foothills Publishing, ISBN: 978-0-951053-32-4; www.foothillspublishing.com).
| East River Park where 400 trees were cut down & mulched to make way for an environmentally dangerous development of fancy apts. Same old same old. [photo by Sarah Sarai] |
Last Tuesday my weekly talk group - all of us senior and queer - hit the subject of feeling anxious about climate change - are we?/aren't we? anxious. And our guilt and fear, right-now fear and right-now guilt related to climate change and its inevitable impact on that thing ahead of us: The Future. Did we stop it? No. Many of us, to some degree or another, tried, ie, recycled and sometimes boycotted. If you have tried to mollify the planet or if you haven't, it's coming. We agreed we had the anxiety and probably each of us thought more about the messed up Earth awaiting us. The messed up Earth here and now. That giant iceberg that's about to break free. Birds. Always birds. Often cats, too.
So I was relieved to read a very relevant article by reporter Ellen Barry in the New York Times (monthly subscription costs $4!). Here's the first few paras from Climate Change Enters the Therapy Room.
PORTLAND, Ore. — It would hit Alina Black in the snack aisle at Trader Joe’s, a wave of guilt and shame that made her skin crawl.
Something as simple as nuts. They came wrapped in plastic, often in layers of it, that she imagined leaving her house and traveling to a landfill, where it would remain through her lifetime and the lifetime of her children.
She longed, really longed, to make less of a mark on the earth. But she had also had a baby in diapers, and a full-time job, and a 5-year-old who wanted snacks. At the age of 37, these conflicting forces were slowly closing on her, like a set of jaws.
In the early-morning hours, after nursing the baby, she would slip down a rabbit hole, scrolling through news reports of droughts, fires, mass extinction. Then she would stare into the dark. con't.
Yeah. The thought of mass extinction will do that to you.
I would expect that only the captains of industry who push denial like it's soft serve ice cream consider climate change it's a momentary blip. Or believe their fortresses will protect them. Which they won't. God could but God never seems to step in until ten million or sixty million people have been slaughtered. And even then... Anyone's guess. So I recommend you read the article. Here's a little more to bide you over:
It was for this reason that, around six months ago, she searched “climate anxiety” and pulled up the name of Thomas J. Doherty, a Portland psychologist who specializes in climate.
A decade ago, Dr. Doherty and a colleague, Susan Clayton, a professor of psychology at the College of Wooster, published a paper proposing a new idea. They argued that climate change would have a powerful psychological impact — not just on the people bearing the brunt of it, but on people following it through news and research. At the time, the notion was seen as speculative.
That skepticism is fading. Eco-anxiety, a concept introduced by young activists, has entered a mainstream vocabulary. And professional organizations are hurrying to catch up, exploring approaches to treating anxiety that is both existential and, many would argue, rational.
Again, from the Times.
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