Without Artifice

Detail from cover

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, John 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. 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 slatein God...