SARAH GRAHAM - POET
Sarah Estes Graham is a poet.
Past experience tells I had best refer to her merit among us as being a "poetess". I've never cared for the term. Such subtle terms shift
and rearrange a person's origins to diminish, I think, many fine talents in subtle, but deeply important, ways. Enough, I 'd say, that you know the name "Sarah" to be feminine and that I speak of "her" works and the abilities "she" exemplifies.
As a poet I find Sarah Estes Graham sets me free to
enter with her into a word -world fraught with images which would never have been had she been "a poetess" seeing things as being always delicately inactive, full of charm but lacking in vigor and substance for endurance.
Her brief poem titled "Nagasaki" was, for a long time, the only one of her poems I had ever read.
Each of us has our own pre-set ideas of how a poet or a poetess might write about this Japanese city which has a special niche in history.
She turns thing around for me by abruptly speaking of radical change. The line of first impression reads:
"The potato peels fall to the floor in a country of rice."
To me that line meant, "we are in Japan - a room within a larger area, where the prevailing culture of centuries has been supplanted by a starchy, heavy potato-headed one. It was not that there was anything amiss with that only the novelty of peels plopping on the floor seemed out of context.. .hard to accept. where rice alone had fallen so long. I also had a picture of Bismark, having wagon loads of potatoes hauled in to feed starving mid-Europeans. The peasants fed the spuds to their hogs because everyone knew that potatoes caused leprosy !
We have time for another line the poem "Nagasaki" - the second:
"The tatami needs replacing, We must participate in something."
How did I know "tatami" referred to floor coverings in Japan? I don't know, but it helps to be aware of that fact. They were ritually sized and always made of straw with cloth sewed to the side. They were fitted together - again ritually - on the smoothed surface of the dirt floor. Size was rigidly controlled and they were never to placed in a manner which allowed any three or four corners to meet. Misfortune would follow in tiles were thus strew about.
Foreigns would not know the floor needed attention and natives need things to do. The rest of the poem contains other such ideas: should they believe the new light which has come? what about truth and value in the old? ""Hope comes lean and sculpted" she feels ."I thought happiness was fat." She seeks "Antarctic peace" "unpopulated and and spacious. She feels empty:"I feel some closer bone"; "Wisdom guts us. An empty seat on a near full train."
Remember the name: Sarah Estes Graham. Right now she is a student at the University of Virginia. Soon she will be among our nation's leading poets.
A.L.M. Sept. 5, 2005 [c521wds]
