Little Eurekas: a decade’s thoughts on poetry
by Robyn Sarah
Biblioasis, 2007
Reviewed by Joanna M. Weston
Astringent, explicit, and provocative – the voice
of Robyn Sarah comes through clearly in this
collection of essays and reviews. She is a lover
of poetry, reveling in its music, insights, and
language. Sarah acquired her love of poetry
through exposure to it as a child, through wide
reading, and through discovering the absolute joy
of good poetry. She rejoices in the way “it lodged
in my head and prickled my scalp and got under my
skin.” (p.24)
The essays have appeared in various magazines or
newspapers but still make cogent and resourceful
reading. Sarah pinpoints the changes that have
taken place in the ten years since she started
writing these essays. She notes that there is ‘a
renewed interest in traditional poetic forms’ and
‘a renewed interest in the aural’ (p.12) In the
first essay, ‘I to my perils’ she relates her
background, discovering the joys of reading poetry
and learning by heart (including 70 quatrains of
the ‘Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam’) as she grew up.
She also learned that
poetic understanding resided in the gut, that
it had less to do with being able to paraphrase
a poem’s “meaning” than with allowing oneself to
be given *a feeling* in the interplay of images,
by the cadence of verses – that one needed no
more to know the “about” of a poem than one
needed to know it of a dream or a piece of
music, in order to appreciate the qualities of
those. (p.23)
Sarah goes on to say that she believes that
… a true poem, whatever its subject or style,
has a density of meaning, a felicity of
language and an authenticity of feeling that
cannot be faked – a mysterious *synthesis* that
doesn’t happen every time a poet picks up a pen,
but is born of some urgency of the moment. (p.27)
She likes ‘a poem to embody thought as well as
feeling, to give me something I can reflect on,
some earned wisdom delivered through the artistry
of its language.’ (p.29)
Sarah rails against the poems chosen for use in
schools, claiming that
Instead of exposing students to amazing poems –
time-tested masterpieces, contemporary poems
chosen for their high quality as *literature* -
textbook writers … pick a poem with ‘”topic
appeal” – one whose subject matter
supposedly will resonate with a certain age
group. … They choose poems for their
social-studies potential to trigger
discussion of identities …(p.32)
Always Sarah is forthright, up-front, in her
opinions. She follows through on her statements
with example and careful argument. Her essay,
‘Abandonment and after: on editing poetry’ is
helpful to both poet and editor. She discusses
editing at home, with an editor, and workshop
editing, about which she is ambivalent:
…I worry that revision by committee can take a
poem a long way from its original impulse. A
“workshop habit” can, I think, cultivate an
entrenched insecurity about one’s own intentions
as a poet, an inability to judge one’s own
unfinished work, to decide when a poem is
finished, and to stand by one’s choices in
full knowledge of why they were made. Such
knowledge is hard acquired, and it comes of
long, solitary wrestling with one’s own texts. (p.47)
The essay on the poems of George Johnston is a
quiet exploration of Sarah’s delight in his work.
She reveals her own concerns about poetry when she
quotes Johnston:
“…Every art, whether of making or performing,
demands a knowledge of its medium and history.
Of poetry the medium is language, and to know it
one must know its grammar, syntax, diction and
history.” (p.100)
Knowledge of the language leads Sarah to her essay
and conversations on ‘Poetry and polyphony’
towards the end of the book, in which she roams
through Gregorian chant, Glen Gould, and
performance poetry, to J. Alfred Prufrock, with
customary insight, commenting that
the contemporary discursive idiom is heavily
weighted in the direction of sense, and that in
practice, sound is given short shrift by far
too many poets, and played out as a “canned”
track of stock effects by others. (p.212)
The reprinted reviews are excellent examples of
what a poetry review should cover, and helpful in
terms of judging whether or not to read a certain
poet’s book, but at least some could have been
replaced by more of Sarah’s excellent essays.
Her comments and insights into poetry and poetics
are timely and helpful. For any serious student or
writer of contemporary poetry this book provides
understanding and forceful comment.
Joanna M. Weston
A SUMMER FATHER - poetry - Frontenac House
2006 ISBN: 1-89718105-1 $15.95
THOSE BLUE SHOES for ages 7-12
http://www3.telus.net/public/west34/
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