Sarah Lang : from The Work of Days

(forthcoming from Coach House Press)

For three inches, I turned the knife in your neck. I watched
with the word covet. For forty-five days, I missed your hair.

In a borrowed apartment, I held this contentment. You gagged
as a slit shell. Your eyes opened as the blue wing of a jay, as
yawn. My tongue in your ear listened to your throat

sing. Those weren't scabs you fingered, but you always did sail
clean on through. For your olives and dry cleaning. For your happiness,
I opened as an unused window, without grace and wailing.

@

Sarah Lang is an old friend, Canadian, and graduate of the Brown singing-school, where she studied with, among others, C. D. Wright. The Work of Days is forthcoming from a press, Coach House, that publishes a large fraction of what is worth reading from North America and does so with terrific production values. Oh the paper, touch the paper. You can preorder a copy from amazon.com and find her tour schedule at the book's website.

The surface of Sarah's work is a kind of click-clack, like beads knocking together as they slide down the string:

We had chemistry, if not a future. You tell the story. Your hand within hairs' reach. In comparison, I'm largely asexual. I am largely asexual. Eating berries saved from batter. It would have never occurred to me. The feeder near empty. The dew not evaporated. I wish you wouldn't wear that.

Click-clack's the dominant sound of the work, and it's a hard sound to sustain without serious OSHA noncompliance. Poets included, we want a prose structure to a long work and more often than not a book of poems (when it's not a pure miscellany) acheives this by making each poem serve as a sentence. While each individual poem in a collection can be as syntactically bare as you like, they knit together in such a way as to form clauses, subclauses, and all the usual ornaments of prose.

That solution breaks when a poem stretches over seventy pages. One of Sarah's many solutions — Sarah's a fox — is the modulation of diction, as in the opening stanza:

Hibiscus, hibiscus, hibiscus, rolls
of a hip, an eye remembers like a
great flowering: (this is my big break).

It's one solution, but it's not her only one. One of the most important things about this book, indeed, is that it doesn't rely on this alone. Flipping the diction switch from high to demotic is something I think poets today largely import from John Ashbery; it's valid move, but it also gets tiresome. In the end it's also a barrier, a firewall, to authenticity: ha, the modulation says, you were taking me seriously but really I'm you're a dork.

A different modulation is rhythmic, which you can see in the quoted material above. The clipped conclusion — set-up by the pitter-patter, the ear is waiting for more material after "wailing" — is a subtler way to stop the clock:

        For your happiness,
I opened as an unused window, without grace and wailing.

The Work of Days is a psychological portrait, not an intellectual one, and in the end it's this global constraint that brings a readable syntax to the work. It's not an argument-making book, it's a reason-making one, and the engagement it provides is that of following the convolutions of a thought:

I am overmedicated. I feel overmedicated.
I am being overmedicated. I was most definitely
overmedicated. I mean I thought I felt
I could be overmedicated. I thought I was over —

overmedicated, I mean. I thought I felt.

What do thoughts look like? Regular rhubarb readers know I have a bee in my bonnet about innate language capacity and the notion of mentalese — see my essay in the most recent absent. In a nutshell, I think it's clear that any portrait of thought and emotion that claims, as Sarah's work does, to be "close to the bone" is going to involve some choice of conventions.

You can see this in Joyce's portraits of thought in Ulysses. Does Joyce provide an accurate image of consciousness? It's the wrong question. What he does, instead, is torque the usual argument-making sentence in a new way and names it "thought". As does Virginia Woolf, a writer I can't yet enjoy but that's certainly important for Sarah.

In any case, the torque that a writer applies is going to be influenced by whatever she thinks about the psyche. For Joyce (for example, and scholars please correct), that's a big lump of Freud.

We, on the other hand, live in one of the most pscyhologized societies in history; every third day it seems the New York Times releases another article on depression, bipolar disorder, talk-therapy, and psychotropic drugs, and it immediately hits the most-emailed list. Its a discourse that's been wrested from the humanists, a matter for neurologists and when it comes to words they're treated like instruments and quantified, as in cognitive-behavioral therapy.

So a reading of the mind such as Sarah is doing is of necessity going to be an insurgent one. It's going to take some things seriously &mdash feelings under duress — and dismiss other things — the supposed challenge to the autonomy that effective medication provides — that "we" as a society don't.

That alone is worth the price of admission, I think. Sarah's certainly not alone in writing out of, instead of about, emotion. But I think she is unique in doing so in such a sustained, uncompromising, fashion. Woolf was not the first to make her characters conscious, but she was the first to let them remain so. I think it's the case that Sarah is doing something as radical, and important, as that.