Carla Sarett : part five

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

—Diane Seuss’s Frank Sonnets, which reads like a noir novel.  I couldn’t put it down.

—Boris Dralyuck’s stylish and confident My Hollywood and Other Poems (Paul Dry Books)   This book also includes some fabulous translations, including poems by Vernon Duke. 

—Radio Static (Green Linden Press) by James Hoch, such a moving tribute to a brother who fought in Afghanistan.  

—Polina Barskova’s This Lamentable City, (various translators, including Ilya Kaminsky) (Tupelo Press)— I want more from this highly original poet.  

—returning to Thomas Gunn’s The Man with the Night Sweats.  Gunn’s just a wonder, and I am glad to see other poets “rediscovering” him.  

— Ella’s Plan by Jeffrey Bean (Contest Winner, The Poet’s Corner). These enchanting poems about a little girl won my heart. 

Carla Sarett : part four

What poets changed the way you thought about writing?  

All great poets in their way change us in some way, but I can name a few who stick out.  Change takes a long time, so these aren’t “new” writers (of whom several might change my thoughts.)  

As a young person, Emily Dickinson changed all my ideas about what writing does and is;  I return to her often, she still feels radical.  I recited one of her poems (Much Madness is Divinest Sense) at my mother’s funeral (from memory.)

I’ve had a lifelong love affair with Wallace Stevens who writes about philosophy with great nuance.  I was so infatuated with “Sunday Morning” that I wrote it out by hand, in a letter to a good friend before emails were de rigeur— it’s such a deep dive into thorny issues, and yet still lyrical (and in blank verse!)

Frank O’Hara’s sophisticated  informal voice, and his ability to write about the visual arts and classical music, wow— Lunch Poems was one of the first books I bought for myself.  He’s a city poet, and I am a city person— nature poetry, while beautiful, rarely moves me. He’s also one of the writers whose “happy love” poems never feel corny. 

Philip Larkin’s acerbic mix of high and low, vulgar and lyrical, gave me a window into how writing can be alienated, and yet moving. His “Whitsun Weddings” remains one of my favorite poems, that ending gets me every time:  “A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower/Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.”     

Carla Sarett : part three

What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?  

I think poetry (as opposed to short fiction or essays) brings the reader into the moment — whether it’s a walk down city streets or a recollection of childhood.  The thing about moments in life is they don’t have a point, they don’t need an arc, they’re simply experienced. So I think poetry offers us this immediacy, and is more akin, in certain ways, to music than to prose.  There’s a freedom in getting rid of false endings, whether happy or sad— we do need to end poems, but we don’t end their “story.”  (Many of the novelists I most enjoy don’t really have conventional plots, either— I think of Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House in particular.) 

Also, the compression of language delivers us lines to savor, they become part of us.  My head’s filled with many lines, from Horace to Frost’s “The Master Speed”, they’re just in there, floating around— and if you want to know about me, those lines aren’t a bad place to start.  In fact, I’d say they’re one of the best.  

I’d add that as a compulsive “word cutter”, poetry’s just fun to write— and far more elastic than other forms.  

Carla Sarett : part one

Carla Sarett is a poet and fiction writer based in San Francisco. Her debut poetry collection, She Has Visions, will be published by Main Street Rag Press in Fall 2022.  Her poems have appeared in Pithead Chapel, Neologism, Naugatuck River Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Prole, Gyroscope and elsewhere; and her novels include A Closet Feminist (Unsolicited Press) and The Looking Glass (Propertius Press.) Carla has a PhD from University of Pennsylvania.  

photo credit: Shana Sarett 

What are you working on? 

I am working two poetry projects.  

One is a small chapbook of poems about my family, and my older brother (who died when I was twenty)— they’re tinged with TV, film and song influences, from The Twilight Zone to Dylan.    Several of these poems have appeared in literary journals, but together, they will create (or so I hope) a different story.

The other is a series of poems about the 18th century artist, Thomas Gainsborough and his two daughters. I’m drawn to stories of sisters (these two ended up living together in isolation) It’s an interesting case, since Gainsborough wanted his daughters to have “careers” in painting.  The poems has required a good deal of research (reading his letters, etc.), and of course, looking at paintings of the once-joyful girls turning into rather disappointed women.