sara larsen - "humming blood poems"

Sara Larsen recently gave me a CD of her poetry - a short 13 pieces, none more than 2 minutes long. They are work, home-recorded onto her iMac, with her voice hovering right above the mic. It is beautiful, intimate work, daring to be soulful as well as discriminating, sensuous, rooted in specificity of wordchoice and flirting wildly with traditional rhetoric, even with high diction and tone (she even inverts a few noun-verb orders), but never monomaniacally - never without moving on and through the off-beat, the casual, jargot and jargon. Inclusive, seasoned, a traveller of many worlds: this is work intelligent enough not to try to impress the listener with its own intelligence. It is, in a word, poetry. It really fucking is. Sometimes, when that word poetry seems horribly overworked, i wonder if its umbrella has gotten too thin, too wide. Maybe some of the more experimental work, the more hybrid, including some of my own, arrives at such a distance to what has traditionally been poetry that we ought to stress its difference, acknowledge it as its own form, perhaps one particular to its age.

I think we can do this AND acknowledge that poetry is a category as wide as music, and while most of the work under its aegis is easy enough to recognize, there's always trouble tending the edge. Which is cool, I like making a little trouble there too - helps me discover a more worhtwhile definition of the art than any I learned in college as an English major.

So to define my terms, Larsen's work - which I highly recommend - is lyric poetry. humming blood poems is almost sapphic, and reminds me of some of the short, dense word-nets Anne Waldman occasionally put out in the 70s - works I know through CDs such as the Naropa Archive collections of her readings [not sure how many of these are commercially available]. Larsen's CD has the yearning restlessness I associate with the postmodern condition - and Sara has worked found language into her texts - weaving a sort of masterfully conscious visible seam into her own more seamless drift. Its a practice which blows open and unexpectedly allows each poem a spaciousness and breadth of reference they might otherwise lack. Its also a marvel that the insertions here become at much at home as her own language, and are, at some level, distinguishable mainly in accent and in subtle semantic shift. "Yet" the humming blood poems also spring from an embodied rootedness springing straight from the old days, last seen in a living form where? For her, in Shelley, Yeats, Duncan, di Prima. And to this lineage, this work, I say rock on.

There is a real abandon here, a real surfer's sense of surrender - the humility before a really righteous wave. In each poem, up comes this great, massive, powerful, relentless, wild-to-the-core word-universe of thoughts, feelings, fragments and sensations - and there she is, riding it, every bit its partner and equal. Seperate how? To/for whom? Its a wondrous thing to behold, such trust and care and mastery - and it forms the spiritual core of this work, an intimacy with tone and line and language which allows for delicacy and shading to which the ear or eye will keep returning. And for which lesser poets sigh and preen. For it is completely alive, a-quiver with trust, in fearless surrender, true spirit and Jersey grit.

If you would like to hear this work, contact Sara here. She could probably use a buck or two for postage, CD, labor of love.