after R.S. Thomas
Tell me: which of us loves this game more? The incessant
crisscrossing of sentiment and the body, the vibrancy
of aggression in the absence of violence. I am insatiable
alone: chattering with insult and drunk on whatever synonym
for heat I favor at the moment. Despite the persona I paint
onto myself in my poems, I prefer a simmering intimacy
to one that boils over. I swing from the ascetic to
the indulgent as the mood strikes me; there are only two
types of people in this world and I am both of them. I
climb onto the frangible stage of myself each morning and
pirouette my way through every menial task. The second act
lasts much too long. At curtain, the only one clapping is you.
Click here to read Annaka Saari on the origin of the poem.
Image: photo by Nikola Bikar on Unsplash, licensed under CC 2.0.
Annaka Saari:
The initial draft of “Curtain” came to me after encountering R. S. Thomas’s poem “Acting” for the first time. I’m fascinated by the way human beings perform the various roles we inhabit, especially when it comes to matters of sexuality and desire, but it wasn’t until I read Thomas’s piece that I considered framing a romantic relationship as a staged performance available for public consumption. I love a list poem, and being able to anchor the speaker’s statements to the idea of an actress reciting her lines allowed me to fully embrace the bold, self-aware voice that eventually arrived on the page. The direct address also calls into question, at least for me, what the role of the audience is in the poem – does it matter who reads or sees your work if it’s meant for only one person? Is the power of something created as an address to an individual diluted if one hundred other people in the theater also hear it?
Annaka Saari is a writer from Michigan. She earned her MFA from Boston University, where she now works as the administrator for the Creative Writing Program. She also serves as managing editor for Solstice Literary Magazine and a poetry reader for The Los Angeles Review. The recipient of a Florence Engel Randall Graduate Fiction Prize and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, her work has been named a finalist for the Prufer Poetry Prize, longlisted for the DISQUIET Literary Prize, and appeared in or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Maine Review, Pleiades, Image, Cleveland Review of Books, and other publications. Her website is annakasaari.com.
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