Spinoza in Sarah Sarai's gedicht "Today no one is your friend"
Sarah Sarai woont in New York City. Ze schrijft gedichten, fictie en non-fictie. Ze heeft gewerkt als docent Engels aan een high school, was leraar compositie en creative writing, was editor.
Sarah Sarai’s gedichten werden gepubliceerd in Potomac, Threepenny Review, Minnesota Review, Mississippi Review, Boston Review en andere - haar fictie in Tampa Review, Weber Studies, South Dakota Review, Fairy Tale Review en andere.
Haar recentste dichtbundel, The Future Is Happy, kwam uit bij BlazeVOX [books] in 2009.
Doug Anderson over deze bundel: "Sarah Sarai’s poetry is hot-wired and hip-swivel all the way up the spine! Emily Dickinson is Jewish and Moses breaks tablets for stellar sex. She’s retained the best of modernism (especially that syncopated variable foot Charlie Parker bop in the word-love) and moved onto new red earth for her own vision."
In Flâneur Foundry [Issue II, Spring/Summer 2010] verscheen haar gedicht “Today no one is your friend,” waarin Descartes en Spinoza voorkomen.
Het is zo'n gedicht dat niet meteen helemaal open aan je voeten ligt (om ook eens dichterlijk te worden...)
“Today no one is your friend.”
Safe for the duration in a risen-cream snuggly
against his mother’s heat down and down
one peeling corridor. An inquiry
from my lawyer: “What’s your plan?”
Start here and end when informed in Blake’s
“autumn of the seraphs” or
by a distraction of friends buzzing
near a white light bright enough for interrogation,
though the only query from
family ashy in the scattered Pacific is
“Nice to see you, did you think you’d end up here?”
Some asking of
a convert from Descartes’ distinction of finite and
infinite (I know that I am finite; therefore the infinite
exists)
(there’s me and there’s You); to the infinite miracle
of Spinoza, who saw perfection as rational and
merely thought
to surpass human comprehension. He polished lenses
every day, an endless impermanence, and was fully lit
with joy.
________
Sarah Sarai [Van hier]
