Country, Living
by Ira Sadoff
Alice James Books, $16.95 paperback, 100 pages
What does it mean when we say that we turn to a poet for their wisdom? How do we define this quality that informs and enriches our lives without patronizing or clichéd in delivering the message? After all, wisdom is useless and maybe cannot be called wisdom if it cannot be shared or approached by an audience. Wisdom in isolation ceases to be wisdom. Now nearing a dozen collections of work stretching back to 1975, I find it fair to call the poems in Country, Living wise and well-informed, but I don’t want to stop there. These poems, even the briefest—and none are longer than two pages—are so full and satisfying in their humanity and the sense of a speaker who has lived an expansive life and seen broadly. Sadoff’s craft and empathy and imagination are also up to the task of presenting us lessons that don’t feel like lessons, moreso observations about who his speaker is, where he’s from, and what moves him to continue forward after putting many miles in the rearview mirror.
While all three sections of this collection contain aspects of the self-portrait, the world of the speaker, and his passions, I feel like the first section leads most prevalently with poems that identify the speaker to provide both a voice and context for the poems that follow. The section itself is titled “My Design” which I read to mean both the vision of the speaker who is creative enough to have his own blueprints for this planet, but also refers to the configurations of the speaker himself, how he has been designed. The person captured in the poems of self-identification, sometimes explicitly in the form of self-portraits. With this in mind, it’s worth noting the opening poem “Biographical Sketch.” In this poem, we see the complexities of the speaker, both in his kindnesses, but also his self-interested pursuits of pleasure or luxury:
[. . .] I made the sound of a wolf
in Naomi’s bedroom, was shabby
at her wedding, sulking
while pinning an amorous note
to her gown. I refused to cross a picket line
then bought a handsome silk shirt
sewn in the most downtrodden district in China.
This was when I was learning how to be a person,
which even now’s an unfinished symphony.
It’s such a strong overture for the collection, that I’m tempted—despite my intense desire that you pick up the book for yourself—to include the entire poem. But this poem gives an honest and complex portrayal of the self and the past without forgetting about the future, however limited or expansive it may be. I fall in love with the idea that learning to be human is “an unfinished symphony,” even for someone who has seemingly mastered so much. Even with all the authority I feel in the lines of these poems, there’s enough vulnerability to make them approachable instead of feeling haughty or discouraging or egotistical. I find this spirit often in this book, but another specific place to find it is in the poem “Heaven and Hell” which opens:
I’ve never been afraid of heaven or hell.
I’ve had my own versions, like you.
My gods were frenzy, ruckus, and delirium.
My sin: loving the tongue too much.
In reading about a man’s life, I’m drawn to the way in which we all have our own figurations for the two extremes of the afterlife, but the poem is not about the afterlife. It’s about the things that enrapture us during life.
I had my devotions, my book of hymns:
I could praise the curve of her shoulder,
hail her genius, pour so much into her.
In one of those states, who cares
about an afterlife? This life overflows
the way a thaw floods a muddy river.
It’s hard to argue with the question here. When we are truly living, when we are entrenched in our devotions, our praises, our loves, who cares about an afterlife? Who is looking always to what’s next? I genuinely feel pity for anyone so paralyzed by the future that they cannot enjoy or savor or even yearn for what is in their immediate proximity, as we are, by-and-large, so fortunate and privileged. For many, that’s a quality that is inextricable with the place and people we were born into as Americans, a national identity that is simultaneously admired and reviled across the world.
In the course of this collection, it is only fair to say that Country, Living has some highly American poems in setting and in some of the subjects that the book tackles. Some of this has to do with the variety and specificity of the settings of some of the poems. Early on in the collection we’re taken to Indiana in the poem of the same name where “If I coughed, neighbors / boiled me jars of jam. Home of the plow / and pigsty, the KKK, wigs in church.” Here in America—and a place like Indiana may be considered part of the “heartland of America”—the hospitality and racial hostility live next door to each other. The following poem, “The Meadows of Hay Bales” describes his home as a “forgettable little hamlet // in sincere Indiana, my retreat / from the world.” These American places come in even more steadily in the second section of the book entitled “My Country” which contains poems that take us to “My Tulsa” which tells us “in Tornado Alley, where the ground opens up / once in a while before it seals back up, / you get a few glimpses, an upskirt of the city.” In “The Defeat of Brooklyn” we get a history lesson as George Washington, after he “decreed no Black could fight in his Army,” he still dines with a man who he does not realize is black. After trips to “Los Angeles, Downtown: 1958” and being caught “Stranded on Old US 1, [in] Wrens, Georgia” the first US President comes back in the poem “Patriot” wherein the speaker recalls:
the founder of this country and the slaves
he owned. In his very lengthy will
he freed the one who brought him his housecoat
and tea. That’s the Washington
I want to remember.
While being wholly American, the voice that drives this book has no trouble recognizing the complicated and difficult history of America, but then again, the book as a whole has no problem with mixed feelings or celebrating the flawed.
One of the recurring examples of this deft handling of heated subjects can be found in the odes interspersed in this book. At a glance, “Ode to the Defense Mechanism,” “Ode to Forgetfulness,” and “Ode to Income Inequality” all share the quality of celebrating things that are inherently flawed, but wholly American. “Ode to Income Inequality” laughs at our simultaneous generosity and selfishness when the speaker opens up the poem with the irony of “In my favorite Maserati I made a difference.” Later, he remarks, “And why not say my father was my hero / until I saw how insatiable we were for all things shiny.” Over and over, Sadoff manages to be self-deprecating on behalf of a nation of hundreds of millions, more when we count the dead that got us here. How he manages it with grace and honesty are, at times, beyond me, though I can know it when I see it.
The final section of Country, Living leans hard upon the rapturous immediacy of music and the power it contains before looking to the speaker’s future and final days. But there is not a note of significant regret or grief in these treatments. Again, these themes and the subject of music and musicians appear before this final section—jazz greats like Dexter Gordon, John Coltrane, and Ornette Coleman all show up in “Self-Portrait as a Foreign Body,” and we are reminded of the tragic life of trumpeter Chet Baker in “Lost”—but they’re ways to bring the world back to the speaker, or, rather, for the speaker to bring the world he loves to himself. However, it is this final section that moves into the tropics of Florida and the more recent life of the speaker where music and great art saturate the pages. The section opens up with “In the House of Wittgenstein” where the great philosopher reaches out to the poet, asking “Ira, my friend, are you listening?”
The three-section poem “Music” manages to bridge the gulf between John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in the ease of a few lines before prompting us with the question:
[…]isn’t the brain marvelous the way it sits
inside and outside of us as it sets us to dancing
in a hall of strangers?[…]
I can barely get out a breathy “Yes” before the line continues:
[…]It’s so much work
being a person, wrestling with our shadows,
rattling on and on about what distresses us,
I’m all for music pulling the strings,
and if I look like a puppet, jerking my arms about,
I’m just working hard, learning how to listen.
And that is the spirit of this book that exemplifies wisdom for me. Wisdom is something to keep us going rather than weigh upon us with its grand perspective. Wisdom doesn’t mean having every answer or holding yourself or others to a standard of perfection. Wisdom involves being able to look foolish in pursuit of something greater than oneself whether it’s art or family or romance, or some other obsession. Ultimately, this is my argument for why Ira Sadoff is a Great Poet. It’s clear that every one of these poems is serious human business down to the final line break and smallest piece of punctuation, but I never get the sense that the poet is taking himself too seriously.
This is a book that satisfies, that reaffirms, especially after a long period of isolation, that life and companionship and even art are all worthwhile. This is what we do and we are not wrong to do it. I end on the same note that the first poem, “Biographical Sketch” ends with. Both when it comes to this collection and to life, I know there has to be an ending point, but I’m right there with the speaker quietly pleading, “Not yet, not yet.”
