WordCityLit

IN MEMORIAM: SARAH HANNAH

Longing Distance by Sarah Hannah. Tupelo Press, 2004. 

Inflorescence by Sarah Hannah. Tupelo Press, 2007.

            In May 2007, the talented and vibrant poet Sarah Hannah died tragically young, leaving behind a small but impressive oeuvre, her bereft family and friends (including this author), and many devoted students. As a person and a writer, Sarah was complex and exceptional: erudite and down-to-earth, strong and fragile, scathing and compassionate, her profound humanity undiminished by a caustic brilliance. To understand her personality’s exhilarating — and difficult— marriage of contradictions is to begin to understand her writing too.

Having received her B.A. from Wesleyan University, and a Ph.D. from Columbia University, Sarah taught at Emerson College in Boston. Her first book, Longing Distance (Tupelo Press, 2003), a semi-finalist for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, received widespread acclaim from leading poets for its formal dexterity, its verbal play and emotional potency. Her second volume, Inflorescence (Tupelo Press, 2007), published posthumously, confirmed the promise of the first. Longing Distance established her formalist credentials, although I suspect Sarah herself would have squirmed uncomfortably at a categorization implying some dry, toilsome, Casaubon-like endeavor, or a practice borne solely of ideology, and therefore at odds with her sensuous love of language and what she would have seen as the writer’s instinctive urge to understand how sound, rhythm, music, and a “precise manipulation of syntax, rhyme and structure” (to borrow her own phrase) distil meaning in poetry. Adherence to tradition can arise out of a sense of obligation, a fondness for linguistic exercises, or as a reactionary gesture. Alternatively, form can be understood not merely as an intellectual construct, but as the inevitable outcome of an organic process, starting with the basic components of rhythms and sounds, which ultimately progress to those forms because they most profoundly express otherwise inexpressible depths. Sarah’s engagement with literature was as much visceral as intellectual.

These matters were often the subject of our conversations, right from our first meeting, when she was my student at Wesleyan Writers’ Conference. She brought me a sonnet, knowing I share her love of the form. We laughingly referred to ourselves as ‘sonnet junkies’; we laughed a lot, and we both often laughed with bite. She was the kind of student who makes you forget your next appointment, although that teacher-student relationship was almost instantly supplanted by a deep kinship on many levels, and an enduring friendship.

“You Furze, Me Gorse” impressed me with its deft technique, its use of figurative language, its sly asides and the way she incorporated into her writing a certain self-conscious reflection on language itself, which was not at odds with the poem but instead contributed to its tenor: “Furze, Gorse, of equal and abiding value / But for the speed of each word off the lips: / The warm and cornucopic cup of U / Hanging on by the very fingertips / Of the lazy Z . . . .” The poem bears her distinctive hallmark of a lyricism with a sharp edge. A slangy title is set against the sonnet form’s measured tone, almost doubling as a line itself and so adding its extra dimension to the poem, as perhaps any good title should. The witty take on “You Tarzan, me Jane” swiftly disposes of an entire misguided view on gender relations and announces the central theme, timed nicely to emerge at the turn into the sestet: “Raise the lamps high, let us look at ourselves; / Once a tender union, now turned fierce.” Sarah often multilayered her references with a finely tuned self-awareness, as with this title, which allowed her comment on the very process in which she was engaged and to offer a kaleidoscopic view of any one image or idea. (I often think that process is discernable, even transparent, in the best poetry, clarified and not usurped by product.)

“The Linen Closet,” also from Longing Distance, serves as a signatory poem in several ways — “Oh, the linen closet, imperial / Ladder of shelves” — is imperial in its demeanor, its stock-taking: “gold towels glowing / With repose, night creams pearled, in pots / Their risen oils yellowed at the rims, / Tubed salves, perfumed proteins. // Tall and narrow, narrow and deep, / The linen closet of worry and care!” The closet houses a museum of bottles and jars jumbled together, the significance of their contents similarly confused: the cures and even the items of comfort implying the pain they’re mean to alleviate. The ladder of shelves stretches upwards, a majestic structure housing an apothecary of life and death, the poet’s inner fears distilled into “tinctures”: “. . . But no matter the potion // You could not ignore the space / At the back, the absolute black / In the bowels of the shelves, beyond the patch / And blanch of gauze, the catch of clots — / That unflagging question (past cure) // No tonic or robe could appease, / No meter or prodding inspection / Could probe . . . .”

A sort of archetype for her unconscious, this linen closet is drawn from a child’s skewed sense of perspective; as with a Christmas tree from the past, it is recalled as being infinitely taller than in reality. The merged child and adult views move inexorably towards the finality of that terrible darkness at the back: “. . . you could not quite make it out, / And you would not forget it.” Drawn in by a language rich in assonance and alliteration, the reader sees through the writer’s eyes — and feels too — the fascinating grandeur of her own fear.

In “Anaesthesia Green,” which begins: “At the forked vein’s crux, / The largest on the back of your hand, / The doctor points his needle,” we accompany the poet on a journey into unconsciousness: “Count backwards from a hundred. / You’re going in. // To the sleep bath, the sulfur pail.” In this poem too her language is at its most terrifyingly seductive:

By ninety-three
You are peeling back leaves
In the darkened forest.
You have cooled to lichen, almost
Silver, outspread in the eaves of the bark
Like small arthritic hands.
You comb through the ionic ferns,
The mosses lying like animals.
You drift, cooler still—
The succulents:
Crassula, sedum, sempervivum,
Thick as limbs.

In her second book Inflorescence — with its cover featuring a painting by her mother, Renee Rothbein — Sarah’s most urgent and deepest preoccupations become starker, shedding light on many poems in the first. Architectural tropes, such as the one in “The Linen Closet,” recur regularly throughout this book in poems like “The Hutch,” “The Safe House,” “Read the House,” and, one of my favorites, “Eternity, That Dumbwaiter,” which ends with:

Age of sickness, age of pause.
And so it waits at ground
as dour burly men
Heave in the load. It buckles
With the box; it stalls; it will not go,
and then it rallies, then it’s off—
Resumes its loop and chore,
Determined servant through the stories.
Someone’s calling from another floor.

               Many poems loop back to a re-imagined childhood idyll, evoked by place or, as in the poem, “At Last, Fire Seen as a Psychotic Break,” a home which has long since burned down. This event was itself irresistibly symbolic of a state of mind with which she was all too familiar: “You have to evacuate the family, but no one / Wants to go. And when they are dead, / And you are contemplating / The sticks, the wheezing ashes, / The iron pots melted to pools on the lawn, // The authorities will say it was structural.” The startlingly bleak imagery — “iron pots melted to pools” — is characteristic in its inventiveness, its merciless rendering of a scene of imagined destruction, its revelations about the inner self, and its homage to Sylvia Plath.

Sarah’s deeply rooted artistic and intellectual affinity with Sylvia Plath can’t be reduced to biographical terms only, however congruent their emotional landscapes and use of figurative language. She wrote on Plath, and, given more time, she might have gone on to write, for example, about W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, or Homer as well, all poets in her personal pantheon. The monograph, “‘Something Else Hauls Me Through Air’: Sound and Structure in Four Late Poems by Sylvia Plath,” is a scholarly analysis of that poet’s formal development. She writes of “Fever 103”: “Tone is central to the poem’s effectiveness both on the page and in the ear . . . One of the poem’s great successes lies in the voice of its speaker, who mercilessly combines . . . high and colloquial language, and serious and mocking tones . . . In the second line, the terror of hell is instantly deflated and lampooned in the image of Cerberus.” This commentary is an apt description of her own handling of common vernacular set against an elevated tone: her use of form is perhaps a riskier usage than the confessional these days, since in some American circles a whiff of traditionalism is practically a hanging offence.

Even the simple sentence can serve as “a hypnotic and expressive device in a poem,” she remarks of the poem “Little Fugue,” describing how embedded even in Plath’s free verse are the formal precepts of poetry. With her range and fluency, Sarah was equally at ease writing free verse:

7. Get rid of the wicker furniture. It was uncomfortable anyway.
8. Bend at the knees again, raise your hands slowly from your
   sides wide – wider, up above your head, and repeat in a tone
   that steadily ascends:
   I am not a dark lord, I am a Queeen
                             (“First Singing Lesson at Forty,” Inflorescence)

Despite her erudition — or, rather, because of it — her approach to literature and culture more generally wasn’t precious, elitist or hierarchical — neither in her life nor her writing, which were for her inextricable.

Throughout Inflorescence the security of place and home is inextricably tied to her love-hate relationship with her mother, her sole career for years (if this is the right term to describe a mother who was in and out of mental institutions). So it wasn’t quite a reversal of roles when finally Sarah cared for her mother during her final illness, the period that provides the backdrop for her second book, described as a “memoir in verse” (a description A. E. Stallings rightly objects to because it diminishes Hannah’s stylistic accomplishments).

Although the book’s ostensible unifying device is a taxonomy of flora, its real theme is her mother’s mental illness, an illness that formed the narrative of Sarah’s childhood. The tone throughout, informed by the confessional mode, remains that of a poet who, while passionate about a natural world especially connected with her mother, is also indebted to her father, Nathan Goldstein, a painter whose oeuvre, unlike her mother’s, is in the classicist mould. Sarah poignantly and wittily explores this rich inheritance of opposites in the poem “Sky Pencil,” in Inflorescence: “So we’re of one mind that there are two names for / Every real thing—in Latin, Genus, species— / More, if we can count the common ones from lore / Many impartial // Parties call this poem’s title tree ‘Japanese / Holly’ but you should know right now: we aren’t here / At all concerned with neutrality.”                    

Her trip to London, the city of her mother’s birth — “Oh my Greenwich Mean. Zero Longitude!” — was one chapter in a lifelong quest to understand a mother who was both nemesis and inspiration, and to reconcile the ensuing opposing forces within her. She understood these experiences influenced her as a writer, as in “Sky Pencil”: “. . .which // Brings me to the flip side of that coin of my / Begetting, the woman who’d have loved that name, / Who painted, let’s say, quite a bit differently, / Colors off spectrum, // Flowers, heads, eye sockets, and skulls, floating.” From this mother, the inquiring, intelligent, and creative child would deduce that creativity must sometimes come with a terrible price.

Although she was absorbed by a maternal legacy increasingly equated with the creative drive, her technical finesse in this poem particularly, written in Sapphics, illustrates how Sarah’s paternal legacy was of equal importance to her development: “‘That’s not the real / Name,’ he says. ‘Aphids’ // I reply ‘It has aphids. They’re killing it.’ / ‘How will you find a cure,’ he says, ‘when you don’t / Know the real name?’” By targeting the limitations of this language used to define and codify the natural world, Sarah takes aim at herself too, since her fascination with the terms she scorns has her putting them in the poem. This inclusion ultimately validates and exonerates her own ambivalence, and forms a kind of acknowledgement of and tribute to a dual inheritance. Her legacy lies in such contrasts, although she struggled to come to terms with her creativity being traceable to the drives inherited from a literal marriage of polar opposites, analogous with the bi-polar disorder from which her mother suffered.

One of Sarah’s most powerful poems, “Azarel (Angel of Death),” strides forward with savage exuberance and an inventiveness which packs a devastating punch, right from the opening line, “Death the lawyer adjudicates between us.” Ostensibly about her mother, the poem’s last stanza begins with “Death the lover. / You loved him many years,” and concludes:

Whored him, married and divorced him;
Coaxed, cuckolded, and cozened him;
You high-stakes rolled, you bet the house
And won, but now, my dear,
He’s really come.

Linguistically and tonally, all her poetry has an extraordinary richness. Both her volumes (not enough, alas!) are certainly of “equal and abiding value”; one hears in the first the echoes preceding the sounds themselves in the second, with the latter book’s perhaps more sensational provenance (it was published posthumously). Tragically, Sarah departed just as she neared the peak of her powers. Read, admired, and loved in her lifetime, she should have been read more while she lived.

Shortly before she died, and referring to her step-mother, she applied her analytical mind to her personal situation, asking: “So, do I go with Harriet and life, or my mother and death?” She couldn’t always shine that compassion she displayed to others on herself, but a poem like “For the Fog Horn When There is No Fog,” from Longing Distance shows such moving wisdom about pain and humanity:

For everything that tries to counsel vigilance—
The surly sullen bell, before the going,

The warning that reiterates across
The water: there might be fog someday

(They will be lost), there might be fog
And even squall, and you’ll have nothing

But remembrance, and you will have to learn
To be grateful.

The following poem’s eloquence and elegance further attests to both her promise and her achievement, and to our great loss:

                             Cassetta Frame (Italy, circa 1600)
                             Robert Lehmann Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art

                             I wonder what his hands were like—skin,
                             Thumbprint’s orbits, half moon of the nail—
                             The artisan who plied bough and alloy, chisel,
                             Stone, for the sake of circumscription:
                             Poplar, walnut, ebony, pear, niello,
                             Crystal, lapis. The words abscond from wood
                             And bloom in trees: Pioppo tremulo;
                             Forma di pera. I confess to find
                             Myself astonished by outskirts of things:
                             Hem and shirr, ice storm, sea coast, shadow, fringe,
                             To find myself forsworn to the mixture,
                             Poplar, walnut, ebony, pear,
                             Niello, crystal, lapis. Lapse! No life
                             But in the rim; no word but on the lips.

                             (The materials used were typed out on a small card beneath the          frame on display and are considered by this author to be a found poem.)

Legacies of Damaged Women Artists

The introductory essay to my anthology Women’s Work: Modern Women Poets Writing in English (Seren) — dedicated to Sarah — presents Sylvia Plath as an exemplar for arguments about how women poets are too frequently regarded and assessed, by critics and society generally, a topic Sarah and I often discused, and which would be relevant to Sarah’s life and writing in due course, considering Plath’s literary influence on Sarah and the parallel trajectory of their deaths. More than happens with male poets, the life is allowed to overtake the value of the writing itself. Consider how Plath’s formal dexterity is less the focus then the sensationalism of her life. At the same time, we can’t help being fascinated with this aspects of a life, though, curiously and tellingly, not so with Ted Hughes.

    Plath is Ground Zero for what I call the fetishization of the damaged woman and, especially, the damaged woman artist whose special talent is demeaned as accident, anomaly or a symptom/function of illness. This trope of the woman artist as damaged goods is another branch on the sexist tree. It resembles the woman on a pedestal, flattery employed to disguise invalidation and elevation diminishing the person and her achievement. Vulnerability is usually regarded as a feminine quality and its usage can switch seamlessly from being positive to pejorative. Numerous essays employ the word ‘pathology’ including, in its first sentence, Elizabeth Hardwick’s essay “On Sylvia Plath,” previously cited, which otherwise contains astute observation and praise.   

The woman poet who kills herself is enhanced by virtue of death as the ultimate vulnerability. It renders her mute for all time and the passive object of speculation. It’s the ultimate invalidation if the pedestal remains in place. Plath’s suicide makes it harder to reconcile her role as example or mentor to young aspiring women poets if self-abnegation — a short step from annihilation — remains within the deepest recesses of our psyche a powerful social conditioning.

Many male poets — Keats, Shelley, Robert Lowell, Hart Crane, and for that matter Ted Hughes, to name a few — had lives about which it can be said “The tragedy is part of the narrative,” as the English journalist Danuta Kean puts it. Yet this doesn’t overshadow or detract from an author’s achievement. It doesn’t degrade the life as a whole or the author’s authority as an author. Nor does the biography exert relentless outsize influence on the critics, frequently men.

The damaged woman trope is more likely potent if her legacy is in the hands of a man who may be least qualified to behave responsibly with respect to it. Many men of our current generation remain ignorant — sometimes wilfully — of the routine handicaps under which women artist often labour. It’s still not unusual for a male artist to take for granted the protection and support his art receives, perhaps by another artist, and so remain unaware how the lack of such a system would impinge on his output.

    Apart from any arguable dereliction of duty excused by a wish to protect his children (or himself), by living on, Hughes controlled his own legacy. He then handed it to his sister Olwyn along with Plath’s legacy too, despite her having hated Plath, as Hughes surely knew. We can only imagine, as Woolf does about women writers, what other women’s legacies have been lost or distorted for similar reasons, passing through the wrong hands or overseen by those whose own art and/or grief took precedence. I’ll guess that more women’s legacies are passed onto men than men’s onto women. The outcome is bound to perpetuate both inequality and revisionism, if not outright ignorance. 

    So we bat Plath back and forth — Plath the Poet and Plath the Damaged Artist — creating adversaries of these dual and duelling sides to her nature. We thumb the pages of the potboiler starring a handsome brooding northern Ted Hughes who eventually had the last word over the wife he’d abandoned by way of a patchwork book that earned a prize and much praise despite an appropriation worse than any like accusation levelled at Plath’s poetry.

Goodbye (Only for Now)

I write this on the brink of finishing a long goodbye to the UK: or, rather, listening to its goodbye to me, since it has never made me feel very welcome. A phrase comes to me more frequently these days: In my beginning is my End, and in my end is my beginning. Recently, I listened to Sarah say this in an interview: one of several phrases or ideas I trace back to us both, unsure who said it first or if we both thought these things separately, before we’d even met perhaps.

    I visited her and her ugly beloved pug dog and her lizard in Harlem only once, offering feedback on several new poems, at her request. Since then, more unpublished and uncollected poems have been discovered at her stepmother’s in Portland, Oregon, including some striking poems that seem to suggest the direction she was headed and, as happens with talented authors, surprise is an important element of their currency when it comes to new chapters.

    Before arriving at her new house in Cambridge, Mass, I was struck with a sudden urge to take photos of her and her mother’s paintings. This was very unlike me. I never take photos and am glad, therefore, when others do so, marking memorable occasions in this tangible way. Since I had no camera, before heading to her house, I diverted to find a place that sold cheap cameras. 

In some of the photos I took, Sarah looks gaunt, for example holding up a self-portrait drawing by her mother. In others she is her usual beautiful self, and smiles. In the most striking photo she’s seated in a chair with her pug dog Bridgett in her lap, just underneath another painting by her mother, though when the photo was developed and before I knew it was of Icarus, I was chilled because the figure hovering over her looked like Death himself. I remember almost exclaiming this and then quickly cut myself off.  That stays with me. The visit stays with me due to my uncharacteristic need to take photos alongside the fact that this visit would be the last time I ever saw her.

Other than the poems, Sarah’s final words included remarks which demonstrated a characteristic mix of defiance, strength and humility. She wrote:

My husband is a good man. I love my students, family and friends. I can’t go on. Suicide is not an act of cowardice. I’m sorry about writing on your wall.

Before writing out Plath’s poem, “Words,” she wrote out two lines from an early lesser-known Yeat’s poem, “A Dream of Death”: “I dreamed that one had died in a strange place /Near no accustomed hand.”

The poet Wendy Battin — also dead by this time though not by suicide — wrote about an episode from her undergraduate days in the 1970s when Plath was an icon for women poets. The day Anne Sexton killed herself, Battin was at a party when, she relates: 

…. a male professor cornered me to ask, “Why do all you women poets kill yourselves?” I was twenty years old, awed by the real talent and knowledge of my teachers. I didn’t say: “Because of people like you.”

Who are those people? Are they men or is that irrelevant? I feel like I’ve met them. Their power over us depends upon how far off to the side they remain with respect to our trajectory. Did they park themselves right smack in the middle of our paths? Did they take us by the arm? Were we led into or out of the forest? 

Sarah would have appreciated Wendy’s comment, its delicious dark edge and the trick to her wittily disingenuous claim to silence which, in fact, is neatly contradicted by her own announcement of it. I hear Sarah’s ironic yelp of laughter, see her distinctive crooked smile, recalling in all its complexity her irresistible vitality, vulnerability and kindness, all perfectly in tune with her  cutting humour.

I’m glad that voices are no longer lost forever and that faces no longer evaporate as memory fades. We now revisit Plath with fresh eyes and information. Hopefully, the newly discovered words by Sarah will make their way into book form. Perhaps others will come to light, new memories too.

In the meantime, we have two books, recordings and videos. We have ourselves, carrying her and her words around with us for the rest of our days. In time and in turn, I hope too that there will be others wanting to carry her and her words forward: others like you, reader.

(This essay consists of compiled excerpts from “Ars Longa, Vita Brevis: On Sarah Hannah,” published in the journal Dark Horse, Winter 2007/2008, Issue 21, and from the subsequent adapted version which appeared in the online journal Contemporary Poetry Review (https://www.cprw.com/Misc/hannah.htm ), as well as from the essay “I’m Not Sorry About Writing On Your Wall’ which was published in Dark Horse, Summer 2021, Issue 43. Some changes have been made and there have been additions reflecting new information.)

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