Sara Nicholson, The Living Method

THE END OF TELEVISION
Covet not the sun its honorariumnor authorize the stars their grants to write.
The sojourners spotted a forestadrift with language, but couldn’t make sense of it.
The woods at odds with the usual channelsand those neighboring mountains
didn’t look like pyramids, no matter the scale.Read this part as if the sum of lilac
mattered to you. For love of someone*else’s vortex, toss the luminaries aside.
In lieu of flowers, please donateand in exchange for your sympathy I’ll give you
edits on the level of the line. Poems are to waras are ghosts to the proverbial orchard.
Headstones offer us nothingbut an end to syntax. Microsoft
Word inverts the sea. I readyour manuscript. Reader, I married it.
I fear for the estuaries.They are so small this time of year.
I’m admittedly a bit late to the game on Arkansas poet Sara Nicholson’s first poetry book, The Living Method (New York NY: The Song Cave, 2014). A collection of sharp, stunning lyrics, Nicholson’s poems shift and shimmy through what is known and not known, seen and not seen, shifting perspectives from line to line, writing a meditative abstract through a sequence of direct phrases. Her poems somehow contain multitudes in a unique precision of condensed space and revel in a quick movement between ideas, images and facts. There is such a powerful certainty that comes through such shifts, rolling across the page like a thunderstorm. There is a ferocity that comes through here, as well as a fierce intelligence as she articulates a sequence of moments that describe a state of being. As she writes in the poem “O.E.D.”: “I hate you and I hate / the art of these letters, this language.”
WEEKEND IN ARCADIA EGO
Our skin, beyond recognitionmakes music in the blood.
Yet the thought of thisis enough to me make me count
the numbers that have become uglythis semester. I might get lost
though my blood won’t. My eyes’lldrop their verdict in the leaves.
Methodologies and flowers, little documentswith wings, leave their lesions in the dust.
The lyric is something greater than forestand less than skin. Those that I have loved now sleep
within the quotient of our breathing.Nothing will have the wherewithal
to sound me out. Not the wind,complex among the poplars this season.
Not the occasional email,reminding us of what’s missing:
a field of poppies and a book review,a really good one. Not the wolves.