About the Poems - CS
About the Poems
by Carly Sachs What happens when you are going through a break-up, tending bar, and studying the Bible and the Talmud? Perhaps these poems. As a writer, I've often wondered how much of my life filters into my work either directly or indirectly and if it's a good or a bad thing. I've often heard people say that writers need to have messy lives so they have something to influence and inspire them. However, the poems of Mary Oliver refute that. Or maybe they don't, as nature is often messy and unexplainable. Ultimately, I think all poems are about wanting in some way, some small or large desire to be able to be the named or the one who names. In a way, the Torah is a book of transition and a bar is a place of transition and essentially our lives are constantly in transition. If all of this is metaphor, stories with similar themes, a bar with multiple narratives and then that gets super-imposed on my life, poems like light and dark refracted, parables and rifts, all attempting to name.