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Before Much Ado About Nothing

 

When I read a poem

that fucks me up

with its gorgeousness

I don’t want to be the poet.

I want to be the poem.

I’m sorry for bumping

into your mom, Kid.

It was summer in NYC.

Little white face, you

craned back your head

to face the accuser.

In the afterlife, I’ll be

a poem. Just a plain

sheet of typing paper

bludgeoned with ink.

The one that captures

the tar-green tenderness

in your, eyes, hardened

with daughterly outrage.




Sarah Sala

levelheaded: Before Much Ado About Nothing

 

In addition to leading us to draw comparisons with the Shakespeare play referenced, the title of Sarah Sala’s poem implies that the past (“Before”) is no big deal. Her making this point suggests its opposite—that the past is in fact important. Looking at the title another way, it suggests that after the incident at the center of the poem, there is much ado about something. The incident—a mother being accidentally bumped into and her daughter taking offense—is like a poem, an unintended action spawning an instinctual, brash, beautiful reaction.

 

The phrase “Much Ado About Nothing” may be a stand in for recognition bestowed upon a poet, which, Sala suggests, pales greatly in comparison to a poem itself. The poet has an expiration date, but the poem is infinite. This explains why the speaker doesn’t “want to be the poet” but instead “want[s] to be the poem.” Pondering death, the speaker finds that the poem itself offers an “afterlife.”

 

Why is this so? What makes a poem immortal? We think that, for Sala, a poem is emotion, and emotion doesn’t have a shelf life. For a writer with an audience, feelings the poem “captures” live on long after the poet’s death. The “plain” language Sala employs mirrors the simple “sheet of typing paper / bludgeoned with ink” that a poem a.k.a. the soul is.

 

The word “bludgeoned” in the above quotation deserves special attention. In a poem, words are not neatly marched out across the page, but they spill violently forth. For Sala, what forces a poem into the world, what the words of a poem are, is pure emotion. Emotion fills poems like it fills the eyes of a daughter who thinks her mother has been wronged.

 

 

– The Editors