Sarah Lindsay Profile
1,306 words


Sarah Lindsay's Wildly Exhilarating Imagination

Poets praise her work, critics acclaim it. Her first book of poetry, Primate Behavior, was nominated for the National Book Award; Publisher's Weekly listed it on the year's best books. Who is Greensboro's Sarah Lindsay?

By Ralph Grizzle

In Care of The Soul, Thomas Moore writes: "Slight shifts of imagination have greater impact on living than larger efforts at change." On one level, Moore's conviction says the imagination provides portals through which we can see the world anew. Greensboro poet Sarah Lindsay has peered through some of those portals.

Consider the imagery from these lines in her book, Primate Behavior: Close to the Pole, where daytime stretches like taffy, / and icebergs move in vast and moaning herds . . . .

Or these lines: . . . to tear a mountain open and let it rust / to trace an eyebrow with a wondering thumb, / to make stories out of everything . . . .

Consider the marvel of the world embodied in a penguin that hatches an offspring from a tin can tossed out by an Antarctic explorer. Strange, but The world is large / and without fuss has absorbed stranger things than this.

Consider, too, the praise of California poet Kay Ryan, who introduced Sarah's poems to New York's Grove Press: "Her poems just had this muscular imagination. They were different from anything I had seen. She was dealing with material that seemed fresh."

Or the praise of State Poet Laureate Fred Chappell: "Her poetry impressed me enormously because of its range of reference, not only of literature and music but of science too, which a great many young people, especially those interested in the arts, take no cognizance of."

Finally, consider the acclaim heaped upon her in mid-November when she flew to New York to represent Primate Behavior--one of five National Book Award finalists in the poetry category.

All of this may strike you as very impressive, but you may be asking yourself why you haven't heard of Sarah Lindsay's work before now. Well, maybe you have.

If you've thumbed the pages of Delta Air Lines' Sky magazine lately, you've seen traces of her meticulous copy-editing skill. Maybe you even caught her article, "So You Want To Write Poetry?" Have you slept at a Radisson hotel in the past few years? If so, you probably nosed through the in-room publication, Voyageur. Like the hotel attendant who prepared the room for your comfort, Sarah was there ahead of you, too, fixing words.

Word Up
A copy editor at Greensboro's Pace Communications, Sarah doesn't immediately offer poet when asked her occupation. "Saying I'm a poet is like making this huge claim," she says. "You're either Keats or somebody who writes verses that nobody wants to read. You can't win. A lot of times, I say I am a copy editor. That's a big part of my identity, getting in there and fixing words."

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on December 31, 1958, Sarah has been fixing words from early on. Words have always been important to her. "Some people seem to feel that words come between us and reality, distorting our perception of it or somehow keeping us apart from it," she says. "To me words come between me and reality as my connection to it and my response to it. It doesn't seem to me as if I've even had a thought until I put it in words anymore."

Raised by a college math professor and a French teacher who were interested in "just about everything," Sarah began reading in The Book of Knowledge, a series of encyclopedia-like books, when she was just a child. In high school, she tackled the 11-volume Will and Ariel Durant series, The Story of Civilization. Nowadays, she reads such books as The Life Story of the Fish: His Manners and Morals by Brian Curtis, Bone Hunters in Patagonia by J.B. Hatcher and The Song of
the Dodo by David Quammen.

In a review of Primate Behavior, Publisher's Weekly alluded to her worldly fascination: "Had Dr. Doolittle fathered a prodigious daughter, she might well be behind the bizarre and entertaining personae found on the pages of Lindsay's first-book bestiary." She marvels at the world of explorers and animals, and she creates poems to express her admiration. "There's clutter and ordinariness in our world," Sarah says. "But there's strangeness too, and there are marvels. With luck, what I write can in a faint way reflect that."

Among the cast of Sarah's marvels are Antarctic explorers, giraffes, elephants and many things that go unnoticed by the mass of humanity. "She sees things that we don't," says her mom, Phyllis. "She'll get excited about simple things, a single white violet in the shade of a tree."

Or the insect that survived nuking. "When a bug walked out of my microwave after I had been cooking, I knew I had to use it," Sarah says.

What separates Sarah's imagination from ours is that we would have probably crushed the bug. She found poetry in it. "Maybe the first important shift in perspective is slipping from just registering that something is happening," she says, "to thinking, 'There's something strange about that, something that catches my attention, what can I do with it?' " She finds inspiration from a clear bead of water lit on every tip-end of the tree or the plant that grew up to the window in her dad's office. "Philodendrons have an encouraging quality," she says. "They just grow and grow."

Others fonts of inspiration are more elusive to lay a finger on. "She will say, 'I had a poem,' the way that someone would say 'I had a baby,' " her mom says. "The ideas just come to her. She says that writing prose is like calling the dog, and writing poetry is like calling the cat." (When I asked about this, Sarah tactfully responded that writing "good prose" is a bit more "elusive and less effusively obedient than calling your average dog.")

An Exceptional Poet
In the summer of 1996, Grove Press Poetry Consultant George Bradley wrote Sarah asking her to submit some poems for consideration. She ultimately mailed 110. "I was astonished," Bradley recalls. "I had asked around to find poets that I'd be enthusiastic about publishing. It's easy to find really capable, really professional poets, but to find exceptional poets is never easy. I was delighted when I ran across her work."

Working from his Connecticut home, Bradley mailed a copy of the poems to Kay Ryan. They drew up a scorecard--George likes it, Kay likes it, We both like it--and chose 67 finalists. Sarah added one more, and they were bound under the title Primate Behavior.

The book's jacket boldly announced, "Once in a generation a young poet arrives with such unexpected and compelling vision that readers take notice right from the start." It added that the book was a product of "a wild and exhilarating imagination."

When Primate Behavior hit the bookshelves, critics embraced it, poets praised it. "It was stunning, so strikingly original," says Grove Press Editor Joan Bingham. "There was just nothing else like it."

At the National Book Awards in New York, Sarah joined writers like Charles Frazier, who won the prize in the fiction category. "What was wonderful about it for me was that it didn't feel unreal," she says. "I felt credible. I didn't have these panicky feelings that I didn't belong with these other people."

National acclaim didn't completely submerge self-doubt, though. "My ego is like a rock with split layers" she says. "Some of the layers are solid in their belief in myself, but right in between are other layers that say 'I'm a fraud, I really can't do this, I'm not good enough.' "

She continues to write, peering through portals put there by her imagination. She continues to marvel at a world that is all too easy to take for granted. I am here for no personal good, but to help make maps / I am civilized. See, the word Forward is drawn on my heart.--from the poem "Primate Behavior."