Sandra Berris’ life has been chock-full of experiences.
In college, she would sometimes listen to Bob Dylan records at the home of Karl Shapiro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and her professor. One evening, she attended Shapiro’s dinner party, where Allen Ginsberg personally recited his incendiary and then-buzzing poem, “Howl.”
After earning a master’s in education from Stanford University, Berris took to Alamo, Calif., where she taught. On the weekends, schoolchildren would pile into her car to explore San Francisco’s corners and cultures in the days before teachers needed permission slips to expose their students to the world.
Life then took her east. For more than 20 years, Berris lived in Greenwich, where she became engrossed in a community she loved, active in the Arch Street Teen Center, Greenwich Historical Society, United Way and other town institutions.
Despite moving permanently to Carmel, Calif., four years ago, she still has a membership with the Greenwich Branch of the National League of American Pen Women and will return to town for the organization’s meeting this month to celebrate her first book of poetry, “Ash on Wind,” published in August.
But while Berris has ties on opposite ends of the country and can boast a more diverse autobiography than most, she often chooses to escape her own reality in her poetry, telling imagined stories instead.
“A poem, it’s not a diary, it’s not a journal, it’s something that’s created,” Berris said in an interview with Greenwich Time. “There’s a term ‘poetic license’ that everyone’s heard.”
Her new collection is divided into five sections, all of which have a thematic pull. The first part focuses on death, and later infidelity takes center stage.
While the poems often come from a seemingly personal perspective, Berris isn’t always the narrator.
In “Adagio Adieu,” for example, she juxtaposes a violin with a piano, playing off their harmony and individuality to build an allegory for a marriage that has been disrupted. She said she thought of the poem as an orchestra performance, after listening to her friend talk about divorce for weeks.
“I don’t sit down and think, ‘I’m going to create a poem,’” Berris said. “I’m not someone who writes every day. A poem actually finds me.”
When two threads meet — when her mind connects a moaning violin with her friend’s marital issues — she feels inspired to write.
As an avid reader, Berris also discovers creative motivation in literature. For example, after reading a work by Joyce Carol Oates that tried to capture what it was like to lose a child, Berris imagined how she would have felt if she had ever had a miscarriage, a project that culminated in her poem, “Atonement.”
“Part of reading the fiction to me is empathizing, not sympathizing,” she said. “Empathizing. Feeling exactly how someone else would feel.”
Berris writes convincingly, so much so that she said fans have expressed disappointment when learning some of her stories aren’t true in a literal sense. That poems are autobiographical is an assumption lovers of the art form often make.
Anthony Reed, an associate professor of English and Africa-American Studies at Yale University, said because of poetic conventions since the Romantic period, audiences tend to “assume the first-person narrator of a poem is a stand-in for the author, which is often accurate.” He added that confessional and feminist poets have stressed the links between the personal and political, only strengthening assumptions about the writer as subject.
“But,” he countered, “there have flourished, alongside those trends, many schools of poetry concerned with character, with intensity of certain common emotional experiences, and other concerns, that have implicitly or explicitly rejected the idea of the poem as testimony.”
In an email to Greenwich Time, Reed wrote that poets often cover sensitive material without personal experience in the matter. He referenced Gwendolyn Brooks’ poems that addressed abortion, though she most likely never had one herself. And he added that if Berris was able to make her readers believe in the truth of her story, “it sounds like she wrote successful poetry.”
Ironically, Berris’ best known piece, “The Clock Shoe,” is based on actual experience — her own struggles with her mother’s descent into Alzheimer’s. The poem has appeared in a sermon by a Greenwich minister, on a Russian website and in a newsletter about Alzheimer’s, among other places.
In “The Clock Shoe,” Berris asks her mom to draw a clock, a preliminary test to see if she has Alzheimer’s. She instead doodles a shoe design. The moment is light and humorous, but with a troubling undercurrent. It is included in “Ash on Wind,” among an entire series about her parents and their aging process.
For Berris, publishing her first book has meant having something that, unlike an anthology or journal, is uniquely hers.
She said the best part is “just holding the beautiful finished product in my hand.”
Berris isn’t expecting to make a killing off her work, a reality most poets must face. And despite her return trip to Greenwich, she is not planning a book tour anytime soon.
“I do realize,” she said with a calm confidence, “I’m a bubble in the ocean.”
source: http://www.greenwichtime.com/local/article/Former-Greenwich-resident-pens-first-book-of-12186728.php