This is my story that was intended for University of Toledo’s Student newspaper The Collegian. It was never published due to COVID 19.
On February 15, 2020 Yerra Sugarman presented poems from her upcoming chapbook From Her Lips Like Steam as well as other works to faculty and students in Libby Hall. The readings allowed listeners to sample her new poems before the book is officially released in a larger collection called Aunt Bird, which will be published by Four Way Books.
Yerra Sugarman, the author of the poems and professor at the University of Toledo, is a critically acclaimed poet. She has received a “Discovery” which is The Nation Poetry Prize, a Chicago Literary Award, and two awards from the Poetry Society of America as well as other honors. She started out as a visual artist but started writing poetry about twenty years ago.
She explains why she went into poetry by saying “ I thought that poetry related to sculpture it felt like it was making carvings out of words so it seemed like a natural progression, I really wanted to let go of the physicality of visual art of paintings I thought words are both things but they’re also not things, their both solid and ephemeral and I liked that”
For the readings today Sugarman hopes to “give people an idea of why I write and why I write is to give words to people who can’t speak for themselves “
The central theme of Sugarman’s poems from Thursday’s readings is her Aunt Feiga Maler who died in the Ghetto of Kraków, Poland after the Nazis took over. Sugarman is a child of holocaust survivors. She wants to convey the story of a young women who was killed for being Jewish.
She explained that she never knew her aunt, but she found archival material about how her aunt passed away on the internet. The poems are a mixture of things that she imagined and facts.
The chapbook From Her Libs Like Steam which was handed out to attendees on Thursday contains seven poems. Sugarman took the time to explain each of the poems.
The first poem is called “Aunt Bird, Conjured” which she explains “starts of in my imaginary world in my room in New York City and I feel her presence so I make up a narrative about her presence. I try to make solid how she really appears in my imagination.
The second poem is called “Aunt Bird on What Happened to the Alphabet When the War Broke Out” Sugarman explains, “Aunt Bird is my aunt , her name in Yiddish for bird, I try to bring her to life and she talks about what happed to the alphabet when the war broke out and the letters become representations of people and they’re panicked.”
Poem three “She Lived Amid the Tumult of an Occupied City” as Sugarman explains “shows what happened when the Nazis took over Kraków and how they rounded up and arrested Jews and how I imagined my aunt coping with that. There is chaos in the city and people who were just doing regular things like shopping of drinking coffee in a café are arrested just for being Jewish.”
The poem “During Wartime, Aunt Bird Reconsidered the Story of Abraham and Isaac” Sugarman explains “Abraham was patriarch for several religions including Judaism and in the Hebrew bible he is asked to sacrifice his son and she tries to make sense of evil in the world and why God would ask Abraham to sacrifice his son. The implication is why is the holocaust happening? It goes through a series of questions like why did God do this? Why was Abraham about to follow? He doesn’t of course ultimately do it because he is stopped by an angel and he sacrifices a ram instead, but the point was how could a father be willing to sacrifice his son?” The overall theme is “why is there evil in this world?”
The fifth poem “Aunt Bird Opening the Steel Door of Gratitude” “is about her trying to make sense of her circumstances of being imprisoned in this ghetto and I think the key part there is her idea of ‘how could there be beauty in this place that was really awful?’ People were dying on the streets, she tried to forgive the brutal beauty of crocus peddles sprayed with blood, again she is trying to make sense of the very terrible circumstances around her.” She ends with “but she is still grateful for being alive.”
The sixth poem “(She Imagined Painting all the Walls in the World with a Single Rose) discusses an ideal world without walls and without violence.
The final poem “(That her Soul Warmed Itself in a Body Which Would not Persist)” talks about people staying silent when they know there are bad things happening.
Sugarman says that poetry is important because “words matter, words are important because poetry tries to undo the verbal violence that sometimes makes people do the wrong things. Poetry in comparison to stories like pros, poetry has a strong emotional urgency to it so the language, it’s musical so it might stay with us, it’s a musical language and also I think in a very urgent forceful way it makes us consider how words can be used for goodness, for kindness, for change”
The readings in Libby Hall featured stories in From Her Lips Like Steam and other poetry works from the upcoming book Aunt Bird. One student who came to the reading was Rin Baatz, a Junior at the University. She came because of her love of Sugarman.
She said, “I had Dr. Sugarman as a professor twice, she is a really good teacher” and overall she though the poems that were read were “gorgeous.”
Another attendee was Madison Vasko, a graduate student in the English program.
She attended because students in the program “are encouraged to attend program events. I have Sugarman as a class and I have an interest in poetry.”
Vasko enjoyed the poems that were read by Sugarman.
She said, “I really enjoyed the comments that Sugarman make about the dangers of complicity, fascism and tyranny, and the importance of giving a voice to marginalized groups.”
The full poetry collection Aunt Bird will be released in March 2022.
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