Zimble Zamble Zumble
Praise

What do I know about poetry? Well, I know what I like, don't I? You bet, but so what do I know about eating, either? Here's an answer for you again: only what I like, not excluding sucking on Twizzlers all day long, chewing cold braised beef as a preparation for breakfast, and meanwhile swallowing by the flagon Diet Coke until it kills me and everyone I breathe on. I read poetry in the manner of a fellow no more reasonable in his moods and comportment. My taste runs not to the temperate. Am not at all concerned to spend myself on anything that cannot buy me out to the last red cent. I read, when I am reading poetry, Stevens and Sarki, and understand neither one more than the other, nor either hardly at all. Look, I come to poems not to place behind me an event in understanding, but to enter an occasion unexampled in its feeling. Knowing what at bottom a poem is would constitute for me a kick comparable to knowing what at bottom the beef is in the absence of the wizard's braising it and leaving it chilled to death for me in the overnight fridge. You want to fight with me over the wisdom of my nutrition? You want to show me your carrot sticks and ingenious tea? That's okay. You'll win hands down. The books will take your side. The whole goddamn gang running the whole goddamn central zone will back you up -- to the enlightened, edified, long-lifed man. Fuck the long life. Fuck the safe side. Fuck the gang, whatever its drift in the reigning climate. Stevens stood alone -- and was first. Sarki stands alone -- and is first. The undersigned wants no nourishment. The undersigned is starved for the clench in his kishkes. Hey, it could be poison, right? -- your fats, your sugars, your sweetening from the otherworld. But I ask you, I honestly, not even angrily, but really really really sadly, ask you: what's a good time for?

--Gordon Lish

If the poems in Zimble Zamble Zumble [elimae books, 2000] had been previously published in The Paris Review or The New Yorker, M Sarki would by now have been hailed as a marvelous home-grown successor to Charles Simic and the book itself offered by Knopf or Farrar Straus. But the poems have instead appeared mostly in online magazines, such as elimae and 5_Trope, and Sarki is virtually unknown. Which may be just as well, for the time being, because the comparison to Simic would be misleading and maybe even harmful. For one thing Sarki's poems owe more to the not quite Dadaist tendencies of Wallace Stevens than to European surrealism; for another, Simic would give his third eye to write poems as wonderful and delicious as the best of these. I frequently have no idea what Sarki is talking "about," but his language both astonishes and amuses me. Zimble Zamble Zumble gives more pleasure than the last dozen Pulitzer Prize winners all together.

--B. Renner

1996 © 2003