It is hard not to think of Sarah Klassen as family. And what I mean by “family” is perhaps the notion of extended family. Though I am resigned to write about Klassen in accordance with academic convention, I must acknowledge that doing so does not characterize the relationship she develops with this reader—or, I argue, her audience in general. There is simply no way that Klassen expects us to button our Sunday-best or assign a grade to her composition. It is more like she is inviting readers into her care.
Sarah Klassen has a fine ear, and her poetry resounds with voices, mostly of women, that have not often appeared on the page—a grandmother speaking of how she came to Canada, a teacher talking about how language works (or fails to), a mother telling what a character from a story in the Bible means to her. That is not to say Klassen acts like a ventriloquist. If we want to think of her work in terms of performance, Klassen is more of a vocalist with dynamic range. Her poems appear to be the result of listening, an act of attentiveness, along with reflection, an act of interpretation that yearns to understand, but not make assumptions about, the story told. The idea, as many readers have pointed out, is that Klassen sensitively interprets both personal stories of adversities from the past and difficulties in the present. By presenting voices with clarity and control, Klassen prompts and occasionally even provokes us to listen to the still and small during an age of trumpets sounding.
Awareness
Klassen tends to write in a lyrical voice that strikes my ear as trustworthy. Without talking down to me, it appears to have my best interests in mind. Although the speakers of Klassen’s poems do not often lecture, I can find myself reaching for a pencil to take marginal notes. In an interview with writer Miriam Maust from 1993, Klassen articulates the aesthetic she strives for in a poem: “I think if somebody expresses something about the inner world or the outer world in a fresh way and shows a dynamic use of language that draws the reader in (it’s got to be interesting) that’s part of it” (39). Poets, she proposes, are uniquely positioned among all writers to “explore the inner world with intelligence” by showing “how to use language, how to put it together, and how to work with images and say something” (Maust 39). I contend that Klassen demonstrates the depth of thought such an exploration demands. More specifically, she deploys precise diction and deliberate metaphor to evoke a sense of awareness.
Take, for example, the poem “Higher” from her most recent collection, The Tree of Life (2020). It opens with a quotation from first-century Christian theologian Origen—one that Klassen uses as an epigraph twice over her oeuvre—“You yourself are even another little world / And have within you the sun and the moon / And also the stars.” With those words, the speaker prepares the implied audience to “Hunger for something more than bread” as “you rise up” to an internal plane where “solitude will be your soul companion.” That play on words, soul for sole, signals that the poem’s subject is simultaneously spiritual and personal. The speaker then implores us to “Listen to your own breathing, / give ear to the alarm within: a congregation, a quarreling crowd / of shoppers, a kindergarten class.” The purpose of paying attention thus is to notice “The whole world sits at the centre of your self, / waiting to be loved, forgiven, reconciled.” If we can perceive that profound depth within ourselves, we might prepare ourselves to recognize its presence inside someone else. The urgency of that state of mind, recalling the philosophy of Simone Weil—especially in Simone Weil: Songs of Hunger and Love (1999)—informs so much of Klassen’s work.
In a “Tribute to Sarah Klassen” from 2008, critic of
Mennonite literature Hildi Froese Tiessen offers this generous overview:
Sarah Klassen [has] often invoked, with sensitivity, insight, and grace, the environment and sensibilities of people who had gone before. In a goodly number of her poems she records compelling personal memories—memories she has assembled from others, as well as her own—and, by force of her wonderful poetic voice, she transcribes the past and inscribes it with a palpable force of emotion. (94)
I
would add that by scripting memories so, Klassen exhibits an important function
of empathy. Paying close attention as she does can develop the “sensitivity,
insight, and grace” that Tiessen describes. Moreover, Klassen indicates that
such self-awareness is not an end in and of itself. We must also take care to
become aware of our limitations. By that, Klassen urges us to see beyond
conventional or traditional patterns of thought. She calls attention to beliefs
that heal the body and others that harm it, along with those behaviours that
unite the body politic and the arguments that divide it. For Klassen, the
truth of recorded history may be doubtful and the quality of received wisdom is
sometimes questionable, but the value of becoming aware is eternal. That is how she
presents lived-in moments without slipping into mundanity. Similarly, the anecdotes
she presents resist seeming routine.
Sensitivity
To my mind, the most affecting aspect of Klassen’s poetry is its depiction of suffering. I suspect this “affect” results from her engagement with concepts Mennonites are generally preoccupied with: insecurity about religious ethics, redemption of hard work, and difficulty of independence. The poem “Collector” from Klassen’s first collection, Journey to Yalta (1988), renders those thematic concerns with remarkable sensitivity. It begins with a stunning statement, “My mother throws nothing away.” With the next two lines, the speaker personifies mother by focusing on a skill she accrued over a lifetime: “She has fingers fashioned to gather / small hard seed from fruit that’s over-ripe.” The next few lines list the contents of mother’s collection, which could imply that the clutter of bric-a-brac and curios is how mother marks time. However, the poem complicates such an interpretation. It would appear mother retains these items because “she’s had to abandon too much / in Russia” when her family fled. The subsequent list is far weightier than the first, including “Scent of apricot blossoms,” “the green silk dress her mother made,” and “Friends / and the graves of sisters.” Mother must have curated that collection of miscellany in reaction to deep-seated suffering. In response, the speaker demonstrates care for mother by annotating the collection with compassion. Before leaving her village, mother remembers uttering “Furtive last words, prayers spoken / embracing the train’s shadow.” In the speaker’s telling, belief in God offered some comfort, but it did not prevent the past from pursuing mother throughout her life.
Even though I have read “Collector” many times, the poem still makes the hair on my forearms rise. To come to terms with that reaction, I must briefly consult French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s definition of “affect” in A Thousand Plateaus: “Affects are becomings” (256). In the notes to his translation of that text, Brian Massumi glosses “L’affect” as “a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act” (xvi). In other words, an affect is a reaction that occurs prior to or apart from thought. Massumi distinguishes affect from emotion in his influential essay “The Autonomy of Affect.” He draws on Spinoza to demonstrate “the irreducibly bodily and autonomic nature of affect” (Massumi, “Affect” 28). Whereas emotion results from conscious interpretation, affect is largely unconscious. In “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Ruth Leys takes issue with “the belief that affect is independent of signification and meaning” (443). She addresses the literary type of affect in a note about “affective reactions”: “The fact that a novel or painting makes me feel or think a certain way may be a significant aspect of my response to the work, but, simply as my response, it has no standing as interpretation of it” (451). By contrasting “affect” and “form, cognition, and meaning,” Leys suggests that readers engage with aesthetics (450). Presumably, readers contact or connect with a text by experiencing an “asignifying intensity” (Massumi, “Autonomy” 31) prior to making meaning.
Dwelling on affect may appear to be a ploy to explain away my reaction to “Collector.” But there is no denying that even when I reread the poem a shudder of intensity passes between me and it. In truth, I suddenly feel the urge to call my own grandmother, because she arrived in Canada at about the same time as the mother from “Collector.” In this poem, Klassen catalogues a few items that relate to the suffering her mother endured prior to immigration. She does so by engaging an aesthetic that writer and editor Maurice Mierau astutely terms the “Mennonite sensibility” (77). Employing Mierau’s definition, much of Klassen’s poetry “includes some intellectual or visceral knowledge of Mennonite experience (preferably both), whether that experience be cultural, historical, theological or literary (preferably all of these)” (77–78). With the exception of Simone Weil: Songs of Hunger and Love, each of Klassen’s collections includes poems about family and other stories of Mennonite experience. And, according to Mierau, one reason for “making art out of one’s own experience and history” is to illustrate how “that history is different from the official version of propaganda and pulpit” (71). With her work, Klassen negotiates that difference with compassion, which explains her place of respect within Mennonite letters.
While a Mennonite sensibility informs the poetry Klassen composes about her family, it is worth noting that her concerns range outside the community as well. In fact, I would adjust Mireau’s formulation to propose that Klassen’s poetry is also informed by a Mennonite sensitivity. Whether Klassen writes about educating high schoolers, exploring the Interlake, or explicating Bible stories, she addresses these subjects with specific “cultural, historical, theological or literary” insight. By that I mean she is interested in understanding the ethical response to human suffering. At the end of her interview with Klassen, Maust comments about the prevalence of imagery in Journey to Yalta that illustrates “how frangible, yet how tough, humans are” (44). Klassen replies that she is curious to know how people recover from harm and “our constant quest for healing” (45). She explains that healing can take place in “the body or spirit or mind or soul,” but there is no guarantee that it will happen: “You don’t always find that healing—but there’s always that quest, that journey for healing” (45). Healing, then, provides hope to overcome the borders built to deny Lithuanian independence (as in Borderwatch, 1993) and the violence in Ukraine during and following the Russian Revolution (as in Violence and Mercy, 1991). It offers peace to a sixteenth-century Anabaptist heretic (as in Dangerous Elements, 1998) and a seventeenth-century Dutch engraver (as in A Curious Beatitude, 2006). It even gives grace to meddlesome birds (as in Monstrance, 2012) and misshapen trees (as in The Tree of Life).
Works Cited
Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Klassen, Sarah. “Faith, Art, and Reconciliation.” Direction: A Mennonite Brethren Forum, vol. 27, no. 2, 1998. https://directionjournal.org/27/2/faith-art-and-reconciliation.html
Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 37, no. 5, 2011, pp. 434-472.
Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, vol. 31, 1995, pp. 83-109.
---. “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements.” A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, 1980. Translated by Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987, pp. xvi-xix.
Maust, Miriam. “An Interview with Sarah Klassen.” The New Quarterly, vol. 13, no. 3, 1993, pp. 34-45.
MacDonald, Tanis. “Hunger, History, and the ‘Shape of Awkward Questions’: Reading Sarah Klassen’s Simone Weil as Mennonite Text.” Journal of Mennonite Studies, vol. 28, 2010, pp. 87-102.
Mireau, Maurice. “Why Rudy Wiebe is Not the Last Mennonite Writer.” Conrad Grebel Review, vol. 22, no. 2, 2004, pp. 69-82.
Tiessen, Hildi Froese. “A Tribute to Sarah Klassen.” Conrad Grebel Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 2008, pp. 93-96.
reprinted with permission of Canadian Mennonite University Press
from New & Selected Poems of Sarah Klassen (2024), ed. nathan dueck
nathan dueck
[image credit: Jonathan Dyck] lost a staring contest with the US of A after
eighteen years. See, he was raised in a town 10 minutes from the border, but he
blinked and had to move away. He is the author of king's(mère) (Turnstone,
2004), he'll (Pedlar, 2014), A Very Special Episode (Buckrider, 2019), and
Nathan Russel Dueck (1979- )
(Turnstone, forthcoming). He teaches English and Creative Writing at the
College of the Rockies on the traditional unceded territory of the Ktunaxa
peoples in Cranbrook, B.C.