Remember the last time you listened to Bessie Smith sing the blues. Close your eyes and hear her wail. Guttural voice. Hips swaying. Sugar in her bowl. Eyes burning through you. It’s easy to love Bessie Smith’s music since she’s conveniently dead. You don’t have to worry about waking up one morning and finding her laying in bed next to you, singing up her soul from the depths, taking your measure and turning it into song. Legend has it that Bessie Smith died because she was turned away from an all-white hospital, and was sent to a pauper’s hospital many miles away. White folks didn’t want to deal with the fact of her existence – or the meaning of her genius - while she was alive.

Things haven’t changed much. The streets are a part of America that most people today would rather forget. Our radio stations play hip-hop music, but the world of modern poetry stays off the sidewalks and huddles over pots of gourmet coffee in quaint university district cafes. What if I told you that one of the very finest poets in America is – right now – walking the streets in a southern city, and almost no one has ever heard her name? What if I told you that, if you would dare to enter her world, she might take your measure and make you into a poem straight from her gut? She is not conveniently dead

Her name is Saphire, and that’s the only name you’ll get. She is not Bessie Smith, but if you take a healthy dose of Bessie and mix it thoroughly with equal measures of Leonard Peltier, Lauryn Hill, John Brown, Crazy Horse, Muhammed Ali, Janis Joplin and Nina Simone, you’ll get a pretty good idea of what Saphire’s poetry is like. If you would care to look closer, you might see her sashaying down the street with one of her three pitbulls, swinging her hips to the rhythm of music in her head, focusing on you with eyes like a tiger. The way she moves, you know that she could break a strong man’s back, or his heart. Saphire is a Woman, spelled with a capital “W.” If you can’t deal with that, go somewhere else and read Sylvia Plath.

Listen to her rock.

   Rodeo Tricks

HE rode side saddled,
'headed' me and wrapped his strap
round tight for a thrashing that
drug him down horses high
to strawberries

enduring my rage ,
he entered the coveted walls
of cowboy fame and buckled belt
for laying me dusty down
in seven seconds, heeled
rope burnt and somewhat
pissed  

Saphire’s poetry definitely is not for the faint of heart. She can be bold and boisterous, bad and brazen, but that’s not all of her. Contained with equal ease in her work are heartbreak and love, wistful longing and fiery anger, cynicism and gentleness, spiritual searching and connection, and an encompassing compassion for the legions of shattered souls who walk the dark and brutal streets of America with her. Perhaps no one has written more honestly, eloquently and evocatively about the inability to love at the deepest levels. Her poems are rewarding in both substance and style. Meaning is at the heart of her work, and her poems are at the same time deeply enigmatic and crystal clear. Her voice is passionate, incisive and without pretension, delivering complex yet clear imagery through language that vibrates in intensity and is metered to the rhythm of hand drum, hip-hop and chant. While her brilliance is sometimes flawed by a lack of discipline, it is her brilliance that stands out in the end. She is a powerful antidote to the kind of technically perfect but meaningless poetry that predominates in the modern era. She is guilty of excess, but innocent of guile. Her voice is her own. There is nothing else like it anywhere.

Saphire also is an artist, and her digital work is exhibiting increased technical ability, coherence and focus of vision. Much of her artwork involves a series of self-portraits, but she also paints impassioned digital collages of subjects ranging from child abuse to men who frequent prostitutes.

Origins and Essence

The essence of Saphire’s poetry arises from her origins and experiences. While this essay does not pretend to be a biography, her life cannot be separated from her work. My understanding of her life is based on several conversations, an exchange of correspondence, and a substantial body of journal entries. I have made no attempt to corroborate the information she provided, and have taken her word. In many cases, she made it clear that she did not want me to publish certain identifying information about her, as she has concerns about her own safety. I do not have a problem with this, as the only purpose biographical material serves in a critical essay is to deepen one’s understanding and appreciation of her work.

There is a miraculous aspect to Saphire’s poetry, in the simple fact that it exists at all. It is almost miraculous that she survived to reach adulthood with body, mind, spirit and psyche reasonably intact, and it is even closer to the miraculous that she is able to write eloquent poetry: she was barely able to read or write only two years ago. In two years’ time, she has learned to read and write in English with great sophistication. For the most part, she taught herself everything she knows about the language. A close friend, Karen Barker, inspired her to write poetry, and Saphire persevered at least in part because she wanted to write poetry as a memorial to sharing life on the streets with a woman who was very close to her. It can be said that much of Saphire’s work, both in poetry and life, exists as a way of honoring her love for this young woman, Cheyenne, who died of a drug overdose. It is not an exaggeration to say that Saphire’s poetry is a shattering and dramatic testimony to the power of love and devotion in the human heart.

At this point, it must be emphasized that my appreciation for Saphire’s work is not an act of charity, and has nothing at all to do with bleeding hearts. I do not see her work as primitive chic (in the sense of the recent vogue of Haitian painting) or as a sociological statement. Instead, I see it as highly sophisticated poetry that can stand on its own - without apology - next to the work of any poet in America. If anything, her “ghetto” background has enriched the meaning, imagery and language of her poetry to a level far beyond what one most often reads in renowned literary journals. I like her work because she is a very good poet who is worthy of recognition.

Saphire (this is how her name is spelled) was born and raised on an Indian reservation, and her ethnic heritage is mixed Native American and Black. She grew up speaking only Spanish and some of the Cherokee language, and could not speak English when she entered school. Her childhood was economically impoverished, and she describes her home life as very abusive. She did poorly in school and reached eighth grade by default (“I was doing other things,” she wrote wryly).

At age 13, she ran away from home and made a life for herself in the streets. Life in the streets for Saphire was, at times, filled with ugliness, drugs and violence, and sometimes she survived in any way she could. There also was much beauty and intensity in some of the human relationships she developed on the street – friends, lovers and protectors who took her under their wings. Life on the streets would destroy many people, but it made Saphire strong, courageous and capable of deep intimacy on many levels. It also made her capable of anger, violence and revenge. She acknowledges these things in her journals, but adds prophetically, “our darker side can b(e) used for good…the dark is no(t) always a ‘bad’ thing.” Cheyenne’s addiction kept Saphire on the streets beyond the time she knew she should move on, but she could not abandon her close friend. Love and loyalty were not enough to save Cheyenne, but a resilient sense of life and self-esteem were enough to allow Saphire to escape the harshness of ghetto streets. She also wisely knew that she didn’t have the skills to do it on her own, and credits a loyal friend, identified only as “Jack,” as having taught the two young women the rudiments of reading and writing in English, and also for “forcing” them to take jobs in construction to learn how to survive.

After Cheyenne’s death, Saphire found a job as an independent contractor installing communications cable, now owns a house in a middle class neighborhood (which she refers to as “the pink world”) and makes enough money to save for future goals, and also to fund a project to help street people. She would not discuss the specifics of this charitable project. Today, she gives much credit to the support and encouragement of others, and especially to poets Karen Barker and Andrew Bryan Carson.

Saphire’s use of language continues to develop, and a dictionary is her constant companion. She looks up any word she doesn’t know and learns it. In conversations via online messengers, she refers often to the dictionary and also asks people to explain how they use a word or phrase. Writing formally continues to be hard work for her. In conversation, she often prefers to loosen up and write in the language and style of the streets. In a very real sense, formal English for her is a third language – after Spanish and ghetto English. It cannot be emphasized too much that Saphire’s gifts for poetics and language are almost entirely the product of her own mind. She has read very little and is not familiar with the work of other major modern poets. Her reading is confined almost exclusively to the work of contemporary young poets who write on message boards on the web. In that her gifts are a combination of natural insight and natural language, in a very real sense Saphire’s work takes poetry back to its human roots and essence. This is very significant as counterpoint to the intellectualized, formalized and utterly sterile atmosphere of most contemporary poetry.

She is sick to death of “the pink world,” with its meaninglessness, endless rules and isolation. She wants to save up more money and, as soon as possible, get out. In looking toward the future, she expresses ambivalence. She feels a strong need to do something to help people on the streets, and to do something significant to combat child abuse and to help heal its victims. She also feels the call of wild lands, and to a spiritual way of life that is surrounded by the power and beauty of nature, and close to the Earth. The spiritual and at times almost shamanic aspects of Saphire are essential to an understanding of how she sees herself.

A Sense of Compassion

The abuse of children – be it sexual, physical or emotional – is a focal point of Saphire’s sense of compassion in her poetry. Her compassion extends both to abused children, and also to the scarred adults they become. It does not extend to the abusers (she calls them “perps,” or perpetrators), to whom she responds with rage that comes close to being projected into violence, and it only rarely extends to herself.

Her poem, “shake me baby dolls (sold out everywhere)” is a wry and poignant portrait of abuse. This poem is based on the image of a toy baby doll that is extended into the realm of the universal.

shake the baby and hear her cry

complete with sucking sounds, interchangeable eyes

…SHAKE until she says

‘I’m sorry’

…molding her pleasure in brutality for life

evolving her into a battered wife

Not surprisingly, Saphire named this poem as one of her three favorites among her own work. Her other two favorites are poems about intimacy: sharing and the inability to share at the deepest levels of friendship and love between women who were abused as children.

Her sense of outrage about child abuse is reflected in a journal essay entitled “A Survivor’s Address.” Alluding to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on America, Saphire says our nation is forgetting about the real terror we face – child abuse - and ignoring the real war on terrorism, which is to protect children. She calls the national war on political terrorists “only an opening set for the coming…inescapable wrath of unprotected children, ignored.” This invisible terrorism causes our society to ignore the plight of millions of children who are “raped, molested, beaten, programmed, verbally hijacked, Xposed, videotaped, sold, harmed, mutilated, sodomized, starved, neglected, rejected, blamed, hurt.”  By ignoring these children, she wrote, we are ignoring our own future and filling it with dysfunctional families, decreasing prosperity, and a rise in anger, violence and sorrow: “the pedophiles and rapists of tomorrow – the terror….” She reacts with anger to claims about a reduction in child abuse, saying that these numbers are utterly hollow when more than half of the children born in America still face the terrorism of abuse.

The poem, “Validation,” is another of Saphire’s favorites. It is about the coming together of Saphire and Cheyenne on the streets – two survivors of abuse finding each other and colliding,

and we were HIGH

THIS was love, and

THIS WAS LIFE

and we were FREE

while we misdirected revenge

released the beasts…

we were hell

and we were wild

we were angry

and this was life

we were rage

and we were pain

we were fire

we were free

and we warmed our souls

beside infernos of

Validation

Moving beyond the inferno of “Validation,” in “It’s Bethie’s Time to Fly,” Saphire looks compassionately on a girl whose “sixteen years punched holes in her heart” that she bandaged “with Jesus and art.”  The poem urges Bethie to “put that luggage down and fly,” even as her life “speed burn(s) the dirtied tracks of her tears,” and to never look back and never blame the past because she would use the past as an excuse for failure.

Saphire only grudgingly (if at all) extends that kind of compassion to herself. In “Liquid Confessions,” she sees herself as broken, jagged pieces of a mirror, shattered because her own image “gags me…

and it’s not that I was born ugly

it’s just that I have become it

becoming fear

shame

becoming a festering wound

growing

hard

calloused

empty…

In her poetry, Saphire often sees herself as sterile, unable to bear fruit, be it in the form of birthing a child or sustaining a loving relationship. “I do know that delivering is always the task I can’t complete on a personal level,” she wrote in her journal, “delivering love or delivering anything real at all.” In “What I cannot Bear,” she berates herself for inseminating her poetry with too much pride, conceiving it as a love for a person that is futile,

leaving

each of these my

cold babies

undone

locked tight in mother’s womb

“Aborted” speaks of a pregnancy when she was “too young” in the eyes of her mother and the unborn child’s father, who “took that baby out himself.”  The poem ends in bitter irony and ambiguity:

he was mean

but perhaps she was the only daughter

to whom he’d EVER

shown mercy

mama knows best

Was the daughter in the poem the unborn child, or was it Saphire? Or was it both? Was the baby’s father also Saphire’s father? In the poem, Saphire leaves home and finds love, but often thinks about the baby and

How lucky it was to have never breathed

Or opened its eyes to the reality

That it

Would have real eyes to perceive