A Poet Soars from Stage to Page

The Bones Below
by Sierra DeMulder
Available from Write Bloody Publishing
$12

Today is your birthday.
I wish you would answer my calls
so I could tell you how much
I wish you were never born
miss you.¹

There’s something to be said for conflict, for indecision. There’s a purity in contradiction. What readers look for, in literature, is a general dichotomy between two coexistant states—something that appears unresolvable at first glance and—if the work is particularly powerful—is still unresolved at the book’s conclusion. When National Poetry Slam and Individual World Poetry Slam champion Mike McGee called Sierra DeMulder’s writing “a bastion of youthful wisdom and vigorous, tempestuous confessions,” he hit the mark so squarely that it’s almost startling to read DeMulder’s poems and see this process in action. The Bones Below, published in January of 2010, is exemplary of one of literature’s oldest and most beloved tricks: a complete reconstruction of the two halves of each human heart trying to destroy one another.

MCB would like to make a confession.

When MCB passed from one life into the next—when MCB first began lurking the streets of Minneapolis trying to solve whatever existential angst that seemed so unshakable at the time—MCB was a slam poetry groupie. Scarcely a slam would pass without MCB at a table in the back of the room holding a few pages of poetry struggling against an indecision, whether or not to read. In this way MCB got to know the rules of slam, the conventions, which rules and conventions the poets break, the poets themselves, and even the individual poems heard repeatedly throughout each season. Although no longer a slam groupie, MCB still knows a thing or two about the artform, and this is why MCB knows that Sierra DeMulder is a remarkable individual, not just as a slam poet, but a poet in general—a poet that transcends her native genre and excels on the page as well as the stage.

MCB would like to stress how rare that is.

So often there’s something sacrificed in performance. For the sake of being understood, a performer will often strike a line that’s too subtle or too easily buried by a room full of quiet exclamations and affirmations. MCB, having paid borrowed crippling sums of money to study poetry in its traditional written form, was frequently frustrated at slams with the overt direction many poets took with their work. Today, MCB understands that this is what separates the great slam poets from the stellar, from the exceptional. DeMulder is one of these exceptions. There are poems in The Bones Below that MCB has seen performed, and splayed flat on a page in b&w print they lose none of their power. It is for this reason that The Bones Below can reach beyond those with a love for slam to those who foster a love for poetry pure and simple, because there’s nothing that separates DeMulder from our most poignant and daring young poets.

So it’s really no surprise that we fall in love with DeMulder’s work when she describes cancer as “a greedy tenant,” or children as aging “like sun rays” and drying “like clay.” We should have seen it coming when the poem “Mrs. Dahmer” unfolds for us a loving mother who told her son “you can grow up to be anything” despite his killing of a squirrel at age eight, his body “shivering, illuminated.” When Mrs. Dahmer turns her questions inward—“Did I hold you too tightly when we crossed the street?” or “Did I teach those fingers to pluck families apart like flower petals?”—we understand just how exact DeMulder’s “youthful wisdom” can be, and how mature her understanding of humanity. In her work, ribs are “like cello strings,” Marilyn Monroe is our country’s “first wet dream,” the states between speaker and addressee are “pressed like stubborn flowers” on a map. Her poems are full of human beings so real that one feels like he or she has met them, people who go through their lives with all the ambition and hurt and loneliness we ourselves have suffered. It’s a pleasure to see DeMulder perform for a packed room, but it’s an entirely new pleasure to read about this human intimacy, or, as she puts it, “the art of licking wounds”—a parallel worthy of any of the great national magazines.

Winner of numerous awards and championships, Sierra is on the 2011 Soap-Boxing Slam Team and will be representing Saint Paul in the National Poetry Slam Championship this August in Cambridge, MA. With a little bit of luck (and their oustanding talent, of course) the Saint Paul team will take the national championship for the third year in a row.

The Bones Below is available from Write Bloody Publishing. Visit DeMulder’s website at http://sierrademulder.tumblr.com/ for more information, or simply to admire her intensely.

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1: “2/2/08” quoted in full.