In praise of Sarah Cortez’s transcendent poetry 

A true poetics engages the real. A true poetics is not kitsch or sentimentalism. As Flannery O’Connor reminds us, the best writing and poetry “is a plunge into reality and it’s very shocking to the system.” By that standard, Houston-based Catholic poet Sarah Cortez is one of the best, especially because, through her spare language, she brings us face-to-face with the worst of human life but also the best, pointing us, ultimately, to God.

Sarah Cortez has been a school teacher, tax accountant, and employee benefits consultant, but she is likely most known for her work as a police officer before transitioning to writing and poetry.This background has given her insights into human nature most of us can only come to through reading serious writers or thinkers or through decades of hard-won wisdom. There have been doctor-poets, businessman-poets, teacher-poets, but I’m not sure if there have been many police officer-poets. And it shows in the work. Cortez has had access to the darkest aspects of human life, which she presents to us, unblinkingly.

In “Dog Remembers Night,” for instance, we readers find ourselves, along with the speaker, “crawling up/this hill and the guy/who just killed Ericsson/is holed up at the top, shooting.” We learn that there’s a K-9 officer nearby, both he and his dog low to the ground, returning fire. But then the guy who killed Ericsson, the cop-killer, hits the K-9 officer, and quickly we’re treated to a moving scene where the “dog sticks/his big muzzle/into the officer’s bulk/and whines…/the dog’s breath/trapped in his strong throat/by the lump of love/or whatever it is bigger/that a dog feels for his man.” The dog whines, pained by the loss, and then stops, and the speaker knows “that guy is dead and that/blood-stained summer concrete/is all that’s left to that dog/even as it chills and blackens.” This poem is told in sparse language, and it is utterly unsentimental. But therein lies its strength. It’s a quick scene and violent. It lacks a resolution. We know someone is dead. We know nothing about the rest of the police or whether the unnamed murderer has been arrested or shot. We instead witness this event happen—we’re there, in fact; the use of “we’re” at the opening has a kind of cinematic effect, as if we’re one of the police at the scene—and we grieve with the dog, and then we move on. This is a poem that, told a different way, could have been treacly. But Cortez hits the right note.

Indeed, Cortez knows exactly what to reveal and what to leave to the imagination. In “Two Cases Child Abuse, Same Work Week,” we meet a speaker, presumably a police officer, in the process of investigating exactly what the title tells us—child abuse. The narrative is reporatorial. The speaker says that, each time, he “makes a good/case.” And he tells us how he does so. We learn he will “document all wounds/each scar.  Bruises, bites or/burns.  Get a crime scene/photographer.  Sit on the floor/while interviewing the child/like in the training videos.  Make/proper notifications.  Type/the report before going O.D.  File/charges.” But the speaker also reminds us that the most evil of people are not exactly repentant, even if arrested, because going to jail “doesn’t change/anyone’s rot/or fondness for torture.”

What elevates this poem, though, is the next stanza. It reads almost like a haiku. The details and descriptions are quick. But we know what this stanza is describing. The “soft pink to black/pale rose to livid purple/flesh to flesh, ruptured/families, dismembered hopes/torn fabric,” without the previous stanza, could—emphasis on could—look like a semi-jazz, semi-haiku piece, delivered by a young poet at a coffee house. But instead it’s the sparse details of the case, or cases, this speaker has worked on, and our minds immediately imagine the things people can do to the most innocent of human beings. It is a poem meant to shock and enrage.

Cortez’s subject matter, of course, requires seeing, requires honesty. It requires no wasted words. And that’s why her work is a perfect representative of contemplative realism, the aesthetic-critical mode identified by Joshua Hren. In an essay on the subject, Hren says that

It is the duty of the novelist to portray reality as it is, not to merely make it as artificially pretty as we might like it to be. All literature is a search for the truth about human life. But these truths, we contemplative realists know, include, amidst the graveyard, the sign of a new moon rising.

We’ll shift novelist to poet—although Cortez is both—but the quotation applies. Cortez is certainly showing us reality as it is, particularly the harsh reality of the American police officer. She is not turning it into kitsch. She’s not hiding the truth. This is what police have to deal with, and the evil they witness is not something drawn up from the imagination. It is real.

If you were to read only the poems listed above, you might get the sense you were encountering the mind of a nihilist, which couldn’t be further from the truth. Cortez is a deeply serious Catholic who also writes sacred and prayerful poetry. But this is not a case of someone maintaining a kind of strict separation between the sacred and the profane. The policing poems and the sacred poems are meant to be read together, because they show us reality in total. And that which forces us to gaze at the most evil of acts also has us turn upward, toward the hereafter.

We see some of that directly in “Walking Home,” a poem that features a speaker reflecting on memories of childhood—“mom chopping for dinner/attic fan cooling.” It’s filled with the Rockwell-esque images of youth that fill all of our heads. In the memory-world of the poem, “daddy will come home” and the speaker will “fall asleep beneath saints’/smiles after homework/dishwashing, praying on knees.” But when things are past, they are past.  These are things to which we “cannot go back.” But the speaker encourages us to “remember each detail, its beauty” and to “walk yourself home, then back here again.”

There is a Chestertonian dimension to the final stanza. It recalls Chesterton’s Charles Dickens. I’ll quote the passage I had in mind at length:

But this at least is part of what he meant; that comradeship and serious joy are not interludes in our travel; but that rather our travels are interludes in comradeship and joy, which through God shall endure for ever. The inn does not point to the road; the road points to the inn. And all roads point at last to an ultimate inn, where we shall meet Dickens and all his characters: and when we drink again it shall be from the great flagons in the tavern at the end of the world.

A la Chesterton’s analysis of Dickens, we get the sense Cortez is showing us that these joyous memories point to the joy of heaven, our ultimate and eternal home, and that, by clinging to them, we are also getting a small taste of the transcendent.

In “Before Cloudbursts,” Cortez shows us the striking beauty of creation—again, that the beauty of things reflects God, who is Beauty Itself. The language here is shot with energy. The speaker wonders how, after “lift[ing]/our flattened daisy/faces to dark/coiled thunder,” did they “know to trust/pink platters/of tongue/with fat drops/of cold parcels/tasting of/everywhere delicious.” The implication here is that there is an innate drive toward the Good. It is a moment, too, that readers have likely shared, and it is perfectly depicted and constructed here.

In addition to her work as a writer and poet, Cortez has also led the efforts to restore a proper Catholic poetics. Her organization, Catholic Literary Arts, according to its mission statement, “encourages ongoing growth in literary, artistic, and spiritual development of artists and writers so that the Cultural Patrimony and rich treasures of the Catholic Church may be more perfectly explored and used to draw all peoples to God.” We can see then that, for her, poetry is a spiritual pursuit. Her work, as she said in an interview with Voegelin View, has “a strong and hopeful current of grace through it.” But she also believes, a la St. John Henry Newman, that “you cannot have a sinless Literature of sinful man.”

Cortez, truly, is a poet who invites us to see reality in total and to recognize the goodness of things. And she is a poet who deserves a wider audience. A lot of nonsense gets published and held up as good poetry. Cortez’s work serves as a necessary corrective—to that and to those who say there are no good Catholic poets and writers working today. Cortez reminds us of what good poetry, and good Catholic poetry, is, and reading it shows us that this world is not all there is.