Red Letter Poem #276

 The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind, all poetry and art serves as a reminder that every day we wake together beneath the sun is a red-letter day.



––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tomorrow, in Arlington. . .

 

The seventh annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

 

Saturday, November 8^th 2025

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-2:30pm, (music beginning at 12:45pm)

with a reception to follow

 

Free, and all are welcome!

 

Featured poets:

 

Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate

Regie Gibson

 

Ukrainian-American poet

Dzvinia Orlowsky &

 

Red Letter founder

Steven Ratiner

reading from his own work

and a new chapbook by Ted Kooser

benefiting the Red Letter Project

 

with a musical performance by bassist

Rick McLaughlin

 

More details in attached flyer.

A reception will follow the reading.

If you’re nearby, we’d love to see you there

 

Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #276

 

 

 

 

From the Yangtze to the Mississippi Delta



The acrosswater call of a stringborn song––

inspired by an untitled song by pipa-player WuMan



Li Bai,



As you wandered in exile, did you hear the acrosswater call of the pipa

being played by the slender fingers of a young girl on the other side of the Yangtze?



Was each of her precisely plucked strings a singing mountain?

Was each of her fingerslide and trill the sound of wind spilling down from the hills?

Did you to stop wandering for just a moment to live inside the shimmer of those 4 strings?—

Perhaps pour yourself cup after cup of rice wine until you were nightfall drunk?



I imagine you, Li Bai, a poet smiling, twirling, laughdancing among the falling

blossoms of dove trees— your shameless shadow offering sips to the sober moon.



Decades later, another exiled poet, Bai Juyi, would meet that same girl,

now a woman on that same river—she, too, also an exile from a former life.

Her fingers are now sorrowwise on the pipa’s strings as it sits like a tear in her lap.

Bai Juyi, offers wine, she plays the pipa and in her music the two of you connect across time—



Her music is the splatter of rain…it is the clatter of jumbled notes

Each falling like a pearl on a platter of jade.



Perhaps upon hearing her the both of you imagine the many women you’ve loved.

Perhaps each of you imagines himself to be an emperor forgetting a kingdom

longing to get lost in a woman’s hair—a woman’s hair as black as the insides

of wineshut eyelids.



I wonder if, in that moment, the both of you knew how a millennia from your now

the faint camphorsmoke of that song would be carried to a faraway land and river?

How it would conjure scenes like those you’ve seen along the Yangtze—

scenes of ancient grandfathers sweating and toiling beneath straw hats

their bent backs aching and arching over crops—their sundarkened arms

now made muscularfire from years of planting and chopping and clearing

mile after mile of sugarcane and cotton…



and that, like the two of you, when night finds them, they too will sit down

next to a moving body of slowwater––offer libations beneath that same moon

as in the distance, a stringborn song quivers in the flowercensored dark



—quivers like a woman’s black hair.



––Regie Gibson





There’s no way of explaining it: how can a state like Massachusetts, with perhaps the most storied literary tradition in the country, become one of the very last to establish the official position of Poet Laureate to serve our Commonwealth? If I were to list all of the acclaimed poets who’ve lived and worked here over the centuries, the small space allotted for my commentary would contain nothing else: from Anne Bradstreet and Phyllis Wheatley, through Emerson, Dickinson, Longfellow, Frost, Cummings, Bishop, Lowell, Plath––and enough contemporary luminaries to populate the grandest of anthologies. But fortunately, Governor Maura Healey recently corrected that oversight––and I could not imagine a more perfect selection with whom to inaugurate that position than Regie Gibson: impassioned poet, dynamic performer, musician, actor, educator, community activist.



Let me underscore that last item, a central concern within this poet’s life: community. All poets and artists are engaged in a complex experiment where the I pronoun is pivotal. Alone at the desk or in their studio, each is engaged in that most individual and inward of enterprises: mining the emotional and imaginative ore within the recesses of consciousness. But unlike some, Regie has demonstrated the deepest of commitments to We, that foundational understanding that we are inextricably woven in community, and that artists’ work ought to celebrate and invigorate those bonds. Regie is the author of Storms Beneath the Skin, and the creator of the Shakespeare Time-Traveling Speakeasy —a theatrical/musical/literary performance focusing on the enduring influence of William Shakespeare. He’s lectured and performed widely in the US, Cuba, and Europe. Among a long list of honors, Regie has received the Walker Scholarship from the Providence Fine Arts Work Center; multiple Mass Cultural Council Awards for poetry; the YMCA Writer’s Fellowship; the Brother Thomas Fellowship from the Boston Foundation and two Live Arts Boston (LAB) grants for the production of his first musical, The Juke: A Blues Bacchae. He has served as a consultant for the National Endowment for the Arts’ “How Art Works” initiative and the “Mere Distinction of Colour”—a permanent exhibit examining the legacy of slavery and the U.S. Constitution at President James Madison’s home in Montpelier, Virginia. He teaches at Clark University in Worcester and is an Assistant Professor at Berklee College of Music.



Today’s offering is the embodiment of that impulse toward artistic commonality. Some time back, Regie had the chance to work with renowned Chinese instrumentalist WuMan––she plays the pipa, an ancient lute-like stringed instrument, with the Silk Road ensemble. She later sent him a recording of a solo piece inspired by Regie’s poetry. Her enthusiasm fired up his own, and the poet composed the piece featured above. Thank goodness poetry is not hemmed in by political borders, or even the laws of time and space. Not only did Regie’s poem bridge the distance between their homes and their separate cultural backgrounds, but it opened a path back to 8th century China where its most famous poet, Li Bai (formerly known in the West as Li Po), could remind them both of the primal poetry and art-making impulse that unites them across millennia. I was even fortunate enough to see a video Regie created where poet and musician, in their separate studios, could at least seem to be performing this duet side by side. WuMan’s sometimes frenetic strums on the pipa are wonderfully echoed by Regie’s invented word-compounds and long, spirited lines. Rereading the poem, the mind can’t help but stop and linger on such marvelous phrases: the “acrosswater call” of the music; the musician’s fingers “sorrowwise on the pipa’s strings”; and, in a metaphor I think every poet will relate to, “the faint camphorsmoke of that song” rising into the sky of an attentive mind. This epistolary poem is not only directed to his literary forebears, its aim is to conjure the sort of muse that could have as easily visited Homer’s cottage as Li Bai’s––been as welcomed in WuMan’s living room as Regie’s, yours, and mine, accompanied perhaps by the scent of rice wine warming. In such consciousness, all the rivers by which civilization was created flow from one into another. At a time when the political discourse across the planet seems more determined to divide people than discover their shared purpose, the gift from artists like Regie is considerable and utterly necessary.

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/

Poet Jim Dunn goes 'behind the state capitol' with the ghost of John Wieners.

Recently I went on a tour of the Beacon Hill environs that the late poet John Wieners inhabited for many years. Jim Dunn, a confidante of Wieners in his last years hosted the tour, and was full of anecdotes about the poet and his life and times. The walk was partly in support of a reissued collection of Wiener's, " Behind the State Capitol: Or Cincinnati Pike." Jim generously agreed to this interview.



The original book was published in 1975 by the Good Gay Poets. Can you tell us about this collaborative and why was it decided to reissue this book in 2025?


The Good Gay Poets were an influential publishing group that was an offshoot of the gay liberation Fag Rag collective. John Wieners was involved primarily through his friendship with Charley Shively. Charley, Michael Bronski, John Mitzel and Larry Martin formed the radical gay anarchist collective in the early 70s and began publishing the Boston gay newspaper, Fag Rag, which ran until the early 1980's. Charley was a founding member the Good Gay Poets Collective publishing several seminal books of poetry by queer poets outside the mainstream poetry establishment. They published Freddie Greenfield's Were You Always a Criminal? ruth weiss' Desert Journals,  and Aaron Shurin's  broadside Exorcism of the straight/man/demon, Charley was the author of one book of poetry as well as the Collected Works of Lysander Spooner (1971), A History of the Conception of Death in America, 1650-1860, his doctoral dissertation (1988), Calamus Lovers: Walt Whitman's Working Class Camerados (1987) and Drum Beats: Walt Whitman's Civil War Boy Lovers (1989).


Charley also published Behind the State Capitol putting the book together with Wieners and John Mitzel. The three of them worked together on the collages and layout of the text. Originally, 1,500 soft covers and 100 hardcovers were printed. However, many of those copies were lost in a fire deliberately started by off-duty police and firemen in 1982, making the book very scarce. As John’s reputation has grown, his work was discovered by a new generation of younger poets. The decision to reissue now was primarily Raymond Foye’s idea working with the publisher, The Song Cave and it is long overdue. Copies of the original book are rare and go for hundreds of dollars. Until now, readers could only read it in PDF or excerpted in the Black Sparrow Collected Poems that Raymond edited.


This version will be an exact reproduction of the original text and collages, which was important to preserve as they were originally published, because it is such a unique book, visually and textually. (The re-issue will be available on November 4th) Also, coincidentally, a book of Charley’s poems has just been published by Bootstrap and there is another Wieners book of John’s essays and interviews to be published by Lithic Press this year.


They were years ahead of their time. The world has caught up. Charley, John and their work are so important in the air of these dark and tricky times. The only lingering regret I have is that I wish they were both here to see the fruits of their literary labors.



Wieners was a veritable 'walker in the city." You formed a walking tour of his haunts. Tell us about this.


The Tour was suggested and sponsored by the Woodberry Poetry Room. I have Christina Davis and Mary Graham to thank for putting the whole thing together. It was a companion event to the reading the prior Tuesday at Havard’s Houghton Library with poets Eileen Myles and Cedar Sigo celebrating the re-issue of Behind the State Capitol. John’s world the last years of his life was the Bohemian Northside of Beacon Hill, “Beatnik Hill” as you call it.


I was lucky enough to spend time with John the last 10 years of his life walking those streets with him. And it was always reassuring to be driving around Boston and have a random John Wieners sighting in Beacon Hill, in Government Center, by the Boston Public Library – I would see him walking the streets, even though we met regularly, and it was good to know that he was still part of the fabric of the city back then. Now, it seems his absence is part of the story of neighborhoods that has been lost with gentrification over the years, in Beacon Hill, the destruction of the West End and the ghosts of Scollay Square. I wrote an essay in Jacket Magazine about John and his walking world, The Old Brick City by the Atlantic.


Wieners used newspaper clippings, Hollywood fan magazines, even a disfigured image of gay porn. Did he ever talk to you about his art—collages, etc... that he used, in his books?


John would cut and paste various images and articles inside copies of his own books, especially in Behind the State Capitol. Images and collages were as important in that book as the text. The books in his library would become scrapbooks of decoupage, collages composed of everything around him. Although they would appear, at first glance, to be random assemblages of images cut from magazines, junk mail and articles, one would gradually see a pattern of transposing and pasting his dreams over the reality of his printed work.


John actively was engaged in his own work on a very visceral and physical level. Beyond stuffing his texts with the various ephemera of his everyday existence—and pasting pictures throughout, which frequently contained hidden personal meaning. John’s active relationship with his books was ongoing and speaks to the fact that he was constantly reworking, collaging, covering and uncovering poems and pages in his books to a point where some copies are damaged beyond repair. But in John’s world the books were not damaged, they were improved—with new edits, torn images of movie stars, poetry-reading flyers, and whatever else held secret importance to him at the time.



The late Jack Powers told me that Beacon Hill—home to the poet—was called "Beatnik Hill" back in the day. I would think Wieners would have been comfortable here—although he didn't consider himself a Beat poet, per say. 


I think John was very comfortable in Beacon Hill living in the same apartment for almost thirty years from the early 70s until his death in 2002. I think his apartment specifically was very dear to him. Although it was sparse and a bit eccentric, it was home to him. I always felt privileged when I visited his apartment like I was entering another world—John’s world. I really treasure those memories of the two of us just sitting silently in the back room of his apartment together alone in our own thoughts.


John’s comfort in Beacon Hill and his well-being was provided by a small group of friends and relatives—Charley Shively, me, Raymond Foye, and his cousin Arlene Phinney and her son, Walter. Another person who truly was a lifeline to John in his later years was Jack Powers. Jack made sure John had cigarettes and would always whip up a warm meal for John, even when Jack was down on his luck. John’s comfort day to day in Beacon Hill was in large part, thanks to Jack. Jack set up many readings for John including two legendary readings at the Old West Church –one with an amazing cast of musicians and poets, and another with John Sinclair with Wayne Kramer playing crazy guitar accompaniment before a gig at TT the Bear’s. Jack always made sure John was paid even if it meant taking money out of his own pocket. Jack was essential. I got to know John well through his connection to Jack. They were more than neighbors—they were poet brothers.


Wieners was once asked directly what it was specifically that differentiated him from the other Beat writers. He took a long puff of his cigarette, and responded, “They got famous. I did not.” – a response so obvious, simple and direct, it elicited uneasy laughter from those present.




Why do you think Wieners is an important poet? When he was alive was he accepted by the academy—the Boston literati?


Wieners’ work is authentic in nature and pure in spirit. His unique voice had the sonorous quality of Old Towne Boston. Through the depths of drug abuse, bouts of mental illness, and emotional turmoil, he dedicated his life to the practice of poetry, and the artistic pursuit of heavenly visions amidst the ruins of daily life. There was a certain light from within him that was truly connected to a divine inspiration. He had a rare genius in his ability to perceive magic in the mundane and capture it in the immediate language of his work.


Although he published only a handful of books and three issues of his magazine, Measure, in his lifetime, his influence upon his contemporary poets and subsequent generations of writers is immeasurable. Poets who admire his work take him immediately to heart, and regard him with absolute devotion. His work has gained a cult status among generations of Boston poets like Joe Torra, Dan Bouchard, Sean Cole and Jim Berhle but especially amongst queer poets including Eileen Myles, Cedar Sigo, Kevin Killian, Jeremy Reed, Dennis Cooper, Michael Rumaker, Julian Brolaski, CA Conrad, Nat Raha, and many others. A poet’s poet, his various friendships and connections placed him in multiple influential poetic movements, but his poetry is singular and unique, especially in Behind the State Capitol.


Allen Ginsberg saw immediately the purity of Wieners’ unique talent, “John Wieners glory is solitary as a poet – a man reduced to loneness in poetry, without worldly distractions - and a man become one with his poetry.” I think Robert Creeley in his introduction to Cultural Affairs in Boston said it best, “The poetry of John Wieners has an exceptional human beauty as if there is any other…(He) makes manifest the complex place from which all (his) work finally has come, and to which it, and he also, insistently returns: ‘my city, Boston…’He said once to an interviewer, “I am a Boston poet,” and there is no one for whom that city, or any other, has proven so determining and generative an experience….Against the casual waste of our lives, his has proved a cost and commitment so remarkable. He has given everything to our common world.”


I think there is such fervent appreciation for John’s poetry lately because he was so criminally under-appreciated as a poet in his lifetime. He was virtually ignored by critics and Academic poets in his lifetime. I wanted to write my thesis at the Harvard Extension School on his work, and I was initially rejected because of the lack of criticism published at the time. It took several years but I finally was able to write my thesis on John. Since then, young scholars such as Robert Dewhurst and Seth Stewart have worked tirelessly to champion his work. Since his death, multiple editions of his letters, journals and other writings have been published, with more to be published in the near future. Consequently, his reputation and popularity among a wide array of poets and critics have increased considerably. Maybe, in another 50 years, he will be seen as one of the true lyric poets of the late 20th century whose work was years ahead of its time.








The reissued edition of Behind the State Capitol is available from The Song Cave now and can be found here-


https://the-song-cave.com/products/behind-the-state-capitol-or-cincinnati-pike-by-john-wieners


Charley Shively book of poems I Have a Poem for You, was recently published by Bootstrap Press available now-


https://terrier-celery-swmk.squarespace.com/store/p/i-have-a-poem-for-you-by-charles-shively





Jim Dunn’s latest book of poems Angry Bull’s Cadence was recently published by The Bodily Press and can be found here---


https://sb0111-qr.myshopify.com/products/jim-dunn-angry-bulls-cadence

Red Letter Poem #275

 

The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind



The seventh annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

Saturday, November 8th 2025

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-2:30pm, (music beginning at 12:45pm)

with a reception to follow

Free, and all are welcome!

Featured poets:

Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate

Regie Gibson

Ukrainian-American poet

Dzvinia Orlowsky &

Red Letter founder

Steven Ratiner

reading from his own work

and a new chapbook by Ted Kooser

benefiting the Red Letter Project

with a musical performance by bassist

Rick McLaughlin

More details in attached flyer.

A reception will follow the reading.

If you’re nearby, we’d love to see you there




Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan

 

Red Letter Poem #275

 

умШум

(Ukrainian word for the sound of wind in trees)

Russified, having lost its original meaning,

this rustling wooded breath was leveled

to noise—a loud whistling

through broken windows, an invisible

heavy scuttling among ruins.

It favored crackling trees

against a blanched sky, unmoored

echoes claiming rivers

before they dried— bird calls

from censored dictionaries,

ruffled feathers—

No one heard its leaving.

Only a few held on to the word’s original meaning,

taking it with them into the next life

the way a child might drag a torn blanket.

Could I have saved its fragile

word stem, pressed it between

the pages of my childhood diary,

protected it from becoming sirens, air traffic,

construction sites, fireworks—

crowds breaking apart

their names lost in the smoke.

Шум. A sound I used to know.

Today, walking in woods, I listened for wind

while mercy falls apart into a deck of cards—

the new go-to phrase for negotiating peace.

This noise saves no one.

We fall silent, then eerie quiet,

before the next sounds begin.

Even a dead crow on the road

might raise one wing to the wind

to feel itself once more part of a forest

that takes it in.

––Dzvinia Orlowsky

When, in the third century BCE, the leader of the Qin people finally conquered the last remaining neighboring kingdom––thus uniting for the first time what would become known as China––he set about solidifying power in his vast lands. Among his strategies, two stood out: he ordered (at tremendous cost) the construction of one unified defensive structure––expanding on the many piecemeal sections that already existed––to curtail the offensive advantage of the Mongol invaders from the north. (History does not record whether his armies rallied before the palace, chanting: ‘Build the Great Wall!’) But a second approach was equally important: from then on, by law, there would be only a single style of written language allowed, supplanting all those that had developed in the fifty-plus indigenous peoples across this giant land mass. Creating a new name for his exalted position––the Qin Shi Huangdi, Emperor of the Qin––he believed he had established an empire that would last a thousand years. This strategy of linguistic hegemony has been repeated, in various incarnations, by most conquering powers over the centuries as a potent tool for asserting political and cultural dominance. You can think of the burning of Mayan-language books by the Spanish, or the suppression of Gaelic in Ireland by the British. How many Native Peoples here in our own country had their children forced to adopt a new tongue and new gods? The stunning Ukrainian-American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky began to pay special attention to the effects Russification had on the language she grew up speaking. Pronunciations shifted, meanings altered or were erased––even those names for everyday experiences––all supplanted by Russian terminology. It was part of an effort to persuade the citizenry to accept the false narrative that an independent Ukrainian country and culture never existed. This is one battle where poets and writers need to marshal their lexical troops and lead the counteroffensive.

In a series of poems (which I’m hoping will grow into a whole section of some future book), Dzvinia focuses on a single Russified word and tries to conjure, not only something of its Ukrainian past, but the intimate way those syllables once lived inside her mouth and imagination. Today’s Red Letter is the first of two I am delighted to offer readers. Entitled Шум (using the Cyrillic alphabet that became welded onto Ukrainian), the word should be pronounced ‘shum’ (with that long u-sound puckering the lips). Originally signifying the sound of rising wind through leaves, it has come to mean––in both Ukraine and Russia––simply ‘noise.’ As Dzvinia explained to me: “As a first generation Ukrainian-American, I grew up in Ohio surrounded by meadows and tall, thin trees. The shum of a pre-storm wind was a deeply sensory experience. I cannot begin to think of it as ‘noise’”––though, sad to say, our urban life has certainly become more of a place for jarring sounds, and only rarely for the calming. But when the poet writes of “a loud whistling// through broken windows, an invisible/ heavy scuttling among ruins,” it is impossible not to imagine the current situation in her family’s homeland where some noises presage drone strikes and cries from beneath rubbled apartments. It seems each day brings a fresh barrage of bad news––not just for Ukraine but our whole beleaguered planet. So perhaps it is even more imperative that, in the face of the onslaught, we cling to the most precious and personal of our dreams––and, of course, the deep-rooted utterance in which we first learned to express them. Poets attempt to bring that experience back to us––those dreams, that imaginative and linguistic autonomy.

As a poet and translator, Dzvinia’s authored of seven books, including A Handful of Bees from Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series; and Bad Harvest, a Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read.” Her newest collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is focused on the tragic conflict in Ukraine. Dzvinia’s been awarded the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (selected by Robert Pinsky) from the New England Poetry Club. Her Ukrainian co-translations with Ali Kinsella of Natalka Bilotserkivets's and Halyna Kruk's poetry, have been short-listed for such prestigious honors as the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation. Her service to poetry more broadly extends to her work as a co-founder of Four Way Books, one of our mainstay literary presses. I’ll add one more very small accolade to her list: beginning with the first time I read today’s poem in a batch Dzvinia sent me, I now hear the drawn-out syllable shoooom whenever––as it is now–– the wind is rising outside, stripping some of the last pale leaves from my dogwood, making my spine shiver. There is a kind of knowledge which poets transmit that alters lives––the very reason tyrants take pains to suppress the arts. So I’ll add one last thought to this Letter: the Qin Shi Huangdi’s ‘kingdom of a thousand years’ ended up destroyed after a mere fifteen. It’s a fact that the Red Emperor in Moscow and the Orange wannabe-Emperor in Washington might do well to keep in mind.

The Red Letters

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter

@StevenRatiner


All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/