Poet Wendy Drexler harvests what remains

Recently, I caught up with my fellow New England Poetry Advisory Board Member Wendy Drexler to talk about her new collection of poetry  "Harvest What Remains" 

 From her publisher:

In Harvest of What Remains, Wendy Drexler navigates her intense journey as primary caregiver for her husband as Alzheimer's wraps its great arms around them, irrevocably altering their relationship in ways that call upon depths of grief and survival strategies of dissimulation as well as the imperative to sow seeds of love and compassion.

No doubt, Alzheimer's is a devastating disease. But even in life's most dire circumstances, we can find beauty, maybe ugly beauty...in the situation. Your thoughts?



Yes, Alzheimer's is indeed devastating and ugly, but there are many beautiful moments with a loved one. Perhaps the most beautiful gift has been my growing capacity for tenderness and compassion. For example, when we were getting haircuts together and I was helping my husband put on his coat, a woman in the salon came over and asked if she could "step into the middle of this love." When you are so important to someone, when you are "his person," you play a very sacred role in their life, and while it's a very demanding role, there are definitely blessings to be found that are deep and beautiful.


This may be a strange question. Could there be a sense of discovery in the disease. We all eventually go back to our childlike state. The question is—since your husband was slowly losing his memory, and you reintroduced him to things—was their a sense of wonderment for him?


Yes, definitely. Alzheimer's silver lining has been (at least for me, as I can't speak for my husband), that as his memory fades, rendering the past a jumble, and the future disappears in vagueness, he lives increasingly in the aspirational present, making connections with nearly everyone he sees, stopping to chat with strangers, complimenting someone on her bright sweater, enriching their lives and well as mine. Time is no longer a rush to accomplish anything. It's a very Buddhist insight: "Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. Present moment. Wonderful moment."


You capture a moment in the poem, "In the Kitchen," watching your husband's confusion as he tries to navigate around it. I imagine each day is a string of banal events that lead up to oblivion. It sort of like watching a dour Beckett play, each day wondering what the "Endgame" will be.


Actually, cognitive decline is so incremental and the day's challenges are so great that it takes your full attention and energy to be a caregiver. I rarely think of the end game. Especially in the last year or two before my husband went into memory care, my days were consumed in a state of nearly constant vigilance to keep him clothed, fed, safe, and as happy as possible. And I had, and greatly needed, a lot of help from a wonderful caregiver. And there are different stages of the disease, and in his case, an earlier stage of anger and frustration at feeling controlled, which was extremely difficult. No one likes to lose autonomy and yet one neurological aspect of the disease, stemming from changes in the brain, is that someone with Alzheimer's is not aware of their own decline. This is called anosognosia. I found that it was a constant challenge learning to respond at each stage of the disease, to learn not to argue, to accept that I could not control or stop the progression, to develop greater patience, along with skills such as the telling "fiblets," and to feel satisfaction when I handled an exchange successfully. So life has definitely not been banal. In the acknowledgments in my new book, I write, "While I fervently wish you had never developed Alzheimer's, the other side of having to endure it has been my ever-deepening compassion--in that, you have been my teacher."


In your poem "At Hansen Farm" you freely engage your senses with nature, and the sweet pleasures of ice cream. Has your experience with your husband helped you to seize the moment or savor the moment more than you previously have?


I think I've been inclined toward trying to savor the moment for some time, and of course, writing poetry is a kind of paying attention. Trying to savor moments with my husband is a practice in lowering my expectations, for example, taking a deep breath when he hasn't taken a shower, that he's only half shaved, because we are on our way to a family gathering and he's just said, "It's so wonderful to see you!" I have to constantly remind myself of his limitations, of my tendency to become impatient and to have too many expectations, and to try to appreciate his pleasure at seeing me and our being together.


Has writing this collection been cathartic for you?


Definitely. The poems in this collection have been written nearly simultaneously to the events as they've taken place, in the heat of the moment. Writing these poems has enabled me to reflect on my experiences and process my emotions; to legitimize my anger, grief, and fear; and to find greater compassion for myself and for my husband. I have a number of poems I call "Reconstructed Sapphic Fragments," in which I've taken fragments of poems by Sappho, translated by Ann Carson, and written around the fragments. Then I erase the first poem to create a second poem, an erasure of the fragment poem. Both the reconstructed fragments and erasures have surprised me in that I seem to be offering myself advice and consolation. For example, in "Reconstructed Sapphic Fragment 83," I write, "Carry me, oh tide, let me try to give thanks." That's the advice and consolation part. And in the ersasure of this poem, the distillation is "night again turns time to tanks," a surprising image I would never have found if not through erasure.


I've also really enjoyed my creative collaboration with Cambridge visual artist Connie Saems, whose drawings and cover art grace the book. To see my words transformed into letter drawings is inspiring and takes the poems to another level of richness and meaning.


Is poetry a sort of caregiver for you?


Definitely, that's a beautiful insight!


Why should we read this book?


To quote Rosalynn Carter, "There are only four kinds of people in the world--those who have been caregivers, those who are currently caregivers, those who will become caregivers, and those who will need caregivers." Caregiving touches everyone's life. I hope this book will be a source of solace and greater understanding for those who've already shared this journey and will provide insight to those who have not yet experienced the challenges and rewards of caring for a loved one.

 How to Make Even a Little of It Slow Down

At the hot pot restaurant, we dip kabocha squash, sweet as candy,  

into miso broth. Lotus root dense as meat. I scald my tongue, 

trying to eat too quickly. That impatience again. These days, 

I can’t listen to any more sad stories. Thank goodness 

on the Nature show the endangered pangolin on the island 

of Taiwan made it into the protected forest and found a mate 

before the end of the breeding season. That the adorable 

African bush baby, abandoned by his pregnant mother, 

escaped the snake and the hostile bush babies and was able 

to travel six miles in five days to the outskirts of Praetoria 

where a friendly pack of bush babies welcomed him, 

and suburbanites had laid out bananas on platforms linked 

by ropes strung between trees. The bush babies mashed 

bananas all over their happy faces and gamboled among 

the ropes and trees. At the restaurant, I grab the clam 

you are about to eat raw and toss it into the hot broth. I have to 

watch out for you all the time now. You couldn’t hear 

my conversation with D and G across the table. So sweet 

how you start talking to our waitress instead, teaching her 

muchas gracias and buenos dias, asking her for a placemat 

to write down sentences so she can talk with Latino kitchen staff 

and customers. How to say La comida está muy magnifico! 

Quieres un poco de cerveza? She tells us she’s from Laos 

and she squats right next to you beside our booth. 

She smiles a lot. Let’s say I’ve never seen a waitress stop to talk 

to a customer for so long. Let’s say we need more hope, more 

bush babies who find new families and new homes. 

More protected forests. More treetops and more mashing 

our happy faces with kabocha squash. Let’s slow it down 

over a meal. Let’s savor the lotus root and the bok choy 

and the wrinkled cabbage leaves 

we’ll learn to let cool long enough 

we won’t burn our tongues.

—first published on Autumn Sky Poetry Daily

  *************Wendy Drexler is a recipient of a 2022 artist fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her fourth collection, Harvest of What Remains received honorable mention for the Paul Nemser Prize and will be published in February 2026 by Lily Poetry Review Books. Her poems have appeared in Barrow Street, J Journal, Mid-American Review, Nimrod, Pangyrus, Prairie Schooner, The Sun, and The Threepenny Review, among others. She was awarded the 2025 E.E. Cummings prize from the New England Poetry Club. A recipient of the Juror's Prize for Art on the Trails, Southborough, MA, in 2021, Wendy served as poet in residence at New Mission High School in Hyde Park, MA, from 2018-2023, as programming co-chair for the New England Poetry Club from 2016–2024. She currently serves on the Club’s advisory board. Her website is wendydrexlerpoetry.com.

Red Letter Poem #287

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #287

 

 

 

 

In the Kitchen

I know what you’re looking for, standing there,

holding the orange juice carton in your hand.



I see ^ watch you open the cabinet with our

coffee mugs, then turn, pondering, in the center



of the kitchen. I’ve struck out see and inserted

watch—I’m on watch here, a watchwoman



pacing the figurative ramparts, watching

and wanting to insert a little caret of ease



into the sinkhole of your hesitation.

The glasses are over there, in the cabinet



to the right of the sink, I say, shrinking my voice

to the size of a seed so my tone will seem



anecdotal, incidental, nondirective, inflected

with an orchard of kindness. This time,



my words go down smoothly, you thank me,

walk to the right cabinet, take out a glass.



You pour your juice, and I stand there,

watching you do what you still can.

 ----Wendy Drexler 

Modulation. The way––through boundless revisions––a poet calibrates a poem’s diction, tone of voice, rhythmic force, word choice and, its corollary, the potency of what remains unsaid. Typically, readers are drawn to the unique styles with which poets speak onto the page; but after several readings, we may realize how powerfully we are moved by what was left unarticulated. Our minds, then, are drawn into that void to fully substantiate the unscrolling vision, becoming a necessary element in the completion of the poem. And in this process, we make the poem ours, a vehicle for our own intimate discoveries. The subject matter of Wendy Drexler’s new poem is heart-shaking––there’s little doubt in that. But its most dramatic effects come from the ways she’s used these subtle inflections to coax us to a place many of us have not yet had to confront. Quietly, our illusion of control is being laid bare. The unassailable experience of reality suddenly trembles. Dementia involves the gradual loss of someone we love, well before the body itself is failing, facing departure. From the first line of this poem––“I know what you’re looking for,”––we are standing in a place where certainty and doubt are in contention. Wendy’s husband, Herb, was a brilliant individual with advanced degrees from both MIT and Harvard. He spent his work-life as an adoption lawyer and helped found what’s now called the Academy of Adoption & Assisted Reproduction Attorneys. The insidiousness of Alzheimer’s lies in its slow erosion of an intricate mind created over many decades. In this poem, we sense how her husband’s illness is gradually remaking the poet’s experience as well, from a loving wife into Herb’s vigilant caretaker. How painful, seeing him standing in his own kitchen with the carton of juice in one hand and the empty one searching––not simply for a glass, or the word that maps its meaning––but for the simple calm that once signified home.



We are a little startled to read: “I see ^ watch you open the cabinet”––and suddenly we have slipped from the actual kitchen to the literary territory where we use inky syllables to comprehend our complex situation. “I’ve struck out see and inserted/ watch—I’m on watch here, a watchwoman// pacing the figurative ramparts…”. And now we find our sympathies shifting, enlarging: from the husband’s confusion to that of the poet/narrator who––in a mood that combines necessity and desperation––has already begun carrying the moment over into verse, into a realm where she still has some measure of control (ah, those modest little couplets!) And how she wishes she could do more ––“to insert a little caret of ease/ into the sinkhole of your hesitation”–– but there is only so much that is possible. She can, of course, answer her husband’s unspoken question (‘what is it I’m looking for?’)––but more importantly, she can modulate her manner, the style of her speaking (“shrinking my voice/ to the size of a seed”) to try to keep this proud man from feeling still further diminished by what has taken possession of his life. And we can feel how that vast unsaid impacts the scene, deepens our understanding––“This time,// my words go down smoothly…”. This time. And we are forced to imagine what those other times might be like, torn by rage and fear, both husband and wife clinging to the debris of a remembered life that’s been stoved in by the storm.



Wendy, a poet and educator, is about to publish her fourth collection, Harvest of What Remains (Lily Poetry Review Books) which explores the situation of Alzheimer’s and its effect on the whole circle of relationship. In 2022, she was honored with an artist’s fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council. Her poems have appeared in dozens of fine print journals including The Threepenny Review, Salamander, and Prairie Schooner––and over the airwaves on sites like Verse Daily and WBUR radio’s ‘Cognoscenti.’ I return to her work often, valuing the mixture of creative rigor and emotional intelligence, a hallmark of the best of poetry. In this new book, we share her experience of fighting a calamitous battle where we know, from the outset, that the stakes are dire and the outcome fated. Still, this is precisely what Frost intended when he spoke of poetry as “a momentary stay against confusion.” For a little while, we can set our minds to the task of ordering, clarifying, unveiling our inner circumstance––raising a verbal roof beneath which we can seek shelter. It is a fortifying, even enlightening practice. And then we can return to our marvelous, heartbreaking, unruly outer lives, trying hard to savor what’s been given, what’s being lost.

 

 

 

 

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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

 

A Handpicked Poem article by Michael Todd Steffen

A Handpicked Poem


article by Michael Todd Steffen



From Plume, November 2024, issue 159 (note the author’s finish date for the poem, September 2024)




F O R T H E D E A D U N I O N


by Christopher Bakken

a savage servility slides by on grease



After summer rain, the old-growth forest


behind Greendale Cemetery fills


with eerie promise—boletes, milk-caps,


and terraces of pink-white oysters,





while the veterans of remembered wars


doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss


and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.


Even this far west, five hundred miles





from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution


have graves to tend, as do the offspring


of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.


Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.





Paying no heed to local history,


remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush


the layered shale embankments, cut ravines


so steep old gravestones sometimes slide





from their tidy, metered plots to murmur


obituary greetings from below.


I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt


while out foraging, sounding out the names.








If the rains are right, by mid-July


the first chanterelles tunnel up through leaves,


timid as small flames for a day, before


rising bold as Corinthian columns





into the mist—fluted, comically orange,


and not reeking of funeral soil


but scented improbably apricot


—hints of death’s most subtle literacy.








~








Atop the city’s other distinguished hill


the college buildings shrug, clutch their ivy.


The old observatory, named for Captain Newton,


who fought with the Union of Corinth,





is really just another church—its design


cruciform, compassed north, domed with green copper,


its Doric narthex cheerful as a crypt.


The students only stroll downhill for booze,





wary of the red-capped, red-faced whites


who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks


and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,


the same men who join militias in the woods





across French Creek, where young George Washington


once paddled his canoe. On Braveheart Radio


the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo,


their sniggers ringing in the city’s ears.





Some years back, I read a student essay


that not once, but twice referred to Lowell’s


“For the Dead Union” by mistake, a bit


too apt, only months after Charlottesville.











My children practice active-shooter drills


at school, though I fear almost as much in-


active shooters, my well-armed small-town


neighbors, who see mostly through the dark glass





of their rage. Tonight, carting groceries to my car,


I had to dodge a pickup flying an upside


down American flag. On bumper rust:


BELIEVE IN GOD NOT GOV SCIENCE.








~








Our city boomed in the cross-hairs


of an infant nation—a half-way stop


on the New York to Chicago rail,


and a stop, too, for those running north





underground: at his busy safe-house


near the corner of Liberty and Arch,


the freedman Richard Henderson


sheltered hundreds, working the secret line





a local firebrand had established


out of his tannery in New Richmond


—young John Brown, who buried his first wife


and two children on a hill behind his barn.





Downtown, at Diamond Park, the cast-iron fish


of the faux-Bernini fountain gasp,


since their water was turned off years ago.


The new, most savage servility here





bends low to the con, believing nothing


but what’s been fetched from the extremes


of explanation: the virus a hoax,


and micro-chips, and deep state cabals,














with a million orange ballots hid somewhere


in a blue car with Arizona plates.


The local Klan are now just Oath Keepers,


dismissing any mention of a coup.





In my Night Owl hockey league, machinists,


plumbers, and professors hit the ice, work


off their beer. On the trophy, last season’s


champs christened their team The White Nationalists.








~








A thousand small-town Midwestern greens


are now deserted as dead factories,


guarded by bronze, musket-clutching soldiers


who can’t recall which fields, of which republic,





are engraved on the plaques at their feet,


nor how many Lenape or Shawnee


were scythed to speed the frantic engines


of America pastoral. In the woods





we return to reason and faith…


until faith bends reason towards disbelief


in the great frontier towns, whose fates are geared


to the greater green lights of commerce.





Like Talon, now gone for thirty years,


where generations had fed their fortunes


making zippers—patented here in 1914.


The city nearly died when the plant moved east.





I have tried to remain one of the roughs


all my life, but maybe we’ve had enough


of roughness now. As I marched across campus


at dusk, I scared an owl from its hollow














in a split oak by the observatory.


I thought of the telescope inside,


good for looking far away from here,


and the quiet power of such refraction,





those quick bends in the direction of light.


At the base of the owl’s rotting tree,


a clump of Jack-o’ lantern mushrooms


were casting spores, just beginning to glow.





September 19, 2024














The stateliness of Bakken’s poem is unmistakable. From the outset, foraging for mushrooms in a graveyard, the poet chimes in with a deep vein going back through the American Civil War and our father poet Walt Whitman to a long English tradition of the elegy. The home pulsing reference to Thomas Gray’s canonical “Elegy” surfaces with the poet’s allusion in the last stanza to “the owl’s rotting tree” and its natural woodsy echo of Bakken’s earlier huckster-like proffer of the classic symbol for Death and Athena with the Night Owl hockey league. There are in fact many 20th-century and early 21st-century poets who’ve struck Mediterranean epic poses at major poems in English (or American English, Irish English, or Trinidadian English for that matter), but none of them comes with more observance (and convincingness) about the language’s sensibility for brevity, commonness, local particulars and quiet oblique lineage than does this “Ode” with its deceptive yet alluring nod to Robert Lowell. Bakken strikes a masterly voice for our ear and its preference for soft smiles in the darkest hour, and the softly spoken—





death’s most subtle literacy (first section)








As a centerpiece poem to its culture, in the widest sense, in its day of brassy fanfare for outspoken political divisiveness, the poem keenly identifies the “extreme” elements (of either political division, of both parties) at the throats of American life since the controversial 2000 election denouement, and simmering long long before that. Deftly, Bakken has chosen modesty over profusion, keeping his poem to 112 lines, in Lowellesque un-rhyming stanzas, seven to a section, in unnumbered sections. (Around 100 lines were in Eliot’s thinking for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” from Poe’s ideal for a one-sitting read.) The gaudy rhododendrons mentioned in the seventh line of the poem may just be the poet’s poke at his ambitious wayward confreres.





There Bakken leaves shop talk, enhancing both just the playfulness of his comment, in passing, and also the poignancy of a brush—brevity the soul of wit—about the on-and-on grinding of grand gestures, not by any means confined to poetry, but to the paramount muses in all public arenas these days generally.





In the days before personal computers and word processors with autocorrect, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida discovered one of his seminal concepts, Différance (with an a), while correcting student papers and noticing what he liked to call a recurrent neographism. Similarly, Bakken cites a student paper’s error with the title of Lowell’s memorable poem as the meditation is situated significantly in Meadville, Pennsylvania, home of Allegheny University where the poet teaches; home also of the once widely providing Talon zipper factory (“now gone for thirty years”).





Bakken’s epigram is a direct quote of the two lines concluding the Lowell poem “For the Union Dead,” bearing the exact same title only with the inversion of “Union” and “Dead.” And, yes, for me, that’s a significant enough inversion to constitute an original title—even timely in itself for the mocking or echoing strain in today’s culture with its allowance for reproductive creativity and a nearly imperceptible fine line between assimilating and plagiarism, with promised award for merely systematic reproduction, as with AI or pop medley dance tunes.





Admiring the courage of Shaw and his men, the speaker in Lowell’s poem is driven to reflect that their spirit of heroic self-sacrifice is in short supply in a modern United States riven by segregation, commercialism, and insincerity. Old timey North and South in our times has re-shifted to the opposition of political parties, or, more exactly, to the extreme elements of each party, the radicals. In the poem the polarity is arranged in opposition most prominently in the second section of the poem. The liberals are scantily and passingly represented in the students of Allegheny College who “only stroll downhill (from the campus) for booze.” They appear in the poem to give the poet his title, but also show up here in the poem mostly as a way into to the caricature as looming victims of the radical right,





the red-capped, red-faced whites


who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks


and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,


the same men who join militias in the woods





across French Creek… On Braveheart Radio


the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo…











Vis-à-vis Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: the concept of lacrimae rerum, or lament of the human condition.





Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r


The moping owl does to the moon complain


Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,


Molest her ancient solitary reign.





Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,


Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,


Each in his narrow cell forever laid,


The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.








Compare to Bakken:





while the veterans of remembered wars


doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss


and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.


Even this far west, five hundred miles





from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution


have graves to tend, as do the offspring


of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.


Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.





Paying no heed to local history,


remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush


the layered shale embankments, cut ravines


so steep old gravestones sometimes slide





from their tidy, metered plots to murmur


obituary greetings from below.


I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt


while out foraging, sounding out the names.

Poet/ Bartender Christopher Reilley has made many 'pour' decisions

 

Recently, I caught up with Christopher Reilley about his new book of poetry " Pour Decisions" Reilley writes: "Whether you come for the poems, the drinks, or the stories, this is a celebration of bars as civic spaces and bartenders as witnesses to contemporary life." I think I will hoist one for this fine collection.


Did you work as bartender for any length? of time?

Over thirty years off and on as an adult, but I also grew up in a dive bar on Grand Street in Worcester. I’ve worked in just about every bartending experience imaginable, from corporate to backyard barbeques, hotel and restaurants of every size and description. I was also Back of the House working in kitchens. I’ve supplemented my income in the Hospitality industry pretty much all of my life.


I always found bars as a great source of material to write about. They can be sort of dark cathedrals that house the 3AM of the soul. Your take?


Humans are social creatures, we gather and collect, share mutual pastimes, engage in group recreation. Bars, taverns, and pubs are where we go to “belong.” This is addressed a couple of times in the book, “Where We Gather,” and “At the Corner of Local and Familiar." Bars are a civic and social requirement, in one form or another.


You write in one poem of a "great conspiracy" among denizens of a bar. They are sort of diplomats with treatises, secret agendas, etc.. Explain


It is kind of a dive bar thing, where you have regulars. Really regular, almost daily. Folks with a long shared history have remembered slights, alliances of convenience, mutually agreed upon “no-fly” zones. You might be expected to move over one seat because Charlie is coming in, and he always sits there. Or never play that song on the juke because it makes Barney crazy sad. Or don’t mess with Darlene if she comes in with her hair up.


Large or small, shared history binds folks together, makes them feel part of the fabric of their place. Every bar worthy of the name has its own lore, stories, and even legends.


In the poem "In the Glass Between" you put a microscope into the process of a man getting drunk, and his Jekyll and Hyde personality. In the end, the booze turns into a monster that consumes him. But at first it is described turning up, "the dimmer switch of the soul." Too bad he couldn't stop at the first drink. Your take....


Well, like I say in the Notes for that poem, it is the bartender's job to not let that happen, but the only way to be good at not letting it happen is to have it happen to you a couple times. Hey, people forget to eat, or are super stressed, or whatever, it can get away from you. But I would instead refer you to the poem “The Sweet Pull.” Sometimes it really is an addiction.


I always felt the bar scene in the " Shining" was probably the greatest one in modern cinema. Of course there is Billy Joel's " Piano Man." Bukowski wrote a lot of drinking and bar poems. Did these guys inspire you?


Well, Bukowsky is the reason I got into poetry in the first place. Growing up, I had a blue collar guy’s understanding of poetry. But then I found Bukowski, and I realized the poem doesn't have to be just one type of thing, it could be whatever the writer wanted. Changed my perception of poetry altogether.


But the great thing about bars is the variety. Both of those you mentioned, as well as Cheers, or Archie’s Place, or brass and fern yuppie bars, or Chinese restaurants, etc.


Two of my favorite bars are gone, the " Wursthaus" in Harvard Square, and " Jake Wirth's" in Boston. What bars did you haunt, and did they work their way into the collection?


I’m not really a big drinker. I prefer the craft of mixology. I worked at so many different bars, I was not a frequent visitor. Most of these poems I actually wrote standing behind the bar. I spent hours in that environment, and I was usually leaving with a pocket full of cash, so I learned long ago I was better off getting in my car and going home.


That being said, I was a huge fan of the long-gone Gilrein’s, a blues bar on Main Street, and I'm still a big fan of the still ever-eclectic Ralph’s Chadwick Square Diner, which is stuck on the side of a warehouse converted to a terrific music venue, and they have great burgers, as well as a weekly poetry open mic.


Did you ever have a drinking problem?


Thankfully, no. My old man did, and he was nothing if not a great example of a bad example.


Why should we read this book?


Pour Decisions is a book about work — the kind that happens late, quietly, and in public — written by someone who actually did the job. It doesn’t romanticize bar life or turn it into spectacle. It listens. These poems treat bars as civic spaces and bartenders as witnesses to contemporary American life. If you care about labor, voice, or how people really talk when the night gets thin, this book belongs on your shelf.




WHERE WE GATHER


We meet in the middle,

between the jukebox and the door,

between the clink of glasses and the spill of laughter.


This is where stories loosen their collars,

where strangers lean closer,

where love wears no crown, but sits,

cross-legged, at a sticky table.

Taverns are cathedrals without pews—

here we pray into stained glasses of another kind,

confess in slurred whispers,

forgive with a touch on the shoulder.


Here, you can break and no one will sweep you away.

Here, you can build again

with borrowed hope and the last of your change.


In these walls,

we are not titles, not troubles, not ticking clocks—

we are the shared breath of a song half-remembered,

the arm around your back when you didn’t ask.


Love in a bar is not always forever,

but it is real in the moment—

and sometimes,

a moment is what saves us.

Red Letter Poem #286

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letter Poem #286

 

 

 

 

The ER   

 

for Steve and Patsy

 

 

It was COVID-time, so the phone was all I had.

“Gotta go,” I’d tell Patsy or Steve

each time someone pushed past the pale green sheet

delimiting my cubicle. 

 

I must have been helped or surveilled or tested or moved or advised

by two dozen people while I was there. 

Most did their best with their mini-moment in my life

 

one aide’s arm even had “SIBI”

tattooed in blue

which is Latin for ‘to or for them’, i.e., others;

 

          what a motto for a medic!

But as a whole the great space jammed

with computers and desks and beds and equipment and people

leaned down with expert indifference

 

and dealt with what ailed me moderately well.  Now I

who used to take no pills at all (and made a thing of it)

take a tiny pink pill each night.

 

Remember me, the ER sighs as darkness falls.

I whisper back, I do.

Good, it says. I have forgotten you.   

 

                                             ––Linda Bamber

                                   

 

 

 

 

  

All I want is to be on channel 12!  It’s what I kept telling myself––a soothing mantra during a three-day hospital stay.  Two decades in the rearview, but the effect on me is enduring.  I’d experienced some sort of “brain event” (in the doctors’ remarkably bland parlance), and they were performing endless tests and scans on me, seeking the source of the problem.  Time on a hospital ward is stressful, to say the least––but forced isolation is far from a curse for a poet.  I remember busily writing and reading for hours each day––though the poems were tinged with the red of existential threat: the fear that a more encompassing stroke might mark this as my last poem, my last night....  When bored, I’d watch television on a small monitor suspended from the ceiling.  Flipping through the few available stations, I came to channel 12 which was, I soon realized, the feed from a simple video camera mounted on the hospital roof and trained on tree-lined Memorial Drive and the Charles River below us.  Now and then, I’d lie in bed watching the stop-and-go traffic, recalling the frustration it always produced.  I’d see joggers in skimpy shorts, determinedly striding on the footpath––going over to-do lists in their minds, perhaps, or what they’d like for dinner.  Beech trees.  Ducks on the water.  A solitary rower.  The view presented the workaday, the trivial.  Few, if any, of the folk who appeared briefly on that video seemed to be overjoyed with the knowledge that they were not sick, not endangered, not thinking of a last poem or a last anything.  If I could be there on channel 12, back in the stream of ‘ordinary life,’ I promised myself I’d remain forever grateful.

 

When Linda Bamber sent me today’s poem, it felt like meeting a fellow citizen from the old country, from a select sister/brotherhood whose members carried a special mortal understanding.  Of course, the situation she’s recounting in her poem was, in some respects, very different than mine: in the heart of Covid (you may or may not remember––or want to), everyone was afraid, everyone was (at least occasionally) considering the fragility of human existence, scrolling through the roster of precious moments and much-loved faces whose loss would be devastating.  Many of Linda’s poems are built around modulating tone of voice, the many ways our spoken expression can color the written, and imbue it with a vibrant, and seemingly ‘un-literary’ sort of vitality.  For example, when the speaker offhandedly punctuates her phone calls with “Gotta go,” we register both the breezy farewell but also the dark humor implied by that inevitable fact of life.  A wealth of small telling details accrues in her poems, conveying the actuality of lived experience.  Take, for example, the speaker’s sanctuary––only a curtained cubicle––but in those frantic days, when hospitals struggled to care for the flood of patients, even this was a reason for gratitude.  Then there are those little litanies like “helped or surveilled or tested or moved or advised,” hinting at the profuse medical apparatus of a crowded Emergency Department.  And wasn’t that ‘SIBI’ tattoo on the arm of an aide a marvelous observation (imagining the conversation it must have engendered)?  It underscored the selfless nature of this hospital staff.  “what a motto for a medic” indeed!

 

Linda is the author of a collection of poems (Metropolitan Tang) and a work of fiction (Taking What I Like)––both published by David R. Godine.  She’s now retired from a successful career as an English Professor at Tufts University.  Linda continues to write fiction, essays, and reviews,­­ appearing in such places as The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Nation, and The New York Times.  It would please me to think that the three new poems which have begun appearing in the Red Letters are a harbinger of a second full-length volume of poetry.  I find her voice lifts my spirits in these troubled times.  The quiet epiphanies that often close her poems feel real and attainable.  Here, that “tiny pink pill” serves as the daily reminder of this hard-earned knowledge.  “Remember me, the ER sighs as darkness falls.”  And after reading Linda’s account, I suspect neither she nor I will easily allow these memories to fog over with time.  “I whisper back, I do.” (certainly a seemly response).  “Good, it says.  I have forgotten you.”  Why do we feel both a sting and a blessing in that final line?  Perhaps it hints at the dispassionate nature of this medical institution, where every life requiring care is equally valued.  And once they are discharged?  The evening I was released from Mt. Auburn Hospital, I raced into Boston to attend a new friend’s poetry reading.  Driving along that length of Memorial Drive, I almost forgot to look up––such is the powerful momentum of normalcy.  But I was back on channel 12!  And is Linda.  As are (I sincerely hope) you.   

  

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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