Red Letter Poem #315

 Red Letter Poem #315

 

 

 

 

 

An Unnoticed Moment in Eden:

      the Apostrophe’s Fall

 

“That fallen leaf from the ruined garden”

                     ––from: “Grief’s” by Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

Still high above the ground, in

The moment of someone else’s weakness,

When it is still too early for

 

The woodchucks and mice and trout,

The beetles with their shining elytra,

To know they are now dying,

 

The apostrophe has just detached

And is surprised and unaware

It now means loss or is possessed

 

By the serpent-S following,

And is about to start the slow

Descent, to drift into its

 

Increasing shadow, into

That twilight-dimming space

The dead will own.

 

 

                           ––Jack Stewart

 

 

 

 

 

 

Before I can discuss my response to Jack Stewart’s startling little mythology, I must begin with the literary elephant in the room: the epigraph.  Poets, of course, use epigraphs for a whole range of purposes.  Sometimes it’s to invite the work of another poet into the reader’s mind––a choral background awaiting a new soloist to take the stage.  Or it might signal the harmony or antiphony of thought between an older work and one’s own.  But often, it is a small homage to acknowledge that some element in another’s poem so thoroughly entered this writer’s consciousness that it triggered a new creation in response.  I can say that, over the years, I’ve tipped my hat in this manner dozens of times.  But when I received “An Unnoticed Moment. . .” from today’s poet, who I’ve gotten to know through his Red Letter contributions, I was shocked to realize that this was the first time I’ve ever been a recipient of this gesture.  We forget, sometimes, that when we put our work out into the world, there are actual readers who might lay claim to these poems, use them for unanticipated purposes­­––and even, in the most intense instances, feel the need to respond to what they’ve discovered on the page.  I felt deeply honored. . .and then immediately fearful: what if I didn’t actually like how Jack used my line as a jumping-off point?  But I’d nothing to worry about: this poet took some thematic elements from my recent collection, Grief’s Apostrophe, and used them to challenge his own vision––about the grammar of loss and the power of a simple punctuation mark.

 

Among other things, my collection explored the way we struggle to carry our deepest emotions into language, and how every element at our disposal must be used in an attempt to portray and illuminate.  In one poem, I used a metaphor for the apostrophe that seems to have lodged in Jack’s ear: “That fallen leaf from the ruined garden.”  Such powerful meaning to be embedded in so diminutive a symbol; it signals both possession and a placemark for absence.  Somehow Jack found himself within an Edenic space where all once seemed possible––but now some dire change was taking place.  In his poem, the leaflike punctuation mark hovers “high above the ground”––that earthly domain from which, according to the Biblical text he’s called to mind, we arise and to which we return.  Circumstance is about to lay claim to some unsuspecting pronoun: “The moment of someone else’s weakness.”  The poem has brought to mind the essence of all mortal frailty, and the passage from an inherent grace to an inevitable decline.  I loved those lines of enumeration––“The woodchucks and mice and trout,/ The beetles with their shining elytra”––which also echo the primal human task of naming all we see (even as we are reminded that we creatures must share the same fate).  “The apostrophe has just detached/ And is surprised and unaware/ It now means loss or is possessed/ By the serpent-S following…”.  Here, the apostrophe itself is a consciousness whose descent signals the great transformation––and I found myself smiling ruefully at that “serpent-S,” as if all fruitful knowledge was embodied in every mouthful of language.

 

Today’s poem marks Jack Stewart’s seventh appearance in the Red Letters (which may be a record).  His fine first book, No Reason, was published in the Poeima Poetry Series––and, over the years, his work has appeared in scores of literary journals including Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, as well as international journals in Ireland, Austria, and Italy.  Formerly a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology, he taught creative writing in Fort Lauderdale at the Pine Crest School––but, for the first time, I’m having to shift that verb to the past tense.  After four decades as an educator, working with students at various levels and educational centers, Jack has recently retired.  My hope is that this new expansive time will bring us closer to an anticipated second collection.  I love how Jack’s poems celebrate the creative impulse, play within the endless possibilities of human experience––but do not shy away from the most challenging discoveries along the way.  In today’s piece, that inky curl––like a dried leaf or a wisp of imagination––is about to “start the slow/ Descent, to drift into its// Increasing shadow, into/ That twilight-dimming space/ The dead will own.”  Nothing we can do will prevent that fall––but the attention we bring to the moment, and the way we are able to memorialize the experience in language, feels as if we’ve done more than simply surrender.  Tell me: is it too much to think that all we commit––to each other, to that sacred ground––renews the garden’s fertility?  (Apostrophe-S––because we belong to that green beauty even still, as it belongs to us.)

   

  

 

 

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/

Come to the Little Crepe Cafe for a unique gathering of artists, intellectuals, and activists

 

Come to the Little Crepe Cafe on Wednesday, September 16th, for the first of a series of encounters between the artistic world, the intellectual world, and the activist world. Featured speakers include members of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Prevention of Gun Violence, members of City Night Readings, and representatives of the Platypus Review. These three very different frameworks of engaging with society's ills are often in conflict with one another...but that need not be the case. How can we learn from each other, so that, to borrow a phrase from Robin Williams, our words and ideas can change the world?

Red Letter Poem #314

  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 #314

 

 

 

 

As I Lay Dematerializing

 

 

In this theater, in this reading of myself,

the pathologist says, “See? His body’s own

enzymes are breaking down his cells.”

One of the onlookers at the anatomy

 

lesson waxes, “Breaking out of his prison?”

The trained rooster the farmer’s daughter sent in

as a last resort at long last stops crowing

and splays down on top of me, a strange egg.

 

I was losing interest in my bank account.

Rage, rage against the dying—Yeah, yeah.

How to put this? The bases were loaded.

The organ was groaning. The bullpen was scratching.

 

I bloated, losing my soul of wit.

I took on rigor. They asked, What’s that mean?

I got over myself. I hovered

over the rags I lay in, this patchwork, my quilt.

 

 

                               ––Michael T. Steffen

 

 

 

 

 

I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – 
The Stillness in the Room
Was like the Stillness in the Air – 
Between the Heaves of Storm. . .

 

                         ––Emily Dickinson

 

Where are we?  It’s an appropriate question––within today’s poem, specifically, but within the whole of our turbulent lives.  And how can we hope to navigate if we can’t take our bearings?  But, of course, how may we orient ourselves if we’ve no fixed point of reference, a guiding star?  It’s not only Emily’s predicament––and that of today’s featured poet, Michael T. Steffen––it’s our own daily struggle.  It seems more than fitting that in Michael’s marvelously disorienting “As I Lay Dematerializing,” we must experience our true lostness if we’re to have any hope of being found.  So what does a poet use to help navigate?  Two things quickly come to mind: the history of what’s come before, and a reliance upon the music of the mind.

 

Michael’s poem is teeming with literary history.  I’m guessing the phrasing of the title put you in mind of Faulkner’s masterpiece, As I Lay Dying––and that, in turn, created echoes of a self-aware corpse-to-be on its journey toward some final place of rest.  (The English majors among us may even recall that the novel’s title is an echo from Homer’s Odyssey––a phrase spoken by Agamemnon in the underworld, riven by disappointment.)  This poet is situating himself amid the brother/sisterhood of scribes, hoping to use the past to chart a course through the bewildering present.  Like Faulkner, Michael employs a kind of stream-of-consciousness as a way of making the mind porous to the world and the culture in which it’s rooted.  All those flickering impressions and bits of memory may seem a jumble––but the thinking brain is the body’s engine, and everything becomes fuel for the fire.  Right from Michael’s opening line, the reader must shift into a higher gear: is this an operating “theater” where a patient’s life is at stake?  Or a post-mortem table where fatal flaws will be revealed?  Or perhaps some Theater of the Absurd performance where, from our balcony seats, we can gawk at the farce of one human desperately trying to make meaning of the chaos?  

 

Before we can get comfortable, in comes that “trained rooster” to hunker down upon the protagonist’s chest as if guarding some sort of cosmic egg.  Startling, the strange gyrations of which the mind is capable: bad puns (“losing interest”), bits and pieces remembered from freshman lit (as the patient in question brushes aside Dylan Thomas’ classic villanelle, and slips into a kind of Fenway Park of the Mind––the tone more Abbott and Costello than John Updike).  “I bloated, losing my soul of wit,” says the poet, throwing a little Hamlet into the mix.  Indeed, how can brevity survive when the mind is flooded with so much tumult?  And yet, if nothing else, a poem is an intentional act of focus––and so the speaker attempts to take these rags of consciousness and make a quilt from them––“a momentary stay against confusion” (if I can welcome another New Englander’s voice), and a purposeful counter to the Welshman’s “the dying of the light.”  It may not be much––this determined straining for clarity––but perhaps it’s all we can do.

 

Michael has recently published his third poetry collection––I Saw My Life (Lily Poetry Review Press), centered around the long title piece, an impressive narrative exploration in 41 sections.  He’s also been the recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award.  Michael’s work has appeared in numerous fine journals, and I’m pleased he’s become a frequent Red Letter contributor.  He is also an organizer of poetry events, honoring the work of contemporary poets as well as past masters.  And that, after all, is one of culture’s primary purposes: it affirms that others have traveled this path before us; that their experiences and insights might accompany us on the journey, especially at moments when our very survival seems at stake.  That’s where the music comes in: we can feel the rhythmical charge within us, elevating language into song.  That instinctive sense is so primal, visceral, we trust it to steer us safely through the evolving poem.  Dickinson’s Musca domestica brings her to this: “With Blue – uncertain stumbling Buzz –/ Between the light – and me –/ And then the Windows failed – and then/ I could not see to see.”  The musicality is so unusual but self-assured, our hearts become willing passengers.  And Michael performs a similar feat with: “They asked, What’s that mean?”––just as we readers might be asking ourselves the same.  But then the poet calms the choppy seas with a playful double entendre and a little cascade of V-sounds: “I got over myself. I hovered/ over the rags I lay in, this patchwork, my quilt.”  This blanketing consciousness of ours may indeed be rife with holes, but it comforts us, keeps us warm through the day’s uncertain weather. 

  

 

 

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/