Red Letter Poem #259

  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 #259

 

 

 

 

 

The Nature Of

 

 

 

Generosity        

                             

 

The day my last aunt, Lala, died

I visited, just by God’s chance.

She was sitting on the couch,

corpse-thin, smiling.

“Susie dear!” And, as they all did, always,

she reached her arms out to hold me.

 

 

 

Fear

 

 

Walking along the tar-stuck lane,

past a crowd of roses,

grandparents on the screened porch.

Nineteen years old.  Each rose

accusing: you don’t love him.

Dry-mouthed.  Alone.

                             

 

 

Heroism

 

 

My cousin Stephen held one sister up

from beneath the cracked ice,

as another clunked off on skates for help.

Held, held, so she could clutch at

and keep her life. Then he sank.

That apple of his father’s eye.

 

––Susan Donnelly


“So clearly will truths kindle light for truths”––this, from Lucretius, Roman poet and philosopher from the first century BCE, and author of De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things), often considered the greatest masterpiece of Latin verse. Composed in six books, some 7400 dactylic hexameters, the didactic poet lays out the principles of Epicurean thought, the nature of the mind and soul, and the world of celestial and terrestrial phenomena. In today’s Red Letter, Susan Donnelly makes her return to these electronic pages with a much more succinct portrayal of our human landscape: a mere three 6-line verses, stitched together by the tremulous needle of a heart in motion. Unlike Lucretius, her poems do not entirely dismiss the hand of the divine––but they do present clear-eyed observation of lived experience, leaving us readers to elaborate on the philosophical implications. Her subtitles––‘Generosity,’ ‘Fear,’ ‘Heroism’––remind us that, for several thousand years, humankind has considered what takes place within the all-too-brief span of a lifetime, wondering whether meaning is inherent or imposed by the ones talking about it.



What I love about Susan’s poetry is the way she crafts completely naturalistic scenes, portrayed in simple colloquial voices; but beneath that ‘simple’ surface, tumultuous dramas and cerebral surprises abound. Our own imaginations quickly become willing collaborators in the unfolding mystery. “The day my last aunt, Lala, died” sets the stage with deliberate iambic pacing and that string of open vowel sounds. But it may take a second or third read to begin sensing the gravity of those seemingly off-hand details. “My last aunt” hints at the succession of griefs that life presents––something each new generation is compelled to recognize. But it’s the simple love which family often provides (there’s that deceptive term again) that is crucial here: “And, as they all did, always,/ she reached her arms out to hold me.” Always. How easily we trusted that idea in our youth, and how bedeviled by it as the years progress.



Of course, we aging children find ourselves more than a little benighted, rarely possessing much confidence about our place in the scheme of things. Are we worthy of that unconditional affection, or must it be somehow earned? And, as in the second poem, can we even trust the heart’s assessment of its own mercurial nature? The grandparents, behind the scrim of that screened porch, exist in a world very different from this heartsick nineteen-year-old’s (where even the roses are accusatory.) But that reaching out returns in the final poem with a gesture that seems unmistakably pure, yet nearly impossible to grasp. How deftly Susan sketches the deadly drama of thin ice on a New England pond. “Held, held, so she could clutch at/ and keep her life.” (If you heard a sonic allusion here to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”, you’re not alone.) Precious life will both triumph and succumb in a matter of fourteen words. Didn’t that matter-of fact drumbeat of three stressed syllables––“Then he sank.”–– make your own heart turn leaden? And the poet follows it with an unaffected folkism–– “That apple of his father’s eye.”––because that’s why cliché often exists: to say something when the unspeakable engulfs us, though we know words will fall short. Words do––but we do not. In the depths of the imagination, we place ourselves into this moment––as the girl clutching at her young life, and as the brother preparing to let go of his own––and wonder to what we would cling.




Susan is the author of four full-length poetry collections and six chapbooks. Her first book, Eve Names the Animals was awarded the Morse Poetry Prize from Northeastern University Press; and the title sequence in The Maureen Papers and Other Poems (from Every Other Thursday Press) shared the New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Award. Recently, she published The Winners: Poems for Tim, a small collection written in the time leading up to her brother’s death and its aftermath, elegiac and deeply moving. “Life is one long struggle in the dark,” writes Lucretius, and I know Susan is honest enough to acknowledge the truth of the statement. Yet she seems more committed to the possibility that honest thought and the music of well-crafted language generate their own kind of light. I, for one, am grateful.

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

New England Poetry Club: We, (too) The People

 

I am on the board of the New England Poetry Club and I want to let you know about this wonderful series we have coming up this summer.. Such poets as Robert Pinsky, Richard Blanco, Diannely Antigua, and Stephanie Burt--will read from their work at the LONGFELLOW HOUSE in Cambridge, Ma.  Our first event is July 6th with former U.S. Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. The events will start at 3PM on the Longfellow House lawn.  For more info go to:     

https://nepoetryclub.org/we-too-the-people/

We (too) The People

NEPC is proud to feature a series of events featuring some of the most acclaimed voices in American poetry.

It’s the sweetest poetic phrase in American democracy: “We the People.” It is confounding, then, that some, in recent days, aim to limit the inclusive vision of what we are and to narrowly redefine American culture.

To explore the diversity of voices and visions in contemporary poetry—and to begin celebrating the 250th anniversary of our great democratic experiment—we are producing WE (too) THE PEOPLE—eight poetry programs across Summer 2025 and 2026.

The New England Poetry Club is collaborating with the Longfellow House–Washington’s Headquarters and their Friends organization to invite some of the most acclaimed names in American poetry to bring their voices to this special program. Taken together, the work of these literary artists will offer a dynamic vision of our country and its people, our shared history, and imaginative reach.

The readings will be presented, free and open to the public, on the lawn at the Longfellow House on four summer Sundays each year—and, for the first time, will be live-streamed so that audiences from across the country will be able to join us. In addition, the edited recordings of these events will eventually be made available to anyone who wishes to explore the contemporary literary landscape and consider how poetry, as a primary historical resource, can illuminate discussions of civil society and deepen our historical understanding.

Study guides will be prepared so that schools across the country can use these materials in the classroom.

The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller: A Novella

 

The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller: A Novella

by Lawrence Kessenich

Pierian Springs Press

ISBN: 1965784151

140 pages

Review by Kevin M. McIntosh

Oh, Daisy. Since Henry James birthed (and killed) you in 1878, readers have celebrated, defamed, lamented, but, mainly, puzzled over you. A rich man’s daughter touring Switzerland and Italy in the socially essential company of your mother and little brother, seeing the culturally significant sights, attending the mandatory ex-pat parties, flirting with the men at hand, foreign and domestic, we continue to argue what you’re about. Libertine? Naif? Or proof of Cyndi Lauper’s timeless proposition that Girls just wanna have fun? Whatever. But James left us with an ugly question to ponder: Must a nice, high-spirited girl from Schenectady pay for her high spirits with her life?

No, says triple threat novelist-poet-playwright Lawrence Kessenich, in his charming, graceful, provocative answer to James, The Further Adventures of Daisy Miller.

Kessenich’s Daisy, having suffered but survived that Roman miasma, emerges toughened by her near-death experience, more a woman and less a curious, drifty girl. Winterbourne, the fellow ex-pat who squired her about those Swiss sights, enraptured by her beauty, critical of her indifference to nineteenth century gender norms, is put on his heels by this tougher Daisy. Encountering him in Paris, she takes him to task for having “deserted me on my sickbed.” When he is appalled at her strolling, unescorted, in the company of a married male friend, she tells him she has “no intention of misshaping myself into a society whose customs I disrespect.” Then she befriends the man’s spouse. Take that, old bean.

In granting Daisy further adventures, Kessenich answers the question James left hanging as to whether Miss Miller is a beautiful and smart force-of-nature or merely another pretty, wealthy American girl, flitting about Europe, fatally drunk, as some might say now, on her class-and-looks privilege. This new-and-improved Daisy is an emerging first-wave feminist. (And why not? As she points out, she was raised a stone’s throw from Seneca Falls.) Daisy’s natural curiosity and social courage draw her into the sphere of French suffragist Hubertine Auclert, make her a subject for famed portraitist (and Henry James buddy) John Singer Sargent. Daisy taking her rightful place among Sargent’s self-possessed beauties is, for my money, Kessenich’s historical masterstroke.

In addition to these engaging real-life figures, Further Adventures supplies the pleasures and avoids the pitfalls of historical fiction. As the tale unfolds in dueling first-person narratives between Daisy and Winterbourne, Kessenich wisely makes no attempt at imitating his source material. His voice deftly evokes James’s characters and settings, but he rightly eschews any attempt at Jamesian prose (a thicket of dependent clauses and semi-colons from which some have never escaped). And though this volume, like the original, is slim, we still get to stroll the Exposition Universelle, fly over the newly electrified City of Lights in a hot-air balloon. We get a sense of the old world made new, a world––like Daisy––reborn.

But, Daisy-being-Daisy, she can’t get past––even in reincarnation––being attracted to a man of the wrong sort. This time, however––Daisy 2.0––it’s not a fatal attraction. Her pursuit of said man and Winterbourne’s attempts at intervention form much of the climactic tension in this novella, but that’s not this Daisy’s real heart or the heart of her story. In this retelling, this addendum, Kessenich shows us the capacity for human growth (yes, even in a stick-in-the-mud like Winterbourne) and how that growth––plus courage––can change the world. The ending needn’t be inevitable, predictable. We can rewrite it if we have the guts. “I just want to be allowed to be myself,” Kessenich’s Daisy says. “But apparently in order to do that I will have to be strong.” True that. And a message worth embracing, for her world, and ours.

Somerville Poet Jennifer Badot: After a hiatus the poet returns....

 Recently, At a Lit Crawl event in Union Square, I heard Somerville poet Jennifer Badot read from her work.  I asked her for an interview, and the rest is history!

From her website:


Jennifer Badot is the author of A Violet, A Jennifer ( Lily Poetry Review Books). Her poems and book reviews have appeared in The Boston Globe, Studia Mystica, Lily Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, the Poetry is Bread Anthology, edited by Tina Cane (Nirala Publications), and elsewhere in the glorious vastness.




How has it been for you as a writer/poet in Somerville?

The purpose of my first ever visit to Somerville was to deliver a sheaf of poems to Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz at his home in East Somerville. I was a student in his poetry workshop at UMass Boston, and I was late turning in my assignment and so had to deliver it in person at the last possible minute of the last day of the semester. I recall driving in circles and getting lost somewhere near Washington Street and the McGrath Highway overpass and thinking “I could never live here!” Well, Fate obviously had the last laugh because I ended up settling in Somerville and raising my kids here. Our city has grit and vitality and is a great place to make art of any kind. As I’ve dipped in and out of the Somerville poetry scene over the years, I’ve always found welcoming faces and voices.



How difficult is it to raise children, work and have time to write? Did you totally have a shutdown during that period?

I’ve always admired people who raise children and work and still manage to have thriving writing careers. I wasn’t one of them. I was a single parent to two children and worked full time to provide for them. And while I wrote all during this time — notes, fragments, occasional poems, letters, journals, a plethora of facile marketing copy for my jobs — I was not consistently in the business of publishing and promoting my work. I was frazzled, distracted and too tired! I’m proud of me and my kids. We made it through some tough times together. Now it’s my time to shine.



You ran a poetry workshop at the defunct Boston Center for Adult Education. This was a later iteration of the very workshop that Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin attended. Did you have these poets in mind when you ran the workshop. The noted poet Tom Daley was your student. How was your experience with him?



In 2002, when I was asked to step in to run the BCAE workshop for Ottone "Ricky" Riccio, who had suddenly fallen ill, I was keenly aware of the fact that Ricky was a beloved teacher, and of the lineage of those who had run and taken the workshop before me. Naturally, I was nervous. But I took the plunge and found it to be one of the most rewarding experiences I’ve ever had. As for Tom Daley, he distinguished himself in my workshop as an astute reader of poetry and a wonderful poet. When I realized that I had to give the workshop up due to competing responsibilities as a parent and wage-earner, I knew that Tom was up to the task and so, much to his delight and surprise, I handed him the baton. Tom never fails to tell this story nor to credit me with giving him his start as a teacher. For my part, I’m overjoyed that he ran so far with it and has become the great champion of poetry that he is today.



You review poetry books. Do you feel the need to pan any of them?


No, there’s enough negativity in the world. It would be a waste of my energy. I review books that I admire and that I want to spend time with. I want to celebrate poets and the necessary life-giving work they do in the world.



In your poem "The Basket of Apples" you use a painting by Cezanne to contrast your family's situation. There is a dichotomy of perfection and reality here.



During the worst, most volatile period in my parents’ marriage (which was doomed from the start) there was a print of Cezanne’s, "The Basket of Apples" hanging in the kitchen where we ate our meals. There was tension and verbal violence at our table, and Cezanne’s apples, wine, and loaves of bread presided over it all, mocking our unhappiness. In my memory, the painting is infected with our discord. For many years, as I say in the poem, I couldn’t look at that painting “without revolting.”



You read Tarot cards—has this experience ever entered your poetry?

I’ve been reading Tarot cards professionally for nearly 20 years. While Tarot doesn’t enter my poetry explicitly, the experience of reading Tarot for others requires deep listening skills, intuition, and the ability to engage fully with images while putting one’s ego aside. These are also skills I endeavor to bring to the writing of my poems.



Why should we read your work?

I’ve never been great at self-promotion, so I’ll just steal a quote from what poet Spencer Reece said about my recent book A Violet, A Jennifer (Lily Poetry Review Books) and hope it will entice people to buy and read the book: “Badot casts her spell with these poems, in original sound and intent to make a modern secular, melancholy, mischievous, gospel. With language fresh and weird like Hopkins, tight and cryptic like HD, Badot — a girl, a woman, a single mother, a lover, a maker, a worker, a thinker, a survivor, a joker, a dancer, a cook, a gardener, a poet — attends her tasks with this charm. These poems coo and coax, water and nurture dreams.”

The Basket of Apples

What I knew of Cezanne: that he was from France, the country of our father, and a still life that hung in a blue frame in our kitchen beside the telephone, its coiled cord hanging down, a goldilocks curl. Those sweet, burnished apples couldn’t have been further from our truth, though flaxen highlights matched the colour of our walls, and shadows under the radiator were the same blackened green as the wine bottle leaning between the bread and a basket of apples. What more could we have wanted than everything on Cezanne’s tilted table to spill onto ours? When the apples tumbled out of the painting, they turned sour, and when the wine bottle emptied into our father’s unfathomable glass, our mother chewed her bread slowly, carefully, and was ridiculed with great acerbity. It would be many years before I could look at The Basket of Apples without revolting.

Jennifer Badot