Tim Mayo: 'A Poet with Muscle Memory'

Interview with Doug Holder

Recently I caught up with New  England Poetry Club member Tim Mayo. He has a new collection of poetry out, "Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster." He generously agreed to this interview. 

 Mayo is the author of two previous full-length poetry collections, The Kingdom of Possibilities (2009), and Thesaurus of Separation (2016) and two chapbooks, The Loneliness of Dogs (2008) and Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper (2019). He holds an ALB, cum laude, from Harvard University and an MFA from Bennington College. A ten-time Pushcart Prize Nominee, and a two-time finalist for the Paumanok Award, Mayo is also the recipient of three Vermont Writers Fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, as well as being a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Book Award and the Montaigne Medal. He lives in Brattleboro, VT, where he worked for fifteen years at the Brattleboro Retreat, a mental institution, and where he is also a founding member and organizer of the Brattleboro Literary Festival. His third full-length collection Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster was just published by Bainbridge Island Press in March, 2026.

DH:  The book faces death in a head on collision. There is little romantic gloss, it is devoid of purple poetry. It has great irony, beauty, gallows humor, and it rages against the dying of the light. Was it in any way frightening to write this book? Its honesty can be disarming.

TM: That's an interesting question, "was it frightening to write this book?" No is the quick answer, but quite obviously says very little. Nonetheless, it's interesting that you should say "The book faces death in a head on collision," since, I did in fact have one on my bicycle, and that almost killed me. This was the motivation for me to finish the manuscript. I'd like to say it kept me alive in the ICU. The deaths I face in this book, even my own, are all in the past. It's hard to be afraid of death or anything when it has already happened, and you've survived it. Of course, I have not so much survived the losses of those I write about as I have endured them. None of us ever forget grief, it just moves to another place in our consciousness and our bodies.

I must say in the poem "Meditation on Your Final Moment," which I wrote to the poet Patricia Fargnoli, I felt that some of what I wrote might be irreverent and as such insulting and not lovingly acknowledging or validating her suffering in a more delicate and diplomatic way. I read it to her and most likely sent her a copy. She never told me her reactions. When you write a poem, it is a thinking out loud, where the reader can "hear" what you're thinking, and the epiphanies you may come to in the poem. Even then, when the poem was more truly directed to her while she was alive, I must have sensed that I was also writing to those readers overhearing what I was saying. Certainly, that irony and gallows humor kept the poem from descending into a maudlin exploration that Pat was dying. She claimed she didn't believe in God, but wanted to. I'm an unabashed atheist and have been for my entire life, but having worked with addicts and seen them thrive in twelve step programs such as AA and NA, I realize it's not what I believe or don't believe that counts, it's what they believe, that is important to their recovery. And so, it's the same with Pat and dying. I don't know what she realized before she died, but I hoped that she left this world with a comforting thought. That's why I end the poem with the couplet about her final moment:

Who cares whether it’s real or not?

Won’t that breath be worth it?

About my own near-death experience, which I write about in the second section of the book, I think I have mixed feelings. Although it made me realize that, for example, living to write poetry was more important to me than I thought, I realize how much my reaction to the accident depressed and angered me. I still suffer from a form of depression which in part derives from my past, but could also be biological. Depression dulls your senses. Almost dying did not give me religion or a belief in a god, but it did show me, in retrospect, that my life was worth living if I wanted to live it. And I do. Falling in love helped, too.

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DH: Your title is interesting " Muscle Memories of Love and Disaster." Pain evokes memories for you. Yor music seems to reside in the very muscles—fonts of memory mixed with pain. It reminds of the lines Billie Holiday once sang, " Hush now don't complain, you're my joy and pain." Your take?

TM: Yes. I agree. What good does it do to complain of what you've lost. It's gone, and to honor it, you must acknowledge that others in your life are gone, too, or otherwise you are living in a state of denial. And there is no joy in denial, just an avoidance of pain, which is dysfunctional. I must say that in so far as this book honors dead loved ones, it also evokes the ghosts of emotional pain, but I'm not writing about it to evoke pity. I am exploring the meaning of these losses at least to me, and I am trying to make sense of it in a way that might be meaningful to the reader.

Nonetheless, there is joy in this book, that is entirely apart from loss. Finding love late in life has given me untold joy. I am at an age where people begin to reckon with what they have done and what they have experienced. I spent a large part of my life avoiding the emotional pain of past experiences, and now I find it doesn't hurt as much as it did before, and I can talk about the events that gave me pain with a certain emotional and perhaps clinical distance. Oddly enough there is a joy to be able to write about something you couldn't talk about before. I think working in a mental hospital may have contributed to this. Talking to and helping people in greater pain than I was, began to put my emotional circumstances into a different perspective. When I write about anything, I have to be in an emotionally neutral state of mind, or I can't write about it. I think with all the pain in this book, I have tried to form a positive emotional arc to the book. I hope readers can see it.

About the title, I was an athlete before I was injured. Muscle memory is a guiding force to any athlete, but also the title evokes that emotions are not just feelings you experience in your mind, but they are there remembered in your body, in your whole being. Again, I hope the poems I've written in this book to and about the people I've lost, honor those people, and that the poems don't say woe is me, because they are gone or for any other reason. In the first poem of the book ("Landscape with Still Life") I write

We die . . . we die . . .

nothing new there.

For me that's an acceptance of death. It is an event which is part of life, be it the last part, the end for the person dying or dead, and a disaster for the living who survive them, that they must also accept. Yet people live on in memories. For me that's a big part of life, because I tried for so long to forget an aggregate of emotional pain in my past. But now, by remembering I paradoxically begin to live.

You still love the people in your life who have died, and the memory of that love can give you joy, as they did when they lived, but their death obviously modifies your life into something we can call disaster, because it alters the way you can love them. You can't caress or kiss them, change their diapers or act in other loving ways anymore. Oddly enough, you can still give them flowers, putting them on their grave, even bring them their favorite food as in a Day of the Dead offering, write poems about them, but they can never say thank you or love you back as they might have done before.

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DH:  In a review I read of your book the critic opined that your poetry is welcoming—it wastes no time getting between the reader and the poem. Do you feel your book differs in many ways from the trends in modern poetry?

 TM:I don't know whether I can speak with any authority to current trends in contemporary poetry. I do find that a lot more poetry written these days seems to depend on how the words are arranged on the page rather than how the sounds of words are aesthetically arranged and still maintain meaning. Often the syntax of poems (especially those where the poem depends on how the words are arranged on the page) seems to stretch beyond what I can comprehend. My poems don't depend on some visual arrangement of words on the page to work. They are meant to be heard. What you read on the page should be like a piece of sheet music, that you play with your voice, when you speak it. When you read the words out loud, the arrangement of the words should make a spoken melody without losing its conversational lilt and its purported meaning. I don't use rhyme as a musical device, mainly because English has a poverty of rhyming words that other languages don't. Instead, I want to make a less obvious arrangement of sound through a combination of assonance and alliteration to have the words create that melody. The reader should be able by reading out loud thus hear that spoken melody. I want this idea of spoken melody to converge with the meaning of the words to make a whole. I'm not sure if I am succeeding in this, but that's something I'd like to be there in my poems.

My poems are personal with what I hope is a conversational tone. In that sense they become a personal conversation to the reader. This is may be what Eden Hefferon-Hanson, who reviewed my book, meant when she said my poems were welcoming, that their diction and accessibility close the distance between the reader and the speaker.

Almost all my poems are anecdotal. If the speaker in the poem is telling you an anecdote about their life, this, too, welcomes you into the poem, the same way when a friend or an acquaintance starts to say, "you know, what happened to me the other day." Although, my poems never talk about daily occurrences or daily life, the anecdote, I hope, communicates something that happened which is important to the speaker and as such could be important to the reader as an empathic reader and another human being.

Lastly, I find a lot of poems where the poet either shies away from metaphor, or doesn't know how to use it, or uses it in a way where it sounds good and is even striking, but doesn't make any sense. In poems lacking metaphor, all I can say is plain speaking is admirable, I am not an advocate of writing complicated poems, I really try to make my poems accessible, and you can still do that and include imagery, which when combined with a good flow of sounds is powerful stuff. To me metaphors need to make sense or they just muddy the waters. They should also have an emotional immediacy to them. One of my mentors said metaphors should have a verisimilitude, and I think if they do they evoke a stronger emotional impact.

I read a lot of contemporary poetry, but I also realize there's more out there than I can read. I'm also probably more old-fashioned–– probably because I'm just getting old. Poems should be heard, and not seen, even though as poets they are our children. Erasure poems are interesting, if you can see them against the text the poet has derived them from, but you still can't hear them. Or if you read them out loud, do they make a melody? In any case, I'm not interested in doing them. I prefer a blank page. Although, in concept, the idea of making an erasure poem suggests to me Michelangelo chipping away at a block of stone and leaving you the statue of David. I like that idea.

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DH: Why should we read this book?

Well, in part because "the book faces death in a head on collision. There is little romantic gloss, it is devoid of purple poetry. It has great irony, beauty, gallows humor, and it rages against the dying of the light." Besides all of that, we will all sooner or later experience grief and loss and love––if we haven't already. It can be a comfort to know you're not alone in the first two of these, and what you are reading expresses your feelings or plight in some way that matches your own experiences.

Nonetheless, I do for the most part write about what I've experienced. Also, I think that the experiences I've written about are relatable to others. Our experiences are not unique to ourselves. So, what I have experienced others have as well. Does that make these poems universal? It can, in so far as most of what I experience in life has been experienced by others. If I face death head on, as you mentioned above, it's really grief and loss, that the poems are exploring, and grief and loss are universal experiences. Of course, love is, too. Let's definitely not forget love, the universal elixir. And everyone should read about love.

Granted there are poems in this book about my experiences working in a mental hospital that are more unique. Not everyone will be able to easily relate to them, if they have not experienced either mental illness themselves or people with mental health problems. People (readers) are or may be afraid of others with mental illness. There, I hope I show the compassion I've learned from my former job towards the patients I've worked with, and that mentally ill people deserve empathy and compassion, nor should they be stigmatized. They are as human as any "normal" (whatever the hell that means) person. They are just mentally frailer than your average individual.

This book definitely does not provide a "Lord-is-my-Shepherd-I-shall-not-want" kind of comforting answer to that part of life, which is death or to any other part of life. As a poet, I am trying to create well-crafted poems that most often describe experiences that I've found were important to me and wrestled with trying to find an insight into them. Part of my aesthetic is to also create poems that have an emotional urgency to them, and I think that urgency is conveyed to the reader. This might also be what the reviewer was alluding to, when she said my poems were welcoming.

I think literature is always a two-way street; the reader must be willing to give up something in order to be able receive what the poet has offered them. Even as I write this, I see my literary prejudices coming to contradict what I just said. I pooh-pooh poems that rely on the visual effects they make on the page, because those poems disregard the dimension of sound, be it an erasure poem or just one which spends so much time scattering words around as though the poet is planting a field and hoping what they drop on the page grows. I am making my own two-way street trying to include sound. They honestly reach out to the reader.

As a poet, I keep needing to consciously open myself up to read and accept poems, which are different from my own. We should always be learning our art, even as we hunker down developing our own, perhaps, more-narrow, aesthetic through what we write. None of us have monopoly on poetry. We just want to write what we believe will be poetry that lasts beyond our lives, continuing to speak deeply to a reader somewhere in the future and, hopefully, be recognized for it to some extent during our own lives. At least, I do.

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Meditation on Your Final Moment

For Pat Fargnoli

For me, maybe that moment is a heightened state

slackened to a palatable point, where body

and brain can balance before the end. Or is it

possibly . . . just a state of immense relief?

No, it must be more, although I’d settle for that.

Any old port in the storm as they say. But for you,

the poet in me wants something more out-of-body,

where, when it fans its feathers before your eyes,

your jaw just drops and you’re there.

In some stories that must be how it happens:

an affirmation of the holy spirit extends its wing

like the hand of God. But in the flesh and blood world?

A bird before your eyes, and bingo! you’ve suddenly

bounced off the bottom of your life ascending

into the air of who-knows-where? Not a chance.

So let us then think of the practical how,

the mechanics to move you to your end without needing

some bureaucratic benediction, some absolution,

or a passport for your pale ghosts of regret.

Maybe all you need is just a gentle,

saline solution of generosity

flushing the blood right out of your veins––

I mean, why not? It feels right

in its medically nonjudgmental soulagement,*

the cool liquid diffusing the fever that was

the passionate red of your life’s discomfort.

Your salut* in all its meanings as you greet

the penultimate experience of your life.

The soul––I hate to say the word––twisted with the wishes

and wants of this world––I hate to say it, because

nothing’s immortal except the stone base of the universe––

the soul, as your seeing-eye dog sensing everything you can’t,

wants its way to where the flesh isn’t in the way.

Christ! How did I get here? Talking like this.

I’m not a believer. Yet I think of you, now, only you,

and not myself, my own less pain-racked body

aching in the dark with its muscle memories

of love and disaster. I think of you reaching

for this timeless moment, and I ask why not

pass these last moments of your life in that grace

of letting go, that anti-struggle to faith? But I know

you're waiting for some ecstatic flash of mind to happen

before the big sigh you only have to exhale once

lifts you to the wherever you’ve always wanted to be.

Who cares whether it’s real or not?

Won’t that breath be worth it?

*soulagement is French for relief, and salut has two meanings in French, the first is as a greeting and the second meaning is salvation.

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Red Letter Poem #307

 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 #307

 

 

 

 

American Flags at the Recycling Center

 

 

They rest, discarded heaps of worn-out cloth,

white stars on blue above red stripes on white,

off to the side, and with the better trash,

where our recycled goods accumulate.



These cloths too worn to be restitched, each one

a flag, no longer useful for a cause,

but ready for a casket, four by four,

and on the lid, the words RETIRED FLAGS.



They built this wooden chest to store the flags.

The time would come to start the ritual

when each would be disposed with dignity

to yield its precious substance into fire,



to be reborn, a living flag, and flown

from June till Labor Day, all-weather flag

revered through storms and bitter times,

reminder of the past, when some of us



had scorned the flag and that for which it stood,

had raised its mast in anger, pride, protest,

to bear it through the streets, or wave from cabs

until its hems were loosed and frayed like fringe.



Some cut it down, some dared to cut it up.

I restitched mine, a square of it, to patch

the rips that scarred my precious Wrangler jeans,

then found the jeans were suddenly outgrown.



But not my memory of summer camp,

which gave each Scout a chance to hold the flag,

unfurl and raise it up, to hear the cords

and clips that snapped against the metal pole,



to join the circle gathering again

at end of day, with prayer and trumpet’s “Taps,”

to help with lowering, to fold lengthwise,

then over-and-over, making triangles.

 

                                         ––Joyce Wilson

 

 

                       

 

 

 

We are all honoring our country’s 250^th anniversary––and well we should.  There are many things that have been achieved through this grand American experiment that have been nowhere duplicated in the history of mankind.  But there are forces currently emanating from Washington DC that are attempting to expunge any and all of the darker aspects of our history––as if platitudes, fireworks, and star-spangled illusions could be enough to sustain a people.  This effort not only dishonors the actual lived experience of the men and women who worked and sacrificed over the centuries to bring us to this celebratory moment, but it would blind us to the very knowledge you and I will need as we try to move forward.  Our responsibility requires of us a continual effort to create that “more perfect union” the Founders spoke of (and in a democracy, what is more vital than that?)  My suggestion: to read as much and as widely as we possibly can––history, journalism, commentary, poetry––by writers considering all the aspects of this revolutionary journey.  Then we can each take our bearings and advocate for what seems most vital––but out of many disparate (yet respectful) voices, some unified path forward may still emerge––because our commonality far outweighs our differences.  Walt Whitman proclaimed: “I CELEBRATE myself”––creating a persona that embodied a grand and inclusive American consciousness––“And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”  I must believe in that––even while issues about race, religious belief, family background, political persuasion continue to rage.  It’s the only possible way we can endure.

 

Joyce Wilson is offering us some small-h history in her new poem––the kind most of us participate in daily.  It’s set in that most humble of civic spaces: the recycling center, where old discards hope to find new life.  The United States Flag Code (4 U.S. Code, 5-10) is a set of federal guidelines for the proper display, handling, and respect of the American flag.  It’s legally binding for any governmental agency, though only a suggestion to the rest of the citizenry.  For example, it specifies that the flag is never to be used for articles of clothing, as decoration, or advertising material––but you don’t need me to tell you how that stricture is widely ignored.  You’ll see Old Glory turned into scarves and hats and blazers by folks who deem themselves quite patriotic.  But I also remember, during the Vietnam War, how young people patched ragged jeans with the stars and stripes as a sign of opposition to a futile war––just as the speaker inside today’s poem has done.  Each constituency probably regarded the other’s gesture with disdain.  The code also specifies when and how a banner may be repaired––and under what conditions it must be respectfully destroyed, usually through burning or burial.  And yet, in countless instances, burning the American flag was a gesture of, not honor, but vehement protest.  Despite our troubled history, the speaker in this poem takes a moment to admire the chest (“casket”) built to contain these retired flags before they will meet their end.  The poet imagines these banners turned into smoke, into “a living flag. . .revered through storms and bitter times,/ reminder of the past.”

 

Joyce is the author of five poetry collections, including Take and Receive, and the new The Morning After Burns Night (both from Kelsay Books).  She is the editor of The Poetry Porch, an Internet literary magazine founded 1997 that maintains a large and enthusiastic following.  Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including The Hudson Review, Poetry Ireland, and Salamander.  She’s taught English at Suffolk and Boston Universities.  Since I lived through the eras Joyce is calling to mind, I was intrigued by how these simple vignettes seem to amount to a much larger American portrait.  We can feel the national distress in words like discarded, worn-out, and the better trash; there’s even the overarching drive of capitalism to turn every idea or image into profit (my precious Wrangler jeans).  But she closes the poem by returning to an older memory: Summer camp, Taps, and the cords and clips clanking against the metal flagpole.  She is relishing the experience of that unifying circle, gathering at the end of day with prayers and stirring songs.  It offers us a child’s sense of connectedness––something many of us remember wistfully––of times when we shared a common sense of belonging beneath the rippling shadow from our flag.  Has that been made impossible by the political vitriol we heap upon one another?  Is the very idea this country embodies too tattered and torn to be repaired?  Are flames our only destiny?  I don’t believe that’s inevitable (though I’ve been called naïve before), and my suspicion is that you share my feeling.  So the question before us is straightforward: what are we prepared to do about it?

 

 

 

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/

The Only Song We Have by Lawrence Kessenich

Review of The Only Song We Have by Lawrence Kessenich

Published by Pierian Springs Press, Sheridan Wyoming. 2026

Review by Marcus Breen

Creative lives offer insights into the human condition that are not replicated elsewhere. No one reads a biography of a business executive to discover insights about the meaning of life and relationships: at least I don’t. Then again, if I was obsessed with learning the nefarious ways of making money by robbing the poor and enriching myself, then business biographies would take me to the ethically challenged world of all-money-all-the-time, or more technically “economism.” Somewhat ironically, artists and creative people offer insights to the human condition because their work reaches the public through the commercial processes of business.

In contrast, this well-conceived short novel by Lawrence Kessenich illustrates the way in which artistic creativity takes a front seat among those artists who make outstanding contributions to the history of human development and knowledge, while necessarily accepting the less savory work of business. Without the business, it would be unlikely that much attention could be drawn to the artwork, leaving it unsold. This connection to the market, makes the artists’ reputation, and often is the source of an income with which to manage the daily routines of life. Consequently, behind every great sculptor and poet is a committed business network, informed by someone who “gets” the work and commits to promoting and commercializing it.

Of course, as the wonderful, late Australian art critic Robert Hughes pointed out, sometimes the market is the most foolish force at work in bringing ideas to the public that amount to rubbish. Hughes’s excoriating criticism of the “artist” Jeff Koons remains a touchstone for those interested in making distinctions between art as a response to the living world and commercial dross dedicated to decorating over-priced corporate offices.

No such dross is offered in Kessenich’s writing about the relationship between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Artistically, the story Kessenich lays out, offers imagined self-analysis by Rilke of the relationship between himself and Rodin, two very different men who became friends and colleagues between 1902 and 1907. They both worked with and were promoted by art dealers and publishers who saw the brilliance of their work and brought it to the public. By the time Rilke met him in 1902, Rodin was well established, even a European celebrity as a sculptor.

This was an era in Europe when the world of art radiated in, around and from Paris. There was good reason for this, as Kessenich describes Paris in the mind of Rilke, as the magnetic force in European and western artistic creativity. There is good reason for this.

Paris was the foundation place of emancipatory politics, much of it grounded in revolt, committed to removing the feudal system of slavery and monarchical authoritarianism, replacing it with democratic systems of government that continue to resonate today. The political climate that fed Parisian creativity included The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791-1792), a book that contributed to the foundational theory of French and American democratic ideology, published before the first mass working class effort to establish European communism in the Paris Commune (1871). In the latter case, Karl Marx was present through his journalism and his theory, while Fredric Engels’s advocacy for popular government “by the people,” reinforced the power of the revolutionary urge beyond Europe.

Although there is none of this radical political detail in The Only Song We Sing, there is a profound engagement with radical materialism, translated to artistic representation. This occurs through the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. In fact, Kessenich uses descriptions of Rodin’s sculpture-making method to explore the way art makes meaning through the appeal to the material world Rodin experienced then brought to life in clay and bronze sculptures.

This sensibility of experience translated to static imagery, is what makes art either a creative act of resistance in reconceptualizing the human condition, or when it is missing, merely decorative dross. Kessenich describes the divergence between the two characters in this book by drawing on this comparison that drives the dynamic of the characters’ relationship. Put schematically,

Rodin is the materialist, working with his hands to give the clay he molds the representational quality of his experiences. In contrast, Rilke is the idealist, writing poetry from the lofty perch of Germanic disengagement with experience. The book turns around these two philosophical modalities of art practice and theory: materialism and idealism.

As Kessenich has Rilke note in a personal reflection: “For years, I had ignored the physical world, living purely in the realm of thought and feeling and spirit.”

This materialism has a sensuous elements. Rodin had intimate relations with many of the female models who posed for him, suggesting that he was a serial philanderer in a somewhat negative light. Kessenich offers a kind of American morality to this aspect of Rodin’s story. This is aspect of Kessenich’s interpretation of Rodin fails to fully comprehend the uninhibited instincts of the materialist Rodin. He was not married, and as a free man engaged in the realization of the erotic relationships translated into sculpture. There is a kind of puritanism at work here that rejects the urges of lust and desire by Rodin, however much it might be unpleasant to the modern moral mind.

Despite this the relationship between Rodin and Rilke is based on mutual admiration, colorfully traced in The Only Song We Sing. Indeed, the book offers a contemporary vision about the creative communion between two outstanding artists and how they navigated their lives, leading to the curious arrangement in which Rilke became Rodin’s live-in administrator-secretary.

Rodin becomes something of a mensch for Rilke, because he encourages Rilke to write, and more importantly to work like he does, almost non-stop. Kessenich has Rilke ponder:

I was taken aback that the Master would speak about writing poetry, having never written any himself. It is one thing to reproduce or interpret things in clay, marble and bronze, to create something so boldly physical. It is quite another to sift thoughts through the brain and put abstract words on a flat piece of paper. That act was so much more detached from the world, so much more fleeting, so much harder to “work” at, in my experience, because it was so ineffable. I wished I had the talent to form things with clay, to sculpt them from stone. It was so much more “real.” Could I learn from him how to see the world anew? Would the poetry sing itself through me if I could truly see?

Written in the first person – as if Kessenich is Rilke – the story unfolds as the two artists meet and get to know and appreciate each other. It becomes increasingly apparent to Rilke that Rodin’s work is created as an extension of the material world defined by his experiences, this seems to Rilke to be a revelation. The imagined conversations between Rilke and Rodin and Rilke and Rilke’s companion Rose, among others, take place mostly in Rodin’s home and studio in 1902 in Meudon, France, then in Rilke’s mind during his retreats to Paris to write poetry, all while planning and collecting material through interviews and observations of Rodin for a biography.

The tension that emerges in Rilke the poet, as he grows to comprehend what Rodin “the Master” draws on for his inspiration, is effective, if at times unnerving. The material world is something Rilke learns to interpret, by watching the Master.

A serious quibble arises in the language: who these days would want to refer to a great person as “Master” as Rilke does? (For example, not even President Donald Trump’s most ardent MAGA followers take on that disposition). More tellingly, the use of the word “Master,” references the last days of feudal hierarchical relationships. Rilke is corrected to stop referring to Rodin as “Master,” yet almost cannot help himself.

What is more telling for the philosophically inclined, is that the Master-servant relationship was a key aspect of the 1807 book, The Phenomenology of Spirit by the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His “invention” of modern ideas about contradictions as the dialectic, emerged from this study. It is difficult not to believe that Rilke was not playing a little with the idea, as Kessenich has Rilke use the word “Master,” and as it transpires, Rilke becomes something of a slave in the sculpture’s home.

Rilke’s interest in Rodin was partly instrumental, a function of the need for the poet to make an independent living, rather than reply on funds from his father, so that he could write poetry. In fact, it was not as a poet, but as a journalist biographer and commentator that turned Rilke’s hand in a commission to write a Rodin profile that took him to Meudon. This proved to be a welcome turn in the poet’s career, because the book he produced about Rodin became a best

seller across Europe. It also became part of an elaborate series of artists profiles, known as Lives of the Artist Series (still available), with Rilke’s Auguste Rodin one book in the series.

In effect, The Only Song We Sing serves as an introduction to Rilke’s book, August Rodin. Certainly this was the case for me, as I sat out to write down this review.

Re-released in 2004 with a superb introduction, “Rilke’s Rodin” written by Willian Gass, Rilke the writer is revealed with all of his elaborate language elocutions at work. He can be read as the man who Kessenich describes becoming worldly, and as such a materialist, or at least conscious of the value of the world of relationships, objects and contradictions. Here is Kessenich’s Rilke:

You changed my life, Master. You made me learn to stop and truly see the world, to take it in, and reflect on the physical. And that is now being reflected in my poetry. It’s much more grounded. My poems more often revolve around things in the world, instead of abstract ideas in my head. (66)

The end of the story is a testament to the generosity of Rodin towards Rilke. More than educating him about the “real world,” which could then inform his poetry, Rodin showed Rilke a level of generosity and care that is wonderful to consider. After employing him as administrator and a kind of business partner in his home, paying him while encouraging him to continue to write poetry, Rodin then “fired” Rilke so that he could return fulltime to writing poetry. This is how Kessenich presents the story, suggesting that Kessenich too sees and admires the humanity of Rodin, when today, he might otherwise be considered less than remarkable because he employed Rilke to do his business.

For his part, in his book Auguste Rodin, Rilke refers to love. Rodin “learned to embrace this Life with ever more faithful love. It reveals itself to him as if he had been initiated, no longer concealing itself from him, beyond any sign of distrust.” (83)

The collaborations bore incredible fruit for Rodin and Rilke. And now Lawrence Kessenich adds his wonderfully rich contribution.

***********   Marcus Breen is a professor of communications at Boston College.