On Being a Regular by Jen Fries

On Being a Regular

Tremont Street, Boston, in June, collage on board, detail. I used to work down there.

An acquaintance of mine, poet and columnist Doug Holder, recently posed a question on social media: Have you ever been a regular, and what does that mean to you?

He was responding to an article in Esquire, “The Lost Art of Being a Regular,” by Mark Allen Burger. It’s paywalled (fair enough). Check your public library if you’d like to read it. In any event…

I realized that being a regular may indeed be a lost art, at least in the US. People my age are forgetting what it was like, and younger people never knew.

I further realized that we should probably revive this lost art, because we are entering a time when we’re going to need it.

Being a regular is a status relative to another person. It’s an earned title. You become a regular when someone else says you are, based on your interactions with them.

It’s a word belonging mostly to commerce, but it has the effect of de-business-ing business, of personalizing the impersonal. It’s a humanizing word that shifts the focus from transaction to relationship.

But what is it? How does it happen, and how does it work? I’ll tell you about my own experience.
Coffee and a Newspaper

In my home town, New York City, I commuted to work by the same route every weekday, along with thousands of other people, from Queens into Manhattan. Every morning, I stopped at the newsstand at the top of the stairs into the subway and bought the NY Times. I then went downstairs and stopped at the coffee stand in the station to get a regular coffee with milk and one sugar. I then continued down to the train with my paper and my coffee.

Beyond requesting my paper and ordering my coffee, and saying thank-you, I never spoke to anyone and barely made eye contact because that’s how we rolled in NYC.

And yet one day, I got to the newsstand, and my Times was folded and waiting for me, along with the papers of other regulars. I just had to put down my money and take it.

In about the same time period, I got down to the coffee stand one day and found my coffee waiting for me on the counter – regular, milk, one sugar, hot and fresh because the guy knew what time I’d be there.

We still didn’t talk to each other beyond me saying thank-you, which was now all I had to say.

I realized suddenly that I was part of the scene, the community. Despite the traditional New York conversation-avoidance, I was remembered, recognized. I was known to these people. If I ever went missing, those guys along my daily commute would be able to help the cops pinpoint just where and when I’d vanished.

A little while after that social breakthrough, I had another. I worked in those days in the financial district, near Wall Street. Back then, the work day was 9 to 5 with a lunch break from 12 to 1. This was universal. So every day, the narrow streets of lower Manhattan would be crammed with people arriving to work, then become empty and silent, then get crammed with people going out for lunch, then become empty and silent again, then get crammed with people going home, and then stay empty and silent overnight. (I know about overnight because sometimes my friends and I would wander around down there to decompress after getting out of the Village dance clubs, and it was just us and the rats and the ghost of Peter Stuyvesant.)
Peter Stuyvesant, still a regular on the lower Manhattan scene. Quick pastel sketch from a portrait, c. 1660, attr. Couturier.

Those crammed hours were absolute madness, and the lunch rush was the craziest because the traffic was less orderly than the morning and evening rushes.

Near the office where I worked stood a hamburger and hot dog joint. It was a tiny little storefront on the corner that only cooked 2 or 3 things with 2 or 3 variations each, and it was only open for lunch. What little they did, they did extremely well, though, and the place was incredibly popular, so much so that they had to create a hyper-efficient way to process customers in the limited lunch-rush time window.

They had one line going in the double-door entrance and another line going out. You’d ride the in-line to the counter (where there were always a few crusty old dudes eating in), and place your order with the guy who would shout it out to the short-order cooks at the grill behind him. Then you’d step to your left and pay and receive your food, which would be ready and bagged in seconds because they were already cooking everything on the menu. Then you’d turn around and ride the out-line back to the street.

They gave this service to literally hundreds of people within the space of a single hour.

Now, granted, I’m a creature of habit, and I had my favorite thing that I would get from that place every time I went, up to three days a week because it was cheap as well as good.

But still – hundreds of customers on a virtual conveyor belt every single lunch rush.

And yet a day came, surprisingly quickly, when I got up to the counter, and the guy said, “The usual?”

Stunned, I said, “Yes, thanks.” And he turned and shouted out exactly what I wanted. I will never comprehend how, out of that sea of humanity all getting burgers and hot dogs, he could remember anyone’s order or face, but the man obviously had the power of professionalism.

That’s what being a regular means to me. It means being a noticed presence in the spaces you occupy and move through. It means being recognized by identity markers unique to you. Small woman with long, dark hair. New York Times. Regular coffee, milk, one sugar, 7:30 AM. Hot dog, heavy mustard, sauerkraut, ginger ale. It means being part of someone’s world enough that they add you to their schedule. They prepare for you, reserve space for you. You become part of the easy, efficient flow of their work. You are expected, and missed when you don’t show up.

Sometimes, it can be moments like the time the delivery guy from our favorite Chinese restaurant came to our apartment by mistake. He was going to another apartment in our large building, but his feet carried him to our door by sheer force of habit, and he didn’t realize it until we were all looking at each other in confusion. And then we laughed.
All Our Third Places

Whether you’re in and out in 30 seconds or you stick around for hours, anywhere that you’re a regular becomes a “third place” in your territory.

Third places, a concept developed by sociologist Ray Oldenburg, are spaces for free, informal, social interaction, additional to home and work. It’s your coffee shop, pub, park, bookstore, basketball court, hair salon, etc. I argue they can also be transitional spaces on routes we travel frequently, turning the route itself into a third place. Here’s a free article about the importance of third places by Ray Oldenburg and Karen Christensen in the UNESCO Courier.

Being a regular at a place grants you a certain emotional ownership of it. Something about it is now yours. Your paper, your coffee, your lunch, your time slot. Eventually, you might even have your table by the window, your pizza combo added to the menu with your name on it.

The day I became a regular at the news and coffee stands granted me ownership over my commute. That route became part of my home turf. I could relax and enjoy my morning that little bit more. I felt comfortable enough to look around and begin to recognize other regulars I shared it with, who also ceased to be strangers just by dint of being seen every day.

Has that ever happened to you?

Has a barista anticipated your order? Maybe your favorite Thai restaurant knows how spicy you like your drunken noodles. Is there a shop you spend so much time in that when a newbie asks for help, you take care of them before revealing that you don’t work there? Do you see the same joggers and families at the park every Saturday, and do they see you?

How many such third places do you have? Probably fewer now than before the pandemic. Covid cut us off from so much that was regular about our lives, but it was just the knock-out punch. It was already getting harder to become a regular before that disaster.

Our digitized, virtual, automated world yaps endlessly about connection and community, but it doesn’t want us to go anywhere or meet anyone. We save our coffee order to the app, but the app won’t anticipate our arrival or remark on our absence. The worker won’t connect our face to our cup. We’re responding only to the apps, not each other.

One-click ordering. Frictionless payment. Contactless delivery. These “conveniences” scrub the humanity out of our habits. They’re bad when we need them, as during a plague, but worse when we don’t.

Supposedly, eliminating all that interactive friction will free up more time for “quality” socializing. Really, though?

I mean, your commute is your commute. Is it better to make that daily trip with people to help you fuel up on the way out and wind down on the way back, or to do it in a bubble of invisibility and isolation?

And how will we do all this quality socializing when the work day is longer and more exhausting than ever? How much of that freed-up time gets spent doomscrolling before collapsing into bed?
Here-Place, Now-Moment
Devonshire Street, Boston, collage with wood, on board. One of my regular haunts.

When you leave your home, how many faces do you recognize, and how many might recognize you? Do you know which dogs belong to which houses on your street? Do you have a personal map of businesses and amenities along your various routes, favorites that you use again and again?

If you needed to beg a favor, or drop out for a couple of hours, or you were being followed by a suspicious van, where would you go? What haven or check-in spaces do you have, where you are “one of us”?

That’s what community is, our “us.” The We of We the People. It’s our extended home where we do all our regular stuff among our regular faces. We belong because we are participating members.

To be clear, I’m a hardcore introvert. I hate chatting, smiling, sparkling. I love silence and solitude. But even those who read books at ballgames are present. We recognize and are recognized. None of us has to perform a particular way to be part of the “us.” We just have to show up often enough to be a regular.

The Age of Convenience is failing us. We need those passing, superficial relationships with all their frictions. We must re-humanize our ordinary, daily lives.

We do that, first, by getting out of the house, and then by de-automating all those pesky little tasks we’re told are such a burden.

Turn your eyes from your phone to the person doing something for you. Order online but go to the local restaurant to pick up your meal in person. Say thank-you.

Choose your favorite businesses, services, amusements where you live, where you work, along your routes, and make a habit of stopping in rather than adding another app. Use your commons – parks, beaches, libraries, transit, etc. You part-own the damn things, after all.

Pop the bubble. Put the phone in your pocket. Be present in the here-place and now-moment. Little by little, you’ll start feeling the “us” around you. You’ll hear the music and languages. The dogs will learn your scent, and you’ll learn your neighbors’ roses and holiday decorations. You’ll collect arcane, insider knowledge of all your places. You’ll start thinking of your street, your shops, your station.

And before you know it, you’ll be surprised by someone greeting you with, “The usual?” followed by, “Didn’t see you last week.”

And then you’ll be a regular.


Note: The essay above contains 2,022 words which, according to western numerology, reduces to 6. The number 6 represents love, partnership, and community. In tarot, the sixth Major Arcanum is The Lovers, while the sixes of the minor suits represent various forms of shareable benefits. The 6 of Swords, an easing of burdens and difficulty. The 6 of Wands, victory and leadership. The 6 of Cups, relationships, memories, and simple joys. The 6 of Pentacles, sharing and mutual aid.

Please note also, this essay is 100% human-made by me. No AI was used in the writing or the art, all of which are my original creations. – Jen

Red Letter Poem #312

 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 #312

 

 

 

Cancer Qasida

1.


Praise to the paper gown, vinyl table

sprayed down, still sticky when I sit.



Praise, O nurse in purple shoes,

kindest finger on my bruise, asking



questions to ensure I’m me

and no one else. I’m me. I’m me,



on every floor, in every room

where I repeat name, date of birth



and she checks off a corresponding

doom and doom’s activities, which I praise.



2.



Praise three members of the high school

jazz quartet, studiously tuning in the lobby,



and the man waiting for his wife, counting

almonds into a baggy, the man counting



lengths of sterile plastic tubing. Praise

the doctor who looks so caring and



the doctor behind her, the carousel

of wheelchairs in the hallway—praise them.



I’ve been a different me

since the biopsy needle



became the compass-needle,

since the doctor told me I’m lucky



not to be dying any faster.

O praise the abyss those words split



open under me—praise it.

I’ve learned the shape of the abyss



in which I hear the music

of cancer and faster,



in which I’m gently sent home

to water the dahlias, to let



my nerveless fingers trace two new

freckles (praise them!) on my son’s face.



3.



O praise the music, praise tomorrow’s

sorrow and not-sorrow, praise the mind



narrowed with knowledge, praise

the spells I’ve made and borrowed: love,



luck, forgiveness, fairness, faith

in the idea a “me,” in the idea there will be



another and another day. There’s a cold disk

pressed to my chest, a colder needle in my vein,



a mother making lists, as if it can change everything.

Praise the spell a list creates, praise



the spell of the IV drip, the pills and the pills

to help you tolerate the pills. Praise the gloved hands



that clean up what you can’t keep down. Praise all

the sweating, heaving, freezing, nauseated ones



closing their eyes against this frame, all the ones

who came and sang this song before me, all



the ones still waiting and waiting and waiting.

In my marrow I feel the woman silently crying



in the curtained cubicle beside me,

the man upstairs putting on a brave face for his son,



the family playing cards in reception, the duet

laughing somewhere down the hall—



I can offer them nothing but praise

on the way to the paradise where we’ll meet.

 

                                          ––Kirun Kapur

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s Letter is about cancer. . .and praise.  At first, you might assume these two words do not/ought not even exist in the same universe.  While modern medicine has become much more skilled at detecting and treating this multifaceted category of disease, just the mention of ‘the c-word’ still casts a pall over any conversation.  But in the case of Kirun Kapur, a poet of tremendous sensitivity and insight, she is using the heightened consciousness of a poem to demand more: from her response to her own diagnosis and treatment; from her relationships––not only with those she dearly loves, but with all who pass through her days.  I believe Kirun is also stretching the boundaries of what she’s prepared to bring to the page, taking to heart the duty that Ralph Waldo Emerson said falls to every practitioner of this ancient art form: "The poet is the person who re-creates the common, who is the public voice of the private heart, and who praises the ordinary."  In “Cancer Qasida,” the ordinary ordeal involved in long-term medical treatment––especially for any serious illness––reminds us that it is possible to be both broken- and great-hearted within a single moment.

 

While the speaker of a poem and the text’s author are not identical, I never had a moment’s doubt that, in this case, the literary was being informed by authentic first-hand experience.  And though I’d never suggest that the poem itself was the source of the subject’s courage and determination, I cannot help but believe it fortifies her spirit.  Kirun is creating an externalized platform for her own deepest self, and for others in similar circumstances.  I’d say that the process she is engaged in echoes Einstein’s breakthrough formulation.  The physical and emotional energy in this painful experience (and in the poet’s exacting portrayal) is being converted into matter (ink on paper, or images on a computer screen) so that, when shared with some stranger, the material can be converted back into psychic energy.  The reader may, in turn, use this to power their own thoughts and actions, to touch on the challenges of their own unfolding day.  E=MC² indeed!

 

Kirun chose to create a contemporary version of the qasida––a pre-Islamic Arabic verse form that has since spread throughout the Middle East––and though she dispenses with the set rhythm and single repeating rhyme, her poem chimes with repetition and a heightened musicality; I suspect that a traditional poet writing in, say, Persian or Urdu, might feel a certain kinship.  And the three-part form often forms a journey, ranging from court life to the marketplace, but usually culminating in an act of praise.  Here, the specificity of images like that “paper gown,” “vinyl table,” and the nurse’s “purple shoes” can be, by turns, both menacing and marvelous.  But the brio of her unexpected shifts in context is nothing short of breathtaking––“from biopsy needle” to “compass-needle,” and then the oncologist’s comment that “I’m lucky not to be dying any faster.”  Who else but a poet would follow such thoughts as they morph from the doctor’s dispassionate assessment to “the shape of the abyss// in which I hear the music/ of cancer and faster”––and then on to the act of watering the dahlias or touching her son’s newly-freckled face as an intimation of “paradise”?

Kirun is the author of four books of poetry, including: Women in the Waiting Room (from Black Lawrence Press), which was a finalist for the National Poetry Series.  Last year, I Ride Upon a Tiger won the Benjamin Saltman Prize, and will be published by Red Hen Press in 2028.  Today’s poem was a finalist for the Amy Lowell Prize from the New England Poetry Club and was subsequently nominated and awarded a Pushcart Prize.  Kirun serves as editor at the venerable Beloit Poetry Journal, and directs the creative writing program at Amherst College.  She grew up between Honolulu and New Delhi, and now lives along the banks of the Merrimack River.  Her poem today rings with the litany: “praise”––though the purpose of those imperatives keeps shifting.  Because Kirun’s literary experience is far-ranging, she understands that in many of the creation stories pivotal within world religions, humankind begins in a garden and ends in a kind of paradise.  But how we live in-between determines the nature of our experience; it either fosters or thwarts the possibility of achieving wisdom and deep (if ephemeral) happiness.  Though we may use a multiplicity of names and gestures in our attempt to address divinity, there is great commonality in what we are all yearning for.  Perhaps, like superstitious children, we hope things like counting and incantatory list-making will somehow safeguard our fate.  Or that if we bow before death’s sovereignty, Thanatos might take pity and spare us.  But a poem like Kirun’s is striving to be clear-eyed about the beautiful/brutal nature of our mortality, while still leaning on that primordial pronouncement: it is good.  Praise be.

 

 

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/

Review of Conversations with Michael S. Harper

 

Conversations with Michael S. Harper, edited by John Zheng and Michael Antonucci

Reviewed by Rishabh Kumar and Vivek Singh

There's a moment, decades into this book, where Michael S. Harper stops explaining himself and just says it plainly, "to survive as an artist in America is always an endurance contest, particularly if you are Black." By then you believe him as you've watched him prove it, interview after interview, for almost forty years. Conversations with Michael S. Harper, edited by John Zheng and Michael Antonucci, gathers fourteen of those conversations, from a wary young poet talking to John O'Brien in 1972 to the professor of Literary Arts at Brown University looking back in 2016, months before his death. What holds the book together isn't argument so much as accumulation, the same voice, tested against a new stranger every few years, circling the same handful of convictions until they harden into something like philosophy, that jazz is "not programmatic and not abstract" but a way of thinking, that history "is your own heartbeat," not a fact in a textbook, that a poem, done right, comes from "a human, intuitive feeling for the language" rather than a formula. Read straight through, it stops feeling like a reference book and starts feeling like something closer to a portrait sat for, session after session, over half a century, by a man the volume's own editors remember, as "a remarkable poet, an inspiring teacher and a kind human being."

In terms of structure, the book justifies its subtitle as a "conversation" rather than a mere document. The editors describe the interviews as "separated by three decades, these comments take their place among the interlocking discursive pathways" that together produce "a high-relief portrait of the poet," and the chronological arrangement bears this out. Recurring preoccupations, history, modality, myth, race, teaching, accumulate depth as Harper returns to them with different interlocutors across different decades, rather than repeating himself.

The opening interview, conducted by John O'Brien in 1972, sets the terms for much of what follows. O'Brien's headnote credits Harper with "complete mastery over the tools of his language" and locates his early poetry's power in its ability to draw on Black speech and jazz

structures. In the conversation itself, Harper immediately complicates a frequently quoted description of his verse as "rhythmic rather than metric," clarifying that his interest lies not in mimicking musical form but in cultivating "a human, intuitive feeling for the language." Asked about Coltrane's influence, Harper offers what becomes the book's central theoretical concept, modality. Jazz and blues, he explains, are "open-ended forms, not programmatic and not abstract," modal, not fixed. What he means by modal, he explains, is a way of hearing the world that assumes "man is basically spiritual" and that the universe is a "wholistic" whole rather than a fragmented. This means “the universe is not fragmented, that man has a place in it, that man is a reflection of the environment, and the environment is the reflection of man.” Thus, humanity, art, and environment reflect one another rather than standing apart. This idea is elaborated further in the 1973 Chapman interview ("modality is always about relationships... modality is always about unity"). Modality, in other words, is never simply a musical technique borrowed for poetry, it's a whole way of understanding experience, and Coltrane is its clearest example, not its source.

The four interviews from the 1980s, with James Randall, David Lloyd, James R. Keegan, and Reginald Martin, turn toward Harper's sense of vocation and responsibility. To Randall, he insists that a Black writer must develop the stamina to be "optimistic in attitude" while expecting the worst, treating race as "a metaphor and a challenge of assertion" rather than a limitation to escape. To Lloyd, Harper is blunt about the American relationship to the past, Americans, as he says, are simply "not very good historians," people whose sense of the past collapses into “topicality but not towards continuity." For Harper, as a poet, real history isn't something filed away and consulted at "the local libraries,” but something lived out in ordinary speech, in which “these events are reflected in the lives of the people who live there and utter these place names that are named for somebody else” without ever learning the story attached to them. The past, on this account, survives everywhere in language and geography and almost nowhere in memory, an inheritance nobody bothered to explain to the people still living inside it.

The 1990s interviews, with Charles H. Rowell, Edward Hirsch, and Michael Antonucci, deepen the volume's engagement with Harper's literary genealogy and his sometimes-unsparing critical judgments. To Hirsch, Harper distinguishes poetry's "own laws" from music's, framing his interest in improvisation as a way of keeping tradition alive rather than repeating it, and offers a candid, mixed assessment of Langston Hughes, whose work he found lacking in the "complexity" he himself pursued. To Antonucci, Harper describes his cultural touchstones, Sterling Brown, Robert Hayden, Ralph Ellison, Coltrane, as "models, not to be copied, but to be instructed by," a formulation that neatly encapsulates his lifelong resistance to imitation.

The final four interviews, from 2003 to 2016, shift register. Graham Lock's two 2003 conversations dwell on Harper's editorial stewardship of Sterling Brown's Collected Poems and his early years in Los Angeles under Coltrane's influence. Sascha Feinstein's 2007 interview functions almost as a memoir, tracing Harper's path from Brooklyn through integration and segregation to his teaching career. Heather Treseler's 2009 interview, paired with her own warm personal essay about studying under Harper at Brown, revisits his difficult years at Iowa and extends the conversation into the Iraq War and contemporary racial politics. The book closes fittingly with the editors' own 2016 interview with Harper, conducted for a special journal issue that, poignantly, was published only after the poet's death that year.

Red Letter Poem #311

  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 #311

 

 

 

My People


They were uncomfortable with expressions of feeling

and I suspect most of them died without ever hearing

a single “I love you.” Sentiment was tolerated in letters

where the distance between writer and recipient

kept any emotional excesses at arm’s length, literally,

and those slightly unsettling words were refolded

along the creases they came with, tucked back into

their envelopes, the flaps folded over and smoothed,

then rubber-banded and kept in a drawer in a sideboard

where they would be happened upon many years later,

and impolitely read by some stranger for whom they

were never intended, and then, with no hesitation,

torn in half, and in half again, and in half a third time,

and dropped into a wastebasket, to be consigned to

a rusty burn barrel at the back of the overgrown yard,

fed into the crackling flames, love after love after love.

––Ted Kooser

 

 

 

 

 

Don’t compliment Ted Kooser.  It discomforts him.  I think fanfares and effusive encomiums are simply not his cup of tea––even though he is an extremely popular writer with nearly fifty titles on his authorial resume, casting a wide net that includes poetry, non-fiction, memoir, and children’s stories.  I noticed over time that when, in any of my e-mails, I devoted a paragraph to praising his work, his seemingly-indomitable spirit, his characteristic generosity, my comments would pass unremarked.  But if I spoke about the weather blessing/afflicting my Massachusetts home, or enquired about the meteorological state of his beloved Garland, Nebraska, his responses were enthusiastic and carefully observed.  No, let me amend that––there were many topics that engendered bountiful responses: questions about his continued practice of waking in the early morning dark to write at his desk, to see what language has in store for him that day––that was worth a hefty paragraph.  Or work around his farm which the poet still attends to largely without help––despite being an 87-year-old, four-time cancer survivor––that merited a burst of spritely sentences.  And rural life; the compelling beauty of the natural world; his beloved wife, family, and friends––some of whom were struggling with the same mortal pitfalls we all must face––any of these topics would get the ink flowing.  Just not Ted himself, and why we––who have come to know and appreciate his unique perspective through his books and his work as a former United States Poet Laureate––like to imagine him as, if not a personal friend, then a cherished neighbor (no matter how many miles lay between our homes).  If that’s what is being offered: crickets.

 

I’ve felt very fortunate, not only to have published some of Ted’s recent poems in the Red Letters, but a whole chapbook of what he refers to as his “critter poems”––diminutive portraits of animal and insect life and the imaginative possibilities they provoke.  Fellow Creatures was not only one of a very few print publications issued from Red Letter Editions (StevenRatiner.com), Ted (and did I mention his generous spirit?) allowed the publication to serve as a benefit for this project so that poets and musicians performing in my annual Red Letter LIVE events might receive a small honorarium.  From time to time, he will send me one of his morning poems, and I was grateful for his blessing to include “My People” in the Letters.  I love this as a poem, but also for what it illuminated about the character of this remarkable poet (darn, there I go again!)   Composed in the straightforward language we might find in a family missive, he states plainly that his people “were uncomfortable with expressions of feeling.”  But he follows that with as devastating a declarative as I’ve run across in quite some time: “and I suspect most of them died without ever hearing/ a single ‘I love you.’”  It is a stereotype of Midwesterners, deserved or not––this flinty and stoical nature.  But to hear it put so plainly: I was shaken, imagining the children who might have hungered for those effusive embraces and expressions of deep affection.  I expect a certain self-reliance resulted from such an upbringing, but can’t help imagining a longing for more.  Was that what bolstered the poet’s predisposition toward literary pursuits where––as he says of family letters––“the distance between writer and recipient/ kept any emotional excesses at arm’s length, literally”? 

 

T. S. Eliot’s concept called the ‘objective correlative’ extends beyond simple metaphor; it is a literary moment, excised from lived experience, that embodies some deep emotional state and resonates with unspecified energies which cannot help but affect a reader, conjuring unexpected meaning.  The next few lines of Ted’s poem, describing the feeling sometimes expressed in family letters, are a textbook example: “those slightly unsettling words were refolded/ along the creases they came with, tucked back into/ their envelopes, the flaps folded over and smoothed,/ then rubber-banded and kept in a drawer…”.  Tell me you did not feel the pain of those “creases”, the dark tomb of that sideboard drawer!  And then, in a rush of stoic inevitability Zeno himself would have admired, the poet allows the years of a lifetime to flutter by like those brittle pages––falling now beneath some stranger’s gaze for whom those feelings, those human days, have no meaning.  Torn and discarded into the “rusty burn barrel at the back of the overgrown yard,” (now Eliot, too, must be smiling), they are “fed into the crackling flames, love after love after love.”  How much suppressed longing is embodied in that closing line and achieved with what admirable restraint?  So now I’ve changed my mind: shower Mr. Kooser with praise; embrace him through that quiet voice we relish in his poems; beam our love and admiration in the direction of Garland.  And if there is no outward response, please don’t think that means it wasn’t gratefully received.

 

 

 

 

 

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/