Red Letter Poem #217

 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 #217

 

 

 

 

A Pact

 

 

I make a pact with you, John Berryman.

I have detested you for a long time.

I completely agreed with your mother.

I thought you had no inner resources.

I saw your poems as navel gazing.

I saw you force form on a natural rhyme.

I still can’t believe you were such a child.

I wish I knew nothing of your real life.

I can now see, you had a bad disease.

I come to you now as a grown man.

I am taken by the Shakespeare in you.

I can even hear your Walt Whitman in there.

 

I see the minstrel in your vaudeville show.

I am old enough, now, to make amends.

 

 

 

                                     ––Kevin Gallagher

 

 

 

 

You say from Spring Hill: ‘I am not the same.’––

No more am I: I’m neither: without you I

Am not myself. . .

 

                         ––John Berryman, Berryman’s Sonnets #94

 

 

I, the first-person pronoun: how deceptively simple, when it appears in a poem.  Intimate. . .aloof. . .straightforward. . .confounding––this pronoun each one of us lives inside, hides behind, displays like a flag (but of decidedly mixed allegiance.)  Sometimes I signals the ‘confessional’ approach, an honest appeal to the reader, baring the heart.  In other instances, it projects a conception of the self, an aesthetic calculation we want the world to appreciate––hoping (at least in some cases) we, too, might come to believe it over time.  Kevin Gallagher’s new poem sets out a veritable picket fence of I’s as he attempts to make peace with one of modernity’s great and troubling poets (just as every ink-stained son or daughter must with their literary forebears.)  Of course, reading the piece, we’re left to grapple with a host of voices from a variety of poets, whose intentions likely do not coincide.

 

Let’s begin with some history: if you heard a vague echo in your ear when you first read Kevin’s opening lines, it’s because his piece is an elaborate reworking an older poem: Ezra Pound’s verse by the same name, dating from the beginning of the 20^th century.  Here it is in full:

 

A Pact

 

I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

 

Pound disliked Whitman’s long breathy lines and American matter-of-fact-ness, both in its subject matter and tone.  But he came at last to admire the Good Gray Poet’s authenticity and the liberating force of his imagination which, over time, helped give birth to what we think of as modern poetry.  When Whitman opens his long masterwork “Song of Myself” with this appeal to readers: “I CELEBRATE myself;/ And what I assume you shall assume;/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”, it takes time to realize this is not the “barbaric yawp” of some raging narcissist but the myth-making proclamation of our country’s first truly native (and radically inclusive) poetic voice.  In the diversity of offshoots that grew from Whitman’s roots, Berryman’s couldn’t have been more different: if Whitman wanted to carve out a dramatic distance from our European literary ancestors, Berryman’s brilliant mind wanted to wholly digest that lineage––Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne and (notably in his sonnet sequence) Sir Philip Sydney––and blend them with an unlikely 20^th century sensibility.  Erudite, often opaque, filled with strange inversions of syntax and kaleidoscopic literary references, the 117 poems of Berryman’s Sonnets (not to mention his even more phantasmagorical Dream Songs) both thrill and overwhelm.

 

Now, if you’re familiar with Kevin’s poetry, what likely comes to mind is its blue-collar honesty, its links to Irish history and mythology, its muscular and arresting imagery––all things Pound might applaud but which would certainly give Berryman pause.  And so what we have here is a tidal process across the generations: a kind of give and take, a raising up and breaking down––helping to refresh the language, drive the imagination.  It’s a familiar pattern among young poets: to counter their immediate antecedents and strike out in a new direction, building upon the wreckage of the old.  But then, over time (or so we hope), they’ll find themselves entering into a gradual reevaluation that helps us all to appreciate our literary ancestry, embracing the very traditions from which we’d once fought to free ourselves.  Keep in mind, some of these figures are more persona than person: is Walt Whitman of Brooklyn identical to the monumental I in his poetry?  Is the poet speaking in Berryman’s Sonnets the very same man who hoped those poems might entrance his beloved?  And, for that matter, is Dr. Kevin Gallagher––professor, political economist, and Director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center––the same mind traversing this bare-boned sonnet?  Or the same as the poet and publisher, author of four fine collections (most recently And Yet It Moves from Madhat Press), who I know from captivating readings around Boston?  No easy answer presents itself.  So as I watch him construct that column of I’s in this poem, and wrestle (as every writer must) with what the head and heart each demand upon the page, I can’t help thinking about all the scores of men and women whose creative visions I, too, have battled with, fed upon.  My desire to know them was always, perhaps, a stand-in for the even-more-daunting desire to eventually know myself.

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Review of Odysseus' Daughter by Cammy Thomas

 

Cammy Thomas, Odysseus’ Daughter. Parkman Press. 2023. 20pp. $18.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman

Amid summer heat and ghastly newspaper headlines, Cammy Thomas’s Odysseus’ Daughter blows in like a brisk, briny sea breeze. Nineteen poems beautifully printed, with a gatefold blue-gray cover bearing an elegant line drawing of Athena by the poet’s brother: the book is a pleasure to hold in your hands. And the poems make those familiar Odyssean characters come alive yet again: Penelope, Nausicaa, Cyclops, the sea nymph Leucothea, Argos, and others are transformed by Thomas’s precise, musical language into new guises. Anyone who has taught the Odyssey repeatedly—as Thomas has—knows how beautifully it opens up conversations about love, family, heroism, mortality, gender politics, and community. Thomas’s poems touch on many of these themes but what struck me most was their repeated return to the uncanny: the sense that on some level we are unfamiliar to ourselves, shot through with contradictory yearnings as we negotiate what she calls in one poem the “shifting voids of the waves.”

A Boston-area poet, Thomas taught literature and creative writing for many years (including fourteen years of teaching the Odyssey) and now lives in Bolton, Massachusetts. Odysseus’ Daughter is her fourth book.

Homer’s Odysseus, of course, had no daughter; men in his family bore single sons. I take the title poem’s imagined daughter to be the poet, heir to Odysseus’s prowess not in war, but with words: “my boat has nothing of mast or crew,” Thomas writes. “I stand under the bow of heaven/words locked in my throat.” Meanwhile, the world does what it will: the boat floats on an unfathomable sea, and “gods hang above decks.” Greek gods are notoriously imperfect, much like the humans in whose lives they interfere. The speakers in these poems live in an eerie, unmanageable world that mirrors their own unwieldy desires.

So Penelope is neither the standard sad sack, weeping and sleeping her life away, nor is she the clever, idealized wife. She’s just human—“weary now,” getting fed up. Yes, she cleverly manipulate the suitors with her ruse of weaving and unweaving her father-in-law’s shroud, teasing them “into limbo/as they feast on dwindled flocks.” But she also feels something herself:

Now I dream of the handsome one,

imagine his soft lips on mine,

shame myself in morning light.

Penelope’s desires make sense in human terms—twenty years of celibacy! But they also make sense in Homeric terms, as an example of homophrosyne—the “like-mindedness” of Odysseus and his wife.

“Sea Nymph Leucothea” is another poem about complicated desires. As a former human, Leucothea is pained by Odysseus’s fear when she intervenes to save him from drowning. “In his face/I see—I’m no longer human”:

Still, he takes the scarf, and it scares

the water calm. I sink back into the cold

foreign gloom that’s now my home,

turn, swim down.

The modulations in vowel sounds are beautiful and evocative. How sad, we think, that poor Leucothea is condemned to such gloom. And then remember that she has solace of being immortal.

On the facing page Odysseus is human and near drowning: “His arms can’t pull through the chop,/mouth choked with salt, a ring of jagged/rocks clanging as he goes down.” Between sound and rhythm, I can just about feel the whitecaps splashing into my mouth, cutting off breath. And then Leucothea-as-bird offers a scarf as she transforms into nymph. No wonder Odysseus is scared as he “pumps his legs/against whatever glides beneath.”

“Whatever glides beneath”: the sea in these poems—as in Homer—is the ultimate undoing of human identity: unknowable, threatening us with oblivion, undoing our efforts at control. Its apotheosis comes in the final poem of Part 1, “Facing Scylla,” a virtuosic rendition of seawater sloshing and whirling, drowning syntax along with Odysseus’ remaining crew members. Words repeat, return with varying meanings, rhyme, almost rhyme; body parts, boat parts, sky and sea churn chaotically:

We row the foam we sense the mouth

It opens in a moment smoked

Sea foam smokes the glass we row

The mast the past come floating on the foam

While Part 1 adheres closely to Homer, the eight poems in Part 2 move into the modern world. We’re still in the hands of forces we can’t control (whether we call them gods or not) but without Odysseus’s resources to help us through. In “Not Your Wit I Want,” the speaker mourns, “She’s got cancer/and I can’t do a thing.” Brawn and wit won’t help, only “toxic drugs and scalpels.” But still the speaker yearns for the “nose-thumbing backtalk” with which

Odysseus faced death. “Save us Odysseus,” the speaker concludes: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”

Feminist poets in recasting Homer have often elevated Penelope, Circe and Kalypso at Odysseus’ expense. Thomas’s take is surprisingly sympathetic, emphasizing Odysseus’ vulnerability. Even as he rapes a nameless woman taken in a raid, he seems a little lost, “her tears/rough ropes/twisting my heart.” But in Part 2, through the imagined figures of Odysseus’ daughter, granddaughter, and sister (who, unlike her brother, wouldn’t “pillage a town for fun,”) Thomas begins to offer an alternative to Odyssean values. The book’s final poem is its least Homeric, positing a benevolent Zeus horrified by what we’ve made of the world. Reimagining Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” Thomas has Zeus contrast the world he’d planned—“a simple favored place,/with greenery that shaded all from pain” and “no faceless governments that cannot feel”—with contemporary actualities; much as Auden contrasts the peaceful world that Thetis expected to see on her son’s shield, with the totalitarian nightmare Hephaestos has actually wrought there. But here I’ve come full circle, back to heat waves and ghastly headlines. “Save us Odysseus,” I’m tempted to say: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”

Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns

 Limitarianism by Ingrid Robeyns, Astra House, New York, 2024

Review by Ed Meek

Excessive wealth seems to be getting a little out of hand. To take one example, Jeff Bezos has a net worth of about $199 billion (according to CNN). We have a limit for how poor someone can be in the United States: the poverty line for annual income is $15,060. That’s where the safety net kicks in. Should we limit how rich someone can be?

In 2011 the Occupy Movement gained widespread support when thousands of people in New York City and around the world protested the concentration of wealth in the top 1%. Today, according to Statista.com, the top 1% holds almost a third of the wealth in the US. The top 10% controls two thirds of the wealth, leaving the rest to be divvied up by the bottom 90% and a measly 3% for the bottom half of the country. Despite the widespread popularity of the Occupy protest, the group made no concrete policy demands. Ingrid Robeyns, Utrecht University Academic (Economics and Ethics) provides a solution for them and us in her book Limitarianism.

Because of the growing disparity between the rich and the rest, capitalism is just not working very well for most Americans. Anne Appelbaum in Twilight of Democracy points out that this wealth gap leads people to embrace authoritarianism under a strongman who promises something better (or a return to the good old days). Sound familiar? While President Biden and The New York Times assure us that the economy is just great with plenty of jobs and inflation under control, most Americans think the economy is poor and the country is headed in the wrong direction.

Robeyns tries to convince us that limiting wealth, and reallocating it, will result in a better life for all of us. Does anyone need to have a billion dollars? She asks. According to economist Jeffrey Sachs, (whom she cites) “2775 people in the world are billionaires.” How about Elon Musk with his $193 billion (according to Forbes). Musk was able to buy Twitter with $40 billion and is now reshaping it to fit his twisted agenda. Musk also owns half the satellites in orbit. Isn’t that a little too much money and power for one individual? Robeyns wants to set a suggested personal wealth limit of 10 million dollars. The principal reason she gives for redistributing wealth is that it is the moral thing to do. It is a matter of fairness. You can hear echoes of this in phrases like “climate justice” and calls for “equity.”

Robeyns wants to redistribute the wealth to solve the problem of poverty. As Matthew Desmond tells us in Poverty, by America, the US has had the same rate of poverty (12%) for over 50 years. That’s 40 million poor people, far and away the most of any first world country. In comparison, a little over 1% of the population of China lives in poverty. Meanwhile, the federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour. That just about gets a person to poverty level. To make matters worse, Desmond and Robeyns tell us that it is the top income earners who reap the most benefits from the government in tax breaks for mortgage payments, lower taxes on capital investments than on labor, tax breaks for losses, and low taxes on inheritance.

Robeyns illustrates how the rich work the system and use their wealth in ways that hurt everyone else. They buy political favors, influence the media, and promote a culture of acquisition through

neoliberalism: the belief in individualism, private ownership, and free trade. Neoliberalism gained traction under Reagan and was picked by Clinton, then the Bushes and Obama. Now the tide is beginning to turn under Biden and the “social democrats” who are attempting a new version of the New Deal.

Robeyns also claims the wealthy are standing in the way of addressing climate change since they are the group with the biggest carbon footprint with their mega-mansions, car collections, yachts, and private Jets.

Philanthropy is not the answer according to Robeyns. With a few exceptions, philanthropists divert money that might have been better spent. Bill and Melinda Gates are an exception with their work on world health and green technology. Too many rich donors use tax-deductible contributions to enrich elite colleges and influence politicians to perpetuate the upper class. Robeyns even claims Limitarianism will be good for the rich. Avoiding taxes, finding friends and lovers they can trust, maintaining multiple estates must be a struggle, she says.

How should we tackle the problem of excessive wealth? Robeyns wants much more progressive income taxes. After WW11, tax brackets went as high as 90% on income. The top bracket today is 37%. She suggests a CEO to average worker income ratio of 12 to 1 (it’s 344 to 1 now according to the Economic Policy Institute). She’d like higher taxes on capital and the elimination of tax havens. And last but not least, she’d like much higher taxes on inheritance. Inheritance is not earned or deserved, she says. She wants to limit it to $400,000.

Robeyns is not alone in her call to address the concentration of wealth. Biden wants to raise taxes on the rich and eliminate tax havens. Politicians on both sides of the aisle have brought up closing the wealth gap (from Bernie Sanders to AOC to Josh Hawley and Marco Rubio). The organization Patriotic Millionaires is working to address the wealth gap. But because both political parties in the US embraced neoliberalism for so long, a significant number of Americans have turned against the government. Rebalancing and regulating capitalism must occur if we are to deal with the many problems we are facing. Limitarianism is well-worth considering and debating.

There is an ongoing argument about what the biggest problem we face is. Some would claim it is the conflicts between nations. The rise of China, the aggression of Russia, the discord in the Middle East. Others would say it is the challenge of climate change. Or maybe it is the issue of media disinformation promulgated by Fox News, Truth Social, Facebook, X and Tik Tok with the spreading of conspiracy theories, gaslighting and the blurring of reality. It is certainly arguable that the thread that connects all these problems is the concentration of wealth and power. The only way to solve all these issues, according to Ingrid Robeyns, is to redistribute the wealth and power.

Red Letter Poem #215

 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 #215

 

 

 

 

On the Road to Lviv

 

 

When Zagajewski read at Vilenica,

In the courtyard of a medieval castle

That fell to ruin long ago, to the poets

Seated beneath a chestnut tree, which rained

Ripe chestnuts on their heads at intervals

No one could time, their attention may have wandered,

For they kept looking up, as if in prayer,

Since poetry is prayer. This festival

In the Karst region of Slovenia

Brought kindred spirits from around the world

To revel in the word made manifest,

Here in the courtyard and later in a cave

The organizers called their tectonic cathedral.

Say amen to the poets, then, who savor

A blaze of words under the chestnut tree.

 

 

             ––Christopher Merrill

 

 

 

 

To leave   

in haste for Lvov, night or day, in September   

or in March.  But only if Lvov exists,

if it is to be found within the frontiers and not just   

in my new passport. . .

 

––Adam Zagajewski

                                       “To Go to Lvov”

 

 

Christopher Merrill has been speaking to people who aren’t there.  Of course, this seems to be something of an occupational hazard for poets.  After all one could argue that, in some cases, the self which composes a poem and the one who, later on, stops to make coffee are, at best, distant relatives.  And, of course, there’s always some imagined readership whose eyes might someday interact with the written text.  But, in Christopher’s case, his poems have, as part of their very conception, a broader invisible audience––and this is especially true for his recently-published On the Road to Lviv (Arrowsmith Press.)  It’s a book-length poem, written in short sections, depicting his deepening connection with the people and culture of Ukraine.  It evolved over time, beginning during a trip to that country in 2006; continuing with a visit after the Maidan Revolution ousted their corrupt president; and culminating with the 2022 start of the Russian invasion.  He has undertaken these often-hazardous journeys because––in addition to being an acclaimed poet, essayist, journalist, and translator––he’s currently the director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.  A cultural diplomat, he began recording his impressions of that beleaguered nation, and soon found himself in conversation with the much-loved Polish writer Adam Zagajewski––even though he died one year prior.  As Christopher slowly made his way toward Lviv, how could he not think of what is perhaps Zagajewski’s most famous poem, “To Go to Lvov”–– the city of that poet’s birth, and one that’s changed hands numerous times over the years, from Polish to Soviet to Ukrainian (the old ‘Lvov’ spelling reflecting the Russian influence.)  Zagajewski’s was a dream-pilgrimage to a city where his soul resides; Christopher Merrill’s was a nightmarish odyssey through the ruins of history.

 

I love how the poet’s diction is constantly shifting throughout the verses; one moment he is reporting, with journalistic exactitude, the way a Russian thermobaric bomb “is capable/ Of vaporizing bodies,” and how it “Explodes in a bright flash that sucks the air/ Up from the ground and out of human lungs.”  And the next, his speech is that of a political scientist, describing the theater bombing in Mariupol where “at least 600 citizens were killed/ That day in March in what investigators/ Concluded was not only the most heinous/ War crime in the first month of the invasion/ But the most visible in modern warfare.”  But before we can even catch our breath, his utterance shifts, becoming that of the broken-hearted poet who zeroes in on just the precise image, just the critical detail to shake readers’ hearts as well: 

 

For a set designer had inscribed the word

CHILDREN in white paint on the pavement outside

The entrances in front and back, in Cyrillic

Letters large enough for satellites

To register, and journalists to broadcast

Around the world, and Russian pilots to read

Before they followed their orders.  Bombs away.  

 

Christopher’s collection Watch Fire earned him the Lavan Younger Poets Award from the Academy of American Poets.  His writing since has been translated into nearly forty languages; and among his many honors are a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres from the French government, and fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial and Ingram Merrill Foundations.  In April of 2012, he was appointed to the National Council on the Humanities by President Barack Obama.  Reading On the Road to Lviv, and seeing the facing-page translations into Ukrainian, it becomes plain that his new book is also intended to speak––not for, but to––the people of that country, both the brutalized survivors and the all-too-silent dead.  Christopher is attempting to stand as a witness to that suffering, to make sure that politicians never attempt to take refuge behind the deceitful shield: we didn’t know.  In her landmark anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness, Carolyn Forché writes of that earlier time: “These poems will not permit us diseased complacency.  They come to us with claims that have yet to be filled, as attempts to mark us as they have themselves been marked.”  Certainly, there are children being born into the 21^st century for whom names like Mariupol and Kharkiv and Lviv will not be coupled with the sting of tears.  This poet is speaking to them as well.

 

 

 

 

 

Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner