Red Letter Poem #254

 Red Letter Poem #254

 

 

Unatoned


I’m fifteen years old, and halfway through our delicious

Dinner when my father, for once, gets home

From his store by six and sits down to eat with us.

My younger brother goes right on carving his lamb.

I lift my fork—then put it back down. I gulp

Some water. I try some bread. And then I get up

All too abruptly from the kitchen table,

And carry my half-filled plate to the garbage pail.



Fifty years pass, and no getting past the way

My mother looked at me. I couldn’t stomach

The stench that clung to his clothes from standing all day

At his butcher’s block. And now and forever I choke

On the meat from that meal: as if I’d sinned against

My father’s mortal flesh, my place at the feast.


––George Kalogeris


What is more shame-producing, more self-lacerating than memories of our youthful self-righteousness––and recognition of the hurt our blindness engendered? We knew; we possessed certainty––and thus any brash gesture or gratuitous attack on our part felt wholly justified. And isn’t this especially painful when we recall the relationship with our parents and the wounds we remember inflicting? Yet I can confidently repeat our and we in these sentences because such violation of our filial duty must be something of a universal experience. Examples in literature abound––even prior to that Biblical injunction to “honor thy father and mother”––and still the pattern persists across millennia. So, in today’s Letter, we have a further example from George Kalogeris––who, I must quickly say, is not only a superb poet (if you haven’t read his Winthropos, from Louisiana State University Press, I suggest you rush to your nearest bookstore,) but one of the gentlest and most thoughtful individuals I know. Still, at age fifteen, he could coldly commit an act that remains in his mind as a devastating sin: he attempted to shame his father for daring to come home from his butcher shop with the stink of the world on his clothing. And then, to twist the metaphorical knife, he dumped into the garbage the very food this hardworking immigrant had labored so earnestly to provide.



There are many devastating details included in this poem: how the younger brother, in his innocence, goes on eating, unaware of what is taking place. And how the platefuls of this “delicious/ Dinner” are heaped with lamb––a typical feature of Greek cuisine, certainly, but an unmistakable stand-in for their religious savior, the ‘Lamb of God.’ That the father most often comes home too late to dine with the family seems to be regarded, by the speaker, as a failing––ignoring the very reason why a man might be prompted to work such long hours. But the most wonderful/awful image, to my mind, must be the way a simple admonitioning look from his mother underscores the boy’s shame, returns pain for pain, which persists even decades later. Belatedly, we all must learn that it’s the family gathering which constitutes “the feast”––no matter how luxurious or simple the meal; childish diffidence only results in a kind of self-banishment.



Reading “Unatoned,” I couldn’t help imagining myself at aged eight, playing in our backyard, blissfully unaware, while––“protected” by my mother from the dark knowledge of what was about to engulf our family––my father lay in our living room in a rented hospital bed at death’s doorway. What I wouldn’t give to have been older, wiser, so I might have offered some comfort to this dying man. What the poet here wouldn’t offer in exchange for a seat at that kitchen table, to savor again the fruits of his father’s arduous work. And we both must share the company of a poet like Robert Hayden who, as a boy, only seemed to notice his father’s “chronic angers”––and not the fact that he arose early on Sunday mornings to drive the winter cold from the house, and to polish his son’s “good shoes” for church. When Hayden closes his poem with these plangent lines: “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” our hearts seize––and we, too, must remember. So what are all we ‘sinners’ to do about these shameful memories? I look back at the ancient Greek word ἱλασμός (hilasmos) which is often translated as “propitiation” or an “atoning sacrifice.” Even years later, it is still possible to make amends. I hope I’ll be forgiven if I borrow from the Hellenistic tradition and recommend an offering to the gods. Perhaps Apollo’s temple would be a good place to start because he was not the Father of the Olympian deities, but rather Zeus’ son––and I imagine he harbors his own memories of youthful disobedience. In addition, Apollo was not only the patron of poets and musicians but farmers and shepherds as well––so he has a deep understanding of how hard it is to nurture new life in a harsh universe. And what would be a fitting sacrifice? George, it seems, is willingly providing the ‘burnt offering’ of his transgressive heart. But I’d recommend this instead: a poem or a song which might delight Apollo. How about a sly sonnet like “Unatoned” whose colloquial rhythms and subtle off-rhymes barely rise above dinner table diction? Perhaps this might earn us the knowledge that our fathers and mothers have, most likely, already forgiven us the pains we delivered––because they, too, were young once and had to learn about “love’s austere and lonely offices” to expiate their own sad memories.

 

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

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

THE MELTING POINT Broadstone Books poems by Robert Fillman

 


THE MELTING POINT Broadstone Books  poems by Robert Fillman

Reviewed by Tim Suermondt

The poet Adam Zagajewski had a lovely definition of poetry, calling poems “a moment of lucidity.” And the poems in Robert Fillman’s fine new collection of poems display those moments with consummate skill. This review can’t cover all the mature magic in THE MELTING POINT, but let’s take a little look.

Many poets write about their school days, their parents, and the life they live now as parents themselves, but Fillman’s work on these themes is one of the best I’ve read.

His poems of school days are best exemplified by the wonderful “The Day that Baseball Taught Third Grade,” some of the teachers a Mr. DiMaggio and a Mr. Williams. But the true poignancy of the poem is when it ends on Mr. Buckner who will forever be remembered as the player who let an easy ball get by him, whose almost broken legs prevented him from bending down far enough and helped cost the Red Sox a World Series. Yet he wins when he tells the children mistakes will happen to everyone, even those with good legs. I appreciate Fillman’s awareness of the fragility of life for children too which he catches most movingly in “Boy on a Train” and “Things Like this Happen.”

Parents can come in for a beating in poems—they’ll always take some flak—but despite the differences of growing up in a life he wasn’t entirely comfortable with, a life of drinking, smoking and hunting, Fillman doesn’t berate, displaying the maturity I mentioned earlier. He looks upon his parents now with forbearance and affection, while still questioning and probing that life in poems such as “After the Fallen Deer,” “On Not Hunting Crisby Land Again this Year with my Kin” and “I Have Never Held a Gun—” / never wanted to look down/ a sight.”

As for the poet’s family, I like the daughter who’s not afraid to get on the father, especially to watch his drinking and the son who’s admonishments are of a quieter variety, all while the father is questioning himself—is he doing the right things as a parent, will his children manage the line between being aggressive and being passive, and in a most human and humorous moment, will his son ever forgive him for not bringing the boy’s karate belt to his karate lesson?

And despite all the doubts, how great it is for the father and son to go down the water ride at the amusement park, together—“a boy just looking happy to be alive.”

He writes so well of his neck of the country, the Long John Silver’s Restaurant, for his birthday no less, a diner that went belly up—the pathos (and that’s the word) of its demise captured in “SORRY, WE’RE CLOSED FOR GOOD”—the trips to the WAWA supermarket to pick up bags of ice to soothe his wife’s health condition. Iceman, you bet. Fillman’s poems of and to his wife are beautiful, proving there’s enough in the every day that will keep a poet occupied and writing The last poem in the book “There Should Always Be Two” is one of the best love poems I’ve read recently—those grapefruits and oh that pie on the kitchen counter!

Fillman also, most interestingly, includes three poems inspired by paintings by Rembrandt, Jackson Pollock, and Andrew Wyeth. At first glance they seem a bit out of place, but, no, Fillman has threaded them well into the book, and the atmosphere remains, even enhanced. The poem that I liked the most is the Wyeth “Abandoned Boat”—here’s the perfect ending: “Here a way of life is stranded/on the shore, like a lost bucket/ of oysters baking in the sun, the blue flesh of barefoot soles/cold against a wet, slatted floor.” That “slatted” I might steal for one of my poems. And since we’re all on a journey, lost and found in one form or another, it’s a good move to bring Robert Fillman’s THE MELTING POINT along with us, poems from a poet worth paying attention to, a poet we’ll be reading with pleasure and for insight for many years to come.

The Daylong Muse in Ron Padgett’s new book of poems Pink Dust

 

A H a n d p i c k e d P o e m

by Michael Todd Steffen

From his new book of poems, Pink Dust, in a section with the title “Geezer,” Ron Padgett writes,

It’s something of a relief

to fritter away a few hours

doing not much of anything

other than walking around

and looking at things

that aren’t in any way remarkable,

and to know

that, of the diminishing hours

left in your life,

you are frittering some away,

something you can’t remember

ever doing before,

relaxing into nothing in particular.

Like many of the “poems” in the book, this little meditation appears without a title. There are section headings throughout the book, announcing sequences. Pink Dust may be one long book-length poem with sections. It’s unannounced, another sign of blurring sequential and temporal definitions, a privileged work and view of a work and works for a laureate poet.

The poem appears on page 38 of the new book: 3 the mathematical whole number representing a circle; 8 the figure of the circuit of eternity: more, there’s more, onward, endless, like the meditation that feeds poetry, a discipline of attention where the unremarkable often comes into focus as remarkable. And, in this poem by Padgett, where the subject is frittering, “relaxing into nothing in particular,” where the (un)act of (no)concentration—“looking at things / that aren’t in any way remarkable”—becomes remarkable, catches our notice, tells me, in fact, how prone my mind is to busy-ness, how addicted I am to being intellectually proactive, even spurred onto it the more by the hum and light constantly in my back pocket or in the palm of my hand. Not only is it ruining my eyesight and posture (bent neck), it’s the source of a great deal of tension in my head, as in the belly after you’ve eaten too much. Sleep specialists tell us it’s a major source of widespread insomnia in our times.

When we’re ever looking at something made to be looked at, we omit silence, meditation, wandering, reflection. The gifts of frittering. We become an answer machine.

Like that, Padgett has, accidently or not, hit upon a general malaise of the times by merely setting out to confront a particular anxiety in his own life, in its “diminishing hours,” more and more discovering how open-ended writing is in the far field (Roethke) – more, onward – which

leads simultaneously to a sense of the futility, the endlessness of it. What’s interesting is how frittering becomes a rebellion against that urgent sense of economizing these last precious moments. It is a poignant microcosmic moment, for a poet who has walked with John Ashbery and Kenneth Koch on the traces of high modernism and its sources in surrealism and dada, back to their seminal rejections, in the early 20th century, of the hyper stress brought to daily life by mechanical engineering and productivity-oriented Nationalism and Fascism—with their efforts to be rid of the unproductive, undesirable elements, doing what humans do most, and especially intellectuals, hanging around, having conversations, just being here.

In 2018, the Poetry Society of America awarded Padgett the Frost Medal, for a distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry. A busy intellectual lifetime, reaching further back than its first appearance in an avant-garde literary journal, The White Dove Review, in high school in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Between then and now, a staggering output of publications in prose and poetry (over 20 volumes now)—and awards, including an L.A. Times Book Prize, the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award, and the Chancellorship of the Academy of American Poetry from 2008 to 2015— attest to the kind of restless, prolific literary life, the vigilant, upkeeping mind that could make a significant statement about the virtue of a couple hours of frittering.

Good poems don’t leave us silent. But they do much more than simply add to the chatter in our minds. The right words, mots justes, become a vehicle to remind us we’re consuming perhaps an awful lot of language; straining at its limits and ripe silences for genuine expression and meaning; expending, per-minute per-day, an awful lot of concentration. It’s good for us to zone out, back off, take a walk. Breathe, as the cognitive behavioral therapists remind us. Who of us, stepping out onto a crosswalk, isn’t potentially in a twilight zone? It’s something beyond the secular sense of things, in our sense however dim that might be of eternity. We’re all, on one level, in the same boat, aged 17, 26, 35, 52, 81 or 90. Life is mortal, we each feel its urgency, pine in its slags.

Anne Waldman nails the general feeling Padgett’s late writing, “masterful for its panoramic humanity and mind-stopping verbal wit, its breathtaking power and beauty. We want to stay with the person in these poems all day long.”

Pink Dust

poems by Ron Padgett

ISBN: 9781681379081

New York Review Books / Poetry, 2025

is available for $16

through The Grolier Poetry Bookshop

www.grolierpoetrybookshop.org

or from New York Review Books

207 E 32nd Street, New York, NY 10016

www.nyrb.co

Methods of Repair, Micro Poems by Michael Keith

 

Michael C. Keith

Methods of Repair, Micro Poems

Scantic Books

Methods of Repair © Copyright 2025

By Michael C. Keith

ISBN 979-8-9913229-1-1

165 pages, softbound, No Price Given

Review by Zvi A. Sesling

Michael C. Keith is an extremely accomplished author. His resume includes more than two dozen books on electronic media, a memoir, a young adult novel and twenty-nine story collections. And now, Methods of Repair, Micro Poems.

Although it is a departure from his normal prose efforts, Keith has hit a homerun with his micro poems. First is the wonderfully eclectic cover by his late wife, Susanne Riette. Next are the poems themselves which reflect Keith’s sense of humor as in

Ties That Bind

Shoe laces have

low regard for Velcro

and almost total

contempt for loafers

Then there is a view of marriage that many people, male and female must heed :

My Third Divorce

The first two were better.

Or if you are looking for some humor about poetry:

Keith, who has read and knows many poets, both famous and unknown is in an excellent position to know the fairness of the poetic scene.

Who Said the World is Not Fair?

There are as many great unknown poets

as there are great well-known poets

Of course

A Liar at Confession

Bless me Father

for I have not

sinned.

-2-

Even death can bring a bizarre approach in which Keith and his readers will find a comical viewpoint thanks to a few feet of snow:

Blizzard of ‘78

Snow piled so high

Corpses were nine feet

Under.

Conundrums are a familiar format to Keith as we can see in his puzzle of the limb and the head.

Which?

The

tree limb

fell

on his

head

and it

broke.

The title poem Methods of Repair

A freon leak

in our a/c

we sit under it

to keep cool.

In addition to humor Keith is a keen observer of what might be overlooked, yet obvious once noted. Take for example

The Great Plains of Western Kansas:

Where he could set his GPS

for nowhere and get there.

Whoever Keith is referring to does not wish to be in Kansas anymore. And the GPS replaces Dorothy’s tornado which transports her out of the plains and farmlands of Kansas to a faraway dreamland.

Or remember that ultra-thin paper they used in typewriters that was often required in college or corporate reports:

-3-

Copy?

Onionskin

isn’t made

from onions

or skin.

Affection Goes the Way of Daylight

Thought about friends

I had long ago.

Were very special to me

back then.

Don’t care to see them

anymore.

The final poem is perhaps the truest of Keith, for me and for many people. We all move on from rascals, liars, cheaters, criminals, girlfriends, boyfriends, ex-spouses, even relatives. Everyone changes, outgrows others and moves on. Even then there might another set of forget thems and how many times that occurs is dependent on each individual. As Keith infers, there can be new people who are special to him, but who he may forget about in the future.

All in all, Michael C. Keith has authored a book of micro poetry that encompasses humor, observation and seriousness. In fact, the subtext to all of his micro poems are sober reflections of his personal thoughts and experiences.

I was thoroughly engulfed in Keith’s poems and viewpoints and recommend them both for their creative writings and as prompts for your own writing.

Red Letter Poem #253

 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 #253

 

 

 

 Two Poems from As If: Variations on Enrique Anderson-Imbert by Steven Cramer

History

His travel grant came through, so where should he go?

The Roaring 20s? The Enlightenment? The Renaissance?



Because he just turned forty, the Middle Ages maybe?

The morning suddenly went dark. When he looked up,



he expected to see clouds, with a remote hint of thunder.

Instead, he saw a giant hand draw back behind the sky,



as if unsure how to move on history’s chessboard: queen,

bishop, knight, rook, pawn? Or stay unmoved like the king?





In the spirit of this forthcoming poetry chapbook, As If––not to mention the Argentinian microcuentos (micro-stories) upon which the poems are based––please indulge my own fantasy: it’s a crowded gathering in the studio of poet/educator/translator/reader-par-excellence Steven Cramer. In one corner, Basho is serving tea to Emily Dickinson, murmuring provocatively. I believe that’s Rimbaud and Rainer Maria Rilke heatedly discussing ‘lyrical innovation’ with Eric Clapton, sipping from rather more potent libations. Huddled on the couch, laughing, Tomas Tranströmer is showing Philip Guston how to use a cell phone to search for ‘wild images.’ Such is the boisterous salon an hospitable poet like Steven maintains inside his cerebral parlor, entertaining all of the influences (artistic and otherwise) which, even after decades, remain formative for an always-evolving imagination. It’s the confluence of these disparate forces that makes this poet’s writing so unpredictable and engaging across seven poetry collections and innumerable essays. His last book, Departures from Rilke (Arrowsmith Press), attempted something rather unorthodox: he didn’t so much attempt ‘translations’ from Rilke’s Neue Gedichte/New Poems as he wholly reimagined them as contemporary texts––both responding to and transforming the originals by channeling them through his own life experience and out into the atmosphere of our 21st century American life. The work of both Rilke and Cramer felt enlarged by the experience.



Perhaps invigorated by that project––and the critical esteem it garnered––Steven began immersing himself in the microcuentos of Enrique Anderson-Imbert (1910-2000), South American fiction writer and scholar. He was intrigued by the unbridled nature of Anderson-Imbert’s vision which, sadly, did not often find an adequate representation in English translation. In the end, Steven selected twenty-one pieces from three collections of short fiction––and what was born originally as prose reemerges here as succinct lyric poems. As If, the chapbook that resulted, will be published by Lily Poetry Review Books sometime this September. In it, the poet has made sure that the playfulness and imaginative reach of the fiction remained intact; the poetry, while distinct, feels to me like a dream-cousin to the original. And so, in a poem like “History,” why shouldn’t the term ‘travel grant’ inspire a more far-reaching sabbatical journey than, say, a few weeks London or Rome? I love how Steven hints at the literary catalog many of us are still carrying inside our weary minds, decades after college. At first, we smile at the whimsical slide from the personal (“Because he just turned forty”) to the historical (visiting “the Middle Ages maybe?”) But when he follows that with: “The morning suddenly went dark,” it’s not unreasonable to hear a distant terza rima echoing in our ears––“Midway on our life’s journey/ I found myself in dark woods,/ the right road lost…”––and the stakes of this little fantasy are suddenly a bit more dire. Or, in another bit of mythic invention, we meet a decidedly more contemporary teenager in “Icarus” who is, nonetheless, still determined to expand his artistic reach. But is he some thrill-seeking hang glider who needs the possibility of plummeting in order to feel his own life as actual? Might the impulse also be to ensure the abiding attention of the parent who gives order to our universe? Or is the poet reminding us, in that final riven stanza, of something we understood in our youth but tend to forget within our older and more cushioned existence? That some radical surrender may be necessary (at least metaphorically) if we’re to finally step beyond the limitation of our bodies and know the universe from a wholly new vantage? Reading through this set of poems, I believe that Steven does indeed desire to chirrup with invented birdsong and to navigate ocean currents with the fish. His poetry reminds us that there are many more experiences, more guests to invite into our celebratory lives, than we’ve yet to imagine.



Icarus


Dad didn’t get my imagination

whenever I chirruped birdsongs,



broke into a trot during our walks,

or made like a whale vacuuming krill.



The last time we flew together,

I wanted the sun to melt the wax



fastening wings to my shoulders.

To feel how a fish breathes water,



I wanted to plunge into the sea.

 The Red Letters

 

* If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your own in-box – or would like to write in with comments or submissions – send correspondence to:

steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com

 

 

* To learn more about the origins of the Red Letter Project, check out an essay I wrote for Arrowsmith Magazine:

https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And coming soon:

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