Flashback Friday––RLP#12 RED LETTER

Dear Readers,


I’m doing the final preparations for the summer WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series––very exciting! If you haven’t heard about that yet, a flyer will be going out shortly. So for today's Flashback Friday, here's an updated Red Letter #12 from the very outset of this evolving project, a lovely poem from Polly Brown.



Enjoy!

Steven

 

 

 

Flashback Friday––RLP#12

 

 

  



Dvorak and My Grandfather



My grandfather was six years old
when Dvorak discovered America,

but I can’t be sure
this music ever reached him.

Instead, he had the cows, wide and slow,
carrying their cargo of darkness

under a blue Maine sky;
ferns and white pines, the river;

the bride who didn’t abandon him
when all the wealth of his barns burned down

a week before their wedding. Listen:
here’s the quick-fingered mischief

of their sons. Maybe the cello is what we take
from love into the city, to help us

breathe there. Or maybe the sorrows
that made him weep and look away, every goodbye,

could have been soothed by the sound
in the night, later, of a cello.



-- Polly Brown

 

 

Reading Polly Brown’s poems, I find a more permeable membrane between human nature and the natural world than is common in contemporary writing.  Goat, goose, barn swallow; apple, catalpa, spruce––they each share the spotlight in her poems like much-loved family members, and are just as astutely observed.  And grandparent, parent, child, grandchild seem to be elemental parts of the landscape, entwined with all that green urgency––and subject to sun, rain and all the varieties of mortal weather.  But the effect of Polly’s approach is often a remarkable sense of at-homeness in the world, a feeling many of us will realize we’ve forgotten somewhere along the way into adulthood.  And thus the poems comfort even as they challenge.

 

I love how clear-eyed observation, sly and alluring, morphs into something akin to mystery.  Those cows, “wide and slow,/ carrying their cargo of darkness”, alert us to something just beyond the powers of perception.  When “all the wealth of his barns burned down”––a week before what should have been life’s happiest day––and still the bride-to-be remains loyal––I felt the spirit of Thomas Hardy inspecting this family drama.  But then there is music, poetry, which erupt in our lives unexpectedly, and bring with them an almost anomalous sense of peace.  After reading the headlines in today’s Boston Globe, I could use a little of that soothing cello, and I’m sure I’m not alone in this.

After two lovely chapbooks, Polly published a full-length collection––Pebble Leaf Feather Knife (Cherry Grove Collections) back in 2019––and where this poem eventually appeared.  I am happy to report that a brand-new collection, Stitching, will be released in 2025 by Every Other Thursday Press.  Polly has received awards from the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the Worcester County Poetry Association.  A lifelong writer and educator––each skill nurturing the other––Polly moved back to her mother’s farmhouse in New Sharon, Maine, a place where many generations of her family had rooted their lives.  The voices embedded in that landscape––as well as the ones they prompt from Polly’s own imagination––continue to make their regular visits to her notebook.

 

 

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 BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George At The Hartford Stage

 

Review by Andy Hoffman

HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George At The Hartford Stage June 5-29, 2025 Directed by Zoe Golub-Sass

 The Hartford Stage closes out its 2024-25 season with a rousing production of HURRICANE DIANE, by Madeleine George. A comic take on Greek tragedy, the play has Dionysus returning to claim a rightful place among humans and stop the degradation of the Earth — starting with a cul-de-sac in a suburban New Jersey neighborhood. The demi-god appears as Diana, a landscaper promising to return the neat, manicured lawn of suburbia into permaculture forest, a state of natural equilibrium. Dionysus, god of wine, agriculture, theater, and insanity, prefers a world with as few controls as possible, a place that celebrates the rioting soul of both nature and human beings — especially women. The four identical houses on this cul-de-sac hold four very different women out of whom Diane plans to create her first acolytes and from there reestablish the Dionysian cult. Among the four, Diane first picks Carol, played coolly by Katya Campbell, in whom she senses a deep loneliness. 

Unfortunately, though, Carol treasures her suburban ideal of pristine lawn and curb appeal as the only defense against the wild disappointments of life. She dreams of an elaborate wrought-iron bench as the centerpiece of her blessedly restrained garden. Diana, repulsed both spiritually and physically, realizes she has chosen her first convert badly and turns her attention to Beth, whose husband sucked her dry and then left her in this emotional desert. The seduction is almost immediate, freeing Diane to shift her focus first to Renee, a former lesbian who already believes in permaculture, and then to Pam, an Italian housewife who has becomes the emotional center of this corner of the world. 

\The all-female cast – Christina DeCicco as Pam, Sharina Martin as Renee, and Alyse Alan Lewis as Beth – push the story forward with visible energy – holding the spotlight for Bernadette Sefic’s Diane. Between the sequential seductions, the women gather to tell stories and assess their lives. Like most of HURRICANE DIANE, these exchanges provide nonstop laughs, from the good-natured ribbing about Renee’s too-often told stories of her wild past to the more serious question of how much sex is normal. Madeleine George has a gift for humor; she’s a writer and executive story editor on the Steve Martin vehicle on Hulu, the award-winning ONLY MURDERS IN THIS BUILDING. The Hartford Stage brought in Zoe Golub-Sass to magnify the laughs. This production finds the extraordinary balance between humor and cataclysm. As Diane says in her opening monologue, “It’s 11:45. If I don’t step in now, the glaciers are gonna melt the permafrost is gonna thaw and fast-forward a hundred years and there won’t be a single human left on the planet to worship me!”

 HURRICANE DIANE blends the bawdy and existential threat into a shining example of ‘a spoonful of sugar’ to help the medicine go down, a call to action wrapped in myth and hi-jinks. Almost every aspect

Hard Up By M.P. Carver

 

Hard Up

By M.P. Carver

Lily Poetry Review Books

223 Winter Street

Whitman, MA

ISBN: 978-1-957755-50-2

25 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Calliope rules the world of heroic poetry. Even collections of short heroic poetry motivated by injustice. Whatever the intent of the poet, this muse waits for her opportunity to intervene, to alter, to charm. When reading M.P. Carver’s latest chapbook, Hard Up, one delights in the counterpoint between musical expression and poetical grievance. Carver’s (and her muse’s) ability to transcend down-and-out situations with humor and the necessary concomitant irony inspires. It inspires so much that the political point of her art becomes secondary to her admirable persona and descriptive magic.

Carver’s opening poem, At the Public Housing Complex, or, It Wasn’t All Bad Until We Ran Out of Sky, picks out moments of joy and possible goodness in a smelly, derelict environment infested with mosquitoes and bats. Her detailed attention to reality and blunted expectations impress. Even Carver’s tone evinces complexity by mitigating its sarcasm with conflicting facts. Consider these telling lines,

I remember the landlord

would come rolling in

for a visit in a shiny car

each Sunday and park it

in our rusting sea

of jalopies. He didn’t kick

anyone out for paying

late and got broken

appliances fixed right

away by his son-in-law

who came quick to hit

on all our single moms.

In her poem Why Do Teenage Girls Travel In Groups of 3, 5, or 7?, Carver conjures up the magic phenomenon of mall rat. The poet’s mnemonic shopping mall appears as it originally was, exuding wonder, brightness, and promise. Its starling-like denizens, the teens, commanded respect as they assembled, disassembled, and assembled again in concert, all the time avoiding their nemesis, the mall cop. In time, of course, the underside of this brave new capitalist world would wreak havoc on these innocents, a fate the poet duly notes,

…We were little gods of our

well-appointed domain. We didn’t have money,

but we could bum around and be swept up

in our tidy, colorful, shopping world just the same

as everyone else. Better, we knew every corner.

Knew, too, the old men, 20s and 30s, even 40s,

who hung around too long, trying to find the girl

whose home was worst, trying to look cool to an unwise

young rebel. This was before we got minimum

wage jobs like our parents, learned what it meant

to be broke and care…

The eye-catching centerpiece of this jewel-encrusted collection, My Friend’s Mom is CFO of Some Private Equity Holding Company; My Mom sells Rings at the Mall, says a lot about a daughter’s admiration for her mother. Carver describes the retail process, as her mother practices it, more like a dance or dalliance. She, in effect, translates capitalism into humanity, a novel alchemy without question. The poem concludes this way,

My mom makes the sale seem

like some half-remembered dream.

Not the dream about falling through the ice,

but the dream pulled out and fussed over,

‘til it’s so warm it shines.

Oddly, but wonderfully, Carver teleports Mencius, an ancient Confusion philosopher, into her poem entitled Welfare. Mencius, it seems, believed that people were essentially good. Now there’s a thought. His proof for this insight entailed his belief that even a common criminal would go out of his way to save a baby perched on the rim of a well. Carver points out that today’s criminal, schooled in our twenty-first century culture, might consider conditional implications. The poet, tongue in cheek compares the two eras,

… You could save a baby then, without

everyone asking What the hell? Who are you

to save that baby? There’s paperwork associated

with that baby. Do you know how much that baby

is worth? Mencius’s criminal lived in the Warring

States period, a good well-defined time for folks.

Criminals were criminals, peasants were peasants,

the rich were rich, yes, even then, and anyone

could just walk around thoughtlessly saving babies.

F. Scott Fitzgerald once famously said, “Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” Carver ruminates on the ability of these very wealthy types to book future rocket ship flights to Mars aboard Elon Musk’s SpaceX in her piece Safe Travels. Her gentle and full-smile sarcasm strikes home again and again. I find this poem strangely comforting. The poet notes how even her actions mimic the behavior of upper class when among them. She says,

I won’t make it to Mars,

but after a poetry reading

at the BPL the other day

I found myself in the IN crowd

at the afterparty at the Copley,

where a waiter brought me pillows

of pretzel skewered on plastic sticks

and I didn’t even look at him,

though he could have been

my best friend, my student,

or my mom who used to cater

weddings at Spinelli’s, at the head

table with the biggest tips.

Carver’s poetic grievances, despite their earnest and valid points, have no hard edges. Whatever you consider your station or caste in life, everything about this accessible, mini-book charms. Invest your time in reading Hard Up. Believe me, it’s (pardon the expression) worth its weight in gold.

Red Letter Poem #258

 

 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

 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 #258

 

 

 

 

A poem should be palpable and mute   

As a globed fruit,

 

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb. . .

 

                          Archibald MacLeish

                          from: “Ars poetica”

 

 Ars

 

 

I press the long handle of the mallet

into the wedged clay   the clay has already

been slammed into the table again and again

in the process of consolidation   airless it accepts

the smooth wooden dowel   making way

as I work it down   and begin to stir   finding

and making space a shape inside round

and oblong and square   it is everything before

it is something

                              one hand on the new forming

inner wall   the other across the exterior  fingers

spread   palm flat   the skin of me against the skin

of the clay I shape its heavy liquid substance 

this spadeful of earth that will never sprout a seed

listens to me   to my making mind that moves

inside it pressing   pulling   I draw up edges

to surround the hollow center   it shows me

it can stand upright and so I begin

the subtraction   gouging the surface

cut after cut I take whole slabs away

whose life is it after all

 

                          ––Mary Buchinger


Blame Horace. Whether you’re delighted by, intrigued, or simply cringe at those occasions when poets take their own art form as the subject of their work, this Roman bard deserves a good deal of the responsibility. Sometime between 20 and 13 B.C.E, he penned his treatise in verse, Ars Poetica, and legions of poets ever since have felt a certain compulsion to add to their repertoire––not only poems about their lives and loves––but the very process involved in turning life into verse. The principles Horace highlighted included: knowledge, decorum, and sincerity; and he advised poets to read widely, strive for precision, and seek honest criticism (not a bad starting point for an MFA curriculum). Poets––like all who labor earnestly at any profession––eventually feel the urge for self-reflection: the why and how of the practice, and to what end? What remains to be discovered about language’s capabilities––and, more specifically, what will that search show us about our own lives? I prefaced this commentary with an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish’s famous example of this sub-genre; influenced by the “no truth but in things” Imagists, he urged poets to create work that moves away from the rhetorical and, instead, produce word-objects that stand in the world like sculptures, whose physicality and presence embody the act of meaning-making. Today’s Red Letter from Mary Buchinger––esteemed poet, professor, part-time painter, full-time student of existence––would, I imagine, have made both Horace and MacLeish smile.



If not for the title (“Ars”––Latin for ‘skill’ or craft’, but also the root of our modern term ‘art’), we might read this poem simply as a hands-on description (and I use the word literally) of what it’s like to work with clay. But coming from a skilled poet, we can’t help but feel this is a double-game, where we can exist in the physical and intellectual realms simultaneously. As we, too, work the substance, arduously preparing clay to be used for pottery or sculpture, we are kneading the mind as well, feeling the materiality of thought and language, as it resists and accepts the forms we wish to impose upon it. Haven’t you sometimes wanted to slam some poor sentence onto the desktop, to squeeze the air pockets from its recesses, to feel it smooth out beneath the dowel of our attention? Is this potter/poet producing a vessel––and, if so, what is it intended to contain? Isn’t that one of the goals of all artists: “making space a shape”––whether intended for the pedestal, the page, or the mind? And what better description of the marvelous (and mysterious) stuff we craftspeople work with––clay, color, gesture, sound, word––than Mary’s observation: “it is everything before/ it is something.” “Ars” sits on the page as a protean mass of possibility, being formed (forming itself?) into a shape of which the mind might make use. Even the elastic sentence structure, the lack of punctuation, the caesuras (like air pockets in the clay? like places to catch our breath?) give us the feeling that we, too, must be actively involved if this poem is to cohere and stand before us. No, not a double- but a triple-game, because we cannot escape the Biblical allusion to clay being the substance from which our ancestral bodies were formed. Perhaps the maker inside these lines is divinity itself, bringing some sort of new progeny into being––and, if so, how can we not ask (as the poet does): “whose life is it after all”?



Mary is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks, the most recent being The Book of Shores (Lily Poetry Review Books.) Among her many honors are: the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Press Annual Chapbook Prize; the Daniel Varoujian Award; the Firman Houghton Award; and honors from Best New Poems Online and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is the past-President of the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation’s oldest literary associations, and (as many in this part of the country will tell you) has worked tirelessly on behalf of poets and poetry. MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” concludes: “A poem should not mean/ But be.” Yes, we know how the game is played: art is made by humans, for human attention, assembled from the substances of our material existence. Even when the result seems effortless (the artifice hidden from view), we grasp the intent of this undertaking. But here, we can feel the mind of the maker strenuously shaping this offering, as if arriving at its finished form at the precise moment we do. Mary’s poem sits here like a clay vessel, filled with sheer potentiality. Clearly, it is in the kiln of our shared imaginations that it must be fired.

 

 

 

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