"Lunch in Chinatown" by Mary Bonina

REVIEW BY LEE VARON

Mary Bonina’s latest chapbook “Lunch in Chinatown” (Cervena Barva Press,2024), is a window into the lives of immigrants who come to this country seeking a new beginning. In her work as an ESL teacher Bonina taught English to adult students from all over the world .

I wish everyone in our country could read “Lunch in Chinatown” and have a glimpse at how hard those coming to the U. S. struggle to learn the language and culture and forge a fresh start— many fleeing unspeakable atrocities in their native lands. In “the makeshift classroom” at the edge of Chinatown in downtown Boston, Bonina met with her students.

As you can imagine, with students from all over the world , all trying to learn English, lessons often go off-topic and into interesting new areas . Or as Bonina writes “Someone always gets a discussion moving/ on a different track, a related subject,/ one that comes with its own set of problems.”

And sometimes Bonina, as teacher, becomes enthralled with the stories her students bring to class, as when Andre , one of the Haitian men in class, tells the story of when he met his wife in the streets of Port au Prince. You can almost feel the electrifying moment as : “He puts me on that bright street brimming with activity in Port / au Prince. I can see Giselle a young girl with her friends all standing / around her. They don’t giggle . They feign aloofness/ And Andre approaches the group, as he approaches his English class:/ shyly and respectfully. “

Or in the powerful poem , “Teaching the Past Tense” when all of her students chime in with the names of the countries where they came from: “Haiti. Guatemala. Ethiopia. China.”
A benign run of the mill lesson ends with the devastating stanza: “Hagos, the Ethiopian says — not somberly,/ just matter-of-factly—‘My country./ Lots of people dead.’”

Bonina has a wonderful ability to mix short lyrical lines with longer prose-like lines. This reminded me of the way so many of her lessons must have gone— some short and to the point and others discursive and taking many twists and turns .

One of the most moving poems was the title poem “Lunch in Chinatown.” In this poem one of Bonina’s students— Wei Wei— takes her arm as they walk , the day after Christmas, along the sidewalks “slippery with snow and ice.” Teacher and student are going to a restaurant to order Dim Sum—“The air was bitter cold ,/ smoky and scented with ginger and sesame,”.

Looking down, Bonina notices that her student “wore bright yellow summer shoes,/ like ballet shoes, but with hard soles.” Wei Wei, she learns, had “worked as a doctor / in China’s largest hospital.”
It seems that her fear of falling on the slippery sidewalks and holding onto Bonina is a metaphor for how these new immigrants hold onto these English language classes, and their teacher, to help negotiate living in their sometimes precarious and often confusing new world .

This is a richly imagistic and meaningful book of poems that speaks to our shared humanity beyond cultural and linguistic differences. Though only twenty- six pages, it is packed full of memorable vignettes that resonate long after we close its pages.

Lee Varon is the author of “My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery,” and “A Kid’s Book About Overdose.”
She is co-editor of “Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and those Touched by Homelessness.”

Red Letter Poem #226

  

Red Letter Poem #226

 

 

 

 

 

Tango


My wristband tight as a tourniquet,

my reptile skin windswept, dry as dust.

My glasses fogged by someone else’s breath.



My passport in a pocket where my hand

should go but won’t for fear of change.



The song a tango from below the border

that divides us, keeps us at arm’s length,

line drawn in sand that blows in our eyes.







––Wyn Cooper





Mary Oliver was once asked by a reader what a certain poem ‘was about’––and her answer came quickly: “commas.” She explained to me sometime later that she was not being flippant––the poem in question became, during the long revision process, a marvelous experiment in the use of commas for spacing, bundling thought, regulating breath. This memory came to mind because, if someone asked me what Wyn Cooper’s new Red Letter poem “Tango” was about, I’d be tempted to respond: T’s. Just listen to the spree of those hard consonants––seven in the first two lines!––like the rhythmic clacking of the claves as a Latin band swings into gear. In a poem named after a South American dance, it should not be surprising that the poet would have an inner soundtrack propelling the language.



But widening my purview, I find myself fascinated by a quality in many of Wyn’s poems: they feel like mini-cinemas in which we readers have arrived in our seats sometime after the first reel. We are quickly trying to catch up, fill in the narrative, speculate about the protagonist and where the movie is leading us. In the case of “Tango”, the film feels a little noir-ish, what with that “reptile skin,” fogged-over glasses, and “someone else’s breath” so close and intimate we’re feeling both aroused and exposed. But when the speaker mentions “below the border/ that divides us,” a soupçon of political intrigue enters the picture. As we approach what is surely one of the most divisive elections in American history, the very word border is fraught; and who and what we permit to cross our boundaries––let alone into our hearts and minds––becomes a matter of greater consequence. When I was young, I always loved how characters like those Humphrey Bogart often played––rugged individualists who could somehow feel enamored by and completely at ease in many cultures and locales––made me imagine a world without all those “line(s) drawn in sand” intended to separate peoples––blown sand, Wyn points out, that ultimately serve only to blind us. In those films, the dignity and imaginative freedom every character craved pointed toward a commonality I’d not heard spoken of in my public education. The very notion of a world with flexible borders and intermingling ideas seems painfully naïve these days. But elusive things like music, poetry, dreams still somehow find a way to subvert governments, slip past checkpoints, and bring us their stories, their truths.



Wyn is the author of five collections of poetry––the most recent being Mars Poetica (White Pine Press)––and the novel Way Out West (Concord Free Press.) His poems, stories, essays, and reviews––in accordance with today’s poem––have had their passports stamped by scores of publications such as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, AGNI, and more. He is also the co-creator of two fascinating recordings featuring the voice of the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. And speaking of crossing boundaries: his poem “Fun” was the basis for the Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow. It pleases me to think of contemporary poetry, in all its complexity, making its way into so many unsuspecting ears. When our dance partner is graceful, inventive, quietly assured, how can we help but be swept away?

 

 

 

 

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

Nassim Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

 

Nassim

Review of Nassim, a play by Nassim Soleimanpour

At the Calderwood Pavilion of the Huntington Theatre through October 27, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Nassim, currently playing at the Calderwood Pavilion and presented by the Huntington Theatre, defies all expectation of a theatrical experience. It features a new co-star every performance, and that co-star has not seen the script prior to the start of the show. As the play begins, we see the featured performer struggle to gain his or her footing as they attempt to act out a play about which they know almost nothing, cold-reading their lines projected on a screen behind them. The audience instantly sympathizes with the performer as the script they read pokes fun at stage conventions. On the night I saw the production, Armando Rivera, the Puerto Rico-born Co-Artistic Director of Teatro Chelsea gamely kept up with the process, even when the text on the screen appeared in Italics, as stage directions typically do. He boldly faced the challenge of talking to the audience while glancing back at the screen for his lines. A pair of hands sometimes appear with the lines, changing the words or forcing an emphasis the performer elides. About 20 minutes into the play, we learn that those hands belong to the playwright himself, Nassim Soleimanpour.

Soleimenpour has a fascinating story to tell in this autobiographical play. Born in Iran, Soleimenpour cannot produce his plays in his repressive home country. Living now in Berlin, the playwright feels always disoriented, writing in his native Farsi for audiences that will not understand him and then translating the script to perform elsewhere. As a result, NASSIM deals with language and the ways in which language both divides people and brings them together. Soleimanpour has gathered many languages on tour with his plays. He lives in Germany now, and seems largely fluent in English, though he speaks little. In the almost 500 performances of NASSIM, he has gathered words from around the world, which he shows the audience in the journal he keeps of words contributed by the audiences and defined by the performers. Through his “new best friend” – the performance’s special guest – Nassim and NASSIM reach a remarkable plateau of feeling and insight. And as you might expect, if you attend NASSIM, you might have the opportunity to learn some Farsi – onstage, in front of a supportive audience.

I would like to take this opportunity to praise Loretta Greco, the Huntington’s Artistic Director, who has shaken awake the somewhat staid old-guard company with a stunning and excellent line-up of inventive productions. And she has transformed the Boston theater scene not only through the Huntington Theatre’s annual schedule, but also through her policy of partnering with small theaters in the city, most particularly with African-American companies like the Front Porch Arts Collective. Under Greco, The Huntington will present Mfoniso Udofia’s multi-play cycle about a Nigerian American family. Efforts like this have opened up theater in the city, making it a truly a cultural institution for all of the region’s cultures. NASSIM carries this attitude forward with charm. Greco has the knack of staging shows that push the theatrical envelope while embracing the audience. Having sat through adventuresome but painful and destructive seasons at theaters elsewhere, I wish to give Greco unstinting praise for embracing the new without alienating traditional theater fans. It’s been a remarkable growth to watch. I hope the Huntington can keep Greco in Boston for a good long time.

NASSIM has an entertaining line-up of performers scheduled for its run, including Mfoniso Udofia, Tony Shalhoub, Jared Bowen, Keith Lockhart, and Imari Paris Jeffries. Every night will bring a different performance of the same play as these public figures and sometimes actors play with Nassim Soleimenpour’s script. Bringing in community leaders to perform makes NASSIM a bit of a gimmick, a gimmick that Soleimanpour used previously in his 2011 WHITE RABBIT RED RABBIT. But just because it’s a gimmick does not mean that it is easy to do or that it isn’t effective. My party left the theater feeling more connected to the world, and we can all use that feeling, however we acquire it.

The Biographer Poems by David M. Katz

 

The Biographer

Poems by David M. Katz

Dos Madres Press

Loveland, Ohio www.dosmadres.com

ISBN: 978-1-962847-07-0

71 Pages

Review by Dennis Daly

Spectral power belongs to ages and cultures long past. But here and there evidence emerges of its elusive endurance in the form of poetic techniques such as projection and personalization. Here imagination (Cotton Mather aficionados take notice) provides the proper venue with insight, empathy, and understanding as value added attachments. In his new book of poetry, The Biographer, David M. Katz haunts his set of chosen characters with his mnemonic underpaintings. He merges his rich emotional values with the objective facts of his characters, real or fictional.

Katz’s first poem, His Last Book, hooked me with its third person objectification of the artist getting old. Sentimentality and emotional pain are met head on. But they are contained and given purpose. Rather than bathos and mawkishness, the poet elicits an identifiable hard-bitten reality that one can recognize immediately. The poet introduces his protagonist empathically and with reflective preciseness,

… he realized

He was no longer young. He recognized

A periodic feebleness of mind,

A lack of balance, tendency to slip

And wobble in his steps, rise in the night

Repeatedly to pee: of scant concern

In themselves, these irksome little symptoms,

Annoying as mosquito bites,

Together made it seem to him as if

There were just two things in the universe

That mattered: his life and the end of it…

In his poem, The Altitude, Katz fills in the unknowable (read spectral) blanks between father and son. The speaker, no older than five, looks up the length of his father and nurtures the beginnings of an evolutionary understanding of the man. A moment of

drama creates a mnemonic guidepost on which the son attaches facts—both real and quasi-imaginary. Here is the heart of the poem,

… Suddenly I pitched

Forward like a ship, the mica chips

In concrete hurtling up at me before

My arm grew taut. My father’s hand had held

Me back from falling, though he didn’t seem

To notice, and we took a slow next step.

My eyes rose up and saw, beneath his hat,

A jaw, a nose, and something like a smile.

Generally, I am not fond of poems dealing with substance abuse, alcoholism or otherwise. Are You Still Drinking, Dad?, Katz’s piece on this very subject jolted me beyond any personal biases. Dealing with the disease’s phenomenon of quitting and relapse, Katz ghosts his persona with both unspoken and spoken connections that re-live intense, emotional hurts. But it is more than that. Missed opportunities caused by human failings are the bedrock of mortality. This Shakespearean sonnet is, pardon the expression, top shelf and my favorite poem in the collection. The last lines nail the irreversible pain and are not to be missed in any review. So here they are,

… He might have had one shot,

A rye to ease the future shock a bit;

Sweet Gypsy Rose; cheap peach or apricot

Liqueur. I said I’d be a father soon,

And he was miles away across the phone

On some highway with a cowboy tune

Fading behind. He always drank alone.

It’s now or never, Dad, I might have said.

Before my son was born my dad was dead.

Tread-worn spooks flitter past, still in grand context, but not as certain, not as noble in Katz’s mysterious poem The Code, written in memory of John le Carre. The real world is fading into the spectral by half and the activities of the spectral seem confused and leaderless. The poet has withdrawn his added details and leaves his audience in the dark or to their own Kafkaesque devices. The poem opens this way,

They were muttering in half-understood languages,

Half-wanting to be known, half wanting to know,

Half not and half-not. They were in the lobby,

Exchanging the code, partly overheard, the bellhops

Inured to it by now as they hustled

To the ever-ringing bell in their tight red coats…

Notice, everything appears compromised in this piece except the bell, which seems to signal the need for intervention.

Katz’s title poem and masterwork, The Biographer, A Verse Novella, spans twenty-six pages of compelling and imaginative narrative. The poet outdoes himself. He first creates a persona worthy of his truly American story. Then he essentially possesses the persona, not in a hostile way, but in a way that merges both biographer and subject in a dual adventure of creation and kaleidoscopic life.

Telling the story of an abandoned foundling, adopted on board ship on the way to Ellis Island, Katz’s persona intimates her techniques of biography referring to her subject’s newly found (and soon lost) parents,

… While Shmuel gazed, Ida

longed desperately to be off her feet. Their

Internal lives

are of course, my own creation, as is

the bulk

of any biography, a story

based

on a handful of facts. I have seen,

in fact, a creased,

anonymous photo of a pushcart

from that time

with a grimfaced father, mother, and

little girl posed

in front of it…

Katz’s narrative continues in a rapid, almost dream-like fashion, elucidating the life of vagabondage, independence, fame and activism. The reader, along for the ride, can do nothing but marvel at both the external and internal goings-on.

From beginning to end this superb book of poems illuminates the magical sum and substance of human nature, as well as the importance of soulful imagination at the heart of even the most objective life histories, or their fictional and spectral counterparts.

Somerville Artist Michael Silverman: A consummate coffee--doodler

 

Recently I caught up with Michael Silverman, one of the many artists in our creative burg. He writes,

 "My wife and I are both artists in Somerville in that we try to draw something every day at a coffee place. Over the last 6 years or so we have a stockpile of thousands of drawings. The whole thesis we have is to have fun with it.

How is it being an artist in Somerville?

It’s a treat. Love the atmosphere and the city is beautiful. Also it’s nice to be able to walk everywhere or take the T. We don’t have a car and don’t have to worry about parking/gas prices etc. Walking the bike path or down to Harvard and so on is a nice way to relax.

I haven’t cracked into the artistic community here that much as I’m not too social and tend to get hung up on minutiae that distracts from more meaningful discussion at the meetings. We did a few of the Sommer Streets festivals but I think maybe our art wasn’t the best fit for that kind of event. Mostly we just sold some pins and stickers.

I’m now thinking of that scene in Star Wars where the death star designer says “It’s a peaceful life.” lol.

You say the most important thing in creating is to have fun. Can having fun with your work, instead of wrestling with your work or struggling with it— can it bring serious work?

We all know the horrible artist who was obsessed with “My Struggle!” I did some political game stuff a while back that was fun to make and also a bit more… I wouldn’t say serious, but perhaps a bit more socially topical? It’s not my favorite project looking back.

My “fun” approach isn’t for everyone… Or even the path to making the “best” art. The serious stuff is something I don’t know how to tackle rather than something bad to make. Obsessing over somber and dark work and focusing on making that your life… I’m not sure I could stay sane. Or, to make a serious piece that deals with heavy feelings, do you just fake it? Does art reflect the feelings of the artist, or change them? Emotions are challenging for me, I’m not so sure I could look at the whole spectrum of human emotion in the mirror without a lot of support and hand holding and it feels like I already need a lot of support just to make my goofy wacky fun stuff. 

So the direct answer is: I don’t know. I would love to crack it… Serious fun!

The reason I make art is that feeling of freedom: it can be anything, there aren’t any rules (despite what people may argue), so I can just pour my soul onto the page and it’s thrilling to get my heart and mind out there. So maybe my art belongs hung on the refrigerator with the kid’s stuff? I wouldn’t be offended at that!

What was the germ of the idea to pair coffee with your art?

So I would go get coffee every day, people watch, sit there and do basically nothing while I got breakfast or whatever. Also I had some of those adult coloring books where I was deliberately not coloring in the lines and making my own pattern on top of the mandala that was there. It was kind of serendipitous to just combine the two, so I went to that “Blick” art store down near Central and bought a bunch of sharpies and a sketchbook and the “Coffee Doodle” was born.

Actually, I consider the coffee shop patrons my collaborators. Sometimes the antics of people getting a coffee or making some noises or having a conversation will change the direction I move in my drawing. There is a stream of consciousness element to the drawings, and having a bit of a kinetic element changes the work.

What coffee shop do you frequent to work on your art?

We have 3 major places that are near Davis Square, the Starbucks there, Diesel (I actually bought one of their T-Shirts) and the Bagel Place down by Rosebud, which makes a Lox and Bagel sandwich that competes with the real thing in NYC. The choice of place depends on the crowds, mood, and how hungry I am!

From looking at your work  it seem to be mostly colorful abstract paintings. Do you work in other genres?

Sometimes I will do a black and white piece when I am in a more serious mood. Those can be tougher days. As I was saying, when the art gets serious, so does my whole life, and then I start to get a bit down. I also sometimes do more representational stuff, or try to draw a cartoon. I would say about 90% of the drawings are abstract stuff. Actually some of my abstracts have been deemed “too representational” for some of the true Abstract aficionados. 

What artists influence your work?

Obviously Picasso is the big guy, can’t go wrong with him. I love cubism though I wouldn’t say I really am capable of doing it properly. Andy Warhol’s sarcastic post-modern “I want to make fun of the entire art world and make a ton of bank doing it” is admirable and cool. I think Paul Klee said something about wanting to be able to paint like a kid, which I have mastered, lol. I also like Mondrian, just because he is famously a boring person but his art is so impactful.

I also listen to a lot of pop music when I work that has a big impact on the mood of the pieces. I have a playlist of over a thousand songs and they all had their part in my work, lots of 60s, 70s, and 80s hits in there. Occasionally I will literally write down the song lyrics on the canvas, but only rarely.

Are you formally trained as an artist?

I went to an MFA program out in LA and dropped out. So … No. To me, the more formal art stuff goes into a miserable Game of Thrones style, “who will get to show their art to the world?” This is a crazy thing that I cannot stand and can even be traumatic to deal with. I don’t consider my lack of formality to be something good: I would love to make my work more professional. But sometimes if you polish a gem too much you end up ruining the stone.

In my high school days I was called “outstanding” and to be clear my school considered that a bad thing. I’m somewhat inconsistent, and sometimes really basic stuff I mess up, vs sometimes extremely complex things I just do easily.

I’m told my art is “Outsider Art” which is either art made by people without formal training, or the art of insane people. Pretty much the same thing, lol.

Why should we view your work?

When I say my art is about fun, I mean both for the artist and the audience. I’m trying to make the whole loop fun for all parties. For my work, I’ve tried to focus on the desert instead of the veggies, and I’m hoping that’s also what it feels like when people view the stuff. Even if you want to goof on my stuff or critique it, just have fun with that too!

for more info go to:

https://coffeedoodle.art

Review of Almost Bluing for X-tra Whiteness Timothy Gager Poems

 Review of Almost Bluing for X-tra Whiteness

Timothy Gager Poems

Big Table Publishing, 2024

73 pages

by Lo Galluccio

Is the title ironic? Is it meant to mimic a toothpaste or detergent commercial? X-tra Whiteness suggests not race in this book, but some kind of gleam. Or maybe Gager is playing on the theme of whiteness, and even including race. After several readings, I’m still not sure but the title, it’s pop and its ambiguity, drew me to this collection, without a doubt.

The book’s divided into four sections, the first “Blue” contains poems most of which are elegiac poems to loss: the loss of a pure, true love, the death of his beloved father, its blue meaning bereft, blue as in the blues, to be blue, sad, as Nick Cave mentions in his lecture on love songs like the Portuguese word saudade. Here is tangible sorrow, even desolation, a sense that the world has broken apart into a void. In “Dependents” Gager posits that rescue when it comes, comes too late to save anybody. “Listen/smother me with a pillow/Don’t worry, no one will come/…/and when they finally come…it’ll be too late.” p. 11. In “After You Go” he writes: “we send to the sky our grief/when writing letters/to the deceased.” p 13. This affirms both the sense of futility and awe that accompanies a close relative or friend’s passing. Certainly, a testament to mortality and our inability to stop death. And later, “No one makes/our longings/into a song.” There seems no compensation, no silver lining to this black cloud. There is a nostalgic poem to three past New Year’s Eves with the lost partner, now gone: 2020, 2021 and 2022, where in a Cape Cod Airbnb it begins to drizzle, “right before the sky fell down.” p 17. Gager deftly deals in worldly concrete specifics, often juxtaposed with more abstract forces, nature, the sky. In 1/1 he insists that his love is “one of one” and that since they no longer converse, “…I no longer recite.” p 19. A sense of mute longing that is however, undercut by the playful, imaginative language with which Gager crafts these “blue” poems. They are, as he writes in “It Sunk” “…my best pieces, /wreckage after implosion.” p 23.

Part 2, is a shorter section entitled “X-tra-White.” It begins with a poem called, “Reflections: A 17 Year old Drug Addict 40 Years Later,” a meditation on getting clean and losing bad habits of addiction, a little shoplifting, badmouthing others which amount to an “empty echo of lunacy –” and the harsh violence or violated foundation “struck, strike, striking,/of permanence.” The addict recovers through an act of faith as God is summoned and gives one more chance, so the addict “started to clean.” p 29. This is an ode to recovery without going into the painful steps sobriety requires. In contrast, in a combative mood, there is indulgent excess that is a “reply to someone who said, there’s a lot of selfish going around here.” In response to this reprimand, the narrator licks sweet syrup and heaps on bacon, “sticking my tongue directly on/the sizzle of a steak.” When something is stolen from us sometimes our impulse is to steal more from the world, in a desperate and seemingly justifiable greed, “I’m waiting to eat more/of what the world owes me.” He wants, “More/Bring it/Some more.” p. 31. Dunno, is Gager suggesting that X-tra whiteness in\our society means, addiction/recovery/country music/abuse/death…some of the themes in this section. He ends this part with a “found” poem that takes excerpts from Twitter, In Their Own Words on NYE, 2022, drawing upon the tweets of female public personas that

range from Michelle Obama (On Knitting) to Marjorie Taylor Greene (Saying Stupid as Fuck Things) to Margaret Atwood (On New Year’s Day)-- the kind of piece that gives us verifiable documentation of the way social media voices can scream at us for good or ill.

In Part 3, “Re(a)d” Gager moves into a more redemptive sequence of poems on matters of the heart. The first, title poem plays with the homophones, “red” and “read” and suggests that we read or interpret that bold valentine of love in a hypnotic, playful way. There is rhythmic music to it: “heart/red red/heart/red red/heart/red/heart/red.” p 44. Here is something almost primal about how fragile and trancelike a beating heart is. In “Picturing One Great Love” the poet pines to paint a portrait of the beloved and ends with the plea, “Can I finish one drawing/Please…just one?” p. 45 Longing can trick us with its endless myriad tugs, no matter how clearly we see and want the vanished love object to materialize. And there is also a coming to terms with the reality of not possessing-- the sanity of it-- by acknowledging our lack of control. In “Acceptance Poem” he pens an ode to serenity, a concept familiar to many recovered addicts (or members of 12 step programs of all kinds.) As he puts it: “A goal is to have no expectations/Please accept this distance/a gift, where serenity lives/as prospects crucified us.” p 51 Same as prey he suggests we survive with grace like birds, “hummingbirds, bluejays, sparrows and finches.” There is poignant beauty in the poem “Into the Silent Sea” where “the moon was not full today;/it was shaped like a heart,/seen from the bottom, light diffracted,/in a way that made you nauseous…/ that sickness that a state of isolation brings as he still feels “like an incredible ship/sunken and abandoned.” p 47. This section ends with a poem for which Gager was nominated for a Pushcart prize, a narrative poem about a visit to Star Island in 2024 that juxtaposes the calm beauty of a “white gull, blue water/the calmness of the completed” with the brutal excavation for a grave back home. The piece ends with a moment of seemingly perfect harmony though, a bird joining the choir by the sea, and the poet’s astonishment that “a piece of congruence, /swiftly the flash of/” could be real. “Damn, it can be,” he asserts.

The final section, “Blu-ing, as distinct from the first section, “Blue,” is where the poet takes on other themes, objects, even humor. It’s as if “Blu-ing” were the poet’s ability to compensate for or distract from the underlying grief by looking at the world with some jauntiness and resilience. It begins with “Abecedarius,” in compressed form, a poem whose lines copy the sequence of the alphabet. Only this one is just seven lines, that run from letters A to X, a lovely mysterious piece that lives “under voracious waters,/xeric, your zone.” Someone, and I forget who, said that a few poems should contain exotic or unfamiliar words, so I looked up “xeric,” and it means arid. With the big currents turned back, the poet is dwelling in a paradoxically safe, dry space, under a deluge. The poems “Almost Famous” and “Literary Action Figures” give us some comical relief; the first about how Boston’s so called famous eating joints are actually not known outside of the locale and the second is a look back to childhood toys and a sibling spat about a Barbie whose hair is pulled out, and a “Bukowski doll” and the favorite, a Kurt Vonnegut figure, who defies his sick sister’s destructive tendencies. Real or fictional it gives some insight into the writer’s psychic literary pantheon. In “Recipe Dumb-Ass Men Use to Cook Women” Gager catalogues the obnoxious ways men can turn off women in their ego-centric stupidity, including lying and “proclaiming distaste toward/ the dirty bourgeoise./ p. 69. A simple fave of mine is the closing poem, a list poem called, “Things You Find in Miami Beach,” that includes “a hairless cat” and “Hot as fuck/white/sand.” In the end, he leaves us with a slice of the world, an ode to escape on a popular Florida beach.

This is a marvelously composed collection that includes both the sacred and the profane. It’s about love, loss, mortality, addiction, recovery and survival and it’s both a good time read and enlightening literature about the state of our humanity. From the particle of deep loss to a wider field of understanding and acceptance, Gager takes us on a carefully executed poetic journey that leaves us wiser and well sated. I’ve frankly missed out on a lot of Tim’s fiction work, but I’m very happy to have found this, his latest offering. I feel both alive and awakened by it.

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

 

Leopoldstadt

Review of Leopoldstadt, a play by Tom Stoppard

At the Huntington Theatre through October 13, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Tom Stoppard has said that Leopoldstadt might be his final play. The production of it at the Huntington Theater, running through October 13, 2024, gives us reason to celebrate and reflect on the playwright’s accomplishments. From his first hit, Rosenkrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead in 1966, through his most recent work – with important side journeys into film, such as Brazil and Shakespeare in Love (for which he won an Oscar) – Stoppard has challenged directors and audiences with his intellectual slapstick, jumps from reality to fantasy, splices of chronology, and productions seemingly too large for the stage. In Leopoldstadt, Stoppard explores his family history, but with all the elements that have made his plays essential viewing.

Stoppard has transferred his family from Zlin, Czechoslovakia to Vienna, Austria, which gives him the broad canvas he loves. Beginning in the 1860s, Vienna became an artistic and intellectual magnet, providing a launching pad for excellence in diverse fields. Home to Sigmund Freud, Gustav Klimt, and Gustav Mahler, Vienna drew people and perspectives from across the Habsburg empire. Approximately ten percent of Vienna was Jewish, and Jews wielded disproportionate influence in universities, in the arts, and in society. Although still excluded from full and equal participation in public life, Viennese Jews led and inspired Austrian culture. Stoppard, who only learned at age 57 of his own Jewish roots, reimagines his family in the political and artistic milieu of Vienna, where secular Jews often adopted Christianity, married out of their tribe, and endeavored to mix completely into Austrian society. Leopoldstadt is a multi-generational family drama, in which the largely Jewish family is buffeted about through history. Despite their accomplishments, their friends, and their individual efforts to pass beyond social barriers, in the end Nazis determine who is Jewish and who is not, who is worthy of full citizenship in Austria, and who will find themselves in the ashpit of Auschwitz. Stoppard’s parents had the good fortune to escape, though his father died on the circuitous route to England, and he was himself raised as an Englishman, full stop. Most of his family, like most of the family we meet in Leopoldstadt, fall victim to the Holocaust.

Directed by Carey Perloff, who helmed the superb Lehman Trilogy last season, this production of Leopoldstadt handles Stoppard’s dramatic pyrotechnics adroitly. In the first scene, for example, the entire family appears on stage for a Christmas gathering, almost twenty characters crowding the stage with music, dancing, and family quarrels as we focus in on small groups chatting about art, politics, and religion. The scene could devolve into a confusing mess, but the Huntington’s actors, following Perloff masterful direction, keep the action moving throughout. The drama focuses on Hermann’s attempt to navigate Vienna’s turbulence with money and connections. He converts, marries a Christian, and truly believes he will ride out the tide of history. He learns, after attempting to satisfy his honor through a duel, that members of the class he aspires to won’t even deign to kill the descendent of a Jew in pursuit of honor. Only then does he, and the audience, begin to fully realize how impossible fighting the tide will become. Stoppard uses the well-known story of the rise of Nazism to point out the dangerous times we live in now. Toward the end of the play, when we meet the few survivors in the fourth generation of the family we meet in the first scene, one of the characters representing the English Stoppard observes that the Holocaust could never happen again. The audience knows better and gasps audibly. We have seen almost the entire family obliterated, generation after generation, before we can clearly distinguish individual members, more expendable Jews than remarkable people.

Brave and ambitious as it is, Leopoldstadt does not quite reach the stratospheric heights of Travesties or Arcadia, but it reminds us that we have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of sharing the earth with Tom Stoppard. As Ludwig, the family mathematician, uses a cat’s cradle to explain the hidden relationships between events discernable only through study and intellect, we recognize and thank Stoppard for helping us in our struggle to understand the extent to which people choose cruelty. Extraordinary performances by Nael Nacer as Hermann and Firdous Bamji as his cousin Ludwig anchor the picture of the family, even as they disappear under the waves of the twentieth century. The costumes, set design, lighting and sound also help pull together this complex family portrait. I encourage you to see Leopoldstadt and embrace the sweep of language and history Tom Stoppard brings to life.

Red Letter Poem #225

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Dear Readers: I’ll be taking a two-week hiatus for some travel and work commitments.

I will be back with a new Red Letter on October 18th. I trust, in the meantime, you’ll be busily making your own red-letter days.



Red Letter Poem #225



The Lindesfarne Manuscript 

Lamp-black for letters,

light sinking before him,

no wonder the monk believed

the world would end

in a whisper of fire.

Under the nib, the vellum

flexed like a woman’s soft arm,

the Gospels an elaborate tattoo.

In the cemetery, the stones

lay strewn like petals in moonlight.



Now we admire it under glass

and light candles only

for romance or hurricanes.

We trim black wick and write little

on paper. No wonder we believe

the world won’t last forever,

although in cities not our own

we throw coins into bright fountains,

hold hands and stare at night sky.





––Jack Stewart







Let me remind you of two tropes that have become familiar from novels and movies. The first: a medieval monk, laboring at his work table by candlelight, transcribing a holy manuscript. Such an endeavor represents the archetypical image of knowledge transmitted: gloriously, painstakingly, entirely by hand––long before the printing press would facilitate that process and make books accessible to more than society’s elite. If you have ever stood before one of the masterpieces of illuminated art––the Book of Kells is perhaps the most famous example in the West, originating in 9th century Ireland, but there are pieces of immense beauty stemming from the Persian tradition, the Hebrew, the Chinese, and beyond––it’s likely that you, too, were mesmerized by the intense spiritual practice that went into producing a single book. Today’s Red Letter poet, Jack Stewart, remembers seeing the Lindisfarne Gospels, a breathtaking leather-bound volume, assumed to be the creation of a single monk named Eadfrith, working at an 8thcentury island monastery off the coast of Northumberland. All that is known, believed, cherished can––within such a magnificent creation––be passed on from one set of eyes to another. But the second trope is considerably darker: it imagines some unspecified time in the near or distant future, perhaps following a cataclysmic event, where books have all but vanished––and those few that still hold to the sanctity of the written word are regarded like wizards, keepers of an arcane knowledge which the greater populace has long since abandoned. (I’m imagining fans of novels like Fahrenheit 451 or visual narratives like Game of Thrones, are smiling knowingly right now.)



I’m hoping Jack’s poetic voice will not feel unfamiliar to Red Letter readers; he has become a regular presence in these virtual pages. His educational roots extend from the University of Alabama and Emory University to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he became a Brittain Fellow. His debut collection, No Reason, appeared in the Poeima Poetry Series in 2020. He’s been widely published in literary journals like Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, and numerous poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He now directs the Talented Writers Program at the Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale where he works to initiate young minds into our literary brother/sisterhood.



Did you feel, as I did, that Jack’s poem both references those two tropes and quietly subverts them? When he describes the vellum as “flexed like a woman’s soft arm,” and the Gospels as “an elaborate tattoo” on this supple calfskin page, the tone is a far cry from what we expect of that celibate friar. The medieval scribe quickly morphs into a contemporary one, lamenting how those flickering candles are used now only for romance or power failures. “We…write little on paper,” Jack himself writes (initially in the pages of his notebook)––and perhaps you too winced to be reminded that this very text was being conveyed to your attention via electrons dancing across some lit screen. Are you thinking the mystique of the reading/writing experience has been diminished or enhanced by modern technology? I found myself nodding in agreement when the poet wrote: “No wonder we believe/ the world won’t last forever,/ although”––and that simple conjunction turns the emotional vector of this poem in yet another direction––although we still find ourselves journeying to foreign lands (often accompanied, not surprisingly, by our beloved partners), seeking wisdom, beauty, or at least the possibility that such things still exist. And so, as our contemporary headlines grow darker by the day (and do you even subscribe anymore to some inky broadsheet? or are current events delivered solely via the conglomerated pixels of electronic news?) you too might feel the desire to make a wish upon some exotic fountain. As the poem suggests: hold hands with someone you love, raise your eyes to the vastness of the night sky. That plopping sound may be the lucky coin breaking the watery surface; or perhaps it’s the plangent heartbeat a good poem can stimulate. Doubtless, it’s our quiet imaginations that are suddenly illuminated.

 

 

 

 

 

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