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

Poet Gloria Monaghan: A Love Song to Detroit and the sweet/sadness of life

I recently caught up with New England Poetry Club member-- Gloria Monaghan. She has a new poetry collection out from the Lily Press titled " The Diary of St. Marion"  

From her website:

Gloria Monaghan is a Professor at Wentworth University. She has published seven collections of poetry. Her seventh book, Diary of Saint Marion, Lily Poetry Review, (2025) was featured at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (2025, AWP). Her poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, NPR, Poem-a-Day, Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Quartet and River Heron among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Griffin Prize. She has also been nominated for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. Thanks to a Bistline Grant from Wentworth Institute, she recently completed a film on the painter, Nancy Ellen Craig, Daughter of Rubens, which was accepted into the 2023 Provincetown Film Festival. She is currently working on another film about the Dominican painter, Jose Ricon Mora.

You grew up outside of Detroit. I know Marge Piercy grew up there and wrote about the city. The city is not known as the Paris of the Midwest—what did Detroit give to you as a poet?

I come from an old Detroit family. My great, great uncle won $5,000 in a card game in 1903 and picked up the phone and bought the Tigers baseball team. In the 1880’s Detroit was like New York in its glory days. There was a port which contributed to trade and wealth of the city. There was and still is beautiful architecture. The houses of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are still there, albeit in poor condition. In the days when I grew up right outside of Detroit, it was a seedy, ruined place. It has always had a sort of underground art scene, and now wonderful poets thrive in Detroit and the area we used to call, the 3rd coast.

It was dangerous, but it felt glamourous to me as a child. In the 80’s, when I was a punk rock kid, we would venture down to the Freezer Theater, Lilies in Hamtramck, and Bookies on Joy Road. These were really run down places, some of them abandoned. But there were great bands that played there like Iggy Pop, Killing Joke, The Necros, and L7. It was an innovative and interesting scene. The City Club which became Clutch Cargo had an old jazz club adjacent to it, and we would go there after the shows and hear music from the old jazz masters. It also had an abandoned swimming pool on the upper floor where some of us would swim. Detroit, for me, was nostalgic; the old glory of those empty beautiful buildings, the train station, and the anger of the youth 100 years later. My grandmother would tell me stories about Detroit. She lived in the past, and I got that from her.

In your new collection of poetry, it opens with a little opera bag, What is the story behind this?


The little black opera bag is miniature. I found it in my grandmother’s desk and took it as a relic. I made a small shrine of skeleton keys, dirt blessed by a priest, and a patch of my grandmother’s crocheted work. I had this idea that these objects, in addition to the over 80 letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother that no one had opened or read for 100 years, would transport me to another time. I found the letters in an old wicker basket. No one had opened them. They were written on the USS Mississippi in 1919 where my grandfather was serving in WW1. When I opened these letters, I could smell his cologne- a faint lime smell, cigarettes and desire. It blew my mind. Perhaps these objects could speak through me, and I would tell their stories and secrets.

You have a number of dog poems in your book. In one you get inside the canine experience-- the elemental and instinctual aspects. I know Billy Collins wrote a number of fine dog poems. There is always an interest in how our pets view the world. What is your take on dogs?


I like what you said about the instinctual and elemental- I think that is what I was attempting. Dog is God spelled backwards. And it is true that all animals lead us to God and the divine. They know things we are too blind to see in daylight. They provide us with comfort and peace. They have not forgotten their kill instincts. They accept death as a natural phenomenon, and they know that it is not the end.

In your poem " I am not afraid of Storms" you write of a chance encounter with a young man on a train. I love taking trains because of the limbo between destinations—you are sort of outside time. There is a sort of ephemeral, transitory magic.....

When I was a kid in college, I would take the Detroit train to Kalamazoo and then later Chicago. I got to know the backs of people’s houses, the farms of corn and beans. The train window provides a quiet view of the loss of the people who have lived there for decades. Taking the train for me was cheap at the time, but it also was a place to write and read. Taking the train is cinematic. It fills your head with the lives of those forgotten. You are outside of time and perimeter. Anything can happen on a train.

You are a member of the New England Poetry Club—and have been nominated for a Motton Prize. What does the club mean to you?


I am a proud member of the New England Poetry Club. It was founded in 1915, and as far as I know it is the oldest poetry club in America. I am honored to have been nominated for a Motton Prize. To me, the club is about community. They sponsor prizes, events and support for poets in New England. It is rare, and it is a labor of love for those poets who work hard to protect the heritage of poetry. People can sometimes take these institutions for granted, but they are fragile, especially in these times when the arts are generally under attack. NEPC is a refuge for poets and a community of love.

Suddenly I Become the Dog

Hooves melt in the dust dirt
mouth slack open.

I have nothing to hide.
Chipmunk dead in the grass.
Did I do that?

His eyes weirdly peaceful
tail still fluffy
small smile.

I don’t remember it.
When time stopped, I was
chastised for recklessness

made decisions no longer justified.

In my youth I was a star shatterer.
Now I scatter black flies

left to my own devices
sheltered and surrounded by flowers
forgotten or tamed.

What rubric against the sky,
Orion, lost love,
has caused this shift to silence?

Red Letter Poem #257

  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 #257

Loneliness


In Henri Cole’s erotic sonnet

about the carwash I misread

flesh-colored tentacles for desire

in the lap of his mate—



desire to touch, somehow

to be touched, or is it the loneliness

of suds squalling over the car—

slap of rags on the windshield.



It’s May. Night goes down

on a garnet suture later and later.

I ask how to extinguish sadness.



I don’t have to say it out loud:

I blow out a candle, make a wish

then reach for you in the dark.

––Anastasia Vassos



I hesitate to use the metaphor (here, in this age of pandemic), but it’s just so apt: poetry is a virus. Only rarely does it spontaneously erupt inside an individual consciousness. We catch it from someone who already has it. Beauty, too, is infectious and, once exposed, it insinuates itself into our nervous system. We soon grow accustomed to those sporadic fevers, crave their presence; they become one of the ways the self comprehends its reality, locates itself within this physical and emotional world. Beauty (and by that, I mean the intensity and clarity of experience that enlivens the senses and charges the imagination) is a kind of arousal which, in many cases, leads to the desire to make more beauty––whether in poetry or some other form. The opposite is also true: when poetry and beauty are absent or dormant for too long, we suffer a malaise––because even that heartsick joy feels far superior to our old lowkey ‘normalcy.’ Can’t you remember the first times you came across poems that made your head spin? In high school, Dylan Thomas’ mesmerizing “Do Not Go Gentle…” prompted me to dream that, one day, my own fierce thought could be embodied in perfect form. Gerard Manley Hopkins’ “The Windover” actually made me dizzy, and I’d read it aloud to myself over and over, praying it might induce some similar verbal ecstasy. Roethke, Plath, Bishop, Basho, Clifton, Rilke, Li Bai––with each new poet I discovered, I began to see how thoroughly (and thrillingly) poetry could infect a life. We who loved poetry (and especially those who labored to produce their own) became carriers of this ancient evolutionary outbreak, grateful for the new understanding about our lives germinating inside.



Perhaps Anastasia Vassos first developed a case of love’s melancholy delight from her contact with poets like Henri Cole. Certainly, she has now become a fine poet in her own right, and here she honors the process of how one poem, one moment, finds a new host. In “Loneliness,” Cole’s unrhymed sonnet is breathing life into her own. How unlikely a setting for love or verse––the carwash––and yet first Cole, and now Vassos, each found both a haunting loneliness and a passionate solitude in the experience (not to mention the prescription to treat its condition.) “I misread/ flesh-colored tentacles for desire/ in the lap of his mate"––but how can we not be a little overwhelmed by the churning tumult that is the carwash (and, at times, love itself)? “suds squalling over the car—” and the “slap of rags on the windshield”––it’s all brimming with a kind of hormonal exuberance that makes the heart race and the toes curl. But then we are suddenly not at the carwash; we find ourselves at home, sitting with a book in hand, staring out as “Night goes down/ on a garnet suture later and later” (and somewhere, Hopkins and Plath are smiling at such prosody.) The fever of desire calls for the balm of a loving touch: the candle is extinguished, and we reach for someone we love. But––at least in my imagination––Anastasia reached for her notebook first, scribbled a few inky lines that might also be prescriptive for her need. A kiss on the page and then a kiss on the lips.



A fellow Boston-area poet, Anastasia has had work nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets. She’s the author of Nostos (Kelsay Books) and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate). Her work has appeared in numerous journals like Whale Road Review, RHINO, Comstock Review, and elsewhere. Her poems about the Greek-American diaspora have been translated into Greek versions, much to her delight. The situation depicted in today’s poem seems to represent a kind of I/thou moment––even if the thou in question may be at a distance and wholly unaware. But like a viral outbreak, poems can produce a broad geometrical spread, a single poem infecting a hundred lovestruck readers at one time. And those hundred new hosts. . .? It’s how poetry and beauty survive, even in the darkest of times, when repressive forces do everything within their power to stamp it out.

 

 

 

 

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