Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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

To the Red Letter community:

Many who received the announcement that I’d completed my third and final term as Arlington’s Laureate wrote in to offer their appreciation – but also to ask, with a certain anxiousness: did that mean the Red Letters would come to an end? I am happy to let you know that I will continue the Letters for as long as I have fine poems worth sharing and engaged readers to receive them. And thank you for all your kind thoughts.

Red Letter Poem #147

Of all the verbal gymnastics and prosodic invention that have shaped the contemporary poem, to my mind the venerable image is still at the heart of things, the lynchpin that brings vitality to the reading experience. The image is word-picture, sense-impression, a moment of tangibility. As readers, it’s something we take possession of, substantiate with the stuff of our own lives – and through that portal we enter the moment unfolding on the page, staking our claim. Imagism, that ‘brand new’ poetic idea erupting at the dawn of the 20^th century, was old Ez Pound borrowing shamelessly from the 8^th century Tang Dynasty poets he’d been introduced to in translation – which, in turn, was the product of the even more ancient approach embodied in the pictographs/picture-words at the root of the Chinese written language. Pound believed this quality fostered, in their compact verses, their inclination to show rather than explain; and he felt it might reinvigorate the writing of his contemporaries. I think it was this quality – vivid, intriguing images – that first drew me into Phil Lewis’ poems.

I met Phil in the Beehive poetry group here at the town library. A soft-spoken nonagenarian who would, again and again, produce sonnets whose traditional formality would feel effortless, balanced by the voice of a contemporary mind trying to figure it all out. Phil’s love of poetry was nurtured as a young man at Dartmouth where the presence of poets like Robert Frost and Philip Booth inspired a belief that beauty could crystallize into form – even for a mind as mathematical and analytical as his own. Phil would go on to teach math to high school students and experiment with early computers as part of the educational process – yet the poems endured. Because his wife Deb was a talented painter, I like to imagine that images were always part of the lingua franca of their household. I admired that Phil’s devotion to poetry had none of the careerist drive that has become prevalent today. When I featured one of his poems as Red Letter #106, it was only the second one he’d ever published in a public forum. Poetry was just something that gifted him with delight – and insight.

Let me offer up Phil’s poem before I risk further comment:

Hard Frost

Not the first frost:this is the sharpest,crisping the grassunder bare toes.

Stars crowd the skyto the northwestabove the treeswhere the barn stood.

On the front lawnI mark the terrain,an old dog lifting a leg,and think of my father,

claiming this placeon a November night,watching the starsover his barn.

––Phil Lewis

Even in a free verse poem like “Hard Frost”, there is a crystalline structure at the core upon which these curious images emerge. The sibilance in that opening stanza whispers beneath our feet like the frozen grass. But in this brief lyric, the poet is displaying a curious trick of the mind: that the image of what is not can seem as real, as compelling, as the very ground we walk upon. We’re allowed to wonder about what’s brought us into this scene, and what the barefooted speaker is seeking, wandering land his family once farmed. The stars in this poem’s night sky are a presence above a constellation of absences – the father’s barn, the father himself – and we’re left to question that very need to claim life as ours (especially since winter, approaching, seems to refute that disposition.) The poet grasps all of this with a few well-chosen words. The simple experience of being embodied, in all its human frailty, occupies Phil’s mind – and now ours. Was it the conjured cold that made me shiver with those last lines – or the fact that I found myself transfixed by the image of Orion or Cassiopeia climbing just above the ridgepole of the barn that the poet was raising out of ink and longing?

The 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

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

To the Red Letter community:

Red Letter Poem #146

This poem by Julia Lisella is not the one I was planning to share with you today. In fact, I’d already written the introduction to a different selection from her new book Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), when circumstances demanded I change course.

On Sunday, in yet another murderous rampage, a gunman opened fire at the Star Ballroom in Monterey Park, California. Eleven innocent lives were snatched away and nine others were wounded. The victims had done nothing more offensive than attend a celebration of the Lunar New Year, and it seems likely it was their Asian ancestry that made them a target. Penning my first draft on Sunday night, I mentioned that this constituted the 33^rd mass shooting of our new year, not yet four weeks old (this, according to the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit research group.) By Monday evening, as I struggled to revise this Red Letter and clarify my thoughts, that total had already been increased by two. How can we not see this rampant violence as anything but a symptom of something desperately wrong in the health of our nation. And perhaps more damning: as, year after year, our people are outraged by such dark events, our elected officials do nothing more to respond to the problem than to wring their hands and express sympathy. And we the people – from whom they borrowed the power to legislate, to help shape our evolving society – we shake our heads, grief-stunned, as if we are helpless to make any difference. That is an act of self-deception from which we must struggle to free ourselves. It is possible to make inaction more costly to officials – concerned, as always, about re-election – than the anger from vocal lobbyists that substantive action would bring. Saner approaches to gun safety are common in many other nations. When a mass shooting in 2019 occurred at the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, within six days their Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had not only marshalled her nation to condemn such a terrorist act, she’d pioneered gun reform legislation that would help prevent its reoccurrence. Six days. How can America not feel ashamed by our complete failure to act?

But I remembered there was another poem in Julia’s collection, one imbued with the sort of painful beauty only a mother might create. It was composed after the 2016 mass shooting at Pulse, a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, where 49 lost their lives. But the poem’s dedication quietly acknowledged the sad rollcall of events that preceded it, and hinted at the unnamed list of tragedies that would inevitably follow. Sometimes a poet simply feels called to bear witness – to not simply turn the page of the morning newspaper and move on. Yet how can one speak articulately about what such awareness does to the soul? And so, instead, Julia chose to join us in our inarticulate grief. By borrowing a metaphor from the world of nuclear science, she allowed her mind to tumble inside the whirlwind where facts cannot measure what has taken place – for the mothers of these victims; for the mothers and fathers everywhere who, hearing the news, looked with different eyes upon their own fragile families.

Let me remind us about the mythology at the heart of the Lunar New Year’s celebration, perhaps the most loved holiday in the Asian calendar. It is believed that a terrible beast called the Nian would arise from the ocean or descend the mountain at the time of the spring festival and devour the nearby villagers, especially defenseless children. Each year the people, terrified, went into hiding. But finally, one old man convinced them to gather together and fight back: they decorated their village in red, a fierce color, to alarm the monster. They set off firecrackers and banged pots and pans, alerting the Nian that an equally fierce adversary was prepared to defend all they loved. And the beast did not return. Perhaps we, too, will finally make some noise, feel the power of collective action. This violence, this madness need not be a permanent condition. Or, at the very least, we can make our leaders more frightened of our righteous anger than the Nian of the gun lobby and the most uncompromising Second Amendment advocates. Share this installment with friends, with your civic representatives. Today my Letter is adorned with a very different kind of Red.

Maternal Half Life

(for Orlando and for the Others)

“In the illustration above, 50% of the original mother substance decays into a new daughter substance. After two half-lives, the mother substance will decay another 50%, leaving 25% mother and 75% daughter. A third half-life will leave 12.5% of the mother and 87.5% daughter. In reality, daughter substances can also decay, so the proportions of substance involved will vary.”

From: "What is Meant By Half Life"

Mornings have their half-lives as surely Mourning

does. Morning light’s half-life streams in as if

torn from night. First light becomes sunrise

into lives not yet ready. And already the light

divides and divides into the day while Mourning

shakes and shakes, trying to itself achieve half of half of half

which is infinite, bottomless,

like the bang, the plume of the machine gun

of the mad young man at odds with the body that made him

dividing and dividing the pure bodies of the 49 around him

into the halves of halves of halves of morning light.

And left in the doorways, the living rooms, the cramped kitchens,

are Mourning’s half-lives halved and halved and without end,

like the half-life of the labor pain

that circles, returns, but does not diminish,

until the torso radiant with light amazes and releases

its others whose half-lives cleave and divide again.

––Julia Lisella