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 #169
Swift River Ballad
A winter sky darkens above Swift River;
Regulars gather at Charlie's Bar & Grill.
"I Fall to Pieces" plays on the old jukebox
Beside the grudge-handled cigarette machine.
Regulars gather at Charlie’s Bar & Grill:
There’s a faint smell of sawdust and spent dreams.
Beside the grudge-handled cigarette machine,
A grit-voiced redhead staggers from cheap gin.
There’s a faint smell of sawdust and spent dreams:
Five or six local boys get high out back.
A grit-voiced redhead staggers from cheap gin:
Who's gonna buy the lady another drink?
Five or six local boys get high out back:
Money is scarce and jobs are hard to come by.
Some guy buys Julianne another drink.
Larry, that's Butch's kid, his wife just left him ...
Money is scarce and jobs are hard to come by:
“I Fall to Pieces” plays on the old jukebox.
Like a comfortless man whose wife’s just left him,
A winter sky darkens above Swift River.
––Thomas DeFreitas
There is a give-and-take interplay of energies within us – as individuals, as a culture: one force that wants to break loose from all form and spiral outward toward absolute freedom; and another that feels the need to contract, condense, solidify our understanding into a design whose dimensions will offer comfort (while still providing a jumping-off place for exploration.) For the better part of a century, poetry and art in the West worked hard to escape the shackles of established principles and historical precedent, to invent new creations that felt as volatile and unimaginable as the age we find ourselves struggling through. And even though unbridled experimentation continues to thrive today, we also see a resurgence of form and stricture in art-making – an aesthetic that stands in contrast to the lax vision or slack music that marks the more populist anything-goes creative expression. Perhaps when we experience so much chaos all around us, the promise of, say, a sonnet or a villanelle (even in forms that have been treated to radical contemporary make-overs) is that what’s most essential will cohere – and, by extension, our lives, our dreams may also endure.
Thomas DeFreitas returns to the Red Letters with a new piece – the title poem from his forthcoming collection from Kelsay Books. In the scene he portrays – one that could be taking place in any number of hardscrabble towns, in Massachusetts or beyond – the Bacchic forces of delight and dissolution are tempered by an undercurrent of despair. But the poet has framed his tableau within the elegant design of the pantoum, a Malaysian verse form dating from the 15th century. It’s built upon a series of interwoven quatrains where the second and fourth lines of the opening stanza are repurposed as the first and third lines in the subsequent one, and so on. And thus we feel that tug of war between chaos and stasis in our lives – the heart keeping a look-out for a daring stab at possibility, while remaining in the comfortable embrace of Love’s Old Sweet Song. Asked about the origin of the poem, Thomas said he aspired to a voice somewhere between James Wright and Bruce Springsteen (not that I’d ever compare myself to either of the masters, he quickly added.) I took that to mean he desired a certain blue-collar reality where beauty and hard truths square off on the dance floor until they either come to blows or someone buys another round. Thomas’ careful eye notes the sort of telling details that bring the drama to the lip of the stage, and his sympathetic heart seems to bear a quiet affection for these folks – for the hard days and jagged narratives that lured them out to Charlie’s this evening, and for those small moments of tenderness that might be enough to convey them safely to their beds.
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:
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* 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
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