Artist Barbara Marder Brings Intense and Bold Color to the Bloc Cafe in Union Square, Somerville

I have been a patron of the Bloc 11 Cafe since its inception. And over the years, the paintings and photographs on the walls have attracted my interest. While munching on my everything bagel and updating a syllabus for classes I teach at Endicott College, I noticed a number of vibrant watercolors of scenes from Boston and just beyond. Well, I was on it like the proverbial hornet--and I decided to ask the artist for an interview....

How has Somerville been for you as an artist?


Somerville was an amazing place to teach public school art and also to have a studio on Tyler Street at the former Artisans Asylum location. Somerville is an art -minded community, and expression of the arts was everywhere outside the confines of the school building. At one point in my career (1999) the city council addressed the graffiti on the wall at Dickerman playground on Craigie Street by enlisting me to bring my 6th graders to paint a mural at that location. That was a triumph for community pride.


The former Ames Paper company donated boxes of paper items appropriate for many art projects. They offered mounting board for student paintings. One year they printed a set of colorful note cards representing the artwork of my students at the John F. Kennedy School. The Davis Square Artbeat event offered me a window to display student art. A group of eighth graders met me there to arrange the display in July even though school was on summer break. A former bank in Davis Square granted my 6th grade a bus and free admission to a special Monet exhibit at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In return the entire sixth grade painted a 17 foot mural of waterlilies for the bank. I was always an ARTIST teacher, not simply an art teacher. The Somerville Museum hosted exhibits featuring the work Somerville art educators. The above events demonstrate some of my community involvement in Somerville. During my 24 years of teaching in Somerville, I was actively involved in my own art -making and expanded my repertoire of materials and media.

You have two canvases you work with—one on copper, and one on paper. How is your jewelry connected to your painting?


I was always a painter! I have an MFA degree in art education and painting from Boston University. Before that I was a painting major at Skidmore College. I entered the enameling world as a painter. I self taught enameling in 1980 in a high school teaching position. The instructor who oversaw the kilns was on sabbatical. I was awed by the colors of glass! Color was always my primary focus in art making.

I had no metalsmithing skills. Folks admired my enameled pieces and suggested that I make wearable jewelry. This idea intrigued me. During my tenure in Somerville Public Schools, I took silversmithing classes from colleges that had student interns doing a practicum with me. The remuneration was a free class. I had many college interns at the John F. Kennedy School in Somerville. Today I oversee the enamel studio at ArtisansAsylum.com now located in Allston.



You have written that observing children at play is an inspiration for some of your work. Explain.



My 24 years teaching K-8 in Somerville were truly inspirational for me regarding my own creative work. I was observing children fearlessly and spontaneously trying different approaches to color, dabbling, exploring outcomes, and combining disparate media in their creative expression. In turn I experimented with my own work. I was fortunate to create my own instructional units. Many days after school, I would engage in my own “creative play” trying new approaches with the goal of developing ideas for lesson planning. This exploration impacted my own growth as a creative artist.



Your paintings of scenes from Boston on display at the Bloc Cafe in Union Square are mainly vibrant watercolors of scenes in Boston, and just beyond. How do you choose what you paint? The paintings are realistic, do you ever dabble in the abstract?




My current body of work is an expansion of my membership in a group called Urban Sketchers Boston. Urban Sketchers is an international Facebook group. There are no membership fees and anybody can show up for a two hour informal sketching session at a designated location. Frankly, I was inexperienced painting architecture, and I was primarily a landscape painter. I think landscapes have many abstract elements in organic forms and color relationships. For the last few years I have worked hard to study buildings and how they relate to the urban landscape. Viewers might recognize the locations but my work remains expressionistic with my bold usage of intense color. Choosing a subject to paint is the artist’s first creative decision. I spend a lot of time exploring a location, and I create thumbnail sketches before deciding on the composition I want to paint. I get a lot of satisfaction from folks who share with me their own connections to locations of my paintings



Why should we view your work?


I think all artists hope for an audience.


Creating the work is a sole activity, but once I frame and display my art, I am wishful for an audience to view it. I want to share what I saw and where I was. I am hopeful others will view and appreciate it. This exhibit, PLACES AROUND BOSTON, will be on display until the first week of March, 2025.

 

The Red Letters :Flashback Friday––RLP#40

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday––RLP#40

 

 

 

 

 

Sense/Nonsense

I cook with my nose

When the toast burns

I snatch it out with tongs



I hear with my eyes

When the cat yearns

I recognize her songs



I taste with my ears

When the meat sears

I hear the flavor’s wrong



I know with my hands

When the pain churns

I jolt if it’s too strong



I see with my heart

When things come apart

I learn where they belong


—Deborah Melone


The new, for better or worse, is perhaps the most prized quality in art-making: cutting-edge creative style, the unanticipated voice or subject matter. But in truth every creation, even the most radical, has a bond with the vast catalog of all that’s come before. From what else could we fashion new work––or actively rebel against––but the world we’ve inherited? Our lives, our efforts, are links in a chain––in a tangled multiplicity of chains––that join us to sources often obscured in time’s vast unscrolling. So now, as we inch toward what promises to be a tumultuous new year, I’d like to revisit installment #40 which appeared in late December of 2020 during the first year of the Red Letter project.

But I have to start my commentary just a bit earlier, with Red Letter #37 featuring Lloyd Schwartz’s lovely poem “Song.” Of course, we can never know where a poem finds its genesis, but I was fascinated by this early memory Lloyd recounted: his mother reciting aloud to him Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," when he was too young to read. I believe there is always a sound-signature that great poems leave on us––and his mother’s voice embodying Coleridge remains indelible for him. And though these other texts might not have been consciously in mind, Lloyd mentioned Frost’s “Fire and Ice” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet” as part of his poem’s musical ancestry. Deborah Melone read Lloyd’s poem in these electronic pages and was enthralled by its lyricism––so much so that, after a few days, a new poem began taking shape in her notebook, one trying to recapture how that music had catalyzed something inside her. Deborah is the author of Farmers’ Market and The Wheel of the Year, and has work featured in the new anthology The Heart Off Guard––all issued from Every Other Thursday Press. I love how the rhymes and half-rhymes of her poem chime along with something approaching regularity––even as the imagery in each stanza twists and tugs to retain its freedom. The tone feels almost aphoristic––wisdom skewed, perhaps, by dream––and how can we resist? And now, reading “Sense/Nonsense”, who knows: maybe some of you, dear readers, will fall under Deborah’s melodic spell and be surprised by a new voice rising up in your own mind.



Ch’eng T’ang, the first king of the ancient Shang Dynasty, seeking a formula for happiness, had these words inscribed on his washbasin (nearly four millennia before Ezra Pound turned the Chinese phrase into a Modernist manifesto): Make it new, and again make it new. Can’t you imagine the king lifting cold water in cupped hands and then, as his eyes clear, re-reading this potent command? This morning, rinsing the shave cream from my own face, I looked down at the clean porcelain and imagined the same injunction, compelling in its invisible calligraphy. Back in 2020, we shared Deborah’s poem to help wash away the bitter residue of our first year of Covid. And now, as 2025 prepares to make its debut––hauling in a storm of unimaginable circumstance––I’ll offer up this wish: may we wash ourselves each morning in that ancient aspiration and rejuvenate possibility. But in doing so, may we also be mindful of all those hands that came before us, and all those yet to come: how every individual cups the same cool waters, dreaming of renewal.

 

 

 

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

What?! No Massachusetts State Poet Laureate?

 

I am on the board of the New England Poetry Club, and at a recent meeting one of our board members wondered why we don't have a state poet laureate. In December, we had a wonderful reading with New England Poet Laureates, and we all were very impressed with the work that they have done. A friend of mine--a former state legislator--tried to push a bill through many times, but it was considered "fluff."  Hey--don't we have a state donut? This couldn't be a money issue, because most laureates get grants of only a couple of thousand per year, and I believe you get a lot of  bang for the buck.  And it is a damn shame that our state that has a rich literary history does not have one. I encourage you to call or write your legislator, the governor,  or your local newspaper to make them aware of this. It couldn't hurt if you put this on your social media. Who knows!-- it may become viral---and there is no vaccine.  Below is a link to the State Poet Laureate reading--where the poets read from their work and explained what they have done in their roles as community building creatives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDwPgPrU1J0

 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 #235

 

 

 

 

Because Delicious!


--after Dorian Kotsiopoulos

What if I drank tankards,
dyed my hair black,
gave up on whiteness?
What if I tossed my bra—
nothing against being female,
but fifty years of itching,
yanking? Enough!
What if I stayed awake
late every damn night,
proudly ate poutine

because delicious?
Would I even know
whether that glee
shortened my life
by an inch, a mile?
Fuck doom!

––Cammy Thomas

 

 

 

I don’t know about you, but I needed this!



Recently, I hear similar stories from most of my friends: waking from uneasy dreams with that closed-fist-acid-surge in the stomach––and, first thing, flicking on NPR or reaching for those cell phone headlines, wondering just what calamity has already befallen while we slept. Is our democracy still tottering on the brink? Do the wildfires continue to rage? Is that hurricane plowing inexorably toward someone’s destruction? It feels as if we’ve been living beneath a toxic cloud of anxiety for. . .well, so long that it’s become the normal weather. But what long-term effects does dread have on the nervous system? And that sense of constant vigilance––as if our acute attention might somehow shield us from threats like the slow-motion disaster of climate change, the proliferation of hate-disguised-as-politics, not to mention the more immediate concern from our doctor about our salty diet and spiking blood pressure––mustn’t all this, too, come at a price?



The preponderance of my weekly reading comes from books of poetry––and the lion’s share of those poems (especially of late) tend to focus on varieties of doom, both personal and societal. And I must confess that my own poetry generally explores those darker terrains as well. So sometimes I have to make a conscious choice and add a measure of joy to my literary diet; I have to seek out those poems that maintain praise and delight as their central impulse. To be clear, I wouldn’t call Cammy Thomas’ work more optimistic than most––though I do return to her poems for their clear-eyed vision and nuanced language. Her most recent collection––Odysseus’ Daughter (Parkman Press), a handsome letterpress production––grew out of her many years teaching Homer’s epic to students and adults. Like the Greek bard, Cammy has produced a chorus of voices that rail against the way war ravages the living as well as the dead. Prior to that, she published three full-length (and well-praised) collections: Cathedral of Wish was chosen for the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America; and Tremors received Poetry Honors from the Mass Book Awards. Her poem “Far Past War” grew into a collaborative project with her sister, the composer Augusta Read Thomas; the choral work premiered at the National Cathedral in Washington DC. Still, sometimes a poet must simply break loose of all constraints––and when I received this new piece from Cammy in the mail, I knew instantly it belonged in the Red Letters, a tonic offering reserved for one of those troubling weeks when the heart threatens to founder.



“Because Delicious!”––even its curious title (a little flag waving from the staff of that unapologetic exclamation mark) both entices and brandishes hope. “What if I drank tankards”––and right from the rat-a-tat consonants of that opening salvo, sparks fill the atmosphere. Possibility flourishes: dying her hair black and defying age––why not! And did I blush, perhaps, when Cammy suggested discarding her bra like one of those militant women’s lib-ers from the Sixties? “nothing against being female,” the poem’s narrator reassures us, “but fifty years of itching,/ yanking? Enough!” The old inhibitions are giving way and joy is threatening to burst through its dam: staying up until all hours, eating whatever food delights us, allowing free rein to our wildest thoughts! Would such behavior result in a diminution of her life by any appreciable amount? And even if so, would she simply respond with a brazen: worth it! I found my own heart wanting to storm the barricades with this revolutionary spirit. Of course, after a few readings, I had to remind myself that this entire piece is framed as a thought-exercise, a mammoth “what-if.” Still, as my heartbeat slowed and the smoke cleared, I was left with the residue of the poet’s elation––how far words can take us, how an upsurge of imagination can shock the mind awake! And so I hope you’ll join me in applauding Cammy’s insistence on life over fear: Fuck doom! Put up a fresh pot of coffee! There’s work to be done!

 

 

 

 

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