Red Letter Poem #232

 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 #232

 

 

           

 

La Liseuse

 

       —Paris, 1878

 

 

This is the year the Eurydice sinks

      and the SS Byzantin. Here,

the World’s Fair has opened,

while back home the Senate debates

 

women’s suffrage as the First Lady

smiles and rolls pink and yellow-

striped Easter eggs across the lush

White House lawns. Cassatt

 

does not show us the headlines,

      and we cannot tell from Lydia’s

soft profile which stories she reads

      or what she thinks of them,

 

or that at forty-one she’s just four years

      from her death, Bright’s disease

already ravaging her kidneys,

though neither she nor her not-yet

 

famous sister knows this. They believe

whatever ails her—the doctors

disagree—is in remission now,

and so together with Mary she tours

 

the boulevards and galleries,

attends the right plays and salons—

though she knows Mary brings her

mostly as chaperone, to quiet

 

the gossips, and that she uses her,

as a free model and housekeeper. It’s Lydy

who shops and sews, keeps the accounts,

stays the loneliness her sister

 

battles. Did she long for a husband

and children? A lover? An art of her

own? Nothing survives of her letters,

and little is said of her in Mary’s,

 

except reports of her devotion

and the family’s praise. Angel

in the house, she’s forever silent, her sister’s

Reader, her Woman, Crocheting.

 

 

                                 ––Susan Aizenberg

 

 

The painter Mary Cassatt was a bundle of contradictions: the first great American Impressionist, she spent the majority of her creative life as an expatriate in France; famous for her realistic depictions of motherhood and domesticity, in her own life she eschewed both in order to pursue her artistic career.  And, as a fierce advocate for suffrage and women's rights, it seems Mary (as poet Susan Aizenberg depicts in today’s bittersweet poem) may have allowed another woman’s needs to go unfulfilled, simply in service of her own (a failing often attributed to men.)  Susan centers our attention on Lydia Cassatt, Mary’s elder sister, who accompanied her to Europe as companion, housekeeper, unpaid model, deflector of gossip.  And though we are familiar with her appearance from a number of well-known canvases, far less is known of the woman––especially her inner life and aspirations.  It seems she was content to spend her days in service of the creative genius she saw in her sister––an avocation often called ‘kinship work’ by anthropologists––or, in a phrase featured in a famous poem of the day, "the angel in the house."  In today’s perspective, it likely seems an act that is both selfless and self-negating.

 

In any skillfully-executed composition, no daub of color, no background detail is presented unless it serves the overall aim of the canvas.  The same is true for a fine poem, and Susan begins hers with two little details intended (one might guess) simply to help indicate the 19^th century time frame.  “This is the year the Eurydice sinks/ and the SS Byzantin.”  Of course, the roster of shipwrecks in 1878 is extensive; so Susan’s choices hint at a range of cultural markers: the mythological Eurydice, forced into the Underworld to become Hades’ bride; and the fall of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, and with it the intricate and arcane styles that were its hallmark.  In contrast, the Impressionists would attempt to make viewers experience the simple beauty of everyday life and the extraordinary marvel of that is our perception of light.  In a series of paintings, we eavesdrop on Lydia’s immersion in activities as varied as concert-going, crocheting, or (as in “La Liseuse,”) the petit solitude involved in reading the morning newspaper.  Of course, all of these underscore their primary purpose: to sit patiently as her younger sibling worked at the easel.  Lydia left behind no letters or diary entries which might help us understand her feelings––so it takes a poet’s imagination to consider whether this was rewarding or frustrating or something beyond simple comprehension.

 

Susan, Professor Emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University, is the author of three poetry collections––the first of which, Muse, was awarded Virginia Commonwealth University’s Larry Levis Prize, and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry.  She’s the co-editor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press.)  Today’s poem is taken from her recently-published A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems (University of New Mexico Press.)  I am always intrigued by the varied subject matter, tonal shifts, and surprising emotional navigation captured in her work.  If both heart and mind remain alert (her poems seem to be telling us,) perhaps we can avoid the pitfalls of the habitual.  Susan’s portrait here––not of the ‘famous sister,’ but the largely-unheralded companion––allows us to experience her mortal jeopardy as akin to our own.  Lydia Cassatt is not unique in the sacrifices love demands of family members.  By the close of this poem, I found myself both angry at a world that forces such choices on individuals, especially women––but also frustrated with Lydia herself for not demanding more of life before illness would cut hers short.  And yet I also marveled at the generosity of spirit required to make such a ‘gift’ to someone so dear.  I don’t know if that quality comes naturally to me––yet it’s one I experienced in two of my sisters, and to which I quietly aspire.  So I’m thankful to recognize that Lydia’s simple pleasures, perhaps, provided more contentment than I often recognize.  It seems I may be carrying my own tangle of contradictions as well.

 

 

 

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          

@StevenRatine

Red Letter Poem #231

  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 #231

 

 

             





Aphasia Poem 2


cultivate vigilance.

as single words lose their coherence

wait for the moment born decisive.



slash chop each every green

thought let it all to dry to all dry

kindling stumps seasoned words dormant roots.



ignite slashed felled tree-words.

sentient combustion burns hot leaves

nothing but curtains ash gardens smoke.



sow morphemes in the moon’s

fertile clear æther rain craters where

seed sounds in earth light can germinate.



without words enchanted syllables

elude broken language broken world.


––Robert Guzikowski


It was the most poetic postal address I’ve ever had: Green House, Brown Road, Vestal. Back in those golden days, if you penned simply that on a stamped envelope, it would eventually appear inside my tinny roadside mailbox. Some friends and I rented this ramshackle farmhouse in the hills above our college campus––and on the tail end of this country road (named for farmer Brown who once owned and worked those sprawling acres) were three old dwellings: green, red, and white. The colors were the only signifier the postman needed. Bob Guzikowski, another poet, lived in the White House and we became friends––but, after graduation, lost track of each other as so often happens, and the decades rose like smoke trails. But, through the power of the Internet, I recently heard from Karen Keefe, Bob’s wife (and a poet in her own right) when she discovered the Red Letter Project, and she wanted to send me Bob’s new book. She was writing for him because, back in the 1990’s, Bob suffered from encephalitis which damaged his brain and left him with a number of disabling conditions, aphasia chief among them. Often the result of a stroke, traumatic injury or infection, aphasia is a communications disorder which, in its most severe cases, can make speaking, reading, or writing nearly impossible. These severed connections with the ones you love are, of course, extremely isolating, though therapies can often help. It’s a condition that affects over 2,000,000 Americans––but it seems an especially cruel fate for a man for whom words and communication were paramount. But Bob is not the sort to surrender easily.



After decades of hard work, Bob has produced Unwordly (UnCollected Press), a collection of poems with (dare I say) an unworldly sense of magic and surprise. He’s made his condition both the subject of and the engine powering his poetry, disassembling and reconstructing the very elements of language and cognition so we might see how this most vital, and most tenuous of experiences really operates. In some poems, what we’ve come to expect of ‘normal’ syntax is stretched to its very limits; words become like birdsong, beautiful but hovering at the tantalizing edge of significance. Or, in poems like “Aphasia 2,” he places his readers inside the neural maelstrom as the speaker tries to offer his meanings and we readers struggle to receive them. “slash chop each every green” (and for a moment we’re imagining someone taking a scythe to unruly fields)––but no, the enjambment reveals it to be “green/thought” the poet’s harvesting. And soon he’s put the torch to these cuttings––“sentient combustion”––and we see the world through fresh eyes beyond the scrim of customary understanding: “nothing but curtains ash gardens smoke.” How lovely, to imagine those unencumbered syllables germinating “in the moon’s/ fertile clear æther.” How deeply satisfying––for any poet–– when we sense we are able to impress upon this complex system of sound, some bit of insight, some trace of joy––and we, for a moment, “elude broken language broken world.”



Robert Guzikowski (I must address him now, not as an old friend but a fellow poet) published his work in a number of magazines prior to his illness, but the poems he’s painstakingly produced since have found enthusiastic acceptance in journals like The Raw Art Review, Wild Roof Journal, Kissing Dynamite, Full Mood Magazine, Fig:ment, and others. Earlier on, he was also a performance artist and one of the founding editors of the Parlor City Review. But reading through unwordly, I was reminded of the line from Auden––often quoted by people attempting to undermine the scope of poetic power: “poetry makes nothing happen.” It must be remembered, this phrase occurs in a poem dedicated to a poet (Yeats) who most definitely made things happen in the world––and goes on to say: it [poetry] survives/ In the valley of its making. . .flows on south/ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/ Raw towns that we/ believe and die in; it survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth.” I think Auden would recognize these very qualities in the poetry here; Robert has taken in all that’s occurred within his life, transformed it, empowered it, passed it on. These poems happen, right there on the page and on the willing tongue. I am grateful these messages found their way to my door.

 

 

 

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