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
