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 #236
The Ledge
(for Alfie)
Woken again by nothing, with this line
already at my back, I thought of you
at twenty, as you are – which passed somehow
while I was staring – thought how yesterday
you said you wanted to be young again,
which left me with this nothing left to say
that’s woken me. You are, you are – what else
does father wail to child – though wailing it
he’s woken with six-sevenths of the night
to go – you are – look I will set to work
this very moment slowing time myself,
feet to the stone and shoulder to the dark
to gain you ground – if just one ledge of light
you flutter to, right now, rereading that.
––Glyn Maxwell
There is no imaginative stance, no literary conceit, no traditional prosody nor contemporary revamped approach to song that Glyn Maxwell isn’t more than willing to bring to bear––once some experience has gotten under his skin. I first met this poet some thirty-five years ago when he’d returned to read at Boston University (his alma mater, where he’d studied with Derek Walcott)––and, hearing his work then, my impression was that of an accomplished formalist born into an age when such artfulness was most definitely out of fashion. So he’d committed himself to devising ways to give free rein to a fierce intelligence and dazzling lyric ability, all the while dressing down in colloquial garb so that readers could approach without hesitation. But upon entering the poems, we’d quickly sense the subterranean depths echoing beneath the surface. He was innovative, mercurial, often darkly comic, always provocative. I’ve kept up with his work over the years, finding consistent pleasures in the new collections. I met him in-person again just recently when Arrowsmith Press was launching his New and Selected Poems; I’m happy to report that, if anything, he’s become a writer even more comfortable in his own skin, confident in his bonds to the tradition as well as his love of invention. He’s still offering poems that reward the head and heart in equal measure.
“The Ledge” is a loosely-rhymed sonnet about––well, a whole host of things I’d hesitate to pin down: a father fearing for the wellbeing of his son; a poet working toward some sort of clarity that might ease his own trepidation; even the implied promise a formal literary structure offers us (though uncertainty threatens to undermine all.) Look at that opening line: “Woken again by nothing”––and it becomes clear that the nothing referred to is both a ‘needless concern’ and, at the same time, the ultimate nothingness that terrifies us all. “(T)hought how yesterday/ you said you wanted to be young again,/ which left me with this nothing left to say/ that’s woken me.” Isn’t that every parent’s wish: to delay, as long as possible, our children’s experience of mortal limitation? And this leads us to yet another fearful nothing: the writer’s anxiety that words might fail him in his desire to speak honestly, shape meaning (for his son’s sake, or his own.) Still, what else can a poet do but sit up in the dark and bring the tentative pen to paper, hoping for the grace of inspiration. “You are, you are” (the narrator declares) far too young for such worries––though what else can a “father wail to child” (or, for that matter, to his own young self who first conceived the dream of poetry, let alone progeny.) And so the speaker sets “to work/ this very moment slowing time”––slowing it to the cadences of verse, to the green involutions of thought––so that he might offer the child (and the reader) some purchase on “one ledge of light.” That’s the sort of place where we fledglings might find a brief experience of peace––even if it only arrives via the “momentary stay against confusion” (borrowing Frost’s notion) that a poem may provide.
Born in Hertfordshire, England to Welsh parents, Glyn is a poet, playwright, critic, and educator, living the sort of literary life to which our world has grown increasingly inhospitable. A prolific writer, he’s published nearly a dozen volumes of poetry, and more than that number of theater pieces. He’s taught in universities like Princeton, Columbia, NYU, and is currently Head of Studies on the MA at The Poetry School at Somerset House in London. The former Poetry Editor of The New Republic, he is now a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The influences of Glyn’s poetic ancestry hover about his verse: in addition to Frost, there’s T. S. Eliot’s perspicacity and regard for tradition; Thomas’ (Dylan, of course, but a little of Edward as well) feel for the well-made song as the receptacle for both tenuous beauty and the fearsome unknown. And, throughout the collection, there’s the echo of a whole range of naturalists, from Wordsworth to Ted Hughes, each displaying their faith that the observed world will give rise to a specialized language, capable of conjuring as well what can only be imagined. Out on that ledge, Glyn is still at work on the task.
Red Letters 3.0
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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
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