Red Letter Poem #275

 

The Red Letters

 

 

In ancient Rome, feast days were indicated on the calendar by red letters.

To my mind



The seventh annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

Saturday, November 8th 2025

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-2:30pm, (music beginning at 12:45pm)

with a reception to follow

Free, and all are welcome!

Featured poets:

Massachusetts’ first Poet Laureate

Regie Gibson

Ukrainian-American poet

Dzvinia Orlowsky &

Red Letter founder

Steven Ratiner

reading from his own work

and a new chapbook by Ted Kooser

benefiting the Red Letter Project

with a musical performance by bassist

Rick McLaughlin

More details in attached flyer.

A reception will follow the reading.

If you’re nearby, we’d love to see you there




Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan

 

Red Letter Poem #275

 

умШум

(Ukrainian word for the sound of wind in trees)

Russified, having lost its original meaning,

this rustling wooded breath was leveled

to noise—a loud whistling

through broken windows, an invisible

heavy scuttling among ruins.

It favored crackling trees

against a blanched sky, unmoored

echoes claiming rivers

before they dried— bird calls

from censored dictionaries,

ruffled feathers—

No one heard its leaving.

Only a few held on to the word’s original meaning,

taking it with them into the next life

the way a child might drag a torn blanket.

Could I have saved its fragile

word stem, pressed it between

the pages of my childhood diary,

protected it from becoming sirens, air traffic,

construction sites, fireworks—

crowds breaking apart

their names lost in the smoke.

Шум. A sound I used to know.

Today, walking in woods, I listened for wind

while mercy falls apart into a deck of cards—

the new go-to phrase for negotiating peace.

This noise saves no one.

We fall silent, then eerie quiet,

before the next sounds begin.

Even a dead crow on the road

might raise one wing to the wind

to feel itself once more part of a forest

that takes it in.

––Dzvinia Orlowsky

When, in the third century BCE, the leader of the Qin people finally conquered the last remaining neighboring kingdom––thus uniting for the first time what would become known as China––he set about solidifying power in his vast lands. Among his strategies, two stood out: he ordered (at tremendous cost) the construction of one unified defensive structure––expanding on the many piecemeal sections that already existed––to curtail the offensive advantage of the Mongol invaders from the north. (History does not record whether his armies rallied before the palace, chanting: ‘Build the Great Wall!’) But a second approach was equally important: from then on, by law, there would be only a single style of written language allowed, supplanting all those that had developed in the fifty-plus indigenous peoples across this giant land mass. Creating a new name for his exalted position––the Qin Shi Huangdi, Emperor of the Qin––he believed he had established an empire that would last a thousand years. This strategy of linguistic hegemony has been repeated, in various incarnations, by most conquering powers over the centuries as a potent tool for asserting political and cultural dominance. You can think of the burning of Mayan-language books by the Spanish, or the suppression of Gaelic in Ireland by the British. How many Native Peoples here in our own country had their children forced to adopt a new tongue and new gods? The stunning Ukrainian-American poet Dzvinia Orlowsky began to pay special attention to the effects Russification had on the language she grew up speaking. Pronunciations shifted, meanings altered or were erased––even those names for everyday experiences––all supplanted by Russian terminology. It was part of an effort to persuade the citizenry to accept the false narrative that an independent Ukrainian country and culture never existed. This is one battle where poets and writers need to marshal their lexical troops and lead the counteroffensive.

In a series of poems (which I’m hoping will grow into a whole section of some future book), Dzvinia focuses on a single Russified word and tries to conjure, not only something of its Ukrainian past, but the intimate way those syllables once lived inside her mouth and imagination. Today’s Red Letter is the first of two I am delighted to offer readers. Entitled Шум (using the Cyrillic alphabet that became welded onto Ukrainian), the word should be pronounced ‘shum’ (with that long u-sound puckering the lips). Originally signifying the sound of rising wind through leaves, it has come to mean––in both Ukraine and Russia––simply ‘noise.’ As Dzvinia explained to me: “As a first generation Ukrainian-American, I grew up in Ohio surrounded by meadows and tall, thin trees. The shum of a pre-storm wind was a deeply sensory experience. I cannot begin to think of it as ‘noise’”––though, sad to say, our urban life has certainly become more of a place for jarring sounds, and only rarely for the calming. But when the poet writes of “a loud whistling// through broken windows, an invisible/ heavy scuttling among ruins,” it is impossible not to imagine the current situation in her family’s homeland where some noises presage drone strikes and cries from beneath rubbled apartments. It seems each day brings a fresh barrage of bad news––not just for Ukraine but our whole beleaguered planet. So perhaps it is even more imperative that, in the face of the onslaught, we cling to the most precious and personal of our dreams––and, of course, the deep-rooted utterance in which we first learned to express them. Poets attempt to bring that experience back to us––those dreams, that imaginative and linguistic autonomy.

As a poet and translator, Dzvinia’s authored of seven books, including A Handful of Bees from Carnegie Mellon University Press Classic Contemporary Series; and Bad Harvest, a Massachusetts Book Awards “Must Read.” Her newest collection, Those Absences Now Closest, is focused on the tragic conflict in Ukraine. Dzvinia’s been awarded the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (selected by Robert Pinsky) from the New England Poetry Club. Her Ukrainian co-translations with Ali Kinsella of Natalka Bilotserkivets's and Halyna Kruk's poetry, have been short-listed for such prestigious honors as the 2022 Griffin International Poetry Prize, the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry, and the 2025 PEN American Literary Award in Translation. Her service to poetry more broadly extends to her work as a co-founder of Four Way Books, one of our mainstay literary presses. I’ll add one more very small accolade to her list: beginning with the first time I read today’s poem in a batch Dzvinia sent me, I now hear the drawn-out syllable shoooom whenever––as it is now–– the wind is rising outside, stripping some of the last pale leaves from my dogwood, making my spine shiver. There is a kind of knowledge which poets transmit that alters lives––the very reason tyrants take pains to suppress the arts. So I’ll add one last thought to this Letter: the Qin Shi Huangdi’s ‘kingdom of a thousand years’ ended up destroyed after a mere fifteen. It’s a fact that the Red Emperor in Moscow and the Orange wannabe-Emperor in Washington might do well to keep in mind.

The Red Letters

* 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


All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/

Poet Matthew Johnson: an E.E. Cummings finalist with a dream of Ebbets Field

I Dream the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn

By Matthew Johnson



I want the Dodgers back in Brooklyn.

Real Brooklyn, with pigeon-coop rooftops

And stickball kids who cuss in five languages while at lunch.

I want Jackie back, stealing home like it’s owed to him,

As if America is just a constant curveball,

And you've got no choice but to go for it.

I want Jackie juking gravity.

I want a hot dog in each hand,

And a halo of ketchup around my mouth.

I want Ebbets Field, not a memory,

But brick and echoes and peanuts cracked by hand,

And bleachers packed like rush-hour trains,

Filled with old ladies heckling like prophets.

I want to believe in losing again,

The kind a Yankees fan could never understand.

The kind where you have scraped a knee And have often been told, no, over and over again.

I want to sit in the bleachers with my grandfather,

Whose heart was broken when the Dodgers left Brooklyn,

And see him fall in love all over again….

From Poet Matthew Johnson's Facebook post:

"It has been an incredibly exciting past couple of days, as I recently learned that I was named a Finalist for the E.E. Cummings Poetry Prize by the New England Poetry Club for my poem, “I Dream the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn,” and that my poem, “The One Movie Scene That Always Gets Me,” was selected by The Indianapolis Review as a Best of the Net nominee."


I caught up with Johnson recently and asked him these questions:




From looking at your picture, you don't seem old enough to have experienced Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. Did you pick the mind of your grandfather about old time Brooklyn, and the Dodgers? I can taste the hotdogs; I can hear the roar of the fans, a very vivid poem, indeed!




- I truly wish I had the chance to pick the mind of my grandfather. Sadly, I never really did. I’m grateful that I knew him, but he passed when I was still a child. I was too young to understand the concept of nostalgia or to ask those larger questions about the Dodgers or about life itself. Still, I’ve been lucky enough to inherit pieces of that world through my father, who has told me about how my grandfather and great-uncles were devoted Brooklyn Dodger fans and were loyal to the team of Jackie Robinson, Dan Bankhead, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe. I have considered myself a wandering sports historian/amateur sports scholar. Since I was a child, I grew up reading books/articles and watching documentaries on sports figures before my time; since I love the teams and athletes of my time (the late '90s into the early 2000s), I wanted to know who came before and who inspired the games they play now. I love sports, and I especially love sports history.






The poem brought to mind the lines from a Simon and Garfunkel song, " Where have you gone Joe DiMaggio-- a nation turns its lonely eyes to you." Is there a yearning for this kind of community in this divisive world?


I think many of us ache for that feeling again—the comfort of community, the poetry of shared experience. Maybe that’s why nostalgia tugs so insistently at us: it’s less about the past itself, and more about the longing to feel connected.

I do think there’s a deep yearning for that kind of community, now more than ever. Sports is one of those few gathering places where differences could be blurred. And despite the hate and vitriol that someone like Jackie Robinson, and so many Black players, endured when they broke baseball’s color barrier, time and courage taught fans to embrace them. It wasn’t a perfect process, and I often wish Jackie could have been celebrated simply for existing, whether his career average was .311 or .211. But in those moments, sports became (and can continue to serve as a place) for a nation learning, slowly, to embrace its differences and move as one whole.


I read that you have an interest in the Harlem Renaissance, a literary and art movement in the early part of the last century. Do you think African Americans are in a sort of arts/lit renaissance now?

- I view the ongoing creative works of African Americans as an extension of the Harlem Renaissance. It's not a second Harlem Renaissance, but a continuation of the voices and spirits of artists such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Paul Robeson, Aaron Douglas, Oscar Michaeux, and Duke Ellington (among so many others). What I see today is that same thread of creativity flowing through both similar and different forms: literature, film, music, fashion, athletics, and digital art. The mediums have evolved, but the message: the insistence on being seen, heard, and celebrated, remains unchanged. Black artists today are still exploring the complexity of identity, the beauty of resilience and hope, and the power of imagination to reimagine a world that has not always been kind. In that sense, the Harlem Renaissance never truly ended; it simply transformed. Each new generation adds its own rhythm to the same song.


You have said your faith informs your work. Explain.

My faith informs my work in the sense that it reminds me of purpose, humility, and connection. It’s not something I actively publicize, but it's definitely woven into all of my work, as my faith shapes how I see the world and how I try to express myself in it. My faith helps me get a sense that every story, every person, every act of creation carries a spark of the divine. When I write, I’m guided by that belief: art, in this instance, poetry and literature, can serve as both expression and service. It can heal, uplift, and bear witness to truth. My faith keeps me grounded when I’m uncertain and pushes me to approach my work with integrity and empathy. I try not to preach; instead, I let faith express itself through presence and through the compassion, honesty, and hope that often shape my words and the stories I share.

Somerville artist Robert Wright: A 'shell' of an artist

 

By Doug Holder

One day I got an email from the accomplished Somerville sculptor Ann Hirsch about a talented outsider artist-- Robert Wright. She told me he has this strange but very compelling art on display in a little park in Gilman Square. On a crisp morning in October, I walked over to Gilman Square in Somerville, to meet the man and view his art. It was a bit nostalgic, as the old Paddock Restaurant site was across the street, a place I used to frequent years back. Wright was walking with a friend of his, and I introduced myself. Wright told me that he is a resident of the Park Street Senior Center and started working on this art among a little warren of trees next to his residence. He revealed that he had once been an ironworker, and was severely injured in a work-related accident, and since then he had been looking to fill his time with something interesting. His canvas for his artwork is trees, where his creations are posted. He is not a formally trained artist. His medium is mostly seashells. One creation which is inventively arranged is in the form of a turtle--that has now reached the ripe old age of 20. He also created a Halloween mask from shells, that can be lit up at night. In addition , he formed a seashell rose for his mother, who of course is named Rose. He also has a few abstract paintings on display. Wright told me he has lived in Somerville for thirty-five years, and had made friends through his artwork, and takes pleasure in the many comments he gets. He has formed a community around this special place. Wright is just one the creative people that makes Somerville the    "Paris of New England."

Red Letter Poem #274

 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 #274

 

 

 

 

Long Story Short

 

Tinkering with carbon and hydrogen

for half a million years, life taught itself



to make sugar from sunshine. Whence came

cells, then cities of them: sea sparkles



and slipper, wheel and trumpet animalcules

and eventually big us, tucked into skins



moist and just the right temperature to host

tribes of one- and multi-celled microbes.



Handy, we grew, hungry for more

than food—oil, iron, even sand. We mined



and built and fought. The ground shakes

with wars, and we've altered earth's skinny



atmosphere: the sky, invisibly broken, visibly

perturbed, drops bats, drops birds.

 

                              ––Pamela Alexander

                                   

 

If, by chance, the colloquial flourish used as a title for today’s poem has fallen out of fashion among your acquaintances, here’s all you’ll need to know: when you find yourself being regaled by your visiting aunt or next-door neighbor with some convoluted narrative––and they punctuate their epic with the phrase long story short––prepare for disappointment. Any notion of brevity, or the hope for a pithy summation that will justify one’s patience––well, that ship’s sailed. This particular expression is one I very much associate with the rather tangled family stories I heard when I was growing up––tales of hardship, triumph, and general mishigas––and thus I was predisposed, with my first reading, to feel a kind of intimacy toward this verse. So what makes Pamela Alexander’s history of planet Earth––in a mere fourteen lines, no less––so utterly charming (and, at the same time, so subtly unsettling) is that we are left to concoct the bulk of this shaggy dog tale on our own, to tap into our less-than-authoritative resources to understand the implications of what she’s presented. After all, for a few billion years before Pamela’s first couplet, this planet’s atmosphere was an uninhabitable morass of methane and carbon dioxide. A quick billion years elapse, and now cyanobacteria have appeared, performing the astonishing little trick of “mak[ing] sugar from sunshine”––and, as another colloquialism might put it, we’re off to the races! But when those ‘cities of cells’ proliferate, the poet leaps––in a matter of a dozen words––to “big us,” and suddenly the playfulness of this tale has taken on a finer edge. “Handy, we grew, hungry for more/ than food—oil, iron, even sand.” I’m wondering whether you, too, felt a cold shiver down the spine when those alliterative H’s seemed to be encapsulating either humanity’s curriculum vitae or penning its epitaph.



How poignant and, at the same time, shameful to recognize the truth in those lines: “The ground shakes/ with wars, and we've altered earth's skinny// atmosphere: the sky, invisibly broken…”. And yet even the most obvious of warnings––birds dropping from the heavens, microplastics rife throughout the food supply, young children with lungs too compromised to play in our sullied atmosphere––seem not to be enough to free us from our inertia, to spur the political will to change course before it’s too late. And since almost all of the crucial details have been left to our imaginations, I found myself thinking of this poem as kind of a thumbnail entry in some galactic Wikipedia, written by an alien race who’d been charged with summing up the brief and brutal history of this blue-green planet after its inhabitants had doomed it to extinction.



Pamela is the author of four captivating poetry collections. Her publishing career began auspiciously when Navigable Waterways was awarded the Yale Younger Poets Prize, selected at the time by no less an eminence than James Merrill. Slow Fire (from Ausable/Copper Canyon Press) demonstrates how the power of a book of poetry can become even greater than the sum of its parts. The same applies to her recent chapbook, Left––winner of the Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize from the Beloit Poetry Journal. It’s a heartbreaking depiction of the breakdown of a marriage, and the disillusionment involved in discovering how imperfect is our understanding of even those we most dearly love. Today’s new offering seems to revolve around ideas of time and fragility. How the former accelerates dramatically from line to line, prehistory threatening to become a tragic posthistory across a few short breaths. And who would have imagined that the massive planet upon which we’ve made our homes could be almost as fragile as our dreams, as the hearts that craved endless new possibilities? With echoes in my head of a President still clamoring to ‘drill, baby, drill!’ while climate catastrophes abound, I found myself looking back to this poem’s sly title, realizing that the many billions of years it took to compose this story––Earth’s as well as our own––could be cut short in a heartbeat.

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* 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

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/

Red Letter Poem #273

 

 

 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 #273

 

 

 

 

Clouds

The rope whips against

the flag pole. I miss hearing

him say we, yet I wasn’t

the one. Yes, he was thinking



about someone else and

I look to the sky. Painters

need to know the sky—always

a witness. And birds too,



realists, yet we often don’t

pay them any attention.

Did you hear me? I was

in love for five minutes.



And then the pond

stretched out inside my chest.


––Kevin McLellan

                                   

 

 

 

Orbis non sufficit. Long before the translation of this Latin motto became the title of a James Bond movie, it was said to be part of the epitaph of Alexander the Great: “A tomb now suffices for him for whom the world was not enough.” In the historical reference, that phrase speaks to humanity’s insatiable craving for existence, vitality, and all its diverse embodiments––even though we can never escape the knowledge that all experience is resolutely ephemeral. Still, those words came to mind when I was reading Kevin McLellan’s newest collection: Sky. Pond. Mouth.–– selected by Alexandria Peary for the 2024 Granite State Poetry Contest (YAS Press). The speaker that drifts through these poems is alternately anchored in the pains and desires of the flesh––and then suddenly untethered: a thought-mist, capable of passing through the membrane of the material world, suffusing flower, water, cloud, or whatever this child going forth discovers in his day. Might the self be capable of dissolving so easily––abandoning the subject/object distinction, and experiencing what Walt Whitman imagined as a kind of soul-refuge? Could our burden of longing and grief be soothed by even such a momentary escape? Providing a beautiful complexity to his poems, Kevin treats thought itself and the grammar that governs the page with that same spirit of abandon. Once he senses where he needs to go, the poem-as-vehicle invents the very highway beneath its wheels.



Experimental poet and filmmaker, Kevin has authored a half-dozen books and ‘book-objects,’ and appeared in scores of anthologies and journals. In addition to the prize that prompted the publication of this collection, his work has received honors from the Hilary Tham Capital Collection and the Massachusetts Book Awards. His videos have been screened in numerous film expos including: the Berlin Short Film Festival; Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival; and the LGBTQ+ Los Angeles Film Festival in which "Dick" won Best Short Form Short. And, in fact, there are many sections of Sky. Pond. Mouth. that almost have the feel of video montage––where the eye’s camera pivots, jump-cuts, and quickly refocuses, leaving our minds racing to match the velocity of the language.



Some of the most impressive pieces in this collection are also the most experimental and challenging––but they tend to be rather long, an impossible fit for my Red Letter format. Still, the book contains compelling short lyrics as well, like today’s “Cloud,” a kind of free-form sonnet which, early on in the book, sets the tone and announces the possibility of heartbreak. “I miss hearing/ him say we, yet I wasn’t/ the one.” Who’d have expected simple pronouns could be so devastating? “Yes, he was thinking// about someone else and/ I look to the sky.” Shifting gears, fractured syntax, sudden changes in direction––throughout the poems, we are given the feeling that older literary expectation only holds us back. There are references honoring many of Kevin’s prominent queer literary forebears––James Schuyler, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery––but I kept having the feeling that these poems were a kind of 21st century dialogue with the father of almost all contemporary poetry, Whitman himself. The language Kevin brings to bear is both sensuous and calamitous. And after all, loss, illness, and despair can’t help but make us keenly feel our own vulnerabilities. Still, poetry from artists like these inspires a sense of liberation: to embrace this whole ecosystem of nouns; to let every unbridled verb carry us back into the world. “Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from/your throat” urges the Good Gray Poet. Or (borrowing words from another of Kevin’s poems) simply welcome a new openness: “…because I am also/ in the lap of a meadow//with my mouth wide open.” Indeed, the world––or the inveterate self––may not be enough for some of us; but, fortunately, we contain multitudes.

  

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* 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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com