Red Letter Poem #250

 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 #250

 

 

 

 

Valentine to Jimmy Piersall

Even if you hadn’t cracked a hundred homers

and rounded the bases backwards,

even if your mitt couldn’t reach

from the starstruck green of center field

straight up to Mars

to snatch fly balls from the sky,



I would have loved you.



Because you feared no one. Because

when your chest pushed up against an umpire’s

words did not fumble in your mouth

but hurled like a stream of tobacco spit.



I was small, had yet to find my voice.


––Susan Eisenberg

There is a reason we create grand statuary––and place them high on pedestals, above the ground we mortals walk upon. We elevate these expressions of the extraordinary so everyone will have to lift their eyes to see them, their glorious heads haloed by sun and sky. These days, true heroes (and, to be clear I’m referring to towering figures of any gender; the term heroines has come to have a diminished stature of late) are an increasingly rare commodity. In this encompassing media landscape, it seems we quickly begin uncovering their flaws and failings even while the marble or bronze is being unveiled. Some even suggest that people first exalt their heroes so that, subsequently, they can have the pleasure of tearing them down. But the societal need to discover and spotlight our champions––those who are born with extraordinary gifts, or work diligently to perfect their skills, or stand with an unswerving commitment to some enduring principle: this is quite an interesting thing to consider and is brought to mind by Susan Eisenberg’s delightful new poem.



In our cultural climate, sports figures are often accorded the hero’s laurels; but Susan is recalling a simpler time (before mind-boggling half-billion-dollar contracts, and ESPN fanfare.) She’s celebrating the great Jimmy Piersall who signed his first baseball contract with the Boston Red Sox at age eighteen and, in 1950, was one of the youngest players to ever play the game. (I should add that Susan, a Cleveland girl, first saw him play during his time with the Indians.) Piersall became an All-Star center fielder but excelled at the plate as well (he still holds the Sox record for garnering 6 hits in a single nine-inning game.) Yet his behavior often extended beyond the capricious, becoming erratic and sometimes violent. He would get involved in brawls, on and off the field, which led several times to minor league demotions. Still, his career spanned 17 years, playing for five teams. But one of his most lasting impacts came with the publication of his memoir Fear Strikes Out; in it, he revealed that he suffered from bipolar disorder and had experienced a mental breakdown––but determinedly fought his way back to health and the sport he loved. This was at a time when sports figures kept such ‘dark’ secrets hidden from the public, but Piersall’s honesty helped so many suffering their own double lives.



Susan, you may know, is a poet and retired electrician; she’s the author of five poetry collections, most recently, Stanley’s Girl (Cornell)––as well as the nonfiction (and New York Times Notable) book, We’ll Call You If We Need You: Experiences of Women Working Construction. When I first came across her poetry, I was impressed how her verse often celebrated the blue-collar working experience in a country not always appreciative of its labors. But now Susan is also a visual artist, oral historian, and a Resident Scholar at Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center––which, to my mind, begins to flirt with hero-status. Her poem today touches on Piersall’s gleeful on-field antics. Not surprisingly, this felt thrilling to a young girl who might not feel so free to express what was curtained off inside the mind. “Because you feared no one. Because/ when your chest pushed up against an umpire’s/ words did not fumble in your mouth...”. The possibility that authority might be defied and unbridled individuality expressed––this was, perhaps, the first liberating poem seeded in Susan’s consciousness. And its relevance today is underscored by the news story just unfolding from a current Red Sox outfielder, Jarren Duran. He revealed in a new documentary that he was almost broken by his sense of failure and, in 2022, attempted suicide. We are overjoyed that he was unsuccessful––not only because he has since become a marvelous player (voted MVP of the 2024 MLB All-Star game), but because the emotional courage he is displaying today will likely save other lives.



All this makes me think of the friends of mine suffering devastating illness, or acting as caretakers for spouses struggling with debilitating conditions. It brings to mind all the artists I know who persist in producing new instances of beauty and delight, even when the world seems determined to ignore them. And still others, determined to stand up for our democratic republic when dark forces are attempting to shatter its ideals. Heroics, Susan reminds us, come in many unexpected forms, and have an effect on people which no one could have anticipated. ‘Finding our voice.’ These, here, are my modest statues built of ink and breath. Am I wrong to think that––right now, dear readers––your minds are serving as their pedestals?

 

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

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

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

 

A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

The Organizing Music in Robert Pinsky’s poem ‘Branca’

Who the heck is Ralph Branca? Well, as baseball fans (and there are poets among this group) may know, Branca was a not bad, not bad at all pitcher in the Major Leagues between 1944 and 1956, with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the Detroit Tigers, and finally with the New York Yankees. The specific moment of Branca’s career that still registers with us is that he gave up the game-winning homerun to Bobby Thompson of the New York Giants in a 1951 playoff game, and that hit became known as The Miracle of Coogan’s Bluff, and also as The Shot Heard Around the World

The poem is not merely about defeat and failure, it’s about widely-witnessed and soul-crushing defeat and failure.

After he gave up the most famous homerun ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping, face down.

The poem appears in Pinsky’s most recent collection Proverbs of Limbo, published last June (2024) by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

It is a poem typically rife with subjects for discussion. I just wanted to make this one note about the stunning topical variety of the poem and how its immediate appearance of random organization, which keeps us on the edge of our seats as we read, still maintains our trust with its rhythmical consistency. Life is crazy, we need something to hang onto. Kids prepare to confront crazy love and mortality with poetry:

Ring around the rosies,

Pocket full of posies,

Ashes, ashes, we all fall down.

Similarly the poem ‘Branca’ conjures life’s falls, with a dazzling variety of facts about Ralph Branca, importantly as to his identity as a human being associated with so much more than that moment of failure which has been etched in history, or baseball lore. The poet will also take the opportunity to make statements about himself in the ramble of his data:

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

Why these two pieces of information are joined in the same couplet? Seemingly for no reason at all, and there’s a great indulgence these days of being unburdened by reason or coherence. However, the two do go quite profoundly together, as they each evoke origin of the man, his father of the biological Ralph Branca, Robert Pinsky as another, different source of Ralph Branca in the poem itself which will extend and expand on the pitcher’s living repute as a man, in details, much more than just the notorious baseball pitcher, otherwise diminished to a needle of failure in the haystack of historical addenda.

When we read through the poem, we notice an end-line or “heroic” based versification, with the little hiccup, in most of the lines, of a dactyl or anapest (however you score it)—

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

Speaking is the punchline of a Jewish joke.

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn has its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers…

That versification holds the very remote and difficult associations between the two lines of each couplet stable, so to speak, and keeps us going along with it even as we’re wondering, perhaps squirming, about the sense of the organization or logic of the poem, however our nature to just swallow language. Again, as poets and readers of poetry, it can be a gimme to revel in madness. But if folks are going to start talking about the poem, that is if the poem is to stand a chance to stay with us, in memory, as Branca himself somewhat obscurely has, we need to find sense in it. The editors of The New Yorker found sense enough to publish it in March 2017.

The music or prosody of the Greek-ish lines begins to work on us subconsciously as a sort of coherence. When we look closer, associations emerge: unlucky number 13 and the (mortal) laugh in a joke; a Roman colloquialism and a town’s daily journal both vehicles of hearsay or facts; late in life “At eighty-five” balanced with early career “He was twenty-one”…

The poem will be the challenge and subject of this week’s poetry discussion forum Let’s Talk About a Poem hosted by Somerville Poet Laureate Lloyd Schwartz via Zoom, on Saturday April 12 at 11a.m. Robert Pinsky will be “there” to read ‘Branca’ and take part in the discussion. For more information and a link to join, contact Marita Coombs at maldencirc@gmail.com.