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
Flashback Friday:
Red Letter Poem #5
Lingua Franca
My language languishes:
it neither scampers nor frisks;
it executes no back-flips,
no handstands, no moonwalks;
it does not somersault; it does not pirouette;
it neither pounces like the cobra
nor springs like the yearling lamb.
I want that lithe and limber idiom,
that sassy brassy palaver,
that red-stiletto dialect,
that margarita-mother-tongue
with the salted rim,
spectacular vernacular,
slang with a bang;
I want blab, blurt, yawp, yelp,
hoot, howl, holler,
the lingua franca
of bump and tussle and nudge.
— Thomas DeFreitas
To Seamus Heaney’s way of thinking, poetry was about providing that “extra voltage in the language, the intensity, the self-consciousness” that raises thought to another level. Often, we experience that intensity through its sounds, its lyricism––and this is true even in contemporary poems that sometimes pose as normal speech. So it didn’t surprise me to learn that, when Thomas DeFreitas was 15 and he heard the great Irish poet read at Boston College, the event became a catalyst for him and helped make his love for poetry “all-consuming and irreversible.” An emerging talent, at work on his first full-length manuscript, Thomas’ writing has appeared in a number of journals like Dappled Things, Ibbetson Street, Muddy River Poetry Review, and Plainsongs. His desire for the richness and complexity of experience that words can bring to us is abundantly on display in this boisterous fanfare of a poem – the lingua franca, perhaps, with which all our roving hearts converse. . .
Or so said I back in 2020 when the Red Letters was a brand-new experiment, we were all walking around wearing surgical masks, wary of any human contact, and Thomas was making his first appearance in these electronic pages. A good deal has changed for the poet in the intervening years: he’s published three collections with Kelsay Books, the most recent being Swift River Ballad. A new title, Walking Between the Raindrops, is scheduled to appear later in 2025. His work has also been included in On and Off the Road: Poems of New Hampshire (from the Peterborough Poetry Project.) Though his more recent poetry (several examples of which have appeared in other RL installments) reveals a ripening of his vision and his skills, I’m impressed that the exuberance of the fifteen-year-old literary acolyte––who was thrilled by the cerebral and musical possibilities he experienced in Heaney’s performance––is very much present in his work today. And these days, when the headlines bring us a continual supply of distressing news, I thought we all might savor a little burst of linguistic delight.
The Red Letters
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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
* 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
