Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: 06/08/2025

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

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 #258

A poem should be palpable and mute

As a globed fruit,

Dumb

As old medallions to the thumb. . .

Archibald MacLeish

from: “Ars poetica”

Ars

I press the long handle of the mallet

into the wedged clay the clay has already

been slammed into the table again and again

in the process of consolidation airless it accepts

the smooth wooden dowel making way

as I work it down and begin to stir finding

and making space a shape inside round

and oblong and square it is everything before

it is something

one hand on the new forming

inner wall the other across the exterior fingers

spread palm flat the skin of me against the skin

of the clay I shape its heavy liquid substance

this spadeful of earth that will never sprout a seed

listens to me to my making mind that moves

inside it pressing pulling I draw up edges

to surround the hollow center it shows me

it can stand upright and so I begin

the subtraction gouging the surface

cut after cut I take whole slabs away

whose life is it after all

––Mary Buchinger

Blame Horace. Whether you’re delighted by, intrigued, or simply cringe at those occasions when poets take their own art form as the subject of their work, this Roman bard deserves a good deal of the responsibility. Sometime between 20 and 13 B.C.E, he penned his treatise in verse, Ars Poetica, and legions of poets ever since have felt a certain compulsion to add to their repertoire––not only poems about their lives and loves––but the very process involved in turning life into verse. The principles Horace highlighted included: knowledge, decorum, and sincerity; and he advised poets to read widely, strive for precision, and seek honest criticism (not a bad starting point for an MFA curriculum). Poets––like all who labor earnestly at any profession––eventually feel the urge for self-reflection: the why and how of the practice, and to what end? What remains to be discovered about language’s capabilities––and, more specifically, what will that search show us about our own lives? I prefaced this commentary with an excerpt from Archibald MacLeish’s famous example of this sub-genre; influenced by the “no truth but in things” Imagists, he urged poets to create work that moves away from the rhetorical and, instead, produce word-objects that stand in the world like sculptures, whose physicality and presence embody the act of meaning-making. Today’s Red Letter from Mary Buchinger––esteemed poet, professor, part-time painter, full-time student of existence––would, I imagine, have made both Horace and MacLeish smile.

If not for the title (“Ars”––Latin for ‘skill’ or craft’, but also the root of our modern term ‘art’), we might read this poem simply as a hands-on description (and I use the word literally) of what it’s like to work with clay. But coming from a skilled poet, we can’t help but feel this is a double-game, where we can exist in the physical and intellectual realms simultaneously. As we, too, work the substance, arduously preparing clay to be used for pottery or sculpture, we are kneading the mind as well, feeling the materiality of thought and language, as it resists and accepts the forms we wish to impose upon it. Haven’t you sometimes wanted to slam some poor sentence onto the desktop, to squeeze the air pockets from its recesses, to feel it smooth out beneath the dowel of our attention? Is this potter/poet producing a vessel––and, if so, what is it intended to contain? Isn’t that one of the goals of all artists: “making space a shape”––whether intended for the pedestal, the page, or the mind? And what better description of the marvelous (and mysterious) stuff we craftspeople work with––clay, color, gesture, sound, word––than Mary’s observation: “it is everything before/ it is something.” “Ars” sits on the page as a protean mass of possibility, being formed (forming itself?) into a shape of which the mind might make use. Even the elastic sentence structure, the lack of punctuation, the caesuras (like air pockets in the clay? like places to catch our breath?) give us the feeling that we, too, must be actively involved if this poem is to cohere and stand before us. No, not a double- but a triple-game, because we cannot escape the Biblical allusion to clay being the substance from which our ancestral bodies were formed. Perhaps the maker inside these lines is divinity itself, bringing some sort of new progeny into being––and, if so, how can we not ask (as the poet does): “whose life is it after all”?

Mary is the author of five full-length poetry collections and three chapbooks, the most recent being The Book of Shores (Lily Poetry Review Books.) Among her many honors are: the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Press Annual Chapbook Prize; the Daniel Varoujian Award; the Firman Houghton Award; and honors from Best New Poems Online and the Massachusetts Center for the Book. She is the past-President of the New England Poetry Club, one of the nation’s oldest literary associations, and (as many in this part of the country will tell you) has worked tirelessly on behalf of poets and poetry. MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica” concludes: “A poem should not mean/ But be.” Yes, we know how the game is played: art is made by humans, for human attention, assembled from the substances of our material existence. Even when the result seems effortless (the artifice hidden from view), we grasp the intent of this undertaking. But here, we can feel the mind of the maker strenuously shaping this offering, as if arriving at its finished form at the precise moment we do. Mary’s poem sits here like a clay vessel, filled with sheer potentiality. Clearly, it is in the kiln of our shared imaginations that it must be fired.

The Red Letters

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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

http://dougholder.blogspot.com

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And coming soon:

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

I recently caught up with New England Poetry Club member-- Gloria Monaghan. She has a new poetry collection out from the Lily Press titled " The Diary of St. Marion"

From her website:

Gloria Monaghan is a Professor at Wentworth University. She has published seven collections of poetry. Her seventh book, Diary of Saint Marion, Lily Poetry Review, (2025) was featured at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (2025, AWP). Her poems have appeared in Nixes Mate, NPR, Poem-a-Day, Lily Poetry Review, Mom Egg Review, Quartet and River Heron among others. She has been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, as well as the Massachusetts Book Award, and the Griffin Prize. She has also been nominated for the Sheila Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. Thanks to a Bistline Grant from Wentworth Institute, she recently completed a film on the painter, Nancy Ellen Craig, Daughter of Rubens, which was accepted into the 2023 Provincetown Film Festival. She is currently working on another film about the Dominican painter, Jose Ricon Mora.

You grew up outside of Detroit. I know Marge Piercy grew up there and wrote about the city. The city is not known as the Paris of the Midwest—what did Detroit give to you as a poet?

I come from an old Detroit family. My great, great uncle won $5,000 in a card game in 1903 and picked up the phone and bought the Tigers baseball team. In the 1880’s Detroit was like New York in its glory days. There was a port which contributed to trade and wealth of the city. There was and still is beautiful architecture. The houses of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison are still there, albeit in poor condition. In the days when I grew up right outside of Detroit, it was a seedy, ruined place. It has always had a sort of underground art scene, and now wonderful poets thrive in Detroit and the area we used to call, the 3rd coast.

It was dangerous, but it felt glamourous to me as a child. In the 80’s, when I was a punk rock kid, we would venture down to the Freezer Theater, Lilies in Hamtramck, and Bookies on Joy Road. These were really run down places, some of them abandoned. But there were great bands that played there like Iggy Pop, Killing Joke, The Necros, and L7. It was an innovative and interesting scene. The City Club which became Clutch Cargo had an old jazz club adjacent to it, and we would go there after the shows and hear music from the old jazz masters. It also had an abandoned swimming pool on the upper floor where some of us would swim. Detroit, for me, was nostalgic; the old glory of those empty beautiful buildings, the train station, and the anger of the youth 100 years later. My grandmother would tell me stories about Detroit. She lived in the past, and I got that from her.

In your new collection of poetry, it opens with a little opera bag, What is the story behind this?

The little black opera bag is miniature. I found it in my grandmother’s desk and took it as a relic. I made a small shrine of skeleton keys, dirt blessed by a priest, and a patch of my grandmother’s crocheted work. I had this idea that these objects, in addition to the over 80 letters my grandfather wrote to my grandmother that no one had opened or read for 100 years, would transport me to another time. I found the letters in an old wicker basket. No one had opened them. They were written on the USS Mississippi in 1919 where my grandfather was serving in WW1. When I opened these letters, I could smell his cologne- a faint lime smell, cigarettes and desire. It blew my mind. Perhaps these objects could speak through me, and I would tell their stories and secrets.

You have a number of dog poems in your book. In one you get inside the canine experience-- the elemental and instinctual aspects. I know Billy Collins wrote a number of fine dog poems. There is always an interest in how our pets view the world. What is your take on dogs?

I like what you said about the instinctual and elemental- I think that is what I was attempting. Dog is God spelled backwards. And it is true that all animals lead us to God and the divine. They know things we are too blind to see in daylight. They provide us with comfort and peace. They have not forgotten their kill instincts. They accept death as a natural phenomenon, and they know that it is not the end.

In your poem " I am not afraid of Storms" you write of a chance encounter with a young man on a train. I love taking trains because of the limbo between destinations—you are sort of outside time. There is a sort of ephemeral, transitory magic.....

When I was a kid in college, I would take the Detroit train to Kalamazoo and then later Chicago. I got to know the backs of people’s houses, the farms of corn and beans. The train window provides a quiet view of the loss of the people who have lived there for decades. Taking the train for me was cheap at the time, but it also was a place to write and read. Taking the train is cinematic. It fills your head with the lives of those forgotten. You are outside of time and perimeter. Anything can happen on a train.

You are a member of the New England Poetry Club—and have been nominated for a Motton Prize. What does the club mean to you?

I am a proud member of the New England Poetry Club. It was founded in 1915, and as far as I know it is the oldest poetry club in America. I am honored to have been nominated for a Motton Prize. To me, the club is about community. They sponsor prizes, events and support for poets in New England. It is rare, and it is a labor of love for those poets who work hard to protect the heritage of poetry. People can sometimes take these institutions for granted, but they are fragile, especially in these times when the arts are generally under attack. NEPC is a refuge for poets and a community of love.

Suddenly I Become the Dog

Hooves melt in the dust dirt
mouth slack open.

I have nothing to hide.
Chipmunk dead in the grass.
Did I do that?

His eyes weirdly peaceful
tail still fluffy
small smile.

I don’t remember it.
When time stopped, I was
chastised for recklessness

made decisions no longer justified.

In my youth I was a star shatterer.
Now I scatter black flies

left to my own devices
sheltered and surrounded by flowers
forgotten or tamed.

What rubric against the sky,
Orion, lost love,
has caused this shift to silence?