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 In the historical reference, that phrase speaks to humanity’s insatiable craving for existence, vitality, and all its diverse embodiments––even though we can never escape the knowledge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

This essay is in Ibbetson Street 57--the latest issue of this Somerville-based magazine.

TRIBUTE TO DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES (1964-2025)

By Martha Collins

When Danielle Legros Georges passed away earlier this year, I, like many others, lost a dear friend.

I met Danielle in the 1990s, when she was a participant in a summer translation workshop at the William Joiner Institute at UMass Boston. Some years later she became a colleague who taught that workshop herself and was instrumental in welcoming more writers of color into the Joiner community.

In the years between and beyond, I knew her as a writer whose stunning poems seamlessly fused the personal and the political; as a poetic innovator who took enormous risks in her work; as a researcher who transformed history into beautiful poems; as a translator who carefully brought the important work of Haitian women poets to our attention; as a social activist whose work on behalf of others extended far beyond her written work; and as a friend with whom I shared both deep sadness and grief, and abundant laughter and joy—a woman who shared herself and her many gifts both deeply and widely.

Born in Haiti and raised in Boston, Danielle graduated from Emerson College, earned her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and served as Professor and later Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at Lesley University. She received numerous fellowships and awards, including an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Emerson College, and in 2024 was inducted into the American Antiquarian Society and named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Culture.

Many of her awards and recognitions were also opportunities for service. As Boston’s Poet Laureate from 2015 until 2019, she worked tirelessly to bring poetry to the lives of ordinary Bostonians. She partnered with museums and libraries, sponsored poetry workshops for students and elders, collaborated with musicians and photographers, and brought poetry to the attention of the entire city through POETRY ON THE T, the innovative sidewalk installation Raining Poetry, City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems, and other projects. She was on the Board of Directors of the New England Poetry Club, for which she spearheaded the creation of two awards for BIPOC poets and projects, one of which is now named for her. She was also a valued member of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Artist Advisory Council, a founding member of the the Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts (HAAM), and one of the lead editors of HAAM’s Anthology of Haitian Poets of Massachusetts. Her public service will extend beyond her lifetime, as it continues to touch people in the many communities she loved and served.

But Danielle will be remembered best and longest for her poems, which draw from all of these communities, small and large. She first explored her Haitian heritage, as well as her early life in Boston, in Maroon (2001). In The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton prize, she created boldly experimental poems to deal with such disturbingly timely subjects as racism in Boston and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, as well as exquisite lyrics in praise of her friends and loves, her neighborhood and its people, her city and its surroundings.

A year later, she published the chapbook Letters from Congo, which included translations of letters her parents wrote from the Congo when they worked there in the 1960s. The chapbook was a precursor to her stunning full-length collection Three Leaves, Three Roots:

Poems on the Haiti–Congo Story, which was published less than a month before her passing and from which she gave an impressive number of readings during the final weeks of her life.

Expanding her territory beyond family stories into the histories of colonial and post-colonial Haiti and Congo required an enormous amount of research, and transforming it into dazzlingly memorable poems led Danielle into an ever-expanding reservoir of poetic innovation.

In her final published book, a chapbook completed before and published just months after her passing, Danielle continued to transform history into poetry as she turned once again to the city and region where she lived. Aided by research grants, Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England took her far back into history as she continued to integrate documentary material into deeply moving lyrics.

Danielle’s adept adaptation of research into poems was paralleled by, and I think related to, her practice of literary translation. In the last years of her life, she translated and published two volumes of poems by Haitian women: Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert (2021) and Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, Maggy de Coster (2024). A similarly transformative work was Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters, co-edited with Bethany Artress White and published in 2023. I think it’s no accident that these books feature women poets. All of Danielle’s books, from the earliest on, include memorable portraits and mentions of women, and in her poetic accounts of the Haiti- Congo connection and New England slavery, she was careful, as history often is not, to focus on women as much as men.

As in her poems, so in her friendships. Even in the darkest times, knowing Danielle Legros Georges was a joy. I miss her. I will always miss her. But I will always have her poems