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 #303
The Visit
for Baron Wormser 1948-2025
I can't yet speak about you
as if you are in the past;
I feel you are still here
if I write you, so I write you,
and though I am versed
in losing brothers, how
being the one left turns
here hell, now desolation,
your death concussed me,
made me understand: I
wanted a friend to promise
not to die before me whom
I would promise in return
to not die first so both of us
would have to live forever.
I am sick and tired of grief.
Say what you will, I saw
a new mark on the moon,
a gray declivity, a cryptic
brushstroke, maybe part
of the name for my sorrow,
or my sorrow's shadow,
or maybe I never before
looked up so vulnerably,
having so blithely marked
the calendar for our visit
before that last phone call
to check that you'd be home.
––Richard Hoffman
Over the years, an artist-friend, Marty Cain, had developed quite a following for her meticulously observed, marvelously rendered colored pencil drawings focusing on small elements of the natural world––stones, twigs, feathers. Then one day, she visited the gallery that regularly showed her work, to bring them a batch of her newest creations: life-sized portraits of friends and fellow-artists, captured in vigorous charcoal strokes. “I can’t sell this!” explained the gallerist. “This is not you.” Believe it or not, this is hardly an uncommon problem among artists in all genres: whether to solidify your style (your brand!)––by focusing on one style, one subject matter, cultivating your audience––or to keep evolving, reaching out in any direction in which the Muse invites you. The smart move: capitulate, conform, develop your market. Marty’s response: thank you, but no. I recalled this story when reading through a large sheaf of poems sent to me by Richard Hoffman. This autumn, Lily Books will publish, not one, but two retrospective volumes by this poet: Each Child a Disappearance: New & Selected Poems (1972–2025) and Mundus et Infans: New & Selected Suites, Sequences, & Series. One thing becomes immediately clear in reading this work: the you Richard brings to the page is not a single distinct entity, nor does he feel any need to curtail his creative impulses in favor of the demands of the marketplace. Rather, he takes to heart that hallmark declaration by the father of contemporary poetry, Walt Whitman––“I am large, I contain multitudes!” Looking over these poems––three of which will join the chorus of Red Letter voices––I marvel at a half-century of verse that has resulted from an insatiably curious mind and a determination to bear witness to all that was taking place in and around it. This choice––which every poet and artist must make––is not only a matter of integrity (though that is certainly essential); it is a matter of survival. If one is not a faithful practitioner of this art, the Muse seems to conveniently lose your address, look elsewhere to bestow her gifts.
In today’s poem, Richard is taking part in an honorable old tradition. In the late fifteenth century, the Scots poet William Dunbar penned “Lament for the Makaris” (for the makers) to salute his poetic forebears without whom his own writing would not be possible. “Our plesance here is all vain glory,/ This fals world is but transitory,/ The flesh is bruckle, the Feynd is slee:/ Timor Mortis conturbat me.” And indeed, as we age, we do discover the vainglorious nature in our all-too-transitory lives––but if the ‘flesh is frail’, there is something heartier, more enduring: the love we can maintain for beautifully crafted art and those individuals who devote their lives to its creation. We’ve lost many fine poets in this past year, but Richard is singing of his dear friend, Baron Wormser: much-honored poet, educator and, for 25 years, librarian in Madison, Maine. “The Visit” takes the form of a one-sided conversation with someone he cannot truly believe is no longer in this world. I’m sure this is something many of us have experienced: the feeling that, if the conversation continues, then death’s claim will not be absolute. Richard is both playful (that bittersweet double entendre “I am versed/ in losing brothers,” which his poetry bears out) but also distraught, almost to the breaking point. I love how he tears at syntax until it very nearly loses meaning, yet somehow holds: “how/ being the one left turns/ here hell, now desolation,// your death concussed me,/ made me understand…”. But then he takes a half-step back from grief’s precipice to do what every poet must: he fashions an image both poet and reader can hold onto, to keep us from going under: “I saw/ a new mark on the moon,/ a gray declivity, a cryptic/ brushstroke, maybe part// of the name for my sorrow,/ or my sorrow's shadow…”. A poem such as this is a place marker, an invitation to stand still and take in how the heart and head register our mortal moment: “I never before/ looked up so vulnerably…”. Timor Mortis indeed, but also the heart’s quiet defiance.
Richard is the author of five collections of poetry, including Gold Star Road (winner of the Barrow Street Press Poetry Prize and the Sheila Motton Award) and Noon until Night (which was honored with the Massachusetts Book Award). His celebrated memoirs Half the House and Love & Fury, detail the devastating effects of child sexual abuse, and the difficulty of safeguarding one’s soul within the tumult of blue-collar American life. He is Emeritus Writer in Residence at Emerson College and nonfiction editor of Solstice Magazine. Reading through his work, another writer came to mind: the astonishing Portuguese talent Fernando Pessoa who, in the course of his lifetime, published poetry under seventy different names! He did not define these as ‘pseudonyms,’ but coined the term ‘heteronyms’ because he felt that better captured their independent intellectual nature. I visited his tomb in the Jerónimos Monastery in Lisbon––and, around the pillar, are four names––not just Pessoa’s but the three other primary personalities out of which he explored the world. One of those alter-egos supplied this inscription: “To be great, be whole: exaggerate or exclude nothing of yours." Curious strategy: to become whole by being varied. Though Richard’s voices and styles are not so dramatically different from each other nor so carefully sequestered, still, it seems this poet has created a house with many rooms and many inhabitants. And each one seems a hospitable host, bidding us to enter, make ourselves at home.
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
* The weekly installment is also available at
the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/
