Flashback Friday––RLP#19

 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

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dear Readers,

 

The New England Poetry Club’s WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series this summer was a tremendous success!  Wonderful poets, enthusiastically received, by large audiences at the Longfellow Historical House.  If you missed any of the readings, you can still view the videos by searching under the series name on YouTube, or by visiting nepoetryclub.org and look for the We (too)… dropdown: Robert Pinsky, Stephanie Burt, Diannely Antigua, Richard Blanco, and Martha Collins.  (And, if I can don my salesman’s hat for a moment, there are still about two dozen of the beautiful We (too)… t-shirts remaining for sale, helping us to earmark funds for the 2026 season of this powerful diversity-affirming project.

 

So I’m taking a little R&R and sending out a Flashback Friday from early on in the history of the Red Letters––updated here and focusing on a stirring Covid-era elegy by Jo Pitkin.  It seems appropriate now, as the infection rate is once again climbing, and certain government officials want to employ the ostrich form of medical intervention: insert head firmly in sand, and the monsters will vanish.

 

Wishing you a safe and calm conclusion to the summer,

Steven

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday––RLP#19

 

 

 

 

Luna Moths


On the day I realize my father

might be ill, two luna moths appear



like lime-green handprints stuccoed

on the white walls of my office studio.



This husband and wife come to me

from the boughs of my black walnut tree.



While their spread wings cure, eight

eyespots fix on my clumsy, worried haste.



Because the moths only live to mate,

they do not have mouths. They do not eat.



Flying at night, the moonly moths live

for a week. This is all the span they have.



Now, fading by day like scraps of fabric,

the pair rests. Their feathery antennae tick



lightly in June gusts. At twilight, a sheer

single hand almost waves at me as it flutters



across the pale gold disk fobbed firmly,

like a pocket watch, to the deep blue sky.

 

                                    — Jo Pitkin

 

 

Elegy. Acknowledgement of grief. Awareness of the void we feel in even the most beautiful of summer days. Over seven million families around the world—1.2 million in the United States alone—will forever hear that word, Corona, and feel every nerve in the body plucked like a bass string, reverberating deep. But elegy is one face of a two-sided coin, and the obverse is celebration—knowledge of how a certain face, a familiar voice made our day brim with abiding joy. We each carry our share of unvoiced elegies, for losses great and small; and we must also find in our awareness the possible celebration every new day presents, simply to maintain our humanity. Often a poet’s work assists us in both.



I am struck by Jo’s surprising use of language, subtle but affecting. Think of all the verb choices available to the poet when she describes those two luna moths––fastened? affixed?––no, “stuccoed/ on the white walls of my office studio.” And when those creatures are drying their wings in the sun, I never for a second doubted that her choice of “cured” was anything but a sad double entendre for what even a loving daughter cannot offer her father. Such an accumulation of telling details in the poem: that single pale hand fluttering; that shockingly brief lifespan; that dreamlike pocket watch in the sky––and before we realize it, the moth’s fate, the father’s, and our own are quietly intertwined.



I think of Jo Pitkin as an Arlingtonian—even though, after fifteen years, she traded the waters of Spy Pond for the majestic Hudson River in upstate New York. What I remember best were her tireless labors on the yearly Heart of the Arts Festival, back when the Arlington Center for the Arts was young, helping our town to enjoy the work of painters, dancers, musicians, craftspeople and, yes, poets. Jo’s poems have a painter's eye and a musician’s sense of rhythmic invention. She is the author of five full-length poetry collections including Commonplace Invasions where today’s poem first appeared. “Luna Moths” is sort of a pre-elegy when the prospect of her father’s loss first entered her consciousness. But in my reading, it’s a tribute to our sense of relationship—to the people we most care about and the places that summon our deepest attention. In pronouncing her quiet words, in imagining the brief beauty of the luna moth, we too might feel the complexity of our moment: its somber joy, its pained exultation.

 

 

 

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

Somerville Writer Lesley Pratt Bannatyne sings her "Lake Song'

Recently, I caught up with Somerville writer Lesley Pratt Bannatyne to talk about her new book "Lake Song: A Novel in Stories." Bannatyne is best know for her books about Halloween, but she is also an accomplished fiction writer, as evidenced by her new book.




How has it been for you as a writer in Somerville, after all these years?

Being in Somerville–it's been 36 years, give or take—is something I almost don't think about until I go somewhere else. What's amazing about this city becomes clear. Years ago, when Robert Goss, Gary Duehr, and I wanted to stage a theatrical walking tour of a Somerville neighborhood, complete with fireworks! it was the city of Somerville that gave us the green light, firefighters, and its blessing. Where other cities saw only headaches, Somerville (and here I include both the city officials and audiences) were game. When poet Denise Provost and I proposed to display “locally sourced literature” at the Davis Square Farmer’s Market, they said sure, and we were able to set up a table to introduce shoppers to books by Somerville writers (of which there are an incredible number!). Somerville Library, too, gave us space to hold a Somerville Readers and Writers Festival not long ago. Maybe it's because we live so close together that this can happen, or maybe it's because we have awesome organizations here. Whatever the reason, it makes this city a place where new ideas flourish, and that can only be good for creativity.



Your new book takes place in the Finger Lakes region of upstate NY from 1906-2006 . Why did you choose this time frame?


I wanted to tell a story about the long tail of trauma; about generations connected through events and place, and how the past colors the present. The sweep of the 20th century seemed right for it. I could draw on history and culture to create a very real time and place so that readers feel they’re on familiar ground. Bootlegging, the Kennedy assassination, space missions, the rise of spiritualism–these all ride in the background of the book. The characters and plot, though, are completely invented.



A body of water, Okisee Lake is a symbol, and in a way a major character in this book. How does this lake center the story? Does it connect people? Does it seal their fate?





I was on Revere Beach recently - the waves are so mesmerizing, and endless. Our ocean here makes us feel its vastness. A lake, I think, makes you feel held. When I was trying to imagine a place that would support the small community of Kinder Falls, I chose a place I know deeply, which is the Finger Lakes in west central New York State. Okisee (a fictional lake loosely set on Keuka) holds a collective memory, I suppose, and stands in as a repository for all the history that's happened on its shores. The lake is both the site of the tragedy that begins the book and the symbol of hope that ends it.



The setting is a small town in rural New York.  There seems to be a Spoon River anthology or Our Town vibe in the book...but on a much more visceral level.  Is a small town a great microcosm of our society at large?


I imagine that most things in the society at large can be reflected in the interactions of neighbors in a small town. But this book is character-driven more than ideological. These folks are farmers, grifters, miners, driving instructors, lovers. They set fires, read tarot cards, sell Avon, build houses with their own hands. Putting them in a small town is like putting them in a pressure cooker. Things heat up quickly in a small town.


Are you from a small town? How much research did you do?


I'm from a suburb of Bridgeport, CT. But my connection to upstate New York is lifelong. My grandparents bought a cottage there when they were newlyweds, and I've visited every year since I was born. It’s given me a good taste of rural life. You need a grocery store? 12 miles. You want something to do? Climb up a creek. Catch a fish.


The research I did was focused on specific historic events that had an impact on the characters. Yes, the Klan was active in New York state in the 1930s (and before and beyond that). Yes, companies from all over the US tried to drill gas out of the shale underneath this part of our country. The 1965 East Coast blackout, our country’s first major electrical outage, is very real, and many were terrified it was a Russian attack, or aliens. Yes, there was a gang called the Albany Ketchup Murderers. I love finding details in the historical record that add color to a story.


I originally got interested in this part of New York state because it birthed an unusual number of utopian communities and religions: this was where Joseph Smith Jr. received the golden plates that would become the Book of Mormon. Shakers have a history here, the Millerites (who believed the world would end in 1843), and of course, Spiritualism. It's a fascinating place, and it seemed rich with possibilities.



Why should we read this book?


Lake Song is a multigenerational saga set around the Finger Lakes in rural New York, and it's gently haunted. If anything about that intrigues you, I think you should read this book.


I’m thrilled it won the Grace Paley Prize for short fiction, and thrilled it’s now out in the world (thank you Mad Creek Books). 

A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M presented by Michael Todd Steffen

 A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M

presented by Michael Todd Steffen

From the December 14, 2024 online Daily Rattle, from the printed Rattle Winter 2013

The Famine of Love

by Jenneva Scholz

After his mother forbids him to marry Psyche, Cupid puts down his

bow and all living things on earth stop mating.

First the fruit flies fell around the fruit bowl and the air was still,

the figs and apples ripened and then were gone. The end of bees

means the end of plums and roses, the end of rye and amaranth.

Soon, no mice: we noticed their silence after the years of traps

and scratching in the ceilings, no droppings in the flour, no footprints

in the butter. I found an owl dead in a glade. Take less

time than you might think for horsefeed to look like food

if there is no food. There are our orchards, there are

our fields, empty of hum and buzzing, empty of peaches

and wheat. The male swan left the lake, just flew away,

and his mate made widening circles over town,

honking her grief until we shot her down.

The goats stripped every bush of leaves but bore no kids,

no cats birthed kittens, no kits for the foxes, no goslings,

no grubs, no nymphs, no infants. My son now prefers the empty

woods to the dancing girls—it’s true they’ve grown bony,

and though I go to watch them they don’t stir me. I’m hungry.

At the town council we address the issue: how long can we survive

on leaves and boiled bark? Two months, if we eat our seed corn,

and slaughter our horses. One month if we save some corn,

save some horses to try to plant in the spring. My wife

once rode that horse fifty miles just to see me

for an afternoon. Once she rode over a river in winter,

the ice spackled with rabbit tracks

and filled with unlucky fish, just to marry me.

Once we made love in the garden, under the bean trellis;

in our bed we made a child. I make a list

of her good qualities. I try to find my love for her

in things, wearing the clothes she gave me, reading

notations she left in my book. Re-reading her letters

I think, I’m so hungry I could let you starve.

It’s hard to know yourself anymore

when you can think a thing like that.

Some things might outlast this. Tortoises, maybe.

But look at them: each grooved to fit smoothly with the other,

built to heave those heavy bodies together and lock in.

See how his belly is arched

to cradle her shell.

I keep thinking: I don’t need her.

I keep opening the cupboard to find nothing.

~ ~ ~

From the onset with the fruit flies (the virologists’ study analogues) the poem gives us a terrible vision of the end of a world, not just the death of an individual, but a general diminishing of resources, animals, fruits, grains, insects dying off to foreseeable total depletion, of a community undergoing famine—

Two months, if we eat our seed corn,

and slaughter our horses. One month if we save some corn,

save some horses to try to plant in the spring…

The situation is hopeless, expressed in a logic that makes no sense: They have a chance to plant later if they starve themselves to death first in order to preserve corn seed. (Other interesting elements in the poem don’t stand up to the scrutiny of reason, like gender: At one moment the narrative voice is communal, at another moment it is Venus taking up from the epilogue talking about Cupid, at another moment it is a man talking about making love to his wife in the garden and the child they made…)

What helps keep the poem interesting, instead of just desperate, is the magnified awareness of the poem’s being a poem, the way we sometimes abide a nightmare by being vaguely aware we are only dreaming. The artificiality (or artfulness) of the poem is announced in the prompt in the epigraph about Venus and Psyche and Cupid and how all things on earth stop mating. It situates us in an etiological or mythic realm, not the real world. As with every poem, there’s a big implied As if running throughout it. In reality, perhaps, a long lonely Friday night without a date might have inspired Jenneva Scholz—or fretted her—with the intensity to begin seeing this poem under her pen. Remembering the story about Psyche and Cupid would be all the spark needed for the fire. It was written, I think, close to its first appearance in the early 20-teens, when the world was having a voluble discussion about the disappearing number of bees (second line) and how that affected the whole food chain.

For a lot longer we’ve been told about goat grazing and the depletion of vegetation on the Mediterranean islands. When the goats stop mating here, the drop-off we feels is the hollowness of eating or consuming without love, without procreativity, without creativity. It’s a dilemma for me evoked in our present world with the consumption of much processed food, without real taste or appreciation, without love.

The really big drop-off we feel, however, is earlier in the poem. The onset of the poem enumerates the deaths of small beings, which hardly matter to us, seemingly, fruit flies, bees… And then mice, maybe a little more troublesome, yet they are pests that keep us awake. The bluntness with which Scholz announces the significantly larger death is telling about our first somewhat immediate encounter with death: “I found an owl dead in a glade.” It’s an utmost poetic stroke of the unpoetic, the bluntness of bluntness. (Sorry belles-lettrists and this failure to encompass poetry with the merely beautiful!)

Though the dilemma here is famine, the withdrawal of food sources, we are reminded again and again of its “mythic” cause, that Cupid has ceased to shoot his arrows of desire at the creatures. That element is re-invoked powerfully by Scholz in the image of the male swan leaving its mate on the lake. Without love: the lone left swan honking out grief until somebody in the community shoots it, out of irritation, sure, but then also for the food it provides.

The thing that makes a poem like this all the more urgent, and true, is its ability, proven as it so happens just now by world events, to open a vivid intimate door onto the ongoing disaster of humanity, who we are. I’ve been hearing about people undergoing famine all my life. I’ve seen the images of the bloated children in magazines and on TV. Never have I, as a tax payer, felt so involved, at however a slant. But works of art like Guernica, or this poem, “The Famine of Love,” bring us as close to that failure as possible without actually being there, with the power of art to carry us into that realm of woe and suffering stripped of ideology. The imagination is a far more powerful vehicle than mere fantasy. Ask any nightmare.

The speaker in the poem undergoes the simultaneity of grief and want, the excruciating loss of the love Cupid is deliberately no longer delivering and the hunger resulting in that withdrawal. It is such a polarly opposite set of deprivations:

I make a list

of her good qualities. I try to find my love for her

in things, wearing the clothes she gave me, reading

notations she left in my book. Re-reading her letters

I think, I’m so hungry I could let you starve.

I love you and hate you, more than anything. It brings us to the breaking point, where Robert Lowell in a similar despair, in the poem “Skunk Hour,” another poignant love-loss poem, utters the lucid perspective of insanity: My mind is not right. When the universe seems to have gone as deaf to our cries as a child-god brooding over his implacable mother’s injunctions, we can only recognize the validity of the thorough breakdown—

It’s hard to know yourself anymore

when you can think a thing like that.

When that’s what the world is saying, that’s what we need to recognize. That’s the step that needs to be made before any remedial steps can be taken. The admission that we, we all, not just the people in the news, are doomed.

Red Letter Poem #266

  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 #266

 

 

 

Prayer


With the swimmers, swim,

with the travelers, travel,

as they say in church.



With the one who was raped

and is expecting a child,

breathe, breathe, breathe.

With the child whose hair has gone grey,

prepare a backpack for school.



With the frostbitten, freeze,

with the shellshocked, vomit in the trench.

With the tank commander,

who's been missing since October,

be found, be pieced together

from scattered body parts.

Consecrated particles

as they say in church.



And also be

with the one who eats pot noodles with cold water;

with the one who was captured but will never talk;

with the one who was conceived

but never got born.

And be with the one

who never got to give birth.



And also be

with the two girls

somewhere in the Rivne region, do you remember?

We were driving to the east, in a convoy,

and they stood watching at the roadside,

and put their hands on their hearts.



And then I understood everything.

 

 

        ––Artur Dron’

 

(Translated from Ukrainian by

Yuliya Musakovska)

 

 

 

 

It would be funny––were not so stunningly awful: the prospect of two imperious old men pretending they are not subject to time’s sovereignty, despite all evidence to the contrary. These commanders-in-chief, representing two of the most powerful nations on Earth, are meeting in a hastily-convened summit, to decide between them the fate of Ukraine, Europe and (it’s not too much of an exaggeration to claim) the world. By the time you’re reading this, these two ‘leaders’––one, an absolute tyrant and the other a shambling acolyte––will be meeting in Alaska. Surrounded by the ceremonial trappings of statesmen, their conference will possess all the political nuance of Mafioso bosses dividing up territory. How can they even pretend to be discussing peace when the country who suffered the barbarous invasion in the first place is not party to the negotiations? As much as possible, I try to screen off my politics from the Red Letters, but my own humanity demands that I speak frankly. The President of my country––who declared on the campaign trail that he’d end the war in Ukraine on his “first day in office” (seven long months ago), will now make statements like: "There'll be some land swapping going on. . .Good stuff, not bad stuff. Also, some bad stuff, for both." Setting aside the power of Trump’s almost-Churchillian rhetoric, his breathtakingly simplistic mindset makes it sound as if he’s trading land parcels for a new shopping mall, rather than determining the future of a people who have fought and bled for three long years against the naked aggression of a colossal superpower. And only the truly naïve would think this President can possibly match wits with the ex-KGB master manipulator in what will play out like some absurdist drama. Try not to stare at the blood pooling beneath the scenery. Where is Samuel Beckett when you really need him?



Now, let’s compare the tone of the President’s language with that of a young poet-turned-soldier, who volunteered to take up arms in defense of his home and family. Artur Dron’ was a journalism major and event organizer for the Old Lion Publishing House when, after the Russian invasion, he joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine. He’d already published one poetry collection, Dormitory No. 6––and, after being sent home to recuperate from a shrapnel injury, he completed his second acclaimed book, We Were Here. It was issued last year by Jantar, an independent London-based publisher of European Literary Fiction and Poetry, and was released in the US in May. Sometime back, his translator, the noted poet Yuliya Musakovska, sent me the manuscript; I published one poem as Red Letter # 244, and I’m honored now to be able to offer this second. It’s immediately evident that someone who has seen, up close, the brutality of this war cannot help but speak with an altered gravity:



With the swimmers, swim,

with the travelers, travel,

as they say in church.



With the one who was raped

and is expecting a child,

breathe, breathe, breathe.



If human life still has any sanctity––and if human suffering still has the power to shame anyone with even a teaspoonful of decency––that’s what we experience right from the outset of this poem. That repetition of “breathe” takes on a variety of meanings: is it a doctor coaxing the mother during a difficult birth? Is it the soldier trying to remind himself not to fail in his duty as a witness? Or might it be the mantra of an entire civilian population, just trying to endure another day of wanton destruction? The poet vacillates between the objectivity of a journalist (that “child whose hair has gone grey,” preparing a backpack for school as if it were any ordinary day!) and the prayerful litany of the faithful:



And also be

with the one who eats pot noodles with cold water;

with the one who was captured but will never talk;

with the one who was conceived

but never got born.



And when, in the end, he spots the two girls beside the road, watching his convoy drive past, their simplest gesture––placing “their hands on their hearts”––cannot help but break ours. Artur has said of these poems that they “were written at the front, but they are not about the war. They are about people who love more than they fear.” I am wondering now which spokesperson better speaks for us.

 

 

 

 

 

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