Red Letters: Flashback Friday––RLP#20

 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,



I need to offer another Flashback Friday because, at the moment, I am on rustic little Star Island––a flinty bit of rock ten miles off of Portsmouth, NH––on an annual writing retreat. Immersed in the peace of the island––sea sounds, gulls, bell buoys, and time for poetry––I realized I might not be able to switch gears easily and take care of the business of the Letters. So, in a time when even the thought of ‘celebration’ feels alien to most of us, it’s good to be reminded of what our lives are really made of (the headlines can take a back seat for a moment.)



Wishing you a safe and calm conclusion to the summer,

Steven





Flashback Friday––RLP#20



First Chairs



— for Kirk and Julie Bishop



I thought, they seem like violins,

Guarnerii, perhaps,

warm to the touch, full-toned,

impossible not to play.

They must, like violins, be held

in just one certain way.

When stroked by the fiddlers’ bows

they curl uncurl their toes

and sing with a milky sound.

— Con Squires










“Celebration?!” wrote a friend, incredulous after reading my intro to last week’s Red Letter. “Have you been paying attention—these days, what’s to celebrate?” I think he misunderstood me, perhaps imagining something on the order of fireworks, birthday sparklers. But a poet like Con Squires provides the ideal response, again and again throughout his poetry: memory, dogs, New Orleans jazz, a friend’s voice, Atlantic waters lapping below his home, second chances—and, oh yes, the sight of a child—any child—for whom nearly every minute of each ordinary day is charged with awe, surprise, fear, relief, unanticipated pleasure. Deep attention—a poet’s stock in trade — equals, in my mind, celebration.



Case in point: following a divorce, and at a time when his life felt in disarray, Con met his future wife—the partner with whom he still shares his days (and, even better, Bonnie Bishop is a fine poet as well). Later, being introduced to his bride’s brother and sister-in-law, he remembers the couple seated on their couch, each with one of their twin babies held in the crook of an arm, a symmetrical tableau, feeding them from bottles. Con goes home and puts pencil to paper: celebration. I find such simple beauties throughout this poet’s work, in collections like Dancing with the Switchman and Ifka’s Castle, not to mention his novel about ancient China––The First Emperor––and a section in the anthology The Heart Off Guard from Every Other Thursday Press. Years pass; the babies grow; the poem remains evergreen. The biographical note he sent me ended with this sentence: “Con Squires is 89 and getting younger by the minute.” Quod erat demonstrandum.


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

Interview with poet bg Thurston: The Many Lives of Cathouse Farm: Tales of a Rural Brothel"

 

I caught up with poet bg Thurston to talk about about her new poetry and prose collection " The Many Lives of  Cathouse Farm."  Judith Ferrara writes of her book,

"This compelling and singular collection is an expert weaving of history and poetry. The story of Cathouse Farm begins when poet bg Thurston spies "a small red farmhouse nestled behind tall sugar maples" which beckons her with its For Sale sign. Images presented throughout these pages elucidate Thurston's narrative of dwelling and landscape. We listen as the very house itself speaks in "Sister Houses, 1771" and "The Ruined House" and hear occupants, such as Sarah Weeks, who "labored long for all / these years on this forlorn farm, / birthed and buried our babies- / once within the same week." Section 3 links us to Prohibition-era owner George F. Rivers, who "set the property up as a speakeasy and rural brothel" and inspired persona poems that do not look away from these women's struggles. This book is a significant and fascinating accomplishment, full of curiosity, empathy and respect for the ghostly inhabitants of Cathouse Farm."

You write about this old farmhouse you moved to in Warwick, Mass. It reeks with history, and has many incarnations from the 1800s to 1990. The title mentions the brothel it once was— why did you choose to focus on the 'house of ill-repute' on the front cover?

The fact that our farm was a speakeasy and brothel during the Great Depression and Prohibition is what it is most known for. The big question was how a simple farmhouse in the middle of nowhere became such a place? Many properties in Warwick are still owned by descendants of the original owners. I wondered what became of the family who built this house and lived here for generations.

What was your situation before you moved to the farmhouse? In essence what drove you to live in the middle of nowhere?

My husband and I lived and raised our daughters in a somewhat suburban setting in Stow, Massachusetts. We had a couple of horses, a few sheep, and chickens. I always wanted to have a farm and more land on which to garden and raise sheep, so when my husband was thinking about retiring, we began looking for a property in Western Massachusetts.

The poems reflect the joy and tragedy of people who inhabited the farm over the years. Do you feel the energy—-the ghosts?

I do feel the lingering presence of some of the people who have lived here. I often think about the four generations of women in the Weeks’ family who were the first inhabitants of the farm. They likely had difficult challenges living out here from the 1770’s to about the 1870’s, between the Revolutionary War and Civil War era. All summer they had to prepare to survive the coming winter. How did they cope with the loneliness, the uncertainty, and the lack of modern medicine? Each one lost children due to illness or stillbirth.

We joke that the spirits of “the ladies” are happy ghosts. It was harder for me to imagine their lives and what circumstances might have brought them here. Very little is factually known about them at this point. I believe the Depression brought about its own struggles and opportunities for survival. I often wonder about their lives and dreams.

This collection is full of period detail--- how much research was involved?

The research for this book took about a decade. I originally found Sarah Weeks’ petition and the probate documents from when her husband, Caleb Weeks, died. I had been told incorrect stories about who built the house and looking through the deed registry documents helped verify names and dates. I visited Historical Societies and libraries in Massachusetts and New Hampshire to find information about the early inhabitants’ genealogy. I spent most of my evenings following threads on the Find a Grave site and Ancestry.com, to create family trees and verify Census data. What I could not find were photographs of the Weeks’ family. Even after photography came into existence, most farming families would not have been able to afford it.

Later photographs of the farm during the 1900’s were given to me by the family who visited during that time. Their stories enabled me to write the poems in that section of the book.

Do you think the farm has come full circle with your presence?

I hope so. What I’ve tried to do is acknowledge that even though the farm is known for its colorful moments in history, there was much more that came before and afterwards. For me, it’s a magical place, somewhere I always dreamed of living, and very much my home.

I would guess that you want readers to think about their own homes and their history.

I think everyone might have a different idea of what home means to them. I think it is a place that embodies where we have felt most loved. For me, a home is a luxury, a blessing, as well as a physical shelter. Hopefully, it is a place where we feel protected and where our dreams can grow.

Why should we read this book?

Good question! I hope people read and enjoy this book because it explores both an interesting history of a remote New England farmhouse, as well as the vulnerabilities, desires, and commonalities of all the people who were destined to live here.

Sky Meadow

We search all our days

for a place called home,

hoping that walls and windows

will keep us safe inside.

As our skin grows loose

over our bones and our sight

softens the landscape,

we discover home might be

hidden in a meadow

amid murmurs of green

and sun-gold blossoms rising

all around our feet. This

will be the place we return to

when we remember our lives,

knowing the shelter that held us

as the water-blue sky came down

with a peace that could hardly last.

The Silent Pendulum and Full Circle in Broken Identities, the new novella by Denis Emorine

 The Silent Pendulum and Full Circle in Broken Identities, the new novella by Denis Emorine

article by Michael Todd Steffen

Denis Emorine’s moving fidelity to his creative inspiration pulses at the heart of his new novella, Broken Identities (JEF Books, Arlington Heights, IL, ISBN 979-8284824-05-4). The book unfolds a sequel, a further denouement and conclusion to the public emergence of a writer begun in the 2017 novella Death at Half-Mast, where Emorine traces origins of “broken identities,” foremost that of his fictional subject, Dominic Valarcher and his integral duality as a human being and his vocation as “the writer,” the alternative appellation chiming like a formal constraint throughout the two narratives.

Laetitia, Dominic Valarcher’s wife, reappears here with her fairy-esque character as muse, metaphorically represented playing private recitations for her husband at a piano topless, with her breasts exposed to him. The trope has flown my imagination to the cinema and the possibility of a movie perhaps with the title “The Naked Pianist.” While arousing erotic tensions, the portrayal of Laetitia at the piano remains in a sensual rather than graphic character. In scenes beyond her home with Valarcher and her piano stool, we are also made to understand her true beauty, not just to Dominic, yet also her devotional character to him. She is his, his alone, strictly immune to other hungry suitors. This is essential in delineating Valarcher’s deep sympathies for his wife as well as the excruciating extent of his dilemma in carrying his work, as it must be, fully to the public. The depth of Valarcher’s sympathies has been noted also for its nominal ambiguity by Cristina Deptula, in the revelation of the writer’s name, Dominic, for its more frequent feminine form, Dominique. (synchchaos.com/2019/08)

As the narrative is inevitably determined, the figure of inspiration is left to sink and fade at moments throughout the two stories with the realization of Valarcher’s worldly success in publications and in presentations of his writing, public readings, notably with the emergence of a young Hungarian Literature researcher, Nóra. The young student’s coming to life in the writer’s presence and in his stirring desire makes an elastic and revisited topos. Emorine follows his subject as the writer oscillates. This goes like a pendulum, back and forth beside the piano of his exposed musician, between devotion to the original inspiration and its release in an expression of love toward the very work’s appreciation. There we meet, again, the figure of the young Hungarian student Nóra, the fresh clay of consciousness awakening under the intelligence conveyed by the author.

This ontological movement of Emorine’s fiction, between numinous, mnemonic origin and its naïve, “lively” and irresistible recipience, intersects with our civilization’s deepest foundations and iconography, in new seminal terms and oppositions, the politics of East vs. West, in reminiscence and therapy between parent and child, and between the authentication of art through its intimate inspiration in contrast to its marketing epiphany in the rival world of publishers and university appointments.

Without giving away their charm and details, let it be noted this second story’s beginning, with a partial disappearance of the writer at the end of his wits, comes full circle with the story’s astonishing but convincing conclusion. A worthy read, for its charms, curiosity, resonance and much needed reminder (of the ever-vigilant light in darkness) under the flickering lamps of our busy desks.

Somerville writer Patricia Wild: Brings the strands of the soul together in her new memoir.

 

Patricia Wild is a well known and respected writer, Quaker activist, journalist, and community organizer. She is an integral part of the beating heart of Somerville, and beyond. As long as I have known her, she has been a straight ,no chaser sort of woman-- with a built in shit detector. She is also a very spiritual woman, who questions herself and the world around her. In her new book, "Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss,"  she goes past the bone and into the marrow of grief, loss, and our very souls. I caught up recently with her for an interview.

You described your new book as an "opus of the soul." Explain…

Sounds a little lofty, doesn't it! But I’m sure your readership knows this phenomenon—but perhaps uses different language. In the zone? Connecting with something greater than ourselves? Connecting with that gift we humans have been given: Consciousness? Our Muse showed up? There’s something about connecting with Truth wrapped in all of this, too, right? And trusting, as a spiritual practice, that the words will come.



Much of your book is centered around Quaker practice. What led you to become a Quaker?

A long story. But a pivotal and conveniently-brief story may explain a teeny bit: On Easter Sunday an elderly Quaker stood: “we don’t know what happened at Easter,” she said. "But we know this: There is Mystery.” I'd loved that!



The title refers to you as an apprentice of grief and loss. When does one move on from apprenticeship?

I wrote Strands during COVID. Subsequently, my beloved sister Deborah and my best-friend brother, Paul have died. So in a sense my immediate answer would be: Um, never? I did bring some gained understanding to these incredible losses in my life; some newly-acquired rituals helped. I freshly understood the importance of friends, community, sharing stories. But I also, humbled and overwhelmed by grief and loss, found a grief counselor.



One of the struggles you have had was around being a woman of privilege. Why couldn't you just accept that and move on?

I’m not wired that way, I guess. (And another reason why I joined a religious community in which folks at least try to walk the walk.) And to circle back to that marvelous thing called Consciousness, doesn’t that huge gift ask our species to be aware of and to acknowledge Life’s deeply-outrageous unfairnesses?



In this day and age, it is hard to find time for quiet reflection. But your Quaker practice involves this on a regular basis. What has changed in you from this reflection?

Um, everything? Early Friends called themselves Seekers of the Truth. My judgey-ness, my relationships, my confusions as to what I’m called to do in this overwhelmingly broken, broken world, how to answer someone’s snarky email; in quiet reflection sometimes I can find my way. I’m gifted with a sense of Truth. And one of the things about seeking is, rarely, rarely are we given The Whole Picture. An early Friend, Caroline Fox (who apparently struggled with depression) basically said, “Live up to the Light and more will be given.” In other words, inwardly ask/seek with curiosity and humility. And keep asking.(“How would my better angels response that snarky email?”) t It’s the process that’s important!



You quote Thomas Merton. Merton talks about mystical moments when he feels connected to all people-- he is part of a larger organism. How often do you feel that way?

Such moments are preciously rare. And, unfortunately, we’re not designed to be able to fully reconnect with such blissful and powerful moments as we did when we first experienced them. We remember them with incredible gratitude but they have faded. So unfair!



I am sure that you agree with Socrates, that the unexamined life is not worth living. Do you think there is a fear if we are in conversation with our soul...we might not like what we hear, and our complacency will be ruined?

What complacency? If we examine our lives fully.

Red Letter Poem #268

 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 #268

 

 

 

 

Tomatoes


It’s when I hear how one out of every three

Of the first Cambodian grocers in downtown Lowell

Had somehow managed to flee the Khmer Rouge

I think two things: Satanic Boott Mills, where alley

By alley my mother’s father once failed to dodge

The splatter of rotten tomatoes; and volley by volley

Those shooters who somehow missed my village uncle

As he scampered up goat-paths, eluding the KKE.



Row by palpable, swollen-to-bursting row

It all comes back in those ripe domátes my cousins

And I would pack into narrow cardboard cartons.

In my father’s grocery store, I pictured giant

Blood blisters, flush with a little cellophane window.

And elders of legend, running the tribal gauntlet.


––George Kalogeris




“The past is never dead. It's not even past.” A cogent if unsettling observation from novelist William Faulkner who knew something about the power of tribal memory. History and cultural inheritance is a central concern throughout the poetry of George Kalogeris––often delving into the world of ancestral Greece but, more specifically, exploring the mythos of his extended immigrant family that settled on the north shore of Massachusetts. And so it’s not surprising he felt an instant affinity when he learned that fully one-third of all the Cambodian grocers in the nearby city of Lowell emigrated to this country to flee the brutal regime of the Khymer Rouge. He’s heard this story before, in numerous incarnations. In the current political debate about immigration, that fact is too often minimized: the majority of people would never choose to leave their homelands if their very lives were not endangered. Some Americans may regard them as interlopers, come to ‘steal our jobs’; but, far more often, they’ve come to these shores to ensure that their children are not dragged down by political terror or abject poverty. And so the familial connections George teases out in today’s new poem extend beyond blood relations and include a broad range of people who are (as Liberty’s signature poem describes it) “yearning to breathe free.”



I was caught off-guard at first, seeing Boott Mills––a group of Lowell cotton mills founded in 1835––tagged with the appellation “Satanic” (William Blake’s “Jerusalem” suddenly echoing in the back of my mind). But it turns out it was not uncommon, during the early days of the Industrial Revolution, for people to consider this new mechanized production (coupled with the despoiling of our natural surroundings) as being an enterprise in the employ of Lucifer himself. The narratives in this poem are fragmentary, and so we are left to imagine what might provoke the local citizenry to pelt George’s grandfather with tomatoes––though we can easily deduce the message: these streets, these jobs, this freedom is ours, not yours. But quickly, the narrator’s mind skips back to the Greek Civil War, recalling stories of his uncle dodging bullets from Communist squads, high in the Peloponnese. It was yet another example of ideology tearing whole families apart, and bloodshed muddying the earth. And, just like that, the speaker jumps again and presents himself as a boy working in his father’s grocery store in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Clearly, the young poetic mind is already ripening––and as he packs the domátes, he’s able to perceive both sweet sustenance and deep-rooted suffering in what he holds in his hands.



An Emeritus Professor from Boston’s Suffolk University, George is a poet, scholar, and translator––recipient of the James Dickey Prize and the Meringoff Prize for Poetry. His last collection, Winthropos (Louisiana State University), is the inky embodiment of his historical and imaginative citizenship in both the Old and New Worlds. He is a craftsman of great skill and subtlety. Be honest: how many times did you have to read this little colloquial lyric before you realized it was a sonnet, replete with lovely off-rhymes and intricate patterning? But I must add one more detail to this biographical sketch: mere literary distinction does not reflect another, and quite essential quality of this individual and his life’s work: George is a deeply humane spirit who reaffirms the best aspects of our cultural legacy and the elements of its ancient Hellenic roots. And so a moment ago, laying down my pen, I found myself looking out the window at my wife’s garden where squash and green beans are flourishing, and her tomato vines are bent from the weight of the red ripening globes. It’s an image of plenitude which, sadly, is in stark contrast to the grim newspaper headlines I found waiting for me this morning. If we were better students of history, we might realize that, with a more enlightened perspective, our planet’s abundance can still sustain far more than we might imagine––and that our violent protective impulses only engender more of the same. Perhaps there ought to be a corollary to George Santayana’s famous dictum: that those who do learn from the past are doomed––like Cassandra (another echo from the Greeks)––to spend their days shouting out this warning, even when our countrymen seem hellbent on plunging into yet another bloody repetition.

 

   

 

 

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

Red Letter Poem #267

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 #267

Bullet Points

 

• Wait before purchase      because rage may subside,

                                          the moment pass, and besides,

                                          what’s the big hurry?

• 21 to buy                          because to vote, drink, sign a lease or

                                           be legally responsible for . . .

                                           because the human brain is still developing . . .

                                           because most shooters are not even . . .

• Ban bump stocks             because concert goers in sundresses,

                                           party shirts, stonewashed jeans

                                           and sandals fell where they danced,

                                           because shoppers with cupcakes in hand,

                                           or choosing fruit or helping someone

                                           load her groceries in the parking lot

• Red flag rules                  because those closest may know

                                          that he has been, or often is,

                                          or might even do . . .

• Background checks         because no child says he wants

                                           to grow up to be a killer,

                                           because the shooter’s posts

                                           may be a plea in disguise,

                                           because we can say NO

                                           to those whose eruptions splatter,

                                           rip apart the bodies of random . . .

• Ban assault rifles             because Star Wars backpack,

                                           pink sneakers, unicorn T-shirt,

                                           and their tender flesh, pulped

                                           beyond recognition in a spray of . . .

----------Bonnie Bishop

Sometime back, I accepted this poem from Bonnie Bishop for the Red Letters. Then I prayed I’d never publish it.

“Bullet Points” was written sometime after the absolutely heartbreaking mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, back in 2022. Bonnie hesitated to circulate it at the time, but it will appear in her new book Patience, her third full-length collection, forthcoming from Every Other Thursday Press. When she showed the poem to me, I told Bonnie I’d keep the poem in reserve and issue it after yet another shooting at a school: when our hearts would be broken yet again; and when something like a righteous anger would be necessary in the face of what (forgive my cynicism) I fully expect will be the standard response from many state and national leaders. When––for what feels like the thousandth time––the President and government officials appear in public to offer heartfelt prayers and hand-wringing, followed by promises that this time something will be done to prevent this continual nightmare. . .that is, as soon as we’d sufficient time to mourn. . .or another study can be commissioned. . .or when political fevers subside. . .or (and again I’ll beg your pardon) hell freezes over. The fact is as simple as it is unavoidable: there is just too much money, buying too much influence, solidifying passionate constituencies on the Right and the Left, to allow this issue to ever be put to rest––that is, unless we the people demand otherwise. Other countries have mobilized their national will to institute real change, so this is not impossible. Take the case of New Zealand, for example; following the 2019 mass shootings at a mosque in Christchurch, their elected officials, across parties, united to pass comprehensive gun regulations that showed an immediate reduction in firearm violence (though I was saddened to discover, in writing this, that right-wing political parties are now trying to roll back those laws). Up until now, we’ve clearly not shown such resolve. And meanwhile, yet another community will have to endure the unbearable pain

of seeing the most innocent among them forced to live in fear––or far, far worse––laid to rest inside diminutive caskets, while family and friends face the cold heavens and weep.

And I’ll ask your forgiveness yet again for magnifying your grief (or, perhaps, troubling your indifference) at a time of such awful tragedy. But I believe it is, in fact, one of the responsibilities of poets and artists: to convey uncomfortable truths, to challenge the imagination and stir the conscience––anything but simply allowing such violence to become normalized in our society. And so, out of sadness and revulsion, Bonnie assembled a PowerPoint display in fragmentary verse, complete with the ferocious irony of her bullet points. The poem coaxes us to sit with the reality of this situation, even as the media turn it into a pageant of communal suffering (and, let’s not forget, there’s money to be made in that as well). She employs a variety of verbal attacks, assaulting us with our own benign logic (“because to vote, drink, sign a lease or/ be legally responsible for . . .”); or with images we would most certainly rather forget (“and sandals fell where they danced…Star Wars backpack,/ pink sneakers. . .”). She even resorts to the underhanded tactic of simply reminding us that we have a role in all this––“because we can say NO”––hoping we might finally exercise the power that remains in the hands of a democratic electorate. When the poem concludes with the heartrending phrase “pulped/ beyond recognition in a spray of . . .“, it’s as if even the poet hadn’t the heart to complete the sentence, leaving that final ellipsis like bullet holes across window glass.

And so, just before 8:30 a.m., at the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis––while the children were celebrating Mass during the first week of classes––another senseless act of brutality will add Annunciation’s name to the sad roster of places such as Columbine and Sandy Hook and Parkland and Robb Elementary and Virginia Tech and. . .. The inscription at the front of the Annunciation Church read: “House of God and the gate of heaven.” If you and I, my friends and fellow citizens, don’t do something to finally demand that sensible laws be crafted to at least lessen the possibility of further tragedies like this one, we ought not even pretend to ask anyone’s forgiveness. And those celestial gates we are so fond of imagining will never swing open to grant us peace.

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