Memoirist Brittany Perham: Pens a poetic memoir that meets the demands of memory

Interview by Doug Holder

Recently I caught up with Brittany Perham --the author of the memoir "Executrix." Brittany is an associate professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. She is an accomplished poet, and as she told me this memoir is very much a poet's memoir. It is written in an original style, and exhibits the sensibility of a poet. Her publisher writes of the book:

"Executrix begins with a mystery: Why would the author's father, from whom she had been estranged for more than a decade, change his will in the weeks before his death to make her the executor of his estate? Executrix charts the process of sorting out the business of this indebted estate using the language of real estate foreclosure, income tax audits, and medical records. The executor transforms the disjointed details of a life into a tidy financial narrative that meets the demands of claimants; the writer transforms the disjointed details of a life into a story that meets the demands of memory. Through this twin accounting, Perham asks the big questions: What are the implications of being the child of an alcoholic? How do we reconcile memories that are fragmented, elided, or nonexistent..."

From her website:

 "Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo..."

What do you think your sober father's reaction to this memoir would be? How would the drunk one respond?

Good question—and I don’t have a good answer. This is because the sober/not sober distinction is difficult when it comes to someone who has a substance use disorder. The disorder is so much a part of the person whether he’s drunk or sober that his unpredictability becomes the only kind of predictability. So, even insofar as I can imagine my father, it’s hard for me to imagine two different reactions. But I can say what I’d hope: If my father could read the book, I hope we’d begin some conversations about what happened between us. I’d like to hear about what he remembered, especially if and how he remembered some of the events that I wrote about. Because of course our memories would be very different. The book enacts a conversation between my narrator and a cast of imagined fathers. I’ve wished many times that my real father and I could have had such conversations, so the book is probably trying to correct the fact that this was never possible. I have very few stories of my father’s and I’d like to have more.

It seems in this memoir that you are in conflict with your brain. The brain tries to create a neat narrative that you are not satisfied with. Your take?

Yes, the book is absolutely concerned with questions about narrative: Why are we driven to create personal narratives about our pasts? What can those narratives teach us? In what ways are they unreliable and in what ways are they entirely reliable? The nonfiction I like best is the nonfiction that tries to reckon with these questions, even though that means narrative can’t be presented as an unassailable reality. (And as readers, we often crave the solid, unassailable realities books can present!) I’ll never know with certainty what “really happened” in my childhood but what I can investigate are the stories I’ve told myself about my past at different points in my life. I have access to those stories; I know how they’ve changed over time, and I know how my feelings about them have changed. So that’s my material. And that material is, to me, the reason to write nonfiction.

Do you trust the reader? I ask that because you send out sort of provisos for he or she to remember—it seems you think people will get the wrong impression of what you are writing. Do you trust yourself?

I trust the reader entirely. Absolute trust is required for me to ask the reader to stand side by side with my narrator because in Executrix the reader isn’t witnessing what happened to the narrator so much as they are witnessing what the narrator is thinking. That’s a very intimate place to be, a very intimate position from which to read a book. The reader must be on board with that type of close encounter very early on or they won’t continue reading—which is why, I hope, the form of each essay helps the reader accrue experience that allows them to feel their way into the next essay. My hope is that, through recurrence and repetition, the reader can access a brainstate that mirrors my own thinking process, at least as far as I can make an analogue for it in language. It’s a kind of obsessive thinking, one in which I return to a premise (usually a memory) and try to think clearly about the possibilities that follow from that premise. So the cues to “remember,” for example, often signaled with anaphora, aren’t directed at the reader so much as they are an invitation for the reader to be participatory in my thinking process as a writer. Executrix has the feeling of being a dialogue not only between the narrator and the chorus of father characters, but between the narrator and herself.

Philip Roth wrote, "You have to be willing to insult your mother, if need be, to write honestly." How hard was it for you to be so candid about your family—this is not some white picket fence sort of approach.

I disagree with Roth: The writer must not insult anyone. As soon as the reader feels that the author is trashing a character—failing to have empathy for them, using them as a tool to achieve a certain outcome or, worse, to make the main character look better—the reader is going to turn against the writer. Good writing is built on empathy, which is why it has the capacity to produce empathy in us. It doesn’t mean the characters can’t do heinous things—great literature is built around bad behavior. But the writer must work to understand each character, even the terrifying or terrorizing ones. Insult is the opposite of understanding; there’s no depth to an insult. So if you’re insulting someone in your writing, you’re either writing dishonestly or for revenge, or both. I do agree with Roth that you must write honestly—in memoir, and in fiction and poetry too. And that’s hard. Insults and superiority are much easier.

In memoir, to write honestly, you have to look at yourself first. Your narrator is your primary subject. You must be clear-eyed when it comes to that narrator, to their faults and failures—and you must also maintain your empathy for them. The narrator, that surrogated part of yourself, can be the hardest character of all to sustain empathy for. For example, the narrator can, and very well may, insult other characters—and can do much worse to them besides. But the writer cannot: The writer must be both disinterested (as in, not on anyone’s side) and interested (as in, invested in seeing as much as they can about everyone and everything that appears in their field of vision). This is why it helps to write toward our questions instead of our certainties. When we are genuinely investigating something or someone, when we have no or few preconceived ideas about what we’ll find, we have a better chance of revealing some truth.

To answer your question about my own family—yes, it was hard to write about them. I worried that I was not being generous enough toward my father, that I might be making up things I remembered about him. My fear about failing to tell, or even to know, the truth of my own experience is one of Executrix’s storylines, and the narrator expresses that fear all the way through. I worried differently, but just as intensely, about writing characters drawn from living people—my mother and my brother. I do a lot of work in the book to remind the reader that the characters are my inventions—because this is the number one fundamental truth of memoir. Characters are created things, a matter of artifice just like everything else in writing. And this is true even of memoirs that don’t treat this fact explicitly. But in the end, I trust the reader to understand the difference between real people and created characters. And, if I’ve done my job, the reader will have empathy for and understanding of each of the characters and, by extension, their real-life counterparts. One lucky thing for me is that I trust my mother and my brother to understand the difference too, which tells you something about my relationship with them. This doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings about encountering the characters who bear their names, and it doesn’t mean there isn’t difficulty for all of us in navigating this process.

It is interesting to me after reading your book that you chose to come back to teach at Endicott College in your hometown of Beverley, Ma. Tell me, how does this feel?

It’s very strange to be launching this book from Beverly, as much of the book takes place in this town. I didn’t know if I’d ever return to this part of the world. This is my first year living back on the North Shore and it still feels to me more like a time than a place. That is, the place still feels like childhood. So much so that it’s sometimes hard to feel like, or even remember, my grown-up self, who lived her adult life elsewhere for the last twenty-odd years.

This book is a lyrical memoir. You are an accomplished poet, but why not write separate poems... this is sort of one long poem.

I got interested in sentences instead of lines. I wanted to see what the sentence could do. What it was capable of. I’m a formalist; all my decisions are formal decisions. From the time I wrote the first sentence, I knew this book wasn’t poetry. It had to be written in prose.

At times your book is like a chant-- a lot of repetition. I remember reading about your father—you have a Ginsberg Howl-like chant about him. Is Ginsberg an influence?

Ginsberg’s a lurking intermediary—I go right back to Whitman’s inciting barbaric yawp. What my work has in common with both of theirs is that it’s a highly patterned expression built to transmit the force of spontaneous thought. Whitman was the Big Bang; the rest of us live in his spacetime.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream presides for Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 30th-Year Presentation

 

A Midsummer Night’s Dream presides for Boston’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s 30^th-Year Presentation

 

by Michael Todd Steffen

 

Shakespeare’s wonderful fantasy comedy of otherwise and elsewhere, all about the confusion of young lovers and the curative transformations brought about by the woodland fairies—A Midsummer Night’s Dream is back, for its 3rd performance in the 30-year life of Shakespeare on the (Boston) Common, directed by Steven Maler.

 

The pending marriage at the opening between Theseus and Hyppolyta polarize the two source conflicts of the play: Hermia’s refusal to obey her father Egeus and accept Demetrius’s suit for her hand in marriage; and the quarrel in the realm of the woodland fairies between Oberon and Titania over the possession of an Indian boy left orphan by one of Titania’s devotees.

 

Viewers of the play retain the memorable scene of Hermia arguing with her father against the arranged marriage. We remember the two sets of lovers running off and falling prey to the fairies’ interventions and confusion in the woods outside Athens.

 

The cover of my Folgers Library pocketbook version of the play shows the fairy queen

Titania holding the ass’s head to her bosom, gently embracing and kissing its elongated muzzle.

Of the dozens of other versions of paperbacks, CDs, Bluerays and DVDs available on my

library network, about 4 out of 5 of them present a similar image, as do the majority of posters

I’ve seen for live performances staged here and there. In abstract: the ass’s ears, the goddess’s

tiara, stardust, woodland greenery, the delicate mesh of dragonfly wings with the bodies of

fairies… This is from Act 4 Scene 1, where Titania dotes on Bottom:

 

TITANIA 
Come, sit thee down upon this flow’ry bed,
While I thy amiable cheeks do coy,
And stick muskroses in thy sleek smooth head,
And kiss thy fair large ears, my gentle joy.

 

We are less apt to remember the waste land the world of the play is depicted as, in a speech by Hyppolyta recalling to Oberon the wide catastrophic effects the quarrels of Heaven cause simple mortals on earth, natural environments, farmland and even their fun time:

 

But with thy brawls thou has disturbed our sport.

Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,

As in revenge, have sucked up from the sea

Contagious fogs; which falling in the land

Hath every pelting river made so proud

That they have overborne their continents.

The ox hath therefore stretched his yoke in vain,

The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn

Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard;

The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;

The nine men’s morris is filled up with mud,

And the quaint mazes in the wanton green

For lack of tread are undistinguishable.

 

Some of this is literaria from Shakespeare’s many classical sources. Some of it, though, does hit home to those who have studied the period, especially aware of the wave of Plague in and around London in 1593.

 

More specifically, political deaths were in the air in 1595 when the play was first staged. These deaths touched the playwright and actors:

 

Threats against French, Dutch and Belgian immigrants had been pasted or nailed on the

streets. On 5 May [1593] a bitterly xenophobic poem of fifty-three lines had been

placed on the walls of the Dutch churchyard. It had been signed “Tamburlaine.” Not

unnaturally, perhaps, these attacks were considered to be the work of professional

writers…[who] were to be arrested and examined…One of the first arrested was the

author of The Spanish Tragedy, Thomas Kyd, who was duly put to the torture. He named

Christopher Marlowe himself…Ten days later [Marlowe] was dead, stabbed through the

eye as a result of an apparent brawl in Deptford. Kyd himself died in the following year.

It is hard to overestimate the impact of these events on the fraternity of the players…It

was a series of shocking events, of which no one could see the outcome. The uncertainty

and anxiety were intense, the fearfulness rendered even worse by the prevalence of the

plague and the closure of the theatres. [Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography, Doubleday, New York, 2005, 202]

 

In the congenial disguise of the witty mechanicals, staging the play within a play, to be performed at the Theseus’ and Hyppolyta’s nuptials, artistic fear of violent censorship is playfully evoked in an arresting question as to the fright Snug as Lion might give the ladies in the audience: “and that were enough to hang us all.” The fear of the players being hanged, and elaborate measures in the way of apologetic addenda to the play’s script in order to avoid scaring the audience, are repeated in this scene and in Act 3 Scene 2. There the players reconvene and Bottom is transformed. Indeed, the contemporary audience could gather nuances of much more immediate danger than we might pick up on these 430+ years later, inclined as we are to enjoy the comical elements as being “pure.” Especially in the repetition of the“hanging” notion, we can detect these elements might not have been so innocently written order claimed. The gallows especially fixates Bottom, underscoring the less than evident

terror of the transformation he is to undergo.

 

George Bernard Shaw famously said, “Hamlet’s experience simply could not have happened to a plumber.” The range of Shakespeare’s characters, in different registers of society, high and low, would challenge the witty Shaw observation. A vital and guiding world beyond, be it the ghost of a slain king, or the benighted queen of the woodland fairies, is indeed concerned with and apt to reveal itself to prince and “rude mechanical” alike. It is a truth so intimate, so tailored, so personal. Only the centuries-long upholding of a genuine companion to the imagination in its great, generous range could possibly wit-ness to the experience’s validity, up and down the social scales. Why is Shakespeare still so widely appreciated? Because the mirrors he used to reveal the strangest yet most persistent missteps of our lives are still powerfully at work, reflecting our world, with its willful, dark, dangerous sometimes absurd center stage, as well as its shrugging yet willing survivors closer to the general, vulnerable, yet all the more humored and fluent proverbial bottom of the barrel.

 

To note in this year’s Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s production, eight of the principle characters will be played by four actors doing double duty, underscoring the “mirroring” aspect of the Athens and woodland scenarios in the play. De’lon Grant will embody Theseus and Oberon; Nora Eschenheimer doubles as Hyppolyta/Titania; Nick Cearly: Puck/Philostrate; and Brook Reeves as Egeus and Starveling; with Meghan Carey as Hermia; Annika Burley playing Helena; Jaime José Hernández as Lysander and Jack Greenberg as Demetrius.

 

Presentations of Shakespeare on the Common are free and open to the public. Staged at the Parkman Bandstand on the Boston Common, A Midsummer Night’s Dream runs from July 22nd to August 9th. For more information, specific dates and times, chair rentals, etc., visit https://commonshakes.org/production/dream26/

Poets Beth Rosenberg and Charles Levenstein explore 'secret cities'

 

I recently caught up with Somerville professor and poet Beth Rosenberg. Along with her mentor, Chuck Levenstein-- they have written a book of poems about the workers in the nuclear industry......

From their website:

"The setting for this poetry collection is the Secret Cites of the Manhattan Project. It was written by two occupational health professors who were hired by the union to assess the working conditions of those who are trying to clean up and contain the radioactive and chemical detritus of the Cold War and nuclear weapons production. Workers’ words are incorporated into the poems, so readers can see some of the ripple effects of work that is hidden from view."

How has it been for you as an academic, writer and poet to live in Somerville?

I have loved living in the vibrant city of Somerville for 30 years. Most of my neighbors are creative and literate. I taught occupational and environmental health in the public health program at Tufts for most of that time, where I emphasized the importance of having a voice at work.. Equally important to me is my work with a variety of unions to improve health and safety conditions. My mentor, Chuck Levenstein, has been writing poems for decades, so 5 years ago, inspired by him and our work with the United Steelworkers on former nuclear weapons production sites, I started to write poems. I don’t quite consider myself a poet. We both wrote poems and edited each other’s work. It was a wonderful collaboration, and it was a collaboration that started when I was a graduate student at the Work Environment Dept at UMass Lowell in 1989.


This is an unusual subject for poems. Why did you pick this genre?

Chuck had already been writing poems about our work, to capture ideas that did not go into reports to the union about working conditions and how to improve their excellent health and safety training program. I thought it was a great way to convey vignettes of people’s lives – lives that most of us don’t get to see. Poetry’s pithiness appeals to me.


I would think it would be difficult to bring 'art' to a subject like this. So often political poetry tends to turn into a polemic. Your take?

Studs Terkel’s book “Working” was a powerful influence on me, as was the poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser, “The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.” I want to capture people’s words about work. I’m a reporter and an advocate. I let their words speak for themselves.


When you were interviewing workers in the nuclear industry around the country, you wrote that you and your co-author were viewed as strange Jewish birds. Did you experience any blatant, angry antisemitism?

That’s not exactly true. We were viewed as strangers, but we were hired by the union so we came to these sites already vetted. We looked different and sounded different. We were 2 swarthy, hirsute Jews. I envied the hairless arms of those Appalachian men of Scots-Irish descent and the tall blond Mormons in Idaho Falls! I don’t know that we were identified as Jews, but we were unquestionably foreign. We have Boston and New York accents, which were exotic in slow talking Carlsbad, New Mexico and Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Even if we were identified as Jewish, there are many Jews in the labor movement - remember the union organizer in “Norma Rae.” Any suspicion due to our differences was quickly overcome by the realization that we on their side, and we truly wanted to bring their ideas back to the union leadership to improve things.

How did interviewing these workers change your perception of them—and yourself?

I knew I’d meet smart people, but I didn’t expect I’d like many of them so much. On the other hand, I learned that just because someone is active in the union, and is working towards better working conditions, doesn’t mean they share all my political beliefs. Some were jerks. That seems obvious to me now, but it wasn’t 20 years ago. Interviewing these workers broadened my circle of caring and gave me a more nuanced view of human behavior.

Why should we read this book?

This book is a weird combination of worker health and travel log. It will give you a glimpse of the people and the secret, Atomic Cities, where we built pieces of the bombs that incinerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Eighty years later, these places are contaminated, people have high cancer rates and nuclear energy has been rehabilitated. We didn’t intend it as such, but it really is a quiet expose of contractor behavior. For those who think nuclear energy is clean, this book reveals how things work on the ground. Even if you believe the technology works, until you fix the management, that cuts corners and harms workers and communities, it will be a mess. Now that some these sites have been “cleaned up”, the Dept. of Energy wants to build small nuclear reactors to power data centers. This book gives another view of work in the US.

 Paducah 2007 Safety Systems

We met in a crowded, cluttered office. Desks facing walls,

more chairs dragged in.

Lanky, laconic, local union Prez, Cherokee cheekbones.

Pert contractor safety manager. She extolled the benefits of Behavior

Based Safety, where “everyone watches out for each other.” Your

brother’s keeper, etc.

They got trinkets for noting bad behavior.

It was always the worker behavior, never the company behavior,

that was the problem.

Earlier, workers told us they were ordered to leave their radiation

badges “in the truck” when they worked, so high exposure wouldn’t be

documented.

Companies get awards for low injury rates.

Teams of workers are bribed with monthly Lowe’s gift cards

to not report injuries.

If someone does, they’re threatened with days without pay, firing —

no one gets gift cards for the quarter.

In the office, we all listened politely.

Union Prez sat silently, his back to her, facing the wall.

                

Red Letter Poem #209

  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

 

 

 

 

 

As most of you have heard, this Sunday will begin the culminating summer of the WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series, created by by the New England Poetry Club and the Longfellow Historical House.  If you want to learn more, here’s a link to the page highlighting that program:   https://nepoetryclub.org/we-too-the-people/

 

Wearing my other hat as NEPC president, I am working to iron out last-minute arrangements for the event and writing the introductions.  So let me offer a Flashback Friday Red Letter this week instead of a new installment.  WE (too)… kicked off last summer with a reading by a Former US Poet Laureate, Robert Pinsky––and we are fortunate enough to have another to start this year’s program, the wonderful Tracy K. Smith.  If you live in the Boston area, I hope to meet many of you there on Sunday (but, for those at a distance, videos of each WE (too)… event will be posted two days afterward).  Here’s one of my favorite Red Letters featuring a poem from Robert’s new collection––one that echoes the theme of the WE (too) events: affirming that a diversity of voices is essential to the vitality of our culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Flashback Friday:

Red Letter Poem #209

 

 

 

 

Branca  

 

 

Ralph Branca was the fifteenth of seventeen children.

This poem is not the poem of “the speaker.”

 

His father was an immigrant from Calabria.

These words are those of Robert Pinsky. Speaking.

 

Branca wore Dodger uniform number 13.

“Speaking” is the punch line of a Jewish joke.

 

Some Romans call Calabrians “Africani.”

Brooklyn had its own daily, the Brooklyn Eagle.

 

At eighty-five Branca learned about his mother.

He was twenty-one when Robinson joined the Dodgers.

 

At eleven I loved Robinson for his daring

Running the bases. Stealing home. His fire.

 

Branca was one of the few who befriended him.

I was too young to understand his mission

 

The fuel of that dancing to taunt the pitcher.

Robinson never forgot Branca’s kindness.

 

What the old man found out about his mother

Is she was born a Jew in Hungary. Kati.

 

After he gave up the most famous home run ever,

Back in the clubhouse Branca lay weeping face down.

 

Kati gave birth to seventeen Catholic children.

The Giants won the pennant. 1951.

 

Branca means “claw,” a fit name for a pitcher.

His teammates thought it best that he cry alone,

 

But “Only my dear friend Jackie, who knew me so well,

Came over and put his arm around my shoulder.”

 

The Nazis killed the aunts and uncles Branca

Didn’t know existed until he was old.

 

42 in itself a nothing of a number.

The Dodgers traded Branca to the Tigers.

 

Grief: with its countless different ways and strains.

Glory: a greater thing than success, but slower.

 

Some of the Tigers who had been Giants explained

To Branca how the Giants had stolen the signs

 

From opposition catchers.  The telescope

In center field. Wires, buzzers. Branca chose not

 

To talk about it.  It’s all in Prager’s book.

His research unearthed Kati, those aunts and uncles.

 

The Dodgers were taken from Brooklyn by their owner:

I, Robert Pinsky, choose not to say his name.

 

I didn’t live in Brooklyn but I knew the score.

I knew it was a kind of underdog place.

 

Nowadays once a year all Major Leaguers

Wear Jackie Robinson’s number 42.

 

In the joke, the person who answers the telephone

At Goldberg, Goldberg and Goldberg keeps replying

 

That Goldberg is out of the office. And so is Goldberg.

“Alright, then let me talk to Goldberg.” “Speaking.”

 

Robinson spoke to Branca: “Without you”

He said, “We never could have made it this far.”

 

 

                                      ––Robert Pinsky

 

 

 

“Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns.”  With this intriguing line, Homer introduces his famed protagonist, Odysseus; but, had the bard been born in a later time, he might have said much the same invoking Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher, Ralph Branca (especially if he’d ever attempted to hit his curve ball.)  Branca was a three-time All-Star whose dozen years in the Majors were completely overshadowed when he gave up a single fateful hit––baseball’s famous “Shot Heard ‘Round the World.”  Coming into the decisive game of the National League Pennant race––October 3^rd, 1951 at the New York Giant’s old Polo Grounds, ninth inning, with his team nursing a 4-2 lead––Branca gave up a three-run walk-off homer to Bobby Thomson, bringing his team’s glorious season to ruin and breaking hearts from Greenpoint to Sheepshead Bay. 

 

Aristocratic men in ancient Greece lived by the code of kleos, or “fame”, aiming to crown their names with the renown of a great warrior, while bringing honor to the tribe.  Again, not so very different from the situation of those baseball players back in the Forties and Fifties––way before today’s age of massive contracts for even mediocre talents.  To other New Yorkers, Brooklyn was seen as something of a tribal enclave who heartily embraced their ‘neighborhood team’––as I often heard from my father when I was small.  He’d tell me how he remembered sitting on his front stoop in Flatbush and seeing the owner of the Dodgers (I’ll respect the poet’s wishes and leave him nameless), strolling along giving out bleacher tickets to the local kids.  Life can often be unfair, and Branca’s name, if it’s remembered at all, is forever associated with defeat because of a single fastball.  Yet America’s bard, Robert Pinsky sings the praises of this good man whose faith and moral character were their own form of triumph.  One example: on opening day in 1947—which marked the major league debut of Jackie Robinson, baseball’s first player of Color—Branca lined up on the field beside Robinson, when all other players refused.  It took some courage to stand up for what was simply right, and a friendship quickly grew from it.  And so, in this poem from Robert’s eleventh collection, Proverbs of Limbo, (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), his couplets unscroll deliberately slow, offering us their refracted meditation on honor, identity, and the private and civic experiences to which poetry remains an essential response.  The piece is a sly intermixing of remembered events, curious bits of biography, and even a corny joke; and only as we readers immerse ourselves in the poem, do the elements coalesce into a more unified vision, mirroring perhaps how the multi-faceted mind pieces together its reality.  The poem provides us with some insight into where we are today in our American journey, and what’s enabled us (as the poet phrased it in that concluding line) to make it this far. 

 

Robert has earned his own version of kleos, working as a poet, essayist, educator, and three-term United States Poet Laureate.  And, for goodness sakes, how many poets have on their resumé an appearance in an episode of The Simpsons?!  Fame indeed!  That attests to his public profile which he’s used again and again to herald poetry’s essential role in our cultural wellbeing.  Forty-five years ago, Robert published his book-length poem An Explanation of America, crafted as an elaborate letter to his daughter concerning the world she was entering.  Near the conclusion he writes: “If I could sail forward to see the streets/ Of that strange country where you will live past me,/ Or further even by a hundred years;/ And walk those pavements with my phantom steps. . .my courage/ Would fail, I think: best not to mount the steps/ Where I could leave no footprint in the snow…”.  It is fortifying to both poet and reader that such imaginative courage carries him onward, and his explanations of the tortuous American mythology continue––speech directed toward that unimaginable future.  And those footprints in the snow––they’ll belong to newcomers who are still carrying poems like this one.

 

 

 

 

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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

Poet Cindy Veach: A Poet adrift in the 'Monster Galaxy'

Interview by Off the Shelf Correspondent John Wisniewski

From her website:
Cindy Veach is the author of three full-length poetry collections: Monster Galaxy (MoonPath Press), a finalist for the Sally Albiso Award; Her Kind, (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal; and Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press), a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book "Must Read." She is also the author of the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate Press).

Her poems have appeared in The Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day Series, AGNI, Chicago Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Journal, Nimrod, North American Review and elsewhere. Her poem, "This Patch Where the Light Cannot Reach," was selected by Mary Ruefle for the Philip Booth Poetry Prize (Salt Hill Journal) and her sonnet crown, "Witch Kitsch," was selected by Marilyn Nelson for the Samuel Washington Allen Prize (New England Poetry Club).

Cindy received an MFA from the University of Oregon where she was a graduate teaching fellow and an assistant poetry editor for Northwest Review. She currently serves as the Poetry Editor for MER (Mom Egg Review).

When did you begin writing, Cindy?

The first poem I remember writing was titled “Red Bird” and was part of an eighth-grade class assignment. After that I started keeping a diary (it had a silky blue floral cover and a padlock) which I filled with terrible poems and a litany of teenage angst. My junior year of high school I enrolled in a creative writing class. There was virtually no instruction. It was basically a free write session (more poems about teenage angst were written). In college I took creative writing courses and began writing more seriously.

Are there any poets who inspire you?

There are many and they have shifted over the years. Early in my writing career I was inspired by James Wright especially his collection “Shall We Gather at the River.” Also, Emily Dickinson, Robert Bly, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sylvia Plath, Ann Sexton, Adrianne Rich, Jane Kenyon and Rilke. While those poets will always be important to me, poets that have been influential in more recent years include Marie Howe, Jennifer Chang, Terrance Hayes and Jericho Brown among others.

Do you find it difficult to provide the reader with glimpses into who you are?

I do find that challenging. My third collection “Monster Galaxy” is my most personal book as it looks at my girlhood and relationship with my father among other things. My first two books are themed around local history and share some slanted glimpses into who I am.

Could you tell us about your early life? Where did you grow up?

I grew up on the East Coast (New England) and the Mid West (Indiana, Iowa). My family moved every 2-3 years due to my father’s education and then, later, his academic career. When I was very young, he decided to go to college (the first in his family to do so) and then he continued for a master’s degree and PhD. Each degree meant a move. Each new academic position meant a move. Consequently, I don’t have a hometown, and I never felt like I belonged. I was always the new kid and that came with a heavy dose of insecurity. At the same time, it made me quite resilient and adaptable.

.Could you tell us about your poetry Collection "Monster Galaxy"? What do you remember most about your childhood?

In hindsight I’ve realized that writing “Monster Galaxy” was how I grieved my father. His passing in 2019 was my first experience with deep grief, and it triggered an examination of my girlhood, my upbringing and became a portal for self- discovery. I found myself looking through a new lens acknowledging my father’s flaws and my own internal monsters. Here is an excerpt from a review by Carla Panciera published in Sugar House Review (link to the full review is included below).

“Cindy Veach’s newest book, Monster Galaxy, is her most intimate collection to date. It reads like a memoir while making the personal archetypal. It allows for the intimate details of one life to reveal the universal and it reminds us that memories and experiences may individuate us, but they do not make us other.

Veach employs a personal speaker who not only assesses the present, but who also looks back on her past. In fact, the book is organized around the idea of before and after. Before and after the loss of loved ones, or becoming a mother, or historical events like the Challenger explosion or the Summer of Love, and absolutely before the fall of innocence and the startling realizations of adulthood.”

https://sugarhousereviews.blogspot.com/2025/12/monster-galaxy-by-cindy-veach-moonpath.html

https://www.moonpathpress.com/CindyVeach.htm

There are so many things I remember about my childhood so it’s very hard to answer this question. One of my favorite memories is when my father, who was the debate coach at Colgate, took my me and my older brother with him on debate trips to DC and Boston. With a large family (6 children) it was rare to get to spend this kind of time with my father and to experience him in unfamiliar settings. What I also remember about childhood are feelings of shame (although I couldn’t name it then) related to my years in Catholic school (my mother was Catholic).

Why did you want to write about the Salem Witch Trials?

In 2016, after living in the Salem area for twenty-five years, I stumbled on the Salem Witch Trials Memorial when I was cutting through a side street. Up to that point, I had succumbed to the witch kitsch narrative of modern-day Salem but for some reason on that day in that place I was changed—these were innocent human beings who were murdered. I decided to write a poem about each of the twenty victims, and this became the chapbook Innocents published by Nixes Mate.

While I was writing the victim poems, I was making the difficult decision to end a long marriage. As the person who ultimately filed for divorce, I felt judged and I also felt guilty. Most of the victims of the witch trials were women. Many were persecuted because they lived outside of Puritan norms. As I empowered myself to do what I needed to do I felt a sort of kinship with the witch trial victims and especially the female victims who are represented in Her Kind. A woman with agency, who dares puts herself first, dares to defy what is expected of her, is often a target. All this coincided with Donald Trump being elected. His narcissism and references to witch hunts and the witch trials to paint himself as a victim were triggering and so he also found his way into this book. It is both interesting and oppressing that even today a woman can feel guilty about choices she makes for herself. This is what captivated and connected me to the Salem Witch Trials. https://cavankerrypress.org/products/her-kind

Did you often feel like an outsider in life?

I’ve always felt like an outsider, and I think that stems from the fact that I moved so much growing up and never felt like I belonged. In a way, my family was my hometown, but I’ve never been able to shake the feeling of being an outsider.

What kind of a dialogue do you hope for between the reader and yourself?

Books have had such an impact on me, and I hope that one of my books or even a poem or two resonates with the reader. I can only write about what I know and feel so it’s always a gift when someone connects with my work. My hope is always that my books will inspire a dialogue that is meaningful to the reader.

Doug Holder interviews poet Kevin Carey and Stephenie Young about " Revere Beach Stories"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwCXBc-rHYs

Steve Ratiner: Mastermind of WE (too) THE PEOPLE series at the Longfellow House in Cambridge

Interview with Doug Holder



Steve Ratiner is the president of the New England Poetry Club. I talked with him about the WE (too) THE PEOPLE poetry series at the Longfellow House in Cambridge this summer. On July 12th, 2026 the club hosts Tracy K. Smith--the former U.S. Poet Laureate, and Pulitzer Prize winner. There will be readings throughout the summer.



What was the germ of the idea for the WE (too) THE PEOPLE series at the Longfellow House in Cambridge?



As you know, the New England Poetry Club is one of the oldest literary associations in the US, begun in 1915 by the signature New England poets Amy Lowell, Robert Frost, and Conrad Aiken. Among several reading series we hold in various venues, we have a long-standing partnership with the Longfellow Historical House in Cambridge, and the Friends of the Longfellow House (who help support its programming). Each summer, we put on a program of five poetry readings––usually modest affairs featuring interesting regional poets, with one very special event: The Golden Rose reading, to honor one acclaimed poet with the Club’s highest prize.



I was a newly appointed Club president in 2024 when I went with David Miller, my Director of Programs, to plan the following summer’s Longfellow events. But I’d been troubled––as have most of us––by the increasing discord in our country, and especially by an effort from certain circles to sanitize American history and to portray ours as a kind of monoculture. I share the belief that a diversity of voices and visions is essential to the vitality of our society––and waking that morning to some particularly upsetting headline, I felt we needed to offer a counterargument. The administration at the Longfellow House had expressed their desire to do something quite special to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary––and I realized this might offer an opportunity to do just that.



I thought of the sweetest poetic phrase in all of American democracy: “We the People.” History reminds us that, from the very beginning, the founders set the nation on a path of ongoing development, aiming toward “a more perfect union.” But I dubbed this series, WE (too)THE PEOPLE, reflecting on the legacy of America’s founding documents, but adding that parenthetical “too” in order to acknowledge those omitted from the framers’ original vision of liberty––who may be overlooked even today. The American story is composed by so many people from such a vast range of backgrounds, who have together profoundly shaped and enriched the democratic journey across generations. The people at Longfellow House shared that belief that today’s diverse and vibrant culture offers a lens through which to reflect on the nation’s progress toward that dream.



For the first time, we added a musical component to our summer offerings. If you look at the roster of stellar poets and musicians who performed in 2025, or are scheduled for this summer in 2026, I think you will find a portrait of our nation’s vibrant cultural community. We will present two former US Poet Laureates, Pulitzer Prize winners, Massachusetts’ first state Poet Laureate, and a variety of dynamic voices representing who we are as a people.



Who are the headliners for the event?

We have a marvelous array of talents reading for this summer’s WE (too)… programs at Longfellow House:


July 12th–Tracy K. Smith

July 26th––Lloyd Schwartz and Regie Gibson

August 2nd––Major Jackson and Kirun Kapur

August 9th–– The season will conclude with the 2026 Golden Rose Award for Marie Howe. She will read from her Pulitzer Prize-winning New and Selected Poems.



All of these events are presented on the back lawn of the Longfellow House and are free and open to the public. As I mentioned, each program will begin with a 15-minute performance by a variety of marvelous musical talents, beginning at 2:45 p.m. At 3 p.m. we’ll begin the formal introductions, and then call back the musical guest for a brief spotlight performance focusing on some traditional or popular musical number, reinterpreted through a 21st century perspective. Last summer, the songs included “America, the Beautiful,” “God Bless the Child, ” “Summertime,” and “Ashokan Farewell.”


Some perceive the New England Poetry Club as an old school organization. How does this event change this perception?


I’m sure there have been times in NEPC’s long history when we seemed more of an inward-facing organization, focused on our poetry competitions and readings series––but I don’t think that’s been the case for quite a while now. I think I am following in the footsteps of a number of fine leaders who have expanded our membership, reinvigorated programming, offered new and innovative workshops, and expanded our geographical reach. I hope my work has added to that effort and begun an outreach to make sure that younger generations of poets feel they, too, have a place in this literary community. Beginning in the fall, we’ll start offering additional readings/craft talks––open to members and visitors––from acclaimed poets who will help enhance any poet’s writing practice. And we are planning a U35 series to highlight the work of poets at earlier stages in their careers, and to feature some of the new developments in the art form. I’d encourage anyone to visit our website https://nepoetryclub.org/ to learn more about our programming––and to https://nepoetryclub.org/we-too-the-people/ for additional details about the WE (too) events or to view videos from the 2025 performances. I feel certain they will find NEPC is still an important voice for the literary community at-large.