Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Dan Carey

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 #184

Unbuilding the Golden Gate Bridge

Birdsong cures everyone’s hangovers,

and trucks beep as they back up

through sunrise. My headache

carries me in front of this bridge

that, by the way, is red, not golden.

In a hundred years, I bet, it will fade

to rust, like the Tobin’s symbiosis

with the rocks near Boston Harbor.

The first two decades sprinkle gray, decay’s

invasion, as the wind volleys the sand

nearby. Forty more years of sea spray

and the work’s about done. A century,

though! That’ll glow with disrepair

like drivers turning blind eyes

to pile-ups. Not that it matters now.

San Francisco rain falls all night long.

––Dan Carey

Reading Dan Carey’s new poem, I found myself with mounting questions: does that barrage of morning birdsong really serve as balm to our collective hangover? (And when was the last time I was still awake to hear that dawn chorus?) Who was this group of sleepless revelers who partied so long and hard (or is the poet a self-appointed spokesman, perhaps, for the city’s late-night carousers as a whole?) And what was the reason for such celebration––or is ‘reason’ even needed, beyond the fact that there is poetry in the world and plentiful wine. . .but also weather and rust and time’s rough machinery taking its toll on all that we love? And will the Golden Gate fade to rust, as the young poet predicts––recalling, as he does, the cautionary tale of the Tobin Bridge, spanning Boston’s Mystic River (indeed, an edifice that long suffered shameful disregard?) Or, perhaps, is it true that––in the wisdom of the city fathers and mothers––the San Francisco landmark has been perpetually repainted since 1965 in an effort to ward off the corrosive effects of the salt air? That’s what I heard, back in the Seventies, when I was living on the West Coast, a young man who might easily have fit in with Dan Carey’s hungover dreamers, standing in awe before this stately orange-vermillion rainbow.

But then my attention was snagged by the poem’s mention of a “century” of disrepair, and I began to get the impression that Dan’s faithfulness was not so much to the fact of the moment but to the feeling of a young person who worries that the great overarching structures of his reality (perhaps even our democracy, our culture as a whole) may be in a spiraling decline, providing little hope for his contemporaries who are more recent arrivals to this beleaguered world. It’s almost enough (as they said in old movies) to drive you to drink! And as I watch the morning drivers crossing the span of this vivid lyric, I find myself rooting for the strength to endure, to hope––perhaps for some Chrysopylae to appear before us (that was Captain Freemont’s Greek appellation, circa 1846, for this strait at the entrance to the city’s Bay––a ‘Golden Gate’ into this prosperous land), offering us a renewed sense of promise. Or is that asking too much of a sixteen-line poem?

This is Dan’s second appearance in the Letters. He received his B.A. in English from Suffolk University and, in 2021, completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University’s Low-Residency Program. Since graduation, Dan’s done what young poets do these days: turned to the Internet to (literally) help spread the word. He created three issues of Paradise in Limbo, a literary magazine offering a new a forum for other emerging poets. Some of his own poems have appeared in journals like Crosswinds, Anti-Heroin Chic, DropOut Literary Journal, and Suspended Magazine. He currently manages social media for Grid Books/Off the Grid Press, and works as an Elementary/Middle School teacher.

Red Letters 3.0

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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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@StevenRatiner

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 #151

Back when my mother was alive – a widow then in her late seventies, and on what would be her last visit to my home up in Boston – we made a pot of coffee together and spent the morning trading stories with this theme: all the things we’d never told each other. These tales about wild adventure, foolish peril, and narrow escapes, produced in us such a strange emotional amalgam: bursts of laughter mixed with solemn astonishment. Somehow, it was affirming, though – to learn that we all carry old secrets and that, for the most part, we survive them. Today’s Red Letter poem got me thinking about hindsight – what we can (and cannot) learn from the tonnage of memory we tow around with us most of our lives. If hindsight is, as they say, 20-20, you’d think that perfect vision would be an invaluable resource for steering wisely into the future. And yet. . .

Somewhere in the Oedipus plays, Sophocles offers some caution about gazing in the rearview: “I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.” And yet, after two dozen centuries, audiences still experience the play with hearts fully-engaged – hoping, perhaps, to learn enough from old suffering to avoid the new (though, we understand, new challenges will be continually barreling toward us from the road ahead.) Though Dan Carey is a fairly young poet, he has become adept at mining personal history: for the insights the conscious mind craves; for the honest ache the heart feels compelled to preserve. Dan is a native son of Ipswich, Massachusetts; he received his B.A. in English from Suffolk University and, in 2021, completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University’s Low-Residency Program. I know some of the marvelous poets he studied with, and they tell me his great promise was quickly apparent. Since graduation, Dan’s published three issues of Paradise in Limbo, a magazine he created as a way of furthering his literary apprenticeship; and some of his own poems have begun to find their way into magazines like Crosswinds, Anti-Heroin Chic, and DropOut Literary Journal. He currently manages social media for Grid Books/Off the Grid Press, and works as a substitute teacher.

In today’s poem, he recalls driving through a storm high in the Rocky Mountains – and the grandeur of the scene both magnifies his brush with mortality and places it in the larger context. It provokes a question we must repeatedly ask ourselves: how far can love carry us through this treacherous landscape? The poem, as artifact, highlights the double-nature that is inherent in the art form: deep observation of the present moment that, somehow, cannot quite reveal its significance until some distant future. Strange oracle – this far-sightedness that requires hindsight for its translation. If Dan’s writing experience is anything like mine, his notebook is full of poems that seem to grasp some deeper understanding of circumstance for which our conscious minds will require months (or even years) to catch up to. It makes me wish for this talented poet, at the outset of his career, that a day will come – years and years from now –when he’ll be drinking coffee with his mother and marveling over how surprising their journeys have been. A poem like “Hindsight” may stand as one of those markers along the way, directing us: Life, icy roadway, bear right.

Hindsight

Ten-thousand feet above sea level,

creeping through Colorado, a two-wheel drive,

our Civic astounds us. Pressure in the altitude

and traffic—I touch my face, sweating and alive,

hands at ten and two. The storm we watched

break over the Rockies like a kiss goodbye

unburies itself now from the clouds

right over us, and hail appears.

We build cars to withstand weather,

but when they rust, they rust quicker

than most people. People—what stinks

we make on our way out! Against

our windshields, gumball-sized pellets

crack our comfort zones, like a critic’s

rejection of my “shitty first drafts”—

if only I had more time. Death associates

from every direction. What do I do?

Face it? Who would I tell I love you?

We descend the mountain, and soon

I’ll learn this was the day Mom first

heard cancer, maybe at the same time

I let my own death drift in as I drove,

wanting, bad, for someone to feel

for me, hypochondriac ventriloquist.

Put it any way you want, I’m the son

who’s forever at a loss for words.

––Dan Carey

The Red Letters 3.0