Red Letter Poem #92

 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 #92

It is a strategy poets have employed since antiquity: to proceed by contraries – and Thomas DeFreitas uses it to bountiful effect in this poem from his first full-length collection, Winter in Halifax (Kelsay Books.)  The poem is an eloquent prayer for the most pedestrian of things (the Harvard Square hangouts of his youth.)  It uses the formal rhymes and entanglements of the villanelle while ushering us chockablock past the odd shops and cold facts of teenaged street life.  It clearly portrays a landscape where a part of the speaker’s heart is anchored – and yet the history and personality of that devotional voice is veiled behind his catalog of landmarks. . .except in those moments when the emotional tenor of the images rises into a higher register (ah, the “ink-sleeves” on those “ghost-white arms”!)  And then we may feel, for a moment, a curious kinship: we were all young once; the world was baffling and new; and we cared so passionately for this fragile existence that sometimes we too wished for some intercession, some clarifying force that would offer its blessing.

 

There is another category under which Thomas’ poem sits in my mind: it hints at the ubi sunt motif.  Derived from the Latin phrase: Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerunt? ("Where are those who were before us?"), it represents a kind of nostalgia for people and places that proved to be (what a shock to our young psyches!) just as susceptible the forces of ephemerality as we.  A generation before Thomas inhabited these very streets, I remember hitchhiking up to Cambridge in the summer of 1969, the first stop on a cross-country odyssey.  Harvard Square was famous then for its artistic and intellectual scenes, and boasted an array of unique businesses.  But this holiday, when I made my annual shopping trip to the Square, I was stunned to see how its gradual transformation had been dramatically accelerated by the economic effects of the pandemic.  There were several empty storefronts – an unimaginable occurrence, here in one of the most valuable commercial districts in the Northeast!  Parts of whole blocks were being gutted for restoration, and the quaint shops that had been fixtures for decades will be replaced by luxury chains.  Even in this college town, the dozen or more bookshops I used to browse endlessly in my younger days had been reduced to a precious few.  I experienced a ghostly sense of history being hollowed out and erased – and I stopped to imagine how downtowns all across our nation might be undergoing similar changes.

May the “Mother of winter roses” and that “spare-change Madonna” take pity on us all, and reassure that the future will not think too harshly of us and the choices we’ve made when, in the coming years, some undergrad poet writes his or her own ubi sunt?     

 

 

 

Our Lady of Cambridge

 

 

Virgin of Harvard Square, gendering grace,
watch over Holyoke Center, the Garage,
Chameleon Tattoos, and the nose-ring place.

Pray for the pink-haired waif of mournful face
and ink-sleeves on both ghost-white arms. Take charge
(Mother of winter roses blushing with grace)

of Raven, Grendel’s, Peet’s; and, just in case,
tend to hungry undergrads at the large
Palace of Pizza near the nose-ring place.

Keep the Yard safe and sage. Make it your space.
Send down, María, pardon from the stars;
expand this city’s heart! Lady of grace,

shelter the sleepers crouched in church doorways
against the cold; protect the crowds in bars,
the punks in the Pit and at the nose-ring place.

Gather us all in your clement embrace;
hasten with healing for our wounds and scars.
Bless Newbury Comics, bless the nose-ring place,
spare-change Madonna, prodigal of grace!

 

 

     –– Thomas DeFreitas

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)   

At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our homes, we could still face this challenge together.  As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors.  Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country.  And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”

 

Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified.  Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.

 

Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0.  For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives?  It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy.  Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love.  Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member?  Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces?  So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life?  Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse?  Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet?  Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us?  The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.

 

Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3091-redletter-123121), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com).  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.

 

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Red Letter Poem #91: Frank Bidart

 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 #91

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot,/ and never brought to mind?”  It was my mistake: I was too young when I first heard the song to grasp what the Scots poet Robbie Burns was aiming at; perhaps I just couldn’t detect that dangling question mark, requiring a listener’s response.  But early on, I thought the word should was prescriptive and tried to make myself believe that moving beyond memory was the path to freedom.  It’s an unsurprising reaction; children who’ve experienced early loss are simultaneously burdened by the past and gratefully imprisoned within the bright rooms of memory’s palace.  But often kindled within such individuals is a passionate desire to fashion new structures that might safely house all the incomprehensible voices echoing inside the green and permeable self.

 

Frank Bidart is one of the most acclaimed American poets; his virtual trophy case is burgeoning with prestigious honors including the Pultizer and Bollingen Prizes, and the National Book Award.  His eleventh collection, Against Silence (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) appeared recently.  I’m fairly sure that when Frank first ran across Walt Whitman’s line, “I am large.  I contain multitudes”, he instantly nodded in assent; his fifty-year body of work is crowded with the voices of people – remembered, imagined – that inhabit the metropolis of his consciousness.  These are characters he, by turns, discovered, conjured, nurtured, or preserved – all within his supple lyrics and sprawling monologues.  It seems to me the poems are intended to simultaneously separate himself from and fully embrace the upsurge of these unbridled energies.  Reading his work cannot help but make me aware of the many rooms in my own self into which I’ve rarely ventured.  So, in 1999, when I directed a massive poetry/music/dance/art project to celebrate the new Millennium, I asked Frank if he’d let me make a video-poem of his “For the Twentieth Century”, to be included with the performances.  So generous with his time, he welcomed me and my crew into his Cambridge apartment which, I was surprised to see, was filled floor-to-ceiling with books, video tapes, and audio recordings.  It was as if he was the self-appointed archivist of our cultural era, preserving artifacts of the past that formed his imagination so they would always remain accessible to his further explorations.

 

And so here, his poem celebrates the technology of a century that, while perfecting the most awful war-making machinery, also managed to create the means by which the voices of poets, the performances of musicians, and even the slapstick antics of classic movie comedians, would have lives that extended far beyond that of their mortal selves.  Talking with him in his private spaces, hearing his voice bring this poem to life, I began to more fully understand how precious memory really is – how even the simplest moments of our waking day are inextricably wedded to older times, distant voices which our minds sustain (and which sustain us in turn.)  When, later on, I discovered that Burns’ famous song was actually preserving and elaborating upon lyrics that had been fashioned a century earlier, I felt grateful now to be able to offer my own response to the Scotsman: yes – we will preserve and cherish moments of our remembered past, and pass along what we can to the generations that follow.  For the sake of our culture and all that makes us human, we’ll happily press the play button, re-read a few favorite poems, and raise “a cup o’ kindness yet” as another year slips into the rearview and we turn to face the oncoming brights.   

 

 

 

For the Twentieth Century

 

 

Bound, hungry to pluck again from the thousand

technologies of ecstasy

 

boundlessness, the world that at a drop of water

rises without boundaries,

 

I push the PLAY button:—

 

. . .Callas, Laurel & Hardy, Szigeti

 

you are alive again,—

 

the slow movement of K.218

once again no longer

 

bland, merely pretty, nearly

banal, as it is

 

in all but Szigeti's hands

 

                                    *

 

Therefore you and I and Mozart

must thank the Twentieth Century, for

 

it made you pattern, form

whose infinite

 

repeatability within matter

defies matter—

 

Malibran. Henry Irving. The young

Joachim. They are lost, a mountain of

 

newspaper clippings, become words

not their own words. The art of the performer.

 

 

                                    –– Frank Bidart

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0: A New Beginning (Perhaps)   

At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our homes, we could still face this challenge together.  As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors.  Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country.  And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”

 

Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified.  Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.

 

Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0.  For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives?  It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy.  Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love.  Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member?  Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces?  So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life?  Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse?  Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet?  Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us?  The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”  I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.

 

Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3070-redletter-111121), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com).  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.