Red Letter Poem #106

 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 #106

 

 

It’s National Poetry Month – and Phil Lewis’ Red Letter poem affords me the opportunity to think about this artform which is currently enjoying a resurgence in public interest.  But poet Gary Snyder reminds us that “Of all the streams of civilized tradition with roots in the paleolithic, poetry is one of the few that can realistically claim an unchanged function and a relevance which will outlast most of the activities that surround us today.”  I’m thinking now of how composing a poem seems to transform the day in its entirety; of how reading a good poem transports the consciousness to a wholly unexpected destination; and how, sitting at a poetry reading, some stranger’s voice can seize an audience with his or her measured lines and make us aware of those precious materials we humans hold in common.  I am imagining also a set of eyes a thousand years in the future reading a poem from our time (just as I read favorite poems from ancient Athens or Song Dynasty China) and wondering for a moment what our days were like.

 

When, on occasion, young poets ask me for advice about where to publish and how to amass an audience, I’m afraid the counsel I offer them is often not what they’re looking for: I plead for diligent practice, for patience, for deepened attention, for mastering one’s craft, and honestly exploring why you have the desire to compose these inky constructions in the first place (let alone committing to them as a career.)  I’m advocating for a poetry that is a vital activity in an individual’s life, as close at hand (and as essential) as breathing – something that will sustain them throughout their years, whether their job title is doctor, lawyer, farmer, carpenter, teacher, or perhaps poet.  Phil’s life presents a wonderful example: he remembers first writing poems as a freshman at Dartmouth, describing to me the powerful influence of faculty members like Sidney Cox and poets like Robert Frost and Philip Booth, both frequently present on campus.  A stint in the Navy silenced the Muse but later, while pursuing an advanced degree at Harvard and teaching high school mathematics and computer science, he returned to writing.  Even today, when Phil reads one of his artful sonnets to the Beehive group at the local library (one of the few enumerated responsibilities of Arlington’s Laureate is to lead this monthly workshop), I can recognize the flinty rhythms and softened vowels of Frost’s reading style.  Phil is a clear-eyed observer and a diligent craftsman who subtly maneuvers us through the grammatical twists until we, too, grasp the matter at hand and feel the ah! rising within us.

 

At this time – when the spring holidays of Easter, Passover, and Ramadan converge – here is a poem of quiet abundance.  It hints at the way absence can become a generative presence in our lives – even as what is present is made more precious by the knowledge of its inevitable loss.  Taken from what we imagine must have been a ruined church, this statue of Mary now reaches people in a new way within this museum setting.  There is a marvelous fullness conjured by those empty arms, by the dust on the stone.  No, Phil’s exemplary career as an educator and an early innovator in the use of computers to foster mathematical understanding did not include literary prizes or audiences applauding him at the podium – things, I realize, every poet dreams of to a greater or lesser degree.  But through all his years, poems have been a constant presence, illuminating the circumstances of his days, and offering him deep pleasure.  This is a poetry that sustains life.  It’s what I wish for every poet, old or young, who takes up the pen.  Phil Lewis is approaching the close of his 91^st year, and this is his newest poem – only the second one published in a public forum.  Yet another reason to celebrate April. 

 

 

 

Mary

 

 

She had, we guess, remained unseen,
except by occasional birds, for centuries
before today, and now exposed  
in this eclectic alcove, still cradles
in empty arms her infant son
long gone. She looks down fondly
on where he was –– and, moved,
we wonder if the artisan
who carved for pay, believed before
accepting his task — or only after,
job done, he dusted off the stone.

                         – Phil Lewis

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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

 

* 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/3132-redletter-040822

 

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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Poets Michael Todd Steffen, Mary Bodwell, and George Kalogeris to read May 2

(Click on to enlarge)

 

Newton Free Library Series : National Poetry Month Reading

"BEASTS" BOSTON PLAYWRIGHTS THEATRE

Review by Andy Hoffman

In BEASTS, Cayenne Douglass has written an engaging play about the connections – and disconnections – between sisters. The older and wilder Judy unexpected visits Fran, living a suburban life with her frequently absent husband Jim. The sisters have not seen one another for years, it seems, and their last phone call, when Fran called Judy six months earlier to announce her pregnancy, ended with Judy hanging up on her sister. These two appear to have only one another as family, and neither seems all that certain that they want even that tenuous link.

Reminiscent of Sam Shepard’s FOOL FOR LOVE, BEASTS fills 95 uninterrupted minutes with this dyad trying reach an understanding of what ties them together. The play opens in Fran’s sterile suburban home, so far from whatever city it lies near that wolves howl in the darkness outside. Judy arrives with one small duffel and two-plus decades of resentment of her sister. We learn, as in Shepard’s play, about the family of origin only through the myths the sisters tell about the vanished father and the unstable mother. We can’t know with any certainty the truth of the sisters’ upbringing, but we learn quickly that they don’t take much comfort from one another.

The current friction springs from Fran’s pregnancy and the implied surrender Judy sees in it. Fran had promise as an artist but traded it in for the domestic certitude of money, marriage, and children. Judy, now in her late 30’s appears to have lived her past twenty years as a nomad on the margins of society, never beholden to anyone, but also never entirely free either. Fran doesn’t welcome her sister into her cocoon, threatened by Judy’s unpredictability. Fran wants to protect the world she has built, nervous that the poverty and insecurity of her youth will leak into her nondescript castle.

But Fran can’t keep the wild at bay. The wolves come closer, and Judy declares her intention to bring her unsettled life into the heart of her sister’s world.

Unlike FOOL FOR LOVE. BEASTS brings in some humor and release into the sisterly conflict by introducing Amelia, Fran’s birth coach, and Jim, her hapless but successful husband. Amelia only lacks crystals to complete the portrait of a New Age healer. She insists that Fran talk about her ‘vagina’ rather than her ‘hoo-ha’ and pronounces affirmations of motherhood as a sort of blessing over Fran. During these affirmations, Judy gets carried away, breaking down into a confession that she too is pregnant, though not visibly so.

This news – true or not – burrows holes in the walls between the sisters. Judy begins to nest, albeit in her sister’s house, and Fran reclaims some of the artist’s unpredictability of her sister. This role-switching creates the dramatic crescendo of the play.

BEASTS is the final production of the season for Boston Playwrights’ Theatre, which receives support from Boston University’s New Play Initiative and the College of Fine Arts. Clara Francesca brings a dangerous energy to her representation of Judy, and Katherine Schaber steals her scenes as Amelia. Marina Sartori’s set design and Kelly Galvin’s direction support the play without amplifying the depth of BEASTS’ inquiry into women’s reactions to one another’s pregnancies and the love/hate relationship between Fran and Judy.

The play itself will no doubt undergo some further rewrites. For example, the last-minute appearance of Jim – while funny – seems like an imperfect way to lead to the play’s denouement, and Judy’s initial appearance alienates the character from the audience rather than opens her up. Altogether though, BEASTS presents an entertaining and insightful evening. I found that getting back into a theater after

two years away injects the breath of life into me, and I look forward to seeing and supporting new plays at the Boston Playwrights’ Theatre.

Lloyd Schwartz talks about " The View from Somerville: An Anthology of Student Poetry"

Red Letter Poem #105

 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 #105

 

 

 

I would like to believe that the signature statement of our age is this one: “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice” – taken from Dr. King’s speech at the National Cathedral in 1968.  But I fear it will end up being this – spoken at a crisis meeting of high-ranking Soviet officials focused on what came to be known as the Holodomor famine in the 1930’s: “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.”  The speaker was, at the time, the Commissar of Munitions – but Joseph Stalin went on to become the supreme ruler of his nation, operating with that same heartless realpolitik, where power and control trumped all other concerns.  It’s a cruel irony that the famine being addressed – and dismissed – at that meeting was taking place in Ukraine, another nation whose people had been swallowed up by the Soviet empire.  It seems that, today, Vladimir Putin must be using Stalin’s statement as a political guide as he wages his remorseless war on the cities and towns of a neighboring country that refuses to bend to his will.

 

So I especially appreciate the reminder that poets provide – voices representing the ordinary and the marvelous within our shared existence: that enmeshed in the sweeping forces of history, ours is the living and dying at stake.  Ours, too, the dreams we inherited from our parents – whose transmission to our own children is both a sacred duty and our deepest hope.  And, of course, ours, this very conversation which despots have tried to control since the earliest human civilizations, hammering it down with darkness and brutality, but which somehow keeps managing to find some small path back into daylight.

 

Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko made her poetry debut at the age of 12 but, because her parents had been blacklisted during the Soviet purges of the 1970s, it took another dozen years and the advent of perestroika before her first book received publication. Since then, she has authored twenty works of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, literary and social analysis which have been translated into a score of foreign languages.  Today’s Red Letter piece is taken from her Selected Poems, translated by Lisa Sapinkopf and published by Boston’s own Arrowsmith Press.  Oksana has been called “without doubt the most influential literary figure in Ukraine of the last half century”; one of her novels occupied a spot on her country’s best-seller list for a full decade.  Her honors – in her native land and beyond – include MacArthur and Fulbright Fellowships, as well as the Antonovych International Foundation Prize, the Shevchenko National Prize of Ukraine, and the Order of Princess Olha.  In early March, she addressed the European Parliament about the threats to Ukrainian sovereignty and the dire situation especially for the women there.  But for decades even before this crisis, her writing has borne witness to the myriad ways totalitarian regimes practice suppression in order to separate beleaguered people from their cultural inheritance and their imaginative freedom.  And now, away from her beloved home and friends in Kyiv, she is doing everything within her powers to support her country’s resistance to the Russian onslaught.  In a sense, she is testing something of an Archimedean principle: with the heart as the fulcrum and a lever of fervid language, is it possible to move the world? 

 

 

A Kingdom of Fallen Statues

 

 

Just as children scrawl self-portraits
With two figures, mom and dad,
Grasping them with unsteady stick-hands,
I’m drawing on the windowpane
A kingdom of fallen statues —
And the outlines, delicate, are quivering.
In the kingdom of fallen statues all gates hang open,
And even marauders no longer tread grass
That was overgrown in an instant.

Vanished temples,
And yes, vanished dramas —
But how real, O God, how alive they are...

Gilding and lapis flake like skin
From the leprous faces of princes and saints.
And, seated on tombstones or perhaps on column stumps,

Black-hooded gravediggers roll cigarettes in yellowed verse.

Don Quixote’s shield lies somewhere,
Somewhere Casanova’s cloak has been tossed,
Somewhere stands the tent where Khmelnytsky

Hosted Europe’s envoys.
In the kingdom of fallen statues you can hear a language

Of words still warm but learned no longer.

I’m drawing it all: everything that’s ever vanished, or will;
I peer into my picture as into rippling water:
Triumphant Nike’s head

Lies somewhere in the grass.

I’ll draw it — and then
I’ll end it with a period.

   – Oksana Zabuzhko

 

 

                                       (Translated by Lisa Sapinkopf and Oksana Zabuzhko)

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters 3.0

 

* 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

 

* 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/3106-redletter-021822.html

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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner