Red Letter Poem #246

 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  246

Red Letter Poe #246 

 

 

 

 

Little Elegy

****in Memory of Joseph Brodsky





After a night in the shaky

but mysteriously comfortable guest room

bed, he materializes in the kitchen,

still only half-awake.



“How’d you sleep?” “Terrific.”

He sits at the table. Sips a cup

of black coffee, gets up, goes outside

for a smoke or two.



Returns a few minutes later, heads for

the fridge, opens it, stoops into its cold glow.

“I see ham. I see a chicken leg.



Do you have any meatballs?"

And with a grin adds,

“Times like this, nobody dies.”





––Jonathan Aaron

 

 

When it comes to poetry––and especially in the more unorthodox voice of Jonathan Aaron––the math doesn’t always add up. I understand the normal accrual of details within a lyric poem: how images mount to form complex descriptions; musical phrases interlock to intensify emotion; and together a more complete scene takes shape––1+1+1 equals 3. Jonathan seems to take a special pleasure in surprising feints, unexpected detours, elliptical leaps that leave our minds scrambling to fill in the missing pieces. Within his compositions, sometimes 1+1+1 equals 39. Or X. Or “baby ghosts.” But there is such a relaxed colloquial tone to the writing, we can’t help but join that spirit of play. Jonathan is the author of four fine poetry collections, and his work has graced such journals as The New Yorker and the London Review of Books. Five times, he’s been highlighted in the annual Best American Poetry. Typically, he employs a diction so straightforward and unpoetic, we’re caught off-guard when he casually starts up a conversation with Bach in one poem, or in another with his talking dog who happens to be partial to the work of Russian novelists. Raising the dead through verse feels as matter of fact as sipping Calvados. When I received my copy of his brand-new collection, Just About Anything: New and Selected Poems (Carnegie Mellon University Press), I was planning to reprint the poem “Lateness,” a mournful narrative about his childhood friend. But instead, I gravitated toward the much more provocative “Little Elegy;” I simply could not resist investigating why such a devious bit of joy had such a hold on me. So perhaps we can think out loud together, pool our resources, relish the unanticipated delight.



We awaken inside the poem (so to speak) just as the houseguest enters the kitchen––none other than the Russian-exile and Nobel Prize-winning poet Joseph Brodsky. At first, the relationship is unspecified: old friend? Mere acquaintance, crashing after a reading? That “mysteriously comfortable guest room/ bed”––do you think it grants a peaceful night’s rest because of some uncanny cushioning, or the deep affection surrounding it? With the simplest interchange––“How’d you sleep?” “Terrific.”––the ease of the connection is becoming clear. A normal moment: the houseguest sips black coffee, steps outside to smoke (how courteous!) But when the Russian returns, he does something that not only conveys the intimacy of the relationship, it represents the sort of unselfconscious liberty we associate with teenagers: he opens the refrigerator (no permission asked, or needed) and happily gazes at the contents. What gesture better demonstrates one’s membership in a household! That icebox interlude––Brodsky “stoop[ing] into its cold glow”––felt to me oddly magical, like a prophet gazing in toward an oracle. But it also brought to mind a bit of the history of this unique figure.



The very first time I came across poems by Brodsky was in Suzanne Massie’s 1972 anthology, The Living Mirror: Five Young Poets from Leningrad. The once-exquisite city was just being rebuilt from the effects of 20th century devastation. The editor described the thriving literary scene: coteries of young idealistic poets (hundreds of them!) sharing hardships and relishing each other’s new work. Massie recounts how they’d talk deep into the night until, inevitably, they’d end up at one apartment or another where someone would make scrambled eggs, pour glasses of vodka––a poor poet’s feast. It’s an intoxicating combination: hardship plus innocence and a faith in the power of art. Then: deeper crackdowns on dissent, a political trial, and Brodsky is branded ‘a cultural parasite.’ Soon, exile becomes his only option.



Making his appearance in today’s poem, Brodsky was already internationally famous, his fate secured––but does one ever fully outgrow deprivation? (Until the day she died, my mother never had less than five loaves of bread in her freezer, a talisman to ward off the remembered pain of the Great Depression.) And thus Brodsky speaks his holy litany: “I see ham. I see a chicken leg.// Do you have any meatballs?" Ensconced in his new life, face luminous with a cold 60-watt glimpse of the promised land: what a picture! We cannot know whether Jonathan is reporting or inventing the next declaration from the Russian master––“Times like this, nobody dies.” Patently untrue, but emotionally accurate: sometimes it feels as if even our seemingly-simple lives contain an unearthly abundance. How could death dare to exist at such a moment? And yet of course it does. Brodsky’s absence today attests to that. But within Jonathan’s modest unrhymed sonnet––or in all the poems through which we learn to relish our capacity for shared delight––the dark shadow is forestalled. The feast is ours; pass the plates around.

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

 

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 #245

 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 #245



Travelling Solo


The enveloping comfort of solitude

among strangers, to-do list suspended,

book unopened in my lap. The engine huffs.

Out the window, the station scrolls by.



Figures on the platform wave, turn away.

The urban apron of concrete, abutments,

electric lines and power stations gives way to

shabby backyards, low-rent neighborhoods.



Sofa cushions, a one-wheeled bike,

a blue plastic bucket and orange traffic cone

adorn the embankment. I crack the code in

the balloon letters of the bright, defiant graffiti.



A trance, as if serenity enfolds me as

I become, for once, my own destination.

––Bonnie Bishop





* * *





[Coming to a fork in the path, Alice addresses the Cheshire Cat:]



`Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?'

`That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,' said the Cat.

`I don't much care where––' said Alice.

`Then it doesn't matter which way you go,' said the Cat.

`––so long as I get somewhere,' Alice added as an explanation.

`Oh, you're sure to do that,' said the Cat, `if you only walk long enough.'



― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland



We’re a particularly directed species, aren’t we? A sense of purpose, forward momentum, clear goals and chosen destinations––these are prized by humans as keys to life-satisfaction. I’m not disputing their importance––I think I’m as driven as the next creature, negotiating the maze or racing down the track––but I do know how beneficial it is sometimes to. . .well, delay, or wander, or even (hope my mother can’t hear me) idle. I remember discussing, with the esteemed poet William Stafford, the power involved in being lost, even momentarily. It’s an image that had frequently found a place in his poems. His response: “I believe it's kind of an emblem for that deliciousness that I was trying to get into my explanation about the 'delicious writing' of the early morning. That if you're lost enough, then the experience of now is your guide to what comes next.” Of course, we have been taught by the Buddhists about the vitality of simply being present to the moment; and from the Taoists, we’ve been counseled on the importance of allowing the way––the cosmic current that shapes creation––to guide our decisions, carry us along. But let’s be honest: when do we actually permit ourselves the luxury of simply going with the flow? One of the few occasions for many of us is when we depart from our homes, our routines, and surrender ourselves for several hours into the hands of the airline pilot or train engineer. We no longer need to steer; we can avoid the requirement of meetings and work product (though laptops and Zoom connections have encroached upon that too much of late.) We get to be ourselves, to sit quietly inside our own consciousness, and simply look out at the world.



Bonnie Bishop––poet, educator, social activist––has authored a chapbook and two full-length collections, the most recent being River Jazz (Every Other Thursday Press,) a portrait of her beloved New Orleans and its music. Her work is included in EOT’s new anthology, The Heart Off Guard. In today’s Letter, Bonnie has indeed “cracked the code,” as she stares out at the landscape rushing past, barreling down an unnamed Amtrak line to some unspecified station. In the small, even shabby, particulars of our daily experience, we know we are alive. In the used-up, broken-down, cast-off ephemera of lives passing, we grasp the commonality of what writers used to call (with fanfares and dramatic lighting) the human condition. Despite the great beauty and insight which might reside within that novel “unopened in my lap,” the speaker opts instead for the wild-style poetry of graffiti scrawled along the railway, or the flickering frames glimpsed on the passing platforms, the cinema of the ordinary. Reading her poem, I actually felt myself exhaling slowly––ah!­­––as if I were being offered a seat beside her. Then, after three visually-detailed quatrains, the speaker drifts toward the poetic: “A trance, as if serenity enfolds me as/ I become, for once, my own destination.” A lovely thought––but only then it dawned on me: this is an unrhymed sonnet! And here in the volta, or ‘turn’ that’s customary in the closing couplet, a greater meaning is being imposed upon this locomotive idyll. Of course, just like the rest of us, the speaker’s serenity is fleeting; big ideas intrude––and I wonder just when the poet drifted from being a pair of eyes observing to a purposeful mind commanding a ballpoint pen? No longer lost in the moment, she realizes she can employ this lovely now as a ticket to a poet’s much-loved station on the page. Perhaps it is unavoidable; and I’m grateful, not simply for the understated elegance of Bonnie’s verse, but for the honest way she has allowed us the experience of how ephemeral peace morphs into something else. Still, rereading it, the poem remains a space I can travel inside, delaying my arrival at that final couplet. Like Alice, I long to arrive “somewhere”; but perhaps that moment of being “my own destination”––before self-awareness sets in––is what the heart desired all along.

 

 

 

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

 

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 224

 

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

­ ­ ­ ­ The 1st Letter to the Corinthians ­ ­ ­ ­ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast; love fears with a primal fear, but walks on; love could have surrendered, abandoned everything, but it walks on. And sometimes love gets shot in the legs, or shell fragments get stuck in them, or its legs get blown off. Then love is carried by its friends. Love digs trenches and lives in them, gnawing on ice from a hacked-up plastic bottle, when it suffers thirst at minus twenty. Love goes out on combat duty, enters firing positions with hernias, fever, prostatitis, with blast concussions, asthma and allergies, with a high probability of not making it back, thinking all the while about the one most important to them. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things! Love distinguishes the sounds of a Grad rocket launching, mines exploding and tanks advancing. Love's eyes ache when it stares through a thermal imager too long. Love wakes up at night when mice in the dugout crawl under its coat. Sometimes love vomits at length in the woodland after a heavy fight. And sometimes love closes its friends' eyes, wraps them in sleeping bags and carries them away. Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. Because sometimes when the shelling ceases, friends close love's eyes, wrap it in sleeping bags and carry it away. And then it passes on to the living. —Artur Dron’   *    *    * "War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength."                                                 —George Orwell; 1984    “You’ve [Zelenskyy] been there for three years. You should have ended it. ... You should have never started it. You could have made a deal.”                                                 —President Donald Trump We were warned.  There is no way of escaping that fact.  There have been a wealth of excellent books in recent years—How Democracies Die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky; and Autocracy, Inc by Anne Applebaum come to mind—fully illuminating the wannabe-dictator’s playbook.  Each one details how authoritarian leaders use lies, threats of violence, and a host of quiet coercions to eventually take complete control of a populace.  But even if you’re the sort that never ventures into the ‘political science’ aisle of the bookshop, a classic novel like George Orwell’s 1984 has become part of the intellectual fabric of our culture since its publication 75 years ago—if nothing else, through its famous quotes and movie adaptations.  Orwell demonstrates, with terrifying accuracy, one central strategy: to convince ordinary people to accept the violation of our shared perception of reality, the connection between language and actuality.  History, current affairs, can be rewritten at any moment simply because Big Brother says so.  One of Orwell’s quieter lines continues to haunt my thoughts: “It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words.”  And perhaps that’s the very reason we turn to the words of poets in times of great distress: because we trust the authenticity of their voices, their commitment to the truth of their experience—as best it can be witnessed, imagined, inscribed in the heart.  And so I am deeply honored to have been given permission to share two poems from a new collection written by a young Ukrainian poet-turned-soldier, published during his recuperation from serious injuries received battling for his nation’s survival.  His are words that cannot be easily repressed nor crushed beneath tank treads or hammering artillery.   In 2022, Artur Dron’ was a twenty-one-year-old journalism major and event organizer for a publishing house; but he quickly joined the Ukrainian Armed Forces after the Russian invasion. Today, at age 24, he is already a celebrated poet, on and off the battlefield; he’s been translated into several languages including these evocative just-published English versions from the acclaimed Ukrainian poet Yuliya Musakovska.  They are taken from his 2023 collection, We Were Here (Jantar Publishing) and, I’m happy to report, the book will become available in the US in the coming months. The title echoes the defiant declaration of President Zelenskyy at the war’s outset, when he refused to go into exile for his own safety.  For a time, though, Artur turned away from the pen, unable to justify art-making in the face of the brutality and destruction the Russian troops unleashed on his people.  But, after a while, poetry reasserted itself into his life because it brought with it one undeniable attribute: it could make us “feel less lonely.” He’s said of these poems that they “were written at the front, but they are not about the war. They are about people who love more than they fear.”   By constructing this, the book’s final poem, on the Epistle of Paul, Artur is already asserting that some language will endure every attempt at obliteration.  It’s the accumulation of carefully-observed detail (his distinction between the sound of different munitions; or the description of staving off thirst by “gnawing on ice from a hacked-up plastic bottle”) that insists we approach this moment from his perspective, and not through the filter of our safe remove.  His personification of Love is hunkered down with him in the muddy trench; and after conveying the bodies of its comrades away from the fighting, Love itself becomes a casualty which we, the living, must care for and honor.  Today’s Red Letter is appearing just days after the third anniversary of Putin’s unprovoked assault. (I’ll issue the second of Artur’s poems in a later installment.)  It prompts me to remember that, when the Russian tanks were first amassed on Ukrainian borders, all the expert analysis was that Kyiv would fall within weeks.  No one predicted how astonishingly resilient a people could be when they’re fighting—not for ideology, political aims, or bloodlust (as were the Russian conscripts,) but for their own families, homes, and deep-held beliefs.  That same driving force empowers the words of this young poet, makes them feel utterly necessary.  Under the regime depicted in Orwell’s classic, “Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”  Artur—along with scores of other poets and artists, not to mention millions of Ukrainian citizens—are adamantly refusing to accept the constraints of such terrifying borders.  Perhaps it’s a lesson we, in America, will be compelled to relearn. ­       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 X (formerly Twitter) @StevenRatiner   Website and Red Letters archives coming soon!