TRIBUTE TO DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES (1964-2025) By Martha Collins

 

This essay is in Ibbetson Street 57--the latest issue of this Somerville-based magazine.

 TRIBUTE TO DANIELLE LEGROS GEORGES (1964-2025)


By Martha Collins



When Danielle Legros Georges passed away earlier this year, I, like many others, lost a dear friend.

I met Danielle in the 1990s, when she was a participant in a summer translation workshop at the William Joiner Institute at UMass Boston. Some years later she became a colleague who taught that workshop herself and was instrumental in welcoming more writers of color into the Joiner community.

In the years between and beyond, I knew her as a writer whose stunning poems seamlessly fused the personal and the political; as a poetic innovator who took enormous risks in her work; as a researcher who transformed history into beautiful poems; as a translator who carefully brought the important work of Haitian women poets to our attention; as a social activist whose work on behalf of others extended far beyond her written work; and as a friend with whom I shared both deep sadness and grief, and abundant laughter and joy—a woman who shared herself and her many gifts both deeply and widely.



Born in Haiti and raised in Boston, Danielle graduated from Emerson College, earned her MFA in Creative Writing from New York University, and served as Professor and later Director of the Creative Writing MFA Program at Lesley University. She received numerous fellowships and awards, including an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Emerson College, and in 2024 was inducted into the American Antiquarian Society and named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by France’s Ministry of Culture.



Many of her awards and recognitions were also opportunities for service. As Boston’s Poet Laureate from 2015 until 2019, she worked tirelessly to bring poetry to the lives of ordinary Bostonians. She partnered with museums and libraries, sponsored poetry workshops for students and elders, collaborated with musicians and photographers, and brought poetry to the attention of the entire city through POETRY ON THE T, the innovative sidewalk installation Raining Poetry, City of Notions: An Anthology of Contemporary Boston Poems, and other projects. She was on the Board of Directors of the New England Poetry Club, for which she spearheaded the creation of two awards for BIPOC poets and projects, one of which is now named for her. She was also a valued member of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s Artist Advisory Council, a founding member of the the Haitian Artists Assembly of Massachusetts (HAAM), and one of the lead editors of HAAM’s Anthology of Haitian Poets of Massachusetts. Her public service will extend beyond her lifetime, as it continues to touch people in the many communities she loved and served.



But Danielle will be remembered best and longest for her poems, which draw from all of these communities, small and large. She first explored her Haitian heritage, as well as her early life in Boston, in Maroon (2001). In The Dear Remote Nearness of You (2016), winner of the New England Poetry Club’s Sheila Margaret Motton prize, she created boldly experimental poems to deal with such disturbingly timely subjects as racism in Boston and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, as well as exquisite lyrics in praise of her friends and loves, her neighborhood and its people, her city and its surroundings.


A year later, she published the chapbook Letters from Congo, which included translations of letters her parents wrote from the Congo when they worked there in the 1960s. The chapbook was a precursor to her stunning full-length collection Three Leaves, Three Roots:

Poems on the Haiti–Congo Story, which was published less than a month before her passing and from which she gave an impressive number of readings during the final weeks of her life.

Expanding her territory beyond family stories into the histories of colonial and post-colonial Haiti and Congo required an enormous amount of research, and transforming it into dazzlingly memorable poems led Danielle into an ever-expanding reservoir of poetic innovation.



In her final published book, a chapbook completed before and published just months after her passing, Danielle continued to transform history into poetry as she turned once again to the city and region where she lived. Aided by research grants, Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England took her far back into history as she continued to integrate documentary material into deeply moving lyrics.

Danielle’s adept adaptation of research into poems was paralleled by, and I think related to, her practice of literary translation. In the last years of her life, she translated and published two volumes of poems by Haitian women: Island Heart: The Poems of Ida Faubert (2021) and Blue Flare: Three Haitian Poets: Évelyne Trouillot, Marie-Célie Agnant, Maggy de Coster (2024). A similarly transformative work was Wheatley at 250: Black Women Poets Re-imagine the Verse of Phillis Wheatley Peters, co-edited with Bethany Artress White and published in 2023. I think it’s no accident that these books feature women poets. All of Danielle’s books, from the earliest on, include memorable portraits and mentions of women, and in her poetic accounts of the Haiti- Congo connection and New England slavery, she was careful, as history often is not, to focus on women as much as men.

As in her poems, so in her friendships. Even in the darkest times, knowing Danielle Legros Georges was a joy. I miss her. I will always miss her. But I will always have her poems

To order Ibbetson 57 as well as other Ibbetson Street Publications:  https://www.lulu.com/spotlight/ibbetsonpress?srsltid=AfmBOopyQIo5Ss6oAnnjpnlDVFXe6c75p9JBeL4FTGUWY2YFkPLOfDEA

Red Letter Poem #272

 

 

 

 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 #272

 

 

 

 

Silverfish


It had lived for years in a space no thicker than a dime,

where the mat on a picture had warped up under the glass,

and had fed on the paper—a cheap reproduction of Homer’s

“The Gulf Stream”—nibbling its way in from the margins,

this happening while the lost sailor lay sprawled on the deck

of his wreck, drifting out toward his end. If there’d been

more silverfish than the one I’d found dead, washed up

at the edge of that picture, they’d vanished before I had

ripped off the brown backing paper and pulled out the brads.

And in fact, the dead one was exactly the size of a brad,

as if it had worked its way out and then dropped to the bottom,

like that Hemingway fish, cut loose to sink in the sea.







––Ted Kooser

                                   

’

 

 

It began with a happy accident.



I was introduced to Ted Kooser after receiving a kind note concerning a poem of mine he came across in an anthology. The work of this acclaimed and much-loved poet has always meant a great deal to me, so I immediately responded. We began corresponding (both electronically, but also with the poet’s neatly-packed handwritten postcards). I told him about the Red Letters––and I asked whether he might have something new which I could feature. He told me he’d send me “The Vole,” one of his unpublished “critter” poems. But the next day, when I opened his e-mail attachment, I unscrolled thirteen short poems, each focusing on a different kind of animal or insect. I alerted Ted to the confusion, and he apologized, having sent the wrong file. But I loved what I’d read, and told him they had the feel of a sequence of poems. I casually remarked: You should publish these as a little chapbook. One day later, my thoughts had become emboldened: I should publish that chapbook! And so I wrote to Ted to make that somewhat impertinent suggestion. I was delighted that he loved the idea and said he’d comb through his files to see if he could send me more to choose from. One day after that, a new e-mail arrived containing sixty-two poems of what I began to think of as the Kooser Animalia.



It took some time to narrow down my favorites, and slowly I began to discern a dramatic sequencing which, I thought, might bring out the best in this set of poems. After consultations with the poet, Fellow Creatures is the result of that process––and, because of Ted’s generosity, it was determined that the chapbook would be published as a fundraiser for the Red Letters, especially allowing us to keep paying honoraria for the poets and musicians who perform in our yearly Red Letter LIVE! events. You can find out more at:

https://stevenratiner.com/product/fellow-creatures/



I think of these poems, written across many years, as a kind of journal of the poet’s experiences of the natural world in and around his Nebraska home. In it, we witness a careful observer who feels free to use every imaginative resource at his disposal in order to capture what commands his attention. But the poems are not some romantic depiction of an idealized world; they are clear-eyed, often playful, occasionally brutal confrontations with the life surrounding him––every sort, size, and disposition––just one creature regarding another, curious to discern from each encounter what might be learned. And central to the writing: the quiet vitality of being, the difficulty of each day’s survival, and the momentary grace every creature cultivates in its own way. This is, after all, a poet who has hard-earned knowledge about the preciousness and fragility of existence. It’s not a secret that Ted has battled cancer for some time now, and the illness has taken its toll. He published a powerful little essay about the experience last year entitled “Whistling Past the Graveyard” (in New Letters journal––you can find it online). Yet I am continually astonished by Ted’s calm acceptance of mortal jeopardy coupled with a quiet determination to savor all he finds in his life. He is up early each morning and busy at the notebook. The chores of the day are approached with a certain gratitude. And the new poems that keep coming––certainly providing ballast in any storm the day might bring––seem undiminished from the work we’ve followed all along. Ted is thought of as the bard of the Midwest, highlighting the actuality of experience in what too many of us regard as the ‘flyover states.’ Rather than catalog his many honors, I’ll summarize them with two: he is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; and is the former United States Poet Laureate. But I especially want to highlight the agility of his imagination in poems like this twelve-line elegy for a simple silverfish (the sort of insect whose appearance might have engendered nothing more than a thoughtless swipe with a rolled-up newspaper). Here, the fate of this creature is poignantly linked with that of the desperate fisherman in the Winslow Homer painting, and the quiet heroics of Hemingway’s ‘old man’ who battles sharks, loneliness, and the illimitable sea. As do you, and as do I––even when our sharks possess only metaphorical teeth. It takes a special kind of talent to celebrate that.

 

  

 

 

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

 

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

Poet Michael Minassian: Having a pint with Christopher Marlowe

I caught up with Michael Minassian about his latest poetry collection, "1,000 Pieces  of Time." From his website:


Michael Minassian a graduate of Dumont High School, Fairleigh Dickinson University (BA), and California State University at Dominguez Hills (MA) was born in New York and has lived in New Jersey, California, Florida, North Carolina and Texas. A professor of English for 30 years at Broward College in South Florida, he also taught in Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Jamaica, England, and served as a consultant in Spain and Ecuador.



What was the spark that led you to become a poet?


There were two things, really, that sparked my interest in poetry. The first was my sophomore High School English class. The teacher, Mr. Meade, assigned the class to write a rhyming poem. He gave me an A and had me read the poem in front of the entire class. Throughout the term, he encouraged me to write more poetry. The second spark occured in the senior year of HS when we took a class trip to Stratford, CT to see Hamlet. It was my first time seeing a live performance of Shakespeare, and I was struck by the musicality of his language.


You bring a wide range of historical and mythological figures in your poetry. I like your poem  "Christopher Marlowe Buys Me a Drink." Marlowe would be a good drinker partner as he was a rogue , and a raconteur. How did you come up with this conceit?


What better place to meet Marlowe than in a tavern or a bar? Marlowe is a fascinating character. Two months older than Shakespeare, he was an influence on Elizabethan theatre, including Shakespeare, and is credited with refining the use of blank verse. Suspected of being a spy for Queen Elizabeth, accused and arrested for heresy (for being an atheist), Marlow was allegedly killed in a brawl over a bill in a tavern in Deptford on the South Bank of the Thames. Here is the poem:


CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE BUYS ME A DRINK



At first, I don’t recognize

the person sitting

on the next bar stool.



His hat pulled down low

over his forehead,

I hear him order an ale

in a clipped British accent,

& realize his clothing

has a distinct

16th century look.



Christopher Marlowe? I ask.



Call me Kit, he replies,

fingering his wispy moustache,

and winking at me

with his one good eye.



We talk for a while

about theatre, exotic birds,

and the British monarchy,

but he makes no mention

of Ben Jonson or Shakespeare.



When I get up to leave,

he offers to buy me a drink.

These vagabond seasons

are out of balance,

he complains,

and somehow, I know

just what he means,

our hearts full,

dense as time.



© 2024 Michael Minassian




In " Darwin's Beard" you bring facial hair to the high holy. The white beard grows with the breadth of the great man's experience The beard becomes a metaphor for the life of a man. What is your take on this?


Darwin's influence on science and evolution is huge, and his beard grows along with reputation. Since God is often depicted with a white beard (think Michelangelo's "Creation of Adam") and because of the way the theory of evolution is often pitted against creationism, I felt the beard was the best metaphor to talk about Darwin's life. Since he lived and worked in the 19th Century, the pressures on him (and his family) must have been enormous, especially from the Church of England.


You seem to have a lot of fun with your poetry. Billy Collins thought, when he was starting out, that all poets had to be miserable. Do you think that is a popular misconception?


Yes, the idea that poets (and other writers) have to be miserable is a popular misconception. The stereotype of the depressed and derelict artist persists in popular culture. Poe is often used as an example of the poet with a dark cloud over his head. It's true that he abused alcohol but stories of his drug use are greatly exaggerated.
It is true that many poets have died by suicide (Berryman, Sexton, Plath, Hemingway, Woolf, for example) so perhaps that's where some of this misconception comes from, but they are in the minority.


I like to include humor in my poems. I think Collins, Charles Simic, and many other poets do the same. And I think it is great fun to take historical, mythical, or literary characters from the past and drop them into the 21st Century to see how they react and how others react to them.


Why should we read this book?


Using plain and direct language, 1000 Pieces of Time explores time's myriad possibilities as a vast array of characters come to terms with the past and the future. The poems are entertaining and designed to make the reader think about time itself. What is time? Does the past matter? How can we write our own personal narratives? Many of the poems have appeared online and in print in, among other publications, Baltimore Review, Comstock Review, Glimpse, Slant, the Somerville Times, Third Wednesday, and Verse-Virtual. My hope is that anyone can read these poems and come away richer for the experience.

Red Letter Poem #271

 Red Letter Poem #271

 

 

In Our Time


1



Men back from the front say:

In the trenches, it’s hard to find anyone

Who refuses to pray.



2



“The Truth exists within a cannon’s range”

This is a popular expression these days.

Poets without cannons, where is your truth?



3



In our time,

Some cannons have pretty flower names,

“carnation” for instance...

While some concentration camps are hidden

In a fairyland of angelic birch trees.



4



A country as “united” as a “pomegranate”

A country composed of dozens of marshes

A country driven by tanks and “The Noseless Slut”*

A country in the dragon seat

A country controlled by the sorcery of soul-stealers

A country hanging, swaying from a tree’s crooked neck

A country where prosthetics stock soars in value



5



He was released. The sack covering his head was removed.

He found himself in an open field in early autumn.

He could run to freedom with open arms.

What he didn’t know, is that he had been left in

The middle of a beautiful––

filled with drifting golden leaves––

Minefield.

                                                                      (April, 2023, New York)

 

 

                                        ––Wang Jiaxin

                                   

(translated by John Balcom)

 

 

*The Noseless Slut--death. (The word for death in Russian is of feminine

gender).  See the third part of Anna Akhmatova’s ‘Poem without a Hero.’

“The empire in ruins––rivers and mountains remain.” Du Fu’s opening line is one of the most famous in all of Chinese poetry, and hints at the somewhat conflicted allegiances poets had to maintain throughout Imperial history. With the exception of those strange souls who chose to opt out of society, living in seclusion, ancient poet/scholars were generally an official part of the governing apparatus. Their writing reflected the mood of the people, lionized the emperor’s glories, preserved histories and traditions, and cultivated the blessings of the heavens. But I suspect the temperament of individual poets was likely not so very different from that of our contemporaries: awed by the natural world, delighted by the love of family and friends, made solemn by an understanding of our mortal fragility––and these tendencies were amplified by Taoist principles and the amalgamation of Buddhism into the culture. Du Fu, thought by many to be China’s greatest poet, was so devastated by a ruinous civil war that tore through the Tang Dynasty, he eventually resigned his official post and returned to an impoverished private life––only partially comforted by his awareness that, while power-crazed leaders carved their bloody paths, nature’s realm would survive them all.



Wang Jiaxin is one of China’s finest contemporary poets and, in my reading of his work, a direct descendant of Du Fu and his blend of personal exploration and social observation. Working my way through At the Same Time: New and Selected Poems (about to be published by Arrowsmith Press, and skillfully carried over into English by John Balcom), it’s clear that he takes seriously both spheres of a poet’s responsibility: to sing out of the intensities of an individual’s experience, but to cry out loud at the brutality and injustice inflicted on people living everywhere and under every banner. In what is often called his most important poem, “Pasternak” (many of Jiaxin’s verses highlight the achievement and the suffering of fellow writers across the globe), he offers the lines: “The darkness and hunger in the people’s bellies, how/ Can I ignore this just to talk about myself?” Recently, the wanton suffering being inflicted on Ukraine (spurred by another power-mad emperor’s reckless aspirations) has become a frequent focus in his writing––and I selected “In Our Time” for today’s Red Letter because those antiphonal aspects of a poet’s self are so marvelously implicated. In the poem’s five sections, he challenges the capacity of our hearts and minds as we try to keep up with the verses.



Section one starts off with what has become a truism from the millennial history of war: the closeness of death makes every beleaguered individual seek out some God to whom he/she can appeal (or, in the popular adage from World War 2, ‘no atheists in a foxhole’). Even for those who have not witnessed a battlefield, the second stanza is deeply resonant: that “The Truth [with a capital-T] exists within a cannon’s range,” because the nearness of oblivion demands a radical perception of the moment. Then, to what absolute can we civilian poets turn––we who are blessed with abundance and do not wake and sleep within earshot of drones and missile strikes? Section three teases out intimations of life and death, heaven and hell, from what surrounds us every day. But then the poem intensifies, shifts direction with section four’s litany; perhaps you felt, as I did, that the poet’s anger seemed to be scarcely contained. I had little trouble imagining who those “soul-stealers” were, and upon whom their sorcery was being worked––our beloved homelands swinging from nooses we did little to prevent. The only industries prospering in such a world are the ones that trade in misery.



Born in Hubei Province, Wang Jiaxin was among the multitudes sent to the countryside for labor and reeducation. When the furor of the Cultural Revolution ended, he attended Wuhan University, and later worked as a teacher, editor, translator, and critic. He was a professor of literature at Renmin University in Beijing until his retirement in 2020. As author of over forty books, he’s won numerous domestic and international awards, and has had a deep influence on the poets of China and far beyond. He now spends most of each year in New York City. Reading his poems, I am reminded of why poets are often targeted by authoritarian regimes: because sometimes the truth of a dozen lines has the potential to upend how we’d been experiencing our days, to make us hunger for more. But the attempt at such honesty places one in personal danger––like the figure in the final section of today’s poem. A prisoner of some unnamed force, at last the sack is removed from his head, and he’s set free––only to discover he's in “The middle of a beautiful––filled with drifting golden leaves––Minefield.” Those intrusive em dashes feel like prison bars and yet, between them, perhaps only a poet would notice what vibrant beauty is everywhere available. That is the dilemma we are all being forced to navigate: beauty endures, but the minefield encloses it. What are we willing to do for one more afternoon of such possibility? This poet’s made his choice. (Is that cannon fire I’m hearing in the distance?) Perhaps, soon, we’ll be required to make ours.

 

 

   

 

 

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

 

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