Poet Heather Treseler discusses her award-winning new collection Auguries & Divinations

 I have been a Board Member of the New England Poetry Club for a few years now; and I remember judging our Motton Book Prize with other board members. When we came to discuss Heather Treseler's poetry collection, "Auguries & Divinations" there was a hands down love for the book. We were impressed with her facility with language, the music of her work and the deep layers of the lines in this insightful new collection. So after she won the Award, I decided to interview the author, and she generously agreed.

From her website:

"Auguries & Divinations tracks a young woman's coming of age, attuned to the unspoken liabilities in women's lives, the suburban underworld, and the energies of eros. An older woman becomes the narrator's Beatrice in love and survival, and she returns to the New England of her childhood ready to claim a life of her own making, drawing on the classical practice of augury, or observing birds to discern human fate.​

​Auguries & Divinations received the 2023 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize (Bauhan), and the 2024 Shelia Margaret Motton Book Award from the New England Poetry Club. It's been reviewed in the Boston Globe, the Poetry Foundation, LitHub, On the Seawall, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Worcester Magazine, and it's available directly from Bauhan and at many independent bookstores."

Your poetry explores “the suburban underworld.” I remember an image from the movie “Blue Velvet” by David Lynch. Lynch pans on the broad lawns of suburbia, and then goes below them, to show us the savagery of insects, etc., below the benign green carpet. Do you feel in some way you are doing the same thing?

I hadn’t thought of that before, but I think the David Lynch analogy is a very canny one.

I am interested in the suburbs as a material enactment of American ideals—pastoral, economic, familial, and social—and as a geography in which appearances and realities often collide. I was ten years old when my family moved from a triple decker in Hyde Park to a rundown Victorian in an upper-class suburb. We were outsiders, strivers, and as a newcomer (and later as a neighborhood babysitter), I started picking up on notes of disorder beneath rigorously maintained surfaces, the human complexities and unmet hungers behind façades of contentment and domestic tranquility.

As an adolescent, I felt like an amateur anthropologist, observing the lives around me, particularly the lives of girls and women, and I was discomforted by some of the compromises and even privations and wrongdoing that I saw. The suburbs enact an ethos of privacy, property, and propriety, but also surveillance, exclusion, and exploitation, which can serve to hide shocking goings-on. I was interested in the wildness that persisted underneath all that orderliness, and I felt I had to understand that tension if I was going to construct a life that met my hungers and desire for certain kinds of freedom.

An older woman, Lucie, becomes a guide for your narrator—a sort of Beatrice in Dante's Divine Comedy. Why did you choose to have a guide or mentor to traverse the narrator through the rocky shoals of your old neighborhood?

“The Lucie Odes” are about an historical person: the second section of the book details a narrator’s friendship with Lucie Nell Beaudet (1960-2018) in St. Louis, Missouri, while the narrator is in graduate school and, in other important ways, acquiring her life education. Lucie, who enacted a “Great Gatsby” climb in her life from an early abusive marriage and a terrible car wreck to a life of professional attainment, friendship, and fulfillment, shows the narrator—through her love and guidance—a path to her own agency and freedom.

You use birds in some of your poems. Birds are frequently used as symbols in art to express human-animal connection; human hopes; spiritual beliefs; and wealth, power and colonialism, and extinction. Their use as symbols can be seen in the earliest known art (the Lascaux Caves), and their use as symbols persists to the present moment. There was a harrowing poem about a hawk devouring another bird, or a heron snapping up a sun-dazed fish, etc. I think you embrace the beauty and ugliness of nature, and ourselves. Your take?

The “auguries” in my book title refers to the ancient Roman practice of making important political decisions—about the timing of battles, elections, and state proceedings—in connection with priests’ interpretations of birds in flight, their appearance in certain regionsof the sky, their wings’ speed and noise, their feeding patterns, and even the appearance of avian entrails. Consulting natural signs to discern human fate seemed a good metaphor for the narrator’s search for insight into the truer nature of her surroundings.

I’ve also always loved Geoffrey Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls in which Nature defends a female eagle (or formel)’s right to choose (or abstain from choosing) a mate, upholding free will in the harmonious conduct of life, as well as the humorous role of the pet sparrow in Catullus’s love poems for Clodia.

So yes, the birds in Auguries & Divinations are polyvalent symbols for the realities of appetite and survival but also of pleasure, free will, and dialects of song.

You won the New England Poetry Club's Motton Book Award. You have had any number of honors—what is special about this award?

The New England Poetry Club is one of the oldest, most active organizations of its kind. Since Auguries & Divinations is a coming-of-age collection set here in New England, it’s a special honor to have it recognized in its place of origin by a civic organization that has advocated for the work of New England poets for over a century.

Why should we read your book?

I am not sure anyone should read my book, but I hope those that do might find it pleasurable: that it rewards their attention with stories and images they find useful and moving; that it might help them see the landscape of everyday life in new ways. I don’t know that a poet can hope for more than that.

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Cul-de-Sac

That old rage for order: how my father drove a square mouthed mower
over-and-back, over-and-back, each row of neatly trimmed grass

cut just like he told his barber: boy’s short, regular. O pioneer, taming
this joke bit of prairie, no bindweed or dog shit on his verdure.

Mother, meanwhile, absolved counters of crumbs, paired two dozen
socks to matching mates, hummed some half-remembered Sinatra

song as she dusted the porcelain figurines and never-used, quaintly
painted China plates. In the antic business of having nice things,

the obligation of display: a furnishing. Each squat house in our street’s
orb eyed the other, envious of another’s paint job, carport or owner.

Left alone, I built model planes with my torn-pocket parachutes. Rode
a blue scooter in dizzying loops of the prescribed circle. Adults

acted as if living here were preferred or exalted. But I had looked it
up: I knew it meant bottom of the sack, the fate of drowned cats,

a sickly child or rabbit. Gathered up, held head-down in a satchel
or bucket. When the hands closed in, I’d make a run for it

Red Letter Poem #230

 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 #230




A Warm Spell in November

My jack-o’-lantern bloomed with mold.

I tossed it out behind the stone fence

for the deer to ravage. Poor smile,

poor googly face my son drew on

to guide the knife. Stout runners out

in shorts and Ts, a peloton

on Liberty I swerve my Prius

to avoid. The local market’s

full of local Gravensteins: small

this year because of chill spring weeks

and summer drought. I hailed John Greenlaw

on his tractor in the cabbage fields

at Clover Farm, and he complained,

as John is wont to do, of yields

and prices and the late year heat.

The north barn roof fell in, he said.

A big relief. Let someone else

rebuild. I’ll burn the wood for heat

once the season finally turns.

He swiped his brow, his John Deere cap

black with perspiration. It’s not

the way that I remember it,

but how long have I really got?

I felt the same. Miles of houses,

heat shimmers from the parking lot

that make the HomeGoods’ glass doors wave.

If one more jerk nice-weathers me,

I swear I’m going to scream. The dream

devours everything. At night

the dry sorghastrum ticks against

the cedar shakes. The stripped boughs bend,

and then they break.


––Jonathan Weinert


The lyric poem sings, the narrative poem tells and––when artfully melded together, and set in the New England countryside––the result becomes a type of lettered passage that was Robert Frost’s métier, inviting a reader into the rural landscape as well as the heart’s. Poet Jonathan Weinert has found himself walking along similar roads (both literary and actual) near his home in Stow, Massachusetts, nestled amid farm and conservation land. Living there, he could not help but witness a part of the natural world––not to mention a traditional American way of life––straining beneath the forces of modernity, their very survival being challenged. This was especially true for him during the pandemic when threat encompassed our lives like a strange unseasonable weather, and there was little else to do but walk, think, and (if you were fortunate) attend quietly to the kind of solitary work which sustains.



Jonathan is the author of three poetry collections: the first, In the Mode of Disappearance won the Nightboat Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the Norma Farber First Book Award. His most recent, A Slow Green Sleep was chosen for the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize. Along with Kevin Prufer, he is the co-editor of Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W.S. Merwin, a finalist for a ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year. His work has earned him fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Ucross Foundation. More importantly, he consistently produces the sort of poems that both entrance and challenge, reflect our lived experience back to us and reveal its hidden dimensions.



Ecclesiastes (not to mention the old rock tune from the Byrds––for those of a certain age) informs us: "For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven." Late fall is the season of natural summation and breakdown, but this poem subtly paints a picture of an accelerated destruction, with mankind’s fingerprints all over the steering wheel. How tragic, that promising orange face––sketched by the son, carved by the father––now left to rot amid the scrub. How unsettling to imagine the force of the American economic machine which has made farmland more valuable as the site for suburban homes than the source of our food supply. And when “The north barn roof fell in,” I found myself feeling the ache of defeat; but the farmer, John Greenlaw (a name Charles Dickens would have admired)––who has been a keen observer of our society’s trajectory––reports only a kind of dark relief. “(B)ut how long have I really got?” he muses. How long indeed. What in hell is happening to us?––I kept hearing that thought inside my head. But that’s disingenuous: we all know exactly what’s happening and, it seems, have decided not to do a whole lot about it. To my mind, it is the authenticity of the narrative in “A Warm Spell. . .” that draws us into its distressing situation; but it’s the music of the poem that causes the neurons to tremble and sets the mind’s deepest recesses echoing (that place a poet in Frost’s time might have understood as the soul––and of which contemporary culture, I fear, understands precious little.) At the close, Jonathan forms an arpeggio of k-sounds across the final two lines––tick, shakes, and then break. When the back of the tongue forms those hard consonants, momentarily stopping the airflow, we both choke back and then expel little sharp breaths. We intuitively understand that something which should be green and supple inside us might now fracture beneath the strain. And for the briefest of moments, that fragility, that threat, sings its brief elegy beneath the proscenium arch of our imaginative understanding. It might actually make us feel what––of our lives, our planet––is presently at stake.

 

 

 

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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

Doug Holder retires as Director of the Newton Free Library Poetry Series

Nov. 12, 2024 was my last night of hosting the Newton Free Library Poetry Series. I have directed it for 23 years, and I have booked 100s of poets in that time span. I was handed the baton by Robert K. Johnson years back, and it has been a pleasure meeting and listening to folks. I will be consulting with the library to make as smooth a transition as possible.. I felt it was time to pass the series on to new leadership, who could bring new energy and innovations to this venerable-long-running series. I have been assured by the library that they are very interested in continuing the series, so stay tuned...Below are the poets who participated this last night ( Left to right) Li Min Mo, Alex Kern, me---the host--- Jayla Tillison--- Mary Buchinger

Red Letters 229

 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

Saturday!



The fifth annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

has arrived!

Saturday, November 9th 2024

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-3pm, with a reception to follow

Free, and all are welcome!



Featuring poets:



Danielle Legros Georges

Indran Amirthanayagam

Heather Treseler &

Steven Ratiner

with a musical performance by clarinetist

Todd Brunel

If you’re in the Boston area, we’d love to see you there



Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan



Red Letter Poem #229



Cupid Peruses The Times


A curly-headed cupid, reading

on my balcony, rain-drenched

and naked, hand on chubby chin,

thinking, no doubt, about what

certain words mean—delirious:

the way his perfumed head feels?

Or rapacious: his appetite for gold-

tipped anything and honey skin?

And resuscitate, to raise up again

in Latin, the way Lazarus, risen

from his tomb in Bethany,

ate supper with his sister Martha.

As in: restored to daily walks

and the scent of lemon trees.

My cupid reads ventilator, thinks

Ventus, the night wind his mother—

wild black hair rising—

calls the breath of the gods.


––Teresa Cader





Thank goodness for that angelic presence! Not the cherubic sculpture that Teresa Cader has perched on her balcony (though I’m sure her familiar companion provides both comfort and inspiration at times while this poet sits quietly sipping morning coffee.) No, I mean this elemental, all-pervasive aspect of our lives: language. Or, more specifically, the sylph-like way words––unexpected meanings, captivating images, musically-charged syllables––circle about us, infusing nearly every waking moment. They’re like a kind of intermediary between the inner landscape of consciousness and the outer material world––so familiar (from Latin familiāris–– “of the household,”) we often take them for granted. Language––especially those forms to which we’ve given our deepest, our most artful attention––reflects a certain light on the substance of our days until we find ourselves experiencing a heightened emotional impact, its elusive beauty. It almost seems as if words––even those that sometimes come to us unexpectedly, in an intuitive leap––cannot help but prompt small or great awakenings (such as my casual phrase we find ourselves for example which, I am reminded now, is at the heart of our attraction to those gifts poets and prose writers lavish upon us.)

Teresa is one of those fine craftswomen and determined explorers I return to often in order to jumpstart my own sluggish consciousness. It’s why I took pleasure in seeing the first copies of AT RISK, Teresa’s fourth collection of poetry, finally arriving this month on bookshelves. Published by Ashland Poetry Press, the book was awarded the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Award, judged by Mark Doty. Reviewers are already heaping praise on this work which furthers an already-distinguished career. Right from her first collection, Guests––honored by The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award–– the clarity and fierce honesty of her voice was evident. Many honors soon followed including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. I think it’s admirable, as well, that she’s spent many years working to inspire younger writers to develop their own poetic voices, teaching in programs at MIT, UMass-Boston, the Emerson College Graduate Writing Program and, for a decade, the low-residency MFA Program at Lesley University.



Meditating on this wingéd presence, Teresa finds herself unpacking the rich baggage words bring with them. After all, meanings accumulate, evolve over time––and thus language bears the impression of those who came earlier (sometimes centuries before our arrival,) and whose utterance takes on a new life within our own. If we make ourselves open to it, we may intuit those distant lives in the very derivation––the family lineage, so to speak––evident on the page or echoing on the tongue. Think, for a moment, of the range of connotations contained in that delirium Teresa imagines her cupid feeling; did you imagine the doorways to the heart swinging open or the gates of Bedlam? Because of the present context of our fraught election season, rapacious couldn’t help but bring to mind any number of recent headlines. And I hope that we have not grown so inured to Covid that the word ventilator doesn’t conjure flashes from those desperate early days of the pandemic when hospitals were hard-pressed to keep patients alive (even as, today, I try to force my mind imagine the breath of the gods conveying some sort of protection upon us all.) This poem seems to bring a quiet dissonance between its playful approach and its more ominous overtones. As I am finishing my revision of this Letter, the Presidential election is underway, and our nation’s voice will become manifest. I am hopeful but anxious (another two-faced Janus of a word that carries a range of meanings.) By the time this Red Letter reaches you, perhaps you’ll be perusing your own copy of The Times, and a new path for our country will have made itself clear. I pray the better angels of our nature (to borrow a phrase heavy-laden with history) will have prevailed.

 

 

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 Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

Cant Republic by Chad Parenteau

Review by Lo Galluccio

Just a few days before this very contentious Presidential election, I sat down with Chad Parenteau’s latest offering: a chapbook called, Cant Republic, whose cover features a photo of Donald Trump in a face mask with the word, “Placebo” scrawled on it. My first question was is “cant” a real word and it is. The definition is “hypocritical and sanctimonious talk, typically of a moral, religious or political nature.” Of course, there is also the play on the word “can’t” as if this republic, resting on Trump’s words alone, is an impossible one to sustain. And cant rhymes nicely with rant. But “cant” is the perfect word choice for this author’s take on the former President’s way of expressing himself as a so-called leader.



This is a book of erasure and blackout poems, where the author has taken out words, and repeated words and phrases, to show us the sort of underlying spell Trump is casting. My favorite erasure work is one by Phoebe Reeves of the Malleus Maleficarum, or The Hammer of Witches, which was released in 1486, a treatise on witchcraft by a German Catholic clergyman.

It was employed to persecute mainly if not exclusively women, of the sorcery of witchcraft. Its language is quite elevated and sometimes brutal in its call for the torture and extinction of witches. It was considered the standard handbook on witches until well into the 18th century.

One technique Reeves uses is to change the word “heresy” to “her “in her redaction in order to uncover the woman these poems speak about. I haven’t read the entirely of The Flame of her Will but admire the brilliant and beautiful way Reeves has altered this text into something like its opposite. For example:



“God, groping blindly, does not always give the world life. God is subject to a woman.”



Parenteau’s project is slightly different. It’s a timely exercise in stripping down Trump’s speeches into the marrow of their meaning, and as the back cover testifies to “a gutting of Democracy and civil rights, a boosting of ego and bravado, a moral and ethical decay that takes us all down with it.” Mark Lipman



Indeed, many Americans are aware of the pseudo-fascist nature of Trump’s charisma. There are still his robust followers who believe him to be a good leader and even great speaker. Perhaps never in the history of the U.S. has there been such a polarizing Presidential figure, a man who was impeached in office, but who unlike Richard Nixon, declined to resign; who has been convicted of 34 felony counts and who also refused to concede the 2020 election, even when there was ample evidence to prove it was free and fair.



In his introduction, Parenteau explains:



“The poems based on transcripts were less erasure or blackout poems and more highlight poems. As the pandemic went on, I spent my days going through pages and pages of his words with a

highlighter (orange of course) capturing what I judged to be his rampant ID and rotted ego (which has become one single monstrous voice…)



Clearly, despite his brazen lies and ridiculous non-sequiturs, Trump has managed to create a devoted following and one has to wonder what Americans really pay attention to, if not the words themselves? Some argue that Trump is loved for being an outsider, an anomaly and that his dumbed down rhetoric appeals to those turned off by the liberal Democratic Party elites. Be that as it may, Parenteau has chosen to wield a poet’s tool against the “brazen nonsense” that Trump imparts.



In the first piece, “Cant Republic,” he captures these words:



“It was

victory

we’re now

Trump territory

voters

overturned.”

P 8



and



“fraud

American public

this

country

this election

win this

win

to ensure

the

nation

this

‘ very big

nation

we want the law

to stop

in the morning…”

p 10



In the longest piece “Rough Beast Born,” a title taken from the Yeats’ poem, we see the colliding opposites in Trump’s speech, the endless repeating of words and phrases like “thank you” and “quarantine” and “ we’re setting records” and “terrible (people)” and “to beat” and “incredible.” He is a master of repeating simple phrases made to ingratiate himself, to subdue, to dramatize

during a public health crisis where millions of lives were at stake and when the US lost more lives than any industrialized nation with Trump at the helm.



“for decades

African Americans

children

African Americans

we are reversing

your

countries

ended

I am

the globe

I am

American.”

P 28



and



“a thing called murder

we won

did you see that

we won

p 30



And on the subject of healthcare Chad has uncoded these riffs:



“we killed

we’re trying to kill

you’ll have

preexisting conditions

preexisting conditions

doubled

think of that.”

P 33



and



“…you’re terminally ill

go home and

die

terminally ill

go to Asia

go to Europe

sign paper

get results

unbelievable

unbelievable”

p 33



It is perhaps the most powerful section in this book: the clear bullshit that Trump as President spewed about public health and the epidemic, how unwilling he was to engage in facts, to empathize or truly boost morale through positive action without his political ego being at stake. That familiar refrain, “unbelievable, unbelievable” that he ends so many of his crazy assertions with.



“we are

epidemic

deaths

disease

big deal

disease

people die

so much work

die from overwork

for a long time

The word

they have to do

so much easier

such an honor

great thing

great thing”

p 34





Parenteau has in some cases, bolded words to underscore their significance:



“til the end

I don’t get enough

I need

more….”

P 36



The Don uses words like “swamp, “invokes the expression “dirty people,” and “incredible stories,” always to somehow both denigrate and glorify the people who he’s trying to win over. In this poem, Parenteau highlights his subconscious fears and desires. Trumps tries to honor Americans who work but comes back to his administration’s greatness. How many times have we heard him say, “It’s gonna be great?” So vague, casual and pompous all at once.



The chapbook concludes with four shorter poems that encapsulate an episode of the Trump Presidency. In “At Home” the author transcribes:



“I know

pain

I know

hurt

we had

us

a landslide

everyone knows…

law and order

we

hurt

very tough…

This was

play

people

you’re

what happens

you

are

so bad

so evil

I know

You feel

peace

p 47



Again, Trump’s catch phrases of winning by a landslide, of law and order, of it being “very tough” for him, always to win sympathy and then the extreme demonizing “so bad/so evil” and the placating of “I know/you feel/peace.” This is the dance Trump does over and over -- the lying bravado and the simple attempt to identify with his people, draw them in with a statement as simple as “it’s tough” and then the reassuring statement at the end. In this version we see that Trump could as easily be calling his own followers, “so bad, so evil,” when of course he was alluding to his detractors in real time.



This poem was taken from a transcript of Trump’s January 6th words to Capitol rioters telling them to go home. And this was the event that for many Americans, marked the lowest point of his Presidency, an insurrection on the Capitol, an attempt to block, through violence, the certification of the people’s vote.



This is an ingenious collection that serves as a kind of testimonial to Trump’s deceptive and deceiving rhetoric, especially evident during the Pandemic.