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!

A Conversation with poet Jean Flanagan about the anthology "The Silver Note: Poets of Arlington, Massachussets"

 

Recently, the Ibbetson Street Press of  Somerville, MA. published an anthology of Arlington Poets, titled " The Silver Notes: Poets of Arlington, Mass." I spoke with one of the editors of this book, Jean Flanagan. Flanagan is the poet laureate of Arlington MA, and is an accomplished poet and publisher.

Do you think Arlington has been overlooked as a historic city, and a city of poets? If so, do you think this anthology in some way addresses that?

Arlington is equally as important as Concord and Lexington to the American Revolution. The Battle of Menotomy was fought on what is now Massachusetts Avenue, the main street, in Arlington. The British were retreating to Boston and Patriot soldiers were converging along the road from neighboring towns. It was a running battle, where guerilla-like warfare behind trees, rock walls and houses, by the Colonials, and multiple flanking movements by the British, led to the high casualties in the day of battle.

At the historic Jason Russell House, near the center of Arlington, 11 Colonials and 2 British soldiers were killed, one of the bloodiest encounters of the day of fighting.

The Arlington 250 will highlight Arlington as both an historic town, as well as a wonderful place to live, work and write poetry. The anthology addresses Arlington as a city of poets. The poets here have written poems about Spy Pond, the Reservoir, Menotomy Park, the Meadows, the Bike Path, Jason Russell House and other sites in town. The cover of the anthology is a photo of the Flagstaff, a sculpture by Cyrus Dallin.

The anthology was edited by the poets Andy Oram. Philip Lewis and Steven Rapp. How was this collaboration? What were the criteria for poems to be published in this anthology?

Led by Andy Oram, we worked well as a collaborative team. Each of us were assigned a group of poems and worked with the authors to prepare them for publication. Andy particularly focused on some of the historical selections. We also incorporated photos from some of the authors into the anthology. We worked closely with Steve Glines at Ibbetson Press, who kept us informed and cognizant about meeting deadlines.

As a group, we decided to take at least one poem from every poet. Poets could submit up to three poems. We felt strongly that we wanted to be inclusive and to encourage town poets, no matter the level, to express themselves and to participate in a completed published product. I didn’t want to say to anyone you are not a poet. My job as poet laureate is to engage an interest in poetry throughout the town which includes reading, writing, studying with other poets, and a ton of hard work.

Spy Pond, among other locations, is a source of inspiration for some of the poems. What do you think this body of water evokes in poets. There seems to be something seminal about it.

Spy Pond was formed more than 10,000 - 15,000 years ago when the Wisconsin Glaciers retreated and melted in New England. In 1960, a tusk of a 43,000 Wooly Mastodon was fished out of the pond. It is an ancient place that precedes any human habitation. In the 19th century, ice from Spy Pond was shipped around the world from its waters. Spy Pond still invokes many emotions whether it be the peace you feel walking around the pond, paddling a canoe or watching the fireworks on Town Day. The opportunity to write about nature, the birds that sweep in, the swans and ducks and the places like Spy Pond is fodder for a poem. It also helps citizens get in touch with rhythms that transcend its suburban present back to of ancient days.

Hemingway once wrote that the suburbs are a ' land of broad lawns and narrow minds.' But it seems here that the minds here are broad. Do you think there is a prejudice against suburban poets? The suburbs are sometimes viewed as a limbo, between vibrant cities, and rural areas-- but one can write poetry anyplace.

A poet can write a poem anywhere about anything. The suburbs are full of people with open minds who might work in the city all week and want the peace of walking the bike path or the Reservoir on a warm sunny weekend. Arlington is just as vibrant as a big city. There are gardens, fine eclectic restaurants, lively pubs and taverns and busy coffee shops. You can walk to many places and the MBTA buses run from Harvard Square to the Lexington Line. There’s a stunning library and beautiful stone churches. Most of all, Arlington is a community made up of wonderful people (and families) from all over the world. Poets who come to Arlington also bring with them their own dreams histories, memories and journeys. All of these are deep depositories for new poems.

I noticed that Steve Ratiner, the president of the New England Poetry Club had a poem in this collection. From a quick view I can see a number of NEPC people in this collection. Do you have close ties with the club?

I have been a member of the New England Poetry Club for close to 50 years. I have known several of the past presidents. Mary Buchinger Bodwell and Hilary Sallick were the first readers at our New Book and Open Mic series that takes place the 3rd Tuesday of the month at the Robbins Library. Helping Steven Rapp organize the series is part of my duties at Poet Laureate.

I met Steven Ratiner at a reading at the Open Studios of the Arlington Center for the Arts 35 plus years ago. Steven and I now organize the Red Letter Live readings that evolved from many years of readings we organized to celebrate Arlington Center for the Arts Open Studios.

The press that published this collection, the Ibbetson Street Press (that I founded with Dianne Robitaille and Richard Wilhelm) shares the same name as an early book of yours. What is it about this non-descript street in Somerville that inspired you? I lived on Ibbetson Street, and I found the name had a sense of music and poetry to it.

My deceased husband was from Somerville. His parents were immigrants from Ireland. My mother-in-law’s family used to visit their friends and family at a home on Ibbetson Street. I became close friends with one of my husband’s cousins who related the stories that were told in the house on Ibbetson Street to me. The stories touched my soul and sparked my imagination. Ibbetson Street is a special place for me.

Kathleen Scott Molds a Statue of Her Husband Robert

Diary entry by Kathleen Scott on Feb. 18, 1912, “I was very taken up with you all evening. I wonder if anything special is happening to you. Something odd happened to the clocks and watches between 9 and 10 p.m.”



I started a sculpture of you.

Clay hard and dark, thick as ice

I pounded, molded and pinched

Until your face began to appear

Gray as a snowy sky.



I felt a devastating cold.

The night our clocks stopped.

I worked to give you

Strong thighs to keep you

On your feet

Doubled your clothing

Closed your hand

Around a compass.



Cast in bronze your statue stands

For you

Who did not make it home.

-- Jean Flanagan



****Previously Published in The Power of the Feminine I – Poems from the feminine perspective Volume l - 2024

 

By the Sea at Eyeries

Beyond the sea wall

all that remains of the fishermen

lost at sea

are remnants of their nets

blue, green, and red

and one orange plastic glove.



That morning as the sky started to darken

and the wind smacked against my windows

I searched for Jim’s boat entering the bay.

When the clouds finally began to clear away

I cried with the others

by the water’s edge

and pressed purple crystal rosaries

between my fingers and thumb

until they broke

and fell

one by one

into the rocky crags.

---Jean Flanagan

****Published in Muddy River Review = 2011

Plastic by Scott Guild.

 

Plastic by Scott Guild. Vintage Books, Penguin Random House, New York, 2024.

Review by Ed Meek

--Life is plastic. It’s fantastic. (Barbie Girl)

The multi-talented Scott Guild has created both a novel and an accompanying musical version of the novel. The novel focuses on live plastic figurines existing sometime in the not-to-distant future after nuclear war. Guild is very inventive. He is adept at world-building and he presents us with a bizarro version of our current era of hyper-advertising, plastic everywhere and terrorist attacks. Yet, where we are talking about ways to try to diminish the role of plastic, in Guild’s novel, the people are plastic. The main character, Erin, works at Tablet Town where she makes Smartbodies that enable the figurines to enter virtual worlds. Erin and the other figurines in the novel even have their own clipped, robotic language they use to converse.

The novel is told as if Erin is watching a movie: “The next scene opens on a slender kitchen.” As the novel begins, we learn that Erin’s boyfriend, Patrick, was murdered and that she is having a hard time dealing with it. The plastic figurines are routinely attacked by terrorists. Partly to escape her problems, Erin watches a show called The Nuclear Family, about a dysfunctional family that is blended with humans and waffles, parents who are always arguing and a son who is dealing with his feelings of homosexuality. The show has a laugh track which adds to its satirical tone.

Guild has an MFA from U of Texas at Austin and a PhD in English from U of Nebraska Lincoln. He worked on the novel and album over the course of ten years. The album has a new age sound to it and there is a music video. It can be found on Spotify. The combination of music and a compelling story seems like a natural fit for either an anime movie or a cartoon series. The novel is kind of a cross between “Klara and the Sun,” the great novel by Ishiguro and Barbie, the movie. Like Barbie, the novel is insistent on making points. In Barbie’s case about the patriarchy, in Plastic about our current problems with terrorism and the break-down of the family, and the way our language is devolving through texting. Here is an exchange between Erin and Jacob, a character she befriends: “You worry she listen at door?” “She prob not. But it small apartment. No want hurt her feeling.” After a while, this language becomes stilted and annoying like the way native Americans talk in old Westerns.

It is also difficult to read an entire novel written in the present tense. In addition, song lyrics are sprinkled through the book. When we read song lyrics in a novel, we can either read them as poetry or fill in our own music. She (Erin) sings into the void: “The day I bought a VR suit/to lose myself in dreams, /To flee the sorrows of my youth/Behind a Smarthead screen.” Maybe this is a good song, but as stand-alone lyrics, it is something one just skims over.

John Gardiner, the novelist, talks about creating a fictional dream. When a novel is effective, the reader gets lost in the dream. Formatting a novel as if it is a movie and then having the main character watch a tv show that functions as a satire, commenting on our world and hers, using stilted dialogue, puts the reader’s focus on the artifice. Like Barbie, the novel is a great concept. It is very clever, but unlike, Klara and the Sun, we are never really drawn into the world of the characters. Characters who are plastic but somehow still have to eat food. Plastic characters who die. Does this make sense? These would not be issues in anime or cartoons and that I think would be the best format for Plastic.

Red Letter Poem #243

 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 #243

 

 

 

 

 

Cellar Bat

The hider’s shadow suddenly unfolds

strange fingers—and the world sets out to fly.

The world stops, opening a cellar door

to watch the 8 it weaves between two lights,

the ceiling low, and narrow-most the walls

in the dim corridor of this surprise

encounter between differently-gifted mammals,

its super-sighted blindness, our stunned eyes


offset and at a standstill as we block

the famed lost soul’s way to its light, the dark

of night behind us… Was the bat as frantic

as our heart’s panic? In bewilderment

it wasn’t shooed from its pattern. We stepped back

and out it came, fluttering meaning as it went.

 

 

––Michael T. Steffen

 

 

 

Here it comes––watch out!  Swooping up from the dark recesses: this unexpected, unnerving presence.  Some might even think it a beautiful terror––depending on how they were first introduced to this species and its fastidious behavior.  No, not just the bat, which the poet Michael T. Steffen confronts in his basement; I’m referring to that other venerable creature––once thought endangered, but which has seen a surprising resurgence in recent times: the sonnet.  I’m willing to bet that, at this very moment, many of you are darting back up to the poem, quickly counting: oh yeah, I hadn’t noticed––fourteen lines, check, split after the octave, (according to the Petrarchan format, rather than the Shakespearean style many more of us had drummed into our fertile minds during high school.)  Yes, a sonnet indeed.  But of course Michael, like many contemporary poets who have returned to the form, hasn’t bothered himself with obeying the dictates of rhyme scheme.  Or has he?  Looking back, I can hear it now: the long-i assonance (fly…lights…surprise…eyes) chiming in the opening stanza, followed by those cutting k-sounds that stitch together the second with off-rhyme and consonance.  And so we can see how the traditional spirit of this ‘little song’ (the meaning of the word the Italians coined for this poetic form) has actually found a lyrical and agile incarnation in this poet’s hands. His is a verse that feels both colloquial and just a bit unearthly––and isn’t that a perfect equivalence for the moment being described?   Sudden surprise prompts our oldest fears to erupt while, at the very same time, the natural world seizes us with its beauty, elevates the heart rate, reminds us (as all good poems must) that we are alive in the moment.

 

And what of this moment?  When the hider unfolds those “strange fingers,” a part of our mind, too, takes flight, turning figure-8’s amid what had been, only seconds earlier, ‘ordinary’.  When Michael refers to his pair of protagonists as “differently-gifted mammals,” suddenly we’re compelled to temper our fear of the ‘other,’ the unknown, and recognize our commonality: the imperative to escape danger and fly toward freedom’s open expanse.  But we slowly become aware of the shifting focus; after all, this is a human mind at work, nature’s great meaning-making machine.  And so, in the final sestet, the poet is already busy devising ways to reconsider what is happening around him, to recast its details so they might reveal something emblematic in what’s taken place.  “We stepped back and out it came, fluttering meaning as it went.”  To my mind, this poem is a fine extended metaphor for the very moment when inspiration takes hold, yanks us from the mundane into something more resonant.  Perhaps, like the bat, a part of our mind uses echolocation to sense where we are in the darkness, and where we (and the poem) need to travel.

 

Michael was the Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award; his work has appeared in a variety of publications including The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, and The Concord Saunterer.  His second collection, On Earth As It Is, was published in 2022 by Cervena Barva Press and demonstrates the mind of a humanist wrestling with the inner and outer realities of life in these United States.  “Cellar Bat” is taken from Storage, a manuscript-in-progress consisting of 64 sonnets, exploring and innovating various aspects of the form.  Michael has an interest in the performance of poetry as well as its impact on the page, and so he’s been staging choral readings of important long-form poems from the modern canon, including Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” and Donald Hall’s “The One Day.”  But, in his own work, I think the shorter lyric is still the place where his talents shine.  His singing weaves in and out between beauty, suffering, memory, creation––so perhaps this humble Chiroptera is something of a spirit-animal for the poet.  Michael registers the invisible echoes bouncing off the world so that his poem can whirl and veer, describing patterns in the darkness a reader’s mind might follow.

 

 

 

 

 

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!