Red Letter Poem #273

 

 

 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 #273

 

 

 

 

Clouds

The rope whips against

the flag pole. I miss hearing

him say we, yet I wasn’t

the one. Yes, he was thinking



about someone else and

I look to the sky. Painters

need to know the sky—always

a witness. And birds too,



realists, yet we often don’t

pay them any attention.

Did you hear me? I was

in love for five minutes.



And then the pond

stretched out inside my chest.


––Kevin McLellan

                                   

 

 

 

Orbis non sufficit. Long before the translation of this Latin motto became the title of a James Bond movie, it was said to be part of the epitaph of Alexander the Great: “A tomb now suffices for him for whom the world was not enough.” In the historical reference, that phrase speaks to humanity’s insatiable craving for existence, vitality, and all its diverse embodiments––even though we can never escape the knowledge that all experience is resolutely ephemeral. Still, those words came to mind when I was reading Kevin McLellan’s newest collection: Sky. Pond. Mouth.–– selected by Alexandria Peary for the 2024 Granite State Poetry Contest (YAS Press). The speaker that drifts through these poems is alternately anchored in the pains and desires of the flesh––and then suddenly untethered: a thought-mist, capable of passing through the membrane of the material world, suffusing flower, water, cloud, or whatever this child going forth discovers in his day. Might the self be capable of dissolving so easily––abandoning the subject/object distinction, and experiencing what Walt Whitman imagined as a kind of soul-refuge? Could our burden of longing and grief be soothed by even such a momentary escape? Providing a beautiful complexity to his poems, Kevin treats thought itself and the grammar that governs the page with that same spirit of abandon. Once he senses where he needs to go, the poem-as-vehicle invents the very highway beneath its wheels.



Experimental poet and filmmaker, Kevin has authored a half-dozen books and ‘book-objects,’ and appeared in scores of anthologies and journals. In addition to the prize that prompted the publication of this collection, his work has received honors from the Hilary Tham Capital Collection and the Massachusetts Book Awards. His videos have been screened in numerous film expos including: the Berlin Short Film Festival; Flickers’ Rhode Island Film Festival; and the LGBTQ+ Los Angeles Film Festival in which "Dick" won Best Short Form Short. And, in fact, there are many sections of Sky. Pond. Mouth. that almost have the feel of video montage––where the eye’s camera pivots, jump-cuts, and quickly refocuses, leaving our minds racing to match the velocity of the language.



Some of the most impressive pieces in this collection are also the most experimental and challenging––but they tend to be rather long, an impossible fit for my Red Letter format. Still, the book contains compelling short lyrics as well, like today’s “Cloud,” a kind of free-form sonnet which, early on in the book, sets the tone and announces the possibility of heartbreak. “I miss hearing/ him say we, yet I wasn’t/ the one.” Who’d have expected simple pronouns could be so devastating? “Yes, he was thinking// about someone else and/ I look to the sky.” Shifting gears, fractured syntax, sudden changes in direction––throughout the poems, we are given the feeling that older literary expectation only holds us back. There are references honoring many of Kevin’s prominent queer literary forebears––James Schuyler, Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery––but I kept having the feeling that these poems were a kind of 21st century dialogue with the father of almost all contemporary poetry, Whitman himself. The language Kevin brings to bear is both sensuous and calamitous. And after all, loss, illness, and despair can’t help but make us keenly feel our own vulnerabilities. Still, poetry from artists like these inspires a sense of liberation: to embrace this whole ecosystem of nouns; to let every unbridled verb carry us back into the world. “Loafe with me on the grass—loose the stop from/your throat” urges the Good Gray Poet. Or (borrowing words from another of Kevin’s poems) simply welcome a new openness: “…because I am also/ in the lap of a meadow//with my mouth wide open.” Indeed, the world––or the inveterate self––may not be enough for some of us; but, fortunately, we contain multitudes.

  

 

 

 

 

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

 

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