Thursday, February 05, 2026
A Handpicked Poem article by Michael Todd Steffen
A Handpicked Poem
article by Michael Todd Steffen
From Plume, November 2024, issue 159 (note the author’s finish date for the poem, September 2024)
F O R T H E D E A D U N I O N
by Christopher Bakken
a savage servility slides by on grease
After summer rain, the old-growth forest
behind Greendale Cemetery fills
with eerie promise—boletes, milk-caps,
and terraces of pink-white oysters,
while the veterans of remembered wars
doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss
and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.
Even this far west, five hundred miles
from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution
have graves to tend, as do the offspring
of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.
Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.
Paying no heed to local history,
remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush
the layered shale embankments, cut ravines
so steep old gravestones sometimes slide
from their tidy, metered plots to murmur
obituary greetings from below.
I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt
while out foraging, sounding out the names.
If the rains are right, by mid-July
the first chanterelles tunnel up through leaves,
timid as small flames for a day, before
rising bold as Corinthian columns
into the mist—fluted, comically orange,
and not reeking of funeral soil
but scented improbably apricot
—hints of death’s most subtle literacy.
~
Atop the city’s other distinguished hill
the college buildings shrug, clutch their ivy.
The old observatory, named for Captain Newton,
who fought with the Union of Corinth,
is really just another church—its design
cruciform, compassed north, domed with green copper,
its Doric narthex cheerful as a crypt.
The students only stroll downhill for booze,
wary of the red-capped, red-faced whites
who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks
and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,
the same men who join militias in the woods
across French Creek, where young George Washington
once paddled his canoe. On Braveheart Radio
the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo,
their sniggers ringing in the city’s ears.
Some years back, I read a student essay
that not once, but twice referred to Lowell’s
“For the Dead Union” by mistake, a bit
too apt, only months after Charlottesville.
My children practice active-shooter drills
at school, though I fear almost as much in-
active shooters, my well-armed small-town
neighbors, who see mostly through the dark glass
of their rage. Tonight, carting groceries to my car,
I had to dodge a pickup flying an upside
down American flag. On bumper rust:
BELIEVE IN GOD NOT GOV SCIENCE.
~
Our city boomed in the cross-hairs
of an infant nation—a half-way stop
on the New York to Chicago rail,
and a stop, too, for those running north
underground: at his busy safe-house
near the corner of Liberty and Arch,
the freedman Richard Henderson
sheltered hundreds, working the secret line
a local firebrand had established
out of his tannery in New Richmond
—young John Brown, who buried his first wife
and two children on a hill behind his barn.
Downtown, at Diamond Park, the cast-iron fish
of the faux-Bernini fountain gasp,
since their water was turned off years ago.
The new, most savage servility here
bends low to the con, believing nothing
but what’s been fetched from the extremes
of explanation: the virus a hoax,
and micro-chips, and deep state cabals,
with a million orange ballots hid somewhere
in a blue car with Arizona plates.
The local Klan are now just Oath Keepers,
dismissing any mention of a coup.
In my Night Owl hockey league, machinists,
plumbers, and professors hit the ice, work
off their beer. On the trophy, last season’s
champs christened their team The White Nationalists.
~
A thousand small-town Midwestern greens
are now deserted as dead factories,
guarded by bronze, musket-clutching soldiers
who can’t recall which fields, of which republic,
are engraved on the plaques at their feet,
nor how many Lenape or Shawnee
were scythed to speed the frantic engines
of America pastoral. In the woods
we return to reason and faith…
until faith bends reason towards disbelief
in the great frontier towns, whose fates are geared
to the greater green lights of commerce.
Like Talon, now gone for thirty years,
where generations had fed their fortunes
making zippers—patented here in 1914.
The city nearly died when the plant moved east.
I have tried to remain one of the roughs
all my life, but maybe we’ve had enough
of roughness now. As I marched across campus
at dusk, I scared an owl from its hollow
in a split oak by the observatory.
I thought of the telescope inside,
good for looking far away from here,
and the quiet power of such refraction,
those quick bends in the direction of light.
At the base of the owl’s rotting tree,
a clump of Jack-o’ lantern mushrooms
were casting spores, just beginning to glow.
September 19, 2024
The stateliness of Bakken’s poem is unmistakable. From the outset, foraging for mushrooms in a graveyard, the poet chimes in with a deep vein going back through the American Civil War and our father poet Walt Whitman to a long English tradition of the elegy. The home pulsing reference to Thomas Gray’s canonical “Elegy” surfaces with the poet’s allusion in the last stanza to “the owl’s rotting tree” and its natural woodsy echo of Bakken’s earlier huckster-like proffer of the classic symbol for Death and Athena with the Night Owl hockey league. There are in fact many 20th-century and early 21st-century poets who’ve struck Mediterranean epic poses at major poems in English (or American English, Irish English, or Trinidadian English for that matter), but none of them comes with more observance (and convincingness) about the language’s sensibility for brevity, commonness, local particulars and quiet oblique lineage than does this “Ode” with its deceptive yet alluring nod to Robert Lowell. Bakken strikes a masterly voice for our ear and its preference for soft smiles in the darkest hour, and the softly spoken—
death’s most subtle literacy (first section)
As a centerpiece poem to its culture, in the widest sense, in its day of brassy fanfare for outspoken political divisiveness, the poem keenly identifies the “extreme” elements (of either political division, of both parties) at the throats of American life since the controversial 2000 election denouement, and simmering long long before that. Deftly, Bakken has chosen modesty over profusion, keeping his poem to 112 lines, in Lowellesque un-rhyming stanzas, seven to a section, in unnumbered sections. (Around 100 lines were in Eliot’s thinking for “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” from Poe’s ideal for a one-sitting read.) The gaudy rhododendrons mentioned in the seventh line of the poem may just be the poet’s poke at his ambitious wayward confreres.
There Bakken leaves shop talk, enhancing both just the playfulness of his comment, in passing, and also the poignancy of a brush—brevity the soul of wit—about the on-and-on grinding of grand gestures, not by any means confined to poetry, but to the paramount muses in all public arenas these days generally.
In the days before personal computers and word processors with autocorrect, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida discovered one of his seminal concepts, Différance (with an a), while correcting student papers and noticing what he liked to call a recurrent neographism. Similarly, Bakken cites a student paper’s error with the title of Lowell’s memorable poem as the meditation is situated significantly in Meadville, Pennsylvania, home of Allegheny University where the poet teaches; home also of the once widely providing Talon zipper factory (“now gone for thirty years”).
Bakken’s epigram is a direct quote of the two lines concluding the Lowell poem “For the Union Dead,” bearing the exact same title only with the inversion of “Union” and “Dead.” And, yes, for me, that’s a significant enough inversion to constitute an original title—even timely in itself for the mocking or echoing strain in today’s culture with its allowance for reproductive creativity and a nearly imperceptible fine line between assimilating and plagiarism, with promised award for merely systematic reproduction, as with AI or pop medley dance tunes.
Admiring the courage of Shaw and his men, the speaker in Lowell’s poem is driven to reflect that their spirit of heroic self-sacrifice is in short supply in a modern United States riven by segregation, commercialism, and insincerity. Old timey North and South in our times has re-shifted to the opposition of political parties, or, more exactly, to the extreme elements of each party, the radicals. In the poem the polarity is arranged in opposition most prominently in the second section of the poem. The liberals are scantily and passingly represented in the students of Allegheny College who “only stroll downhill (from the campus) for booze.” They appear in the poem to give the poet his title, but also show up here in the poem mostly as a way into to the caricature as looming victims of the radical right,
the red-capped, red-faced whites
who fly the Dixie flag from their new trucks
and shop at Giant Eagle packing heat,
the same men who join militias in the woods
across French Creek… On Braveheart Radio
the new patriots whine and stockpile ammo…
Vis-à-vis Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: the concept of lacrimae rerum, or lament of the human condition.
Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r
The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such, as wand’ring near her secret bow’r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould’ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell forever laid,
The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.
Compare to Bakken:
while the veterans of remembered wars
doze on beneath deep mattresses of moss
and gaudy rhododendrons wide as mansions.
Even this far west, five hundred miles
from Bunker Hill, Daughters of the Revolution
have graves to tend, as do the offspring
of those who fell at Shiloh and Khe Sahn.
Fresher mud roofs the new pandemic dead.
Paying no heed to local history,
remote or absurdly new, quick streams gush
the layered shale embankments, cut ravines
so steep old gravestones sometimes slide
from their tidy, metered plots to murmur
obituary greetings from below.
I’ve sometimes brushed their faces clear of dirt
while out foraging, sounding out the names.
Sunday, February 01, 2026
Poet/ Bartender Christopher Reilley has made many 'pour' decisions
Did you work as bartender for any length? of time?
Over thirty years off and on as an adult, but I also grew up in a dive bar on Grand Street in Worcester. I’ve worked in just about every bartending experience imaginable, from corporate to backyard barbeques, hotel and restaurants of every size and description. I was also Back of the House working in kitchens. I’ve supplemented my income in the Hospitality industry pretty much all of my life.
I always found bars as a great source of material to write about. They can be sort of dark cathedrals that house the 3AM of the soul. Your take?
Humans are social creatures, we gather and collect, share mutual pastimes, engage in group recreation. Bars, taverns, and pubs are where we go to “belong.” This is addressed a couple of times in the book, “Where We Gather,” and “At the Corner of Local and Familiar." Bars are a civic and social requirement, in one form or another.
You write in one poem of a "great conspiracy" among denizens of a bar. They are sort of diplomats with treatises, secret agendas, etc.. Explain
It is kind of a dive bar thing, where you have regulars. Really regular, almost daily. Folks with a long shared history have remembered slights, alliances of convenience, mutually agreed upon “no-fly” zones. You might be expected to move over one seat because Charlie is coming in, and he always sits there. Or never play that song on the juke because it makes Barney crazy sad. Or don’t mess with Darlene if she comes in with her hair up.
Large or small, shared history binds folks together, makes them feel part of the fabric of their place. Every bar worthy of the name has its own lore, stories, and even legends.
In the poem "In the Glass Between" you put a microscope into the process of a man getting drunk, and his Jekyll and Hyde personality. In the end, the booze turns into a monster that consumes him. But at first it is described turning up, "the dimmer switch of the soul." Too bad he couldn't stop at the first drink. Your take....
Well, like I say in the Notes for that poem, it is the bartender's job to not let that happen, but the only way to be good at not letting it happen is to have it happen to you a couple times. Hey, people forget to eat, or are super stressed, or whatever, it can get away from you. But I would instead refer you to the poem “The Sweet Pull.” Sometimes it really is an addiction.
I always felt the bar scene in the " Shining" was probably the greatest one in modern cinema. Of course there is Billy Joel's " Piano Man." Bukowski wrote a lot of drinking and bar poems. Did these guys inspire you?
Well, Bukowsky is the reason I got into poetry in the first place. Growing up, I had a blue collar guy’s understanding of poetry. But then I found Bukowski, and I realized the poem doesn't have to be just one type of thing, it could be whatever the writer wanted. Changed my perception of poetry altogether.
But the great thing about bars is the variety. Both of those you mentioned, as well as Cheers, or Archie’s Place, or brass and fern yuppie bars, or Chinese restaurants, etc.
Two of my favorite bars are gone, the " Wursthaus" in Harvard Square, and " Jake Wirth's" in Boston. What bars did you haunt, and did they work their way into the collection?
I’m not really a big drinker. I prefer the craft of mixology. I worked at so many different bars, I was not a frequent visitor. Most of these poems I actually wrote standing behind the bar. I spent hours in that environment, and I was usually leaving with a pocket full of cash, so I learned long ago I was better off getting in my car and going home.
That being said, I was a huge fan of the long-gone Gilrein’s, a blues bar on Main Street, and I'm still a big fan of the still ever-eclectic Ralph’s Chadwick Square Diner, which is stuck on the side of a warehouse converted to a terrific music venue, and they have great burgers, as well as a weekly poetry open mic.
Did you ever have a drinking problem?
Thankfully, no. My old man did, and he was nothing if not a great example of a bad example.
Why should we read this book?
Pour Decisions is a book about work — the kind that happens late, quietly, and in public — written by someone who actually did the job. It doesn’t romanticize bar life or turn it into spectacle. It listens. These poems treat bars as civic spaces and bartenders as witnesses to contemporary American life. If you care about labor, voice, or how people really talk when the night gets thin, this book belongs on your shelf.
WHERE WE GATHER
We meet in the middle,
between the jukebox and the door,
between the clink of glasses and the spill of laughter.
This is where stories loosen their collars,
where strangers lean closer,
where love wears no crown, but sits,
cross-legged, at a sticky table.
Taverns are cathedrals without pews—
here we pray into stained glasses of another kind,
confess in slurred whispers,
forgive with a touch on the shoulder.
Here, you can break and no one will sweep you away.
Here, you can build again
with borrowed hope and the last of your change.
In these walls,
we are not titles, not troubles, not ticking clocks—
we are the shared breath of a song half-remembered,
the arm around your back when you didn’t ask.
Love in a bar is not always forever,
but it is real in the moment—
and sometimes,
a moment is what saves us.
Friday, January 30, 2026
Red Letter Poem #286
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 #286
The ER
for Steve and Patsy
It was COVID-time, so the phone was all I had.
“Gotta go,” I’d tell Patsy or Steve
each time someone pushed past the pale green sheet
delimiting my cubicle.
I must have been helped or surveilled or tested or moved or advised
by two dozen people while I was there.
Most did their best with their mini-moment in my life
one aide’s arm even had “SIBI”
tattooed in blue
which is Latin for ‘to or for them’, i.e., others;
what a motto for a medic!
But as a whole the great space jammed
with computers and desks and beds and equipment and people
leaned down with expert indifference
and dealt with what ailed me moderately well. Now I
who used to take no pills at all (and made a thing of it)
take a tiny pink pill each night.
Remember me, the ER sighs as darkness falls.
I whisper back, I do.
Good, it says. I have forgotten you.
––Linda Bamber
All I want is to be on channel 12! It’s what I kept telling myself––a soothing mantra during a three-day hospital stay. Two decades in the rearview, but the effect on me is enduring. I’d experienced some sort of “brain event” (in the doctors’ remarkably bland parlance), and they were performing endless tests and scans on me, seeking the source of the problem. Time on a hospital ward is stressful, to say the least––but forced isolation is far from a curse for a poet. I remember busily writing and reading for hours each day––though the poems were tinged with the red of existential threat: the fear that a more encompassing stroke might mark this as my last poem, my last night.... When bored, I’d watch television on a small monitor suspended from the ceiling. Flipping through the few available stations, I came to channel 12 which was, I soon realized, the feed from a simple video camera mounted on the hospital roof and trained on tree-lined Memorial Drive and the Charles River below us. Now and then, I’d lie in bed watching the stop-and-go traffic, recalling the frustration it always produced. I’d see joggers in skimpy shorts, determinedly striding on the footpath––going over to-do lists in their minds, perhaps, or what they’d like for dinner. Beech trees. Ducks on the water. A solitary rower. The view presented the workaday, the trivial. Few, if any, of the folk who appeared briefly on that video seemed to be overjoyed with the knowledge that they were not sick, not endangered, not thinking of a last poem or a last anything. If I could be there on channel 12, back in the stream of ‘ordinary life,’ I promised myself I’d remain forever grateful.
When Linda Bamber sent me today’s poem, it felt like meeting a fellow citizen from the old country, from a select sister/brotherhood whose members carried a special mortal understanding. Of course, the situation she’s recounting in her poem was, in some respects, very different than mine: in the heart of Covid (you may or may not remember––or want to), everyone was afraid, everyone was (at least occasionally) considering the fragility of human existence, scrolling through the roster of precious moments and much-loved faces whose loss would be devastating. Many of Linda’s poems are built around modulating tone of voice, the many ways our spoken expression can color the written, and imbue it with a vibrant, and seemingly ‘un-literary’ sort of vitality. For example, when the speaker offhandedly punctuates her phone calls with “Gotta go,” we register both the breezy farewell but also the dark humor implied by that inevitable fact of life. A wealth of small telling details accrues in her poems, conveying the actuality of lived experience. Take, for example, the speaker’s sanctuary––only a curtained cubicle––but in those frantic days, when hospitals struggled to care for the flood of patients, even this was a reason for gratitude. Then there are those little litanies like “helped or surveilled or tested or moved or advised,” hinting at the profuse medical apparatus of a crowded Emergency Department. And wasn’t that ‘SIBI’ tattoo on the arm of an aide a marvelous observation (imagining the conversation it must have engendered)? It underscored the selfless nature of this hospital staff. “what a motto for a medic” indeed!
Linda is the author of a collection of poems (Metropolitan Tang) and a work of fiction (Taking What I Like)––both published by David R. Godine. She’s now retired from a successful career as an English Professor at Tufts University. Linda continues to write fiction, essays, and reviews, appearing in such places as The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Nation, and The New York Times. It would please me to think that the three new poems which have begun appearing in the Red Letters are a harbinger of a second full-length volume of poetry. I find her voice lifts my spirits in these troubled times. The quiet epiphanies that often close her poems feel real and attainable. Here, that “tiny pink pill” serves as the daily reminder of this hard-earned knowledge. “Remember me, the ER sighs as darkness falls.” And after reading Linda’s account, I suspect neither she nor I will easily allow these memories to fog over with time. “I whisper back, I do.” (certainly a seemly response). “Good, it says. I have forgotten you.” Why do we feel both a sting and a blessing in that final line? Perhaps it hints at the dispassionate nature of this medical institution, where every life requiring care is equally valued. And once they are discharged? The evening I was released from Mt. Auburn Hospital, I raced into Boston to attend a new friend’s poetry reading. Driving along that length of Memorial Drive, I almost forgot to look up––such is the powerful momentum of normalcy. But I was back on channel 12! And is Linda. As are (I sincerely hope) you.
The Red Letters
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* 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
* The weekly installment is also available at
the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene
http://dougholder.blogspot.com
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