Celebrate April Poetry Month at the Newton Free Library Poetry Series

 

Red Letter Poem #152

 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 #152

 

 

 

 

It was discovered in 1896 by two tenant farmers who were double-plowing Joseph Gibson’s field – Broighter, near Limavady, County Derry.  At first they thought it a large clod or stone, but were surprised by the stickiness of the surface. They carried the black bundle home in their arms and washed it in a sink.  As the water splashed down, the gold gleamed through.

 

They’d unearthed a cache of gold artifacts from before the time of Christ: two chain necklaces, several decorated torcs, and this miniature gold boat marvelously fashioned, outfitted with oars and rudder, mast and yardarm, bench and spear.  Along with the Book of Kells and the Tara Brooch, the Broighter Hoard is considered one of Ireland’s proudest treasures.

 

Ireland’s at last – but England’s first, as the landlord sold the objects to the British Museum for the princely sum of 600£.  It took seven years of wrangling in the courts to bring the archaeological find back to its homeland, the case hanging mainly on a technicality: the imagined reason the items were committed to the earth.  In a legal oddity, if the burial was votive in nature – a gift to the Celtic gods – then it was an archeological find and the British Crown could demand possession.  But if it was instead a treasure trove, intended to be unearthed after a time, then this was a private possession, and Ireland’s claim would prevail.  The latter argument won the day – even though the Irish eventually admitted the gold might indeed have been an offering to the sea-god Manannan mac Lir, the waters of Lough Foyle shimmering close by.

 

My wife and I saw the gold boat during our first visit to Ireland, nearly forty years ago, and the memory of it remained with me.  It resembled a sea-going currach, a traditional Irish wood-framed, skin-covered fishing craft.  A little over seven inches in length, it was the perfect dream-vessel: an exquisite representation of what is, which compels the imagination to envision what might be just out of reach.  And isn’t this precisely what every artist aspires to: some image, gesture, rhythm, word which permits the maker (and invites the viewer) to step, with keen delight, inside the breathing present – and to sense, however briefly, something more.

 

*     *     *     *     *

Today is, of course, St. Patrick’s Day – and the holiday prompted me to share today’s poem.  But, if you’ll permit me, a few additional thoughts came to mind.  One concerns the Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet Seamus Heaney who I was fortunate enough to interview, photograph, and then correspond with until his death in 2013.  The conversation was part of my poetry interview series – a project which eventually became the collection Giving Their Word (University of Massachusetts Press.)  I went to purchase what was then his brand-new collection – Seeing Things – and there it was again: the gold boat, in all its glory, gracing the cover.  It felt like a good omen.  Seamus’ greatness was not only as a poet but as a human being (and it seems everyone who knew him takes pleasure in affirming this.)  Could one ask for a better legacy?  Which makes me think of a second individual: Brian O’Donovan – broadcaster, writer, concert presenter – whose Celtic Sojourn program on WGBH Public Radio features the best of (as Brian likes to phrase it) the roots and branches of music from across the Celtic world.  I can think of few cultural ambassadors who have had as far-reaching an effect as Brian.  I’ve listened to his programs for decades and been educated by his musical curation and on-air essays (my favorite being one he did on the poetry of Seamus Heaney.)  Brian received a rather terrible health diagnosis this year but has continued to speak publicly and eloquently about the importance of living/savoring each given day.  I try to take his message to heart.  Both of these gentlemen helped me to realize how that something more I spoke of is always more precious and closer-at-hand than we’d imagined.  

 

 

 

Gold Boat

 

            The Broighter Hoard; County Derry

 

 

Hull, a hand’s length of beaten gold.

Gold straw for mast and spar and,

both port and starboard, nine bright twigs

for oars.  The artist’s burnished craft –

 

unearthed by a plow blade near Limavady, 

after twenty-one centuries becalmed.  Time

might easily have crushed it for good – and yet. . .  

Tonight, the moon’s a currach, cupped

 

like my father’s palm.  Memory in its hold.

A word-hoard massed like stars.    

Our vessel, large enough to carry a single

warm breath across the tideless dark –

 

yet small enough to ferry

all the names of the dead from

the providence of our saying

to the perdition of the said.

 

 

                 ––Steven Ratiner

 

 

 

The 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

K-I-S-S-I-N-G A play by Lenelle Moïse

 

K-I-S-S-I-N-G

A play by Lenelle Moïse

A Front Porch Arts Collective production in collaboration with The Huntington,at Calderwood Pavilion, through April 2, 2023

By Andy Hoffman

If you have ever wondered what might draw you back to live theater after the pandemic, the Huntington has the answer for you: Lenelle Moïse’s K-I-S-S-I-N-G, a laugh-out-loud-funny and joyous celebration of young love and high hopes. Created in collaboration between The Front Porch Arts Collective and the Huntington, K-I-S-S-I-N-G follows sixteen-year-old Lala (Regan Sims) on her voyage of discovery of herself through love, art, and family. By turns comic and heart-breaking, K-I-S-S-I-N-G represents theater at its very best, showing what a group of visionary and talented artists can invent. The script, its performance, the set, and direction elevate the very air of the Calderwood Pavilion, and the audience responded in kind. Not since I saw the original cast of HAMILTON have I experienced a night of theater of this power and quality.

Lala, the product of a teenage romance herself, possesses talent and brilliance, but has little exposure to life outside her urban neighborhood. Her parents, long separated, seem at a loss to understand her. We first meet her at a park, where she has taken her mute half brother Max to a playground, her first outing since catching his chicken pox. She just wants to enjoy the sunshine and a burger when Albert (Ivan Cecil Walks), a fellow teenager, spots her and tries to put his smooth moves on her. Enraged by his presumption, she cuts him down and sends him packing.

Albert was at the park with his twin brother Dani (Sharmarke Yusuf), who watches the demolition with pleasure. Dani and Albert, born into wealth, struggle with being black and rich, trying to find a place for themselves in a world which doesn’t have a code for them. Albert tries being blacker, as though he’s from the ‘hood rather than his posh suburb. Dani just immerses himself in the advantages of his life – art, knowledge, and nature. Months later, Lala and Dani run into one another at a bus stop, the same way Lala’s parents met, and they discover a soul-mate in one another. Their relationship grows but hits a snag as Lala begin to feel desire for physical contact, while Dani identifies as asexual. These young people don’t have the emotional sophistication or social skill to navigate this trouble. When Lala attends Dani’s prom with him, the night ends in confusion and disappointment.

The set for K-I-S-S-I-N-G is itself an extraordinary achievement. The abstract shapes dangling from the fly space and the rotating structure center stage at first appear as a decrepit urban landscape and then as neighborhood trees, only reaching their full purpose when Dani takes Lala to a museum. The surfaces become layered projections of the art they see, and the coordination between the maturing relationship between the teens and their personal growth gives the story its power. The use of art, dance and music throughout the production extracts the highest level of passion from Lenelle Moïse’s poetic script. Everyone involved in K-I-S-S-I-N-G deserves recognition for their brilliant work, especially director Dawn M. Simmons, who brings together these remarkable pieces into an extraordinary evening of theater.

K-I-S-S-I-N-G is one of the first products of the three-year partnership of the Huntington with Front Porch Arts Collective, a Black theatre company committed to advancing racial equity in Boston through theatre. In residence at The Huntington, Front Porch Arts Collective creates a place where Black perspectives and experiences become an integral part of the global conversation, fostering a greater understanding of our shared human condition. Cambridge native and Northampton resident and former poet laurate Lenelle Moïse wrote the play on commission from Clark University. Go see it as soon as possible. You owe it to yourself.

Dr. Andrew Hoffman reviews theater here regularly. He has published novels, biography, literary criticism, poetry, games, and screenplays. He holds a PhD in English from Brown and software patents. He can be reached at ndhffmn56@gmail.com

The Red Letters

 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 #151

 

 

 

 

Back when my mother was alive – a widow then in her late seventies, and on what would be her last visit to my home up in Boston – we made a pot of coffee together and spent the morning trading stories with this theme: all the things we’d never told each other.  These tales about wild adventure, foolish peril, and narrow escapes, produced in us such a strange emotional amalgam: bursts of laughter mixed with solemn astonishment.  Somehow, it was affirming, though – to learn that we all carry old secrets and that, for the most part, we survive them.  Today’s Red Letter poem got me thinking about hindsight – what we can (and cannot) learn from the tonnage of memory we tow around with us most of our lives.  If hindsight is, as they say, 20-20, you’d think that perfect vision would be an invaluable resource for steering wisely into the future.  And yet. . . 

 

Somewhere in the Oedipus plays, Sophocles offers some caution about gazing in the rearview: “I have no desire to suffer twice, in reality and then in retrospect.”  And yet, after two dozen centuries, audiences still experience the play with hearts fully-engaged – hoping, perhaps, to learn enough from old suffering to avoid the new (though, we understand, new challenges will be continually barreling toward us from the road ahead.)  Though Dan Carey is a fairly young poet, he has become adept at mining personal history: for the insights the conscious mind craves; for the honest ache the heart feels compelled to preserve.  Dan is a native son of Ipswich, Massachusetts; he received his B.A. in English from Suffolk University and, in 2021, completed his M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Lesley University’s Low-Residency Program.  I know some of the marvelous poets he studied with, and they tell me his great promise was quickly apparent.  Since graduation, Dan’s published three issues of Paradise in Limbo, a magazine he created as a way of furthering his literary apprenticeship; and some of his own poems have begun to find their way into magazines like Crosswinds, Anti-Heroin Chic, and DropOut Literary Journal.  He currently manages social media for Grid Books/Off the Grid Press, and works as a substitute teacher.

 

In today’s poem, he recalls driving through a storm high in the Rocky Mountains – and the grandeur of the scene both magnifies his brush with mortality and places it in the larger context.  It provokes a question we must repeatedly ask ourselves: how far can love carry us through this treacherous landscape?  The poem, as artifact, highlights the double-nature that is inherent in the art form: deep observation of the present moment that, somehow, cannot quite reveal its significance until some distant future.  Strange oracle – this far-sightedness that requires hindsight for its translation.  If Dan’s writing experience is anything like mine, his notebook is full of poems that seem to grasp some deeper understanding of circumstance for which our conscious minds will require months (or even years) to catch up to.  It makes me wish for this talented poet, at the outset of his career, that a day will come – years and years from now –when he’ll be drinking coffee with his mother and marveling over how surprising their journeys have been.  A poem like “Hindsight” may stand as one of those markers along the way, directing us: Life, icy roadway, bear right.

 

 

Hindsight

 

 

Ten-thousand feet above sea level,

creeping through Colorado, a two-wheel drive,

our Civic astounds us.  Pressure in the altitude

and traffic—I touch my face, sweating and alive,

hands at ten and two.  The storm we watched

break over the Rockies like a kiss goodbye

unburies itself now from the clouds

right over us, and hail appears.

 

We build cars to withstand weather,

but when they rust, they rust quicker

than most people.  People—what stinks

we make on our way out!  Against

our windshields, gumball-sized pellets

crack our comfort zones, like a critic’s

rejection of my “shitty first drafts”—

if only I had more time.  Death associates

from every direction.  What do I do?

Face it?  Who would I tell I love you?

 

We descend the mountain, and soon

I’ll learn this was the day Mom first

heard cancer, maybe at the same time

I let my own death drift in as I drove,

wanting, bad, for someone to feel

for me, hypochondriac ventriloquist.

Put it any way you want, I’m the son

who’s forever at a loss for words.

 

 

                 ––Dan Carey

 

 

 

The 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