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 #292
Beginning the Seventh Year of the Red Letter Project
The Old Words
The hole of it. The dirt of it.
The wet seep. The deepening dark.
The half-lit, head-first, half-gone.
The red-clay-veined cold cradle.
The dampening sounds.
The stiff canvas bundle smeared with tar.
The thrum of the old words, repeating.
The stubborn drumming of the heart.
The blackened hands. The tamped mound.
The ache of the spine uncoiling.
The going, and then the going on.
The forever-knowing what is up
by never forgetting what is down.
––Steven Ratiner
Astonishing! This poetry project––born out of the fearful climate and physical isolation brought on by the Covid crisis––was intended to last for the month or so I imagined it would take for the government to get a handle on the outbreak. I am stunned today to think back on my naiveté! This installment marks the beginning of our seventh year(!), and I’m delighted to report that The Red Letters is stronger than ever. The driving force behind this literary project has grown and diversified over the years––as have the voices I’ve been able to bring you in this forum. Beginning with poets from my home in Massachusetts, I’ve now had the privilege of featuring writers from across the United States as well as several from foreign shores––whose poems put the lie to the word foreign. Despite the political borders that raise such a furor these days, poetry slips easily from country to country (with no passports required), celebrating both commonality and difference, and reaffirming Walt Whitman’s declaration that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (and, of course, vice versa). When I write in the subject line of each week’s mailing “A Community of Voices,” what was once an aspirational concept now feels quite tangible. I’ve been spurred by a faith that the creative impulse is not only an essential human endeavor, but the very emotional and imaginative ballast we need to weather any storm, personal or global.
I feel I’ve been given a rare opportunity: to engage with scores of fine writers, bringing together a tremendous range of poetic voices and approaches––and to attempt to respond to their poems in as honest and intimate a way as I am able. I see my job as being an astute and committed reader which, in turn, might form a correspondence with a host of unseen readers who wait for these Friday missives. (Perhaps astute is debatable, but I hope I’ve earned that second attribute with the hundreds of weekly commentaries.) The ultimate measure I use in making my editorial judgments: if I feel a deep urge to continue thinking (and writing) about one poet’s text, I assume that poem will prove of interest to many, if not most of you, as well. Happily, you’ve let me know (in the most generous of terms) when I’ve been right in that assumption–-and in equally passionate messages when you’ve disagreed. A community of languages, of histories, of dreams––this is a foundational aspect of human consciousness. In the way that the fish probably don’t think much about the sea in which they swim, nor the birds about their sky, we humans navigate, mediate almost all of our lived experience with words. And yet only rarely do we stop to pay real attention to these conceptual devices with which we grasp, explore, record, and share what happens in our busy days. Poets are that rare breed that cannot help but consider, question, tinker with, and repurpose language, spoken and written; we shape it to our own intuitive needs, and attempt to intensify it with a musical charge. When we’ve done this task well, we walk buoyantly through the tumultuous days, smiling with a momentary contentedness. And some readers–– whose acquaintance we may never make––may use these linguistic assemblages as a means of enlarging, illuminating one of their own experiences. Though Americans, it seems, have something of an uneasy relationship with poetry (perhaps the residue of old classroom tyrannies), that is far from universal. There are countries around the world that rely on their national poets, embrace them as pivotal figures, even plaster their faces on their currency––something we, here, can barely imagine. Such poets take the matter-of-fact of shared experience and reveal it to be the stuff of red-letter days.
Once a year, I’ll share one of my poems in the Letters. Today’s installment comes from Grief’s Apostrophe, published last spring by Beltway Editions. The majority of the poems in the collection focus on the personal and societal losses we all face, as well as the myriad ways we use poetry, story, art, and music to grieve, cry out, question, comprehend, find some way back into life––not healed, perhaps, yet somehow fortified. But a number of poems are about language itself, that strange creation by which our species alerts members of the tribe. “The Old Words” is a kind of meditation on the physical, emotional, spiritual excavation we must do to find out what our ancestors have buried beneath this world we walk upon––the dust we are and (as was so powerfully phrased in yet another text) the dust to which we shall return.
