Red Letter Poem #307

 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 #307

 

 

 

 

American Flags at the Recycling Center

 

 

They rest, discarded heaps of worn-out cloth,

white stars on blue above red stripes on white,

off to the side, and with the better trash,

where our recycled goods accumulate.



These cloths too worn to be restitched, each one

a flag, no longer useful for a cause,

but ready for a casket, four by four,

and on the lid, the words RETIRED FLAGS.



They built this wooden chest to store the flags.

The time would come to start the ritual

when each would be disposed with dignity

to yield its precious substance into fire,



to be reborn, a living flag, and flown

from June till Labor Day, all-weather flag

revered through storms and bitter times,

reminder of the past, when some of us



had scorned the flag and that for which it stood,

had raised its mast in anger, pride, protest,

to bear it through the streets, or wave from cabs

until its hems were loosed and frayed like fringe.



Some cut it down, some dared to cut it up.

I restitched mine, a square of it, to patch

the rips that scarred my precious Wrangler jeans,

then found the jeans were suddenly outgrown.



But not my memory of summer camp,

which gave each Scout a chance to hold the flag,

unfurl and raise it up, to hear the cords

and clips that snapped against the metal pole,



to join the circle gathering again

at end of day, with prayer and trumpet’s “Taps,”

to help with lowering, to fold lengthwise,

then over-and-over, making triangles.

 

                                         ––Joyce Wilson

 

 

                       

 

 

 

We are all honoring our country’s 250^th anniversary––and well we should.  There are many things that have been achieved through this grand American experiment that have been nowhere duplicated in the history of mankind.  But there are forces currently emanating from Washington DC that are attempting to expunge any and all of the darker aspects of our history––as if platitudes, fireworks, and star-spangled illusions could be enough to sustain a people.  This effort not only dishonors the actual lived experience of the men and women who worked and sacrificed over the centuries to bring us to this celebratory moment, but it would blind us to the very knowledge you and I will need as we try to move forward.  Our responsibility requires of us a continual effort to create that “more perfect union” the Founders spoke of (and in a democracy, what is more vital than that?)  My suggestion: to read as much and as widely as we possibly can––history, journalism, commentary, poetry––by writers considering all the aspects of this revolutionary journey.  Then we can each take our bearings and advocate for what seems most vital––but out of many disparate (yet respectful) voices, some unified path forward may still emerge––because our commonality far outweighs our differences.  Walt Whitman proclaimed: “I CELEBRATE myself”––creating a persona that embodied a grand and inclusive American consciousness––“And what I assume you shall assume,/ For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”  I must believe in that––even while issues about race, religious belief, family background, political persuasion continue to rage.  It’s the only possible way we can endure.

 

Joyce Wilson is offering us some small-h history in her new poem––the kind most of us participate in daily.  It’s set in that most humble of civic spaces: the recycling center, where old discards hope to find new life.  The United States Flag Code (4 U.S. Code, 5-10) is a set of federal guidelines for the proper display, handling, and respect of the American flag.  It’s legally binding for any governmental agency, though only a suggestion to the rest of the citizenry.  For example, it specifies that the flag is never to be used for articles of clothing, as decoration, or advertising material––but you don’t need me to tell you how that stricture is widely ignored.  You’ll see Old Glory turned into scarves and hats and blazers by folks who deem themselves quite patriotic.  But I also remember, during the Vietnam War, how young people patched ragged jeans with the stars and stripes as a sign of opposition to a futile war––just as the speaker inside today’s poem has done.  Each constituency probably regarded the other’s gesture with disdain.  The code also specifies when and how a banner may be repaired––and under what conditions it must be respectfully destroyed, usually through burning or burial.  And yet, in countless instances, burning the American flag was a gesture of, not honor, but vehement protest.  Despite our troubled history, the speaker in this poem takes a moment to admire the chest (“casket”) built to contain these retired flags before they will meet their end.  The poet imagines these banners turned into smoke, into “a living flag. . .revered through storms and bitter times,/ reminder of the past.”

 

Joyce is the author of five poetry collections, including Take and Receive, and the new The Morning After Burns Night (both from Kelsay Books).  She is the editor of The Poetry Porch, an Internet literary magazine founded 1997 that maintains a large and enthusiastic following.  Her poems have appeared in numerous literary journals including The Hudson Review, Poetry Ireland, and Salamander.  She’s taught English at Suffolk and Boston Universities.  Since I lived through the eras Joyce is calling to mind, I was intrigued by how these simple vignettes seem to amount to a much larger American portrait.  We can feel the national distress in words like discarded, worn-out, and the better trash; there’s even the overarching drive of capitalism to turn every idea or image into profit (my precious Wrangler jeans).  But she closes the poem by returning to an older memory: Summer camp, Taps, and the cords and clips clanking against the metal flagpole.  She is relishing the experience of that unifying circle, gathering at the end of day with prayers and stirring songs.  It offers us a child’s sense of connectedness––something many of us remember wistfully––of times when we shared a common sense of belonging beneath the rippling shadow from our flag.  Has that been made impossible by the political vitriol we heap upon one another?  Is the very idea this country embodies too tattered and torn to be repaired?  Are flames our only destiny?  I don’t believe that’s inevitable (though I’ve been called naïve before), and my suspicion is that you share my feeling.  So the question before us is straightforward: what are we prepared to do about it?

 

 

 

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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

The Only Song We Have by Lawrence Kessenich

Review of The Only Song We Have by Lawrence Kessenich

Published by Pierian Springs Press, Sheridan Wyoming. 2026

Review by Marcus Breen

Creative lives offer insights into the human condition that are not replicated elsewhere. No one reads a biography of a business executive to discover insights about the meaning of life and relationships: at least I don’t. Then again, if I was obsessed with learning the nefarious ways of making money by robbing the poor and enriching myself, then business biographies would take me to the ethically challenged world of all-money-all-the-time, or more technically “economism.” Somewhat ironically, artists and creative people offer insights to the human condition because their work reaches the public through the commercial processes of business.

In contrast, this well-conceived short novel by Lawrence Kessenich illustrates the way in which artistic creativity takes a front seat among those artists who make outstanding contributions to the history of human development and knowledge, while necessarily accepting the less savory work of business. Without the business, it would be unlikely that much attention could be drawn to the artwork, leaving it unsold. This connection to the market, makes the artists’ reputation, and often is the source of an income with which to manage the daily routines of life. Consequently, behind every great sculptor and poet is a committed business network, informed by someone who “gets” the work and commits to promoting and commercializing it.

Of course, as the wonderful, late Australian art critic Robert Hughes pointed out, sometimes the market is the most foolish force at work in bringing ideas to the public that amount to rubbish. Hughes’s excoriating criticism of the “artist” Jeff Koons remains a touchstone for those interested in making distinctions between art as a response to the living world and commercial dross dedicated to decorating over-priced corporate offices.

No such dross is offered in Kessenich’s writing about the relationship between the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke and the French sculptor Auguste Rodin. Artistically, the story Kessenich lays out, offers imagined self-analysis by Rilke of the relationship between himself and Rodin, two very different men who became friends and colleagues between 1902 and 1907. They both worked with and were promoted by art dealers and publishers who saw the brilliance of their work and brought it to the public. By the time Rilke met him in 1902, Rodin was well established, even a European celebrity as a sculptor.

This was an era in Europe when the world of art radiated in, around and from Paris. There was good reason for this, as Kessenich describes Paris in the mind of Rilke, as the magnetic force in European and western artistic creativity. There is good reason for this.

Paris was the foundation place of emancipatory politics, much of it grounded in revolt, committed to removing the feudal system of slavery and monarchical authoritarianism, replacing it with democratic systems of government that continue to resonate today. The political climate that fed Parisian creativity included The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine (1791-1792), a book that contributed to the foundational theory of French and American democratic ideology, published before the first mass working class effort to establish European communism in the Paris Commune (1871). In the latter case, Karl Marx was present through his journalism and his theory, while Fredric Engels’s advocacy for popular government “by the people,” reinforced the power of the revolutionary urge beyond Europe.

Although there is none of this radical political detail in The Only Song We Sing, there is a profound engagement with radical materialism, translated to artistic representation. This occurs through the sculpture of Auguste Rodin. In fact, Kessenich uses descriptions of Rodin’s sculpture-making method to explore the way art makes meaning through the appeal to the material world Rodin experienced then brought to life in clay and bronze sculptures.

This sensibility of experience translated to static imagery, is what makes art either a creative act of resistance in reconceptualizing the human condition, or when it is missing, merely decorative dross. Kessenich describes the divergence between the two characters in this book by drawing on this comparison that drives the dynamic of the characters’ relationship. Put schematically,

Rodin is the materialist, working with his hands to give the clay he molds the representational quality of his experiences. In contrast, Rilke is the idealist, writing poetry from the lofty perch of Germanic disengagement with experience. The book turns around these two philosophical modalities of art practice and theory: materialism and idealism.

As Kessenich has Rilke note in a personal reflection: “For years, I had ignored the physical world, living purely in the realm of thought and feeling and spirit.”

This materialism has a sensuous elements. Rodin had intimate relations with many of the female models who posed for him, suggesting that he was a serial philanderer in a somewhat negative light. Kessenich offers a kind of American morality to this aspect of Rodin’s story. This is aspect of Kessenich’s interpretation of Rodin fails to fully comprehend the uninhibited instincts of the materialist Rodin. He was not married, and as a free man engaged in the realization of the erotic relationships translated into sculpture. There is a kind of puritanism at work here that rejects the urges of lust and desire by Rodin, however much it might be unpleasant to the modern moral mind.

Despite this the relationship between Rodin and Rilke is based on mutual admiration, colorfully traced in The Only Song We Sing. Indeed, the book offers a contemporary vision about the creative communion between two outstanding artists and how they navigated their lives, leading to the curious arrangement in which Rilke became Rodin’s live-in administrator-secretary.

Rodin becomes something of a mensch for Rilke, because he encourages Rilke to write, and more importantly to work like he does, almost non-stop. Kessenich has Rilke ponder:

I was taken aback that the Master would speak about writing poetry, having never written any himself. It is one thing to reproduce or interpret things in clay, marble and bronze, to create something so boldly physical. It is quite another to sift thoughts through the brain and put abstract words on a flat piece of paper. That act was so much more detached from the world, so much more fleeting, so much harder to “work” at, in my experience, because it was so ineffable. I wished I had the talent to form things with clay, to sculpt them from stone. It was so much more “real.” Could I learn from him how to see the world anew? Would the poetry sing itself through me if I could truly see?

Written in the first person – as if Kessenich is Rilke – the story unfolds as the two artists meet and get to know and appreciate each other. It becomes increasingly apparent to Rilke that Rodin’s work is created as an extension of the material world defined by his experiences, this seems to Rilke to be a revelation. The imagined conversations between Rilke and Rodin and Rilke and Rilke’s companion Rose, among others, take place mostly in Rodin’s home and studio in 1902 in Meudon, France, then in Rilke’s mind during his retreats to Paris to write poetry, all while planning and collecting material through interviews and observations of Rodin for a biography.

The tension that emerges in Rilke the poet, as he grows to comprehend what Rodin “the Master” draws on for his inspiration, is effective, if at times unnerving. The material world is something Rilke learns to interpret, by watching the Master.

A serious quibble arises in the language: who these days would want to refer to a great person as “Master” as Rilke does? (For example, not even President Donald Trump’s most ardent MAGA followers take on that disposition). More tellingly, the use of the word “Master,” references the last days of feudal hierarchical relationships. Rilke is corrected to stop referring to Rodin as “Master,” yet almost cannot help himself.

What is more telling for the philosophically inclined, is that the Master-servant relationship was a key aspect of the 1807 book, The Phenomenology of Spirit by the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. His “invention” of modern ideas about contradictions as the dialectic, emerged from this study. It is difficult not to believe that Rilke was not playing a little with the idea, as Kessenich has Rilke use the word “Master,” and as it transpires, Rilke becomes something of a slave in the sculpture’s home.

Rilke’s interest in Rodin was partly instrumental, a function of the need for the poet to make an independent living, rather than reply on funds from his father, so that he could write poetry. In fact, it was not as a poet, but as a journalist biographer and commentator that turned Rilke’s hand in a commission to write a Rodin profile that took him to Meudon. This proved to be a welcome turn in the poet’s career, because the book he produced about Rodin became a best

seller across Europe. It also became part of an elaborate series of artists profiles, known as Lives of the Artist Series (still available), with Rilke’s Auguste Rodin one book in the series.

In effect, The Only Song We Sing serves as an introduction to Rilke’s book, August Rodin. Certainly this was the case for me, as I sat out to write down this review.

Re-released in 2004 with a superb introduction, “Rilke’s Rodin” written by Willian Gass, Rilke the writer is revealed with all of his elaborate language elocutions at work. He can be read as the man who Kessenich describes becoming worldly, and as such a materialist, or at least conscious of the value of the world of relationships, objects and contradictions. Here is Kessenich’s Rilke:

You changed my life, Master. You made me learn to stop and truly see the world, to take it in, and reflect on the physical. And that is now being reflected in my poetry. It’s much more grounded. My poems more often revolve around things in the world, instead of abstract ideas in my head. (66)

The end of the story is a testament to the generosity of Rodin towards Rilke. More than educating him about the “real world,” which could then inform his poetry, Rodin showed Rilke a level of generosity and care that is wonderful to consider. After employing him as administrator and a kind of business partner in his home, paying him while encouraging him to continue to write poetry, Rodin then “fired” Rilke so that he could return fulltime to writing poetry. This is how Kessenich presents the story, suggesting that Kessenich too sees and admires the humanity of Rodin, when today, he might otherwise be considered less than remarkable because he employed Rilke to do his business.

For his part, in his book Auguste Rodin, Rilke refers to love. Rodin “learned to embrace this Life with ever more faithful love. It reveals itself to him as if he had been initiated, no longer concealing itself from him, beyond any sign of distrust.” (83)

The collaborations bore incredible fruit for Rodin and Rilke. And now Lawrence Kessenich adds his wonderfully rich contribution.

***********   Marcus Breen is a professor of communications at Boston College.

Red Letter Poem #306

  

 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 #306

 

 

 

The Three Sorrows

 

 

To know you’re incomplete—

 

Death natters in the squirrel’s ear all day

but I’m mindful of something larger           the width of all shadow

 

Red fruits flourish on the glassy tree I have no name for

 

 

                      To love the thing and not its substance

                      To love the object not its atoms

                      You can love only the differentiated

                      which means you can’t love everything

                      and from this the first sorrow arises

 

 

The neighbors have installed a plastic owl on a post

 

The long sloping roof of their red barn has buckled in the middle

like a piece of wet cardboard

 

Yellow backhoe with its shadow hard beneath it

 

                                         You can’t understand everything

                                         You’re always leaving something out

                                         which means there’s much you must ignore

                                         which means you can’t love everything

                                         and from this the second sorrow arises

 

 

Fly nuthatch goldfinch sparrow woodpecker rabbit chipmunk groundhog

 

 

The intelligent stance of the blue jay

The less intelligent stance of the titmouse

 

Lavender stripe on my left forearm where I burned it cooking drunk

 

 

          You can’t love poison and radiation

          unless they’re in the proper place

          which means you can’t love those places

          which means you can’t love everything

          and from this the third sorrow arises

 

 

Grief enclosures in the trees          black warrens

 

Pockets of deep shadow out of which I’m paid

Roadside ivy closing its summer home one leaf at a time

 

Where the lawn comes down to a storm drain          a granite slab

                                                ––Jonathan Weinert

 

 

                       

 

 

“There was a child went forth every day,” begins Walt Whitman’s entrancing poem from Leaves of Grass, celebratory and elegiac all in one long-lined out-of-breath ramble through the landscape he loved.  “And the first object he looked upon and received with wonder or pity or love or dread, that object he became,// And that object became part of him for the day or a certain part of the day . . . . or for many years or stretching cycles of years.”  I suspect that Jonathan Weinert has received his commission from that storied child––and from the Good Gray Bard himself (as have almost all contemporary poets, in one way or another)––to continue the exploration, no matter where it takes him.  And so he does in this new and wonderfully intricate poem.  It begins with incompleteness (ah, the beauty of that em-dash abruption!), and accepts that condition as both his starting point and his mortal inheritance.  But like Whitman’s child, it only spurs him to venture tirelessly, observe voraciously––as if the momentum itself will, if not solve, then soothe the despair waiting in those widening shadows.  Indeed, “Death natters in the squirrel’s ear all day” (as it does in ours as well), but that won’t keep us from relishing the possibility being offered with this very next breath.  We’re struck by the sheer profusion of our immediate environment (the delight of that little unpunctuated burst: “Fly nuthatch goldfinch sparrow woodpecker rabbit chipmunk groundhog”?)  Whitman, too, was fond of lists–– and naming, of course, is a form of praise and possession.  But beauty is not only a catalog of the ‘eye-pleasing’ details, but all the most vivid sense-impressions.  The cocked head of the blue jay, yes––but also the sagging barn roof and rusting storm drain.  The protagonist of this poem is experiencing the elemental thrill of being alive in the physical world.  And he sweeps us along with his enthusiasm.

 

But the path is not without its obstacles.  The more innocent yearning of the sensory mind finds itself at odds with the analytical/philosophical faculties.  That other voice––offset here in those italicized passages––has an incessant need to parse and comprehend, to step back from experience in order to deliberate.  And that’s at the core of the tension most of us experience daily, the throbbing heart/head conundrum: can we allow ourselves the (dare I say it?) joy of simply waking to yet another day, or must we first demonstrate (to whatever parental/canonical authority we carry inside us) that we are cognizant of all that’s involved?  This speaker carries that conflict seared into his flesh: “Lavender stripe on my left forearm where I burned it cooking drunk.”  He can’t help but admire the beauty of what was once produced by pain––pain so acute, we fragile humans sometimes use/misuse whatever analgesic we can get our hands on.  Those ‘three sorrows’ are, perhaps, inescapable––but we can work toward a finer, kinder relationship with that chorus of consciousness echoing inside our heads.  Because despite it all, we’ve come upon the central element of this abundant garden of delights––“Red fruits flourish on the glassy tree I have no name for”––and, for knowledge’s sake, we are willing to take a bite.

 

Jonathan has authored three books of poems, with two new ones forthcoming.  A Slow Green Sleep was the winner of the Saturnalia Books Editors Prize; and In the Mode of Disappearance, was awarded the Nightboat Poetry Prize.  A new collection, The New England Book of Dying and Living, is due out from Saturnalia in 2027 and will contain today’s poem.  Ghost Smoke, a book-length hybrid collaboration with H. L. Hix, will be published next month by Project Poëtica / Bridwell Press.  And so where does today’s “…Sorrows” leave us?  If the poem has not succeeded in harmonizing those conflicting inner voices, what good has it done?  I think it suggests that the reward may lie, not in muting the dissonance, but embracing it.  Dread is indeed lurking––but it’s out of those “Pockets of deep shadow” that the hungry mind is paid in the coin of the imaginative realm.  On some mornings, “the granite slab” down by the storm drain may bring to mind a tombstone.  On others, a protective barrier, a jumping-off point.  Yet another poetic forefather once wrote: “Sorrow prepares you for joy.  It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter.  It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place.”  That was Jalal al-Din Muhammad Rumi, 13^th century Sufi mystic-poet, and yet another wide-eyed child.  I suspect if Jonathan, Walt, and Jalāl met hiking across that wild field, they would have much to discuss.  I, for one, would happily be invited along on that outing.

 

 

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

 

* The weekly installment is also available at

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 visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/