Red Letter Poem #308

  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 #308

 

 

 

 

 

I strap the truth onto my back and set out

 

 

I am on a mountain smiling / I am bathing

in a journal / the sun is my skin / a panther 

longs for a friend at night / swabs her fur

with moonlight so 

her velvet lids

may dream 

of me / all I hear are words 

 

this wooded hideaway a stranger

home

 

when the panther has had enough of her

sleepless reverie / when she has wept 

enough petals / to cover the casket

completely / then

we will hold hands

the skeleton

and the moon / bursting

 

into the togetherness of death / like spring

peonies

 

 

                             ––Faith Shuster

 

 

                       

 

 

 

“How Poetry Comes to Me”

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light”

 
― Gary Snyder

 

 

I have a friend who appreciates ‘good poetry’––he’ll remind me over coffee––but draws a line at “the intentional obfuscation” that he feels ‘runs rampant’ in contemporary verse.  His upset signals that he ran across something in Poetry magazine or a more obscure journal that baffled him, made him feel ‘cheated.’  He appreciates dynamic imagery and elegant music––but, most importantly, wants ‘a poem that makes sense.’  I tell him I know exactly how he feels.  But I offer this in response: as intelligent a reader as I think he is, he’s missing the point of the whole exercise.  It’s not as if more traditional approaches signify ‘skilled writing,’––and these other experimental young talents have simply lost their way.  The rules of the game have changed, as culture has changed; and many older styles of (for lack of a better word) beauty began to feel inadequate to the experience of the chaotic and often caustic world we face these days.  Along the way, poets stepped back from the elegance of ‘the well-made thing’ and embraced the visceral intensity of a poem that was bravely finding its way.  Gary Snyder, for example, was fond of explaining that he didn’t write because he ‘had something to say’ but because he needed to find out who he really was that morning, and to take his bearings.  Faith Shuster (née Blake––in case some have come across her poetry under her maiden name) is a young poet unafraid of the challenge posed by a raw and unruly poem.  It feels to her as if each fresh draft is an opportunity to discover what, from the outer world, was pulling at something from the inner.  Or conversely: what wild presence in her inner landscape was desperate to make its way out, into the clearing of the blank page, where voice, musicality, vision can make itself known.

 

Like Snyder’s little ars poetica reproduced above, Faith is conceiving of some animal presence––though it is never made clear whether the habitat of that panther is arboreal, neural, or both.  But whoever or whatever is the hunter, clearly the prey is the truth––or some version of what, at this very moment, feels to be vital and true.  In this “wooded hideaway,” the imagery is leaping–– first, into the consciousness of the poet, and then eventually ours.  And it’s so appealing, I suspend disbelief and allow the poem to carry me along, savoring lines like: “…a panther/ longs for a friend at night / swabs her fur/ with moonlight so/ her velvet lids/ may dream/ of me…”.  As you’re probably familiar, the slash-mark punctuation is usually employed in revising or quoting from poetry to indicate a line break (as I’ve done here).  But Faith has added them even within lines, either to signify auxiliary pauses (like caesuras) or, spatially, to have her lines visually interrupted with something almost vegetal.  Again, I am left to interpret how meaning is being made––but there’s something freeing in that.

 

Faith is an emerging poet whose work (using her own words) “enquires into the ways language can play, move, and liberate.”  Her work has just begun to make its way into journals like the Lyrical column of the Somerville Times, as well as an anthology appearance in The Silver Note, a collection gathering poets from Arlington, MA.  Faith studied Biology at Tufts University, and Education at Stanford.  She founded Effect Learning LLC and works as an Executive Function Coach, empowering neurodivergent adults and teens to learn the skills they need to get things done.  I’ve found her poems daring but emotionally grounded, with language that elevates the heart rate.  I look forward to seeing how her style will develop in order to keep pace with her own powerful curiosity.  This makes me want to remind my earnest but puzzled friend that, at one time, poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Alan Ginsberg or Gary Snyder, were so radical that their work was widely ridiculed.  These days, passages of their poetry can appear in popular culture and no one bats an eye.  Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused a riot at its first appearance––but within a year, it was engendering standing ovations.  It’s the speed at which modern consciousness is evolving.  I have a suspicion of what’s happening when Faith’s panther “has wept/ enough petals / to cover the casket/ completely”––but I’m not troubled if it changes with subsequent readings.  Because what I most desire is for me to make sense of my own experience––not to have some masterful poem impress its ‘answers’ upon me.  I want to trust that if the intuitive exploration within a poet’s work brought them to some place of wonderment, I might be propelled to one of my own.  

 

 

 

 

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:

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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

 

* For updates and announcements about Red Letter projects and poetry readings, please follow me on BlueSky

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

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

Memoirist Brittany Perham: Pens a poetic memoir that meets the demands of memory

Interview by Doug Holder

Recently I caught up with Brittany Perham --the author of the memoir "Executrix." Brittany is an associate professor of English at Endicott College in Beverly, MA. She is an accomplished poet, and as she told me this memoir is very much a poet's memoir. It is written in an original style, and exhibits the sensibility of a poet. Her publisher writes of the book:

"Executrix begins with a mystery: Why would the author's father, from whom she had been estranged for more than a decade, change his will in the weeks before his death to make her the executor of his estate? Executrix charts the process of sorting out the business of this indebted estate using the language of real estate foreclosure, income tax audits, and medical records. The executor transforms the disjointed details of a life into a tidy financial narrative that meets the demands of claimants; the writer transforms the disjointed details of a life into a story that meets the demands of memory. Through this twin accounting, Perham asks the big questions: What are the implications of being the child of an alcoholic? How do we reconcile memories that are fragmented, elided, or nonexistent?"

From her website:

 "Brittany Perham is the author of Double Portrait (W.W. Norton), which was selected by Claudia Rankine for the Barnard Women Poets Prize; The Curiosities (Free Verse Editions); and, with Kim Addonizio, the collaborative word/art project The Night Could Go in Either Direction (SHP). Her writing has received support from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the Hemingway House, the James Merrill House Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the Wallace Stegner Fellowship Program, and Yaddo..."

What do you think your sober father's reaction to this memoir would be? How would the drunk one respond?

Good question—and I don’t have a good answer. This is because the sober/not sober distinction is difficult when it comes to someone who has a substance use disorder. The disorder is so much a part of the person whether he’s drunk or sober that his unpredictability becomes the only kind of predictability. So, even insofar as I can imagine my father, it’s hard for me to imagine two different reactions. But I can say what I’d hope: If my father could read the book, I hope we’d begin some conversations about what happened between us. I’d like to hear about what he remembered, especially if and how he remembered some of the events that I wrote about. Because of course our memories would be very different. The book enacts a conversation between my narrator and a cast of imagined fathers. I’ve wished many times that my real father and I could have had such conversations, so the book is probably trying to correct the fact that this was never possible. I have very few stories of my father’s and I’d like to have more.

It seems in this memoir that you are in conflict with your brain. The brain tries to create a neat narrative that you are not satisfied with. Your take?

Yes, the book is absolutely concerned with questions about narrative: Why are we driven to create personal narratives about our pasts? What can those narratives teach us? In what ways are they unreliable and in what ways are they entirely reliable? The nonfiction I like best is the nonfiction that tries to reckon with these questions, even though that means narrative can’t be presented as an unassailable reality. (And as readers, we often crave the solid, unassailable realities books can present!) I’ll never know with certainty what “really happened” in my childhood but what I can investigate are the stories I’ve told myself about my past at different points in my life. I have access to those stories; I know how they’ve changed over time, and I know how my feelings about them have changed. So that’s my material. And that material is, to me, the reason to write nonfiction.

Do you trust the reader? I ask that because you send out sort of provisos for he or she to remember—it seems you think people will get the wrong impression of what you are writing. Do you trust yourself?

I trust the reader entirely. Absolute trust is required for me to ask the reader to stand side by side with my narrator because in Executrix the reader isn’t witnessing what happened to the narrator so much as they are witnessing what the narrator is thinking. That’s a very intimate place to be, a very intimate position from which to read a book. The reader must be on board with that type of close encounter very early on or they won’t continue reading—which is why, I hope, the form of each essay helps the reader accrue experience that allows them to feel their way into the next essay. My hope is that, through recurrence and repetition, the reader can access a brainstate that mirrors my own thinking process, at least as far as I can make an analogue for it in language. It’s a kind of obsessive thinking, one in which I return to a premise (usually a memory) and try to think clearly about the possibilities that follow from that premise. So the cues to “remember,” for example, often signaled with anaphora, aren’t directed at the reader so much as they are an invitation for the reader to be participatory in my thinking process as a writer. Executrix has the feeling of being a dialogue not only between the narrator and the chorus of father characters, but between the narrator and herself.

Philip Roth wrote, "You have to be willing to insult your mother, if need be, to write honestly." How hard was it for you to be so candid about your family—this is not some white picket fence sort of approach.

I disagree with Roth: The writer must not insult anyone. As soon as the reader feels that the author is trashing a character—failing to have empathy for them, using them as a tool to achieve a certain outcome or, worse, to make the main character look better—the reader is going to turn against the writer. Good writing is built on empathy, which is why it has the capacity to produce empathy in us. It doesn’t mean the characters can’t do heinous things—great literature is built around bad behavior. But the writer must work to understand each character, even the terrifying or terrorizing ones. Insult is the opposite of understanding; there’s no depth to an insult. So if you’re insulting someone in your writing, you’re either writing dishonestly or for revenge, or both. I do agree with Roth that you must write honestly—in memoir, and in fiction and poetry too. And that’s hard. Insults and superiority are much easier.

In memoir, to write honestly, you have to look at yourself first. Your narrator is your primary subject. You must be clear-eyed when it comes to that narrator, to their faults and failures—and you must also maintain your empathy for them. The narrator, that surrogated part of yourself, can be the hardest character of all to sustain empathy for. For example, the narrator can, and very well may, insult other characters—and can do much worse to them besides. But the writer cannot: The writer must be both disinterested (as in, not on anyone’s side) and interested (as in, invested in seeing as much as they can about everyone and everything that appears in their field of vision). This is why it helps to write toward our questions instead of our certainties. When we are genuinely investigating something or someone, when we have no or few preconceived ideas about what we’ll find, we have a better chance of revealing some truth.

To answer your question about my own family—yes, it was hard to write about them. I worried that I was not being generous enough toward my father, that I might be making up things I remembered about him. My fear about failing to tell, or even to know, the truth of my own experience is one of Executrix’s storylines, and the narrator expresses that fear all the way through. I worried differently, but just as intensely, about writing characters drawn from living people—my mother and my brother. I do a lot of work in the book to remind the reader that the characters are my inventions—because this is the number one fundamental truth of memoir. Characters are created things, a matter of artifice just like everything else in writing. And this is true even of memoirs that don’t treat this fact explicitly. But in the end, I trust the reader to understand the difference between real people and created characters. And, if I’ve done my job, the reader will have empathy for and understanding of each of the characters and, by extension, their real-life counterparts. One lucky thing for me is that I trust my mother and my brother to understand the difference too, which tells you something about my relationship with them. This doesn’t mean they don’t have feelings about encountering the characters who bear their names, and it doesn’t mean there isn’t difficulty for all of us in navigating this process.

It is interesting to me after reading your book that you chose to come back to teach at Endicott College in your hometown of Beverley, Ma. Tell me, how does this feel?

It’s very strange to be launching this book from Beverly, as much of the book takes place in this town. I didn’t know if I’d ever return to this part of the world. This is my first year living back on the North Shore and it still feels to me more like a time than a place. That is, the place still feels like childhood. So much so that it’s sometimes hard to feel like, or even remember, my grown-up self, who lived her adult life elsewhere for the last twenty-odd years.

This book is a lyrical memoir. You are an accomplished poet, but why not write separate poems... this is sort of one long poem.

I got interested in sentences instead of lines. I wanted to see what the sentence could do. What it was capable of. I’m a formalist; all my decisions are formal decisions. From the time I wrote the first sentence, I knew this book wasn’t poetry. It had to be written in prose.

At times your book is like a chant-- a lot of repetition. I remember reading about your father—you have a Ginsberg Howl-like chant about him. Is Ginsberg an influence?

Ginsberg’s a lurking intermediary—I go right back to Whitman’s inciting barbaric yawp. What my work has in common with both of theirs is that it’s a highly patterned expression built to transmit the force of spontaneous thought. Whitman was the Big Bang; the rest of us live in his spacetime.