Red Letter Poem #320

 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 #320

 

 

 

 

 

10. (Anhedonia)

 

 

When even Henry grays and is drink

comes a mallet      muffled brain thunked out

jellied quivering in sealrot preserve

flatlined the seeds shooting at light. Think

not. So many branchings pruned

isn’t many anything left to serve.

 

Remember all it was grammared glowing

once of some consequence. Good

without being able to get back for. 

No matter. Opus crescendoed years ago

& anymore the even automatic tuning 

is once-perfect pitch dulled in discord. 

 

After, speculation: was it in such meditations

did John fall? So many studies the test

was impossible to fail? So thought firstwife

once but late recanted: to be haunted

is to pale; there is no rest—

It was the poetry that had kept him alive.

 

 

                                     ––Jon D. Lee

 

 

 

 

Extremity calls for its own specialized language.  By the very nature of the art form, some poetry will be compelled to focus on the sorts of overwhelming situations most of us do not face in everyday life.  A common intuitive stratagem: harness the energy of chaos and interweave it with wily invention.  Such fierce poetry often presents us with a desperate voice attempting to escape the psychic debris of what might appear, from the outside, to be an ordinary morning.  I’ve been rereading two poets who wrote out of such extremity and who, in their own ways, expanded the expressive capabilities of language itself.  Paul Celan was the Romanian-born son of German-speaking Jews; a Holocaust survivor, he spent the rest of his life attempting to dig out from the emotional and spiritual ruins of the Second World War.  The second is John Berryman, one of America’s most original and turbulent poetic voices, famous for his 385-poem sequence, The Dream Songs.  For Celan, the losses were both personal and abundant; his parents died in the camps along with the millions.  As for Berryman, depression was likely a biological factor from birth.  But it was a single loss––his father shot himself outside their apartment when the poet was 11––that served as the tipping point into a lifelong struggle with alcoholism and bipolar angst.  Trying to bring his internal struggle into an external form, Berryman’s poems summoned the voices of alter egos onto the psychological stage: brilliant, depressive ‘Henry,’ hanging on to life by his fingertips; and the haunting ‘Mr. Bones,’ who sounds like the comic interlocutor from a Southern minstrel show, happily puncturing whatever fragile hope bubbles to the surface.  Yet I should point out that it is bracing, even illuminating, to confront language in poets such as these, where––and it’s clear in every line––so much more is at stake than just artistic creation.  One leaves these poems with an almost irresistible urge to respond in kind.

 

And that’s precisely what poet Jon D. Lee has done.  He has begun creating an extended series of cantos employing both Berryman’s challenging subject matter as well as his linguistic invention and improvisational music.  Two of them, I’m happy to say, will make their magazine debuts here in the Letters.  The author of four previous books of poetry and prose, plus the recent chapbook Eden (from Finishing Line Press), Jon is on the faculty of Suffolk University in Boston and serves as Director of the annual David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize for Poetry and Poetic Translation.  I relished the opportunity to wrestle with this new work because, like Berryman before him, Jon is willing to take a riskier stance in these texts.  I believe he’s hoping, not simply for a surprising coherence (and who knows whether dreams or nightmares can ever be translated into the light of day), but for an unflinching glimpse into the mirror.  When Jon addresses “John” directly in these verses, Berryman becomes yet another psychological persona in this drama––one that, as we know, could not survive the final act.  Writing these poems, that fact must have weighed on the poet’s mind––the homonym always reflecting each questioning back in his own direction.

 

Of such mercurial experiments, an attempt at explication would be, not just a disservice, but a form of self-deception.  Like music that arrives before the brain’s language resources can even process what it’s hearing, we take in a line like “When even Henry grays and is drink” as both a symptom of his drunkenness but also a surprising grammatical arpeggio.  We smile, even as the mallet comes down on that well-educated “thunked out” brain of ours.  The poem calls for profusion and wildness; nothing of the intellectual topiary we learned in literature seminars: “it was grammared glowing/ once of some consequence.”   The speaking voice in this poem seems (and let me quickly say that seeming is as close as we need to come, at least for the first few readings) to long for an earlier time when we understood far less but language felt unbridled and capable of true wonder.  We return to literary forebears like Berryman and Celan, not only as exemplars of aesthetic daring, but as connectors to our deeper humanness.  The eternal college student within us is always hunting for a new parental-professor to impress, a new bid for elusive honors.  But there is no “test” for Jon’s song except for, perhaps, increased heart rate and neural electricity.

 

Jon’s poem closes with a line from the memoir Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson.  She was the putative “firstwife” Jon coins for this poem.  At the time of Berryman’s suicide, journalists wrote disparagingly about the current school of ‘confessional poetry’––as if its radical honesty were the cause for madness and suicide among its practitioners.  “It was the poetry that had kept him alive” wrote Simpson, a trained psychotherapist––and today’s poem seems to be in agreement.  If, battered by this grievous world, we too stop feeling any joy in existence, sometimes the solitary retreat of a poem may provide a clearing in the thorny wood––a place in which we can take our bearings, and remember the old path to where delight was hiding.

 

 

 

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/

A Handpicked Poem article by Michael Todd Steffen

 

A Handpicked Poem

article by Michael Todd Steffen

 

by Mary Buchinger, from There is only the Sacred and the Desecrated

Lily Poetry Review Books, 2026

 

 

Bare ruin’d choirs –

 

 

            Last night

I walked

     past my dead

 

            friend’s house

my feet plowed

     the fallen

 

leaves beneath

     the borer-ridden

            street ash

 

words so

     many words

he and I had

 

            dared to try

out against

     indifferent air –

 

            Once in a country

I’d never known

     he took my hand

 

            we crossed

the broken threshold

     of an old chapel

 

 

            laced with thistles

crows perched

     on crumbling pews

 

            the open loft

above us then

     there –

 

     an absolute

unburdened

            blue

 

 

 

 

Mary Buchinger’s poems speak with the intimacy and hush of sacred places, churches, libraries of old, and I’m often inclined when reading her poems to start making topic lists, like a reference librarian.

 

One of the unusual topic search words for this poem on my list would be “nudity,” synonymous with the first word in the title, “Bare,” like the unornamented language of the poem and justified by the poem’s close with the blue of sky showing through “the open loft” of the broken chapel ceiling. The poem is visionary, dreamlike.

 

“Grief” would be a more prominent topic word on the list, announced in the enjambment from the first to second strophes of truncated lines—“past my dead / friend’s house”—a breach that misleads us, at first, from one bat of the eye, homing in like popular belief about poetry the speaker is being lofty by addressing “my dead” (ancestors, the culture at large)—to the rather cadaverously thudding actuality of “friend’s house”—a deceased friend. Oh my. Acceptance can be one of the trickiest psychological labors for the mourning heart and mind and it is laden yet bold of the poem’s speaker here to take this walk—in halting breaths of two or three words at a time—and endure the bitter dark windows of the announcement. My friend is no more. Terrible and necessary, courageous the demand on those in the wake.

 

Shakespeare’s name would appear on my list for this poem’s reference index also, the author of the three-word title of Buchinger’s poem, referring to Sonnet 73, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold…” The selection of the title powerfully evokes the I-thou intimacy of the Sonnets, a palpable nearness in Mary’s poem—which is searching to raise the friend as it simultaneously reflects on her own approach to mortality, embracing a different coming-of-age realization.

 

The reference to Shakespeare in the title also prepares us for the transport of the poem, which occurs at the dash midway, after the fifth tercet, where we glide as it were from an American neighborhood in autumn, ankle-deep in fallen leaves, into a vision of “a country / I’d never known”—perhaps France or England, in a land where there are ruins of old churches to explore as well as the tourist-friendly restored ones.

 

Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter where the second half of the poem takes place. It takes place, in a sense, in no time, or in suspended time, in the timelessness of art, time of dreams, visions, perhaps the time of (the dead) immortality, and so it happens no where, the unlocated Byzantium of Yeats’s vision. Buchinger’s dream is not nearly so fancy, yet it is very precise and responding to the degree the broken chapel stands as a figure of the mortal friend, haunted by spectral crows perching on crumbling pews (a sound for our reaction to the odor of putrefaction).

 

We in this sense, as Buchinger’s new collection title suggests, are caught in a paradigm of the sacred and (subject to time with its imminent ruin) the desecrated. Yet the desecrated, those ruins, accumulate an air of the sacred about them which ultimately must yield to the sanctity of nothing, heaven, the blue of the sky above—configuring a dynamic of reversal of terms distinguishing us as people and the places we live and visit. The reversal of those definitions question the severity of the difference upon which so much discord in our society today relies, and probably has relied on for a lot longer. Yet it is good to remember these moments and visions that become pristine and nearly tangible in the hush and suspended disbelief of poetry easily escape us (or we it) in the harder walls and streets and harsher light of our daily lives, where an opposite pronouncement of nothing sacred or desecrated tends to resound.

 

There is Only the Sacred and the Desecrated is Mary Buchinger’s eighth collection of poetry. Other recent titles include The Book of Shores, Navigating the Reach and Virology. Her poems have appeared in many top journals, including AGNI, Pedestal Magazine, Plume, Salt Hill, Salamander and Seneca Review. Mary is the winner of the 2024 Elyse Wolf/Slate Roof Chapbook Prize. She teaches at the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences.

 

Her upcoming readings:

Saturday, November 7, 12:45-2:30 pm, with Patrick Sylvain and Steven Ratiner

Red Letter Live! Hosted by Arlington Poet Laureate Emeriti Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan

Robbins Library, Community Room, Arlington, 700 Mass Ave. Reception at 990 Mass Ave following the reading

 

Sunday, November 15th, 4 pm, with Kevin Gallagher, hosted by Michael Franco

The Press Room, 90 Oxford Street, Somerville ($5 donation requested)