Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene

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

Flashback Friday:

Red Letter Poem #8

That Blue

One day after the eternal winter,

the scilla gush out of the ground

in a tide that laps
at the sidewalk. Cold wind

rakes them into ripples
so they make a lake on the lawn.

This blue shimmering with violet

makes the sky seem pale.
You can find it across centuries

in beads, ribbons, velvet,

concocted on the palettes

of Gauguin and Van Gogh,

favored by the Fauves,

those wild beasts of art.

A blue that makes you pause

as if listening for music;

maybe you could
wish on it

for something

you’d forgotten

you wanted.

––Cathie Desjardins

Cathie Desjardins: it’s always pleased me that her name and her passionate interest coincide. Her poetry has often been of the gardens, and no more so than in her most recent collection Buddha in the Garden issued by Tasora Press. It uses the year’s path through the seasons as the archetypal journey within all of our lives, the vines of beauty and mortality braided inextricably. When I asked her how this became so important to her, she recalls Michael Pollan’s idea: “The garden suggests there might be a place where we can meet nature halfway”––and that she does: the garden as classroom where life-lessons are acquired with earth-stained hands; garden as laboratory where commitment and patience are tested; place of poetic retreat where one’s avid eye and attentive mind often blossom into mystery. After one of the most brutal winters in recent memory, what sheer delight this week to receive a few unseasonably warm days, melting the snow drifts, and exposing the wet earth. Looking out my window now, I detect the first green leaf-tips of early spring in my wife’s garden, signaling what feels like a rescue. Can the poet’s precious scilla be far behind? And so I thought I’d offer a second viewing of Cathie’s poem from the earliest days of the Red Letter Project’s history––especially now, when next week will mark the beginning of our seventh year of publication.

A lifelong literacy teacher and writing specialist, Cathie’s taught in many elementary and secondary schools in Massachusetts, as well as colleges and writing centers, helping the power of language to take root in thousands of students. Her work has been published in numerous journals and newspapers, such as The Boston Globe, Pulse, The Christian Science Monitor, and WBUR’s Cognoscenti online magazine. And, on a more personal note, she was my predecessor as Arlington’s Poet Laureate, and continues to share her vision of poetry as essential in community life. I have admired the clear images and colloquial tone of voice within her poetry. Even in simplicity, a gentle music emerges; describing the scilla’s blue, she writes how the wind “rakes them into ripples/ so they make a lake on the lawn.” The contrast between those swelling L’s and the counterpoint of sharp K’s––it feels like a duet scored, perhaps, for cello and flute. This quiet attention to what is happening around us does, indeed, make me remember what is most desired and too often overlooked in the daily hubbub. I have enjoyed the bounty within Cathie’s first two poetry collections and look forward to a new manuscript, Floral Constancy, that is slowly working its way toward an eventual blossoming.

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/

Recently I caught up with poet Wyn Cooper, a former Somerville resident, to talk about his new collection of poetry " The Unraveling."

Wyn Cooper has published five books of poetry, including, most recently, Mars Poetica.

His sixth book, The Unraveling, will appear in May 2026. His poems, stories, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, AGNI, The Southern Review, Five Points, Slate, and more than 100 other magazines. His poems are included in 25 anthologies of contemporary poetry, including A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker, Poetry: An Introduction, and The Mercury Reader. His first novel, Way Out West, was published by Concord Free Press in 2023.

In 1993, “Fun,” a poem from his first book, was turned into Sheryl Crow’s Grammy-winning song “All I Wanna Do.” He has also cowritten songs with David Broza, David Baerwald, Jody Redhage, and Bill Bottrell. In 2003, Gaff Music released Forty Words for Fear, a CD of songs based on poems and lyrics by Cooper, set to music and sung by the novelist Madison Smartt Bell. Their second CD, Postcards Out of the Blue, based in part on Cooper’s postcard poems, was released in 2008. Their songs have been featured on six television shows.

Cooper has taught at the University of Utah, Bennington College, Marlboro College, and at The Frost Place. He has given readings across the country, as well as in Europe and South America. He is a former editor of Quarterly West, and the recipient of a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation. For two years he worked at the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, a think tank run by the Poetry Foundation. He lives in Vermont and Massachusetts, and works as a freelance editor. His website is www.wyncooper.com.

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"The Unraveling"--your new book of poetry is a perfect heading for the state we are in. As Yeats wrote: "Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." Your take?

I wrote these poems over a a six-year period with no theme in mind, no narrative arc. Even after it was accepted two years ago I couldn’t see how the poems were related, except that some were reactions to the pandemic, and some were indirectly about the end of a long marriage. Even the title was different. In my attempt to replace that title with one I liked, I came up with over a hundred of them, and created a small focus group of Cambridge poets who were kind enough to read the ms and react to the titles I came up with. None of them were compelling, or sufficiently able to summarize the collection. I finally realized that the majority of the poems described different kinds of unraveling—of human relationships, of the effects of the pandemic, and of the state of both our country and the world. The center simply wasn’t holding.

I am glad that you have a poem about Somerville Ave.—my neck of the woods. I have written about the Ave before, noting its twists and turns with the Boston skyline in the distance. It is a very urban sprawl of an avenue. But in spite of the grittiness of the street, you put angelic, yellow monarchs at the end. Does hope spring eternal?

I lived on the Somerville side of Porter Square for a decade, and would often walk down the avenue toward Boston. I always found it to be a more meditative journey than my walks in other directions. I like to think that the poems in this book, like the poem you refer to, describe a world that’s unraveling, but a world that can also provide hope because of the people in it who don't give up. There’s beauty peeking out from the chaos, and simply walking down the avenue provides an example of that.

How do you come up with ideas for your your poems? What is the process?

I think most of my poems come out of my unconscious, because I never ever sit down to write a poem “about” something. I just play with language until thoughts and eventually lines and sentences form, and trust that my unconscious is doing the work. It’s like our dreams: where on earth do they come from?

In my poem" Chronic" --I used a quote from Freud to focus me --he wrote that his experience of cancer was like “an island of pain in a sea of indifference.”

Could you have written this book when you were young?

My first book, The Country of Here Below, came out when I was 30, and it was fairly dark, but it reflected a world much different than the world we live in now. My mindset, however, was not all that different. Maybe I need to grow up!

Why should we read this book?

Despite the subject matter, and the fact that the book’s title wouldn’t lead a reader to expect hope, I think readers will find that there is hope here. In a larger sense, I think the fact that there are so many poets who continue to spend countless hours on poems that attempt to understand our hearts and minds is a miracle, and I think miracles are always hopeful by definition.

Somerville Avenue

Entering the atmosphere

the beat of wings grows louder,

the wings not wings but wonders

as speakers hung from streetlights carol

Hark! the herald angels sing.

Jets lift off from Logan, their contrails

parallel in late Atlantic light,

hark the angels serving cocktails

who herald flight so brightly.

This checkerboard street

steers cars southeast, toward