The Red Letter Poem Project
NOW ONLINE! I was asked to write an essay for Askold Melnyczuk’s Arrowsmith Journal about what I learned from the first year of the Red Letter Project. It also became a meditation about the relationship between poet and reader. If you’d like to take a look, here is a link –
https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices
-- and you’ll also be able to check out the variety of marvelous literary projects that appear under Askold’s Arrowsmith imprint. Enjoy!
At the outset of the Covid pandemic, when fear was at its highest, the Red Letter Project was intended to remind us of community: that, even isolated in our separate homes, we could still face this challenge together. As Arlington’s Poet Laureate, I began sending out a poem of comfort each Friday, featuring the fine talents from our town and its neighbors. Because I enlisted the partnership of seven local arts and community organizations, distribution of the poems spread quickly – and, with subscribers sharing and re-posting the installments, soon we had readers, not only throughout the Commonwealth, but across the country. And I delighted in the weekly e-mails I’d receive with praise for the poets; as one reader recently commented: “You give me the gift of a quiet, contemplative break—with something to take away and reflect on.”
Then our circumstance changed dramatically again: following the murder of George Floyd, the massive social and political unrest, and the national economic catastrophe, the distress of the pandemic was magnified. Red Letter 2.0 announced that I would seek out as diverse a set of voices as I could find – from Massachusetts and beyond – so that their poems might inspire, challenge, deepen the conversation we were, by necessity, engaged in.
Now, with widespread vaccination, an economic rebound, and a shift in the political landscape, I intend to help this forum continue to evolve – Red Letter 3.0. For the last 15 months, I’ve heard one question again and again: when will we get back our old lives? It may pain us to admit it, but that is little more than a fantasy. Our lives have been altered irrevocably – not only our understanding of how thoroughly interdependent we are, both locally and globally, but how fragile and utterly precious is all that we love. Weren’t you bowled over recently by how good it felt just to hug a friend or family member? Or to walk unmasked through a grocery, noticing all the faces? So I think the question we must wrestle with is this: knowing what we know, how will we begin shaping our new life? Will we quickly forget how grateful we felt that strangers put themselves at risk, every day, so that we might purchase milk and bread, ride the bus to work, or be cared for by a doctor or nurse? Will we slip back into our old drowse and look away from the pain so many are forced to endure – in this, the wealthiest nation on the planet? Will we stop noticing those simple beauties all around us? The poet Mary Oliver said it plainly: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” I will continue to offer RLP readers the work of poets who are engaged in these questions, hoping their voices will fortify all of ours.
Two of our partner sites will continue re-posting each Red Letter weekly: the YourArlington news blog (https://www.yourarlington.com/easyblog/entry/28-poetry/3035-redletter-072921), and the Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene (http://dougholder.blogspot.com). 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.
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 #73
Summertime and the livin’ is. . . well yes, easy (though perhaps for only moments at a time) – and then desperate, intoxicating, frantic, beguiling, maddeningly boring, drenched in tears and punctuated by (if you’re lucky) bouts of laughter that erupt like fireworks. It’s not just the long stretch of hot days and lush foliage that propel our moods to their extremes. I believe we’ve been conditioned by years of the school calendar to spend nine months longing for the unreasonable promise of summer, only to be confronted by the fitful and all-too-ordinary reality. Needless to say, the entertainment industry helps to compound the anticipation, plying us with frothy summer pop tunes and Hollywood confections that make us crave those fantasies about love and adventure all the more. And as the Buddha has taught us, expectation is the source of all suffering – and so summer provides that too, often in generous doses.
Chen Chen’s poem plays off those summer tropes, though the expectations he’s wrestling with are familial, societal, and even poetical. But by intensifying the feverish turns of the imagination, he seems to be concocting his escape plan. Or is he? Is that fantasy of ‘falling in love midair’ hinting at how flights of the imagination can somehow rescue us – poet and reader alike – or only another catchy top-40 chorus in search of a guitar riff? But what I’m much more convinced of – reading Chen Chen’s highly-acclaimed inaugural collection, When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities (BOA Editions) – is that this poet has found inventive ways to intensify language while defying assumptions about how a poem must sound. Chen Chen creates seemingly playful vignettes that dazzle the imagination and break the heart, often at the same time. Born in Xiamen, China, he grew up in Massachusetts, and sometimes his writing attempts to surf the riptides between cultures. Recipient of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award, Chen Chen currently teaches at Brandeis University as the Jacob Ziskind Poet-in-Residence. And so, before the new school year rolls around, I’m humming a summer tune under my breath and thinking: one of these mornings, I’m gonna rise up singing. . . not just because the Gershwin lyric promised us that, but because of magic tricks like the one Chen Chen has pulled off with such aplomb. Perhaps, as August wanes, I really will spread my wings and take to the sky. This poet almost makes it look easy.
Summer Was Forever
Time dripped from the faucet like a magician’s botched trick.
I did not want to applaud it. I stood to one side & thought,
What it’s time for is a garden. Or a croissant factory. What kind
of work do I need to be doing? My parents said: Doctor,
married to lawyer. The faucet said: Drip, drop,
your life sucks. But sometimes no one said anything & I saw
him, the local paper boy on his route. His beanstalk frame
& fragile bicycle. & I knew: we would be so terribly
happy. Our work would be simple. Our kissing would rhyme
with cardiac arrest. Birds would overthrow the cathedral towers.
I would have a magician’s hair, full of sleeves & saws,
unashamed to tell the whole town our first date was
in a leaky faucet factory. How we fell in love during jumps
on his tragic uncle’s trampoline. We fell in love in midair.
–– Chen Chen
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