The Red Letter Poem Project
The Red Letters 2.0: When I was first appointed as Poet Laureate for Arlington, MA one of my goals was to help bring the strength and delight of poetry into unexpected settings. The Red Letter Poems Project was going to be a novel way of sharing Arlington’s poetic voices, sent off in bright red envelopes, a one-off mass mailing intended to surprise and delight. But when the Corona crisis struck, and families everywhere were suffering a fearful uncertainty in enforced isolation, I converted the idea into an e-version which has gone out weekly ever since. Because of the partnership I forged with seven organizations, mainstays of our community, the poems have been able to reach tens of thousands of readers, throughout Arlington and far beyond its borders. I hope you too are grateful that these groups stepped up and reached out: The Arlington Commission for Arts and Culture, The Arlington Center for the Arts, The Arlington Public Library, The Arlington International Film Festival, Arlington Community Education, The Council on Aging, and YourArlington.com – each of which distributes or posts the new Red Letter installments and, in many cases, provide a space where all the poems of this evolving anthology continue to be available. And I’m delighted to add our newest RLP partner: Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene – a blog that is a marvelous poetry resource.
But now we are experiencing a triple pandemic: the rapid spread of the Covid virus, which then created an economic catastrophe, and served to further expose our long-standing crises around race and social justice. My hope is to have the Red Letters continue as a forum for poetic voices – from Arlington and all of the Commonwealth – that will help us gain perspective on where we are at this crucial moment and how we envision a healing will emerge. So please: pass the word, submit new poems, continue sharing the installments with your own e-lists and social media sites (#RedLetterPoems, #ArlingtonPoetLaureate, #SeeingBeyondCorona), and help further the conversation. Art-making has always been the way we human beings reflect on what is around us, work to alter our circumstances, and dream of what may still be possible. In its own small way, the Red Letters intends to draw upon our deepest voices to promote just such a healing and share our enduring hope for something better.
If you would like to receive these poems every Friday in your in-box plus notices about future poetry events, send an e-mail to: steven.arlingtonlaureate@gmail.com with the subject line ‘mailing list’.
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 #58
I stared at the headline on Yahoo News, convinced I must have mis-read the startling bold face: “The 50 Richest Americans Are Worth as Much as the Poorest 165 Million.” Drawing on data from a comprehensive U. S. Federal Reserve study examining how income inequality had been exacerbated during the Covid crisis, they charted how dire the situation had become. Inconceivable, isn’t it: a balance scale with 50 wealthy individuals standing on one tray and, on the other, fully one half of the entire American population. This should not come as news to any of us – but this succinct portrayal of how utterly out-of-balance our society has become felt like a blow to the heart. After all, wasn’t this a theme that ran through the last presidential election? And hadn’t economists been raising red flags for several decades now? No less prominent a Cassandra than hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio trumpeted this very warning in an essay two years back, and it earned him a spot on almost every news outlet. “I was raised with the belief” he wrote, “that having equal opportunity to have basic care, good education, and employment is what is fair and best for our collective well-being.” And now he feared that “the income/wealth/opportunity gap is leading to dangerous social and political divisions that threaten [society’s] cohesive fabric and capitalism itself.” He wasn’t just making a critique of capitalism though; he was giving fair warning to his fellow one-percenters that some reformation of the system was in their self-interest – or else the mobs with pitchforks would be coming soon. And now, after the January 6th insurrection, and the social justice protests across the country, and the vastly disproportionate Corona death rate between communities – perhaps his dark prediction is coming to pass.
Not surprisingly, these forces have given rise to art, cinema, and poetry that try to offer a vision of another way forward, one that eschews violence and attempts to remind us of ideals that once knitted our lives together. Arlington’s own Grace Solomonoff is just such a poet. She divides her year between the U.S. and Panama, and each living situation sharpens her perspective on the other. Often, her writing centers on the flora and fauna of the tropics and how she imagines our human place in this environment. But sometimes her poems are playful, full of mythic and even phantasmagoric imagination, as she nudges readers back to that dreamscape we all once had access to – a place where broad humanist ideals weighed as heavily on the mind’s scale as profit margin. A writer of varied interests, she’s had poems appear in journals like Prairie Schooner and Mother Jones, and received awards from the Poetry Society of America; but she also co-authored a book on marionettes and articles about artificial intelligence. Hers is a curious mind that wants to savor the full contents of this existence. Perhaps, following her lead, we can step away from our monetary concerns, even for a moment, and remember what led us to dance in the first place. That sort of freedom harms none, rewards the multitudes.
How I Spent My Day at the Bank of America
As the days grew like the money,
stacked up, flat, identical,
we secretaries said, "What can we do?"
From the top floor we danced down
among green confetti.
"Arrest them!" they cried
and we kept dancing.
"Straitjackets!" they cried
and we showered them with silver.
Suddenly the mail boys hip-hopped out
dancing with the finance advisers,
then tellers, waltzing,
corporate executives in a swan lake ballet.
We did the mambo through the hallways,
discoed down the great front steps,
brought silver ingots to the subways
gold pieces in the tenements.
Everywhere we scattered little suns
and the bank was an empty fort,
and we gave all the money away,
and we set the days free.
–– Grace Solomonoff
