Saturday, October 29, 2022
Friday, October 28, 2022
Red Letter Poem #133
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 #133
“The Way that can be told in words is not the true Way.” So begins (paradoxically) Lao Tsu’s seminal Taoist text, Tao Te Ching – penned six centuries before (what a Christian scholar might refer to as) ‘the Common Era.’ In Judaism, Adonai or Hashem are not the true (and unknowable) names of God – they are placeholders marking an entry point into mystery. It is, in fact, a common element in many mystical traditions: that what one sees directly may not represent the essential spirit of the matter; and perhaps, looking away, some ineffable hint of knowing begins to take hold.
Jack Stewart is a talented poet with a keen interest in stories, both ancient and modern, religious and secular. His poems often begin with a received narrative – whether Biblical, artistic, historical, or personal; but he only indirectly explores this subject matter, trying to find out instead something about what the story has left out, obscured, or could never grasp in the first place. But even in his poems with overtly religious themes, he has little interest in arriving at easy formulations or established truths. If there is anything doctrinal in his writing, it appears to be his faith in clear images as a window into both the surrounding landscape and the mind’s enigmatic terrain. But, of course, the pleasure lies in the journey, not the arrival – and in poems like today’s installment, the poet clearly situates us within his scene and, at the same time, prompts us to long for what is quietly felt as absence or (though the term is over-used) the possibility of transcendence.
Jack published his first collection in 2020 -- No Reason, from the Poeima Poetry Series. He’s had work appear in fine journals like Poetry, Iowa Review, and New York Quarterly – but also appeared in places where you might not expect a poet to venture: the Journal of the American Medical Association, Military Experience and the Arts, and The Perch (Yale Program for Recovery and Mental Health) – all signs of a peripatetic intelligence uneasy with boundaries. Educated at the University of Alabama and Emory University, he became a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology. He now directs the Talented Writers Program at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale. Of course, these biographical details are easily blown aside to be replaced by the clear-eyed observations and subtle musicality within his “Eclipse” – something I trust will be worth remembering in the end.
Eclipse: What You See When You Look Away
The rocks along the shoreline
sun themselves like gray crabs.
The thin sheets of ice that held them
down last winter,
that broke when stepped on,
are gone. The waves imitate
the see-saw of breathing.
Sometime between one and one thirty,
the sun will deepen into
a knot of wood round and dark
as an oracle. At that moment,
the light we have no color for
will still, and I can almost forget
the faces I wish I could touch again.
Down the beach, a small gray moth
of people might gather,
not looking up at what we are told
would be dangerous to see. Another age
might call that holy, something you want
to but can’t see. Something that
cannot be named satisfactorily.
Tonight, everyone will tell
how they were witnesses
to something they were turned away from.
Yellow lights dot the hills above
the beach. Inside, people pass plates,
knowing how rare it is to encounter
anything worth remembering.
––Jack Stewart
The Red Letters 3.0
* 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
* 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/3184-redletter-090222
and 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 Twitter
@StevenRatiner
Tuesday, October 25, 2022
Poetry Reading Nov. 9 Lee Varon and David Miller
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Poetry Reading
November 9, 20227:00pm
First Church Congregational (Stone Church just outside of Harvard Sq.)
11 Garden St, Cambridge, MA 02138
Lee Varon is a social worker and writer. She is the co-editor of "Spare Change News Poems: An Anthology by Homeless People and Those Touched by Homelessness." She has written several volumes of poetry, and her most recent book is an illustrated children's book for kids aged 7 - 12, "My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery."
David P. Miller's second book of poems, "Bend in the Stair," was published by Lily Poetry Review Books in 2021. A retired college librarian, David is a member of the New England Poetry Club Board of Directors. He lives in Jamaica Plain with his wife, the visual artist Jane Wiley.
