Red Letter Poem #139

 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 #139

 

 

 

 

I just re-read Lynne Viti’s brand-new collection, The Walk to Cefalú (Cornerstone Press) and the word that kept coming to mind was ordinary.  In other contexts, you might think I was being critical of her work, but that’s not at all the case.  What I mean is this: we are presented here with a poet writing about the passage of time: ordinary days, the customary procession of seasons, the unremarkable range of emotions we all find ourselves coping with as we continue placing one foot in front of the other, following where the days lead us.  Her joys tend to be quiet joys – the bounty of relationships, the beauty of the garden, the delights of the kitchen, the fullness of memory – with few pyrotechnics or dramatic flourishes.  And so we instantly believe them; we live them; they deepen what was present in our experience all along.  Her griefs, when they arrive, are ones we all have in common – even as we feel her heart utterly shaken.  I imagine most readers will simply find themselves nodding their heads: yes.  Some poets captivate us by exploring the unfathomable occurrences that cut to the core of existence; or they write with such a bracing and inventive style as to make us rethink the very nature of poetry.  Lynne’s poems let us walk beside her, as if we were one of her circle of intimates; and as she muses aloud about what we are seeing – or slips into her treasure house of remembered moments to pluck one as if it were ripe fruit – we taste what she offers.  Some literary practitioners leave us feeling that our ordinary lives are somehow insufficient, inspiring us perhaps to demand more.  Lynne reminds us that we have hardly scratched the surface of what our days contain; only deeper attention is required of us to sound the depths.

 

Lynne is faculty emerita in the Writing Program at Wellesley College, and currently serves on the Board of the New England Poetry Club.  The Walk… is her fourth poetry collection.  And when, across whole sections of the book, she delves into the histories of family members – lives she failed to take the true measure of until now – the expression it takes a village came to mind.  It’s a kind of reaffirmation of the complex web of relationships necessary to nurture every single child.  But Lynne teases out a corollary to that concept: later in life, that same child must then contain a village, preserving within one consciousness that interwoven community voices which endures within memory long after its members have vanished from the shared earth. 

 

 

At the Yoga Studio

 

 

Last to class, I spread my mat on a spot just inside the studio.

I roll off the mat, nudge it away from the stream of cold air

coming in through the space between floor and door

 

leave my sweatshirt and socks on until we finish neck rolls

until we finish side stretches until we’ve finished pelvic tilts

until we go up in bridge pose

 

The draft from the hallway no longer concerns me

the frigid air outside the building no longer concerns me

the ache of grief, fresh or old no longer concerns me

 

I sit in sukhasana and bend forward slowly, deliberately

till I reach my edge I pose and repose

that my nose does not touch my ankles no longer concerns me

 

When I lie against the wall in viparita karani

when I count the breaths in out I forget that I was late—

here is the place of ease, the place of comfort, of peace

 

Sitting in my car, I know I should hold on to

that state of not holding on to anything—

not switch on the car radio to grasp news/not check my phone.

 

Fat snowflakes fall onto my windshield—

The sunless day stirs joy in my heart

 

 

    ––Lynne Viti

 

                       

 

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/3217-redletter-last

 

 

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

 

Somerville Artist Sophia Ainslie: An artist of movement and color.

 

I met Somerville artist Sophia Ainslie at the Vernon Street Studios on a cold day in November. She was part of their Open Studios event. She is a woman that exudes flashes of energy and her work is reflective of that energy.



How has Somerville been for you as an artist?

Somerville has provided me with a studio in a building with other artists. I’m grateful to work amongst others rather than in isolation.


You incorporate a lot of dashing colors in your work (at least from what I have seen) and after viewing them I had a sense of movement—that the painting was actually moving. Do I need a psychiatrist—or was that your intent?


Hahaha! I think you need a psychiatrist ( laugh). Different works have different personalities and different intentions. There may be a lot of movement in my work and perhaps that’s reflective of my environment in someway - nothing stands still..


I see the movement in my most current work almost like a frozen gesture because of the way that it’s made. it often begins loose, gestural and spontaneously but then I go over the gestural spontaneity to flatten the paint, almost as if I’m capturing that gesture and freezing it in time.


I've read that you often try to achieve a bodily experience when you are painting, rather than a conceptual one. Explain.


I am a very physical and experiential person, aware of my surroundings and how they affect me and others. I am also process based. I balance concept with the bodily experience of process. I need a concept to begin my work. But I’m not interested in illustrating the concept. The concept gets me started and then the process directs me. The process is the bodily reaction and experience. I’m working from my core rather than my head.


You have done a lot of work with murals. I was reading about one you did with your students at Northeastern University. What draws you this type of expression?


I’m drawn to large scale indoor murals because it allows me to work much bigger than I possibly could in my studio. This changes the work on multiple levels.


Formally, the lines become thicker and the shapes become bigger. This gives it a very different presence in the world. The viewer becomes much more engulfed in the work. It’s more experiential.


A bigger work that is painted directly on the wall becomes apart of the architecture. I am very aware of where the work sits within the architecture, the relationship of the work to the ceiling and the floor, or whether there are duct pipes or other skeletal features of the architecture. all these components become part of the work and influenced the way I compose it.


It also becomes a full body experience. What I mean is I’m painting with my full arm and my whole body rather than my wrist. I become part of the work. The work envelops me. it’s much more experiential and at the same time, more intimate too. The painting and I become extensions of each other.


If you had to come up with a mission statement for your work what would that be?

I was with my mother when she exhaled for the last time. After her death and began using a single x-ray of her abdomen combined with my surrounding landscape as source material. It proved to be a way to hold onto her memory and absorb the meaning of her passing; the resulting shapes and marks led to the development of a visual language.


The process began by projecting the x-ray onto paper and tracing specific shapes of organs and spaces between organs. These were then painted with acrylic and Flashe in flat opaque shapes of color commemorating the body. I would then react to the shapes making spontaneous marks in black India ink. As the work involved I began using the computer as a cutting tool to ‘collage’ carefully selected shapes and marks. Almost as if performing surgery, areas were fragmented, reconstituted and ultimately mapped through light projection.


In the last three years, my contact is shifted away from the content of my mother’s body to looking deeply at structure and relationships- of scale, color, application, The manner in which shapes meet and the specificity of the edge they create in their meeting. Often beginning with observation as a starting point, my paintings and with the look of abstraction. They are a translation of what I see and experience.


Ultimately it’s a celebration and orchestration of color, line, shape – the visual elements in the work and their relationship to each other. And creating a sense of democracy between these elements - a harmonious coexistence and sense of equality. It’s a conversation of trial and error, which when successful opens my eyes to new and surprising outcomes.

To find out more about Sophia    

https://www.sophiaainslie.com/

Red Letter Poem #138

 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 #138

 

 

 

 

The term itself conjures mystery: horology.  It is the science (or art – even Webster’s equivocates) of making timepieces or measuring time.  In mankind’s earliest development, an understanding of time’s passage was something akin to wisdom.  From Egyptian sundials and water clocks; to the elaborate 17^th century contraptions harnessing pendulums, springs, and hand-wrought gears; through the high-tech chronometers adorning wrists today where an oscillating sliver of silicon carves each second into a hundred pieces – it seems something in human consciousness takes comfort in the attempt to regulate the horological, knowing full well how time defies our timekeepers at every turn.

 

And so Denise Bergman returns to the Red Letters with a fascinating linguistic device where the springs and escapements of grammar make us all into watchmakers, our workbench surrounded by the echoes of history and desire.  Can we rely on our tools, our skills, to coax that “dead 1:22” back from oblivion?  Has time’s arrow been misplaced in our understanding, or has it already found its target?  I’m left feeling a little befuddled, one eye gazing through a jeweler’s loupe at the minute details of our fragile now, while my other eye squints at the bright window where flocks of days and months seem to race past like birds on a southward trajectory.  The poem makes me savor that faint tick-ticking inside my ribcage, as words trickle through the hourglass of couplets.  Denise is the author of five poetry collections, the most recent of which is The Shape of the Keyhole (from Black Lawrence Press.)  As was her penchant in the earlier volumes, this one is formed around a single historical figure and incident – in this case, one week in the year 1650 as a woman accused of witchcraft awaits her hanging.  No surprise that time is again a protagonist in her verse.  Denise is also the editor of the anthology City River of Voices, a literary panorama of Cambridge, MA where she’s made her home for decades.

 

I must add that “Split Second” is also an ekphrastic poem – a piece created in response to an existing artwork – in this case, the eccentric and engaging Watchmaker by Jacob Lawrence, the noted Harlem Renaissance painter.  And it dawns on me that one of the projects of both the artist and poet is to arrest time so that even the momentary can be seen as momentous, capable of bearing our scrutiny, our delight.  We lose ourselves briefly, standing before the canvas or rereading the poem, only to reemerge into our morning refreshed, invigorated – blissfully unaware of how much time has fled in our absence.

 

 

 

Split Second

 

                   (Watchmaker, Jacob Lawrence, 1946)

 

 

Into the split second where the gear’s teeth will engage,

a man peers, head tilted, eyepiece wedged against gravity’s claim

 

Arm on a ledge of air, his fingers with tiny tools mend time

Look who’s waiting: Cupid on a table-clock’s brass bell

 

arched back, arrowless bowstring pulled taut

Nude stretched on a tangerine sun, hour hand mired in dusk

 

On the wall behind intent’s blue-stripe shoulders, a dead 1:22,

jittering 7:10, paralyzed ticktock swinging on a wristband

 

Mouth to the watchmaker’s earless ear

the 11:45 waits to start counting

 

The hand in his hand stutters  His work is working on time

 

 

                                                ––Denise Bergman

                       

 

 

 

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/3207-redletter-102822

 

 

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