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 #162
What is required of a poet to achieve authenticity in their writing? Certainly, it’s a quality that readers prize, even if it’s only through intuition or a strange neural excitation that we are alerted to its presence. I don’t know if it’s a course of study in the innumerable creative writing programs across the country – or whether it can be taught at all – but it’s worthy of consideration because, lacking it, even the most inventive poetry becomes mere pretense and performance. Across her long career as poet, essayist, translator, and educator, Jane Hirshfield has for me been a touchstone of the authentic, a writer I return to when I feel myself blown off-course by my own inner storms. And so I’m delighted to debut a new poem in the Red Letters, one that will appear next fall in The Asking: New and Selected Poems (from Knopf), Jane’s 10th collection. When I encounter a sense of the genuine radiating from a body of work, I can’t help feeling it’s a principle operating in that poet’s life as well, the two inextricably entwined. There’s a kind of daily practice that slowly shapes the mind’s sensory instrument, our interface with the world. Such honesty (and, I hasten to add, perilous clarity) can’t simply be turned on when there’s a pen in hand. Coming across this on the page, it’s as if these voices possess such magnetic force, the iron filings of our consciousness cannot help but respond.
In our formative years, we often first identify the magnetite of our own authentic voice when it’s unearthed in response to that of some other much-loved writer. We suddenly apprehend just how much one mind can invest in language and, once initiated into this rare literary brother/sisterhood, can’t help but mine our days for this precious ore. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s a whole genre of poetic memoir in praise of lost poets, honored mentors. I think of Donald Hall's Their Ancient Glittering Eyes, remembering the likes of Pound and Eliot; or Eileen Simpson's Poets in Their Youth, focusing on John Berryman and company. Jane is herself unfailingly generous in her praise of poets and artists who’ve helped identify and reinforce her sense of this artistic necessity. And so, upon learning that the great Polish poet Adam Zagajewski had died, Jane told me she spent a day rereading each of his collections, astonished that one’s life work can be so compressed and yet so consequential. In today’s poem, she remembers a walk she once took with Adam leading, it seems, from the streets of Kraków down to the banks of the Lethe. Delicately, she touches on the poet’s life, on and off the page, as only one can who has spent her own lifetime in similar pursuits. It feels to me as if the wind rises and falls through these stanzas, sweeping thoughts away, allowing new ones to settle. It is her unmistakable regard for this writer that guides our steps.
Judging from today’s literary marketplace, it’s hard to remember that – before the 1950s and the post-war boom in MFA programs – poetry was more of a passionate calling than a career. I think young writers these days have developed an unprecedented expertise in building audience, developing a creative brand, and harnessing technology to capitalize on their endeavors. The challenge, still, is whether they’ve also figured out how to connect their language-making abilities to what is most essential in their beings. The finest poetry is always about more fully inhabiting one’s own life, and comprehending the ways each life is connected to the totality of the living – both in this present moment and the ineluctable past. This experience of connectivity is, perhaps, the primary purpose of literature and, without it, meaning bleeds away from existence. Such awareness requires that you write with a different sense of urgency, knowing what is ultimately hanging in the balance. Without it, how can you expect the work to sustain you, or offer sustenance to a stranger?
A student once asked me the question: what’s required of a writer who desires such authenticity in their work? I answered, perhaps too quickly: simply everything. Was I romanticizing, overstating the situation? Thinking now of the work of Adam Zagajewski – and reading poets like Jane Hirshfield today – what’s the requisite price of admission? Not everything – just everything that matters.
Letter to Adam Zagajewski
(1945-2021)
As if walking the Old Town of Kraków
in one quick half hour
in the midst of a lengthening conversation—
in one afternoon and an evening, a life's work can be read.
Of all you had hoped for, much did arrive.
A new saeculum opened – however briefly – its windows.
You loved and were loved.
Your poems became themselves fully.
Also more sad.
The passion for birds, animals, insects, cities, mystics,
stayed for a lifetime.
To them, you compared many things.
The wind yawned for you once like a foxhound.
Dusk spoke in Sanskrit.
You noted, calmly, the earth's indifference,
then noted its chestnut trees' openings, summonings, calls.
You lived in three countries, carried three countries' passports.
Time stamped onto each of their pages
its visas' ornate, colored inks:
griefs, loves, meals, musics, haircuts.
Is it now—already so quickly?—for you
as you once imagined for poets then already dead?
“Their doubts vanished with them,” you wrote.
“Their rapture lives.”
––Jane Hirshfield
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
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
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