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 #179
I Will Not Name It Except To Say is the title of Lee Sharkey’s eighth and final collection of poetry. She put together the manuscript in 2020, working within that shadowy valley between a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer and, two months later, her untimely passing. The poems, written in the prior two years, were already mindful of the small and large griefs most of us experience while aging––but the poet’s lessons in loss had been magnified by her husband Al’s intensifying struggles with Alzheimer’s. She had to witness his brilliant mind being slowly effaced, knowing that the only balm she could offer was to continue loving him. And yet the poems are equally concerned with––not what is taken from us––but what we must constantly strive to reclaim through the power of memory, will, and our imaginative potential. Re-reading the poems now, I am continually astonished by the luminous quality of the work, whether she is unscrolling carefully etched images or surrealistic fragments of dream. This is, to say the least, a substantial achievement. Of course, Lee never got to see the finished book in print but, in an almost herculean act, her publisher at Tupelo Press was able to put together a proof copy––adorned with her chosen cover art, Paul Klee’s flickering seraph entitled “Angelus Novus”––so she could at least hold that in her hands.
Lee’s writing––always quite imagistic in its approach––pays homage to the work of visual artists referenced all throughout the text: Klee, Kandinsky, George Grosz, Käthe Kollwitz, among others. One of the central pillars of the collection is a sequence of a dozen prose poems inspired by the life and work of Samuel Bak: prolific painter, writer, and Holocaust survivor. Like Bak, Lee has wedded the materials of our mundane existence to haunting images of personal memory, communal history, and the sort of strange glimmerings that feel like a kind of mystical awakening. In the Jewish religion, God is unnamable, referred to only through a host of euphemisms; and in a similar way, Lee understood she could never pin down what was taking place within the private and inviolable core of life’s fearsome transformations––but neither could she remain silent. As an acclaimed poet, editor, teacher, mentor, she also understood that these poems were a kind of keeping faith with all she had known in the years she’d been given. Clearly at work here is the way poetry’s lucidity can be used as (using Robert Frost’s phrase) a momentary stay against confusion. But at other times, she is enigmatic, mercurial, coming at us from odd angles––as if, even in her saying, she needed to allow readers the imaginative space to incorporate their own inner responses, piecing together our fragmented worlds.
As many may know, the title of Lee’s poem here is borrowed from a Talmudic passage whose roots date back to the 1st century CE. Tikkun Olam, often translated as ‘repairing the world,’ has since become one of the cornerstones of Jewish thought. Especially in the post-Holocaust experience, where the utter brokenness of the world can feel overwhelming, the commentary is that ‘it is not incumbent upon us to complete this task, but neither can we desist from trying.’ The prose poem is, perhaps, an ideal choice for such subject matter. A most welcoming verse form, it resembles the humble paragraph (with which everyone is familiar and few intimidated), though its voice and vision behave like the unbridled lyric poem. Without the choreographic cues of line breaks, we readers are compelled to discover our own rhythmic turnings within the piece, our points of emphasis and momentary silences as we pause for each new breath. With every reading, we make this prose poem our own inky vessel, reassembling the shards, and finding that it’s capacious enough to contain all that poet and reader bring to the moment. From what I’ve heard about Lee’s generous spirit and her tireless engagement with each community of which she was a part, this poet’s energies were continually marshalled toward repairing our troubled existence, illuminating the dark. And in those closing moments in her life, she was still fully engaged by the healing properties of language, even as she looked out into the starless night.
Red Letter Poem #179
Tikkun
The scroll of the Law’s gone blank. An angel unrolls and holds it. A hole the size of a country appears in it, with tears branching out. Look, look! says the Angel of Melancholy, pointing to the rupture. It’s the inverse of the gesture for blessing that hovers over the tiny shack on the workbench before him, where smoke rises from the chimney. The woman who lives there has lit candles, covered her eyes, muttered the prayer over bread. She sits for a moment as stars rise in the heavens. Bending to lift a letter that fell from the scroll of the Law, she carries it to bed.
––Lee Sharkey
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
No comments:
Post a Comment