Red Letter Poem #217

 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 #217

 

 

 

 

A Pact

 

 

I make a pact with you, John Berryman.

I have detested you for a long time.

I completely agreed with your mother.

I thought you had no inner resources.

I saw your poems as navel gazing.

I saw you force form on a natural rhyme.

I still can’t believe you were such a child.

I wish I knew nothing of your real life.

I can now see, you had a bad disease.

I come to you now as a grown man.

I am taken by the Shakespeare in you.

I can even hear your Walt Whitman in there.

 

I see the minstrel in your vaudeville show.

I am old enough, now, to make amends.

 

 

 

                                     ––Kevin Gallagher

 

 

 

 

You say from Spring Hill: ‘I am not the same.’––

No more am I: I’m neither: without you I

Am not myself. . .

 

                         ––John Berryman, Berryman’s Sonnets #94

 

 

I, the first-person pronoun: how deceptively simple, when it appears in a poem.  Intimate. . .aloof. . .straightforward. . .confounding––this pronoun each one of us lives inside, hides behind, displays like a flag (but of decidedly mixed allegiance.)  Sometimes I signals the ‘confessional’ approach, an honest appeal to the reader, baring the heart.  In other instances, it projects a conception of the self, an aesthetic calculation we want the world to appreciate––hoping (at least in some cases) we, too, might come to believe it over time.  Kevin Gallagher’s new poem sets out a veritable picket fence of I’s as he attempts to make peace with one of modernity’s great and troubling poets (just as every ink-stained son or daughter must with their literary forebears.)  Of course, reading the piece, we’re left to grapple with a host of voices from a variety of poets, whose intentions likely do not coincide.

 

Let’s begin with some history: if you heard a vague echo in your ear when you first read Kevin’s opening lines, it’s because his piece is an elaborate reworking an older poem: Ezra Pound’s verse by the same name, dating from the beginning of the 20^th century.  Here it is in full:

 

A Pact

 

I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

 

Pound disliked Whitman’s long breathy lines and American matter-of-fact-ness, both in its subject matter and tone.  But he came at last to admire the Good Gray Poet’s authenticity and the liberating force of his imagination which, over time, helped give birth to what we think of as modern poetry.  When Whitman opens his long masterwork “Song of Myself” with this appeal to readers: “I CELEBRATE myself;/ And what I assume you shall assume;/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”, it takes time to realize this is not the “barbaric yawp” of some raging narcissist but the myth-making proclamation of our country’s first truly native (and radically inclusive) poetic voice.  In the diversity of offshoots that grew from Whitman’s roots, Berryman’s couldn’t have been more different: if Whitman wanted to carve out a dramatic distance from our European literary ancestors, Berryman’s brilliant mind wanted to wholly digest that lineage––Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne and (notably in his sonnet sequence) Sir Philip Sydney––and blend them with an unlikely 20^th century sensibility.  Erudite, often opaque, filled with strange inversions of syntax and kaleidoscopic literary references, the 117 poems of Berryman’s Sonnets (not to mention his even more phantasmagorical Dream Songs) both thrill and overwhelm.

 

Now, if you’re familiar with Kevin’s poetry, what likely comes to mind is its blue-collar honesty, its links to Irish history and mythology, its muscular and arresting imagery––all things Pound might applaud but which would certainly give Berryman pause.  And so what we have here is a tidal process across the generations: a kind of give and take, a raising up and breaking down––helping to refresh the language, drive the imagination.  It’s a familiar pattern among young poets: to counter their immediate antecedents and strike out in a new direction, building upon the wreckage of the old.  But then, over time (or so we hope), they’ll find themselves entering into a gradual reevaluation that helps us all to appreciate our literary ancestry, embracing the very traditions from which we’d once fought to free ourselves.  Keep in mind, some of these figures are more persona than person: is Walt Whitman of Brooklyn identical to the monumental I in his poetry?  Is the poet speaking in Berryman’s Sonnets the very same man who hoped those poems might entrance his beloved?  And, for that matter, is Dr. Kevin Gallagher––professor, political economist, and Director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center––the same mind traversing this bare-boned sonnet?  Or the same as the poet and publisher, author of four fine collections (most recently And Yet It Moves from Madhat Press), who I know from captivating readings around Boston?  No easy answer presents itself.  So as I watch him construct that column of I’s in this poem, and wrestle (as every writer must) with what the head and heart each demand upon the page, I can’t help thinking about all the scores of men and women whose creative visions I, too, have battled with, fed upon.  My desire to know them was always, perhaps, a stand-in for the even-more-daunting desire to eventually know myself.

 

 

 

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:

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* 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