Red Letters 229

 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

Saturday!



The fifth annual Red Letter LIVE! reading

has arrived!

Saturday, November 9th 2024

Robbins Library, Community Room, 700 Mass Ave, Arlington

1-3pm, with a reception to follow

Free, and all are welcome!



Featuring poets:



Danielle Legros Georges

Indran Amirthanayagam

Heather Treseler &

Steven Ratiner

with a musical performance by clarinetist

Todd Brunel

If you’re in the Boston area, we’d love to see you there



Hosted by

Steven Ratiner and Jean Flanagan



Red Letter Poem #229



Cupid Peruses The Times


A curly-headed cupid, reading

on my balcony, rain-drenched

and naked, hand on chubby chin,

thinking, no doubt, about what

certain words mean—delirious:

the way his perfumed head feels?

Or rapacious: his appetite for gold-

tipped anything and honey skin?

And resuscitate, to raise up again

in Latin, the way Lazarus, risen

from his tomb in Bethany,

ate supper with his sister Martha.

As in: restored to daily walks

and the scent of lemon trees.

My cupid reads ventilator, thinks

Ventus, the night wind his mother—

wild black hair rising—

calls the breath of the gods.


––Teresa Cader





Thank goodness for that angelic presence! Not the cherubic sculpture that Teresa Cader has perched on her balcony (though I’m sure her familiar companion provides both comfort and inspiration at times while this poet sits quietly sipping morning coffee.) No, I mean this elemental, all-pervasive aspect of our lives: language. Or, more specifically, the sylph-like way words––unexpected meanings, captivating images, musically-charged syllables––circle about us, infusing nearly every waking moment. They’re like a kind of intermediary between the inner landscape of consciousness and the outer material world––so familiar (from Latin familiāris–– “of the household,”) we often take them for granted. Language––especially those forms to which we’ve given our deepest, our most artful attention––reflects a certain light on the substance of our days until we find ourselves experiencing a heightened emotional impact, its elusive beauty. It almost seems as if words––even those that sometimes come to us unexpectedly, in an intuitive leap––cannot help but prompt small or great awakenings (such as my casual phrase we find ourselves for example which, I am reminded now, is at the heart of our attraction to those gifts poets and prose writers lavish upon us.)

Teresa is one of those fine craftswomen and determined explorers I return to often in order to jumpstart my own sluggish consciousness. It’s why I took pleasure in seeing the first copies of AT RISK, Teresa’s fourth collection of poetry, finally arriving this month on bookshelves. Published by Ashland Poetry Press, the book was awarded the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Award, judged by Mark Doty. Reviewers are already heaping praise on this work which furthers an already-distinguished career. Right from her first collection, Guests––honored by The Journal/Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize and the Norma Farber First Book Award–– the clarity and fierce honesty of her voice was evident. Many honors soon followed including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe. I think it’s admirable, as well, that she’s spent many years working to inspire younger writers to develop their own poetic voices, teaching in programs at MIT, UMass-Boston, the Emerson College Graduate Writing Program and, for a decade, the low-residency MFA Program at Lesley University.



Meditating on this wingéd presence, Teresa finds herself unpacking the rich baggage words bring with them. After all, meanings accumulate, evolve over time––and thus language bears the impression of those who came earlier (sometimes centuries before our arrival,) and whose utterance takes on a new life within our own. If we make ourselves open to it, we may intuit those distant lives in the very derivation––the family lineage, so to speak––evident on the page or echoing on the tongue. Think, for a moment, of the range of connotations contained in that delirium Teresa imagines her cupid feeling; did you imagine the doorways to the heart swinging open or the gates of Bedlam? Because of the present context of our fraught election season, rapacious couldn’t help but bring to mind any number of recent headlines. And I hope that we have not grown so inured to Covid that the word ventilator doesn’t conjure flashes from those desperate early days of the pandemic when hospitals were hard-pressed to keep patients alive (even as, today, I try to force my mind imagine the breath of the gods conveying some sort of protection upon us all.) This poem seems to bring a quiet dissonance between its playful approach and its more ominous overtones. As I am finishing my revision of this Letter, the Presidential election is underway, and our nation’s voice will become manifest. I am hopeful but anxious (another two-faced Janus of a word that carries a range of meanings.) By the time this Red Letter reaches you, perhaps you’ll be perusing your own copy of The Times, and a new path for our country will have made itself clear. I pray the better angels of our nature (to borrow a phrase heavy-laden with history) will have prevailed.

 

 

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