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 #195
Shop Talk
The door-shop man talked…doors. He talked about
centimeters, frames of width and height,
his raised voice drowning as his sander droned
and dust flew from the jam he had in mind,
his goggles in the streamed flurry it snowed.
He rattled his thick fingers through a box
of hinges, saying hang so that the load
of the door weighed in its intransitive syntax.
That summer we shouldered slabs with holes for knobs
from delivery trucks, leaning them into
just tilted stacks against the cinder wall.
I’d mention poetry. His eyes would cross
in concentration almost. Then he’d smile
and skip getting fancy with Violets are blue.
––Michael T. Steffen
Shop talk: “a discussion about one's trade, business, or employment that only others in the same field can understand.” Yet there’s an unmistakable allure in jargon, don’t you think, the way that such specialized language evolves inside every trade or profession? It has the power to quickly confirm a sense of inclusion, or implicitly exclude the uninitiated. Back in college, I worked one summer in the warehouse of a local department store, helping to deliver furniture all across New York’s Southern Tier. Let me tell you, woe to the newbie who drives onto the loading dock with a settee on his forklift when the order was for a sectional! Yet I couldn’t help admiring how the men who schooled me in their occupation could balance-load a 24-foot box truck as artfully as I arranged iambs in a sonnet. I had a professor back then, Milton Kessler (a fine poet in his own right), who relished jargon in poems, praising the sense of “actuality” and “lived experience” they brought to a piece. And so, in Michael T. Steffen’s “Shop Talk”, it only takes a few lines to convince us that, sometime in his life, he’s put in his hours at the door shop, learning the trade. For me, the delight of the poem is watching the double-mind he’s conjured; the young apprentice who’s taby the earnest shop talk, while the agile mind of the poet can’t help but record the experience, leading us to speculate about what’s crucial within all of our working lives.
It's no accident that the poem begins with six monosyllables: “The door-shop man talked…doors”–– a hammering drumbeat, unadorned, workaday. But then the more complicated music and double entendres come rushing into play: “his raised voice drowning as his sander droned/ and dust flew from the jam he had in mind”. His boss’s voice is indeed buffeted by drown and drone––and we’re not surprised to see him, first awash in noise, then snowed in by blown sawdust (and oh, that troublesome mind-jam!) Poetry seems to be insinuating itself into the very texture of the labor. But when the actual mention of verse enters the conversation (has the speaker, perhaps, confessed what he really wants to do with his life?), the older man dismisses the enterprise with the most artless of rhymes (skipping the roses are red, as perhaps being too highbrow, but settling on those blue-collar violets––whether or not he’s aware that they signify modesty and humility.)
Michael’s poetry has the ear of a classicist and the calloused hands of the salt-of-the-earth citizenry. Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award, his work has appeared in such diverse places as The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, and The Concord Saunterer. His second strong collection, On Earth As It Is, was recently published by Cervena Barva Press. He’s also begun staging choral readings of important long-poems from the modern canon, including Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” and Donald Hall’s “The One Day.” Today’s piece brought to mind the characters of Robert Frost’s “The Death of the Hired Man.” If you’ll remember: there’s Silas, the itinerant farm hand, nearing the end of his life; and Harold Wilson, a college boy doing summer labor. Silas can’t comprehend the boy’s fixation on things like Latin and the violin––useless skills to this hardworking man. Still, he’d like to teach Harold “how to build a load of hay”––a task Silas has elevated into almost an artform. We’ve long had something of an uneasy relationship with poetry––in America more so than in many European countries. And so apprentice poets usually have had to find separate employment in order to survive. Are we incapable of valuing what the well-made poem provides for all of us? Must beauty be marketable before we’ll give it its due? Perhaps Michael learned (through his work in the shop as well as the notebook) how gratifying it is when either a poem or that well-crafted door swings open on its hinges, allowing others to enter. Both offer a welcome, and the invitation to make yourself at home.
Red Letters 3.0
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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
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