Red Letter Poem #195

 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

 

* 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

Somerville Printmaker Liv Cappello: Leaving an imprint on her audience

I recently caught up with printmaker Liv Cappello, who recently took up a space at the Vernon Street Studios.  She went to college in the hinterlands of Vermont, and is now in the Paris of New England--Somerville, MA--perfecting her craft.



How has it been for you as an artist working in Somerville, and being a resident of the Vernon St. Studios?


I’m relatively new to Vernon Street (moved in late 2023) but I’ve already met a few of the wonderful artists in both buildings and have learned a lot from their experience at Vernon street and through their art practices. My past studios have been in garages, basements, and my bedroom, so I’m excited to not only have my own studio space but to be a part of a community of artists. I also love how arts-focused Somerville is - it feels like a key part of the community here and we need to keep it that way by protecting Somerville’s fabrication districts! http://www.dontfwithfab.org/).




You named your studio after your favorite wilderness trail in Vermont, the LONG TRAIL. Tell us about the trail, and what experience you had there that influenced your work.



I went to college in Vermont and lived there for a bit after graduating. Part of my college’s campus intersects with the Long Trail, and while I’ve camped off the trail many times, I’ve yet to actually hike the whole thing. I planned to in 2020 but that fell through - it’s still a goal of mine! I love everything about the state — the small, tight-knit communities, the enthusiasm for the outdoors, the appreciation for small artists and small businesses. I came up with the name Long Trail Studio as a nod to the place that shaped a lot of my young adult life.




You are a printmaker, among other things. Can you give us a snapshot of the process that goes into the making of your prints?


I’m trying to be a little more planful with my art - I usually just grab a piece of linoleum or wood and start carving and hope for the best. I’ve gotten into screen printing in the past few years, which is a medium that, unfortunately for me, requires a lot more planning than I’m used to. I started teaching screen printing classes at Artisan’s Asylum in Allston a while back - learning to teach and articulate each step to other people has been really helpful in slowing me down and making me appreciate the process. This is especially true with three or four color screen prints, which require a lot of measuring and registering paper, etc.


Most of my screen prints start with a sketch in my notebook that turns into a finalized design in Adobe Illustator or Procreate; then is burned into a mesh screen coated in emulsion; then is washed out and ready to print onto paper by pulling ink through the screen with a squeegee. Once you’ve got the process down it’s relatively easy - and addicting. I make each of my prints by hand, so every single copy of a print is a little different from the last - that’s one of my favorite things about this medium.



From viewing your gallery online, you have a variety of subjects for your prints—fish, an elongated, sinewy torso of a woman, a can of Somerville coffee, etc... How do you pick your subjects?


A lot of my earlier work was inspired by living in Vermont - I did a lot of topo maps, trees, trail maps of the Middlebury College Snowbowl and maps of the state itself. Since moving to Massachusetts, I’ve leaned more toward representing things in my daily life - though I still feel really connected to the outdoors and go back through old backpacking photos and memories of trips for inspiration in my art. Most of my work was black and white when I started out because I thought a big jar of black block ink on sale at Blick. I’ve finally gotten through that jar and my new years resolution for 2024 is to use a lot more color, so hopefully I’ll follow through with that in my work this year.


Why should we view your art?


I think there’s something cool about seeing art in the everyday object. A lot of my work is based on simple and playful things that you’d see from day to day and I think if you can see the beauty in that, you might like my work!

Alan Kaufman speaks to Endicott College Creative Writing Students

Review of Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight, a play by John Kolvenbach

 Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight

Review of Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight, a play by John Kolvenbach

Huntington Theatre, at the Maso Stage at the Huntington through March 23, 2024

By Andy Hoffman

Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight put the play back in the theater experience. Though it has no plot to speak of, Stand Up runs for a very engaging hour of meta-theater. Directed and written by John Kolvenbach, the script operates like a cooperative game where the audience’s reaction become part of the entertainment. Composed specifically for Jim Ortlieb, who plays The Man in the one-man (almost) show, Stand Up asks questions about the theater-going experience, most sharply: “What is the purpose of theater? Why go at all?” Given that the play was written during the pandemic, the question has teeth. If we don’t experience the transcendence of live theater, that moment when the play and performance disappear into the emotional and intellectual understanding great theater provides, then it will have lost its purpose. Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight reinvigorates that transcendent joy and provides an hour of laughter at the same time.

The Maso Stage looks like a rehearsal space, filled with mix-and-match chairs at floor level and several rows of risers behind. The upstage wall has a mishmash of old sets, lights, and furniture from earlier shows. When Ortlieb and Kolvenbach first staged the show in Los Angeles, as the pandemic began to wane, they took hold or a performance space that had not received a human presence for a couple of years, and the set for Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight evokes that same gestalt, the purgatory of a theater waiting for a play and an audience to see it. The Man builds up interactions with the audience which pile up until prepared to feel. It’s sort of a positive response to the nihilistic view of theater without an audience expressed by The Player in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead: “It was not until the murderer’s long soliloquy that we were able to look around. . . . Our eyes searched you out (until) every exposed corner in every direction proved uninhabited. . . .The silence was unbreakable.” The magic in this performance comes through theater’s ability to conjure up a connection with an audience – in fact, conjure an audience itself – from one nameless character operating with a series of comic bits, sympathetic tugs, and a few scripted interactions.

Jim Ortlieb pulls of a high-wire act for his hour onstage. The audience has little reason to engage with him as he rambles around the pile of junk that comprises the set. From the moment he enters the stage carrying a board and a sawhorse, we wonder who he is. The Man puts off the start of the play several times, or he seems too. He also breaks the continuity of illusion with several periods of silence. He tempts the audience to leave, to look away, to simply disengage, but the 200 spectators I sat with kept their focus on the stage and on the man even through the surprise ending. Ortlieb deserved the standing ovation he received.

The performance maintains its questioning interaction with the audience even after the play has ended, inviting people up to the stage for drinks and conversation. Stand Up If You’re Here Tonight leaves the audience feeling as though it has helped answer the question about how theater can survive the pandemic and even return stronger. That’s a massive achievement