My Dear Readers,
I’m on the road this week––but rather than leave you Letter-less, I decided to share an older piece that many newer Red Letter readers will have missed (and old subscribers will likely savor a second time.) Instead of ‘Throwback Thursday,’ this will be another Flashback Friday! Enjoy Jennifer Barber’s meditation on the magnificent freight carried within the meaning of words.
How time flies! When this installment first appeared as Red Letter #60, this poetry project was just over one year old (we’re about to begin our fifth year!); and sweet George was turning five (now, rapidly approaching his eighth birthday.) And yet somehow, you and I haven’t aged a bit. Astonishing!
See you with a new poem next Friday!
Red Letter Flashback Friday
Just a short time ago, I was sitting on my son’s back porch playing with his toddler son. Little George would call to me: “Baw, baw!” And when I rolled the ball to him, he’d snatch at it with both hands and then applaud at the marvel of it all: he simply speaks a syllable, and Papa understands precisely what he needs. It seems a few weeks have passed, and George is about to turn five, a precocious boy who is prone to lecture me on the difference between a tower crane and a gantry crane at the construction site––or why referring to that long-necked creature in the picture book as a brontosaurus is no longer deemed correct; “paleontologists now call him a brachiosaurus, Papa”, and he gives me a bemused look. What a privilege: to witness a small being acquiring that most astonishing of tools, language, with which we each come to believe we might chart the vast distances between one thought and another––or, even more mind-boggling, between one galaxy (mine), and the one you inhabit, sitting there across the room.
And Jennifer Barber––whose poems seem to alternate between those quiet reaches within our hearts and the breathtakingly-mutable world without––reminds us that there is yet an even greater level of complexity involved when we attempt to rocket a probe into the deep space between one language, one culture, and another. But the impulse propelling us is not so very different from George’s: by what name can I conjure that object of desire; and how can I ever know if my signal has reached you? Jennifer’s poetry always seems adorned in its simple attire––and it takes some patience, a discerning eye and ear, to allow its beauty to overtake us––but when it does, we often find it has led us to unexpected beauties we, too, were quietly bearing. Her most recent collection is The Sliding Boat Our Bodies Made published by The Word Works. And she co-edited (with Jessica Greenbaum and Fred Marchant) a marvelous anthology of poems entitled Tree Lines: 21st century American poems (from Grayson Books.) In 2021, she was selected as the fourth Poet Laureate from Brookline, MA. And I cannot fail to mention that, way back in 1992, Jenny founded the literary journal Salamander, serving as its editor-in-chief through 2018 and patiently nurturing its evolution. Now centered at Suffolk University in Boston, it remains a space where the voices of young and diverse talents can test the powers of their own language experiments and launch them in our direction.
In the Hebrew Primer
A man. A woman. A road.
Jerusalem.
Nouns like mountain and gate,
water and famine,
wind and wilderness
arrange themselves in two
columns on the page.
The verbs are
remember and guard;
the verbs are
give birth to and glean.
The eye picks its way
through letters like
torches and doors, like scythes.
The harvest, the dust.
The day calls, the night sings
from the threshing floor.
A woman, a man:
I was, you were, we were.
–– Jennifer Barber
