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 #202
Family Photographs:
My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965
In a year, Haldol, ECT, the closed gates of a sanitarium.
But for now—how happy you were. To be eleven and unconcerned
For once with school, the Cubs, who punched who.
For a few minutes to be unlearned, to be taught
A new world. O, distant boy, how marvelous
It all must have been, to be turned into a ghoul with your friends,
To spurn the murmur of grown-ups with their highballs and hair
On the deck for a lowering sky burned sepia, orange.
At three o’clock to feel yourself disappear inside yourself —
To cast no shadow. And – so long ago now
how did you put it? —the delicious, insistent thought
What if it stays like this? To yearn and yet not to know yet
What that yearning meant.
––Danny Lawless
Danny Lawless is twice-blessed. This might seem like a strange thing to say because––reading through the poems of his new book, I Tell You This Now (Cervena Barva Press)––we find no small amount of anguish in his work, though it’s certainly balanced with an equal measure of love (with the two often inextricably braided inside a single poem.) In a note to me, Danny helped identify the source of both this grief and his early impulse to poetry: “I imagine the stirrings of poetry begin in one's sensitivity to the world. . .in my case, among three schizophrenic siblings: brilliant, kind, reserved, graceful boys and girl...until taken up by the whirlwind, each at puberty. I was 8 when my older brother was diagnosed; and then on down the line.” How carefully observed, agonizing, and yet utterly restrained his phrasing––“and then on down the line”––all qualities that appear throughout Danny’s poetry. Such sensitivity can easily become a burden, powerful enough to drag an individual under the waves, if one does not find a way to discharge some of those dire energies––and certainly Danny has done so marvelously in this, his second collection: clear-eyed, dream-stunned, painfully beautiful. His first blessing.
But then there is the life of a public poet, something Danny achieved slowly, only after a number of decades. As a young man, he began ‘publishing’ his poems on mimeo sheets stapled to telephone poles in Louisville where he went to college (influenced by his fascination with homemade concert posters similarly displayed during the early days of punk rock.) It would require a long gestation, but he eventually founded Plume: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry which has published monthly issues ever since 2012, as well as annual anthologies under the imprint Plume Editions. A dozen years on, and his journal has become one of the most vibrant forums for poetry and aesthetics, with a broad and loyal readership. The roster of poets who have appeared there is a who’s-who of contemporary writing. Blessing number two.
But let me focus for a moment on what takes place inside Danny’s poems. In “My Brother, Solar Eclipse, 1965”, for example, the diction has the lightness of childhood patter: school days, sports teams, “who punched who.” And so the contrast with that opening line (“Haldol, ECT, the closed gates of a sanitarium.”) strikes us like a gut-punch. The poet’s spot-on depiction instantly takes us back to our own childhoods when we experienced things like illness and loss as if they were vast and almost supernatural forces. How are we to comprehend, let alone resist, being swept away by them? But as an adult, we can’t help but feel a certain indignation: how dare illness trespass inside the precincts of innocence (followed quickly by the sobering realization: how dare I be surprised?) The love of his older brother is infused in the poem’s every detail; and then––beneath the encompassing darkness of a solar eclipse, the very natural order of the universe seemingly overturned––the brother risks a teasing/terrorizing proposition: “What if it stays like this?” But from where we readers are standing, the deeper meaning of the statement erupts, and our hearts can’t help but plummet. It is one thing to write poems that––in a sense which extends far beyond the metaphorical––help save one’s own life. In fact, I think that’s every poet’s and artist’s first responsibility: to build their own creative life raft to buoy themselves across the world’s treacherous flood. But when I am reading Danny’s writing, I don’t just feel a deep kinship with that elusive speaker; I find that the poems become vessels which I may board, bringing my own history and emotional turbulence as cargo. To say that something within a work of art has rescued me from my own disasters––that’s one of the highest compliments I can pay a fellow-poet. Danny strikes me as being quite a self-effacing individual, and I seriously doubt he would claim any of this for himself––but we can do it for him, and gladly. So perhaps I was incorrect when I called Danny Lawless twice-blessed. Thrice.
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
