Red Letter Poem #217

 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 #217

 

 

 

 

A Pact

 

 

I make a pact with you, John Berryman.

I have detested you for a long time.

I completely agreed with your mother.

I thought you had no inner resources.

I saw your poems as navel gazing.

I saw you force form on a natural rhyme.

I still can’t believe you were such a child.

I wish I knew nothing of your real life.

I can now see, you had a bad disease.

I come to you now as a grown man.

I am taken by the Shakespeare in you.

I can even hear your Walt Whitman in there.

 

I see the minstrel in your vaudeville show.

I am old enough, now, to make amends.

 

 

 

                                     ––Kevin Gallagher

 

 

 

 

You say from Spring Hill: ‘I am not the same.’––

No more am I: I’m neither: without you I

Am not myself. . .

 

                         ––John Berryman, Berryman’s Sonnets #94

 

 

I, the first-person pronoun: how deceptively simple, when it appears in a poem.  Intimate. . .aloof. . .straightforward. . .confounding––this pronoun each one of us lives inside, hides behind, displays like a flag (but of decidedly mixed allegiance.)  Sometimes I signals the ‘confessional’ approach, an honest appeal to the reader, baring the heart.  In other instances, it projects a conception of the self, an aesthetic calculation we want the world to appreciate––hoping (at least in some cases) we, too, might come to believe it over time.  Kevin Gallagher’s new poem sets out a veritable picket fence of I’s as he attempts to make peace with one of modernity’s great and troubling poets (just as every ink-stained son or daughter must with their literary forebears.)  Of course, reading the piece, we’re left to grapple with a host of voices from a variety of poets, whose intentions likely do not coincide.

 

Let’s begin with some history: if you heard a vague echo in your ear when you first read Kevin’s opening lines, it’s because his piece is an elaborate reworking an older poem: Ezra Pound’s verse by the same name, dating from the beginning of the 20^th century.  Here it is in full:

 

A Pact

 

I make truce with you, Walt Whitman—
I have detested you long enough.
I come to you as a grown child
Who has had a pig-headed father;
I am old enough now to make friends.
It was you that broke the new wood,
Now is a time for carving.
We have one sap and one root—
Let there be commerce between us.

 

Pound disliked Whitman’s long breathy lines and American matter-of-fact-ness, both in its subject matter and tone.  But he came at last to admire the Good Gray Poet’s authenticity and the liberating force of his imagination which, over time, helped give birth to what we think of as modern poetry.  When Whitman opens his long masterwork “Song of Myself” with this appeal to readers: “I CELEBRATE myself;/ And what I assume you shall assume;/ For every atom belonging to me, as good belongs to you.”, it takes time to realize this is not the “barbaric yawp” of some raging narcissist but the myth-making proclamation of our country’s first truly native (and radically inclusive) poetic voice.  In the diversity of offshoots that grew from Whitman’s roots, Berryman’s couldn’t have been more different: if Whitman wanted to carve out a dramatic distance from our European literary ancestors, Berryman’s brilliant mind wanted to wholly digest that lineage––Petrarch, Wyatt, Shakespeare, Donne and (notably in his sonnet sequence) Sir Philip Sydney––and blend them with an unlikely 20^th century sensibility.  Erudite, often opaque, filled with strange inversions of syntax and kaleidoscopic literary references, the 117 poems of Berryman’s Sonnets (not to mention his even more phantasmagorical Dream Songs) both thrill and overwhelm.

 

Now, if you’re familiar with Kevin’s poetry, what likely comes to mind is its blue-collar honesty, its links to Irish history and mythology, its muscular and arresting imagery––all things Pound might applaud but which would certainly give Berryman pause.  And so what we have here is a tidal process across the generations: a kind of give and take, a raising up and breaking down––helping to refresh the language, drive the imagination.  It’s a familiar pattern among young poets: to counter their immediate antecedents and strike out in a new direction, building upon the wreckage of the old.  But then, over time (or so we hope), they’ll find themselves entering into a gradual reevaluation that helps us all to appreciate our literary ancestry, embracing the very traditions from which we’d once fought to free ourselves.  Keep in mind, some of these figures are more persona than person: is Walt Whitman of Brooklyn identical to the monumental I in his poetry?  Is the poet speaking in Berryman’s Sonnets the very same man who hoped those poems might entrance his beloved?  And, for that matter, is Dr. Kevin Gallagher––professor, political economist, and Director of Boston University’s Global Development Policy Center––the same mind traversing this bare-boned sonnet?  Or the same as the poet and publisher, author of four fine collections (most recently And Yet It Moves from Madhat Press), who I know from captivating readings around Boston?  No easy answer presents itself.  So as I watch him construct that column of I’s in this poem, and wrestle (as every writer must) with what the head and heart each demand upon the page, I can’t help thinking about all the scores of men and women whose creative visions I, too, have battled with, fed upon.  My desire to know them was always, perhaps, a stand-in for the even-more-daunting desire to eventually know myself.

 

 

 

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

Review of Odysseus' Daughter by Cammy Thomas

 

Cammy Thomas, Odysseus’ Daughter. Parkman Press. 2023. 20pp. $18.00

Review by Ruth Hoberman

Amid summer heat and ghastly newspaper headlines, Cammy Thomas’s Odysseus’ Daughter blows in like a brisk, briny sea breeze. Nineteen poems beautifully printed, with a gatefold blue-gray cover bearing an elegant line drawing of Athena by the poet’s brother: the book is a pleasure to hold in your hands. And the poems make those familiar Odyssean characters come alive yet again: Penelope, Nausicaa, Cyclops, the sea nymph Leucothea, Argos, and others are transformed by Thomas’s precise, musical language into new guises. Anyone who has taught the Odyssey repeatedly—as Thomas has—knows how beautifully it opens up conversations about love, family, heroism, mortality, gender politics, and community. Thomas’s poems touch on many of these themes but what struck me most was their repeated return to the uncanny: the sense that on some level we are unfamiliar to ourselves, shot through with contradictory yearnings as we negotiate what she calls in one poem the “shifting voids of the waves.”

A Boston-area poet, Thomas taught literature and creative writing for many years (including fourteen years of teaching the Odyssey) and now lives in Bolton, Massachusetts. Odysseus’ Daughter is her fourth book.

Homer’s Odysseus, of course, had no daughter; men in his family bore single sons. I take the title poem’s imagined daughter to be the poet, heir to Odysseus’s prowess not in war, but with words: “my boat has nothing of mast or crew,” Thomas writes. “I stand under the bow of heaven/words locked in my throat.” Meanwhile, the world does what it will: the boat floats on an unfathomable sea, and “gods hang above decks.” Greek gods are notoriously imperfect, much like the humans in whose lives they interfere. The speakers in these poems live in an eerie, unmanageable world that mirrors their own unwieldy desires.

So Penelope is neither the standard sad sack, weeping and sleeping her life away, nor is she the clever, idealized wife. She’s just human—“weary now,” getting fed up. Yes, she cleverly manipulate the suitors with her ruse of weaving and unweaving her father-in-law’s shroud, teasing them “into limbo/as they feast on dwindled flocks.” But she also feels something herself:

Now I dream of the handsome one,

imagine his soft lips on mine,

shame myself in morning light.

Penelope’s desires make sense in human terms—twenty years of celibacy! But they also make sense in Homeric terms, as an example of homophrosyne—the “like-mindedness” of Odysseus and his wife.

“Sea Nymph Leucothea” is another poem about complicated desires. As a former human, Leucothea is pained by Odysseus’s fear when she intervenes to save him from drowning. “In his face/I see—I’m no longer human”:

Still, he takes the scarf, and it scares

the water calm. I sink back into the cold

foreign gloom that’s now my home,

turn, swim down.

The modulations in vowel sounds are beautiful and evocative. How sad, we think, that poor Leucothea is condemned to such gloom. And then remember that she has solace of being immortal.

On the facing page Odysseus is human and near drowning: “His arms can’t pull through the chop,/mouth choked with salt, a ring of jagged/rocks clanging as he goes down.” Between sound and rhythm, I can just about feel the whitecaps splashing into my mouth, cutting off breath. And then Leucothea-as-bird offers a scarf as she transforms into nymph. No wonder Odysseus is scared as he “pumps his legs/against whatever glides beneath.”

“Whatever glides beneath”: the sea in these poems—as in Homer—is the ultimate undoing of human identity: unknowable, threatening us with oblivion, undoing our efforts at control. Its apotheosis comes in the final poem of Part 1, “Facing Scylla,” a virtuosic rendition of seawater sloshing and whirling, drowning syntax along with Odysseus’ remaining crew members. Words repeat, return with varying meanings, rhyme, almost rhyme; body parts, boat parts, sky and sea churn chaotically:

We row the foam we sense the mouth

It opens in a moment smoked

Sea foam smokes the glass we row

The mast the past come floating on the foam

While Part 1 adheres closely to Homer, the eight poems in Part 2 move into the modern world. We’re still in the hands of forces we can’t control (whether we call them gods or not) but without Odysseus’s resources to help us through. In “Not Your Wit I Want,” the speaker mourns, “She’s got cancer/and I can’t do a thing.” Brawn and wit won’t help, only “toxic drugs and scalpels.” But still the speaker yearns for the “nose-thumbing backtalk” with which

Odysseus faced death. “Save us Odysseus,” the speaker concludes: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”

Feminist poets in recasting Homer have often elevated Penelope, Circe and Kalypso at Odysseus’ expense. Thomas’s take is surprisingly sympathetic, emphasizing Odysseus’ vulnerability. Even as he rapes a nameless woman taken in a raid, he seems a little lost, “her tears/rough ropes/twisting my heart.” But in Part 2, through the imagined figures of Odysseus’ daughter, granddaughter, and sister (who, unlike her brother, wouldn’t “pillage a town for fun,”) Thomas begins to offer an alternative to Odyssean values. The book’s final poem is its least Homeric, positing a benevolent Zeus horrified by what we’ve made of the world. Reimagining Auden’s “Shield of Achilles,” Thomas has Zeus contrast the world he’d planned—“a simple favored place,/with greenery that shaded all from pain” and “no faceless governments that cannot feel”—with contemporary actualities; much as Auden contrasts the peaceful world that Thetis expected to see on her son’s shield, with the totalitarian nightmare Hephaestos has actually wrought there. But here I’ve come full circle, back to heat waves and ghastly headlines. “Save us Odysseus,” I’m tempted to say: “you/and the iron-helmeted goddess,/give us ringing words that force/the invisible monster to its knees.”