Red Letter Poem #218

 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 #218

 

 

 

 

American Song

 

(after Marcantonio Flaminio)

 

 

If you listen to the love-calls of birds as you walk

early to the bus stop, sweating a little

on the third day of a heat wave,

 

think of me in an apple orchard, the smell of sap

and dust from the once-living trees

cut down, the farmer done

 

with spraying, happy to sell the bloom of acres

to Lennar, builder of golf courses

and homes I could never afford,

 

nor could you.  We’re alone with America’s plenty,

you on foot as a red Mustang blares past,

me in the cab of a backhoe,

 

A.C. on the fritz.  If I fill a bucket with ripe fruit,

let’s picnic Sunday at Morse Park, green glen

soft with late-summer flowers.

 

 

                                     ––Joyce Peseroff

 

 

 

“Amaryllis, awake! Lead your snowy sheep to pasture while the cold grass

glitters with white dew.”

 

–– Marcantonio Flaminio

                                                                  from: “Fête Gallante”

 

 

I was sitting with a group of writer-friends, enjoying conversation beneath hemlock shade, and a troublesome question was posed: what purpose does culture still serve in so battered and polarized a world?  It’s a challenging thought, one we are still mulling over––but I have a single thread in my developing answer: it preserves the concept of we.  We who have long shared this land; we whose memories preserve great tragedies and profound joys; and we who, day by day, attend to the simplest of activities, propelled by the most innately-human of impulses.  When massive political forces have an interest in atomizing the population––thus making us more fearful, malleable––a song, play, painting, or poem that contains a vision of communality is quite a powerful instrument.  In Robert Frost’s early poem “Mowing”, he closes with the couplet: “Men work together, I told him from the heart,/ Whether they work together or apart.”  (Women too––I’m sure he’d add if he were writing today.)  And Joyce Peseroff’s new poem demonstrates that connectivity, right from its opening dedication.  Marcantonio Flaminio was a Humanist poet and scholar of the Italian Renaissance.  His poem, “Fête Gallante”, came to Joyce via the Academy of American Poets' Poem-a-Day postings (another cultural seed-spreader.)  So, on a quiet morning, this 21^st century American poet unexpectedly got to have tea with a 16^th century counterpart who wrote in Latin and could never have imagined the world outside Joyce’s window.

 

Flaminio’s poem was not just a celebration of the pastoral moment––“To-day I will pasture my goats in a shady valley, for later it will be very hot.”––it was a billet-doux to his beloved with a specific intention in mind: “Dear, there I shall be alone, and if you love me, there you will come alone also.”  No further explanation needed.  Joyce began wondering just who those lovers might be in a context closer to home.  Her little stream of tercets is so conversational, so utterly believable, how can we not be seduced by the intimate voice?  I have mixed feelings about Joyce’s poem––and that attests to its power.  The innate poetry (and what else can we call such language when, any of us, alone, are observant of our surroundings and attentive to our own inner voices) that arises from the speaker is open-hearted and coy, at the same time.  Notice this beauty. . .but think of me.  I imagined a young man in the backhoe, but of course readers will conjure assorted possibilities.  And that sweet apple-smell in the air is, we need to remind ourselves, the smell of death––the “dust from the once-living trees”––as he works his construction job, obliterating orchards so that farms can be replaced by condo complexes and golf courses (“America’s plenty” indeed!)  I find myself utterly delighted by his call to love––and quietly horrified by how easily he (and we, by extension) accept the destruction of the family farmer’s once-foundational place in society, along with the beauty of the natural world.  All in the name of progress (or should I say commerce.)  Ah, that bucket of ripe fruit, that picnic on Sunday, the coupling of willing hearts!  Just don’t stop to think about where the children, the children’s children will find themselves one day.

 

Joyce has already given us six fine poetry collections, with more to come.  Her most recent, Petition (Carnegie Mellon University Press) was named a “must-read” by the Massachusetts Book Awards.  She is a poet, editor, and educator, representing a life-long commitment to the necessity of literature and the arts in the life of the community.  Among her honors are grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation, as well as a Pushcart Prize.  I’m grateful for this bracingly-honest pastoral Joyce has given us.  It made me hunt down a passage from the Roman poet Virgil’s Eclogues (carried over from the Latin by another cultural caretaker, David Ferry.)

 

Time takes all we have away from us;
I remember when I was a boy I used to sing
Every long day of summer down to darkness,
And now I am forgetting all my songs…

 

But he did not forget, and neither do we, because the poems preserved that voice for all time.  Whether we know it or not, we are enmeshed in lineages such as this: Virgil, Dante, Flaminio; Dickinson, Frost, Peseroff; that amorous backhoe driver, you and me.  We live here.  We will perish.  We will leave a world behind us––a little better than the way we found it (if that cultural force and the heart’s will can help guide our actions,) or perhaps smoldering after the conflagration.  The answer is still being written.

 

 

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

 

New And Selected Works By Charles Coe

 

New And Selected Works

By Charles Coe

Leapfrog Press

New York and London

ISBN: 978-1-948585-69-972

140 Pages

$14.95

Review by Dennis Daly

Few confessional poets can tug hearts with their first-person observational words without sliding into sentimentality and mediocrity. Charles Coe proves the exception with this delightful new collection of narrative, bluesy poems entitled New And Selected Works. This compelling volume contains twenty new poems as well as an assortment of extraordinary poems from four earlier books.

Opening the collection, Coe’s poem Prelude sets the standard, and a very high standard indeed. Fusing the illusory nature of man with a horrifying image of victimized children from a war zone, Coe makes an obvious point. But, unfortunately, not so obvious to our hardened and sterilized comprehension of war. The juxtaposition of scientific emptiness with affecting image adds the needed intensity,

Would it bother you to look through

my suddenly spectral form and see

the backrest of this chair?

It wouldn’t be intentional, a parlor trick.

It’s just that when I think about broken children

lying in the rubble of bombed-out buildings

I sometimes find it difficult to remain tied to this world.

For Ruby Bridges is a prose poem based on Norman Rockwell’s famous painting The Problem We All Live With, which depicted the brave six-year-old black girl, who, accompanied by federal marshals, singlehandedly desegregated the William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, Louisiana. Like the painting, Coe focuses the little girl in the center of a racist and poisonous whirlwind. The poem itself gathers force by addressing Bridges in the second person. The closing Astronaut metaphor both illuminates the subject and strikes home with poetic precision,

Ruby, what can we possibly say about you? What words can describe

this six-year-old child, armed with only a notebook and ruler, walking

resolutely past that pack of jabbering hyenas, past the woman who every

day threatened to poison you, past the woman who every day waved

before your face a black doll in a coffin?

The lead marshal said you never cried once during that nightmare year.

What can we possibly say about you, brave as an astronaut climbing

into a tin can to be launched into the airless world?

Coe’s piece In the House of Echoes details the homey pathos and blood-ties of a large family dealing with demise of one of their siblings. The poet’s mother provides perspective, and food and conversation dominate. The death-watch takes a new turn as Christmas carols, spontaneously begun by the participants, fill the house with echoes of sentiment. That is, until mathematical reality (read: dark humor) takes center stage. The poem concludes thusly,

In the silence that followed the last carol,

a silence neither pained nor awkward,

merely thoughtful,

as each sat with his or her own memories,

my mother whispered softly,

to no one in particular,

“Three down, six to go.”

Halfway through the collection Coe’s poem Sleep Cycles thunders off the page. This well-wrought formalist villanelle, devoid of any sentiment or emotional controls, is the classic and mythological anomaly that highlights the singular artistry of the other included works. A scene from his mother’s recurring nightmare, this narrative resounds over universal chords. Despite our efforts, the piece seems to caution, humans do not control life, life controls humans. Here is the heart of the poem,

as once again they set upon

this changeless and eternal race

beneath an unforgiving sun

spurred by a dread of what’s to come

that Morpheus cannot erase

foam-flecked and wild, the horses run.

the spectral carriage thunders on

although in passing leaves no trace

beneath an unforgiving sun.

My favorite poem in this collection is Coe’s The Dance Hall at Porter Square. In this affecting piece the poet idealizes a specific tableau of a street couple about to dance to a popular tune on a boombox. The troubadour-poet assesses the makeshift scene as a courtly love ritual and imagines a shy damsel, accompanied by a sensitive gentleman/ knight. The poet fears his passive intervention or even a close observation might break the spell and so he continues his walkabout. The piece opens with the narrator setting up an appropriate stage for the young lovers,

Near the entrance to the Porter Square subway stop

is a small tree-shaded concrete plaza, off to the side

where street people congregate

and where yesterday I heard an old boombox

call out that it was “Time to get together, and love

one another right now,” and saw a shirtless young man

in a grimy Red Sox cap hold out his hand

Blasphemy as a strategy into religiosity often succeeds. Thomas Merton seemed to know that. Dorothy Day certainly did. Coe’s poem Butt Dialing Jesus offers a mildly impious premise to its readers and beyond and then proceeds to an old-fashioned demonstration of the golden rule (that is “do unto others as you would have them do unto you” Matt. 7:12). The piece works because of its irreverence and humor erases sentimentality and cliche. Consider this very funny set up,

“You have reached the Son of God.

I am currently speaking with another supplicant.

But please hold; your salvation is important to me.”

This was followed by music.

I expected celestial choirs, or maybe an elevator-friendly

version of “My Sweet Lord,” but was instead treated

to acoustic Delta blues guitar, interrupted after

a few minutes by the voice of Himself, greeting me

by name and asking how he could serve.

Armed with these sturdy, compassionate, and accessible poems, Charles Coe delivers his forthright lessons in empathy and warmth with ethical fidelity. His mnemonic inner-city parables are not to be missed. See him in person (he’s a powerful reader) if you can. In any case, buy this book, you won’t regret it.

Origami Night—a choreo poem based on the poetry of Pamela Annas.

 

Origami Night—a choreo poem based on the poetry of Pamela Annas. Performed by Elenaluisa Alvarez; narrated by Luz Nicolàs; choreographed by Graham Cole; libretto, set design and lighting by Christopher Annas-Lee; costumes designed by Virginia Belt. At the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Black Box Theatre, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, Massachusetts. Remaining performances: Saturday, August 4, 2024 at 2 pm and 8 pm; Sunday, August 5, 2024 at 2 pm. For tickets, go to https://www.bostontheatrescene.com/shows-and-events/origami-night/#performance-picker

review by Tom Daley August 2, 2024

Last night I went to see Origami Night at the Black Box Theater at Boston Center for the Arts. I want to most enthusiastically encourage anyone who is able to brave the heat wave we are enduring in the Boston area to get out and take in this riveting, brain-shimmering, thoroughly engaging fifty minutes of theater, which has three performances remaining (the theater is air-conditioned, in case that wasn’t clear!). Origami Night is a choreo poem composed of excerpts of the poetry of Pamela Annas, a feminist Sylvia Plath scholar and a now-retired professor at U Mass-Boston. Her son, Christopher Annas-Lee and his creative partner, the Portland (Oregon)-based choreographer Graham Cole, conceived of the fifty-minute show which will delight connoisseurs of ballet, modern dance, and performance poetry. The sole live performer of the show (the narration of the poetry was recorded) is the dancer, Elenaluisa Alvarez, a furiously talented movement artist whose aggressively graceful and spiritedly athletic classical ballet and modern dance moves would be enough to enthrall even the most exacting dance critic. But she adds to that expertise the execution of now comical, now melancholic, now exuberantly idiosyncratic gestures—pouts, punts. grimaces, grunting torso twists, wry smiles, spooky shoulder tremors, neck contortions, and withering collapses— all done in precise synchronicity with certain phrases of Annas’ poetry—gestures that demonstrate that she is a marvelous actress as well. Most of these moves were adeptly choreographed by Graham Cole, but one can sense the way in which Alvarez incorporated the precise instruction and wrestled and wrapped her own vigor and elan, her own graciousness, and her own passion and pain into the choreographer’s imagination. Annas’ poetry—full of that kind of nostalgia that purges longing of any sentimentality with its clear-eyed and candid reconnoitering of its subjects—an army brat past, a swing dance-hall denizen’s exhilaration, a mother’s woes and wonders—was narrated, in the sparking soundtrack/libretto dreamed up by Christopher Annas-Lee, by Luz Nicolàs, an actress who has spent most of her career in Spanish-speaking theater (this was her first performance in English). The odd choice of narrator with a Latin-inflected voice for the poetry of a bottle-blonde, sunhat-sporting gringa professor somehow worked just about perfectly—although there were times when it was a little hard to follow all the words. Nicolàs’s elucidation of the poems has the flavor of a sometimes spunky, sometimes affectionately wary abuela (grandmother) ruminating with matter-of-fact sobriety over the bittersweets and the redolent triumphs of a life lived with attitude and attention, with wry perspicuity, and with an insistence that simultaneously flickers and flares through the rigor of her sturdy voice. Hers is an inventive channeling of the spirit of Annas’

storytelling—but with an affecting fidelity to the distinction between the narrator’s background and that of the poet. The difference between the voice of the narrator and the culture of the poet adds a fascinating disruption to the expectations we have for the libretto—the Latin voice complicates and complements the Anglo experience with its implied and ironic resistance in its fond, at times distanced interpretation of the articulations of a poet who is part if not parcel of the dominating culture. The platform on which Elenaluisa Alvarez strutted and whirled and broke and then rearmed herself in a bundle of gyrating gesticulations was designed and built by Christopher Annas-Lee, who also wrote the libretto. Annas-Lee, an up-and-coming theater lighting designer whose talents I first appreciated years ago when he was involved with the young and precocious Circuit Theater company, a Newton (Massachusetts)-based troupe with Broadway production values, fashioned a circular stage replete with an elaborate (and sometimes dizzying) network of LED lights and special effects. These included three overpowering blasts of a thunderstorm that made us forget that we were under the impression that we were seated in a ring around the dance floor of a discotheque. In the final movement of the choreo poem, realizing the choreographer Graham Cole’s cleverness, Alvarez opens a hatch at the center of Annas-Lee’s stage and yanks out a many-yards-long tube charged with white neon light whose severity rivals the marquees of Las Vegas. The actress-dancer pulls the tube offstage where she, a modern-day Eve, seems to be at once caressing and recoiling from the phallic serpentine grip of the glowing hose. The post-Eden, modest Alvarez-Eve is covered in a blouse that was designed by Virginia Belt, one that those of us who know Pamela Annas would recognize as having an apt resonance with Annas’s personal style. While just about everything was done to perfection in this production, I wish that the talents of Elenaluisa Alvarez as an actress had been more emphasized than her extraordinary skills as a practitioner of ballet moves and modern dance gymnastics. The first part of the show was rather top-heavy with a kind of show-offy exhibition of many of the moves in her impressive arsenal of arm stretches and balances and toes pointed at the ceiling—an exhibition in which it was hard to feel a connection with the poetry, except at the level of a kind of a too-generalized, overarching, yet resonant joy. With a performance centered around an Annas poem that references the Brecht-Weill song, “Mack the Knife” (the speakers in the theater blasted out a growling Louis Armstrong’s rendition), the exhibitionism began to slow to a series of facial contortions, wrinkling bows, shimmering and blubbering knee bends—a series in which every raised eyebrow, every hip surge, every sophisticatedly hesitant pirouette seemed to be driven by the pistons of the poetry (and the music), to honor its specificity, its emotional complexity—a deeply satisfying and authentic product of the collaboration between movement artist, choreographer, narrator, stage-and-lighting designer-librettist, and poet that informed most of the rest of this remarkable show.

Poet Margaret Young Wonders: 'How Else Can We Know What's Beautiful?'

Interview by Doug Holder

Recently I received a chapbook of poetry from Margaret Young, a former colleague of mine at Endicott College. It is titled, "How Else Can We Wonder What's Beautiful." ( Main Street Rag). I decided to send some questions to the poet on a very hot summer's day. Oddly enough, as I was considering when to write the interview questions -- Young's husband Rocco Gangle-- a noted philosophy professor at Endicott College-- greeted me at my table at the Bloc 11 Cafe--my usual haunt in Union Square, Somerville. And indeed, Young  has the touch of a philosopher in her work.  According to Young's website,

Margaret Young grew up in Oberlin, Ohio. She earned a B.A. from Yale and worked in a traveling theater company before earning an M.A. in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. She has taught writing and theater to all ages and been an artist-in residence in schools, and received an Individual Artist Grant from the Ohio Arts Council in 2005. Her poetry collections include Willow from the Willow, Almond Town, Blight Summer, and How Else Can We Know What's Beautiful? Her translations of Sergio Inestrosa's In el espacio improbable de un haiku and Luna que no cesa appeared in 2017 and 2018, respectively. She is one the faculty of the Global Center for Advanced Studies, and lives in Beverly, Massachusetts.




Interview by Doug Holder ( Board of Directors/ New England Poetry Club)

When you taught at Endicott College you had a popular course on Pop Culture. Some might comment that POP Culture is not appropriate for the rarefied air of poetry. I think when poetry is rarefied it is a problem. Your take?


I agree that poetry is doomed if it doesn't embrace pop culture. I include references in my poetry to TV etc. because it's the stuff of life, just like food or grief, (or the inscrutable philosophy my husband studies.) I hope that comparing the color of pokeweed to the T-Mobile campaign brings those two disparities a little closer, not for any moral lesson, but just on an aesthetic basis, helping people pay more attention to both weeds and ads.


I was intrigued by your line in the poem "Art": " We all have regrets. How else can we know what's beautiful?" Explain.


That's one of those poems/lines that came to me unbidden, so I'm not sure how to explain. I think it might be the notion that beauty is less about the ideal than about things flawed, not-figured-out. That we learn more from the latter. Anti-Platonist?


In the poem " International Water Day at Assisted Living" you wonder if the elderly patients who are 'adrift' are dreaming about the sea. We started in the sea of the womb-- the sea is elemental—seminal. In a way we go back to the waters of our birth or youth, and again when we are in our dotage. Your thoughts?


Yes, yes. My dad's now in an assisted living facility, and I read him poems every day. We were just discussing Jaques's speech in "As You Like It" where the 7th (and last) age of man describes a return to helpless infanthood. I think this occurred when he was telling me they call them not bibs, but "clothing protectors," in the dining area, not wanting to remind people of this concept.


The poems in your new collection are not wordy—you have a real economy to your poetry. Is this your signature style?​


I hope so! I had flirtations with Whitman & Lorca in graduate school, and with performance/slam poetry in the 90s, but feel like I really found my truest voice when I whittled things down, got comfortable leaving big gaps.

You are on the faculty of the Global Center for Advance Studies. Can you tell us a bit about this organization?

GCAS website: https://gcas.ie

Their description: "GCAS (The Global Center for Advanced Studies) began in 2013 with over 100 leading writers, philosophers, professors, artists, and filmmakers. We started as a non-profit in the USA but later incorporated in Ireland as a limited company so we could share ownership with faculty and graduates. We are the first debt-free degree granting institution of higher education co-owned by faculty, financial supporters, staff, and graduates on blockchain and our own crypto-token, GCASy. We offer a few accredited degrees in the European Union via Woolf."

And--though it's been mostly my husband teaching in far-flung places (like last summer's hike-the-Alps-while-studying Nietzche course) I've done a series of seminars on ecopoetics, including one about its relationship to permaculture. Gary Snyder once defined bioregionalism as "flying around the world to tell people to stay home..."



Why should we read this book?

Because it's rooted in place(s), because it's fun and weird, because you love language.