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 #222
Searching for John Murillo’s Demo Tapes
in the Library of Congress
Which is to say I imagine the tapes like
lost arrow heads having served their purpose,
having been found again like a man frozen in ice,
a rock in a basket of blades shorn from their roots.
Which is to say I did not find the demo tapes;
instead, I watched their evolution, a track
becoming poem, becoming book, becoming
a number one hit, and yet the track remained silent.
And I ask, “What’re you going to do now
after you’ve achieved some financial independence?”
and the poet of the lost-demo-tapes tells me,
“Man, I’m married—there’s no such thing.”
And what he wants, I’m told, is what all poets want:
a bike to work off the extra pounds, a redone backyard,
and a stage for the poets we love and no one knows,
the poets that will likely never get a piece of this
arbitrary pie—the poets we hope will win so we can
read more of them and through them, their verse,
be less lonely, find company in words strung like pearls
and lost somewhere in the Library of Congress.
––Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo
I’ve always been fascinated with the concept of the potlatch. Stemming from the Indigenous peoples of the Northwest of Canada and the US, it is centered around a huge feast intended to reaffirm the bonds of family, friendship, and connection to the spirit world. One of the primary features of the celebration is gift-giving, and it’s always incumbent upon each participant to give greater gifts than you receive. That gesture not only demonstrates your wealth, it establishes generosity as a foundational element of abundance itself. I can remember when I was a young poet, hoping to enter the vast literary brother/sisterhood, how surprised and delighted I was to find a similar ethos in operation. Immersing myself in the seemingly-bottomless reservoir of world literature, my poet-friends and I couldn’t help but be impressed by the lengths some older writers would go to nurture members of a younger generation. Decades later, after completing a two-year interview project for the Christian Science Monitor newspaper, I collected those conversations in a book I named Giving Their Word. It was one of the greatest learning experiences of my life––due mainly to the generosity of spirit of these accomplished poets sharing their insights. In my introductory comments, I hoped to make the case for this idea of gifts exchanged––across cultures and unbound by time––as a fundamental feature of all language and art-making.
These memories were stirred up anew when I received today’s poem from Ryan Clinesmith Montalvo, who is himself a young poet at the start of a promising career. As he explained to me, Ryan studied and interned with the poet John Murillo while working toward his MFA at Hunter College. One of the tasks he took on for his mentor was to try and track down the ‘demo tapes’ a young Murillo sent to the Library of Congress. The recordings gathered, not only his own poems, but the work of other emerging spoken word artists and musicians around him. Now that Murillo had achieved a certain degree of fame, he still felt the imperative to make sure others were not simply forgotten. As you’ve read in today’s Letter, Ryan’s efforts were not successful––at least not as he’d hoped––but the resulting poem demonstrates that Murillo’s implied lesson had not been lost on his protégé. In a literary landscape that has, over the years, become alarmingly careerist––harnessing new technologies in the hope of building readership and reputation, while vision and true craft often languish ––Ryan received (as he explained to me) this immeasurably valuable gift from his teacher: “how to genuinely practice the craft of poetry despite the trappings of achievement; and how to use a poem, book, or career's success as a way to uplift the art of others.” I don’t know which poets helped create such a desire in John Murillo, but I like to imagine the satisfaction they must feel (in this world or another) to see their gifts, passed down now to poets like Ryan, continuing to share the bounty of that creative impulse upon which all our hearts rely.
I don’t expect it will be long before we readers get to share Ryan’s debut manuscript, Epilogue to Paradise. It was a Letras Latinas-ILS/Notre Dame––Andres Montoya Poetry Prize Finalist; reached the C&R Press 2022 Poetry Award longlist; and received an honorable mention in the Southern Collective Latin American Chapbook Competition. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming from the Penn Journal of Arts and Sciences, Stone Poetry Quarterly, Ibbetson Street Press, and other magazines. It feels clear to me that Ryan has begun to see how the discipline of poetic practice, and an attention to the inner and outer voices of his life, will yield great discoveries over time. But had he not also come to understand how his life and work are intimately connected to others in a broad community, I fear his capacity would be undermined. My wish for him, for his friends and colleagues: relish the immensity of the gift you’ve been given––and develop the most articulate and unimaginably beautiful means for giving it all away.
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
