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 #223
Some Women Marry Houses
Sexton’s house, in my hometown,
is still margarine yellow with blue
shutters, a square Colonial sensible
as a durable shoe on a quiet road
abutting woods, its lawn gracious
as a lap smoothed to perfection:
Nature, plotted, hedged and bedded,
a prelude to the garden of garters
and stays, silky slips. Garments meant
to seduce, contain, or govern the approach
to bounty, feminine reward, what awaited
men in their return from the capital wars.
To live in a rectangular fashion, by right
angles, in rooms assigned their functions:
a tidy house keeping mum about its lusts
and layaways, its pang, its plan. To play
croquet beside the flagstone patio,
wielding mallets, nudging balls inside
all the pretty little wickets while flank
steaks sizzle and pop in their own blood
juice, and the martini pitcher perspires
along its long glass handle as the afternoon
marinates in a pointed jest, subtle rebuke,
something edging to break loose.
––Heather Treseler
I couldn’t choose just one.
When I received an advanced copy of Heather Treseler’s debut collection, Auguries & Divinations, I knew I wanted to alert Red Letter readers to this quietly-astonishing poet’s work. So I reread the poems with an eye toward an ideal choice. The task proved impossible. At first, I wanted to highlight the lush and wrenching “Purpura,” a description of the slow reassessment of our maternal bonds when we first come to know our parent’s mortality (when we learn, at the same time, how unfathomable love’s hold on a mother’s psychology, knowing from the outset it must eventually be relinquished.) Or might I highlight one of “The Lucie Odes,” a sequence of ten 21-line poems that came to my attention when they were awarded the 2019 Jeffrey E. Smith Prize from the Missouri Review. These poems are so rich and psychologically devasting––forming the biography of a love that was everywhere informed by her partner’s previous abuse and clearly indomitable spirit––but I think readers ought to read these poems together, as intended. So I finally decided to focus on “Some Women Marry Houses” because it helps situate Heather in a long tradition of Feminist poets, and highlights the musical and metaphorical charge that is central to her work.
It seems almost laughable to say this now, but back in the 1960’s, when the male bastions of publishing and academia were begrudgingly admitting more women to its ranks, some editors and literature professors actually gave this advice to young women who were aspiring writers: don’t bother tackling those broad and consequential themes which men have traditionally explored––things like war, peace, life, death, the resonance history; focus instead on more novel topics central to a woman’s experience: domesticity, family, love. Shockingly, many of these female firebrands decided to do just that––only not at all in the manner the men had anticipated. Poets like Denise Levertov, Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Diane Wakowski, Lucille Clifton, Louise Gluck (the list is too extensive to do justice here) made it their business to overthrow every stereotype concerning a woman’s imaginative domain (bruising many male psyches in the process.) I should add one more name to that Feminist pantheon: May Sarton, because it was the prize named for that prolific poet, offered by Bauhan Publishing, that ushered Auguries… into print. It’s clear that Heather is charged with helping to carry that new tradition into 21st century territories. Today’s poem begins modestly: “Sexton’s house, in my hometown,/ is still margarine yellow with blue/ shutters” (and didn’t the use of “margarine” set up a certain homey expectation. . .like a metaphorical lit fuse?), “a square Colonial sensible/ as a durable shoe”. But clearly the shoe did not fit when, growing up, Heather witnessed the empty promise of suburban paradise. The tone of words like “gracious,” that smoothed “lap,” are suddenly subverted by a line like “Nature, plotted, hedged and bedded,” where every single word is a double-entendre, the sexual politics on the verge of eruption. “lusts/ and layaways, its pang, its plan”––this is not the Ladies Home Journal’s version of marriage––and don’t get me started on balls nudged through those “pretty little wickets.” The stanza ‘sizzles and pops’ with consonance and enjambments as the sexual frustration threatens to boil over. Is this merely a way of increasing sensual intensity (forget the garden tool, check out the urban dictionary for the contemporary meaning of “edging”)––or is subjugation on the menu? We’re provoked and left to question.
In a later poem, “Honey and Silk,” Heather writes of Clodia, the muse and lover of the Roman poet Catullus (a poet in her own right, I should add.) Even Cicero, on the Senate floor, decried such a wanton widow who had control of her own wealth, chose lovers for her own satisfaction, and was willing to accept (and even relish) “the sheer bright robe of her lonesomeness” once an affair concluded. He sees this as nothing less than a threat to the empire. Consult our recent headlines if you think such a sordid argument is no longer politically potent, two millennia down the road. Heather has made the commitment to follow her own imaginative path wherever it leads; to risk accessing the heart’s taproot of desire, despite the consequences; and to labor making any poetry that grows from that process as vibrant and musically complex as her skills can accomplish. In other words: women’s work. We men (perhaps we’re coming to realize) have no say in the matter––though we can certainly stand back and admire the beauty that results.
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
