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
Dear Readers: I’ll be taking a two-week hiatus for some travel and work commitments.
I will be back with a new Red Letter on October 18th. I trust, in the meantime, you’ll be busily making your own red-letter days.
Red Letter Poem #225
The Lindesfarne Manuscript
Lamp-black for letters,
light sinking before him,
no wonder the monk believed
the world would end
in a whisper of fire.
Under the nib, the vellum
flexed like a woman’s soft arm,
the Gospels an elaborate tattoo.
In the cemetery, the stones
lay strewn like petals in moonlight.
Now we admire it under glass
and light candles only
for romance or hurricanes.
We trim black wick and write little
on paper. No wonder we believe
the world won’t last forever,
although in cities not our own
we throw coins into bright fountains,
hold hands and stare at night sky.
––Jack Stewart
Let me remind you of two tropes that have become familiar from novels and movies. The first: a medieval monk, laboring at his work table by candlelight, transcribing a holy manuscript. Such an endeavor represents the archetypical image of knowledge transmitted: gloriously, painstakingly, entirely by hand––long before the printing press would facilitate that process and make books accessible to more than society’s elite. If you have ever stood before one of the masterpieces of illuminated art––the Book of Kells is perhaps the most famous example in the West, originating in 9th century Ireland, but there are pieces of immense beauty stemming from the Persian tradition, the Hebrew, the Chinese, and beyond––it’s likely that you, too, were mesmerized by the intense spiritual practice that went into producing a single book. Today’s Red Letter poet, Jack Stewart, remembers seeing the Lindisfarne Gospels, a breathtaking leather-bound volume, assumed to be the creation of a single monk named Eadfrith, working at an 8thcentury island monastery off the coast of Northumberland. All that is known, believed, cherished can––within such a magnificent creation––be passed on from one set of eyes to another. But the second trope is considerably darker: it imagines some unspecified time in the near or distant future, perhaps following a cataclysmic event, where books have all but vanished––and those few that still hold to the sanctity of the written word are regarded like wizards, keepers of an arcane knowledge which the greater populace has long since abandoned. (I’m imagining fans of novels like Fahrenheit 451 or visual narratives like Game of Thrones, are smiling knowingly right now.)
I’m hoping Jack’s poetic voice will not feel unfamiliar to Red Letter readers; he has become a regular presence in these virtual pages. His educational roots extend from the University of Alabama and Emory University to the Georgia Institute of Technology where he became a Brittain Fellow. His debut collection, No Reason, appeared in the Poeima Poetry Series in 2020. He’s been widely published in literary journals like Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, and numerous poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. He now directs the Talented Writers Program at the Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale where he works to initiate young minds into our literary brother/sisterhood.
Did you feel, as I did, that Jack’s poem both references those two tropes and quietly subverts them? When he describes the vellum as “flexed like a woman’s soft arm,” and the Gospels as “an elaborate tattoo” on this supple calfskin page, the tone is a far cry from what we expect of that celibate friar. The medieval scribe quickly morphs into a contemporary one, lamenting how those flickering candles are used now only for romance or power failures. “We…write little on paper,” Jack himself writes (initially in the pages of his notebook)––and perhaps you too winced to be reminded that this very text was being conveyed to your attention via electrons dancing across some lit screen. Are you thinking the mystique of the reading/writing experience has been diminished or enhanced by modern technology? I found myself nodding in agreement when the poet wrote: “No wonder we believe/ the world won’t last forever,/ although”––and that simple conjunction turns the emotional vector of this poem in yet another direction––although we still find ourselves journeying to foreign lands (often accompanied, not surprisingly, by our beloved partners), seeking wisdom, beauty, or at least the possibility that such things still exist. And so, as our contemporary headlines grow darker by the day (and do you even subscribe anymore to some inky broadsheet? or are current events delivered solely via the conglomerated pixels of electronic news?) you too might feel the desire to make a wish upon some exotic fountain. As the poem suggests: hold hands with someone you love, raise your eyes to the vastness of the night sky. That plopping sound may be the lucky coin breaking the watery surface; or perhaps it’s the plangent heartbeat a good poem can stimulate. Doubtless, it’s our quiet imaginations that are suddenly illuminated.
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
