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
Flashback Friday––RLP#40
Sense/Nonsense
I cook with my nose
When the toast burns
I snatch it out with tongs
I hear with my eyes
When the cat yearns
I recognize her songs
I taste with my ears
When the meat sears
I hear the flavor’s wrong
I know with my hands
When the pain churns
I jolt if it’s too strong
I see with my heart
When things come apart
I learn where they belong
—Deborah Melone
The new, for better or worse, is perhaps the most prized quality in art-making: cutting-edge creative style, the unanticipated voice or subject matter. But in truth every creation, even the most radical, has a bond with the vast catalog of all that’s come before. From what else could we fashion new work––or actively rebel against––but the world we’ve inherited? Our lives, our efforts, are links in a chain––in a tangled multiplicity of chains––that join us to sources often obscured in time’s vast unscrolling. So now, as we inch toward what promises to be a tumultuous new year, I’d like to revisit installment #40 which appeared in late December of 2020 during the first year of the Red Letter project.
But I have to start my commentary just a bit earlier, with Red Letter #37 featuring Lloyd Schwartz’s lovely poem “Song.” Of course, we can never know where a poem finds its genesis, but I was fascinated by this early memory Lloyd recounted: his mother reciting aloud to him Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "Kubla Khan," when he was too young to read. I believe there is always a sound-signature that great poems leave on us––and his mother’s voice embodying Coleridge remains indelible for him. And though these other texts might not have been consciously in mind, Lloyd mentioned Frost’s “Fire and Ice” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sonnet” as part of his poem’s musical ancestry. Deborah Melone read Lloyd’s poem in these electronic pages and was enthralled by its lyricism––so much so that, after a few days, a new poem began taking shape in her notebook, one trying to recapture how that music had catalyzed something inside her. Deborah is the author of Farmers’ Market and The Wheel of the Year, and has work featured in the new anthology The Heart Off Guard––all issued from Every Other Thursday Press. I love how the rhymes and half-rhymes of her poem chime along with something approaching regularity––even as the imagery in each stanza twists and tugs to retain its freedom. The tone feels almost aphoristic––wisdom skewed, perhaps, by dream––and how can we resist? And now, reading “Sense/Nonsense”, who knows: maybe some of you, dear readers, will fall under Deborah’s melodic spell and be surprised by a new voice rising up in your own mind.
Ch’eng T’ang, the first king of the ancient Shang Dynasty, seeking a formula for happiness, had these words inscribed on his washbasin (nearly four millennia before Ezra Pound turned the Chinese phrase into a Modernist manifesto): Make it new, and again make it new. Can’t you imagine the king lifting cold water in cupped hands and then, as his eyes clear, re-reading this potent command? This morning, rinsing the shave cream from my own face, I looked down at the clean porcelain and imagined the same injunction, compelling in its invisible calligraphy. Back in 2020, we shared Deborah’s poem to help wash away the bitter residue of our first year of Covid. And now, as 2025 prepares to make its debut––hauling in a storm of unimaginable circumstance––I’ll offer up this wish: may we wash ourselves each morning in that ancient aspiration and rejuvenate possibility. But in doing so, may we also be mindful of all those hands that came before us, and all those yet to come: how every individual cups the same cool waters, dreaming of renewal.
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 BlueSky
@stevenratiner.bsky.social
and on Twitter
@StevenRatiner
