Poet Charles Coe has passed--interview with Doug Holder

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HftI8JoJzDw&t=34s interview with Coe

I am so sorry to hear of Charles Coe's death. I first interviewed him for a small South End magazine, and since then I have read, served on the NEPC Board with him, reviewed him, and was on a panel with him to select the Somerville Poet Laureate. Here is an interview I conducted with him years ago... Fine man, poet, teacher, performer and citizen...

Red Letter Poem #278

 Red Letter Poem #278

 

 

 

 

 Six Autumn Haiku

tall oaks

a first grader whistles

an acorn cap


an acorn

in its mouth

autumn silence



another equinox

catching up to the acorn

I kicked ahead

 

  

I blame Basho and his illustrious “crow on a bare branch.” I know full well that the tradition of Japanese haiku explores/celebrates every season and every conceivable mood. But hearing the word, my mind invariably brings me to autumn, and a darkening sky rich with melancholy. So I invited Brad Bennett to return to the Red Letter forum with a sampling of his haiku for the current season, fully expecting that he’d remind us all of how complex, diverse, and wonderfully subtle the genre can be. Perhaps you’ll remember Brad, an accomplished writer and teacher of American haiku, from his earlier appearances here. His fourth collection from Red Moon Press, a rush of doves, was just published this year, and he’s the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Touchstone Haiku Award, and The Heron's Nest Reader's Choice Haiku of the Year. But Brad is not simply a talented poet; he possesses a quality that skill alone cannot achieve: authenticity. As with all the great haiku masters following in Basho’s footsteps, this art form was intended as more than a poetic style, but a way of life––a daily practice that alters what each poet experiences in the world and thus what he or she carries to the page.



It’s useful to think of haiku, not as a small poem but as a mammoth one––a hundred-line lyric impossibly condensed into a diminutive package. If a revised poem is the sum of a countless choices, great and small, this must be true as well of a poem containing a mere handful of syllables. The very fact of its brevity seems to entice readers to come close. But it’s only when we attempt to pull at the metaphorical bow that binds the package––to question what we sense is waiting inside––that we begin to realize what’s being offered to us. These poems are sometimes playful, sometimes somber, but always engaged with the tension between clarity of experience and the ambiguity of implication. Haiku presents a moment of unusual complexity––part of which is centered on a more acute experience of the shared world; but an equally-important part revolves around the inner mechanics of a consciousness contending with language, discovering something about its own nature. I hesitate to say too much about each of Brad’s poems for fear of undermining your own intuitive approach––but perhaps I can comment on how my mind first pulled at each bow, watching as the package began offering up its surprising contents. Starting with “tall oaks…,” it presents an innocent childhood memory, turning the acorn cap into a shrill whistle. Of course, we can’t help remembering the old adage (whose roots, surprisingly, lie with Chaucer’s 14th-century poetry): from little acorns mighty oaks grow. Something much grander is being trumpeted in even our simplest memories. “an acorn/ in its mouth/ autumn silence” ups the ante considerably, making us aware of the inner grammar of perception––in whose mouth is this nut captured: a squirrel, perhaps, observed on a branch, staving off hunger? The autumn silence itself? But when I read “another equinox…” I found myself stilled by the possibilities. Because we grasp the utter everydayness of the action––making a little game of kicking an acorn while on a solitary autumn stroll––the heart quakes just a bit to feel how quickly another year has passed, and how our aims did or did not guide us.

 

raspy cough

a pause to pluck leaves

from rake tines


autumn maple

a shadow races

to meet its leaf





a hole

in the falling leaf

tumbling sky

  

 

             ––Brad Bennett

 

                                   

 

Here, in this little suite of autumn-leaf poems, the typical focus on the showy colors never comes into play. Rather, “raspy cough…” hints at the body’s fragility, while the clatter of those hard consonants (pause…pluck…rake…tines) almost seems to catch in the throat. Even now, imagining those once-green leaves, brittle in the claws of the rake, makes me shudder with a terrible apprehension. “autumn maple…” feels like an emblem of mortal inevitability, our shadow (the dark reflection of our sunlit world) racing to confront us, an action we are powerless to delay. We are minds toppling into a new awareness––and unlike other creatures, we can’t help but see what’s coming. But then I read a poem like: “a hole/ in the falling leaf/ tumbling sky” and the roof of the imagination is blown open, transcendent possibilities becoming suddenly available. Through the window of that tiny decay, that inevitable loss, the dizzying heavens can be glimpsed. Indeed! A potent haiku cannot help but up our game, prompting the wheels to turn faster, the eyes to more carefully savor what is right before us, before it is gone. Because, like the haiku, things always seem to be over far too soon.

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

* 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

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/

A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M presented by Michael Todd Steffen

 A H A N D P I C K E D P O E M

presented by Michael Todd Steffen

From AGNI 102, autumn 2025

Let Me Put It This Way

by Katherine Indermaur

When I light my lighthouse’s

lantern, the ships come,

their hard bodies creaking, snouts

first to breach the bay, to beach

on my glistening shores. Men pour out

to dry their salt-crested beards

and their angry laughter. They burn

red and blister and bully. They cut

off each other’s fingers, cut out

each other’s eyes, and more besides.

From my window, I watch the lantern

knit its shadows into the waves.

Then the men, bored with bloodshed, turn

to me, singing, Come to the window,

let down your hair. They call me one wrong name

after another. They are climbing my stairs.

I could say that, in a panic,

I seized the lantern and hurled it

into the sea, that I survived

long enough to bear a child who had so many fathers

that he inherited every kingdom on earth

and on every shore built a lighthouse for me

but that would just be the prayer

I recite as they reach the final step.

~ ~ ~

I was so taken with Katherine Indermaur’s poem the first time I read it and had to reread it over and over, that night it kept piecing itself back to me in my dreams, the ships drifting to the lighthouse’s shore, the sterns of the vessels described as “snouts” like pigs, with the vivid nearly cartoonish pirates and their behavior, wearing their half-naked sun burns, bullying one another, cutting off each other’s fingers and cutting out each other’s eyes. Caricatures of exaggerated violence, the sort that makes us laugh—yeah, right—as at so much other dubious language, though formally belonging to the genre of Napoleonic romance—all this is more than familiar to us, ubiquitous in our media, at the highest official levels, these days. Such a politically prominent notion—conspicuous immigration—dolled up in these terms casts a wholly different light on what can easily be reduced to demographics and conflicting national ideals. Oddly lampooning, the poem is winding toward a deeper humanization of alienation.

So many levels are at work in Indermaur’s positioning herself in that lighthouse, New England and California, shore to shining shore, making the invention of her speaker in the poem mythic and even colossal, and, even more endearing, part of our bedtimes (involving deeper, more intimate levels of meaning, childhood and adult) when the men’s call to her transforms her into Rapunzel: let down your hair…after she has worded her lantern into magic, having knit its shadows into the waves. Above all, brilliant poems turn brilliant phrases.

Dig a little, like a pirate for a treasure map, a lot of potential homemade guilt is buried in this mesmerizing incantatory poem, latticed for absolution (hence her title, Let Me Put It This Way) in a verbalization of what’s going on here. Not all poets are childless—and thus prone to evoke the demigod-like child who had so many fathers, which is like the writing produced of loneliness, the body of desperation illuminated by creative insight, intelligence, enlightenment, entertainment that potentially carries the parent-writer’s all but DNA code on in the world.

Katherin Indermaur’s poems have also appeared in Ecotone, Frontier Poetry, New Delta Review, Seneca, just to name a few of her prominent literary journal credits. Her essays and poems have won many awards, including the 2022 Deborah Tall Lyric Essay Book Prize and the 2023 Colorado Book Award. She currently edits for Sugar House Review and Alpinist

  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 #277

 

 

 

 

 (Bad) Scheherazade: the Library

 

 

Tattoo’d & ruby-lipped, she shows

Up, her squeaky grocery cart over-

Flowing with books.  Past the metal

Detector shrieking at her gown, sewn

With slivers of mirror, tilting sparkle wig.

 

Thumbs up to that homeless guy calling

Let her in! because she’s here to read

Stories in a prime voice to kids gathering

Where she sits next to a sign she carefully inked:

 

Read books!  And listen to them read by––

 

Shhh she whispers, though she’s not here

To stay quiet.  Unlike the unread threat:

Sultan of Silence, the one who burns books––

That blaze spreading if we stop paying

Attention to page after page that he

 

Crumples and tosses into flames, because:

 

It was the best of times and the worst

The Reader repeats out loud

Or in your head: Goodnight Moon!

Or On the Road. Or “I’m nobody”––

 

“Will you take me home?” Boo asks

Scout & Jem in his dream-like odd politeness.

 

Souls in a library light up, listening.

You can Call me Ishmael.  Call me Sula.

Here’s a cartful of books.  Somebody loves you.

 

 

                           ––Carol Muske-Dukes

 

                               

There’s only so much I can tell you. I know that the next collection from the acclaimed poet, Carol Muske-Dukes, will be entitled (Bad) Scheherazade, and the title character––the star of today’s Red Letter as well––will make at least a few appearances across the texts. Beyond that, I am left to imagine––but the two poems from the manuscript that will appear in these electronic pages already assure me any speculation will be rewarded with delight. Let me start with the book’s title: we’ve all heard of Scheherazade, the protagonist of the famed collection of Arabic folktales, One Thousand and One Nights. These stories were compiled during a period known as the Islamic Golden Age––a time of flourishing science and culture between the 8th and 13th centuries. The name is derived from Middle Persian, a conjoining of the words čīhr ('lineage') and āzād ('noble, exalted'). And so, what to make of Carol’s modifier (Bad) attached to the appellation? Is she implying that this incarnation will turn out to be a less enthralling storyteller? Or that her nobility may be disguised beneath the trappings of poverty or her status as an outcast? Might the poet even be playing off the urban parlance where bad refers to the ultimate cool? But when our Scheherazade finally barges into the inky spotlight––“Tattoo’d & ruby-lipped. . .her squeaky grocery cart over-/ Flowing with books”––this larger-than-life figure comes into focus: it’s Drag Queen Story Hour, the popular library offering that delights young children and drives Right-wing zealots out of their fevered minds. Her nemesis is the euphemistically-named “Sultan of Silence” who’d rather burn books than trust readers to decide on their own preferences. (One might call such a villain ‘a bad actor,’ but here the word would simply mean ‘reprehensible’).



I love that this modern-day Scheherazade finds some way to slip past the censorious gatekeepers (not to mention metal detectors), to bring a shopping cart’s worth of literary delight to whomever might have ears to receive them. Sparks fly up from the likes of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Emily Dickinson; Harper Lee, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, and even Margaret Wise Brown’s children’s classic. Perhaps you, too, found yourself wishing you could be seated cross-legged on the library carpet, being mesmerized by these tales. Our poet––in the jagged, boisterous rhythms of this verse––is stirring up the same commotion as our mirror-bejeweled luminary. Silence in the face of oppression has too often been the source of tragedy, and this flamboyant storyteller will not be easily silenced––nor should the one performing inside the library of our minds.



A former California Poet Laureate, Carol is the author of sixteen books, ranging from poetry and fiction to essays and anthologies––for which she has been richly honored with awards and fellowships. For many years, I’ve sought out her muscular poetry, intrigued by a kind of torsion within it: the fragile heart trying to embrace a linguistic whirlwind. She is a retired professor from the University of Southern California, but also taught in MFA programs across the nation. When you think of it, we should not be surprised that she’s embraced the Scheherazade persona; to a certain degree, I think every poet feels they are in the position of unscrolling an endless stream of language in order to preserve their own sanity, if not their very existence. And we each experience many versions of the fable’s King Shahryar in our lives––cruel monarchs who would behead us (metaphorically, if not actually) for what they would deem an inherent disloyalty. Some innocent intuition assures us that if our poems and stories are compelling enough, we will survive for another day. Maybe even death itself will forget about us or determine that we’re too entertaining to sacrifice. If nothing else, each new poem reminds us that our passionate minds and entrancing imaginations are what make for another red-letter day––and what could be more necessary in these troubled times? This is true from Damascus and al-Andalus to Washington and the sun-blessed California coast.

 

The Red Letters

 

* 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

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/