Monday, February 03, 2025

Governor Healey Signs Executive Order to Establish Massachusetts’ First-Ever Poet Laureate

 


Governor Healey Signs Executive Order to Establish Massachusetts’ First-Ever Poet Laureate


   I remember I asked in a recent issue of The Somerville Times, "Why don't we have a Massachusetts Poet Laureate?"  Well, we got a great answer from the Governor, today!

 



For immediate release:
2/03/2025Governor Maura Healey and Lt. Governor Kim Driscoll


Boston — Today, Governor Maura Healey signed an executive order creating the first-ever Poet Laureate of Massachusetts. This new, honorary position is intended to promote poetry and creative expression across the state, serve as the Governor and Lieutenant Governor’s ambassador of the arts, and inspire the next generation of writers.

“Massachusetts has a rich legacy of pioneering poets, from Phillis Wheatley Peters to Robert Frost to Emily Dickinson to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Our administration is committed to honoring this legacy by celebrating the many contributions of poets to our state, including their ability to inspire future generations,” said Governor Maura Healey. “We’re grateful to the Mass Cultural Council for their strong partnership in creating this important position, and we encourage poets from across the state to apply when the application goes live.”

“From day one, our administration has been committed to supporting arts and culture in Massachusetts," said Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll. “The creation of the Poet Laureate is not only an investment in our creative economy, but also an invitation for us to embrace the unique power poetry has to open our minds, stir our hearts and educate us all.”

“Mass Cultural Council is thrilled that today, Massachusetts – a celebrated hub of arts, culture, history, creativity, and innovation – is embracing poetry and creative expression and establishing an official Poet Laureate,” said Michael J. Bobbitt, Executive Director, Mass Cultural Council. “This position will continue our proud tradition of using language and creativity to tell stories, evoke emotion, inspire new ideas, and sometimes, call others to action. It is truly an honor to partner with the Healey-Driscoll Administration on this initiative, and to again shine a bright spotlight on the power of culture.”

The Poet Laureate will be charged with encouraging the appreciation of poetry and creative expression across Massachusetts, organizing and attending public readings and other statewide literary and cultural events in different regions, composing poetry for ceremonial occasions, and advising the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education on an outreach program for schools focused on the celebration and advancement of poetry.

The Executive Order establishes an advisory Poet Laureate Nominating Committee to review applications for the role and submit recommendations to the Governor. The selected candidate will be eligible for a stipend provided by the Mass Cultural Council.


Saturday, February 01, 2025

Red Letter Poem #240

 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 #240

 

 







Three Poems from Andrea Cohen



Lucky Strikes



We smoked them so we

could blow smoke rings––



little halos above

coffee cups, above dish



rags and coupons

our mothers clipped



back when the earth

employed them.





Swap Shop



We keep

coming back––



leaving this

mirror for that.





Deadpan. It’s a surprisingly modern word; Webster dates its first appearance in print to1928, referring to the style of acting used in some vaudeville comedy and silent movies (think: the stony stare of a Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton, aimed directly toward the audience.) The term quickly spread to sports where certain baseball pitchers and boxers became known for their blank expressions––as if they were about to eviscerate their opponents with no more emotion than swatting a fly. Deadpan is an essential quality in the public persona––and certainly in the literary performance––of Andrea Cohen. Her eighth collection of verse, The Sorrow Apartments (talk about jarring understatement!) was recently published by Four Way Books, where today’s poems were taken. Among her numerous honors are a Guggenheim Fellowship, Glimmer Train's Short Fiction Award, and several fellowships at MacDowell. (When I asked her if there were any recent laurels I should know about for this introduction, she replied: “My laurels? None to speak of.” Bob Newhart would have admired the delivery.) In 2002 Andrea took over from Gail Mazur––the founder of the Blacksmith House poetry series in Cambridge, MA, one of the country’s premier showcases of poetic talent––and has directed it ever since. And yet when she steps to the podium to make her brief introductions, sometimes it takes a moment for the dry wit or the heartfelt praise to have its effect on the audience, delivered in such a quiet, self-effacing manner. Her own poetry––especially her signature short laconic pieces––comes across as being so matter-of-fact, that readers let down their guard (and isn’t that what both comedian and pugilist were counting on?) Before you know it, Andrea has slipped a sly bit of absurdity or a wrenching realization past the mind’s customary defenses. Perhaps she has learned over the years that histrionics only distance the audience, while a demure and measured approach finds the cracks in the mind’s armor.



“Lucky Strikes” is a perfect example; playing off of the cigarette brand name, we imagine a gathering of friends (teenagers, perhaps?) engaging in behavior they might have witnessed in their elders, blowing smoke rings (those nonchalant little halos) “above/ coffee cups, above dish// rags and coupons/ our mothers clipped. . .”. The hominess of the scene is downright calming––leaving aside, for the moment, the cancer warnings on the package which, of course, my lucky parents were not afforded. But what to make of the culminating couplet: “back when the earth/ employed them.” That curious pronoun them––who or what exactly has become obsolete in the earth’s inexorable progress? Does it refer to the coupons––or the mothers themselves who prized their meager rewards? I found the four short lines of “Swap Shop” quietly devastating. The implication is we’ve been trading the furnishings of our lives––perhaps our very self-conceptions––in this psychic swap shop, expecting that one new acquisition will finally make all the difference. By withholding any authorial judgement, we can’t help seeing our reflections in––a harsher light? a more sympathetic one? Finally, there’s the last of today’s trio, and it demonstrates why deadpan is so effective a technique.





Between the Wars


It’s the phrase

we had



after the first

war––so don’t



say blood-

shed invented



nothing.





The preposition of the title refers to the time period between those capital-W World Wars––but it also creates a sense of being wedged-in (as if each couplet formed a tiny vise, gradually tightening.) “It’s the phrase/we had” (what could possibly be menacing about a ‘phrase’?) “after the first /war” (and the lower-case ‘first’ hit me hard, making me realize I’d been lulled into thinking World War 1 and 2 were a finite sequence, instead of an ongoing accounting with no end in sight.) “so don’t// say blood-/shed invented”––so many recombinant ideas teased out by these line breaks: there’s the enjambed command “don’t” stifling comment; the painful rending of “blood-/shed” across two lines (leaving something like an open wound;) and finally that dangling “nothing,” as if it were one half of a couplet waiting for its inevitable mate. And now I’m even wondering whether the shedding of intra-species blood––going all the way back to the prehistory of Neanderthals and those upstart homo sapiens––is the source of the existential nothing that terrifies our sleep today. Andrea delivers these lines in such a subdued manner, unconsciously I’ve dropped my guard––and then: pow! Right to the sweet spot. And the heart is down for the count.

 

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives!

Wednesday, January 29, 2025

Somerville Artist Carol Moses brings math and logic to her work.



                                 "We Come in Peace"  Carol Moses

Interview conducted by Doug Holder



Recently, I caught up with Somerville artist Carol Moses. Moses has been affiliated with the Vernon Street Studios, and Brickbottom for many years. From her website:

"Carol Moses paints in watercolor and oil, on paper and canvas. The artist also produces series of photographic portraits with interviews of the subjects. With an affinity for math and logic, and a background in cultural anthropology and linguistics, communication and connection are at the forefront of both the non-representational painting work and the portrait/interview series."



What is your connection to Somerville and how do you view it as a city of artists?


Somerville has such a strong history of artist buildings, in particular Brickbottom and Vernon St. I have been affiliated with both for many years. The idea and the reality of artists working together in factory and industrial spaces is so powerful; they find lower-cost places and make them productive in a powerful way. There are so many other artists throughout the city, in homes and in shared spaces. and the Somerville Arts Council is a strong, effective, accessible presence.



Since I am interviewing you, I am especially interested in your image/interview project.
How would the content be different from a newspaper or magazine article?
Why do you ask the same questions of all of your subjects?




My Image and Interview project started with the portraits, not the text. I was exposed to Felix Nadar’s work – portraits of his contemporaries. I was impressed from a variety of perspectives: the nature of the portraits - the casual and sincere approach yet still extremely dignified images; the subjects included a lot of French intellectuals important to my early years, and Nadar numbered women among his contemporaries worthy of attention. I immediately thought “I’d like to make portraits of my contemporaries!” feeling that my own peers were worthy of close attention. As I began to think of doing that portrait photography, I decided to also interview the people. I am curious about people, and what they think about themselves and about the meaning of life. I began scribbling questions on little scraps of paper and stuffing them in my back pocket. By the time I embarked on the project, I had a huge pile of these. I reviewed them, and found many duplicates, and came up with a final list of about 30 questions. I did not want to make the focus be on people’s social status or identity – more reflections about what they thought about themselves and about life, and the world. As they are conceived, they are suitable for people of almost any age or situation, and ask universal queries. So how they’d differ from a journalistic focus for magazine or newspaper – They are not focused on a social identity, or a current achievement about the person. They aren’t triggered by a public view of who the person is; they allow that to unfold, from the person. When I do the project, I do not share the questions ahead of time, so that people won't prepare lofty or admirable topics, but rather respond in chatting in company with me, at the time. (For the same reason, I don't publish the interviews online, so the questions will be fresh for future subjects.) I assure people they may pass on any question they don't wish to answer, and occasionally they do. I also say there is no “gotcha” going on – I am not intending to show anyone up as foolish; I only invite people whom I feel positively about, and find interesting, to shine a light on them from the process. People who participate often express great pleasure in the process, and what they thought about.

The reason I ask the same questions is I think it makes the project cohesive – I have many strong feelings about how similar we human beings are in a good way, and have other painting work focused on this theme. Also I think artistically, having a constraint, a boundary, elucidates the differences more than shaping individualized, personal questions would. I like the flow of the exhibit so that as one walks around, and reads the interviews, the ideas and experiences echo and flow through the exhibit as a whole. You may be familiar with the so-called Proust Questionnaire – parlor game set of questions from the late 1800’s. Although many parts are dated, I think the fact of its enduring use reflects the virtue of using a repeated structure applied to varied individuals.



You have written that in your watercolor paintings you have rejected the artistic and symbolic work and have gravitated to science. Explain.

From her website:

"At a young age Moses gravitated towards logic, math and science, rejecting artistic and symbolic enterprises. Instead she studied the nuance and minutiae of her surroundings finding patterns in the natural world."



In this case, the bio material above may seem to indicate I rejected artistic and symbolic work in art. In fact, in my youth, I was not doing art, and I was uncomfortable with realms that weren’t literal and factual. I struggled with symbolism in literature, and felt confused and alienated by most art, feeling at home with numbers, equations, and science. I was mesmerized by the natural world, and could spend ages closely observing grass, soil, tiny insects, or looking at pond water under my microscope, and I imagined happily living among animals. As an adult, I expanded my interests and attractions, and became interested in mark-making, colors, and patterns, creating them and considering their interactions and connections.


You also create word paintings. Are the words that you paint more stream-of-consciousness than linear?

What does painting add to the words?



I'm a pretty verbal person. I often found myself, while painting, writing notes of multiple-line titles next to the work I was painting on. One day, I decided to write the things I was thinking on the painting paper, with my pens. I'm not sure how to say if they are stream of consciousness, yes, I guess so, or linear, yes, also. They were written at one sitting, not composed then transferred. There were just disquisitions on what I was working through in my mind. I’ve previously said that painting served as a funnel to unpack things in my head; my head would be full, stuff tumbling around, and I’d have to get ahold of paint, and get it out, unwrap it, untangle it, settle it into patterns. I used to work in software as my day job. I would include painting reproductions in my portfolio of technical writing, and coding samples, because I felt it was math-y, logical.




Anyway, back to the writing – I would untangle my ideas by writing words, then paint around, over, between the words to reinforce or support the ideas. I think mostly the painting has its own value, and works well with the text.




Why should we view your work?


I don't go around saying to anyone “you should view my work” but I’ll address what value I think it has. I think it’s an incredibly rich field of patterns, colors, structures that resonate. I think they can be ennobling, calming, stimulating, reassuring by turns. A very few pieces are about painful disturbances, and I think they look distressed, painful. I have been extremely pleased that children often feel drawn to my work, and not just animal-y pieces. I think it means that there is truth and reality there. I feel that I create scenes, environments, snapshots of the natural world, the built world, and of our inner world. Places to be, places that you can be, a human world. I have often said that a lot of my focus is about connection – alienation, distance, fear, and lack of connection; tentative connection; space for everyone where we need not connect, but exist in amity; tense and stressed connection; and consumingly intimate connections. I think the situations I'm communicating often resonate with viewers inner states.


For a Readerly Companion On the Other Side of Goodbye, the new book by g emil reutter

 



For a Readerly Companion On the Other Side of Goodbye, the new book by g emil reutter

article by Michael Todd Steffen

We’ve learned to appreciate hybrid writing for itself, for the wide palette and integration that makes today’s poetry uniquely liberal and balanced, striking and robust. But it’s good also sometimes to recognize definitions in a progression, as g emil reutter dispatches them to us in the three parts of his new book On the Other Side of Goodbye, from POEMS to FLASH to STORIES. One’s different sense of genre joins the conversation.

The reutter poem is often suburban/pastoral observation of atmosphere, weather, times of day, neighborhood wilderness, flora with its names, and elements of contrast that reflect the liminal location between nature and humanity. An Adam-and-Eve-esque conjugality haunts the garden-kempt woodland sylphs of songbirds and squirrels. In the poems, the poet’s “other” or addressee can assume an airy, echo-like or mirroring presence,

She floats in a torrent

of words, sips coffee

tattoos the words onto

a piece of marble…(page 15)

Ink, writing: tattooing the dead (a piece of marble). His lexical curiosity is highlighted in the poem “Adularescence,” bringing us with that novelty orthoclase and albite. With the wonder more than an actual question to be answered: What is writing?

While at yet another boundary, technology marks the notably greyed, more menacing big foot print of the industrial landscape, in its jarring testimony that our progress has not brought about betterment, or as the title of one poem states, “Not over the Rainbow”:

Dorothy not here

loud crunching of carrots, rabbit not

here. Jersey across water, interstate ribbons

through. Town of refinery tanks. Amazon rises

from steel dust, under bridges over roads… (page 17)

reutter’s muse is more complicit with the envoys of nature, as with the Cardinal who sings to her in the flash piece “Performance.” He, the outlier, the poet. His vision and liberties push definitions for the medium. The reutter piece of flash is suspended atmospheric writing, like the poem with an eye for suburban wildlife and fauna.

The STORIES in the collection offer, in reutter’s concept of genre, the human world, of a narrative of clear progression concealing a secret to be revealed, a surprise birthday party, the odd bric-a-brac collected by a weekend browser of flea markets, and the very personal item that his rummaging turns up. Grammatically striking and definitive between genres, the STORIES in prose accommodate their nouns with articles (“the”, “a”, “an”) which are habitually omitted in the poems, perhaps for the sake of compression, imparting a brisk catch-as-you-can manner to the poetry.

On the Other Side of Goodbye has been praised for bringing us “exquisite chronicles of journeys through local landscapes, down main streets, and on occasion, to destinations a train trip away.” Gloria Mindock has noted the book’s display of deft and detailed “descriptions…so immersive, it feels as if you’re inside his writing. He captures real life and its characters with remarkable skill.”

g emil reutter is the generous and eclectic partner editor of the admirable North of Oxford webzine and press. He is the author of eight books of hybrid and story collections, eight books of poems and four poetry chapbooks.

His greeting to us On the Other Side of Goodbye is full of across-the-fence neighborly observations and I wouldn’t so much say “small” as right-sized talk with that best of conversationalists, an alert and responsive sensibility. It’s a good companionable read for days at a time for every season.

On the Other Side of Goodbye

ISBN 13-979-8300959593

By g emil reutter

Published by Alien Buddha Press, 2025

Monday, January 27, 2025

In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

 

In the Absence of Birds (Cervena Barva Press, 2024) by Ruth C. Chad

REVIEW BY LEE VARON


In this exquisite collection, poet Ruth Chad interweaves her keen attention to the details of our natural world with deep emotions of love, loss, joy, and grief.

Many of the poems in this collection (divided into three sections) focus on the poet’s mother who suffered from Alzheimer’s before she succumbed to the disease in her 90s. These poems read like journal entries with often just dates for titles

I imagine witnessing a loved one fall into the depths of dementia must be heart-wrenching as one sees the person becoming unmoored from their former life. Chad captures this brilliantly in such poems as:

April 24:

Last night I dreamt of mermaids

in the surf

on the white

wild mane of the waves

and floating mussels

with no flesh

no byssus attached

Byssus refers to the protein threads that attach mollusks, such as mussels, to solid surfaces.

What a perfect image of her mother, a shell of her former self, totally unable to attach to anything in the world around her.

Chad is not afraid to plumb the complexities of the mother/daughter relationship. In If Only, she laments the strictures of her mother’s life.

…Long after her death

I will wish

that my mother had been freed

of the yellow walls

of our split level

that she could have walked

calmly away

from the turquoise kitchen

apron trailing behind her in the grass

that she could have walked

calmly away

into the moonrise

and left a path

for me

Chad’s poems are a testament of how we go on, how we manage devastating things and come to terms with them. One thing poetry can do so well is help us survive difficult times and certainly Chad’s poems provide this solace. Through her poetry, she illustrates how it feels to see a loved one slip into illness and infirmity, but she also shows us how one takes in the fullness of another’s life and, in so doing, transmutes this loss into a triumph of the spirit.

These poems are artfully crafted with deceptive simplicity. Often, Chad dispenses with punctuation altogether and the beauty of her words on the page shines forth with its power and resonance. Most of these poems are no longer than a page and among these the poet intersperses haiku and other short poems which serve to crystallize her message as in this poem after her mother’s passing:

February 14

I cried when I dropped the teacup

robin’s egg blue

shattered shards of china

on my kitchen floor

it was yours

No extra words slow the conveyance of the deep emotion in such poems.

There are poems in this collection about travel, the process of aging, and about other family members. All of these are imbued with Chad’s keen attention to the natural world and breathtaking images as in lines from Life in the Pandemic:

A hundred sparrows

gather in the firs flutter

against each other

feathers bronze umber

their chatter

fills the lilac sky…

And in another poem Ice After a Storm, the poet writes:

I shudder

in chill crusty morning

awed by the cold fist of sun

and how small I am

standing here

under the great loud beeches

like a girl in the circus crowd

the wild universe

whirling around me

Certainly, the poems in this enduring collection engender an equal sense of awe.


Lee Varon is a social worker and writer. Her latest poetry book is The Last Bed (2024). She has written two children’s books about substance use disorder: My Brother is Not a Monster: A Story of Addiction and Recovery (2021) and: A Kids Book About Overdose (2024).

Thursday, January 23, 2025

Red Letter Poem #239

 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 #239

 

 

 

 

 

Askew, Akimbo

 





Charcoal trees drawn down a papery sky

bisect the windbreak, water sketched behind.



From the marsh a Great Blue Heron eyes me.

I hear bloodied horsemen pound arterial roads



where all my sorrows incandesce, and find

I’m as alone in the world as I’ve ever been.



Genealogies of leaves become encampments,

lacquered by rain on graves at the root-foot



of damaged new-growth trees: the Emerald Ash Borer

has carved labyrinthine and curving maze-end scars



on the trunk and limbs in Hubbardston, Massachusetts

for two hundred acres and through the conservancy.



The mackerel sky and dusk appearing so soon

no longer catches me off guard. Winter is approaching.



New England surrenders. I am wed to the world

with a plain, cut-paper ampersand––fragile, slight,



subtle as a footfall of fog disturbing salt marsh hay.

I miss the sea. My old life. A dog. A man. A house.





––Melissa Green







Melissa Green is a lifer. I believe she was born to be a poet, devoted all her creative and emotional energies to the practice, and persisted long after circumstances in her life made such (dare I use the word?) spiritual discipline all but impossible. Her first book, The Squanicook Eclogues, was hailed as an astonishing achievement––both for its formal brilliance and its almost-mythological portrayal of her beloved landscape in Central Massachusetts. But then illness and hospitalization devastated Melissa’s budding career, and it seemed that this incipient dream might be cut short. But again and again over the decades, Melissa would work her way back to the notebook, back to verse of such imaginative discernment and lyrical richness, it provided the ballast through even the most challenging of storms. Her diminutive collection, Fifty-Two––consisting of fifty 5-line poems (each with a dramatic caesura central to its unfolding)––demonstrates the wholeness of intent and brilliance of execution that, to my mind, warrants the term masterpiece. Sadly, that collection is long out-of-print––but if you run across a copy in a used bookstore, trust me: snatch it up immediately. Fortunately, sometime back, Arrowsmith Press published Magpiety: New & Selected Poems which contains a generous sampling of that and other collections.



Here's one of my favorites from Fifty-Two which, to my mind, bears some relationship to today’s Red Letter offering:





The Eater of Paper, The Drinker of Ink





With my pen point, I dig up the watermark, a white peony soft on my tongue.
In that sweet wafer I taste a cluster of birches, cherry, oak. I swallow acres
of forest, seed pods like limpets at my heart.
The nib plunges into a black current.
Its unguent on my lips, I suck down the streets of Evangeline, the drowned parishes
of Katrina, these lines an alphabet drawn from a corpse’s single alchemized hair.



Sometimes it feels as if we are only tethered to this existence by the imaginative investment we make. For such a poet, the watermark of a written page might actually become her communion wafer, providing for a momentary salvation. And the exacting description of one’s surroundings becomes a necessary act of self-perpetuation (even if that bond is as modest as an ‘&’ logogram.)



Receiving a batch of new poems from Melissa, I put up a pot of coffee, ease into my favorite chair, and allow myself to savor the sort of sonic complexity that’s becoming rarer in much contemporary poetry. Lines like “I hear bloodied horsemen pound arterial roads// where all my sorrows incandesce” make me know I am now traversing Ms. Green’s territory, and I’d better keep eyes open, my mind alert. Allow a musical phrase like “Genealogies of leaves” to simmer in your ear for a moment: four long-e sounds amid the lapping of those l’s––sheer pleasure! But like Emily Dickinson or Lorine Niedecker––two poets I think of as Melissa’s forebearers––the intent here extends far beyond lush music and entrancing imagery. Something vital is at stake, as we experience a woman’s life, long after romantic notions have been weathered away: “I’m as alone in the world as I’ve ever been.” Of course, Melissa is not alone in her losses––I’m sure any of us with years under our belts knows how time takes a bite out of our lives. As the New England landscape surrenders to winter, implacable as an invading army, the poet can make this startling statement: “I am wed to the world/ with a plain, cut-paper ampersand”––and we, too, are reminded how precarious the day can feel (though most have the luxury of pretending otherwise.) The poem reaches its resolution with a series of utterly plain but heartfelt declarations: “I miss the sea. My old life. A dog. A man. A house.” Bringing language to this litany of absences––mustn’t this bring a measure of comfort? Enough? My answer about that seems to change with every reading. But I can say this, though, without reservation: Melissa’s life-long literary pursuits have enriched my life immeasurably. I feel a certain pride to be included in the same inky guild as such an artist. My hope is that her next book (and the book after that) will continue to sustain poet and reader alike.

 

 

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives!