Red Letter Poem #262

 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 #262


Those Are Not My Grades


My nephew, may his wildest dreams come true,

confronted by his parents with his teenage grades

shot back, Those are not my grades;

immediate, definitive, assured.



Was that when they were fixing up the house?

Now Matt himself’s a major renovator

always improving reality

which admittedly could use a boost. Yesterday, for instance,



stopped at a light

glancing at the rearview mirror

there it was: Reality

by which I mean my current upper arm



resting on the rolled-down-window ledge––

wrinkled, loosened, wrecked.

That was near the lot where Masse’s Hardware used to be

now waiting for a Lowe’s or some damn other piece



of corporate shit to come along.

Will this light never turn?



People, if you’re out there,

listen up!

These are not my arms!





––Linda Bamber




OK, show of hands: who thinks the teenage nephew in this poem’s spotlight is simply trying to brazen his way out of parental trouble with that “Those are not my grades” declaration? And how many believe he is making a kind of political argument, that grades do not define either his person or his school performance? Perhaps some are entertaining the possibility that the young man is taking a philosophical, or even spiritual, stance about the very nature of objective reality and the labels we place on it? That single line of poetry could easily be an emotional Rorschach test, challenging a reader’s assessment of human nature. But one thing is certain: we cannot help but smile as we puzzle it all out. In so many of Linda Bamber’s poems, the strange situations she presents––and the unique tone of voice with which she addresses her readers–– provoke quiet laughter. But that humor is often nettled with the awareness of mortal suffering, how we tend to be captive within our minds’ tangled trains of thought. The result: we are made aware that our own vulnerable hearts were not as walled-in as we might have imagined. If the psychic DNA of Anne Sexton and Joan Rivers could be interwoven in a laboratory, the result might well sound like Linda Bamber.



In the span of the opening two lines, ‘dreams’ and a ‘confrontation’ with authority come into play­­––instantly upping the emotional ante. After all, many of the choices we made (or were made for us) occurred so early in life, our days seemed almost predetermined. This poem is a little meditation about what we expect from existence and how our expectations continually confound. Veering between wry and spritely, the poem takes turn after sharp turn, jostling readers in our easy chairs. Were you startled when time suddenly lurched forward and, we assume, the young boy is suddenly a grown-up like us, ‘renovating’ this beleaguered world (which can certainly use the make-over)? But then the scene shifts again, and now the speaker is driving in her car, temporarily frozen at a red traffic light. She glimpses, in the rearview, her arm “resting on the rolled-down-window ledge––/ wrinkled, loosened, wrecked.” This made me think: how often, when approaching a mirror, do I half-expect to see my young self staring back, shocked instead at the weathered countenance waiting there? How did we ever convince ourselves that we understood the nature of lived experience? Amazement should be our default. Why didn’t someone warn us of all this early on––how the safe and familiar evaporate all-too-quickly, giving way to “some damn other piece// of corporate shit,” right before our eyes? Forced to hold still and reflect, we find ourselves praying for the freedom to gun the engine and lurch ahead––even if we’re not sure where we’re going. And so Linda, dangling from a psychic thread, exclaims: “People, if you’re out there,/ listen up!”––talk about an existential crisis!––“These are not my arms!” Indeed! Self-awareness butts heads with a childlike sense of hope. I found myself thinking: these are not my weary eyes, not my mind trembling at the prospect of what the years do to our fragile selves. Perhaps today, you and I should write our own report card; and why not cast it in the spasmodic rhythms of a free verse poem. Should all our F’s be expunged, replaced perhaps with the much more forgiving ‘needs improvement’? Are we still trying to fake it until we make it, hoping some divine parentage will be taken in by our bravado? Or maybe we’ll honestly face our reflections in this darkly-lit mirror of a poem––and if that isn’t deserving of an A, I don’t know what is.



I remember, years back, the unexpected delight when I stumbled upon Linda’s first collection, Metropolitan Tang. For a time after that, she focused on fiction and released Taking What I Like (both books issued by David R. Godine.) She spent her entire teaching career as an English Professor at Tufts University. While we anxiously await a second volume of poetry, Linda continues writing and publishing verse, fiction, essays, and reviews­­––appearing in such places as The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Agni, The Nation, and The New York Times. Because of the light touch within her poetry, and baseline of compassion, it came as no surprise to learn that she was a practicing Buddhist. Ideas of non-attachment slip into unexpected moments because, after all, this is not really my life. Or is it?

  

 

 

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

Fanny Howe Video

 https://www.instagram.com/reel/DMA8al8O9vB/... Nidia Hernández's (NEW ENGLAND POETRY CLUB BOARD MEMBER) video of the late Fanny Howe

Red Letter Poem #261

 The Red Letters

 

 

I

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 #261



The Two Liberations of Crispus Attucks





First from his master who had

This to say about



The Mulatto Fellow, about 27

Years of Age, named Crispas.



How his hair was short and curl’d

His knees nearer together



Than common, and his bear-skin

Coat light-colored. That his



Britches were made of new

Buckskin, his yard stockings



Blue, his woolen shirt checked.

What he did not see



Is what he did Not See.

The empty space of Crispus.



How like smoke, like nothing,

Like dust he disappeared.



So to write him in—to restore

The It of him, the ad and mug-



Shot payed-for and run. October

2, 1750, Boston Gazette:



Whoever shall take up said

Run-away, and convey him



To his abovesaid Master, shall

Have Ten Pounds, old Tenor



Reward, and all necessary charges

Paid. And all masters of Vessels



And others, are hereby

Cautioned against concealing



Or carrying off said Servant

On Penalty of the Law.



For the weight of him,

For the worth of him,



Who stands presently

Martyr and master



Of his wounded and full

Self, first among men



Before enslavement,

Among them the actual



Unconceptually detained.

Crispus taking the first



Bullet like a 21st century

Black man, like a Black



Man in a car to convey

Him up the freeway.



The way to free.

The way from tyranny.





––Danielle Legros Georges








"What, to the Slave, Is the Fourth of July?" That was the title of a speech delivered by Frederick Douglass on July 5, 1852, at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York. Douglass was, of course, the American abolitionist, social reformer, compelling orator, writer, and statesman nonpareil––an acclaimed figure at a time when the vast majority of his fellow black men and women living in these United States would have been considered the equivalent of a horse or carriage: property. If you think about how outraged many in Donald Trump’s America would be by the tone (let alone content) of this address, imagine how utterly revolutionary this would have seemed, eleven years prior to the Emancipation Proclamation. Invited to deliver this Independence Day speech, organized by the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society, Douglass began to respond to his own query this way: “I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade and solemnity, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy––a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”



It is always a challenge for any chronicler to make use of centuries-old documentation in such a way as to preserve its historical potency without leaving contemporary readers too much in the dark. Most poets shy away from attempting this. But Danielle Legros Georges did this often, and with unusual efficacy and grace––especially in Acts of Resistance to New England Slavery by Africans Themselves in New England––the small chapbook from Staircase Books published posthumously this year. That word, posthumously, hits especially hard at those who associate the poet with her vibrant spirit, commitment to community, and seemingly bottomless reservoir of energy––even when (we would find out only belatedly) Danielle was suffering from a slow terminal illness. She was determined to live her life on her own terms and with her unique sense of imaginative imperative. In these final poems, she explores the history of enslaved people in the liberal enclaves of New England colonial states, making extensive use of newspaper accounts, slave papers, legal documents, and contemporaneous historical writing. The unusual spelling and syntax she borrows make us feel both distant from these sources and also strangely intrigued––as if we were eavesdropping on some alien world which, it turns out, was situated upon the very ground we presently inhabit. If your memory of high school history class is somewhat a blur, I’ll remind you who Crispus Attucks was: sailor and whaler from Framingham, MA; a man of African and Native American ancestry; and, like Douglass a century later, an escaped slave. He was also part of a rowdy protest in March of 1770 that resulted in British soldiers firing upon the crowd. Attucks was thought to have been the first to die––perhaps the earliest casualty of the approaching Revolutionary War. Contrast this pivotal role in history with how his former ‘owner’ saw him: a sketchy list of clothing items and physical traits. But then the poet illuminates the situation by saying: “What he did not see// Is what he did Not See./ The empty space of Crispus.”



Poets know how language conveys the overt meaning of the speaker while also betraying the covert intent. How easily the mind ricochets from “run” (as in a notice in a newspaper) to “runaway” (with visions of slave-catchers and manacles.) If the stance throughout much of the poem feels like that of the historian, nearing the conclusion the incendiary intent of the poet is revealed: “Crispus taking the first// Bullet like a 21st century/ Black man, like a Black// Man in a car to convey/ Him up the freeway.// The way to free./ The way from tyranny.” The contortions of language reveal just how hard the struggle has been to assess the distance between those antebellum slave days and our (supposedly) ‘post-racial’ 21st century America. Douglass’s rhetoric and the magnitude of its righteous indignation function like a sledgehammer. But Danielle’s language is more elliptical, subdued––right up until she places a needle into the center of the wound, shocking us with the reminder of how slowly the racial landscape has changed across the two-and-a-half century arc within this poem.



I will not spend my remaining sentences here detailing Danielle’s accomplishments (though I hope you’ll explore them further online.) I will only hint at the mark a poet can actually make upon this world, represented simply by some of what has been planned in her absence: France’s Ministry of Culture posthumously awarded Danielle a Chevalier de L’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres; the newly redesigned Copley Square Park will feature her poem “How many kinds of love,” carved into the stone; a scholarship in her name is planned for students of Boston Public Schools; and the New England Poetry Club’s biannual fellowship for young writers of color will be titled in Danielle’s honor. These will now themselves become historical facts. And who, in the unscrolling years, will be moved by them and incorporate such reflective moments into poems?

 

 

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com

Robert Pinsky/Stan Strickland, We, Too the People Reading--Longfellow House/ New England Poetry Club

                                                         (Click on below for video)

                                               https://www.youtube.com/live/oyjC3V2LVpo

Somerville Poet Molly O'Leary: A poet of Memories

Recently I caught up with Somerville Poet Molly O'Leary. She generously agreed to answer my questions.  From her website:

"Mollie O’Leary (b. 1995) is a poet from Massachusetts. She holds a B.A. in English and Philosophy from Kenyon College and an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Washington. Mollie’s chapbook The Forgetting Curve was published in 2023 through Poetry Online’s chapbook contest. Her work has appeared in McNeese Review, Chestnut Review, wildness and elsewhere. Mollie has participated in workshops through Tin House and Inprint; she has also attended artist residencies in Mexico, Italy, and Norway."

How has it been for you as a poet living in Somerville?


Somerville and the surrounding neighborhoods have a really vibrant arts and poetry scene. I’ve met a lot of people through poetry, including a local group of Boston poets called the Chickadee Collective. It’s been really inspiring and energizing to connect with people who share a love of language and want to talk about it!


You studied at Kenyon College with Somerville Poet Jennifer Clarvoe—how did this experience shape you as a writer?


Jennifer taught my Introduction to Poetry workshop when I was sophomore in college which was hugely influential since I was just starting out and finding my voice. I was also in her Prosody and Poetics class where I learned more about the musicality and rhythm of poetry. I remember we had to memorize and recite poems in her class, and that was such an interesting exercise in what lines, rhymes, or metaphors tend to stick with you and why that might be. It was a wonderful surprise to run into Jennifer at a coffee shop in Somerville almost 10 years since I took my first class with her!


Reading your poem " The Forgetting Curve," I am reminded of Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" with its opening line " The art of losing is not hard to master." Was Bishop an influence for you?


Almost all of my mentors and various readers have drawn parallels between myself and Bishop—and I love that! Bishop has always been a big influence. I was actually introduced to her poem ‘Sestina’ in a class with Jennifer. Bishop’s understatement in that poem while also being so straightforward and honest with the reader struck me and has stayed with me ever since. Studying Bishop’s emotional restraint and her use of unadorned yet moving language has helped me write some of my more difficult poems like “Anti-Elegy.”


Why should we read your work?

My poetry is very interested in memory and how it shapes our understanding of ourselves and our connections with others, especially in the wake of traumatic or emotionally difficult events. If you have memories that you are both hesitant to remember yet afraid to forget, I think you’ll connect with my work.

RECURRENCE

Peering into the scoured bathtub, I spot
sour mildew budding. I wake to pink biofilm
on graying porcelain. Even slime mold has memory;
its amoeba body retrieves oat flakes. After I scythe
seven inches of hair, still I feel long strands running
down my spine. Ever since the flood, I try not to hold
onto much, exfoliate dead cells as if this excess
might weigh down a life raft. I slip pale sea glass
into my pocket only to part with it once I reach the car.
I used to capture wild hermit crabs, place them
in salted tap water, swooshing the tupperware
to mimic waves. I thought I could trick them
into being home. The hermit crabs lasted a day,
leaving behind their tiny calcified capsules, perfect
like piped frosting. The brain wants to be buoyant,
shedding ghosts to avoid overgrowth. We’re meant
to slough off the past, but I still don’t know
where to keep the shells the tide gives back.

*** From the Chestnut Review

Red Letter Poem #260

 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 #260

 

 

Metaphysics of the Seahorse

In a seagrass meadow, a male seahorse

gives birth, lunging like the yellow horse



on springs at the Vineyard’s penny arcade

my daughter loved, the barrel-bellied horse



grinning, Emma thought, as if it remembered

her each year. A camera films the seahorse



expelling hundreds of fry in a murky froth

from his brood pouch. Most seahorses



don’t survive—they’re weak swimmers—

but Poseidon’s chariot was pulled by seahorses.



Imagine the shock of Dr. Julius Caesar Aranzi

in 1587, cutting into a brain and finding seahorse-



shaped tissue in the temporal lobe, branding it

the hippocampus, sea monster horse,



not knowing it held the key to memory

and memory’s loss. The mindful seahorse



can look forward and back at the same time

while staying put. Me? I’m a crab, not a seahorse.


––Teresa Cader


Dizzying terminology. Metaphysics (so says my dictionary) “is the branch of philosophy that focuses on first principles, including ontology and cosmology, and is intimately connected with epistemology.” If ontology feels shrouded in the foggy recollection of your college philosophy class, a thumbnail might point to “the study of existence itself.” Cosmology and epistemology round out this heady quartet with an investigation of the physical universe, as well as the place of human knowledge within its grand design. A little overwhelming. . .and that’s just in the title of the poem! But then everything else that follows in Teresa Cader’s lovely meditation on our tenuous place within the natural world feels intimate and much more present. What a revelation, when I first learned about the seahorse, seadragon, and pipefish––members of the Syngnathidae family––whose males are impregnated by the females of their species, injecting their eggs into the partner’s ‘brood pouch.’ Then it’s the fathers who will fertilize, incubate, and give birth to some 2000 offspring when they come to term. But the poet quickly returns our attention to the human realm, writing: the seahorse “lunging like the yellow horse// on springs at the Vineyard’s penny arcade/ my daughter loved, the barrel-bellied horse// grinning, Emma thought, as if it remembered/ her each year.” The form of the poem––a contemporary ghazal–– acclimates us to the eddies and repetitions of our thought processes. And so, we slip easily from the nature documentary to the deep heart of the familial––and suddenly we have a good deal more skin in the game, so to speak.



But this deft poet is intent on drawing us into the whirlpool of comprehension by shifting back and forth between (what my mother termed) ‘textbook knowledge’ and the sort of wisdom (or astonishment) that is particular to the lived experience of our species. Mythology and history enter the mix (the names Poseidon and Julius Caesar can’t help but conjure schoolroom memories). And then, in 1587, when Dr. Aranzi performed his early investigations of the human body, we share his astonishment to discover that “seahorse-// shaped tissue in the temporal lobe, branding it/ the hippocampus, sea monster horse”––and we are quickly reminded that, while each day we navigate both the quotidian and the utterly mysterious, saddled to these fragile human bodies, we barely understand how any of this universe works. Human consciousness sometimes seems yet another far galaxy, and just as confounding. We can’t help imagining what depth of meaning resides in that seahorse-like brain structure. And how utterly at sea our lives would be if it were somehow damaged. As these couplets progressed, I felt myself releasing a heartfelt sigh: for the seahorse and its all-too-fragile young; for Teresa and Emma and the yellow rocking horse of youth; for all those scientists and poets who are so hungry to know, they will travel through emotional storms and over whatever rough seas necessary in order to reach that far shore.



I find the poetry Teresa produces to be a perfect combination of craft and invention; she is a student of history, but also an adventurous mind willing to startle us with improvisation. This is the third poem I’ve featured in the Letters from a manuscript that has finally achieved book publication. At Risk––awarded the 2023 Richard Snyder Memorial Award, and published by Ashland Poetry Press––explores, in a variety of dimensions, how our existence on this planet is buffeted by the storm tides of history, memory, grief––but spurred as well by the tailwinds of love and the full-sails of imagination. Teresa has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe; she also spent years working with young writers in programs at MIT, UMass-Boston, the Emerson College Graduate Writing Program and, for a decade, the low-residency MFA Program at Lesley University. And while this poet admires the seahorse’s ability to direct its attention both forward and back, I think Teresa’s crab-mind sideways crawl reminds us that, between where we hope to go and where we’ve been, lies the experience (and the deep rewards) of simply living on this planet.

 

 

 

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

 

And coming soon:

a new website to house all the Red Letter archives at StevenRatiner.com