Red Letter Poem #238

 

 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 #238

 

 

 

 

Two Poems from Martha Collins

Right up front, this must be said: we hope we’re wrong. We pray our fears are unfounded and, as the curtain is about to rise on this second Trump presidency, it contains none of the reckless developments which made the first so disastrous for so many individuals. Perhaps all the promises of retribution against their enemies will prove to be only campaign bluster––and the plans for reshaping two-and-a-half centuries of democratic precedence will never come to pass. But one thing is certain: if we pretend that this is the new normal; if we turn a blind eye to political powerplays and egregious behavior, thinking this is merely an effort to shake things up, then we may experience an unthinkable transformation for these once-United States––a circumstance we never imagined our children, our grandchildren would ever face.



Martha Collins is something of a unique literary talent. Poet, translator, educator, historian without portfolio, she’s been lauded for her book-length examinations of social and political forces and the ways they are manifest in the lives of ordinary Americans (though the poet uncovers extraordinary circumstance at every turn). In 2022, she published her eleventh volume of poetry, Casualty Reports (Pitt Poetry Series). The following year, her fifth volume of translations from the Vietnamese was released; Dreaming the Mountain (in collaboration with Nguyen Ba Chung) carries over into English work from across a forty-year period by the Buddhist poet and scholar Tuệ Sỹ. Among Martha’s trove of honors are fellowships from the NEA, the Bunting Institute, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the Witter Bynner Foundation––as well as three Pushcart Prizes, the Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award, the Laurence Goldstein Poetry Prize, and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. Let me start today with what must surely be one of her briefest of poems (something of a carry-over from last week’s Red Letter installment gathering poetic one-liners:)





Erratum, November 2024



We said it would be close. It wasn’t even





This miniature offers us a glimpse into the DNA of Martha’s poetry: in the smallest of gestures, or the most unassuming of grammatical shifts, the synaptic sparks of a thinking mind are revealed. It likely took a minute or so before you entertained the double-meaning of the word even (truncated, and without punctuation), and the ache of our society’s disequilibrium is conjured once again. But doesn’t the title also elicit a certain fear and trembling? How can something so consequential be reduced to one of those little paper slips (like a ballot?) we sometimes find tucked into a just-published volume?



Sensitized to her technique, there are so many small but potent inflection points in this new poem, “Cast,” which arrived in my inbox. Its composition began eight years back, at the dawn of the first Trump presidency; but she set it aside, perhaps feeling it did not accomplish enough. But when she returned to it in 2024, and updated the dramatis personae, something new and unexpected took place.





Cast





for State the head of Exxon a billionaire

for Labor a critic and violator of labor



for Environmental a climate change denier

for Education a critic of public schools



for Housing someone who simply lived in a house

for Homeland Security someone to build a wall



for Senior Councilor race white don’t ask

for Attorney General immigration watch out



Intermission



for Attorney General accused pedophile oops

for Defense defender of war crimes sex offender



for Homeland Security someone who shot her dog

for Education a wrestling empire exec



for France a family associate convicted felon

for Israel no such thing as Palestinians



for Health a conspiracy anti-vaxxer no training

for whatever he wants the richest man in the world



(2016, 2024)





Once again, the lines feel just a little breathless, lacking all punctuation. The title makes us imagine we’re perusing the inside of a Playbill, as the overture swells and we await the first act. And for each of the President’s appointees, the poet insists on bearing witness, on reminding readers who “only the best people” really turned out to be. The bitter ironies are evident throughout, but I loved a line like “for Senior Councilor race white don’t ask”––there’s a whole op-ed diatribe condensed into those closing four words.



But then comes what is, for me, the most devastating element in the poem, a one-line stanza: “Intermission.” And suddenly the relative calm we’ve felt for four years vanishes––poof!––in a cloud of stage-mist. There were certainly failings during the last administration (we should never turn our national life into a fairy tale, no matter who occupies the White House––self-delusion is the opioid that allows awful things to take place on the national stage.) But life felt (for lack of a better word) normal. What is being promised by the incoming administration is anything but. And as the second act begins, Martha introduces the whole new cast of characters, and my heart turns leaden. Perhaps that is all a poet can do at the moment: demand that we sit up straighter in our seats, pay attention, bear witness to what is taking place. Remember, because of the recent election, we all have earned a certain degree of authorship for the scenes being enacted all around us. Are the actors, emboldened, going off-script? There will be some who applaud. And others whose lives will suddenly be torn open, dashed against these political shoals. We cannot simply choose to exit the theater––that is not an option. The strength of our commitment to this democratic experiment will be tested. The final act is being written as we speak.

 

 

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

A Handpicked Poem by Michael Todd Steffen

 A Handpicked Poem

by Michael Todd Steffen

Winter 2024

A l e x a n d e r H o l l e n b e r g

origin story, crow

First in the 2-Day Poem Contest 2023, Contemporary Verse 2, published online in December 2023

– on the occasion of Earth Day 2023

The crow’s wing is a blade

slicing the ocean open:

inside, the usual offal—birds’ nests

of old transatlantic cable, fists of seagrass

that clasp and conceal the bleached bones

of tankers and trawl nets, dusky shards of fallen stars

set down on the seabed in a sunken syzygy

of celestial trash—a drowned, stationary orbit.

Even deeper in abyssalpelagic space, a forest

of grey spruce slow-dances

in the dark undercurrent, like phosphenes

forged by the pressure of water and salt.

The crow plucks one, squirrels it in her plumage

and soars—for a moment spruce and crow and sea and sky

concatenate, which is to say create,

a new cosmos in the ink of her wing,

connecting the drowned

to what cannot be drowned.

She returns the spruce to drier ground, from its boughs

watches fishermen gadding about the bright, boatless harbor,

gathering bait and gossip, mending generations

of decay in their nets,

listens to them quiz one another about traps and tides,

the topography of a good trawl line, the boundaries

of inherited territories and the brisk profits

to which they’ll one day return—

as if returning

is something that will always happen,

as if there were a net wide enough

to reel back in the world.

As I comb back through a file named poems_by_others, I find the great blessing of Alexander Hollenberg’s poem, “origin story, crow,” found a year ago in the cited online poetry journal I go back to. To me it’s a “winter” poem because I found it online last winter, and because the fishermen in the poem are doing the winter work of mending nets and readying gear. The texture of the language is rich as the paperweight weather and its palpable ghost-pluming air we’re in today.



It’s January 11th, 2025. In the Boston area it’s snowing, a brief assurance we’ll get at least a taste of the winter season this year. 10 years ago, in 2015, we had a doozy of a winter that had me looking for a plane ticket back to Oklahoma to spend a month just to get out of the blasts and shoveling. As I remember it, one full-blown 13-inch blizzard a week. We accumulated a record 110.6 inches that year.



And, on most of the media I try like a dog chasing a Ferrari to keep up with, we’re in the aftermath of the LA wildfires which began on Tuesday evening, three nights ago. The scope of the devastation is piercing. Right here in my own country a glimpse of the sort of bleakest devastation I’ve been watching unfold in Gaza, Ukraine, Haiti, Sudan over recent years. There is no war in America… Except perhaps the back lines of the war or struggle humanity is engaged in now globally: climate change. Which in a sense is an ongoing war we have been in against global reality or truth. A week or so ago Meta (formerly Facebook) dismissed its fact-checkers. Somebody leaped at the LA tragedy in a lampooning gesture to that dismissal, posting Greenland had carpet bombed LA in response to assumptive President Trump’s bid to annex their land, and for our involvement in the destruction in Gaza. Try fact-checking ironies. The post was seen before it disappeared. Perhaps in an age of widespread farce, effect-checking would be the name of the game.



This morning’s snow isn’t all a job. As I woke to see it blanketing the housetops outside my window, something child-like sprang and effervesced in me. April, month of awaking desire and its dormant virulence surrounded by a new generation of competition, might be the cruelest month. But December, January and February can contain superlative senses of claustrophobia, darkness, and doom (end of year, end of the world…). A snowfall, brief as most are anymore, is a divine distraction from all that closed-in northern angst.



Climate change and warmer weather has opened the northern winter to more clement temperatures, yet deepened the sense of our doom in the long view. The less snow we see up here, the more convinced we become of the phenomenon that the world is warming. This is different from being convinced by reports and photographs. It is, I imagine, the difference between a doctor’s words and the pain and weakness the gravely ill are overcome by. Warm or even not so cold winter days in Boston refute any hope that documents have just been photo-shopped and edited along with all the scientific research. January sunshine sinks a much starker dread in me, because my mind is convinced of its global and potentially millennial implications.



Hollenberg’s poem is an “origin story”—the title not capitalized, as in the beginning of the beginning, in the throes/remnant of timeless chaos, still lacking conventions, like rules for capitalized letters in titles. The first act of the poem, the crow’s flight or rowing, is “slicing” as though the ocean here were a pie? This opening, true to the title, remembers the divisions of the acts of creation in Genesis, land from water, day from night.



Winter’s the season of ends and so origins and origin stories. Its beginning is marked by the shortest day in the calendar year, scientifically the darkest time of the year, night with its analogues of chaos, blindness and lostness. Along these lines the birth of Christ signifies the beginning of a new order. We make resolutions for New Year’s Day to become new, better people.



But Hollenberg’s poem is going to get a little more forensic—“inside, the usual offal”—with that homophone of “awful,” the dread feeling darkness, death, which the absence of order deepens inside us.



For the new order to step in, the old must be largely digested and dissolved. Hollenberg’s primordial waters, bearing witness to the historical day, have a bad case of indigestion from “old transatlantic cable…the bleached bones/of tankers and trawl nets”—modulating the musical registers of the poem’s language between myth and documentary, juxtaposing the two essential times, eternity and now, aligning with the poet’s “sunken syzygy/of celestial trash.”



Science is now admitting to materials we call forever plastics.



In another staggering signature the poet more deeply names his “deeper” ocean, for our utter disorientation of up and down, “abyssalpelagic space” where a “forest/of grey spruce slow-dances” from its valley or hillside time out of mind before an a-historical flood swept over it. Forests of spruce don’t grow under salt water. But oceans have been known to move, over whole areas, forests.



Crows are bantering spirits. Known to collect odd things, bottlecaps, earrings… They are notorious takers. They sing in omens of noise. Their high status in indigenous mythology stands well documented and we have phones, we have, more importantly, libraries. Nearly everybody at one time or other, most of us more than once, is gathered into an audible address by these odd angels of roadsides, neighborhoods, fields and, yes, the seaside. In Jung’s sense, the crow’s an archetype of the supernatural, a luminous token of creation in the world out there before but also always just as we see it, as though we have always known it, a touchstone for the nature of reality beyond, though also part of, our will and might to bend. Like the doubtful hope expressed in the brilliant final lines of the poem:



as if returning

is something that will always happen,



as if there were a net wide enough

to reel back in the world.



Again the homophonic play between “reel” and “real”; that “net” both referring to the tradecraft net of the fishermen and also to the (Inter)net we most all are most always caught up in.



“origin story, crow” is what Allen Grossman might call a cosmogenic poem. In it Hollenberg magisterially lights up the dual nature of our tenuous residency on earth, in its subjective/objective framework of interdependency, dear and endearment. It’s hard to imagine another language with its demands to adhere, advocate for and sell, holding and giving so much so succinctly, to nearly anybody, other than the language of poetry.