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!

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

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).