Speaking for Everyone: An Anthology of “We” Poems

 

Speaking For Everyone

An Anthology of “We” Poems

Edited by Eric Greinke

Amazon

ISBN: 9798332054433

181 Pages

Review by Off the Shelf Correspondent Dennis Daly

Use of the third person plural in poetry not only draws the writer away from the overly fashionable confessional style of versifying but adds a sense of universality and transcendence to the wordcraft. The ability to connect the emotions and thoughts of a multitude suggests either deep arrogance (in bad poetry) or collective insight and consciousness (in good poetry). There are obvious pitfalls. For instance, “we” could simply be used as a metaphor for “I.” Or the writer may project his revelations onto others without any real sapience. Eric Greinke’s masterfully edited anthology entitled Speaking For Everyone avoids the pitfalls of this genre and, in his inspired choices of good poetry, bonds together the fears and hopes and commonalities inherent in the nature of mankind.

Greinke’s informative introduction gives his anthology context and gravitas. All the poems included were written in the past 60 years except three by Walt Whitman. According to Greinke, Whitman’s theme of universality foreshadows the other pieces in this book. He’s right. Looking back on the book’s setup, Whitman’s delightful poems do add ballast to the timelessness of Greinke’s poetic ship.

W. D. Ehrhart’s poem The Cradle of Civilization directs us back to our archaeological beginnings. The “we” persona examines the commonalities of birthright that presumably made us what we are. This begs a question: What happened? Ehrhart provides the answer with not a little irony. His “we” has a destructive side, an incomplete evolution of “our” souls. Presumably he cites the recent wars in Iraq. This pessimistic view is part and parcel of the human condition. The poet’s lament ends this way,

How very far we’ve come

that we should come to such a place

not in gratitude and wonder

but with bombs and guns,

that we should not find this odd

that we should so believe our otherness

that we would rather kill and die

than search for common ground.

Alienation takes center stage in Eric Greinke’s piece, Flood Tide. Adrift in a strange and terrible ocean, we swim through the waves of life, experiencing both pleasures and pains, but utterly confounded and beyond comprehension. Are we on course or deluding ourselves? Love comforts, but even that emotion is illusionary. In the end we die alone. Greinke’s poem begins in measured time, in human time,

Another day surges over

the horizon, flotsam

sloshing through the dark

sluice. Loose pages

drift in pools, like

travelers, asleep beneath

the hills. There is no

bowl to contain our

tears, just flooded floors in

a hastily abandoned factory.

In his poem The Man in the Booth in the Midtown Tunnel, Doug Holder expands on the themes of isolation and estrangement. Set in the New York tunnel which runs under the East River between Manhattan and Queens, the poem’s objectified man devolves into a blur of fumes and pressure. Despite the continuous traffic the man loses his identity as he gains familiarity. The “we” persona, consoled by its multiplicity, can only observe a fading individual in isolation. Understanding has absented itself. Here is the heart of the poem,

And he

Has lost

His face

Long ago

In a blue

Uniform

And the sun

And the fresh air

Merely throw

Him hints

In our car

We pass him.

Faceless

And a blur

Phantoms behind

Thick plates

Of light-bleached

Glass.

In Here, We Are Gathered, a poem by JudyKronenfeld, death descends onto our reclining faces like a soft pillow. The “we” persona notices each detail right up until the end. Details comfort. So do connections. We love to share images of illness and decrepitude until, well…just until. Then the bottom falls out into the mystery of individuality. The poet perceives the end is near,

But no, not quite there,

not quite then,

for there is esprit de corps

in Shearly Beloved—where everyone’s

hair starts out frizzled, or orange, or white,

and highlights, lowlights,

ombre, sombre drown out the fear;

and even in the infusion center,

there is quiet communication, comparing

of wigs and scarves, hope-woven threads…

Universally experienced alienation perplexes mankind in Paul B. Roth’s piece entitled Strangers. Here the faces of “we” experience the same anxieties, but separately. They individually share their photographs with others, hoping for a reaction or perhaps a tidbit of information. The results, always the same, are melded together in the third person plural. This “we” transcends time and territory. But in the end the self is still a stranger. A good night’s sleep in Roth’s reality never ends. He puts it this way in his prose poem,

We realized we were not waking up, nor were

we hitting ground, as if nothing were below us.

We slept on, unable to awake, unable to

unscramble the millions of neurological micro-

seconds that prevented our eyelids from

opening…

In Hayden Saunier’s Shape Shifting we are all the same under our various coverings, Even this poem moves from second to third person. Thus, our multiplicity is real. Nothing we experience is unique. We are every other person struggling through this life and dealing with the paradoxes embedded in our human condition. The poet says,

Maybe you’ve heard this song,

how the screech owl sounds

like a horse’s whinny

slight wind shifting through a sycamore

precisely like another

sleep-scented body shifting in its sleep

how those glugs and whirrs

from the amphibious

crowd at marsh and creek

match the murmurs and leaps

of your own underwater heart.

Every single thing’s

like every other single thing…

Like Greinke’s magnificent book we are all anthologized through history, each of us edited as a reminder to our fellow homo-sapiens to keep it going, to find life’s final destiny. And, yes, we are all in this together.

Red Letter Poem #242

  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 #242

 

 

 

 

 



The Winners


Remember the game

Tim one day proposed:

we each think of a word,

and keep it a secret forever,

all our lives, and whoever

guessed was the winner?

Another silliness of his,

like his wildly unhelpful hints

for Twenty Questions:



“OK, here’s the middle vowel

in the last name.”



And we’d laugh. But now,

after the end of his life,

surely everyone in this hall

must be thinking a word—

one that fills each heart,

a word we needn’t say aloud.





––Susan Donnelly







In our society, grief is often treated like a private thing––too personal to be shared beyond one’s immediate circle of family and friends. But because of that attitude, people at their most vulnerable moments may even feel something akin to shame if their emotions spill out into public view. And this is a bitter irony because it’s one of the experiences that transcends every

family background, religious tradition, affinity group, and nationality: if you are human, you will experience loss. Every face I pass on the street shares this sad potentiality. Awareness of this, you might say, is part of the essential nature that defines our species. And this corollary follows: the more you allow yourself to love, the more you’ve placed your heart at risk. Poets, over the centuries, have often defied that enforced silence, and instead have shared the depths of such suffering in carefully-honed language. Two examples from New England come quickly to mind––Donald Hall writing about the death of his wife, and Martha Collins about the loss of her husband––but there are many more. And to that group, I’ll now add Susan Donnelly’s heartbreaking little chapbook The Winners: Poems for Tim, a collection written in the time leading up to her brother’s death and its aftermath. Like Hall’s and Collins’s, these poems were not necessarily written for public consumption; they were, in part, simply an essential way of keeping faith with her sibling as Tim slowly succumbed to illness––and, perhaps, to keep her own mind from closing off to those overwhelming emotions. Perhaps there was a thought that they might eventually be shared with family members (though even that was not certain from the outset.) She began bringing them to a poetry circle of which I am a member, and was gratified to see how strongly we responded. It’s a truism I learned from my years of teaching young people and adults: a side of us firmly believes that our experience is so individual, “no one else can possibly understand.” But if we feel brave enough to share the poems, they always result in the happy astonishment that our personal suffering not only makes sense to others, it somehow grants them permission to feel their own lives more deeply.



This encouragement finally prompted Susan to print a small chapbook for family and friends––but, I am pleased to report, she plans on adding a section of these poems to a new manuscript-in-progress, so they will eventually be able to gain entrance into many other kitchens, family rooms and, yes, hospice wards. What I find so compelling about the poems in The Winners is their matter-of-factness; they are never overly poetic, sticking instead to the careful observation of everyday scenes. It’s what she refers to in another of the poems as “Our/ family-style repartee/ of humor and heartache.” Yet there is an unassuming elegance to her reporting, and a tone of voice that makes us feel as if we, too, were family and could share in the pain of this relinquishment. This is a quality exhibited in all six of her prior poetry chapbooks and four full-length collections. The newest of those is The Maureen Papers and Other Poems (from Every Other Thursday Press) whose title sequence shared New England Poetry Club’s Samuel Washington Allen Award.



In today’s poem, Susan recalls the playfulness, the light touch her brother possessed, even in the face of an illness he knew would claim his life. What a strange and marvelous game to propose: that we acknowledge a secret each family member would carry, and of which we might only guess. Instead of ‘Twenty,’ perhaps it should be called ‘Ten-thousand Questions.’ And what might such a secret spark in our attention? It brings to mind the Hindu greeting Namaste––‘the God in me greets the God in you.’ Pausing, even for a second, to consider that inner secret might alter what our eyes see next. Right now, are you picturing the face of some beloved family member or friend, perhaps a person at an unimaginable distance? And is there some word that comes to mind which you hold as a link between your lives, that summons memory, secures their place in your heart? If so: ring the bell––we have another winner!

 

 

 

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!

A Handpicked Poem article by Michael Todd Steffen

 

A Handpicked Poem

article by Michael Todd Steffen

This poem is from The Greensboro Review, Spring 2024, Issue 115, awarded the journal’s affiliated Robert Watson Literary Prize.

P I G T H E R A P I S T

by Mark Spero

I find myself with a wide prospect of Iowa.

Everything here is easy

to say, difficult to imagine. A horizon

of corn that tastes like yellow

wallpaper, and such are the reeds

around lakes of excrement. I’m crying

at the beauty, the fertile smells, the fields

of dreams. Below, there is a pilgrimage

of pigs, from their galaxy of mud

to the consigning hug of thick metal

bars and the veiled entrance

of whatever may come. My beautiful view

is shaded by pig tears, sobs shaking

my green expanse, so I come down

to the march, take my place in their pens,

by their sides, and begin to console,

offer a sermon for their unchosen end.

Touch each crusted hoof.

We cannot blame others for their

wants, their needs. Nuzzle each

wet snout. We can find meaning in

purpose. Run fingers through

hairs on each chin. All we get to

choose is how we respond. I find

I am pretty good at preparing pigs

for death, and they are quiet while

plodding toward their short futures.

I never return to my life. This job smells

too sweet. Listen: all grunting stops,

there is only the sizzle of sun on

pink backs.

The sheer oddity of the poem’s subject, announced by its title, “Pig Therapist,” is an undeniable attention-getter. A smile creeps over my face as I begin to think of the incongruity here, of the

subtle, soft-voiced, delicate sensibilities and dim chair-and-sofa décor of psychotherapy—and the rough, crude, noisy, filthy, smelly surround of a pig farm or slaughterhouse. Contrast and paradox account for a good deal of what we designate as the compression of language which gives poetry definition, makes it distinct from the more naturally allotted pace and leisure of creative prose. Poetry’s charms lie largely in the how (how dare) rather than the what that is written to speak, in measure, aloud. The title merely “Pig Therapist” delivers the punch of a whole paragraph, if not several paragraphs, of narrative build-up, nosy description and sleepy hook.

Underlying the jolt and absurdity of the title, on second thought, piercing through appearances, after all, pigs are known to be highly sensitive creatures, in fact. Underneath it all, perhaps they are very adequate subjects for therapy, and in their age-old dilemma with our society as prime animals for slaughter, for death, with a heightened sense of the doom they are herded to. Most of us, even if we haven’t grown up around pigs, have heard of their acute awareness on that final march to becoming sausage, ham, bacon… There’s little more in wilderness or civil husbandry that expresses distress more direly than the squeal of a pig.

That desperate squeal is the sound I want to make when I read the poet’s phrase “lake of excrement,” evoking the drainage around our modern overpopulated highly polluted and toxic animal farms more like factories and the environmental detriment (not to mention animal trauma) caused by these waste lands. The odor pervades the poem to the letter of today’s doom-spelling alphabet. The poem, moreover, exudes the Hitchcock-esque nightmare, the vulnerability of the open spaces across our Midwest farmland—“a wide prospect of Iowa,” which is also a well-known breadbasket of America’s creative writers, as well as election-year caucus seedbed.

Poetry welcomes us the full-body dive into metaphor. At some point we begin to look through the lattice of the poem and see ourselves – our kind – us humans named…we pigs. The poet is our therapist, and it can be the best therapy to be told point blank about our less than most beautiful selves. We see it in those around us, but also entirely available with ourselves, and know what the poet tells us warmly, in italics:

We cannot blame others for their

wants, their needs…

All we get to

choose is how we respond…

Spero’s daintiness is wont to reach us, endearingly and disarmingly as Galway Kinnell’s Saint Francis blessing his sow, reminding us how

everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness, to put a hand on its brow of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch it is lovely until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing…

Spero, perhaps as an individual but also from a tradition and in the throes of a different historical moment, has concluded on a more wry, inevitable note, unsparing about the “sizzle of sun.” The slow heat of a day which does in fact make that last depiction—“pink”—realistic, as the color of pig flesh through their light scrim of hair we kids and grandkids of pig farmers know. The sizzle is also a compression of whatever skillet cooks us our breakfast. It is also the galaxy’s sun in the age of climate change and global warming, which makes it especially dangerous to forget one’s sun screen.