Red Letter Poem #243

 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 #243

 

 

 

 

 

Cellar Bat

The hider’s shadow suddenly unfolds

strange fingers—and the world sets out to fly.

The world stops, opening a cellar door

to watch the 8 it weaves between two lights,

the ceiling low, and narrow-most the walls

in the dim corridor of this surprise

encounter between differently-gifted mammals,

its super-sighted blindness, our stunned eyes


offset and at a standstill as we block

the famed lost soul’s way to its light, the dark

of night behind us… Was the bat as frantic

as our heart’s panic? In bewilderment

it wasn’t shooed from its pattern. We stepped back

and out it came, fluttering meaning as it went.

 

 

––Michael T. Steffen

 

 

 

Here it comes––watch out!  Swooping up from the dark recesses: this unexpected, unnerving presence.  Some might even think it a beautiful terror––depending on how they were first introduced to this species and its fastidious behavior.  No, not just the bat, which the poet Michael T. Steffen confronts in his basement; I’m referring to that other venerable creature––once thought endangered, but which has seen a surprising resurgence in recent times: the sonnet.  I’m willing to bet that, at this very moment, many of you are darting back up to the poem, quickly counting: oh yeah, I hadn’t noticed––fourteen lines, check, split after the octave, (according to the Petrarchan format, rather than the Shakespearean style many more of us had drummed into our fertile minds during high school.)  Yes, a sonnet indeed.  But of course Michael, like many contemporary poets who have returned to the form, hasn’t bothered himself with obeying the dictates of rhyme scheme.  Or has he?  Looking back, I can hear it now: the long-i assonance (fly…lights…surprise…eyes) chiming in the opening stanza, followed by those cutting k-sounds that stitch together the second with off-rhyme and consonance.  And so we can see how the traditional spirit of this ‘little song’ (the meaning of the word the Italians coined for this poetic form) has actually found a lyrical and agile incarnation in this poet’s hands. His is a verse that feels both colloquial and just a bit unearthly––and isn’t that a perfect equivalence for the moment being described?   Sudden surprise prompts our oldest fears to erupt while, at the very same time, the natural world seizes us with its beauty, elevates the heart rate, reminds us (as all good poems must) that we are alive in the moment.

 

And what of this moment?  When the hider unfolds those “strange fingers,” a part of our mind, too, takes flight, turning figure-8’s amid what had been, only seconds earlier, ‘ordinary’.  When Michael refers to his pair of protagonists as “differently-gifted mammals,” suddenly we’re compelled to temper our fear of the ‘other,’ the unknown, and recognize our commonality: the imperative to escape danger and fly toward freedom’s open expanse.  But we slowly become aware of the shifting focus; after all, this is a human mind at work, nature’s great meaning-making machine.  And so, in the final sestet, the poet is already busy devising ways to reconsider what is happening around him, to recast its details so they might reveal something emblematic in what’s taken place.  “We stepped back and out it came, fluttering meaning as it went.”  To my mind, this poem is a fine extended metaphor for the very moment when inspiration takes hold, yanks us from the mundane into something more resonant.  Perhaps, like the bat, a part of our mind uses echolocation to sense where we are in the darkness, and where we (and the poem) need to travel.

 

Michael was the Recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship and an Ibbetson Street Press Poetry Award; his work has appeared in a variety of publications including The Boston Globe, E-Verse Radio, The Lyric, and The Concord Saunterer.  His second collection, On Earth As It Is, was published in 2022 by Cervena Barva Press and demonstrates the mind of a humanist wrestling with the inner and outer realities of life in these United States.  “Cellar Bat” is taken from Storage, a manuscript-in-progress consisting of 64 sonnets, exploring and innovating various aspects of the form.  Michael has an interest in the performance of poetry as well as its impact on the page, and so he’s been staging choral readings of important long-form poems from the modern canon, including Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island” and Donald Hall’s “The One Day.”  But, in his own work, I think the shorter lyric is still the place where his talents shine.  His singing weaves in and out between beauty, suffering, memory, creation––so perhaps this humble Chiroptera is something of a spirit-animal for the poet.  Michael registers the invisible echoes bouncing off the world so that his poem can whirl and veer, describing patterns in the darkness a reader’s mind might follow.

 

 

 

 

 

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!

sidebody: a band of friends who experiment

I recently hooked up with Somerville artists Cara Giaimo, Lena Warnke, Martha Schnee, Hava Horowitz, a band of friends who experiment with music, performance, and zine publishing.
They call themselves "sidebody." They are part of the fabric of Somerville, MA.--the" Paris of New England."

As musicians and artists how has it been for you guys living in Somerville—the " Paris of New England?"


“We all feel grateful to live in Somerville. We have a practice space in the basement of Central Street Studios that allows us to keep this project going, and to meet other artists. I love going to shows and getting to know people from overlapping scenes and generations. It’s inspiring and also motivating — we need to make the city more affordable so that artists can live and work here.” (Cara)




“I feel there is a very interesting direct comparison between Paris and Somerville, which is that their prime time is in the past, and they are now slowly falling into a capitalist decay. And there are certain holdovers, specifically older generations, who embody that spirit. I personally feel like I'm learning from those elders to try to keep it alive.” (Lena)




People have described your music as experimental, punk minimalist, do it yourself etc... How do you define yourselves?

“Sidebody is an amalgamation of sound, friendship, silliness, physical space, performance, and making nothing into something.” (Martha)


“Friendship-based vibes. Rocky, snappy tunes that come up with new and crazy theories about the world. Organic, intuitive and fun, and surprisingly complex when you're not expecting it.” (Lena)


“Experimental is right but it’s more like a kid experimenting with a chemistry set — mixing up all our influences and personalities in different shaped beakers, and seeing what freezes or blows up.” (Cara)




Tell us about the performance aspect of your group....is it traditional theatre or something else?




“We do work with all of the fundamental elements of what theater is — the body, the voice, the set, the audience, and the emotional realm of characters. We're really focused as a collective on having some sort of storyline or thematic focus for our performance, which I think is different than a lot of bands… The more we can break down barriers of what a typical music performance looks like — where there's really clearly defined roles of who plays what instrument and who's watching and who's listening — the more fun it is, for us and also the audience.” (Hava)


“It's somewhere between a DIY rock-and-roll basement show performance, and performance art in the tradition of the Dadaists or the surrealists or 60s-style Happenings, where process comes before product.” (Martha)




I am a small press publisher, so I was interested in your zine publications. Years ago --I interviewed noted Somerville writer Pagan Kennedy. She started her career by publishing zines when she lived in Allston. How does this fit in with your artistic mission? Is there a political aspect to them?




“We are a community focused band, and we make music in a communal way. Our zines also embody that. ELFLAND: a zine, for example, brought together neighbors to archive an ephemeral, communal art space that was displaced because of development. We're trying to hold onto a certain time, a certain spirit. Another political aspect is deconstructing individualism — this also relates to the way we write songs, which really is something that we do as a group. Our band and our zines decenter or complicate the idea of the individual maker.” (Lena)




It is hard to make a living as an artist. How do you guys make your daily nut?




We all have jobs that are not sidebody — we piece different and overlapping professional and artistic endeavors together in order to make a living. Cara is a journalist who writes articles and books, Hava is a storytelling and presence coach, Martha is an educator and printmaker, and Lena is a researcher, educator, and photographer. We do find that all this work informs sidebody and vice versa. We called our last album “full time job” as a joke, because while the band feels like a full time job, and sometimes we wish it was, it’s very difficult to imagine making the numbers work.


We all also come from privileged backgrounds, and are very aware of how lucky we are to be able to do this at all. Not everyone is in a position to give so much time and energy to art in a society where it’s not valued the way other work is!



Why should we view and or listen to your work?


“Our work deals with the simple joys and tragedies and small-time aspects of life — like breakups, or like doing nothing. But then we go big as well, so we're kind of stretching across the scales of life. And I think that's really relatable. I think our work is also a celebration of friendship, and I think people want to hear that more.” (Lena)


“I think that we are sharing the possibility that you don't have to be technically excellent in order to make something really interesting. That is something I find super refreshing when I view art. Especially now with AI that can make technically perfect pop songs, or technically perfect digital paintings — I think messiness and the raw material of making is only going to become more interesting and important and vital to art. We're constantly learning new things as a group, whether that's learning to play instruments that we're not familiar with, or sing in styles that we're not familiar with, or use our voices in new ways, or engage in new kinds of audience interaction or bits. We're constantly experimenting. And I think it's just fun to watch a band experiment live. That's an exciting space to be a spectator in, versus going to a show where you know it's gonna be perfect.” (Hava)


“No matter what’s happening in the world, or in your day or your week or your year, making music and art basically always feels good. The professional aspects of being in a band are fun to experience and play around with, but the core of sidebody is about bringing these spontaneous, creative, silly aspects of life to the forefront, and reminding other people that they can do that too.” (Cara)


“You should do whatever you want!” (Martha)

Anthropoetics: Poetry and Human Progess

 

Critically acclaimed poet Eric Greinke presents his visionary theory of Anthropoetics – an approach to poetry that is oriented to our entire species. The book is a hybrid of prose lavishly illustrated by poems that predicts and promotes a worldwide paradigmic shift in both aesthetics and human cooperation. Includes a fifty page “little anthology” of “We” poems by thirty contemporary poets in the center of the book, abridged from Greinke’s 2024 anthology Speaking For Everyone. Topics range widely from Whitmans vision of the future to ethnopoetics, creativity, archetypes, symbolism, surrealism, inspiration, imagination, intuition, imagery, collaboration and divergent thinking. Greinke draws on his experience as a psychotherapist, poet and literary editor to delve into attitudinal and psychological aspects of poetry and how they relate to both human and personal progress. He describes how globalization and the internet have made Anthropoetics inevitable as part of a progressive worldwide shift to an anthropocentric orientation with an artistic focus on universality. The book concludes with The Universal Poet – tracing a line of anthropoetically oriented poets from Walt Whitman through Allen Ginsberg, Bob Dylan, Maya Angelou and on to young poets like Amanda Gorman. The implication of Anthropoetics - Poetry & Human Progress goes far beyond poetry and the Arts, into human nature and survival itself. Every page is thought-provoking and inspiring, for both poets and general readers alike. Greinke uses poetry as a metaphor for human nature in this profound, transformative “instant classic.” A highly compressed little book packed with literary/social criticism and a prophetic vision of the future.