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 #272
Silverfish
It had lived for years in a space no thicker than a dime,
where the mat on a picture had warped up under the glass,
and had fed on the paper—a cheap reproduction of Homer’s
“The Gulf Stream”—nibbling its way in from the margins,
this happening while the lost sailor lay sprawled on the deck
of his wreck, drifting out toward his end. If there’d been
more silverfish than the one I’d found dead, washed up
at the edge of that picture, they’d vanished before I had
ripped off the brown backing paper and pulled out the brads.
And in fact, the dead one was exactly the size of a brad,
as if it had worked its way out and then dropped to the bottom,
like that Hemingway fish, cut loose to sink in the sea.
––Ted Kooser
’
It began with a happy accident.
I was introduced to Ted Kooser after receiving a kind note concerning a poem of mine he came across in an anthology. The work of this acclaimed and much-loved poet has always meant a great deal to me, so I immediately responded. We began corresponding (both electronically, but also with the poet’s neatly-packed handwritten postcards). I told him about the Red Letters––and I asked whether he might have something new which I could feature. He told me he’d send me “The Vole,” one of his unpublished “critter” poems. But the next day, when I opened his e-mail attachment, I unscrolled thirteen short poems, each focusing on a different kind of animal or insect. I alerted Ted to the confusion, and he apologized, having sent the wrong file. But I loved what I’d read, and told him they had the feel of a sequence of poems. I casually remarked: You should publish these as a little chapbook. One day later, my thoughts had become emboldened: I should publish that chapbook! And so I wrote to Ted to make that somewhat impertinent suggestion. I was delighted that he loved the idea and said he’d comb through his files to see if he could send me more to choose from. One day after that, a new e-mail arrived containing sixty-two poems of what I began to think of as the Kooser Animalia.
It took some time to narrow down my favorites, and slowly I began to discern a dramatic sequencing which, I thought, might bring out the best in this set of poems. After consultations with the poet, Fellow Creatures is the result of that process––and, because of Ted’s generosity, it was determined that the chapbook would be published as a fundraiser for the Red Letters, especially allowing us to keep paying honoraria for the poets and musicians who perform in our yearly Red Letter LIVE! events. You can find out more at:
https://stevenratiner.com/product/fellow-creatures/
I think of these poems, written across many years, as a kind of journal of the poet’s experiences of the natural world in and around his Nebraska home. In it, we witness a careful observer who feels free to use every imaginative resource at his disposal in order to capture what commands his attention. But the poems are not some romantic depiction of an idealized world; they are clear-eyed, often playful, occasionally brutal confrontations with the life surrounding him––every sort, size, and disposition––just one creature regarding another, curious to discern from each encounter what might be learned. And central to the writing: the quiet vitality of being, the difficulty of each day’s survival, and the momentary grace every creature cultivates in its own way. This is, after all, a poet who has hard-earned knowledge about the preciousness and fragility of existence. It’s not a secret that Ted has battled cancer for some time now, and the illness has taken its toll. He published a powerful little essay about the experience last year entitled “Whistling Past the Graveyard” (in New Letters journal––you can find it online). Yet I am continually astonished by Ted’s calm acceptance of mortal jeopardy coupled with a quiet determination to savor all he finds in his life. He is up early each morning and busy at the notebook. The chores of the day are approached with a certain gratitude. And the new poems that keep coming––certainly providing ballast in any storm the day might bring––seem undiminished from the work we’ve followed all along. Ted is thought of as the bard of the Midwest, highlighting the actuality of experience in what too many of us regard as the ‘flyover states.’ Rather than catalog his many honors, I’ll summarize them with two: he is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; and is the former United States Poet Laureate. But I especially want to highlight the agility of his imagination in poems like this twelve-line elegy for a simple silverfish (the sort of insect whose appearance might have engendered nothing more than a thoughtless swipe with a rolled-up newspaper). Here, the fate of this creature is poignantly linked with that of the desperate fisherman in the Winslow Homer painting, and the quiet heroics of Hemingway’s ‘old man’ who battles sharks, loneliness, and the illimitable sea. As do you, and as do I––even when our sharks possess only metaphorical teeth. It takes a special kind of talent to celebrate that.
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
