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 #294
On Starting the Car to the Final Movement
of Bach’s First Keyboard Concerto After
Making it on EMPTY to Junior’s Automotive
This must be what Allegro’s for—
an avenue of relief and jubilance,
your life refilled, technicolored
with orange cones,
blinking traffic lights,
shoppers, hardhats, cyclists,
where everyone around you
seems to know—
as surely he did also,
that prolific maker
of children and chorales—
you’re on the road again.
And what is more, this road
can lead you anywhere.
––Susan Donnelly
Susan Donnelly is a master of restraint. Her poems tend to arrive in the guise of the simplest of everyday events. A second and third reading, though, slowly allows the pathos depicted in her miniature compositions to grip our attention, often turning us both outward and inward with a single gesture. She deftly captures the vicissitudes of aging and loss in our surprisingly chaotic century––and the ways that this sharpened awareness actually makes us savor those rare moments of calm and beauty that somehow endure. We see this approach at work in her four full-length collections and six chapbooks. The long title sequence from The Maureen Papers and Other Poems (from Every Other Thursday Press) was the co-recipient of the Samuel Washington Allen Award from the New England Poetry Club. The Winners: Poems for Tim, is a small elegiac collection she recently published, written about her brother who succumbed to cancer in 2023. In it, these thirteen poems somehow managed to convey the intimate nature of grief, extraordinary and shockingly mundane.
Having said all this, I sometimes forget how funny Susan can be––a wry, often self-deprecating kind of humor that elicits knowing smiles (not to mention those little winces of self-recognition on our part). At a time when we check the headlines each morning to find out what new outrage has become normalized, or which existential dread will be served up as a traumatic le petit-déjeuner at our table, sometimes a poem will provide that momentary stay against confusion we are hungering for. She begins today’s piece with one of those elaborately long titles we probably associate with the 18th-century Augustans, or even earlier verse from the classical Chinese. Having pushed her modest chariot (not to mention her luck) to its very limit, somehow the speaker has made it safely to her local service station and refueled her tank for another three hundred-plus miles of urban freedom. The title places us at the very moment when, key in the ignition, she knows she’s been saved. And two ecstatic sounds envelop the speaker’s mind: the four cylinders of her car engine churning into life; and that 18th-century psycho-spiritual fuel source that is the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Indeed, “This must be what Allegro’s for—/ an avenue of relief and jubilance. . .”––as the poet’s heart speeds with the music and she toes the accelerator. Suddenly, the city seems a little phantasmagoria of bright colors, and we can blithely rush into our futures, intoxicated by the freedom this modern world offers us (or some of us, at least––but let’s not worry about that for the moment), bang a right, hit the open road!
Yet perhaps, as we drive––soothed by the thrum of the engine, the blur of passing scenery––other thoughts creep into mind. Aren’t we, in our troubled age, in desperate need of the sort of imaginative genius and encompassing faith of a Bach? Is our society even hospitable for such talent? Thinking of “that prolific maker/ of children and chorales,” we can’t help wondering what we are leaving behind for future generations, as we speed toward life’s inevitable off-ramp, the sky above us orange with carbon emissions. What is it in human nature that entices us to drive on empty in the first place, knowing full well what might result from our miscalculation? I wasn’t quite sure at first how Susan did it––but now my mind, too, was racing along like all those exuberant measures of forte in the composer’s score, feeling freedom and dread intertwined. Or have I missed the point: should I have stopped at “jubilance” and made this diminutive sonnet the occasion for a little joy? Or was this always intended to instigate a more subtle journey? Susan’s humor is not the in-your-face riffs of a Nikki Glaser; hers are the ingenious vignettes of a classic storyteller like Carol Burnett, rife with irony and rich with emotion––maybe spiced with a little of that inner ventriloquism that Maria Bamford does so well, sly narrators who guide us into the depths. Susan offers us unusual takes on everyday scenes so we might laugh (under our breaths) at the absurdity of it all. Balm? Admonition? A mélange of both? Perhaps “this road can lead (us) anywhere.”
The Red Letters
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* 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
* The weekly installment is also available at
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
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And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/
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