Red Letter Poem #308

  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 #308

 

 

 

 

 

I strap the truth onto my back and set out

 

 

I am on a mountain smiling / I am bathing

in a journal / the sun is my skin / a panther 

longs for a friend at night / swabs her fur

with moonlight so 

her velvet lids

may dream 

of me / all I hear are words 

 

this wooded hideaway a stranger

home

 

when the panther has had enough of her

sleepless reverie / when she has wept 

enough petals / to cover the casket

completely / then

we will hold hands

the skeleton

and the moon / bursting

 

into the togetherness of death / like spring

peonies

 

 

                             ––Faith Shuster

 

 

                       

 

 

 

“How Poetry Comes to Me”

It comes blundering over the
Boulders at night, it stays
Frightened outside the
Range of my campfire
I go to meet it at the
Edge of the light”

 
― Gary Snyder

 

 

I have a friend who appreciates ‘good poetry’––he’ll remind me over coffee––but draws a line at “the intentional obfuscation” that he feels ‘runs rampant’ in contemporary verse.  His upset signals that he ran across something in Poetry magazine or a more obscure journal that baffled him, made him feel ‘cheated.’  He appreciates dynamic imagery and elegant music––but, most importantly, wants ‘a poem that makes sense.’  I tell him I know exactly how he feels.  But I offer this in response: as intelligent a reader as I think he is, he’s missing the point of the whole exercise.  It’s not as if more traditional approaches signify ‘skilled writing,’––and these other experimental young talents have simply lost their way.  The rules of the game have changed, as culture has changed; and many older styles of (for lack of a better word) beauty began to feel inadequate to the experience of the chaotic and often caustic world we face these days.  Along the way, poets stepped back from the elegance of ‘the well-made thing’ and embraced the visceral intensity of a poem that was bravely finding its way.  Gary Snyder, for example, was fond of explaining that he didn’t write because he ‘had something to say’ but because he needed to find out who he really was that morning, and to take his bearings.  Faith Shuster (née Blake––in case some have come across her poetry under her maiden name) is a young poet unafraid of the challenge posed by a raw and unruly poem.  It feels to her as if each fresh draft is an opportunity to discover what, from the outer world, was pulling at something from the inner.  Or conversely: what wild presence in her inner landscape was desperate to make its way out, into the clearing of the blank page, where voice, musicality, vision can make itself known.

 

Like Snyder’s little ars poetica reproduced above, Faith is conceiving of some animal presence––though it is never made clear whether the habitat of that panther is arboreal, neural, or both.  But whoever or whatever is the hunter, clearly the prey is the truth––or some version of what, at this very moment, feels to be vital and true.  In this “wooded hideaway,” the imagery is leaping–– first, into the consciousness of the poet, and then eventually ours.  And it’s so appealing, I suspend disbelief and allow the poem to carry me along, savoring lines like: “…a panther/ longs for a friend at night / swabs her fur/ with moonlight so/ her velvet lids/ may dream/ of me…”.  As you’re probably familiar, the slash-mark punctuation is usually employed in revising or quoting from poetry to indicate a line break (as I’ve done here).  But Faith has added them even within lines, either to signify auxiliary pauses (like caesuras) or, spatially, to have her lines visually interrupted with something almost vegetal.  Again, I am left to interpret how meaning is being made––but there’s something freeing in that.

 

Faith is an emerging poet whose work (using her own words) “enquires into the ways language can play, move, and liberate.”  Her work has just begun to make its way into journals like the Lyrical column of the Somerville Times, as well as an anthology appearance in The Silver Note, a collection gathering poets from Arlington, MA.  Faith studied Biology at Tufts University, and Education at Stanford.  She founded Effect Learning LLC and works as an Executive Function Coach, empowering neurodivergent adults and teens to learn the skills they need to get things done.  I’ve found her poems daring but emotionally grounded, with language that elevates the heart rate.  I look forward to seeing how her style will develop in order to keep pace with her own powerful curiosity.  This makes me want to remind my earnest but puzzled friend that, at one time, poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, Alan Ginsberg or Gary Snyder, were so radical that their work was widely ridiculed.  These days, passages of their poetry can appear in popular culture and no one bats an eye.  Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” caused a riot at its first appearance––but within a year, it was engendering standing ovations.  It’s the speed at which modern consciousness is evolving.  I have a suspicion of what’s happening when Faith’s panther “has wept/ enough petals / to cover the casket/ completely”––but I’m not troubled if it changes with subsequent readings.  Because what I most desire is for me to make sense of my own experience––not to have some masterful poem impress its ‘answers’ upon me.  I want to trust that if the intuitive exploration within a poet’s work brought them to some place of wonderment, I might be propelled to one of my own.  

 

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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https://www.arrowsmithpress.com/community-of-voices

 

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