Red Letter Poem #320

 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 #320

 

 

 

 

 

10. (Anhedonia)

 

 

When even Henry grays and is drink

comes a mallet      muffled brain thunked out

jellied quivering in sealrot preserve

flatlined the seeds shooting at light. Think

not. So many branchings pruned

isn’t many anything left to serve.

 

Remember all it was grammared glowing

once of some consequence. Good

without being able to get back for. 

No matter. Opus crescendoed years ago

& anymore the even automatic tuning 

is once-perfect pitch dulled in discord. 

 

After, speculation: was it in such meditations

did John fall? So many studies the test

was impossible to fail? So thought firstwife

once but late recanted: to be haunted

is to pale; there is no rest—

It was the poetry that had kept him alive.

 

 

                                     ––Jon D. Lee

 

 

 

 

Extremity calls for its own specialized language.  By the very nature of the art form, some poetry will be compelled to focus on the sorts of overwhelming situations most of us do not face in everyday life.  A common intuitive stratagem: harness the energy of chaos and interweave it with wily invention.  Such fierce poetry often presents us with a desperate voice attempting to escape the psychic debris of what might appear, from the outside, to be an ordinary morning.  I’ve been rereading two poets who wrote out of such extremity and who, in their own ways, expanded the expressive capabilities of language itself.  Paul Celan was the Romanian-born son of German-speaking Jews; a Holocaust survivor, he spent the rest of his life attempting to dig out from the emotional and spiritual ruins of the Second World War.  The second is John Berryman, one of America’s most original and turbulent poetic voices, famous for his 385-poem sequence, The Dream Songs.  For Celan, the losses were both personal and abundant; his parents died in the camps along with the millions.  As for Berryman, depression was likely a biological factor from birth.  But it was a single loss––his father shot himself outside their apartment when the poet was 11––that served as the tipping point into a lifelong struggle with alcoholism and bipolar angst.  Trying to bring his internal struggle into an external form, Berryman’s poems summoned the voices of alter egos onto the psychological stage: brilliant, depressive ‘Henry,’ hanging on to life by his fingertips; and the haunting ‘Mr. Bones,’ who sounds like the comic interlocutor from a Southern minstrel show, happily puncturing whatever fragile hope bubbles to the surface.  Yet I should point out that it is bracing, even illuminating, to confront language in poets such as these, where––and it’s clear in every line––so much more is at stake than just artistic creation.  One leaves these poems with an almost irresistible urge to respond in kind.

 

And that’s precisely what poet Jon D. Lee has done.  He has begun creating an extended series of cantos employing both Berryman’s challenging subject matter as well as his linguistic invention and improvisational music.  Two of them, I’m happy to say, will make their magazine debuts here in the Letters.  The author of four previous books of poetry and prose, plus the recent chapbook Eden (from Finishing Line Press), Jon is on the faculty of Suffolk University in Boston and serves as Director of the annual David Ferry and Ellen LaForge Prize for Poetry and Poetic Translation.  I relished the opportunity to wrestle with this new work because, like Berryman before him, Jon is willing to take a riskier stance in these texts.  I believe he’s hoping, not simply for a surprising coherence (and who knows whether dreams or nightmares can ever be translated into the light of day), but for an unflinching glimpse into the mirror.  When Jon addresses “John” directly in these verses, Berryman becomes yet another psychological persona in this drama––one that, as we know, could not survive the final act.  Writing these poems, that fact must have weighed on the poet’s mind––the homonym always reflecting each questioning back in his own direction.

 

Of such mercurial experiments, an attempt at explication would be, not just a disservice, but a form of self-deception.  Like music that arrives before the brain’s language resources can even process what it’s hearing, we take in a line like “When even Henry grays and is drink” as both a symptom of his drunkenness but also a surprising grammatical arpeggio.  We smile, even as the mallet comes down on that well-educated “thunked out” brain of ours.  The poem calls for profusion and wildness; nothing of the intellectual topiary we learned in literature seminars: “it was grammared glowing/ once of some consequence.”   The speaking voice in this poem seems (and let me quickly say that seeming is as close as we need to come, at least for the first few readings) to long for an earlier time when we understood far less but language felt unbridled and capable of true wonder.  We return to literary forebears like Berryman and Celan, not only as exemplars of aesthetic daring, but as connectors to our deeper humanness.  The eternal college student within us is always hunting for a new parental-professor to impress, a new bid for elusive honors.  But there is no “test” for Jon’s song except for, perhaps, increased heart rate and neural electricity.

 

Jon’s poem closes with a line from the memoir Poets in Their Youth by Eileen Simpson.  She was the putative “firstwife” Jon coins for this poem.  At the time of Berryman’s suicide, journalists wrote disparagingly about the current school of ‘confessional poetry’––as if its radical honesty were the cause for madness and suicide among its practitioners.  “It was the poetry that had kept him alive” wrote Simpson, a trained psychotherapist––and today’s poem seems to be in agreement.  If, battered by this grievous world, we too stop feeling any joy in existence, sometimes the solitary retreat of a poem may provide a clearing in the thorny wood––a place in which we can take our bearings, and remember the old path to where delight was hiding.

 

 

 

The Red Letters

 

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