Red Letter Poem #297

 

 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 #297

 

 

 

 

Opening


Dark but somehow clear,

the passageway. Childhood cats

run ahead of me. I'm seventy! What

a long walk. Did someone

call my name? Where's



my passport? Blood-rush loud

in my ears, or perhaps it's the ocean.

Yes. Somewhere a wave collapses,

another. Fish wear scales like snakes

and armadillos and butterflies



and none of them knows its name.

Now I've lost mine. Light comes

in waves, that's what I'm hearing,

but I can't see in the usual way.

How else? I'm not there yet.





––Pamela Alexander














I am a little dizzy amid the rush of images, the twisting syntax, in Pam Alexander’s new poem. Am I dreaming? Just waking? Or (and I have to consider the possibility) have I died and I’m floating on the Lethe, trying desperately to discern what lies just ahead? But somehow I find myself delighted to be carried along by these four surprising quatrains. Isn’t that the definition of authority: a sense that a writer is in control of her materials––even when the subject matter may be beyond ours? And thus, feeling we can trust the poetic voice, we can allow ourselves to be carried––strangely confident that we will arrive where we ought (a different destination, of course, for each set of eyes boarding this craft).



If perhaps, mid-river, I was somehow able to scribble quick notes in a mental-journal about my curious travels through this poem, these might be some entries: beginning with the title, that enticing initial letter O in “Opening”––calligraphic symbol, open vowel-sound. Was that a sun? A moon? An oculus? And who might be watching as I pass through? “Dark but somehow clear”––should I even be entering such a passageway? I’m sensing danger––but then: cats! The bliss of our childhood pets––that ginger tabby with the fluffy tail––perhaps it’s safe here after all. So I join the speaker in this “long walk.” “I'm seventy!” she declares. Crazy, yes? But I recognize the feeling. Wasn’t I, too, a child, only last week? Then suddenly: “Did someone/ call my name? Where's// my passport? Blood-rush loud/ in my ears…”. No turning back now, but the dread is mounting again––or not! It’s not my blood I hear thrumming at the temple––it’s the ocean, that encompassing presence, the mother of all life. Even though I take notice of each successive wave (“collapse” is quite a potent word), I can accept that the world is (as the mystics say) as it should be. The “fish wear scales like snakes” (uh-oh, heart rate elevating again), “and armadillos and butterflies// and none of them knows its name.” And now I've lost my name as well! What a huge step to even contemplate: becoming nameless, untethered from this marvelously elaborate, painfully cumbersome self I’ve been traveling inside all these decades. I’m trying to use the as it should be like a little mantra, to remain calm. “Light comes/ in waves, that's what I'm hearing”––audible light? Didn’t Dante speak of such luminous music?––“but I can't see in the usual way.” Of course not––neither the speaker nor the reader is “there yet.” Revelation, in whatever form it takes, does not come with previews, study guides. We are left to consider (and hopefully savor) this momentum––by which we are carried, and toward what inevitable destination awaits.



Pam is the author of five books of poetry, including Left, recent winner of the Chad Walsh chapbook prize from Beloit Poetry Journal. Her first collection, Navigable Waterways, won the prestigious Yale Prize, and her work has been showered with honors ever since. You may have run into her work in some of the important journals (The New Yorker, Poetry, The Atlantic, Orion, TriQuarterly, Plume), as well as numerous anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2000, American Alphabets, The Extraordinary Tide, and Poetry for a Small Planet. Her work has also been featured on the websites of National Public Radio and the Academy of American Poets. After a leaving a teaching career at M.I.T. and Oberlin College, she wholly uprooted her life, and spent the next five years traveling North America in an RV with her cat. How can you not admire so adventurous a spirit? And it’s a quality I appreciate in all of her poetry––the kind of quiet daring we find in today’s piece, where she is inviting us to travel alongside her into a vast unknown. Just what is the “there” to which we are bound? At one time in my life, I might have envisioned (along with Signore Alighieri) that: “Heaven wheels above you, displaying to you her eternal glories, and still your eyes are on the ground.” These days, I fear that only oblivion awaits, and that (much as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, California) there may be “no there there.” Or might this eternal realm be linked to the inky marks we’ve left on fluttering pages, coupled with the neural loci twinkling in the minds of loved ones? Of course, this poet will not tell us––even if she knew. Her work is there to prompt the journey––within ourselves and beyond––gaining some understanding of where the mind’s skiff is carrying us. Perhaps the purpose of poems – Pam’s as well as others––is more in line with what Franz Kafka wrote in his Diaries, considering this very subject: “Even if no salvation should come, I want to be worthy of it at every moment.”

 

 

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

 

* 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

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/

New Book from Michael Steffen ( Lily Books)

 https://lilypoetryreview.blog/i-saw-my-life-by-michael-steffen

The long eponymous poem making up the middle section of this collection narrates the very near, local journey of loss with its timeless bearing. It leads Steffen (and us through his sketchbook with its commentary) to the recognition of a daughter who’s gone away to college and come back home for the weekend. The narrative explores the layers of age and youth in a father confronted with the inventory of his life, in a crisis of the heart, a dispute with his landlord, all under the enchantment of tactile common day-to-day moments puzzled and informed by a revisited past.

Line by line there’s a real cumulative pulse in the life of the here again, lost again, George Kalogeris has said of the extended meditation. I love the haunting particulars, the day by day detail of attrition evoking the larger trauma.

Daniel Tobin has praised the poem for how it maintains the virtues of an episodic narrative with the vigorous musical qualities of genuine poetry. The late David Ferry noted, The meter, at the poem’s length, and with so many different tasks to perform, is really remarkable. The melody runs through it all and is a pleasure, in the likely conversations, the poem’s physical descriptions as well as its metaphysical propositions.

The reaches of far and near persist thematically into the book’s haunted third section where the poems fantail between subjects as intimately owned as a Sunday afternoon family meal and as distantly passed down as a story about the maternal grief of a great grandmother. The poet’s list reaches all the way back to the Battle of Hastings, in a memory of visiting the Tapestry of Bayeux recording the origins of the language on his tongue and its first canticles of springtime’s desire in the woods’ warblers, So pricketh hem nature in hir corages.

Documentary, audaciously imaginative, I Saw My Life brings us poems in a likely American idiom, with loft and charm to wave us off the untextured information highways our daily lives have come to frequent and speed along. Here we find a singular voice of variety appealing to our preference for a life of experience and choices, abiding to its story without any pitch at our convictions. It is a welcoming and welcome body of writing.

Michael Todd Steffen lives in Somerville, Massachusetts. He co-curates The Hastings Room Reading Series, and publishes articles on new and established poets on The Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene.

Red Letter Poem #296

 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 #296 

 

 

 

 

A Palace of Mourners

 

 

I sought to cage memories,

Houdinis escaping

from opaque brain cells harboring

a palace of mourners. In my birth country,

nightsticks swung from Columbus

to modern leaders, fear simmered

and poured into our veins.

 

After nights of needles pricking my sleep,

floods of images breached the dam of silence.

Joseph, a twenty-six-year-old journalist

arrested in August of ’92, demanded to speak.

My skull became an echo chamber

where the dead reverberated—

their screams shattering corrals of memory,

their tapestry woven with Joseph’s blistered back,

his broken knee, cicatrized head.

 

The army wanted to teach him

the grammar of silence.

Thin wires glowed,

turned his tongue into an eel,

slapping words into nonsense.

Still, he would not bow or confess.

He trumpeted justice through scars,

through the body’s refusal to obey.

 

Even with this carnival of nightsticks

and stench, I tried to write

of clouds, of pastoral stillness.

But screams of a valley of Haitians

migrated ferociously across my page,

tearing lilies and dandelions to shreds.

On the palace lawn, no flowers remain––

only the bald eagle’s wings spread wide.

 

 

                          ––Patrick Sylvain

                                   

 

 

 

 

 

“It is difficult/ to get the news from poems…” declares William Carlos Williams (the good doctor thinking about love, the Trojan War, and humanity’s survival).  Surveying contemporary poetry, I’d say we can make a strong case refuting that.  One evening, I’m listening to Robert Pinsky and his Poem/Jazz ensemble declaiming about the societal and spiritual cost of governmental “Misrule…,”––and the next day, Morning Edition is reporting Hungary has freed itself from the oppressive regime of Viktor Orbán using no munitions other than ballot box, no armed forces beside the battalions of vox populi.  Reporting online as I write, a bipartisan group of our Congressional representatives has spurred debate (yet again) on “The Dignity Act,” a previously-abandoned effort at immigration reform––one of the most contentious (and blatantly partisan) hot-button concerns we’re facing today.  But alongside NPR bulletins, I’ve been reading Patrick Sylvain’s soon-to-be-published poetry collection, Fire on the Tongue (Arrowsmith Press)––and wouldn’t our politicians be better equipped to consider these fraught issues had they gotten at least a little of their news from sources other than Fox and MSNBC?  How about a voice from the Haitian diaspora who can speak authoritatively (heartbreakingly so) about the trials of any beleaguered family trying to survive in an adoptive country––as well as the unbridled terror that would drive them to leave their homeland in the first place?

 

The weight of Patrick’s family’s history and that of his island-home (and the two constantly intermix in his fraught vocabulary) drive this poet to demand more of language if it is to bear witness to all that’s taking place around him.  “I seek words to speak for scorched tongues,” he writes in the poem “Pyramid of Words”––“…in a country where pain burns from bones that beat/ for life, where nightsticks crack skulls, spreading terror.”  But as vividly as he describes what is around him, he never loses sight of the unseen forces that helped create this situation in the first place: “I seek words to cleanse the infection of the conquerors’/ languages, their long vowels of repression: the A’s,/ the I’s and the O’s screaming in the night.”  In “A Palace of Mourners,” Patrick confronts that history directly because, like the famed escape artist he mentons, memories can no longer remain imprisoned in his tumultuous mind.  He centers the poem around the experience of one journalist who could not be broken by the violence––within the regime or outside on the embattled streets.  How many news reports from how many locales have we read depicting similar oppression?  “The army wanted to teach him/ the grammar of silence./ Thin wires glowed, turned his tongue into an eel,/ slapping words into nonsense.”  Perhaps it is the poet’s job to translate that pain into lines that will reach us, perhaps even touch hearts hardened by the propaganda flooding from both sides.  “Still, he would not bow or confess./ He trumpeted justice through scars,/ through the body’s refusal to obey.”  I think we have much to learn from the poet’s perspective––certainly, to be more compassionate about what’s taking place on distant shores; but also to keep those same horrors from becoming normalized closer to home.  When, in the final lines, that raptor spreads his wings on the palace lawn, we have little doubt who that eagle represents.

 

Patrick is a Haitian-American educator, poet, writer, social and literary critic, and translator.  He’s authored several poetry collections in English and Haitian, poems that have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appeared in literary journals in America and beyond.  He holds degrees from UMass-Boston, Harvard, Boston University, and Brandeis University, where he was the Shirle Dorothy Robbins Creative Writing Prize Fellow.  Currently, he teaches Global, Transnational, and Postcolonial Literature at Simmons University, and recently served on Harvard’s History and Literature Tutorial Board.  In addition to this new Arrowsmith title, his forthcoming works include Scorched Pearl of the Antilles (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) and poetry collections from Central Square and Finishing Line presses.  Indeed, “It is difficult/ to get the news from poems,” though far from impossible.  We have to broaden our information streams to include the widest variety of voices and visions if we are to develop our own inner editors committed to seeking, if not some absolute truth, then its nearest incarnation.  Patrick interrogates both his dreams and nightmares, trying to come to terms with how this world and its politics shaped his existence.  It is a necessary undertaking because, without such “news”––as Dr. Williams rightly concluded––“men die miserably every day/ for lack/ of what is found there.”

 

 

 

 

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

 

* 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

@stevenratiner.bsky.social

and on Twitter          

@StevenRatiner

 

And visit the Red Letter archives at: https://StevenRatiner.com/category/red-letters/