Red Letter Poem #279

 

 

Red Letter Poem #279

 

 

 

 

 Transmigration

 

 

Bach Cello Suite #1 in G Major: Prelude /

performed by Yo-Yo Ma

 

 

A cello is a tree singing.

Take his bow—drawn across

the crescent of hollow spruce

filament touching filament.

 

As I listen my body a tree’s body

vibrating and the wind’s hands

and the spruce shivers.

 

In the forest he caresses his cello.

 

Trill of a minor key under G major.

Sound under silence

and I understand—I think

 

how Pythagoras understood

the inaudible music of perpetual spheres

planets chanting. And you,

 

Red-winged Blackbird—

flame bursting from ebony wings

waiting atop the cattail—

sing your river of syllables.

 

 

                           ––Anastasia Vassos

                                   

 

 

Synchronicity.  The term was introduced by Carl Jung––the Swiss psychiatrist, prolific author, and founder of the school of analytical psychology.  Referring to “meaningful coincidences that cannot be explained by cause and effect,” Jung’s “togetherness principle” was part of his larger cosmological vision, borrowing heavily from Chinese Taoist philosophy.  Of course, you can argue that our meaning-making minds are always furiously at work, trying to impose order on this chaotic existence––that perhaps it’s only human consciousness that turns chance into revelation.  But this morning, I’m thinking about interconnectedness and gratitude––here in our time of thanksgiving––and have a perfect poem, not to answer the question, but to help intensify that wondering.  Anastasia Vassos has appeared once before in these electronic pages; but a few months ago, and thinking ahead to that familial red-letter day on the calendar, I decided to schedule her poem “Transmigration” to mark the holiday.  To be honest, I’d completely forgotten about her epigraph at the start, saluting Yo-Yo Ma’s performance of the first of Bach’s Suites for Unaccompanied Cello––even when, last Friday, I attended the cellist’s return to Symphony Hall in Boston, playing all six Suites––a three-hour performance without intermission!  It was an astonishing, challenging experience, not least because the celebrated musician was offering the Bach as part of a program he entitled We the People: Celebrating Our Shared Humanity, which he’s been performing all around the world.  “In this time of turmoil and divisiveness,” Yo-Yo Ma wrote in the program, he was challenging us to think deeply about how our lives might be more intertwined than we know––and how music and art create those “communal spaces where we all feel safe and welcome.”  And this morning I learned that Anastasia was in the audience as well.   

 

Right from her poem’s opening line––“A cello is a tree singing.”–– we are being invited into Anastasia’s communal space where she is allowing herself to feel truly at-home on this blue-green sphere hurtling through darkness.  “As I listen my body a tree’s body/ vibrating and the wind’s hands/ and the spruce shivers.”––intentionally omitting some of the punctuation that might separate subjects and objects, our minds from (what another poet once called) “the music of what happens.”  Perhaps that is one of the main purposes of art: to allow us to stop (for a few moments) being contained within these mortal bodies, this circumscribed consciousness, and to experience something unimagined–– that “Sound under silence.”  It seems that Bach grasped what Pythagoras and the red-winged blackbird also understood: that design (intentional or accidental) is woven through all we know, but that (and here’s that Taoist patriarch Lao Tzu chiming into the conversation) we must find some more intuitive way to apprehend what is everywhere present.  “The tao that can be told,” begins the Tao Te Ching, “is not the eternal Tao/ The name that can be named/ is not the eternal Name.”  So how are we to respond?  Balance precariously atop the quivering cattail of our days, and sing our river of syllables as artfully and clearly as we can.

 

Anastasia Vassos is the author of two collections: Nostos (from Kelsay Books), and Nike Adjusting Her Sandal (Nixes Mate Press).  Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best New Poets.  A speaker of three languages, Anastasia writes compellingly about the Greek-American diaspora, and how poetry is a vehicle for deepening understanding––within our lives and without.  It’s clear that her psychic antennae are always up and scanning the airwaves for whatever vibration feels most compelling.  And that, I’ve come to realize, is what I, too, am most thankful for: the possibility of deep awakening, always close at hand and, of course, those much-loved beings with whom I can share the experience.  Forgive me, but now my mind can’t help but angle off in a tangent.  In the last month or two, we have lost a number of fine poets––including, just this past weekend, the unimaginably buoyant spirit that was Charles Coe, with whom I served on the board of the venerable New England Poetry Club.  Somehow Anastasia’s fine poem has allowed me to feel such deep gratitude for all we are fortunate enough to know in our lives––and to sense the magnitude of the loss when we must let go.  Unless there is no loss but simply transmigration into something else.  What would it feel like, I wonder, to entertain that possibility for, say, the duration of a walk in the woods, the song of a blackbird, the arpeggiated chords of Bach’s masterpiece––or, Dear Reader, for the time it takes to peruse a letter from a distant friend?

 

 

 

 

 

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

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/

Somerville poet John Pijewski: Interview about his new book of poetry "Collected Father"

At a recent gathering I ran into the poet John Pijewski. Pijewski, a member of the New England Poetry Club. He told me about his new book of poetry coming out from the Finishing Line Press in January 2026. It sounded gripping and harrowing, so I decided to ask for him an interview--which he generously agreed to. The poet writes:




The poems in COLLECTED FATHER exist in the province between Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird, in which an abandoned boy struggles to survive on his own in the brutal peasant culture of Poland during WW II, and Franz Kafka’s Letter to His Father. They deal with dark subjects (my father's life in pre-war Poland and his imprisonment in a Nazi labor camp during WWII, along with the domestic violence my father perpetrated in our family). I've written the poems with the cold, clear eye of a witness, but also used nightmarishly dark humor. The poems are meant to be read like a novel, not to read randomly as though picking through a box of chocolates.



* * *



John Pijewski was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1952. He graduated from Boston University, the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and attended Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop. His book of poems, Dinner with Uncle Jozef, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 1982. He received a writing fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1984. John taught Creative Writing as an adjunct professor for 35 years at Boston University, the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, and the University of Southern Maine in Portland. His poems have been published in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Tri-Quarterly, Poetry Northwest, The New Yorker, and other journals.




*************************************************************************************************



How has it been for you as a writer living in Somerville all these years?


Being a writer in Somerville has been an absolute dream. I’ve lived in a house near the summit of Spring Hill for the past 28 years. The views are fabulous. The air is clean and clear. The sunlight bright and invigorating. It’s spring every day of the year. Inspiration wafts through my open windows and I pluck poems from the air before they jump into my lap.

This collection reminds me in some ways of the novel, The Pawnbroker, by Edward Lewis Wallant. Your father was like the pawnbroker in the story, twisted by the Holocaust, and seething with anger.

Yes, my father was somewhat like the main character in The Pawnbroker. He was clearly traumatized by his three years in a Nazi labor camp. He was an angry man, but his situation was molded by more than just WW II.

He was born in 1914 to extreme poverty on his farm in Poland, as well as being brutalized by an angry father who ruled with an iron fist and a thick leather razor strop. His father was also a heavy drinker. My father’s mother died when he was 9 years old, leaving him stranded in a family of all males, devoid of any feminine presence. He left school at age 12 to work full time on the family farm. It was a national disaster when the German army conquered Poland in 1939. My father was 22 when he married a local farm girl, age 18, who died at age 22 (1941) when she was pregnant with her second child, a daughter, who also died. In 1942 he was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp and had to abandon his 4-year-old son on the family farm.

After the war my father was confined to a Displaced Persons camp in Germany for 5 years to wait for a country, any country, to accept him as a war refugee. While in the D.P. camp, he married a Polish woman who’d also been an inmate in a Nazi labor camp. Their first child, a daughter, died in childbirth in 1947. My father probably asked himself why the women in his life kept dying. In May 1950 they gave birth to a son before they arrived in United States (Boston) in late November of that year. This means that, for my father, WW II lasted 11 years, which is longer than Odysseus spent trying to return home in The Odyssey.



You use gallows humor in your work, and I imagine in your life---when you think back on the past. Is humor a way to deflect the pain; is irony a sort of shield?



Any kind of humor, including gallows humor, is a great gift in understanding and tolerating difficult situations. It’s a way all of us can howl at the moon. Whether it’s a coping mechanism, or a deflection of pain, or a shield of irony, humor makes pain more tolerable without minimizing it. Most great humor has pain as its source. It’s also how we can achieve grace and transcend the darkness that’s an inevitable part of life.




Your father created a sort of concentration house in the West End of Boston where you lived. Was this pure cruelty, or in some perverse way was he trying to teach you something?

My father was in a labor camp, not a concentration camp, although the two sometimes overlapped. Most of the famous Nazi concentration camps also had labor camps attached to them. The Nazis needed healthy people to work for the German war effort, so they weren’t going to kill everyone (except for Jews and people who posed a political threat). There were about 200 labor camps in Germany during the war; none of these made it a policy to kill the inmates. The intention was to use slave labor for Germany’s benefit. If people died in the process (many did), so be it. When (if) Germany won the war, after all the Jews had been killed, they had plans to kill most of the Poles and Russians, saving some of them to work as slaves for the Third Reich.



As a child, as a young adult, as an inmate of a Nazi labor camp, my father was always at the mercy of the power others exerted over him. He had very little, if any, power in his life. When he arrived in America, he thought of himself as, finally, having power in his family. And he wasn’t interested in sharing his power with anyone because no one had shared power with him. Unfortunately, his life had taught him a very narrow, nasty view of what personal power was. My father never had the chance to develop much emotional maturity given how awful his life had been before he arrived in America. It became evident that my father remained a hurt child for most of his life and lashed out at his children with anger.


The book is meant not to be read as separate poems but as a whole work. Why?


Collected Father is definitely a book of individual poems. Each poem was written to stand on its own. But the poems were also built to support each other and are presented in a linear chronology. To really appreciate the book, I think, it’s best to read the poems in the order they’re presented, like a novel




Was the work anyway cathartic for you?


Of course it was. I had to enter the sensibility of a child in many of the poems to experience my father as I had many years ago. I wanted to capture the raw emotions I felt then, and I wanted the reader to feel them too. My father was distant, neglectful, dismissive, disrespectful, judgmental. He was abusive physically, verbally, emotionally, psychologically. He often called me “Shithead” in Polish (his nickname for me). He often castigated me for not being like my older brother, who didn’t challenge our father the way I did.



In some ways it got worse when I became an adult. He didn’t dare abuse me physically because I was taller and stronger than him and he knew I’d defend myself, but he ramped up his other forms of abuse. If I accomplished anything positive, he often expressed surprise, or dismissed it. To him I was a failure as a son and a human being. He liked to say that if I was ever sent to a slave labor camp, I’d never survive it.



It saddens me to say that his family in Boston didn’t provide my father with much joy. He gave the impression that we were a constant burden to him. What seemed to give him the most pleasure was doing projects (alone) in his basement workshop and drinking with his Polish buddies.



But a curious thing happened as I was writing these poems about my father. I’d always felt sorry for him, for having faced the many hardships in his life and WW II. I also marveled that he was a living slice of history; in school we studied the awful things that had been done to the people in labor and concentration camps. By writing poems that tried to understand what he’d had to confront in his early years in Poland, and then as an inmate in a Nazi labor camp, I was able to be more sympathetic toward him and recognize the many obstacles and difficulties that had, to some degree, destroyed him. I was able to separate the angry father he’d been from the tragic man he became.


Your mother doesn’t appear in these poems. Why Not?


Collected Father is about my father, not my mother. She makes a few appearances in these poems, but none of them are about her. I’ve written poems about her, and I hope they’ll be published in the future.

My mother had been even more traumatized by her labor camp experiences than my father. Based on her behavior at home, I suspected some truly awful things had happened to her in the labor camp, against her as a woman. She was a basket case of anxiety at home, often startled by noises, and sometimes descended into a black hole of depression. She never responded to men in the street who tried to speak to her. She tended to avoid social situations and preferred staying home where she felt “safe.” My father, to his credit, recognized this about her and NEVER raised his hand against her.

Despite her problems, my mother was the opposite of my father. She was very supportive and loving toward her children. Being a mother gave her great satisfaction and meaning in life. It became her identity. She devoted herself wholeheartedly to nurturing her two sons. In doing so she became my saving grace and was a blessed antidote to who my father was.



I also became bewildered that trauma could express itself so differently in each of my parents. I suspect that gender played a significant role. My father spewed his trauma as anger against his children who couldn’t retaliate. He was able to express his trauma as anger against others, while my mother cast her trauma as anger inwardly, against herself, which induced her anxiety and depression. This seems to be a fairly common pattern from a gender point of view.

Is there an historical aspect to the trauma you document in your poems?

I think my poems show how the Holocaust was also inflicted upon the off-spring of survivors. My parents suffered tremendously but, whether intentionally or not, they gave my brother and me a taste of the Holocaust. They showed us how trauma gets transferred to a second generation.

Let’s say that, metaphorically speaking, my father felt the trauma of the Holocaust as a rock thrown into a pond, a big splash. My brother and I then became the ripples that spread across the pond in all directions. Our father gave us his trauma. We became witnesses to his trauma, as well as owning this trauma ourselves (second generation). Even though the Holocaust may have ended 80 years ago, its effects are still reverberating today, and will probably appear in future generations. Not a welcome prospect.

Poet Charles Coe has passed--interview with Doug Holder

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HftI8JoJzDw&t=34s interview with Coe

I am so sorry to hear of Charles Coe's death. I first interviewed him for a small South End magazine, and since then I have read, served on the NEPC Board with him, reviewed him, and was on a panel with him to select the Somerville Poet Laureate. Here is an interview I conducted with him years ago... Fine man, poet, teacher, performer and citizen...

Red Letter Poem #278

 Red Letter Poem #278

 

 

 

 

 Six Autumn Haiku

tall oaks

a first grader whistles

an acorn cap


an acorn

in its mouth

autumn silence



another equinox

catching up to the acorn

I kicked ahead

 

  

I blame Basho and his illustrious “crow on a bare branch.” I know full well that the tradition of Japanese haiku explores/celebrates every season and every conceivable mood. But hearing the word, my mind invariably brings me to autumn, and a darkening sky rich with melancholy. So I invited Brad Bennett to return to the Red Letter forum with a sampling of his haiku for the current season, fully expecting that he’d remind us all of how complex, diverse, and wonderfully subtle the genre can be. Perhaps you’ll remember Brad, an accomplished writer and teacher of American haiku, from his earlier appearances here. His fourth collection from Red Moon Press, a rush of doves, was just published this year, and he’s the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including the Touchstone Haiku Award, and The Heron's Nest Reader's Choice Haiku of the Year. But Brad is not simply a talented poet; he possesses a quality that skill alone cannot achieve: authenticity. As with all the great haiku masters following in Basho’s footsteps, this art form was intended as more than a poetic style, but a way of life––a daily practice that alters what each poet experiences in the world and thus what he or she carries to the page.



It’s useful to think of haiku, not as a small poem but as a mammoth one––a hundred-line lyric impossibly condensed into a diminutive package. If a revised poem is the sum of a countless choices, great and small, this must be true as well of a poem containing a mere handful of syllables. The very fact of its brevity seems to entice readers to come close. But it’s only when we attempt to pull at the metaphorical bow that binds the package––to question what we sense is waiting inside––that we begin to realize what’s being offered to us. These poems are sometimes playful, sometimes somber, but always engaged with the tension between clarity of experience and the ambiguity of implication. Haiku presents a moment of unusual complexity––part of which is centered on a more acute experience of the shared world; but an equally-important part revolves around the inner mechanics of a consciousness contending with language, discovering something about its own nature. I hesitate to say too much about each of Brad’s poems for fear of undermining your own intuitive approach––but perhaps I can comment on how my mind first pulled at each bow, watching as the package began offering up its surprising contents. Starting with “tall oaks…,” it presents an innocent childhood memory, turning the acorn cap into a shrill whistle. Of course, we can’t help remembering the old adage (whose roots, surprisingly, lie with Chaucer’s 14th-century poetry): from little acorns mighty oaks grow. Something much grander is being trumpeted in even our simplest memories. “an acorn/ in its mouth/ autumn silence” ups the ante considerably, making us aware of the inner grammar of perception––in whose mouth is this nut captured: a squirrel, perhaps, observed on a branch, staving off hunger? The autumn silence itself? But when I read “another equinox…” I found myself stilled by the possibilities. Because we grasp the utter everydayness of the action––making a little game of kicking an acorn while on a solitary autumn stroll––the heart quakes just a bit to feel how quickly another year has passed, and how our aims did or did not guide us.

 

raspy cough

a pause to pluck leaves

from rake tines


autumn maple

a shadow races

to meet its leaf





a hole

in the falling leaf

tumbling sky

  

 

             ––Brad Bennett

 

                                   

 

Here, in this little suite of autumn-leaf poems, the typical focus on the showy colors never comes into play. Rather, “raspy cough…” hints at the body’s fragility, while the clatter of those hard consonants (pause…pluck…rake…tines) almost seems to catch in the throat. Even now, imagining those once-green leaves, brittle in the claws of the rake, makes me shudder with a terrible apprehension. “autumn maple…” feels like an emblem of mortal inevitability, our shadow (the dark reflection of our sunlit world) racing to confront us, an action we are powerless to delay. We are minds toppling into a new awareness––and unlike other creatures, we can’t help but see what’s coming. But then I read a poem like: “a hole/ in the falling leaf/ tumbling sky” and the roof of the imagination is blown open, transcendent possibilities becoming suddenly available. Through the window of that tiny decay, that inevitable loss, the dizzying heavens can be glimpsed. Indeed! A potent haiku cannot help but up our game, prompting the wheels to turn faster, the eyes to more carefully savor what is right before us, before it is gone. Because, like the haiku, things always seem to be over far too soon.

 

 

 

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

 

All Red Letter installments and videos will be archived at:

https://stevenratiner.com/category/red-letters/