Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: George Kalogeris

Red Letter Poem #254

Unatoned

I’m fifteen years old, and halfway through our delicious

Dinner when my father, for once, gets home

From his store by six and sits down to eat with us.

My younger brother goes right on carving his lamb.

I lift my fork—then put it back down. I gulp

Some water. I try some bread. And then I get up

All too abruptly from the kitchen table,

And carry my half-filled plate to the garbage pail.

Fifty years pass, and no getting past the way

My mother looked at me. I couldn’t stomach

The stench that clung to his clothes from standing all day

At his butcher’s block. And now and forever I choke

On the meat from that meal: as if I’d sinned against

My father’s mortal flesh, my place at the feast.

––George Kalogeris

What is more shame-producing, more self-lacerating than memories of our youthful self-righteousness––and recognition of the hurt our blindness engendered? We knew; we possessed certainty––and thus any brash gesture or gratuitous attack on our part felt wholly justified. And isn’t this especially painful when we recall the relationship with our parents and the wounds we remember inflicting? Yet I can confidently repeat our and we in these sentences because such violation of our filial duty must be something of a universal experience. Examples in literature abound––even prior to that Biblical injunction to “honor thy father and mother”––and still the pattern persists across millennia. So, in today’s Letter, we have a further example from George Kalogeris––who, I must quickly say, is not only a superb poet (if you haven’t read his Winthropos, from Louisiana State University Press, I suggest you rush to your nearest bookstore,) but one of the gentlest and most thoughtful individuals I know. Still, at age fifteen, he could coldly commit an act that remains in his mind as a devastating sin: he attempted to shame his father for daring to come home from his butcher shop with the stink of the world on his clothing. And then, to twist the metaphorical knife, he dumped into the garbage the very food this hardworking immigrant had labored so earnestly to provide.

There are many devastating details included in this poem: how the younger brother, in his innocence, goes on eating, unaware of what is taking place. And how the platefuls of this “delicious/ Dinner” are heaped with lamb––a typical feature of Greek cuisine, certainly, but an unmistakable stand-in for their religious savior, the ‘Lamb of God.’ That the father most often comes home too late to dine with the family seems to be regarded, by the speaker, as a failing––ignoring the very reason why a man might be prompted to work such long hours. But the most wonderful/awful image, to my mind, must be the way a simple admonitioning look from his mother underscores the boy’s shame, returns pain for pain, which persists even decades later. Belatedly, we all must learn that it’s the family gathering which constitutes “the feast”––no matter how luxurious or simple the meal; childish diffidence only results in a kind of self-banishment.

Reading “Unatoned,” I couldn’t help imagining myself at aged eight, playing in our backyard, blissfully unaware, while––“protected” by my mother from the dark knowledge of what was about to engulf our family––my father lay in our living room in a rented hospital bed at death’s doorway. What I wouldn’t give to have been older, wiser, so I might have offered some comfort to this dying man. What the poet here wouldn’t offer in exchange for a seat at that kitchen table, to savor again the fruits of his father’s arduous work. And we both must share the company of a poet like Robert Hayden who, as a boy, only seemed to notice his father’s “chronic angers”––and not the fact that he arose early on Sunday mornings to drive the winter cold from the house, and to polish his son’s “good shoes” for church. When Hayden closes his poem with these plangent lines: “What did I know, what did I know/ of love’s austere and lonely offices?” our hearts seize––and we, too, must remember. So what are all we ‘sinners’ to do about these shameful memories? I look back at the ancient Greek word ἱλασμός (hilasmos) which is often translated as “propitiation” or an “atoning sacrifice.” Even years later, it is still possible to make amends. I hope I’ll be forgiven if I borrow from the Hellenistic tradition and recommend an offering to the gods. Perhaps Apollo’s temple would be a good place to start because he was not the Father of the Olympian deities, but rather Zeus’ son––and I imagine he harbors his own memories of youthful disobedience. In addition, Apollo was not only the patron of poets and musicians but farmers and shepherds as well––so he has a deep understanding of how hard it is to nurture new life in a harsh universe. And what would be a fitting sacrifice? George, it seems, is willingly providing the ‘burnt offering’ of his transgressive heart. But I’d recommend this instead: a poem or a song which might delight Apollo. How about a sly sonnet like “Unatoned” whose colloquial rhythms and subtle off-rhymes barely rise above dinner table diction? Perhaps this might earn us the knowledge that our fathers and mothers have, most likely, already forgiven us the pains we delivered––because they, too, were young once and had to learn about “love’s austere and lonely offices” to expiate their own sad memories.

The Red Letters

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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 #219

Whirlpool

On sale at Sozio’s, just off Revere

Beach. And with it came the bottomless foam

It seems to have channeled. All that high-speed chugging

And churning that shook the ceiling until it was clear,

At least to us downstairs, our uncle should heed

My father’s anxious warning about a flood

And put the thing in the basement—where it belonged.

He said it in Greek, and he was adamant.

But there were too many steps for my aunt to be lugging

Laundry up and down our double decker…

That brand-new Whirlpool. And all that old-world doom

And immigrant gloom I heard when he vent the pent:

“The hose will let go! These ceilings are only plaster!”

Not exactly Cassandra, foreseeing the palace walls

Awash with royal blood. But maybe my father

Was on to something… Just saying Sozio,

The Sixties are underway. And there they go,

Shades of my aunt and my mother, rushing for towels.

--- ––George Kalogeris

Considering that America is, for the most part, a nation of immigrants, it astonishes me how easily and adamantly certain citizens want to demonize the very notion of ‘strangers making their way to our shores,’ dismissing out of hand any of the forces that might be propelling them. Sometimes, these migrants are steering toward a better life for their families; other times, they’re desperately veering away from an old life that has become wholly untenable. It strikes me as an irrational impulse (a vestige of our long tribal past) to furiously deny the very welcome to newcomers that we, or our forebears, hungered for so mightily at the time of our arrival. Along with many other nationalities, there was a large influx of Greeks to the U.S. after the brutality of Nazi occupation during the Second World War. That’s when George Kalogeris’s father and his brothers came to coastal Winthrop, north of Massachusetts. As a poet, George has celebrated that Greek community (and the idea of communality itself) in four dynamic poetry collections, the most recent being Winthropos, (Louisiana State University)––the title being a Hellenized name for his hometown. George is the quintessential humanist––poet, scholar, educator, and translator––and when he last appeared in the Letters he was an Associate Professor at Suffolk University and Director of their Poetry Center. But he has recently retired, which is certainly a loss for the university but a blessing, I’m sure, for those of us who take sustenance from his poetry. As we anxiously await his next collection, I am happy I can bring new work to Red Letter readers.

Among many strong poetic qualities, I think George’s strongest is his ear. That term usually refers to a poet’s sense of diction and musicality––and, indeed, it’s a nuanced skill evidenced throughout his work. (You probably felt the internal rhyme and the quiet pulsing of his iambic cadences operating within this poem, bolstering the colloquial.) But I find other dimensions at work in George’s writing: the uncanny way he hears echoes of historical narratives and the most ancient of Greek mythologies at play in the simple features of his family’s daily life. When his uncle seizes upon one modest element of the American dream––in this case, a Whirlpool clothes washer to ease his wife’s labors (a bargain, no less, at the local discount store)––comic possibilities quickly emerge. But George’s antenna sensed that there was more at stake here, and deeper meanings folded into that brand name. Yes, his father is worrying about a leak bringing down their brittle plaster ceiling; but this family has already witnessed first-hand the tumultuous whirlpool of history, capable of carrying its political brutality even high into the small villages of the Peloponnese. Having come to the United States to be free of such turbulence, they now find the Sixties beginning to erupt around them––the horrors of political assassination, and a divisive war threatening to snatch up the young men in its net (with George himself as a possible victim.) The simple mention of Cassandra reminds us of the suffering brought on by myopic kings and petulant gods. Will those towels the women rush for soon be drenched with soapy water or something far worse?

Ultimately, we are all engaged in a continuous exploration––beginning immediately with our bawling arrival into this existence––to discover a sense of home, to find the place (or places) where our hearts feel inclined to take root. In his poem “Ithaka.” C. P. Cavafy––often called the greatest Greek poet of the 20th century––points to the distinction between home and the journey to get there.

“Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you’re destined for.

But don’t hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you’re old by the time you reach the island…”

All this leaves me thinking: doesn’t every individual born on this planet deserve at least this––not simply a roof above their heads, but the requisite freedom to keep mind and spirit venturing toward that dream of a homeland? Especially here in America, where there is such abundance, is it really so radical an idea that we can afford to care for more than our own––perhaps to continue making them our own, as has been our tradition? No matter which side of the ocean that Ithaka is found, whether in the Old World or the New, can’t a welcome be extended and a chance to live at peace? Traveling such a path, Cavafy reminds us, “then you will have learned what [all those] Ithakas mean.”

Red Letters 3.0