Boston Area Small Press and Poetry Scene: Jack Stewart

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 #265

The Wicked Witch of the West

Goes to Seattle

I wasn’t always like this. As a girl, I loved

The shower, my wet hair heavy on my shoulders,

The warm soapy water on my back and legs.

It wasn’t like now, with fear and bitterness.

When I got my power, no one told me

I would have to sacrifice something,

And not of my choosing, which is why

When I received my talent during a thunderstorm—

You know the rest. My skin turned green from lament,

And I have come here to risk oblivion,

To sink into what I loved for so long, the one

Element that could return my heart to me.

I stare out the window at the rain pouring down

But have not yet decided how I will do it.

Will I run to the coffee shop next door, acting

Like I forgot my umbrella? Then take my

Hat off and stand under the edge

Of the awning and let the water drip

On my bare head? To feel my body

Run down itself until I am nothing

But what I have missed for so long.

To flow in a direction I don’t yet know,

But which no one can change,

Or ever take away.

––Jack Stewart

I know what you’re thinking: a little late, isn’t it? Why didn’t Steven run this poem back in March, when the Academy Awards were all abuzz with Jon Chu’s movie and, at the drop of a pointy hat, audiences couldn’t help but belt out: “I think I'll try/Defying gravity!” It’s true, I do on occasion tie Red Letter poems to seasons and cultural events, making real life the backdrop for a literary experience. And I’ll admit it: that was my plan all along when I first received Jack Stewart’s surprising poem about the possibility of washing a life free of its history, and transforming it into something new. But then I feared that it would be subsumed in the overarching drama of Broadway and Hollywood––the rather grand spectacle that Gregory Maguire’s 1995 novel has unleashed on popular culture. Maguire’s brilliant idea was to shift our perspective on L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz, and consider what made the Wicked Witch wicked in the first place. Such a dramatic lineage resulted: from Baum’s turn-of-the-century classic to numerous plays, other books, movies, musicals, and even now to this poem. It’s more than a little thrilling to witness one artistic vision demonstrating the generative power of cultural crosspollination. So I decided to wait, wanting readers to have a clean slate (or as much as that’s ever possible) when Jack’s more modest vision––stripped of stage lights and orchestration––first stepped out onto their inner stage.

From the very first, I loved the poet’s recasting of this little mythology, setting it into a contemporary American landscape which we all inhabit. I remember, when I was twenty, California was brimming with its ‘Summer of Love’ (younger readers: Google it), and I hitchhiked cross-country to experience my generation's version of Oz. For young people in recent decades, Seattle and the Pacific Northwest seem to have been cast with that same aura of possibility. So who exactly is this woman Jack’s introducing us to––perhaps leaving behind a hot and arid place (like, say, Jack’s South Florida) and lighting out for the West (a decidedly greener and rainier terrain)? And what’s caused her aversion to the cleansing/comforting power of a warm shower? Did you find yourself considering all the ways this once-happy girl might have come to feel her life sullied? Or was that “power” she’s attained simply the change from innocence to womanhood, with all the apprehensions brought on by her life in a society where a woman’s autonomy can be challenged by the male powers-that-be? And so she’s journeyed to a locale where precipitation is a common occurrence––“come here to risk oblivion,/ To sink into what I loved for so long…”. Reading (no, thinking her thoughts) through this persona poem, I began feeling the many ways my own life has calcified, grown comfortable in its old ways––even while knowing how certain elements were never ‘in the plan’ and may not be conducive to furthering my dreams. This woman is willing to risk a kind of dissolution––“until I am nothing/ But what I have missed for so long”––and I’m left wondering what I’d be willing to risk in order “To flow in a direction I don’t yet know,/ But which no one can change…”. Our protagonist’s skin turned green from lament; mine might be more out of envy.

Jack has become a frequent contributor to the Red Letters. Formerly a Brittain Fellow at The Georgia Institute of Technology, he now teaches writing in Fort Lauderdale at the Pine Crest School. His first collection, No Reason, was published in the Poeima Poetry Series in 2020. New work has appeared in numerous literary journals like Poetry, the New York Quarterly, and the Iowa Review, garnering nine nominations for the Pushcart Prize. I love how, in his poetry, Jack twists situations, charges syntax, and continually defies expectations––anything to keep the reading experience fresh. I can easily imagine his protagonist, beneath the cataract descending that shop awning, feeling herself reborn into a wholly new circumstance. Is she singing to herself: “Something has changed within me/ Something is not the same…”? Or maybe she’s more old school and––watching gulls and osprey angling through the downpour, heading back toward the sea––she’s awaiting the rainbow which must surely come. Is she entertaining the possibility of wings to carry her beyond all expectation, maybe thinking: “Why, oh why can't I?

The Red Letters

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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

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And coming soon:

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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 #232

La Liseuse

—Paris, 1878

This is the year the Eurydice sinks

and the SS Byzantin. Here,

the World’s Fair has opened,

while back home the Senate debates

women’s suffrage as the First Lady

smiles and rolls pink and yellow-

striped Easter eggs across the lush

White House lawns. Cassatt

does not show us the headlines,

and we cannot tell from Lydia’s

soft profile which stories she reads

or what she thinks of them,

or that at forty-one she’s just four years

from her death, Bright’s disease

already ravaging her kidneys,

though neither she nor her not-yet

famous sister knows this. They believe

whatever ails her—the doctors

disagree—is in remission now,

and so together with Mary she tours

the boulevards and galleries,

attends the right plays and salons—

though she knows Mary brings her

mostly as chaperone, to quiet

the gossips, and that she uses her,

as a free model and housekeeper. It’s Lydy

who shops and sews, keeps the accounts,

stays the loneliness her sister

battles. Did she long for a husband

and children? A lover? An art of her

own? Nothing survives of her letters,

and little is said of her in Mary’s,

except reports of her devotion

and the family’s praise. Angel

in the house, she’s forever silent, her sister’s

Reader, her Woman, Crocheting.

––Susan Aizenberg

The painter Mary Cassatt was a bundle of contradictions: the first great American Impressionist, she spent the majority of her creative life as an expatriate in France; famous for her realistic depictions of motherhood and domesticity, in her own life she eschewed both in order to pursue her artistic career. And, as a fierce advocate for suffrage and women's rights, it seems Mary (as poet Susan Aizenberg depicts in today’s bittersweet poem) may have allowed another woman’s needs to go unfulfilled, simply in service of her own (a failing often attributed to men.) Susan centers our attention on Lydia Cassatt, Mary’s elder sister, who accompanied her to Europe as companion, housekeeper, unpaid model, deflector of gossip. And though we are familiar with her appearance from a number of well-known canvases, far less is known of the woman––especially her inner life and aspirations. It seems she was content to spend her days in service of the creative genius she saw in her sister––an avocation often called ‘kinship work’ by anthropologists––or, in a phrase featured in a famous poem of the day, "the angel in the house." In today’s perspective, it likely seems an act that is both selfless and self-negating.

In any skillfully-executed composition, no daub of color, no background detail is presented unless it serves the overall aim of the canvas. The same is true for a fine poem, and Susan begins hers with two little details intended (one might guess) simply to help indicate the 19^th century time frame. “This is the year the Eurydice sinks/ and the SS Byzantin.” Of course, the roster of shipwrecks in 1878 is extensive; so Susan’s choices hint at a range of cultural markers: the mythological Eurydice, forced into the Underworld to become Hades’ bride; and the fall of the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) Empire, and with it the intricate and arcane styles that were its hallmark. In contrast, the Impressionists would attempt to make viewers experience the simple beauty of everyday life and the extraordinary marvel of that is our perception of light. In a series of paintings, we eavesdrop on Lydia’s immersion in activities as varied as concert-going, crocheting, or (as in “La Liseuse,”) the petit solitude involved in reading the morning newspaper. Of course, all of these underscore their primary purpose: to sit patiently as her younger sibling worked at the easel. Lydia left behind no letters or diary entries which might help us understand her feelings––so it takes a poet’s imagination to consider whether this was rewarding or frustrating or something beyond simple comprehension.

Susan, Professor Emerita of Creative Writing and English at Creighton University, is the author of three poetry collections––the first of which, Muse, was awarded Virginia Commonwealth University’s Larry Levis Prize, and the Nebraska Book Award for Poetry. She’s the co-editor (with Erin Belieu) of The Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women (Columbia University Press.) Today’s poem is taken from her recently-published A Walk with Frank O’Hara and Other Poems (University of New Mexico Press.) I am always intrigued by the varied subject matter, tonal shifts, and surprising emotional navigation captured in her work. If both heart and mind remain alert (her poems seem to be telling us,) perhaps we can avoid the pitfalls of the habitual. Susan’s portrait here––not of the ‘famous sister,’ but the largely-unheralded companion––allows us to experience her mortal jeopardy as akin to our own. Lydia Cassatt is not unique in the sacrifices love demands of family members. By the close of this poem, I found myself both angry at a world that forces such choices on individuals, especially women––but also frustrated with Lydia herself for not demanding more of life before illness would cut hers short. And yet I also marveled at the generosity of spirit required to make such a ‘gift’ to someone so dear. I don’t know if that quality comes naturally to me––yet it’s one I experienced in two of my sisters, and to which I quietly aspire. So I’m thankful to recognize that Lydia’s simple pleasures, perhaps, provided more contentment than I often recognize. It seems I may be carrying my own tangle of contradictions as well.

Red Letters 3.0